The Biden Administration’s Ukraine strategy is increasingly disconnected from political and military realities on the ground, Judge Andrew Napolitano told Sputnik’s New Rules podcast.
“Joe Biden cannot articulate what the goal of the American military involvement [in Ukraine] is,” Judge Andrew Napolitano, former New Jersey superior court judge and host of the Judging Freedom podcast, told Sputnik. “The neocons around him just love the concept of war, particularly war against Russia, particularly against Russia while Vladimir Putin is in office.”
Delusional Neocons Set Biden’s Ukraine Agenda
The US has been involved in the Ukraine conflict for 17 months and has already transferred over $68 billion. Nevertheless, Kiev cannot boast any considerable progress on the ground with their much-discussed counteroffensive having eventually stalled. As the conflict is continuing to drag on, Biden administration officials and the US president are still asserting to Kiev that Washington will support it “as long as it takes.”
“If you ask him, as long as it takes to do what he can’t answer the ‘To do what?’ As long as it takes to produce a stalemate? As long as it takes to produce a cease fire? As long as it takes, if you ask Victoria Nuland, to drive President Putin from office? I mean, they can’t answer that question,” Napolitano noted.
Can Trump Strike Ukraine Peace Deal?
The Ukraine conflict has been presented in the Western mainstream press as a way to bleed Russia dry and drain President Vladimir Putin’s “political standing with the Russian people,” the judge opined.
In February 2023, President Biden made a claim in front of a Polish crowd that suggested he wanted to see the Russian president deposed: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden stated. The White House later downplayed this rally cry as a gaffe.
Still, what Team Biden and their neocon allies “don’t understand is that President Putin is enormously popular, that he’s fighting a patriotic war for a return of land, for which there is a valid legal argument, it has always been a part of Russia, culturally a part of Russia, linguistically a part of Russia,” according to Napolitano.
“They think they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to drive President Putin from office. They’re crazy. It’s not going to work. Joe Biden does not have an off ramp. He doesn’t have the ability to say, okay, we’ve we’ve succeeded. It’s time for us to stop. There’s no goal and there’s no off ramp. His internal goal is to run for reelection as a wartime president like his hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in 1940. But this is not a war like World War Two. This is not a war that the American public perceives as a threat to American national security. All the politicians will argue that. But they’re so tied up with the military industrial complex that, you know, you have a majority in the Congress, Republicans and Democrats, that like all wars because it enriches the military industrial complex and keeps people working in the factories.”
What’s more, there is no American national security interest at stake in Ukraine, despite US neocons arguing to the contrary, according to the judge.
US war hawks are continuing to claim that Washington’s military aid to Kiev is a great investment since Russia is being bashed without American lives being lost. “The Russians are dying. The best money we’ve ever spent,” as US Senator Lindsey Graham said back in May. As long as no American body bags are coming home, the public is buying into this argument.
Still, it’s no longer a secret that a limited contingent of US servicemen has been operating on the ground in Ukraine. “We know the US military is there in Ukraine out of uniform. We know it is there in Poland, operating equipment that is shooting projectiles at Russian boys,” noted the judge. US mercenaries have also joined Ukrainian battalions on the battlefield.
And these Americans are dying in Ukraine: a sad statistic has already found its way out, indicating that dozens if not hundreds of US citizens have been killed in the conflict zone since February 2022.
Dissent is Brewing Within the US Military and Intel Community
Meanwhile, the US president and his administration are continuing to assert to the American public that Russia is losing and that Ukraine is going to prevail.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently insisted that Russia had “already lost” while speaking to an American broadcaster. However, this triumphalist stance is not unanimously shared by US Department of Defense officials and the US intelligence community. The so-called Pentagon leak – that caught the headlines in April – shed some light on what the US military and spies really think about the situation on the ground in Ukraine.
“There is a 21 year old young Massachusetts National Guardsman sitting in a federal jail cell as we speak, named Jack Teixeira, who is accused of leaking secret documents – to which he had access by virtue of his work in the National Guard – to a chat room,” said Napolitano.
“The documents, the authenticity and accuracy of which have never been challenged by the government, reveal the government’s own internal deliberations as showing it expects Ukraine to lose. To lose. So if the Department of Defense expects Ukraine to lose and the Secretary of Defense goes before a Senate committee and says under oath ‘Ukraine is going to win’, who are you going to believe? You’re going to believe their candid, unvarnished statements recorded in documents that they believed would forever remain secret.”
Prior to the scandalous leak, American army and intelligence veterans voiced their skepticism with regard to Biden’s Ukraine strategy in their podcasts or interviews with alternative media.
“On my podcast, Judging Freedom, where we have a number of ex-CIA and ex-military harshly critical of the current CIA and the current US government, who are, I believe, giving a far more accurate version of what’s happening there,” Napolitano pointed out, referring to former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Scott Ritter, retired US Army colonel and government official Douglas Macgregor, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson and ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern. All of them have stated loud and clear that “it is inconceivable that the Ukraine military can prevail,” the judge underscored.
On top of that, it has been almost impossible for the US and NATO military officials to ignore massive casualties sustained by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in terms of military equipment and manpower since the beginning of their counteroffensive.
As of mid-July, Ukraine had lost 26,000 servicemen, 21 aircraft, five helicopters, some 1,244 tanks and armored vehicles, including 17 Leopard tanks, five French AMX wheeled tanks, 914 units of special vehicles, two air defense systems, and 25 MLRS vehicles, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Thus, unsurprisingly, Western leaders in private conversations cast doubt on Kiev’s odds of winning at the recent Aspen Security Forum despite publicly trying to put a positive spin on Ukraine’s military efforts.
Why is the US Public Buying Into Biden’s Ukraine Narrative?
Meanwhile, the Western mainstream press has been busy spreading the one-sided Biden administration’s Ukraine narrative since the outset of the conflict. Judging from polls, most of the public in the West appear to have swallowed the bait.
“The American public still seems to be in favor of the war. Again, they only hear one side,” highlighted the judge.
“While the Biden administration, through the American Central Intelligence Agency and British MI6, has succeeded in taming the press,” continued Napolitano. “So the press and the American media, even my friends and former colleagues at Fox, are giving a version of these events which is not based in reality on the ground. The version of events that Americans are getting is that the so-called spring offensive, even though we’re now in the middle of the summer, is slow, methodical, but but a steady movement eastward by the Ukrainian forces, Whereas in reality, as you just pointed out, the Russian military has established three runs of defenses and the Ukrainians haven’t even approached, much less breached the first of those three rings. So the American public is not getting a true and accurate view of the so-called spring effect offensive from mainstream media.”
What’s making the West’s Ukraine narrative even less credible is that there are very few American journalists on the ground, according to the judge.
“The military won’t allow them there, Napolitano said. “The Ukrainians won’t allow them there. They don’t want the true story to be told. So the American public hears that same drumbeat over and over and over again, which you so nicely articulated. But in reality, it is not our war, it is not our fight. We shouldn’t be losing any blood and we shouldn’t be losing any money over it. And we are losing.”
In addition, most US presidential candidates from both sides of America’s political aisle are also promoting the US proxy war in Ukraine. Just two major candidates – Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – are against the conflict. “Everybody else is lockstep in favor of it for a variety of what I think are nonsensical reasons,” Sputnik’s interlocutor added.
However, over the past two weeks or so, a growing number of mainstream media outlets have started to release unflattering reports about the Ukraine situation on the front lines. They are even publishing interviews with Ukrainian soldiers where they talk about how this counteroffensive is not exactly going to plan. This could be a harbinger of some potential change, according to the judge, even though Team Biden is still wearing a brave face.
“It’s very telling that that is beginning to happen. So that would mean the president’s political advisers are taking polls saying the American public’s getting tired of this war. There doesn’t seem to be any progress. We need an off ramp. The off ramp is not going to come all at once. The off ramp is going to come gradually and slowly with the American public acclimated to the coming off ramp. If the Biden administration were to say, that’s it, we’re not involved anymore, well then everybody would say, what about the $68 billion already spent? Are we going to get that back. I mean, was it wasted? What was accomplished by it? So in order to prevent that kind of a blowback, they need this gradual acclimation to the likelihood of Russian success and Ukrainian defeat,” Napolitano concluded.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Russia, Ukraine, United States |
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Court documents stemming from Hunter Biden’s failed plea-bargain deal on federal criminal charges have revealed that US President Joe Biden’s son brought in income of more than $4.4 million, mostly from China and Ukraine, while paying no taxes in 2017 and 2018.
In 2017 alone, Hunter Biden netted nearly $2.3 million from foreign sources, including over $1.6 million from his Chinese business interests and $500,000 in director’s fees from a Ukrainian energy company, according to a filing released on Wednesday by US District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika in Wilmington, Delaware. He also had $70,000 in earnings from a Romanian business and $48,000 from a multinational law firm.
The president’s son belatedly reported an additional $2.1 million in earnings from 2018. He didn’t pay taxes for either year, despite having enough money and being repeatedly urged by his accountant to do so, according to the documents, which Noreika released in response to a request from NBC News.
Biden became addicted to crack cocaine in 2016, contributing to the collapse of his marriage and his most significant business relationship the following year. Despite his escalating drug use, “Biden successfully entered into business ventures and landed legal clients, earning millions of dollars.”
Republican lawmakers have accused the Biden family of soliciting bribes through Hunter Biden’s overseas business forays, including a stint serving as a director for Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings. Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky reportedly urged Hunter Biden, whose father was then the US vice president, to help end a corruption investigation against the company in 2015.
Zlochevsky later told an FBI informant that he was coerced into paying a $10 million bribe to the Bidens and that he had multiple recordings to verify his claims.
Hunter Biden’s substance abuse worsened in 2018, when he moved to Los Angeles for a “spring and summer of nonstop debauchery,” according to the plea agreement. Weeks before his 2017 tax return was due to be filed, he received a $1 million payment for legal services to Chinese business associate Patrick Ho, but he spent almost all of the money over the next six months on travel, entertainment and other expenses. Similarly, around the time his 2018 return was due, in April 2019, he received $758,000 and spent almost all the money by the end of May.
The documents showed that an unidentified third party paid Biden’s nearly $2 million in combined tax liabilities for 2017 and 2018 in October 2021. That same person also paid about $243,000 on Biden’s behalf for unresolved tax liabilities from 2016 and 2019. Media outlets have identified that backer as Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden’s “sugar brother” lawyer in Los Angeles.
Noreika refused to accept the plea agreement last week, saying she had concerns about the terms granted to Biden. Republicans had accused prosecutors in the Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) of giving the president’s son a “sweetheart” deal on the tax charges against him and a separate case involving an illegal gun purchase. Republican lawmakers launched an investigation this week of the DOJ’s handling of the plea and diversion agreements in Hunter Biden’s cases.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | Hunter Biden, Ukraine, United States |
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Nicole Schwab explains how lessons learned from the Covid Crisis can be applied to Climate Crisis
A video of Klaus Schwab’s daughter, Nicole, giving a talk in June of 2020, is getting a lot of attention. Nicole is co-director of the Platform to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions & 1t.org, at the World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
In the video, she can be seen and heard saying the following:
This [Covid] crisis has shown us how, first of all, things can shift very rapidly when we put our minds to it and when we feel the immediate emergency to our livelihood. And second, that clearly the system—I mean you mentioned it earlier—that we had before is clearly not sustainable. So, I see it as a tremendous opportunity to really have this Great Reset, and to use this, you know, huge flows of money, to use the increased levers that policymakers have today in a way that was not possible before to create a change that is not incremental, but that we can look back and we can say that this is the moment where we really started to position, you know, nature at the core of the economy.
Note the elements of her assertion:
1). The Covid Crisis and response provide a model response for the Climate Crisis.
2). Both crises are emergencies that provide tremendous opportunities for the Great Reset agenda.
3). The huge flows of money resulting from the Covid emergency may flow again in response to the Climate emergency.
4). Both emergencies produce increased levers that policymakers can use to force immediate and dramatic change instead of the sort of incremental change that is less disruptive to the economic lives of ordinary citizens.
In other words, with the “tremendous opportunity” of the Covid Crisis now a thing of the past, it appears that the Olympians at Davos and their well-positioned friends are making arrangements for the Climate Crisis and the huge flows of money that will go to them for their “solutions” to the crisis.
Get ready for a coming propaganda blitz, an Emergency Declaration, and huge money flows from public coffers for Emergency Countermeasures to deal with the Climate Emergency.
If you are in the business of providing emergency countermeasures to the climate crisis, you will do well. If not, you will probably be tormented and burdened with onerous and arbitrary restrictions that do nothing for the environment but that make your life more expensive and difficult.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video |
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Everyone seems to know someone taking Ozempic these days. But, it’s not all roses for the wonder weight loss drug, with serious side effects including suicidal ideations and stomach paralysis. Jefferey Jaxen reports.
A Louisiana woman who sued the manufacturers of popular diabetes and weight loss drugs Ozempic and Mounjaro is alleging the drugmakers failed to warn the public about the risk of severe gastrointestinal problems.
Jaclyn Bjorklund, 44, who on Wednesday filed the 26-page lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Lake Charles Division, claims she was “severely injured” after taking the two medications.
According to the complaint, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the manufacturers of Ozempic and Mounjaro, respectively, “downplayed the severity of the gastrointestinal events,” such as gastroparesis and gastroenteritis, caused by the drugs.
Gastroparesis, a disorder that “slows or stops the movement of food from your stomach to your small intestine, even though there is no blockage in the stomach or intestines” is frequently caused by diabetes. Narcotics and antidepressants also are linked to gastroparesis.
Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) are injectable diabetes medications, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), CBS News reported. Mounjaro was approved in May 2022. Ozempic was first approved in December 2017, and approved at a higher dose in March 2022.
According to NBC News, Bjorklund is the first person to come forward alleging that the drugs in question cause gastrointestinal injuries.
The two drugs are part of a new category of medicines known as glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, receptor agonists. They are intended to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their blood sugar levels. However, the medications are also commonly prescribed off-label for weight loss.
According to CBS News, “These drugs were originally developed to treat patients with Type 2 diabetes as they produce insulin and lower blood sugar. They also release a hormone that slows down digestion and keeps food in a patient’s stomach longer.”
However, their long-term impact is unknown.
According to CNN, “The lawsuit is seeking compensatory and punitive damages for past and future pain and suffering Bjorklund will have including health care costs and medical monitoring as well as her attorney’s fees and court costs.”
Attorneys Paul Pennock and Jonathan Sedgh, of Orlando-based Morgan & Morgan, said during a press conference, that the basis of the lawsuit is “a failure to warn,” CBS News reported. Pennock told the press:
“It is our opinion that these drugs are causing these problems. We think that the evidence is sufficient for us to be able to prove it or we would not have filed the case, and we intend to file many more in the coming days and weeks.
“[Bjorklund’s] problems have been so severe that she’s been to the emergency room multiple times, including last weekend. She’s actually even thrown up so violently that she’s lost teeth.”
This is the first lawsuit alleging the two drugs caused gastrointestinal injuries, however, lawyers representing Bjorklund said hundreds more similar lawsuits are ready to be filed by victims across the U.S.
Ozempic recently was linked to a range of other health issues, including kidney disorders and causing suicidal thoughts.
Plaintiff suffered from ‘severe gastrointestinal events’
The lawsuit states that Bjorklund, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in 2017, was prescribed Ozempic and took the drug for more than a year before switching to Mounjaro.
During this period, she experienced “severe gastrointestinal events,” including severe vomiting — which also led to the loss of teeth, gastrointestinal burning and stomach pain. As a result, the complaint states, Bjorklund “sustained severe and permanent personal injuries, pain, suffering, and emotional distress, and incurred medical expenses.”
The lawsuit also alleges the two companies “knew of the association between the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk of developing severe gastrointestinal issues, including gastroparesis and gastroenteritis.”
The companies’ “failure to disclose information that they possessed regarding the association between the use of GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk of developing severe gastrointestinal issues, including gastroparesis and gastroenteritis, rendered the warnings for this medication inadequate,” the lawsuit adds.
According to The Hill, “While the labels for both medications note that they delay gastric emptying and can cause a variety of stomach problems — including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation — they do not explicitly warn of gastroparesis as a risk.”
CNN reported that “Ozempic’s prescribing information says the most common adverse events related to the drug are nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation. Under a section on drug interactions, it says that Ozempic delays gastric emptying, which may impact absorption of oral medications.”
Similarly, “Mounjaro’s prescribing information also says nausea, diarrhea, decreased appetite, vomiting, constipation, dyspepsia, and abdominal pain are the most common adverse events, and that Mounjaro delays gastric emptying, which may impact medication absorption.”
However, due to the lack of an explicit warning regarding gastroparesis, the lawsuit alleges that Bjorklund “was and still is caused to suffer from severe gastrointestinal issues, as well as other severe and personal injuries which are permanent and lasting in nature, physical pain, and mental anguish.”
In statements, both companies defended their products. Novo Nordisk claimed that gastrointestinal events are “well-known side effects of the GLP-1 class,” according to CBS News. The company added:
“For semaglutide, the majority of GI side effects are mild to moderate in severity and of short duration. GLP-1’s are known to cause a delay in gastric emptying, as noted in the label of each of our GLP-1 RA medications. Symptoms of delayed gastric emptying, nausea and vomiting are listed as side effects.”
And, as reported by The Hill :
“Patient safety is of utmost importance to Novo Nordisk. … We are continuously monitoring the safety profile of our products and collaborate closely with authorities to ensure patient safety, including adequate information on gastrointestinal side effects in the label.”
Eli Lilly said patient safety is its “top priority,” according to CBS News, and the company is “actively engage[d] in monitoring, evaluating and reporting safety information for all our medicines.”
NBC News cited FDA spokesperson Chanapa Tantibanchachai, who said it’s “unclear” whether GLP-1 medications are connected to occurrences of gastroparesis.
A separate FDA statement cited by CNN states the agency has “received reports of gastroparesis with semaglutide and liraglutide, some of which documented the adverse event as not recovered after discontinuation of the respective product at the time of the report.”
‘This medicine made my life hell’
However, lawyers for Bjorklund say that many more patients are ready to come forward with lawsuits of their own.
According to CBS News, Pennock’s firm “is investigating 400 other inquiries from clients across 45 states,” while according to The Hill, Pennock ultimately expects to see “thousands of such cases.”
Several patients also spoke to media outlets regarding their injuries.
Brea Hand told CBS News, “The stomach pain was just unbearable and I couldn’t keep anything down. I would drink something and within minutes, like five, 10 minutes later, I would be throwing up.”
Hand visited the hospital six times while taking Ozempic and was admitted to an intensive care unit. She is not involved in the lawsuit.
A July 25, CNN featured the stories of other patients, including Louisiana resident Joanie Knight, 37, who said “I wish I never touched it. I wish I’d never heard of it in my life,” referring to Ozempic. “This medicine made my life hell. So much hell.”
And Emily Wright, a 38-year-old teacher from Toronto, began taking Ozempic in 2018. Today though, despite not having taken the medication “for a year,” she said, “I’m still not back to my normal.” She told CNN she is now vomiting so frequently that she was obliged to take a leave of absence from her job.
In recent months, several reports have indicated that Ozempic in particular is linked to a range of other health problems.
Last month, health regulators in Iceland, followed by the European Medicines Agency, began investigating reports that Ozempic and other popular weight-loss drugs are linked to the inducement of suicidal thoughts.
In June, a report by Dr. Joseph Mercola referenced studies based on data from Eudravigilance, Europe’s system for analyzing adverse reactions to medications. The data showed a link between Ozempic and a high prevalence of gastrointestinal disorders. This confirmed findings from a separate study conducted in 2018.
Ozempic also was linked to an increased risk of adverse kidney events, diabetic retinopathy, and metabolic, nutritional, eye, retinal, urinary and cardiac disorders.
And in April, the FDA warned that Ozempic should be discontinued at least two months prior to pregnancy because it takes that long for the body to eliminate the drug.
However, those warnings are buried, and long-term testing won’t be completed for years. The drug was not studied in pregnant women during clinical trials.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
August 4, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception | FDA, United States |
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Last week, a senior member of Parliament for the UK’s Labour Party went on television demanding the UK – maybe even the entire world – be on a “war-like footing” to combat climate change.
Speaking on the BBC’s flagship political magazine Newsnight, Barry Gardiner MP argued for unity of purpose against climate change’s “existential threat”:
“… if this were a war we wouldn’t be arguing about whether the Labour strategy or the Tory strategy were better, we would be working together to try and win […] Well, it is a war. It is a war for survival and climate change threatens everything […] So actually instead of playing party political games about who is up, who is down, what we need to be doing is saying let’s get together, let’s mobilise on a war footing and that is what is needed…”
Two days later, the exact same thoughts were expressed in a Financial Times column by Camilla Cavendish, former head of David Cameron’s Downing Street policy unit and Kennedy School of Government alumnus:
The answer is surely to invoke a wartime spirit, and make the fight against climate change a joint endeavour against a common enemy. If the public and political will is there, human ingenuity can prevail, with remarkable speed. In the second world war, America transformed its manufacturing base to produce tanks and ammunition. The Covid pandemic resulted in the discovery and development of vaccines at scale, saving millions of lives.
It’s interesting to note the comparison to Covid, but we’ll come back that.
The campaign isn’t isolated to the UK, in fact it kicked off on the other side of the Atlantic, with the Inquirer running an article headlined “President Biden should address the nation and declare war…on climate change” on July 16th, which argued:
Biden and his aides need to grab that metaphorical bullhorn and call the TV networks to announce a prime-time address from the Oval Office that will declare a national emergency — in essence, a state of war — to fight climate change.
Joe Biden himself called climate change an “existential threat” on July 27th.
The invocation of metaphorical war is of course nothing new.
“War” is a very important word in the world of politics and propaganda. It has – or is assumed to have – an immediate effect on the collective public mind; an instant connection to generations of shared memories, that promotes feelings of conformity and solidarity.
Some psychological study or focus group clearly figured this out decades ago, and as such the word “war” is frequently used to control narratives.
In Western “democracies” the deployment of the W word is code for bi-partisan agreement, attempting to breed faux solidarity between the same people they encourage to hate each other 90% of the time, whilst branding any dissenters as outsiders who are a threat to the safety of the group.
More pragmatically, being “at war” creates an “emergency” which justifies “temporary” suppression of human rights and freedoms and permits increases in the powers assumed by the state.
OffG – and others – have discussed this ad infinitum, past a certain point any authoritarian government needs to exist in a state of war in order to avoid collapse, and so enemies are created that, by their nature, can remain forever never undefeated.
See: “The War on Drugs”, “The War on Terror”, “The War on Covid”
… and, now, the war on climate change.
Or, more properly, “the war on climate change… again”.
Because neither Barry Gardiner nor Camilla Cavendish are the first person to express this thought. Not even close.
Then-Prince now-King Charles expressed the exact same sentiment in the exact same words in a speech to the COP26 in November 2021, contemporary opinion pieces in the Guardian agreed with him.
They were, in fact, echoing a University College London report from May 2021.
CNN warned we were “losing the war on climate change” in April 2019, plagiarizing the exact same headline in The Economist from a year earlier in August 2018.
Bill McKibben wrote “We’re under attack from climate change—and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in WWII” for the New Republic in August 2016.
Venkatesh Rao wrote “Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War” for the Atlantic in October 2015, repeating the same arguments from a CNN article four months earlier.
Hell, all the way back in 2003 the New York Times was running editorials “After Iraq: Declare war on global warming”
(Ah, remember when Climate Change hadn’t yet received it’s unfalsifiability makeover and was still just known as “global warming”?)
Essentially, every few months they trot out this idea of “declaring war on climate change”, get almost no engagement from the public, and then go back to spouting alarmism and fear porn for a while before trying again.
They have been doing this for years. So far it has not worked.
… but this time might be a little different.
Why? Because we now live in a post-Covid society.
Consider, with the exception of the vaccines, everything brought on by Covid – the lockdowns, the financial collapse, all of the “Great Reset” – was originally meant to be a “response” to climate change.
They had a package of “solutions” ready and waiting for a public “reaction” that never came. People were simply never scared enough at the idea the world might get a bit warmer.
It could be argued that global warming’s repeated failure to spark a global panic is the very reason they resorted to “Covid” in the first place, but whatever the cause-and-effect relationship the fact of the matter is that Covid has laid a foundation for the “war on climate change” that never existed before.
- “anti-Covid measures” provide precedent both for the use of extreme ‘responses’ and their apparent “effectiveness”
- Covid created enough fear that they can increase climate hysteria by linking environmentalism to future potential “pandemics”
- Covid (allegedly) “inspired global cooperation” and “demonstrated what we can achieve when we all work together”
- Covid lockdowns (allegedly) “showed how the world can heal” by cutting emissions.
- And, most vitally, the roll out of the Covid narrative demonstrated that once people have invested their virtue or personality in a story you can tell them almost anything relating to that story and they’ll be incentivised to believe you – NO MATTER HOW ABSURD IT MIGHT BE.
We noted earlier that several recent articles “declaring war on climate change” reference Covid, almost always as a global success story.
It is now commonplace to talk about avoiding climate disaster through the medium of Covid. The United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations and International Monetary Fund have all run articles in the last couple of years with near-identical titles eg:
What the Coronavirus Pandemic Teaches Us About Fighting Climate Change
Perhaps the most blatant example of using Covid imagery to sell climate change and globalism is the call to create a “Global Climate Organization”, from Dr David King in the Independent a few days ago (our emphasis):
“In terms of a health crisis, such as the Covid crisis, we have a World Health Organisation and it’s based in Geneva and is part of the United Nations. We don’t have a world climate crisis organisation. That’s what we need, so that all countries of the world could come together through a body of this kind, as we do when there’s a health crisis, we all contribute to the cost of the WHO. We need a global system that pulls us all together to battle with this external threat to our manageable future.”
We know what this is, this is the “pivot from Covid to climate” they literally told us was coming.
The “Great Reset” has made a good start, but they still have a raft of fun policies they want to introduce (eg. rationing food). In a post Covid world, they are hoping to finally make “climate change” frightening enough that people will beg them to completely reshape the world as they see fit.
The amusing part is that it still doesn’t feel like it’s landing, to be honest.
Outside of the media echo-chamber and the virtue-signalers, all the “terrifying” temperature maps, the experts warning that “millions will die instantly” if they turn their air conditioning off, the new buzzphrase of “global boiling” is being met with a bit of a “meh”.
Unfortunate for them, because they’ve set themselves a deadline. Every year that passes without catastrophic climate breakdown, every summer the ice caps don’t disappear, every unseasonably cold or wet July is another nail in the coffin of their narrative, a few more normies disengaging from the story.
Which is probably why the coverage of “heatwave cerberus” and “global boiling” is fervid verging on feverish. There is an element of sweaty-palmed desperation seeping into every tweet, every headline.
They are running out of time.
The dark corollary of that is that someday soon they may well give up trying to persuade people, and start trying to force them.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, UK |
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Before there was the narrative pushed by the mainstream media that the 2016 US presidential election was rigged – there were the Democratic primaries, regarding which the evidence of actual rigging taking place has been much more solid.
The victim was hapless presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders – but now, this once great hope of left-wing citizens seems to be turning increasingly authoritarian, at least in his rhetoric.
He is, essentially, providing a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist (not in a democracy) – namely, what to do, legally, to stop political opponents?
In this case, it’s about corporate skeptics around the “climate change panic.” And Sanders has the answer – prosecute them, and if found guilty, put them in prison.
Sounds fairly extreme, but here we are.
In a letter co-signed by Senator Sanders, a group of his Democrat colleagues is asking the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to do just such a thing, aimed at what’s termed the fossil fuel industry.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
And although it seems careful to point the finger and demand retribution from companies that are accused of, basically, organizing campaigns to improve their business (shocking (NOT) – and, that business anyway is far from being illegal) – once a precedent of legally hounding dissenters is set, it can go anywhere.
ExxonMobile, Shell, and other giants are mentioned, perhaps as a way to soften the blow of that reality, but if what the senators are asking is to become reality, next up could be journalists, and then social media users, and just in general, it’s turtles all the way down.
Sanders and his companions would not want any of their actions to be seen that way, naturally. So they assert that, “the fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change and the role that burning fossil fuels play in increasing global temperatures for more than 50 years.”
The letter continues: “To coordinate their illegal misinformation campaign, the fossil fuel industry funded a multimillion-dollar plan through the American Petroleum Institute that sought to make climate change a ‘non-issue.’”
But the exact same argument could be used (in court) against any “regular Joe” not into the whole climate change – in court, down the line, should such extreme red lines as requested by the letter get established.
Of course, there’s no way to say that will happen – but also, that it won’t.
Kind of the same argument that climate change skeptics are trying to make about the climate change policy push.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | United States |
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The 22-year-old Belgian defender Lars Dendoncker announced last week that he was retiring from football due to a heart condition, thus making him the second Brighton player to retire because of heart problems in less than a year.
Dendoncker, the younger brother of Leander Dendoncker of Aston Villa and the Belgian national team, announced his retirement on Instagram, saying “this was and will be the hardest decision ever in my life” and that it “really hurts”. He was signed by Brighton & Hove Albion on a two-year contract in 2020 and played for the Scottish side St Johnstone for a year on loan.
Although Dendoncker has only now made his retirement official, he in fact already stopped playing football over a year ago after being diagnosed with myocarditis. In an Instagram post from last December, he wrote:
I have been through tough times the past few months. Six months ago I was about to make a transfer to a new club. I did my medical and something wasn’t right with my heart condition. I suffered from myocarditis.
Six months earlier will have been in May, not long before the unfortunate Dendoncker’s contract with Brighton was set to expire.
Last October, the Brighton midfielder Enock Mwepu was also forced into retirement by a heart condition. At the time, the condition was described as congenital. But when Mwepu first started feeling unwell and was rushed to the hospital just two weeks earlier while on a trip to Mali, the problem did not sound congenital. Thus, in his own September 26th Instagram post, he noted cryptically that doctors, and presumably he himself, were not at liberty to disclose the details of “what really happened”.
Mwepu’s words are reminiscent of remarks made by the American basketball player Brandon Goodwin. In mid-2021, while playing for the Atlanta Hawks of the NBA, Goodwin fell ill after being vaccinated against COVID-19 and was subsequently diagnosed with blood clots.
Goodwin himself attributed his condition “1000%” to the vaccine. But in a Twitch video, he described how while in the hospital a team official told him “Don’t say anything about it, don’t tell anyone” – to which he responded, “Bruh, what?” (The video appears to have been removed from Goodwin’s Twitch account, but relevant excerpts are still available on the Daily Caller here.)
Brighton is not the only major football club to have had multiple players stricken by cardiac problems in the last two years. So too did German powerhouse Bayern Munich, though the Bayern players have since returned to action: French winger Kinsley Coman after undergoing heart surgery in September 2021 and Canadian defender Alphonso Davies after being diagnosed with myocarditis in January 2022.
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Are vaccines required for your child to attend school?
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
With summer winding down and schools about to open, parents around the country (USA) have received or will receive letters of exclusion from their child’s school. The letter will state that your child is required to be up to date on their childhood immunizations according to the CDC, or they will not be allowed to attend school.
You are not told that other than a handful of states that have eliminated both the religious and the philosophical exemptions, you are free to do whatever you believe is best for your child. You can do some, all, or none of the childhood vaccines. Each state may have a different form or process but rest assured; it is the law of your state that you have this right; the freedom to choose.
To learn more about the specifics for your state, NVIC (National Vaccine Information Center) https://www.nvic.org has all the information you need.
National Vaccine Information Center
If you live in California, New York, West Virginia, Maine, and possibly Mississippi, the only exemption allowed is a medical exemption. All states allow medical exemptions, which is where a doctor writes a medical exemption.
The challenge for doctors is that the states only allow medical exemptions according to the CDC guidelines, which means you can only get exemptions for a vaccine that has caused death or a severe anaphylactic reaction. They essentially don’t allow exemptions for all vaccines. More importantly, doctors who write medical exemptions invite an investigation by their state medical board and risk losing their medical license. This has made medical exemptions something, in theory, one could hope to get, but in reality, and practically speaking, medical exemptions no longer exist.
So, what do you do if you live in one of the states that only allow medical exemptions?
Basically, you either must get your child up to date, home school, or leave the state for one that allows religious or philosophical exemptions. If you feel you have no choice but to get your child up to date, I highly recommend that you consult a medical provider to help you figure out the safest way to do this.
I am available for coaching at https://www.kidsfirst4ever.com. I don’t diagnose or treat as I am retired and relinquished my license.
Parents and guardians, there is nothing more important in your role to nurture and protect your children than how you handle the vaccine situation. There is no one size fits all that makes sense. Each vaccine should be looked at individually, and you should determine if it makes sense for your child, given the prevalence of the disease for which there is a vaccine and the risks and benefits of giving the vaccine or not giving the vaccine.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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Ecological Analysis Suggests Worldwide Mass Vaccination for Childhood Illnesses Could be Backfiring
When ACIP panel added the experimental mRNA vaccines for infants age 6 months and older, it triggered concerns that ACIP may not have ever had adequate intent for risk mitigation or re-evaluation of the ever expanding vaccine schedule. Many have had reservations for a long time and have felt drowned out by the medical orthodoxy of “more vaccines are better.” Now an analysis by Miller, et al, suggests the entire program of hyper vaccination may be backfiring.
The two main independent variables in this analysis restricted to developed countries at two time points 2019 and 2021 (check for internal validity) were the number of vaccines given in the 28 day neonatal period (none, hepatitis B, Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) for tuberculosis) and then the overall number of shots given before age 1 year. The outcome variable was all cause mortality at age 1 and 5 years.
As you can see this does not look good for vaccines. In every analysis the children who went “natural” with no shots did the best and there was a trend for the fewest number of injections to be associated with the lowest mortality. I was born in 1962, so I received zero shots in the neonatal period and a total of 6 doses for four diseases (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio) before the age of 1 years. As you can see the optimal number of infant doses in the vaccine schedule is <14. The current US ACIP schedule is ~23 doses by year one—a proxy for national intent for hyper vaccination.
This paper has all the limitations of an ecological analysis where individual child record information is not available. The exact configuration of specific vaccines and causes of death are not specified. Thus we can only conclude from this study that “less is more” and countries should consider a risk stratified approach. The two main neonatal vaccines, hepatitis B and BCG should be reconsidered altogether according to individual risk of hepatitis B and tuberculosis, respectively.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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New internal documents reaveal
In a significant blow to the principle of free speech, recently disclosed documents reveal that President Joe Biden’s administration exerted considerable pressure on tech giant Facebook to constrain the reach of The Daily Wire and The New York Post, and promote content from established news outlets, within months of occupying the White House in January 2021. This revelation, coupled with the administration’s alleged intentions to alter the Facebook algorithm, has raised substantial concerns about government-sanctioned censorship.
These documents shed light on the Biden administration’s campaign to promote its Covid vaccine strategy, sidelining dissenting viewpoints.
The dialogues memorialized in the disclosed documents underline the charged interactions between then-White House Digital Director Rob Flaherty and Facebook representatives. The focus of these discussions was curbing The Daily Wire’s considerable influence on Facebook while simultaneously elevating legacy news outlets such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
For context, The Daily Wire’s popularity on Facebook had outstripped that of both NYT and WSJ, drawing significantly more audience engagement, and casting a more amplified conservative alternative.
The meeting notes underline the Biden administration’s apprehensions about “misinformation” leading to vaccine hesitancy, sparking a quest to mold public sentiment using Facebook’s vast reach.
White House representative Flaherty’s frustration with Facebook’s inability to readily produce data to support the administration’s agenda becomes evident in the correspondence.
Highlighting the confrontational tone of these correspondences, Representative Jim Jordan, chairing the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, reinforced the troubling indication of the administration’s attempts to stifle free speech via social media control.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Human rights, United States |
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Recalling William Appleman Williams final work
Once again, while other needs are squeezed, a federal budget deal will literally starve the poor to feed the military. While new work requirements are placed on SNAP recipients that will drive some from the food support program, the military budget (never call it defense) remains untouched. The recent debt ceiling deal leaves Joe Biden’s $886 billion 2024 Pentagon budget request intact while domestic programs are slashed. The above graph from the National Priorities Project tells the story.
In real terms it is the largest military budget in U.S. history, the only exceptions being World War II and the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that came after 9-11. Larger by far than during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, or the Reagan military buildup. Again, from the National Priorities Project:
The real military budget is even higher. Adding in nuclear weapons, foreign military aid and “intelligence,” the project puts the current 2023 budget at $920 billion. That is still an undercount. William Hartung, an expert on military spending, calculates that even in fiscal year 2020 the total military expenditure was $1.25 trillion, adding in other costs such as support for veterans and debt service. It’s easily pushing $1.5 trillion by now.
The U.S. by far is the biggest military spender on Earth, with 39% of the total, exceeding the next 10 nations combined, as this chart shows:
Most warlike nation
So why is the military budget so unassailable? Why, no matter how often bloated military spending is denounced, does the budget climb toward ever greater heights? Even after Dwight Eisenhower made the famous warning in his farewell address:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Ike would have known, being one of the progenitors of that complex as the general leading U.S. forces that invaded Europe during D-Day and as the president during the nuclear buildup of much of the early Cold War. One clue as to why his warning went unheeded is in the fact he originally wanted to call it the military-industrial-congressional complex, the “iron triangle” that keeps pumping up military expenditures. As Hartung writes, Congress is bought by the weapons industry. It is a kind of money laundering scheme where increased military spending comes back as campaign donations, a perfect example of the legalized bribery that is the real governing system of the U.S.
But there are deeper reasons, explaining why that “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” for which Ike called has never appeared, at least to the level able to tie back the power of the complex. War and militarism are rooted deep in the U.S. of American experience. As former President Jimmy Carter said, “If you go around the world and ask people which is the most warlike country on Earth, which one do you think they would respond? The United States. Since we left the Second World War, and even before, the United States has constantly been at war in some part of the world. We’ve been in about 30 combats with other countries since the Second World War . . . So I would say that the military-industrial complex, the manufacturers of all kinds of weapons, are very influential in the country and the Congress as well.”
Carter noted that the U.S. hasn’t been at war with someone only 16 years of its 242-year history. (Even that is doubtful since even during Carter’s so-called peaceful years the U.S. was stirring up trouble in Afghanistan in a successful effort to give the Soviets “their own Vietnam,” as his National Security Adviser, Zbignew Brzezinski, has confessed.) The list is extensive. If the U.S. was not fighting with some European or Asian power, it was warring on some native nation or another on the frontier. War has worked for the United States, historian Geoffrey Perrett noted in his 1989 history of major U.S. conflicts, Country Made by War.
“Since 1775 no nation on Earth has had as much experience of war as the United States: nine major wars in nine generations. And in between the wars have come other armed conflicts such as the Philippine insurgency and clashes in the Persian Gulf. America’s wars have been like the rungs on a ladder by which it rose to greatness. No other nation has triumphed so long, so consistently, or on such as vast scale, through force of arms.”
Although conflicts since World War II have not been so successful, nonetheless they failed to dislodge the fundamental U.S triumph in that war, which left it overwhelmingly dominant over all other powers, each of which had been ravaged in the war. As historian Alfred McCoy noted in his recent work, To Govern the Globe, it left the U.S. in the unprecedented position of holding sway on both European and Asian ends of Eurasia. If this hegemony is eroding with the rise of China and other powers, the U.S. still remains in a powerful position.
To all this one must ask the more fundamental question. Why has the U.S. been the most warlike, most continually at war? For the answer we can look to historian William Appleman Williams and the title of his final book which summarized his substantial life work, published in 1980, Empire as a Way of Life. Williams was the dean of what came to be known as the revisionist school of U.S. history that penetrated the myth of American exceptionalism with the facts of history, that the U.S. was an empire from its colonial roots, and behaved much as any other empire.
First let Williams define his terms. “. . . a way of life is the combination of patterns of thought and action that, as it becomes habitual and institutionalized, defines the thrust and character of a culture and society.” Then, empire, a system in which, “The will, and power, of one element asserts its superiority.” In some cases empire “concerns the forcible subjugation of formerly independent people by a wholly external power.” Such as native peoples or those who lived in the former northern half of Mexico.
Williams does not let the mass of U.S. of Americans off. We are enmeshed in the ways of empire.
“Empire became so intrinsically our American way of life that we rationalized and suppressed the nature of our means in the euphoria of the enjoyment of the ends . . . It is perhaps a bit too extreme, but only by a whisker, to say that imperialism has been the opiate of the American people.”
The U.S. was “born and bred” of another empire, the British. “The 19th– and 20th-century empire known as the United States of America began as a gleam in the eyes of various 16th century critics of, and advisers to, Elizabeth I,” Williams explains. At that time, “England was then a backward and underdeveloped small island” outclassed by other powers emerging in the Atlantic fringe, Portugal, Spain, France and The Netherlands, who were already commencing the age of European world conquest.
England concluded that “domestic welfare and social peace required vigorous imperial expansion,” and began first by consolidating the internal empire on the British Isles in Scotland and Ireland, and then in the 1600s expanding to the North American coast. “. . . the most significant aspect of the empire was the success in transforming the American colonies from tiny, insecure outposts into dynamic societies generating their own progress . . . It produced another culture based on the proposition that expansion was the key to freedom, prosperity, and social peace.”
Inevitably, tensions rose between the ruling class of the home isles and the rising elites of the colonies. Benjamin Franklin believed the weight of development would eventually move the center of the British Empire to North America (which it finally did in 1945, but that comes later in the story), and until nearly the time of the split recommended that course. “But the British feared that such a policy would lead to the loss of control and profits, and Americans increasingly asserted their own claims to their own empire,” Williams writes.
That culminated in the Revolutionary War and the successful creation of the United States. But a weak central government seemed unable to fully press forward what George Washington would call “a rising empire” – the founders were not shy about using that kind of language. It appeared the union would fray into two or more nations, while uprisings such as Shay’s Rebellion threatened to shatter social peace. So the new national elites came together to create a framework to ensure continued expansion under a strong central government, the Constitution. Writes Williams, “. . . the Constitution was an instrument of imperial government at home and abroad.”
The Constitution was founded on a clever turnaround of a fundamental political understanding architected by one of its key authors, James Madison. The general belief to that point had been exposited by French political philosopher Montesquieu “that liberty could only exist in a small state. Madison boldly argued the opposite: that empire was essential for freedom.” Madison needed to make that argument because many citizens of the new nation, burned by their experience with Britain, wanted nothing to do with a strong central government.
Madison made his case in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. “This form of government, in order to effect its purpose, must operate not within a small but extensive sphere . . . Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all to feel it . . . to act in unison with each other.”
Williams writes, “He was arguing that surplus social space and surplus resources were necessary to maintain economic welfare, social stability, freedom and representative government.” A strong central government would be needed to expand land for agriculture, to expand and protect exports, and to promote manufacturing.
With the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the Pacific, Jefferson fully embraced Madison’s understanding. “I am persuaded that no constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government,” he said as he left the presidency. “Jeffersonian Democracy, as it came to be called, was a creature of imperial expansion,” Williams writes. “He, perhaps even more than Madison, established it as a way of life, and most Americans embraced it because it gave them personal and social rewards.”
So much for the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”
“. . . once people begin to acquire and enjoy and take for granted and waste surplus resources and space as a routine part of their lives,” Williams writes, “and to view them as a sign of God’s favor, then it requires a genius to make a career – let alone a culture – on the basis of agreeing upon limits. Especially when several continents lie largely naked off your shores.”
The myth of empty continents and the racism it embodies has always been part of the story. “Racism . . . began and survived as a psychologically justifying and economically profitable fairy tale. It provided the gloss for the harsh truth that empire . . . is the child of an inability or unwillingness to live within one’s own means. Empire as a way of life is predicated upon having more than one needs.”
Next: Coming installments will review how imperial expansionism is rooted in a misguided sense of mission and compulsive drive for security, and how empire as a way of life continued to unfold after the era of the founders.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | UK, United States |
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Speculation is swirling about whether Niger’s patriotic military junta will follow its reported ban on uranium and gold exports to France with a demand for that country’s troops to leave the country after the example that was recently set by the de facto Burkinabe-Malian federation. That would be a risky move to make, however, since France just declared that it won’t take orders from them. Here’s what PBS reported about this on Thursday:
“Even if Niger’s military rulers demand the withdrawal of French troops — as happened in neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso — it wouldn’t make a difference, said Anne-Claire Legendre, a spokesperson for the French foreign minister during a press briefing on Wednesday. ‘We don’t answer to the putschists. We recognize one constitutional order and one legitimacy only, that of President Bazoum,’ she said.”
Considering this, the junta would either discredit itself by making a major demand that France confirmed it will defy or risk being ousted from power by its former colonizer in the event that it tries to impose its will, both scenarios of which aren’t in their objective interests. French President Emmanuel Macron warned last week that “The President will not tolerate any attack against France and its interests”, hence the reason to expect it to resolutely respond in the second-mentioned scenario.
Nevertheless, not directly addressing the issue of French troops in Niger will likely prove impossible for the junta since these forces will eventually require supplies once their existing ones at their air base in the capital start running low, which will lead to them breaking the closed border regime unless it’s lifted before then. They already did so on at least one occasion so far as admitted by the junta shortly after they seized power and issued that decree, but repeated violations would prompt a dilemma.
On the one hand, letting them flout this rule would deprive Paris of the pretext that it might be trying to provoke for directly attacking the junta in the unlikely event that the planned NATO-backed Nigerian-led ECOWAS invasion of Niger is called off, but its new military rulers would be discredited. On the other hand, while firing on them would be a strong reaffirmation of Niger’s sovereignty, it would also almost certainly lead to an overwhelming French response that could escalate to a Libyan-like regime change.
Unlike in Syria where the US’ military forces are based in far-flung but still strategically positioned parts of the country, France’s military forces in Niger are located in the capital, which means that they can’t be ignored. The junta also recently accused them of plotting airstrikes on the presidential palace in order to free ousted President Mohamed Bazoum who’s being held there, thus making their continued presence a potentially imminent threat to national security.
France’s preemptive refusal to withdraw from Niger if the junta demands that it do so on the pretext that they’re illegitimate putschists contrasts with its compliance with Mali’s and Burkina Faso’s earlier such demands that were made by their own military-led interim governments. This suggests that France has decided to draw a line in the sand signaling that it’ll fight to preserve its last regional bastion, which bodes ill for the future of the Nigerien junta.
August 3, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Africa, France, Niger |
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02.13.2026 
Aletho News 