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How to Use Blood Testing to Increase Your Resilience to COVID

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | August 29, 2021

In this interview, Thomas Lewis, Ph.D., and Dr. Michael Carter explain how biomarker panels can help you take control of your health by identifying underlying chronic infections that might be sabotaging your health. Lewis is a microbiologist with a Ph.D. from MIT and certifications from the Harvard School of Public Health and Carter is an integrative physician.

They run a company that performs diagnostic testing to guide patients through a process of diagnosing various ailments. Biomarkers such as D-dimer, fibrinogen, clotting factors and auto antibodies, which are largely ignored by the mainstream, can clue you in on where you lie on a health/disease continuum.

Importantly, poor COVID outcomes are rare unless you have two or more comorbidities, and in the last year, they’ve developed a more refined way of assessing an individual’s COVID-19 risk using a panel of specific markers associated with inflammation and blood clotting.

Their testing helps YOU understand where you are on the health-disease continuum. In their model, you are not either sick or well — you are somewhere on this continuum. Find out where you are and then work to improve your status.

“Really, it’s your chronic health status that helps you figure out where you are in the continuum for COVID risk,” Lewis explains. The same goes for the COVID shot. According to Lewis, whether you got COVID-19 or the vaccine, the risk factors that determine whether you’ll have a serious bout of COVID-19 or experience more serious adverse events from the shot are identical.

The Role of Underlying Infections

Underlying or latent infections can play a significant role not only in chronic disease but also in SARS-CoV-2 infection. Judy Mikovits, Ph.D., has pointed out the role of retroviruses and coinfections with pathogens such as borellia and babesia in leading to less favorable outcomes in COVID.

Her hypothesis is that SARS-CoV-2 in and of itself is not the primary cause of COVID-19. She’s convinced there must be a coinfection along with SARS-CoV-2 that suppresses or compromises your immune system in order for symptomatic COVID-19 to occur.

Carter and Lewis have discovered a number of infectious pathogens that are even more prolific than those highlighted by Mikovits, and which appear central in triggering many chronic conditions that then predispose you to more severe COVID-19.

Primary among those are bacteria involved in periodontal disease (periodontitis). You don’t have to have oral issues or root canals to have a high burden of periodontal pathogens. The Lewis/Carter team test for these pathogens using an oral DNA home test kit.

Another is chlamydia pneumoniae, a respiratory pathogen that 60% to 70% of older adults have antibodies against. Chlamydia pneumoniae plays a role in several common age-related conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease and rheumatoid arthritis. Unfortunately, few are ever tested for the presence of this organism.

According to Lewis and Carter, inflammatory markers and clotting markers such as C-reactive protein, fibrinogen, uric acid, the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio, D-dimer, and sedimentation (SED) rate are strongly associated with innate immune response activity and chronic infections, which in turn correlate with COVID-19 severity.

“What’s tricky about these organisms is they don’t always show up from the classic acute perspective of diagnostic,” Lewis says. “If you talk to any infectious disease doctor that’s not functional in nature, they’ll say that the IgG antibody is historic. But I can guarantee you they’re completely wrong.

They’re not looking at things from a chronic, stealth [perspective]. Do we think chickenpox, the herpes zoster virus, is the only organism that can cause problems and then go dormant and reactivate when you’re immune-compromised later in life? No.

Every single one of these organisms has a potential opportunity to go from an acute phase to a chronic phase. Some never even express acute disease. They just hang out in biofilms and will express in the chronic phase later in life, causing disease of “unknown” origin!

It’s called crypticity, which makes it extremely difficult to create, in the minds of doctors and researchers, the association between the disease and the exposure. Sometimes these exposures are congenital. They happened pre-birth. So, that’s really the art.”

So, to clarify the hypothesis presented by Lewis and Carter, the conventional view is that these infections, once they’ve generated an IgG antibody response, no longer pose a threat to your body. But this isn’t the case.

They can indeed lay dormant only to later contribute to chronic diseases that, on the surface, appear to have nothing to do with a pathogenic infection. The book by Paul Ewald titled, “Plague Time: The New Germ Theory of Disease,” written in 2000, explains well this conundrum.

How to Identify Underlying Infections

The clinical approach to identifying whether an underlying infection is at play in a particular disease is to look at antibody levels. Immunoglobulin G (IgG) is reflective of long-term protection and also happens to be the most common antibody, found in blood and other body fluids. It protects against both viral and bacterial infections and tends to be elevated when the infection has reached a chronic state.

Immunoglobulin M (IgM) is associated with acute responses to infections and is found primarily in your blood and lymph. It’s the first antibody to be made when your body encounters a new pathogen. Carter explains:

“Everyone has a baseline level of IgG and IgM, especially in the acute phases, but the long-term IgG, once it is above the normal background level, then in many cases, especially in those who are symptomatic with various diseases, there is reactivation of that virus, bacteria, parasite or other pathogen, what have you — any grouping of these organisms that can smolder and cause disease patterns.

The driver is inflammation and tissue destruction. The mechanism is simple. We all have some “wear and tear.” These organisms increase wear and tear so your “repair and recovery” pathways cannot keep up.

We also — even without doing those IgG levels, just on our basic platform of biomarker testing — can see things in the complete blood count where, let’s say our white blood cell count has a ‘normal range’ somewhere between 3.8 and 10.8 depending on the lab. But that’s a very wide normal range.

Really, anything above 6.2, in terms of your white blood cell count, is an indicator that something is brewing. When we start looking deeper at the neutrophils, the lymphocytes, the basophils, the monocytes and eosinophils, when those values are increased or decreased beyond the optimal range, we can tell that there are critters being unruly even though you don’t have fever, chills or a classic increase in white blood cell count.

So, we know that these pathogens are present in everyone. It’s really incumbent upon your own immune system to be vigilant to keep them at bay and stop them from replicating.”

In summary, if you have elevations (or suppressions) in white blood cell markers, then you likely have an infectious process going on in your body. There’s also typically a direct correlation between your antibody level and the risk of disease, so the higher your antibody level, the greater your risk of chronic disease and poor COVID / JAB outcomes.

PCR testing can be useful for identifying a specific pathogen. However, if excessively high cycle thresholds (CTs) are used (as has been the rule when testing for SARS-CoV-2), the test becomes useless, as it can find even a single molecule if run at a high-enough CT. So, the CT needs to be below 26 to avoid false positives.

Review of Lewis and Carter’s Research

Before we go further, here’s how Lewis describes their research, and how it can improve your health and medical decisions:

“Carter and I are not researchers. We like to fancy ourselves translators of best clinical research. There’s really great science published, but medicine is a business decision. Less than 1% of the great medical research makes it to clinical practice.

We had the opportunity to evaluate 100 people at a Fortune1000 company. Based on that, we made an assumption that, because of their health status, 42 of them had some sort of an infectious process.

So, we were given license to test IgM, IgG, bacterial [and] viral. Forty-one of 42 were positive using our testing. Now, we’re not looking for everything in the universe. We’re telling the lab what to look for: what we call ‘usual suspects.’ Some of them had IgM and IgG, and some of them just had IgG with a negative IgM for a single or multiple pathogens.

When we treated them over nine months, everyone got better. What was remarkable is IgG levels [indicative of chronic infection] came down. When someone had a negative IgM but a positive IgG and symptoms, and their IgG level came down, they got better too. This proves that IgG is indicative of the presence of a “hidden” but chronically active infection.

So that’s not an extraordinarily scientific evaluation, but it’s completely consistent with the work of folks like Charles Stratton out of Vanderbilt, who’s written about chlamydia pneumoniae and its three different life forms.”

There are many other researchers and clinicians who have come to this conclusion. Lewis and Carter are in the process of publishing a peer-review medical paper that references many other publications explaining how important an IgG antibody test is.

Treating Chronic Versus Acute Infections

Carter and Lewis have developed a pretreatment program, followed by a variety of treatment strategies aimed at chronic infections. As you might expect, the chronic infection treatments involve more aggressive approaches, and will depend on whether the infection is caused by bacteria, viruses or parasites.

The biggest factor for effective treatment is eradicating pathogens hiding in biofilm, which takes time. (We do not address the use of specific remedies in this interview, as each patient must be tested, seeing how there’s such a broad array of potential causal factors.)

As noted by Lewis, even if you use a broad-spectrum anti-infective, such as ozone, you’ll rarely eradicate enough of the chronic phase of these organisms, as they shelter inside biofilms or inside your cells — including your white blood cells. that are very difficult to get into. These pathogens are often referred to as “obligate intracellular pathogens.” The “obligate” part infers that these harmful organisms rob your energy by mimicing to be your mitochondria. He explains:

“For long periods of time, you have to maintain a physiologically anti-infective dose. The other piece of it that we’ve learned, [and which] everybody knows much better now because of COVID-19, is the inflammatory component. There’s no question that the inflammatory response can override, go too far, even in chronic conditions.

There’s a brilliant paper by Australian groups that talk about cytokines, anti-inflammatory treatments and their clinical relevance.

The biggest problem we face is that, if you bang your elbow and your brain at the same time with the same sort of force, your elbow will recover in a couple weeks, but the brain perpetuates inflammation much longer, and sometimes forever. Consider traumatic brain injury as an example. It happened one time a while ago, but your brain stays “inflamed.”

So, every treatment has to consider an infectious [risk], has to consider lifestyle risks, and help you optimize those things. But generally, there has to be a very strong anti-inflammatory component, which … has to be rigorous and continuous. That’s the big challenge …

Dr. Stratton at Vanderbilt has shown that these organisms can live in an elementary body, a reticular body, and a “cryptic” phase. In some of these phases they’re completely refractory [i.e., resistant] to antibiotic treatment …

J. Thomas Grayson, 95 years old, [a doctor of] preventive medicine at University of Washington … showed that … when it comes to organisms like chlamydia pneumoniae, you have to treat for one year. That’s scary for people, so what we do is we do three-month segments and then retest. Obviously, we measure for symptoms, but also the IgG.”

The Role of Vitamin D

A basic intervention that is really important for shoring up your immune system is vitamin D. Vitamin D is really a pro-hormone and hormones regulate physiological processes. I believe vitamin D optimization — making sure your blood level is between 60 ng/mL and 80 ng/mL (150 nmol/L and 200 nmol/L) — is one of the easiest, least expensive and most important things you can do to avoid infections of all kinds, including COVID-19.

The activated form of “vitamin” D is produced in your liver when you have an infection and it is strongly antibiotic. Lewis and Carter recently completed a study in which they looked at the vitamin D level compared to neutrophil and lymphocyte ratio. Lewis explains:

“Neutrophils go up with bacteria. Lymphocytes often go down with viral infections, so [your neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio] is sort of a measure of your overall infectious burden.

What we did recently, and we’re putting this into a paper we’ll be publishing, is a study of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio versus blood 25 hydroxy vitamin D levels. We saw a very clear linear relationship between a bad neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio count and low vitamin D, and then just the opposite.”

They’ve also found a similar correlation between chronic infection and free cholesterol (not total cholesterol). This correlation appears particularly strong in those with cancer, who typically have a free cholesterol level of 50 ng/mL and above. An optimal level is thought to be somewhere between 5 ng/mL and 20 ng/mL, with the healthiest of people typically falling between 5 ng/mL and 15 ng/mL.

When free cholesterol is elevated, you’re more prone to tissue destruction, as cholesterol is an important repair molecule. Since your cholesterol level can indicate your tissue repair capability, it is also included in Lewis’ and Carter’s COVID panel.

“Cancer patients are, I think, just the tip of the iceberg in terms of people that have some virulent infectious process that is destroying tissue,” Lewis says. “I’m pretty sure we’re going to see a very strong correlation to your free cholesterol number as part of the portfolio of tests you want to do to investigate what is going on inside your body.”

How Do You Know if an Infection Is Chronic?

One way to determine whether you’re suffering from an acute or chronic infection is to look at the half-life of the factors being measured. Lewis explains:

“If you take a test now and in three months and you see a sustained trend of biomarker elevation, that’s obviously a way to relate it to chronic infection. But in a single test, every biomarker has a half-life. Red blood cell distribution width, because it’s tied to red blood cells, it’ll stick around for four months.

It has a much longer half-life than say C-reactive protein. If you bang your knee, [C-reactive protein] will go way up, then come down with the half-life of one and a half days.

Fibrinogen is seven days. When you understand half-lives, then when you look at a single lab and they’re all elevated to sort of the exact same extent above what we consider our baseline, then we know it’s chronic, or at least with a very educated guess, that it’s in the chronic phase.”

What’s in the Panel?

Speaking to the issue of what the panel Lewis and Carter developed contains, Carter explains:

“A typical panel … is a very concise panel of blood biomarkers. We expand that with the inflammatory markers that really play a role [in chronic infections].

So, if your homocysteine and C-reactive protein are up, these are key inflammatory markers that many people are walking around with that are high and that are really directly causing toxicity to the [blood]vessels, [thereby] leading to coronary artery disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s and a whole host of things. Almost every chronic disease starts in the vessels — more specifically the capillaries.

High sensitivity C-reactive protein is another inflammatory marker that when elevated is really indicative of pathogens in the mouth, among other things. That is one thing that is totally missed by traditional doctors [but] is a key component. The oral testing we do includes Interleukin-6 that tracks closely with C-reactive protein.

If you’ve had root canals or wisdom teeth taken out, or have bleeding gums, [we can] test to see the vast array of pathogens that we know are associated with pretty much every disease syndrome out there.

So, we take these things that have been invisible to the masses and bring it at an affordable cost structure. We have a very robust panel of 55 biomarkers that runs about $150, including vitamin D … If you were to take that same panel, it would be $400 to $500 if you were to go directly to LabCorp.

However, we highly recommend you get this testing from us with a one-hour consult included because of our unique way of explaining the “story” behind your biomarkers — and what you can do to take control of your health. Even with the consult, our pricing is less compared to the labs alone from most places.”

In addition to helping you evaluate your chronic disease risk, this panel will also help you assess your COVID-19 risk. They also offer an advanced panel that is even more comprehensive. It costs about $400 and includes a one-hour consultation to help you understand what all the markers mean.

As noted by Lewis, “It’s all about where do you lie on the health/disease continuum. We very accurately are placing people on that, and there’s not a marker we test for that’s not modifiable through lifestyle or other appropriate interventions. We’re not treating symptoms. We’re going right at the disease.”

Where to Get the Panel

If you’re interested in ordering this panel, go to HealthRevivalPartners.com. If you want to get the comprehensive COVID / JAB risk screening panel, go to www.healthrevivalpartners.com/post-jab-tests. You will be asked to fill out a questionnaire, after which you receive a requisition to have your blood drawn at a LabCorp.

The report you get will be a comprehensive and detailed report from Health Revival Partners in addition to the standard lab report. Carter explains:

“It really starts with the initial questionnaire and we give you a grade from A to F. We wanted to make it so that the average person could really see what is going on in a very tangible fashion. Obviously, you answer 125 questions that are much more probing than your traditional questionnaire.

If you end up with a grade of C, D or F, then that tells you your report card of health is not so good. Then we give guidelines on those questions. When you do your biomarker test, we give you a temperature. It’s called your chronic disease temperature and of course 98.6 is a normal temperature.

When we do the biomarkers, we look at optimal ranges, not just normal ranges. We want everyone to be optimal, not just normal. When those values are either too high or too low out of the optimal range, then you get a corresponding increase in your temperature.

Our “normal” ranges are best on early mortality data for each biomarker. Our normal levels are much tighter compared to the standard of care. We are looking for chronic (smoldering) whereas they are only looking to see if you are very sick or acutely sick.

So now you can have a temperature of, say, 103 based on high homocysteine, high C-reactive protein, high fibrinogen, high white blood cell count and various other biomarkers. We’re testing 55 biomarkers, but 21 of them really home in on and create that temperature setting … Even more biomarkers are part of the COVID panel.

When you correlate that to COVID, we have a little analogy of what’s in your glass. If your glass is a quarter-full, half-full, three-quarters full, you could be walking around with all of these different things: toxins, pesticides, subacute infections.

When your glass gets full and overflowing, then generally that’s going to express as disease. We show where people are on that continuum. How full is your glass of these different things? With the biomarker panel, that gives us a great window [into your COVID risk].”

Building a Stronger Foundation for Functional Medicine

Again, to learn more, and to join the Health Revival Partners’ chronic disease support program, go to HealthRevivalPartners.com. In closing, Lewis notes:

“Integrative and functional medicine is like herding cats. They got into that because they’re outliers, but I’ve been trying to get some of the highest-level leadership in functional medicine to create a core standard of labs that every doctor takes because the biggest reason why you’re not getting served well in medicine today is because the dark side is saying we don’t have the evidence.

One of Carter’s and my life’s goals is to herd the functional integrative cats together to build standards, and I think we’ve done a very good job of creating a very important end-point standard that I think anybody could hang their hat on. That’s early mortality. So, we really want to do that.

“The other part of it is we wrote a peer-reviewed paper1 last year, and we coined the term the ‘pre-cytokine storm.’ Carter talked about your glass being a quarter-full, half-full or overflowing. Measuring your pre-cytokine storm — which our panel incorporates, and then our COVID panel expands even more, so either of those panels are available to anybody that comes to our site — will tell you what your risk factors are.

Your blood doesn’t lie. So, what I’m hoping people will do is become part of the solution. Take the COVID and the vaccine survey, get your COVID risks labs drawn, and then we’ll be able to report back to you and publish peer-reviewed articles about this correlation that right now we’re all being marginalized on because we’re not creating enough evidence.

Judy [Mikovits] knows exactly what’s going on, but to convince the world, we’ve got to get more conventional and functional lab data in large sets to prove our point. That’s how we’re going to start winning, with evidence-based functional medicine.”

August 29, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Who Is ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’?

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | Children’s Health Defense | August 25, 2021

Today, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a household hero to half of America. Drug companies, government officials and the pharma-funded corporate media invoke his name to justify lockdowns, masks and experimental vaccines. The other half do not look on him favourably.

A recent editorial in a leading medical journal urged Congress to make it a felony to publicly criticize Dr. Fauci.

Encouraging his own deification, Dr. Fauci has declared that all those who questioned his pronouncements are “anti-science.”

But who is Dr. Fauci really?

In my new book, I show that Dr. Fauci has done little to earn the sobriquet  “America’s Doctor.”

Instead, he has survived 50 years as the J. Edgar Hoover of public health by consistently prioritizing Big Pharma profits over the welfare of his countrymen, and through mercenary homage to the chemical and agricultural industry, the military industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus and all the other pushers of pills, potions, powders, poisons, pricks and the police state.

During more than a year of painstaking and meticulous research, I unearthed a shocking story that obliterates the obsequious media’s spin on Dr. Fauci … and that will alarm every American — Democrat or Republican — who cares about democracy, our Constitution and the future of our children’s health.

In my book I reveal how Fauci:

  • has been the principal architect of “agency capture” — the subversion of democracy by a drug industry that manipulates regulators like sock puppets.
  • failed dismally over his 50-year career with the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to address the cause, to prevent or cure the exploding epidemics of allergies and chronic disease that Congress charged him with curtailing. The chronic disease pandemic is his enduring legacy. Those ailments now debilitate 54 percent of American children compared to 6 percent when he joined NIAD.
  • repeatedly used fraud, bullying, intimidation, dissembling and falsified science to win approval for worthless and deadly drugs and vaccines.
  • sabotaged safe and effective off-patent therapeutic treatments for AIDS while promoting deadly chemotherapy drugs that almost certainly caused more deaths than HIV.
  • transformed NIAD from a public health regulator into an incubator for pharmaceutical drugs for which he and his trusted deputies often file patents and collect royalties. Dr. Fauci has claimed Moderna vaccine patent rights worth billions of dollars for NIAD and hand-picked at least four of his NIAD underlings to receive $150,000 annually from royalties.
  • exercises dictatorial control over the army of “knowledge-and-innovation” leaders who appear nightly on TV to parrot his orthodoxies and “debunk” his opponents who run his crooked clinical trials globally and who populate the “independent” federal panels that approve and mandate drugs and vaccines — including the committees that allowed the Emergency Use Authorization of COVID-19 vaccines.
  • violated federal law to allow his pharma partners to sacrifice and kill hundreds of impoverished and dark-skinned children and orphans in the U.S and Africa as lab rats in deadly experiments with toxic AIDS and cancer chemotherapies.
  • repeatedly concocted and weaponized fraudulent pandemics, including bird flu (2005), swine flu (2009) and Zika (2015-2016), in order to sell novel vaccines.
  • partnered with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies to conduct “gain-of-function” experiments to breed pandemic superbugs in poorly regulated labs in Wuhan, China  and elsewhere, under conditions that virtually guaranteed the escape of weaponized microbes like SARS-CoV-2.

That’s just the short list.

Dr. Fauci and his band of pharma and Silicon Valley profiteers — working with corrupted politicians, captured federal agencies and the bought and brain-dead mainstream media — have used the COVID pandemic to mint billions from vaccines and other profitable medicines.

His disastrous mismanagement ran up one of the biggest COVID death counts among all nations.

Dr. Fauci has led the crusade to suppress functional remedies like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine which could have avoided 80 percent of the deaths and hospitalizations from COVID and ended the pandemic overnight.

We need to stop Dr. Fauci and the coup d’état against the Constitution, human rights and liberal democracy globally.

Because this book threatens their trillion-dollar vaccine enterprise, Dr. Fauci and his allies in the medical cartel, the media and military will hurl fierce criticism and use censorship — to debunk and silence “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

With your help, this book can play a transformational role in exposing Dr. Fauci as a charlatan and quack and in showing the world that Dr. Fauci, far from being a healer, is one the most noteworthy mass murderers in human history. 

It is my hope that this book will motivate — and mobilize — millions more advocates for truth, health and democracy.

“The Real Anthony Fauci” publication date is Nov. 9. By pre-ordering your copy today, you’ll help push the book to bestseller status, diminishing the powers of the censors to silence me. Thank you.

August 25, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Cult Of “Science” Has Got To Be Smashed

By Tom Woods | Principia Scientific | August 6, 2021

Should we trust people who claim to be speaking in the name of science?

Someone on Twitter just posted this, thinking himself profound:

“If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.”

Saifedean Ammous, a great friend of the Tom Woods Show, wasn’t about to let this stand.

Before going any further, let me add this: after the past 18 months, I think the dangers and absurdities of scientism have become clear enough.

“Science” does not and is not intended to have the answers to all questions. It does not and cannot tell us what we should value, what our priorities should be, whether certain behaviors are morally acceptable or indeed required, etc.

Staring longingly at men in white coats, seeking the meaning of life, is superstition of the worst kind.

Not to mention: the standard story of how science progresses is completely wrong. We do not move forward because government-subsidized men in lab coats play around in laboratories doing “basic science” untainted by mundane concerns.

It is generally men of action who actually do the work.

Now for Saifedean:

The Wright brothers and a century of airplane builders were engineers. Scientists first dismissed flight as impossible even after it happened, then made up a bunch of irrelevant equations to pretend to explain how it happened.

Everything that matters to our modern life was built by engineers and workers who got their hands dirty. Scientists sat in cushy universities writing textbooks after the fact indoctrinating generations to think it was their post-hoc explanations that built things.

Lord Kelvin was one of the world’s most important scientists when airplanes were invented. This is what he thought:

“I have not the smallest molecule of faith in aerial navigation other than ballooning, or of the expectation of good results from any of the trials we heard of.”

Astronomer and polymath Simon Newcomb in 1903:

“Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.”

This was the same year in which the Wright Brothers,  two bicycle shop owner high school dropouts, built the first working airplane.

Three years after the Wright Brothers flew, The London Times dismissed their claims of flight as fake, and was instead writing:

“All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to human life, but foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint.”

The first commercial steam engine was invented by Simon Newcomen, a barely literate ironmonger who had never come in contact with a scientist. James Watt was a technician, not a scientist, and explicitly denied that any scientific theories influenced his invention.

The scientific method is practiced by engineers building things, experimenting to see what works. Professional science consists mostly of nerds quibbling over each other’s irrelevant papers and agreeing they all need more funding.

Nothing in science needs trust. I don’t trust anyone to get in an airplane. I look at the track record of airplanes and decide the risks are acceptable given the benefits. “Trust science” is how you end up with billions of lives destroyed over virus hysteria.

I love Saifedean.

The real story of science, again, is something like the opposite of what we’ve been told. Not to mention: countries that heavily subsidized science in the nineteenth century lagged behind the UK, which spent no government money.

I tell the story in my 2011 book Rollback, but the classic treatment is Terence Kealey, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research.

At Liberty Classroom, my dashboard university, we don’t go in for cutesy myths about how the world works. We tell the un-p.c. truth, every time.

August 6, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Authoritarians Drunk on Power: It Is Time to Recalibrate the Government

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | July 27, 2021

It is time to recalibrate the government.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

This COVID-19 pandemic has provided the government with the perfect excuse to lay claim to a long laundry list of terrifying lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level) that override the Constitution: the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, reshape financial markets, create a digital currency (and thus further restrict the use of cash), determine who should live or die, and impose health mandates on large segments of the population.

These kinds of crises tend to bring out the authoritarian tendencies in government.

That’s no surprise: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

So what we can do to wrest back control over a runaway government and an imperial presidency?

It won’t be easy.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

In other words, the American police state is alive and well and flourishing.

We have arrived at the dystopian future depicted in the 2005 film V for Vendetta, which is no future at all.

Set in the year 2020, V for Vendetta provides an eerie glimpse into a parallel universe in which a government-engineered virus wreaks havoc on the world. Capitalizing on the people’s fear, a totalitarian government comes to power that knows all, sees all, controls everything and promises safety and security above all.

Concentration camps (jails, private prisons and detention facilities) have been established to house political prisoners and others deemed to be enemies of the state. Executions of undesirables (extremists, troublemakers and the like) are common, while other enemies of the state are made to “disappear.” Populist uprisings and protests are met with extreme force. The television networks are controlled by the government with the purpose of perpetuating the regime. And most of the population is hooked into an entertainment mode and are clueless.

Sounds painfully familiar, doesn’t it?

In V for Vendetta, as in my new novel The Erik Blair Diaries, it takes an act of terrorism for the people to finally mobilize and stand up to the government’s tyranny: in Vendetta, V the film’s masked crusader blows up the seat of government, while in Erik Blair, freedom fighters plot to unmask the Deep State.

These acts of desperation and outright anarchy are what happens when a parasitical government muzzles the citizenry, fences them in, herds them, brands them, whips them into submission, forces them to ante up the sweat of their brows while giving them little in return, and then provides them with little to no outlet for voicing their discontent: people get desperate, citizens lose hope, and lawful, nonviolent resistance gives way to unlawful, violent resistance.

This way lies madness.

Then again, this madness may be unavoidable unless we can wrest back control over our runaway government starting at the local level.

How to do this? It’s not rocket science.

There is no 10-step plan. If there were a 10-step plan, however, the first step would be as follows: turn off the televisions, tune out the politicians, and do your part to stand up for freedom principles in your own communities.

Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree. Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc. Vote like Americans, for a change, not Republicans or Democrats.

Most of all, use your power—and there is power in our numbers—to nullify anything and everything the government does that undermines the freedom principles on which this nation was founded.

Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it. If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it. Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it.

That’s their job: make them do it.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

The police state does not discriminate. Eventually, we will all suffer the same fate.


Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

July 28, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Film Review | , | Leave a comment

Joseph P. Kennedy, the Cursed Peacemaker

BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 10, 2021

There can be no complete understanding of John Kennedy without some understanding of his father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, for this is where he came from, not only in his own eyes and those of his friends, but in the eyes of his enemies too. The same is true for his brother Robert, of course.

I have emphasized before that, although very different in character, John and Robert Kennedy may be seen, from the point of view of their historical significance, as one person killed twice. But it should be stressed that their unity was grounded in their filial piety. I learned from David Nasaw’s biography, The PatriarchThe Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (2012), that it was their father Joe who insisted that Jack name Bobby Attorney General, because “Jack needed someone in the cabinet in whom he had complete and absolute trust.” Robert didn’t like the idea, arguing that “nepotism was a problem,” and John was reluctant to pressure Bobby.

He decided to offer Bobby the number two position at the Defense Department and asked Clark Clifford, who was running his transition team, to go to New York to explain to [Joe] Kennedy, who had flown there after visiting Jackie and his new grandson in the hospital, why Bobby should not be named attorney general. Clifford agreed, though he thought it rather odd that the president-elect had asked “a third party to try to talk to his father about his brother.” Clifford met Kennedy at Kennedy’s apartment and presented his carefully rehearsed case against the appointment. “I was pleased with my presentation; it was, I thought, persuasive. When I had finished, Kennedy said, ‘Thank you very much, Clark. I am so glad to have heard your views.’ Then, pausing a moment, he said, ‘I do want to leave you with one thought, however — one firm thought.’ He paused again, and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Bobby is going to be Attorney General. All of us have worked our tails off for Jack, and now that we have succeeded I am going to see to it that Bobby gets the same chance that we gave to Jack.’ I would always,” Clifford recalled years later, “remember the intense but matter-of-fact tone with which he had spoken — there was no rancor, no anger, no challenge.” The father had spoken, and his sons, on this issue at least, were expected to obey.[1]

Although there is no recorded statement to that effect, Joe probably envisioned that Robert could succeed Jack as president in 1968. And it is easy to imagine that, had John survived and been reelected in 1964, Robert, with John’s support and under his watch, could have inherited the White House. We may ponder what the world would be like today had there been Kennedys in the White House until 1976.

John and Robert shared a common horror of modern war, and that, too, was their father’s legacy. John was a genuine war hero decorated with the Navy and Marine Medal for “extremely heroic conduct.” Yet on Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945, as a young journalist covering the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco, he wrote in the Herald-American: “Any man who had risked his life for his country and seen his friends killed around him must inevitably wonder why this has happened to him and most important what good will it do. . . . it is not surprising that they should question the worth of their sacrifice and feel somewhat betrayed.”[2] When announcing his candidacy for Congress on April 22, 1946, JFK declared: “Above all, day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we must work for peace. We must not have another war.”[3] Hugh Sidey, one of his journalist friends, wrote about him: “If I had to single out one element in Kennedy’s life that more than anything else influenced his later leadership it would be a horror of war, a total revulsion over the terrible toll that modern war had taken on individuals, nations, and societies, and the even worse prospects in the nuclear age. . . . It ran even deeper than his considerable public rhetoric on the issue.”[4] John once said to his friend Ben Bradlee that he believed that “the primary function of the president of the United States [was] to keep the country out of war.”[5]

That was the conviction that had guided his father throughout his political life in Franklin Roosevelt’s government, until his resignation in December 1940. As U.S. ambassador to London, Joe Kennedy wholeheartedly supported Neville Chamberlain’s policy of “appeasement” in 1938-39. He wanted peace as passionately as Churchill wanted war. “I am pro-peace, I pray, hope, and work for peace,” Joe declared on his first return from London to the U.S. in December 1938.[6] For this, he ended in the wrong side of history, which Churchill took care to write himself.

The Stain of Appeasement

Like his father, President Kennedy was a determined peacemaker, and those in the Pentagon who wanted to push the U.S. into a third world war tried to destabilize him with insinuations that he was an appeaser like his father. On October 19, 1962, in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as Kennedy resolved to blockade Soviet shipments rather than bomb and invade Cuba, General Curtis LeMay scornfully told him, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich . . . I just don’t see any other solution except direct military intervention right now.”[7]

The stain of his father’s record as a Hitler-appeaser had followed John like a shadow. Although the press had not published it, it was no secret in the Pentagon and the CIA that the U.S. army had discovered in 1946, in Berlin’s Foreign Office, reports about Joe’s meetings with German ambassador von Ribbentrop and his successor von Dirksen, that said that Joe was Germany’s “best friend” in London and “understood our Jewish policy completely.”[8]

Ambassadors Joseph P. Kennedy and Joachim von Ribbentrop

In a joint debate during the 1960 Democratic convention, Johnson had attacked John as being the son of a “Chamberlain umbrella man” who “thought Hitler was right.”[9] During Kennedy’s presidential campaign, the Israeli press worried that Kennedy’s father “never loved the Jews and therefore there is a question about whether the father did not inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his son John’s.”[10] Abraham Feinberg recalls that when he invited Kennedy to his apartment to discuss his campaign funding with “all the leading Jews,” one of them set the tone with this remark: “Jack, everybody knows the reputation of your father concerning Jews and Hitler. And everybody knows that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Kennedy came back outraged from that meeting (but with the promise of $500,000).[11] When meeting the new president on May 30, 1961 in New York, Ben-Gurion could not help but see in him the son of a Hitler-appeaser. Feinberg (who arranged the meeting) recalls that “Ben-Gurion could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy].”[12]

Is Joe’s bad reputation among Jews relevant to the assassination of his two sons? Many Jewish authors think it is. In his book The Kennedy Curse, purporting to explain “why tragedy has haunted America’s first family for 150 years”, Edward Klein links the “Kennedy curse” to Joe’s anti-Semitism, citing a story “told in mystical Jewish circles” (perhaps made up by Klein) according to which, in “retaliation” to some remark Joe made to “Israel Jacobson, a poor Lubavitcher rabbi and six of his yeshiva students, who were fleeing the Nazis,” “Rabbi Jacobson put a curse on Kennedy, damning him and all his male offspring to tragic fates.”[13] Ronald Kessler, for his part, wrote a book titled, The Sins of the Father — a not so subtle allusion to Exodus 20:5: “I, Yahweh, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” Naturally, for Kessler, Joe Kennedy’s worst sin was that “he was a documented anti-Semite and an appeaser of Adolf Hitler” who “admired the Nazis.”[14]

The “Kennedy curse” did run into the third generation and possibly the fourth, when John’s only son died in a suspicious plane accident on July 16, 1999, with his wife, possibly pregnant. Five days later, John Podhoretz, son of neoconservative luminary Norman Podhoretz, published in the New York Post an opinion piece titled “A Conversation in Hell” in which he imagined Satan speaking to Joe Kennedy in Hell. The devil rejoices at the idea of eternally torturing Joe for “saying all those nice things about Hitler,” and brags of having caused the death of his grandson because, he says: “When I make a deal for a soul like yours, I need to season it before I’m ready to put it in the infernal oven.” This hateful fantasy, which is reminding of the Talmud’s depiction of Jesus in Hell, illustrates the devouring hatred of some Jewish intellectuals toward the Kennedys, and the root of that hatred in Joe Kennedy’s effort to prevent the Second World War.[15]

Interestingly, Podhoretz’s devil (or is it Yahweh?) accuses Kennedy of having done “everything you could to prevent Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany. Thousands of Jews died because of you.” The truth is exactly the opposite. In 1938, the “Kennedy Plan”, as the press called it, was to rescue German Jews. Since the U.S. government refused to open its borders to Jewish refugees, and since Great Britain strictly limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, Joe was urging the British government to open up its African colonies for temporary resettlement. “To facilitate the resettlement process,” Nasaw writes, “Kennedy volunteered to Halifax that he ‘thought that private sources in America might well contribute $100 or $200 million if any large scheme of land settlement could be proposed.’”[16] The plan was presented to Chamberlain just days after Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), and was supported by Jewish financier Bernard Baruch. But it angered the Zionists, who didn’t want to hear about any Jewish emigration except to Palestine, because, Ben-Gurion said, it “will endanger the existence of Zionism.”[17] Therefore, today, the “Kennedy Plan” is reviled as a kind of “final solution to the Jewish question,” and further proof that Joe was Israel’s mortal enemy.[18]

If Jewish hatred of Joe Kennedy could still inspire Podhoretz’s nasty column in 1999, imagine how deep it ran in the 1960s. At the height of his showdown with JFK over Dimona, 25 April 1963, Ben-Gurion wrote him a seven-page letter explaining that his people was threatened with extermination by a newly formed Arab Federation, just like when “six million Jews in all the countries under Nazi occupations (except Bulgaria), men and women, old and young, infants and babies, were burnt, strangled, buried alive.” “Imbued with the lessons of the Holocaust,” Avner Cohen comments, “Ben Gurion was consumed by fears for Israel’s security.”[19] He was enraged by what he saw as Kennedy’s obvious lack of concern for his people’s security, and at this point, he must have decided that Kennedy was indeed his father’s son, a modern-day Haman.

Before we get to the main piece of evidence of a direct relationship between Joe Kennedy’s appeasement policy and John Kennedy’s assassination, let us get an overview of Joe’s public career, using mainly David Nasaw’s biography and on Michael Beschloss’s Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (1979).

The Ambassador

Joe Kennedy entered national politics as a supporter of Roosevelt in his first presidential campaign in 1932. In July 1934, Roosevelt asked him to chair the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission, charged with bringing the New Deal to Wall Street by regulating and disciplining the Stock Exchange market. Kennedy announced: “the days of stock manipulation are over. Things that seemed all right a few years ago find no place in our present-day philosophy.” According to Beschloss, Kennedy “won almost universal praise for his salesmanship, political acumen, and ability to moderate conflicting sides that encouraged capital investment and economic recovery.” “Few were more impressed by Kennedy’s accomplishment than the man who hired him,” and “Joseph Kennedy increasingly became a familiar figure at the White House.”[20]

In 1936, Joe supported Roosevelt’s second campaign with a book titled I’m for Roosevelt (mostly ghost-written by Arthur Krock). He was hoping to be named Secretary of the Treasury, but Henry Morgenthau Jr. also wanted the job, and got it. Instead, Roosevelt named Joe chairman of the Maritime Commission, and one year later made him ambassador to London. As war was brooding in Europe, this was an important position, and Joe made it more important by often overstepping his Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s instructions.

He supported Chamberlain’s position that the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia was not worth a war, declaring in September 2, 1938, “for the life of me I cannot see anything involved which could be remotely considered worth shedding blood for,” a statement for which he was reprimanded by Hull and Roosevelt.[21] On October 19, Joe began another speech by jokingly listing the topics he had decided not to talk about, including “a theory of mine that it is unproductive for both democratic and dictator countries to widen the division now existing between them by emphasizing their differences, which are self-apparent.”[22] Hull held a press conference the next morning to clarify that Kennedy had been speaking for himself, not the government, and Roosevelt delivered his own display of belligerence: “There can be no peace if national policy adopts as a deliberate instrument the threat of war.”[23]

In the meantime, without informing Hull, Kennedy had summoned Charles Lindbergh to London and asked him to write a letter, to be forwarded to Washington and to Whitehall, summarizing his view regarding the strength of the Luftwaffe. Lindbergh had just visited German airfields (and been presented the Service Cross of the German Eagle by Goering), and concluded that the Luftwaffe would be unassailable in a war of the skies. Kennedy then arranged a meeting between Lindbergh and an official of the British air ministry.[24] His diplomatic strategy consisted in trying to convince the British that Germany was unbeatable and that the U.S. wouldn’t join the fight, so that the British had better come to terms with Germany, whose territorial claims were justified anyway.

In the same period, Joe made plans to meet in Paris with Dr. Helmuth Wohlthat, Goering’s chief economic adviser, with whom he had made contact through James Mooney, the president of General Motors Overseas. As Nasaw explains, “Kennedy was in effect laying the groundwork for a new appeasement strategy, one that would buy Hitler off by providing him with the means to convert his war economy to a peace economy.”[25] Hull forbade him to go to Paris, so Joe met Wohlthat in London without informing Hull.

In August 23, 1939, a week before Hitler invaded Poland, Kennedy urged Roosevelt, in vain, to pressure the Polish government to cede territory to Germany.[26] After Hitler’s invasion, Kennedy, like Chamberlain, was heartbroken: “It’s the end of the world . . . the end of everything,” he told Roosevelt on the phone.[27] But a week later, he was still urging him to save peace, writing him: “It seems to me that this situation may crystallize to a point where the President can be the savior of the world. The British government as such certainly cannot accept any agreement with Hitler, but there may be a point when the President himself may work out plans for world peace.”[28] He got his response from Hull: “The people of the United States would not support any move for peace initiated by this Government that would consolidate or make possible a survival of a regime of force and of aggression.”

Simultaneously, Roosevelt was initiating direct contact with Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty and soon to be Prime Minister. From Roosevelt’s letters, Churchill got enough confidence that the U.S. would ultimately join the war if it broke out, and he bet everything on it. Joe was infuriated when learning about this most irregular channel of communication, at a time when the President was bound by neutrality laws and the American people overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. engagement. Joe was particularly distressed by Roosevelt’s trust in Churchill, whom Joe considered “an actor and a politician. He always impressed me that he’d blow up the American Embassy and say it was the Germans if it would get the U.S. in.”[29] In early December 1939, Kennedy confided to Jay Pierrepont Moffat of the State Department that Churchill “is ruthless and scheming. He is also in touch with groups in America which have the same idea, notably, certain strong Jewish leaders.”[30]

After the defeat of France, Kennedy saw a new opportunity for peace. He cabled Washington on May 27, 1940, recommending that the President push Britain and France to negotiate an end to the crisis, as Lord Halifax, still Foreign Secretary, was actually proposing. “I suspect that the Germans would be willing to make peace with both the French and British now — of course on their own terms, but on terms that would be a great deal better than they would be if the war continues.”[31]

Although aware that Roosevelt was now ignoring him, Joe remained at his post until October 1940. Before leaving, he wrote a note to Chamberlain, then a broken and dying man: “For me to have been any service to you in your struggle is the real worthwhile epoch in my career. You have retired but mark my words the world will yet see that your struggle was never in vain. My job from now on is to tell the world of your hopes. Now and forever, Your devoted friend, Joe Kennedy.”[32] Joe Kennedy was still a convinced appeaser, determined to give peace every chance.

David Irving mentions that, before boarding a ship from Lisbon to New York, Kennedy “pleaded with the State Department to announce that, even if this vessel mysteriously blew up in mid-Atlantic with an American ambassador on board, Washington would not consider it a cause for war. ‘I thought,’ wrote Kennedy in his scurrilous unpublished memoirs, ‘that would give me some protection against Churchill’s placing a bomb on the ship.’”[33]

Kennedy arrived in New York October 27, a week before election day. He knew enough of Roosevelt’s secret contacts with Churchill to endanger his reelection. He was seriously considering speaking out to the press. In a wire to his lover and admirer Clare Booth Luce, he promised a bombshell that would “put twenty-five million Catholic voters behind [Republican candidate] Wendell Willkie to throw Roosevelt out.”[34]

But Joe had a strong sense of loyalty, and his wife reminded him of a political truth instinctive to them both: “The President sent you, a Roman Catholic, as Ambassador to London, which probably no other President would have done. . . . You would write yourself down as an ingrate in the view of many people if you resign now.”[35] After a long conversation with Roosevelt on the day of his arrival, of which nothing has transpired, Kennedy gave a radio address over CBS on October 29 to endorse Roosevelt, but not without reasserting his “conviction that this country must and will stay out of war.” A few days later, with Joe Kennedy by his side, Roosevelt made his own pledge: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars!”[36] Roosevelt was elected. On December 1, 1940, Kennedy delivered his resignation letter, and told reporters: “My plan is . . . to devote my efforts to what seems to me to be the greatest cause in the world today . . . That cause is to help the President keep the United States out of war.”[37]

On December 17, Roosevelt revealed at a press conference his plans to provide billions of dollars in war supplies to Great Britain in the form of Lend-Lease (eventually, the U.S. would supply England with $13 billion). Joe expressed privately his feeling of having been exploited by the President. But he stayed in relatively good terms with Roosevelt, although he refused to support his nomination for a fourth term, when he visited him on October 26, 1944 in the White House. Kennedy recorded in his notes telling the President — a very sick man — that the Catholic voters were hesitant to vote for him because “they felt that Roosevelt was Jew controlled.” He added that he agreed “with the group who felt that the Hopkins, Rosenmans, and Frankfurters, and the rest of the incompetents would rob Roosevelt of the place in history that he hoped, I am sure, to have. . . . Roosevelt went on to say ‘Why, I don’t see Frankfurter twice a year.’ And I said to him, ‘You see him twenty times a day but you don’t know it because he works through all these other groups of people without your knowing it.’”[38]

After his resignation in 1941, Joe had envisioned writing a memoir of his London years, and told his friend and former president Herbert Hoover that the book would “put an entirely different color on the process of how America got into the war and would prove the betrayal of the American people by Franklin D. Roosevelt.” But, Beschloss comments, “the necessities of wartime unity and, later, his sons’ political careers kept Joseph Kennedy’s diplomatic memoir out of print, where it remained.”[39]

Here, there is an interesting parallel with James Forrestal, another American patriot of Irish Catholic stock and a friend of Joe Kennedy. As David Martin shows in his book The Assassination of James Forrestal (summarized here), when Forrestal was pushed out of the Defense Department by Truman in March 1949, he planned to write a book and to start a magazine. As Navy Secretary, he had gained inside knowledge of Roosevelt’s scheme to provoke the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. In 1945, he had worked behind the scene to achieve a negotiated surrender from the Japanese, and was very bitter about Roosevelt’s demand for “unconditional surrender” and the unnecessary suffering imposed on the Japanese. Forrestal had also much to say about the way the Zionists obtained the Partition Plan at the U.N. General Assembly, or about the way Truman was bought into supporting the recognition of Israel. On April 2, 1949, Forrestal was interned against his will and forcibly confined in the 16th floor of the Navy hospital of Bethesda, and on May 22 was declared to have fallen from a window while trying to hang himself from it with a dressing-gown sash. No criminal investigation was conducted, but the evidence obtained by David Martin through a Freedom of Information Act leaves no doubt that he was assassinated by the Zionist mafia.

It is easy to imagine that, had Joe Kennedy decided to expose Roosevelt’s betrayal of the American people and the Jewish intrigues to push him into the war, he might have suffered the same fate as Forrestal. Instead, he retired from public life and devoted his remaining influence to his sons’ political future. Despite the death of his eldest son Joe Jr. in a high-risk mission in 1944, he achieved his presidential ambition through his second son. The “Kennedy curse,” however, would ultimately catch up with his lineage.

John Kennedy’s Intellectual Filiation

John has always been loyal to his father’s memory, and there is enough evidence that he shared his most fundamental principles and his views of World War II. In 1956, in his book Profiles in Courage, John praised Senator Robert Taft for having, at tremendous personal cost, denounced in 1946 the hanging of eleven Nazi officials as “a blot on the American record which we shall long regret.”[40] One symbolic hint of President Kennedy’s intellectual and political filiation with his father was his invitation of Charles Lindbergh on May 11, 1962, for a grand reception at the White House. Lindbergh and his wife caused a sensation when they dined at the presidential table and stayed overnight at the White House.[41] Let’s recall that, in September 1940, Lindbergh had been a founding member of the America First Committee and the staunchest critic of Roosevelt’s ploys to drag the U.S. into the war.[42] His reputation had suffered tremendously from his criticism of Jewish influence, and he had been living as a recluse ever since.

Kennedy had nothing to gain politically from inviting Lindbergh very publicly to the White House. The significance of this gesture should not be underestimated. It probably demonstrates a wish to vindicate the vilified appeasers of 1938-40. Lindbergh at the White House may have been a sign that the wheel was turning, and that history would soon be written in a more balanced way. John’s assassination halted and reversed this movement. Half a decade later, along with the expansion of Israel, the dark cult of the Holocaust would start swamping over the U.S. and the world. Arguably, if Kennedy had lived, there would be no compulsory Holocaust religion today.

For those like David Ben-Gurion whose self-image and worldview revolved around the Holocaust, the Kennedy brothers were essentially sons of a Hitler-appeaser and Nazi-supporter, and their leadership of the United-States was an existential threat as well as an intolerable insult. Although, for obvious reasons, this murderous hatred is seldom expressed publicly (John Podhoretz’s “A Conversation in Hell” is a remarkable exception), it is a critical fact to take into account in our quest to solve the mystery of the “Kennedy curse.” And it sheds a bright light on one of the most bizarre aspects of JFK’s assassination.

In his 1967 book titled Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy assassination proving that three gunmen murdered the President, Josiah Thompson first drew attention to a character who can be seen on the Zapruder film and on other photographs taken in Dealey Plaza at the moment of JFK’s assassination. Here is how Thompson presents him in a short video recorded by Errol Morris for the New York Times in 2011:

On November 22nd, it rained the night before. But everything cleared by about 9 or 9:30 in the morning. So if you were looking at various photographs of the motorcade route, in the crowd gathered there, you will have noticed: nobody is wearing a raincoat, nobody has an open umbrella. Why? Because it’s a beautiful day. And then I noticed: in all of Dallas, there appears to be exactly one person standing under and open black umbrella. And that person is standing where the shots began to rain into the limousine. Let us call him “the umbrella man”. . . . You can see him in certain frames from the Zapruder film, standing right there by the Stemmons Freeway sign. There are other still photographs taken from other locations in Dealey Plaza, which shows the whole man standing under an open black umbrella — the only person under any umbrella in all of Dallas, standing right at the location where all the shots come into the limousine. Can any one come up with a non-sinister explanation for this? So I published this in Six Seconds, but didn’t speculate about what it meant . . . Well, I asked that the Umbrella Man to come forward and explain this. So he did. He came forward and he went to Washington with his umbrella, and he testified in 1978 before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He explained then why he had opened the umbrella and was standing there that day. The open umbrella was a kind of protest, a visual protest. It wasn’t a protest of any of John Kennedy’s policies as president. It was a protest at the appeasement policy of Joseph P. Kennedy, John Kennedy’s father when he was ambassador to the court of Saint James in 1938 and 39. It was a reference to Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella.[43]

The black umbrella had been Chamberlain’s iconic trademark, and, after his return from Munich, a symbol of “appeasement”, both for those who supported it (some old ladies “suggested that Chamberlain’s umbrella be broken up and pieces sold as sacred relics”)[44] and for those who opposed it (“Wherever Chamberlain traveled, the opposition party in Britain protested his appeasement at Munich by displaying umbrellas,” according to Edward Miller).

The Umbrella Man was Louie Steven Witt, and had been identified by local newsmen before he came forward to the HSCA. Josiah Thompson assumes that his “visual protest” and JFK’s assassination are unrelated, and that they happened at the exact same time and place by some kind of quantum-physics coincidence. He cannot bring himself to see the connection, even though the Umbrella Man himself made it clear to the HSCA that he wanted to “heckle” JFK about his father’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938. Knowing what we know about Jewish perception of the “Kennedy curse” as linked to the “sins of the father”, we cannot but find Thompson’s refusal to see anything conspiratorial as very typical of Gentile self-induced blindness.

Was Louie Steven Witt a Zionist agent, a sayan? Not necessarily. He might have been instructed to do what he did without knowing that Kennedy would be killed right in front of him. On the other hand, the explanation he gave for his “bad joke” sounds disingenuous: “In a coffee break conversation,” he said, “someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. . . . I was just going to kind of do a little heckling.” Witt carefully avoided mentioning why the umbrella was “a sore spot with the Kennedy family.” He also avoided naming Joe Kennedy when he said that he had heard that “some members of the Kennedy family” had once been offended in an airport by people brandishing umbrellas. The “airport” sounds like an allusive reference to Chamberlain’s widely publicized return at the Heston Aerodrome on 30 September 1938. There is clearly a cryptic undertone in Witt’s explanation. For those Unz Review readers who have ears to hear and eyes to see, executing JFK while “heckling” him about his father’s appeasement policy should be an unmistakable signature. Chamberlain’s umbrella is Kennedy’s cross.

Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., is the author of The Unspoken Kennedy Truth(2021), Essays on Jewish Power(2020), and From Yahweh to Zion (2018).

Notes

[1] David Nasaw, The PatriarchThe Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, Penguin Books, 2012, pp. 818-819.

[2] Christ Matthews, Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero, Simon & Schuster, 2011, pp. 71-72.

[3] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, Touchstone, 2008, p. 5.

[4] Quoted in Robert Kennedy, Jr., American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, HarperCollins, 2018, p. 101.

[5] Quoted in Robert Kennedy, Jr., American Values, p. 101.

[6] Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance, Open Road, 1979, p.187.

[7] Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 21.

[8] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 349.

[9] Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. IV: The Passage of Power, Alfred Knopf, 2012, p. 104. Also in Arthur Krock, Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968, p. 362.

[10] In the journal of the Herut, Menachem Begin’s political party, quoted in Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 2: David Becomes Goliath, Clarity Press, 2013, p. 252.

[11] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 96.

[12] Hersh, The Samson Option, p. 103.

[13] Edward Klein, The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America’s First Family for 150 Years, Saint Martin’s Press, 2004.

[14] Ronald Kessler, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded, Coronet Books, 1997, quotes from the publisher’s presentation and the back cover.

[15] John Podhoretz, “A Conversation in Hell,” New York Post, July 21, 1999, on nypost.com

[16] Nasaw, The Patriarch, pp. 403-406.

[17] Alan Hart, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, vol. 1: The False Messiah, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 164.

[18] Clive Irving, “Joe Kennedy’s answer to the Jewish question: ship them to Africa,” Apr. 14, 2017, on www.thedailybeast.com

[19] Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, Columbia UP, 1998, pp. 10, 119.

[20] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, pp. 105-109.

[21] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 373; also Beschloff, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 180.

[22] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 396.

[23] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, pp. 185-186.

[24] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 182.

[25] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 425.

[26] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 445.

[27] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 199.

[28] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 201.

[29] Nasaw, The Patriarch, pp. 460-461. The quote is from Joe Kennedy’s diary, according to David Irving, who renders it slightly differently in Churchill’s war, vol. 1: The Struggle for Power, Focal Point, 2003, p. 207.

[30] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 476.

[31] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 496.

[32] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 534.

[33] David Irving, Churchill’s war, vol. 1: The Struggle for Power, Focal Point, 2003, p. 207.

[34] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, pp. 15-16.

[35] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, pp. 43 and 230.

[36] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, pp. 235-237.

[37] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 247.

[38] Nasaw, The Patriarch, p. 625; Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 279.

[39] Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, p. 273.

[40] Robert Taft, October 6, 1946, quoted in John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, 1956, Harper Perennial, 2003 p. 199.

[41] “Visit of Charles A. Lindbergh”, on www.jfklibrary.org

[42] Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941, Random House, 2013.

[43] “The Umbrella Man”, on Vimeo.com or YouTube

[44] Patrick J. Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, Crown Forum, 2008, p. 208.

July 13, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Covid19 – the final nail in coffin of medical research

By Dr. Malcolm Kendrick | June 28, 2021

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” Edward Grey

Several years ago, I wrote a book called Doctoring Data. It was my attempt to help people navigate their way through medical headlines and medical data.

One of the main reasons I was stimulated to write it, is because I had become deeply concerned that science, especially medical science, had been almost fully taken over by commercial interests. With the end result that much of the data we were getting bombarded with was enormously biased, and thus corrupted. I wanted to show how some of this bias gets built in.

I was not alone in my concerns. As far back as 2005, John Ioannidis wrote the very highly cited paper ‘Why most Published Research Findings are False’. It has been downloaded and read by many, many, thousands of researchers over the years, so they can’t say they don’t know:

‘Moreover for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.’1

Marcia Angell, who edited the New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years, wrote the following. It is a quote I have used many times, in many different talks:

‘It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgement of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.’

Peter Gotzsche, who set up the Nordic Cochrane Collaboration, and who was booted out of said Cochrane collaboration for questioning the HPV vaccine (used to prevent cervical cancer) wrote the book. ‘Deadly Medicine and Organised Crime. [How big pharma has corrupted healthcare]’.

The book cover states… ‘The main reason we take so many drugs is that drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs… virtually everything we know about drugs is what the companies have chosen to tell us and our doctors… if you don’t believe the system is out of control, please e-mail me and explain why drugs are the third leading cause of death.’

Richard Smith edited the British Medical Journal (BMJ) for many years. He now writes a blog, amongst other things. A few years ago, he commented:

‘Twenty years ago this week, the statistician Doug Altman published an editorial in the BMJ arguing that much medical research was of poor quality and misleading. In his editorial entitled ‘The scandal of Poor Medical Research.’ Altman wrote that much research was seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative sample, small sample, incorrect methods of analysis and faulty interpretation… Twenty years later, I feel that things are not better, but worse…

In 2002 I spent eight marvellous weeks in a 15th palazzo in Venice writing a book on medical journals, the major outlets for medical research, and the dismal conclusion that things were badly wrong with journals and the research they published. My confidence that ‘things can only get better’ has largely drained away.’

Essentially, medical research has inexorably turned into an industry. A very lucrative industry. Many medical journals now charge authors thousands of dollars to publish their research. This ensures that it is very difficult for any researcher, not supported by a university, or a pharmaceutical company, to afford to publish anything, unless they are independently wealthy.

The journals then have the cheek to claim copyright, and charge money to anyone who actually wants to read, or download the full paper. Fifty dollars for a few on-line pages! They then bill for reprints, they charge for advertising. Those who had the temerity to write the article get nothing – and nor do the peer reviewers.

It is all very profitable. Last time I looked the Return on Investment (profit) was thirty-five per-cent for the big publishing houses. It was Robert Maxwell who first saw this opportunity for money making.

Driven by financial imperative, the research itself has also, inevitably, become biased. He who pays the paper calls the tune. Pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturers and suchlike. They can certainly afford the publication fees.

In addition to all the financial and peer-review pressure, if you dare swim against the approved mainstream views you will, very often, be ruthlessly attacked. As many people know, I am a critic of the cholesterol hypothesis, along with my band of brothers… we few, we happy few. In the 1970s, Kilmer McCully, who plays double bass in our band, was looking into a cause of cardiovascular disease that went against the mainstream view. This is what happened to him:

‘Thomas N. James, a cardiologist and president of the University of Texas Medical Branch who was also the president of the American Heart Association in 1979 and ’80, is even harsher [regarding the treatment of McCully]. ”It was worse than that – you couldn’t get ideas funded that went in other directions than cholesterol,” he says. ”You were intentionally discouraged from pursuing alternative questions. I’ve never dealt with a subject in my life that elicited such an immediate hostile response.

It took two years for McCully to find a new research job. His children were reaching college age; he and his wife refinanced their house and borrowed from her parents. McCully says that his job search developed a pattern: he would hear of an opening, go for interviews and then the process would grind to a stop. Finally, he heard rumors of what he calls ”poison phone calls” from Harvard. ”It smelled to high heaven,” he says.’

McCully says that when he was interviewed on Canadian television after he left Harvard, he received a call from the public-affairs director of Mass. General. ”He told me to shut up,” McCully recalls. ”He said he didn’t want the names of Harvard and Mass. General associated with my theories.’ 2

More recently, I was sent a link to an article outlining the attacks made on another researcher who published a paper which found that being overweight meant having a (slightly) lower risk of death than being of ‘normal weight. This, would never do:

‘A naïve researcher published a scientific article in a respectable journal. She thought her article was straightforward and defensible. It used only publicly available data, and her findings were consistent with much of the literature on the topic. Her coauthors included two distinguished statisticians.

To her surprise her publication was met with unusual attacks from some unexpected sources within the research community. These attacks were by and large not pursued through normal channels of scientific discussion. Her research became the target of an aggressive campaign that included insults, errors, misinformation, social media posts, behind-the-scenes gossip and maneuvers, and complaints to her employer.

The goal appeared to be to undermine and discredit her work. The controversy was something deliberately manufactured, and the attacks primarily consisted of repeated assertions of preconceived opinions. She learned first-hand the antagonism that could be provoked by inconvenient scientific findings. Guidelines and recommendations should be based on objective and unbiased data. Development of public health policy and clinical recommendations is complex and needs to be evidence-based rather than belief-based. This can be challenging when a hot-button topic is involved.’ 3

Those who lead the attacks on her were my very favourite researchers, Walter Willet and Frank Hu. Two eminent researchers from Harvard who I nickname Tweedledum and Tweedledummer. Harvard itself has become an institution, which, along with Oxford University, comes up a lot in tales of bullying and intimidation. Willet and Hu are internationally known for promoting vegetarian and vegan diets. Willet is a key figure in the EAT-Lancet initiative.

Where is science in all this? I feel the need to state, at this point, that I don’t mind attacks on ideas. I like robust debate. Science can only progress through a process of new hypotheses being proposed, being attacked, being refined and strengthened – or obliterated. But what we see now is not science. It is the obliteration of science itself:

‘Anyone who has been a scientist for more than 20 years will realize that there has been a progressive decline in the honesty of communications between scientists, between scientists and their institutions and the outside world.

Yet, real science must be an area where truth is the rule; or else the activity simply stops being scient and becomes something else: Zombie science. Zombie science is a science that is dead, but is artificially keep moving by a continual infusion of funding. From a distance Zombie science looks like the real thing, the surface features of a science are in place – white coats, laboratories, computer programming, PhDs, papers, conferences, prizes etc. But the Zombie is not interested in the pursuit of truth – its citations are externally-controlled and directed at non-scientific goals, and inside the Zombie everything is rotten…

Scientists are usually too careful and clever to risk telling outright lies, but instead they push the envelope of exaggeration, selectivity and distortion as far as possible. And tolerance for this kind of untruthfulness has greatly increased over recent years. So, it is now routine for scientists deliberately to ‘hype’ the significance of their status and performance and ‘spin’ the importance of their research.’ Bruce Charlton: Professor of Theoretical Medicine.

I was already pretty depressed with the direction that medical science was taking. Then COVID19 came along, the distortion and hype became so outrageous that I almost gave up trying to establish what was true, and was just made up nonsense.

For example, I stated, right at the start of the COVID19 pandemic, that vitamin D could be important in protecting against the virus. For having the audacity to say this, I was attacked by the fact checkers. Indeed, anyone promoting vitamin D to reduce the risk of COVID19 infection, was ruthlessly hounded.

Guess what. Here from 17th June:

‘Hospitalized COVID-19 patients are far more likely to die or to end up in severe or critical condition if they are vitamin D-deficient, Israeli researchers have found.

In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%.

“This is a very, very significant discrepancy, which represents a big clue that starting the disease with very low vitamin D leads to increased mortality and more severity,” Dr. Amir Bashkin, endocrinologist and part of the research team, told The Times of Israel.’ 4

I also recommended vitamin C for those already in hospital. Again, I was attacked, as has everyone who has dared to mention COVID19 and vitamin C in the same sentence. Yet, we know that vitamin C is essential for the health and wellbeing of blood vessels, and the endothelial cells that line them. In severe infection the body burns through vitamin C, and people can become ‘scrobutic’ (the name given to severe lack of vitamin C).

Vitamin C is also known to have powerful anti-viral activity. It has been known for years. Here, from an article in 1996:

‘Over the years, it has become well recognized that ascorbate can bolster the natural defense mechanisms of the host and provide protection not only against infectious disease, but also against cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases. The functions involved in ascorbate’s enhancement of host resistance to disease include its biosynthetic (hy-droxylating), antioxidant, and immunostimulatory activities. In addition, ascorbate exerts a direct antiviral action that may confer specific protection against viral disease. The vitamin has been found to inactivate a wide spectrum of viruses as well as suppress viral replication abd expression in infected cell.’ 5

I like quoting research on vitamins from way before COVID19 appeared, where people were simply looking at Vitamin C without the entire medico-industrial complex looking over their shoulder, ready to stamp out anything they don’t like. Despite a mass of evidence that Vitamin C has benefits against viral infection, it is a complete no-go area and no-one even dares to research it now. Facebook removes any content relating to Vitamin C and COVID19.

As of today, any criticism of the mainstream narrative is simply being removed. Those who dare to raise their heads above the parapet, have them chopped off:

‘Dr Francis Christian, practising surgeon and clinical professor of general surgery at the University of Saskatchewan, has been immediately suspended from all teaching and will be permanently removed from his role as of September.

Dr Christian has been a surgeon for more than 20 years and began working in Saskatoon in 2007. He was appointed Director of the Surgical Humanities Program and Director of Quality and Patient Safety in 2018 and co-founded the Surgical Humanities Program. Dr. Christian is also the Editor of the Journal of The Surgical Humanities.

On June 17th Dr Christian released a statement to over 200 of his colleagues, expressing concern over the lack of informed consent involved in Canada’s “Covid19 vaccination” program, especially regarding children.

To be clear, Dr Christian’s position is hardly an extreme one.

He believes the virus is real, he believes in vaccination as a general principle, he believes the elderly and vulnerable may benefit from the Covid “vaccine”… he simply doesn’t agree it should be used on children, and feels parents are not being given enough information for properly informed consent.’ 6

When I wrote Doctoring Data, a few years ago, I included the following thoughts about the increasing censorship and punishment that was already very clearly out in the open:

… where does it end? Well, we know where it ends.

First, they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist

Then they came from the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist

Then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak for me

Do you think this is a massive over-reaction? Do I really believe that we are heading for some form of totalitarian stated, where dissent against the medical ‘experts’ will be punishable by imprisonment? Well, yes, I do. We are already in a situation where doctors who fail to follow the dreaded ‘guidelines’ can be sued, or dragged in front the General Medical Council, and struck of. Thus losing their job and income…

Where next?

The lamps are not just going out all over Europe. They are going out, all over the world.

1: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

2: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/10/magazine/the-fall-and-rise-of-kilmer-mccully.html

3: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033062021000670

4: https://www.timesofisrael.com/1-in-4-hospitalized-covid-patients-who-lack-vitamin-d-die-israeli-study

5: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14383321_Antiviral_and_Immunomodulatory_Activities_of_Ascorbic_Acid

6: https://off-guardian.org/2021/06/25/canadian-surgeon-fired-for-voicing-safety-concerns-over-covid-jabs-for-children/

June 29, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

American Medicine, American Malfeasance

By Dr. Gary Null and Richard Gale | Global Research | June 26, 2021

An issue that is rarely discussed or given serious attention is the over-specialization in healthcare. Modern medicine’s approach to identify and treat illnesses and tackle the reduction of infections has in many instances ceased to be multidisciplinary. Medicine has also become increasingly compartmentalized and confined to a rigid materialistic belief system that has now established its own set of standards, criteria and values that are often contrary to gold-standard scientific protocols. The consequence is that its narrow single-mindedness has insulated modern medicine from objective criticism and preserved its internal flaws, errors and fabrications, which have contributed to the unnecessary injury and death of countless patients.

US healthcare spending reached $3.8 trillion in 2019. Due to the Covid pandemic, expenditures for 2020 will be astronomically higher. One might expect that with the world’s most expensive healthcare system, the US would equally have the best evidence-based practices to keep its citizens healthy. By now we should be proficiently expert at preventing and reversing disease, while making minimal errors resulting in injury or death. However, the exact opposite is the case. Instead of minimizing disease-causing factors, American medicine causes more illness through misguided diagnostic testing, overuse of medical and surgical procedures, and over prescribing pharmaceutical drugs. The fundamental reason for this catastrophe is that today’s healthcare establishment, and corporate science in general, over relies on profit-generating motives.

Dr. Peter Gotzsche is arguably recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts in evaluating evidence-based medicine (EBM). As the co-founder of EBM’s preeminent flagship organization – the Cochrane Collaboration — to review and analyze peer-reviewed clinical research, he is intimately knowledgeable about the widespread corruption permeating the pharmaceutical industry and medical journals. In his book Deadly Medicines and Organized Crimehe writes,

“The reason why we take so many drugs is that drug companies do not sell drugs. They sell lies about drugs… The patients do not realize that although their doctors know a lot about diseases, human physiology and psychology, they know very little about the drugs that have been concocted and dressed up by the drug industry.”

After we take a fair and objective look at American medicine during the past five decades, especially at the statistics of iatrogenic fatalities, or deaths caused by prescribed medications and medical error, our healthcare establishment is found to be anything but benign. Despite its many noteworthy discoveries and merits, a substantial amount of recommended medical practice has failed patients. “If the medical system were a bank,” writes Dr. Stephen Persell at Northwestern University’s School of Medicine, “you wouldn’t deposit your money here, because there would be an error every one-in-two to one-in-three times you made a transaction.” Dr. Persell is referring to the rates of preventable medical errors causing patients serious injury and now the third leading cause of death.

There is excellent evidence to support the argument that iatrogenic deaths have passed cancer fatalities and are now challenging heart disease for the number one spot. A 2008 study found as many as half of adverse events reported by patients were not recorded in their hospital charts. As of 2017, investigations continue to find that less than 10% of medical errors are reported. Reported adverse effects vary depending on the specialty and frequently go unnoticed or are improperly evaluated. An additional study found that almost two thirds of cardiologists had refused to report a serious error they had direct personal knowledge of to an authority.

As one example, heart disease is America’s leading cause of fatality, accounting for 665,000 deaths annually. The CDC, which consistently undermines health threats if it means positioning itself in opposition to private commercial interests, estimates that 34 percent of cardiovascular fatalities are premature and preventable. In contrast, the American Heart Association claims 80 percent are preventable. What are the heads of our federal health agencies doing to advocate on the side of prevention? Little to nothing.

There is no realistic and science-based national policy in place to lessen cardiovascular, cancer and diabetic death rates. Since the most viable and effective means to prevent these diseases are natural and within every person’s means, it is not financially lucrative to divert federal funding away from pharmaceutical treatments and surgical procedures. The CDC and FDA are largely dependent upon monetary income received from the drug and medical device industries.

Earlier we reported about the systemic corruption and fraud that has plagued the CDC and FDA for decades. It would be far cheaper to completely empty, dismantle, fumigate and rebuild the agencies anew rather than continue exerting pressure for reforms, which have only perpetuated a killing spree by protecting life-threatening drugs, vaccines and unnecessary medical procedures. Dr. Gotzsche notes, the same is true for private drug companies. Despite the numerous lawsuits drug companies have lost in federal courts, nothing has fundamentally changed in order to deter them from illegal activities to increase profits. In fact, the cost of paying out settlements and settling lawsuits is factored into the expense of doing business.

A decade ago, we teamed up with three board-certified physicians to undertake the task to review the peer-reviewed literature in order to recalculate the statistics from many branches of medicine in order to arrive at a more realistic casualty rate due to medical error. We began with a basic question. Do the current standards of American medical practice and its supporting science prove that the recommended therapies and healthcare protocols – whether drugs, surgery, diagnostic methods, medical devices, etc – are actually effective? And if so, at what cost to the patients’ health and well-being?

Our results and final conclusions were startling and culminated in the release of a widely read and referenced book, Death by Medicine. We made every effort to avoid editorial commentary to our findings. We decided to only report the statistics and facts with our calculations. The fact that our data placed iatrogenic error as the number one cause of death in America was alone sufficient. What was novel in our analysis was that we included preventable deaths, such as certain infections and severe nutrient deficiency, which could have been easily corrected by clinicians and medical personnel if viable prevention programs had been part of our healthcare system. After publication the book was sent to hundreds of journalists, federal officials and non-profit medical organizations. It was completely ignored by the orthodoxy; however, it became increasingly popular among alternative and complementary medical physicians who were already fully aware of the structural dangers to public health within conventional medical care.

Revisiting American medicine’s legacy of iatrogenic deaths is now more crucial than ever because the same behaviors that have contributed to the nation’s leading cause of death are being repeated during the Covid-19 pandemic. The government and federal health officials are in reprehensible denial of inexpensive and highly effective drugs, such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to treat early and middle stage SARS-2 infections. Cases of Covid infections and deaths have been grossly exaggerated. And now we are realizing that the efficacy and safety profiles of the vaccines are orchestrated scams. As a result, the entire institutional edifice to vaccinate the global population is destined to become the greatest scandal of the 21st century.

Unfortunately, nobody can acquire accurate statistics for Covid-19 vaccine associated injuries and deaths from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). Careful weekly monitoring of VAERS’ adverse event updates convince us that the entire system is criminally rigged. CDC officials overseeing the database are undoubtedly fudging numbers after ratio of adverse events, including deaths, per number of doses administered are compared to the more robust and accurate EudraVigilance database in the European Union and the less reliable Yellow Card System in the UK.

As of June 17, VAERS was reporting 329,021 injuries and 5,888 deaths due to the Covid vaccines. The database’s most recent update is reporting an additional 26,541 injuries but 1,972 less deaths. How can this sudden disappearance of almost 2,000 deaths be accounted for? The mysterious loss of fatality entries occurred during the same week as a CDC working group of outside medical professionals was reviewing an association between the mRNA vaccines and the rising number of reported cases of cardiac inflammation or myocarditis. The group concluded that there is indeed “a likely association.” The occasion of deleted deaths in VAERS is also on the heels of the Israeli Shamir Medical Center report that Pfizer’s vaccine is linked with occurrences of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, an autoimmune disorder associated with a rare form of blood clotting. However, despite weekly local news stories around the nation about youth as young as 19 years of age dying of vaccine complications shortly after receipt of an mRNA vaccine, the CDC is claiming that all 1,200 persons, between 16-24 years of age, recovered and no deaths were reported. Does this account for the likely scrubbing of entries in VAERS?

But it is much worse. We only need to look at the European Union’s statistics for adverse Covid-19 vaccine events and compare that with VAERS and the CDC’s recent conclusion to realize there is a massive cover-up in our government’s efforts to sanitize the safety record of Covid vaccines. As of this week the EudraVigilance system is reporting over 1.5 million injuries and 15,472 deaths. Within those figures, 28,583 injuries and 1,862 deaths are from cardiac complications such as myocarditis.

Second, the EU and US have administered approximately the same number of Covid vaccine doses, roughly 409 million and 379 million respectively. Therefore we should expect to find a similar dose-to-injury ratio. Again we discover the CDC gaming the nation’s reporting system to lessen the perception of lethal risks. Based upon the EU ratio we can conservatively estimate that a minimum of 14,300 Americans have been killed by the vaccines so far. If we go back a week before the CDC scrubbed entries in VAERS, it would be over 17,000 Covid vaccine deaths.  The actual number of Americans suffering adverse reactions would be 1.4 million.

In other words the EU is reporting 4 times more vaccine injuries and deaths than American health officials.  In both the US and EU, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine accounts for the majority of these casualties. Unless the Covid-19 vaccines engineer a personal vendetta against people holding EU passports, these numbers don’t add up.

Before the arrival of the Covid vaccines, Merck’s anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx was widely regarded as the single largest pharmaceutical catastrophe in American medical history. The drug should never have been approved and licensed in the first place; and, Merck knew beforehand that the drug would be lethal and concealed that documentation from FDA regulators. Vioxx was on the market for five years before being withdrawn. At the time of the federal class action lawsuit against Merck, FDA epidemiologist Dr. David Graham estimated the drug had killed 60,000 patients due to heart attacks and strokes.  Since the majority of deaths were among elderly patients, a later report by the American Conservative predicted that upwards to half a million patients may have died from the drug over the course of a longer period. Yet during those years Merck was cashing in $2 billion annually from Vioxx sales, earning over double its eventual $4.8 billion fine after being found guilty.

To put this into a broader perspective, the Covid vaccines have only been distributed for six months and have now contributed to a realistic 17,000 deaths or upwards towards 30,000 this year alone. Since the vaccines’ immunity quickly wanes and it seems certain they provide little protection against new SARS-2 strains, health officials are already recommending regular booster shots.  Similar to a prescription medication, those who buy into the vaccine propaganda hype are in principle relying upon these vaccines for life or until such time the virus resides into just a seasonal nuisance. Consequently iatrogenic vaccine injuries and deaths may likely continue at current rates during forthcoming years.  The Covid-19 vaccines are on track to outpace the conservative number of Vioxx deaths over three-fold and even modern medicine’s most deadly drugCerivastatin, manufactured by Bayer in the late 1990s and responsible for over 100,000 deaths during the four-year period it was on the market.  In short time, Covid vaccines will be the deadliest drug to have emerged from Big Pharma.

A study published in the Journal of Patient Safety estimated that 400,000 unnecessary and preventable deaths occur annually in American hospitals alone. At that rate, it is not surprising that the large majority of deaths ruled as SARS-2 infections happened in hospitals. If our federal health officials had been competent, and less compromised by the demands and influence of drug makers, most of these fatalities likely would never have occurred.

It has been estimated that US taxpayers have paid out $39 billion for Covid-19 vaccine development, funding and towards nationalized response measures. Most of this has been horribly wasted after we consider other options on hand to curb the pandemic but were categorically ignored. “In the case of vaccines in general,” the journal Health Affairs observed,

“the government often plays an outsized role, but in the era of Covid-19 the government’s role was even more central than usual. The government essentially removed the bulk of traditional industry risks related to vaccine development: a) scientific failures, b) failures to demonstrate safety and efficacy, c) manufacturing risks, and d) market risks related to low demand.”

While this may shock and disturb a rational person, Health Affairs – a thoroughly orthodox medical publication – applauds the government’s negligent measures as “money well spent.”

For this reason it is crucial to understand the terrible decisions made during the Covid pandemic in the context of modern medicine’s past crimes and preventable failures. In the coming months Anthony Fauci’s reputation will become further tainted. We might predict he will resign as more evidence of incompetence emerges, and, in our opinion, perhaps criminal negligence in his handling of the pandemic and efforts to whitewash the US’s role in supporting gain of function research leading to the genetic engineering of the SARS-2 virus. Fortunately, unlike past scandals when misguided medical decisions were responsible for thousands of unnecessary disabilities and deaths, numerous doctors and scientists worldwide are raising their voices to condemn the lethal policies of the CDC, NIAID, British Health Ministry and the World Health Organization.

So what can we reasonably surmise at this point? At one time most Americans trusted science, medicine and our healthcare system without question or criticism. However, today we observe systemic corruption and gross conflicts of interest across the same federal health agencies that have also contributed to untold medical errors and deaths prior to SARS-2 arrival. They have weaponized pharmaceutical science and a supplicant braying media supports this perversion of medical facts. Now the drug-happy media is attacking the truth-tellers, the physicians, professors and accomplished journalists who are risking their careers and reputations to bring forth the fallacies in the pandemic narrative. This is one battle that the silent majority can find its voice and courage to step forth and support.

Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD direct Progressive Radio Network.

June 28, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

New evidence reveals John McCain and other Vietnam War POWs may have lied about being tortured

By Paul Benedikt Glatz, Jeremy Kuzmarov and Steve Brown | Covert Action Magazine | June 21, 2021

Collusion by the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media resulted in disparagement, denial, and suppression of eyewitness testimony confirming that most POWs were actually well-treated by their North Vietnamese captors (in contrast to the brutal torture and death often meted out to North Vietnamese POWs by U.S. forces).

Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam's Hoa Lo Prison to America Today
[Source: amazon.com]

When numerous U.S. POWs began to understand the truth about the war they had been fighting, they spoke out against it—voluntarily—as an act of conscience. But they were cynically portrayed as traitors, turncoats and “camp rats,” their reputations and lives destroyed, driving many to despair and even suicide.

Among the few memories that most Americans still retain of the Vietnam War—now nearly 60 years in the past—one of the most vivid centers around the torture suffered by Senator John McCain at the hands of his brutal Vietnamese captors while a prisoner of war in Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (AKA The Hanoi Hilton).

This story has been told, retold, and continually burnished countless times by admiring media interviews and a flood of books and memoirs, including several by McCain himself.

Another memory of the war, still believed by millions of Americans, is that hundreds or even thousands of American soldiers classified as MIA (Missing in Action) are actually being held and tortured in secret North Vietnamese POW camps, callously abandoned by our government and desperately praying to be rescued—preferably in a Hollywood-style rescue by Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone, who starred in the spate of Commie-hating blockbuster movies inspired by their plight.

This belief is continually reinforced by POW/MIA flags which fly at every post office, and a ready supply of new books and movies, such as the 2018 release of the film M.I.A. A Greater Evil.

But both memories of the Vietnam War are false memories. However passionately believed, they were cynically manufactured fantasies implanted in all-too-willing American minds for political purposes.

How and why these counter-factual beliefs were so successfully foisted on the American public is the subject of the new myth-shattering book by Tom Wilber and Jerry Lembcke, Dissenting POWs: From Vietnam’s Hoa Lo Prison to America Today (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).

Wilber is the son of a dissenting POW, Walter “Gene” Wilber, who is featured in the book, and has contributed to the award-winning documentary film The Flower Pot Story by Ngọc Dũng. Lembcke is a distinguished sociologist from College of the Holy Cross who has written a number of books debunking popular myths about the Vietnam War.

The two start their book by noting that the dominant war hero image of the POW—who endured torture and resisted service to enemy propaganda—was to a large extent created by high-ranking men like McCain who were captured early in the conflict.

John McCain Was a War Hero. But He Shouldn't Have Been.
John McCain embodied the war hero image of someone who endured torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors while retaining loyalty to the United States. [Source: nymag.com]

McCain’s oft-told story of ill-treatment and torture is contradicted by Nguyen Tien Tran, the chief prison guard of the jail in which McCain was held. In a report by The Guardian, “[Tran] acknowledged that conditions in the prison were ‘tough, though not inhuman’. But, he added: ‘We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded’. . . . [H]e denied torturing him, saying it was his mission to ensure that McCain survived. As the son of the US naval commander in Vietnam, he offered a potential valuable propaganda weapon.”

Most of the others promoting a heroized image of U.S. POW’s were graduates of service academies and came from privileged backgrounds. They included a) James Stockdale, who ran for Vice President in 1992 as the running mate of Ross Perot; b) Robinson Risner, a double recipient of the Air Force Cross, the second highest military decoration for valor; and c) Jeremiah Denton, who went on to become the first Republican Senator from the state of Alabama and a close ally of President Ronald Reagan.

John McCain fit well with this group because he was also academically privileged and his family included high-ranking military officers like his father, Jack, who was an admiral and the Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.

James Stockdale, Medal of Honor, Vietnam War | Military.com

James Stockdale while in captivity. [Source: military.com]

Jeremiah Denton featured in famous film footage from his captivity. [Source: washingtontimes.com]

After his release in 1973, Colonel Risner, right, and Maj. Gen. LeRoy J. Manor rode in a parade in San Francisco.
Robinson Risner, right, is celebrated in a parade in San Francisco in 1973 after his return following seven years in a North Vietnamese POW camp. [Source: nytimes.com]

With post-war military careers at stake, these high-ranking officers played up the alleged barbarity of the North Vietnamese, demanded resistance to interrogations from other captives, and threatened so-called deviants with disciplinary charges after release to the U.S.

The Nixon administration advanced their credibility and status in a desperate ploy to stir up support at home for an unpopular conflict abroad; and further concocted a story—announced in a press conference by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird on May 19, 1969—that 1,300 American soldiers deemed “missing in action” were believed to be prisoners of war.

Melvin Laird was first to publicize plight of POWs in Vietnam - Hartford Courant
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird gives the opening statement of a press conference on May 19, 1969, to publicize the plight of U.S. POWs and MIAs in North Vietnam. [Source: courant.com]

The unaccounted for would now publicly be described as “POW/MIA,” implying that any serviceperson missing in Vietnam could also be a prisoner of war. This transformed the war from a political issue into a humanitarian one, trading public support for sympathy. It didn’t matter why we were there in the first place: Our boys were there, and by God were we going to do anything to get them home.

Suddenly, the public image of Vietnam looked very different. The very real footage of brutalized Vietnamese bodies, wailing children, and napalmed villages was traded for a fantasy—all of the violence that had been done in Uncle Sam’s name was now being done to him.

Kim Phuc, the napalm girl: 'Love is more powerful than any weapon'
Images like this famous one of a Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim Phúc, running from a U.S. napalm strike, were supplanted by the fixation with the plight of American POW/MIAs. This was a brilliant public relations maneuver by the Nixon administration in collusion with the media. [Source: irishtimes.com]

The POW issue soon became a cause célèbre. In the early 1970s, millions of “POW bracelets” were sold by a student group called VIVA (Voices in Vital America), each branded with the name of a missing American serviceman.

Washington Memorial Park | Pow mia, My childhood memories, Baby boomers memories

POW/MIA bracelet. [Source: pinterest.com]
POW MIA Bracelet

[Source: audacy.com]

These shiny nickel bracelets were spotted on the wrists of celebrities like Sonny and Cher—who had often before dressed like hippies—and Sammy Davis, Jr, and allegedly Princess Grace of Monaco put in an order for two bracelets.

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, Episode 42 - Cher Scholar

Sonny and Cher with returned POW John “Spike” Nasmyth on their CBS comedy hour program in March 1973 in which they announced that they wore POW bracelets with his name. [Source: cherscholar.com]

The silver bracelets could even be spotted on the fashion runway, where models with an interest in political activism took to wearing them. A New York Times profile from the day quotes a model named Astrida Woods, who said she was “dissatisfied” with her life as a model and felt the urge to give back. “I began to do some work with Ralph Nader, and now [wearing the bracelets]. It’s a way to contribute something.”

Pretty young women showcasing POW bracelets as part of PR campaign to unify the nation around support for POW/MIAs, if not the Vietnam War itself. [Source: audacy.com]

Many U.S. GIs and pilots, however, reported being humanely treated during their captivity, with access to adequate food, recreation facilities and reading material.

Wilber and Lembcke conclude that “instances of brutal treatment” were “less common than [has been] purported” and that evidence of systematic torture drawn from visitor reports, POW statements, and oral histories was scant.

Those POWs who questioned the war were dismissed by the military for their supposedly “weak personal character” and “lack of education and backgrounds in broken and poor families,” a typical case of “psychologizing the political.”

These men were in turn stigmatized and then forgotten by the public amidst the manufactured concern about POW/MIAs who were supposedly brutalized and then kept in captivity and abandoned by their government.

Camp Rats?

A person with a mustache Description automatically generated with low confidence
Edison Miller [Source: valor.militarytimes.com]

The ranks of the POW dissenters included Lt. Col. Edison Miller, a recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart from California who spent six years in captivity after his fighter plane was shot down over North Vietnamese skies on October 13, 1967.

A contemporary described Miller, a Californian who flew previously over Korea, as a “first-rate pilot with a zeal for combat but an independent sort.”

John McCain falsely accused Miller of being a turncoat because he appeared in North Vietnamese propaganda.

In his 1999 best-selling book Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote about Miller as one of two “camp rats”—the other being Tom’s father Gene, who had been executive officer of a squadron of F-4s when he was shot down over North Vietnam on June 16, 1968.

McCain said both “had lost their faith completely.”

“They not only stopped resisting but apparently crossed a line no other prisoner I knew had even approached,” McCain wrote. “They were collaborators, actively aiding the enemy.”

Miller told the Orange County Register in response to these charges that McCain had “lied about me … The attacks on my character and integrity are totally without merit or justification. I did stand up and say the war was wrong. I would speak against the war, but I never spoke against my country. And I gave up no secrets.”

A person in a suit and tie Description automatically generated with low confidence
Edison Miller holding his Marine Corps uniform in 2008. [Source: ocregister.com]

McCain accused Miller of receiving eggs, bananas and other delicacies to eat from camp guards. Miller says, however, that he never saw eggs during his internment and that McCain was never in a position to see the food brought to him.

A picture containing text, person, wearing, person Description automatically generated
Robert Schweitzer [Source: valor.militarytimes.com]

McCain further claimed that Miller turned him in to a North Vietnamese guard when McCain tried to befriend him, and that the guard then beat McCain. Miller said: “I never ratted out a fellow American. McCain has fabricated and exaggerated his experience for political advantage.”

Miller’s anti-war views had been sharpened in conversation with Navy Commander Robert Schweitzer, a captive from 1968 to 1973 who died a year after his release while still on active duty in San Francisco.

Schweitzer felt that, because the U.S. had never declared war, there could not legally be any North Vietnamese prisoners of war, only “Americans detained by a foreign power,” Miller said.

A tape of a conversation between Miller and Schweitzer was played for other prisoners, who heard not only an anti-war message but a challenge to the legality of the U.S. military action in Vietnam.

In 1970, when Miller and Gene Wilber were interviewed on national television, Wilber called for an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal “so that the Vietnamese can solve their own problems.”

U.S. journalists at the time, however, did not take their interview seriously, regarding it rather as a North Vietnamese propaganda show.

The two men along with Schweitzer continued to write protest statements and together with fellow dissenters met with American peace activists visiting North Vietnam, including actress Jane Fonda and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

Jane Fonda in Nghe An, North VN 1972 | manhhai | Flickr

Jane Fonda (center) during trip to North Vietnam in 1972. [Source: flickr.com]

Mr. Clark, left, in North Vietnam in 1972. He met with Communist officials in Hanoi and publicly criticized American conduct of the Vietnam War.

Ramsey Clark (left) in North Vietnam in 1972. [Source: nytimes.com]

Empathy for the War’s Victims

Amazon.com: Black Prisoner of War: A Conscientious Objector's Vietnam Memoir (9780700610600): Daly, James A., Bergman, Lee: Books
[Source: amazon.com]

Most dissenting POWs came from a working-class background.

James A. Daly, an African-American infantryman from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, for example, was raised in poverty by a single mother.

His 1975 book, Black Prisoner of War, describes his three years of jungle confinement after his capture by North Vietnamese soldiers and the South Vietnam-based National Liberation Front (NLF), followed by a two-month trek north to Hanoi on the Ho Chi Minh trail where he experienced what it was like to be on the receiving end of U.S. ordnance.

Bob Chenoweth, from a white working-class family in Oregon, similarly developed an empathy for the Vietnamese people and a distaste for the racist views of most Americans toward the Vietnamese.

A helicopter crew member, before he was shot down and captured, Chenoweth said he “couldn’t see how U.S. forces could possibly be helping the Vietnamese given the attitude that GIs had, viewing them as ‘subhuman’ and disparaging them as ‘gooks and dinks.’”

Chenoweth and other of his contemporaries authored anti-war statements, wrote messages to GIs asking them to follow their consciences, sent letters to politicians, and recorded tapes to be aired via Radio Hanoi.

A person standing at a podium Description automatically generated with medium confidence

Bob Chenoweth speaking at Veterans for Peace conference in Spokane, Washington, in 2019. He was active in the Vietnam era anti-war movement upon his return from the war. [Source: wagingpeaceinvietnam.com]

Higher ranking POWs responded by trying to isolate the dissenters from other American prisoners while charging them with participating in a conspiracy against the United States.

One of the dissidents, Abel Kavanaugh, committed suicide as a result of the intense pressure and prospective stigma of a dishonorable discharge only a few months after coming home from Vietnam.

 Abel Larry Kavanaugh

Abel Kavanaugh [Source: findagrave.com]

Charges against the POW dissidents were eventually dropped, Wilber and Lembcke believe, so as to not jeopardize the hero-prisoner story with too much attention on dissent and through a possible exposure of inconsistencies in the accusers’ own prison biographies.

Fear of Communist Infiltration

A critical trope in Cold War America was the fear of communist infiltration and internal subversion through brainwashing and mind control.

This trope was fortified by a CIA propaganda effort that depicted Korean War POWs who defected to the North Korean and Chinese side as having been brainwashed in interrogation.

Brainwashing by Edward Hunter

CIA propaganda tract accusing Communist China of brainwashing U.S. POWs. The stereotype of cunning and evil Oriental communists endured through the Vietnam War and beyond and impacted how Americans viewed the dissenting POWs in Vietnam. [Source: goodreads.com]

Most of these defectors were in fact African-Americans who did not want to return to the Jim Crow South, while others were attracted by communist ideals or saw the U.S. war as immoral.[1]

Clarence Adams with Korean prisoners of war and communist captors, in 1954. Photos: SCMP; Della Adams; UPI
Clarence Adams with Korean POWs and Communist captors in 1954. Adams lived in China for 12 years. He said he was well treated in captivity and stayed on in China because he was offered the chance at education there. Later he made propaganda broadcasts for Radio Hanoi, eventually returning to his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, where he ran a chain of successful Chinese restaurants. [Source: u.osu.edu]

The stereotype of the brainwashed POW of the Korean War turned collaborator and traitor because of his weak character would become the backdrop for the discrediting of the dissident POWs of the Vietnam War.

The Korean War Prisoner Who Never Came Home
POW defectors in the Korean War who stood for peace. [Source: newyorker.com]

In an appearance on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Gene Wilber was grilled on whether he had given in to the enemy to make antiwar statements. That he had acted on his own “conscience and morality” was drowned out by host Mike Wallace’s implications of collaboration and opportunism.

When he was subsequently invited to the White House POW reception, Wilber found his hotel room broken into and marked with accusations of treason when he returned from the reception.

In the summer of 1973, James Stockdale charged Wilber and Edison Miller with collaborating with the enemy, mutiny, and inciting personnel to insubordination. However, military judges found insufficient evidence to prosecute the case, and Wilber and Miller instead received letters of censure for their failure to meet the standard expected of officers.

Hollywood Revisionism

POW films starting from this time focused on returnees’ estrangement with their families and society and were told as stories of spousal infidelity, representing both individual drama as well as a sense of “home-front betrayal.”

These films were part of a post-war revisionism, which included a spate of films that contributed to the legend of American servicemen left behind in Vietnam.

In the 1980s, a new subgenre emerged focused on Vietnam veterans heroically taking on the task of returning to Indochina and liberating the left-behind POWs, who had been betrayed on the home front and abandoned by the U.S. government.

The POWs were depicted as victimized and emasculated captives who needed to be rescued by individualist heroes and whose honor as Americans was to be restored.

A picture containing text, book Description automatically generated

[Source: wikipedia.org]

This image, Wilber and Lembcke argue, fits the post-war efforts to psychologize the once political conflicts of the Vietnam War and to depict the veteran as a victim and loser.

More of a heroized image and the POWs’ endurance of torture was revived with the 1987 film, The Hanoi Hilton, which starred Michael Moriarty, Ken Wright and Paul Le Mat as U.S. POWs who defy their captors while enduring brutal treatment at Hanoi’s Hoa Lo prison (aka The Hanoi Hilton).

The Hanoi Hilton (1987) - IMDb

[Source: imdb.com]

This film meshed particularly well President’s Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause,” fought by noble men, with the POW dissenters by implication being ignoble.

Persistence of the Hero-Prisoner Story

In their quest to comprehend the persistence of the hero-prisoner story, Wilber and Lembcke take their readers back to American colonial history and the captivity narratives emerging during that time.

These stories are about a complex mix of violence against captives, temptations to stay with their captors, the ideal to remain loyal with their fellow colonists, and their Christian beliefs.

Indian Captives

Illustration of captives in the Indian Wars. [Source: legendofamerica.com]

Such tensions and correlations between the Self and the Other were critical in the making of an American identity. The wars in Korea and Vietnam and the POW experiences there can be understood as a new chapter of this identity-making process. Here, too, Americans must prove their will and ability to endure the brutality of a racialized Other.

A wrench in the story, however, is revealed in the autobiographical accounts of POW-heroes like Stockdale, Denton, and Risner. They wrote about fasting as a way of enforcing self-discipline and self-assurance, sometimes with a religious subtext.

More bizarrely, they also wrote about self-mutilation—the deliberate infliction of physical wounds on themselves that would be visible during filmed interviews.

The aim was to make it appear to other POWs (and to the U.S. public) that they had been tortured. One officer wrote of how he purposely damaged his vocal apparatus so he could not be forced to make propaganda statements.

In addition to some high-ranking officers attempting to portray themselves as heroes by means of self-mutilation, Wilber and Lembcke also noted that they tried to keep political literature and news of dissent back home away from other POWs, fearing that these would enhance critical positions on the war and against their authority within the prison population.

Moreover, these ranking officers often despised the more humane view of the Vietnamese displayed by other prisoners, including an interest in their language and culture, and an understanding of why they were fighting back against an invasion of their country by the most powerful military force in the world.

Bringing Back Forgotten Dissenters

Wilber and Lembcke’s book helps restore these forgotten POW dissenters to their rightful—and honored—place among the large and diverse Vietnam generation of dissidents, draft resisters, oppositional GIs, veteran activists, deserters, and all those who supported them.

Antiwar Resistance Within the Military During the Vietnam War
[Source: vietnampeace.org]

The book also shows that, despite all destruction and death brought by the invaders from the sky, North Vietnam maintained a moral superiority through oftentimes fair treatment of the captured Americans. This was in stark contrast to the more systematic adoption of torture methods by USAID and CIA-trained police under the Operation Phoenix and like-minded programs.

A group of people holding signs Description automatically generated with low confidence
Vietnam War protesters create mock Tiger Cage, replicating one in the USAID-run Con Son prison where Vietnamese inmates were tortured in a way American POWs claimed they had been tortured. [Source: easyyolktoofiles.wordpress.com]

The POW/MIA flag that flies today over the White House is intended to honor the men who endured captivity; however, it continues to perpetuate a distorted understanding of a war that was as abominable as it was unjust, and helps to advance a dangerous nationalist ideology that will lead to future Vietnams.


  1. See Clarence Adams, An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). 

June 23, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Film Review, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Fear Is Contagious and Used to Control You

fear contagious

By Dr. Joseph Mercola | June 18, 2021

Governments are using fear to control and manipulate their citizens. That has now been admitted by members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B), a subcommittee that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the U.K. And they should know, because they advocated for it, and now say it was a regrettable mistake. As reported by The Telegraph, May 14, 2021:1

“Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behavior during the COVID pandemic have admitted its work was ‘unethical’ and ‘totalitarian.’ Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s COVID-19 response.

SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase ‘the perceived level of personal threat’ from COVID-19 because ‘a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened.’

Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: ‘Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.’”

Psychological Warfare Is Real

The Telegraph quotes several of the SPI-B members, all of whom are also quoted in the newly released book, “A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” written by Laura Dodsworth:2

“One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: ‘In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.

The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared’ …

One warned that ‘people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise … We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in’ …

Another member of SPI-B said they were ‘stunned by the weaponization of behavioral psychology’ during the pandemic, and that ‘psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them.’

Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the COVID Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: ‘If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become. If we’re being really honest, do I fear that government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.’”

The Manufacture of Fear

For nearly a year and a half, governments around the world, with few exceptions, have fed their citizens a steady diet of frightening news. For months on end, you couldn’t turn on the television without facing a tickertape detailing the number of hospitalizations and deaths.

Even when it became clear that people weren’t really dying in excessive numbers, the mainstream media fed us continuous updates on the growing number of “cases,” without ever putting such figures into context or explaining that the vast majority were false positives.

Information that would have balanced out the bad news — such as recovery rates and just how many so-called “cases” actually weren’t, because they never had a single symptom — were censored and suppressed.

They also refused to put any of the data into context, such as reviewing whether the death toll actually differed significantly from previous years. Instead, each new case was treated as an emergency and a sign of catastrophic doom.

Don’t Be Confused — Contradiction Is a Warfare Tactic

Aside from the barrage of bad-news-only data — which, by the way, was heavily manipulated in a variety of ways — fear and anxiety are also generated by keeping you confused. According to Dodsworth, giving out contradictory recommendations and vague instructions is being done intentionally, to keep you psychologically vulnerable.

“When you create a state of confusion, people become ever more reliant on the messaging. Instead of feeling confident about making decisions, they end up waiting for instructions from the Government,” she said in a May 20, 2021, interview on the Planet Normal podcast.3

An example provided by Dodsworth are the pandemic measures implemented over Christmas 2020:

“Family Christmases were on, then off, then back on, then off again. You have got someone tightening the screw, then loosening the screw, then tightening it again. It’s like a torture scenario.”

But that’s not all. As explained by psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, by layering confusion and uncertainty on top of fear, you can bring an individual to a state in which they can no longer think rationally. Once driven into an illogical state, they are easily manipulated. I have no doubt driving people into a state where logic and reason no longer registers is the whole point behind much of the conflicting information we’re given.

The Fear Factory

In her book, Dodsworth details a number of branches of the British government that are using psychological warfare methods in their interaction with the public. In addition to the SPI-B, there’s the:4

Behavioral Insights team, the so-called “nudge unit,” a semi-independent government body that applies “behavioral insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver positive results for people and communities.”5 This team also advises foreign nations.

Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which is part of the U.K.’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, advises front groups disguised as public “grassroots” organizations on how to “covertly engineer the thoughts of people.”

Rapid Response Unit, launched in 2018, operates across the British Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s office (colloquially known as “Number 10” as in the physical address, 10 Downing Street in London) to “counter misinformation and disinformation.” They also work with the National Security Communications Team during crises to ensure “official information” gets maximum visibility.6

Counter Disinformation Cell, which is part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Both monitor social media and combat “fake news” about science in general and COVID-19 in particular, with “fake news” being anything that contradicts the World Health Organization’s guidance.7

Government Communications Headquarters (QCHQ), an intelligence and security organization that provides information to the U.K. government and the armed forces. According to Dodsworth, QCHQ personnel, and even members of the 77th Brigade, have been enlisted as so-called sockpuppets and trolls to combat anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown messaging on social media.

According to Dodsworth, there are many others. In her book, she claims at least 10 different government departments in the U.K. are working with “behavioral insights teams” to manipulate the public.

We’re Just Seeing It Now

Importantly, government’s reliance on behavioral psychology didn’t just happen as a result of the pandemic. These tactics have been used for years, for myriad PR purposes, and while the pandemic may be winding down, Dodsworth warns that more and more behavioral scientists are being hired:8

“It’s growing and growing. Right now, I feel we are in a maelstrom of nudge,” she says. “In the past, there have been calls to consult the public on the use of behavioral psychology, and those calls have come from the behavioral scientists themselves. And yet it hasn’t happened. We haven’t yet been consulted on the use of subconscious techniques which effectively strip away our choices …

I fervently hope this book [‘The State of Fear’] is actually going to inspire a much-needed conversation about the use of fear, not just in the epidemic, but the way we use behavioral psychology overall.

It’s not just a genie that has been let out the bottle. It’s like we’ve unleashed a Hydra and you can keep chopping its head off, but they keep employing more of these behavioral scientists throughout different government departments. It’s very much how the Government now does business. It’s the business of fear …

I think ultimately people don’t want to be manipulated. People don’t enjoy being hoodwinked and they don’t want to live in a state of fear. We maybe need to be a bit bolder about standing up more quickly when something is not right.”

Full article

June 21, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Deception | , | Leave a comment

On ‘conflict’, ‘peace’ and ‘genocide’: Time for new language on Palestine and Israel

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | June 12, 2021

On 25 May, famous US actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

“I have reflected and wanted to apologise for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding: “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”

But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of “hyperbole”?

To avoid pointless social media spats, one only needs to reference the “United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. According to Article 2 of the 1948 Convention, the legal definition of genocide is: “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

In its depiction of Israel’s latest war on Gaza, the Geneva-based human rights group, Euro-Med Monitor, reported: “The Israeli forces directly targeted 31 extended families. In 21 cases, the homes of these families were bombed while their residents were inside. These raids resulted in the killing of 98 civilians, including 44 children and 28 women. Among the victims were a man and his wife and children, mothers and their children, or child siblings. There were seven mothers who were killed along with four or three of their children. The bombing of these homes and buildings came without any warning despite the Israeli forces’ knowledge that civilians were inside.”

As of 28 May, 254 Palestinians in Gaza were killed, and 1,948 were wounded in the latest 11-day Israeli onslaught, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. Though tragic, this number is relatively small compared with the casualties of previous wars. For example, in the 51-day Israeli war on Gaza in the summer of 2014, over 2,200 Palestinians were killed, and over 17,000 were wounded. Similarly, entire families, like the 21-member Abu Jame family in Khan Younis, also perished. Is this not genocide? The same logic can be applied to the killings of over 300 unarmed protesters at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel between March 2018 and December 2019. Moreover, the besiegement and utter isolation of over two million Palestinians in Gaza since 2006-2007, which has resulted in numerous tragedies, is an act of collective punishment that also deserves the designation of genocide.

One does not need to be a legal expert to identify the many elements of genocide in Israel’s violent behaviour, let alone language, against Palestinians. There is a clear, undeniable relationship between Israel’s violent political discourse and equally violent action on the ground. Potentially Israel’s next Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who has served the role of defence minister, in July 2013 stated: “I’ve killed lots of Arabs in my life – and there’s no problem with that.”

With this context in mind, and regardless of why Ruffalo found it necessary to back-track on his moral position, Israel is an unrepentant human rights violator that continues to carry out an active policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the native, indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.

Language matters, and in this particular “conflict”, it matters most, because Israel has, for long, managed to escape any accountability for its actions, due to its success in misrepresenting facts and the overall truth about itself. Thanks to its many allies and supporters in mainstream media and academia, Tel Aviv has rebranded itself from being a military occupier and an apartheid regime to an “oasis of democracy“, in fact, “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

This article will not attempt to challenge the entirety of the misconstrued mainstream media’s depiction of Israel. Volumes are required for that, and Israeli Professor Ilan Pappé’s Ten Myths about Israel is an important starting point. However, this article will attempt to present some basic definitions that must enter the Palestine-Israel lexicon, as a prerequisite to developing a fairer understanding of what is happening on the ground.

A military occupation – not a ‘conflict’

Quite often, mainstream Western media refers to the situation in Palestine and Israel as a “conflict“, and to the various specific elements of this so-called conflict as a “dispute“. For example, the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and the “disputed city of East Jerusalem”.

What should be an obvious truth, is that besieged, occupied people do not engage in a “conflict” with their occupiers. Moreover, a “dispute” happens when two parties have equally compelling claims to any issue. When Palestinian families of East Jerusalem are being forced out of their homes which are, in turn, handed over to Jewish extremists, there is no “dispute” involved. The extremists are thieves, and the Palestinians are victims. This is not a matter of opinion. The international community itself says so.

“Conflict” is a generic term. Aside from absolving the aggressor – in this case, Israel – it leaves all matters open to interpretation. Since US audiences are indoctrinated to love Israel and hate Arabs and Muslims, siding with Israel in its “conflict” with the latter becomes the only rational option.

Israel has sustained a military occupation of 22 per cent of the total size of historic Palestine since June 1967. The remainder of the Palestinian homeland was already usurped, using extreme violence, state-sanctioned apartheid, and, as Pappé puts it, “incremental genocide” decades earlier.

From the perspective of international law, the term “military occupation”, “occupied East Jerusalem”, “illegal Jewish settlements”, and so forth, have never been “disputed”. They are simply facts, even if Washington has decided to ignore international law, and even if mainstream US media has chosen to manipulate the terminology to present Israel as a victim, not the aggressor.

‘Process’ without ‘peace’

The term “peace process” was coined by US diplomats decades ago. It was put to use throughout the mid and late 1970s when, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger laboured to broker a deal between Egypt and Israel in the hope of fragmenting the Arab political front and, eventually, sidelining Cairo entirely from the “Arab-Israeli conflict”.

Kissinger’s logic proved vital for Israel as the “process” did not aim to achieve justice according to fixed criteria that has been delineated by the United Nations for years. There was no frame of reference anymore. If any existed, it was Washington’s political priorities that, historically, almost entirely overlapped with Israel’s priorities. Despite the obvious US bias, the US bestowed upon itself the undeserving title of “the honest peace broker“.

This approach was used successfully in the write-up to the Camp David Accords in 1978. One of the accords’ greatest achievements is that the so-called “Arab-Israeli conflict” was replaced with the so-called “Palestinian-Israeli conflict”.

Now, tried and true, the “peace process” was used again in 1993, resulting in the Oslo Accords. For nearly three decades, the US continued to tout its self-proclaimed credentials as a peacemaker, despite the fact that it pumped – and continues to do so – $3-4 billion of annual, mostly military, aid to Israel.

On the other hand, the Palestinians have little to show. No peace was achieved; no justice was obtained; not an inch of Palestinian land was returned and not a single Palestinian refugee was allowed to return home. However, US and European officials and a massive media apparatus continued to talk of a “peace process” with little regard to the fact that the “peace process” has brought nothing but war and destruction for Palestine, and allowed Israel to continue its illegal appropriation and colonisation of Palestinian land.

Resistance, national liberation – not ‘terrorism’ and ‘state-building’

The “peace process” introduced more than death, mayhem and normalisation of land theft in Palestine. It also wrought its own language, which remains in effect to this day. According to the new lexicon, Palestinians are divided into “moderates” and “extremists”. The “moderates” believe in the US-led “peace process”, “peace negotiations” and are ready to make “painful compromises” in order to obtain the coveted “peace”. On the other hand, the “extremists” are the “Iran-backed“, politically “radical” bunch that use “terrorism” to satisfy their “dark” political agendas.

But is this the case? Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, many sectors of Palestinian society, including Muslims and Christians, Islamists and secularists and, notably, socialists, resisted the unwarranted political “compromises” undertaken by their leadership, which they perceived to be a betrayal of Palestinians’ basic rights. Meanwhile, the “moderates” have largely ruled over Palestinians with no democratic mandate. This small but powerful group introduced a culture of political and financial corruption, unprecedented in Palestine. They applied torture against Palestinian political dissidents whenever it suited them. Not only did Washington say little to criticise the “moderate” Palestinian Authority (PA)’s dismal human rights record, but it also applauded it for its crackdown on those who “incite violence” and their “terrorist infrastructure”.

A term such as “resistance” – muqawama – was slowly but carefully extricated from the Palestinian national discourse. The term “liberation”, too, was perceived to be confrontational and hostile. Instead, such concepts as “state-building” – championed by former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and others – began taking hold. The fact that Palestine was still an occupied country and that “state-building” can only be achieved once “liberation” was first secured, did not seem to matter to the “donor countries”. The priorities of these countries – mainly US allies who adhered to the US political agenda in the Middle East – was to maintain the illusion of the “peace process” and to ensure “security coordination” between PA police and the Israeli army carried on, unabated.

The so-called “security coordination”, of course, refers to the US-funded joint Israeli-PA efforts at cracking down on Palestinian resistance, apprehending Palestinian political dissidents and ensuring the safety of the illegal Jewish settlements, or colonies, in the occupied West Bank.

War and, yes, genocide in Gaza – not ‘Israel-Hamas conflict’

The word “democracy” was constantly featured in the new Oslo language. Of course, it was not intended to serve its actual meaning. Instead, it was the icing on the cake of making the illusion of the “peace process” perfect. This was obvious, at least to most Palestinians. It also became obvious to the whole world in January 2006, when the Palestinian faction Fatah, which has monopolised the PA since its inception in 1994, lost the popular vote to the Islamic faction, Hamas.

Hamas, and other Palestinian factions, have rejected – and continue to reject – the Oslo Accords. Their participation in the legislative elections in 2006 took many by surprise, as the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) was itself a product of Oslo. Their victory in the elections, which was classified as democratic and transparent by international monitoring groups, threw a wrench in the US-Israeli-PA political calculations.

Lo and behold, the group that has long been perceived by Israel and its allies as “extremist” and “terrorist” became the potential leaders of Palestine! The Oslo spin doctors had to go into overdrive in order for them to thwart Palestinian democracy and ensure a successful return to the status quo, even if this meant that Palestine is represented by unelected, undemocratic leaders. Sadly, this has been the case for nearly 15 years.

Meanwhile, Hamas’s stronghold, the Gaza Strip, had to be taught a lesson, thus the siege imposed on the impoverished region for nearly 15 years. The siege on Gaza has little to do with Hamas’s rockets or Israel’s “security” needs, the right to “defend itself” and its supposedly “justifiable” desire to destroy Gaza’s “terrorist infrastructure”. While, indeed, Hamas’s popularity in Gaza is unmatched anywhere else in Palestine, Fatah, too, has a powerful constituency there. Moreover, the Palestinian resistance in the strip is not championed by Hamas alone, but also by other ideological and political groups, for example, the Islamic Jihad, the socialist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and other socialist and secular groups.

Misrepresenting the “conflict” as a “war” between Israel and Hamas is crucial to Israeli propaganda, which has succeeded in equating Hamas with militant groups throughout the Middle East and even Afghanistan. But Hamas is not Daesh, Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In fact, none of these groups is similar, anyway. Hamas is a Palestinian Islamic nationalist movement that operates within a largely Palestinian political context. An excellent book on Hamas is the recently published volume by Dr Daud Abdullah, Engaging the World. Abdullah’s book rightly presents Hamas as a rational political actor, rooted in its ideological convictions, yet flexible and pragmatic in its ability to adapt to national, regional and international geopolitical changes.

But what does Israel have to gain from mischaracterising the Palestinian resistance in Gaza? Aside from satisfying its propaganda campaign of erroneously linking Hamas to other anti-US groups, it also dehumanises the Palestinian people entirely and presents Israel as a partner in the US global so-called “war on terror”. Israeli neofascist and ultranationalist politicians then become the saviours of humanity, their violent racist language is forgiven and their active “genocide” is seen as an act of “self-defence” or, at best, a mere state of “conflict”.

The oppressor as the victim

According to the strange logic of mainstream media, Palestinians are rarely “killed” by Israeli soldiers, but rather “die” in “clashes” resulting from various “disputes”. Israel does not “colonise” Palestinian land; it merely “annexes”, “appropriates” and “captures”, and so on. What has been taking place in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, for example, is not outright property theft, leading to ethnic cleansing, but rather a “property dispute”.

The list goes on and on.

In truth, language has always been a part of Zionist colonialism, long before the state of Israel was itself constructed from the ruins of Palestinian homes and villages in 1948. Palestine, according to the Zionists, was “a land with no people” for “a people with no land”. These colonists were never “illegal settlers” but “Jewish returnees” to their “ancestral homeland”, who, through hard work and perseverance, managed to “make the desert bloom”, and, in order to defend themselves against the “hordes of Arabs”, they needed to build an “invincible army”.

It will not be easy to deconstruct the seemingly endless edifice of lies, half-truths and intentional misrepresentations of Zionist Israeli colonialism in Palestine. Yet, there can be no alternative to this feat because, without proper, accurate and courageous understanding and depiction of Israeli settler colonialism and Palestinian resistance to it, Israel will continue to oppress Palestinians while presenting itself as the victim.

June 12, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Nullifying the First Amendment

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | June 9, 2021

Whenever some foreign regime that is independent of the U.S. Empire goes after dissenters, U.S. officials trot out the First Amendment to show how different the United States is. Here, people are free to criticize government officials without fear of being put in jail or otherwise punished for exercising their free speech rights, they proudly point out. 

However, what goes unexplained in such pious proclamations is why so many leading executives in big American companies remain silent when it comes to America’s foreign wars, foreign interventions, coups, alliances with dictators, torture, mass secret surveillance, indefinite detention, denial of due process, Gitmo, state-sponsored assassinations, and other dark-side activities of the U.S. national-security establishment.

The reason is that every one of those executives knows that federal officials are able to retaliate against them in indirect ways for criticizing their policies and operations. Such indirect methods of retaliation can consist of IRS audits, regulatory harassment, denial of applications for mergers and acquisitions, non-renewal of radio and television licenses, and even the threat of disclosure of personal secrets acquired through secret surveillance of emails and telephone records. 

A good example of free speech nullification involved President Lyndon Johnson, soon after he became president after the assassination of President Kennedy. Johnson’s indirect nullification of the First Amendment is set forth in Robert Caro’s book The Passage of Power.

Prior to the assassination, a Dallas reporter named Margaret Mayer had begun investigating Johnson’s radio and television stations in Austin. On the evening of Saturday, January 4, 1964, Johnson telephoned her paper’s managing editor and spoke directly about what he was prepared to do if the paper didn’t stop Mayer’s investigation. 

Johnson mentioned by name the paper’s publisher and board owner, its president, and the president of radio and television stations owned by the paper. He then made it clear that he was prepared to use all the powers at his disposal against them if they didn’t stop Mayer’s investigation, including IRS audits, both personal and business, as well as non-renewal of FCC licenses for the radio and television stations. 

Johnson demanded a response by the next morning. The next morning — Sunday morning —  the editor telephoned the president and said, “We’ll take care of the thing tomorrow” and assured Johnson that his role would be kept secret. Mayer’s investigation was shut down.

Caro provides another example, one involving not just a reporter but rather an entire newspaper, which had been critical of Johnson before the assassination. Johnson set out to stop the criticism.

The paper’s president also served as president of a local bank that was trying to merge with another Texas bank. Such mergers require federal approval. Both the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department opposed the merger. Using presidential aide Jack Valenti as an intermediary, Johnson told the paper that if it wanted the merger to go through, it would have to cease criticizing him. According to Caro, the paper became a supporter of Johnson, even endorsing him in the 1964 race. Johnson overruled the Fed and Justice and ordered the approval of the merger.

Caro provides another example of this phenomenon, one involving a Washington, D.C., correspondent for a Texas newspaper. The reporter had been critical of Johnson. Johnson telephoned the paper’s owner and mentioned Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base as well as the recent decision to close the Fort Worth Army Depot. He also mentioned a project to make the Trinity River navigable for barges from the Gulf of Mexico to Fort Worth.

The paper squeezed out the reporter. Carswell remained in operation and ended up playing a big role in Johnson’s war in Vietnam. Johnson also made sure that one billion dollars in federal money went to the Trinity River project, although the project was never finished. 

Today, it is hard to believe that a president, the Pentagon, the CIA, or the NSA would make these types of direct threats to any U.S. company or its executives. But they don’t have to. Everyone knows what can happen to them if they decide to publicly criticize the sordid, dark-side activities of the national-security establishment. Discretion is the better part of valor, which has to be one big reason why most executives choose to remain silent. 


Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education.

June 11, 2021 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment