Time to Stand Up and Be Counted
By Craig Murray | October 29, 2020
Today, nothing is more important than to say that we will not be silent on the dreadful oppression of the Palestinian people; the daily beatings, killings, humiliations, demolitions, expropriations and destruction of groves that are the concomitant of Israeli illegal occupation.
We will never be browbeaten into silence on the slow genocide of the Palestinian people.
Nobody with any grasp on the location of their right mind believes Jeremy Corbyn to be an anti-Semite. Nobody with any grasp on their right mind believes the Labour Party is now anything but the substitutes’ bench for the Neoconservative team. Under Keir Starmer, the Labour Party has failed to oppose the granting of legal powers to the security services to kill, torture, entrap, forge and fake with impunity. It has failed to oppose the limitation of prosecution of British soldiers for war crimes. The Labour Party now seeks to erase all trace that it might once have been a party that offered an alternative to the right wing security state.
As Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer pressurised Swedish prosecutors who wished to drop the case against Julian Assange, to persist in order that he might be rendered to the USA. He further persuaded them not to interview Julian here, which is standard practice when he was never charged but only wanted for questioning, and which would have reduced Julian’s ordeal by four years.
Starmer received £50,000 in personal donations from lobbyist Sir Trevor Chinn to fund his leadership bid.
It is perfectly plain that Starmer’s aim in suspending Corbyn is to drive the mass membership that Corbyn attracted out of the Labour Party, and make it a reliable arm of the right wing security state. He wants the Labour Party to be financially dependent not on its members, who have annoying principles, but on donors like Chinn.
The media and political elite have attained their aim; there is no longer any point in voting in Westminster elections. A right wing government supporting the neo-con status quo and the ever tightening security state is now firmly guaranteed and cannot be influenced by a Westminster election.
Cui bono from the situation in France
The Saker | October 29, 2020
I won’t even bother repeating it all here, those who are interested in my views of this entire Charlie Hebdo canard can read my article “I am NOT Charlie” here: https://thesaker.is/i-am-not-charlie/
No, what I want to do is to ask a simple question: do you think the French leaders are simply stupid, suicidal or naive? I submit that they neither stupid, nor suicidal nor naive. In fact, they are using a well practiced technique which goes with some variation of this:
- Infiltrate some pseudo-Islamic gang of cutthroats (literally!)
- Keep them under close scrutiny ostensibly for counter-terrorism purposes
- Inside the group, try to promote your confidential informers
- Have your analysts work on the following question: “how could we best provoke these nutcases into a bloody terrorist act?“
- Once the plan is decided, simply execute it, say by organizing the posting of fantastically offensive caricatures
- Once the cutthroats strike, blame Islam and double down
- By then, you have infuriated most of the immense Muslim world out there and you can rest assured that the process is launched and will continue on its own. You can now relax and get the pop-corn
- Have your propaganda machine declare that Islam is incompatible with western civilization (whatever that means in 2020, both Descartes and Conchita Wurst I suppose… )
- Shed some crocodile tears when the cutthroats murder some completely innocent Christian bystander
- And announce a new crusade against “Islamism” (also a vague and, frankly, meaningless term!) and crack down on true Muslim communities and ideas while continuing to lovingly arm, train, finance and direct the “good terrorists” who have now become your own, personal, cutthroats.
Cui bono?
Anybody who knows anything about the political realities in France will immediately know in whose interests this all is and who is behind that: the Zionist power structure in France (CRIF, UEJF, etc. and the Israelis). They have a total control over Macron and over the entire political class, very much including Marine LePen.
Who else could have concocted the “beautiful” term “Islamo-Fascisme“?!
This is a new phenomenon, a new ideology and a new strategy, which Alain Soral calls “National Zionism” which I discussed in some details here: https://thesaker.is/the-great-fraud-of-national-zionism/.
In its inception (from Ahad Ha’am, Theodor Herzl, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, etc) Zionism used to be a largely secular and nationalistic, then, later, after WWII, it became very leftist and still secular ( Ben-Gurion, Shlomo Lavi, Golda Meir). Modern Zionism, however, is both rabidly racist and religious – the perfect example would be US neocons. It is also a ruthless and genocidal ideology which has created something truly original: God-mandated racism, something which, as far as I know, no other religion professes (so much for the ignorant and, frankly, plain stupid notions of “Abrahamic religions” or, even worse, “Judeo-Christian values”!). National Zionism is the next phase of Zionism – it is rabidly “conservative” (in a Neocon sense only, of course!) and it parasitically feeds on whatever nationalist ideology the local patriotic goyim are inclined towards (the best example of that being the so-called “Christian Zionists” in the USA).
But here is the demonic “beauty” of it all: in a society like the French one, the Zionists don’t even need to micromanage their false flags: given enough uneducated and murderous pseudo-Muslim cutthroats and enough rabid secularists wanted to offend the faithful – some kind of violent explosion will *inevitably* happen!
Right now, between the embarrassing Yellow Vests movement, the crumbling economy, the massive influx, wave after wave, of unwanted and un-adaptable immigrants and the resulting social tensions, the French regime is in deep trouble. Add to this the COVID pandemic which just added to the chaos and anger and finish with a total lack of foreign policy successes and you will immediately see why this regime badly needed what could be called a “patriotic reaction”.
Finally, there is the time-proven method of scaring your own population into a state of catatonic acceptance of everything and anything in the name of “security”.
We see it all in France today, we saw it in the UK before, and also in Belgium. And, rest assured, we will see much more such massacres in the future. The only way to really stop these “terrorist” attacks is to show their sponsors that we know who they are and we understand what they are doing. Short of this, these attacks will continue.
Trump is really a 3rd Party candidate, taking the first axe to the two-party US dictatorship in 170 years
By Robert Bridge | RT | October 29, 2020
Washington despises Trump because he’s an outsider – a third-party gatecrasher – who has upset the duopoly that has had a stranglehold on American politics, and they’re doing everything they can to stop him doing it again.
The meteoric rise of Donald Trump defies the law of US political gravity in that he has elevated himself inside of a rigidly controlled two-party system while going against the interests of the establishment. That is a remarkable accomplishment, and no other modern politician – aside from perhaps John F. Kennedy – has made it this far in Washington by promising to drain the very swamp it sits upon. The Manhattan real estate magnate has essentially become a third-party tour de force, the ultimate bugbear of the powers that be.
Trump is no fool and understood early in the game that there is a veritable army of burly gatekeepers in Washington, standing guard against the threat of third-party provocateurs. In fact, one of the largest gatekeepers is none other than the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a non-profit third-party terminator that is actually sponsored by the Democratic and Republican parties. So when people complain that the Democrats and Republicans are two heads of the same poisonous snake, they are right. This organization is so powerful that it barred the highly popular Ross Perot from appearing on the debate stage in the 1996 presidential campaign alongside Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton and Republican Bob Dole.
A buried footnote with regards to Trump’s political career is that he made his first serious foray into the swamp as the presidential nominee in Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 2000 elections. When those efforts fizzled out, Trump, aware that the road to the White House via a third-party platform was largely inaccessible, began to weigh his chances at running for the presidency on the Republican ticket. Not a bad idea considering that the last time a president was elected in the US who did not identify as either a Democrat or Republican was in 1848, with the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor. At the time, however, much of Washington wrote off the tycoon’s dream as a bad joke; the egoistic yearnings of a billionaire who thinks the White House is just another real estate venture.
But Capitol Hill seriously underestimated both the dark mood that had descended upon the nation, as well as Trump’s ability to capitalize on it. With an uncanny gift for electrifying audiences wherever he went, people no longer laughed at his political ambitions. Eventually, Trump went on to do what the polls said was virtually impossible – he defeated the veteran Washington insider, Hillary Clinton, becoming the 45th president of the US. At this point, Trump the ultimate interloper began to use the Republican Party as his own personal Trojan horse to enact radical changes that could not have been achieved otherwise.
For example, despite Washington’s bipartisan love affair with overseas entanglements, Trump held back the dogs of war. He has given the US military arguably its longest break from the battlefield in living memory. That’s not to say that Uncle Sam has suddenly morphed into a marijuana-smoking peacenik under Trump, not at all. In fact, future historians may ultimately blame Trump, the consummate businessman, for selling massive amounts of military hardware to foreign states – like Saudi Arabia, and former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe – that lead to some catastrophic conflict down the road. And who could forget Trump’s crass “we’re keeping the oil” comment with regards to America’s so-called withdrawal from Syria, or the harmful sanctions that have been slapped against Iran?
Meanwhile, Trump has carried out other controversial initiatives, like plugging the gaping hole in the US-Mexico border. Republicans were always content to ignore the massive influx of illegal migrants from South America, so long as it meant cheap labor, while the Democrats found it a great way to capture future voters. Not until a ‘third-party’ solution came along, courtesy of Donald Trump, did the gates begin to close on the “invasion.”
Perhaps Trump’s most ambitious ‘third-party’ project to date has been to take America’s long-ailing industrial sector off of life support. Unfortunately, this program, built around Trump’s pledge to ‘Make America Great Again’, has taken relations with China to the brink. Accusing the People’s Republic of engaging in “unfair trade practices,” the Republican leader took a protectionist position by imposing a number of tariffs and trade barriers, which has naturally triggered a tough response from Beijing. While opinion is split on the matter, a number of analysts agree that the US had been at a severe disadvantage in trade with China and the change Trump fought for was necessary.
Whether or not people agree with Trump’s actions isn’t really the point. The point is that issues that were being ignored by the Democrats and the Republicans, and rarely discussed by the mainstream media, only got attention after a Washington outsider bulldozed his way onto the political scene on behalf of millions of voters. And for all of his efforts, Donald Trump has been one of the most harassed US presidents, suffering a three-year ‘Russiagate’ investigation, as well as impeachment, while still holding onto office with new elections just days away.
In some ways Trump’s political rise was a fluke, unlikely to be duplicated anytime soon. The mainstream media and Big Tech are doing absolutely everything in their power to prevent a second term for the populist. They have even taken the unprecedented step of blocking explosive news on his competitor, Joe Biden, from being seen or shared by the public.‘Once bitten twice shy’, as the expression goes, and the Washington gatekeepers will do everything to block any Donald Trumps and their third-party ideas from storming the scene in the future.
That is very bad news for the US political system, which will continue to be held hostage by the same two parties, with little chance for any winds of change reaching the inner sanctum of power. Trump may very well be the last blast of fresh air in Washington for a long time, and Americans should enjoy the change while they can.
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of ‘Midnight in the American Empire,’ How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
Plutocrat Violence and Election-Night Horror: Marxian Analysis Shows That Antifa Is Fascist
By Joaquin Flores | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 29, 2020
“When fascism comes to America, it will be called antifascism” – Huey Long (misattributed)
Antifa’s fascist violence will return on election night. That’s why it’s important to understand their fraudulence and fascism, and reject the politics of plutocrat-contrived violence. Perhaps strangely, Marxian analysis itself is best suited to communicate this point to the radical left.
This is because at the root of Marxian analysis are not self-declarations, nor definitions based in superstructural manifestations, but rather the material relationship between base and superstructure.

In layman’s terms this boils down to two things in practice: ‘follow the money’, and ‘watch what they do and not what they say’.
The real existing financial motives and the socio-economic class behind those motives is what we will find driving the base, even while at the superstructural level we find an ideology which only nominally, only apparently, appears at odds with the real motives at the base. Antifa, at its class and financial base (i.e., its objective and material base) is a plutocrat supported and controlled operation against the republic.
“Unlike the old left, rooted in radically independent organized labor, Antifa’s leadership and activities, to the contrary, are financed through billionaire oligarchs both directly and indirectly, like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg.”
In the simplest possible terms, Antifa is fascist because while they use some of the talking points and imagery of the old left, they actually work towards a plutocratic coup (or counter-revolution) against the republic. This is not to say there is a system-wide fascist threat, for reasons we will explain in an upcoming installment. In short, the coming coup against republican norms will not establish ‘fascism’ as historically understood, but a new kind techno-industrial repressive society within the rubric of post-modernity, which has hitherto not been contemplated rigorously outside of small circles of futurists and science fiction authors.
Antifa and BLM protests have generally disappeared from the simulated reality of the controlled media lens, because these riots did not have the intended effect of delegitimizing the Trump administration, instead working against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Antifa Explosion – What the Week of November 2nd Will Look Like
Once Trump declares victory at around 11:30 pm on November 3rd, right as social media bans, blocks, and censors Trump’s announcement of victory, we will see the start of mass Antifa violence in key cities in swing states. As the French Marxist Baudrillard would have explained, an entire media simulation will ensnare (within its simulacra) whole portions of the population, which will be encouraged to send in their late ballots, following a last minute strategic ballot harvesting ploy targeted at key locations.
The disastrous ruling of the Supreme Court allowing three-day late ballots to be counted, will encourage a whole post-election drive to harvest ballots precisely in those precincts where the known data is already in from election night. The push to throw the election for Biden post facto will focus largely on those precincts within particular communities, within swing states. The problem for Biden has been the lack of a ground campaign and any sort of excitement.
This means we should expect a very big controlled-media scandal to captivate headlines right after the election. Whether or not this will actually motivate post facto ‘voting’ is beside the point. It must only be a semi-credible narrative that will explain why hundreds of thousands of voters turned out starting November 4th to cast their late ballots organically, even as in fact these will have been the result of targeted ballot harvesting.
Why Antifa’s ‘Communists’ Are Actually Fascists
- It Doesn’t Matter What You Call Yourself
Many Antifa members, as well as the BLM leadership, call themselves Marxists, and because this self-declaration is also convenient for their conservative opponents, these self-descriptions go unchallenged.
Likewise in terms of its membership, fascist movements a hundred years ago were largely drawn from workers and small business owners who saw themselves as socialists and liberal-progressives. People do not fit into easy categories, and besides socialism and liberal-progressivism were a mix of both enlightenment and romantic ideas relating to both myth and utopia.
What defined them as fascists in Marxian terms was not the self-professed utopian, futurist, religious, socialist, or reactionary beliefs of this or that member of the movement, but by the objective material and financial reality of being backed by the plutocracy against the public, itself. All the while posing as guardians of the public.
Marxian analytic tools demonstrate that the same as true of Antifa in the U.S. today. The conservative right has long enjoyed throwing around the term ‘socialist’ and ‘Marxist’, especially ‘cultural Marxism’, to denounce their opponents within the Democrat Party, and this has the inverse effect of drawing elements of the populist and radical left who have no relation to the ruling plutocracy within the DNC, towards down-ballot DNC politics and Antifa protest-riots.
We cannot characterize a party or movement by the plurality socioeconomic class of its members in a vacuum. Otherwise both the Democrats and Republicans are ‘labor parties’.
- We Already Proved That Antifa Is Financed by the Plutocracy
Indeed, Antifa in the U.S. has become a plutocrat-financed fascistic movement if we are using any Marxian metric. This seems counter-intuitive, for after all they profess themselves to be antifascist, and the fascists they are opposed to are allegedly the ‘basket of deplorables’ that back Trump. This means we need to set aside the institutionally approved (Eco, Griffin, et al) definitions of fascism, ultimately liberal ones in service of the status quo, to arrive at any meaningful definition of any utility. The academic institutions themselves are compromised with regard to these matters.
This is why in our piece ‘How Can the Deep State’s Antifa Organization Be Stopped?’ we showed the plutocrat financed NGO industrial complex through organizations like Democracy Alliance, was the defining base of Antifa activism – what Marxian analysis has always held, far and above, as defining the objective nature of a movement, and not its self-professions nor characterizations by their opponents.
Marxian analysis requires that we assess a movement by a.) Its material base, meaning which class empowers it and makes it possible (finances it) and b.) In whose class interest they work to empower. The answer for both here is the plutocracy. Because they pose as ‘revolutionary left’ but are in fact plutocratic, means they are fascist.
Marxian analytic tools must be salvaged from today’s ‘Marxists’, as these are as prescient as they are timely. They go farther to explain the 4th Turning, the 4th Industrial Revolution, the declining rate of profit, the internet of things and 3D printing, and the potential for a future economy based on the natural right of liberty and human dignity, both in the world and of the soul. But it is vulgar misrepresentation as the ideology of Antifa and BLM serves the purpose, perhaps intentionally, of turning-off tens of millions of Americans who could otherwise see what is useful within the analytic framework of class and economic development through history.
- Their Tactics Are Taken From Fascism
Of course the fascism of Antifa is visible to many, because of its gang-stalking and arson, the mob intimidation of citizens and small businesses to support this nascent totalitarian movement. To force passersby to raise the fist just as eighty-five years ago, Germans and Italians were identically forced to give the Roman salute, is only a corroborating piece of anecdata, and not the root of the reasoning that Antifa is fascist in nature.
But insofar as the Antifa mob and BLM leadership situates itself ostensibly in Marxism, this is perhaps even more dangerous for the reasons we’ve explained. And yet it is Marxian analysis itself which is best suited to demonstrate that even at a theoretical level, Antifa is fascist.
The owning class weary of radical economic changes and a rising ‘right-wing’ populist movement which itself is fixated on economic issues historically associated with the left, deploys the very same ‘victims of modernity’ (war veterans, permanently unemployed of all ages, workers, vagabonds, indebted students, adventurers, petty thieves and released criminals) to bring its definition of order out of chaos by operationalizing the chaos and the chaotic tendencies of its minions.
Unlike the old left, rooted in radically independent organized labor, Antifa’s leadership and activities, to the contrary, are financed through billionaire oligarchs both directly and indirectly, like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg.
Likewise we cannot characterize something as ‘fascist’ by its explicit beliefs or by views that may be projected onto them, but rather by the class that operationalizes them, and towards what end. Race, nationality, ethnicity, religion – these are but superstructural permutations of the givens of a time and place. Here is, among many other places, where Umberto Eco and Roger Griffin and those in their image are critically errant in understanding fascism. Fascism is a matter of methods, of tactics, and of financing – not of symbols, explicit ideology, or specific positions on culture-war (wedge) issues.
That said, Griffin’s point that fascism no longer has the ability to mobilize a mass movement in the way it did prior to WWII, but that it can carry on as a smaller phenomenon that can inspire terrorism, is agreed. Many of his reasons for stating so are incorrect, even if this conclusion is apt.
- Antifa Punches Down, the Historic Labor Left Punches Up
Both the traditional radical left and fascist right were proponents of violence towards political goals, even if in self-defense, but the traditional radical left used to focus on ‘punching up’: Attacking capital, the ruling class, the banks, big land owners.
But historic fascism in its late-nascent stage is more similar to Maoism during the Cultural Revolution (there’s a strong New Left orientation to Maoism as well). It organizes and concentrates power by ‘punching down’.
This dangerous fascistic trend among what has come to be known as ‘the left’. At the level of universities, it began in the late 90’s when coastal university classrooms became ‘call-out sessions’. It moved into mass culture through venture-capital funded click-bait websites like Buzzfeed and Jezebel. Of course all of these antics would have been unrecognizably alien to militant rank-and-file labor union members in decades past.
That Antifa punches down and that mainstream media echoes their talking points, and that public service announcements are increasingly indistinguishable from Antifa propaganda, is a clear sign of its fascist essence. Punching down is always from a position of power, and its appropriation by the overt sections of power is a clear sign that their ideas have become what the French Marxist Althousser called the Ideological State Apparatus: That anything and everything outside of nebulous, ever-changing shibboleths (i.e. ‘community standards’) can potentially be called ‘fascist’ as a justification for ‘cancel culture’ and black-listing, is precisely that which the growing ‘illiberal liberalism’ of the plutocrats indeed flourishes on.
Pro-systemic propaganda punches down. Anti-systemic propaganda punches up. It’s an equation as simple as it is true.
- Like Fascists, Antifa Relies on Support from Local Law Enforcement, Local Business, and an Entrenched Local Political Class to Place Them ‘Above the Law’
Perhaps you’ve seen old film reel of Nazis in the 1920’s in paramilitary uniform, long before they had official power in the governmental sense, seemingly able to physically attack those they wanted at whim, without local authorities intervening. From a position of power, from local friendly police departments, business interests, and politicians who at the very least ‘look the other way’, Antifa – like its fascist counterpart – is able to get away with enforcing its power on a down vertical. Road-blocks, riots, home-burnings, against the general public – all with local official support. Their aim is to coerce from the public a fear-based passivity and conformity to the politics of their program.
It matters very little in this sense, that they call themselves Antifa. While history moves in one direction, and historical parallels are fraught with contradictions, Antifa today in the most simple terms is recruited and built from that disenfranchised and permanently unemployed hodgepodge of people of various socioeconomic backgrounds, along with thrill-seeking youth (in that age-old quest for meaning, purpose, and identity) which formed the bulk of fascist mobs in the teens and twenties a hundred years ago in Europe.
When we understand that, their ability to operate ‘above the law’ in many cases, find large groups of philanthropically minded lawyer’s groups (like the National Lawyers’ Guild) to work to have their charges dropped, district attorneys who are lenient, and the media industrial complex including monopoly social media, all work in coordinated fashion to enable the Antifa organization.
- Their Violence Has Not Once Been in Defense of Labor Strikes and Pickets
Their methods and tactics are entirely uninvolved in labor ‘general strike’ type strategies that would more correctly characterize them as traditionally leftist. As seen above, rather, their methods are taken solely from the rise of fascism. Their material financial base, as well as their methods and tactics are fascist, as we have shown. Legitimate left-wing movements arise from, and are materially (financially) rooted in organized labor at its base. The various superstuctural manifestations along the ideological plane, whether nationalist, fascist, social-democratic, communists, anarchist, etc., are not – in the final analysis – determinative of the class and socio-economic nature of its (conscious or not) ‘leftism’ in terms of its relation to organized labor.
- Their Cancel-Culture and Voter Disenfranchisement Campaign is Against Democracy
This is critical in separating Antifa from historical bourgeois-democratic movements. In Marxian terms, in the transition from feudal modes of production to capitalist modes of production, the plutocracy helped arm and organize workers and peasants, the poor and disenfranchised, to overthrow the feudal nobility and usher in an historical period characterized by bourgeois-democratic liberties and freedoms, which have come to characterize the ‘western tradition’ in modernity. Antifa is not a bourgeois-democratic movement because the U.S. is not a feudal, nor semi-feudal country, and also because their actions work against the existing rights to association and speech (cancel-culture), and work against enfranchisement as they have been operationalized towards a ballot harvesting scheme.
Concluding Commentary
The views of Griffin and Eco focus overwhelmingly upon the superstructural manifestations of the fascism of a century ago, so much so that Eco’s attempt to uncover an ‘Ur-fascism’, or generalized theory of identifying fascism, is an utter failure. Rather, Marxian analysis demonstrates that both historical fascism regardless of name as well as contemporary movements of the same essence are defined not by these superstructural manifestations (ideology, aesthetics, etc.) but rather by its driving base in terms of socio-economic class (economic foundation, private property, capital).
Election night and the weeks to follow will be met with a wave of violence larger than seen before. It will be difficult for those remaining on the left to understand that the Antifa foot soldiers are agents of capital, and not of labor. This is largely because of the gradual takeover of the left by new-left identity politics which crept slowly, and then rapidly, with May of 1968 and the Situationist moment being a key signifier.
We know that the FBI’s field offices which historically have infiltrated radical left-groups are also compromised, because we would otherwise see these FBI agents – whose work is often to act as agents provocateurs – to act as de-escalating agents urging calm from within the ranks of these fascistic Antifa outfits. We have not seen this, which is a key sign that the FBI at the very top is wrought with complicit activity, which incidentally is another piece of evidence in 5., above.
Perhaps it is ironic that Marxian analysis itself is best able to demonstrate that Antifa – whose members often describe themselves as Marxists (socialists, communists, etc.) – is in fact fascist.
The defense of the republic, of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary gains of 1776-89 which were expanded in 1865, today rests upon election integrity, voter enfranchisement, and in a strange twist of fate, the Justice Department under AG Barr.
Vaccines – Who Needs Them?
By David Macilwain | American Herald Tribune | October 28, 2020
It’s a serious question that few have asked, and there’s no clear answer. Up till this point in the Coronavirus play, discussion on vaccines has been limited to one perspective – how effective might they be, and how long before one is available. Thanks to the rigors of lock-downs and upending of society necessitated – we are told – by the need to avoid the virus and “save lives”, interest in a vaccine that might save us from this hell has been intense, not least amongst the shareholders of pharmaceutical companies vying for a share of the global market.
This massive financial interest, hardly denied even by those who claim philanthropic concerns are their real motivator, has nevertheless led to some perverse outcomes and corrupt manipulation. The suppression and distortion of the true worth of Hydroxychloroquine is the greatest crime amongst these, as its leading advocate – Professor Didier Raoult of Marseilles – continues to observe; a worth that has been demonstrated globally by those countries where it has been approved or prescribed.
It now appears almost beyond doubt that the campaign against the use of HCQ, driven by pharmaceutical companies and their agents in governments and institutions, is because of its efficacy in treating COVID 19 infections, and so taking away the market for both other drugs and for vaccines. Prof Raoult has made this claim – and allegation against the French government of serious negligence that has cost many lives – since April. But just last week the case has become a nationally significant conflict following the prohibition against Raoult’s Mediterranee Infection Institute on using Hydroxychloroquine/Azithromycin treatment for COVID patients.
Not only is this prohibition quite contrary to principles of care and the doctor-patient relationship, but Raoult’s record of success in treating patients with the protocol is undeniable, and proven by his results – out of nearly 9000 patients attending the Marseilles hospital, of which 5,800 were treated with the HCQ/AZM protocol, just 30 deaths were recorded. A regional health official and regional MP have now made official protests in support of Prof Raoult’s right to continue the treatment, as described in this interview as well as in a rather bad English translation.
Prof Raoult, who repeatedly notes that he cannot predict the future behaviour of the epidemic and the changes in the virus, but has unfailingly correctly forecast its progress and likely developments, has recently also made some highly pertinent observations on vaccines. Unlike many of those who are sceptical or opposed to vaccines, Prof Raoult’s reservations on a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 are based on purely scientific observations of the behaviour of this virus and the particular characteristics of the infection it causes. Of these the most important feature is in the vastly different susceptibility of different age groups, which may be seen as a fatal weakness in the virus that can be exploited to defeat it.
The ability of younger people to “suffer” SARS-2 infection unscathed, and often without any symptoms – immunity effectively – forms the basis of the “Great Barrington Declaration” – a proposal for the safe development of natural immunity amongst the younger part of the population while older and more vulnerable people are isolated and protected. Although most sections of the health fraternity and mainstream media persist in wilfully ignoring this feature, instead emphasising all the cases of young and healthy people suffering serious illness or “long-Covid”, the statistics are unambiguous and unchanging since the start of the pandemic.
While sidestepping the claims in some quarters that no-one has actually died of COVID, because 99% of deaths are of people with some other serious illness, it is an incontrovertible fact that those who die from or with the Virus are overwhelmingly very old – and the majority in their eighties. The proportion of younger people developing serious illness or dying may be higher in some countries – notably in the US – where those age groups normally have greater morbidity from the diseases of affluence and indolence – diabetes, heart disease and obesity.
Importantly however, and regardless of these varying conditions, the apparent immunity of children to SARS-CoV-2 infection is most striking, and another “weakness” of the virus that may well play a part in limiting its dangers. This is yet another area on which Prof Raoult has focused in the past, when looking for an explanation for the relative immunity to the virus in adults under 50. He considers that children act as reservoirs or carriers of respiratory viruses and so may encourage generalised latent immunity in their parents to related Coronaviruses.
And it is the existence of this natural resistance to the novel Coronavirus which has important implications for the use of a vaccine, and whether its use will be justified or advantageous for some sections of the population, or even contra-indicated. The latter possibility, raised recently in a conversation with Prof Raoult, comes about because of the extremely low mortality from COVID 19 amongst younger people – rated at around 10,000 times lower than in those in their mid 80s – the predominant group of those dying with or from COVID.
Considering this feature of the epidemiology, he concluded that for a vaccine to be safe for younger people, it must be shown to cause lower mortality than the untreated viral infection. Clearly this applies to all age groups and all vaccines, if preventing deaths is their main function. And it is an ever more important consideration with many different types of vaccine now being developed and trialled, and with the possibility of unusual or unpredicted side effects.
Raoult concludes that if a vaccine is to be considered suitable for all, and including younger adults with a minimal chance of serious disease or death, then it must be safety tested on tens or hundreds of thousands of people, which is way beyond the limits currently imposed on potential vaccines thanks to the relative urgency and speed of their development. It is an exquisite irony that the prohibition of the literally life-saving drug Hydroxychloroquine has been based on claims of serious but extremely rare side-effects.
So what if the vaccine is only given to those at greater risk of death from SARS-2 infection, where the danger of vaccine side-effects is outweighed by the life-saving benefits? This may seem sensible, and is rather the practice with current flu vaccines, available free to the over 70s – but here a different factor comes into play. Vaccines mostly depend on the body to produce an immune response that will combat a subsequent viral infection, but this immune response gets weaker as you age. Consequently the benefits of vaccination are far less for older people, and marginal for those over 80 and with weakened systems – the very ones most likely to die following viral infection.
While this relative ineffectiveness of vaccines for the old gets little attention, it is often enough said that a vaccine may only be 50 – 60% effective, as if to avoid raising peoples’ expectations, but this is hardly a minor point. Who would drive a car whose brakes couldn’t always be relied upon, even if they knew it?
So I repeat the question – who actually needs a vaccine to protect them from contracting this not very dangerous respiratory virus? We can rule out anyone under the age of 30, whose chance of dying as a result of CV19 infection is less than 1 in 20,000. For those under 50 this chance may be around 1 in 5000, so a vaccine showing no deaths amongst 10,000 volunteers will have a marginal benefit for this group. In fact the only real benefit of vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 might be amongst those in their sixties and seventies, particularly if they have other serious health issues, or are more exposed to infection – as is the case for older health-care workers.
But there is another factor that comes into play here. In order to protect the most vulnerable sectors of the population from infection, a significant percentage of the whole population must be made immune, either from vaccination or from their natural immune reaction to infection. The current path being pursued is to prevent infection and natural immunity developing, so such levels of herd immunity can only be achieved by mass vaccination, subjecting half the population to unnecessary dangers from vaccine side effects.
It would seem hard to make a sound scientific case for such a policy, or an economic one – the cost of vaccinating millions or billions of people around the world is barely calculable. But what is a cost to governments and the taxpayers who support them is a benefit to the pharmaceutical industry and private health industry, and it appears as though they will be driving policy to suit their interests.
There is one last aspect to this question, which only further emphasises the point; the significantly lower death rate associated with the currently circulating strains of the virus. Whether the escalation in positive-testing case numbers is partly due to oversensitive tests, or previously unaccounted asymptomatic cases, associated deaths have barely risen, and remain below 1% of total infections – roughly one tenth of the mortality rate during the “first wave” in Europe.
If science were allowed to prevail, then it would follow the prescriptions of the Great Barrington Declaration, abandoning the great vaccination project and allowing “nature to take her course”. But clearly she will not be allowed to, in a way epitomised by the Indian Government’s announcement last week that all citizens will be vaccinated. This was accompanied by news that India’s rapidly climbing infection rate was levelling off – most probably because herd immunity levels are now being reached.
‘Psychos’ fueled by ‘blood lust,’ Australian special forces tortured and executed prisoners in Afghanistan – report
RT | October 28, 2020
A disturbing new report blows the lid on the shameful conduct of Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan, accusing them of waging a campaign of torture and murder across the war-torn country, and hiding the evidence.
When Australia’s elite SAS soldiers would raid villages in Afghanistan, they brought terror and death with them, a report seen by Melbourne newspaper The Age alleges. The special forces “would take the men and boys to these guest houses and interrogate them, meaning tie them up and torture them,” the report states.
By the time the SAS units left, “the men and boys would be found dead, shot in the head, sometimes blindfolded and throats slit. These are corroborated accounts,” it continues, comparing the alleged war crimes to the My Lai massacre of the Vietnam War, and to the US’ mistreatment of detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
The report was commissioned by then-Army chief Angus Campbell in 2016, and an upcoming Inspector-General report into war crimes by senior judge Paul Brereton has confirmed many of its findings, The Age claimed. Compiled by defense consultant Samantha Crompvoets, the report is based on interviews with soldiers and whistleblowers, who told Cormpvoets some grizzly tales of “competition killing and blood lust.”
In one instance, two “14-year-old boys suspected of being Taliban sympathisers had their throats slit … the bodies were bagged and thrown into a nearby river.” In others, unarmed Afghans were shot in the back as they ran away.
According to the report, war crimes allegations made by NGOs and SAS staff were quashed by the special forces leadership in Afghanistan. Soldiers involved in these crimes allegedly covered them up, and expected their comrades to keep quiet. Meanwhile, the perpetrators “gloated about” their killings.
“Soldiers would do bad stuff to fit in. It becomes part of the banter,” one witness recalled. Another stated: “guys just had this blood lust. Psychos. Absolute psychos. And we bred them.”
Despite the gruesome details revealed in the report, the Australian operators were envious of their British and American counterparts, one informant told Crompvoets.
“Whatever we do, though, I can tell you the Brits and the US are far, far worse. I’ve watched our young guys stand by and hero worship what they were doing, salivating at how the US were torturing people,” the informant said.
Crompvoets’ report alleges that the majority of crimes were committed by a small group of patrol commanders. Brereton’s inquiry found the same, The Age reported. The newspaper said that Brereton will make war crimes referrals to the Australian Federal Police for a number of these soldiers, charges that will be contested by the Department of Defence.
Australian troops have been deployed in Afghanistan since 2001, with combat operations ceasing in 2014. Around 150 Australian soldiers and civilian staff remain in the country in support and advisory roles.
Bolivia’s former ‘interim president’ and coup government ministers could face trial over 2019 crackdown on protesters
RT | October 27, 2020
The Bolivian parliament has approved a resolution demanding a criminal case be opened against the nation’s former interim president Jeanine Anez and some of the ministers in her government over their 2019 crackdowns on protests.
The motion says Anez must stand trial over a decree authorizing the army to use force against the protesters back in November 2019, and exempting the military from any criminal responsibility as well as for what was called “massacres” in the cities of Cochabamba and El Alto.
Anez and her government had just ousted President Evo Morales in a coup, and deployed the security forces in a violent crackdown on his supporters. The law enforcement and the military fired live rounds at the demonstrators on several occasions.
At least 37 people died in clashes with the soldiers and riot police officers, according to local media reports. Police and army were even reported to have assaulted processions of mourners carrying coffins of those killed in previous demonstrations.
In addition to Anez herself, seven ministers from her government also face various charges that include corruption and illegal purchase of non-lethal weapons. The list of those that could stand trial involves Foreign Minister Karen Longaric, Defense Minister Fernando Lopez, and Justice Minister Alvaro Coimbra.
Upon learning of the parliament’s decision, Anez rushed to Twitter to declare it an example of political persecution.
“MAS [Movement Towards Socialism party] is returning to its habit of prosecuting those who think differently,” she wrote, even though it was her own government that was accused by Human Rights Watch of persecuting its political opponents.
Anez came to power after Morales, who had ruled the country for some 14 years, resigned under pressure from the military. The November 2019 coup came following massive protests led by the opposition supporters of the former Bolivian president, Carlos Mesa, who insisted that the October elections that handed victory to Morales had been rigged.
As Morales resigned and fled, first to Mexico and then to Argentina, Anez declared herself “interim president,” even though she lacked a quorum in the Senate to get a confirmation.
Earlier this month, MAS leader Luis Arce won the presidential election in a landslide. Anez herself had withdrawn from the running after polls showed her with just ten percent of popular support.
Some questions about “the new normal”

By Richard Hugus | October 24, 2020
Dear Editor, Cape Cod Times :
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health*, on October 22, 2020 only 1 person diagnosed with Covid 19 was counted as “hospitalized” and 0 were counted in the ICU at Falmouth Hospital. The count at Cape Cod Hospital in these categories was 0 and 0. Falmouth has a population of about 30,000 people. The population of Cape Cod is about 212,000.
Some questions:
Should 212,000 people be required to wear face masks and maintain a distance of six feet from everyone else when just one person is in the hospital?
Should small businesses Capewide be forced into onerous restrictions and widespread closings?
Should students be kept out of school and forced into “virtual” education via computer screen? For that matter, should students be denied an education altogether, or workers be denied employment, if they refuse to get the flu shot that has been mandated in Massachusetts in order to keep the case load (of 1, in this case) in hospitals down?
Should the healthy be required to quarantine when such measures have never been taken before?
Should our right to assemble be curtailed?
Do public health officials, or does anyone, have a right to limit our right of assembly? Or our right to travel?
Should children in day care centers be required to wear masks, and learn at the beginning of their lives that not being able to see other kids’ faces is normal?
Does oxygen deprivation from wearing masks make sense?
Is it right to make people so afraid of the virus that they fear getting medical attention for other illnesses?
Is it acceptable to see young people committing suicide in greater numbers because of the dark world the virus scare has ushered in?
If there was a raging virus, would masks make even a bit of difference?
Are masks a preparation for vaccines which we will also have no choice about?
Does the pharmaceutical industry perhaps have a profit motive in seeing vaccines mandated? Does that industry perhaps have undue influence at WHO and the CDC?
Whatever Covid may once have been, it now looks a lot like a political agenda masquerading as a health crisis. Too many things just don’t make sense. It’s time to say no to whatever and whoever is driving this agenda.
—————
* See 10:50 mark of video presentation
From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent
Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least.
By Raul Diego | MintPress News | October 27, 2020
Days away from the most polarized electoral contest in American history, social media companies like Facebook have vowed to censor any voices which they and their partners in the federal government consider inconvenient. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook is ready to implement election information strategies that have been in the works for years.
Company spokesman Andy Stone told the WSJ that the social media giant will be applying the “lessons” learned from previous elections in accordance with the designs of “hired experts” and vague references to “new teams,” who are leveraging their “experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s de facto monopoly over online peer-to-peer communication tools has given Facebook an inordinate amount of influence over the political narratives at both national and regional levels, which it has shown a willingness exercise with topics like the Philippines and Palestine.
Last week, the company took a major step in solidifying its grip over the content purveyed on its platform with the official launch of the Facebook Oversight board. A body that is to function like a ‘Supreme Court’ for chat rooms, if you will, with the power to review any decisions regarding post removals or deplatforming and to make policy recommendations. Members have been drawn from “law experts… rights advocates” and journalists from around the world. The oversight board currently boasts 20 members.
Four members – two of which have extensive experience in the U.S. judicial system – serve as the board’s co-chairs and were handpicked by Facebook, according to The Guardian. Other board members include former Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, who is also a co-chair and is perhaps only remembered outside of Denmark for her selfie faux pas at Mandela’s funeral in 2013 when she was photographed taking a group photo with Barack Obama and David Cameron during the commemoration.
Judges of little character
Thorning-Schmidt’s insensitive moment at the laying-in-state of one of the most significant figures of the 20th century may be less damning to her presence on a social media oversight board than the tax-evasion scandal involving her husband – a British MP –, which ended up costing her re-election. When confronted over the accusations, she retorted that if her intention had really been to evade taxes, she would have done so “much more elegantly.” Despite these questionable instances and her reputation as an “extravagant” woman with expensive tastes, Thorning-Schmidt remains among the least objectionable figures on the oversight board.
Emi Palmor, for example, presents a much more alarming profile. One of 16 non-chair members of the board, Palmor is a former General Director of the Israeli Ministry of Justice, she was directly responsible for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinian posts from Facebook. Before being fired from that job, Palmor had created the so-called “Internet Referral Unit” at the ministry; a cybersecurity team that deliberately targeted and took down the aforementioned content, and whose nomination to the Facebook oversight board was loudly protested by pro-Palestinian advocacy groups back in May.

Palmor posing with Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016. Photo | Israeli Government Press Office
Inviting a literal state censor from a country with such an atrocious record of oppression and overt ethnic cleansing policies to serve in a supervisory role at one of the largest content networks in the world, should be reason enough for concern. Perhaps, even reason enough to call for the board’s dissolution given that such an egregious choice of personnel reveals an unacceptable political bias in an ostensibly impartial quasi-judicial body.
A clear agenda
A look at the other co-chairs on the oversight board leaves no doubt as to which interests Facebook intends to further through its sham social media traffic court. It might not be a surprise to learn that an American company would tap American legal minds to form part of a dispute resolution body, as Jamal Greene, an oversight board co-chair, describes it.
Greene is a Dwight Professor of Law Columbia Law School who served as an aide to Sen. Kamala Harris during the highly-controversial Senate confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Prior to this, he was a law clerk for late Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the 1997 Internet decency controls decision that shot down legislation that sought to regulate online speech. An auspicious sign, perhaps, but tempered by Steven’s own pragmatist views on free speech, leaving the door open to context when protecting the “public interest” surrounding the first amendment.
Sitting alongside Greene and Helle Thorning-Schmidt on the oversight board’s co-chairmanship is Michael McConnell; a constitutional law scholar who served seven years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit court. McConnell wrote the dissenting opinion in the seminal “Ten Commandments” case, which centered around the government’s authority to decide which monuments can be erected in a public park.
Judge McConnell, who has been floated as a potential Supreme Court nominee more than once and is “highly regarded for his writing on church-state law,” argued in favor of the government’s discretionary powers, claiming that private donations to public facilities – like the ten commandments monument in a public park in Utah, that spurred the case – became “government speech” and, therefore within the purview of governmental authority.
Rounding out the co-chair suite is Catalina Botero Marino, a Colombian attorney and former special rapporteur for freedom of expression at the Organization of American States (OAS); an organization well-known for being Washington’s mouthpiece for D.C.-aligned policy in Latin America.
Botero expressed her position on the very topic she will be dealing with first-hand in her new position as co-chair of the Facebook oversight board in a 2019 paper titled “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: standards, contexts, and lessons from the Inter-American Human Rights System.” In it, Botero reveals why she was tapped to join the make-shift panel of social media judges when she defines freedom of expression as “individual and collective self-government” and highlights her “utmost concern” over the “deliberately false circulation of information, created and put into circulation with the purpose of deceiving the public” in electoral processes.
Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.
Biden vows to sanction ‘Lukashenko regime henchmen’ until Minsk turns ‘democratic’

RT | October 28, 2020
Democrat candidate for US president Joe Biden has called for regime change in Minsk, denouncing President Alexander Lukashenko’s “brutal dictatorship” and vowing to sanction his “henchmen” until there’s a “democratic Belarus.”
“I continue to stand with the people of Belarus and support their democratic aspirations,” Biden said, claiming that President Donald Trump “refuses to speak out on their behalf.”
Biden said that “No leader who tortures his own people can ever claim legitimacy” and demanded that “the international community should significantly expand its sanctions on Lukashenka’s henchmen and freeze the offshore accounts where they keep their stolen wealth.”
The Belarus statement was among a flurry of press releases by Biden’s campaign on Tuesday, and a rare foray into the subject of foreign policy. The Democrat has generally avoided the subject during the campaign, focusing his attacks on Trump on the Covid-19 pandemic.
Lukashenko, who has been president since 1994, was awarded a convincing victory in the August 9 election, by election organisers. The opposition claims the results were rigged.
Official runner-up Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, whom Biden endorsed in the statement, supposedly received about 10 percent of the vote. She has since fled to the neighboring Lithuania and reached out to EU countries for support, calling for a general strike to pressure Lukashenko into annulling the election they claim was “rigged.”
Police in Belarus forcefully dispersed demonstrations on Sunday, prompting some Biden supporters to demand “a plan for Belarus.”
While the EU, UK and Canada have imposed sanctions on Belarussian officials and openly sided with Tikhanovskaya in denouncing the “rigged” election, the Trump administration has been more diplomatic.
Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun met with Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania at the end of August, but said his job was “to listen, to hear what the thinking of the Belarusian people is and to see what they are doing to obtain the right to self-determination.”
“The United States cannot and will not decide the course of events in Belarus,” Biegun said at the time.
This stands in stark contrast with the Trump administration’s strategy for Venezuela, which Biden’s Belarus plan appears to mirror. Vowing to stand with the Venezuelan people in their pursuit of democracy, Washington endorsed opposition figure Juan Guaido as “interim president” of that Latin American country in January 2019, lining up the Organization of American States and even the EU in support.
However, Guaido has repeatedly failed to seize power in Caracas, leaving the government of President Nicolas Maduro more entrenched than ever. Meanwhile, the US-imposed sanctions – ostensibly targeting Maduro’s “regime” – have made lives miserable for the vast majority of Venezuelans, as even think tanks supporting the policy have noted.

