Authorities in Nashville, Tennessee have identified the person who killed three students and three teachers at the Covenant School on Monday morning as Audrey Hale. The 28-year-old was said to have been a former student at the Christian elementary school, and identified as a transgender man.
Initial reports spoke of a “teenage woman” as the attacker who was fatally shot by the responding police officers. Police chief John Drake told reporters that Hale was armed with two rifles and a handgun, and opened fire after using a side entrance.
During the search of Hale’s home, police discovered a plan of attack on the school. Another location, which police did not identify, was also considered as a potential target, until Hale decided it had too much security.
Police also found a manifesto, but have not shared any of its contents. Hale had no prior criminal history “at all,” Drake said, while two of the weapons were “obtained locally, legally.”
Hale’s rampage was cut short by two officers, who “went to the sounds of gunfire” and “engaged the shooter on the second floor,” according to the Nashville police.
Police also identified all six victims of Hale’s rampage – three students and three faculty at the Covenant School. They were named as nine-year-old Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, as well as Cynthia Peak (61), Katherine Koonce (60), and Mike Hill (61).
The school is run by the Covenant Presbyterian Church, and serves children ages 6-12. It has more than 200 students and 40 staff.
Earlier this month, Tennessee banned transgender surgeries on minors and adult performances (such as “drag queen story hour”) in front of children. In response, the Virginia-based Trans Radical Activist Network (TRAN) called for a “Trans Day of Vengeance” to “Stop trans genocide” on April 1 in Washington, DC and announced a fundraiser for firearms training.
The White House responded to the Covenant School shooting by calling for stricter gun control laws.
Of all the theatricals of the last three years, one of the most dramatic was Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dice with death by Covid. Having won a landslide in the general election of December 2019, he found his fresh mandate diverted almost immediately by the deadly contagion from China. But was Johnson really blindsided, or was he aware of the coming Covid-19 regime before it spread from Wuhan? And if he knew, this leads to another sensational but serious question.
If you believe, as I do, that Covid-19 was an elaborate hoax, this burdens you with a need to explain how such a massive scam could be conducted so successfully. At what level of the powers-that-be would the truth be known, and who was running the show from the outset? Probably the vast majority of politicians, like scientists, health service managers, doctors and other clinicians simply took the novel coronavirus as fact, but leaders of prominent nations must have known more: in some cases, their contribution went beyond giving daily briefings to press and public to actively performing the pseudopandemic.
A leading character, I suggest, was Boris Johnson. His role was to get himself admitted to hospital, and to nearly die from the terrifying disease. If you deny the existence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there are two possible explanations for Johnson’s admission to St Thomas’ Hospital in London in April 2020. First, that he succumbed to illness as a result of overwork and stress, although it would be unusual for a man of his age (he was then 55) to be knocking at death’s door with a common respiratory infection. The second is that this episode was a psy-op to escalate fear in society.
Let us recall the sociopolitical context of spring 2020. Johnson, bête-noire of the progressive intelligentsia, not least for promoting Brexit, was as much loathed as loved. The Tory government, in a knee-jerk reaction by media critics and political opponents, was accused of reckless disregard for lives. The portrayal of Johnson was of a buffoon, scientifically and morally inept for the situation. His statement about ‘herd immunity’ was lambasted, but perhaps this was all part of the play.
In the early days, the government and its scientific and medical advisers counselled calm and constraint on Covid-19, implying an overblown threat. My guess is that this was a holding phase, to present a stark contrast between the initial approach and the shocking declaration of an unprecedented mortal hazard.
A week after imposing lockdown in March 2020, Johnson tested positive for Covid-19. At that time, such diagnosis was widely regarded as extremely worrying, with a reported infection fatality rate upwards of 5 per cent, increasing with risk factors such as obesity (Johnson is no sylph). His supporters lamented his cavalier attitude, visiting hospitals without a mask and shaking hands with victims. Soon after, Johnson was admitted to hospital as ‘a precautionary measure’. He rapidly progressed to the intensive care unit (for the official narrative, see here).
Could Johnson be killed by the disease that he failed to take seriously? His haters hoped so. Piers Morgan, disgusted by the trolls, tweeted on April 52020:
If you’re not rooting for our Prime Minister tonight & willing him to make a speedy recovery, then you’re a despicable human being. He is very ill with a deadly virus & his pregnant partner has also been sick. Incredibly worrying time for them & the country. Come on Boris 👊 pic.twitter.com/hQjZtgFGUz
He survived, of course, and one week later went on television (on Easter Sunday no less) to declare that ‘the NHS saved my life, no question’.
.
He claimed that hospital doctors had been preparing to announce his death. Was he lying? Johnson is still undergoing scrutiny for his account of Partygate over the gatherings he and colleagues attended Downing Street during lockdown. The man is certainly not averse to economies of truth.
Inconsistencies in the hospital story led to Marcus J Bull, founder of the lobby group Stop Lying in Politics, seeking information from the hospital and the Information Commissioner. Bull had previously tried to sue Johnson for a controversial slogan on a ‘Vote Leave’ campaign bus. The highly effective message was that Britain was sending a vast sum of money to the EU which could otherwise be spent on the NHS. Bull failed to take Johnson to court on that occasion, but now he was convinced that he had evidence that Johnson had lied about almost dying. Johnson later retracted, saying that his condition had been relatively mild, and that his doctors were erring on the side of caution. (Watch the video explaining Marcus Ball’s Deathgate accusation: Did Boris Johnson lie about nearly dying of COVID?)
Two years later, on June 6 2022, the hard-left ‘Tories eat your babies’ website Skwawkbox revisited the alleged lies by Johnson about his stay in St Thomas’ Hospital. The article covered Bull’s investigative efforts, and asserted:
This quote epitomises the abject failure of the Left (socialist or liberal) to understand what was really going on with the whole Covid-19 emergency. Locked in their political tribalism, they cannot see the wood for the trees. Skwawkbox referred to Johnson saying ‘let the bodies pile high’, as if that was cast-iron truth.
A properly critical perspective on Johnson’s admission to St Thomas’ Hospital would be to ask whether he was really there (apart from a photo-shoot on admission). In my cynical view, Johnson didn’t have Covid-19 because the disease, as we’ve come to learn, is a contrivance, and it’s very likely that he must have known the real reason for this particular pantomime. This would be a crime far more malevolent than the ‘too slow to lock down’ argument being posited by the statist Left.
An obvious challenge to the alleged faux maladie is that hospital management and clinicians must have participated in the pretence. This would be anathema to anyone who still believes that the NHS is a wholly ethical operation, despite its dubious Covid-19 policies (which included unnecessary and hazardous use of ventilators, mass discharge of sick elderly patients, stopping cancer screening and surgery, and telling people not to come into hospital unless they were at death’s door). Is it beyond the realms of possibility that with such a credible and compliant (already caught up in a culture of panic) staff of doctors and nurses, some were quite prepared to believe that the PM was critically ill – or agreed (perhaps with sufficient inducement) not to question it and to provide care and treatment to a patient who wasn’t ill, and so conspire to support the lie?
I’ve heard many people say that Johnson seemed a changed man when he returned to duties in Downing Street. Could that be because he had just told the biggest and boldest lie of his life?
Years ago, when I sat on the Board of the American Psychiatric Association as a psychiatrist-in-training, the word ‘biopsychosocial’ was used frequently to describe the range to which the profession of psychiatry aspired in its categorization of and treatment approaches to mental illness. It was meant, in other words, to encompass everything: every aspect of human thought, feeling and behavior. Rather grandiose, I remember thinking, but in keeping with the compulsion in the field to cover every base, as it were.
It strikes me now that the term is especially relevant as a descriptor of the covid agenda because it does, with realistic accuracy, embrace the scope of this uniquely massive operation that has been played out across the globe. Thus covid, the measures adopted by authorities to manage the so-called pandemic, the jabs, the jab passports, mandates, digital identification and, essentially, centralized control over human autonomy – this may be accurately described not merely as a ‘psyops’ but as a ‘biopsychosocial’ operation. An operation designed to influence virtually every aspect of the human condition – biology, psychology and social relations.
The magnitude and breadth of the covid operation render it historically unique, and, as a result of this operation – still ongoing – the world has demonstrably been altered, perhaps irrevocably so.
The iron fist of a coordinated program of control has been revealed and the fingers of this fist have imprinted themselves on every aspect of our lives. The economic impact has been enormous, resulting in an impoverishment of underlings while overlords have been majestically enriched. The ‘normality’ that, after three years, seems now to be reestablishing itself, is tenuous, for we have all seen how swiftly and fiercely the fist may come down, perhaps at the drop of another bat and the emergence of yet another infectious threat. Or perhaps the ever-looming dangers of climate change, another biopsychosocial operation, may necessitate measures of control that were so quickly, easily and successfully employed for covid, measures that included, for the very first time, the wholesale quarantining of the healthy.
Nonetheless, questions running counter to covid propaganda have been making an appearance in the propaganda outlets themselves – mainstream media – and recently some attention has been focused on the origins of covid. Was it an accidental leak from the Wuhan lab, or was it a deliberate release of a Frankenstein pathogen funded by the United States and outsourced to China?
Dr. Mike Yeadon quite flatly states that he does not believe there was ever a covid virus, while Igor Chudov clearly states that Sars-Cov-2 was a deliberately engineered pathogen. Citing the work of Ralph Baric, Chudov concludes that ‘high pathogenicity is not necessary for a perfect bioweapon: instead, what is important is that the bioweapon creates fear.’
Thus we have two widely diverging opinions from two quite respectable and diligent people.
In fact, we also have a plethora of different opinions from other respectable and diligent people about the jab, the jab’s contents, about covid variants and even the very existence of viruses. Was the pandemic a statistical rather than medical phenomenon created by dubious PCR testing, was it merely a mislabeled flu? And on and on.
If you are not confused, you should be, because creating confusion is a hallmark of every successful operation to control the masses, and the perfect biopsychosocial operation will create confusion in spades. It’s not a matter of covering tracks to make an investigation into the origins or other parts of an operation impossible – it’s a matter of deliberately creating many tracks, tracks that run in various directions and lead to questionable conclusions. This is why, for example, batches of the so-called Pfizer vaccine appear to differ. This is why highly dubious PCR testing was employed and why deaths from a variety of causes were attributed by hospitals to covid.
Under such a cloud of confusion the activities of an objective investigator are grievously hampered and the investigators themselves may be consumed by the following of leads and the pursuit of deliberately created false mysteries so as to render them ineffectual.
The ostensibly greatest pandemic in human history derived from an errant bat in a Chinese market, so were we told. I understood this from the outset to be false, knowing that every grand piece of propaganda begins with an extraordinary, hardly believable event that serves as the genesis of a myth.
The complete disappearance of the flu for over two years, coupled with an aggressive suppression of attempts to treat people with covid until the last stages of respiratory illness, suggested that an agenda was in play. This was confirmed when the covid inoculations were announced as the only way out of the ‘pandemic’, particularly when it was clear that the jabs could not have been adequately evaluated for safety during the short time in which they were developed.
From my personal experience of illness I am convinced that a covid pathogen existed, that it was infectious, and, judging from peculiarly strange symptoms, that it was unnatural. I applauded the efforts and work of real doctors such as Vladimir Zelenko who developed successful treatments and helped countless patients.
Not being a virologist skilled in the ways and means of viral detection and sequencing, I really can’t speak much further, though I lean heavily towards the side of a pathogen that was as deliberately engineered as the covid agenda itself. I believe it was a bio-weapon, the first punch in a two-punch combination, the second being the far more lethal and debilitating jab, whose deleterious consequences we have only begun to appreciate.
But while we may expect to be confused about viral specifics, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the glaring subversions of the role of medicine and human rights, the totalitarian governmental control that emerged with hardly a whimper of protest, and the very presence of bio-weapons laboratories and research not only in Wuhan but around the world – in the United States and also in the Ukraine.
Of this we can be certain: ‘gain of function’ research is bio-weapons research, and ‘depopulation’ by whatever means and at whatever rate is murder.
Baroness Goldie is an experienced Scottish politician and life peer who served as Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party from 2005 to 2011 and as the UK’s Minister of State for Defence since 2019. She is anything but a party girl like Liz Truss who often had to swallow her indiscreet words betraying ignorance.
Certainly, Baroness Goldie understood perfectly well the implications of what she put down in a written statement at the House of Lords on March 20 in her answer to Lord Hylton’s seemingly innocuous question: “To ask His Majesty’s Government whether any of the ammunition currently being supplied to Ukraine contains depleted uranium.” (By the way, Lord Hylton is one of 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords; he is currently the longest-serving Crossbench member of the House of Lords, since 1968, and is a dynamic campaigner for peace and the interests of the vulnerable and the marginalised.)
It is a fair guess that the UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace kept 10 Downing Street informed — and even more important, had prior consultations and concurrence with his US counterpart, Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin — before Baroness Goldie made the statement.
Both Wallace and Austin are military people and understand why ammunition tipped with “depleted uranium” is needed in the current stage of the proxy war in Ukraine if at all Kiev is to launch a “credible counter-offensive” in spring when the tide of the war has distinctly turned in Russia’s favour.
Equally, both must be well aware that the legality of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia is still an open issue. In response to NATO’s bombing campaign, former Yugoslavia instituted proceedings before the International Court of Justice on April 29, 1999, against the ten NATO members directly involved in the attack — Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US — citing a series of violations of the law of nations (which included the obligation not to use prohibited weapons.)
Although the ICJ rejected Belgrade’s request for provisional measures, it, nonetheless, declared itself profoundly concerned with the use of force in Yugoslavia, which “under the present circumstances … raises very serious issues of international law.” Suffice to say, the cases brought by Yugoslavia against the NATO respondents still remain on the ICJ’s docket although the petitioner got dismembered.
Make no mistake, Washington and London are consciously repeating the war crime in the former Yugoslavia. The Anglo-Saxon clique’score objective is a calculated escalation of the proxy war that is certain to draw forth a robust reaction by Moscow, as predictable as night follows day.
Indeed, that is precisely what happened when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Saturday that Russia will deploy its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Putin linked this to a request from Belarus in reaction to Baroness Goldie’s statement in London a week ago.
More importantly, Putin also drew the analogy of the US placing its tactical nuclear weapons on the territories of the allied NATO countries for decades.
The EU and NATO went ballistic after Putin’s disclosure. EU’s chief diplomat Josep Borrell said on Sunday called out Moscow’s decisionas “an irresponsible escalation and threat to European security.” He threatened to impose “further sanctions” against Belarus!
A NATO spokeswoman called Moscow’s decision “dangerous and irresponsible.” Interestingly, though, the Biden administration neatly side-stepped the issue, focusing instead that the US has not seen any signs that Russia has moved nuclear weapons to Belarus or anywhere else!
In good measure, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby added, “We’ve in fact seen no indication he (Putin) has any intention to use nuclear weapons, period, inside Ukraine.”
But then, Putin also made it clear that Russia would first complete construction on a storage facility in Belarus for the tactical nuclear weapons by July 1.
Kirby is fudging. What is the game plan? First, the Anglo-Saxon clique would hope that the issue will create further antagonism in Europe against Russia and Putin personally and would rally European countries behind the Biden administration at a time when fault lines were appearing within the transatlantic alliance over a protracted war in Ukraine that might be catastrophic for European economies.
Washington is hard-pressed to respond to Putin’s remark that Russia is only doing something that the US has been doing for decades. The point is, a mutual commitment not to deploy nuclear weapons in third countries was one of the proposals Moscow made to Washington in December 2021, alongside a commitment that Ukraine would not join NATO. The US ignored it and precipitated the Russian special military operation in Ukraine.
The crux of the matter is, as with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the Russian decision on tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus is retaliatory, drawing attention to the US missiles stationed close to its borders. (An estimated 100 nuclear weapons are stored in vaults in five European countries — Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey.)
Worse still, the US practices a controversial arrangement known as “nuclear sharing”, under which it installs nuclear equipment on fighter jets of select non-nuclear NATO countries and train their pilots to carry out nuclear strike with US nuclear bombs. This is when the US, being a party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has promised not to hand over nuclear weapons to other countries, and the non-nuclear countries in the NATO’s sharing arrangement have themselves promised not to receive nuclear weapons from the nuclear weapon states!
NATO declared last year that seven NATO countries have contributeddual-capable aircraft to the nuclear sharing mission. These countries are believed to be the US, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey and Greece. And all are signatories to the NPT!
Welcome to the rules based order!What is perfectly permissible to the “collective West” is forbidden for Russia!
Finally, the diplomatic pirouette has yet another dimension: Britain’s decision to send depleted uranium weaponry to Ukraine is confirming its reputation as the most reckless and unscrupulous state in the whole NATO alliance.
For, there is no question that depleted uranium munitions are radioactive and toxic and their heavy use in the Yugoslavia and Iraq wars has been linked to birth defects and cancers. It has been tied to “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied” in Fallujah, the city subjected to two brutal US sieges during the invasion of Iraq.
Ironically, the toxicity of depleted uranium munitions has been accepted by many NATO countries and the European Parliament has called for its use to be banned.So, what is Britain up to, behaving like an outlier?
The heart of the matter is that Britain is creating conditions in Europe to base nuclear-armed US bombers in Britain at Lakenheath in Suffolk (which were removed in 1991 in line with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty.)
At a time when the peace movement in Britain is moribund, count on the Russian retaliation to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus to trigger calls for yet another tit for tat escalation from warmongers and Russophobes. Expect the US bombers to return to Lakenheath in a near future.
Last week saw a sharp increase in attacks on US troops occupying northeastern Syria, with a drone strike against a US base blamed on “pro-Iran” forces and a US counter-strike said to have killed at least 19 people. After the US retaliation, another strike by “pro-Iran” forces hit a number of US sites in Syria. It may be just a matter of time before there are more strikes against the 900 US troops based in Syria against Syria’s wishes. One US contractor was killed last time. Next time it could be many more Americans.
What’s behind the sudden escalation? Fundamental changes in the Middle East over the past month have highlighted how indefensible is the continued US occupation of Syria and Iraq.
Take, for example, the recent historic mending of relations between former arch-enemies Saudi Arabia and Iran which was brokered by Washington’s own arch-enemy, China. US policy in the Middle East has long been “divide and conquer,” dating back at least to the Iran/Iraq [“dual containment”] war in the 1980s. US switching sides in that war guaranteed that the maximum amount of blood was spilled and that the simmering hatreds would continue to prevent any kind of lasting peace.
Then the US invaded Iraq twenty years ago and turned Iraq into an Iranian ally. That’s neocon foreign policy for you: a 100 percent failure rate.
So this month China, which is interested in creating a regional transportation corridor that would include Iran, came in and instead of bombing, invading, and occupying – Washington’s modus operandi – actually brokered the restoration of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Republicans and Democrats in the US both love to attack China, but China has achieved what the US has resisted for years: peace in the region. Should we be surprised that the continued US occupation is not welcome in the Middle East?
The United States occupies that huge chunk of Syria where the oil and agriculture is located and the goal appears to be producing profits for US multinational corporations from stolen natural resources and preventing the natural wealth of Syria to be used to rebuild that country. Is it any wonder why the US is so unpopular in the Middle East?
How hypocritical is it that the Biden Administration has spent $100 billion of our dollars to expel Russia from occupying proportionally less territory in Ukraine that Washington occupies in Syria? And Washington claims to stand for the “international rules-based order,” while they decimated an Iraq and Afghanistan that did not attack us, and before that a Serbia that could not have threatened us if it wanted to.
The end of the US occupation of the Middle East is upon us and the sooner we realize that the better. We have no business meddling in their politics, occupying their territory, and stealing their resources. Americans joined the US Military to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have been manipulated by corrupt DC officials into occupying foreign lands and stealing their oil. Maybe this is why the US military cannot meet its recruitment goals?
Here’s an easy way to protect US forces in Syria from further “Iran-allied” attacks: Bring them home. Tomorrow. Do not wait another day!
Hate crimes including vandalism and assaults carried out by Israeli Jews against Arab Christians in occupied Jerusalem have been rising sharply since the start of this year, Haaretz revealed on Sunday. Church leaders attribute the rise of anti-Christian hate crimes to the rhetoric of the most extreme far-right government that Israel has ever had.
According to Haaretz, the Israeli police do not take the issue seriously enough and refuse to recognise the growing number of hate crimes. Christians now feel that it is futile to report such incidents.
An Armenian priest quoted by the Jerusalem Inter-Church Centre said that he has been spat on more than ninety times this year already, mostly in Jerusalem’s Old City.
“It is no coincidence that the legitimisation of discrimination and violence within the current Israeli political environment also translates into acts of hatred and violence against the Christian community,” said Father Francesco Patton, the custodian of the Franciscan order in the Holy Land. “We expect and demand that the Israeli government and law enforcement agencies act decisively to guarantee security for all communities, to guarantee the protection of religious minorities and to eradicate religious fanaticism. We refer specifically to these serious incidents of intolerance, crimes of hatred and vandalism directed against Christians in Israel.”
Israel police denied the Christian narrative and claimed that all reported incidents are dealt with quickly and decisively, and that suspects had been arrested in most cases, and charged in some of them.
RT pointed out that Christians made up 25 per cent of Jerusalem residents 100 years ago, but are just one per cent today. The number of Arab Christians in Jerusalem started to decline following the 1967 occupation, as Israel has since confiscated 30 per cent of their land and stolen many properties through questionable land deals.
The US is not really a democracy, nor does it seek to promote democracy in its relations with other nations, contrary to Washington’s claims, senior Russian security official Nikolay Patrushev has said. He made the remarks while commenting on the upcoming ‘Summit for Democracy’ hosted by the US government.
Patrushev, who is the secretary of the Russian Security Council, described the US economy as “dependent on corruption and lobbying connections going to the White House and Capitol Hill.”
Corporate interests have hijacked the levers of political power in the US and use the country’s international clout to pursue their own agenda, he said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, to be published in full later today.
Their democracy is a pretty facade for the political system, which serves to hide the neglect of the rights of ordinary Americans.
Washington pursues the same approach in the international arena, where it claims to be the champion of democracy but disregards other nations’ sovereignty, Patrushev said. He believes that this “hypocrisy” will be on display at the Summit for Democracy, which will kick off this week in Washington.
The event will be “a gathering to support a world order in which Washington wants to play the central role forever. Dissenters will be labeled ‘undemocratic states,’” he predicted. The US, which “appointed itself the dictator of the world, will harass the nations whose sovereignties and democracies were undermined,” by Washington.
The reality is that “Washington has long been a leader in violating the sovereignty of other nations, in the number of wars and conflicts it has unleashed,” the security chief said. He called the nations that support this arrangement “vassals” that are constantly “humiliated” in their abusive relationships with the US.
The international event, which is being held for the second time, is meant to promote democracy against what Washington increasingly sees as assertive “authoritarian” states. The US reportedly invited all participants of the first summit, which was held in 2021, including the administration of the self-governed Chinese island of Taiwan. NATO members Hungary and Türkiye were snubbed once again, according to Foreign Policy magazine.
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Moscow last week, and Western circles predictably responded by accusing Russia of becoming “subservient” or even a “vassal state” to China.
MEP Guy Verhofstadt, a Euro-fantasist and former prime minister of Belgium, jeered on Twitter, “Putin’s appalling legacy now includes turning Russia more and more into a Chinese vassal state,” oblivious to the irony of his own words. As the United States took the lead in denouncing China’s peace plan for the Ukraine conflict, publicly setting out the conditions on which it should end, the European Union was nowhere to be seen, or at least had nothing original to say.
This makes Verhofstadt’s comments a damning display of lacking self-awareness. Russia and China are setting out their vision for a new multipolar world, while the US struggles against them in seeking to maintain its hegemonic position. Meanwhile, the European Union has been reduced to the status of a mere bench player in it all, and has become effectively irrelevant. The failure of EU countries to stake out their own will and position amidst the larger powers, as well as their total subservience to the US, has made a mockery of the “strategic autonomy” concept once championed by Emmanuel Macron.
“Strategic autonomy” is a principle of European integration where the EU should be an actor in a multipolar world, which advocates for its own interests and pursues its own agenda. Supporters of this principle insist that the EU should not blindly follow the will of the US when it comes to every foreign policy issue, but should be proactive and enhance its role on the world stage. Therefore, they should not, as is commonly demanded by Washington, take sides on matters such as a new Cold War with China. The term gained growing traction during the years of the Trump administration, when Europe’s relations with the US hit a low due to his particular interpretation of the “America first” doctrine.
However, the practical reality of “strategic autonomy” is that the EU is not a unitary state, but a loose intergovernmental organization of states which, while seeking to establish common positions on a principle of unity, do not truly have a unified foreign-policy-making mechanism. The intra-institutional politics of the EU are often a messy compromise and battle of wills between different levels of actors, including the states themselves, the European Commission, and the European Parliament. This combines with the reality that “European integration” has been a broken process since 2008. Challenges such as the Eurozone financial crisis, Brexit, Covid-19, and internal conflicts with various states such as Poland have all weakened and fractured the EU.
As a result, the EU has been ill-suited to deal with what is, despite media misdirection, the single most explicit source of foreign influence and interference against it, the US. Washington has multiple channels whereby it exerts control over the EU’s many foreign policy actors. Firstly, it uses a web of government-funded think tanks and associated journalists to control public opinion and steer EU countries towards supporting its objectives. Secondly, the US has an extraordinarily political hold over the former Soviet bloc states to the east of the EU (with the exception of Hungary), which it uses to foment increased antagonism against Russia and China, and therefore undermines the attempts of the bloc’s most “autonomous” and powerful states – Germany and France – to pursue more reconciliatory foreign policies.
Thirdly, the US uses the United Kingdom as its primary cheerleader in Europe (be it from within or without the EU) to project its political will onto the continent and override the will of any defiant member states. An example of this is the BBC World Service acting as a massive propaganda machine to push narratives in line with Washington’s foreign policies. Additionally, the US has shown an ability to work with and weaponize the intelligence services of member states against their own countries, such as using Danish intelligence to spy on other European leaders.
Through all these factors, both past and present, the US has been able to keep Europe divided, conflicted, and seemingly unable to pursue any foreign policy which actually meets European interests, as opposed to those of the US. This has culminated even to the extent of literally destroying the Nord Stream pipelines and then propagating a false narrative that Ukraine was responsible. The Ukraine war has ultimately only accelerated the isolation and irrelevance of Europe, which has strengthened the hold of the military-industrial complex over the continent, undermined its energy industries, and thus converted the term “strategic autonomy” into a laughing stock.
One might ask, who is truly the vassal? If a new multipolar world is emerging, it’s fair to say, Europe simply isn’t part of it. Russia, China, and America are the drivers of current events, the EU is but a passenger.
Moscow will determine how its future relations with Western nations will develop only after they come to their senses, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday.
Speaking at the Gorchakov Public Diplomacy Fund, which provides support to Russian and foreign NGOs and think tanks, Lavrov accused the US and its allies of being “mired in cave Russophobia, while sacrificing the glaring problems in their own societies.”
“When and if they sober up, we will decide on our position regarding further relations with them. But we will make this decision, of course, on our own and based on our terms,” the foreign minister added.
Lavrov went on to point out that, despite the ongoing “dirty campaign to cancel everything linked to Russia,” it still had a lot of friends worldwide – including in the West – who like Russian culture and share the traditional family values it promotes.
At the same time, the minister warned that Russia would give a harsh response to all hostile actions. He claimed that Western countries wanted to stir unrest in Russia and undermine its stability. “They have found very capable agents of their will in the current Nazi regime in Ukraine, whose roots were laid a long time ago,” Lavrov said.
Against this backdrop, the top diplomat reiterated that Russia was fighting to protect not only the Russian-speaking population in the new territories that chose to join the country in public referendums last autumn, but also its own statehood.
Russia has repeatedly warned the West against supporting Ukraine, arguing that such policies make it a direct participant in the conflict. While Moscow maintains it is open to talks with Kiev, on Saturday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed that the US “had maniacally set itself up for not allowing Ukrainians to even think about” a potential peaceful settlement of the conflict.
Moscow may insist on compensation for the blasts that ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines last autumn, Dmitry Birichevsky, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s department for economic cooperation, said on Monday.
Speaking to RIA Novosti, the diplomat said that Russia did not rule out “the possibility of later raising the issue of compensatory damages over the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipelines,” which directly connected Russia and Germany under the Baltic Sea.
Birichevsky did not say from whom Russia would be demanding payment, nor did he specify in what form or amount it should be.
He noted that after veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh released his bombshell report last month pinning the blame on the US for the sabotage – a claim dismissed in Washington – Russia prepared a resolution urging the UN Security Council to launch an independent international investigation into the matter.
However, Birichevsky claimed that “Western countries are actively sabotaging the work on the draft resolution, claiming that the international investigation lacks ‘added value’.”
Despite this opposition, Russia would continue to push for a “comprehensive and open international investigation,” he said, stressing that Moscow’s representatives should absolutely take part in the process.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov supported a possible push for compensation. He described the claim as “justified,” arguing that the available data “indicate that… such a terrorist attack against critical infrastructure could not have been staged without the involvement of the state and intelligence services.”
In an interview on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he “fully agrees” with Hersh’s conclusions on who orchestrated the blasts. The American journalist alleged that US President Joe Biden ordered the attack because he did not like the German government’s reluctance to send more military support to Ukraine.
Western media, however, has presented another version of events. Earlier this month, the New York Times claimed, citing sources, that a “pro-Ukrainian group” may have been behind the attack on the pipelines while German media reported that a yacht allegedly used in the sabotage belonged to a Polish-based company owned by two Ukrainians.
Kremlin Press Secretary Peskov has dismissed those reports as “a coordinated hoax” meant to divert attention from the real culprits behind the blasts.
On March 25, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will start deploying its tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Construction of designated storage facilities for the weapons is planned to be completed by July 1. The decision to transfer nuclear weapons to Belarus was made after Minsk issued a formal request, essentially mirroring Washington DC’s nuclear sharing agreements with several NATO member states. And while the decision was officially made after the United Kingdom announced it would supply depleted uranium munitions to the Kiev regime, the actual reasoning might have to do with much more sinister plans by the United States.
Namely, Warsaw and Washington DC have been floating the idea of transferring some of the US nuclear weapons stockpiled in Europe to Poland. The move has been mentioned several times in recent years, including in early October last year, when Polish President Andrzej Duda mentioned it in an interview with Gazeta Polska. The US has nuclear sharing agreements with the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey, with approximately 100 (mainly air-launched) tactical nuclear weapons deployed in all five countries. Greece also took part in the program, but discontinued its participation in 2001, although it’s widely believed Athens still keeps the necessary storage facilities functional.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko advised against UK plans to deliver depleted uranium munitions to the Kiev regime and warned that Russia would soon supply Belarus with “munitions with real uranium”. However, Putin himself stated that “even outside the context of these events”, Belarus still has legitimate security concerns and that “Alexander Grigoryevich [Lukashenko] has long raised the question of deploying Russian tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of Belarus”. This clearly implies that threats to Minsk transcend the immediate danger of depleted uranium munitions deliveries to the Neo-Nazi junta in Kiev.
“There is nothing unusual in such a decision, as the United States has been doing this for decades. They have long placed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territories of their allies, NATO countries, and in Europe. In six states – the Federal Republic of Germany, Turkey, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Greece – well, not in Greece now, but there is still a storage facility,” Putin stressed, further adding: “[Russia and Belarus] will do the same, without violating our international obligations on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons”.
He added that Russia is indeed mirroring the United States in this regard and that it’s not transferring the ownership of its tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, but that it’s simply deploying them to the country and training the Belarussian military to operate and use them in the case of a wider escalation by the US and NATO. The Russian military has already provided Belarus with the necessary upgrades to be able to deliver tactical nuclear warheads. At least 10 (presumably Belarussian Air Force) jets have been assigned and equipped to carry such weapons, although neither side specified what type of aircraft received the said upgrades.
Belarus operates several types of nuclear-capable fighter jets, including the recently acquired Su-30SM and the Soviet-era MiG-29. In addition to air-launched nuclear weapons, Russia already deploys ground-based assets in Belarus, including the “Iskander” systems capable of launching nuclear-tipped hypersonic and regular cruise missiles. Minsk also operates its own “Iskander” units, meaning that those too could be equipped with tactical nuclear warheads, further bolstering the country’s deterrence capabilities. This is particularly important as Belarus has also been targeted by US/NATO covert/black operations in recent years, including an attempted Maidan-style color revolution in 2020.
“We have handed over to Belarus our well-known and very effective ‘Iskander’ system that can carry [nuclear weapons],” Putin stated, adding: “On April 3, we will start training the crews and on July 1 we will complete the construction of a special storage [facility] for tactical nuclear weapons on the Belarussian territory.”
In addition to the “Iskander”, Belarus still maintains a number of Soviet-era nuclear-capable assets, including a substantial arsenal of “Tochka-U” tactical ballistic missiles. These could serve as a secondary delivery option given their shorter range and inferior accuracy when compared to the “Iskander” which boasts a 500 km range, high precision, extreme maneuverability at every stage of flight, as well as a hypersonic speed estimated to be at least Mach 5.9, although military sources indicate that it can go up to Mach 8.7. This makes the “Iskander” virtually impossible to intercept, as evidenced by its performance during the SMO (special military operation). The system also provides a significant advantage over NATO forces in Eastern Europe.
President Lukashenko strongly indicated that Minsk could host Russian nuclear weapons as soon as NATO implied it could deploy US B61 nuclear bombs to Poland, highlighting that his country’s Soviet-era infrastructure for such weapons remains intact despite US pressure to destroy it during the 1990s. Belarus is home to a growing arsenal of state-of-the-art Russian military units and equipment, including strategic assets such as the S-400 SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems, as well as the advanced Su-35S air superiority fighter jets and MiG-31 interceptors, including the K/I variants capable of deploying the already legendary “Kinzhal” hypersonic missiles, which are also nuclear-capable.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
NATO is launching a new investment fund worth €1 billion, which is expected to be officially activated at NATO’s annual summit in July. The fund aims to militarize the civil sector by using the knowledge and skills of manufacturers, scientific institutions, and start-ups to develop technology with military and defence applications.
The fund, described by NATO as the “world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund”, will invest €1 billion into developing dual-use (civilian and military) emerging and disruptive technologies over a 15-year time frame. However, it demonstrates that NATO wants to permanently employ the European economy to the Russian border so they can collectively focus on the Ukrainian crisis.
It will also serve as preparation for any future war against Russia, something that is at great risk of eventuating considering Western efforts to deter Moscow from its special military operation in Ukraine have failed.
In the Ukrainian crisis, the material needs of the Ukrainian military are evident, and especially in preparation for any potential scenario of using NATO forces against Russia. This primarily refers to artillery, ammunition, rockets, bombs, air defence systems and drones. Due to these shortages, projects like this are being developed under the auspices of the NATO pact and are now becoming an investment fund for the economies of member states, depending on the ability of those countries to produce equipment needed for combat needs.
NATO approaches this project by effectively purchasing knowledge and engaging civil institutions, but also by opening various civil-military programs and projects. In addition, there are also investments in the so-called information war, which is part of the intelligence-reconnaissance activity, which is very important for modern warfare.
One NATO official told EURACTIV that the Alliance is looking to have a “competitive edge over strategic competitors”, an obvious reference to Russia.
The Netherlands already announced that it will house the fund. The country also announced that it will facilitate innovative startup companies by helping them find capital.
“We expect that housing this fund in the Netherlands will make it easier for innovative Dutch startups to find their way to capital, stimulating solutions for both societal and military problems,” the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement.
For this reason, the specific technologies invested will include artificial intelligence, big-data processing, biotechnology and human enhancement, novel materials, quantum-enabled technologies as well as propulsion and space. Although the headquarters will likely be in Amsterdam, regional offices will also be established “across the Alliance […] given the wide geographic remit of the Fund”, according to a NATO press release.
It is recalled that the new fund was first announced last year, meaning that the latest announcement made by the Dutch government is a demonstration of a laid-out plan by NATO to bring European civilian structures to operate as if it were in a war time economic climate. This could suggest that NATO is preparing Europe for a much larger conflict with Russia.
However, these provocative actions by the Dutch government comes as the country has been gripped by a wave of strikes in the public and private sectors since the beginning of 2023, something unseen in such a manner for many years. Every week since January, Dutch workers have protested for better wages and living conditions.
On March 16, around 200,000 healthcare workers at 64 Dutch hospitals were on strike for a day, including at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital in Amsterdam, a leading facility for treating cancer patients. Doctors and healthcare workers in 48 departments of the facility went on strike for the first time ever.
Although the Dutch economy will not shrink this year, its growth will slow down, according to ABN Amro. The bank expects the economy to grow 1.2% this year and 1.3% in 2024, a miniscule amount compared to the 4% growth the Dutch economy enjoyed in the previous years. Persistent inflation will ensure that growth will remain low this year, with ABN Amro expecting consumer prices to rise by 4.4% this year and 4% in 2024.
The higher interest rates, keeping in mind the central banks are trying to curb inflation, also slow the Dutch economy. It costs more to borrow money, which has repercussions for the housing market and investments, ABN Amro said.
Yet, with the Netherlands having no security issues to contend with given its geography, it is voluntarily deepening its involvement in NATO structures aimed against Russia, and all at a time when citizens are protesting weekly and suffering from the Western-wide economic crisis.
Ahmed Adel is an Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
I’ve been following Jennifer Bilek’s reporting on the Transgender Agenda for the last year.
In my opinion, she is doing the best investigative journalism, in the world, on the top-down nature of this society deforming “input” and “normalization”.
What we don’t understand is the scale of money behind this push, and the individuals controlling this weaponized capital. These are questions that go to the heart of Jennifer’s work. … continue
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