Over 126,000 Donbass Residents Recognized as Victims Since 2014 – Investigative Committee
Sputnik – 06.05.2023
Russian investigators have established that over 126,000 residents of the Donbass region became victims of the crimes committed by Kiev since 2014, with the damage to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics surpassing 228 billion rubles ($2.9 billion), the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, said.
“More than 9,500 civilians were injured in the armed conflict, and over 5,000 civilians were killed. Over the entire period of the investigation in this criminal case, more than 259,000 people were interrogated, and over 126,000 people were recognized as victims, including about 24,000 minors,” Bastrykin said.
Bastrykin also said that the investigation analyzed the destruction in the cities of Mariupol, Rubezhnoe, Schastie, Krasnyi Luch, Stakhanov, Kirovsk, Alchevsk, Lisichansk and others, adding that the damage assessment in other cities was underway.
Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, after the DPR and LPR appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia’s operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow and have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.
On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the DPR and LPR, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, signed agreements on the accession of these territories to Russia, following referendums that showed that an overwhelming majority of the local population supported becoming part of Russia.
Odessa Massacre 9 Years On… West’s Shameful Silence
Strategic Culture Foundation | May 5, 2023
This week saw the ninth anniversary of a shocking massacre of 42 civilians in Odessa by Ukrainian fascists. Only weeks prior to that, the fascists’ political leaders had carried out a violent coup in Kiev.
The barbarity of the Odessa atrocity was unspeakable but emblematic of the NATO-backed fascist regime that seized power illegally in February 2014.
Significantly, and shamefully, the Western media and governments hardly mention that horror, or if they do, they tend to distort the incident and typically, yet baselessly, accuse Russia of disinformation.
On May 2, 2014, hundreds of protesters in Odessa against the fascist Kiev regime became embroiled in violent clashes with supporters of the regime. Thousands of far-right paramilitaries belonging to the NeoNazi Right Sector had been transported from the north to the southern port city of Odessa on the Black Sea under the guise of attending a football match.
Street battles ensued all day with cobblestones, Molotov cocktails and gunfire exchanged by both factions. By evening, the more numerous pro-regime crowds turned their focus on a tent encampment of anti-regime protesters near the Soviet-era Trade Unions building in the center of Odessa. The encampment was a peaceful gathering which included women and children. It had been set up for several weeks to demonstrate opposition to the Maidan events in Kiev.
The anti-regime protesters were opposed to the coup that had taken place in Kiev weeks earlier by the so-called EuroMaidan movement. On February 20, a gruesome sniper massacre in Kiev (later found to have been carried out by CIA-backed fascists) led to the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych. The latter had maintained friendly relations with Russia which far-right Ukrainian factions abhorred. Yanukovych’s government was strongly supported by Ukrainians of ethnic Russian heritage mainly in the south and eastern parts of the country.
The fascist regime that came to power in Kiev in February 2014 and which prevails till this day – albeit with a president, Vladimir Zelensky, who is nominally of Jewish ancestry – was opposed from the outset by many Ukrainians. They viewed the new rulers as unelected and illegitimate. They were also fearful of the NeoNazi factions that openly glorified Ukrainian figures like Stepan Bandera who had collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War in the mass murder of their own compatriots.
That is why the people of the Crimea peninsula voted in a referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. In other parts of Ukraine, the southeast Donbass region also repudiated the Kiev regime and its “anti-Russian” hostility. In May, 2014, the Kiev regime proceeded to launch its so-called Anti-Terror Operation on the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Lugansk with the backing of then CIA chief John Brennan on a visit to the country. The U.S. vice president at the time was Joe Biden who served as Washington’s point man for the new regime. That aggression marked the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine which culminated in the present conflict with Russia, and the joining last year of the Donbass and neighboring regions with the Russian Federation.
This was the context in Ukraine in May, 2014. The country was in turmoil and splitting into ethnic and political divides. Cities like Odessa had strong historical and cultural connections with Russia. The city known as the Pearl on the Black Sea owing to its storied trading economy was founded in 1795 by Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia.
When the NATO-backed putschists seized power in Kiev in a bloody coup and began organizing Nazi-style torchlit processions, many ethnic Russian people in Ukraine and others were horrified. Odessa was one such city with a large Russian population. The city had suffered mass killings by Nazi Einsatzgruppen SS death squads and their local henchmen.
When the Kiev regime fascists targeted the protest camp in Odessa on the evening of May 2, some 300 of the protesters took refuge inside the Trade Unions building. The mob outside bombarded the historic building with incendiary devices setting it ablaze. The deliberate intention was to incinerate all those inside. The hatred shown by the Right Sector attackers towards the trapped victims was appalling. Several of the people in the building tried to escape the flames by jumping out of high-rise windows. As their bodies smashed the ground below, frenzied crowds clubbed them to death.
In all, 42 people were murdered in the Trade Unions building massacre. Not one attacker was ever prosecuted. The Kiev regime refused to carry out any adequate investigation.
However, the horror of that day was a turning point for many Ukrainians and Russians. It revealed the hideous nature of the regime that had seized power over the country and its vile fascist hostility toward Russia.
This is the regime that was brought to power by Washington and its NATO partners. Since 2014, it has been armed and built up to be a war machine to aggress Russia and obliterate all cultural connections with Russia.
The massacre in Odessa should be remembered for the sake of the victims that day. But also remembered because it helps explain the background of how the present U.S.-led NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine with Russia has come about.
For that reason, Western news media and their governments chose to studiously ignore the Odessa massacre. Their shameful silence is necessary in order to conceal the criminal complicity of the West in Ukraine’s deadly turmoil.
The American Government Arguably Played A Role In Kiev’s Arrest Of US Journalist Gonzalo Lira
BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 6, 2023
Dual American-Chilean national Gonzalo Lira was recently arrested by Ukraine’s secret police on charges pertaining to “wartime propaganda”, for which he faces the possibility of 5-8 years in jail. The US Government’s (USG) silence on this incident completely contrasts with its hysteria over Wall Street Journal (WSJ) employee Evan Gershkovich’s arrest in Russia last month on charges of espionage after he was caught red-handed soliciting classified military-industrial information from a regional lawmaker.
This is a betrayal of American principles since the freedom of speech is regarded as a sacred right of all its citizens no matter where they might be at any given time. Regardless of whatever one might think about Lira’s views and the particular piece of Ukrainian legislation that was cited as the basis for arresting him, the USG is supposed to support the rights of its nationals abroad. This is especially so whenever they’re arrested for expressing an opinion and/or practicing journalism like he was.
Its silence in the face of this scandalous incident suggests a degree of complicity in, or at the very least tacit approval of, Lira’s arrest since nothing else cogently explains the conspicuous lack of any response. These suspicions are further reinforced by the fact that one of the USG’s leading information warfare assets in Ukraine, transgender mercenary Michael John Cirillo, admitted to the Daily Beast that he colluded with the SBU on its case against Lira and even plans to testify against him.
In his exact words, “I’ve already given my sworn statement to SBU about Gonzalo Lira several months ago and expect to be called as a witness in his prosecution.” Cirillo also added on Twitter that “When I’m on Capitol Hill in 10 days, no doubt the arrest of Gonzalo Lira will be a prime topic of conversation.” Instead of seeking his release, the USG is relying on one of its top propagandists in that country to pursue Lira’s conviction, prior to which their proxy brazenly plans to boast about this to Congress.
It should also be noted that Cirillo told this to Julia Davis, who’s banned by Russia on the basis of having worked against its national interests at the behest of hostile powers, which obviously refers to the USG in this context. Her article also mentions that she obtained exclusive footage of Lira’s arrest, which could only have been obtained by the SBU, whose employees shared it with her precisely because they know that she’s one of their patron’s most reliable agents and would thus use it to humiliate Lira in her piece.
These facts lead to the conclusion that the USG is indeed complicit in Ukraine’s arrest of this dual American national. It’s not even hiding its complicity in Lira’s persecution either after one of its leading information warfare assets in that country admitted to colluding with the secret police on this case, told the media that he plans to testify against him, and even plans to brag about this to Congress. The USG is perversely proud of this since it hopes to pressure critics of its proxy war into self-censoring.
This objective also clearly includes its own citizens like Lira, who the USG hates with a passion since his brave reporting from Kharkov discredited many of their claims about this conflict. It could have simply requested that Kiev deport him in order to lessen the damage that he’s inflicted on their information warfare operations, but it preferred to make an example out of him by pursuing his prosecution. Cirillo’s role in this incident and his plans to brag about it to Congress leave no doubt about the USG’ complicity.
When the trading gets rough, the pros go insider
The farm to table vertical integration of the gates foundation investing racket
by el gato malo – bad cattitude – may 6, 2023
in the aftermath of great events, “who knew what and when did they know it?” is always an interesting question.
the US intelligence community (michael spenger substack ) was suspected to have caught wind of covid back in november 2019.
astonishingly, the IC itself denies this and claims they were in the dark until later
Every official interviewed by the Committee—from working level analysts at NCMI to an official with relevant knowledge at the NSC—said that their first indication of a novel virus came with the publication of the ProMED notice published at 11:59 p.m. on December 30, 2019 that reported the announcement of a novel virus by the Wuhan Municipal Health Committee.
In sum, the first warnings of COVID-19 came from the non-IC based public health track—in this case disease surveillance conducted by local public health authorities in Wuhan.
but this invites some pretty pointy questions about their competence, no?
because it sure looks like pretty much everyone on the super special inside track of business and finance CLEARLY knew by then.
bill gates knew. the WEF and team davos knew. and they were making big plays to make big money months before the intelligence community is even claimed, much less claims to have known what was going on.
it does make one wonder…
bill gates bought $55 million (with an option for $100mm) of bioNtech stock in september of 2019 right before they suddenly had the intellectual property for the most profitable vaccine in history.
they were not working on vaccines previously.
i wonder where they got the tech?
no one seems to know.
but it sure looks like billy g knew.
so, here’s a fun little nugget from the bill and melinda gates foundation investment into bioNtech, from whom pfizer licensed the IP for the covid vaccine.
pretty prescient for september 2019.
source
does this seem like “boilerplate?”
because it seems oddly specific (but deniable) as a “partnership” on something unrelated that could suddenly be “covid.”
and the timing is awfully provocative especially in light of some other events.
he did well getting out as well.
gates sold in 2021, banking $260 million, pretty much right at the top and has since changed his tune on mRNA vaccines, but this is hardly uncommon for “investors talking their book.”
the rest of this fact pattern looks a bit nastier though, more like the 3.0 sand hill road model of “buy up companies in a space and then mandate the adoption of their products.”
this has been the great game out there since even before kleiner perkins hired al gore to shill and lobby for their greentech portfolio. they are currently playing a similar (and more subtle) game playing hungry hungry hippos with HVAC companies and then pushing through new “air handling mandates” for new buildings, schools, offices, etc. cuz “public health.”
but the gates foundation makes them look like pikers.
if you’re going to make a big push into selling vaccines and drugs, why buy mere lobbyists when you can buy the WHO? gates is by far their largest private donor, 25X the size of the next biggest and was their number 2 donor overall.
$531 million buys A LOT of access and control. it’s perfect. the WHO is not only on the ground all over, but they also give advice and set policy/terms for assistance. so gates gets all the info instantly about what’s happening in diseases and then gets to tell the WHO what to tell everyone to do about it. play the hero and add a zero (to your bank balances).
it’s a truly great grift and few dare call it out as the nasty, hard-knuckle lobbying and advocacy it is because it looks like philanthropy.
weaponized philanthropy to be sure, but “philanthropy” and tax free to boot.
not only did bill get early word on wuhan and reach out and place big money on the one subtle square that was going to pay out huge by suddenly having the answer to the most asked question on earth and coming out of obscure nowhere to partner with pharma titan pfizer, but he went a full step further and actually held a pandemic war game under the auspices of john’s hopkins that gathered top policy makers and thought leaders to assess a global outbreak of an “imaginary” disease that happened to look exactly like SARS-cov2. this was the now infamous “event 201.”
and look who threw the party: the WEF and the gates foundation.
it’s obvious that they knew exactly what was coming. this was the overt planning plenary for covid. it was not pretend. and many/most those attending must have known that. this is the same time gates was buying bioNtech.
the bioNtech investment was 9/4/19. event 201 was 10/18, five weeks later.
who knows how much earlier the due diligence and planning must have begun, especially for the investment.
there’s getting lucky, and there’s putting the fix in because you know what others do not.
tell me that this “imaginary scenario” 2-3 months before the whole world knew what was happening was just a lucky guess.
the “players” were a high powered gang including big business, healthcare companies, the UN, the head of china’s CDC, a number of academics, the head of US CDC preparedness and response, monetary authorities, and media firms.
The Galician genocide: How Russian identity was wiped out in what is now Western Ukraine
By Dmitry Plotnikov | RT | March 15, 2023
Galicia, a historical region in the West of Ukraine, is currently the center of the country’s nationalist movement. However, things were once very different. A little over a hundred years ago, representatives of opposing Russophile and pro-Ukrainian political movements competed for the loyalty of the local Ruthenian population, also known as Rusyns. Galicia’s Russophiles welcomed the beginning of the First World War as a step toward an anticipated reunion with Russia. However the Ukrainian movement remained loyal to Austria-Hungary. With the help of the latter, Vienna killed off the Rusyn intelligentsia, which it considered a “fifth column”. To accomplish this, the Hapsburgs set up concentration camps.
What happened next amounted to a genocide.
The beginning of the tragedy
By the start of the First World War, the Russophile movement in Galicia was experiencing tough times. As a result of the “divide and rule” policy implemented by the Austrians, the movement suffered a split. The oldest and most respected organizations ended up in the hands of pro-Austrian leaders who advocated Ukrainian, not Rusyn, identity.
After the army of the Russian Empire crossed the border on August 18, 1914, and launched an offensive in Galicia, mass repressions swept through the region. People fell victim to the rage of the Austrian authorities over trifling matters – like possessing Russian literature, being a member of a Russian society, having a Russian education, or just sympathizing with Saint Petersburg. In some cases, people were arrested just for calling themselves Russians. Prisons were full of “enemies of the state” and “dangerous Moscow agents”, and the streets were lined with gallows.
“Those suspected of ‘Russophilia’ were hung on these trees in front of the windows. People were hung right on the trees. They would hang there for a day, then would be taken off and others would take their place… ” recounted one of the peasants in the Gorodetsky district. The repressions primarily affected the intelligentsia and Orthodox priests, most of whom completed spiritual studies in the Russian Empire.
Austro-Hungarian servicemen pose against the background of three hanged men executed on August 30, 1914 in Mukachevo. © Wikipedia
Repressions against the intelligentsia were followed by those against the general public. Anyone who was thought to sympathize with Russia or Russian culture became a suspect. This included people who had once visited Russia, read Russian newspapers, or were just known as “Russophiles.” Military courts worked around the clock and a simplified procedure of legal proceedings was introduced for cases of suspected treason.
Members of Galicia’s Rusyn movement who chose the “Ukrainian way” actively participated in the repressions. Pro-Austrian politicians prepared lists of “unreliable” suspects and based on mere accusations, and arrested anyone who sympathized with Russia. As Russophile public figure Ilya Terekh described, “At the beginning of the war, the Austrian authorities arrested almost the entire Russian intelligentsia of Galicia and thousands of peasants, based on the lists handed over to the administrative and military authorities by the Ukrainophiles.”
“People who recognized themselves as Russian or simply had a Russian name were seized indiscriminately.
Anyone who possessed a Russian newspaper, book, sacred image, or even a postcard from Russia was grabbed, abused, and taken away. And then, there were gallows and executions without end – thousands of innocent victims, seas of martyr blood and orphan tears,” said another Russophile, Julian Yavorsky.
Talerhof in 1917, the place where the camp executions were carried out. © Wikipedia
In October 1914, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin, who served as a medical assistant at the front, wrote in his diary: “When I got to Galicia … I felt and saw the living images of the times of the Inquisition.” Prishvin described the feelings of the Galician Rusyns toward Russia as follows: “Galicians dream of a great, pure, and beautiful Russia. A seventeen-year-old schoolboy walked with me around Lvov [now Lviv, then Lemberg] and spoke Russian without an accent. He told me about the persecution of the Russian language. Students were not even allowed to have a map of Russia, and before the war he was forced to burn books by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.”
Hell on earth
The prisons of Galicia were not big enough to accommodate all the repressed. On August 28, 1914, there were two thousand prisoners in Lviv alone. It was then that the Austrian authorities decided to establish concentration camps. In September 1914, the huge Thalerhof place of incarceration was set up in Styria. The first prisoners were delivered on September 4. According to the testimony of one of the survivors, priest Theodor Merena, prisoners were “people of different class and age”. They included clergy, lawyers, doctors, teachers, officials, peasants, writers, and students. The age of the prisoners ranged from infants to 100-year-olds.
Occasionally, Ukrainian activists who were loyal to the Austrian regime were accidentally placed into Thalerhof. Most of them were removed quickly. One later recalled that all prisoners had a chance to escape by giving up their Russian name and registering as “Ukrainians” in the “Ukrainian list.”
Up to the winter of 1915, there were no barracks in Thalerhof. People slept on the ground in the open air despite the rain and frost. The camp’s sanitary conditions were awful. The latrines were uncovered and used by twenty people at a time. When the barracks were built, they were overcrowded, housing 500 people instead of the intended 200. The prisoners slept on straw beds which were rarely replaced. Naturally, epidemics were widespread. In just two months following November 1914, over three thousand prisoners died of typhus.
“In Thalerhof, death rarely came naturally – it was injected through the poison of infectious diseases. Violent death was commonplace in Thalerhof.
There was no question of any treatment of the sick. Even doctors were hostile toward the prisoners,” wrote imprisoned Rusyn writer Vasily Vavrik.
The prisoners weren’t provided with any adequate medical care. In the beginning, Thalerhof didn’t even have a hospital. People died on the damp ground. However, when the hospital barracks were finally built, the doctors gave almost no medicine to the patients.
Talerhof. Cemetery “under the pines” in 1917. © Wikipedia
To instill fear, prison authorities constructed poles throughout the camp and regularly hung “violators” on these poles. The violation could be a mere trifle, like catching someone smoking in the barrack at night. Iron shackles were also used as punishment, even on women. Moreover, the camp was supplied with barbed wire, observation towers with sentries, barking dogs, posters with slogans, propaganda, torture facilities, a moat for executions, gallows, and a cemetery.
The camp operated for nearly three years and was closed down in May 1917 on the order of Charles I of Austria. The barracks stood on the site until 1936, when they were finally demolished. 1,767 corpses were then exhumed and reburied in a common grave in the nearby village of Feldkirchen.
The exact number of victims in Thalerhof is still disputed. The official report by Field Marshal Schleer dated November 9, 1914, stated that 5,700 Russophiles were imprisoned there at the time. According to one of the survivors, in the autumn of the same year there were about 8,000 prisoners. Twenty to thirty thousand Russian Galicians and Bukovinians passed through Thalerhof in total. In the first year and a half alone, about 3,000 prisoners died. According to other sources, 3,800 people were executed in the first half of 1915. Overall, in the course of the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian authorities killed at least 60,000 Rusyns.
Remembering the forgotten
In the period between the two world wars, the former prisoners strived to preserve the memory of the tragedy that affected Galicia’s Ruthenians and to perpetuate the memory of the victims of Thalerhof. The first monument was erected in 1934, and soon similar memorials appeared in other parts of the region. In the years 1924-1932, the Thalerhof Almanac was published. It provided documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts of the genocide. In 1928 and 1934, Thalerhof congresses, which gathered over 15 thousand participants, were held in Lviv.
The procession of the participants of the Talerhof Congress on the occasion of the opening of the monument to the victims of Talerhof, 1934. © Wikipedia
Galicia became part of the USSR in 1939. Even before Soviet times, there was an unspoken ban on the topic Thalerhof, because the very fact of Russian existence in Galicia was seen as an impediment to Ukrainization, which was actively cultivated in Western Ukraine following World War Two. After Galicia and Volhynia became part of the USSR, most Russophile organizations in Lviv were closed. However, memorial services by the monuments continued. As the eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the events grew older and died, a new generation of Galicians was brought up in the spirit of atheism and took on a Ukrainian national identity. As a result, fewer and fewer people came to the memorials.
In modern Ukraine, the Rusyn genocide isn’t publicly discussed. Thalerhof is not mentioned in any school textbooks on the history of the country. The idea that Russians once lived in Galicia – the proud center of “Ukrainian culture” – does not fit the nationalistic ideology of contemporary Ukraine. Most young people have never even heard of Thalerhof.
The tragedy marked the end of the Russophile movement in Galicia. All those who did not submit and did not take on a Ukrainian identity were physically annihilated. Just a few years after the tragic events, public views changed. The region came under the influence of other movements and politicians. When Austria-Hungary fell apart after the First World War, Galicia turned into a powerful center of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
Bird’s-eye view of the Talerhof concentration camp. © Wikipedia
Dmitry Plotnikov is a political journalist exploring the history and current events of ex-Soviet states.
Meet King Charles, The Great Resetter
Corbett • 05/05/2023
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While most of the the public’s attention is falling on the obvious issues—the monarchy’s increasing irrelevance to the 21st century, the colossal waste of taxpayer resources that go towards the upkeep of the world’s richest family and their multiple palaces, the dark history of slavery and other colonial abuses for which royals of the far-distant past are responsible—few are aware of just how dark the history of the royal family is, or just how twisted Charles’ vision for the future of the United Kingdom—and, indeed the world—really is.
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TRANSCRIPT
[Royal fanfare.]
GARTER KING OF ARMS DAVID VINES WHITE: Whereas it has pleased almighty God to call to his mercy our late Sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth II of blessed and glorious memory, by whose decease the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is solely and rightfully come to the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George.
We, therefore, the lords spiritual and temporal of this realm, and members of the House of Commons, together with other members of Her late Majesty’s Privy Council, and representatives of the realms and territories, aldermen, and citizens of London and others, do now hereby, with one voice and consent of tongue and heart, publish and proclaim that the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege lord, Charles III.
SOURCE: Charles III proclaimed king in historic ceremony @BBCNews – BBC
It’s hard to be a human being living on planet Earth in May of 2023 and not be hearing about, reading about or listening to discussions about the pending coronation of King Charles.
Yes, Charles’ big day is dominating news headlines at the moment, and it seems that the glitz and glamour of the upcoming coronation are infecting people around the globe with a case of royal fever.
. . . Well, maybe not everyone.
TC NEWMAN: Republic states on their website: “As we approach Charles’ coronation the country needs an honest, grown-up debate about the monarchy. We need to stop and ask ourselves: Can’t we just choose our next head of state?”
PROTESTER: Charles, while we struggle to heat our homes we have to pay for your parade.
CHARLES: Oh.
PROTESTER: The taxpayer pays £100 million for you, and what for? Nid fy brenin! Not my King!
SOURCE: Taxpayers ‘pay for your parade’: Charles heckled in Wales on cost of monarchy
[Protester throws eggs at Charles, gets arrested.]
No, not everyone is happy about King Charles stepping into his mother’s shoes . . . or diamond-encrusted loafers, or gold-plated clodhoppers, or whatever it is that monarchs wear to prevent their poor, delicate royal feet from touching the earth.
But while most of the public’s attention is falling on the obvious issues—the monarchy’s increasing irrelevance to the 21st century, the colossal waste of taxpayer resources that go towards the upkeep of the world’s richest family and their multiple palaces, the dark history of slavery and other colonial abuses for which royals of the far-distant past are responsible—few are aware of just how dark the history of the royal family is, or just how twisted Charles’ vision for the future of the United Kingdom—and, indeed the world—really is.
I’m James Corbett of The Corbett Report, and today we’re going to look beyond the headlines and talking points so that we can Meet King Charles, The Great Resetter.
Chapter 1 — King Charles
For those who do not consider themselves “royal watchers” and only know the new King of England as that buffoon who spent his entire life waiting for his mother to die, the first sign of what Charles is really like came in a viral video moment captured during the typically pompous ceremony in which he was proclaimed king.
There, in the manic, sausage-fingered, tooth-gritted flailing of the new king, is the perfect encapsulation of Charles Philip Arthur George Windsor, aka “Charles III.”
His life has been an endless series of carefully arranged photo opportunities and ribbon-cutting ceremonies that serve no actual function other than to punctuate the dreary luxury of his royal existence. But it is in moments such as these where we see through the veil of PR and propaganda to the real Charles: a man who treats his retinue of servants like mere objects, only good for slaking his royal desires and fulfilling his regal demands.
And demands there are.
His royal highness’s daily demands begin with the pressing of his royal shoelaces and the requirement that his royal bath plug be placed in precisely the right position and the royal bathtub be exactly half full of precisely tepid water. Charles’ valet must then squeeze precisely one inch of toothpaste onto his royal toothbrush while the royal chefs prepare a series of boiled eggs, which are numbered according to how long they were boiled so that: “If the prince felt that number five was too runny, he could knock the top off number six or seven.”
In fact, wherever Charles travels, he not only takes along a large contingent of his 124 member staff—including his butler, two valets, a private secretary, a typist, a chef, and a handful of bodyguards—he also makes sure to take his own personal food supply, consisting solely of fresh, organic ingredients grown on his own organic farm.
Yes, King Charles is more than happy to put his John Hancock on The Genetic Technology Precision Breeding Act 2023, which (as its supporters will be happy to explain) “remov[es] barriers to research into new gene editing technology” by (as its supporters will never explain) “remov[ing] regulatory safeguards from whole subclasses of genetically modified organisms” at the behest of (surprise, surprise!) the GMO industry.
But don’t expect him to put those gene-edited frankenfoods anywhere near his lips! They are not fit for the royal gullet, don’t you know!
Chapter 2 — The Royal Sickness
In a sense, the royals aren’t wrong when they assert that the blood that flows through their veins is different from the blood that flows through us commoners’ veins. As many know, the royal families of Europe do indeed suffer from a genetic blood disorder, hemophilia, one of the many defects that has resulted from centuries of inbreeding.
But, strangely, they do not see their so-called “blue blood” as a problem. Instead, they hue to a twisted belief system; one that holds that as a result of their special blood, the royals actually deserve to rule over their subjects.
In order to understand this royal worldview, we have to go back to the beginning. No, not the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign in 1952. Not to the beginning of the English branch of the House of “Windsor” to which she belonged. Not even to the beginning of the monarchical system in England.
No, we have to go back to the beginning of monarchy itself.
You see, the ancient Egyptians worshipped the Pharaohs as progeny of the sun god, Ra. The Japanese were told that their Imperial family descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu, and the sea god, Ryuujin. In Europe, monarchs claimed that God Himself had directly granted them a “Divine Right” to rule over their subjects. In China, they called it the “Mandate of Heaven.”
Yes, the ancients were taught to believe that their emperors were literal gods. The European dynasties, meanwhile, flourished for centuries under the mass delusion that these families were specifically selected by God to rule over their people. Should it come as any surprise that at some point the royals started to believe their own propaganda?
But, as these proto-eugenicists soon figured out, if their blood was too precious to mingle with the commoners’, then that blood must be kept in the family. And so began centuries of royal inbreeding that resulted in the deformities, abnormalities and genetic weirdness that today pervade the royal bloodlines (congenital haemophilia being just one of the most well-known examples). Perhaps the most notable example of intra-family marriage leading to genetic ruin is that of the Spanish Hapsburgs, who, after 500 years of ruling over vast swaths of Europe, managed to inbreed themselves out of existence.
With this understanding of the proto-eugenical philosophy as our background, we can begin to make sense of the millennium-long story of the British monarchy. Alfred the Great yadda yadda yadda Henry beheading wives and starting a church blah blah blah the madness of King George etc. etc. etc. Mrs. John Brown and so on and so forth all the way up to Eddie (VII, for those keeping track at home) and the intrigues that kicked off WWI and birthed the modern world. You know, that story.
To finish making sense of that history, we just need to add one other element to the story: as it turns out, the “British” royal family isn’t very British at all. The House of “Windsor” only became the House of “Windsor” in 1917, after all. Before that, it was Saxe Coburg-Gotha. But the British public were a bit fired up about the Huns because of that whole, you know, WWI thing, so “Windsor” it became.
Noting the true origins of the House of “Windsor” is not just some cheap anti-Germanic slur, of course. It points to something even more fundamental. These royals—connected, as we remember, through inbreeding—had much more in common with their European brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles (but I repeat myself), than they did with the populations they were supposedly ruling over.
With that historical background in place, we can understand, for example, the Windsors’ well-documented fondness for the eugenics-promoting Nazis. Where do you think the Nazis got their eugenical beliefs from, after all? Given the royal pedigree of the eugenic worldview, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that the pseudoscience of eugenics was pioneered by Royal Medal recipient Francis Galton, himself hailing from the celebrated (and thoroughly inbred) Darwin-Galton line, which boasted many esteemed Fellows of the Royal Society.
The overt ties between the Edwardian (VIII, for those keeping track at home) court and Hitler’s eugenics-obsessed regime are well-documented. The covert ties are even more intriguing. (Hmmm, that gives me an idea for a documentary . . . .) But it isn’t just the home movies showing the future queen giving the Nazi salute or Edward VIII’s hobnobbing with Hitler or King Charles’ lifelong friendship with unreformed SS officer (and Bilderberg co-founder) Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands or Prince Harry’s predilection for Nazi cosplaying. More to the heart of the matter is Prince Philip’s infamous desire to be reincarnated as “a particularly deadly virus” in order to contribute to the depopulation of the planet (a remark that has been fact-checked by Snopes, so you know it’s true!).
FIONA BRUCE: What do you see as the biggest challenges in conservation?
PRINCE PHILIP: The growing human population. From where we are there’s nothing else.
SOURCE: Prince Philip on what should be done about “overpopulation”
You see, the royals’ blue blood pomposity wouldn’t be so bad if they simply felt themselves superior to the commoners in a “What, you groom your own stool?!” kind of way. Sadly, it is not mere snobbery that motivates them, and their great desire is not simply to be kept apart from the commoners. As it turns out, the royal family doesn’t just feel superior to their subjects, they actively dislike them and constantly scheme to subjugate them, rob them, impoverish them and mislead them.
Chapter 3 — Royal False Flags
There’s something quaint about Redditors seemingly discovering for the first time that, far from some nice old man who waves to the crowds and enjoys tea and crumpets in pretty English gardens, King Charles is actually the heir to a fortune amassed via the violent subjugation of much of the world’s populace and the plundering of their wealth and resources. The fact that anyone could be shocked by this historical reality speaks to the naïveté of the masses, who cannot imagine that ruthless psychopaths conspire to amass more wealth by inflicting suffering on the world.
(Just wait until these dear, trusting masses learn about the British East India Company and the opium wars and the Bengal genocide and the Boer concentration camps and the Amritsar Massacre, etc., etc., etc. . . .)
But for a prime example of the perfidy with which the British monarchy has ruled for centuries (and which gave rise to the “Perfidious Albion” moniker), one need only look at the history of their speciality: false flag operations.
Befitting the governing monarchy of a nation that has been known for its treachery for centuries, the British royals’ use of false flag events to gin up public support for the persecution of their enemies likewise goes back centuries. For one prime example of that, we will have to “Remember, remember the fifth of November.”
Outside of Britain, the “gunpowder plot” is known only tangentially through cultural artifacts, like the references to the plot contained in V for Vendetta and the subsequent adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask as the symbol of Anonymous. Even in England, most will only know the official version of the story—the one compiled in the so-called “King’s Book” written by King James I himself.
According to that official account: on the evening of November 4, 1605, Guy Fawkes was discovered with 36 barrels of gunpowder and a pile of wood and coal in the undercroft beneath the House of Lords in Parliament, presumably preparing to blow up the building. After his apprehension, Fawkes was brought before the king and, cracking under the interrogation, eventually led the king’s agents to the other conspirators in the plot.
As it turned out, the whole harebrained scheme to blow up Parliament as it convened on the 5th of November had been hatched by the Jesuits and carried out by a ragtag group of crazed provincial English Catholics! King James then took the sensible precaution of cracking down on Catholics in England, thus ensuring that Catholic treachery would never again threaten the kingdom.
Of course, this story—like so much of the history written by the winners—is total hogwash. Entire books could be written about the plot, what we really know about it, and how the official version was conjured into existence . . . and at least one book has! It’s called The Gunpowder Plot and it was written by Hugh Ross Williamson and published in 1952.
Those who are interested in the full story are highly encouraged to read Williamson’s account. Although the full truth of the plot will likely never be known—buried as it is in a sea of forged documents, tampered evidence and official secrecy—we can say with certainty that the official story was constructed from torture testimony and forged confessions, that the king’s spies were likely involved at every level of the plot, that the band of patsies who were ultimately blamed for the whole affair could not possibly have perpetrated it by themselves and, most importantly, that it provided King James with the perfect excuse to crack down on Catholics in the exact manner he had desired.
In other words, Guy Fawkes was likely neither the radical Catholic terrorist mastermind that the court of King James made him out to be nor the crusading anti-authoritarian hero that V for Vendetta and Anonymous pretend him to be, but, rather, a patsy, a dupe or a mole who was used by the monarchy as a convenient excuse to enact draconian new laws clamping down on the king’s opponents.
Go figure.
But the British monarchy’s false flag hits don’t stop there!
Viewers of my WWI Conspiracy documentary will already know the central role played by King Edward VII and his German-hating wife in forging the so-called “Triple Entente” between Britain, France and Russia that paved the way for the “Great” War against the Huns. You will likely also remember WWI conspirator Edward Mandell House’s own account of his rather remarkable conversation with Edward VII’s successor, King George V, on the morning of May 7, 1915. As House recounts in his Intimate Papers, the two “fell to talking, strangely enough, of the probability of Germany sinking a trans-Atlantic liner.” Even more “coincidentally,” House relates that George specifically inquired what would happen if the Huns “should sink the Lusitania with American passengers on board.” Later that very day, the Lusitania was sunk, and public opinion in America turned decidedly against Germany, preparing the way for US entry into the war on Britain’s side.
Coincidence, surely.
“But that’s ancient history!” some would argue. “I mean, yes, the British were responsible for backing, supporting and enabling the Saudi royal family to begin their brutal rule of the Arabian peninsula and” (as I documented in False Flags: The Secret History of Al Qaeda), “British support and collusion with the Muslim Brotherhood and with Wahabbi radicals gave birth to the modern era of false flag terrorism . . . but what does that have to do with King Charles?”
Good question. Maybe some intrepid reporter will put the question of the million-pound donation he received from the bin Laden family to the new king?
Or maybe they could ask about Princess Diana’s remarkable clairvoyance in warning of her own death at the hands of . . . [name redacted]
NARRATOR: In October 1996, in a letter to her butler, Princess Diana expressed the fear that she would die in a car crash and it wouldn’t be an accident.
ACTOR (AS PRINCESS DIANA): I am sitting here at my desk today in October, longing for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head up high. This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous. X is planning an accident in my car. Brake failure and serious head injury [. . .].
SOURCE: What Really Happened On The Night Of Diana & Dodi’s Crash? | Diana: The Inquest | Real Royalty
Given the royal family’s participation in false flag events in the past, perhaps it is no surprise that World Economic Forum chairman Klaus Schwab invited His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales to inaugurate The Great Reset, the grand global attempt to use the generated crisis of the scamdemic to completely transform the world and institute new paradigms of governance and social control.
CHARLES: We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change. Our global crises like pandemics and climate change know no borders and highlight just how interdependent we are as one people sharing one planet.
[. . .]
And as we move from rescue to recovery, therefore we have a unique but rapidly shrinking window of opportunity to learn lessons and reset ourselves on a more sustainable path. It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again, so we must use all the levers we have at our disposal, knowing that each and every one of us has a vital role to play.”
SOURCE: Prince Charles Says Pandemic a Chance to ‘Think Big and Act Now’
Yes, it is no surprise to find this royal mouthpiece popping up in the defining false flag event of our times, advocating a complete re-envisioning of our economy, our way of life and even the social contract between people and their government on the back of a synthetic and constructed “crisis.”
But if only his involvement in false flag events were the greatest of King Charles’ worries. . .
Chapter 4 — The Windsors’ Pedophile Problem
Oh, if only the new king’s greatest fault were to have been born into a eugenics-obsessed family.
If only he were the guiltless benefactor of the cheating, swindling, extortion, theft and plunder of his forebears.
If only his worst sin were his ridiculous climate hypocrisy or his campaigning for Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset or his attempt to mask cows.
If only he were a regular, run-of-the-mill tyrant, a psychopath who got off on torturing and killing others.
Unfortunately for all of us, it’s much worse than that.
ANCHOR: Reports of Savile’s unusual behavior in royal circles came about as details emerged of a surprise role for him as a counselor for Prince Charles and Princess Diana during their marital difficulties and a request from Prince Charles to help with the image of Sarah Ferguson.
SOURCE: Jimmy Savile: ‘licked young women’s arms’ on Palace visits
The public got a hint of what really goes on behind the royal family’s closed castle gates when the Jimmy Savile scandal first came to light a decade ago. If you are able to cast your mind back to the innocent days of 2012, you might recall that, at the time, the existence of high-level pedophile rings (let alone high-level necrophilic pedophile rings) was considered the stuff of total conspiracy lunacy.
You might also recall that the royal family’s relationship to Savile was certainly “problematic” (to use the kids’ lingo). But, given what the public then knew, not necessarily more problematic than the involvement of any of the other people who had cozied up to the monstrous pedophile during the course of his career.
Sure, the Queen had knighted Savile back in 1990, and any number of photographs could tell you that he was awfully chummy with Charles. Yet perhaps knighthood was to be expected, considering that he had seemingly dedicated much of his life to charity and had made many high-profile friends along the way.
In fact, the first hard questions about who knew what when about Savile were asked of the BBC, which certainly did know about the allegations many decades before the disgusting abuser finally died.
JON SNOW: One of the things that’s really interested me there was your view about Jimmy Savile and your knowledge at the time that it was going on.
JOHN LYDON: Yeah. Unfortunately, I think all of us—what we call “the peoples”—knew what was going on with the BBC.
SNOW: As bad as we now know it was?
LYDON: Yeah, we knew. We all knew.
But over the years the “who could have known?” routine used by the Windsors’ defenders has become increasingly insupportable. First, there was the revelation that Savile was so close to the royal family that he was almost made Prince Harry’s godfather. Then came the increasingly damning reports on Savile’s close personal friendship with Charles, culminating in the release earlier this year of letters proving that the now-King of England regularly sought Savile’s advice on sensitive political matters
ALISON BELLAMY: It’s not just a couple—you know it’s not just three or four. There’s absolutely loads—there’s files of it!
ALISON BELLAMY [READING LETTER FROM PRINCE CHARLES TO JIMMY SAVILE]: December 22, 1989. I wonder if you would ever be prepared to meet my sister-in-law, the Duchess of York? I can’t help feeling that it would be extremely helpful to her if you could. I feel she could do with some of your straightforward common sense.
NEWS ANCHOR: 54 minutes after they’d taken off without warning or distress signal, the airliner started to disintegrate over Lockerbie.
ALISON BELLAMY: January 27, 1989. A month after the Lockerbie disaster. This is Jimmy giving PR advice to the royal family about how to react publicly when there’s a major incident in Britain.
PRINCE ANDREW: I suppose that, statistically, something like this has got to happen at some stage on a time. But of course, it only affects the community in a very small way.
ALISON BELLAMY [READING LETTER]: Jimmy advises the queen should be informed in advance of any proposed action by family members. Jimmy suggests they should have a coordinator who’s a special person with considerable experience in such matters. There must be an incident room with several independent phone lines, Teletex, etc.
ALISON BELLAMY: I mean, Jimmy is advising them how to do it. What they should do. How they should act. What they should say. Should they say anything.
So Charles says to Jimmy: “I attach a copy of my memo on disasters, which incorporates your points, and I showed it to my father and he showed it to her majesty.”
Jimmy had sent back to Charles a five-part manual titled “Guidelines for members of the Royal Family and their staffs.” Jimmy seems to be a kind of unofficial chief advisor to the Prince of Wales.
And on top of all that, there was Savile’s own uncomfortable admission that the knighthood had “let him off the hook” for his past sins.
Unsurprisingly, the royal family has never had to respond in any way to public outrage about these reports. No presstitute who wants to keep his job is ever going to dare press Charles on the issue and, since Savile’s crimes were only brought to light after his death, the royals could always hide behind the “plausible deniability” that they didn’t know what Sir Jimmy was up to. They didn’t even need to launch a formal process to strip Savile of his knighthood because, as it turns out, the honour “automatically expire[s] when a person dies.”
But, as I say, the Savile scandal blew up back in the bygone era of a decade ago, when the concept of political pedophile rings was still in the realm of crazed conspiracy podcasts. That all changed, of course, when the Epstein story finally broke into the public consciousness in 2019.
And who just happened to be in the middle of that scandal?
That’s right, Prince Andrew. The brother of the current king and the eighth in line to the British throne. A man so transparently lecherous that for decades the UK tabloids have mockingly referred to him as “Randy Andy.” A man who literally had to invent a scientifically unknown condition of being “unable to sweat” to try to “prove” that the allegations made against him by Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre were false.
I mean, yes, there’s the photo of him with his arm around an underage Giuffre (with intelligence handler and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell hovering in the background), but he doesn’t sweat so . . . it’s all a lie?
No one buys anything that comes out of the mouth of His Royal Lowness, Prince Andrew, Duke of Dork. After all, you know someone must be a public relations mess when even the royal family is compelled to revoke his titles and royal patronages to keep him out of the spotlight of public scrutiny. As we’ve seen, the royals didn’t even dole out that form of retroactive punishment to Sir Jimmy.
As we all know, the public is no longer as naïve as they were in 2012, and, sadly, the nightmarish reality of protected political pedophile rings is so accepted as documented fact that it is no longer mocked as conspiracy yarn. And, to the surprise of no one who is familiar with the ignoble history of the royal family, the House of Windsor has been implicated in two of the highest profile pedophile scandals in recent memory. . . . Oh wait, make that three.
So here’s a rhetorical question for you: who in the controlled mainstream media do you think will ever dare bring up this topic up again now that Prince Charles is officially King Charles?
Conclusion
Making this video feels like I’m telling a child, all in one sitting, that Santa Claus isn’t real, the Easter Bunny is a hoax and the tooth fairy is just your mom.
But, in reality, it’s worse than that. It’s telling fully grown adults that Santa Claus isn’t real, the Easter Bunny is a hoax and the tooth fairy is just their mom and being ridiculed as a fringe loony for doing so.
This isn’t my first attempt at opening eyes on this subject, either. Back in 2015, I made note of the absolute madness that took hold of the global media surrounding the announcement of the birth of Princess Charlotte, writing:
So who is going so crazy for this royal baby? Surely no one who is familiar with the real history of the reign of the “Windsors,” a reign marked by the tens of millions of lives lost in the First and Second World Wars (in which the royal family had a great degree of culpability), close collaboration with the banksters that have brought us to the edge of the next great depression, the formation of the Anglo-American “special relationship” in common cause with like-minded eugenicists in America like Teddy Roosevelt, the cultivation and protection of pedophiles (of whom Jimmy Savile was just the most noticeable tip of a very large iceberg), the slaying of Diana, and any number of other atrocities that should make this family one of the most reviled in the “commonwealth” they claim to rule over. And yet the media still lauds their every action, sings their praises as a venerable institution at the core of British society, dutifully acts as the royal PR mouthpiece in reporting on their charity work, and marginalizes any talk of doing away with the royal family altogether as “republican rabble-rousing.”
Plus ça change . . .
And now once again we have one of these royal events come along to remind us just how many people are still firmly ensconced in normieland. After all the royals have put us through, it’s flabbergasting that they’re still held in such high regard.
It’s incomprehensible that this royal eugenicist is trotted out to be the face of The Great Reset and to lecture the peasants about how they’ll have to become serfs on the neofeudal plantation for the sake of Mother Earth, but even more disheartening is the fact that there are still vast swaths of people who believe that this family has been chosen by God Himself to rule over an entire nation (or even a “commonwealth”).
Here’s to the day when this type of video is completely unnecessary and the placing of a fancy hat on some pompous British octogenarian’s head was of no significance to anyone whatsoever. One can always dream. . . .
This piece first appeared in The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter in September 2022.
How to fight for Covid truth
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | May 6, 2023
The writer is in New Zealand.
Every day brings more news of extreme efforts to promote biotech vaccines and cancel those asking questions.
For example Dr Mark Tykocinski, an immunologist with a spotless academic record who is president of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia may be about to lose his job. His sole mistake appears to be liking tweets by former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson who questions vaccine safety.
British MP Andrew Bridgen has been expelled from the Conservative Party. According to Bridgen, a senior UK politician has privately admitted to him that he may well be right about Covid vaccine harms, but said the government is expecting to suppress public information about Covid vaccine adverse effects for the next 20 years, citing ‘lack of political appetite’ for a public disclosure.
Statistician Professor Norman Fenton was locked out of his Twitter account following a complaint that he had broken German law by claiming Covid data manipulation was creating the appearance of vaccine efficacy, when in fact there was none. The German government is the main sponsor of BioNTech, the co-creator of the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine. Fortunately the complaint was not upheld and Fenton was reinstated.
Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand) has announced that from May 1, pregnant people (!) aged 16 to 29 years can now get an additional Covid-19 booster. They don’t seem to have noticed that stillbirths and miscarriages rose following the Covid vaccine rollout, or the absence of any data to confirm ‘safety’ assurances for pregnant women – quite the reverse, in fact.(See this article.) Is it possible that the NZ government have a lot of boosters left over after a poor response to their latest bivalent vaccine campaign and are now trying to offload them via deceptive advertising to mothers who naturally want to do the best for their child?
Highly vaccinated Portugal has seen a 73 per cent rise in emergency callouts for heart attacks. This mirrors the 83 per cent rise in heart attack hospitalisation in Wellington, NZ.
The continuing attacks from the media and vaccine advocates mean that some people must be seriously worried that the scientific data about vaccine harms is beginning to resonate with a wider audience. We are winning the argument.
Last week I reported correspondence from our Minister of Statistics Dr Deborah Russell MP in which she downplayed the significance of rising excess deaths in New Zealand. This appeared to be the result of misinformed policy rather than real statistics. Does the New Zealand government, in line with the UK, wish to hide Covid vaccine adverse effect statistics from the public until it becomes a matter of distant history? You tell me.
Should we be protesting on the streets?
In fact both the vaccinated and unvaccinated have been injured by government policy and experimental biotechnology. Even the pro-vaccine, pro-zoonotic origin NY Times has conceded that evidence is mounting that Covid came from a lab leak. We have a common cause.
It would certainly suit those who wish the pandemic gravy train and the biotech boom to continue, if the population were to remain polarised and the adverse effects hidden. At this time, it is my belief that launching ad hominem attacks, participating in lawful protests or expressing violent sentiments (never a good idea) will simply play into the hands of those from the media, corporates, medical professions and governments who are hoping that public concern can continue to be managed, marginalised and cancelled.
But this doesn’t mean remaining silent, we should be raising our voices and using our pens. I do believe we should always talk rationally and factually about issues that matter. This is an election year in New Zealand, when there is a higher chance of being heard. We can talk to candidates and demand answers, or even become candidates. In an election year, politicians know that all votes will matter. We can raise a voice of reasoned intelligence, express ourselves calmly, cite research, and send letters to our politicians. Politicians cannot find papers to back their views; published research is now firmly on our side of the debate. Our points cannot be dismissed.
Again and again I come back to ‘knowledge matters’. It might still be possible to nip dictatorial control in the bud before it gains more traction.
Chilean journalist arrested in Ukraine
RT | May 5, 2023
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on Friday confirmed the arrest of Gonzalo Lira, a Chilean national living in Kharkov, suspecting him of pro-Russian sympathies. Lira was detained in April 2022, but released after a week and ordered not to leave the city.
According to a SBU statement quoted by Ukrainian media, Lira “publicly justified the armed aggression” of Russia, denied or glorified alleged Russian war crimes, and “engaged in discrediting the top military and political leadership and the Defense Forces of our state.”
The SBU filmed Lira’s second arrest by heavily armed agents, blurring out the faces of everyone involved.
He is suspected of “producing and distributing materials justifying the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, committed repeatedly.” A court ordered him jailed pending the outcome of the investigation.
The SBU has reportedly seized Lira’s computer and multiple cell phones as evidence.
Lira, 55, is a writer and filmmaker who used to work in the US. Several years ago, he moved to Kharkov, where he got married and began blogging as ‘Coach Red Pill’.
This is the second time he has been detained by the SBU. He was first arrested in April 2022, but was released after a week. No charges were pressed at the time, and Lira would not discuss the details of what happened, saying only that he was not allowed to leave Kharkov.
He blamed the US outlet Daily Beast for directing Kiev’s attention to his work, accusing the outlet of trying to get him killed. The tabloid had reported on Lira’s activities in March 2022, calling him “sleazy” and a “pro-Putin shill,” and noting its reporters had reached out to Ukrainian authorities.
While Lira kept a low profile for several weeks after his release, he eventually returned to social media and continued voicing criticism of Kiev’s policies. Since then, Ukraine has enacted laws criminalizing dissent and allowing President Vladimir Zelensky to ban opposition political parties, nationalize the media and even persecute the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for being in canonical communion with Moscow.
Scientists Against Science: RCTs Which Give the Wrong Answer on Masks Are “the Worst Way to Answer the Question”
BY DR ROGER WATSON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | MAY 5, 2023
Paradigm shifts in science are rare, but it seems we may have just had one. The RCT (randomised controlled trial), an experimental method used to test if medical procedures and drugs work, has long been considered the gold standard method of establishing the relationship between cause and effect. But it may just have been knocked off its perch and usurped by a new approach to seeking evidence.
Based on the first such study by James Lind in 1774 when he rid the Royal Navy of scurvy, the method in its simplest form involves giving one group of people a treatment and withholding it from another group and seeing if the treatment group fares better than the other (control) group. There is no evidence that Lind randomised the sailors on which he tested lemons as a cure for scurvy; randomisation, to avoid bias in who does and who does not receive treatment, was introduced much later. There are many modern variations on the theme of the RCT but, essentially, they are all designed to achieve the same thing.
As an experimental method for trying to settle whether treatments worked, the clinical trial took a while to catch on with the first RCT being published in 1948. Until that time, what was purported to work was based on power and opinion and, therefore, largely on who said it. Other, weaker designs based on observation and correlation abounded but, eventually, were superseded by the RCT.
Of course, not every RCT produces the same results due to an annoying phenomenon called ‘regression to the mean’ whereby observed effects are often obtained one day and inverse effects are obtained on another day. To account for regression to the mean, it is considered necessary to combine the results of similar studies to be able to pinpoint, at any time, where the true effect lies. Thus, the science of meta-analysis arose which does precisely that and the most rigorous repository of such analyses is considered to be the Cochrane Collaboration.
Well, forget all the above. It seems we have been following the wrong lines of investigation — especially when it comes to the use of face masks to prevent the spread of respiratory infections (e.g. COVID-19) — and that we should simply have asked the experts what they thought all along. In view of what we have witnessed in the past few years, what could possibly go wrong?
I may be doing them a disservice, but that is my interpretation of a recent article in STAT of May 2nd titled: ‘Do masks work? Randomised controlled trials are the worst way to answer the question.’ STAT is a newsletter that purports to be “Reporting from the frontiers of health and medicine” and the authors of the article are Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Heinz University Professor in the Department Engineering and Public Policy and Institute for Politics and Strategy Carnegie Mellon University, Martin Cetron an infectious disease epidemiologist who has worked for the CDC and Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiology, data scientist, and science communicator who publishes a Substack, Your Local Epidemiologist.
Such is their faith in experts (and I assume they see themselves as such), with respect to RCTs on the use of face masks they “believe that many of these studies should never have been done at all, reserving resources for studies that could improve health outcomes”. The recent pair of Cochrane meta-analyses of studies on the use of face masks concluded that:
Pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks. There were no clear differences between the use of medical/surgical masks compared with N95/P2 respirators in healthcare workers when used in routine care to reduce respiratory viral infection.
Our paradigm-shifting team is not impressed, however: “Both meta-analyses have been widely misinterpreted as showing that face masks don’t work.” I cannot be certain but, had the Cochrane review shown a positive result regarding the use of face masks, my guess is that they would have been proclaiming that from the rooftops.
With apologies for lengthy quotes, they also say that:
What if it is so difficult to conduct scientifically sound randomised trials of mask wearing that even the best studies reveal little? Such studies can confuse people who want to know how effective face masks are, while emboldening people who are already completely convinced that face masks are ineffective — and are looking for grounds to sow doubt about them.
Clearly they see themselves as being above the misinterpretation of data to satisfy their own predilections; being “convinced” can work both ways.
With reference to the much-quoted and much-maligned DANMASK study where the difference observed between mask mandates and no mask mandates was “not statistically significant”, they conclude — presumably as the outcome, inconveniently, did not fit their prejudices – that “The designs of most clinical trials are too weak to answer the question that they pose — namely, whether an intervention succeeded”. Plus: “RCTs have value only when researchers can be sure that the treatment is administered as intended.” Perhaps they meant to say: “RCTs have value only when they show us what we want to see.” Besides, knowing whether an intervention works in practice rather than when done perfectly is valuable information from a public health point of view.
However, they do not leave us with no hope and inform us that: “Today, we have strong evidence regarding the effectiveness of face masks in the form of laboratory studies, theoretical analyses and RCTs that involved health care personnel. It has not come from RCTs of face masks distributed to the general public.” They do not trouble us ignoramuses with any details of this strong evidence, unless their hypertexted link to some words in an earlier sentence are meant to do the job. I guess they did not expect many people to go past the various subsequent links to read the material. It is fascinating stuff. The link eventually enables the explorer to download a ‘Rapid Expert Consultation on the Effectiveness of Fabric Masks for the COVID-19 Pandemic (April 8th 2020)’. This is a document written by experts which relates a series of studies on the likely effectiveness of face masks. No method is applied to the selection of studies which show a 100% publication bias. They have all been ‘cherry-picked’ to show exactly what the authors want them to show: that face masks could work.
Conveniently, the authors of the STAT article fail to refer to Cochrane reviews of precisely the kind of studies they advocate. A 2015 review of studies titled ‘Gloves, gowns and masks for reducing the transmission of meticillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in the hospital setting’ concluded: “The effects of gloves, gowns and masks in these circumstances have yet to be determined by rigorous experimental studies.” In a 2016 review of studies titled ‘Disposable surgical face masks for preventing surgical wound infection in clean surgery’, the authors concluded: “From the limited results it is unclear whether the wearing of surgical face masks by members of the surgical team has any impact on surgical wound infection rates for patients undergoing clean surgery.”
Naturally, readers of the Daily Sceptic have the humility to admit that absence of evidence is not conclusive – though a null result from an RCT is not really absence of evidence but evidence of absence within the bounds of the trial’s limitations. In these circumstances, is it acceptable to impose a costly, polluting and potentially harmful intervention on the public? I think not.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry.
Documents show how CBC leaned on Twitter to censor content
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 5, 2023
Journalist Matt Taibbi has corroborated claims made by Rebel News that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) coerced Twitter to suppress voices and organizations it found disagreeable, even going as far as threatening litigation if the social media platform failed to oblige.
Earlier this week, Rebel News released documents indicating that the CBC exerted pressure on Twitter to silence specific individuals and groups, many of whom have been criticized by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
These documents contained correspondence between Michele Austin, former Director of Public Policy for Twitter in the US and Canada, and key figures within the CBC, including President Catherine Tait and Cam Gordon, who at the time headed communications for Twitter in Canada. Austin’s communication with Gordon revealed that the CBC had explicitly threatened legal action during a call with the pair, prompting them to terminate the conversation.
Austin further deliberated on whether they should respond to a letter sent by the CBC or simply ignore it, while also mentioning that she had already escalated the case.
Another email highlighted by Taibbi was sent by Claude Galipeau, a CBC executive, addressed to several Twitter executives and Tait. The email contained a follow-up letter regarding the issue they had previously discussed on May 26, 2021.
Additional documents obtained by Rebel News showed that Tait warned Twitter that the CBC would cease advertising on the platform if it failed to suppress the voices that the publicly-funded media organization wanted censored.
Zelensky must choose between talks or losing more territory – former US Army chief
By Ahmed Adel | May 5, 2023
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will have to choose between peace talks with Moscow or the continuation of the conflict and the loss of more territory, former US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis wrote in an article.
“Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is loath to agree to any deal that leaves Ukrainian territory in Russian hands. The reality, however, is that he does not have what it takes to fully force Moscow off his territory. The most realistic choice he faces is between negotiating an end to the fighting that allows Ukraine to hold what it has, or to continue fighting and lose even more ground. That decision is Zelensky’s alone to make, but America also has agency and must look out for its own interests,” Davis wrote in 19FortyFive.
According to him, the counteroffensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is unlikely to be successful since they do not have enough troops to cope with the Russian military given the superiority in the number of soldiers, weapons, and equipment.
The former lieutenant colonel also reflected on his own country’s policy regarding the armed conflict, lambasting the promise to continue giving Ukraine what it needs “for as long as it takes” because it is not a sustainable strategy and will almost certainly not produce a beneficial result for either the US or Ukraine. “A course correction is therefore required,” he stressed.
Davis added that many in Europe already recognise that Ukraine cannot win in a practical time frame at a reasonable cost.
In the end, the author states that, “as horrible as it would be for us to accept ending the war on undesirable terms, it would be even worse to ignore reality and continue pursuing an unattainable military objective. The cost for the former is unpleasant. The cost to the latter could be infinitely worse.”
In early April, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hinted that the Ukrainian Armed Forces might carry out an offensive in the coming weeks. For his part, the Ukrainian Defence Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, appealed to wait until the end of the mud season, known as Rasputitsa, so that the roads are useable.
Spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitry Peskov, noted that any statements about the planned offensive by the Ukrainian military are being carefully monitored and considered in their own planning of the special military operation. In this way, Russia has had ample time to prepare for this Ukrainian offensive, and although gains might initially be made, it is expected that it will fizzle out and be followed by a major Russian counterattack.
The New York Times noted that if the Ukrainian military are not successful in pushing back Russian forces, Western support for Ukraine might weaken. This is especially the case since war weariness and economic crises are gripping the EU and USA.
None-the-less, the European Commission adopted on May 3 the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) “to urgently deliver ammunition and missiles to Ukraine and to help Member States refill their stocks.”
“By introducing targeted measures including financing, the Act aims at ramping up the EU’s production capacity and addressing the current shortage of ammunition and missiles as well as their components. It will support the destocking from Member States and the joint procurement for ammunition,” the announcement added.
For her part, President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “We stand by our promise to support Ukraine and its people, for as long as it takes. But Ukraine’s brave soldiers need sufficient military equipment to defend their country.”
However, for all the talk of supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” it is doubtful that EU member states will continue draining their economies and resources in the long-term because Kiev refuses to negotiate. This will become especially apparent as elections begin creeping up in member states and people’s fury about the dire economic situation are expressed.
In the same light as Ursula von der Leyen, White House spokesman John Kirby revealed on May 3 that the US has already handed over almost 100% of the military aid that Kiev requested for its offensive but this will not prevent them from making further deliveries.
There is evidently a clear divide between Western rulers and experts, especially when recalling that former US Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis is far from the only expert urging for negotiations since Ukraine does not have a chance of winning the war despite all the brave talk and propaganda.
Pumping resources to the Ukrainian military stems from the fact that if Kiev’s offensive is unsuccessful the West would have failed in its task to preserve Ukraine’s pre-war borders and halt Russia’s advances, in addition to wasting billions upon billions of dollars to their own immense detriment. But as said, for now, it is only Western experts, and not the rulers, who are willing to face this reality.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
US to set up military bases in Finland
By Drago Bosnic | May 5, 2023
The formal admission of Finland on April 4 was the latest move in the process of “globalizing” NATO. At the time, the belligerent alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg insisted that Helsinki’s membership “will be good for [its] security, for Nordic security, and for NATO as a whole.” Nobody ever explained how exactly this is “good for Finland’s security”. Russia and Finland share a border over 1300 km long, meaning its ascension has nearly tripled the line of direct contact between NATO and Russia, as the combined border between them has previously been approximately 700 km. Now being well over 2000 km long, the border could be a major source of tensions.
Precisely this is happening now, as the United States and Finland are finalizing a deal that would allow the Pentagon to establish a permanent military presence in the Scandinavian country. According to a report by Newsweek, published on May 2, a senior official of the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mikael Antell, confirmed that Helsinki and Washington DC are negotiating a so-called “Defense Cooperation Agreement” (DCA) that would allow for the construction of significant military infrastructure on Finnish soil. Apparently, the aforementioned agreement doesn’t include the deployment of US nuclear weapons, yet. However, the Finnish government and military officials are yet to specifically rule out the possibility of hosting nukes.
Considering the fact that, for months, Helsinki has been refusing to give any guarantees such weapons will not be deployed on its territory, this is quite telling and concerning. While the US already has nuclear weapons stationed in five NATO countries under several bilateral nuclear sharing programs with each, specifically Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey, these are relatively far away from core Russian regions. On the other hand, Finland is not. Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second most important city, is less than 200 km away from the Finnish border, putting it well within the range of tactical ballistic, cruise and, most alarmingly, prospective hypersonic missiles (provided the US deals with its technological shortcomings).
If Helsinki and Washington DC were to go ahead with such plans, it would be the first case that a country has hosted American nuclear weapons after the end of the (First) Cold War. The same goes for Poland, whose insistence on having nuclear weapons deployed on its territory has already pushed Russia to deploy its own tactical warheads in Belarus. Finnish Foreign Ministry official Mikael Antell stated that the DCA “enables troops to enter the country, stay on the ground, the pre-storage of material and possible infrastructure investments through the funds granted by the US Congress to the Pentagon”. The US and Finland have allegedly been in talks on the DCA since last fall, with the latest round of discussions on the deal taking place in Helsinki last week.
“The agreement also defines the facilities and areas where the cooperation would be focused,” Antell said, adding: “They are basically military areas and garrisons. In principle, there can be more than one, but the discussions are still open in this regard.”
Commenting on the aggressive military buildup, Russian military expert Yuri Knutov told Sputnik: “The Northern Sea Route – a shipping lane that runs along Russia’s Arctic Sea coast – has become a prominent transport artery of late, and Moscow now seeks to increase maritime traffic and cargo flow along that lane. Therefore, the emergence of NATO military bases at the entrance to the Northern Sea Route would require us to boost security measures, to bolster our Northern Fleet and maybe even to deploy our warships to escort cargo vessels in order to protect the latter from any provocations or from some restrictions concocted by Western countries.”
The exact nature of permanent US military presence in Finland is not officially disclosed, although Knutov pointed out that “Helsinki did not attempt to negotiate issues such as the maximum number of foreign NATO troops that could be deployed on its soil, which appears to suggest that Finland is willing to let NATO use its territory without any limitations”. This notion is particularly worrying when counting the strong possibility of nuclear weapons being deployed so close to core Russian regions. Moscow previously never saw Finland as a direct threat, but its membership in NATO, a hostile and extremely aggressive military alliance that openly declared and targeted Russia as its primary enemy, completely changes the geopolitical calculus, a move that Helsinki chose to do unilaterally.
After Finland joined NATO, several high-ranking Russian officials stated that Moscow will respond in kind in case of further escalation and NATO military buildup, but insisted that Helsinki is still not seen as a primary military threat. However, from a purely strategic standpoint, the situation can hardly be considered optimistic. Finland directly broke from its apparent neutrality after it decided to acquire F-35 fighter jets in late 2021. The Pentagon has direct access to everything the F-35’s sensors can detect, meaning that Finland would be sharing key military data with the US regardless of whether it was a NATO member or not. Still, as previously mentioned, Helsinki being a member also means that it’s more likely to see the deployment of US offensive weapons in close proximity to St. Petersburg.
In this regard, when Stoltenberg stated that the ascension of Finland was truly historic, he was right. However, this was only in the sense that Helsinki is essentially repeating the same mistake as over 80 years ago when it joined the Axis led by Nazi Germany. Worse yet, just like Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich established military bases in Finland and deployed the Wehrmacht there just before launching “Barbarossa”, the US is doing exactly the same. Now that Finland is among “old friends” once again, maybe it should dust off the history books and pay very close attention to how such military and geopolitical adventurism ended the last time. The belligerent thalassocracy in Washington DC should be even more concerned, as Finland at least continued to exist in the postwar period. On the other hand, Nazi Germany didn’t.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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Pilpul for Beginners
By Gilad Atzmon | May 18, 2020
Americans may be surprised to learn from Alan Dershowitz that their constitution is far more intrusive and oppressive than what they and their forefathers have believed for generations. The law ‘scholar’ declared yesterday that “you have no (constitutional) right to not be vaccinated.” … continue
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