NewZealandDoc | August 28, 2024
Long covid may or not be a chimera, but the long reach of covid certainly isn’t, as I have learned from an unexpected situation that involved the gratuitous remarks of a covidian doctor here that created difficulties for me. I am hopeful, however, of a positive resolution to this unnecessary development.
This incident merely strengthened my belief that the enemy we are up against, large and small, local and global, is unprincipled, lawless, low, and, given the measures unleashed against the world in the name of protecting us from a danger they created in the first place — dangers heaped upon dangers! — murderous.
If ever I believed in the trustworthy authority of the major media, having grown up on Time, Life, Newsweek, ABC, CBS, NBC in my early youth, and, later, on The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books et al. in my later years, that belief has been smashed into a thousand pieces as I watched all of them drop the veneer and flash the biceps of complete and utter fraudulence in our faces, day in, day out, relentlessly. I now ignore them completely.
If ever I believed in fair play and the rule of law, the inconstant application of justice has shaken some sense into me. What kind of system inveigles a Reiner Fuellmich into an arrest and incarceration, or deceptively seduces the founder of Telegram into an apprehension? Need I mention the numerous illegitimate legal attacks against a former President of the United States, still ongoing? Need I mention the attempt to murder him in the cold light of day? Should I hark back yet again to New Zealand’s use of stormtroopers to invade and disperse the Parliament Protests of 2022?
Should I mention the UK arrests for social media expressions of free speech, or the many and multifarious ways that Big Social Media have censored those whose political inclinations or opinions had been targeted by the governments they had a right to criticize? It has become nearly comic to listen to and watch presenters on YouTube who resort to code words to evade algorithms that would punish their channels?
Dare I refer to the unnecessary wars and the horrific numbers of the dead in the Ukraine and the Middle East, promoted so enthusiastically by the ‘liberal’ so-called democratic Left in the United States, not to mention the openly authoritarian EU?
By the strange contorted logic of our ‘now’, universal inoculation, active armed conflict, and perpetual fear of pandemics mark the road to … to the well-regulated world ordained by some occult globalist racketeers for their own benefit.
Given all of the above, one would think that any vestiges of naivete would be gone as we figure out a way to save ourselves. It’s an interesting word, ‘naive’ — coming as it does from the Latin nativus, and meaning, essentially, being innocent or artless as a newborn babe in the corrupt and devious system devised by humankind to regulate itself. When we use the phrase ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’ we’re saying we’re not naive.
Yet I can’t count how many times so many friends have expressed astonishment at each new depredation and each miscarriage of justice, and how so many still have faith in a legal system that has been commandeered by our enemies. I can’t count how many times people will say, about the latest jab-implicated adverse event, ‘this will turn the tide!’ Or how many game-changers there have been that have only resulted in the game going on with even more ferocity against our cause.
While I believe that it is very important for us to continue to report truth, it is equally important for us to know what we are up against. To know that facts are hardly guaranteed to change the minds of the sleepwalkers around us.
It is destructively naive to believe that simply by being virtuous we will win the day, or that the courts will come to our rescue because of our well-prepared evidence, or that martyrdom will be glorious.
General Patton is reputed to have said that ‘no dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country.’
As Irregulars against Established Power we must fight smart, and fight to live, and we by no means can count on the System to assist us. We must recognize the murderous intensity of our enemy, the rigged judicial system, the coopted media, and adjust our strategies.
Or else.
Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.
August 2024
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | August 26, 2024
As the presidential race enters the final stretch, politicians are recycling the usual cons to make people believe this election will be different. At last week’s Democratic National Convention, sham idealism had a starring role, accompanied by ritual denunciations of cynicism.
But idealism has a worse record in Washington than a New Jersey senator. “Idealism is going to save the world,” President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed shortly after World War I left much of Europe in ruins and paved the way for communist and Nazi takeovers. Wilson’s blather provoked H.L. Mencken to declare that Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts… they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.”
The same verdict could characterize today’s political rogues. On the closing night of the convention, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised that “we will choose a better politics, a politics that calls us to our better selves.” And how can Americans know they are fulfilling their “better selves”? By swallowing without caviling any hogwash proclaimed by their rulers in Washington.
Kamala Harris is being touted for bringing idealism back into fashion after the supposedly tawdry Trump era. But we heard the same song-and-dance with Barack Obama.
Obama declared that America’s “ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake” in his first inaugural address. But one of Obama’s most shocking legacies was his claim of a prerogative to kill U.S. citizens labeled as terrorist suspects without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked individuals to legally object. Obama’s lawyers even refused to disclose the standards used for designating Americans for death. Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, and he personally chose who would be killed at weekly “Terror Tuesday” White House meetings which featured PowerPoint parades of potential targets.
Year by year, Obama’s lies and abuses of power corroded the idealism that helped him capture the presidency. As a presidential candidate, he promised “no more illegal wiretaps”; as president, he vastly expanded the National Security Agency’s illegal seizures of Americans’ emails and other records. He promised transparency but gutted the Freedom of Information Act and prosecuted twice as many Americans for Espionage Act violations than all the presidents combined since Woodrow Wilson. He perennially denounced “extremism” at the same time his administration partnered with Saudi Arabia to send weapons to terrorist groups that were slaughtering Syrian civilians in a failed attempt to topple the regime of Bashar Assad. Obama helped establish an impunity democracy in which rulers pay no price for their misdeeds. As The New York Times noted after the 2016 election, the Obama administration fought in court to preserve the legality of defunct Bush administration practices such as torture and detaining Americans arrested at home as “enemy combatants.”
When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, idealism was temporarily roadkill along the political highway. After Trump was defeated in November 2020, the media scrambled to portray Joe Biden as a born-again idealist and to put the federal government and Washington back on a pedestal. A Washington Post headline proclaimed, “Washington’s aristocracy hopes a Biden presidency will make schmoozing great again.” The Post quickly changed its initial headline to “Washington’s Establishment” but “aristocracy” remained in the body of the article, which assured readers that “the classic friendly-rivals dinner party will be back, likely bigger than ever.” That same aristocracy hoped that idealism would provide the magic words to make the peasantry again defer to their superiors.
But Biden’s idealism was difficult to distinguish from his rage at anyone who resisted his power. Rather than a new Camelot, Biden’s reign vindicated historian Henry Adams’ assertion that politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
Regardless, the same media outlets that slapped a halo over Biden’s head are now hustling to saint Kamala Harris. Amazingly, the prime evidence of her idealism is the fact that she was a prosecutor. And since prosecutors claim to work “for the people,” her record of wrongful prosecutions, tormenting parents of truant children, and detaining convicts after their sentence ended (California needed extra firefighters) is automatically expunged.
Idealism long since surpassed patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. Idealistic appeals were used by Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon to vindicate the Vietnam War, by President Bill Clinton to sanctify the bombing of Serbia, and by President George W. Bush to dignify the devastation of Iraq. The mainstream media is almost always willing to help presidents shroud foreign carnage with pompous claptrap. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius declared in late 2003 that Bush’s war on Iraq “may be the most idealistic war fought in modern times.”
Idealism encourages citizens to view politics as a faith-based activity, transforming politicians from hucksters to saviors. The issue is not what government did in the past—the issue is how we must do better in the future. Politicians’ pious piffle is supposed to radically reduce the risk of subsequent perfidy.
Soviet Union dictator Vladimir Lenin used the term “useful idiots” to describe foreign sympathizers who dutifully repeated Soviet propaganda. Nowadays, we have “useful idealists”—pundits and others who mindlessly praise politicians as if they were more trustworthy than other serial perjurers.
The more deference that idealists receive, the more deceitful idealism becomes. Ideals become character witnesses for the politician who tout them. No matter how often a politician has been caught trashing facts, he is still credible on idealism. One freshly-flourished ideal expunges a decade of perfidy. The media exalts: “He has seen the light! He invoked an ideal!”
In Washington, idealism is an incantation that expunges all past warnings about political power. Nowadays, idealism is often positive thinking about growing servitude. Americans cannot afford to venerate any more Idealists-in-Chief hungry to seize new power or start new wars. Any doctrine that begins by idealizing government will end by idealizing subjugation.
By Svetlana Ekimenko – Sputnik – 27.08.2024
While Telegram founder Pavel Durov waits to be formally charged by French prosecutors for multiple charges relating to the platform’s lack of moderation, no such fate is likely to befall Mark Zuckerberg. The CEO of Meta has admitted his company opted to accede to the US government’s demands to censor content.
While Telegram founder Pavel Durov waits to be formally charged by French prosecutors for multiple charges relating to the platform’s lack of moderation, no such fate is likely to befall Mark Zuckerberg.
Unlike Durov, the Meta CEO has admitted to what was an open secret anyway: that he caved to repeated White House demands to throttle content on his platform. Senior Biden administration officials, “pressured” Meta to “censor” content, acknowledged Zuckerberg in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on August 26.
Elon Musk was quick to note there’s be no arrest for Zuck as he “censors free speech and gives governments backdoor access to user data.”
Let’s see how the two platforms and their CEOs line up:
Pavel Durov
The Russian-born IT entrepreneur co-created Telegram – a blend of private messaging and public channels –with his brother in August 2013. Durov vowed to champion encryption in messaging, not allow the moderation of messages, deny requests to store records of confidential data, telephone messages and internet traffic of clients, or hand over keys for decrypting users’ correspondence upon request.
“Telegram has historically had problems with regulators in some parts of the world because, unlike other services, we consistently defended our users’ privacy and have never made any deals with governments,” Durov wrote in 2017.”
Telegram’s unlimited in size “channels” and group chats are encrypted using a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and Diffie-Hellman secure key, per the Telegram team. Telegram doesn’t provide end-to-end encryption for common private and group chats, but does provide a secret chat feature. Telegram lets users post files enjoying unlimited cloud storage. There is no targeted advertising or algorithmic feed. The platform’s audience exceeded 950 million users by July 2024.
The US government wanted to get its hands on Telegram’s code to infiltrate the system and spy on its users, Durov revealed in an April interview with ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. The entrepreneur rejected pressure to allow a “backdoor” in the app for Western intelligence. Durov resisted personal “pressure” in the US, where law enforcement officials approached him, seeking to “establish a relationship to in a way control Telegram better.”
“[But] for us running a privacy-focused social media platform, that probably wasn’t the best environment to be in. We want to be focused on what we do, not on government relations of that sort,” Durov said.
Mark Zuckerberg
Zuckerberg turned his Meta (formerly Facebook) into a tool for US censorship. The platform with its standard for messaging apps end-to-end (e2e) encryption and non-open source algorithm has served up documented cases of censorship and manipulation of public opinion proven by whistleblowers and information leaks. After the 2016 US elections, conservative viewpoints were suppressed under the pretext of “hate speech” while liberal ones were elevated.
In 2018 it was revealed that UK-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica engaged in the harvesting of tens of millions of Facebook profiles in 2014. They were used to target users with personalized political ads, including during the 2016 US presidential campaign. The company engaged in similar harvesting and vote manipulation operations in nations across the globe.
Posts criticizing everything from US foreign and immigration policy, climate policies, to vaccines were occasionally deleted outright, but more often hidden or deranked.
Used as an election manipulation tool, whistleblowers have documented Facebook’s skewed content moderation directives regarding candidates and their supporters, in direct violation of the company’s policy on protecting political speech.
Facebook barred Donald Trump from the platform in the wake of the 6 January Capitol riot after being accused of “incitement of violence”. He was reinstated his account had “new guardrails in place.”
Biden officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook for months to “censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire” during the pandemic, Zuckerberg has admitted. As a result, in April of 2020 Facebook announced that it was imposing limits on “harmful misinformation about COVID-19.” The decision was reversed a year later.
On the eve of the 2020 presidential elections Facebook suppressed the New York Post story based on damning files in Hunter Biden’s laptop containing evidence of a pay-to-play corruption scheme by the Biden family.
Mark Zuckerberg admitted that in an interview with Joe Rogan in 2022, claiming he was ordered to censor the story by the FBI. He has now conceded that the Hunter laptop story was not “Russian disinformation,” as it was alleged at the time by the Democrats and the mainstream media.
While Meta admitted in 2021 that Palestinian posts using words like “martyr” and “resistance” were inaccurately labeled as incitement to violence, the platform revealed its hypocrisy the following year. Meta openly supported calls for violence against Russian citizens after the start of the special military operation. In March 2022 it loosened prohibitions on violent speech for users in Eastern Europe, allowing the placement of ads with such content.
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 27, 2024
Legacy media and some establishment figures are busy justifying the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, attacking the platform, but also making not-so-veiled threats aimed at other platform owners.
Ukrainian-born former member of the US National Security Council Alexander Vindman, who played a key role in the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, took to X (calling it “Twitter”) – to warn the social site and its owner Elon Musk that there could be “broader implications” in the context of the Durov arrest.
To Musk specifically, Vindman’s extraordinary message, which reads very much like a threat, is that he “should be worried.” As ever, the accusation is that X is allowing “misinformation” – that is, not censoring enough. And the implication is that unless that happens, there could be more arrests.
In one post Vindman went through the Democrat keywords (mentioning “MAGA tech bros,” “weirdos,” referring to Trump as “sexual predator”) and expressed admiration for the EU’s way of “enforcing content moderation” – ostensibly, as opposed to his adoptive country.
Former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt was also on X to reiterate how EU elites see, and treat the issue of free speech while throwing around dramatically-worded accusations: “Telegram sits at the center of global cybercrime… Free speech is not without responsibilities!”
It follows that other platform owners could face a situation similar to Durov’s.
Officials who no longer hold formal office often serve to express some extreme points of view that those in government would rather not say publicly, and other handy mouthpieces are always legacy media outlets.
Thus the Guardian sees Telegram as a platform for “information and disinformation” about the war in Ukraine, but then goes on to brand it as the favorite app of “racists, violent extremists, antisemites” – this is the Guardian giving life to claims made by a pro-censorship group.
Europeans and the war again, and the Washington Post decided to disseminate the accusation originating from a senior EU security official that Telegram is “a primary platform for Russia to disseminate disinformation in Europe and Ukraine.”
According to CBS, the same is true of another war: “Encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp have been a huge source of misinformation and disinformation in the Israel-Hamas war. Misinformation experts say it’s because they are difficult to moderate.”
And the New York Times decided to hand-pick several of the worst examples among the hundreds of millions of Telegram users, to vilify apps in general and argue in favor of censorship.
The Cradle | August 23, 2024
Noa Argamani, the Israeli captive freed by an army operation that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians, has lashed out at the media for misreporting comments she made about her time in captivity.
“I can’t ignore what happened in the media in the last 24 hours. Things were taken out of context,” Argamani stated in an Instagram story posted to her account on 23 August.
“I was not beaten and my hair was not cut. I was in a building that was bombed by the Air Force. The exact quote is: ‘This past weekend, after the shooting, as I said, I had cuts all over my head and was injured all over my body.’ I emphasize that I was not beaten, but injured all over my body by the collapse of a building on me,” Argamani added.
She went on to say that as a “victim of 7 October I will not allow myself to be victimized once again.”
Israeli media had falsely quoted the former Israeli captive as saying that Hamas beat her all over her body and cut her hair while she was in captivity during a meeting with G7 embassy representatives in Tokyo.
Before being updated, an article in the Jerusalem Post describing Argamani’s experience in captivity was published with the title: “Hamas beat me all over my body.”
In early June, Israel launched a rescue operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza to retrieve Argamani and three other captives. Nearly 300 Palestinians were massacred in the process.
Argamani was notably paraded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his speech to the US Congress in July.
Her testimony on Friday echoes that of other Israeli captives who have, since being released, described their experience with Hamas as much less frightening than the Israeli airstrikes that constantly rained overhead.
“We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you,” a freed captive said during a tense meeting with Netanyahu in December.
Israeli forces have killed many of their captives being held by the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip, both through airstrikes and ground operations.
The bodies of six Israeli captives were returned to Israel this week following an overnight army operation.
According to Hebrew news site Ynet, the captives had died months ago, suffocating to death after a nearby Israeli airstrike flooded the tunnel they were in with toxic gases.
Argamani’s social media post comes less than two weeks after Hamas’ Qassam Brigades announced the accidental killing of an Israeli captive.
“After investigating the killing of an enemy captive by his guard, it became clear that the soldier in charge of the guard acted in a vengeful manner, contrary to instructions, after receiving news of the martyrdom of his two children in one of the enemy’s massacres,” Qassam Brigades spokesman Abu Obeida said in a statement on 15 August.
“We stress that the incident does not represent our ethics and religious teachings in dealing with captives, and we will tighten the instructions after the incident was repeated in two cases so far,” he added.
“We hold the enemy fully responsible for all the suffering and dangers that its captives are exposed to as a result of its violation of all the rules of humane and humanitarian treatment and its practice of brutal genocide against our people.”
What role did the German authorities have in the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline?
By Maike Gosch | August 19, 2024
Last week, a number of reports and articles about the Nord Stream pipeline explosion shook the media landscape and citizens in Germany and around the world. After a long period of astonishing silence surrounding this monstrous event, things now seem to be moving. Are we slowly getting closer to the truth in this affair? In any case, the reactions from all sides were fierce and showed once again just how divided the political landscape is in Germany and Europe.
After the news first made the rounds in several German media outlets on August 14, 2024 that German investigators had identified a Ukrainian diving instructor (funnily enough named Volodymyr Z.) who allegedly blew up Nord Stream and then unfortunately escaped arrest due to a lack of cooperation from Polish authorities, further explosive revelations from the Wall Street Journal followed on the same day.
According to the WSJ article, the attack was led by the then-Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian armed forces and current Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, with president Zelenskyy having initially given the operation the green light. Then the Dutch military intelligence service MIVD found out about it, informed the CIA and the latter in turn urged president Zelensky to stop the operation. He then ordered Zaluzhnyi to abort the operation, but the general ignored the order and went ahead with the plan. According to the WSJ, just days after the attack, which occurred on September 26, 2022, the CIA gave the German Foreign Ministry a detailed account of how the covert operation went down. The Ukrainian government has rejected this account.
Much of this report seems implausible, so I consider the article to be more of a “limited hangout” than a clarification of this terrorist attack on our industrial infrastructure.
“Limited hangout” is a term from the intelligence world for a common ploy used by intelligence professionals: when the truth is beginning to emerge or the public is becoming too suspicious and impatient, and they can no longer remain silent or rely on a contrived cover story to deceive the public, part of the truth is admitted — sometimes even voluntarily — while still withholding the essential and truly risky facts in the case. The public is supposed to be distracted from and engaged with the disclosed information, so that the pressure it exerts eases (at least for a while).
One day later, on August 15, 2024, the German newspaper Die Welt published an interview with the former head of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst or Federal Intelligence Service of Germany), August Hanning, which also caused quite a stir. Mr. Hanning says that the attack, if it was carried out by the Ukrainian side, could only have been possible with strong logistical support from Poland and that for him there must obviously have been an agreement between the highest leaders in Ukraine and Poland, naming president Zelenskyy and president Duda.
These statements sound more plausible, but it is surprising that Mr. Hanning begins by saying that only Ukraine and Poland had an interest in and the means of blowing up the pipelines, and that he doesn’t mention other possible perpetrators, such as the US, but also Great Britain or the Scandinavian neighbouring states. Interestingly, however, he takes a very clear stance on the classification of the attacks and comes to a very different conclusion from most voices in the German political landscape, which we will get to below:
There has been considerable damage to the pipelines. […] I once spoke to external experts from the operators and they put it at up to 20 to 30 billion euros. The huge damage caused by state terrorism must be clearly stated and I also expect the German government to make it clear that compensation must be demanded. Also from the operators. I believe that huge damage has been caused by the activities of Ukrainian and Polish government agencies.
This astonishing accumulation of news within a few days around the investigation, which has been ongoing for two years without any results so far, has led some to suspect that this is a controlled action directed against Zelenskyy and part of the public’s preparation for him losing the support of the West and being replaced.
“Thank you, Ukraine!”
The reactions to this explosive news were not long in coming and proved once again what a divided information landscape we find ourselves in.
The German conservative newspaper FAZ led the way. In an article that directly followed the WSJ’s “revelations”, Reinhard Müller explained that the pipeline had been a legitimate military target (according to the headline); the text formulates it somewhat more cautiously: “could be considered a legitimate target”. His arguments: it is owned by a Russian state-owned company and also contributed to Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine. He also makes an argument oft-heard from German commentators whose loyalties clearly lie with Ukraine: at the time the pipeline was blown up, it was no longer serving Germany’s energy supply. Of course, this raises the question: if it no longer served Germany’s (and Europe’s, for that matter) energy supply, how could it have contributed to Moscow’s war of aggression? But let’s leave that aside for the moment. And we will come to the ownership structure later in the text.
He is also of the opinion that if the Ukrainian president or another commander commissioned it, it could also be seen as an act of defense permissible under international law. Müller takes the opportunity, while he’s on the subject of steep theses on international law, to take a similarly idiosyncratic swipe at the German government’s critics of its stance in the Gaza war:
Here, Ukraine, with its back to the wall, gives little cause for concern in terms of the selection of targets, the treatment of prisoners of war and also the prosecution of war crimes and international observation. In such extreme situations, the value of the Western community’s value-based approach is proven. The end does not justify every means — this also applies to Israel, which is also in a struggle for survival. The commitment to human rights, even in the fight against those who do not care about them, makes the decisive difference. Any far-sighted government should also recognise that this is in its own best interests. Only those who fight under the flag of humanity will be able to live in peace with their neighbors at all times in the long term.
So again, because this may be misleading, his statement is: Ukraine and Israel respect human rights, unlike their opponents, and thus fight under the flag of humanity and now the Western community’s value-based approach shows its worth in that we support them in this noble fight (also against our own industrial infrastructure), because (only) in this way can we live in peace with our neighbors in the long term. I would like to award the prize for the most absurd take to Mr. Müller.
But please read the article in its entirety yourself, which also claims that all allies have a duty (!) to rush to the aid of the invaded Ukraine at any time, including with their own soldiers. In legal terms, one would speak of a “minority opinion”; I would like to use stronger words, but I’m trying to control myself so as not to further the division here.
A few days later, the FAZ reported that Germany would be cutting back on military aid for Ukraine and that, according to the German government’s current budgetary planning, no new money would be made available for this with immediate effect.
What initially appeared to be a possible reaction to the revelations and a concession to the large part of the population that is critical of the German government’s NATO course (because of the upcoming elections in some German states?), turns out on closer inspection to be a less major change in policy. This year everything will continue unchanged, next year military support is to be halved and then in 2027 it will shrink to less than a tenth of the current amount. However, most geopolitical analysts expect the war to end by 2025 at the latest. And after that, according to Christian Lindner’s plans, the support will no longer come from the federal budget, but will be financed from the proceeds (interest) of the Russian central bank assets frozen by the G7 states.
There were also comments from abroad that caused an uproar. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, for example, commented the revelations in a tweet as follows:
To all the initiators and patrons of Nord Stream 1 and 2. The only thing you should do today about it is apologise and keep quiet.
The tweet went viral and has been viewed 2.6 million times so far, which is no wonder as it was provocative to the max and triggered correspondingly emotional reactions. So not only should we silently accept the blowing up of the pipelines; we should also be ashamed to have built and supported them in the first place.
But what seems like pure election advertising for the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s new party, BSW, may also have other economic and geopolitical backgrounds:
Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, we have been wondering about the increasingly aggressive and militant rhetoric against Germany from our neighboring country and cannot shake off the feeling that the new favourite child of the US and Great Britain is finally trying to get back at its neighbour, which is often perceived as overpowering, with borrowed courage.
In general, Poland plays an interesting role in the whole Nord Stream pipeline affair, a role that has received very little attention to date. This is because Poland (not just Ukraine) also lost both leverage/pressure and considerable transit income through the construction and commissioning of the pipelines, which allowed Russian natural gas to be supplied directly to Germany and the rest of Europe. And they worked together with the US, Denmark and Norway on an alternative to gas supplies from Russia and also wanted to get back into the game as a transit country for gas supplies from other countries of origin to Germany and Europe. However, as long as Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 were available, the economic prospects for these plans were poor. It is a strange coincidence that the Baltic Pipe, a natural gas pipeline from Denmark to Poland, was opened on September 27, 2022 (only one day after the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up).
But back to Germany, where other politicians and journalists made it clear that even a possible terrorist attack by Ukraine would not change their “Nibelungentreue” — a German expression meaning absolute loyalty. CDU politician Roderich Kiesewetter initially explained in a video interview with Die Welt that the operation of Nord Stream 1 and 2 did not generate any income for Russia, as no gas was flowing through them at the time of the attack (I assume in order to substantiate his otherwise unfounded suspicions of Russia as the perpetrator, more on that later).
He may be hoping for a poor memory on the part of the audience here, but I think most Germans who have studied the topic still have a good memory of the situation in the autumn of 2022 and know very well that Russia had only halted gas supplies through Nord Stream 1 for a short time due to problems with the sanctions and turbine maintenance. This may also have been an attempt by Russia to mitigate or avert the sanctions in exchange for the resumption of gas supplies, or it may have been an attempt by Russia to force the certification and opening of Nord Stream 2, which was ready for use at that time.
In any case, it is clear that Russia was expressly willing and also able to start supplying gas via Nord Stream 2 at any time and that this was blocked by the German government for political reasons (keyword: certification procedure) and that the pressure from the population in this direction grew considerably, especially in the period shortly before the blast (keyword: hot autumn, we remember).
Mr. Kiesewetter omits these connections here in order to give the impression that the pipelines were actually already irrelevant at the time of the blast, which unfortunately — in the interest of truth — many other commentators also claim. As with so many issues these days, one would like to see neutral fact checks, which unfortunately we rarely get.
When Mr. Kiesewetter goes on to say that many elements of the article do not seem very credible, I even agree with him, but then he tries several times in the course of the interview to cast suspicion on Russia and talk about a “false flag” operation, albeit without any indications, arguments or evidence, so who is the conspiracy theorist now?
In addition, he then says that no German property was damaged because the attack took place in international waters. The location of the attack is obviously irrelevant to the ownership status, but Mr. Kiesewetter certainly knows that. And Nord Stream 2 is indeed owned by Nord Stream 2 AG, which is wholly owned by Gazprom, which in turn is a state-owned company. However, Germany has invested around 3.9 billion euros in goods and services in Nord Stream 2. And the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which was also damaged, is held by Nord Stream AG, of which only 51 percent is owned by Gazprom through its subsidiary Gazprom International Projects North 1 LLC, while the other 49 percent is held by German, Dutch and French companies from the energy infrastructure sector.
In this respect, both German and European property was destroyed. Furthermore, the ownership structure under civil law is not the decisive factor in classifying the destruction of important energy infrastructure as a threat to national security, as the issue is how important it is for Germany’s economy and population, and not who owns the pipelines under civil law. Of course, Mr. Kiesewetter knows all about that too, he is an experienced politician who has been in the political business for a long time. Finally, the sentence that caused the most uproar:
Besides, Ukraine is the attacked (sic!), the security of Ukraine, whether they destroyed it or not, is in our interest.
So, in plain language: Ukraine’s security is in our (i.e., Germany’s) interest, even if it jeopardises our security with such a massive attack.
Finally, Julian Röpcke, full-time editor at the Bild newspaper, in his spare time apparently something of a war correspondent for the Ukrainian army and, according to his own description, an “arms delivery ultra”: he reposted his own tweet from November 2023 (i.e., shortly after the attack) with the note “Due to current events”, in which he praised the destruction of the pipelines:
Just to make this clear again: If Ukraine attacked Nord Stream: thank you very much. It was a Russian infrastructure project that made us dependent on their gas. Thanks a lot for ending that dependency, no matter who did it.
In other words: “Thank you, Ukraine!” (paraphrasing the famous tweet by Polish politician Radek Sikorski, shortly after the attack itself).
Moving the goalpost
What the reactions also reveal is an exciting shift in terms and evaluations among representatives and supporters of the German government’s and the EU’s current Ukraine policy. When the rather unlikely thesis of Russia being the perpetrator was initially put forward, Ursula von der Leyen, for example, was still saying:
Any deliberate disruption of active European energy infrastructure is unacceptable & will lead to the strongest possible response.
In short, right after the attack, it was clear to everyone and was not disputed by anyone (except perhaps by the German Greens, but that is such an extreme position that I am leaving it out here) that this was a massive terrorist attack against the energy infrastructure of Russia, Germany and also Europe, which was supplied with energy via these pipelines. It was also largely undisputed that this constituted a “casus belli” under international law, i.e., it was tantamount to a declaration of war and should actually trigger a NATO defense case under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
But that’s yesterday news. Now that there is evidence that Ukraine was at least complicit in this act, the supporters sound very different: the pipelines were irrelevant (so why were they blown up at all?), the demolition was justified and Germany should be ashamed of having built them in the first place.
Storm of outrage
From other quarters, there was a lot of outrage about the news. Alice Weidel from the German right-wing AfD-Party commented the news as follows:
The economic damage to our country caused by the blasting of #Nordstream allegedly ordered by #Zelenskyy — and not #Putin, as we were led to believe — should be “billed” to #Ukraine. Any “aid payments” that burden the German taxpayer should be stopped.
Sahra Wagenknecht of the left-wing BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht or Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance) wrote):
Should German authorities have known in advance about the attack plan on Nord Stream 1 and 2, then we would have a scandal of the century in German politics.
Many private commentators were equally stunned:
Nobody deserves a government that allows critical infrastructure to be blown away with complete equanimity.
For some, angry comments were not enough and they wanted to see action. Opposition Cologne-based lawyer Markus Haintz, for example, filed charges against Kiesewetter with the Ellwangen public prosecutor’s office due to his comments regarding the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Die Welt interview.
Laughter through the tears
Fortunately for the soul, there were also many funny and satirical reactions. Berlin-based AI artist and satirist Snicklink posted this video. But other X users also had fun with pictures and photos making fun of the — from their point of view — implausible descriptions in the WSJ article.
What’s next?
So far (at the time of writing this article) no German government representative has commented on the WSJ investigation or the Die Welt interview, which is incredible in itself. I assume there were some emergency meetings on the weekend where the line of communication is being discussed and we can expect a statement soon. We can look forward to seeing how they position themselves here.
Sahra Wagenknecht is now calling for a committee of inquiry in the German Parliament to investigate the role of the German government in connection with the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines.
This seems urgently needed — because that would be the appropriate forum to shed light on all these issues. For as interesting and sometimes entertaining as the reactions and discussions in the regular and social media are, such a state affair cannot be solved by swarm intelligence.
This article first appeared in German on Nachdenkseiten.
By Motasem A Dalloul | MEMO | August 21, 2024
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 20.08.2024
After nearly a year of efforts to taunt, provoke and intimidate Iran into a full-on regional war in the Middle East amid the Gaza crisis, Iran hawks in Washington have turned to a new strategy, accusing Tehran of interfering in the upcoming US presidential election. A respected Middle Eastern affairs scholar explains what’s behind the new approach.
The FBI, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence formally accused Iran of attempting to hack the Trump and Biden-Harris presidential campaigns on Monday.
The new allegations, which came weeks after a series of reports in US media citing “anonymous intelligence sources” claiming that Iran was plotting to assassinate Donald Trump, or to hack his presidential campaign, were not accompanied with any evidence.
“As the lead for threat response, the FBI has been tracking this activity, has been in contact with the victims, and will continue to investigate and gather information in order to pursue and disrupt the threat actors responsible. We will not tolerate foreign efforts to influence or interfere with our elections, including the targeting of American political campaigns,” the US intel agencies said in a joint statement.
Iran calmly rejected the US’s “unsubstantiated” and evidence-free claims.
“Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing. As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interference with the US presidential election,” the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations said in a statement.
“Should the US government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence – if any, to which we will respond accordingly,” the mission added.
Dangerous Distraction Action
“There is little doubt that the rhetoric itself has more impact than the substantiation of these accusations,” Dr. Mehmet Rakipoglu, a political scientist and international affairs observer and assistant professor at Turkiye’s Mardin Artuklu University, told Sputnik.
“Creating artificial agendas such as [the Iran hacking claims] intensifies hostilities between the parties involved. This accusation seems to be aimed at diverting attention from Israel’s actions in Gaza and refocusing it on the US election process,” Rakipoglu added, pointing out that Tel Aviv has been bogged down by accusations of engaging in genocide against Gaza’s civilian population, while proving unable to defeat Hamas militarily.
“It is already clear that the American public is deeply divided, regardless of whether there is an alleged Iranian attack. It is not Iran or any other external actor that is responsible for these divisions, but rather the US administrations themselves,” the academic said.
Rakipoglu stressed that, conveniently for the accusers, there’s virtually no way to verify the US intelligence agencies’ allegations, or conversely, prove that or Iran, or any other country, has interfered in the US election.
In some sense, the claims against Iran this election cycle are reminiscent of similar allegations made against Russia ahead of, during and following the 2016 vote, Rakipoglu said.
“While the US propagated a narrative of Russian interference during the 2016 elections, it continued to lose influence over time. It seems that the current accusation against Iran serves the same purpose as the allegations against Russian interference in 2016,” the observer said.
If that’s the case, it could signal a dangerous turn for Iran, and the Middle East in general. The 2016 Russian meddling allegations sparked a deep downturn in Russia-US relations, with the Russiagate conspiracy hounding Donald Trump throughout his term in office, blocking his ability to restore any semblance of normal ties with Moscow, and ultimately manufacturing consent among a substantial portion of the US electorate for the NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine which began in 2022.
RT | August 18, 2024
Russia and Ukraine have not been involved in any “direct or indirect” talks that could have been derailed by Kiev’s cross-border incursion into Kursk Region, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists on Sunday.
She was asked to comment on a Washington Post article which claimed, citing sources, that the Ukrainian attack thwarted secret indirect negotiations between Moscow and Kiev regarding a potential moratorium on striking energy infrastructure. The supposed talks were said to be mediated by Qatar, the outlet wrote on Saturday.
“No one has derailed anything,” Zakharova said, explaining that the two sides have not discussed any “security regimes” for critical infrastructure facilities.
She went on to say that threats to energy facilities such as the nuclear power stations in Zaporozhye and Kursk come from Kiev, not Moscow.
Earlier, a Russian journalist had reported that Kiev was plotting a “false flag” attack involving a dirty nuclear bomb either at the nuclear plant in Zaporozhye or Kursk. Commenting on the matter, the Russian Defense Ministry said it takes such reports seriously and vowed a swift and harsh response to any such attacks. Moscow has called on the UN to condemn the alleged plot, while Kiev has denied the claims.
According to Zakharova, Moscow and Kiev have not engaged in any talks since spring 2022, except for prisoner exchanges facilitated by third-party mediators. Peace talks held over the first months of the conflict collapsed after Kiev withdrew from them due to what Moscow claims was Western interference.
Ukraine had “all the chances” to resolve the conflict through negotiations, the spokeswoman said. Moscow repeatedly stated that it was ready to enter into negotiations at any moment as long as the situation on the ground was taken into account.
Kiev banned any talks with the current Russian leadership at the national level through a presidential decree signed in 2022. The move came after four former Ukrainian regions voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.
This June, Moscow put forward another peace initiative, Zakharova noted. At the time, President Vladimir Putin said Russia was ready to immediately open peace talks with Kiev if it withdrew its troops from the four regions that joined Russia in 2022 and committed to maintaining neutral status.
According to Zakharova, Kiev reacted to this “goodwill gesture” by launching an incursion into Kursk Region, where Ukrainian forces were “deliberately killing medics, rescuers, and volunteers, as well as attacking civilian transport.” In the wake of the attack, Putin said there can be no talks with those “who conduct indiscriminate strikes on civilians.”
The Mpox Emergency
By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | August 18, 2024
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.
An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.
Dealing with the Cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.
For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.
The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
I’m still on August hiatus, but here’s a two-hour lecture on the history of mass media to tide you over until September! This is Lesson One of my three lesson Mass Media: A History online course. Buy the complete course for audio and video downloads, a hyperlinked transcript of each lesson and a study guide with questions and reading recommendations. Enjoy!
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By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 15, 2024
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has announced that Canada’s Supreme Court refused his appeal against undergoing social media re-education (“remedial”) training.
The case stems from the demand of the Ontario College of Psychologists (which licenses practicing clinical psychologists) for Peterson to be subjected to media training. The ruling now means he is to pay court costs to the organization seeking to impose this measure on him.
According to Peterson, the demand was spurred by his negative stance regarding what’s known as “gender-affirming care,” the doomsday climate change narrative (that he spoke about on Joe Rogan’s podcast), and criticism of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In a video posted on YouTube, Peterson said the court’s “terrible decision” not to consider his appeal was yet another “blow to free speech” in his country – and could well result in the revoking of his license to practice, while the ultimate goal of the social media re-education would be to get “something approximating a public apology” for his opinions and for expressing them.
Peterson previously mentioned his criticism of social service workers and police “threatening to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protestors” as another reason for the Ontario College of Psychologists wanting to get him “reeducated” – though he did not speak about this in the YouTube video.
In a post on X, Peterson said that the Supreme Court ruling amounted to admitting that “mid-level bureaucrats who rule the professional colleges and regulatory boards” have more power than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In another post, he criticized Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government which he said was “overseeing the commissars” standing in the way of conservatives’ free expression, including “perhaps” Ford himself.
Peterson is also critical of the way Canada’s CBC covers the case (including his remarks on the Rogan podcast), referring to the broadcaster as “paid lackeys.”
But Peterson has received support from other corners, including Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, who said they were willing to work with him “to see if he wants to take the case international” – which he seems to be open to.
And Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre lambasted the decision as an attempt to impose forced political reeducation, noting that this came after “another government bureaucracy threatened to ban a Canadian from practicing his profession because he expressed political opinions the state doesn’t like.”
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By Jim Carey | Geopolitics Alert | January 29, 2019
Paris – French President Emmanuel Macron recently voiced support for protesters in Venezuela as his own country has been ground to a halt by protests every weekend.
There is an overused saying that “people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” While these few words may be cliche there is definitely one man that they can be applied to after this weekend: Emmanuel Macron.
Even though the French President is into the third month of protests against his government, he has decided to weigh in on the legitimacy of another country’s government and his latest outrageous statements just highlight the hypocrisy of Macron and Western leaders in general. … continue
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