Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Olaf Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto in ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine

By Gilbert Doctorow | December 21, 2022

When I first read through Olaf Scholz’s comprehensive foreign policy essay “The Global Zeitenwende” recently published in Foreign Affairs magazine, it brought to mind another sensational manifesto from an international leader in the news published by this very same authoritative journal. That was an essay ‘written’ by then Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko for the late spring 2007 issue.

There are several things these two essays have in common aside from centrality of Ukraine and of Russian malevolence in their thinking about the world. Publication of the Tymoshenko article gave rise to accusations of plagiarism against her for lifting some well known phrases from the writings of Henry Kissinger without attribution. In the case of Scholz, there is a more subtle kind of ‘plagiarism,’ in that he, like Tymoshenko, is clearly not the sole author of the text published over his name. I will go into these matters in some detail below.

Another common feature is the extraordinary way in which these essays were crafted so as to slot into the susceptibilities and preferences of the American foreign policy establishment. The authors seem to have checked every possible box whether or not it was directly relevant to their overriding argument or to the nations they represent.

A third commonality is apt timing of the publication.  In the case of Tymoshenko, her fierce denunciation of Russia in which she deployed every calumny invented by the American Neo-Conservatives came just a few months after Vladimir Putin delivered his now famous speech on Russian claims against the US-led West at the Munich Security Conference. The sheer temerity of the Russian leader whose speech was witnessed by Senator John McCain and other American political worthies seated in the front rows left the U.S. Administration of George W. Bush infuriated and confounded over how to respond. As soon as they found their footing and their voice, they initiated what has ever since been a vast Information War directed against Russia.

Tymoshenko’s article in Foreign Affairs was the first cannon shot in this war of words. The publishers were most obliging, because such service to the State Department in disseminating a document they had to know was fake was the price they willingly paid to receive privileged access to high government officials on a regular basis and thereby provide value to their subscriber base at home and abroad numbering in the hundreds of thousands that makes FA the most widely read journal of its kind.

By giving pride of place to Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto today, when the will and strength of European solidarity with the USA over the war in Ukraine is top of mind and is being questioned by some in the mainstream media, FA continues this line of service to the powers that be.

******

I dealt with the peculiarities of the Tymoshenko manifesto in an essay dated 10 November 2009 that I published on my blog and then republished as a chapter (29) in my 2010 book Stepping Out of Line. In that piece, I used close textual analysis to show that many turns of speech and lines of thinking were utterly inconsistent with supposed authorship by a native Ukrainian of her generation while they were second nature to American political commentators.

In this same essay, I emphasized that the kind of misrepresentation practiced in the publication of Tymoshenko’s text by FA was not a one-off development in America’s war of words on Russia. I pointed to an Open Letter to the Administration of President Barack Obama published in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on 16 July 2009 that was signed by Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other well known thinkers and former statesmen who were behind the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination in the late 1980s. This appeal to the American President to ensure greater U.S. attention be given to the security of their region had a number of explicitly Russophobe points, including the insistence that Russia’s policy towards their countries was revisionist and threatening. Russia was said to be using overt and covert economic warfare in pursuit of its aims.

The context for the Open Letter was Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow a couple of weeks earlier to pursue the ‘reset’ of relations and achieve a rapprochement on several issues of strategic importance to the United States. Mainstream media, including The New York Times, carried the Open Letter.

The American public took it to be a cri de coeur of freedom fighters. In reality it was concocted by a team of ghost writers under the supervision of the German Marshal Fund and its boss Ron Asmus. This later came out in an expose written by Jacob Heilbrunn for the journal The National Interest.

For all of the above reasons, my first thoughts about possible American authorship of the Scholz manifesto had to be tested. However, the verdict of two German-speaking experts who examined the texts at my request was that German, not English was the source language and that the points made here were in line with what Scholz has said in speeches he has delivered around Germany in the past few weeks. And yet, I insist, that in its particulars the manifesto was made to appeal to the American readership of FA.

******

Olaf Scholz is notable for his cunning. In short order, as the days of the Merkel chancellorship faded, he leveraged his prominence as a regional politician (mayor of Hamburg) into national standing. And when the Social Democrats emerged from the last elections as the leading party, though one still without a majority in the Bundestag, he succeeded in putting together a governing coalition relying on The Greens. This fox of a man surely recognized The Greens as politically primitive and so, malleable to his purposes, whereas forging yet another Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU, who would be peers in terms of experience in federal cabinets, would have limited his power. Indeed, the outcome has been a federal government in which the highly visible posts of Economic Affairs (Robert Habeck) and Foreign Affairs (Annalena Baerbock) were filled with utterly inexperienced and incompetent high-ranking Greens politicians whose missteps and foolish statements in public space have diminished the Greens’ weight in a government that the Chancellor dominates.

However, cunning is not the same thing as intellectuality. The author(s) of the manifesto published in Foreign Affairs magazine show a mastery of the skills required to write effective propaganda that you acquire in a political science milieu not in an administration responsible for governing one city on a day to day basis, as was the milieu of Herr Scholz for decades before he rose to the chancellorship.

Am I being unfair or pedantic in calling Scholz a plagiarist when he put his name to a paper written by a team under his direction possibly with inputs from overseas friends in the USA? Isn’t that what political leaders do regularly when they stand on the dais and read speeches that were written by their professional speech writers?

Yes, but speeches are not the same thing as contributions to a journal that is published by political scientists with academic credentials for political scientists with academic credentials.

This is plagiarism in a form that is all too widespread in German political culture. Over the past couple of decades there were a number of scandals involving high politicians there whose doctoral theses were exposed as ghost written or plagiarized in the formal sense of the word. This directly results from the high respect that Germans as a society give to the Herr Doktor moniker. Political aspirants with burning ambition are all too tempted to go for broke.

Had he wished to be more honest with his own people and with the world, Scholz could have said his manifesto was co-authored with one or more experts so that everyone could better judge where this thinking was coming from and challenges to the thinking would be less politicized. Joe Biden did as much when he published his own manifesto in 2017-2018 on “standing up to the Russians” in FA with Michael Carpenter presented as co-author.

*****

Now let us look at the content of the manifesto which is firstly a very carefully trimmed narrative of what over the past thirty years has brought us to the present turning point in the road, or “Global Zeitenwende,” and secondly, a road map to the future, which the author(s) say, in the subtitle to the manifesto, will enable us “to avoid a New Cold War.”

In their hands, the narrative of European and world history over the past thirty years is the story of Russian revanchism that exists in a vacuum, without context of provocations and escalations from the USA, the EU and other actors, and propelled by the animus of one man, Vladimir Putin.

The key message about Russian culpability for everything comes in a couple of paragraphs. The original sin was Putin’s evaluation of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” From that the authors fast forward to Putin’s “aggressive speech” at the February 2007 Munich Security Conference, “deriding the rules-based international order as a mere tool of American dominance.” This was followed in short order by the war Russia launched against Georgia in 2008. And from there we are off to the races:

In 2014, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and sent its forces into parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in direct violation of international law and Moscow’s own treaty commitments. The years that followed saw the Kremlin undercut arms control treaties and expand its military capabilities, poison and murder Russian dissidents, crack down on civil society, and carry out a brutal military intervention in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Step by step, Putin’s Russia chose a path that took it further from Europe and further from a cooperative, peaceful order.

This imperial ambition imputed to the Russians culminated in the unprovoked and utterly illegal invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 to which Europe, and in particular Germany must respond by breaking entirely with past efforts at accommodation with Russia. Instead Germany must rearm and become the leading defender of Europe.

The authors walk a thin line between claiming European leadership for Germany and lauding the Americans for saving Europe presently from the Russian assault. They are giving the Americans exactly what Washington has been demanding for more than a decade: the commitment to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP.  The text even finds space to go into specific procurement items coming up, such as the “dual purpose” (meaning nuclear enabled) American F-35 warplane. Such details obviously are calculated to bring holiday cheer to the Washington establishment.

It is interesting that the manifesto speaks about avoiding a New Cold War when it is patently obvious that we are in the midst of exactly that and should count ourselves lucky that it has not yet escalated to a hot war that quickly becomes nuclear war. We may assume from the text that Scholz is holding out division into hostile blocs as the defining moment for a Cold War. And while formal declaration of anti-NATO alliances has not and may never emerge, the present reality is precisely the formation before our eyes of the Global South in confrontation with the Collective West. The Russia-Iran-China axis is there for all to see even if it is not a formally constituted military bloc. Moreover, a key constituent element of the Cold War, namely an ideological dimension, has in the past several years taken definitive shape in the notion of free democratic nations versus authoritarian nations. As for declaring a Cold War, what is there more to wait for?

Scholz’s manifesto completely distorts history to the point where it even overlooks the finding by the EU, following an investigation by then French President Sarkozy, that the Georgian War was caused by the military assault by Tbilisi on Ossetia, not by some unprovoked Russian attack on the Georgians. More importantly, it is totally blind to where his thinking would and may yet lead Germany and the world.

First, within Europe, his claim that Germany will be the leader of European defense and have the strongest military on the Continent goes directly in the face of a similar ambition of the Poles, the front-line state in the confrontation with Russia that will be receiving the greatest assistance of Washington, because the Poles, unlike the Germans, are putting their bodies on the line in the fight with the Russians over Ukraine.

The German leader’s hopes to become Washington’s closest ally by unquestioningly signing on to the American propaganda line also runs up against the ambitions of the French. It is no accident that the manifesto was issued so as to compete for attention with the visit of Emanuel Macron to Washington, in the knowledge that Macron was bringing to the overlords Europe’s complaints over unfair trading practices embedded in the latest Congressional legislation.

The biggest problem with Scholz’s road map at this Zeitenwende is that it is blind, as is Washington, to where the armed conflict on Ukrainian territory is taking us all. Ukrainian military victory is simply unattainable and sooner or later Kiev will fold. Scholz’s manifesto makes it plain that what lies ahead is what all sides are now calling a ‘long war.’

Yes, Germany will greatly expand its military spending and make amends for the pitiful forces of the present day Bundeswehr. However, the Russians will not go back to their bear caves and hibernate when the fighting stops in Ukraine. Indeed, what I now see is that progressively, over the past 300 days of warfare, Russian society has moved from consumerism and consolidated around patriotism. The ‘fifth column’ Liberals have now mostly left the country and moved to where their assets have long been kept in the West. Russian industry, under state direction, has risen to the challenge of supplying the army with equipment and munitions that are being expended at the highest daily rate since WWII. This trend will only accelerate going forward, as the Russian economy reorganizes on a war footing. Moreover, and most importantly, the small professional army that Russia built up from the start of Putin’s tenure in the presidency has been replaced conceptually by plans to develop an army scaled to offset the whole of European conventional forces. This means, as we have heard repeatedly from the host of the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show, a standing army of three million men and women. And, against that coming force, Mr. Scholz’s Bundeswehr will be as pitiful in the future as it is today when facing Russia. Meanwhile, hopes for an even partial return to normality in relations between East and West on this Continent will be in vain, to the great loss of all sides.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

December 22, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

The Fake ‘Tripledemic’ That Was 90% RSV and Almost Zero COVID-19

BY DR ANDREW BOSTOM | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 21, 2022

Already by the last week of October 2022, continuing through November and early December, local Rhode Island media were amplifying clinician and public health official warnings about a paediatric respiratory illness ‘tripledemic’. The ‘tripledemic’ that prompted this tocsin of looming calamity in children was an alleged convergence of COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Serious paediatric illness is best gauged by the actual number of children hospitalised, as opposed to ‘respiratory virus test positivity’. The latter is especially misleading because of the unique, ongoing phenomenon of continued mass COVID-19 testing for minimal symptoms. Curiously, almost two months later, I could find no local media follow-up coverage elucidating the feared paediatric ‘tripledemic’ by this most germane metric: a direct comparison of children hospitalised for COVID-19, influenza or RSV.

With the cooperation of Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) spokesman Joseph Wendelken, and an academic paediatrician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, I can now present those hospitalisation data, per the table below. Given time lags in compilation and transmission, the hospitalisation record only covers all of October, and November 2022.

Despite the anguished media declarations, there was no Rhode Island paediatric ‘tripledemic’, at least through October and November. RSV, alone, accounted for around 90% (194 ÷ 222 = 87.4%) of so-called ‘tripledemic’ hospitalisations among Rhode Island children, and the rate of RSV hospitalisations (97 per month), was around seven-fold the rate of COVID-19 and influenza hospitalisations combined (14 per month). Moreover, the surrogate for RSV hospitalisations, a single International Classification of Diseases (ICD) RSV code (bronchiolitis, an inflammation of the smaller lung airways) omits RSV pneumonia and bronchitis coded hospitalisations. Certainly, omitting these ICD codes underestimates true paediatric RSV admissions.

The rate of primary (or ‘suspected‘ primary) COVID-19 pediatric hospitalisations mirrored what I discovered about the receding ‘Omicron wave’ from February to early June 2022. After weeks of wrangling, requiring an Access to Public Records Act submission to the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH), supported by two state legislators, my query on paediatric COVID-19 hospitalisations in the first half of 2022 was answered on August 5th 2022. These data revealed that during the 16-week period from February 13th 2022 through June 4th 2022 there were a total of only 15 primary COVID-19 paediatric hospitalisations (for ages 0 to 17 years-old), as determined by RIDOH criteria. Notwithstanding this clinically insignificant, low ebb trickle of COVID-19 paediatric hospitalisations, RIDOH issued two memos recommending Rhode Island public schools re-institute compulsory masking (see RIDOH memos dated May 19th 2022 and May 20th 2022) for all school children in so-called “high COVID-19 transmission” districts.

Present ‘tripledemic’ nonoccurrence aside, the overwhelmingly RSV-driven rate of increased paediatric respiratory illness hospitalisations in Rhode Island during October and November should decline significantly in December and January as RSV infection rates peaked in early November and declined precipitously through early December (see data from RIDOH, plotted below).

Additional reassuring national data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate the early influenza spike this year may be peaking in the U.S. overall as well, albeit not yet in New England. The third leg of the non-‘tripledemic’, COVID-19 paediatric infections, are not spiking in Rhode Island above rates observed since the summer and early autumn, while primary COVID-19 hospitalisation rates in children (see earlier table) remain exceedingly low.

Predictably, those Rhode Island medical thought leaders ginning up unwarranted concerns about the ‘tripledemic’ are once again, ad nauseum, pushing non-evidence-based masking and vaccination in children.

They ignore uniformly negative randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on community masking for the prevention of either influenza (12 RCTs; 10 here; also here and here) or COVID-19 (two RCTs; here, here), complemented by a small RCT in healthcare workers which demonstrated masks also failed to prevent RSV. While acknowledging the absence of a viable vaccine for RSV (but failing to mention the catastrophic failure of historical RSV ‘immunisation’), such thought leaders also ignore the absence of RCT data demonstrating either influenza or COVID-19 vaccines prevent hospitalisation from these respiratory illnesses in children.

The high rate of paediatric RSV hospitalisations alone in October-November should not be shrilly exploited by the media or so-called medical authorities to make counterfactual claims of an RSV, COVID-19 and influenza ‘tripledemic’. Instead, RSV, and now influenza, far more than COVID-19, should be accepted for what they are, i.e., part of the natural cycle of paediatric respiratory infections, and treated calmly, and with caring.

Dr. Andrew Bostom is a physician currently affiliated with the Brown University Center for Primary Care and Prevention, and was an Associate Professor of Medicine and Family Medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University from 1997 until June 2021. As a clinical trialist and epidemiologist he designed and completed the largest randomised controlled trial conducted in chronic kidney transplant recipients.

December 21, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , | Leave a comment

Star Of Body-Positivity Show Dead From Heart Failure At Age 37

By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – December 20, 2022

The body positivity movement, at least in the case of women, has been highly promoted by every area of the entertainment media and among social justice activists based on a singular claim: You can be healthy at any size (HAES).

The claim has inspired numerous efforts to normalize obesity in American society as not only socially acceptable but also medically acceptable. While political activism in science is nothing new and has been present in everything from climate change rhetoric to pandemic response, fat positivity disinformation in scientific observation is perhaps the most egregious and widespread. It attempts to ignore or dismiss decades of studies on the negative effects of obesity and asserts that being grossly overweight has minimal or no health consequences.

This argument is often debunked by the very people that tend to promote it and encourage it, as they die incredibly young and from health problems that are usually reserved for the elderly.

Jamie Lopez, star of the body positivity-based television show ‘Super Sized Salon’, was an advocate of a ‘beauty at any size‘ philosophy, more so than a health at any weight ideal.  However, social justice proponents often held up her example as justification for the HAES lifestyle. She is now dead, suffering from heart failure at age 37.

To be fair to Lopez, she did attempt to lose weight, dropping over 400 pounds in a year.

But, going from 800 pounds to 400 pounds is still not enough to prevent the myriad of health problems associated with obesity. Undoubtedly, body positivity proponents will try to gloss over her cause of death, but the fact remains that health and weight are indelibly intertwined.

While “beauty” might be treated as socially subjective by some people (studies show beauty concepts are actually biologically ingrained), health standards are not subjective.

Gluttony has long been a despised habit within almost all cultures for a reason – It is a sign of a lack of discipline as well as a precursor to societal decline, and, it is a sure trigger for an early demise.

December 21, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Leave a comment

Twitter Gave Boost to Pentagon Psyop Accounts

By Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter | The Libertarian Institute | December 20, 2022

Twitter placed dozens of accounts created by US Central Command (CENTCOM) on a “whitelist” for preferential treatment, according to internal company documents obtained by journalist Lee Fang. The eighth edition of the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed the site’s involvement in propaganda operations run by the Pentagon.

CENTCOM sent an email to Twitter in 2017 requesting special privileges for 52 Arabic-language accounts it said would be used to “amplify certain messages” to target audiences around the world. The social media platform quickly agreed and placed the accounts on a “whitelist,” which, according to Feng, ”essentially provides verification status to the accounts w/o the blue check, meaning they are exempt from spam/abuse flags, more visible/likely to trend on hashtags.”

Many of the profiles did not disclose their relationship with Pentagon, and some of them remain active. CENTCOM used the sock accounts to promote US policy goals or boost the message of American allies, with some posting about the war in Yemen and pushing criticism of Iran. Another handle was seen asserting that “accurate” US drone strikes only kill terrorists.

Fang pointed out that the accounts were in violation of Twitter’s own policies, as company executives had previously told lawmakers that they would “rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations & deceptive propaganda.”

In previous reporting on the Twitter files, Matt Taibbi explained how the company effectively came to operate as a subsidiary of the FBI, while a separate exposé by Michael Shellenberger showed how the bureau leverages its influence to censor content and gain more access to Twitter data without warrants.

December 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Twitter and Facebook chiefs practiced how to handle “fake” Hunter Biden docs, PRIOR to real story breaking

A “tabletop exercise” that was supposedly hypothetical

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 20, 2022

The latest batch of  files, released by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger, revealed that the Aspen Institute held a “tabletop exercise” to influence coverage of a possible future Hunter Biden story. This was prior to the actual Hunter Biden laptop story breaking.

Shellenberger posted documents from the event held in September 2020, which was attended by Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, ’s head of security policy, and top national security reporters at The Washington Post and The New York Times.

View the documents here.

The exercise by Aspen Digital involved an 11-day scenario which started with the imaginary release of “fake” documents related to Hunter Biden’s employment by Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

The company paid the younger Biden $1 million to serve on its board at a time when his father was the Vice President.

According to Shellenberger, “The goal was to shape how the media covered it [the Hunter Biden story] – and how social media carried it.”

The exercise was put to the test just a few weeks later when the New York Post first reported on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which it obtained after Hunter abandoned the laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. The mainstream media either downplayed or ignored it, while social media companies, including Twitter and Facebook, suppressed it.

On October 17, 2020, three days after The Post broke the story, journalist Garrett Graff sent a message to others who participated in the Aspen Institute exercise, saying, “Stephen was right!” However, it is not clear who Stephen is.

The exercise was organized by a former executive at National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, NBC News, and The New York Times, according to Shellenberger. Schiller has been the executive director of Aspen Digital since January 2020.

The Aspen Institute claims that it “empowers policymakers, civic organizations, companies, and the public to be responsible stewards of technology and media in the service of an informed, just, and equitable world.”

In 2019, the institute, which holds week long seminars and a yearly 10-day “Ideas Festival” attended by business leaders, celebrities, and politicians was described by The Economist as “the mountain retreat for the liberal elite.”

December 21, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

NYT, after deciding lockdowns are authoritarian and bad when China does them, now mildly terrified as Xi Jinping reopens & infections rise

You can take the New York Times out of lockdown, but you can’t take the lockdowns out of the New York Times.

eugyppius: a plague chronicle | December 19, 2022

“From Zero Covid to No Plan: Behind China’s Pandemic U-Turn” is the headline of the latest highly revealing Times reporting on the end of Zero Covid in China. “After micromanaging the coronavirus strategy for nearly three years,” we read, “… Xi Jinping has suddenly left the populace to improvise.”

The essence of the piece is that the Chinese have rightly regained their freedoms, but they’re now left to face a terrifying virus alone and undefended by their government, which is also very bad, and possibly worse than the lockdowns, as bad as they were.

China’s party-run media has cast the shift [from Zero Covid] as a stressful but well-considered exit, opening the way back to good economic times. Warnings about the dangers of the coronavirus have swiftly disappeared, replaced by official claims that the Omicron variant is generally mild. By holding off from easing until now, the government has saved many lives, the People’s Daily said on Thursday in a long article defending Mr. Xi’s pandemic strategy as “totally correct.”

In reality, an examination of how the shift unfolded in Chongqing and elsewhere reveals a government overtaken by a cascade of Covid outbreaks, confusion over directives, economic woes and then rare political protests. …

It’s almost like mass containment doesn’t do anything aside from wrecking the economy and ruining everyone’s lives. I’m glad the Times can finally come close to admitting this now, in the last weeks of 2022.

By changing only a handful of words, you could make key sections of the article apply to Germany, or any western nation aside from Sweden or Belarus:

Even the Chinese Communist Party, a virtuoso at controlling the narrative, is finding it difficult to sell the policy lurch to anxious residents.

[Xi] turned China’s intense top-to-bottom mobilization against the pandemic into a showcase of the party’s organizational strength. For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.

Whereas in the West, we had totally open and honest discussions about the insane, enduring closures, that weren’t marked by massive censorship and government intimidation at all. Otherwise, Western nations were themselves locked in exactly this same international competition, eager to display the fruits of their superior pandemic planning to the world, and terrified that failure would cost them legitimacy. One of the reasons Germany locked down so hard during Fall 2020, was that the Merkel government had collected many international plaudits for their handling of the first wave — effectively taking credit for the seasonality of infections. They were unwilling to surrender the regard they had earned so easily.

Mr. Xi has no likely successor and could stay in power for at least another decade. But the scars from the abrupt change may feed distrust in his domineering style.

It’s not subjecting his whole country to absurd containment theatre over what is no more than an influenza-level risk that poses a political problem for Xi, but rather “the scars from the abrupt change” in policy.

Finally the reporters get around to discussing the protests.

In Zhengzhou in central China, thousands of workers clashed with police at an iPhone plant, angry about a delay in bonuses and the handling of an outbreak.

In Haizhu, a textile manufacturing district in southern China, laborers poured onto the streets over food shortages and hardships under lockdown. Migrant workers, who depend on daily work for their livelihoods, went weeks without jobs.

“I couldn’t make a living this year,” said Zhou Kaice, a street porter in Chongqing. “Some bosses I worked for started up for a few days but were then shut by lockdowns.”

Despite the strains, officials still insisted China must win its pandemic war. Provincial leaders throughout November declared their commitment to “zero Covid,” often citing Mr. Xi as their lodestone.

“If pandemic controls were loosened, that would inevitably create mass infections,” said a Xinhua editorial on Nov. 19. “Economic and social development and the public’s physical health and safety would be seriously hurt.”

How many times did we have to read that lockdowns were the ultimate way to grow the economy, because without them, the virus would somehow destroy all business activity?

It’s also interesting how anti-lockdown protestors in the West are thugs and stupid conspiracy-crazed Nazis, while in China they are “students, workers and homeowners.”

By [November], China’s most widespread protests since 1989 had begun. Students, workers and homeowners in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere vented against Covid controls, angered by a fire in western China that many believed, despite official denials, had killed residents trapped in their apartments by lockdowns.

“I tell you that in this world there’s only one sickness, and that’s poverty and having no freedom, and we’ve got plenty of that,” said a Chongqing man whose tirade went viral in China.

“Give me liberty or give me death,” he shouted, using the Chinese version of the American revolutionary battle cry.

Sounds like the Canadian trucker protests — you know, those guys who posed such a threat to freedom and democracy that it proved necessary to freeze their bank accounts.

At the end, the Times assures its heavily masked and vaccinated readership that “most people are staying home,” but that “if deaths rise sharply, public anger could revive” because “infections could hinder a quick economic rebound.”

Until we Decovidify the newsrooms, there will never be sane reporting on SARS-2 in any major press outlet, ever.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , | Leave a comment

Will nuclear fusion power save us?

By Dr David Whitehouse | Net Zero Watch | December 14, 2022

“Nuclear fusion breakthrough,” are the world’s headlines today. Eventually we will have free, pollution-free energy. No CO2 emissions, we will be saved. I have lived with the promise of nuclear fusion all my life and it has always been decades away. It’s become something of a bad joke amongst the science community that fusion is always decades away.

Nuclear fusion liberates energy by combining light atoms – isotopes of hydrogen – rather than by using the radioactive decay of large atoms such as uranium and plutonium – nuclear fission. It could have many advantages; the reaction can be switched off (not possible with fission), it uses water as a fuel and produces very little waste. The question is how do you fuse atoms?

Obviously it isn’t easy. Every star in the Universe generates its energy this way but stars are big and places of great pressure and temperature, unlike the Earth. One way is to generate a hot gas of hydrogen isotopes – 100 million degrees or so – and confine it so that the hydrogen nuclei (for it will be ionised) fuse. The heating is done by microwaves and the confinement by a magnetic field, for anything physical would melt. The problem is that the plasma is unstable and so far the reactions are fleeting.

This is the basis of the major multi-national project to develop fusion, the $22 billion International Thermal Experimental Reactor (ITER)project (China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe, US) which is under construction in France and hopes to start tests in 2035 as part of developing the expertise to build a commercial fusion reactor presumably in the unspecified following decades.

Flash and Burn

Yesterday’s announcement involves a different technique. The US National Ignition Facility focuses a burst from a multitude of high-powered lasers on a grain-sized target that compresses to initiate fusion. The announcement by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was hailed by the world’s media as a great breakthrough in the developing technique of fusing atoms together, limitless, cheap, green were the adjectives used.

The announcement itself is a puzzle and had the feeling of being some much needed good news to announce. In reality although the experiments referred to took place a few months ago the “breakthrough” results were reported a year ago with the major advance being published in the Journal Nature in 2014. By one analysis 2.05 MJ of energy pumped into the pellet produced 3.15 MJ of energy. This does not include the 322 MJ needed to run the 192 lasers. So the story wasn’t a real breakthrough, just an advance. In any commercial development of this laser technique millions of fuel pellets would be needed for each reactor a year. At present they are tailor-made and cost almost $1 million each.

So why did the story lead some news bulletins? Given the announcement by Granholm it was clearly a story and in the main its coverage was good though some specialist correspondents clearly didn’t know the background and one science editor’s analysis of the event was puerile. I’ll leave it for an exercise for the reader to decide who I refer to.

Green Energy

But should nuclear fusion be part of the green energy debate? It is certainly not going to rescue us anytime soon. But I suppose linking fusion to green energy and the climate debate will help funds flowing.

Some would disagree with me and point to the many small, private companies that want to develop smaller-scale fusion reactors much sooner. They have acquired significant investment, some 30 firms have raised a total of $2.4 billion and General Fusion of Canada says it hopes for a viable reactor in the 2030s. CEOs of such companies see a payoff within a decade but to me it sounds like a sales pitch to attract further investment. Experts will privately say this is very wishful thinking.

In the mid-1990s I gave an after-dinner speech to a society of nuclear fusion scientists. I wondered out loud if the arrival of the first commercial fusion power would be as far in the future as the first hits of the Beatles were in the past. It took 50 years from the steam engine to trains and the same time between the internal combustion engine and cars. Nuclear fusion is a lot more difficult than such simple thermodynamic engines. Perhaps the desire for this energy coupled with advances in artificial intelligence analysis and control systems will speed up its development and the equations of history will be superseded.

A modern society needs high energy density power production systems. Without energy storage renewables are limited. We need fusion energy which has been promised for so long but I think humans will have walked on Mars long before we get commercial fusion power.

Commenter Rick Will says:

They spent $3.5 billion to produce the heating power of 10 grams of coal

They have spent USD3.5bn on the reactor to get a gain of 0.4MJ. Enough to vaporise 100 grams of water. Or equivalent to 10 grams of coal. Baby steps comes to mind. Power was impressive though. It appears the laser is rated at 1PW. Civilisation’s entire electrical generation averages 0.003PW. So the laser would not need to fire often to get a decent power output. But then it only produced a gain [of] 20%. So it would need 5 times the internal generation to that sent out.

I guess they say that these reactions can make big gains once the conditions are right but USD3.5bn to produce what you get out of half a cents worth of coal suggests it is still a big mountain to climb. Maybe within 30 years. Just as the last of the die-hard CO2 demonisers shuffle off.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Fake News, Nuclear Power | | Leave a comment

Putin and Modi deepen “privileged strategic partnership” despite Western pressure

By Ahmed Adel | December 19, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently discussed cooperation in investment, energy, agriculture, and transport and logistics. Yet, despite this positive step in relations building, the CIA is attempting to disrupt Russian-Indian relations by implanting fake news, something it has done for the entirety of 2022.

According to a Kremlin statement, Putin and Modi expressed in a phone conversation on December 16 their “satisfaction with the high level of bilateral cooperation that has been developing on the basis of the Russian-Indian privileged strategic partnership.” They also noted the importance of maintaining close coordination on international platforms, including the G20 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

At Modi’s own request, Putin briefed him on Russia’s policy regarding Ukraine. The Indian leader reiterated his call for dialogue and diplomacy as the only way forward regarding the Ukraine crisis, according to a statement on his official website.

Western media and officials are attempting to link Modi’s call for diplomacy as a potential rift in relations with Putin, but official statements from the Russian and Indian sides make it clear that bilateral relations dominated the conversation and not the war in Ukraine. Despite the facts, it did not stop CIA Chief William Burns from claiming only days later that Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping had impacted the Russian decision on whether to use nuclear weapons or not.

“I think it has also been very useful that Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Modi in India have also raised their concerns about the use of nuclear weapons as well. I think that’s also having an impact on the Russians,” William Burns said during an interview with PBS, adding that he does not see any clear evidence today of Russia’s plans to use tactical nuclear weapons and that it was only intimidation through sabre-rattling.

This comes as Putin acknowledged that the war in Ukraine could continue for a while and said that Moscow will not “brandish” nuclear weapons “like a razor.”

Speaking at a meeting of Russia’s Human Rights Council at the Kremlin, the Russian president said: “With regard to the protracted nature of the special military operation and its results, of course, it’s going to take a while, perhaps.”

He also alleged that the US placed a large number of its nuclear weapons on European soil, while Russia had no such plan to transfer nuclear weapons outside of its territory. Putin also stressed that Russia “will protect its allies with all the means at its disposal, if necessary.”

The Russian president added that his country possesses more modern and advanced weapons compared to other nuclear nations, but emphasised that Russia will only strike with nuclear weapons in response, “That is, when we are struck, we strike in response. But we are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”

Although it has long been established that Russia never planned to use nuclear weapons on the Ukrainian battlefield, except in cases of retaliation and existential threats, the Western disinformation apparatus, including the CIA, are naively believing that conjuring fake news and attributing them to India can change the facts and reality on the ground – Moscow and New Delhi are seeing a revitalisation in their already strong relations.

None-the-less, there is a medium- and long-term view for the Russian-Indian relationship that obviously goes far beyond the current conflict in Ukraine. For this reason, New Delhi’s long-standing ties with Moscow will not be derailed by Western sanctions and pressure.

Russia has been forced to reorientate its economy towards the Asian region because of Western sanctions, and this presents huge opportunities for India. It was never expected in 2021 that Russia would overtake Iraq and Saudi Arabia to become the largest supplier of oil to India, but as said, Western sanctions have created opportunities for India as Russian crude is now at advantageous prices and terms.

Reuters reported that India purchased about 40% of all export volumes of Russian Urals grade oil transported by sea in November – European countries accounted for 25%, Turkey 15% and China 5%. In November, Russia supplied 909,000.4 barrels of crude oil to India per day, Iraq supplied 861,000.4 barrels and Saudi Arabia supplied 570,000.9 barrels.

Russia has also emerged as India’s seventh largest trading partner, rising from a paltry 25th place. This means that the imbalance in bilateral trade is widening. However, to alleviate this, Indian Foreign Minister Jaishankar recently visited Moscow to discuss a list of 500 items that Russia would be keen to source from India. Given the supply chain challenges Russian industry has faced since the imposition of sanctions, Jaishankar reportedly stressed India’s readiness to supply spare parts for airplanes, cars and trains.

In this way, Russia and India work collectively to develop their economies and provide the best opportunities and deals for their citizens. This was once again demonstrated by Modi’s recent conversation with Putin. However, it also shows the desperation the West has in dismantling this relationship, with the CIA chief being the latest protagonist to disseminate fake news, this time by claiming that Modi discouraged Putin from plans to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, plans that the Russian president never had to begin with.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Two-Thirds of Voters Believe Social Media Engaged in Politically-Motivated Censorship and Demand Congressional Action

By Jonathan Turley | December 17, 2022

The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is out this week and Mark Penn and his colleagues have some interesting results to share. Despite the refusal of many in the media to cover the Twitter files, nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship.

This week, the media continued to fulfill that common view of a de facto state media by ignoring new evidence of FBI coordination in censorship targets with Twitter in the latest news blackout.

On Friday, Twitter released additional information showing that the FBI and CIA actively pushed for censorship, supplying lists of accounts to be suspended or banned.

Journalist Matt Taibbi described Twitter as acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI and wrote that “between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”

The evidence continues to establish a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy.  While the First Amendment applies to the government and not private corporations generally, it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.

Once again, however, the major networks and newspapers have largely ignored the story. There has been a full mobilization of media, political, and business interests against Elon Musk and Twitter to oppose the restoration of free speech protections at the company. The media is heavily invested in suppressing this story after years of denials of any problems of censorship. Previously, they denied censorship was occurring. When such censorship became obvious, they denied that there was any involvement of the FBI and the government. Now that such involvement is confirmed, they are simply not covering the story.

Instead, the media is “all-in” on the doxxing suspensions (which Musk has now lifted).  I have been critical of Musk’s response to the doxxing controversy.  In part this is due to the scope of the suspensions and the fact that they occurred only 24 hours after the new policy was implemented. I would have preferred warnings and further clarity on the issue, particularly in what constituted doxxing in some of these tweets from journalists.

Despite the overwhelming coverage, there is little explanation of the media’s approach to the underlying doxxing question. Some have said that this is a “grey area” or may be below the threshold.

For years, the media has supported suspensions due to doxxing. In this case, the location of Musk’s plane may have been used by an individual to threaten his family. Most reports omit any discussion of whether the sending of such live locations information is doxxing. If it is, it has long been banned by most sites and journalists are not exempt.

Previously, figures connected with mainstream media from CNN to the Washington Post have been accused of doxxing. Liberal groups were accused of doxxing conservative justices and others, including dangerously posting information on the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It does not seem to matter when the targets are conservative, Republican, or libertarian.

Writers who have long advocated the banning of others with opposing views are some of the loudest objecting in the wake of the doxxing controversy. The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz expressed fear that she could be next. It may not be a groundless fear since Lorenz has been previously accused of doxxing others and described the reintroduction of free speech protections for others as the opening of “the gates of hell.”

Jack Sweeney, the creator of this site (using publicly available information), has expressed shock at being sued and suspended. However, these articles continue to tellingly omit one of the critical issues. Is it doxxing to supply people with the minute-by-minute movement of the plane used by Musk and his family? That would seem relevant to weighing the merits of these suspensions.

Such slanted coverage is clearly losing its hold on the public or its view of Twitter. Indeed, the media continues to write off a large percentage of readers and viewers with openly biased coverage. The public is not buying it. It is buying Twitter. Not only are users signing up in record numbers, but a recent poll shows a majority of Americans “support Elon Musk’s ongoing efforts to change Twitter to a more free and transparent platform.”

In the wake of the latest release, the FBI issued a statement that said that there was nothing to see here and that “the FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”

The statement is notable for what it does not contain: any recognition of the seriousness of the allegations or pledge to conduct its own investigation in whether this relationship crossed over to de facto government censorship. According to some reports, as many as 80 FBI agents may have been tasked to assist in the censorship efforts. Yet, the FBI has offered little more than a shrug in the face of credible constitutional concerns.

According to the Harvard/Harris poll, the public believes that such censorship occurred and warrants action. The denials of the FBI and the dismissal of the mainstream media will only serve to magnify such calls for action.

December 18, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , | Leave a comment

Melting ice brings Chinese threat closer, warns Armed Forces chief

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | December 15, 2022

image

Melting ice caps will enable China’s military forces to “reach into the Atlantic”, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned.

At an address on Wednesday, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin urged people to consider what effect climate change would have on the security of the nation.

In his annual Royal United Services Institute address, Sir Tony said: “We also need to consider the melting of the ice caps in the coming decades, which will: unleash a difficult new competition for minerals and resources; halve the time it takes for shipping to travel between Asia and Europe; and surely China’s military forces will start to reach into the Atlantic?”

The High North becoming more open and accessible due to melting ice caps has been worrying military figures for some time.

As the former first sea lord, Sir Tony previously warned that, as the transit time between Europe and Asia inevitably shortens, so too can the West expect to see China sailing its “growing navy” through the shorter route.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/14/chinas-military-could-reach-atlantic-ice-caps-melt-warns-armed/

Chinese ships may be able to sail through the Northeast Passage for a couple of weeks weeks in summer, but would have a job getting back home again through two meter ice:

https://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icethickness/thk.uk.php

In fact this year the Passage was still blocked as late as mid August, and was blocked again by October.

And none of this is going to change for one very good reason. By autumn the sun in the Arctic is already going down over the horizon. And without the sun, the sea quickly refreezes.

It is absurd to believe that China or any other country would send its navy out into the Arctic Ocean in these circumstances.

Which leads to the question why Tony Radakin is making a fool of himself. The only conclusion I can come to is that he is under orders to play the climate card, so as to scare the public.

December 16, 2022 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

Volodymyr Zelensky and ethnopolitics

By Thierry Meyssan | Voltaire Network | December 13, 2022

The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has been named by Time Magazine as the “Person of the Year 2022”; an obvious choice, according to the magazine’s editors. Indeed, he embodies an infectious courage that has enabled his people to resist the Russian invasion.

However, in his country, power has gradually passed from his hands to those of his deputy chairman of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, since July 25. Zelensky is concentrating on his role as spokesman for the regime, leaving Danilov to prepare the decrees he signs. Together, the two men established a regime of terror.

On July 17 and 25, three members of the Council were dismissed for numerous acts of treason reported by the officials under their command:

  • the diplomat Ruslan Demchenko,
  • the childhood friend of Zelensky and the head of the security service, the SBU, Ivan Bakanov,
  • and Zelensky’s former legal adviser and general prosecutor of Ukraine, Irina Venediktova.

Speaking about those crucial days, Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine before the war, said that Zelensky had seized power, all power, under the guise of reform.

On August 26, Oleksiy Danilov revealed on the NTA channel that the Security and Defense Council had adopted a plan for the defense of the country in November 2021, that is, four months before the Russian military intervention. This document had been prepared since Zelensky rejected the plan for a Minsk-3 proposed by Paris on December 8-9, 2019. “It is a huge fundamental document that sets out the activities of all bodies without exception: who and how to act in a situation of martial law,” he said, September 7 in Left Bank.

ASSASSINATING POLITICAL OPPONENTS

Political assassinations are usually carried out by “mainstream nationalists” and not by government bodies. At any time, they can kidnap and disappear, or even execute political opponents directly in the street in full view of the public. The victims are primarily journalists and elected officials. This is not a new operation since these murders have punctuated the civil war since 2014.

One thinks of the deputy Oleg Kalashnikov, murdered with eleven bullets in the head on the doorstep of his house, in 2015. The police have never established, neither who carried out the assassination, nor who ordered it.

However, in some cases, they are the work of the SBU (security service). For example, the execution of the official negotiator, Denis Kireev, on his return from Kiev, where he had participated in contacts with Russia without success. He was killed in the street on March 6, 2022, because during the negotiations he had dared to mention the historical ties between Kiev and Moscow.

The political leaders do not publicly assume these acts, but encourage them. They say that the country must be “purified”. It is not a question of killing agents of the Russian Federation, but any bearer of Russian culture or anyone who recognizes the value of this culture.

The mayor of Kiev, boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, has commissioned the neo-Nazi group C-14 to hunt down and kill “saboteurs” among Ukrainians of Slavic origin.

Criminal proceedings have been initiated against former high-ranking state officials such as MP Yevhen Murayev, former Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov, former Prime Minister Arseni Yatsenyuk, former Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council Oleksandr Turchynov and former President Petro Poroshenko.

The SBU is henceforth arresting many civilians it accuses of collaborating with the Russians.

BANNING THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

While, according to the Minsk II Agreements (Art. 11, explanatory note [1]) of February 12, 2015, the Donbass regions were to be able to determine their own official language, Oleksiy Danilov declared on September 1, 2022: “It is they [the inhabitants of Donbass] who must find a common language with us, not we with them. We have borders, and if someone is not satisfied with the laws and rules that apply on the territory of our country, we do not hold anyone back.

On October 21, he was more specific: “The Russian language should disappear completely from our territory as an element of hostile propaganda and brainwashing for our population.

CONTROLLING THE MEDIA

Oleksiy Danilov, said on July 20, in the midst of the Security and Defense Council crisis, that many people who used to appear on television before the “Russian aggression”, no longer appear. “We do not know where they have gone. The SBU will make strong statements about them”. He accused them of reporting the Russian point of view: “Implanting these Russian stories here is a very, very dangerous thing. Apparently we should understand what they are. Look: we don’t need them. Let them leave us, let them go to their swamps and croak in their Russian language.

The Security and Defense Council had already placed all print and broadcast media under its surveillance. In addition, it had banned a hundred Telegram channels that it had labeled “pro-Russian.”

DESTROYING 100 MILLION RUSSIAN BOOKS

The Ukrainian Book Institute, which oversees all public libraries, was tasked on May 19, that is, before the Security and Defense Council crisis, with destroying 100 million books [2].

The aim was to destroy all books by Russian authors or printed in Russian or printed in Russia. In practice, a commission was appointed within the Verkhovna Rada to ensure the implementation of this intellectual purge. It turned out that the vast majority of books in the libraries were practical books on cooking, sewing, etc. They waited for a while before being removed. They waited for a while before they were plundered, with priority given to evil authors like Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy.

BANNING POLITICAL PARTIES

The 12 opposition political parties were banned, one by one. The latest one was sanctioned on October 22 [3]. Their elected representatives were dismissed.

Only the Transcarpathian oblast (close to Hungary) refuses to dismiss local representatives of banned political parties.

CONFISCATING THE PROPERTY OF OPPONENTS AND RUSSIANS

Since the end of February, the Ukrainian Agency for Asset Research and Management (ARMA), the European Union’s anti-corruption body, has seized assets worth more than 1.5 billion hryvnias, or $41 million dollars.

One by one, the oligarchs who own media outlets were forced to hand over their assets. This is a general plan to free the country from their influence. However, they still have the right to own other types of companies.

According to the Ukrainian law of 2021, oligarchs are the 86 citizens who have at least $80 million, participate in political life and have great influence on the media. According to Oleksiy Danilov, there should be no more oligarchs at the end of the war.

The Security and Defense Council decided on November 7 to nationalize factories belonging to oligarchs, including Igor Kolomoisky, the financier of Volodymyr Zelensky. They have been placed under the administration of the Ministry of Defence and should be “returned to the Ukrainian people” at the end of martial law.

This decision applies, among others, to the Ukrainian aircraft engine manufacturer Motor Sich, which was in dispute with Chinese investors before an arbitration court in The Hague (Beijing Skyrizon case). China, which claims 4.5 billion dollars, called the nationalization “theft”. According to Beijing: “Since 2020, the Ukrainian government has continuously created problems, blamed, repressed and persecuted Chinese investors without reason, and even imposed special economic sanctions without reason, with the intention of nationalizing Motor Sich PJSC by illegal means and shamelessly looting Chinese assets abroad.”

The Security and Defense Council on October 20 seized the assets of 4,000 Russian companies and individuals in the country.

This decision also applies to Ukrainian personalities who had settled in Russia before the war, such as singers Taisiya Povaliy, Ani Lorak, Anna Sedokova and television presenter Regina Todorenko.

BANNING THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

The National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine decided on December 1, 2022 to “prohibit religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence of the Russian Federation from operating in Ukraine,” President Zelensky announced when signing Decree 820/2022 [4].

The “State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience” was tasked with seizing the
Orthodox Church buildings under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate.

Two weeks ago, the Ukrainian security service (SBU) violently searched a monastery, accusing popes of daring to describe Russia as the “Motherland.

President Zelensky believes that he respects Western human rights standards. Indeed, the European Court of Human Rights will no longer be able to register complaints from Russia since Moscow has left the Council of Europe.

CUTTING OFF ALL RELATIONS WITH RUSSIA

On October 4, President Zelensky signed a decree prohibiting any further negotiations with Russia.
On December 1, Oleksiy Danilov called for “the destruction of Russia. He clarified his statement as follows: “They just need to be destroyed so that they cease to exist as a country, within the borders in which they now exist… They are just barbarians. And when you say that you have to sit at the same table with these barbarians and talk with them, I consider that unworthy of our people. »

[1] “Package of measures for the implementation of Minsk Agreements”, Voltaire Network, 12 February 2015.

[2] “Zelensky government orders destruction of 100 million books”, Voltaire Network, 16 June 2022.

[3] “Ukraine bans last political opposition party”, Voltaire Network, 23 October 2022.

[4] Decree 820/2022 of the Presidency of Ukraine, 1 December 2022

Translation Roger Lagassé

December 15, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

UK admits it sent troops to Ukraine

RT | December 13, 2022

British Royal Marines conducted high-risk operations in Ukraine in April, Lieutenant General Robert Magowan wrote in the force’s official journal. Before Magowan’s admission, Russia’s claims that NATO troops were active in Ukraine had been dismissed by Western analysts and media.

Members of 45 Commando Group of the Royal Marines left Ukraine in January after evacuating the British embassy in Kiev to Poland. However, some 300 members of the elite unit were sent back into the country in April to reestablish the British mission in Kiev, before going on to conduct “other discreet operations,” Magowan wrote in the force’s magazine, according to a report by The Times on Tuesday.

These operations took place “in a hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk,” Magowan, who formerly served as commandant general of the Royal Marines and is now deputy chief of Defense Staff at the Ministry of Defense, stated.

While Magowan did not elaborate on what kind of missions the commandos carried out, his statement marks the first time that the UK has admitted its troops conducted special operations in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense refused to confirm earlier accounts of British special forces training Ukrainian troops in Kiev in April.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict in Ukraine as one between Russia and the “entire Western military machine,” and claimed in September that there are entire military units in Ukraine “under the de-facto command of Western advisers.”

Putin’s words were rejected by Western media outlets. “There is no evidence of NATO ground forces participating in Ukraine,” Edward Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank told the BBC at the time. “Nor of NATO commanders directing Ukrainian units on the battlefield. There is also a very low likelihood of this happening in the future as Nato seeks to mitigate escalation risks.”

Magowan’s admission proves Arnold incorrect, but the UK is not the only NATO country to acknowledge the presence of its forces in Ukraine. An unnamed Pentagon official told reporters in October that an unspecified number of US troops were inspecting American arms shipments somewhere within Ukraine.

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »