A new report by the Costs of War Project has found that at least 37 million people have been displaced by the US War on Terror; however, the group warns that the estimate is conservative and the real total could be far higher.
According to a report published on Tuesday by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, at least 37 million people have been displaced, either internally or been forced to become refugees, in eight different countries as a result of the US War on Terror, begun in 2001.
For comparison, the population of the US state of California is 39.5 million, and the population of Canada is 37.59 million. However, the researchers warn that is a “very conservative” estimate, as the true number could be closer to between 48 and 59 million people.
The report focused on eight conflicts, including declared and undeclared war zones, where the US has carried out military operations under the guise of destroying international terrorism: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines.
The group’s data was compiled from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
In Afghanistan, some 5.3 million people have been displaced in total since 2001, although this number is in considerable dispute, as the researchers concluded that 2.1 million Afghans had fled the country since 2001, but they also found evidence that as many as 2.4 million had fled just between 2012 and 2019. Another 3.2 million have been displaced internally. The researchers noted, however, that war and civil turmoil in the Central Asian country has continued almost nonstop since the late 1970s.
In neighboring Pakistan, the US war near the Afghan border has displaced some 3.7 million people, including 360,000 refugees abroad and 1.56 million from the border area.
Meanwhile in Libya, where the US supported the 2011 overthrow of longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, at least 1.2 million people have been displaced in what the IDMC called a “state collapse trigger[ed] mass displacement.” At the start of 2020, the report notes, 451,000 remained internally displaced, and the civil war continues to rage.
Iraq has the largest total number, with 9.2 million people displaced by several wars. In March 2003, the US launched a massive invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and the brutal counterinsurgency war that erupted afterward had displaced some 4.7 million people by 2007. While the US war in Iraq officially ended in 2011, war erupted again just three years later in 2014, when Daesh roared into existence, and the US once again became involved in major combat operations in Mesopotamia. By 2020, 650,000 Iraqis remained refugees abroad, and 1.4 million had been internally displaced.
In neighboring Syria, where Daesh first established its would-be caliphate amid a civil war raging since 2011, the US became involved at several distinct levels over the years. The report was very truncated in its analysis, looking just at the five provinces where US forces fought on the ground – Aleppo, al-Hasakah, al-Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and Homs – and only since 2017.
By those criteria, 7.1 million had been displaced, including 470,000 internally. However, 220,000 of those have been just since October 2019, when the Turkish invasion of eastern Syria pushed 220,000 Kurds from their homes, including 17,900 who crossed the border into Iraq for safety.
However, the report notes that if a different metric were used – one including all of Syria beginning in 2013, when the US started arming Syrian rebel militias – the number of displaced persons increases massively to between 44 and 51 million people.
In Somalia, where the US has waged or supported wars for decades, “virtually all Somalis have been displaced by violence at least once in their life,” the Norwegian Refugee Council is quoted as saying in the report. From a population of 15 million, some 4.2 million have been displaced by US operations, including 80,000 refugees and 3.4 million internally displaced persons.
Like Somalia, Yemen has seen war rage for decades. The US began airstrikes in Yemen in 2002, pursuing al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but conditions deteriorated catastrophically in 2015, when Saudi Arabia and several of its allies, including the US, launched a war against the Yemeni Houthi movement.
The ongoing war, in which Saudi, Emirati and Moroccan aircraft have bombarded the country and supported militias on the ground as well as forces loyal to ousted Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, has displaced 4.4 million people. In 2019 alone, 400,000 more people were displaced. According to the OCHA, 100,000 Yemenis have been killed by combat operations since 2015, and another 130,000 have died from hunger and disease.
The Philippines is the only country on the list not located in southwestern Asia or northern or eastern Africa. However, the US-supported military operations in Mindanao against groups such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Abu Sayyaf and the Maute Group have displaced some 1.7 million Filipinos, nearly all of them internally.
“In documenting displacement caused by the US post-9/11 wars, we are not suggesting the US government or the United States as a country is solely responsible for the displacement. Causation is never so simple,” the authors note in the report. “Causation always involves a multiplicity of combatants and other powerful actors, centuries of history, and large-scale political, economic, and social forces. Even in the simplest of cases, conditions of pre-existing poverty, environmental change, prior wars, and other forms of violence shape who is displaced and who is not.”
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism | Africa, Human rights, Iraq, Middle East, Syria, United States |
1 Comment
Abdullah Morsi, late son of Egypt’s former president Mohamed Morsi
A law firm representing the family of Egypt’s late former president Mohamed Morsi concludes that the death of his youngest son, Abdullah, last year was caused by injection of a “lethal substance.”
“Information now disclosed appears to confirm that Abdullah was transported in his car a distance of more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) to a hospital after he took his last breath, as a result of having been injected with a lethal substance,” said a statement by the London-based Guernica 37 International Justice Chambers.
“He was not transferred to nearby hospitals, intentionally, until after he had died,” added the statement cited by the Middle East Eye (MEE) news and opinion website.
The Egyptian government claimed the 25-year-old had died of a heart attack while driving.
The law firm said, “It is quite clear that certain elements of the state were aware of this fact that is only now coming to light.”
Prior to his death, Abdullah had named several individuals, including current Interior Minister Mahmoud Tawfiq and Mohamed Shereen Fahmy, the judge who oversaw the Morsi’s trial, as “accomplices” in the “assassination of the martyr, President Morsi.”
The Egyptian leader died during a trial session at a court in the capital Cairo on June 18, 2019 after spending some six years behind bars, Egyptian authorities say.
Last month, the MEE quoted Morsi’s son Ahmed as saying that the ex-head of state and Abullah were both murdered in a state-sanctioned scheme.
Morsi became Egypt’s first democratically elected president in 2012, one year after a popular uprising led to the ouster of strongman Hosni Mubarak and ended his 30-year rule.
He was deposed in July 2013 in a military coup led by Egypt’s former army chief and current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and was immediately arrested.
The coup was followed by a hugely deadly crackdown on members and supporters of the country’s Muslim Brotherhood, to which Morsi used to be affiliated.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | Egypt, Human rights |
Leave a comment
Beijing wants the world community to adopt a set of rules for developing the digital economy, which would endorse national sovereignty over data and oppose mass electronic surveillance in foreign cyberspace.
The code of conduct, dubbed the ‘Global Initiative on Data Security’, was presented on Tuesday by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a conference in Beijing. While the name ‘United States’ was never mentioned in his speech, the official left no doubt that Washington’s recent attacks on the Chinese tech sector prompted the proposal.
“Bent on unilateral acts, a certain country keeps making groundless accusations against others in the name of ‘clean’ network and used security as a pretext to prey on enterprises of other countries who have a competitive edge,” he said. “Such blatant acts of bullying must be opposed and rejected.”
The Trump administration last month announced its ‘Clean Network Initiative’, aimed at pushing “untrusted” Chinese telecom companies and apps out of the US market and protecting undersea communication cables from eavesdropping.
Wang, who also holds the powerful office of state councilor, blasted the US approach as politicization of security issues and protectionism that stifle innovation, and outlined China’s own vision for the digital future. Beijing believes national governments have a legitimate claim on data generated under their sovereignty and should respect each other’s laws on its handling.
Among other things, it means that countries should not “conduct mass surveillance [on foreign soil] or engage in unauthorized collection of personal information of other states,” he said. Governments likewise should not pressure domestic companies into storing foreign data on their territory.
The companies themselves must not install backdoors in their products to gain illegal access to user data or take abusive advantage of the dependence on their products, he added.
The US push against Chinese companies like telecom producer Huawei, digital giant Tencent, and TikTok owner ByteDance is justified by a concern for user data and intellectual property. Washington claims that Chinese companies are subservient to Beijing and act as government agents harvesting the information of their foreign clients.
Beijing denies the allegations, and Wong reiterated that China pledges to adhere to the principles it proposes.
“We have not and will not ask Chinese companies to transfer data overseas to the government in breach of other countries’ laws,” he told the gathering.
He said the Chinese digital economy already accounts for more than one-third of the country’s GDP, with over 900 million internet users, including 88 million 5G subscribers, located in the country. Beijing believes its initiative would drive global digital growth.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics | China, United States |
1 Comment
Almost four years of mainstream media hype about “fake news” and “Russian meddling” propaganda has brought to the world exactly what they were intended to bring: an effective mechanism for internet and social media censorship.
In the center of this move toward global discourse control is an organization called the Poynter Institute, home to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a body created to coordinate, promote and train dozens of fact-checkers from around the world.
The IFCN and many non-profits working in the same field are funded by the big capitalist “philanthropists” of our era, like George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, Bill Gates, and even the Koch brothers… but also by the US Department of State and a shady “aid” – in reality, political meddling – organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), historically linked to the CIA and regime change operations.
Google and Facebook – itself tied to the warmongering Atlantic Council and its “Digital Forensic Research Lab” – are also associated with Poynter, by funding and partnerships to fight “fake news” (including the development of an “automated” fact-checking program for the upcoming 2020).
The marriage between Poynter’s IFCN, politically inclined billionaires, the State Department – and the whitewashed public face of the Deep State – suggest that the institute is probably working in what Nelson Poynter, its founder, worked on for a key part of his life: propaganda and censorship for the US government.
Although this information is not available in Nelson Poynter’s Wikipedia profile or in poynter.org’s history page, his work for a government propaganda agency is not exactly a secret. A remembrance of his wife, Henrietta, also at the institute’s website, quickly passes over the fact that Poynter did work for the Office of War Information (OWI) during WWII, but his specific role as a government censor and propagandist is never mentioned.
Nevertheless, Hollywood Goes to War, a book written in 1987 by Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, is one of the many historical sources that tell the details of Poynter’s job.
Film censorship and the birth of the Voice of America
Nelson Poynter was recruited by the OWI with his wife Henrietta, who worked as assistant program chief under Elmer Davis, head of the agency. She came up with the name for the “Voice of America”, the famous psychological war operation of the US government.
The radio project was established in February 1942 and soon grew to be the most important US overt propaganda arm of the Cold War.
Unlike his wife’s job, Poynter’s regarded not radio – or his previous line of work, journalism – but movies. In 1942, the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) set up office in Hollywood, naming Poynter as its head. His mission was to act as liaison between the agency and the owners of Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM and the other big studio names.
Elmer Davis, head of the OWI, regarded films as:
The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds”, in part, because they “do not realize that they are being propagandized”.
Davis was a career journalist who worked for ten years for the New York Times before being recruited by the government. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House needed the film industry to incorporate specific themes in their movies, ideas that promoted the notion of WWII as being a “popular” war, fought to defend his Four Freedoms.
But at first, Poynter’s office in Hollywood had little veto power over what the industry could produce – for the entire Western world – limiting itself to suggest cosmetic changes here and there, or the toning down of reactionary and racist imagery and language, an inherent feature in the Hollywood of that era.
The heads of the studios were on fairly good terms with the US Army, historically close to the industry. Its owners were happy to portrait US wars abroad as heroic, in exchange for the lending of military equipment, installations and expert advice.
But in most cases, a disappointed Poynter complained, war ended up only as “a backdrop” for shallow romance, cheap comedies and other proven formulas. Poynter and his boss at the BMP, Lowell Mellett, also hired a former assistant of Harold Lasswell, a famous social researcher who said – back in the 30s – that democracy needed propaganda because people were not the best judges of their own interest.
Eventually, the team devised a way to exert more power over the unruly, reactionary and overly commercial Hollywood studios. They decided to ask the US Office of Censorship to weigh in and threaten them with banning “offending” films from export, seriously reducing their potential earnings.
According to Koppes and Black’s Hollywood Goes to War, it was a success, prompting MGM, Warner and the other big names to start turning in their scripts for review to Poynter. The BMP knew it was important to intervene right at that stage, before large amounts of money were spent in production.
Poynter was a diligent censor and propagandist, going as far as to suggest dialogues for the movie scripts he was reviewing, breaching “one of the industries taboos” and provoking the powerful tycoons, according to the authors mentioned above.
When the war ended, Poynter went back to journalism. He eventually took over the St. Petersburg Times (renamed Tampa Bay Times in 2012), owned by his father. He also founded the Congressional Quarterly with his wife Henrietta, who died in 1968. As we can read in the Poynter institute’s website:
When Henrietta died suddenly at the age of 66, Nelson mourned deeply. ‘Her passing marked the end of an era for Mr. Poynter,’ said David Shedden, former research librarian at The Poynter Institute. ‘He started looking to the future and thinking about his legacy. He focused on creating a school for journalists, which of course became the Modern Media Institute, and then the Poynter Institute’.”
Nevertheless, historian W.C. Bourne explains that many of the OWI’s top brass – as Elmer Davis and Nelson Poynter, former journalists – returned to the corporate media after the war, but “retained an abiding belief in the things for which OWI stood and the possibilities of accomplishment in the international information picture”.
Many of them also retained the Deep State contacts and a nationalistic “spirit of collaboration”.
A legacy of censorship
Nelson Poynter’s work for the government ended many decades ago, and it would be reasonable to suggest that his ties to the US government and its propaganda apparatus probably never involved the journalism institution he founded years after leaving the OWI.
But we have evidence pointing precisely in the opposite direction.
Firstly, the obvious – and open – ties between the institute and today’s version of the foreign meddling machine installed by the US during the Cold War (i.e. the NED). As informed on many occasions by independent journalists, one of the founders of the National Endowment for Democracy once admitted that:
“A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.”
Secondly, the intimate ties between the Poynter Institute and the US State Department, which selected it to conduct the “Edward Murrow Program for Journalists”.
It brings together “more than 100 emerging international journalists from around the world to examine journalistic practices in the United States”.
In other words, to be indoctrinated in Western corporate journalism and culture and start a relationship with a potential foreign opinion leader.
The State Department’s Murrow program is part of Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), an agency dedicated to “cultural diplomacy”, intimately tied to intelligence and foreign policy since way before the Cold War. The participants to be trained by Poynter are chosen by US embassies abroad.
A 2017 report of the historical success of the educational exchange agency stated that:
… 565 alumni of the ECA programs are current heads or former heads of state and government, and 31 alumni are heads of international organizations.”
Thirdly, the Poynter Institute, too, redacted an infamous blacklist of “fake news” sites, with the intention of marginalize and, in this case, deny many of them of any kind of advertisement money.
A blacklist to defund them all
For this operation, launched on April 30, 2019, Poynter ganged-up with the rest of the fact-checking “cartel”, so to speak.
The institute gathered the blacklists and analysis done in recent years by Snopes, Fact-check.org, Politifact (owned by the Tampa Bay Times and Poynter), OpenSources and the Fake News Codex, and used them to create the mother of all blacklists, naming 515 “unreliable” news websites.
It was retracted shortly after its publication, on May 2, after coming under criticism for “unreliability and poor methodology”. The irony! And this should be understood as an indictment on the whole bunch. As one critic from the George Washington University noted:
Beneath the veneer of its precision, the fact-checking enterprise relies heavily on opinion and interpretation… If a list summarizing fact-checking results and verified by fact checkers is ultimately retracted by those same fact checkers for not being rigorous, it underscores the question of why we should trust anything from the fact-checking community.”
To add insult to injury, Poynter’s dubious list of “unreliable websites” was intended to cause financial harm to those named in it, by guiding advertisers and ad-technology applications to deny them of ads.
After the retraction, Stephen Gutowski, a writer from one of the affected websites, Free Beacon, wrote:
What a disgusting exercise in bad faith from an organization that’s supposed to be about improving and promoting journalism. Instead, they’re creating tabloid-level listicles to smear reporters without offering even a single piece of evidence. Shame on you, @Poynter.”
Philip Klein, from The Washington Examiner – also listed – thought it was:
… worrisome to call for advertisers blacklisting news organizations, especially given the opacity of the process and arbitrariness of many of the judgements [sic].”
The “cartel”
Most of the non-profits behind Poynter’s blacklist share patrons, except for the controversial Snopes, that runs on less grant money than advertisement revenues.
The International Fact-checking Network and its more than a hundred “associated” – subordinated – smaller fact checkers around the globe, are also funded by the same “philanthropists”, like Bill Gates, whose foundation already finances tens of mainstream corporate news outlets with tens of millions of dollars, just like the Columbia Journalism Review recently uncovered.
Regarding Poynter and Gates, specifically:
… Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride said Gates’s money was passed on to media fact-checking sites, including Africa Check, and noted that she is “absolutely confident” that no bias or blind spots emerged from the work, though she acknowledged that she has not reviewed it herself.”
In a blatant conflict of interests, those same fact-checkers often (try to) debunk information related to the Gates Foundation, just like a private PR agency.
Many lesser players in the global constellation of fact checkers are also funded directly by George Soros and his Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the US embassy and/or the NED.
When “fact-checking”, the members of this private-public consortium often limit themselves to copy/paste from their “parent” sources, like Poynter’s Politifact and Snopes.
As Emil Marmol and Lee Mager recently wrote for Project Censored, the “fake news” psychological operation was little more than a “Trojan horse for silencing alternative news and reestablishing corporate news dominance” :
The fake news hysteria created by those in government and echoed by the corporate news media is being harnessed and used as a pretext for the suppression of dissent and counterhegemonic viewpoints while re-establishing the corporate press’s preeminence as the sole purveyor and manufacturer of public opinion.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the degenerative process under the guise of “protecting us”, prompting democratic governments to take dangerous paths, like arresting citizens for promoting street marches on Facebook.
The internet opened up a world of information to the regular citizen, we must keep it open so more of us can take a look.
Daniel Espinosa lives in Arequipa, second largest city of Peru. He graduated in Communication Sciences in Lima and started researching propaganda and mainstream media. He writes for a Peruvian in-print weekly, Hildebrandt en sus trece, since 2018, and collaborates with many online media. His writings are a critique of the role of mass media in society. You can read his previous work through his MuckRack profile.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering | CIA, Fact-check.org, International Fact-Checking Network, NED, Office of War Information, PolitiFact, Poynter Institute, Snopes, United States |
Leave a comment
So now the Navalny poison episode takes on a new twist with German military intelligence subsequently claiming they found traces of Novichok on a bottle of water the Russian dissident had purportedly been drinking from. Rather, it sounds more like the authors of this false-flag operation have “bottled” – meaning became unnerved by the absurdities inherent in their own narrative.
Last week the German government announced that a Bundeswehr military laboratory had detected Novichok in the body fluids of Sergei Navalny. That promptly led to charges that the Kremlin was responsible for the attempted murder of Navalny using the Soviet-era nerve poison.
The trouble for the German side was that their narrative soon ran into contradictions from the Russian toxicologists who first treated Navalny when he apparently fell ill on a flight from Siberia to Moscow on August 20. The Russian medics said they had tested Navalny for a whole range of poisons, including organophosphate-type chemicals which attack the nervous system. The Russian doctors affirmed they found no poison traces. They concluded Navalny’s coma was induced by an existing medical condition, presumably diabetes. Furthermore, the doctors at the hospital in Omsk where Navalny was taken to on August 20, said they have original samples of his body fluids.
It’s the latter detail which seems to have obliged the Germans to elaborate their narrative with the new element of a poisoned bottle of water. If indeed the Russians have Navalny’s biological samples showing no presence of toxins then the German version falls apart as a fabrication. That could only mean that the claimed detection of Novichok by the Germans was the result of deliberate contamination of his body fluids while he was being treated in the hospital in Berlin where he was airlifted to on August 22 from Russia.
It is reported by Der Spiegel that Navalny’s family relatives kept the alleged bottle after he fell sick on the flight from the Siberian city Tomsk. They purportedly did not hand the bottle over to the Russian toxicologists in Omsk, but rather provided the bottle instead to the Germans when Navalny arrived in Berlin two days later.
This “bottle twist” is a convenient and necessary foil to avoid the potentially damning contradiction from the Russian side. The Germans can now claim to have evidence that was not available to the Russians.
But such a ploy creates more questions that still make the German narrative implausible, if not absurd.
If Novichok was used in poisoning Navalny, the 44-year-old dissident would most likely be dead by now. Also, the aides and flight attendants who came into close contact with him during his flight would have shown symptoms of poisoning. It is inconceivable that a bottle contaminated with the deadly nerve agent could have been transported by Navalny’s family to Germany without them being stricken.
The strange Navalny affair has an unerring resemblance to the equally outlandish Skripal affair. Yet the latter is cited as a precedent for the former in order to “substantiate” incrimination of Russia. The alleged Novichok weapon seems to have an amazing ability to lose its deadly potency on bystanders. The immediate victims apparently go into mysterious comas and are not seen or heard of again in public, detained in secret by the British and now German government. There is also the curious introduction of bottles in both cases: the perfume bottle which allegedly conveyed the Novichok weapon in the Skripal incident in England in March 2018, and now the water bottle in the Navalny incident.
As with the alleged assassination attempt on MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal, the latest incident involving Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny is undoubtedly a false-flag provocation to foment Western sanctions and hostility against Moscow.
Immediately following reports of alleged German detection of Novichok in Navalny’s body, there were predictable calls for the cancellation of the Nord Stream-2 gas project between Russia and Germany. It is no secret that pro-Washington German politicians have long been opposed to the ambitious energy trade with Russia.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has up to now been resolute in wanting Nord Stream-2 completed in spite of immense pressure from the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress to abandon it. The American agenda is transparently to replace Russian gas energy supplies with American exports.
Navalny’s apparent poison-assassination fits neatly with this strategic American agenda. Given the allegiance of German military intelligence and certain politicians to the transatlantic axis it is not difficult to conceive of how a false-flag provocation against Moscow could be orchestrated.
The problem is that in their haste to set up Navalny as a victim in order to sabotage Nord Stream-2, the authors overlooked the unfortunate anomaly of Russian doctors potentially disproving the claim of detecting Novichok in Navalny’s body. Realizing their clumsy mistake, the authors are obliged to invent another twist in the story involving a contaminated water bottle. In terms of credibility, however, their invention doesn’t hold water.
This has grave implications for the survivability of Navalny. As an opposition figure long lionized and exaggerated by the West as the nemesis of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Navalny is more valuable dead than alive as a propaganda weapon. With its false-flag narrative failing, the temptation may be to up the ante dramatically by amending the script to Navalny “succumbing” to Novichok.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | Germany |
Leave a comment
Ocean Rebellion group members march during an Extinction Rebellion protest in London, Britain, September 6, 2020. © REUTERS/Henry Nicholls
The bizarre exploits of Extinction Rebellion are diverting attention from the alarming reality that many in power agree with the group’s bonkers agenda. And that is resulting in a hands-off approach to XR’s disruptive tactics.
While Extinction Rebellion (XR) has been getting lots of attention for its bizarre and disruptive protests, the real madness is the fact that the political and media establishment agrees with its aims. The only quibbles are over timing and methods.
Over the past week or so, XR has reignited its protests after being in abeyance during the Covid-19 pandemic. As is the usual routine, roads have been blocked and institutions targeted. On one day, XR harassed a group of British think tanks based in a shared building in Westminster. Another group of protesters glued themselves to the ground in front of a doorway into Parliament, perhaps symbolic of XR’s disdain for democracy.
Most controversially, XR protesters blocked printing plants for The Times, The Sun and The Telegraph, preventing delivery of the newspapers. XR accuses these publications of promoting lies about climate change. Here was an attack on the free press, and the backlash was substantial. Rather than debating the arguments for a rapid reduction in UK greenhouse gas emissions, the protesters seemed to believe that these media outlets were responsible for brainwashing the public and should simply be shut down.
The newspapers were, rightly, outraged. But the irony is that these publications all broadly agree that climate change is an existential threat to humanity. Saturday’s edition of The Sun even included an article by David Attenborough, the veteran voice of BBC wildlife programmes, demanding stronger action on the environment. At most, The Telegraph has included a handful of sceptical voices in its opinion pages, but the editorial line is right behind the government’s ‘drastic carbon emission plans’.
It is those plans that should alarm us far more than XR, who are a bunch of oddballs engaged in staging stunts that are annoying and disruptive, but which are also bizarre. It seems that XR supporters believe that they can bring down The System through the medium of interpretative dance, staging ‘die-ins’, meditating outside leading banks or dressing up in costumes that offer alarming echoes of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.
For the environmentalist mainstream, XR is utterly embarrassing. Moreover, while demanding that we listen to the scientists, its own claims of imminent global destruction are utterly unscientific.
Meanwhile, every significant UK political party has fallen in line with the idea that we should aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ‘net zero’ – that is, zero emissions once the effect of counteracting policies like planting trees is taken into account. That is exactly the same aim as XR. The only question is over what the target date should be. XR wants to get to net zero in five years, the government wants to do it in 30. But that aim itself is bonkers.
To achieve such a goal would mean a very rapid decarbonisation of society. Without the technology to replace fossil-fuelled transport, energy production, cement, food production and much more, this could only be achieved by a drastic reduction in living standards that would make the post-lockdown recessions look luxurious in comparison. ‘Net zero’ doesn’t just mean turning down the thermostat a bit and recycling your plastic – it means a wholesale transformation into a shivering, stay-local, lentil-munching society.
As a new report by the Institute of Government, a British think tank, notes that ‘there is still little evidence that the government, and the politicians who waved the new target through with little debate, have confronted the enormous scale of the task ahead’.
Moreover, it isn’t clear if imported goods would count in this target. If they do count, then somehow the UK would need to go into negative emissions, since it would have to make up for the emissions created abroad during the production and transportation of those goods. If they don’t count, the net zero target itself becomes rather meaningless – we would just import stuff instead of producing it in the UK.
This places the government in a quandary. It shares XR’s basic aim, while hating the disruption that XR’s protests cause. For example, one Conservative MP, Tobias Ellwood, has come out in support of XR’s original ‘noble cause’, but says he thinks the protesters have gone too far. The result has been a hands-off approach. While protesters against the Covid lockdowns have faced arrest and heavy fines simply for assembling in large numbers, the police have been slow to break up XR’s protests.
Some ministers recognise that this is untenable for the normal functioning of society, but their response has bordered on the irrational. There are now rumours from within the government that XR might be designated an ‘organised crime group’, based on the definition that such a group is ‘characterised by violence or the threat of violence and by the use of bribery and corruption’. This is as bizarre as one of XR’s protests. Whatever it is, XR is not akin to the mafia or a drugs cartel.
There are easier and less illiberal ways of dealing with the problem. XR should not be stopped from peaceful protest. If XR supporters block a road or attack a building, there are perfectly ordinary laws that can be used to arrest them without undermining the right to assembly and protest.
While XR’s antics mostly attract derision, the truly crazy thing is the policy of ‘net zero’. And because every major political party agrees with it, voters have simply been given no choice in the matter. It’s not the lunatics dressing up and blocking the roads we should worry about; it’s the lunatics in Parliament who keep voting for these irrational and reactionary policies.
Rob Lyons is a UK journalist specialising in science, environmental and health issues. He is the author of ‘Panic on a Plate: How Society Developed an Eating Disorder’.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | UK |
Leave a comment
Here’s your BLM Pop Quiz for the day: What do “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning tell us about what’s going on in America today?
- They point to deeply-embedded racism that shapes the behavior of white people
- They suggest that systemic racism cannot be overcome by merely changing attitudes and laws
- They alert us to the fact that unresolved issues are pushing the country towards a destructive race war
- They indicate that powerful agents — operating from within the state– are inciting racial violence to crush the emerging “populist” majority that elected Trump to office in 2016 and which now represents an existential threat to the globalist plan to transform America into a tyrannical third-world “shithole”.
Which of these four statements best explains what’s going on in America today?
If you chose Number 4, you are right. We are not experiencing a sudden and explosive outbreak of racial violence and mayhem. We are experiencing a thoroughly-planned, insurgency-type operation that involves myriad logistical components including vast, nationwide riots, looting and arson, as well as an extremely impressive ideological campaign. “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning are as much a part of the Oligarchic war on America as are the burning of our cities and the toppling of our statues. All three, fall under the heading of “ideology”, and all three are being used to shape public attitudes on matters related to our collective identity as “Americans”.
The plan is to overwhelm the population with a deluge of disinformation about their history, their founders, and the threats they face, so they will submissively accept a New Order imposed by technocrats and their political lackeys. This psychological war is perhaps more important than Operation BLM which merely provides the muscle for implementing the transformative “Reset” that elites want to impose on the country. The real challenge is to change the hearts and minds of a population that is unwaveringly patriotic and violently resistant to any subversive element that threatens to do harm to their country. So, while we can expect this propaganda saturation campaign to continue for the foreseeable future, we don’t expect the strategy will ultimately succeed. At the end of the day, America will still be America, unbroken, unflagging and unapologetic.
Let’s look more carefully at what is going on.
On September 4, the Department of Homeland Security issued a draft report stating that “White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States”. According to an article in Politico :
“… all three draft (versions of the document) describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups…. John Cohen, who oversaw DHS’s counterterrorism portfolio from 2011 to 2014, said the drafts’ conclusion isn’t surprising.
“This draft document seems to be consistent with earlier intelligence reports from DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement sources: that the most significant terror-related threat facing the US today comes from violent extremists who are motivated by white supremacy and other far-right ideological causes,” he said…
“Lone offenders and small cells of individuals motivated by a diverse array of social, ideological, and personal factors will pose the primary terrorist threat to the United States,” the draft reads. “Among these groups, we assess that white supremacist extremists …will pose the most persistent and lethal threat.”… (“DHS draft document: White supremacists are greatest terror threat” Politico )
This is nonsense. White supremacists do not pose the greatest danger to the country, that designation goes to the left-wing groups that have rampaged through more than 2,000 US cities for the last 100 days. Black Lives Matter and Antifa-generated riots have decimated hundreds of small businesses, destroyed the lives and livelihoods of thousands of merchants and their employees, and left entire cities in a shambles. The destruction in Kenosha alone far exceeds the damage attributable to the activities of all the white supremacist groups combined.
So why has Homeland Security made this ridiculous and unsupportable claim? Why have they chosen to prioritize white supremacists as “the most persistent and lethal threat” when it is clearly not true?
There’s only one answer: Politics.
The officials who concocted this scam are advancing the agenda of their real bosses, the oligarch puppet-masters who have their tentacles extended throughout the deep-state and use them to coerce their lackey bureaucrats to do their bidding. In this case, the honchos are invoking the race card (“white supremacists”) to divert attention from their sinister destabilization program, their looting of the US Treasury (for their crooked Wall Street friends), their demonizing of the mostly-white working class “America First” nationalists who handed Trump the 2016 election, and their scurrilous scheme to establish one-party rule by installing their addlepated meat-puppet candidate (Biden) as president so he can carry out their directives from the comfort of the Oval Office. That’s what’s really going on.
DHS’s announcement makes it possible for state agents to target legally-armed Americans who gather with other gun owners in groups that are protected under the second amendment. Now the white supremacist label will be applied more haphazardly to these same conservatives who pose no danger to public safety. The draft document should be seen as a warning to anyone whose beliefs do not jibe with the New Liberal Orthodoxy that white people are inherently racists who must ask forgiveness for a system they had no hand in creating (slavery) and which was abolished more than 150 years ago.
The 1619 Project” is another part of the ideological war that is being waged against the American people. The objective of the “Project” is to convince readers that America was founded by heinous white men who subjugated blacks to increase their wealth and power. According to the World Socialist Web Site :
“The essays featured in the magazine are organized around the central premise that all of American history is rooted in race hatred—specifically, the uncontrollable hatred of “black people” by “white people.” Hannah-Jones writes in the series’ introduction: “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”
This is a false and dangerous conception. DNA is a chemical molecule that contains the genetic code of living organisms and determines their physical characteristics and development…. Hannah-Jones’s reference to DNA is part of a growing tendency to derive racial antagonisms from innate biological processes…. where does this racism come from? It is embedded, claims Hannah-Jones, in the historical DNA of American “white people.” Thus, it must persist independently of any change in political or economic conditions….
… No doubt, the authors of The Project 1619 essays would deny that they are predicting race war, let alone justifying fascism. But ideas have a logic; and authors bear responsibility for the political conclusions and consequences of their false and misguided arguments.” (“The New York Times’s 1619 Project: A racialist falsification of American and world history”, World Socialist Web Site )
Clearly, Hannah-Jones was enlisted by big money patrons who needed an ideological foundation to justify the massive BLM riots they had already planned as part of their US color revolution. The author –perhaps unwittingly– provided the required text for vindicating widespread destruction and chaos carried out in the name of “social justice.”
As Hannah-Jones says, “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country”, which is to say that it cannot be mitigated or reformed, only eradicated by destroying the symbols of white patriarchy (Our icons, our customs, our traditions and our history.), toppling the existing government, and imposing a new system that better reflects the values of the burgeoning non-Caucasian majority. Simply put, The Project 1619 creates the rationale for sustained civil unrest, deepening political polarization and violent revolution.
All of these goals conveniently coincide with the aims of the NWO Oligarchs who seek to replace America’s Constitutional government with a corporate Superstate ruled by voracious Monopolists and their globalist allies. So, while Hannah-Jones’ treatise does nothing to improve conditions for black people in America, it does move the country closer to the dystopian dream of the parasite class; Corporate Valhalla.
Then there is “Critical Race Theory” which provides the ideological icing on the cake. The theory is part of the broader canon of anti-white dogma which is being used to indoctrinate workers. White employees are being subjected to “reeducation” programs that require their participation as a precondition for further employment. The first rebellion against critical race theory, took place at Sandia Labs which is a federally-funded research agency that designs America’s nuclear weapons. According to journalist Christopher F. Rufo:
“Senator @HawleyMO and @SecBrouillette have launched an inspector general investigation, but Sandia executives have only accelerated their purge against conservatives.”
Sandia executives have made it clear: they want to force critical race theory, race-segregated trainings, and white male reeducation camps on their employees—and all dissent will be severely punished. Progressive employees will be rewarded; conservative employees will be purged.” (“There is a civil war erupting at @SandiaLabs.” Christopher F Rufo)
It all sounds so Bolshevik. Here’s more info on how this toxic indoctrination program works:
“Treasury Department …
The Treasury Department held a training session telling employees that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” and demanding that white staff members “struggle to own their racism” and accept their “unconscious bias, White privilege, and White fragility.”
The National Credit Union Administration
The NCUA held a session for 8,900 employees arguing that America was “founded on racism” and “built on the blacks of people who were enslaved.” Twitter thread here and original source documents here.
Sandia National Laboratories
Last year, Sandia National Labs—which produces our nuclear arsenal—held a three-day reeducation camp for white males, teaching them how to deconstruct their “white male culture” and forcing them to write letters of apology to women and people of color. Whistleblowers from inside the labs tell me that critical race theory is now endangering our national security. Twitter thread here and original source documents here.
Argonne National Laboratories
Argonne National Labs hosts trainings calling on white lab employees to admit that they “benefit from racism” and atone for the “pain and anguish inflicted upon Black people.” Twitter thread here.
Department of Homeland Security
The Department of Homeland Security hosted a Training on “microaggressions, microinequities, and microassaults” where white employees were told that they had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” Twitter thread here and original source documents here.” (“Summary of Critical Race Theory Investigations”, Christopher F Rufo)
On September 4, Donald Trump announced his administration “would prohibit federal agencies from subjecting government employees to “critical race theory” or “white privilege” seminar...
“It has come to the President’s attention that Executive Branch agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to date ‘training’ government workers to believe divisive, anti-American propaganda,” read a Friday memo from the Office of Budget and Management Director Russ Vought. “These types of ‘trainings’ not only run counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception, but they also engender division and resentment within the Federal workforce … The President has directed me to ensure that Federal agencies cease and desist from using taxpayer dollars to fund these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.”
The next day, September 5, Trump announced that the Department of Education was going to see whether the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project was being used in school curricula and– if it was– then those schools would be ineligible for federal funding. Conservative pundits applauded Trump’s action as a step forward in the “culture wars”, but it’s really much more than that. Trump is actually foiling an effort by the domestic saboteurs who continue looking for ways to undermine democracy, reduce the masses of working-class people to grinding poverty and hopelessness, and turn the country into a despotic military outpost ruled by bloodsucking tycoons, mercenary autocrats and duplicitous elites. A lot of thought and effort went into this malign ideological project. Trump derailed it with a wave of the hand. That’s no small achievement.
Bottom line: “Critical Race Theory”, “The 1619 Project”, and Homeland Security’s “White Supremacist” warning represent the ideological foundation upon which the war on America is based. The “anti-white” dogma is the counterpart to the massive riots that have rocked the country. These phenomena are two spokes on the same wheel. They are designed to work together to achieve the same purpose. The goal is create a “racial” smokescreen that conceals the vast and willful destruction of the US economy, the $5 trillion dollar wealth-transfer that was provided to Wall Street, and the ferocious attack on the emerging, mainly-white working class “populist” movement that elected Trump and which rejects the globalist plan to transform the world into a borderless free trade zone ruled by cutthroat monopolists and their NWO allies.
This is a class war dolled-up to look like a race war. Americans will have to look beyond the smoke and mirrors to spot the elites lurking in the shadows. There lies the cancer that must be eradicated.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | United States |
1 Comment
Jewish groups support BLM while ignoring Palestinian genocide
There is a tendency on the part of major Jewish groups in the United States and in Europe to discover what they describe as anti-Semitism wherever one turns. Last month, a statue of the well-known and highly respected 18th century French writer and political philosopher Voltaire was removed from outside the Académie Française in Paris. Voltaire was a major figure in the “Enlightenment,” during which what we now call science and applied rationalism challenged the authority of the church and the King.
The statue had recently been vandalized by the French version of Black Lives Matter (BLM) because Voltaire had reportedly invested in the French East India Company, which engaged in the triangular trade between Europe, Africa and the New World. The commodities included Africans who were destined to become slaves in the European colonies. Beyond that Voltaire, a man of his times, believed blacks to have “little or no intelligence” and also considered Jews to be born “with raging fanaticism in their hearts.”
Voltaire was reportedly much admired by Hitler, so perhaps it would not be off base to suggest that in France, where the Jewish community is extremely powerful while Africans are not, it was Voltaire cast as the anti-Semite that consigned his statue to a government warehouse never to be seen again. By that reasoning, one expects that the world will soon have a ban on the music of Richard Wagner and Ludwig van Beethoven as they too were admired by Hitler.
The idea that someone can change history by ignoring aspects of it means that school textbooks are being rewritten at a furious pace to make sure that there is overwhelming coverage of the holocaust and black achievement. Also, the erasing of monuments is being pursued with singular intensity in the United States, where the Founding Fathers and other dead white males are being one by one consigned to the trash heap. Doing so, unfortunately, also destroys the learning experience that can be derived from using the monuments as visual mechanisms for confronting and understanding the mistakes made in the past. A commission set up by the mayor of the District of Columbia has, for example, compiled a hit list of monuments and commemorations that must be either removed, renamed or placed into “context.” It includes the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. The name “Columbia” is, of course, certain to be changed.
Interestingly, Jewish groups in the United States have been in the forefront in supporting BLM’s apparent mission to upend what used to pass for America’s European-derived culture. Ironically, that culture includes free speech, democracy and mercantilism, all of which have greatly benefited Jews. The narrative is, of course, being wrapped around the common cause of blacks and Jews together fighting against the alleged white nationalists who are being blamed by the media for much of the violence taking place even when videos taken at the scenes of the rioting definitely show nearly all black mobs doing the arson and looting.
And blacks who are skeptical of the Jewish role are quickly put in their place, as was Rodney Muhammad of Philadelphia, who was removed from his executive position with the NAACP after expressing skepticism about all the Jewish friends that blacks suddenly appeared to be acquiring, quoting an observation often attributed to the now disgraced Voltaire on a Facebook entry, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
The lead organization in shaping the acceptable narrative is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which promotes itself as “Fighting Hate for Good.” In other words, anyone on the other side of the narrative is by definition a “hater.” ADL apparently advertised an online discussion topic for August 28th, shortly after the shooting incident in Kenosha Wisconsin that killed two white men and injured a third. The headline reads “Why all white American middle schoolers must publicly condemn the Anti-Semitic murders by white supremacist Kyle Rittenhouse.”
If the ad is indeed genuine, one notes immediately that the killings are being framed as anti-Semitism without any actual evidence to suggest that anything like that was involved or that the shooter knew the religion of those who were confronting him. All three of the “victims” are described as BLM supporters, which they apparently were, but it ignores the fact that they were also Antifa activists and all three had criminal records involving violence. One of them, Joseph Rosenbaum, is, to be sure Jewish, and also a pedophile, and the other two might also be Jews if ADL is correct, but that does not seem to have been material in what took place. Credible accounts of the shooting suggest that Rittenhouse was attacked by the three, one of whom, Grosskreutz, had a gun, and was being beaten on his head with Huber’s sidewalk surfboard. He responded in self-defense.
And ADL is not alone in its defense of BLM. More than six hundred Jewish groups have signed on to a full page newspaper ad supporting the movement. The ad says “We speak with one voice when we say, unequivocally: Black Lives Matter” and then goes on to assert “There are politicians and political movements in this country who build power by deliberately manufacturing fear to divide us against each other. All too often, anti-Semitism is at the center of these manufactured divisions.”
So, once again, it is all about the perpetual victimhood of Jews. That Jews constitute the wealthiest and best educated demographic in the United States would seem to suggest that they are especially favored, which they are, rather than targeted by raging mobs of hillbillies. More than 90% of discretionary Department of Homeland Security funds goes to protect Jewish facilities and the Department of Education and Congress are always prepared to create new rules protecting Jews from feeling “uncomfortable” in their occasional interactions with critics of Israel.
Jews largely think and vote progressive, which is part of the reason for aligning with blacks even though rioting and looting is likely to affect them more than other demographics as many of them might still have businesses in the cities that are most likely to be hit. But there is also a much bigger reason to do so. Many blacks in BLM as well as progressive white supporters were beginning to suggest that the movement should broaden its agenda and recognize inter alia the suffering of others, to include the Palestinian people. A strong show of support from Jewish groups, backed up by what one might presume to be a flow of contributions to the cause, would presumably be a way of nipping that sentiment in the bud just as Jewish donors to the Democratic Party were able to block any language in the party platform sympathetic to the Palestinians.
It is of course the ultimate irony that Jewish groups are very sensitive to the suffering of blacks in the United State while at the same time largely ignoring the war crimes and other devastation going on in Israel and Palestine at the hands of their co-religionists. The beating and shooting of unarmed and non-resisting Palestinians, to include children, the destruction of the livelihoods of farmers, and the demolition of homes to make way for Jewish settlers is beyond belief and is largely invisible as the Jewish influenced U.S. media does not report it. It is, simply put, genocide. And on top of that, Israel has been bombing defenseless civilians in Gaza nearly daily of late, attacking and destabilizing Lebanon and Syria, and also conniving with American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to go to war with Iran.
It should not be surprising if black groups would be suspicious of the motives of the Jewish organizations that suddenly seem to want to be friendly. When Rodney Muhammad was removed from his position with the NAACP in Philadelphia, Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of ADL, tweeted “Credit to Executive Committee of Philly NAACP & National NAACP for taking action here. We hope this will enable new opportunities for collaboration as the local Black & Jewish communities can do more to fight against hate & push for dignity of all people.”
Greenblatt has been a leader in the fight to criminalize both criticism of Israel and also the free speech being exercised by supporters of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). For him, “dignity of all people” clearly does not include Palestinians or even anyone who peacefully supports their cause.
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 https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | France, Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
Leave a comment
Timing is everything, they say. Never more so was it crucial in the case of Alexei Navalny, currently coming out of a coma in the Charité hospital in Berlin, Germany, where he was transferred last month from Omsk in Russia after collapsing on a plane. Timing in this detective story is vital to understanding the motive behind the alleged poisoning.
For the West, it is a cut and dried case. Navalny, the Russian opposition activist, was poisoned by a nerve agent ‘Novichok’, probably in a cup of tea he drank at Omsk airport. The German military, after liaising with scientists at the UK’s Porton Down laboratory, came to that conclusion after carrying out tests. The implication is that the Russian state is responsible. In what was an unusually defiant tone, Angela Merkel said that Germany was awaiting answers from the Russian government regarding Navalny’s plight. Heiko Maas, the German Foreign Minister, went further at the weekend to say that he hoped Russia would come up with a response to the allegations of Novichok poisoning, or it could affect the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
And herein lies the rub for the western version of events. For if the Russian state was indeed guilty of poisoning Navalny, why on earth would it allow his transfer to Germany? And why would it carry out such a criminal act during the last phase of the Nord Stream pipeline project, in which so much has been invested? Politically and geopolitically, such an act would absolutely backfire. By eliminating an opposition member such as Alexei Navalny, it would no doubt produce a furious reaction from both foreign powers and domestic opposition, only encouraging anti-government activism.
So why therefore have we not seen protestors take to the streets in Russia in support of Navalny? Partly, it is because many Russians are sceptical of the West’s allegations. Given that Russia would have so much to lose from such a state-sponsored act, the motivation is not there. There are just as many holes in the western narrative as there were with the Skripal case back in 2018. As was the case back then, the Russian state was accused of the poisoning of ex double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, yet no evidence of Russian state involvement was provided. We have yet to hear from the doctors treating Navalny in the Charité hospital in Berlin, just as we didn’t hear from those involved in the Skripal case. As in the Skripal case, the timing of the incident couldn’t be worse for the Kremlin. Then, it was just before the Russian world cup; in this case, it is just before the completion of Nord Stream 2 and when the Trump administration has spoken of meeting with Putin later this year. Why would the Russian state risk such an act at this time? Furthermore, if it was the nerve agent Novichok, a potent chemical up to eight times stronger than VX, why were other people around Navalny not affected? And why did he not exhibit any of the spasms associated with such nerve agents?
On the contrary, as the doctors treating him in Omsk reported, there was no indication that Navalny was suffering from poisoning by a nerve agent. They suggested various possibilities, including one of a pancreatic disorder which would fit the results of the investigations carried out, and the symptoms exhibited. Why the German experts have come up with a completely different diagnosis is not clear, as they have not released any information. The lack of transparency and in particular, lack of communication with Moscow on the detail of analyses taken, only adds to scepticism about the western narrative.
Furthermore, it’s worth considering Navalny’s popularity and reach within Russia. According to a recent poll by Levada, the opposition activist would gain around 2% of the vote in a presidential election was to be held, compared to 56% who would re-elect Vladimir Putin. In a further survey which asked people to select a candidate which they trusted the most, Navalny only came 7th, with Vladimir Putin in 1st place. Such polls reflect the consistently high approval ratings Vladimir Putin has had for years now. Navalny on the other hand, has not gained the popularity he might have hoped given his years of journalism and anti-government activism – another reason why we haven’t seen demonstrations on the streets of Moscow since his hospitalisation. Why would the Kremlin seek to annihilate someone who didn’t pose any real threat to established power?
If Navalny was indeed poisoned, then we have to look elsewhere for a motive. And here the old adage ‘Cui Bono?’ comes to mind. In the last week the headlines have been dominated by the idea that the Navalny poisoning could end the Nord Stream pipeline. What is more interesting however is the extent to which the current US administration has been fixated with the idea of stopping Nord Stream 2, no matter what. And don’t take my word for it. Mike Pompeo himself said in July this year that the US would ‘do everything’ it could to prevent Nord Stream 2. He told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee “We need further tools. We’re prepared to use those tools should you provide them to us”. Just what exactly these tools would consist of, other than support for sanctions, is unclear. But it’s no secret that the US has tried everything in the book to stop this pipeline which would guarantee Europe’s energy supply and greatly reduce US chances of competing and exporting its own fracked gas. From sanctions, to pressurising companies and individuals, no stone has been left unturned. Now, by some twist of fate, an issue has arisen to put maximum pressure on the German government to abandon the project. The timing is extraordinary.
We don’t know yet what happened to Alexei Navalny; there just hasn’t been enough evidence released. Until it is, the western narrative cannot be taken at face value, there are simply too many things that don’t add up.
Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
September 8, 2020
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Russophobia | Germany, Nord Stream-2 |
1 Comment
Aletho News 