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At the height of the McCarthy era and the inception of the Cold War, the great journalist I.F. Stone released The Hidden History of the Korean War, a courageous work of investigative journalism that demolished the official story about America’s so-called “forgotten war.” As the war spiraled to its conclusion, Stone closely analyzed openly available U.S. intelligence narratives on the war’s official start, and the actions of key players like John Foster Dulles, General Douglas MacArthur, and Chiang Kai-shek. The result of his investigations was a controversial book that raised questions about the origin of the war, showed that the U.S. government had manipulated the United Nations, and gave evidence that the U.S. military and South Korean oligarchy dragged out the war by sabotaging peace talks. Stone made a strong case that there were those in the U.S. government and military who saw instability in the region as in the U.S. national interest.
Today, proxy wars are openly practiced for the sake of securing economic dominance — but when it came to news coverage of the Korean War, the story was purposefully buried at the very instant the war set the stage for relations with East Asia. When it was first published in 1952, The Hidden History of the Korean War met with a near-total press blackout and boycott—never receiving a single rebuttal, or answer, from official U.S. sources. First circulated during the long years of the Korean War, and then republished during the Vietnam War, much of what Stone wrote in The Hidden History of the Korean War was further validated forty years after its publication, when declassified documents from U.S., Soviet and Chinese archives illuminated this controversial period in history. With a new introduction by Tim Beal and Gregory Elich, 70 years after its initial publication The Hidden History of the Korean War remains a powerful dissemination of the ‘hidden history’ behind the dominant historical narrative. As we revisit I.F. Stone today, it further dawns on us that the tangled sequence of events leading to the Korean War were obfuscated in plain sight in order to prep the ground for a never-ending Cold War which aims to secure enduring American hegemony in East Asia, above all else.
What people say about The Hidden History of the Korean War
I.F. Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War is investigative journalism at its best. While the war was raging, Stone drew on official government documents as well as newspaper reports to produce a devastating critique of US pronouncements about the origins and aims of the war. But the book is of more than historical importance. Stone’s investigation into US policy makers’ machinations also offers insights that help explain current US policy towards Korea. As a bonus, this edition includes a valuable new introduction by two Korea scholars who discuss Stone’s journalism and the continuing geopolitical ramifications of the Korean War. — MARTIN HART-LANDSBERG, author of Korea: Division, Reunification and US Foreign Policy
… highly explosive arguments and observations.—PARK SANG-SEEK, diplomat (1973)
This book-length feat of journalism… is a testament to Stone’s search for a way to strengthen his readers to think for themselves, rather than be overwhelmed by official stories and war propaganda.—JAY HAUBEN, Columbia University
Isidor Feinstein Stone (1907–1989), better known as I.F. Stone or Izzy Stone, published more than a dozen books and was considered one of the most influential investigative journalists of the postwar period. He was best known for his self-published journal, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which in 1999 was ranked second in a poll of his fellow journalists of “The Top 100 Works of Journalism in the United States in the 20th Century.” He started the weekly after working at the New York Post, The Nation (as editor from 1940 to 1946), and the newspaper PM, covering the New Deal, McCarthyism, the birth of Israel, and the Vietnam War. Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic with a special interest in U.S. imperialism mainly, but not exclusively, in respect of Asia. He first read Izzy Stone’s book as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University in 1970. Enthused, he wrote a long undergraduate essay based on it. Though not well-received at the time, the process initiated a journey of discovery that has resulted in two books and numerous articles on Korea and imperialism. Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute board member and also on the board of directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a contributor to the collection, Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy.
Using particular labels has become the unbeatable weapon du jour of online warfare. If you successfully brand someone a racist, a conspiracy theorist, an anti-vaxxer, alt-right or an antisemite (ideally several of these at once), you neutralise everything-they-ever-said-ever. Boom. Done. You’re finished. Next.
A significant majority of the UK population still consumes and trusts mainstream media. No matter how dissonant to real life this version becomes, legacy media outlets continue to behave like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth and are largely getting away with it. Modus operandi: memory-hole inconvenient truths, destroy dissenters and refuse to cover any events that threaten Le Narrative™. Business as usual.
A picture paints a thousand words, as the saying goes, so let’s examine a paradigm example from George Monbiot in the Guardian, way back in 2021:
This delightful piece is replete with a Nazi salute, the use of ‘anti-vaxxer’ and conspiracy theorist slurs, a masked madman, a ‘convid hoax’ poster topped off with a title suggesting that you must be far right if you even dare to entertain any associated wrongthink. The Guardian has managed, in one fell swoop, to totally delegitimize anyone asking any questions about the covid narrative. After all, who wants to risk being lumped in with this masked nutjob? Keep your head down, your thoughts to yourself and ideally stop thinking them altogether. The parapet does not require your presence, move along please.
As with so much propaganda nowadays, this headline weaponises the threat of ostracism. Kipling Williams, a Professor of Psychology at Purdue University is a leading expert on this topic and notes the following:
“The fear of social exclusion is so salient, most bystanders will adopt the behaviour of the aggressor, ensuring their “in-group” membership, as opposed to risking possible retaliation for questioning group norms.”
Social conformity and fear of ostracism have the power to heavily influence our opinions, even if we have done no personal research on a given topic. Why bother researching when these clever, trusted, virtuous kind people who use big words have done it for us? Very early in life, children detect that certain things are not socially acceptable and are going to land them in the holy hell of social isolation. These thoughts and actions will be deftly avoided at all costs, with no need for further inquiry. It is a coping mechanism that is learned extremely young and persists into adulthood.
The more years spent in institutions of learning, the more exposure to this thought taming a person will be subjected to. In the extremely unnatural, highly age-stratified environment of the education system where thought crimes could mean instant and permanent group exclusion, it doesn’t seem worth the risk, does it? Arguably this might be even more powerful in a 24/7 environment such as boarding school. Self-censorship in full force all day, every day.
Is it a coincidence that people from such institutions are overrepresented in government? The parallels between Westminster and a boys’ public school aren’t exactly cryptic; keeping everyone in a carefully constructed hierarchy, using similar bullying techniques as those seen in a school playground if anyone steps out of line (see recent treatment of Andrew Bridgen for details). Isolate, humiliate, smear, evict. Rinse and repeat. The message is loud and clear: if you deviate from the Party Line you will be severely punished.
Institutionalised groupthink has the potential to be very dangerous and with bizarre and rapid shifts in what constitutes age-appropriate education, many parents have legitimate concerns about exactly what and how children are now being taught to think. A former OFSTED Inspector, Teacher and Teacher Educator of 40 years had the following comment:
“An examination of the National Curriculum (for England and Wales) will reveal that critical thinking and critical reading skill development have been incrementally edited out in subsequent drafts since its inception.”
If children aren’t encouraged to critique material put before them, then they won’t be asking questions of it or forming their own opinion of it. They become passive consumers of the text. Why would this be the evolving trend in education? Who does this serve? It would be interesting to know whether this is a factor in the huge increase in parents choosing to homeschool here in the UK.
The amount of money being spent by governments and institutions worldwide on ‘nudge’ units in various guises indicates that those wishing to shape the prevailing narrative fully understand the primordial fear of ostracism and are more than happy to weaponise it. Who wants to be called a racist? Absolutely no one ever. Guilt and shame are unbelievably powerful tools which can be used to moderate behaviour very effectively. But can one be ‘innoculated’ against these underhand psy-op tactics? The first step towards Thought Recovery appears to be awareness. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and there is certainly no going back. The culture of memes that sprang up in recent years beautifully satirises the point. In what was primarily a psychological war, memes played an important role in boosting the morale of those swimming against the tide of public opinion. The Chad vs NPC series were particularly powerful in highlighting the obvious inconsistencies in The Science™.
Most people do not like to feel as though they have been played any more than they like the idea of social isolation. At a certain point, if one believes that those doing the manipulating may have nefarious intentions, one may be persuaded to not just ‘go along to get along’, even at risk of being labelled aracist, climate denying, anti vax, alt right conspiracy theorist. Many people who supported Brexit will be familiar with this concept, as they were relentlessly called racists by the media machine and in turn by many of their friends and family. They learned to keep it to themselves but in the end, voted leave anyway. If we want to preserve truth as a valuable commodity in society, we must teach young people to critically think and to speak up when they believe something is ethically and morally wrong. If they are no longer being taught these basics in school, it falls to parents to ensure this education is completed at home. The total outsourcing of teaching is no longer a safe option for society.
For those who read George Orwell’s 1984 at school but can only vaguely remember the contents, we highly recommend refreshing your memory. It is utterly chilling in the context of what is going on in the real world. Perhaps it would make a good Christmas or birthday present for anyone stating that everything is hunky dory, we’re back to normal and there’s really nothing to worry about. Here is one of many prescient excerpts:
“The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
And in case you’re still not convinced, how about this one:
“There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.”
It seems Those In Charge have taken 1984 as a detailed instruction manual rather than a fictional novel. Let’s not let the end play out as written!
In 1975, Philip Agee published his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary. In the introduction, he wrote: “When I joined the CIA, I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book.”
Enrique Prado’s book, Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022), is written for the opposite purpose. Prado says, “This book is my attempt to correct the misperceptions that make the Agency one of the least understood and most mistrusted institutions in America today. The reality we faced on the ground in places from Muslim Africa to East Asia, to our own streets here at home, is one of persistent threats that must be countered to keep our people safe.”
Prado’s memoir was approved for publication by the CIA. It is self-laudatory and highly critical of restraints on the CIA. It confirms that, while the ability to assassinate at will was temporarily restricted, CIA sabotage and paramilitary operations against other nations have continued non-stop.
Background
Enrique (Ric) Prado’s father lost his business in the Cuban Revolution and Ric came to the U.S. as a youth in the early 1960s. He grew up in greater Miami. The Vietnam War was raging and his “dream was to go to Vietnam.”
After high school, Ric enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and received training in rescue operations including parachute jumping and scuba diving. Prado’s dream was dashed because the Vietnam War was winding down and the U.S. military downsizing.
Prado alludes to his involvement with Cuban-American gangs and some troubled years. Then, starting with contract work, Prado began to perform assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
A young Ric Prado in Hialeah, Florida. [Source: nypost.com]
Prado and the Contras
Prado’s timing was late for Vietnam but just right for Central America. In 1979 the Sandinista Revolution overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. As a Spanish-speaking Latino, Prado was not a typical Anglo-American. He was recruited as a CIA officer responsible for overseeing the development of the Contra army based in Honduras and conducting cross-border attacks on communities in Nicaragua.
He writes, “In these early days, there were only five CIA officers who interfaced directly with the Contras in Tegucigalpa; none were yet in the field.” There were “ten camps that lay scattered along the Honduran Nicaraguan border.” Ric Prado became the CIA officer responsible for going to the camps to coordinate support and conduct weapons training.
Prado admits the Contra leadership came from the corrupt Somoza regime: “Others who had been part of Somoza’s military…formed the core leadership of the Contras.” Initially, Washington subcontracted the job of mobilizing the Contras to Argentinian military officers who had experience from their own dirty war and death squads. Prado is extremely critical of the Argentinian military trainers, calling them a “den of snakes” and stating that, “to a man, I found them to be useless parasites.” The Argentinian military trainers were supplanted by CIA personnel, with Ric Prado playing a leading role overseeing Contra operations from Honduras and later in the “southern front” in Costa Rica.
During the Reagan years, Ric Prado (clutching rocket launcher) trained Contras to fight communist Sandinistas as part of the CIA’s “tip of the spear” in Nicaragua. [Source: nypost.com]
The CIA is funded by Congress and acutely aware of its public image. Whether it is creating negative press for “enemies” such as Nicaragua, Cuba or Russia, or creating positive press for itself, manipulating the media is an important part of its work. Prado talks about the political benefits of recruiting Indigenous Miskitos to the Contras: “Miskitos were popular with several U.S. political sectors. Among Native Americans and some prominent liberals, the Miskitos were considered to be the oppressed, indigenous forces untainted by association with Somoza. That political viability back in the States with elements often hostile to the Agency helped us enormously.”
Dinner in one of the Miskito camps, Prado on the right, where living conditions were primitive at best. [Source: nypost.com]
The unofficial war on Nicaragua included attacks on infrastructure which echo today with the U.S. sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Prado proudly documents the attack on the Puerto Cabezas pier and underwater gas pipeline: “The dock included an integrated fuel pipeline for faster transfer of oil from tankers. If we could destroy this… we’d make a big statement by blowing up the key link between the Sandinistas and their communist allies….We received exactly what we needed: a specialized underwater demolition charge that combined compactness with tremendous blast power….The charge exploded…the blast was so large it destroyed the fuel pipeline.”
Prado documents the failed attempt to blow up a bridge at Corinto on the Pacific coast. For unknown reasons, Prado was re-assigned and left Honduras in March 1984 after four years managing the Contras. He returned to the Contra campaign in the summer of 1986. They had safe houses and secret bases in ranches along the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border. It was more difficult because the Costa Rican government did not support the Contras as Honduras did.
Prado carried all these weapons while fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. [Source: nypost.com]
Prado briefly describes the sensational events in October 1986 when a CIA plane dropping supplies and weapons to Contras was shot down. The pilot and two others on the flight died, but ex-Marine Eugene Hasenfus survived and was captured. Unmentioned in the book, this was a sensational news event at the time. Beyond the drama of an American plane being shot down over Nicaragua and an American captured and taken prisoner, it revealed the CIA was violating the congressional Boland Amendment prohibiting U.S. military support for overthrowing the Nicaragua government.
The Reagan administration denied responsibility. Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, said:“The flight in which Mr. Hasenfus took part was a private initiative…It was not organized, directed or financed by the U.S. Government.” The counter-evidence was overwhelming and the CIA was caught red-handed violating the congressional resolution and then lying about it. This is unmentioned in the book. Instead, Prado criticizes Hasenfus for having personal identification papers in his possession.
José Fernando Canales, the Sandinista soldier who shot down Eugene Hasenfus’s plane with a surface-to-air missile, leads his hapless captive through the jungle on October 5, 1986. [Source: dailykos.com]
Prado’s Pride
In 1990, after ten years of terrorist attacks by the Contras, combined with economic and political attacks from Washington, Nicaraguans cried “Uncle” and voted the Sandinistas out of power.
Prado says, “our Contra program was a definitively successful black op carried out solely by key personnel from the CIA.” Prado stated further that “that Cuban kid who lost his native country to revolutionaries now helped cut off some of the communist tentacles that threatened to engulf Latin America.”
Prado believes the use of a proxy army to fight against a perceived enemy was an important victory and re-established the credibility of the CIA. He says, “The Contras resuscitated the post-Vietnam decimated CIA back to relevance.”
Prado is annoyed at negative media portrayals of the CIA Contra program. The movie American Made, depicting the story of an American pilot taking guns to the Contras and bringing cocaine back into the U.S., is especially annoying to Prado. He ignores the fact that tens of thousands of Nicaraguans died and cocaine inundated some U.S. cities as a byproduct of the Contra program.
Prado believes that the CIA were the “good guys” in Nicaragua. The International Court of Justice thought otherwise.
In 1986 the court ruled that the U.S. attacks on Nicaragua were violations of international law. The Reagan administration and media largely ignored the ruling.
Later, journalist Gary Webb documented the catastrophic social damage inside the U.S. caused by the cheap cocaine flooding some U.S. cities. Webb was attacked by establishment media. However, in 1998, the CIA Inspector General acknowledged, “There are instances where C.I.A. did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations.”
The 2014 movie Kill the Messenger, based on the true and tragic story of Gary Webb, was undoubtedly another movie that irritated Ric Prado.
Prado’s justification for CIA crimes against other countries is U.S. national security. He says, “The spread of communism through Central and South America became a direct threat to the security of the United States.” He compares the war against “communism” to the World War II fight against Nazi Germany. He says, “The Sandinistas quickly consolidated their power through Nazi-like pogrom and oppression.” Prado says that training the Contras was like “being an OSS officer trying to train and supply the French resistance to the Germans in WW2.”
The U.S. deployed Nicaraguans, Afghans and extremist Arab recruits in proxy wars across the globe. Prado assesses this a great success: The Mujahedin in Afghanistan and Contras in Nicaragua “played crucial roles in the Cold War’s final act.”
Prado does not mention the fact that the Sandinistas were voted back into power in Nicaragua in 2006 after 16 years of neo-liberal rule. The country was in very poor shape with privatized education, little health care, and terrible infrastructure. Since being voted back, the Sandinistas have won increasing levels of support because they have substantially improved the lives of most Nicaraguans. As in the 1980s, Nicaragua is back on the U.S. enemy list and Western media portrayals are universally negative.
Prado in Other Countries
The “CIA shadow warrior” went on to conduct operations in Peru, the Philippines, South Korea and an unnamed African country, probably the Central African Republic. “We were the leadership cadre, spearheading America’s effort against global terrorism.”
Prado says, “Radical Islamic terrorism at the turn of the century morphed into a deadly new enemy.” With the attacks of 9/11, the U.S. homeland was suddenly the victim of a real attack. The timing was very convenient for war hawks and those who wanted a “new American Century.” From being a president who took office under highly contested circumstances, Bush became a “war President.” The 9/11 attack provided a Pearl Harbor moment justifying U.S. military aggression in the Middle East.
Prado describes the fervor and intensity with which the CIA responded: CIA agents worked long hours to identify, capture and sometimes kill those deemed to be “enemy combatants.” Some of these suspects were tortured in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory. The “CIA shadow warrior” is dismissive of the critics. The “much maligned enhanced interrogations [were] sparingly performed on known terrorists.”
“Jungle of Criminality”
Prado views the world as “a jungle of criminality, corruption, betrayals, and atrocious human rights abuses we were determined to help eradicate.” There are numerous allusions to the “good guys” fighting the “bad guys.”
Prado does not attempt to argue with critics who say some CIA actions are violations of international law and human rights. It is estimated that 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the Contra War. This is ten times more than died in the attacks of 9/11 in a country that only had 3.3 million people at the time.
Prado’s claim that Sandinista Nicaragua posed a threat to U.S. “national security” stretches credulity. The CIA actions not only violated international law; they violated U.S. law. … Full review
For more than a decade it’s become expected for books peddling the “China threat” to pop up as best sellers. From Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World (2009) to Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon (2015), the best response has been to just shrug and move on. Talk in serious policy circles and major media were still primarily focused on Beijing’s integration into the “liberal world order” as a “responsible stakeholder,” and of the gains in trade made (and still to be made) in exchange between the United States and China.
The transformation of China from global partner to enemy number one seemed to happen, in Hemingway’s words, gradually, then suddenly. Indeed, despite Donald Trump’s early bellicosity when it came to China, the corporate press didn’t immediately play along with the China threat narrative. Rather, they proclaimed the folly of his trade war and seemed to revel in reporting the losses it was inflicting on American farmers, whose exports to China had been interrupted as a result of retaliatory tariffs.
But in the background the slow, ominous drip of the China threat narrative continued with Graham Allison’s Destined For War(2017). Then, in quick succession, Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept (2019) by Robert Spalding, Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for GlobalSupremacy (2019) by Bill Gertz, Unrestricted Warfare: China’s Master Plan to Destroy America (2020) by Qiao Liang, Has China Won? (2020) by Kishore Mahbubani, The Long Game: China’s Strategy to Displace American Order (2021) by Rush Doshi, The World According to China (2021) by Elizabeth Economy, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (2022) by Robert Spalding, No Limits; the Inside Story of China’s War with the West (2022) by Andrew Small, and Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (2022) by Erich Schwartzel.
It was as though even before the COVID pandemic—which exacerbated already strained relations between the United States and China—the movement was underway to translate for the public the policies pursued through multiple U.S. administrations aimed at containing China. It suddenly became normal to pick up one of the so-called “papers of record,” corporate media giants like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or Washinton Post and encounter a headline about China presented as ominous or threatening. Indeed, by the time Hal Brands and Michael Beckley’s Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China (2022) hit bookshelves last August, entire opinion pages of the major papers sounded like talking points from the 2017 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS), or the 2018 special report from the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) which all painted China as a direct threat to vital U.S. interests, and one that needed to be vigorously countered and contained militarily, geopolitically, economically, ideologically, and technologically.
While many of the books mentioned above are written in the breathless, alarmed manner of their earliest forerunner, the eponymous China Threat (2000) by Bill Gertz, there have been some notable exceptions which have sought and obtained some measure of balance even when they could not completely escape the China threat paradigm. Kevin Rudd’s The Avoidable War (2022) and James Fok’s Financial Cold War (2021) both do a reasonable job presenting the facts, perspectives of both Washington and Beijing on key issues, and have as their aim deescalating the growing crisis that is the present state and trajectory of U.S.-China relations.
Tellingly, outright dissenters, those that questioned any part of the ascendent China narrative, were few. Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is In Jeopardy (2018) by George Magnus and Thomas Orlik’s China: The Bubble That Never Pops (2020) both deserve credit for seeing through to the true mess that is China’s economy. Though their critiques of the China threat narrative are incomplete, and scarcely touch on the demographic, environmental, and geostrategic mountains confronting Beijing, China’s economy is central to everything else (the one-party CCP dictatorship included) and an expansion of their critiques is all one needs to cast the prospect of a future “Chinese Century” into serious doubt.
And it is here that a point needs to be clearly parsed. There is a significant difference between China ruling the world in a manner like the United States has for the past three decades, and Beijing enjoying preponderance in its immediate environs and proportional heft for its relative weight where its interests are concerned around the globe. For while it is increasingly unlikely that China’s economy will ever surpass that of the United States—either in total or per capita output—or that it will ever have the military reach enjoyed by Washington, Beijing has grown powerful enough relatively that it can assert and more or less get what it wants in its immediate environs. Trivial, obvious, or realistic though that may seem to the objective observer, to Washington this fact constitutes the whole of the China threat. The existence of an independent China (or Russia, for that matter) is a threat to Washington’s accustomed ability to do more or less whatever it wants wherever it wants. However, the existence of an independent China is already a fact and continued refusal on the part of Washington to accept it will cause more than theoretical problems.
I did not imagine or intend, when I started graduate school several years ago, that any serious amount of my time would be spent reading Chinese history, learning Mandarin, or studying the specifics of the Maoist interpretation of the Marxist dialectic. As a political scientist, economist, and historian with an interest in the emergence of different political and economic structures in Europe from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, my initial diversion into Sino-American relations, both past and present, came as something of an annoyance.
Writing at the Mises Institute, I’ve done my best to push back against this fake China threat narrative. It’s become clear, however, that a more comprehensive case needs to be made against the ludicrous idea that China is on the cusp of taking over the world. Alas, public fear has been continually stoked and the China threat narrative is worse than ever—hence, The (fake) China Threat (and its very real danger) has taken on book-length form and will be published by the Libertarian Institute in 2023. In the meantime, I will do my bi-weekly best to pour cold water on whatever the latest hawkish nonsense from DC towards China happens to be, as well as inform and contextualize for readers what is going on in China and the wider Indo-Pacific. While I cannot promise readers will always like what I have to say, with no conflicts of interest to declare they can at least be rest assured that I have no reason whatsoever to lie to them—which is (tragically) more than can be said for practically anyone anywhere else.
Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist with degrees from Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, and is currently a graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri. An independent researcher and journalist, his work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Eurasian Review, Libertarian Institute, Journal of the American Revolution, Antiwar.com, and the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can contact him through his website http://www.jsmwritings.com or find him on Twitter @solis_mullen
Last November Philip Zelikow and “the Covid Crisis Group” published a 352 page book, Lessons from a Covid War, An Investigative Report. The book went on sale April 23, 2023 and was launched April 24 in a five hour presentation at the National Academy of Medicine in Washington, DC. The launch of the book has lately gotten attention in the news. By its emphasis on war, the book inadvertently confirms recent evidence uncovered by Sasha Latypova snd Katherine Watt that the Covid psy-op was not a supposed public health emergency but a type of 5th generation warfare carried out by the US Department of Defense against US citizens, and much of the rest of the world, in collusion with many other governments.
Who is Philip Zelikow? He was the director of the so-called 9-11 Commission appointed by the G.W. Bush Administration in 2002. He was the editor of theresulting 9-11 Commission Report. He was and still is a University of Virginia history professor said to specialize in public myths and the effect of “catastrophic terrorism” in making abrupt changes in of the course of human history. As we know, both myth and terror were in full play in the 9-11 and the covid operations. Zelikow was among the neocons of the Project for a New American Century which said in its “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” September 2000, that it would take “a new Pearl Harbor” to motivate the American public to support the militarily aggressive US global hegemony that the Project called for. Exactly a year later, 9-11 provided the neocon-controlled US government with a pretext for just such aggression against a list of Arab and Muslim countries that did not threaten US hegemony, but did happened to be enemies of the state of Israel, which the neocons happen to adamantly support. So many coincidences!
Twenty years later, Zelikow was called in for another coverup, this time unofficially. Under Zelikow’s guidance 9-11 was painted as a series of tragic failures by the US government, the Pentagon, NORAD, and US intelligence agencies to either predict or prevent the hijacking of four passenger airliners by 19 nefarious hijackers. Using the same formula again, Zelikow assembled a group of 34 academic, medical, and government apologists — the “Covid Crisis Group” — to write the authoritative report on the US handling of the “Covid 19 pandemic.” Once again. the entire US government was totally blindsided. It was found woefully inept, incompetent, and completely unprepared to deal with this terrible out-of-nowhere attack.
Zelikow and his hand-picked authors leave no stone unturned in pointing out the failures of almost all the measures a helpless Uncle Sam took to deal with the “pandemic.” The problems listed by Zelikow’s mainstream mouthpieces were: “operational challenges,” lack of preparedness, “policy failures,” ignorance of the source of SARS CoV-2, the failure of Trump’s leadership in “Operation Warp Speed,” a ”fragmented health care system,” and “poor communication” which led to poor “vaccine uptake” and a failure to prevent people being led astray by “misinformation.” The solution offered by the Crisis Group: organize from the top down, globally, with a single authority, for the next predicted “pandemic,” much like what we’re hearing from the World Heath Organization. This is not new thinking. It’s a copy and paste of the globalist agenda.
The strategy for covering up an attack by the US government on US citizens is to make it look like the government was a victim of the attack, not the perpetrator. That lie is facilitated by what sounds like a tough critique of government incompetence, crafted by the same people who were involved in the crime. This is like letting a murderer off the hook by hearing nothing but his apology for serious and reprehensible failures in stopping the murder, and forgetting that he committed the murder.
Of course, Zelikow’s exhaustive report passed over the pre-planning, the trail of predictive pharma patents, the economic devastation, the gigantic upward transfer of wealth, the government corruption, the psychological harm, the extensive injury to human health, the thousands of deaths caused by the US “response” to C-19 — all of it deliberate. The report starts with the premise that a never-before-seen virus attacked us all at once and nobody knew what to do about it. This is more or less how Zelikow and his previous stable of authors said 9-11 happened: our innocent nation was attacked from out of the blue; we were caught totally unaware. It is interesting to see how the public myth and the “catastrophic event” intertwine. Zelikow is not just an academic observing that catastrophic terror changes history. He is an advisor to people who want to change history by creating catastrophic terror. He almost certainly advises on how to do it. Not only has he nicely tied his two academic theses together, he has won handsome rewards and respectability, AND completed the major deception of being the one to write the official history of the operations his handlers planned. Zelikow is the consummate insider. Had he not appeared with this coverup masquerading as an earnest critique, we might have missed seeing that the neocons had to be involved in the covid operation just as they were in 9-11. The Project for a New American Century was not a plan for a robust American empire. Just the opposite. It was a plan to use the US and its people as pawns in what was really the Project for a New World Order. America’s contribution to that was to let itself be robbed physically, morally, and spiritually by a parasite class whose goals for control of the world can’t even be understood as human. Indeed, transhumanism is a stated goal of these people.
Zelikow has tipped his hat with this monstrosity of establishment lies. He has announced that he is involved, despite no one asking, and we can infer from this that the neocons were also involved. “The wicked run when no one is chasing them,” says the proverb. With all the power the neocons wield, most notable today in the Nuland- and Blinken-led attack on Russia, the neocons must of course be connected with the would-be masters at Davos. How clever this clique must think they are to have fooled the whole world. With such arrogance, how hard the fall.
Last week in the New York Times, Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. quoted from Carter G. Woodson, the scholar who founded Black History Month: “Starting after the Civil War,’ Woodson wrote, ‘the opponents of freedom and social Justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind… It was well understood that…by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority…”
Gates proceeded to quote from Rev. Dr. King; “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Prof. Gates commented, “Addressing these ‘ravages’…can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum…”
We enthusiastically agree with these sentiments which, to tell the truth, are in certain respects mainly that—only sentiments. Being in the trenches of the censorship wars requires a willingness to radically displease contemporary white supremacist powers, who are no longer confined to KKK Grand Dragons, Exalted Cyclops and other easy contemporary targets.
It was four years ago this February, in the midst of Black History Month 2019, that billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Amazon colossus waved a giant middle finger at black history by removing and henceforth banning the sale of a trilogy written by a team of black historians.
How could this outrageous censorship have occurred without public protest, rallies, boycotts, seminars, an op-ed in the New York Times and sundry discussions and debates on network and cable television? None of that occurred because the forces of white supremacy arrayed against it were too powerful.
Mr. Bezos’ house organ, the “progressive” Washington Post, was as quiet as a democracy mouse in darkness, along with all of the corporate media. One glance at the titles of this trilogy may tell you why: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, volumes I-III.
The study which the black scholars undertake in these volumes is the authentic history of the role of Judaic enslavers of black people in the New World, in addition to apostate Christians who perpetrated these crimes. They present the facts dispassionately. The books are free of rancor and invective.
“The Truth Hurts”
One of the conservative movement’s most distinguished white scholars privately published a collection of essays several years ago in which he surveyed a wide range of controversial historical issues, including the participation of some Judaic people in the slave trade in America. This conservative author wrote:
“Such was the extent of my knowledge—disturbing as it was – of one of the carefully hidden pivot points of… politics in America. What was my surprise, in the early 1990s, to learn that I ‘didn’t know the half of it.’ That was when Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam published its astounding study, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, laying bare in awesome detail the long buried story of Jews in the African slave trade. The unnamed but clearly astute authors note that they have chosen ‘to present evidence from ‘the most respected of the Jewish authorities’… in order to explore the proposition that ‘Jews have been conclusively linked to… the Black African Holocaust….’
“(I)t needs a little more than a cursory glance at The Secret Relationship volume one to see that its vast array of meticulous documentation does present a devastating testament to racial exploitation…on a staggering scale…The study is based on a huge number of scholarly sources, predominantly by top-flight Jewish authors. There are 76 books and 18 learned articles in the selected bibliography of volume one alone, with many more which I have not counted in the 1,275 footnotes. Most of those notes contain multiple references and enough supplementary material to duplicate a substantial portion of the text. In short, this is a formidable work of scholarship of a ‘classic’ style, not often seen these days. The tone is unfailingly judicious, and the authors make it clear that they have excluded sources considered to be antisemitic, and/or anti-Jewish. Small wonder, then, that The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews touched an extremely sore nerve, possibly of the ‘truth hurts’ variety…”
Readers can google the titles to find a number of criticisms of the trilogy which have been elevated by Google to the opening pages of its search engine. However, there is no substitute for reading these suppressed black history volumes yourself, free of prejudgment.
Making these black-authored books more difficult to find does not speak well of the strength of the arguments of those who denounce the authors’ thesis. Banning these magisterial works of black intellect during Black History Month no less, gives us a peak behind the curtain, affording a glimpse of white supremacy at work in 2023.
Due to their servitude to the white racists who control the funding and call the shots, it’s no surprise that Critical Race Theory’s (“CRT”) leading exponents dare not speak out on the subject of the hidden side of black slavery in the ante-bellum South, or of Amazon’s censorship of The Secret Relationship.
CRT activists and academics are virtually mute regarding the advancement of humanity’s knowledge of how black people first came to be the subject of racist disparagement and dehumanization.
Ancient and Medieval Ideological Sources of the Subjugation and Bondage of Black People
We regret to say that among the earliest sources for this subjugation was the Talmud of Babylon. Specifically, it takes the form of the oral Torah’s theological teaching, circa the third century A.D., that Ham, the son of Noah, sentenced to perpetual enslavement along with his posterity, was black (cf. Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 108b). The Talmud identifies black people as those who therefore are justifiably forever destined to be slaves. Notice that we specify the oral Torah, the Torah shBeal peh (תּוֹרָהשֶׁבְּעַל־פֶּה) as culpable, and not the written Torah of the Old Testament—the Torah sheBiktav (תּוֹרָה שֶׁבִּכְתָב)—which assigns no racial identification to Ham.
Moreover, in the Midrash it is taught, “Ham and the dog copulated on the Ark (of Noah), therefore Ham came forth black-skinned” (Midrash Rabbah 36:7).
These statements, as found in the Midrash and particularly the Talmud—the latter is the groundwork of halacha (rabbinic law)—lend support to those who seek, or who have sought in the past, a divine rationale for domination over blacks. After the Renaissance, as knowledge of these sacred texts began to be more widely disseminated among Christian scholars and ministers, they served to exonerate the white supremacy which was the backbone of the racist belief that black servitude was ordained by God.
Apologists have claimed that these passages were little known among gentiles and represented an insubstantial and merely interstitial element in Judaism. This fallacy is impossible to maintain however, in the case of the authoritative teachings of the medieval Rabbi Moses Maimonides, whose revered image adorns the hall of Congress. Buildings and institutes throughout America are named for him.
Maimonides (sometimes known by the acronym the “Rambam”) remains, even in our time, among the highest halachic authorities in Askenazic Judaism. He has been prominently quoted for centuries by learned Catholic and in particular Protestant clergy. Their repetition of his dogmatic teachings trickled down to the congregants in the churches. “The wisdom of Maimonides” (still upheld in panegyrics published by the New York Times), became renowned as a reflection of his allegedly illuminating exposition of the Bible.
In the uncensored versions of his celebrated Guide of the Perplexed, we discover some of that “wisdom.”Maimonides institutionalized a heinous alibi for the subjugation of blacks which is among the most ruinous ever written, in terms of their impact on the West:
“….the Negroes in the remote South, and those who resemble them from among them that are with us in these climes. The status of those is like that of irrational animals. To my mind they do not have the rank of men, but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher than the rank of apes.” (Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, translated by Shlomo Pines [University of Chicago Press, 1963], vol. 2, p. 618).
Did you ever hear of this? Has this highly influential eugenic malediction, which circulated sub-rosa in white circles for centuries before the Civil War and Jim Crow, been publicly denounced during Black History Month, or at any other time? You know the answer.
Southern Historian Shelby Foote Echoes Maimonides
In light of his reputation for having deep insight into the heart of Old Testament doctrine, Maimonides has had a significant influence over Protestants in the South, even in our time.
The late Shelby Foote, an award-winning white historian of the Civil War who was descended from Mississippi gentry, quoted the statement from the Guide of the Perplexed on more than one occasion, including in the course of a 2001 interview with Brian Lamb on C-SPAN television. After remarking on what he considered high levels of black criminality he observed, “African Americans are acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true.”
Did you catch Mr. Foote’s backhanded method of confirming Maimonides’ dictum? It’s an “utter lie”—that may be true. Possible confirmation of the veracity of Maimonides’ words may be found in how “African Americans are acting,” according to the much-honored historian Shelby Foote, whose bestselling books freely circulate and are, needless to say, not banned by Amazon.
Concerning the consequences of the much-honored Maimonides’ hate speech, silence is all we get from elite whites, as well the domesticated servants of the forces of white supremacy. Some black Conservatives have been labeled white supremacists by progressives. In turn, we observe the presence of white supremacist functionaries among the Henry Louis Gates Jr. coterie, as well as the Obama, Eric Holder and Hakeem Jeffries entourage.
They all have the power and position in American society to decry Amazon’s censorship of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews and see that it is made a national issue. All of them have the means to condemn the legacy of Talmudic Maimonidesianism, made doubly insidious because it bears the imprimatur of religion.
They could speak with one voice to advance enlightenment for the good of all people, including the many Judaic persons who, when they become aware of the problem texts in their own tradition, are often quick to denounce them.
During Black History Month 2023, like every Black History Month for the past four years, the leading personalities who have made themselves central to the Month and who are extended favorable publicity by the ruling class media, dare not confront the obdurate and seemingly ineradicable white supremacy whose weltanschaung is predicated upon the theology of Talmudism and Maimonides.
Black History Month is captive to this self-censorship. It is like a domesticated lion whose rump has been flea’d and whose claws have been pared.
“(T)he opponents of freedom… decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind… It was well understood that… by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority…”
It has been a hundred years since Carter G. Woodson penned those words. They are as salient now as the day he wrote them.
In our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Dr. McCullough and I give numerous examples of how anyone—even eminently qualified scientists and researchers—who questions the prevailing orthodoxy about a range of public policy issues will likely be labelled a “conspiracy theorist.” Since the JFK assassination, “conspiracy theorist” has become a pejorative, accusatory label like “racist” or “sexist.” Through common usage, the label has become charged with the power to smear and dismiss someone outright without supporting evidence.
The greatest trick that powerful interest groups ever pulled was convincing the world that everyone who detects and reports their activities is a conspiracy theorist. Only the naivest consumer of mainstream news reporting would fail to recognize that powerful interest groups in the military, financial, and bio-pharmaceutical industries work in concert to further their interests. Their activities cross the line into conspiracy when they commit fraud or other crimes to advance their interests. The term “conspiracy theory” suggests the feverish imaginings of a crackpot mind. This ignores the fact that the United States government prosecutes the crime of conspiracy all the time. As one prominent defense attorney describes this reality:
Any time the government believes that it can allege that two or more individuals were a part of a common agreement to commit the same crime, they will include a charge of conspiracy in the indictment. There is no requirement that all of the members of the conspiracy even know about each other, or even know each other personally.
A person may be charged with conspiracy to commit a crime even if he doesn’t know all of the details of the crime. History is full of well-documented conspiracies. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, there were three major conspiracies to murder her and replace her with Mary Queen of Scots. All were detected and foiled. The final “Babington Plot” was discovered by Elizabeth’s secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham (an astute intelligence gatherer) and this led to Mary’s execution for treason.
Are we really to believe that there are no longer power-hungry men who conspire to acquire greater power and wealth?
As far as “theory” goes, every prosecutor develops a theory of a crime and presents it to the jury. If you are a concerned citizen and you perceive that your government officials and media are not telling the truth about a vitally important matter, you have no choice but to formulate a theory of what is going on. Developing a theory to explain a pattern of ascertainable facts is a rational attempt to detect and expose criminal conduct. To be sure, some theories are more plausible than others. Some are logical and coherent; others are wild and contradictory.
When President Eisenhower left office in 1961, he expressly warned about what he called the Military-Industrial Complex acquiring “unwarranted influence” that could “endanger our liberties and democratic processes.” When COVID-19 arrived, the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex vigorously and exclusively pursued the vaccine solution instead of the early treatment solution. In order to realize their ambition, multiple actors simultaneously waged a propaganda campaign against hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other repurposed drugs.
It’s likely that only a relatively small number of these actors knew they were making fraudulent claims about the generic, repurposed drugs, and knew they were taking action to impede access to these drugs based on fraudulent claims. These actors were the conspirators. Countless others unwittingly played roles in the conspiracy because they themselves believed the propaganda.
Roger Daltry of mod rock band The Who screamed “We won’t get fooled again” in its lengthy and punchy signature song. But it appears we have. Almost everything that those on the sceptical side of the Covid narrative recognise about the hyped-up nature of the recent pandemic will see parallels in Overturning Zika: the pandemic that never wasby Randall S. Bock.
Bock is a U.S. physician who has long harboured scepticism about something that most of us had completely forgotten: the Zika ‘pandemic’ of 2015 in Brazil. Like COVID-19, this was accompanied by dire predictions of deaths in the millions and, parallel to the ridiculous and extraordinary locking down and social distancing mandates of 2020-2021, Zika was accompanied by ludicrous suggestions that women should not have babies and even abort the ones they were carrying. Some did.
Zika is a mosquito-borne virus that is present in South America. According to Wikipedia, it can be associated with the birth defect microcephaly, whereby a child is born with a smaller than normal brain. One source, GAVI (‘The Vaccine Alliance‘) claimed in 2022 that one third of babies exposed pre-birth to Zika developed microcephaly. However, it then proceeded to say there is a “continued need to develop a safe and effective vaccine for preventing Zika virus infections during pregnancy”. GAVI has a vested interest in vaccine production and distribution.
It is worth pointing out that the author of this book is not a tin-foil hat wearing virus sceptic, ‘anti-vaxxer’ or conspiracy theorist. He does not deny the existence of the Zika virus, or specifically deny its potential to cause microcephaly and does not ascribe the manufacturing of the Zika pandemic to evil forces determined to reduce the population of the world. Instead, he examines the evidence as it stands, contextualises this within the scientific paradigm and examines some of the social and media forces at work which fan the flames. Thus, a smouldering fire of (misplaced) suspicion that there was an outbreak of Zika-related microcephaly in Brazil soon became a forest fire of panic across the country and elsewhere in the region.
The simple facts are that a case of microcephaly was attributed to Zika without a shred of evidence that Zika was the cause. Microcephaly occurs in possibly one in every 800-5,000 babies. If you go out armed with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail and other cases of microcephaly were soon identified and misattributed to Zika. In 2019, when Zika was a distant blip in the rear-view mirror, Bock tried to publish a short review demonstrating that the accompanying pandemic had been a mistake, but major medical journals refused to publish it. This was not because it was inaccurate or that what was contained was not fairly common knowledge among the medical community, but in case it undermined public trust in public health initiatives related to Covid. This is what is now referred to as ‘malinformation’; something that is true but uncomfortable for those controlling the narrative.
The story, briefly, is that Zika was considered the cause of a cluster of cases of microcephaly. This was done against a background of poor baseline information about the extent of microcephaly and without specific laboratory testing for the presence of Zika. A purported Zika test had never been standardised and Zika and its close relative dengue fever are almost identical genetically and almost impossible to distinguish. Scepticism about the existence of Zika, based on the poor science applied to its characterisation was quashed and likewise scepticism about the link between it and microcephaly.
In the sceptical free zone that was allowed to exist around the Zika microcephaly story, local, national, regional and international panic ensued. Pregnant women lived in fear that their babies were going to be born brain damaged, the WHO issued travel advice related to the 2016 Brazil Olympics and NPR, never known to let a good pandemic go to waste, reported fears amongst athletes and staff at the games over Zika infection.
However, when accurate Zika testing became available in 2016, the purported link between the virus and microcephaly failed to hold. Zika-related microcephaly, now described as ‘rare’, just disappeared. The only reasonable conclusion, in the absence of a vaccine or additional preventive measures, was that it probably did not exist. In the meantime, pregnant women had been smothering themselves in insecticides potentially harmful to their unborn babies and the family planning lobby had got to work with increased calls for ‘net zero’ related to birth rates.
Bock traces the main characters involved from the group of physicians who initially raised the alarm, through incompetent national health officials up to the ubiquitous eminence grise, without whom no pandemic is complete, Anthony Fauci who said all the usual things about vaccines and public health measures. In this case, rather than being a driving force, Fauci jumped on the Zika bandwagon. What had started as a cock-up soon became a conspiracy. Fauci used Zika to “wage war” on pandemics. We now know what he meant.
The book is written in a very familiar and even colloquial style. It is reasonably easy to read and not too heavy, within the text, on scientific jargon. It does suffer, however, from a somewhat samizdat style of presentation and there is a great deal of repetition of what the appropriate scientific procedures should have been. That said, the opening synopsis is very helpful, makes all the main points and stands alone. The accompanying diagrams and figures are far too busy, poorly produced, and not signposted properly. On the whole, some ruthless editing may have helped to produce a more concise text. Nevertheless, this is a book that should be read.
Randall S. Bock (2023) Overturning Zika: the pandemic that never was. Drivestraight Publishing, Istanbul, is available to purchase on Amazon.
Dr. Roger Watson is Academic Dean of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry.
Fear of a Microbial Planet, by Dr. Steve Templeton, is a wonderfully accessible book on the Covid era now published by Brownstone institute, offers desperately needed clarity and science on the organization and management of individual social life in the presence of pathogenic infection. It can be read as a definitive answer to expert arrogance, political overreach, and population panic.
For three years following the arrival of the virus that causes Covid, the dominant response from governments and the public has been to be afraid and stay far away through any means possible. This has further mutated into a population-wide germophobia that is actually being promoted by elite opinion.
Steve Templeton, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute and Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Indiana University School of Medicine – Terre Haute, argues that this response is primitive, unscientific, and ultimately contrary to individual and public health. The most unhealthy populations are those which preserve immunological naivete in the presence of a virus that is otherwise going to circulate widely.
Dr. Templeton’s story is both scientific and highly personal, taking the reader through the basics of immune response and public health even while relaying his personal frustrations with trying to talk sense to others in senseless times.
If a public health response is like an immune response, then consider this book as immunization against germophobia, politicized science, a self-defeating safety culture, and misplaced faith in experts. Dr. Templeton is our guide to helping us gain a new and more robust understanding of the relationship between the microbial kingdom and our own lives.
The pandemic forecasts in the United States were very grim. Experts were predicting that 60-70 percent of the population would ultimately be infected resulting in over 1.5 million deaths in just a few months. People on social media were in an absolute panic. Stories about empty shelves and runs on toilet paper were everywhere. Those who tried to refute these doomsday predictions were shouted down and eventually silenced.
And yet, the science on the virus was very clear. Disease severity was age-stratified. Extreme measures would not drive it away and would cause a tremendous amount of collateral damage. Even if the worse-case scenarios were true, it was extremely important that we take measures based on evidence.
But eventually, the cry to “do something” became overwhelming, and the costs no longer mattered. Trying to calm people with wisdom about infectious disease became nearly pointless. Germophobia swept through society and political culture.
Hardly anyone wanted to hear the truth that microbes are everywhere, and they cannot be avoided. There are an estimated 6×10^30 bacterial cells on Earth at any given time. By any standard, this is a huge amount of biomass, second only to plants, and exceeding that of all animals by more than 30-fold.
To live at peace with the microbial kingdom requires trained immune systems, as George Carlin said years ago. That means exposure and the protection of normal social functioning even under pandemic conditions with a new virus.
Many books have been and will be written about pandemic response mistakes, and that’s a good thing. There can’t possibly be enough reflection on what went wrong, otherwise we will be doomed to follow the same path, or an even worse one, next time. This book argues that the safety-at-all-costs culture will continue to result in counterproductive policies until it is challenged at its root.
How did people in our communities and around the world get to the point of hysteria over a pandemic with a clear age-stratified and comorbidity-amplified mortality? Why were young and healthy people with very little risk for disease and death treated as if they were a grave danger to others?
It was always pointless to try to stop much less eradicate this virus. We’ve evolved with pathogens and need to learn to live with them without imposing mass psychological, social, economic, and public-health damage.
Everyone who panicked to the point of meltdown needs this book as a corrective. And even if you did not, everyone knows someone who did, public-health officials above all else.
This excerpt is from a very important book on the conflict in Ukraine: To the Last Ukrainian: An American War. It is written by Régis Le Sommier, who was embedded in both the Ukrainian and Russian armies. The account that he gives in this riveting chronicle tells of the perfidy of politicians and the tragedy of ordinary soldiers caught up as pawns in the machinations of geopolitics.
Régis Le Sommier is one of France’s great journalists whose work, spanning thirty years, has received several awards. He is the only war reporter who went to both sides of the front line with the Ukrainian and Russian armies for a year. This is his story.
You may purchase a copy of To the Last Ukrainian: An American War either from Amazon, or from Barnes and Noble.
The Strange Carl Larson
The bus stopped in the center of a village.
“This is the place,” Max announced.
We, the Frenchmen, picked up our luggage and walked about two kilometers to a place designated by the GPS on Max’s smartphone. At a bend in the road, Ukrainian soldiers came to meet us.
“We are French. We’ve come for the Ukrainian legion.”
One of the soldiers made a phone call. A few minutes later, a man of athletic build, dressed in grey and wearing a commando cap on his head, got out of a vehicle.
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“You have a military training?” He asked after shaking hands.
Max and Sabri nodded in response. This soldier was American.
“They call me the Grinch,” he said to the Frenchmen who had no idea what this nickname was supposed to mean. Neither did the Ukrainian soldiers around them.
The Grinch is the American bogeyman, a grumpy, greenish character from a Theodor Seuss Geisel cartoon, whose goal is to ruin Christmas. This cultural reference reflected the mindset of this American who naturally believed that the whole world knew about the Grinch. He announced that he was part of a team of American instructors who had come to train foreign volunteers.
“I’m here to put the internationals in order,” he told the Frenchmen. “I am in charge here. Too many people showed up at the center and they had no business being there.”
The French volunteers listened to him without saying a word. Then he moved on to instructions and declared:
“If you have international phones, you’ll have to cut them off or get local SIM cards.”
It was at this point that I told him that Noël, my sidekick, and I were journalists. Until then, he naturally thought we were volunteers. His face tightened immediately. What? Journalists who’ve dared to come out here?
The American was upset, or perhaps he realized that he had said too much? He chose to deal with the problem in a radical way:
“You don’t belong here,” he told me in an icy tone.
I protested by invoking the right to information:
“The French public has the right to know what is happening to their fellow-
citizens who’ve come to fight alongside the Ukrainians.”
The man was embarrassed. As a good American, and even though his presence here fell in the realm of clandestine operations, he believed that the right to information was sacred, that it was a virtue of his country.
Technically, he had no right to ask us to leave. So, he called his Ukrainian counterparts on the phone and, as if to pass the buck, asked them:
“You don’t want reporters, do you?”
Then he turned to me and with his white teeth gleaming announced:
“They don’t want reporters.”
He then explained his approach in a more conciliatory tone. He had come to help the Ukrainians. He was fighting for the freedom of the people, the great American classic line which I’ve hear since Iraq. However, from the way he spoke to us earlier, this individual clearly had far greater responsibilities. I’ve been around the US military in Iraq so much that I know by instinct who’s in charge, regardless of what they’re wearing.
Judging from the docile behavior of the Ukrainians around him, this man was no simple volunteer filled with good will. He could have just said that he was an instructor, that he was in charge of training, and that he was from the United States, and that would have been enough. But his commanding tone, that “I’m in charge here,” left no doubt.
I did some research on him. I found an interview he gave to the Seattle Times. His name is Carl Larson and he admits to being one of the American instructors who came to help the Ukrainian army against Russia.
But when we were listening to him with the volunteers, everyone was thinking the same thing. The scene was worthy of being in the Hall of Legends. There were also curious elements in his background. He was an Iraq War veteran. He was part of a military contingent that participated in the initial phase of the invasion. Then, he was no longer in the news. And today, was he still in the military? Was he on a mission for the Pentagon? I can’t say for sure. I tried to verify this through contacts in the American army and in French intelligence, but I did not get any answers. Cover-up is big part of the war in Ukraine.
What I can confirm is that in the recruitment of foreign volunteers to fight in Ukraine, an American veteran was in charge. Another Seattle Times article appeared about him on October 25. It said that after his assignment to select international recruits, Carl Larson trained a unit deployed to the Kharkiv front. Then he returned home. On his role in the selection of volunteers for the Ukrainian Legion, it is written that he was reluctant at the beginning, partly because of the recruits who were “unstable or without military experience.” The article went on to say that he himself was reluctant to join the Legion for fear of not being properly utilized.
“Finally, after discussions with Ukrainian officials, he agreed to select and train a unit before it went to the front.”
We had to leave quickly after we revealed ourselves to the American. We were not allowed to wish our friends well. Just a look, a little wave before they boarded an Opel Corsa, to my great surprise, registered in Essonne and driven by the American. The day after this hasty departure, Sabri explained to me in a text message that they had left by bus for a front line where they had to relieve a unit. They signed a commitment to stay until the end of the war.
Bamford is best known as America’s premiere chronicler of the ultra-secretive National Security Agency in his books The Puzzle Palace and The Shadow Factory.
Unlike most authors published through mainstream publishing houses, Bamford has not held back on exposing extremely damaging and behind the scenes exploits of Israel and its lobby in this damning look at U.S. counterintelligence. That was a shock to the second most prominent reader reviewer on Amazon.com who claimed, “I did not expect a full-throated anti-Israel screed completely devoid of nuance or historical context.” Most other reviewers were much more appreciative of Bamford’s honest take.
Among the most scandalous episodes chronicled in Spy Fail are stunning new details about Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan’s espionage and weapons smuggling operations targeting the United States.
Bamford follows Milchan’s early efforts to prop up apartheid South Africa through well paid weapons dealing and propaganda, including the production of feel good theatrical works depicting exploited blacks as happy with their lot in South Africa. Milchan’s recruitment into Israel’s Bureau of Scientific Relations Lakam spy agency then leaves him scouring the U.S. for nuclear weapons related technology.
Since Israel had already stolen enough U.S. weapons grade uranium to build atomic bombs from NUMEC, Milchan was tasked to obtain high speed switches that could provide the precisely timed pulses to trigger a detonation. Milchan recruited the hapless Richard Kelly Smyth to set up the front company “Milco” in Huntington Beach California by bedazzling the failing businessman with stars and starlets at his Hollywood parties.
Smyth provided the triggers and many other export prohibited items, but always managed to give away what he was doing to vigilant federal government authorities. Smyth (but not Milchan) was eventually indicted and fled overseas. When he sought help, Milchan ghosted him while working to stay ahead of the law.
Milchan benefitted from mainstream press support to spread the word that the billionaire had no idea what was going on in his global network of companies. Perhaps the most valuable diversion was the New York Time’s Tom Friedman who quickly got wind of the Smyth indictment and promoted Milchan’s innocence. While Bamford mentions the Netanyahu-Milchan connection he does not delve into Smyth’s revelation that Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked inside the “Project Pinto” krytron smuggling network at the Israel based Heli Trading company. Heli executed the purchase orders from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for export controlled items Milco misclassified and exported.
The devolution of the Milchan Netanyahu relationship is perhaps the most important revelation of extreme current relevance in the book. Milchan pressed Netanyahu to pressure U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for a 10-year visa after the agency—finally wise to Milchan’s espionage—refused to renew it. The feckless John Kerry eventually acquiesced to Netanyahu and issued the visa. To this day Milchan continues to produce blockbusters and allegedly dodge taxes in the U.S.
But just as Milchan burned Smyth, Netanyahu began pumping Milchan for endless boxes of expensive cigars—“leaves”—and cases of $400 per bottle champagne—“bubbles”—and other gifts for his wife in exchange for the visa favor. Bamford’s depiction of this shakedown is as detailed as it is relentless.
The resultant Israeli corruption cases against Netanyahu have recently led him to seek judicial reforms, which could give his coalition power to shut the cases down. Netanyahu’s initiative has torn Israel apart and put the country on the verge of civil war as protesters sought to stop the gutting of court oversight.
Americans who read and fully digest Spyfail will come away with new insights about how the politicization of American counterintelligence produces media frenzies and scapegoats—such as Maria Butina—while continually steering clear of Israel’s hugely damaging covert intelligence operations against the U.S. Bamford pins this impunity squarely on the Israel lobby and the oversize role it plays in financing the political careers of ever-compliant U.S. elected officials and their political appointees.
Grant F. Smith is director of IRmep and forced the declassification and release of many of the NUMEC and “Project Pinto” documents cited in this book through FOIA lawsuits.
For makers of the swine flu vaccine, 2009 was a year to remember. By June, CSL Limited’s annual profits had risen 63 percent over 2008. GlaxoSmithKine’s 2009 earnings spiked 30 percent in the third quarter alone, to $2.19 billion. Roche made a stunning 12 times more in the second quarter of 2009 than of 2008. But in 2010, drug companies may get their comeuppance.
On Tuesday, the Council of Europe launched an investigation into whether the World Health Organization “faked” the swine flu pandemic to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers. The inquiry, held in Strasbourg, France, vindicates a worldwide movement of insiders, experts, and elected officials who accuse the United Nations organization of misleading the world into buying millions of unnecessary vaccines.
“I have never heard such a worldwide echo to a health political action,” Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, an epidemiologist who formerly led the health committee for the Council of Europe, said at Tuesday’s hearing.
Dr. Ulrich Keil, director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, hammered his own organization and WHO’s flu chief, Dr Keiji Fukuda, for “producing angst campaigns”.
“With SARS, with avian flu, always the predictions are wrong…Why don’t we learn from history?” Keil said. “It [swine flu] produced a lot of turmoil in the pubic and was completely exaggerated in contrast with all the really important matters we have to deal with in public health.” … continue
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In 1975, Philip Agee published his book Inside the Company: CIA Diary. In the introduction, he wrote: “When I joined the CIA, I believed in the need for its existence. After twelve years with the agency I finally understood how much suffering it was causing, that millions of people all over the world had been killed or had their lives destroyed by the CIA and the institutions it supports. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing and so began work on this book.”
Fear of a Microbial Planet
The bus stopped in the center of a village.
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