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German Intelligence Chief Advocates for Monitoring Speech and Thought

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | April 9, 2024

The head of Germany’s domestic spy agency, Thomas Haldenwang, has penned an op-ed for a German newspaper and provided some insight into the way he understands freedom of expression, and more importantly, its limits.

Haldenwang, who is at the helm of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), defended in the article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung his policy of keeping watch on citizens, which includes things like “thought and speech patterns.”

At the same time, Haldenwang didn’t rule out that legal expressions of opinion might be targeted in this population surveillance effort, and made attempts to provide justification for such a stance.

Meanwhile, critics see this as a policy designed to advance restrictions on speech and economic freedoms, primarily aimed at political opponents. In fact, recent polls suggest that most citizens also believe that BfV has become a political tool, and this opinion is said to be strongly present among parties (other than, unsurprisingly, the Greens).

That seems to be precisely the reason Haldenwang felt compelled to publish his thoughts in the newspaper, noting the increased frequency of “headlines and articles” that question and criticize BfV’s activities, some suggesting the agency is policing opinion, language, and even “mood” – and is morphing into German government’s, basically, “bodyguard.”

Haldenwang goes on to assert that “freedom of opinion prevails” in his country, and reminds his readers (less so, it seems, himself) that this freedom is what separates a democracy from an autocracy.

But, the BfV chief also seems to differentiate between “freedom of opinion” and freedom to actually express that opinion. And while in Germany one can have “offensive, absurd and radical opinions” – freedom of expression “has its limits,” he writes.

“Even within the limits of criminal law, however, expressions of opinion, despite their legality, can become relevant for constitutional protection,” the op-ed goes on.

This can be interpreted as yet another example of authorities in a declaratively democratic country trying to find a way to restrict speech they don’t like regardless of its being formally legal – while at the same time being unwilling to legislate to outlaw it, either because of lack of political consensus, or fear of political backlash.

As for what is speech and opinion that the Constitution may need protecting from, the “definition” is broad enough to fit in a lot of things.

It includes “permissible criticism and democratic protest escalating and turning into aggressive, systematic delegitimization of state conduct” – and this may or may not include “calls for violence.” There’s also violation of “human dignity of members of certain social groups or political actors.”

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Desperados… NATO cranks up false-flag mode

By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 9, 2024

It’s open season for false-flag provocations in NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Russia is winning the war – now in its third year – and the NATO weapons laundering scam with its NeoNazi regime in Ukraine is coming apart. So what to do?

Only two weeks after a terror attack near Moscow that killed 144 civilians, which the Western media roundly attributed to Islamist jihadists and Western governments categorically asserted had nothing to do with the Ukrainian regime it sponsors, there now follows a spate of other false flags.

Russia is being accused of dropping chemical weapons on Ukrainian soldiers while also trying to blow up Europe’s biggest civilian nuclear power plant.

Over the weekend, Western media reports bore the hallmark signs of disinformation campaigns by peddling lame claims that the Russian military was dropping gas grenades on Ukrainian troops.

It was reported that chemical weapons were being used daily to target Ukrainian positions near Lyman and Chasiv Yar in Donetsk Oblast. The source of this information was purportedly an “American combat medic” serving in the ranks of the Ukrainian armed forces. That detail alone raises suspicion of planted disinformation.

The second realm of cloying propaganda is the sudden reappearance of reports that the Zaporozyhe Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) is coming under constant artillery fire from drones. Those attacks had gone into a lull since last year. Now they are back, as if by clockwork.

Western media have repeated their earlier pattern of trying to make out that it is not clear whether it is the Ukrainian or the Russian side that is firing on the ZNPP – thereby risking a nuclear catastrophe that would engulf Europe from radioactive fallout.

Rafael Grossi, the director of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, is again shamefully indulging the Western media disinformation. Grossi confirmed that the ZNPP was hit at least three times in recent days and he warned of “a significant risk of a major nuclear accident” adding that “this cannot happen”. But Grossi feigns to be agnostic about who is carrying out the attacks. He did not specifically call out the Ukrainian side as the perpetrator.

The Western media affects the ambiguous notion that it could not confirm Ukrainian or Russian claims, thereby giving the impression that it could have been Russian strikes on the ZNPP.

That is ludicrous. Russian forces control the nuclear plant having taken it in March 2022 soon after intervening in Ukraine to halt the aggression of the NATO-backed regime. Russia has provided documented evidence to the UN that the Ukrainian side has been targeting the ZNPP repeatedly with US-supplied artillery and NATO logistics.

Yet the Western media and the UN’s IAEA indulge in the risible charade that Russian forces might be shelling a nuclear plant that they are in possession and control of.

The Western media claims that Russia is resorting to chemical weapons are also absurdly illogical. Why would Russia need to use such a weapon when it is already gaining the strategic upper hand in the war? Besides, Russia has verifiably destroyed all of its chemical weapons years ago as mandated by the 1997 CW Convention.

The same illogical scenario was seen when the Syrian Arab Army was in full control of the battlefield against NATO-backed mercenaries. It was the Western-sponsored cut-throat jihadists of Al Nusra Front and so on that were the ones who contrived chemical weapons attacks and the Western media would reflexively and wrongly blame the Syrian state forces. The provocation succeeded in Syria in triggering the United States, Britain and France to launch air strikes against the Syrian army.

Russia has no need – even if it had chemical weapons – to use them when it is decimating NATO’s proxy army of the NeoNazi Ukrainian regime.

Likewise, Russia commandeered the Zaporozyhe Nuclear Power Plant at an early stage in the conflict knowing that the NATO regime would otherwise use it as a terror card. How right Russia was. The NATO forces are once again stepping up efforts to bomb the ZNPP in an attempt to create a crisis that would presumably justify an escalation by NATO.

Just like the atrocious mass murder at the Crocus City Hall near Moscow on March 22, the NATO proxy war is shifting to all-out hybrid terrorism. The NATO axis has lost conventional warfare on the battlefield due to Russia’s superior firepower and military tactics.

The NATO powers are becoming desperate from the historic defeat. They have invested an unprecedented huge amount of political and financial capital in winning a proxy war to defeat Russia – and they stand to now lose with devastating losses.

This is the feverish context for French leader Emmanuel Macron mouthing off about sending NATO troops into Ukraine and other NATO leaders issuing desperate pleas for more weapons supplies and compulsory military conscription. Their insane proxy war is a monumental debacle that spells calamity for the political establishments in the West, including the lying propaganda news media.

Amid this desperation on a sinking ship of Titanic proportions, the NATO powers are going into full false-flag mode to create some frenetic distraction.

The trouble for them is that we have been here many times before, and the whole world can see through their sordid playbook.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Why Did Washington Insist on the Kosovo War?

By James George Jatras | Ron Paul Institute | April 9, 2024

The following remarks were delivered at a conference marking the 25th anniversary of the NATO bombing of Serbia: “The 1999 Red-Green Bombing Terror against Serbia,” held on March 20, 2024, at the Bundestag in Berlin hosted by MdB Dr. Rainer Rothfuß and his Alternative for Germany parliamentary group.

In 2004, I appeared as the second defense witness called by Slobodan Milošević at his so-called “trial” before the so-called “International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” at The Hague My testimony was not as an expert witness but as a witness of fact concerning the formulation and implementation of US and western policy. I addressed one specific charge: that – beginning no later than October 1998 – Mr. Milošević was the initiator of a criminal conspiracy to drive the Albanians out of Kosovo and Metohija on the basis of their ethnicity.

There was one little problem with this accusation: there was absolutely zero direct evidence for it. No written order to this effect was ever produced. No person testified as to having received, transmitted, or even heard of such an instruction. Rather, the claim was based solely on circumstantial inferences of events starting from October 1998.

Thus, the heart of my testimony related to a paper I issued on August 12, 1998, as an analyst at the US Senate Republican Policy Committee, titled “Bosnia II: The Clinton Administration Sets Course for NATO Intervention in Kosovo.” In that paper, working solely from open sources, I detailed how, at that time – fully two months before the Milošević-led supposed “criminal conspiracy” came into effect —

“ … planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place, …. The only missing element appears to be an event—with suitably vivid media coverage—that would make intervention politically salable, even imperative, in the same way that [the] Administration finally decided on intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after a series of ‘Serb mortar attacks’ took the lives of dozens of civilians—attacks, which, upon closer examination, may in fact have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of the intervention. . . That the Administration is waiting for a similar ‘trigger’ in Kosovo is increasingly obvious: [As reported in the Washington Post, August 4, 1998], ‘A senior U.S. Defense Department official who briefed reporters on July 15 noted that “we’re not anywhere near making a decision for any kind of armed intervention in Kosovo right now, … [but] I think if some levels of atrocities were reached that would be intolerable, that would probably be a trigger”.’ ”

Now, if I was aware of this as early as August 1998, so were a lot of other people in Washington. I submitted to the “Tribunal” that in light of my paper, all interpretations of events would have to be drastically reevaluated. The issue wasn’t any longer whether Belgrade was planning an expulsion but that Washington was looking for a pretext for aggression.

(My cross-examination by prosecutor Geoffrey Nice (later Sir, based on his work at The Hague), asked me barely a word about my testimony. Rather, he interrogated me about my ethnic origins (Greek, from four Spartan grandparents), my religion (Orthodox Christian), and my opinions about the Islamic challenge to European, Christian civilization (negative).)

As we know, in due course the suitable “trigger” was found, with the so-called “Račak massacre” of January 1999. The key figure in “selling” Račak was William Walker. As described by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi (now of Rolling Stone) in their article “Meet Mr. Massacre,” published in the now-defunct The Exile of February 10, 2000:

Years from now, when the war in Serbia is over and the dust has settled, historians will point to January 15, 1999 as the day the American Death Star became fully operational.

That was the date on which an American diplomat named William Walker brought his OSCE war crimes verification team to a tiny Kosovar village called Račak to investigate an alleged Serb massacre of ethnic Albanian peasants. After a brief review of the town’s 40-odd bullet-ridden corpses, Walker searched out the nearest television camera and essentially fired the starting gun for the war.

From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre, a crime against humanity,’ he said. ‘Nor do I hesitate to accuse the government security forces of responsibility.’

We all know how Washington responded to Walker’s verdict; it quickly set its military machine in motion, and started sending out menacing invitations to its NATO friends to join the upcoming war party.

Focus on that phrase: “the American Death Star became fully operational.” Kosovo became the template that we then took on the road in one form or another in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen. Ukraine.

But the question still lingers: Why? Why was Washington so insistent that we and our NATO satelli– oops – “allies” needed to launch that war? Why did then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reveal in confidence, according to a reliable source, that at Rambouillet “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get”?

Some people will tell you it was about putting a NATO base, Camp Bondsteel, in a strategic location. Or that we wanted to clear the way for an East-West energy pipeline across the Balkans. Or that we coveted the mineral wealth of the Trepča mines. Or to secure the transit route for Afghan opium processed into heroin bound for Europe.

Certainly, all of our various interventions line a lot of a pockets, but in more than three decades of work in and around the Washington apparat, I never heard anyone point to such concrete and, frankly, normal if immoral imperial considerations.

Rather, answers must instead be sought within the larger perspective of American policy since the end of the first Cold War in 1991 and the development of the current one in the course of the 1990s: the American “unipolar moment,” as the bipartisan US policy nomenklatura sought to consolidate and perpetuate its hegemonic control over the entire planet, taking advantage of the vacuum left by the demise of the USSR. Perhaps the fullest expression of this was a 1996 Foreign Affairs article by neoconservative ideologists William Kristol and Robert Kagan (NOTE: Victoria Nuland’s husband), misleadingly titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,” in which they called for the US to establish and maintain indefinitely “benevolent global hegemony” — in other words, perpetual American world domination.

Kristol and Kagan laid out virtually all of the elements that have guided US global policy during the ensuing years. It is no accident that Republican neoconservatives were enthusiastic supporters of Bill Clinton’s Balkan interventions of the 1990s, under the guidance of people like then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who once opined regarding the sanctions-related deaths of a half million Iraqi children that “the price is worth it.” In the US establishment, there is little dissent on either side of the partisan aisle with Albright’s view that a militant United States has a special wisdom: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future …”

The result is a kind of neo-Bolshevik ideology, where, as the vanguard of all progressive humanity, the US leadership class sees itself as the midwife of history. America took the path (as characterized by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov) of the “replication of the experience of Bolshevism and Trotskyism”—morphing ourselves into a new Evil Empire in place of the old one. (Anyone familiar with the origins of America’s neoconservatives understands that the Trotskyite reference is not just rhetorical.)

Which brings us back to the “Why?” regarding Kosovo. When the dissolution of Yugoslavia kicked off in June 1991, largely at the initiative of Austria and Germany, official Washington was terrified that with the end of the Soviet bloc Europe might become “whole and free” – but without us. What then could be the future of Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay’s mission for NATO of keeping the Americans in Europe, the Russians out, and the Germans down? Europe, the crown jewel of the Global American Empire was slipping away.

Hence, as former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) indicated, NATO needed to go “out of area or out of business.” Starting in spring 1992, Washington moved swiftly to expand the conflict from Slovenia and Croatia (where it had been relatively contained) to Bosnia and Herzegovina. There the US became the vociferous champion of the Muslim faction, illegally shipping in al-Qaeda fighters and Iranian weapons via covert C-130 flights into Tuzla. We then engaged in a little demonstrative bombing of the Bosnian Serbs to set the stage for the Dayton Agreement. The arsonist sets the fire, so then he can be the hero rushing to the rescue: “See, you silly ‘dispensable’ European children? You just can’t get along without us …”

Following Dayton, Kosovo was the other shoe that needed to drop – with appropriate violence – to ensure that Europe was totally, abjectly, humiliatingly subservient to the United States through NATO, with the passive complicity of NATO’s concubine, the European Union. The corollary was that, just as the Serbs had no legitimate voice in determining post-Yugoslav structures, the Russians understood they had no legitimate voice in European security arrangements. These would be decided without them.

Now, of course, with defeat looming in Ukraine and with the broader Middle East on the edge of a regional conflagration, with many in Washington beating the drums for war with Iran or even China, the Global American Empire’s “unipolar” moment is coming to an end, one way or the other, either with a bang or with a whimper. Unfortunately, neither in Washington, nor in Berlin or other European capitals, with the exception of Budapest, are decisions made by people who can be regarded as mentally and morally healthy human beings, much less patriots.

The next few months and years promise to be a period of disorder and acute danger. The question is, can we – Americans and Europeans alike – find a path to governance that can secure a future for our peoples?

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

NATO kicks off Black Sea-Danube Delta exercise labeled Sea Shield 24

MAGYAR HÍRLAP | APRIL 9, 2024

NATO has launched its second major exercise this year in the vicinity of Ukraine, this time focusing on the Black Sea and the Danube Delta region.

The joint operation, Sea Shield 24, which runs until April 21, brings together more than 2,200 troops from Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, the U.K., Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Turkey, the United States, Georgia and Moldova. The forces will include 27 river and naval warships, 17 aircraft, and 91 land-based military vehicles.

According to a Romanian Navy statement, Sea Shield is the most complex event of the 2024 training year, with scenarios focusing on missions to combat illegal activities, maritime and river control, the rescue of vessels in distress, and the protection of critical infrastructure in the Black Sea, along the coast, in the Danube, and in the Danube Delta.

The international exercise also aims to strengthen cooperation between the navies of the participating countries and with other forces.

The largest naval exercise organized by Romania was first held in 2015. Since then, Sea Shield scenarios have been continuously modified to enable the participating NATO forces to respond quickly and effectively to the full spectrum of threats to regional security and stability, according to the organizers.

In January, NATO launched “Steadfast Defender 2024,” a five-month exercise rehearsing the alliance’s response to a hypothetical aggression against a member state. All 32 NATO member states participated, with some 90,000 personnel, including the largest single contingent of 20,000 from the United Kingdom.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change

From the archives, a look back and an update

Fundraiser from 2014. We learned from Wikileaks that Tom Steyer, the Center for American Progress, and Michael Mann were behind the curtain. Just $10? Deplatforming me should get at least $15!
By Roger Pielke | The Honest Broker | March 26, 2024

This week marks my final spring break as a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ten years ago this week, during spring break while on vacation with my family, I was dealing with the consequences of what appeared to be an online mob seeking to get me fired from Nate Silver’s 538 where I had just been hired as a writer.

My first piece for 538 was a summary of recent IPCC report consensus conclusions on disasters and extreme events. The apparent mobbing worked.1 I soon lost my position as a writer at 538.

Not long after, I was under investigation by a member of Congress.2 I lost the support of my university and my role in the center I had founded, so I moved across campus to work on sports governance.3 I have little doubt that I remained employed only thanks to academic tenure. It was quite an experience.

Two years later, in 2016, courtesy of the Wikileaks publication of John Podesta’s emails, it was revealed that the Center for American Progress, funded by billionaire Tom Steyer and in collaboration with the ever-present Michael Mann, had been engaged in a well-funded campaign to delegitimize my research, hurt my career, and to have me removed as a writer at 538.4

I can draw a straight line from those events a decade ago to where I am today. And given where I am today, I wouldn’t change a thing. I have no hard feelings towards Nate — He got played and did what he felt he had to at the time.

Below, I have reproduced my first column at 538 in 2014 that was apparently so threatening to some in the climate advocacy community.5 I also add a post-script below. How does it hold up?

In the 1980s, the average annual cost of natural disasters worldwide was $50 billion. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy met that mark in two days. As it tore through New York and New Jersey on its journey up the east coast, Sandy became the second-most expensive hurricane in American history, causing in a few hours what just a generation ago would have been a year’s worth of disaster damage.

Sandy’s huge price tag fit a trend: Natural disasters are costing more and more money. See the graph below, which shows the global tally of disaster expenses for the past 24 years. It’s courtesy of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, which maintains a widely used global loss data set. (All costs are adjusted for inflation.)

pielke-disaster-v3-1

In the last two decades, natural disaster costs worldwide went from about $100 billion per year to almost twice that amount. That’s a huge problem, right? Indicative of more frequent disasters punishing communities worldwide? Perhaps the effects of climate change? Those are the questions that Congress, the World Bank and, of course, the media are asking. But all those questions have the same answer: no.

When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not. All the apocalyptic “climate porn” in your Facebook feed is solely a function of perception. In reality, the numbers reflect more damage from catastrophes because the world is getting wealthier. We’re seeing ever-larger losses simply because we have more to lose — when an earthquake or flood occurs, more stuff gets damaged. And no matter what President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron say, recent costly disasters are not part of a trend driven by climate change. The data available so far strongly shows they’re just evidence of human vulnerability in the face of periodic extremes.

To identify changes in extreme weather, it’s best to look at the statistics of extreme weather. Fortunately, scientists have invested a lot of effort into looking at data on extreme weather events, and recently summarized their findings in a major United Nations climate report, the fifth in a series dating back to 1990. That report concluded that there’s little evidence of a spike in the frequency or intensity of floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes. There have been more heat waves and intense precipitation, but these phenomena are not significant drivers of disaster costs. In fact, today’s climate models suggest that future changes in extremes that cause the most damage won’t be detectable in the statistics of weather (or damage) for many decades.

On Earth, extreme events don’t happen in a vacuum. Their costs are rising, sure, but so is overall wealth. When we take that graph above and measure disaster cost relative to global GDP, it changes quite a bit.6

pielke-disaster-v3-2

Occasionally, big disasters bring outsize costs — especially the Kobe earthquake in 1995, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Honshu earthquake in 2011 — but the overall trend in disaster costs proportional to GDP since 1990 has stayed fairly level. Of course, wealthy countries hold all of the sway in worldwide cost estimates, which tips the scales when we’re looking for a “global” perspective on extreme events. U.S. hurricanes, for example, are responsible for 58 percent of the increase in the property losses in the Munich Re global dataset.

That’s just the property bill. There’s a human toll, too, and the data show an inverse relationship between lives lost and property damage: Modern disasters bring the greatest loss of life in places with the lowest property damage, and the most property damage where there’s the lowest loss of life. Consider that since 1940 in the United States 3,322 people have died in 118 hurricanes that made landfall. Last year in a poor region of the Philippines, a single storm, Typhoon Hayain, killed twice as many people.

We can start to estimate how countries may weather crises differently thanks to a 2005 analysis of historical data on global disasters. That study estimated that a nation with a $2,000 per capita average GDP — about that of Honduras — should expect more than five times the number of disaster deaths as a country like Russia, with a $14,000 per capita average GDP.2 (For comparison, the U.S. has a per capita GDP of about $52,000.)

In the 20th century, the human toll of disasters decreased dramatically, with a 92 percent reduction in deaths from the 1930s to the 2000s worldwide. Yet when the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, more than 225,000 people died.

So the frequency of disasters still matters, and especially in countries that are ill-prepared for them. After 41 people died in two volcanic eruptions in Indonesia last month, a government official explained the high stakes: “We have 100 million people living in places that are prone to disasters, including volcanoes, earthquakes and floods. It’s a big challenge for the local and central governments.”

When you next hear someone tell you that worthy and useful efforts to mitigate climate change will lead to fewer natural disasters, remember these numbers and instead focus on what we can control. There is some good news to be found in the ever-mounting toll of disaster losses. As countries become richer, they are better able to deal with disasters — meaning more people are protected and fewer lose their lives. Increased property losses, it turns out, are a price worth paying.

Postscript March 2024

As THB readers well know, I have continued the research that was the subject of the column above. Below is an update to the figures in the column above, adjusted just for inflation and with 11 more years of data.

Inflation adjusted losses, 1990 to 2023.

Below is the second figure showing weather and climate disaster losses as a proportion of global GDP.

Global weather and climate losses as a percent of global GDP, 1990 to 2023.

I’ve published this analysis in the peer-reviewed literature as well:

Pielke, R. (2019). Tracking progress on the economic costs of disasters under the indicators of the sustainable development goals. Environmental Hazards, 18(1), 1-6.

April 9, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Editors of Top Science Journals to Testify Before House Pandemic Committee, as Critics Call for End of Taxpayer Funding for ‘Corrupt’ Research

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 8, 2024

Amid controversy over censorship in peer-reviewed journals, the editors of three major science journals last week received invitations to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on the relationship between their publications and the federal government.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chair of the subcommittee, sent the letters to the editors-in-chief of The Lancet, Nature and Science, requesting their testimony for an April 16 hearing titled “Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review.”

According to Wenstrup’s office, the hearing seeks to examine “whether these journals granted the federal government inappropriate access into the scientific review or publishing process,” noting that the journals had previously communicated with Drs. Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and other health officials.

Nature Medicine published the now infamous “Proximal Origin” paper in March 2020. The paper, which claimed COVID-19 had zoonotic, or natural, origins was subsequently used in attempts to censor proponents of the “lab-leak theory” of the virus’s origin.

In a press release, Wenstrup said:

“Millions of people worldwide relied on Science, Nature, and The Lancet to provide scientifically accurate and impartial research during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“However, documents show that the federal government may have censored and manipulated the sacred scientific review processes at these journals to progress their preferred narrative about the origins of COVID-19.”

Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough welcomed the announcement of the hearing. He told The Defender :

“I used the term ‘academic fraud’ in my Nov. 19, 2020, Senate testimony. During the pandemic, for the first time in my career, I saw fraudulent papers published and valid ones retracted after full peer review.

“Publication actions always went in a consistent theme of duality: suppression of early therapeutics for acute COVID-19 and promotion of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines as safe and effective … Manuscripts demonstrating successful home treatment strategies were impeded, and above all, manuscripts disclosing COVID-19 vaccine injuries, disabilities and deaths were swept under the rug.”

Several experts said scientific journals censored non-establishment views but regularly published “fraudulent” papers.

Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead told The Defender :

“We have faced an unprecedented level of scientific censorship in the past four years, and this has created a climate of fear for the medical-scientific community, compelling many researchers and scholars to practice self-censorship.

“This has fostered a pervasive hesitancy to broach certain topics, even in venues or contexts that are theoretically supportive of free expression. As a result, dissenting viewpoints that could enhance scientific dialogue are stifled.”

According to molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., “Science has published two patently unsound and presumably fraudulent papers on the subject of COVID-19 origins, has not retracted these papers, has refused to open inquiries into those papers, and has used its news division to promote the false narrative that science favors a natural origin of COVID-19 and to dismiss contrary evidence and contrary views.”

Mark Blaxill, chief financial officer of the Holland Center, a private autism treatment center, told The Defender, “Policymakers and legislators often defer to scientists, ‘experts’ and the published record. To the extent that the record is corrupted by political forces that lean to one side of legitimate public policy disputes, the journals are tilting the playing field in favor of powerful interests.”

This has resulted in “the increasing politicization of science,” as a result of which “the body of published science is becoming increasingly weaponized,” Blaxill said.

Similarly, journalist Paul D. Thacker, publisher of The Disinformation Chronicle, told The Defender he hopes “Congress has something better planned than just parading the scientists running these journals before the public and berating them for being corrupt, because documents I’ve reported on show these journal editors have no shame.”

Wenstrup: Journal editors ‘seem to want to ignore’ COVID lab-leak theory

Much of the subcommittee’s focus has centered on “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, the paper concluded that a lab leak was not “plausible.” It soon became “one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history.”

A House investigation and Freedom of Information Act requests later revealed that a month before publication, Fauci and Collins reviewed drafts of the paper. A July 2023 report by the subcommittee found that Fauci, key virologists and government officials used the paper to suppress the COVID-19 lab-leak theory.

Speaking on Fox Business’ “Varney & Co.” last week, Wenstrup said the editors-in-chief to whom he sent letters “should want to weigh in on this because they published articles that seem to want to ignore [the lab-leak theory].”

“When anybody had the hypothesis of it being a lab leak theory … they were scrutinized, they were canceled, they were put down,” Wenstrup added. “A published article doesn’t mean that it’s been peer-reviewed and that it’s been going through the scrutiny that it should take from scientists … Just look at ‘Proximal Origin.’”

During an April 17, 2020, White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing, Fauci told reporters, in the presence of then-President Donald Trump, “There was a study recently that we can make available to you” which showed that COVID-19 “is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”

“Fauci helped place the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper and then lied about it right under the nose of the president,” Thacker said. “He was thanked by [virologist] Kristian Andersen for his advice in an email, and then he wants to say he had no role in it.”

Wenstrup made a similar observation on “Varney & Co.”:

“‘Proximal Origin’ basically was written by people that were prompted to write it by Dr. Fauci. And all they really talked about was the possibility [that COVID-19] came from nature. If you read this article, it’s full of assumptions and what-ifs, and it completely ignores the lab leak theory.

“And internally, in their discussions, the same authors are saying, ‘Well, we can’t rule out that this came from a lab. It certainly looks engineered.’ So, there’s a problem with using these scientific journals as a be-all end-all.”

Earlier this year, Fauci sat for two days of closed-door interviews with members of the House, during which he reportedly responded with “I don’t recall” over 100 times.

For Thacker, the focus on the “Proximal Origin” paper ignores two other influential scientific papers that also were used try to discredit the “lab-leak theory.”

“This committee has been overly obsessed with ‘Proximal Origin’ … These virologists conspired to launch three different papers into the academic literature. It wasn’t just one paper. You don’t run a propaganda campaign off of just one paper,” Thacker said.

According to Thacker, on Feb. 19, 2020, EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak and Wellcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar published a statement in The Lancet that claimed a possible Wuhan lab accident was a “conspiracy theory.”

The statement did not disclose that Daszak was funding research led by Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

On Feb. 26, 2020, scientists working behind the scenes with Zhengli and virologist Ralph Baric, Ph.D., published a commentary in Emerging Microbes & Infections that claimed it was a conspiracy theory to speculate that the pandemic started in a Wuhan lab.

Mead said the pandemic facilitated government intervention in scientific publishing:

“Most of this government influence is happening behind the scenes to avoid the appearance of impropriety. And when a scientific journal such as Nature or Science adopts a rapid publication process for COVID-19-related research … it tends to compromise the quality and reliability of the findings. It also makes it easier for outside influences to dictate the angle or perspective, or overall thrust, of the article in question.

“Beginning in 2020, this collaboration was tightly synchronized so as to allow for rushed authorization of the mRNA vaccines without sufficient risk evaluation and management protocols.”

Mead said this interference limited scientific discourse, adversely impacting the public.

“[During the pandemic] we could not mention the term natural immunity without being castigated or reflexively labeled an ‘anti-vaxxer,’” Mead said. “Early treatment and vaccine safety issues were, of course, also censored.”

Yet, in remarks to The Hill, a spokesperson for subcommittee Democrats accused Republicans of building “an extreme, partisan and conspiratorial narrative against our nation’s public health officials” and have not “revealed a cover-up of the pandemic’s origins nor a suppression of the lab leak theory [by] Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.”

Journal editors ‘promote favored narratives and suppress dissent’

Blaxill highlighted the increased use of retractions by scientific and medical journals to silence non-establishment narratives on COVID-19 and other topics. He said:

“One worrisome trend I have seen is the use of retractions rather than public debate to manage scientific disagreements. My experience with the retraction of ‘Autism Tsunami’ was instructive. Our 2021 paper sailed through peer review and was among the most heavily downloaded publications of the year.”

But after criticism of the paper reached the editors of the journal that published the paper, the editors informed Blaxill and his co-authors they intended to “re-review” the paper. A few months later, the paper was retracted.

According to Blaxill, “The retraction process itself is what is broken. Instead of allowing debate to play out in public, through letters and responses in the journal, dissenting opinions and unpopular narratives are canceled.”

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender, “In the case of having my own scientific paper retracted in 2014, I know the federal government played a strong role in getting the publication removed from print.”

“When the CDC whistleblower story broke … I was immediately put on notice by the journal (Translational Neurodegeneration ) that the paper would be taken down from their website with a notice of concern. At one point, the journal put a notice on my paper that it was a threat to public health,” Hooker said.

McCullough criticized the use of retractions to silence critical papers. “As an editor-in-chief for over 20 years, I never retracted a paper, nor did I receive pressure from the publisher to pull a valid paper. That is because the peer review process and letter-to-the-editor processes work as data are vetted and interpreted,” he said.

“Scientific journals often manage the peer review and publication process to promote favored narratives and suppress dissent,” Blaxill said. “Scientific merit is rarely the priority in their management. Instead, supporting the favored (or ‘consensus’) narrative is the guiding principle more often than not.”

Experts call for investigation into journals’ relationships with Big Pharma

The experts who spoke with The Defender said that Congress needs to examine more than just the three journals whose editors-in-chief have been invited to testify on April 16.

“They should also be questioning these journal editors about their connections with Big Pharma,” Hooker said. “Journals such as JAMA, Pediatrics, etc., have corporate sponsors through their industry organizations which create myriad conflicts of interest.”

According to Thacker, “If you’re going to be a corrupt journal the way Science Magazine has turned itself into a completely corrupt institution, then we need to begin to think about whether or not publicly funded research can be published in these journals.”

“Taxpayers are funding this research, which ends up in these corrupt journals and lines the pockets of people running these corrupt journals. That needs to end. Something needs to be done to ensure that if you’re not going to abide by the basics of ethics and science publishing, then you can’t publish federally funded research,” he added.

Similarly, Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender :

“The real issue here that must be inquired into by Congress is the fact that Big Pharma has bought and paid for almost all science journals of relevance, to promote their pro-drug, pro-vaccine propaganda and disinformation, to the grave detriment of the public health of the American people.”

Thacker, who previously worked as an investigator for the U.S. Senate, said, “What we’ve learned from this process is that these scientists cannot be trusted. They lie all the time. I am not sure that this hearing is going to do anything unless they bring the documents out and they start doing referrals over to the Department of Justice.”

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.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Israel Seeks to Sell Weapons Used in Gaza Slaughter

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | April 8, 2024

Israeli weapons markers are selling some weapons platforms that have been utilized during the onslaught in Gaza. Tel Aviv’s arms industry has found buyers among several Asian countries as Washington tries to make allies in the region, preparing for a future war with China.

Last week, several Israeli arms markers hosted delegations from multiple Asian nations at their booth at the Singapore arms expo. Jon Ostrower, editor-in-chief of The Air Current, explained, “They’ve come to demonstrate their power.”

Axon Vision CEO Roy Riftin said in an interview with Asia Nikkei that his company was coordinating with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza to refine its military AI tech and then export it abroad.

Some of the weapons platforms featured in Singapore have been used in Gaza. Over the past six months, Israel has killed at least 33,000 Palestinians. Most of the dead are women and children. Several international rights experts have warned that Israeli operations amount to genocide.

In coverage of the Singapore arms event, Haaretz notes that some of the drones touted by the Israeli arms dealers were used by Azerbaijan in Nargano-Karabash. Last year, the Azeris completed an ethnic cleansing of the region by forcing the enclave’s last 100,000 residents out of the Republic of Artsakh and into Armenia.

An Israeli official said it was primarily seeking clients who did not buy Chinese arms. “Ultimately all the countries in the region are threatened by the Chinese,” a senior figure in one of the Israeli defense companies on hand told Haaretz. “Here at the airshow they don’t buy fighter jets from China.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel sells the most arms to India and the Philippines. The US has tried to include both New Delhi and Manila in its Asia-Pacific alliances, with the aim at fighting a future war with China. The US has frequently sanctioned other countries over alleged war crimes and human rights abuses while ignoring the rampant abuses committed by Israel in Gaza.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Scotland Police May Be Forced To Make Budget Cuts To Deal With Authoritarian Speech Complaints

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 8, 2024

Police Scotland is grappling with potential budgetary pressures and service reductions. David Threadgold of the Scottish Police Federation (SPF) has raised concerns about the financial impact of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act. According to him, the legislation has already led to an overload of calls, with over 6,000 logged since its enactment. This influx of reports, he fears, will necessitate cuts elsewhere in the police budget.

Threadgold’s worry centers on the unforeseen costs of handling these cases, particularly the overtime payments for control room staff. He believes these expenses will reverberate throughout the year, affecting other police services. Calum Steele, former general secretary of the SPF, echoes these concerns. As reported by The Scotsman, Steele criticized Police Scotland’s preparation for the Act, calling it “negligently unprepared” and pointing out that the additional costs were predictable.

The new authoritarian legislation has been criticized not only for its financial burden but also for its potential to stifle free speech. The Act consolidates existing hate crime laws and introduces a new offense of inciting hatred against protected characteristics. This broadening of the law has sparked fears about its impact on free speech and expression.

Critics, including Tory MSP Russell Findlay, have accused Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf of ignoring these concerns. Yousaf, for his part, maintains confidence in Police Scotland’s ability to manage these cases, emphasizing that the force is well-equipped and trained for this task.

The legislation’s impact extends beyond financial strains. The Act has resulted in a notable rise in the logging of non-crime hate incidents, incidents perceived as hateful but not necessarily criminal. This increase has prompted concerns about a potential inundation of trivial or malicious complaints, especially in the context of highly charged events like football matches. Tory MSP Murdo Fraser has already lodged a complaint over a tweet he posted being logged as a hate incident.

The Scottish government and Police Scotland maintain that they are adept at handling such cases. However, critics argue that the focus on these hate incidents diverts attention and resources from more serious crimes, potentially impacting the overall efficacy of law enforcement.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan demand end to Israel’s hostilities in Gaza

Press TV – April 8, 2024

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have made a joint statement, calling on the international community to pressure Israel to halt hostilities in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Riyadh and Islamabad made the statement after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif in Mecca on Sunday.

Both parties called for international efforts “to halt Israeli military operations in Gaza, mitigate humanitarian impact and… pressure Israel to cease hostilities, adhere to international law, and facilitate unhindered humanitarian aid access to Gaza.”

The two leaders also called for “the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem (al-Quds) as its capital,” according to the statement.

In February, Saudi Arabia made it clear that the kingdom will not begin diplomatic relations with Israel before the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Saudi officials have repeatedly called for a halt to the Israeli campaign.

Yet even as anger ripples across the Muslim world after six months of bombardment, mass displacement and over 33,000 Palestinians killed, there is no sign of an end to the regime’s campaign in the besieged territory.

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas said on Monday no agreement is even close in the ceasefire talks underway in Cairo.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel withdrew from southern Gaza due to the resistance’s strikes, expert says

MEMO | April 8, 2024

The Israeli occupation army has withdrawn its ground forces from Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip due to the Palestinian resistance’s strikes, Quds Press reported a Jordanian military expert saying.

Jalal Al-Abadi said that over the past two days the Israeli army has suffered a severe blow with 14 of its soldiers and officers killed at the hands of the Al-Qassam Brigades in Khan Yunis.

Al-Abadi told Quds Press that, as a result of its daily losses in Khan Yunis, Israel wants to rely only on its Air Force and drones to strike the area.

He added that Israel could also be looking to regroup its forces in anticipation for heightened tensions in southern Lebanon, noting that a majority of the Israeli military forces are present in the north near the border with Lebanon.

“The [Israeli] occupation wants to enter Rafah only to save face, despite European and American attempts to prevent it, but what happened in Khan Yunis will be reflected in Rafah, and the occupation will move from one failure to another,” Al-Abadi said.

On Sunday, an Israeli army spokesman announced that the army had withdrawn all ground forces from the southern Gaza Strip after four months of fighting, leaving only one battalion in an area established by the army to cut off the north from the south in order to prevent displaced residents of the north returning to their homes.

Israeli media reported that the withdrawal comes within the framework of preparations for a ground invasion of Rafah.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Iran Warns it Has Nine Types of Missiles Able to Strike Israeli Territory

Sputnik – 08.04.2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long urged military action against the self-avowed Islamic Republic, but the nation of 88 million people possesses significant defensive capabilities.

Iran has nine types of missiles with sufficient range to hit Israeli territory, Iranian news agency ISNA reported against the backdrop of concerns over possible armed conflict between the two countries.

An infographic presented by the news agency Sunday revealed multiple Iranian ballistic missiles – the Sejjil, Kheibar, Emad, Shahab-3, Ghadr, Paveh, Fattah-2, Kheibar Shekan, and Haj Qasem – the speed of which ranges from Mach 5 to Mach 14 (from 3,836 miles per hour to 10,741 miles per hour).

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long urged military action against the self-avowed Islamic Republic and regional critic of Israel, but the nation of 88 million people possesses significant defensive capabilities. A war on Iran also raises the prospect of potential involvement by Tehran’s ally Russia, while Netanyahu would presumably count on an assist from the United States.

On April 1, Israel carried out an airstrike on the consular annex of the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, destroying the building. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said seven of its members had been killed in the attack, including two commanders. On Tuesday the Syrian Health Ministry said the attack had also killed four Syrians and injured 13 more.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said it “reserves the right” to respond to the Israeli attack and “punish the aggressor.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi also vowed Israel would pay a “heavy price” for the strike.

“None of the embassies of the (Israeli) regime are safe anymore,” said top Iranian military advisor Gen. Rahim Safavi Sunday, suggesting the country could mirror Israel’s consular strike.

Iran is a staunch defender of the Palestinian cause in the region – Palestinian solidarity was a founding principle of the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution which toppled the US backed Pahlavi royal family. The country’s foreign policy is rooted in strong opposition to US imperialism, which has left a lasting legacy in the Persian country.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Review of “Unmasking Anne Frank, Her Famous diary Exposed as a Literary Fraud” by Ikuo Suzuki

By Karl Haemers | Occidental Observer | August 27, 2022

I am going to assume that most readers of The Occidental Observer are familiar with the official story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl (aged 13–15) who kept a diary while hiding in a house from Jew-hunting “Nazis” in the Netherlands during World War II. In searching the TOO site for “Anne Frank,” I found no hits, but the Anne Frank story is almost as prevalent and persistent as the holocaust story itself, and surely TOO readers know the basics.

Publisher Clemens & Blair has just released a new book focused on the fraudulence of The Diary of Anne Frank. A number of other works examining the fraudulent Anne Frank diary have been published over the course of many years, most famously “Is the diary of Anne Frank Genuine?,” an article in English in 1982 by Robert Faurisson. But this new book surpasses the old ones in many ways.

Author of the current work, Ikuo Suzuki, a Japanese researcher, reviews a number of these earlier analyses of the diary in his new book, as does editor Thomas Dalton in his Foreword. As assistant editor, I do the same in my Introduction. (Disclaimer: I have a partial financial interest in this book.)

From there, Mr. Suzuki explores new analyses of the diary, including an illuminating graphic depiction of the many changes among the many various publications of the diary over the span of decades. So numerous and detailed are the diary’s entries over 26 months that logical inconsistencies and physical and logistical impossibilities inevitably occur; Suzuki identifies many new ones. He calls some of this “Anne magic,” and indeed only a magical explanation can reconcile some of the diary’s many internal flaws and self-contradictions.

Suzuki’s book is arranged into five main chapters, each having four to nine sections. As an example of inconsistency among various published versions of the diary, Chapter 1 is titled “Absurdity on the Surface,” and one section is titled “The Translation of ‘Cat’ Into ‘Tarantula’.” This Chapter displays pictures and drawings of the “Annex” in which Anne Frank supposedly hid out with seven other Jews, along with examinations of physical and architectural impossibilities.

Suzuki goes on to explore “Absurdities Lurking in the Depths” in Chapter 2, closing with the section “Was Everything a Figment?.” Here we see pictures of diary pages themselves, and careful comparisons among the bewildering number of different versions of the diary published at different times in different languages. Here we find Suzuki’s unique graphic display of the many changes among the versions. For example, Anne Frank is said to have edited her own diaries at a later point in her time in the “hideout.” Edited is not the proper term when we see that one early entry in her Diary as presented in the English publish version is actually a combination of two entries more than a month apart from the original diaries.

Chapter 3, “Annie Ample: A Soft-Core Porn Romantic Life?,” examines the core drama at the heart of the diary: the love (or lust) affair Anne supposedly had with a Jewish boy from another family also confined in the “hideout.” One of the great revelations that Suzuki presents is just how grotesque and sexually perverse the diary truly is, raising doubts on its own whether a young girl could even think such thoughts, much less write them down.

I’ll say here that, in my Postscript, I present the content of five missing pages of the diary that supposedly were found in 1998, and then two more “uncovered” in 2018. The five pages contain a scathing denunciation of Anne’s mother Edith and an oblique critique of her father Otto, but the two “uncovered” pages contain “perhaps the filthiest pornographic smut of the entire diary.” (I will spare readers the details here, though the book will not.)

Chapter 4 explores Anne’s writing career (or lack of it), the “infamous bookshelf door,” and the story of the beginning and end of the “hideout” (which is the chapter title). More pictures of documents and infrastructure assist the inquiry. This chapter engages in a staple of Diary doubters—handwriting analysis, and clarifies some former confusion.  A letter Anne Frank supposedly sent in 1940—before the “hideout”—to a pen pal in the US was found, and when its handwriting is compared to the handwriting of the Diary, even an amateur analyst can see the two are different. It also debunks the absurd story—or stories—of how the diaries were finally found after the “hideout” inhabitants were hauled away by the Gestapo.

Chapter 5, “The Diary Unmasked,” explores the core issue of The Diary of Anne Frank, one that all revisionists have addressed: who really wrote the diary? Many speculate that Anne’s father Otto Frank was the actual author all along, but Suzuki excludes Otto as lacking the character, ability and motivation to forge the diary. He says: “there was at least one person in Otto’s vicinity who definitely possessed those qualities.” Suzuki’s in-depth profile and examination of this one person—Jewish playwright and journalist Meyer Levin—I found compelling. For instance, Levin’s relationship with Otto Frank included Frank appointing Levin his copyright agent in 1952. Levin’s history involved him working in the “Office of War Information” in the US, producing propaganda movies. Thus Levin had the presence and ability to invent the Diary as on-going war propaganda.

Mr. Suzuki closes with a touching Afterword he calls “Annelies Next to You,” in which the focus of our outrage is inverted from the evil “Nazis” to those who would fabricate lies in Anne’s name. This is a virtue of this book; Suzuki never blames Anne for the fraud, but rather points the finger at other Jews. “Not a single word in (the diary) contains her truth. It is merely a prison for Annelies’ soul, covered by a thick wall of falsehood in the name of a legend.” Our compassion should be for the real Annelies (her full name) Frank who has been so brutally used and misrepresented to promote a Jewish victim/”Nazi” perpetrator agenda.

The book closes with my Postscript, where, as stated, the five “missing” and two “uncovered” pages bring us up to date on diary developments. Unfortunately, Revisionists can also generate myths to their discredit, and one of these is the “ball-point pen” story. Hopefully I put to rest the claim that the diary is a fraud merely because it was written in ball-point pen, which was not invented until 1950. (Only two attached notes were written in pen, but nothing in the diary text itself.) The Postscript is framed as “Re-Rebutting the Anne Frank House,” which is the lavishly funded and well-organized foundation administering the “hideout” building itself as a museum, curating the diaries themselves (though not all are displayed), and issuing the on-going education about the iconic Jewish victim of “Nazi” tyranny, Anne Frank. I believe that just about the only point on which the Anne Frank House is correct regarding the diary is its position on the ball point pen issue. Everything else is tendentious and misleading propaganda, or outright deception.

In the words of main author Suzuki: “All other textual information, even the testimonies of friends and relations, is too biased and too fraudulent to be believed.” As he carefully demonstrates, there is so little truth to the diary itself that one can hardly accept any of it as valid.

This is one of those books that in parts of a couple sections presents such exhaustive detail as to make reading tedious, while at the same time my fascination with the revelations drew me onward. Suzuki could not completely resist the temptation to depart from a strict scholarly tone and lapse into humor—but neither could Dalton or I. I suppose this has to be accepted in such revisionist material, as we see all over certain “free speech” social media platforms. The lapses are rare and brief however, and the depth and scope of scholarship prevail. If I have any final critique of Unmasking Anne Frank, it is that it treated the perpetrators of the hoax too lightly, failing to express the appropriate loathing and contempt and even criminal accusations they deserve. Suzuki’s compassion is for Annelies, who was so cruelly used by these criminal fraudsters, but he expresses not enough outrage at those who exploited her posterity. We are all victims of the fraud as well.

Unmasking Anne Frank by Ikuo Suzuki, including the excellent Foreword by editor Thomas Dalton and Introduction and Postscript by myself, achieves the difficult task of summarizing and updating previous diary revision, while presenting new crucial insights. The end effect is to drive a dagger of certainty into the bleeding heart of Diary pathos. Suzuki’s detailed biographical analysis of the person he concludes actually wrote the diary—Meyer Levin—is  the climax of a book filled with stunning insights. This book has much to consider for those new to Diary doubt, and much more to ponder for those already familiar with Anne Frank revisionism. Unmasking Anne Frank is, without doubt, the best such revisionist text ever produced; it is not only a great contribution to diary revision, it may be a culmination.

April 8, 2024 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

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