US wants EU to sanction China for its Ukraine-Russia policy
By Paul Antonopoulos | April 27, 2022
Washington is trying to convince Europe that it has the ability to influence China’s relationship with Russia. However, Beijing’s stance on Ukraine and associated threats from the West are unlikely to deter it from deepening cooperation with Moscow.
US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman visited Brussels from April 19 to 22 and forced the Europeans to listen to Washington’s arguments about the possibility of imposing sanctions on China if it provided material support for Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine. At an event organised by the US and EU-funded “Friends of Europe” group, Sherman again warned that China would face sanctions similar to those being imposed on Russia.
After Sherman’s meeting with Bjoern Seibert, Chief of Staff for European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the State Department said the two sides agreed that they must urge China not to circumvent sanctions against Moscow or offer any support for Russia’s special operation in Ukraine.
Effectively, the US is instructing Europeans on the policies they must adopt to counter Russia’s action in Ukraine, making a mockery of the efforts by French President Emmanuel Macron to create a “strategically autonomous” Europe. Macron’s emboldened announcement of Europe’s “strategic autonomy” from the US was exposed as being nothing more than a buzzword with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine as Paris immediately abandoned all efforts of diplomacy after ignoring Moscow’s years-long complaints regarding Ukraine’s illegal and provocative actions in Donbass. This is on top of imposing sanctions that negatively affect the average European citizen.
For all this talk of “strategic autonomy”, Brussels has just once again demonstrated that it is obedient and submissive to Washington. However, despite the EU imposing sanctions, closing its airspace to Russian planes and delivering weapons to Ukraine, the US is clearly not satisfied and sent Sherman to Brussels to ensure that tougher policies against China are also implemented.
The US at the very minimum hopes to divide European countries as many are still unwilling to provoke China due to trade relations. In the context of the US ignoring all international communication norms and continuing its threats of sanctions against China, Beijing unlikely views this as just renewed verbal attacks.
China is using various channels to convey to its European partners its views on the crisis in Ukraine, as well as on efforts to help the conflicting parties resolve the war peacefully. It is recalled that Beijing sent a diplomatic mission led by Huo Yuzhen, China’s special representative for the China-Central and Eastern Europe Investment Cooperation Fund (CEEC). On April 25, the delegation began its European tour in the Czech Republic, with visits to Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and Estonia also included.
The visit to the Czech Republic is significant since the country will hold the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from July 1 to December 31. In this way, perhaps the comments by Czech Deputy Foreign Minister Martin Tlapa were too hasty when he made de facto statements on behalf of EU members. At a meeting with the Chinese delegation in Prague, he warned that China’s cooperation with Russia could damage its relations with the EU.
Clearly, the Czech diplomat’s desire to please and appease the US overshadowed his own obligation to follow rudimentary political submissions, or perhaps the EU has amended this principle like many other ethical and legal norms due to the crisis in Ukraine?
Although EU officials concede China is unlikely to enforce the broad sanctions imposed on Moscow by a minority of the world’s recognized UN member states, this has not deterred their efforts to lambast and shame countries for their position. Brussels falsely hoped that Beijing could influence Moscow to stop its demilitarization of Ukraine, but hopes were quickly dispelled at an EU-China virtual summit on April 1 that left Western leaders frustrated and angry that they are international pariahs on the Ukraine issue.
A joint EU-US statement following Sherman’s talks in Brussels vowed to push Chinese leaders on issues such as the inadmissibility of sanctions circumvention, and “reaffirmed that such support would have consequences for our respective relationships with China”.
However, Sherman and EU foreign service chief Stefano Sannino avoided answering a journalist’s question on what potential repercussions could be for China. This suggests that the West actually does not have a clear idea on how and why they could punish China for its relationship with Russia and instead it hopes that threats of sanctions could deter their cooperation.
This of course is extremely naïve as sanctions have never made state leaderships of Middle Powers, like North Korea and Iran, collapse or capitulate. Given this fact, there is little prospect that sanctions will achieve the West’s hopes against Great Powers like Russia and China, especially as only just days before the US-EU forum, Chinese vice foreign minister Le Yucheng assured Russian ambassador Andrey Denisov of Beijing’s aim to “deepen bilateral comprehensive strategic coordination”.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
Iran and China agree to counter ‘unilateralism’
Samizdat | April 27, 2022
Iran sees its relations with China as part of an effort by like-minded powers to confront US unilateralism and create stability and order, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi told the visiting Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on Wednesday.
Raisi said that the successful implementation of the 25-year strategic cooperation agreement between China and Iran, signed in 2021, was a priority for Tehran, according to the state media.
“Confronting unilateralism and creating stability and order is possible through the cooperation of independent and like-minded powers,” Raisi was quoted as saying by the IRNA news agency. He added that the current “regional and global developments show more than ever the value of Iran-China strategic cooperation.”
Wei said his visit was aimed at “improving the strategic defense cooperation” between Tehran and Beijing, which would have a “remarkable” impact on fighting terrorism and defusing unilateralism, “particularly in the current critical and tense situation.”
Wei also met with Iranian Defense Minister General Mohammad Reza Ashtiani and reportedly invited him to visit China. In their meeting, Ashtiani stressed “the need to counter American hegemony in the world by strengthening multilateralism,” according to a statement by the Iranian Defense Ministry.
Ashtiani also criticized the US military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere, saying that “wherever the US has had military presence, it has created waves of insecurity, instability, rifts, pessimism, war, destruction and displacement,” according to IRNA.
Major General Mohammad Bagheri, the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces, also met with the Chinese visitor, and offered some details on the shape of their cooperation going forward.
“We agreed to expand bilateral cooperation in joint military drills, exchange of strategies, training issues and other common fields between the two countries’ armed forces so that we can provide better security for the two countries,” Bagheri told reporters in Tehran on Wednesday.
The 2021 strategic cooperation treaty has paved the way to military cooperation between Iran and China, but also a variety of economic activities ranging from oil trade to transportation and agriculture.
Iran has been under unilateral US sanctions since 2018, when the Trump administration reneged on the 2015 nuclear deal. China is one of the signatories of the original pact, along with the UK, France, Germany, and Russia. The current US government has said it wants to restore the agreement, but the talks have gone nowhere due to Washington’s refusal to lift the sanctions against Tehran.
The White House is Turning the War in Ukraine into a New Gold Rush
By Valery Kulikov – New Eastern Outlook – 27.04.2022
The Americans have a saying that every new president needs his own “splendid little war.” They understand perfectly that a war of that kind will enrich the incoming political and military establishment and also solve many social and financial problems in the country, not least unemployment, and help reduce foreign debt.
The political establishment has found it easy to arrange matters behind the back of the indecisive and ailing 46th US president, Joe Biden (about whose mental acuity many, both in the US and internationally, are now seriously concerned), and continue the work of previous administrations in drawing Russia deeper into the Ukrainian crisis.
As a result, Washington clearly has no interest in finding a peaceful solution to the conflict, and in provoking its escalation into outright war the White House has found itself forced to put together an anti-Russian coalition and supply more and more consignments of arms to the Ukrainian government.
On March 2, 2022 Dmytro Kuleba, Ukrainian Foreign Minister, claimed that Ukraine had “mobilized an international anti-war coalition, which already has at least 86 states and 15 international organizations” and that “19 countries are giving weapons to Ukraine.” And in a briefing on March 8 Pentagon Press secretary John Kirby confirmed that Ukraine was receiving weapons form 15 countries, including the USA.
The press briefing, published on the official web site of the US Department of Defense, stated that the United States had committed more than $4 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration, including $3.4 billion since the beginning of Russia’s special operation! According to the briefing, the US had provided security assistance including 700 Switchblade drone systems, 16 Mi-17 helicopters, more than 1,400 shoulder-launched Stinger anti-aircraft missile systems, 183,000 155mm Howitzer artillery rounds and 72 tactical vehicles to tow them, 200 armored personnel carriers, 121 Phoenix Ghost tactical drones and more than 7,000 small arms. The Pentagon is also providing the Ukrainian armed forces with 5,100 Javelin anti-tank missiles and more than 14,000 “other anti-tank systems.”
As for the claim that representatives of the US military and political establishment have a financial stake in the Ukrainian conflict, it is enough to take the example of the Javelins. According to a number of US experts and industry publications, the US has provided Ukraine with approximately a third of its stock of Javelin anti-tank missiles. Significantly, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has taken personal charge of supplying the Javelins to Ukraine. The reason is clear – he has long been closely linked to the manufacturer, and is now able to place government orders for these weapons. And with Javelin stocks steadily decreasing, the US army has requested new supplies, which means that Lloyd Austin is placing new orders, and may soon be making a big profit from these transactions.
Let us now look at the articles that have appeared in the US media – clearly planted by the Pentagon – suggesting that the transfer of the US’s supplies of Javelins may damage its own defense readiness, as there is the risk that remaining stocks may be insufficient to respond in the event of an “unexpected conflict.” Naturally, articles of this type are a form of propaganda, aimed at promoting the interests of the Department of Defense and of its head, Lloyd Austin. Currently the US army is not directly engaged in conflict, and is therefore able to replace its reserves of these weapons without difficulty. And by stepping up production volumes, Washington is able to boost its profits and create new jobs.
Many of the Javelins that have fallen into the hands of the Russian, PRD and PRL armies during the current conflict have an expiry date of 2022. Many media have reported on an embarrassing incident in the Yavoriv training ground, while US military specialists were instructing Ukrainian soldiers in the operation of the Javelin system – using a Javelin whose service life had expired. After firing the missile, the missile, fortunately without its warhead attached, fell to earth, almost under its users’ feet.
In other words, the war in Ukraine will, for a long time to come, boost the wealth of members of the United States’ political and military elite, including Pentagon officials, as they offload old stock, attract new orders from other countries, and embroil Washington in the “remote conflict” of their own creation. As for the European governments, US puppets who are supplying more and more of their own arms to Ukraine at Washington’s behest, they will, in the end, start to realize that this policy is harming them. By providing military assistance they are merely serving to draw out Russia’s military operation and tighten the financial noose around their own necks – which is one of the USA’s main goals. For, as a result of Washington’s rush to pressurize them into supplying Kiev with “sponsored military support,” in the end the European nations’ own arms reserves will run low, and they will be forced to restock by ordering new armaments from the USA.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the US government is standing on the sidelines and watching on with glee – it knows that when Europe and Nato need to replenish their arsenals, it will be the US military industrial complex that gets the contracts. And, in their joy the heads of the armament industry are drinking themselves into oblivion.
According to a recent article in The Independent, the arms companies are rushing to cash in on this new “gold rush” triggered by the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine. While to pickings from supplying arms to Kiev may be fairly modest, remilitarizing Europe would bring the US arms manufacturers huge profits. And the arms bosses have already started making promises to their shareholders and talking to the media about the profits to be gained from this project. Countries such as Germany, committed to a policy of pacifism since the end of World War II, are now trying to reform their militaries. Germany has already ordered 35 F-35 fighters, the most modern combat aircraft, from the American manufacturer Lockheed Martin, as well as 60 Chinook CH-47F heavy transport helicopters from the US aerospace giant Boeing.
Poland’s Ministry of Defense has signed a contract for the purchase of 250 US-made Abrams M1A2 SEPv3 tanks, the latest version of this vehicle. It has also signed an agreement for logistical and training support, including training for tank teams. In total, it has budgeted some $6 billion for the purchase of these tanks. According to the Polish army, this is its largest arms purchase since the Second World War.
To make sure no-one else benefits from this new Gold Rush the US intends to coordinate the international supply of arms to Ukraine, and to this end is organizing a conference on Ukraine at the United States European Command in Stuttgart, as reported by the German news television channel Welt.
U.S.-Led NATO Is at War Against Russia
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation |April 26, 2022
We are now in the realm of World War Three. The abysmal situation is such that the war is in danger of going nuclear in which case the future of the planet is at stake.
Incredibly, to warn of this danger leaves a person open to the accusation that they are peddling Russian propaganda. Blindly, the Western governments are doubling down on the powder-keg.
The U.S.-led NATO alliance is flooding Ukraine with heavy offensive weaponry capable of hitting Russia, and the British government this week has openly called for Ukraine to target Russia’s “depth” with NATO weapons.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented that the U.S. military alliance is now fully-fledged in a proxy war against Russia. He said there is a “serious danger” of confrontation spiraling into a nuclear conflagration.
Only a fool or an insane person could remain insouciant about the dynamic unfolding.
Ominously, there is evidently no diplomatic will from Washington and its allies to address the background to the war in Ukraine or Russia’s long-held security concerns. The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is being vilified for even attempting to negotiate a peace settlement by going this week to Moscow before traveling on to Kiev.
There is a palpable sense that the U.S. and NATO are recklessly pushing a military showdown with Russia – albeit under the cynical guise of “defending Ukraine”. All the while, the Western public is being kept in the dark by a complicit corporate-controlled news media.
This week saw the United States host what can only be called a war conference at its European command center in the Ramstein airbase, Germany, where NATO military chiefs coordinated their weapons delivery to Ukraine. This is a war footing.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the United States and its NATO allies would “move heaven and earth” to get more weapons into Ukraine to defeat Russia’s military intervention in that country. Austin’s rhetoric was a disturbing malapropism with apocalyptic resonance.
But it does reveal the determination to take on Russia that is now openly visceral. The conflict in Ukraine is emerging for what it is – a war between the U.S.-led NATO bloc and Russia. Moscow has long held that the U.S. and NATO are a hostile entity tacitly aiming to subjugate Russia. Such claims have been derided as Russian paranoia. However, it’s now apparent that the actual intent is hostility and defeat of Russia.
Austin stated at the Ramstein conference that America’s allies are now openly exploiting an opportunity to “weaken Russia” and pursue the regime change objective in Moscow that U.S. President Biden referred to in his controversial Warsaw speech last month.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken accompanied Austin, the Pentagon’s civilian chief, on a secret visit to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. American news media dutifully complied with an embargo on reporting the Sunday visit which shows that these media are complicit in conforming to Washington’s agenda of belligerence.
The American envoys held three-hour discussions with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during which they pledged more military support on top of the huge arsenal already provided by the U.S. The meeting is a stark signal to Moscow of what the real American intentions are. This is not about resolving Russia’s grievances over NATO expansionism and the neutrality of Ukraine. That discourse was never taken seriously by the United States anyway. No, now relations are in the framework of the U.S. waging a war against Russia, with Ukraine merely the present battleground.
When the top American officials returned to Poland they held a press conference Monday at a warehouse shipping NATO weapons to Ukraine. At one stage, Austin told reporters about the earlier meeting with Zelensky: “So our focus in the meeting was to talk about those things that would enable us [sic] to win the current fight and also build for tomorrow [sic].”
Unable to contain his enthusiasm for confrontation, the Pentagon chief went on to make the direct U.S. involvement more apparent: “In terms of our – their ability to win, the first step in winning is believing that you can win. And so they believe that we can win; we believe that they – we can win – they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support. And we’re going to do everything we can – continue to do everything we can to ensure that that gets there.”
When Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered what he called “the special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24, he said Russia had no choice but to defend the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass who had endured eight years of a deadly offensive by the NATO-backed Kiev regime forces.
The United States, NATO, and the Kiev regime have shown no will whatsoever to resolve the civil war in Ukraine peacefully by implementing the Minsk accords negotiated in 2015.
It is more apparent than ever that the conflict in the Ukraine was never a localized civil war but rather was always a front line in a bigger geopolitical confrontation between the U.S.-led NATO bloc and Russia, as Bruce Gagnon explained in a recent interview for Strategic Culture Foundation.
Instead of an earnest effort to genuinely resolve the conflict, the NATO-backed Kiev regime and its openly Nazi regiments are mobilizing in a general war footing against Russia.
The rationale is now explicitly stated as the U.S. and its allies wanting to defeat Russia and subjugate it.
British armed forces minister James Heappey even went as far as telling the BBC this week that Ukrainian forces should strike Russia’s depth with NATO weaponry.
Russia’s military defense doctrine forgoes first-use of nuclear weapons but it reserves the right to use such weapons if the country comes under existential threat even from conventional military assault.
The United States and its NATO allies have willfully ignored Russia’s decades-long concerns about its security and in particular the use of Ukraine as a cat’s paw to destabilize and dissipate Russia. The full-on U.S. imperial war agenda of targeting Russia for defeat is now coming into focus. The crazies are in charge of the asylum. And shouting about it too.
US Boeing X-37 may carry weapons of mass destruction — Head of Roscosmos
TASS – April 23, 2022
MOSCOW – US Boeing X-37 orbital spacecraft may carry reconnaissance tools or weapons of mass destruction, Director General of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said on Saturday.
“It may carry some kind of reconnaissance tools or weapons of mass destruction. This is a new category of carriers of mass destruction weapons. Attacks from space pose the most serious danger,” he said in an interview with Rossiya 24 TV channel, mentioning the vehicle returning from space.
“We do not have any intelligible information from the United States about the purpose and technical capabilities of this device,” he added.
According to Rogozin, the Russian side believes that the United States is trying to launch weapons into space with the help of the Boeing X-37.
Political West mulls reshaping UN and what’s left of international law
By Drago Bosnic | April 27, 2022
In order to understand the prelude to World War 2, one cannot ignore the failures of the long-defunct League of Nations, which was a UN-like structure aimed at being a forum of countries resolving disputes through dialogue rather than war. Although just another noble idea before World War 1, in the immediate aftermath of the sheer death and destruction resulting from that conflict, it became an urgent necessity. The League of Nations was supposed to make sure nothing of sorts ever happened again.
Sadly, as we all know, it failed miserably, with an even worse conflict erupting less than 20 years after the Paris Peace Conference was completed. Now, nearly 80 years since the horrors of WW2, we have reached a hauntingly similar point as we realize the UN didn’t just inherit the League of Nations flag, but also many of the same faults which ultimately led the world into yet another disaster of global proportions, one which resonates to this very day.
The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the pillar of the UN and its veto power mechanism serves as a balancing tool which takes into account the interests of world powers and thus provides the UN with relevance which no other international organization or forum of sovereign nations in known history ever had. Currently, the five permanent members of UNSC (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US) can veto any resolution put forth by the body. The council’s other 10 rotating members do not have such powers.
This veto power has especially been a source of frustration for the United States, NATO and the EU. Due to their dominance in the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where there is a swarm of Western client states and statelets, many of which were created through deliberate and oftentimes forceful disintegration of larger and more sovereign nations (for instance, Yugoslavia was split into 6 states and one illegal state-like entity), the political West wants this UN body to be more prominent than the UN Security Council.
By pushing the UN General Assembly to the forefront of decision making, the West could then simply force these countless vassal states and statelets to vote in a way which would be beneficial to the US, EU or NATO and give these decisions a sort of “international community” touch which the political West needs in order to build what they see as a much-needed facade of “international legitimacy”.
Because of this, Western political elites and the mainstream media often try to portray the UNGA as a “more democratic” body than the UNSC. How truly democratic is up for debate, given the sheer amount of US pressure and arm-twisting used to coerce countries into voting not just in line with Western interests, but oftentimes at the expense of their own. And in terms of population distribution, we see that these states and statelets, despite oftentimes being the majority or close to a majority in the UNGA, actually represent less than 20 or even 15 percent of the world’s population. This also explains the Western obsession with forceful fragmentation of larger nations into smaller ones, echoing the ancient Roman policy of divide et impera.
To meet this goal, the UNGA is now considering introducing a provision that would require permanent members of the UN Security Council to justify their use of veto powers. It was tabled by Liechtenstein in mid-April and presented at a closed-door discussion panel last Tuesday. The discussion supposedly “turned out to be quite positive” and the initiative “received additional co-sponsors”, the mission of the microstate to the UN said after the meeting.
“We had a strong turnout and positive engagement on the Veto Initiative in open format this afternoon. We will continue our work to get the strongest possible political support for our text which now has 57 cosponsors,” it stated.
If adopted, the initiative would mandate convening the UNGA within 10 days after a permanent member of the UNSC uses their veto power. At the meeting, the state would have to justify its decision to use the veto. According to Liechtenstein, adopting the provision would “empower the General Assembly and strengthen multilateralism.”
Quite unsurprisingly, so far, the initiative has been openly supported only by one permanent member of the UNSC – the United States. Washington co-sponsored the provision, openly acknowledging the drive is aimed at Moscow and its use of the veto power to block a resolution on the ongoing Russian special military operation in Ukraine. Announcing the co-sponsorship, the US envoy to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Moscow of “misusing” its veto powers.
“We are particularly concerned by Russia’s shameful pattern of abusing its veto privilege over the past two decades,” she stated, adding that, in the latest alleged abuse, Moscow had used the veto power to “protect President Putin from condemnation over his unprovoked and unjust war of choice against Ukraine.”
Of course, it would require an entirely separate analysis to dissect US envoy’s statements, which are filled with “liberal interpretation” of facts. But the statement does confirm the assertion that the political West, and the US in particular, are trying to reshape the UN to their liking, which would result in sidelining US competitors. In doing so, the US might be successful in turning the UN into another footnote of its belligerent foreign policy and even use it to justify sanctions and wars of aggression anywhere in the world.
However, even though this may seem like a victory to the aggressive planners in Washington DC, it may spell a disaster for world peace. By sidelining countries like Russia, China or even India, Brazil, South Africa and many others in the foreseeable future, the US is incentivizing these countries to ignore or even leave the UN, which would bring about the de facto end of international law.
At best, it would result in the creation of another UN-style organization led by those same sidelined countries, bringing about a deeply divided world where there would be at least two blocks – the political West (plus its vassals) and the rest of the world composed of sovereign nations. The last time such a division happened, the world suffered up to 80,000,000 dead in just 6 years.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
Biden regime wants private companies to censor online speech
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | April 26, 2022
The White House continued pressuring the tech giants to censor content that it deems to be “misinformation” yesterday by throwing its support behind the use of Section 230 and antitrust reforms to combat misinformation.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shared the Biden administration’s support for these reforms when a reporter asked whether the White House would be interested in working with Twitter, “like it has in the past,” to continue to combat COVID misinformation and disinformation.
The reporter didn’t point to a specific past partnership between the White House and Twitter when asking his question but Twitter has previously facilitated a White House Q&A as part of its “work on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation” and reportedly partnered with the White House to promote COVID vaccines. The White House has also admitted that it regularly contacts social media platforms about misinformation and even flags content for Facebook to censor.
Psaki responded to the question by confirming that Biden’s White House is still “engaging regularly with all social media platforms about steps that can be taken.”
She continued by suggesting that Congress should impose reforms on Big Tech platforms. Specifically, Psaki said the White House would support reforms of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) (which currently gives large tech platforms immunity from civil liability if they act in “good faith” to moderate content), antitrust reforms, and “requiring more transparency” from tech platforms.
Psaki also commented on Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s recent acquisition of Twitter by warning that President Joe Biden wants Big Tech platforms to be “held accountable for the harms that they cause.”
Additionally, when she was asked about “purveyors of election misinformation, disinformation” having more of an opportunity to speak on Twitter after Musk’s takeover, Psaki said: “The President has long talked about his concerns about the power of social media platforms, including Twitter and others, to spread misinformation, disinformation, the need for these platforms to be held accountable.”
Psaki’s comments are the latest of many calls from the Biden administration for tech platforms to purge speech that the Federal Government deems to be misinformation. Research has shown that the current levels of Big Tech censorship already heavily favor Biden.
The Biden White House’s previous demands for tech platforms to censor misinformation are currently the subject of a lawsuit that alleges these demands violated the First Amendment.
The Illusion of Freedom: We’re Only as Free as the Government Allows
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | April 26, 2022
“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away.”— George Carlin
We’re in a national state of denial.
For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.
Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.
Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.
For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.
On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.
The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.
Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.
The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.
In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.
We’re in trouble, folks.
Freedom no longer means what it once did.
This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.
On paper, we may be technically free.
In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.
We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.
Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.
With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.
In our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.
Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.
We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.
Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.
If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
US vice president has wine from illegal Israeli settlements in her office
MEMO | April 27, 2022
US Vice President Kamala Harris has wine produced in illegal Israeli settlements in her office, it has been revealed by Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. The director of the organisation, Shaawan Jabarin, exposed this in an open letter to Harris in which he pointed out that offering her guests wine produced in settlements encourages Israel’s apartheid system imposed on the Palestinians. Apartheid is akin to a crime against humanity.
Jabarin’s letter highlighted violations of the law by Israeli settlers, as well as the disastrous effects of the illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinians. The wine that Harris serves to her guests, he pointed out, comes from a winery in the settlement of Psagot, an illegal Jewish settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank.
Such support for the settler-colonial, apartheid settlement enterprise, said Jabarin, and the US receipt of illegal goods produced from the proceeds of international crimes, as well as America’s direct involvement in the promotion of Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in this way, is of grave concern. “Psagot is complicit in the continued illegal appropriation of privately owned Palestinian land and pillage of Palestinian natural resources, acts amounting to crimes within the jurisdiction of the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court.”
The director of Al-Haq noted that, “Since 1948, Israel has employed a set of discriminatory laws, policies and practices, with the fundamental goal of engineering a Jewish majority in Palestine, through displacing and dispossessing Palestinians, manipulating the demographic composition of the Palestinian population, and at the same time, building and expanding Jewish settlements on both sides of the Green [1949 Armistice] Line.
“Settlements are a key component of Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people, in which Israel administers the territory under two entirely separate legal systems and sets of institutions: a civil administration for Israeli-Jewish communities living in illegal settlements, and a military administration for the occupied Palestinian population living in Palestinian towns and villages.”
The fact that the US supports this “illegal Israeli settlement enterprise in its highest office” is in blatant violation of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, making America “complicit” in the war crime of the pillage of Palestinian resources.
“Moreover, the US substantially supports the dissemination and promotion of Psagot Wine by allowing it to be sold by Duty Free America shops located in airports across America,” concluded Jabarin. “The US thus breaches its obligation to promote respect for human rights with business enterprises… involved in gross human rights abuses.”
Corruption of Language, Corruption of Thought
With a brief discourse on totalitarian regimes and conspiracy theories
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | April 27, 2022
In his classic dystopian novel 1984, George Orwell famously wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” This striking image served as a potent symbol for totalitarianism in the 20th Century. But as Caylan Ford recently observed, with the advent of digital health passports in the emerging biomedical security state, the new symbol of totalitarian repression is “not a boot, but an algorithm in the cloud: emotionless, impervious to appeal, silently shaping the biomass.” The new forms of repression will be no less real for being virtual rather than physical.
These new digital surveillance and control mechanisms will be no less oppressive for being virtual rather than physical. Contact tracing apps, for example, have proliferated with at least 120 different apps in used in 71 different states, and 60 other digital contact-tracing measures have been used across 38 countries. There is currently no evidence that contact tracing apps or other methods of digital surveillance have helped to slow the spread of covid; but as with so many of our pandemic policies, this does not seem to have deterred their use.
Other advanced technologies were deployed in what one writer has called, with a nod to Orwell, “the stomp reflex,” to describe governments’ propensity to abuse emergency powers. Twenty-two countries used surveillance drones to monitor their populations for covid rule-breakers, others deployed facial recognition technologies, twenty-eight countries used internet censorship and thirteen countries resorted to internet shutdowns to manage populations during covid. A total of thirty-two countries have used militaries or military ordnances to enforce rules, which has included casualties. In Angola, for example, police shot and killed several citizens while imposing a lockdown.
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From the Archives
Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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