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Medical reversals – when doctors hurt patients

By Sebastian Rushworth, M.D. | February 26, 2021

I’ve been asked why I’m so skeptical when it comes to health and medical science. My answer is because I’ve spent many hours studying medical history, and I’ve seen how much damage doctors have done over the centuries. If you were to select a patient-doctor consultation at random from all the ones that have happened throughout history, your odds are probably better of selecting one in which the doctor harmed the patient than one in which the doctor helped the patient. That is certainly true if you only look at consultations happening before the year 1900.

It’s a shame that medical history generally isn’t part of the curriculum in medical school. If it was, maybe doctors would be more humble about what they know, and what they don’t know. If I were to design a medical school curriculum, I would make the first five to ten weeks of medical school an in-depth course in medical history, with a particular focus on all the mistakes doctors and scientists have made through the centuries, and why they made those mistakes. To quote a well worn cliché, those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.

Personally, I wear my skepticism as a badge of pride. If I were to seek out a doctor for some medical condition I was suffering from, I would want that person to be a natural skeptic. I would want someone who won’t believe something just because that’s what they were taught in medical school, or because it’s what they heard from a salesperson working for a pharmaceutical company.

I’m going to present four different cases from recent history, that I think show clearly why it’s important to be highly skeptical when it comes to the area of health and medicine. Things can often seem to be very beneficial after a few early studies, or because common sense suggests they should be beneficial. Then when more data comes in, sometimes decades after a certain treatment has become the “gold standard” of therapy, it becomes clear that the intervention is actively harmful. In some cases, millions of people have died prematurely as a result of the intervention by this point. When this happens, when something goes from being the recommended therapy to turning around 180 degrees and becoming something that doctors recommend against, it is known as a medical reversal. Unfortunately, medical reversals are common.

Another thing that I think is unfortunate is that scientific methodology is not really something that is taught in school. People even leave university with very limited training in scientific method. This causes the large majority of the population to be unable to weigh scientific evidence themselves, and it makes them totally beholden to the opinions of others. That’s why I try to use this blog to educate in scientific method. Science, just like democracy, thrives when lots of people are able to examine different pieces of evidence and think for themselves.

Anyway, let’s get to the four cases.

Lobotomy was first developed in the 1930’s by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, and further refined by two American doctors, neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts. A lobotomy is basically a surgical intervention in which parts of the frontal cortex of the brain are destroyed. It was developed as a treatment for psychiatric disorders, based on the hypothesis that destroying parts of the frontal lobe would allow destructive mental patterns to “reset” themselves.

After his first surgeries in 1935, Moniz presented a case report of twenty psychiatric patients. He claimed that a third were significantly improved in their underlying psychiatric illness, while a third were mildly improved, and a third were unimproved. None were apparently harmed. This claim was immediately countered by the psychiatrist that had provided the patients to Moniz, who responded that all the patients had suffered a “degradation” of personality.

The frontal cortex is responsible for complex goal oriented behavior, self-control, and higher order thinking, pretty much the things that separate humans from other animals. So, knowing what we know today about the function of the frontal lobe, destroying large chunks of it is likely to turn a person in to an apathetic, lethargic zombie. And this is what happened to the people who were lobotomized, as was clear early on to those who cared to look.

In spite of the limited evidence of benefit, and early suggestion of harm, the procedure was taken up enthusiastically in several parts of the world. By 1949, when lobotomies were at their most popular, thousands of people were being lobotomized around the world each year. That same year Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine for his efforts.

Then the truth started to catch up with the hype. It became clear that somewhere between 5% and 15% of all patients undergoing lobotomy were being killed by the procedure, either dying on the operating table or shortly after surgery. It was not uncommon for arteries in the brain to become accidentally nicked, resulting in major intracranial bleeding and strokes. When this didn’t kill outright, it often resulted in severe physical handicaps.

It also became more widely known that, although the patients might become more “placid” after the procedure, they were hardly being cured. People who had been institutionalized before the procedure, continued to be institutionalized after the procedure. Few people were able to function independently after undergoing a lobotomy. So lobotomies gradually fell out of favor, although they were still being carried out on patients in some countries as late as the 1980’s.

Let’s move on to our next medical reversal. Starting in the 1960’s, public health authorities around the world started recommending that parents have their babies sleep on their stomachs. The recommendation was not based on any scientific studies, rather it was based on “common sense”, that all too frequent destroyer of lives.

There were multiple hypotheses floating around that together constituted the basis for the recommendation. One was that it would decrease the risk of hip dysplasia, another was that it would prevent scoliosis, a third that it would decrease the risk of aspiration of milk (accidentally getting milk in to the airways), a fourth that it would prevent babies developing “flat heads”.

In the late 1980’s, observational data started to appear suggesting that prone sleeping was causing a huge increase in the number of children dying of cot death, a.k.a. SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Children sleeping on their bellies appeared to be around 500% more likely to die of SIDS than children sleeping on their backs.

Pretty much over night, government health authorities switched from recommending that babies sleep on their bellies to recommending that they sleep on their backs. And virtually over night, the rate of cot death dropped. Dramatically. Here in Sweden, the number of children dying of SIDS decreased by 85% over the course of a few years.

How many children died unnecessarily during the few decades in which prone sleeping was being recommended by public health authorities? Probably millions.

It amazes me how keen government agencies often are to offer recommendations based on little or no evidence, especially when we have such clear examples of situations in which this has resulted in mind-boggling harm. If only public health professionals bothered to follow the first credo of the medical profession, which is “first, do no harm”.

Let’s move on to our next case.

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID’s) have been around for a long time. Aspirin was invented in the 1890’s, and ibuprofen has been around since the early 1960’s. One problem with these drugs, which has been recognized since the early days, is that they can cause stomach ulcers. In fact, over-use of NSAID’s is one of the most common reasons for emergency hospital admissions due to bleeding ulcers.

The reason for this side-effect is that NSAID’s block an enzyme called cyclo-oxygenase, generally shortened to just COX (another name for NSAID’s is COX-inhibitors). There are two different versions of COX, COX-1 and COX-2. All the early NSAID’s are unselective COX-inhibitors. In other words, they block both COX-1 and COX-2.

At some point it was discovered that the entire positive effect that comes from NSAID’s, in terms of decreasing inflammation and pain, comes from their inhibition of COX-2, while inhibition of COX-1 is responsible for the side effect of increased bleeding. This naturally led drug companies to seek to develop specific COX-2 inhibitors, that would decrease inflammation, but not cause stomach ulcers.

In 1999, the first two COX-2 selective inhibitors came on the market, rofecoxib (a.k.a. Vioxx), produced by Merck, and celecoxib (a.k.a. Celebrex), produced by Pfizer. They instantly become some of the best selling drugs in the world. Of the two, rofecoxib was much better at blocking COX-2 specifically, and thus far less likely to cause stomach ulcers.

After a few years on the market, signals started to appear that rofecoxib was associated with a heavily increased risk of heart attack and stroke. In fact, people taking rofecoxib had something like a 300% increased risk of having a heart attack compared with people taking non-selective NSAID’s. Merck’s initial response was, unsurprisingly, to try to put the lid on this information. But by 2004, the cat was well and truly out of the bag. In the face of mounting criticism (and lawsuits), Merck chose to withdraw the drug from the market. By that point, 80 million people had been treated with rofecoxib and around 100,000 people had suffered unnecessary heart attacks.

I’m going to end with a slightly more personal example. On my first day of medical school I was told about a fantastic new treatment that had been developed at my new place of study, Karolinska Institutet, and its associated hospital. The developer of the new treatment was a surgeon called Paolo Macchiarini, and the treatment was a stem-cell coated synthetic windpipe. The windpipe could be transplanted in to people who had damaged their windpipes in accidents, or who had to to have their windpipes removed due to cancer. The idea was that the synthetic windpipe would meld with the surrounding tissues and grow in to a fully functioning new windpipe.

Paolo Macchiarini had been head-hunted by Karolinska Institutet in competition with several other top universities. He seemed a shoe-in for the Nobel prize.

The synthetic windpipe transplant surgeries had started in 2010. The first people to be operated on all died relatively soon afterwards, but there was a lot of media hype around them anyway, probably due to the feeling that this was a revolutionary technology, and probably also due to the fact that Machiarini was an excellent salesman.

Since the people he operated on had an annoying habit of dying, Machiarini supposedly felt that he needed healthier specimens to operate on. Thus far, all the people had been suffering from end-stage diseases that would have killed them in the near future even without the surgery. Maybe they were just too sick to begin with to truly benefit?

So he found some people who weren’t actually dying. In 2012 he put synthetic windpipes in to two people who lived with chronic tracheostomies (breathing tubes in the throat) after car accidents, and one in a woman who had suffered accidental damage to her trachea during an earlier surgery. In 2013 he put a synthetic windpipe in to a two-year old who had been born without one. These people were perfectly healthy otherwise, and they were young.

The synthetic windpipes didn’t work. The stem cells didn’t turn in to functional epithelium, as had been hoped. The synthetic windpipes became seeding grounds for bacteria and were attacked by the immune system. They failed to meld with the surrounding tissues. They literally fell apart within months. And the patients died.

What is particularly galling is that there was no need for the synthetic windpipes. Windpipes could have been taken from cadavers instead. In fact, Machiarini had started out doing surgeries with windpipes from cadavers, which had on the whole been successful, but had then chosen to switch over to synthetic windpipes, apparently because it seemed more high-tech and was therefore more likely to generate media attention. The entire exercise was a PR-stunt, primarily intended to speed Paolo Machiarini on the path to a Nobel prize.

By the time I first heard of the synthetic wind pipes, on my first day of medical school in September 2014, things were already starting to come apart. The patients were dying like flies – even the ones who had been healthy before their surgery. Yet Machiarini was continuing to publish articles in prestigious scientific journals, in which he claimed that the stem cell treated synthetic windpipes were holding up well, and integrating with the surrounding tissues, just as planned.

Everything came crashing down very suddenly, in 2016, when Swedish public television aired a documentary that told the truth about Machiarini’s surgeries. Apart from making clear that the surgeries were nowhere near as successful as was being claimed, it became clear that Machiarini had never tested any of his synthetic windpipes on animals before moving on to humans(!), and it also surfaced that colleagues at Karolinska University Hospital had tried to blow the whistle on Machiarini two years earlier, in 2014, but had been threatened in to silence by the leadership at the university and the hospital.

I guess this last case isn’t really a medical reversal, since the synthetic windpipes never actually became standard practice. But I think it’s an interesting cautionary tale. There are lots of charlatans out there, masquerading as serious scientists. Some of them get discovered early on, like Paolo Machiarini, and some of them don’t get discovered until decades have passed and many people have had their lives ruined, like Egas Moniz.

My main point from these cases is that doctors and health authorities harming patients is not even remotely something that is in the distant past. We’re not talking blood letting here, a practice that resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths, but that doctors thankfully stopped doing on a regular basis two hundred years ago. Serious medical reversals have happened in the recent past, and they will happen again. They are particularly likely when new interventions get rushed out based on scant evidence.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Coronavirus Fact-Check #10: Why “new cases” are plummeting.

OffGuardian | February 26, 2021

The scary red numbers are all going down. Check any newspaper or covid tracking website you want. Cases. Deaths. Hospitalisations. They’re all going down, sharply, and have been for weeks, especially in the US and UK.

So, why would that be?

Pundits across the media world have made suggestions – from vaccines to lockdowns – but there’s only one that makes any real sense.

IT’S NOT VACCINES

The assumption most people would make, and would be encouraged to make by the talking heads and media experts, is that the various “vaccines” have taken effect and stopped the spread of the “virus”.

Is this the case? No, no it’s not.

The decline started in mid-January, far too early for any vaccination program to have any effect. Many experts said as much:

Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said the falling case numbers can’t be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine, because not even a tenth of the population has been vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Further, the drop is happening simultaneously in different countries all around the world, and not every country is vaccinating at the same rate or even using the same vaccine. So no, the “vaccines” are not causing the drop.

IT’S NOT LOCKDOWN EITHER

Another suspect is the lockdown, with blaring propaganda stating that all the various government-imposed house arrests and “distancing” measures have finally had an impact.

That’s not it either.

Sweden, famously, never locked down at all. Yet their “cases” and “Covid related deaths” have been dropping exactly in parallel with the UK:

Clearly, if countries that never locked down are also seeing declines in case numbers, the lockdown cannot be causing them.

So what is?

THE WHO PCR TEST GUIDELINES

Maybe for our answer, we should look at the date the decline started.

Observe this graph:

As you can see, the global decline in “Covid deaths” starts in mid-to-late January.

What else happened around that time?

Well, on January 13th the WHO published a memo regarding the problem of asymptomatic cases being discovered by PCR tests, and suggesting any asymptomatic positive tests be repeated.

This followed up their previous memo, instructing labs around the world to use lower cycle thresholds (CT values) for PCR tests, as values over 35 could produce false positives.

Essentially, in two memos the WHO ensured future testing would be less likely to produce false positives and made it much harder to be labelled an “asymptomatic case”.

In short, logic would suggest we’re not in fact seeing a “decline in Covid cases” or a “decrease in Covid deaths” at all.

What we’re seeing is a decline in perfectly healthy people being labelled “covid cases” based on a false positive from an unreliable testing process. And we’re seeing fewer people dying of pneumonia, cancer or other disease have “Covid19” added to their death certificate based on testing criteria designed to inflate the pandemic.

Just as we at OffGuardian predicted would happen the moment the memo was published.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 3 Comments

Cuomo and the Failure of Covid Absolutism

By James Bovard | AIER | February 24, 2021

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is falling from grace at epic speed. His administration is now the target of a Justice Department probe for policies that resulted in the death of one out of eight nursing home residents in the state. Regardless of whether the New York legislature impeaches Cuomo, the standard he championed poses a continuing peril.

From the start of the Covid pandemic, the media idolized Cuomo for his “safety through absolute power” mantra. Last March 20, Cuomo imposed a statewide lockdown on 20 million New Yorkers, closing schools and businesses. Cuomo labeled his decree a “pause” and declared: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” At that point, most counties in New York state had five or fewer people who have tested positive for coronavirus.

Cuomo’s “just one life” standard for lockdowns should have obliterated his credibility. Instead, Cuomo’s maxim was treated as a triumph of idealism and benevolence. Cuomo’s power grab was enabled by media allies that fanned hysteria. As AIER editorial director Jeffrey Tucker recently noted, the New York Times’ Donald G. McNeil Jr. “was the first reporter from a major media venue to stir up virus panic and advocate for extreme lockdown measures… The Times allowed its voice to be used to promote a primal and primitive disease panic, which they surely knew would create a cultural/political frenzy.” Presidential candidate Joe Biden hailed Cuomo last Spring for setting the “gold standard” for leadership on Covid.

After Cuomo swayed the New York legislature to give him “authorization of absolute power,” as the New Yorker declared, he issued scores of decrees, including one compelling nursing homes to admit Covid-infected patients and permitting Covid-infected staffers to keep working at those homes. A New York democratic legislator said that Cuomo was “inclined towards tyranny. But in a crisis that’s what people want.”

A New Yorker profile, entitled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” For many liberals and much of the nation’s media, placing people under house arrest, padlocking schools, bankrupting business, and causing two million people to lose their jobs vindicated government as “a force for good.”

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace declared that Cuomo is “everything Trump isn’t: honest, direct, brave.” Entertainment Weekly hailed Cuomo as “the hero that America never realized it needed until he was on our television screens every night.” As National Review recently noted, local reporters failed to ask questions on his nursing home edict “for months, as the governor held his much-praised daily press briefings about the pandemic. There were literally hundreds of hours of Cuomo press conferences in the first half of 2020 where not a single question was asked about nursing homes.”

The docile media paved the way to Cuomo winning an Emmy award for his “masterful use of television” during the pandemic. The media’s valorization of Cuomo helped make his self-tribute book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller. 

Cuomo has always known how to milk the media. When he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, he explained to the Washington Post in 1999 how he would fix HUD’s dismal image: “The PR is the most important thing I do … Eighty percent of the battle is communications.” (I christened Cuomo as “the Clinton administration’s most megalomaniacal cabinet secretary in a 2000 American Spectator piece titled, “Andy At It Again: How to Keep Reinventing HUD to Advance Yourself.”) Flash forward to last June, and Cuomo prematurely issued a poster celebrating his and New York state’s victory over Covid. The political art (sold for $14.50 plus shipping and handling) featured a steep mountain symbolizing the rise and fall of Covid cases. The poster was plastered with insipid phrases such as “The sun on the other side, “The power of ‘We,’” “Winds of Fear,” “Follow the Facts,” and “Love Community Support,” and included a jibe against Trump. Though poster sales failed to deter second and third waves of Covid outbreaks, the PR campaign further encouraged the media to focus on Cuomo’s words instead of his deeds.

During the pandemic, “legitimacy” came not from adhering to the U.S. and state Constitutions but from continually invoking “science and data,” as Cuomo did. . Cuomo’s entitlement to absolute power came from modeling concocted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a Washington State-based institution bankrolled by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel noted last week in an AIER analysis, IHME forecasts presumed a death rate 30 times higher than the rate that actually occurred. That horrendous miscalculation sufficed for one governor after another to nullify Americans’ freedom with lockdown orders. Absurd statistical extrapolations forecasting future harm made tyranny irrelevant.

Cuomo describes himself as a “great progressive,” perhaps thereby entitling himself to any power he presumes necessary “for the good of the people,” Bill of Rights be damned. November, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down New York state restrictions that limited religious gatherings to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate, declaring that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” Cuomo’s allies in the liberal establishment reacted with horror to the limit on his sway. An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted to the New York Times that “the freedom to worship… does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf babbled that the ruling signaled that the Supreme Court belonged in “the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”

Cuomo remained revered even though his repressive policies failed to prevent New York from having among the nation’s highest Covid death rates. But a Justice Department probe into his nursing home policies launched last August may be his undoing. New York state reported barely half of the total of more than 12,000 New York nursing home patients who died of Covid.  Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, told Democratic legislative leaders that “basically, we froze” when the feds demanded information. “We were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice… was going to be used against us,” DeRosa said according to a leaked transcript.

But Cuomo’s culpability goes beyond hiding corpses. Early in the pandemic, he pushed to include a legislative provision written by the Greater New York Hospital Association to give a waiver of liability to nursing homes and hospitals whose patients died of Covid. A report last month by the New York Attorney General warned, “The immunity laws could be wrongly used to protect any individual or entity from liability, even if those decisions were not made in good faith or motivated by financial incentives.” As the Guardian noted, “Cuomo’s political machine received more than $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), its executives and its lobbying firms.”

But Cuomo’s credibility should have been dethroned long before the latest disclosures. As early as last May, barely two months after the start of the state lockdown, a New York Post columnist groused: “So Gov. Andrew Cuomo killed Grandma and cratered New York’s economy. But he looked good doing it.” Cuomo’s cachet derived almost entirely from media scoring that until recently ignored almost all of the harms he inflicted.

Cuomo and other politicians have used Covid policy lodestars that were akin to crossing the Pacific Ocean with navigators who insisted the earth was flat. Melinda Gates admitted last December: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.” The politicians who imposed shutdowns based on data from the Gates’ funded by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation apparently never bothered to estimate the collateral damage from their decrees. Similar myopia spurred crackdowns and restrictions in many states that helped cause the sharpest reduction in Americans’ life expectancy since World War Two.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that either politicians or the media have recognized the authoritarian dangers inherent in governors or presidents claiming a right to boundless power to save “just one life.”

A similar standard is helping justify keeping schools closed in many areas. Teachers’ unions have rallied around the motto: “If one teacher dies, isn’t that too many?” But like Cuomo’s shutdowns, that standard ignores the horrific collateral damage on American children. A Journal of the American Medical Association analysis concluded that shutting down the schools would reduce the current crop of students’ collective years of life by more than five million, based on “lower income, reduced educational attainment, and worse health outcomes.” It remains to be seen how much, if any, the role of the well-being of children plays in school policy in the coming months.

While it is unlikely that the media lapdogs who adore Cuomo and other prominent politicians will admit their follies, the exposure of hard facts may help blunt the next stampede to submission. The Justice Department investigation into nursing home policies that boosted Covid death tolls in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania could tarnish some of the nation’s most aggressive Covid lockdowners. Other investigations by the media or private groups could expose far more evidence of misconduct or of gross negligence that boosted Covid death tolls.

In a tour of television talk shows shortly after President Biden was inaugurated, Cuomo recited his latest catchphrase: “Incompetent government kills people.” This intended slapdown of Trump is recoiling badly on the New York governor. If Cuomo is impeached or forced to resign for his Covid fiascos, maybe he could score plenty of media appearances with a new slogan: “Absolute power with impunity kills.”

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | 1 Comment

Tony Blair’s anti-freedom project continues, but ‘War on Terror’ is replaced by ‘War on Covid’

By Neil Clark | RT | February 25, 2021

The ‘War on Terror’ seems to have morphed into a ‘War on Covid’. And guess what? Serial warmonger Tony Blair is a key figure in both, seeking to curtail our civil liberties with the excuse that it’s all for the “greater good.”

The date: Monday November 6, 2006. The place: Downing Street news conference. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair dismisses the civil rights argument against ID cards, which his government is keen to introduce. He says it is an issue of “modernity” and “modern life.”

“We are building a new part of our infrastructure here. And like other such projects the gains to citizens will be much larger and more extensive than anyone could say at the time.”

Sound familiar?

Fast forward fourteen years, and the same Tony Blair is saying much the same thing about Covid vaccine passports. There’s been no more zealous British advocate of vaccine passports than the man the anti-lockdown journalist Peter Hitchens calls ‘The Blair Creature’.

“Prepare for a health passport now,” he said in December. “I know all the objections, but it will happen. It’s the only way the world will function and for lockdowns to no longer be the sole course of action.”

Last week it was reported that ´The Blair Creature’ had been lobbying hard for vaccine passports to be included in Boris Johnson’s so-called ‘road map’ out of lockdown. And they were. The government has announced a review. Michael Gove, a man who once wrote a piece entitled ‘I can’t fight my feelings any more; I love Tony (Blair)’, is heading it.

Tony must be  delighted.

Back in 2006, ID cards were promoted as a way of tackling the ‘terrorism’ threat and keeping us all ‘safe’. Vaccine passports are presented today in the same reassuring manner. The War on Terror and the War on Covid have so much in common. They both have five level ‘alert’ systems. ´The Blair Creature’ is the key linking figure.

Both wars (Terror and Covid), have been used as smokescreens to pursue elite, globalist and extremely illiberal agendas. Under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism‘, the US, UK and their allies embarked on a series of regime change wars.

First up was Afghanistan, on the grounds that the Taliban-ruled country had been sheltering Bin Laden. But while you could make a case for linking this to a ’war on terror’ there could be no such excuses for the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Ba’athist Iraq – whose long serving Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a practising Christian – was actually a bulwark against extremist groups like Al-Qaeda. The assault on Iraq proved to us that the ‘war on terror’ was a sham. Far from making us safer, the invasion actually greatly boosted global terrorism by spawning ISIS.

In short ‘the war on terror’ made the global terrorism situation much worse, and that’s before we get on to the reduction in civil liberties at home. Air travel has never been the same. Restrictions that were imposed – such as prohibitions on bringing liquids on board flights – and which were billed as ’temporary measures’ are still with us. ‘Anti-terrorism’ legislation has been regularly strengthened while at the same time there’s been covert British action in Libya and Syria on the side of the terrorists, which has led to domestic blowback.

We know for instance that the Manchester Arena suicide bomber Salman Abedi, responsible for the horrific attack in 2017 which killed 22 people, more than half of them children, and his father Ramadan, had links with the anti-Gaddafy Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, allegedly used by the UK authorities as part of their regime change operation. As I noted in a previous op-ed, Abedi Jnr was even rescued from Libya by the Royal Navy.

The ‘War on Terror’ was based on a fundamental deceit. It was a deep state/neocon con trick. Not only was it a war that could never be won, it was never meant to be won. It was meant to be permanent. But in 2020 it was superseded by a new war – the ‘War on Covid’.

Again, we see much the same Manichean rhetoric. George W. Bush famously stated “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.” And so it is today, with ‘virus control’ and not ‘terrorism control’ the focus.

If you oppose oppressive lockdowns, restrictions on free movement, and the introduction of vaccine passports, then you are on the side of the virus. You want to ‘let it rip’. You have ‘blood on your hands’ just like the millions who marched against the Iraq War. Support a more nuanced, proportionate approach with people allowed to make their own risk assessments? No, that’s not allowed. You’re either with the ‘War on Covid’ or against it.

The ‘War on Covid’ gives the Western elites the opportunity to strip away our freedoms and complete the building of the digital ‘infrastructure’ that began under the ‘War on Terror’ and which Blair referred to in 2006.

‘Health passports’ are a key part of that infrastructure, as I noted last summer. The WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ is heavily dependent on their introduction.

Of course, it won’t just be your ‘Covid’ status that’ll be on them; they will be extended into full, digitalised bio-ID cards. Vaccine passports are the gateway to a Chinese-style social credit restricted access control system being rolled out in the West.

Blair, the great authoritarian, hopes to get in 2021 or 2022 what he couldn’t get fifteen years ago. “I think you’re going to the stage where it’s going to be very hard for people to do a lot of normal life unless they can prove their vaccination status… Vaccination in the end is going to be your route to liberty,” he said in a recent interview. And of course he is working  hard to make sure we do get to that stage.

Will he succeed? His plan for ID cards fifteen years ago failed because of the strength of opposition. When Labour lost power in 2010, the scheme was ditched. But the Tony Blair Institute (which has received considerable funding for its work from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) boasted on Twitter last May that its ‘teams’ were “embedded in governments around the world, helping them to keep their people safe”.

We know that Blair has been ‘advising’ Health Secretary Matt Hancock and that the secret talks reportedly covered vaccines and mass testing. What is scary today is that the parliamentary opposition – now led by the uber-Blairite Sir Keir Starmer – seems to be even more pro-health passports than the government.

But we shouldn’t give up hope just yet. A petition against Covid-19 vaccine passports has raised almost 200,000 signatures. The campaign against health passports needs the support of the anti-war, anti-imperialist left and hopefully the fact that it’s Tony Blair who is pushing them will cause people to wake up and see the bigger picture. War on Terror, War on Covid. ‘Only connect!’, as the great novelist E.M. Forster might say.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , , | 2 Comments

FAUCI IN HOT WATER

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | February 26, 2021

The one-time hero of the pandemic, Tony Fauci, is losing the trust of mainstream America after flip flopping on critical #Covid19 information one too many times. His latest admission is the final straw for many public figures, including avid pro-vaxxers.

February 26, 2021 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | 1 Comment

Woolsey’s Silly Conspiracy Theory

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | February 25, 2021

 R. James Woolsey, who served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 under President Clinton, has just come out with a new book about the Kennedy assassination that is straight out of a 1964 time warp. Co-authored by the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, a two-star general of the secret police in communist Romani who later defected to the United States, the book, entitled Operation Dragon, posits an old 1964 conspiracy theory that some people in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling back in 1964 — that the communists conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill JFK.

In the process, Woolsey does what the mainstream press has done for 60 years — he simply ignores the mountain of circumstantial evidence that assassination researchers have uncovered since the 1960s that inexorably points the finger of guilt at the U.S. national-security establishment, which was conducting all sorts of Cold War national-security regime-change operations in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and beyond.

That was perhaps the biggest benefit of the shroud of national-security state secrecy that was imposed on the Kennedy assassination. The malefactors knew that if they could just keep a secrecy cap on the assassination and its aftermath, there was a good chance that their assassination and cover-up could succeed.

There is no better evidence of this phenomenon than the autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment performed on the body of President Kennedy just a few hours after his death.

What does Woolsey say about the autopsy? He says nothing. He doesn’t mention it at all, just as the mainstream press never mentions it. Total, absolute silence. Instead, Woolsey keeps his mind firmly embedded in an old 1964 assassination conspiracy theory — that those evil communists conspired to kill President Kennedy because they hated him so much.

Why is the JFK autopsy so important? Because it provides a key to understanding the who of the assassination. The U.S. national-security establishment knew that. That’s why military officials encased the autopsy in strict national-security state secrecy from the very beginning.

As Woolsey knows, there is one irrefutable fact in the Kennedy assassination: the autopsy on Kennedy’s body was carried out by the U.S. national-security establishment. That is, not by the Soviets. Not by Nikita Khrushchev. Not by the communists. Not by Fidel Castro. Not by the Mafia. Not by the Mossad. It was conducted solely by the U.S. national-security establishment.

A shroud of national-security state secrecy was immediately over the autopsy, which was conducted just a few hours after the assassination. Participants were told never to reveal what they had seen. They were forced to sign secret written secrecy oaths. They were threatened with severe action if they ever talked.

The secrecy worked for years and even decades. But assassination researchers, seeing mysteries and anomalies arise in the circumstances surrounding the autopsy, kept pressing, Finally, in the 1990s — thirty years after the assassination — the Assassination Records Review Board partially broken through the dam of autopsy secrecy.

The result? As I detail in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2 and as Douglas Horne, who served on the ARRB, details in his five-volume work Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, the circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly establishes a fraudulent autopsy conducted by the U.S. national-security establishment.

Why would the national-security establishment conduct a fraudulent autopsy? There can be only one reason — cover-up. What other purpose would a fraudulent autopsy serve?

‘The natural question arises: Who would the Pentagon and the CIA be covering up for? Certainly not for the communists or the Soviets. As Woolsey documents so well, the Pentagon and the CIA hated the communists and the Soviets. As Woolsey himself would readily acknowledge, there is no reasonable possibility at all that the Pentagon and the CIA would have wanted to cover up an assassination of a U.S. president by the Reds, who, the Pentagon and the CIA steadfastly maintained throughout the Cold War, were coming to get us as part of a supposed international communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow.

Keep in mind, after all, that the plan to conduct a fraudulent autopsy would have had to originate prior to the assassination itself, especially since it was launched immediately on the death of President Kennedy. That was when a team of Secret Service agents, brandishing guns and implicitly threatening the use of deadly force on Parkland Hospital medical personnel, forced their way out of Parkland with Kennedy’s body. Saying that they were operating on orders, they refused to permit the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, to conduct the autopsy, as Texas law required. They took the body to Dallas Love Field, where new President Lyndon Johnson was waiting for it. Johnson then took the body and placed it in the hands of the military in Maryland.

How could they have launched their autopsy scheme without knowing who had conducted the assassination? That’s how we know they did it. The fraudulent autopsy had to have been built into the assassination plan itself.

Of course the national-security establishment’s fraudulent autopsy on President Kennedy’s body is the last thing that James Woolsey is  going to discuss in his new book on the Kennedy assassination. He’s still stuck back in 1964, when some in the U.S. national-security establishment were peddling the false conspiracy theory blaming the Kennedy assassination on the Reds.

February 25, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Joe Biden Says the Experimental Coronavirus Vaccines are Safe. The Vaccines’ Fact Sheets Say Something Very Different.

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | February 23, 2021

Via a Monday Twitter post, [proclaimed] President Joe Biden made an unqualified assertion that the experimental coronavirus vaccines, which are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of vaccines, the United States government is encouraging Americans to take are “safe” for everyone. However, taking a look through the fact sheets for recipients and caregivers regarding the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna experimental coronavirus vaccines, available at the website of the US government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you find a very different representation.

These fact sheets warn that there are many known health risks of taking either vaccine and that there are also other potential health risks that remain unknown because the experimental vaccines went through rushed and incomplete testing.

Biden stated the following in his tweet:

If there’s one message I want to cut through to everyone in this country, it’s this: The vaccines are safe.

For yourself, your family, your community, our country — take the vaccine when it’s your turn and available. That’s how we’ll beat this pandemic.

Wow. It would be absurd to make such a claim even about the many vaccines that have gone through complete regular testing. There is a basis for arguing taking such injections for many people can be expected to provide greater benefit than detriment. But, to say outright that those vaccines are safe for any particular person is to give false assurance. And to say outright that they are safe for everyone is preposterous.

People are hurt by vaccines that have gone through the full, regular testing process. Further, recognition of the predictable heightened danger for some people taking such vaccines leads doctors to recommend that those individuals not take them at all.

Looking at the fact sheets for recipients and caregivers for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna experimental coronavirus vaccines makes clear how far off Biden’s blanket assurance of safety is. The US government is admitting there are potential negative health consequences of taking the experimental vaccines.

The first warning sign in the fact sheets for the two experimental vaccines is in the fact sheets’ titles. Both titles refer to the “emergency use authorization” of the vaccines. At the end of the fact sheets it is explained that emergency use authorization means the experimental coronavirus vaccines have “not undergone the same type of review as an FDA approved or cleared product.” Further, it is made clear that the emergency use authorization does not mean the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined the vaccines are safe. Instead, “the FDA decision is based on the totality of scientific evidence available showing that the product may be effective to prevent COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic and that the known and potential benefits of the product outweigh the known and potential risks of the product.”

Unlike Biden who seems to say everyone should rush out and take the vaccines, the fact sheets explicitly say that some people should not receive the injections: people under a certain age (16 for Pfizer-BioNTech and 18 for Moderna), as well as people who have “had a severe allergic reaction after a previous dose of this vaccine” (both vaccines have a two shot regimen) or “had a severe allergic reaction to any ingredient” of the respective vaccines.

The fact sheets for both the Pfizer-BioNTech and the Moderna experimental coronavirus vaccines also include this section that suggests that, for particular individuals, taking one of the vaccines will carry greater risk of harm and may be better avoided:

WHAT SHOULD YOU MENTION TO YOUR VACCINATION PROVIDER BEFORE YOU GET THE [PFIZER-BIONTECH or MODERNA] COVID-19 VACCINE?

Tell your vaccination provider about all of your medical conditions, including if you:

• have any allergies

• have a fever

• have a bleeding disorder or are on a blood thinner

• are immunocompromised or are on a medicine that affects your immune system

• are pregnant or plan to become pregnant

• are breastfeeding

• have received another COVID-19 vaccine

For each of the experiment vaccines, the respective fact sheets also provide a list of some of potential health harms from receiving the vaccinations — potential health harms Biden seems to claim do not exist.

The Pfizer-BioNTech experimental coronavirus vaccine fact sheet provides these details about risks from having the shots:

WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF THE PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE?

Side effects that have been reported with the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine include:

• injection site pain

• tiredness

• headache

• muscle pain

• chills

• joint pain

• fever

• injection site swelling

• injection site redness

• nausea

• feeling unwell

• swollen lymph nodes (lymphadenopathy)

Similarly, the Moderna experimental coronavirus vaccine fact sheet provides these details about risks from having the shots:

WHAT ARE THE RISKS OF THE MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE?

Side effects that have been reported with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine include:

• Injection site reactions: pain, tenderness and swelling of the lymph nodes in the same arm of the injection, swelling (hardness), and redness

• General side effects: fatigue, headache, muscle pain, joint pain, chills, nausea and vomiting, and fever

Both experimental coronavirus vaccines’ fact sheets also provide this warning:

There is a remote chance that the [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] COVID-19 Vaccine could cause a severe allergic reaction. A severe allergic reaction would usually occur within a few minutes to one hour after getting a dose of the [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] COVID-19 Vaccine. For this reason, your vaccination provider may ask you to stay at the place where you received your vaccine for monitoring after vaccination. Signs of a severe allergic reaction can include:

• Difficulty breathing

• Swelling of your face and throat

• A fast heartbeat

• A bad rash all over your body

• Dizziness and weakness

These may not be all the possible side effects of the [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] COVID-19 Vaccine. Serious and unexpected side effects may occur. The [Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna] COVID-19 Vaccine is still being studied in clinical trials.

So, are the experimental coronavirus vaccines safe? The answer is “no” according to the fact sheets provided at the FDA website. There are significant known dangers from taking the vaccines. Also, especially given the rushed and abbreviated testing of the experimental vaccines, there may be numerous unlisted health problems that arise in people who receive the shots.

Biden says to everyone in his tweet “take the vaccine when it’s your turn and available.” A wiser course is for people to consider the potential risks carefully and make their own informed decisions regarding taking the experimental coronavirus vaccines.

The experimental coronavirus vaccines’ fact sheets are a good starting point for that risk investigation. It may also be worthwhile to take a look at a few of my earlier articles — “Everyone Should Take the Experimental Coronavirus Vaccines? Dr. Joseph Mercola Says No.” from February 3, “Worries of Coronavirus Vaccine Deaths and Injuries in America and Abroad” from January 19, “Coronavirus Vaccinations Seem to be Causing 50 Times the Adverse Events of Flu Vaccinations after Just the First of Two Shots” from January 6, and “Doctors, Normal and Abnormal” from December 19.

Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.

February 25, 2021 Posted by | Deception | , | 3 Comments

Biden Bombs Syria: A New World Record?

By Daniel McAdams | Ron Paul Institute | February 25, 2021

According to breaking news reports, including by Reuters, [proclaimed] President Biden has ordered and the Pentagon has carried out military airstrikes on Syria, attacking a structure inside the country that the US government claims houses “Iranian-backed” militia.

US missiles struck tonight near the Syrian town of Al-Bukamal, on the Iraqi border. The strike is said to be in retaliation for recent rocket attacks against US facilities in Iraq. After another rocket attack earlier this month, the US State Department pointed the finger at Iran and threatened a US military response.

The Iraqi parliament voted in January, 2020, to expel US troops from the country after then-President Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The US government ignored the vote of the democratically-elected Iraqi parliament, however Trump later announced his decision to pull US troops out of Iraq.

President Biden wasted no time in reversing Trump’s disengagement strategy for the Middle East. After just over a month in office, President Biden is re-igniting the failed US intervention launched in 2014 against Syria under the Obama Administration.

Within 24 hours of Biden being inaugurated commander-in-chief, US military convoys began pouring into northern Syria. His Administration, from Secretary of State Tony Blinken on down, enthusiastically supported the US “regime change” policy for Syria under President Obama – a policy that only benefitted al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the region.

Earlier this month it was reported that the US was building a new military base in Syria, near the Iraq and Turkey borders. New military bases carry with them new missions, so there is plenty of reason to believe that Biden plans to return the US to the “Assad must go” policy of his former boss.

Biden coming out of the gate with bombs blazing should be of little surprise to those who have watched his early foreign policy appointments. For example, he tapped noted neocon and aggressive interventionist Dana Stroul to head his Middle East Desk at the Pentagon and no doubt this airstrike at least indirectly reflects her influence and that of many others like her who have taken up positions in the Biden Administration.

Stroul hails from the AIPAC-founded “think tank,” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), where, as former CIA official Phil Giradi writes, “she has been the Shelly and Michael Kassen Fellow in the Institute’s Beth and David Geduld Program on Arab Politics.” She is an extreme Iran hawk and has advocated and worked for regime change in Syria and US retention of large areas of Syrian territory.

So within a month of assuming office, President Biden looks to be on the cusp of launching a new Middle East war.

February 25, 2021 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism | , , , | 3 Comments

Russia must ditch ‘poisonous’ US dollar says Foreign Ministry as Moscow moves toward Chinese currency

RT | February 25, 2021

Moscow must act urgently to cut its reliance on American financial systems, including the use of the dollar, one of the country’s top diplomats has said, pointing to a wave of sanctions from Washington against the Russian economy.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told the Bloomberg business news network that it was essential to preempt hostile confrontation with new President Joe Biden.

“We need to barricade ourselves against the US financial and economic system to eliminate dependence on this toxic source of permanent hostile actions,” he said. “We need to cut back the role of the dollar in any operations.”

Earlier this week, American media reported that the White House was preparing to unveil a package of punitive measures against Moscow in the wake of a worsening diplomatic row over the jailing of opposition figure Alexey Navalny. One senior administration official told POLITICO that, “suffice it to say, we won’t stand by idly in the face of these human rights abuses.”

At the same time, in a speech delivered to the Munich Security Conference last week, Biden announced that he was intent on challenging “Russian recklessness and hacking into computer networks in the United States and across Europe and the world has become critical to protecting our collective security.”

On Wednesday, the Ministry of Finance in Moscow reduced the share of US dollars and euros in the currency structure of its National Wealth Fund from 45 percent to 35 percent. Instead, it has taken on more Japanese yen and increased the proportion of assets held in the Chinese yuan by 15 percent. State investors retained a 10 percent stake in the British pound.

According to officials, the changes are aimed at “increasing profitability and diversifying the investment risks of placing funds of the NWF.”

February 25, 2021 Posted by | Economics | , | 2 Comments

‘Undermining faith in NATO’ is now grounds for Twitter ban, because certain kinds of politics have become a religion

By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 25, 2021

Heresy against NATO has apparently joined the ever-expanding list of sins that will get one erased from Twitter, as Big Tech mounts a crusade against infidels at home and abroad on behalf of values of Our Democracy.

Twitter announced bans on 373 accounts it connected to “state-linked information operations” on Tuesday. Some of them, the company said, “amplified narratives that were aligned with the Russian government” or “focused on undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.”

Twitter is a US-based company, and the First Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees freedom of speech as well as religion. Under that set of rules, anyone’s faith in NATO – or lack thereof – would be none of Twitter’s business.

Then again, that set of rules isn’t exactly in effect anymore. Twitter has long abandoned its “free speech wing of the free speech party” shtick to become a cudgel for Our Democracy to beat its critics with. Or did you miss the part where they censored a sitting president of the United States over how he “might be perceived and interpreted” and meddled in the election by blocking a newspaper over a true story they falsely claimed was based on hacked materials?

Assuming for the sake of argument that these things were all part of “fortifying” the election – as TIME magazine put it – and defending Our Democracy from the evils of the constitutional republic, that might explain the repudiation of free speech and free press.

Which leaves religion, and still doesn’t answer why Twitter is now embarking on a jihad to protect NATO from heretics.

Last I checked, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was not a god, but a military alliance. It hardly needs anyone’s “faith” – or Big Tech protection thereof. Not only is it armed to the teeth but commands its own legions of “disinformation” hunters and propaganda shops. Why, one of Twitter’s executives is literally an officer in a psychological warfare outfit of the UK military – a member of NATO, if anyone hasn’t been paying attention.

Big Tech is also working hand in glove with an entire cottage industry of “disinformation researchers” such as Ben Nimmo – an alum of the Atlantic Council, a think-tank serving as a NATO cut-out – and Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory.

DiResta ought to be notorious because her old firm, New Knowledge, was exposed for literally running a bunch of fake accounts posing as ‘Russian bots’ during a 2017 special US Senate election in Alabama. Because that helped a Democrat, NK was allowed to quietly rebrand and DiResta failed upward to land at Stanford. These are not the “Russians” you are looking for, move along, that sort of thing.

So it’s ironic that DiResta’s new outfit has provided more information about Twitter’s newest crusade, as well as where it might be headed. Based on information they were provided by Twitter, some of the accounts in one of the “Russian networks,” the SIO says, “appear to have been linked to the operations primarily via technical indicators rather than amplification or conversation between them.”

Notice the weasel phrasing such as “appear to be linked,” or “show signs of being affiliated” in Twitter’s original blog. It’s simply amazing how the same people who demand irrefutable evidence of, say, US election irregularities suddenly need no evidence whatsoever for their own assertions.

SIO also offers a glimpse into the future of this crusade, noting that while Twitter, Facebook and Medium “chip away” at accounts “pushing Russia-aligned narratives about Syria and NATO,” such activity persists on LiveJournal and Telegram.

No doubt these two platforms – one bought by a Russian company back in 2007, the other founded by a Russian national but currently operating out of Dubai – will find themselves in the crosshairs soon enough.

“Censorship is an intoxicating power that endlessly expands until it’s smashed,” as independent journalist Glenn Greenwald pointed out.

Especially since enforcing “faith” means this isn’t about differences of opinion anymore. Forget about things such as free speech, or due process, or debate that’s the cornerstone of an actual democracy. Politics of a certain kind is now religion.

In a move that should surprise no one, this religious war against heretics who dare doubt NATO and other “Russian” wrongthink was hailed by such luminaries of the US establishment as former ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul.

Lest you think he’s an outlier, the US embassy in Kiev applauded the Ukrainian government’s order to close down three opposition TV stations earlier this month. Democrat lawmakers are currently pushing for similar censorship at home.

Just last week, the newly installed US President Joe Biden told European allies that “the transatlantic alliance is back,” pledging his renewed support for NATO. Biden has also said he would govern based on “values.” The thing to understand is that those values aren’t necessarily what the Constitution of the American Republic, now effectively replaced by what has been dubbed Our Democracy, says they are.

Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator

February 25, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Amid ‘political repression,’ Ukraine becoming American ‘colony’ in Europe: sanctioned opposition leader Medvedchuk

By Gabriel Gavin | RT | February 25, 2021

Moscow – A few weeks ago, Viktor Medvedchuk was celebrating as his party, Ukraine’s largest opposition bloc, topped a nationwide opinion poll. Now, he’s facing charges of funding terrorism that could land him behind bars for over a decade.

In an exclusive interview with RT, the MP and chairman of Opposition Platform — For Life, which advocates better ties with Moscow, insisted that the allegations were a tool of political persecution.

According to him, they are part of a wider pattern of repression linked to Kiev’s recent moves to shut down Russian-language media that has been critical of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government. The embattled administration has seen its approval ratings nosedive amid worsening economic woes and a chaotic response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Very serious accusations

Last week, the country’s National Security and Defense Council announced it would seize properties belonging to seven people, including multimillionaire Medvedchuk and his wife, TV presenter Oksana Marchenko, for allegedly financially supporting terrorist organizations. Details of the charges have not yet been made public, but they could carry a 10-12 year prison sentence if he is found guilty.

“These are very serious accusations,” the politician said. “Especially given they are without any foundation at present.” The sanctions, he argued, “are expressly prohibited” by Ukrainian law and in contravention of the Constitution.

“Unfortunately, [prosecution for] crimes like treason and espionage is commonplace. Just as at one time there was a charge of hooliganism, now we can be charged with treachery or spying,” he said. However, despite believing his political opponents are abusing the justice system, any suggestion that the man once described as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ‘favorite Ukrainian’ might flee abroad gets short shrift. “In spite of all of this, I feel like I’m ready to fight – to fight against arbitrariness, against repression, against falsification… I am prepared to stand up to these threats,” he said.

Just a few hours before Medvedchuk spoke to RT, the Kiev-based research group Rating published a poll which they claim shows more than half of all respondents across the country supported the action against the politician and his family. “They say 58 percent agree with the sanctions, but they have not seen any evidence or arguments,” he said incredulously. “So, what can you really say about this figure?”

Again though, he refuses to write off the prospects of healing political divisions in a country where more than half of the population would seemingly relish the prospect of putting him behind bars. “The split can be overcome,” Medvedchuk insisted, “because the East-West divide has existed for a long time. Since independence, even. Yes there are regions… that differ in mentality and attitudes, but that’s not such a terrible thing if there is a wise state policy with solid structures and good governance.”

“We can find shared ground when it comes to the development of the country’s economy, its social sphere, income growth and prosperity.”

External influence

As one of the flag bearers for a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 foreign policy, which pursued closer relations with Moscow until the bloody events of the Maidan uprisings, Medvedchuk is often characterized as being ready to give away the country’s independence to the Kremlin. However, he insists that it is Zelensky’s government, and its Western allies, that presents the real threat to Ukrainian nationhood.

“We live in an independent sovereign state,” he said. “Or, at least, we used to live in one. Now, both independence and sovereignty are being undermined by external influence and most importantly by external political systems imposed by Washington.”

The American embassy in Kiev raised eyebrows internationally earlier this month when it backed an order signed by Zelensky’s government to shut down a group of television channels and news sites owned by one of the country’s elected MPs, Taras Kozak, a member of Medvedchuk’s party. In a media landscape dominated by wealthy oligarchs, Kozak’s ‘Novosti’ media empire carved out a niche with Russian-language programming made and broadcast in Ukraine. Around one in three people in the country speak the language natively at home, and the vast majority of Ukrainians could be considered fluent. Despite this, under laws put in place in 2014, swathes of programming in Russian from Ukraine’s vast eastern neighbor are already banned.

“When you see that the US Embassy supported both the closure of the channels and the sanctions against me,” Medvedchuk said, “it causes real outrage.” He explained that Washington is “used to creating the image that they are the paragon of democracy, but it is their authorities who have imposed external governance and who are now running Ukraine as their colony,” adding, “They will of course target those who push back against external influence.”

The opposition leader reiterated that 2014 was the turning point, explaining that, since then, “the US has imposed its political power, and it has not benefitted my country or the Ukrainian people… nor will it ever be able to.”

Only a court of law can judge us

The shuttering of the Novosti Group’s media channels, Medvedchuk claims, was an extrajudicial act of repression. Having the backing of the country’s National Security and Defense Council, the same body that ordered the most recent sanctions against him, is not sufficient under Ukrainian law, he maintains.

“Did the Security Council have the right to sign a decree after applying restrictions and blocking channels? No!”

Three broadcasters were taken off air almost immediately and several news sites were banned, which Medvedchuk, who holds a doctorate in legal practice, says was unlawful. “There is nothing in the sanctions that enables them to stop broadcasting, or stop internet resources,” he said. “The law knows no such sanctions.”

At the time, Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, explained the move, saying, “it’s clear that sanctions on Mr. Medvedchuk’s TV channels are not about the media and not about freedom of speech… it’s just about effectively countering fakes and foreign propaganda.” Without action, he argued, the opposition media would “kill our values.”

Medvedchuk, however, rejects this as arbitrary and political, when only a judicial decision should apply. “They should go legal,” he insisted. “If you think someone is wrong, go to court. The channels can be defended in court – those who think there are arguments can present them. It is the court that decides who is right and who is wrong, not you, not me, or a government representative who thinks it is bad for the interests of the country when I say it is good for the interests of the people.”

“Only a court of law can judge us,” he concluded. “This is the procedure in all legal systems, and this is real, effective democracy. Everything else is evil!”

The American Embassy in Kiev, however, insisted that the move was “in line with Ukrainian law,” and that it supported Zelensky’s efforts “to counter Russia’s malign influence.”

“We must all work together to prevent disinformation from being deployed as a weapon in an info war against sovereign states,” a tweet from the diplomats argued.

Violating the principles of democracy

When the sanctions against him were first announced, Medvedchuk issued a fiery statement in which he accused the president of taking the country “down the path of establishing a “dictatorship and usurping power.” The government was, he insisted, “seeking to crack down on the parliamentary opposition legally elected by the Ukrainian people.”

No matter how evocative that rhetoric might be, however, the reality is that few in the West can imagine Zelensky as a budding despot, at least at the moment. When elected with more than 73 percent of the vote in 2019 after an unlikely rise from television celebrity to politics, he declared that he would only ever serve one term in the top job.

When pushed on whether his political opponent would really go back on that pledge, Medvedchuk insisted that “it all still looks cloudy and foggy.” However, Zelensky’s plans would become clearer, he said, at the next elections. But, in either case, whether the incumbent would succeed in a re-election bid, he said, “I have my doubts.”

The president’s falling popularity, which has seen support for his party drop in a recent poll to around half the level of Medvedchuk’s, “is the result of unprofessional management of the economic and social spheres, as well as the fight against coronavirus,” he said. “It is because of the lack of peace that he promised in the elections, the lack of return of Donbass to Ukraine.”

“And I think that political repression, the establishment of a dictatorship, the closure of channels, the policy of discrimination against the Russian language, the policy of Russophobia and the policy of usurping power are the result of him struggling to maintain and increase his authority and his ratings,” the opposition leader continued. “This is exactly the kind of illegal and unconstitutional way that violates the current legislation of our country, going out of the legal framework and really violating all the principles of democracy.”

European values

For all Medvedchuk’s talk about Zelensky’s undermining of Ukrainian democracy, the country’s president would likely throw those accusations straight back at him. Advocates of a tough line against both Russia and those Kiev politicians who seek better ties with the country argue that the Kremlin will always pose an existential threat to Ukraine’s nationhood.

Unless it finds its own distinct identity, they argue, through elevating the Ukrainian language and advocating an interpretation of the country’s history as separate to Moscow’s, it will forever be sucked into the orbit of its far larger neighbor. The Russian-language broadcasters that Medvedchuk points to as an example of Kiev’s growing autocracy are, to Zelensky’s supporters, a leash that would lead the country back to control from the East. For them, Ukraine’s future lies only in turning to the West.

The opposition leader, however, shrugged off the suggestion that the country could strengthen the president’s ambitions to join Western institutions like the EU and NATO by simply blocking opposing voices. “When he says he is leading the way to European democracy and is trying to break down the barriers to that, it is just seen as utter absurdity,” the MP argued. “If this democracy is about closing down channels alone, then I don’t know what his idea of European democracy is. European democracy has a mechanism for stopping broadcasting – and we’ve already talked about it – through the courts.”

“But what Zelensky is doing – imposing sanctions on his citizens, restricting constitutional rights extrajudicially, shutting down broadcasters illegally – is not democracy, European or otherwise,” he added. “This is the establishment of dictatorship and a way to seize power.”

“Note that the resolution adopted by the European Parliament in matters related to the association agreement between Ukraine and the EU, in several paragraphs it explicitly states that there can be no extrajudicial closure of television broadcasters. There can be no politically motivated action against the opposition – this is also explicitly stated.”

The Ukrainian Ministry of Justice was approached for comment on whether the sanctions against politicians and broadcasters were within the law. No response has been received.

Though Medvedchuk and Zelensky might lead warring factions, they share the same country, divided as it is. The great irony would be if, by trying to break the deadlock between them with promises of a bright, liberal and democratic future, the president and his supporters delivered the kind of autocracy that they have always accused the other side of wanting to install.

February 25, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

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