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Gemma Peters- did I hear you right?

By Roger Watson | Unity News Network | July 12, 2021

Unfortunately, I did. I caught snippets on 9 July of an interview on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme with Gemma Peters, Chief Executive of the charity Blood Cancer UK. Ms Peters has already declared and tweeted that ‘19 July won’t be freedom day for everyone’ so she is going to keep wearing her mask. Fair enough, I don’t care if she wears a paper bag over her head. But why tell us about it? And then I heard something so absurd that I had to go to BBC Sounds to re-run that section of the Today programme to verify it. And I had heard right.

According to Gemma Peters, many people with blood cancer and who may thus be immune system compromised either do not know they are compromised (something to do with ‘saving the NHS’ apparently) and others who do and who may or may not have been vaccinated may still be vulnerable to COVID-19. The answer? You probably worked it out. We should all be wearing masks all the time and socially distanced indefinitely to protect this group of people. We never know when we might be sitting next to someone who is vulnerable due to being immune compromised. I could, perhaps, appreciate this advice: 1. if face masks were effective; 2. if immune compromised people were coming down our streets in droves. But we all know masks are ineffective and the risk that Gemma Peters was pointing to applies, in the UK, to half a million people; 0.7% of the population.

So, Ms Peters, the immune compromised tail must wag the immune competent dog. Of course, that will be interpreted by my detractors as insensitivity to people with blood cancer. But what have these poor people, for whom I have every sympathy, done during influenza, norovirus and common cold epidemics? In fact, is this what they want? Do they really want to impose an ineffective and damaging restriction on the rest of the population? To tweak the heartstrings, the slot on Today opened with an interview with a man suffering from blood cancer who said how difficult it would be for him to get to work using public transport if people were unmasked. Hardly a representative sample but, of course, it gives meddling do-gooders like Gemma Peters the excuse to lecture the rest of us on how we should behave.

It strikes me that Gemma Peters and her executive team may not have enough to do. After all they have changed the name of their charity twice in four years. This undoubtedly involved a consultancy company and a fat fee. Now they have decided it is their job to try to control the lives of the rest of the population. I can imagine a host of other charities jumping on this bandwagon. How long before The Stroke Association, The Alzheimer’s Society and the British Heart Foundation weigh in? If they do, we must resist this ‘tyranny of niceness’.

July 13, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

‘Scientists’ Want Climate Change Deaths Reported Daily Like Covid

By Richie Allen | July 13, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax. The public are convinced that their lives are in danger, largely due to the media’s relentless reporting of cases and deaths every hour of every day.

Climate change is also a hoax. There is no evidence that CO2 is warming the planet and is responsible for extreme weather events. No really, there is not a jot of evidence to support the claim. Most people are indifferent to it. They’re not scared enough. What to do?

Climate evangelicals calling themselves scientists, want deaths caused by climate change, to be reported every day, just like covid. They also want climate change to be declared a global emergency.

According to SKY News today:

Climate change should be treated with the same urgency as the covid-19 pandemic, according to a study. The study, which was led by Glasgow Caledonian University Centre For Climate Justice, reported concerns that resources used for the pandemic response, would detract from those allocated to climate action.

It said that the recovery from covid-19 should be integrated with tackling climate change and that the public should be able to see climate data as easily as they were able to see data on coronavirus.

This would include real-time reporting of deaths and damage caused by adverse weather.

SKY News is there already. Since March, it has presented a climate change show called “The Daily Climate Show.” It’s usually hosted by Anna Jones. The programme features reports on adverse weather events from all over the world and how they ruin livelihoods, render people homeless and in some cases kill.

The show never offers any evidence that links Co2 to the bad weather. Along with the BBC, SKY has declared the science on climate change to be settled.

As I’ve reported on The Richie Allen Show, there are plans to introduce climate lockdowns in the future to reduce carbon emissions. Flights will be grounded, driving restricted, events shut down, certain foods banned and all in the name of protecting the planet.

It might be an easier sell, if people are shown a daily climate death count on the 24 hour news channels. It certainly worked with covid-19.

Despite the fact that bodies were not piled high in the streets, despite the fact that most people hadn’t been unwell or even known someone who had been seriously unwell or died, they believed that they were in imminent danger.

They believed it because it was repeated ten times a day, seven days a week. I believe that absent that level of propaganda, most people would have ignored covid-19 and we’d have been all the better for it.

Most people are indifferent to climate change. On some level they know that it is nonsense. Will their heads be turned by the reporting of daily death totals by the mainstream media? Time will tell.

July 13, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Larry Sanger is right, Wikipedia has become the establishment thought police – just look at my entry there

By Eva Bartlett | RT | July 12, 2021

For some years now, Wikipedia has had a libellous smear entry on me that cannot be edited to be less of a smear. So, imagine my surprise to learn a co-founder of the site accuses it of not being neutral.

In February 2021, Larry Sanger, one of the founders of the online encyclopedia, said, “The days of Wikipedia’s robust commitment to neutrality are long gone.” This was not his first time speaking out against Wikipedia. Personally, I was surprised to learn that Wikipedia was ever neutral.

In his more recent post, ‘Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever’, Sanger wrote:

“Wikipedia, like many other deeply biased institutions of our brave new digital world, has made itself into a kind of thought police that has de facto shackled conservative viewpoints with which they disagree. Democracy cannot thrive under such conditions: I maintain that Wikipedia has become an opponent of vigorous democracy.”

I would extend his criticism to note that it is not only conservative views that are censored, but anti-Imperialist views, health care, and, specifically in the case of Syria, voices who have reported extensively from on the ground and contest official narratives about the country. These include myself and British journalist Vanessa Beeley. Not coincidentally, we have both been subjected to relentless smear pieces from the Western media and the self-proclaimed fact checkers of Snopes, branding us cheerleaders for terrorists in Syria.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the wiki-smears on us consists of those character assassination articles.

There are of course many more voices who have reported honestly on Syria but, for some reason, I couldn’t find smear entries on them. On the contrary, some have what appear to be glossy PR entries of a more biographical nature, lauding their work.

But for Vanessa Beeley and I, although much biographical information on each of us is widely available online, the Wiki entries remain devoid of the usual bios and instead are just designed to discredit us.

Sanger noted that, “All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia,” declares a policy page, “must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV).”

He went on to detail what this “neutrality” means or should mean.

“From a truly neutral article, you would learn why, on a whole variety of issues, conservatives believe one thing, while progressives believe another thing. And then you would be able to make up your own mind.

Is that what Wikipedia offers? As we will see, the answer is No.”

He went on to give numerous examples of Wikipedia’s stark lack of neutrality on critical issues. For the sake of brevity, I would encourage readers to check out Sanger’s article for the full list.

However, let’s look at the entries on myself and Vanessa Beeley.

Mine refers to me as “a Canadian activist and blogger who is known for promoting conspiracy theories about Syria.” Relegating me to a “blogger” was clearly intended to dispute my credentials as a journalist. Credentials which the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club deemed journalistically credible enough to award. Likewise, award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger more recently deemed my latest article on the Douma chemical hoax an “outstanding report.”

The Wiki smear also states that I “write op-eds for the television network RT.” For a while, that line read, “She blogs for the Russian-controlled outlet RT”, a bogus claim that many journalists (including the fact checkers of Channel 4) have copy-paste repeated without bothering to see that, like tens of other journalists, what I write is actually for the op-edge section of RT’s website.

The entry goes on to cite from the litany of smear articles against me since 2016, smears which I have refuted, and which always read the same: copy-paste character assassinations that whitewash terrorism in Syria.

Then, there is the clear instance of libel: Wikipedia’s assertion that I, “went on a government-sponsored trip to North Korea.”

In fact, my August 2017 trip to the DPRK was not paid for by any government, but by myself, with some support from a colleague who knew I lived on a shoestring.

This lie was most recently regurgitated by British journalist (and I use that term generously) Brian Whitaker.

Any defamation lawyers out there?

Similarly, the Wiki smear entry on Vanessa Beeley relegates her to mere “blogger” status (although John Pilger thinks highly enough of her, and myself, to have highlighted our “substantiated investigative work”) and in 2018 she was included on a list of the most respected journalists in the UK.

It includes the same“conspiracy theories and disinformation” line that mine does, as well as the usual, predictable anti-Russia rhetoric.

But even I was shocked to see Wikipedia’s claim that Beeley has, “been a frequent guest on InfoWars.” When I asked her about this, she replied: “This is an outright lie. I have never been a guest of Infowars. I challenge Wikipedia to publish the multiple interviews they claim exist. They can’t.”

So there we have it. Not only are the entries not even close to neutral, each contains outright fabrication in addition to the character assassinations.

At some point in 2018, I shared an email I had received from a Wikipedia editor, which noted:

“Dear Eva, I’m writing to inform you that we have taken action against a banned user who evaded their ban to create an article about you. The article has been removed. I do not have the full context here, but the content seems to have been extremely problematic and from your Twitter and the flood of supporter emails we received yesterday, I gather this has been an issue for some time.”

And indeed, supporters told me they had contacted Wikipedia to challenge the smear entry on me and were successful in making changes to read more fairly. Yet, in short time, the entry returned to nearly exactly as it had originally been.

The Wikitalk portion of the smear entry on me points out: “Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.”

But no, that hasn’t happened in my entry.

On the same page, supporters called Wikipedia out: “It’s bordering on WP:ATTACK. Nothing about her early life, education or volunteer activities etc, which you’d expect to find in a Biography. It’s just a monologue of critical opinion pieces, with a couple of lines thrown in at the end to cover her response & with a selective focus on the usual slanted key words used to disparage.”

Another critic of the entry pointed out the sources used were “questionable”, including noting that one source, Al Jazeera, is, “owned by the Qatari Royal family… and Qatar has been funding some of the Salafi rebels in Syria. Seriously, does anyone think they will report even remotely fairy on Eva Bartlett?”

In his June post on Wikipedia, Larry Sanger wrote:

“Democracy requires that voters be given the full range of views on controversial issues, so that they can make up their minds for themselves. If society’s main information sources march in ideological lockstep, they make a mockery of democracy. Then the wealthy and powerful need only gain control of the few approved organs of acceptable thought; then they will be able to manipulate and ultimately control all important political dialogue.”

Similarly, Vanessa Beeley had this to say on the matter: “The Jimmy Wales Wikipedia enterprise is little more than a McCarthyite echo chamber that is weaponized to discredit journalists and academics who are influential in challenging US or UK Imperialist policies. There is virtually no redress for the targeted individuals, ‘editors’ scrub any corrections almost immediately. Wikipedia is effectively a gatekeeper for the ruling class.”

In any case, for those interested in a fairer rendition of who is Eva Bartlett, someone created an entry on a site called Everpedia, and otherwise I have an about me section on my blog.

Unfortunately, many will first come across the wiki entries on myself and colleagues, and many will stop there. But, after all the smears, my skin has grown thick and I’m at peace with the fact that I know I’ve reported honestly.

I highly doubt the editors behind such Wiki smears can say the same of their edits.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).

July 12, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

‘Nobody has died’: scandalous vaccine propaganda for NHS staff

By Niall McCrae | Unity News Network | July 8, 2021

Covid-19 vaccine propaganda is everywhere, and particularly shrill in the sanctified NHS. Reluctant care workers are given a chance to see the error of their thinking, through a teaching session attended with compliant colleagues. Take for example the webinar Vaccination Myth Busting Session for Care Staff, used for NHS and other health and social care staff in Hertfordshire.

The slides begin with results of an Ipsos MORI poll, which asked ‘how convincing are arguments for taking a coronavirus vaccine?’ Of the several items, ‘to protect other people from catching the coronavirus’ and ‘because it will reduce my risk of catching the coronavirus’ got 77% and 76% support respectively. This use of a public opinion poll is manipulative, enabling the educators to make a point without recourse to scientific evidence. In fact, the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission. As Peter Doshi explained in the British Medical Journal, trials could only measure mild symptoms, because hospitalisations and deaths were too few for statistical significance.

Also scoring 77% was ‘because vaccines have been very successful against other diseases’. This may be true, but would you agree to take an experimental pill because drugs work for other diseases? Trust in medicine is being exploited. While 66% agreed with the statement ‘because I trust scientists and other medical experts if they say I should take it’, there was also 45% support for following the advice of pharmaceutical companies, and 39% on government recommendation. This is troublingly naïve.

The next slide is on the World Health Organisation’s steps in vaccine development. No mention is made of the need for long-term safety assessment in the trial stages, as would normally be required. Instead, this is left to post-marketing surveillance. Yet the danger of insufficient time for testing was shown by the thalidomide scandal.

The purpose of vaccines is herd immunity, a state that is only reached ‘when most people in a community are vaccinated against a disease’. Naturalistic herd immunity has been conveniently forgotten. According to the slides, ‘vaccines train your immune system using a harmless form of the virus’. Fact check: false. The mRNA type, described in the slides as ‘genetic vaccines’, instructs cells to produce spike proteins. The adenovirus vector type does not use SARS-CoV-2 either, as the virus has never been properly isolated.

‘Single dose is not single dose’ is the illogical title of the next slide. Although there is ‘high efficacy after first dose’, the second dose gives more lasting protection. However, there is clearly not much confidence in immunisation because the webinar instructs staff to ‘behave as if everyone you meet outside your home is infected and you are too’. The status of sick until proven healthy, apparently, persists for the double-jabbed.

Thus everyone should wear face coverings I guess that ‘2 layers min, preferably three’ means the thickness of cloth rather than the number of masks, although Tony Fauci was telling people earlier this year to wear two masks. As with the vaccines, masking is presented as part of a package. Amusingly, a block of Swiss cheese analogises the various interventions: all slices are riddled with holes, but no hole goes through the entire block. None of these are optional: ‘if you want to get out of lockdown, your only real option is compliance’.

The threatening tone continues with the assertion that unvaccinated people will cause new variants to arise, and ‘vaccine escape’. Reference is made to the ‘Green Book’, which makes almost no exceptions to the vaccine regime. Based on advice from the British School for Allergy and Clinical Immunology, anyone who had an anaphylactic shock after a previous jab should be given the Astra Zeneca vaccine rather than Pfizer, and should have half an hour of monitoring afterwards.

The slides were produced before the authorities gave the green light for jabbing pregnant women, but there is little caution: expectant mothers ‘should be reassured that the vaccine does not contain live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and therefore cannot cause COVID-19 infection in her or in her baby’. So that’s all right then. The impact on fertility cannot be known, but the webinar glibly states: ‘current guidance is that the vaccination is safe for women of childbearing age’.

Lastly, the session considers side effects. It is accepted that all drugs can cause adverse reactions in some people. However, the covid-19 vaccine is not a treatment but an experimental intervention on the healthy. Thus the risk-benefit ratio is different from a medicine used to treat illness. The teaching session describes the common side effects of ‘a painful arm, feeling tired, headache, general aches and mild flu-like symptoms’, which disappear over a few days.

Then comes a leap of faith: ‘these symptoms are a sign that your body is building immunity’. Such information may explain why people experiencing adverse reactions say ‘at least I know it’s working’. But the reality is that many vaccine recipients feel very poorly after the jab, as known to healthcare providers due to the high level of staff sickness.

It is unethical and against the principles of the Hippocratic Oath to tell people that adverse reactions are normal. But this seems to be the message of the vaccine regime. A Guardian article this week advised people who are suffering nasty side effects: ‘don’t think of this as a bad sign – it’s exactly what’s expected from an effective but imperfect jab’. In this Orwellian newspeak, harm is safe.

The most egregious economy of truth in this teaching session is on the most serious adverse reaction of all – death. By the time that the slides were produced (27th January), millions of Britons had been jabbed. But this bold claim is made:

‘Nobody has died following having the vaccine in the UK or anywhere else in the world’.

In January covid-19 mortality surged, a pattern seen in most other countries after vaccine rollout. The likely reason is weakened immunity for two or three weeks after the jab. In the frail elderly, recovery of the immune system takes longer, exposing them to infection in the winter peak. This correlation is not proven, but numerous care homes had a spate of covid deaths after all residents were jabbed.

The blood clotting problem was also well known, with several reports of people dying shortly after vaccination. Again, causation has not been fully determined (although belatedly the authorities have added cardiovascular risks to the vaccine marketing information). But why have a Yellow Card system if reported adverse reactions are simply ignored?

The producers and presenters of this misinformation should be held to account. As the ‘no jab, no job’ mandate looms, it is time for professional practitioners to speak out. Indeed, their code of conduct demands they do so.

July 11, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Covid and the death of independent thought

By Elephant City | The Conservative Woman | July 10, 2021

The most depressing thing about the last 17 months is not what our governments have done. I have always expected governments to be corrupt and inept. They are merely acting in character. No, the truly depressing thing about the last 17 months is how people have acted, in particular, my family and friends.

My parents are practising Christians who marched against the Vietnam War and got arrested for protesting at nuclear submarine bases. They raised me to believe that the elites controlled the world and acted through intelligence agencies such as the CIA. They considered it self-evident that such ‘deep state’ actors killed John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. My siblings and I all absorbed the idea that the highest calling in life was to fight the tyranny of the wealthy over the common people.

I took this worldview with me. I sought out friends who appeared to share these values and whose intellects I respected. We spent countless late nights, over great quantities of beer, trying to peer behind the curtain to figure out exactly who ran the show. We went to New York City to participate in a No Nukes demonstration. I remember looking at my friends on the train back home: I thought, ‘We are the people.’ I felt lucky to have such good allies in this world. I was sure that they would stand beside me in the trenches should our country ever be threatened by tyranny.

All that said, I was neither naïve nor overly idealistic. On the contrary, as an adult, I was deeply cynical, at least about worldly institutions. But I had faith in the inherent goodness of people, the durability of common sense, and the wisdom of my friends and family, and my people in general.

In the last year and a half, this faith in humanity has been completely shattered, and that has shaken me to the core.

My parents have drunk deeply at the well of government propaganda. Despite the fact that their son’s business (mine) has been destroyed and their grandchildren’s education and social lives ruined, they cannot bring themselves to utter a peep of protest. They’ve accepted the closing of churches with perfect equanimity, apparently unaware that had the early Christians been so cowardly in their faith, Christianity would never have survived long enough for them to become Christian in the first place. They’ve acquiesced to the sacrifice (‘vaccination’) of children to ‘protect’ the elderly.

When presented with facts and data that contradict the mainstream narrative, my parents and siblings react with real anger. They refuse to discuss any of it. Years ago, even if we disagreed about a topic, we could discuss it without it threatening our relationship. Not any more. They don’t want to hear anything that goes against the media narrative.

As for my group of 20 or so close friends, most of them either ardently support the mainstream narrative or simply can’t be bothered to oppose it. They’ve not only accepted the theft of their most basic freedoms, they defend that theft.

These same guys who used to treat the mainstream media with healthy suspicion now parrot their talking points without a hint of irony. They seem completely unaware that the mainstream media have undergone a drastic transformation in the last five years, changing from sources of information to strident propaganda organs broadcasting a steady narrative of divisive woke talking points designed to split the masses into warring groups, while a tiny elite solidifies their control of the world’s wealth. They’ve gone from deriding the mainstream media as consent-manufacturing organs of the Machine to having a childlike faith in the latest pronouncements of Big Brother.

People I knew to be filled with curiosity and hungry for knowledge now display a kind of allergic reaction to any new information. Faced with something from outside the mainstream narrative, their reaction ranges from annoyance to outrage.

Only three of my close friends have resisted the Covid narrative. We’ve engaged in a running battle with our group about the latest abomination committed in the name of fighting Covid-19, but we’ve made no headway. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that no argument, however clever, and no data set, however telling, would change their minds. They are beyond reach.

We keep falling back on the metaphor of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a 1956 sci-fi film remade in 1978 in which the human race is taken over by an interstellar virus: the people around us look the same as they did, but something is different. They aren’t there any more; the lights have gone out. Where common sense and reason once prevailed, there is now nothing but mindless repetition of talking points from the mainstream media. What happened to these people?

The most depressing thing is the utter shabbiness of the deception that has fooled my friends, family and countrymen. Satan is often portrayed as attractive, urbane and intelligent. It would be natural that people would be taken in by such a beguiling personality. We could forgive people for falling for his blandishments. But to see them fooled by a gang of such third-rate charlatans really boggles the mind. I mean, look at them: that creepy waxy cadaver, Joe Biden; the evil homunculus, Anthony Fauci; that crooked schoolboy, Matt Hancock; and that carefully calculated rumpled act of Boris Johnson. The merest glimpse of any of them sets my bullsh*t alarms ringing.

And the story they’ve swallowed! A few low-budget clips from China of people collapsing in the streets and endlessly recycled shots of lines of ambulances and crowded ICUs. People have completely ignored their own experience. Does this look like a pandemic? Where are the field hospitals crowded with dead and dying? Where are the mass graves? Where are the trucks calling for us to ‘bring out the dead’? Without the internet and mass media, not a soul on earth would think anything out of the ordinary was happening.

I’ve always attributed to humanity a certain animal intelligence and strength of character. But faced with a third-rate propaganda production delivered by a shoddy cast of charlatans, our most ‘educated’ people have shown all the discernment and mental acuity of the gormless rubes at a professional wrestling match. They’ve given up their most important freedoms and allowed their own children to be tortured, injured and killed without raising a finger in their defence.

The most telling realisation of the last 17 months is this: the mass of people are incredibly easy to propagandise and brainwash. Indeed, they seem to hunger for it, even at the expense of their own lives and those of their children.

I honestly thought we were better people. I thought that common sense, fair play and humanity were our default settings. I didn’t think that sheep-like obedience and cowardice were our deepest traits. But, the last 17 months have disabused me of this belief. And I don’t think I’ll ever recover from that loss.

Now, faced with ever more immersive media and more addictive and manipulative technology, all of it controlled and owned by sociopathic billionaires, I truly despair for our future. I keep thinking of the refrain from Ohio by Neil Young: ‘We are finally on our own.’

July 10, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Nicaragua – Varieties of Neocolonial Solidarity

Nicaraguan student leaders lobbying for US intervention with Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Marco Rubio
teleSUR | July 7, 2021

Just as in 2018, Nicaragua is once again the subject of the kind of mass international bad faith news coverage and perception management more usually associated recently with US and allied government offensives against Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Syria and Venezuela. In Nicaragua’s case the current offensive is aimed at influencing the country’s elections scheduled for next November 7th. Currently, all the opinion polls show that, should President Daniel Ortega stand again for election, he and his FSLN party will win easily with over 60% support against around 20% for the the country’s right wing opposition.

The campaign against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government is clearly intended to encourage punitive coercive economic measures from the US and European Union governments aimed at influencing voter opinion in those November elections against President Ortega and the FSLN. Right now, the main false accusation is that “Ortega” has unjustly imprisoned over twenty opposition leaders, among them several presidential candidates. All US attempts to overthrow governments resisting US and allied government dictates depend on this kind of big lie. The standard big lie is that target governments are unpopular, repressive dictatorships. Invariably, the truth is very different if not the complete opposite.

For example, in 2009, the big lie in preparation for the coup against then Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was that the proposed Fourth Ballot referendum aimed to secure him re-election so as to impose a dictatorship. In Nicaragua’s case, the current big lie is that “Ortega” is arresting opposition leaders to prevent them defeating him in next November’s elections. These big lies only flourish in an essentially fascist culture of corporate dominated government in which truthful information is systematically suppressed and substituted by false beliefs.

Typical Western false beliefs or presuppositions are, for example, that the US and its allies are a force for good in the world, that Western culture is morally superior to others and that capitalism promotes optimal economic and social outcomes. These ridiculous false beliefs are fundamental tenets of Western intellectual life and public discourse. They make possible the kind of psychological warfare repeatedly unleashed against governments that obstruct the wishes of Western corporate elites and the governments they own.

An important component of Western psychological warfare shaping the moral dimension of any given disinformation assault is the essentially class based solidarity with the target country’s imperialist proxies. This neocolonial solidarity operates in reactionary and progressive varieties, both claiming a Western monopoly on freedom, democracy and defence of human rights. Both essentially agree that governments resisting Western demands deserve to be attacked one way or another.

The reactionary variety, prevalent mostly among the business and financial classes and related professionals, insists on abandoning international law in favour of intervention based on Western dictated rules. The progressive variety, prevalent mostly among non profit organizations, academics and other socially oriented professionals, agrees but is more diffident about the means of intervention deployed, demanding alibis to satisfy susceptibilities over humanitarian and human rights concerns. The right wing variety generally favors aggressive, overt or covert military-based solidarity with armed opposition rebellion, while the progressive variety favors smart-power coercive measures prioritizing solidarity with some version of opposition civil society or popular movements.

Nicaragua experienced the first right wing version of neocolonial solidarity during the Contra war of the 1980s when president Reagan declared, with more truth than he realized, that the CIA-run narco-terror campaign was “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers”. Subsequently, ever since the Sandinista FSLN party returned to government in 2007, Nicaragua has experienced principally the progressive version of smart power neocolonial solidarity developed under president Obama. That policy, supporting Nicaragua’s anti-Sandinista opposition, intensified under president Trump and continues unchanged now under “Biden”.

Self-evidently, these varieties of neocolonial solidarity thrive on their respective class loyalties and ideological susceptibilities. In 2018, a massive disinformation campaign covered up the Nicaraguan opposition’s extreme violence and their deliberate campaign of destruction. As Harold Pinter remarked in relation to the 1980s Contra War, even as the opposition violence of 2018 was happening, the murders, the extortion, the arson, the torture, it was made to seem that nothing happened. Now, when the Nicaraguan authorities have acted to preempt a repeat of that failed 2018 coup attempt, a furious psychological warfare assault is taking place to conceal the coup mongering opposition’s treasonous collusion with the US and EU country governments.

As regards progressive and left wing opinion in general, militant foreign supporters of Nicaragua’s ex-sandinista opposition have long been important protagonists covering up the ex.sandinistas’ anti-democratic collaboration with Western imperialist intervention. Even before the 2006 elections, the US authorities had coopted ex sandinistas as collaborators. But when Daniel Ortega and FSLN won those elections, successfully managed the crisis of 2008-2009 and then triumphed in the 2011 elections, US government support for the opposition switched to promoting efforts at outright regime change. Inside Nicaragua, the ex sandinistas, devoid of popular support, abused their non profit networks to camouflage their political opposition to the government and the accumulation of resources necessary to mount the 2018 coup attempt.

That systematic abusive subterfuge has been eliminated and its protagonists held to account. So now foreign supporters of the ex sandinista opposition again cloak their militant, aggressive, politically driven advocacy under phony human rights concerns. In 2018, they did so to cover up the violent role of the ex sandinistas in the failed coup attempt. Now, they falsely allege human rights abuses to cover up ex sandinista US collaborators’ treasonous criminality. The false human rights propaganda motif makes it possible for proponents of the progressive variety of neocolonial solidarity in North America, Europe and elsewhere, to work in parallel with their right wing counterparts. Even many supposedly left wing figures have written articles or signed declarations in support of the ex-Sandinista US collaborators and those people’s right wing allies in Nicaragua. They do so for three main reasons.

Firstly, many supposedly left-wing figures attacking the Nicaraguan authorities for defending Nicaragua’s independence and sovereignty have some degree of friendship with the ex-sandinistas now under investigation, so they defend them for essentially personal reasons. Secondly, it is likely that many supposed left wingers supporting the ex Sandinista US collaborators have been duped by the massive psychological warfare assault on Nicaragua without bothering to question it. A third main reason for that kind of neocolonial solidairty from people who should know better, is that they fear alienating their support networks and are simply signaling how virtuous they are so as to avoid criticism.

In any case, the current situation, just like the 2018 coup attempt, categorically defines where everyone’s loyalties lie. People genuinely committed to the principles of sovereign independence and self-determination recognize the Nicaraguan authorities are applying the country’s laws and criminal code to defend the country against US intervention aimed at overthrowing the elected government. People who believe the bogus human rights accusations and claims that the current criminal investigations are driven by electoral considerations are engaging in the kind of neocolonial solidarity regularly deployed to justify yet another operation of imperialist regime change. For anyone foolish enough to credit the ex sandinista leaders denials of complicity with the US government,  this series of photographs should help disabuse them of that false belief.

July 9, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

‘They Make Unsubstantiated Accusations’: Venezuela Calls UN Report Fallacious

Orinoco Tribune | July 6, 2021

In a communiqué, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela rejected the fallacious content and highlighted the biased nature of a report published about the country’s situation by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, on July 1, 2021.

This report is the result of a Resolution promoted by a small group of governments with serious domestic human rights violations, that conspired to satisfy the policy of “regime”-change promoted by the US against Venezuela.

Despite the attacks, Venezuela is distinguished by its harmonious constitutional system that guarantees and defends human rights. The state provides a protective shield for its people against the barbarous criminal blockade imposed and directed from Washington and the European Union, that constitutes a serious crime against humanity.

It is especially worrying that this report is based on information provided by individuals with unknown motivations, and has not been duly verified with the authorities of Venezuela, despite the extensive facilities that the Venezuelan Government has provided for the performance of the OHCHR functions within the country.

On this occasion, based on a handful of alleged complaints of human rights violations, unverified accusations are made against the Venezuelan institutions, further manipulating the false narrative constructed to artificially supplement the file currently before the International Criminal Court, with the political objective of destabilizing the democratic institutions of Venezuela.

In addition to this, the report omits mention of the 26 visits made to detention centers and headquarters of intelligence agencies during which the Office of the High Commissioner has been able to interview hundreds of prisoners, according to its own guidelines of operation. In the Office’s conclusions, delivered to the State, the people interviewed confirmed that their personal integrity was respected during their incarceration.

Venezuela has asked the Office of the High Commissioner to share information with the national authorities on the alleged cases referred to in the report, in order to carry out rigorous investigations and determine their veracity and, if applicable, the corresponding responsibilities, in full consistency with its policy of absolute respect for human rights. Similarly, the Office of the High Commissioner has been invited to accompany the investigation processes developed by local authorities.

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in order to continue intensifying due cooperation with this office, ratifies its willingness to maintain channels of communication and dialogue with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the basis of strict adherence to the principles of objectivity, impartiality, non-politicization, respect for sovereignty, commitment to constructive dialogue, and—as required by international law—free from geopolitical agendas at the service of hegemonic powers.

July 9, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

The progressive civil war over Syria and Assad exposes an astonishing lack of intellectual curiosity by some on the American Left

By Scott Ritter | RT | July 7, 2021

Truth and politics are often mutually exclusive concepts when dealing with the progressive American Left. This unfortunate fact is being driven home in spades in an ongoing spat between two lefty online personalities.

Anyone following Aaron Maté (149K followers on Twitter); The Young Turks (TYT, with 440K followers as an institution, and as many followers each tracking the activity of co-hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian); the comedian Jimmy Dore (274K followers); or any number of other Twitter personalities whose online paths have crossed with any of the above; knows these left-leaning social media stars have been engaged in a vicious feud. Full disclosure, I have appeared on both Maté’s podcast, Pushback, as well as The Young Turks radio show. At issue is Syria and, more pointedly, the contention by both Uygur and Kasparian that Maté is shilling for President Bashar Assad.

A tale of two narratives

The sheer drama and vitriol which has emerged as a result of this feud has been entertaining for those who get a kick out of leftwing internecine warfare. Maté’s use of Jimmy Dore’s popular online program The Jimmy Dore Show as a platform for promoting his arguments has torn the scab off old wounds created when Dore left The Young Turks and struck out on his own, appears to underpin at least some of Uygur and Kasparian’s anti-Maté invective. However, more interesting is the fact that, as Maté pointed out in a recent interview with The Hill, the progressive wing of the American Left has hit a brick wall over the issue of Syria. Criticism of Assad has run up against the lies used to sustain US military hegemony in the Middle East.

“I think,” Maté noted, “that that meltdown reflects just like a general hostility they [The Young Turks] have towards people who are upholding actual progressive values and upholding actual journalism standards.” While the smear campaign waged by Uygur and Kasparian has been as unconscionable as it has been factually wrong, the fact that there is controversy among the progressive wing of the American political Left should not surprise anyone.

As Maté observed, “[t]he reason why they slandered me at that time is because I was in Syria and Syria is a, you know, touchy subject for many people on the Left. It has been divisive.”

Syria is a touchy subject, especially for progressives who primarily focus on notions of human rights and democratic values. Maté has come under attack for taking a contrarian stance on two of the most hot-button issues surrounding Assad: allegations of chemical weapons use, and the suppression of political free will through the conduct of elections designed to keep the reins of political power in Syria firmly in his hands. (It should be pointed out that Maté is joined by other outstanding progressive journalists, including Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Rania Khalek, and many others whose informative work predates Maté’s on the issue of Syria.)

Chemical weapons, denial and disproval

If there is a case to be made that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own population, it has not yet been made by anyone. The most widely cited incident in terms of casualties (i.e., the primary discriminator for any argument seeking to label Assad a “mass murderer”) is that which occurred in the early morning hours of August 21, 2013, in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. While the number of casualties involved remains unclear (estimates range from 281 to 1,729 people killed, with the higher figure largely agreed to be problematic), what is not up for dispute is the fact that, as the official UN report into the incident concluded, there was “clear and convincing evidence” that Sarin gas was used in the Ghouta incident.

While the UN was precluded by mandate from allocating responsibility for the attack, the US government, together with other organizations such as Human Rights Watch, aggressively asserted that the Syrian government was solely to blame. These claims, however, were not backed up by the science on the ground. A detailed forensic analysis of the rocket used in the Ghouta attack – an improvised 330mm-to-350mm rocket equipped with a large receptacle on its nose to hold chemicals—by Richard Lloyd, a former United Nations weapons inspector, and Theodore Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undermined the claims made by the US government assigning culpability for the attack. Not only were the weapons used not included in the arsenal of chemical weapons declared by the Syrian government to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which oversaw the dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons capability between 2013-2014, but the short range of the weapon made its being fired from government-held territory impossible.

Seymor Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, published an article in the London Review of Books in December 2013 which outlined a case for Turkish complicity in helping arm the rebels with Sarin nerve agent. Hersh’s claims were vindicated by Turkish media reports, quoting Turkish members of parliament, who outlined the factual case sustaining Hersh’s key point that the Turkish government was behind the Ghouta attack. New analysis of the Ghouta attack reinforces the findings of Lloyd and Postol, assigning a 96% probability that the Sarin attack of August 21, 2013, was carried out by anti-Assad rebels. Moreover, this finding is supported by video evidence, authenticated on June 21, 2021, which shows the rebels firing the Sarin-filled rockets on the day in question. Long story short – the Sarin attack used by President Assad’s opponents as evidence of his status as a mass murderer was not the work of the Syrian government.

Allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are numerous, as is the mountain of evidence which shows these claims to be as false as the ones made regarding the Ghouta attack. Central to the ongoing TYT-Maté dispute is the Douma incident of April 7, 2018, where once again the Syrian government was accused of employing chemical weapons against civilians, killing scores. The US government used the allegations as justification to launch air strikes against the Syrian government. The US case for military action, always weak, was further undermined by reporting from Maté that exposed the lies of the OPCW in bending to US pressure to falsify evidence in order to sustain the justification for US airstrikes.

The attention Maté received as a result of his outstanding reporting on Douma considerably raised his profile – he was invited to testify at an Arria-Formula Meeting at the UN Security Council in September 2020 on the Douma controversy. But it also opened him up to attacks by TYT, with co-host Kasparian deriding Maté as “the guy who denies that Syrian children were killed with chemical attacks.”

What Kasparian and her co-host Uygur get wrong is the fact that Maté does not deny anything, he simply reports the facts, which sustain the truth about the Douma attack – that it was a false-flag incident perpetrated by the Syrian rebels. Similar to what transpired at Ghouta in August 2013 – which set up the Syrian government to be attacked by the US in retaliation.

Intellectual incuriosity

However, one of the big problems with Maté’s reporting for the progressive wing of the American Left is that, in order to embrace it, they would need to radically alter their view about the legitimacy of the Assad regime, something they are loath to do. The formulation which sustains the current policy position of the progressive Left on Assad is that he is a brutal dictator who has, and will again, use chemical weapons against those who oppose him. The simplicity of this line of argument is that, so long as one can sustain the narrative that Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people, delving into a fact-based discussion about whether or not he is a brutal dictator is avoided by the logic that any man who uses chemical weapons against his own people is, by definition, a brutal dictator.

The reporting done by Maté and others on the allegations of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government has, by proving these allegations wrong, undermined the foundational argument used to sustain the notion of Bashar Assad as a brutal dictator. Stripped of this core argument, Assad’s critics are now called upon to venture into uncharted waters (at least for them) and examine the personal biography of the man they detest, the circumstances surrounding his rise to power, and the nature of his political struggle against deeply entrenched special interest groups opposed to meaningful political reform.

They would also have to examine the complicated relationship between Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the role played by the Turkish government in promoting Muslim Brotherhood activities inside Syria. Any honest evaluation of Syria under Bashar Assad would also be compelled to look at the role of the drought that ravaged Syria between 2006-2011, collapsing the agricultural industry and forcing some 1.5 million rural Syrians to seek refuge in major urban centers such as Homs, Aleppo, and Damascus. The role played by Saudi Arabia in channeling reconstruction money into Syria would also need further examination, along with how this money was used to build mosques promoting Saudi-backed Salafist Islam that ran counter to the secular ideology of the Assad regime.

Lastly, the role played by the US, both in terms of destabilizing the entire region by invading Iraq in 2003, and the role that conflict had on radicalizing Islamic resistance inside Syria would have to be considered. As would the decision, following the Arab Spring of 2010-11, to begin providing training, money, weapons and other support to anti-Assad forces backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other regional powers.

The resulting civil conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced several million Syrians from their homes. The involvement of Iran, Hezbollah and Russia on the side of Syria, when combined with the false allegations of chemical weapons use by the Assad government, made it easy for the progressive wing of the American Left to condemn these interventions. However, that ignores the reality that, unlike every other foreign military presence inside Syria, these came at the invitation of the Syrian government and, as such, have a legitimacy under international law the others cannot claim. When the chemical weapons allegations are stripped away, the moral foundation for opposing Iranian, Hezbollah and Russian intervention collapses.

The fact of the matter is that the reporting by Maté and others deconstructed the lies about the Syrian government’s role in the chemical weapons attacks alleged by the US, OPCW and Syrian opposition and, simultaneously, exposed the dearth of intellectual curiosity on the part of Assad’s critics – especially among the ranks of the progressive Left. The antics of The Young Turks in attacking Maté, Dore, and anyone else (including myself) who dares seek a fact-based discussion about the true nature of Syria and its president only highlights how far many mainstream American progressives have fallen when it comes to Syria. Their claims to embrace fact and intellectual curiosity in the exploration of complex social, political, and economic issues fall flat when it comes to who rules Damascus.

Whether they can recover from this collapse of moral authority and lack of intellectual integrity is unknown. The answer hinges on their willingness to re-engage with a clean slate that allows all arguments to be heard and discussed free of the kind of rancor shown to Maté by The Young Turks. As of this writing, I wouldn’t hold my breath. But in the end, it does not matter – if the Syrian reality could survive US-backed jihadists, it will survive the fiction based, angst-driven antics of an American political elite that has become irrelevant and inconsequential in any universe except the one it currently occupies for its own edification and entertainment.

Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘SCORPION KING: America’s Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.

July 8, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Iran Unjustifiably Blamed for Another False Flag Attack?

By Stephen Lendman | July 4, 2021

Unlike repeated US-dominated NATO and Israeli rule of law breaches, Iran fully complies with its international obligations.

Yet time and again it’s falsely accused of things it had nothing to do with, including attacks on Israeli vessels — despite no evidence of its involvement.

In stark contrast, international outlaw Israel attacked Iranian cargo ships numerous times.

In March, the WSJ reported that Israel targeted at least 12 Iranian cargo ships in international waters.

It cyber-attacked its nuclear facilities, accountability for its criminal actions never forthcoming.

On July 3, Lebanese al-Mayadeen television reported the following:

Citing unnamed “reliable sources,” its report said “a fire erupted in an Israeli cargo ship in the northern Indian Ocean,” adding:

“(T)he…merchant ship was hit by an unknown weapon.”

It “was anchored in the port of Jeddah before moving towards the Emirati coast.”

“(N)o one has claimed responsibility for this targeting so far.”

“(T)he incident c(ame) a day after news of an Israeli drone attack west of Tehran.”

On June 23, Iranian media reported a drone attack on a city of Karaj building.

Since its 1979 liberating revolution from US/UK-installed fascist tyranny, US, Western and Israeli regimes have waged forever war on Iran by other means — wanting its government toppled, the nation weakened, partitioned and transformed into a pro-Western vassal state.

Was Saturday’s incident involving a formerly Israeli-owned vessel staged by the Bennett regime as part of its aim to kill the JCPOA nuclear deal — by once again falsely blaming Iran for what no evidence points to its involvement?

Was the incident a joint US/Israeli false flag to blame Iran like many times before unjustifiably?

Israeli political and military dark forces have been pressuring their Biden regime counterparts not to rejoin the landmark agreement as affirmed by Security Council Res. 2231, making it binding international law.

Ideally, they want the deal killed altogether. At minimum, they want it revised to include unacceptable provisions no responsible government would accept.

Saturday’s incident targeted the Liberian-flagged CSAV Tyndall cargo ship.

Haaretz said the vessel was “previously under Israeli ownership,” the attack “causing only mild damage and no casualties.”

Like time and again unjustifiably, Bennett regime officials blamed Iran for what happened, despite no evidence suggesting it.

No Israeli nationals were on board.

Formally owned by London-based Zodiac Maritime Ltd, a company source said the vessel was sold several months earlier.

No one claimed responsibility for the incident. The Jerusalem Post reported the following:

“On Friday, IDF chief of staff Gen. Aviv Kohavi hinted at an Israeli covert operation against Iran at the graduation of the IDF officers course at the Bahad 1 base,” quoting him, saying:

“Anyone who tries to harm the state of Israel (sic) knows that any offensive enemy activity (sic), near or far, will be answered with a significant, overt or covert response.”

The hostile-to-Iran NYT implied its responsibility for the Saturday incident.

Citing no evidence because there is none, it dubiously suggested what happened was “latest tit-for-tat (sic) in a shadowy regional conflict between Israel and Iran,” adding:

The vessel “was believed to have come under assault by an Iranian drone or naval commandos (sic),” citing an unnamed Israeli source with no credibility.

The Times falsely accused Iran of earlier attacks on Israeli-owned ships despite no evidence suggesting it.

On June 1, US intelligence dubiously warned of a possible Iranian attack.

Was it issued ahead of a planned US and/or Israeli false flag on Saturday to once again blame Iran for what it had nothing to do with?

Contact Stephen Lendman at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

July 4, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

America Leader of the Free World? How to Forget U.S. interference in Foreign Elections

By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 1, 2021

After only five months in office, [proclaimed] President Joe Biden has already become notorious for his verbal gaffes and mis-spokes, so much so that an admittedly Republican-partisan physician has suggested that he be tested to determine his cognitive abilities. That said, however, there is one June 16th tweet that he is responsible for that is quite straightforward that outdoes everything else for sheer mendacity. It appeared shortly after the summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was apparently intended to be rhetorical, at least insofar as Biden understands the term. It went: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country.”

There have been various estimates of just exactly how many elections the United States has interfered in since the Second World War, the numbers usually falling somewhere between 80 and 100, but that does not take into account the frequent interventions of various kinds that took place largely in Latin America between the Spanish-American War and 1946. One recalls how the most decorated Marine in the history of the Corps Major General Smedley Butler declared that “War is a racket” in 1935. He confessed to having “…helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”

And there have been since 1900 other regime change and interventionist actions, both using military force and also brought about by corrupting local politicians with money and other inducements. And don’t forget the American trained death squads active in Latin America. Some would also include in the list the possibly as many as 50 Central Intelligence Agency and Special Ops political assassinations that have been documented, though admittedly sometimes based on thin evidence.

That Joe Biden, who has been at a reasonably high level in the federal government for over forty years, including as Vice President for eight years and now President should appear to be ignorant of what his own government has done and quite plausibly continues to do is astonishing. After all, Biden was VP when Victoria Nuland worked for the Obama Administration as the driving force behind efforts in 2013-2014 to destabilize the Ukrainian government of President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych, an admittedly corrupt autocrat, nevertheless became Prime Minister after a free election. Nuland, who is the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, provided open support to the Maidan Square demonstrators opposed to Yanukovych’s government, to include media friendly appearances passing out cookies on the square accompanied by Senator John McCain to encourage the protesters.

A Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton protégé who is married to leading neocon Robert Kagan, Nuland openly sought regime change for Ukraine by brazenly supporting government opponents in spite of the fact that Washington and Kiev had ostensibly friendly relations. As Biden’s tweet even recognized in a backhanded way, it is hard to imagine that any U.S. administration would tolerate a similar attempt by a foreign nation to interfere in U.S. domestic politics, particularly if it were backed by a $5 billion budget, but Washington has long believed in a global double standard for evaluating its own behavior. Biden clearly is part of that and also clearly does not understand what he is doing or saying.

Nuland is most famous for her foul language when referring to the potential European role in managing the unrest that she and the National Endowment for Democracy had helped create. The Obama and Biden Administration’s replacement of the government in Kiev was the prelude to a sharp break and escalating conflict with Moscow over Russia’s attempts to protect its own interests in Ukraine, most particularly in Crimea. That point of conflict has continued to this day, with a U.S. warships in the Black Sea engaging in exercises with the Ukrainian navy.

Biden was also with the Obamas when they chose to destabilize and destroy Libya. Nor should Russia itself be forgotten. Boris Yeltsin was re-elected president of Russia in 1996 after the Clinton Administration pumped billions of dollars into his campaign, enabling him to win a close oligarch-backed victory that had been paid for and managed by Washington. Joe Biden was a Senator at the time.

And then there is Iran, where democratically elected Mohammed Mossadeq was deposed by the CIA in 1953 and replaced by the Shah. The Shah was replaced by the Islamic Republic in turn in 1979 and the poisoned relationship between Washington and Tehran has constituted a tit-for-tat quasi-cold war ever since, marked by assassinations and sabotage.

And who can forget Chile where Salvador Allende was removed by the CIA in 1973 and replaced by Augusto Pinochet? Or Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 where the CIA failed to bring about regime change in Havana? Can it be that Joe Biden cannot recall any of those “interventions,” which were heavily covered in the international media at the time?

And to make up the numbers, Joe can possibly consider the multiple “interferences in elections,” which is more precisely what he was referring to. As a CIA officer stationed in Europe and the Middle East in and 1970s through the early 1990s, I can assure him that I personally know about nearly continuous interference in elections in places like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, all of which had prominent communist parties, some of which were on the verge of government entry. Bags of money went to conservative parties, politicians were bribed and journalists bought. In fact, during that time period I would dare to say there was hardly an election that the United States did not somehow get involved in.

Does it still go on? The U.S. has been seeking regime change in Syria since 2004 and is currently occupying part of the country. And of course, Russia is on the receiving end of a delegitimization process through a controlled western media that is seeking to get rid of Putin by exploiting a CIA and western intelligence funded opposition. China has no real opposition or open elections, nor can its regime plausibly be changed, but it is constantly being challenged by depicting it and its behavior in the most negative fashion possible.

Joe Biden really should read up on the history of American political and military interventions, regime changes and electoral interference worldwide. He just might learn something. The most important point might, however, elude him. All of the intervention and all of the deaths have turned out badly both for the U.S. and for the people and countries being targeted. Biden has taken a bold step to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, though it now appears that that decision might be in part reversed. Much better to complete the process and also do the same thing in places like Iraq, Somalia and Syria. The whole world will be a better place for it.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , | Leave a comment

Spreading ‘human rights’ at the tip of a bayonet: the LGBT agenda has now become a tool in Western foreign policy

By Glenn Diesen | RT | July 1, 2021

When it comes to issues of ‘human rights’ and individual liberties, every country in the world takes a different stance. Culture, religion, and nationality all play their roles, but now it’s clear the West wants to change this.

On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted a picture of the rainbow pride flag raised outside the State Department in Washington, writing that the commemoration of two major LGBT events “reminds us how far we’ve come – and how much more we need to achieve, at home and worldwide.” The key word here is “worldwide.”

As the West elevates LGBT issues to be the highest measure of morality, reorganizing its culture accordingly, it begs the question – how will this manifest itself in foreign policy? Values are deployed as an effective instrument in Western power politics, with liberal democracy held up as a hegemonic norm that allows countries like the US to lead the world and exempt themselves from international law.

Even the CIA is rebranding itself now as an organization guided by the advocacy of LGBT rights, which is a clear indication that the celebration of ‘our’ righteous values will soon be expressed as derision and attack on the ‘other’.

What is the difference between a ‘values-based’ foreign policy and a civilizing mission designed to undermine the sovereignty and cultures of other states? In the post-Cold War era, the West explicitly legitimizes hegemony, hierarchies, and sovereign inequality in the defense of universal liberal democratic values. Is the world heading towards a woke form of imperialism?

Woke values as a hegemonic norm?

Ideologies tend to appeal to grand ideals such as freedom and reason, yet at the same time they can divide the world into good versus bad – leaving little room for freedom or reason.

An open and democratic debate is missing regarding the extent to which modern liberal values are universal. It is, for example, reasonable to ask whether gender reassignment surgery or hormone treatment for children is a universally held value spanning all cultures, and how different states balance parental consent and involvement.

It also seems reasonable to discuss whether people born male should be allowed to compete in sports as women, and the impact this would have on women’s sports. Ideology has reduced these discussions to love versus hate, which suggests that dissent is impermissible. Herein lies the power of ideology that is too seductive to keep out of foreign policy.

Hungary recently passed a law that banned the promotion of LGBT lifestyles to children. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, argues that he has previously been a strong promoter of gay rights, and this law is intended to protect children and parents from sexual material. As the EU deems this to be an issue of universal values, any nuanced discussion was skipped and it instead moved straight on to talking about punishment.

Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands, stated: “My goal is to bring Hungary to its knees on this issue” and called for expelling Hungary from the EU. The French president argued that Brussels should show “no weakness” in facing down Hungary. No sense of irony was apparent as the EU condemned Hungary for “authoritarianism.” The ideological mantra of ‘diversity and inclusion’ ironically accepts no diversity of values for thousand-year-old cultures, and fails to include states with compatible values.

Russia versus the West

Throughout history, the West aimed to prove its civilizational superiority by comparing itself to supposed Russian barbarism. For centuries, ethnicity was at the center as civilized ‘Europe’ was contrasted with ‘Asiatic’ Russia. The purported opposite of Western freedom and civilization was this Eastern slavery and barbarism, which gradually became a fundamental part of the liberal ideology.

Through this prism, Russia has been allowed to play two roles: either a lowly apprentice of Western civilization, or a counter-civilizational force that must be contained or defeated.

In the early 18th century, Peter the Great established Russia as a great power and initiated a cultural revolution to Europeanize his country. The Western Europeans applauded Peter for adopting the role as the ‘student’ who would civilize Russia, according to European standards.

In the early 1990s, Russia aimed yet again to ‘return’ to Europe by adopting capitalism and a form of democracy. The West again applauded Moscow’s acceptance of the teacher-student relationship, although it rejected the inclusion of Russia in the European security architecture to any extent that would entail sovereign equality.

The rejection of the role as a civilizational second fiddle to the West, and the implicit sovereign inequality that would go with it, has once more entailed a return to containment and confrontation. Moscow therefore remains skeptical of any foreign policy framed as a civilizing mission.

Liberal authoritarianism

The West’s commitment to a ‘values-based’ international system has since meant artificially reorganizing and propagandizing all politics as a competition between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. International law, with equal respect for states, is dismantled and replaced with the so-called ‘rules-based international system’. This is portrayed as an extension of international law, but is actually the antithesis of it. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently commented: “the beauty of these Western ‘rules’ lies precisely in the fact that they lack any specific content.”

Strategically ambiguous standards are designed to enable NATO countries to decide when the rules have been broken and then unilaterally punish those who run contrary to their values.

The rules-based international system is intended for the West to police the rest, which is why it does not apply to the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange or the treason charges leveled against Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk. It also exempts Guantanamo Bay, the Stuxnet saga, NSA mass surveillance, digital censorship, the dismemberment of Serbia, or the hundreds of thousands who have perished in the illegal ‘humanitarian wars’ of Western states. The responsibility of NATO countries to uphold the rules-based system is instead used as the reason for exempting themselves from these rules.

Under the veil of the responsibility to selflessly uphold values, members of the bloc can ever-so casually discuss ways to topple foreign governments with economic sanctions or military power.

Towards woke imperialism?

Will humanitarian imperialism evolve into woke imperialism? It hardly seems far-fetched that woke values will be absorbed into the existing liberal-democratic civilizing mission to remake the world in the West’s image. Can the objective “to bring Hungary to its knees” develop into subversion, regime-change operations, or LGBT wars?

In the current age of liberal authoritarianism, the US is partnering with Saudi Arabia to fight for Syrian human rights by occupying the country’s territory, cooperating with jihadi groups, stealing oil Damascus needs to fund rebuilding, and stealing the wheat required for civilians there to survive.

Rights for sexual minorities is an important topic for any society, but cynical forces are obviously at play when the pride flag is raised over US military bases.

Glenn Diesen is a Professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway and an editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal.

July 1, 2021 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

U.N. Rejects Its Own Data to Claim ‘Climate Change’ Threatens Mass Starvation in Madagascar

Mainstream Media is Onboard with the Lie

By H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | June 24, 2021

A recent search of Google News for the term ‘climate change’ turns up a number of stories in the mainstream media promoting the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme saying climate change is causing a drought in Madagascar that threatens more than one million people with starvation.

Linking climate change to a temporary weather event, which this drought is, equates to a false comparison.

Also, the U.N.’s own data show Madagascar has been setting records in recent decades for crop production, so any food supply shortages are due to political or economic factors not declining crop production.

A story titled “Climate change has pushed a million people in Madagascar to the ‘edge of starvation,’ UN says,” by CNN is typical of the mainstream media’s uncritical coverage of the UN’s claims.

“Climate change is the driving force of a developing food crisis in southern Madagascar, the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) has warned,” writes CNN.

“The African island has been plagued with back-to-back droughts — its worst in four decades — which have pushed 1.14 million people ‘right to the very edge of starvation,’ said WFP executive director David Beasley in a news release Wednesday.”

The UN and CNN should check their premises and data. History shows back to back droughts are not unprecedented in Madagascar’s history.

Indeed, CNN’s own coverage notes the current drought is the worst in forty years. Forty years ago, during Madagascar’s last major drought, scientists were warning of a coming ice age, not global warming.

Peer-reviewed research shows Madagascar’s large megafauna declined sharply, with many species going extinct during previously extended droughts.

Research indicates Madagascar suffered extended droughts nearly 6,000 and again nearly 1,000 years ago.

A drought, approximately 950 years before the present, triggered a large transformation in vegetation, an increase in wildfires, and a sharp decline in the island’s megafauna.

It may be true that some people in Madagascar face potential starvation, but contrary to UN Food Programme’s claims it can’t be due to more than a very recent decline in food supplies, because data from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization show Madagascar’s food production has set repeated records since 1980, as seen in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Primary crops in Madagascar, all available years. Graph created from the FAO Website. Source

Rice, cassava, and sweet potatoes are three of Madagascar’s staple crops. Each has set multiple records for production over the past few decades. Between 1980 and 2019, the last year for which the FAO has records for Madagascar:

  • Rice production increased by approximately 101 percent.
  • Cassava production grew by slightly more than 73 percent.
  • Sweet potato production increased by more than 198 percent.

The FAO reports Madagascar also saw its fresh vegetable production grow 63 percent between 1980 and 2019.

Madagascar’s current drought is hardly unique and as dire as the present food shortage its people face may be, there is no evidence supposed human-caused climate change is to blame.

Indeed, during the era of global warming, Madagascar’s food production, like food production for the world as a whole, has increased significantly.

Research shows at least part of the recent increase in food production is due to the fertilization effect from increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human fossil fuel use.

In a fervor to link the current drought and associated food shortages to climate change, the UN and CNN forgot a basic fact, weather is not climate and temporary weather conditions, such as back-to-back drought years, don’t necessarily reflect a changing climate.

The UN Food Programme should check its own data before it promotes climate alarm to the media.

Also, media outlets, like CNN, should be more skeptical of alarming climate change-related claims about drought and food production, which readily available data refute.

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. is managing editor of Environment & Climate News and a research fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute.

June 28, 2021 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

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