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Is this a War?

Resetting the relationship between The State and The Citizen

LIES ARE UNBEKOMING | NOVEMBER 6, 2021

I’ve been wondering for quite some time about whether we are in a War and the resolution of my thoughts on the subject has recently improved.

Oddly enough, I have some standing on the subject.

I lived in Iraq between 1981 to 1991, a period that covered almost all of the Iraq/Iran War and all of the Gulf War, the original, not the sequels.

It was an old school type of war, with two parties fighting over territory and trying to redraw a border. A lot of people died over 8 years and the border stayed the same. But weapons were sold, and internal power was consolidated.

That’s really what war is about, territory. You have something that I want, and I will fight you for it.

So, if this is a war, who are the warring parties and what is the fight over?

The war is between “the state” and “the citizen”. The latter is YOU and ME and it’s easy enough to understand (sort of), but THE STATE is not straightforward anymore and I’ll cover that later.

The border between these two parties is being redrawn. The relationship between the State and the Citizen is being RESET.

When you hear about The Great Reset, that is what “Reset” really means.

Think back to your life, last year in Feb 2020. Think back to how you thought, what you did, what degree of intrusion the State had in your life and what level of control you had over your life and choices.

In Feb 2020 there was a border, a fairly large circle that you stood in the centre of. Everything within that circle was your domain, your freedoms, and your sovereignty.

Now, reflect on your life today, but more importantly reflect on the size of that circle. It obviously is much, much smaller today. The border between you and the State has been Reset.

Within that circle is a second circle that is much smaller, and it surrounds you almost like a second skin. Within this second circle, you have what is your “bodily sovereignty”. What is within your body is YOURS and not the State’s.

If you have acquiesced to the State’s injection, you have surrendered your bodily autonomy to the State. There is no border anymore between you and the State. It’s a depressing conclusion but true.

Your rationalisation for taking it is irrelevant, you wouldn’t have taken it but for the State’s lies and threats. Unless you took the flu vaccine every year religiously, to “protect yourself and others”, you have surrendered to the State. You may have had no choice because you need to make a living and feed your family, so it was a calculated surrender, but a surrender, nevertheless.

But for almost everyone else, you surrendered your bodily autonomy (let alone your current and future health) so that you could go to the pub, go to the hairdresser, go to the gym, see your parents, travel, plus a laundry list of other reasons that the world has used to rationalise its surrender to the State.

It is worth noting, that if you have surrendered your bodily sovereignty to the State, and there is no longer a border between you and the State, what would you ever say no to in the future. If you were not prepared to stand up for your bodily sovereignty, what would you ever stand up for?

But as a friend of mine said the other day, people just don’t know. They haven’t spent the time (for some hundreds of hours) necessary to figure out what is true and what is a lie.

  • They think the jab is safe (without understanding the meaning of the word).
  • They think it is effective (that it will protect them from getting Covid or giving it to parents, grandparents and others).
  • They think the State is truthful (why would they lie?).
  • They think the disease is exceptionally deadly (because they were told it is).
  • They think that masks work (when hazmat suits are necessary to protect against respiratory viruses).
  • They think that lockdowns work and are worth the cost.
  • They think that social distancing works.
  • They think that healthy people can spread the deadly disease.
  • They think that test results are real.
  • They think that contact tracing works (so they keep checking in, even when nobody is watching or cares).

And they think many other things that all form the framework for the biggest lie ever told to the world.

You need a lot of time to dismantle each one of these falsehoods and unravel the matrix that has been built.

I now would add another leg to this line of thinking.

  • They think there is no war.

This is a vital point, and I draw on my time in Iraq to understand it.

We knew there was a war. We knew who the warring parties were. We knew there was a border being fought over. We knew that our wants and needs needed to recalibrate to the reality of the war we were in. I don’t remember anyone ever complaining about missing out on all of life’s “nice to haves”. Our wants had recalibrated very tightly around our needs, there wasn’t a gap really. If we and our loved ones were fed and safe for the night and we had a job in the morning that allowed us to be fed and safe for the night, then we were generally happy. To survive war, you need to recalibrate psychologically to it. Of all my friends during those years, I don’t remember any of them being depressed. They had psychologically adapted to the reality of war, and to a climate of having and doing less. Within that recalibration, we were content.

We bunkered down and got through it.

The Iraq-Iran War went on for 8 years. Early on people thought it would be over in a few months, that was just normal human optimism. But after a couple of years most understood that thinking in terms of timeframes just created false hope and wasn’t helpful to having a robust and resilient War mindset. So, we accepted that it would be a long war and stopped trying to guess it’s end. Basically, for our own psychological well-being we settled in for the long haul.

I recommend that you do the same here, start settling in for the long haul. This War is not ending any time soon.

Learn to live with less.

I wrote this short piece many years ago, mainly so that I wouldn’t forget the stories and that my kids would get a glimpse into their history. It was a time where we learned to live with less.

The Generator

The first thing the Americans did was take out most of the infrastructure. They took out the bridges, they took out the TV stations and they took out the power plants. We lost our electricity on the first night of bombing in January 1991.

The war lasted for about three months, 100 days to be precise, and then it took another three months before the lights came back on, so all in all about six months without electricity.

Six months!

I’ve heard it said that society falls apart and anarchy sets after a couple of weeks without electricity. Well, that didn’t happen. Maybe we had other things on our minds.

A lot of things changed quickly when the power went out on that first night of bombing. Sleep cycles for one, no more TV and some candle use initially but that quickly changed to mainly a kerosene gas lantern that we had. It looked something like this.

It had a pump that you would use to pressurise the tank, it would then spray a kerosene mist onto a ball shaped net that burned brightly. It made a sssshhh sound that I still remember. I don’t recall anyone else having one and I don’t remember how we got it but it was our main source of light in the living room during those dark months. It burned white and bright and had a constant, soothing pressured burning sound.

One day a friend and neighbour, Abu Bashar (Father of Bashar), managed to get his hands on an old broken down generator. He asked me if I wanted to have a look at it. Having never before seen a generator in my life, let alone fixed one, I announced my intention to resurrect the machine.

I was asked the question because over the years I had built up a reputation as a fixer, helper and general handyman. I had no idea how to “fix” a generator, especially seeing I didn’t know what was wrong with it. But I loved taking things apart, so I did just that.

It was about the size of a large esky and I spent most of the day dismembering the unfortunate machine. I carefully cleaned every piece and when there was nothing left to take apart, I started to put it all back together again. As evening fell the now cleaned generator was pieced together with only a small collection of “extra” bits and pieces left in my pocket.

It was evening by now, Abu Bashar, his family and the occasional neighbour had been casually keeping an eye on me all day. Anyway, the thing was back together by late evening, it was filled up with petrol and now the moment of truth had arrived. As I was about to pull the starter cable, I remember thinking I had no idea why I thought it might work. I knew that all I had done was take it apart, clean it and put it back together again. I hadn’t “fixed” anything. So, any hope that it might work was clearly without basis. Put simply, it was a Hail Mary.

So, I pulled that cable, hailing Mary… and that beautiful two stoke started first time!! The bloody thing was working! And it was loud. As loud as any two stroke, angry at being silent for years, making up for lost time.

It was late, around nine or ten pm and the whole neighbourhood could hear this monster roaring, but no one seemed to care. There was electricity in the street!

The first thing everyone wanted to do was watch a video of an old Egyptian movie. Anything to take their mind off the misery and drudgery that was their daily life. And so there we were, family, friends and neighbours crammed together in a small living room, watching an old favourite movie, barely hearing a word over the roar of the machine outside. But happy that a little bit of joy and normalcy had returned despite the contrived and temporarily nature of the whole affair.

If you don’t know that you are in a war, and “just want your old life back” then taking a “safe and effective vaccine” to “protect you and your loved ones” from a “deadly disease” seems entirely reasonable. But unfortunately, none of that is true, including the bit about getting “your old life back”.

So, to summarise.

Yes, there is a war.

It is being fought over the Territory and the Border between The State and YOU The Citizen. It’s a land grab.

The State has been winning since March 2020.

The injection is the final step in that War and dissolves the last Border surrounding our Bodily Sovereignty.

In War, a War Mindset is required to survive.

On 11 March 2020 the WHO declared a pandemic.

Now, watch this through the lens of War. This was a declaration of War on The Citizen.

It was not clear to most, certainly not to me, back then. It is as clear as daylight today.

What’s interesting about this War, is that REGULAR Compliance is the end game. Not just today’s compliance, but ONGOING Compliance.

Please understand, there is no such thing as “fully vaccinated”.

There is now only non compliant and temporarily compliant.

The unjabbed are the Resistance.

But, not getting the jab, is among other things just a proxy for non-compliance.

So, in truth the non-compliant are The Resistance.

And what’s interesting about that is that if you have surrendered to date, you can Un-surrender.

If you QR Code to check-in everywhere, you could stop doing that. You can deploy a range of evasion tactics.

If you have taken one dose, you can choose to not take the second.

If you have taken two doses, you can choose to not take the “booster”.

If you were “enjoying your freedoms” you can choose to adopt a War mindset.

You can choose at any moment to stop complying with The State and reclaim some of your lost territory.

And while we are on the subject of surrender; just as you can un-surrender at any time, you can also surrender at any time, so do you need to surrender today?

If you have not taken the jab so far, do you need to give in today?

Why not leave your surrender for another day or another week?

I have written extensively about my D.A.D Strategy and a Waiting for Novavax Strategy so why surrender today, wait until tomorrow and then ask yourself the same question. In War, taking things one day and one week at a time makes a lot of sense.

Stuart Lindsay, an Australian retired Federal Circuit Court Judge wrote this wonderful piece:

Nothing to Lose but Chains and Shame

Strictly speaking, we fell in March 2020 when COVID arrived in earnest, but I date it from my acceptance that my fellow citizens would never stir. You cannot wake someone who is pretending to be asleep. The truth is that whether through cowardice or prolonged conditioning the vast majority of Australians, including many of my close friends and even family members, have manifested since then the absence of any kind of allegiance to their country or their heritage.

Most of those I live among have no desire at all to recover the freedom to speak or to assemble which has been taken from them. What would they have to say anyway? The only public utterances to which they now aspire are those to be roared as part of a crowd at the bread-and-circuses events, such as the football, which they are occasionally granted permission to attend. Then they replace their masks for the drive home past empty shops on patrolled and near-deserted streets.

Stuart has some wonderful turns of phrase, such as this one describing the acquiescing (surrendered) masses:

Netflix, full bellies and a warm place to defecate. That is all most want these days, is it not?

Stuart understands the mindset required for these times, and the years ahead:

I show you the times. Look out of your window if you need corroboration. I show you what you must do to get yourself in order if you want to be of any value in the fight to preserve what is left of your heritage. Here are some other ways to ready yourself for that fight.

Relinquish all of that unseemly longing for the return of unregulated visits to the theatre or the cinema and those beloved restaurants. Accept that never again will such things be free of petty invigilation and that on the worst case outcome they will only be possible if you keep having mRNA booster jabs — now the case in Israel, where three shots are now required even as officials moot lifting it four. If you are wary and reluctant to be inoculated with treatments whose long-term effects remain unknown, as am I, you need to accept that governments intend to make you a pariah for not having a “COVID passport” and be prepared to forfeit such pre-Fall pleasures as dining out. Keep your self-respect instead. Read that long-neglected Cervantes or C.S. Lewis on your bookshelf, help out at a refuge for the homeless or visit your sick grannie. Australia is teeming with sick grannies, so I’ve heard.

Here is a wonderful recent speech by Dr. Julie Ponesse.

Do Not Give Up Your Rights ~ Dr. Julie Ponesse’s

She references War a few times, here are the War references:

But it is not only information that is being weaponized, in this WAR; it is a person’s right to think for herself.

… we are in a kind of moral WAR.

But the WARS of the past have had clear and distinct boundaries: the east and the west, patriots, and government.

The WAR we find ourselves in today is one of infiltration instead of invasion, intimidation instead of free choice, of psychological forces so insidious we come to believe the ideas are our own and that we are doing our part by giving up our rights.

As a wise colleague recently said “This is a WAR about the role of government. It is about our freedom to think and ask questions, and about whether individual autonomy can be downgraded to a conditional privilege or whether it remains a right. It is a WAR about whether you are to remain a citizen or become a subject. It is about who owns you, you or the state.”

As someone born in the 70s, I never thought THIS would be a WAR I would have to fight, that the right to bodily autonomy, to the free and transparent exchange of information would be at risk.

Ok, I think it’s time we talk about The State. What does that word mean?

Well, let’s start off by saying that it doesn’t mean what it used to mean, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It used to mean that your government, acting independently of other governments, independently of business and independently of media would try to increase its territorial footprint while reducing the citizens territory. Sometimes they would win and sometimes they would lose and there were checks and balances within the system that worked to reduce the speed and scale of the government’s land grabs.

Well, does that sound like what it is going on today?

If all 200 countries around the world are pretty much all doing the same thing, do you think they are acting independently?

Do you think that business is acting with the government or with you? Do you think business is a check against the government or is business aiding and abetting The State?

Do you think that Media is acting as a check against the government, or is it helping the government disseminate its misinformation and disinformation?

Is the legal profession standing up for you or aligning itself with the government?

Is the medical establishment acting honestly to protect its patients or supporting the government in its campaign?

The State is now a NETWORK and it’s borderless. It’s a Global Network on a scale never seen nor imagined before.

Several months ago, I described it as The MGM Triad

11 Insights into The Medical-Government-Media (MGM) Triad

In that article I wrote this:

I was saying to my wife last night that in the past the “collapse” of a society happened within contained borders. The institutions of that particular country decayed to the point of collapse and/or takeover by nefarious actors (those that want to dominate others, look after others, “fix” the world’s problems because they know best etc., it is a very real personality type and is always a percentage of the population and they climb the poles of business and government).

Because of the way the globe has been rewired over the last 50 years and especially the last 20 years with ever more powerful global institutions and a communication grid with central points of influence and control, the collapse we are witnessing at the moment is “post-national”, its far higher upstream, all the way at the source of the river, which is why it’s happening everywhere.

Today I can say that I was on the right track, but I don’t think The MGM Triad even does this Global Network justice. It’s a good introduction to the question of “Why is this happening?” to someone just waking up, but there are even more layers to understand.

Thomas Roper wrote a great essay recently about:

The networks that created the pandemic

You will need to use a web translator to read it from the Norwegian website.

Within the article you will find a link and reference to this 169 page document, that does a deep dive into this global network. The document:

… shows connections between the Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, WHO, GAVI and other NGOs and Big Pharma. It contains round about 6,500 objects including like Persons, NGOs, Companies, Documents, etc. It also includes more than 7,200 links between them.

A great passage in this essay highlights the immense power of these networks. They have shown that they are able to get the largest governments in the world to heel.

The incredible power of the networks

To give an example of how much power these NGIs and actors have, I would like to show a current example that has hardly been mentioned in the media (nor in the alternative media), but which Mr.X immediately noticed, as he keeps an eye on the “right” NGIs.

On August 3, 2021, an open letter to the Biden administration was published. In this letter, the important NGOs, who – after what we have concluded – have been planning a pandemic since 2017, demanded. We will now take a closer look at these requirements from 3 August 2021.

Global Summit on Vaccinations

In the open letter, for example, one could read the following requirements:

” to host a global presidential-level summit on vaccinations, before the UN General Assembly in September, bringing together leading forces from the public and private sectors from around the world (…) and commits to taking the necessary measures to close gaps in vaccine supply and correct deficiencies in funding and capacity in the distribution and distribution of vaccines, as well as to create demand.”

It took only six weeks for Biden to comply with the claim. In parallel with the United Nations General Assembly, President Biden is currently hosting a virtual summit with representatives from 100 countries, where the president announced just that. And he urged the other countries to follow the example of the United States, as reported by Die Tagesschau, for example.

Do you now understand the power of these actors, when all it takes is for them to write an open letter to the president, and he complies with their demands within six weeks?

Vaccinate 70% of the world’s population

Furthermore, in the open letter it was demanded:

“To get the heads of state and government in the world, before or during the summit, to commit to achieving the goal of vaccinating 70% of the world’s population by mid-2022.”

Die Tagesschau reported in his article on Biden’s vaccination summit:

«As an organizational framework, Biden introduced a transatlantic vaccination partnership. ‘Today we are launching a partnership between the EU and the US for a global vaccination offensive,’ he said, in order to have closer cooperation. The goal is to have vaccinated 70% of the world’s population by September next year.”

Within six weeks, Biden (and also the European Union) pledged to fully comply with the requirements set out in the letter.

This is another good piece fleshing out the role of the WEF (World Economic Forum) network and the many people involved.

The WEF and the Pandemic

This image outlining a WEF vision for the creation of a Digital Identity is from 2018.

The Vaccine Passport is the cover story that rolls out the platform on which your Digital Identity will be managed.

Australia is in advanced stages of finalising its Digital Identity laws.

Home | Digital Identity

What a co-incidence, the World Economic Forum outlines a vision in 2018 for Digital Identity and in 2021 the Australian Government is about to finalise its laws making it a reality.

A wonderful Australian writer fighting the good fight is Alexandra Marshall.

Freedom Day? You have a barcode on your forehead

Make no mistake, vaccine passports are a domestic Social Credit System created under the watch of the federal Liberal Party. It is a sprawling government entity that denies rights based upon compliance in the hope that you will obey rather than exercising your democratic right to resist.

Citizens accepted vaccine passports because the government made them a condition of release from unlawful detention. As a population, we have been emotionally damaged to the point that people cheer on the discrimination of their neighbours. Ethics have been replaced by the intense fear of being sent into lockdown.

We are not witnessing a casual overreach of power – vaccine passports and QR check-ins are a complete abandonment of the Western democratic system. They are a threat to the liberty of our children and the survival of Australia’s laid-back spirit.

CJ Hopkins is a wonderful writer; he has written eloquently about his new War.

Manufacturing (New Normal) “Reality”

He describes the core desire of Totalitarianism as wanting:

… to remake the world in its paranoid image; to replace reality with its own “reality”

He goes further:

We are right in the middle of this process currently, which is why everything feels so batshit crazy. The global capitalist ruling classes are implementing a new official ideology, in other words, a new “reality.” That’s what an official ideology is. It’s more than just a set of beliefs. Anyone can have any beliefs they want. Your personal beliefs do not constitute “reality.” In order to make your beliefs “reality,” you need to have the power to impose them on society. You need the power of the police, the military, the media, scientific “experts,” academia, the culture industry, the entire ideology-manufacturing machine.

What I call The State he calls here Supranational Global Capitalism:

And, yes, it is all one ideology, not “communism,” or “fascism,” or any other nostalgia, but the ideology of the system that actually rules us, supranational global capitalism. We’re living in the first truly global-hegemonic ideological system in human history. We have been for the last 30 years. If you are touchy about the term “global capitalism,” go ahead and call it “globalism,” or “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism,” or whatever other name you need to. Whatever you call it, it became the unrivalled globally-hegemonic ideological system when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. Yes, there are pockets of internal resistance, but it has no external adversaries, so its progression toward a more openly totalitarian structure is logical and entirely predictable.

He goes deeper into the subject here:

The War on Reality

Naturally, there would be one official reality that you would force everyone to rigidly conform to at any given moment in time, but you would change the official reality frequently, and force everyone to conform to the new one (and pretend that they had never conformed to the old one), and then, once they had settled into that one, you would change the official reality again, until people’s brains just shut down completely, and they gave up trying to make sense of anything, and just tried to figure out what you wanted them to believe on any given day.

He coins the term GloboCap, which is his version of my MGM Triad.

But the goal of GloboCap’s War on Reality isn’t simply to deceive the masses and divide them into opposing camps. Rulers have been deceiving the masses and dividing them into opposing camps since the dawn of human civilization. This time, it’s a bit more complicated than that.

And depressingly this paragraph:

You could experimentally “vaccinate” millions of people whose risk of becoming seriously ill or dying from your apocalyptic virus was minuscule or non-existent, and kill tens or hundreds of thousands in the process, and the people whose brains you had methodically broken would thank you for murdering their friends and neighbors, and then rush out to their local discount drugstore to experimentally “vaccinate” their own kids and post pictures of it on the Internet.

The Road to Totalitarianism

We have watched as the New Normal has done precisely what every totalitarian movement in history has done before it, right by the numbers. We pointed all this out, each step of the way. I’m not going to reiterate all that again.

I am, however, going to document where we are at the moment, and how we got here … for the record, so that the people who will tell you later that they “had no clue where the trains were going” will understand why we no longer trust them, and why we regard them as cowards and collaborators, or worse.

Yes, that’s harsh, but this is not a game. It isn’t a difference of opinion. The global-capitalist ruling establishment is implementing a new, more openly totalitarian structure of society and method of rule. They are revoking our constitutional and human rights, transferring power out of sovereign governments and democratic institutions into unaccountable global entities that have no allegiance to any nation or its people.

That is what is happening … right now. It isn’t a TV show. It’s actually happening.

The Covidian Cult (Part III)

Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or rather, its ideology is “reality” When you are an unrivalled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”

Few others have written as well as CJ Hopkins on how to deal with this New Normal “Reality”.

So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that it when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.

In other words, we need to make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.

That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.

Here is a good example of the tools now available to assault reality and create a new “reality”.

Image

Image The global assault on reality and the creation of a new “reality” has created a Mass Psychosis, described by Dr. Mattias Desmet as Mass Formation.

John Waters, writes beautifully about a recent Desmet interview.

Covid Totalitarianism: The Deification of Error

You cannot extract the Mass Psychosis from the New Totalitarianism. They are two sides of the same coin. Here are some extracts that help explain the phenomenon:

Le Bon it was who observed that the consciousness bestowed by membership of a crowd can be transformative, possessing individual members with ‘a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think and act in a manner quite differently from that in which each individual would feel, think and act were that person in a state of isolation.’ In such a ‘psychological crowd’, individual personality disappears, brain activity is replaced by reflex activity: a lowering of intelligence, provoking a complete transformation of sentiments, which collectively may manifest as better and worse than those of the crowd’s constituent members. A crowd may just as easily become heroic or criminal, but is generally disposed towards destruction.

‘The ascendancy of crowds,’ wrote Le Bon, ‘indicates the death throes of a civilisation.’ The upward climb to civilisation is an intellectual process driven by individuals; the descent is a herd in stampede. ‘Crowds are only useful for destruction.’

He says there are four conditions that need to be in place to enable mass formation to occur in a society. The first is the presence of large numbers of socially isolated, atomised, people. The social bonds between people need to have been weakened. This is the most important, and the other conditions follow from it. Secondly, there will be large numbers of people who experience lack of sense-making in their lives and work — people who feel that their jobs are senseless, meaningless. Thirdly, there requires to be ‘a lot of free-floating anxiety’ — i.e. anxiety that is not connected to a mental representation so that the sufferer doesn’t know why he is anxious and afraid. And fourthly, there needs to be a lot of ‘free-floating psychological discontent’ — anger and frustration at, again, apparently nothing in particular.

And you also need mass media — without which mass formation would be impossible. Desmet does not explicitly say so, but of course it is also essential that these media be biddable and readily prone to corruption.

These conditions, he says, existed in Western societies long before the Covid crisis. There was, he says, ‘an epidemic of burnout’. He says something between 40 and 70 per cent of people in modern societies experience their jobs as senseless. He points also to the escalating use of psycho-pharmaceutical medicines to treat anxiety and depression.

There are, in situations of mass formation, says Desmet, three distinct groups that manifest themselves. Only 30 per cent, he says, are really hypnotised, and cannot be reached in any way. In addition, however, there are about 40 per cent who usually follow the crowd, and from the outset go along with that 30 per cent of total believers. There is another cohort of about 30 per cent who are not hypnotised, who try to speak out and resist. This group, he says, is extremely heterogeneous and disunited. If these people could unite, he says, they could bring the whole thing quickly to an end, but this seldom proves possible.

Totalitarianism in its full-blown form, then, is something that comes after, but ‘after’ what? It comes after a lengthy ‘preparation’, not necessarily planned with malign intent, in which human beings become isolated, atomised, alienated and lonely — conditions for which the totalitarian has ready solutions in the promulgation of bogus community and imagined bonds of mutual hatreds. The negative undertones of these processes suggests some form of prior error, and this may well have been present, perhaps in the pursuit of greed or exploitation, but this is not any longer admissible. Totalitarianism is like a secondary condition that descends on a society that has first of all been subjected to certain processes of modernity: technologisation, industrialisation, individualisation, atomisation. It is, in a sense, like the lung cancer that ensues from a lifetime of smoking, or the type 2 diabetes that results from an excessively sweet tooth. But it is not ‘secondary’ in the sense suggesting ‘lesser’ or ‘minor’ or ‘subordinate’: When it arrives, totalitarianism announces itself as the actual purpose and destination-point of the entire historical process, the discovery of the actual meaning of history. It follows, but is not collateral to, the events which preceded it. Indeed, its arrival announces a coherence to those previous events that had not hitherto been perceived: It ‘makes sense’ of the drifts and apparent randomness of the past, and in doing so turns common sense on its head and compels man to admit his prior errors of understanding and accept that the true direction of history has now been revealed.

Paul Collits has done incredible work all throughout the scamdemic, and I was lucky enough to come across him early. Here he writes about August Landmesser (look him up):

Je Suis August Landmesser

Two excuses might be proffered for going along with tyranny – we didn’t know what was going on, and I thought I personally would be safe from the tyranny if I played along.

Take the first excuse. Dr Robert Malone, an inventor of the mRNA vaccine, has noted, “… if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”. He was speaking of the hideous truths about the jab. Malone’s accusation implies the first excuse. We didn’t know. We perhaps suspected something, but we excused the political class for mere “mistakes”. We made a choice, not to think too deeply about the emerging “new normal”. We didn’t try very hard at all to comprehend what was going on. We found excuses to justify our own compliance. Going against the crowd is too much like hard work. People will think I am … an anti-vaxxer! Thinking hard about difficult issues will only give me the guilts, and make my life complicated, so I will park it.

Here he talks about “strategic obeyers” and how they sustain The State:

Some of this behaviour might be termed “strategic obeying”. This is self-regarding conduct whose aim is to protect the things that are important to us while ceding minor freedoms to the Covid State. Anyone who hates mask mandates but obeys them in order to get the shopping done, rather than risk a fine or risk getting spat at by angry CovidManiacs, is a strategic obeyer. A reluctant obeyer, perhaps, but an obeyer nonetheless. If I just do this, maybe they won’t come for me. If they come for the unvaccinated, maybe they won’t come for me. Strategic obeyers sustain the Covid State. They form a key part of the group that remains silent, and no doubt all the various Nudge Units will have figured this all out.

And:

Those who go along to get along enjoy what Levant terms “the peace of surrender”.

This article went viral recently, written anonymously by Spartacus. Personally, I think that Dr. David Martin wrote it as it covers a lot of ground that he is very familiar with. I recommend reading the whole thing as it is a great summary of the story to date.

“You will not destroy America and the Free World. You will not have your New World Order.”

But it ends with this:

What is the purpose of all of this? One can only speculate as to the perpetrators’ motives, however, we have some theories.

The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other “undesirables”, and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed “high-impact”, such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on. Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism.

Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades.

More from Alexandra Marshall.

Covid: the New World Order

Head of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab wrote a Harvard Business Review piece titled, ‘Power and Policy: The New Economic World Order’ where he detailed his belief that the industrialised world has been going through an economic revolution. Keep in mind, the article is written in 1994. He correctly lusts after [he] points out the rise of Asia, commenting, “One consequence of the new parity is that the West can no longer hope to dictate the rules of the game.”

In this, he is only partially right. The circumstance he prophesied has only manifested because organisations like the World Economic Forum and the United Nations have trained Western leaders to be weak. It was not an inevitability of trade structures, but rather a matter of ideological infestation. The constant infiltration of socialist rhetoric into the once free world via endless champagne conferences has left it unable to work out what gender it is, let alone present a strong front against the rise of Asia.

By 2018, the World Economic Forum was publishing articles insisting that we must all work together to hasten the rise of Asia and teach ourselves to embrace the New World Order. The United Nations have a similar song sheet. Before Covid, they spoke of the New World Order in the context of a green revolution and the dismantling of old industrialised nations in favour of empowering the third world.

Most of the propaganda coming out of the United Nations these days talks about sustainability, mass-migration, climate goals, and Covid as a singular item – an omini-shambles apocalypse with only one solution: world socialism disguised as environmentalism.

And lastly here is Iain Davis writing about the “global commons”. It’s a good way of further understanding the “territory” this War is fighting over.

Seizing Everything: The Theft of the Global Commons – Part 1

While we have been distracted and transitioned by the alleged global pandemic, or pseudopandemic, the Global Public Private Partnership (GPPP), who orchestrated the chaos, have been very busy. They have created the asset rating system that will afford them total, global economic control. This is based upon Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and utilises Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics (SCM).

This new global economic system is what the politicians mean by “build back better.” It is the essence of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset.

Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics – SCM – were devised by the World Economic Forum, who describe themselves as the international organisation for public-private cooperation. When combined with the SDGs outlined in the UN Agenda 21 and 2030 frameworks, SCM enable the GPPP to seize the entire Earth, all its resources and everything on it, including us.

In order to control us we are being transitioned into a technocracy with the biosecurity state acting as the central control mechanism. Public health is the new focus for global security and centralised control of the entire system has been established during, and as a result of, the pseudopandemic.

Again we see the recurrent themes of the GPPP. The planet must be saved from us, we are a pestilence that must be controlled; Covid-19 is, as ever, an opportunity to transform the global economy; our survival and GPPP stewardship of the global commons are one and the same and everything must be transformed.

Put simply:

  • If the world is being destroyed by humans doing whatever they want (climate catastrophism)
  • And these humans are grouped together within pesky democracies and pesky borders
  • Then to save the world we need to build a system that keeps people from doing whatever they want
  • By changing the democracies and dissolving the borders
  • It has been a long term project that is coming to fruition today

The role of the CCP within this network is both very real and complex. I’m not going to spend time on it here, god knows this piece is long enough, but you could do worse than follow Michael Senger’s work on the subject.

I will say this though, as long the the Network is useful to the CCP, they will play along. If the Network helps to diminish and destabilise its strategic adversaries, then why not help it along. But if the Network stops being useful, the CCP will simply devour it.

All the players in this Network will one day be long gone, but the CCP will still be around. They are playing the longest game in town.

This is a War.

This is a Reset.

Wake up, stop complying and join the fight.

May 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

UKRAINE CLAIM OF ATTACK ON RUSSIAN SHIP, THE IVAN KHURS, DEBUNKED

By Larry Johnson | SONAR | May 26, 2023

Let’s give the Ukrainian Government of Volodomyr Zelensky credit for one thing — they are world class liars. Yesterday I wrote about the attempted attack on the Russian ship, the Ivan Khurs, by three maritime drones and simply acknowledged that there was a video that claimed to show one of the drones hitting a ship. It was implied that the ship was the Ivan Khurs but there was no identifying information to corroborate the claim.

Today we know the truth. Ukraine lied. The Ivan Khurs pulled into port in the Black Sea on its own power with no visible damage.

This is a consistent pattern for Ukraine. Remember the Ghost of Kiev? That intrepid Ukrainian ace that allegedly shot down six Russian combat aircraft during the first month of the Special Military Operation? Turns out that was footage lifted from a video game and most of the Western media, not to mention several gullible politicians, gobbled up the lie and exulted over Ukraine’s faux victory.

Normally a person or institution regularly exposed as a prevaricator would be denounced and ignored. But not Ukraine. Zelensky and company insisted a year ago that Russia had not taken Mariupol despite conclusive video evidence of the remnants of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi AZOV battalion surrendering to the Russian Chechens as they limped out of the Azovstal steel plant.

Rinse and repeat with Bakhmut. Russia’s Wagner Group was busy hoisting victory flags over the fallen city while Ukrainian political and military leaders continued to insist that their boys were still in the fight. Nope, they were dead, captured or retreating. It was only today that a Ukrainian official, ex-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, finally conceded that Bakhmut was kaput.

The lies and self-delusion are not restricted to Ukraine. In the United States a bi-partisan group of legislators called on Dementia Joe to send Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to Ukraine:

Yesterday, members of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, Chairman Representative Joe Wilson (SC-02), Ranking Member Representative Steve Cohen (TN-09) and Commissioner Representative Victoria Spartz (IN-05) sent a letter to President Biden, requesting he grants the transfer of MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to Ukraine.

In the letter, Commissioners thank the Administration for its beginning steps on getting F-16s to Ukrainian defenders and emphasize the importance of ATACMS on targeting Russian frontlines in occupied Ukraine as well as pushing back Russian supply chain systems which fuel their genocidal war. During the Commissioners’ recent trip to Ukraine and meeting with President Zelensky, ATACMS were requested for an immediate battlefield advantage. These powerful weapons could provide the advantage Ukraine needs to secure its freedom, and the only remaining hurdle to their delivery is the President’s approval.

This should put Russia and China on notice that it is not just Joe Biden and his inept National Security team that are intent on escalating the war in Ukraine. There also is a vocal, bipartisan group of legislators who are pressing to expand the war and are oblivious to the risk inherent in their proposal of Russian retaliation. The Washington Establishment is still willing to bet the lives of Ukrainians on their illusory vision that Russia is teetering towards defeat and their belief that Ukraine is just one Wunderwaffen miracle weapon from total victory.

I am sad to report to those of you who live outside of the Untied States that most Americans are clueless about the implications of the United States apparent strategy of escalation. Most assume that if Russia can bomb Ukrainian cities then fair play dictates that Ukraine should be able to do the same. The point they miss is that Ukraine is incapable of such attacks without the help of the United States and other NATO countries. Increasing Ukraine’s ability to strike further inside Russian territory will inevitably lead Russia to retaliate against those responsible for making those attacks possible. That means an inevitable clash with NATO. I believe that the United States should be doing everything in its power to avoid that. But it is doing the exact opposite and the potential for something terrible looms larger with each passing day.

May 27, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Drone Boats Used in Attack on Russian Ship Ivan Khurs Launched With US Support

Sputnik – 27.05.2023

MOSCOW – The unmanned boats used in Ukraine’s failed attack on the ship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet “Ivan Khurs” were launched from a naval operations center in Ochakov opened with US support in 2018, an informed source told Sputnik.

“These devices were launched from the naval operations center, opened with the participation of the United States in Ochakov back in 2018. They were controlled using built-in Starlink satellite internet modules received by Kiev from the United States,” the source said, adding that target designation for these drone boats was provided by American reconnaissance equipment.

The source further indicated that Ukraine has received a batch of new marine drones of Western production for carrying out naval attacks and provocations in the Black Sea.

“Despite the boasting of Kiev representatives about the use of drones of their own, that is, Ukrainian production, their profile suggests otherwise,” the source said. “The appearance of Ukrainian Mikola-type naval drones assembled from components supplied to Kiev by NATO does not correspond to the profile of those that attacked the Ivan Khurs.”

The new drones were likely produced by the United Kingdom “which has extensive experience in the creation and combat use of such systems in various regions of the world ocean,” the source said.

It was also pointed out that the location of the attack points toward an escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and the expansion of its geography.

“The sabotage against the Russian Navy in the exclusive maritime economic zone of Turkey, more than 200 nautical miles from the area of ​​the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, is a continuation of the provocative course of the Anglo-Saxons to escalate and expand its geography,” the source said.

Earlier this week, the Russian Defense Ministry said that Ukraine had unsuccessfully tried to attack the Ivan Khurs, which ensured the safety of the Turkish Stream and Blue Stream gas pipelines, using unmanned boats.

The Russian Defense Ministry indicated the foiled attack ended with all of the offending boats being destroyed by the Russian military 140 kilometers (87 miles) northeast of the Bosphorus Strait.

The “Ivan Khurs” vessel has since continued to execute its duties despite the earlier sabotage attempt.

May 27, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

The EU has no leadership, only NGOs and think tanks telling it what to do, says Hungarian minister

MAGYAR HÍRLAP | May 26, 2023

No one has the courage and aptitude to lead Europe today, meaning there is no political leadership in the European Union, especially in the European Commission, said Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga at a Budapest conference on Thursday.

“In the European Union today, it is non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations and think tanks that tell Europe how to run Europe, according to the will of their own leaders,” she said.

“Recently, for asymmetric reasons, a crisis of confidence has arisen between the EU leadership and the Hungarian government. This is because the Hungarian government, unlike the EU institutions, says what it thinks and does what it says,” she added.

Varga said Europe is stumbling around the stage of history as a clumsy sideshow, drifting from crisis to crisis, and since the migration crisis, it has been trying to make policy in a way that is completely divorced from the real needs of its citizens. She said the institutional system also failed during the Covid crisis and then shot itself in the foot with sanctions against Russia after the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

She warned that immigration is a crisis that still affects Europe and continues to cost the Hungarian budget heavily.

“At the same time, by defending Europe, we have to constantly fight the judgments and proceedings of the European Court of Justice,” she said. “Waiting for yet another slap in the face instead of any good deed, that is the fate of Hungary.”

Varga noted that during the coronavirus crisis, the EU made deals regarding vaccines, and yet those text messages have never been produced, referring to the murky case involving EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“We make no secret of the fact that we want to hold the functioning of the institutions in the European Union accountable in terms of the rule of law. Let’s talk about whether the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European institutions are respecting the rules, whether the rule of law is working in the institutions,” said the minister.

On the issue of the Hungarian EU presidency, the European Parliament has no say in this, the minister said, stressing that more than 10 years ago, a unanimous European Council decision had established the order of the member states, which can only be changed by unanimity. The presidency is not only a right but also an obligation, and the opposition will not achieve anything by such an attempt, but it could do enormous damage.

According to the minister, the European Parliament wants to block Hungary’s EU presidency precisely because it fears that Hungary will take stock of the dysfunctional state of EU institutions.

May 26, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Economics, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Britain’s Perilous Escalation in Ukraine

By Jonathan Cook | Declassified UK | May 24, 2023

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky made an unexpected trip to Britain last week on a whistle-stop tour of European capitals, pleading for more powerful and longer-range weapons to use in his war against Russia.

What was hard to ignore once again was the extent to which the UK is playing an outsize role in Ukraine.

Last year, shortly after the start of the war, the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson, hurried to Kyiv – presumably on Washington’s instructions – apparently to warn Zelensky off fledgling peace talks with Moscow.

At around the same time, the Biden administration made clear it favoured an escalation in fighting, not an end to it, as an opportunity to “weaken” Russia, a geo-strategic rival along with China.

Since then, the UK has been at the forefront of European efforts to entrench the conflict, helping to lobby for the supply of weapons, training and military intelligence to Ukrainian forces.

British tanks and thousands of tank shells – including, controversially, some made from depleted uranium – are being shipped out. Last week, the UK added hundreds of long-range attack drones to the inventory.

And an unspecified number of £2m-a-blast Storm Shadow cruise missiles, with a range of nearly 300km, have started arriving. Last week Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence secretary, said the missiles were already in use, adding that Kyiv alone was deciding on the targets.

Storm Shadow allows the Ukrainian military to strike deep into Russian-annexed parts of Ukraine – and potentially at Russian cities too.

A recent leak revealed that the Pentagon had learnt through electronic eavesdropping of Zelensky’s eagerness for longer-range missiles so that his forces were “capable of reaching Russian troop deployments in Russia”.

Lip service

Britain now pays little more than lip service to the West’s claim that its role is only to help Ukraine defend itself from Russian aggression. The supply of increasingly offensive weapons has turned Ukraine into what amounts to a proxy battleground on which the Cold War can be revived.

During Zelensky’s visit to the UK last week, Johnson’s successor, Rishi Sunak, effectively acted as an arms broker for Ukraine, joining with the Netherlands in what was grandly dubbed an “international coalition” to pressure the Biden administration and other European states to supply Kiev with F-16 fighter jets.

Washington appeared not to need much cajoling. Three days later, Biden dramatically changed tack at a G7 summit in Japan. He effectively gave a green light for US allies to supply Ukraine not only with US-made F-16s but similar fourth-generation fighter jets, including Britain’s Eurofighter Typhoon and France’s Mirage 2000.

Administration officials surprised European leaders by suggesting the US would be directly involved in the training of pilots outside Ukraine.

After a highly staged “surprise” visit by Zelensky to the summit at the weekend, Biden said he had been given a “flat reassurance” that the jets would not attack Russian territory.

British officials, meanwhile, indicated that the UK would start training Ukrainian pilots within weeks.

‘Rightful place is in Nato’

No 10 has made clear that Sunak’s purpose is to build “a new Ukrainian air force with Nato-standard F-16 jets” and that the prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”.

These statements seem intended once again to block any potential path towards peace. President Vladimir Putin repeatedly spoke out against Nato’s growing, covert involvement in neighbouring Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion 15 months ago.

“The prime minister believes “Ukraine’s rightful place is in Nato”

It is hard to imagine that the UK is heading off-script. More likely, the Biden administration is using Britain to make the running and soften up Western publics as Nato becomes ever more deeply immersed in the military activities of Russia’s neighbour.

Ukraine is being gradually turned into the very Nato forward base that first set Moscow on course to invade.

At the same time, Britain appears to be exploiting the Ukraine war as a showcase for its weaponry. After the US, it has been the largest supplier of military equipment to Ukraine.

This week it was reported that UK arms exports hit a record £8.5bn, more than double last year’s total. The last time Britain was so successful at selling weapons was in 2015, at the height of the Syrian war.

Risk to health

Europe’s weapons largesse is, we are told, the precondition for Ukraine to mount a long-awaited counter-offensive to take back territory Russia has seized in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine.

Speaking candidly in Florence this month, Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, ruled out peace talks. Ukraine needed massive supplies of arms because otherwise “Ukraine will fall in a matter of days”, he said.

Borrell’s warning not only suggested the precariousness of Ukraine’s situation but implied that, out of desperation, its leaders might be prepared to approve ever riskier combat scenarios.

And thanks to British meddling, the heavy toll of casualties as the war rages on – among the Ukrainian population and Russian soldiers, as well as potentially inside Russia’s borders too – may be felt not just over the coming months but for decades.

In March, Declassified broke the story that some of the thousands of tank shells Britain is supplying to Kiev are made of depleted uranium (DU), a radioactive heavy metal produced as waste from nuclear power plants.

Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party has said it “fully supports” the UK government’s supply of these armour-piercing shells to Ukraine, despite the long-term risk they pose to those exposed to the chemically toxic contamination left behind.

DU shells fragment and burn when they hit a target. One analyst, Doug Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, told Declassified that the ammunition produces “chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate [microscopic particles] that poses an inhalational risk to people”.

Nonetheless, British ministers insist the threat to human health is low – and worth the risk given the military gains in helping Ukraine to destroy Russian tanks.

Cancer deaths

As Declassified has highlighted, however, a growing body of evidence following the use of such shells by the US in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and by Britain and the US in Iraq a decade later undermines these reassurances.

Italian courts have upheld compensation claims against the country’s military in more than 300 cases where Italians who served in the police or as soldiers in Bosnia and Kosovo have died of cancer after being exposed to DU.

Many thousands more Italian former service-people are reported to have developed cancers.

In 2001 Tony Blair’s government downplayed the role of DU in Italy’s deaths to avoid upsetting the new administration of George W Bush. Both leaders would soon approve the use of DU rounds in Iraq, though the UK admitted a “moral obligation” to help clean up some of the contamination afterwards.

The West has taken little interest in researching the effects of DU weapons in Iraq, even though local civilian populations have been the most exposed to its contamination. DU shells were used extensively during both the 1991 Gulf war and more than a decade later during the US and British-led occupation of Iraq.

Nonetheless, Iraqi government statistics suggest the rates of cancers leapt 40-fold between the period immediately before the Gulf war and 2005.

The city of Fallujah, which the US devastated after the 2003 invasion, is reported to suffer “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied”. Birth defects are said to be roughly 14 times the rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions of Japan, where the US dropped atomic bombs.

In 2018 the British government reclassified a 1981 report into the dangers of DU weapons by the Ministry of Defence’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment it had made available three years earlier.

Meanwhile, James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has misleadingly suggested that international bodies such as the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have found no long-term health or environmental hazards associated with DU weapons.

But as Weir told Declassified in March: “None of the entities cited by the MoD has undertaken long-term environmental or health studies in conflict areas where DU weapons have been used.”

In other words, they simply don’t know – and possibly don’t care to find out.

Weir added that the WHO, UN and International Atomic Energy Agency had all called for contaminated areas to be clearly marked and access restricted, while at the same time recommending that risk awareness campaigns be targeted at nearby communities.

British officials have also recruited the Royal Society to their efforts to claim DU is safe – as the US did earlier, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, citing two of its reports published in 2001 and 2002.

However, the Royal Society has vocally distanced itself from such claims. A spokesperson told Declassified that, despite the British government’s assertions, DU was no longer an “active area of policy research”.

Back in 2003, the Royal Society rebuked Washington, telling the Guardian that soldiers and civilians in Iraq “were in short and long term danger. Children playing at contaminated sites were particularly at risk.”

At the same time, the chairman of the Royal Society’s working group on depleted uranium, Professor Brian Spratt, also warned that corroding shells could leach DU into water supplies. He recommended removing ordinance and conducting long-term sampling of water supplies.

Voices silenced

By lobbying for more overtly offensive weapons and introducing DU shells into the war, Britain has raised the stakes in two incendiary ways.

First, it is driving the war’s logic towards ever greater escalation, including nuclear escalation.

Russia itself possesses DU weapons but is reported to have avoided using them. Moscow has long warned that it regards use of DU in Ukraine in nuclear terms: as the equivalent of a “dirty bomb”.

In March Putin responded to the UK’s decision to supply DU tank shells by vowing to move “tactical” nuclear weapons into neighbouring Belarus. Meanwhile, his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said it put the world “fewer and fewer” steps away from “nuclear collision”.

But Britain is also creating a situation where a catastrophic move, or miscalculation, by either Russia or Ukraine is becoming ever more likely, as events last week highlighted only too clearly.

Russia struck a military ammunition depot in western Ukraine, creating a giant fireball. Rumours suggested the site may have included British DU shells.

Whether this is true or not, it is a reminder that Moscow could hit such a storage site, intentionally or not, spreading contamination widely over a built-up area.

With Ukraine soon to be in possession of a full array of offensive weapons, largely courtesy of the UK – not only long-range drones, cruise missiles and tanks but fighter jets – it is not hard to imagine terrifying scenarios that could quickly bring Europe to the brink of nuclear conflict.

Moscow hits a DU ammunition depot, exposing a large civilian population to toxic contamination. Ukraine retaliates with air strikes deep inside Russia. The path to a nuclear exchange in Europe has never looked closer.

Those who warned that peace talks were urgently needed rather than an arms race in Ukraine are looking more prescient by the day. For how much longer can their voices continue to be silenced, not only by western leaders but by the western media too?

May 26, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Britain At War – Provoking The Consequences

By Christopher Black – New Eastern Outlook – 26.05.2023 

On the 19th of May, the Financial Times quoted the British Minister of Defense, Ben Wallace, stating that the West could face the threat of full-scale war with Russia and China by the end of the decade and proclaimed defence preparation a paramount task for Western countries.

One has to wonder what universe Mr. Wallace and his boss, Rishi Sunak, are living in since Britain is engaged in war with Russia right now, has, with every step, every hostile action, set itself up for a full-scale war, a full-scale catastrophe, which they cannot prevent. Why Britain would go to war with China as well as Russia when China has not threatened it and is oceans away, no one can explain in rational terms. Yet, this is the British rhetoric, the fetishistic parroting of the words of their lord and master, the USA.

Many argue that statements, a war is not happening, that it is something that exits only in the future, are desperate attempts to fool the British people, to lie to them about their government’s intentions and what is coming. Others argue that they are signs that the British government has no sense of reality. But, in the end, one has to conclude that they are both at the same time.

Worse, these statements speak of a government, that seems to think it is untouchable, that the war with Russia will be limited in geographic space to Ukraine, that Britain’s participation in the war against Russia will have no direct consequences for Britain and its people, that Russia will not dare to follow military and political logic and conduct military strikes against Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the British establishment, dreaming of its past, is unable to accept reality, is leading the British people towards disaster, as the gathering storm of war edges ever closer to their shores.

The deluded thinking in Britain is an extension of the same psychosis that grips all the halls of power in the western world, a psychosis that has its roots in the deeply troubled societies which have developed in the west and whose causes will be the subject of study of future social scientists and historians if there are any. In fact, these governments display observable and classical symptoms of paranoia and delusional disorders, leading to the complete break with reality that constitutes psychosis. This is a very dangerous state of affairs because someone who is delusional, who has no grip on reality, who cannot make distinctions between reality and imagination or wishful thinking, will make decisions and take actions that are dangerous to everyone around them, in this case, Russia, and beyond, the whole world.

Just after Russia began its Special Military Operation, Britain declared its support for Ukraine along with the rest of NATO and announced it would supply it with weapons and munitions to fight Russia. Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, in response, stated that NATO states providing weapons to Ukraine could be hit in strikes.

Ms Zakharova said:

“Do we understand correctly that for the sake of disrupting the logistics of military supplies, Russia can strike military targets on the territory of those NATO countries that supply arms to the Kyiv regime?

“After all, this directly leads to deaths and bloodshed on Ukrainian territory. As far as I understand, Britain is one of those countries.”

The Russian defence ministry, after several attacks inside Russia backed by NATO, has repeatedly said:

“We would like to stress that the direct provoking by London of the Kyiv regime into such activities attacking Russian territory, should there be an attempt to realise them, will immediately lead to our proportional response.”

In April, when the UK announced it was sending depleted uranium tank shells to Ukraine, Russia said it would respond and did so, destroying those munitions in Ukraine just after they arrived, and now a radioactive cloud is drifting west towards Europe and the UK. Russian warnings of the danger of this happening were ignored.

On May 11, Ben Wallace announced a further act of aggression against Russia with the decision to send Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, which have since been used to attack civilian centres in Russia. Again, Russia stated clearly that there would be a military response to this action.

On May 23, during his visit to Laos, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev issued another warning, on the day Russian security forces destroyed the Ukrainian raiding force that attacked civilians in the Belgorod region, an openly terrorist action backed by the UK and the other NATO states. From Vientiane, he stated,

“The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake. NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible. NATO is wrong, and at some point events may take a completely unpredictable turn. The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,”

Medvedev pointed out that no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed,

“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long-range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is.”

But Russia can strike using its conventional weapons as well, against which the UK has no defence whatsoever.

Still, the British attitude towards these warnings is to call on the magic of “legality” as if they can weave a protective cloak around the island with incantations. Yet, everyone knows that to use incantations to ward off danger, the formula used must have mojo or force; otherwise the words have no effect.

In 2022, for example, then Deputy Prime Minister, Dominic Raab, hit back, after Russia suggested it could target British military installations over its support for Ukraine, by branding the Kremlin’s claim “unlawful.” Wallace, Sunak, and others have repeated this claim multiple times.

Raab, and the rest, can only be right if Britain had maintained its neutrality in the war between Ukraine and Russia. But, as we know, this is really a war by the USA, Britain and their NATO mafia against Russia and has been all along. Ukraine is the present battlefield. So, for Britain to claim that it has maintained neutrality is an absurdity.

A neutral state violates neutrality by breaching its obligation to remain impartial, to not participate in the conflict. It violates neutrality by supplying warships, aircraft, arms, ammunition, military provisions or other war materials, either directly or indirectly, to a belligerent, by engaging its own military forces, or by supplying military advisors to a party to the armed conflict, by allowing belligerent use of neutral territory as a military base, or for the storage of war material or passage of belligerent troops or munitions in neutral territory, by furnishing troops to a belligerent, or providing or transmitting military intelligence on behalf of a belligerent are also examples of violations of neutrality.

A State’s neutrality ends when the State becomes a party to an armed conflict, or, in other words, a belligerent. A State becomes a belligerent under the law of neutrality by either declaring war; or participating in hostilities to a significant extent, or engages in systematic or substantial violations of its duties of impartiality and non-participation.

Britain meets all the requirements of a co-belligerent, that is, of a party to the war with Russia; it not only supplies munitions and weapon systems to Ukraine with the objective of attacking Russia and Russian forces in Ukraine it has a direct role in directing the war against Russia, including sending military officers and soldiers to advise and operate with the Ukrainian forces, by preventing any peace negotiations – we remember the action of Boris Johnson just as Ukraine and Russia were about to conclude a peace settlement – by the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Britain and transporting them to the front, by supplying the Ukrainian forces with reconnaissance and intelligence data, actively sending aircraft close to the war zone for this purpose, by providing communications systems, by providing financial aid to Ukraine at the same imposing economic warfare measure on Russia, euphemistically termed “sanctions.  These conditions apply to all the NATO allies, of course, but Britain’s role is an especially egregious one.

In fact, Britain’s aggression against Russia began much earlier than 2022. Britain, as part of NATO, supported the insurgency in the Caucasus region in the mid-1990s. Britain took part in the aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999, part of the strategy to attack Russia, eliminating a potential Russian ally, just as Hitler did in 1941. The Georgian attack on Russian forces in 2008 was also supported by NATO.

All through this period, the UK government and media put out a constant stream of propaganda against Russia, culminating in the wild claims by the British that Russia tried to use novichok nerve poison to kill two Russian citizens, the Skripals, in the UK.  That incident had one objective, to prepare the minds of the British people for war with Russia. That no one has seen or heard from the Skripals for several years now, that Britain rejects Russia’s right to meet with them to see if they are all right, is never mentioned in the West. They have disappeared, their fate unknown, two expendable pieces on the chessboard of war.

Lastly, Russia claims, with some evidence to back up their claims, that the UK was involved, with the US and other NATO nations, in the attack on the NordStream Pipeline, an act of war against both Russia and Germany, though the Germans, still occupied by US forces, are required to accept this humiliation and keep quiet.

So British claims that Russia has no legal right to retaliate against it are absurd. Britain, as with all the NATO countries, cannot claim to have a neutral status in the war. It has become in law and in fact a party to the war.

It follows that any action taken by Russia against the UK to force the UK to stop its assistance to Ukraine and end its participation in the war against Russia will be legitimate under international law and justified under the ancient military doctrine that a nation cannot suffer the attack of another without retaliating to stop the attack and making sure that another attack will not follow.

The NATO gang’s claim of acting in “collective self defence,” a phrase Ben Wallace likes to use a lot, so that they can claim to maintain a neutral status, is not a valid or logical one and does not apply. It is clear that the USA and NATO have been planning an attack on Russia for a long time, and the Ukraine war is a part of this attack. The conspiracy to commit aggression has been developed over decades. Part of the preparation for the war was the overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine and the installation in its place of a puppet government that was then used to attack the Donbass and Russia itself. They now openly admit that the Minsk Accords were a ruse to stall Russia while they prepared the Ukrainian forces for war against Russia.

Further, they cannot rely on Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, since that clause can only be invoked if there is an unprovoked Russian attack on a NATO country. But when a NATO country attacks Russia, and here we have them all joining in the attack, it is the aggressor and therefore cannot claim to be are acting in self-defence. It is also important to bear in mind Article I of the NATO Treaty, since it requires NATO to act in conformity with the UN Charter. It states

Article 1

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered, and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

But the NATO nations have done the exact opposite. They have blocked peace at every turn and push Ukraine to keep the war going. Their forces are directly involved. They have even attempted to expand their military bloc by inviting Finland and Sweden to join the war alliance, in order to increase the forces available to them, with one purpose, to prosecute the war against Russia. They now openly state their objective is to destroy Russia. So, the NATO nations are not only active co-belligerents in the war, they are, in fact, the main protagonists of the enemy camp that Russia faces. They are, therefore, all legitimate targets.

But is an attack likely, and what will its nature be, and what will be the consequences? These are questions only the Russian General Staff can know and foresee. We can only speculate. But speculation can be useful, especially for the British people to realise the danger their criminal government is putting them in.

Medvedev warns again of the dangers of nuclear war, but Russia has no need to resort to that to retaliate against Britain. Conventional stand-off weapons will be more effective, and what can the UK do if a strike on military airfields takes place, on port facilities, to stop the shipment of weapons, on army bases where Ukrainian soldiers are trained, on warehouses storing munitions and weapons marked for shipment to Ukraine, or eliminating the UK Trident nuclear submarine force in Scotland, or any number of other targets they could select? They can do nothing.

The National and Defence Strategies Research Group based in the UK stated in a report on Britain’s air defences in 2016, that,

“Since the withdrawal from service of the Bloodhound missile system in the 1980s, the UK’s Air Defence posture has diminished to mainly a homeland benign airspace policing and point defence posture for deployed forces. The UK no longer has a comprehensive, integrated, or robustly layered short to long-range Air Defence capability, nor a credible or enduring operational capacity.”

Nothing has changed since then, except to get worse. In other words, the UK is defenceless against modern Russian stand-off weapons.

I can remember, as a boy, my mother taking me several times on a bus through London. It must have been 1955 or so and I can remember mile upon mile of burnt-out blackened buildings, as far as the eye could see, especially in east London where entire districts were levelled by German bombs. The country, despite its heroic RAF fighter pilots, could not stop the bombing and then missile attacks which went on for five years.

The British government assured the people before that war, that all would be well, that they would have peace in their time. But they lied to the people then, as they are lying to them now. Britain was never the same after that war. It never really recovered from it. Once again, the British government, ever saluting the masters in Washington, leads the British people into a dangerous war, which they were never asked about, and which they do not want. It lies to them about the causes, it lies to them about the fighting, and it lies to them about the dangers they face, placing them in a distant future, and hides from them the consequences of its actions. The British people must be warned. Britain is at war, and no amount of bluffing and lying can protect them from the consequences their government is provoking. They are predictable and they will be catastrophic.

Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events.

May 26, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Re-Election Hinges On The Success Of Kiev’s Counteroffensive

BY ANDREW KORYBKO | MAY 25, 2023

Senior Ukrainian presidential advisor Mikhail Podolyak told Italian media that his country’s much-hyped counteroffensive already began a few days ago, which is curious since that timeframe coincides with its proxy invasion of Russia’s Belgorod Region that was just copium for deflecting from Artyomovsk’s loss. That media-driven stunt tremendously failed to achieve any tangible gains, however, thus raising even more questions than ever before about whether the counteroffensive will succeed at all.

The Washington Post raised awareness in March about how poorly Kiev’s troops were faring in the NATO-Russian proxy war, which was followed by Politico citing unnamed Biden Administration officials a month later who worried about the consequences of it failing to meet the public’s expectations. Former Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov then concocted a conspiracy theory wildly speculating that Kremlin agents infiltrated the White House and sabotaged the counteroffensive before it even began.

This popular pro-Kiev figure seemed to have been spooked by Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul telling Bloomberg that “I think there’s going to be a lot riding on the line with this counteroffensive. If Ukraine is successful in the eyes of the American people and the world, I think it will be a game-changer for continued support. If they are not, that will also have an impact, in a negative way, though.” In other words, its failure could lead to the US severely curtailing aid to Kiev.

Therein lies the real reason why the counteroffensive is still going ahead despite the overwhelming odds against its success that were detailed in the preceding months by the Washington Post and Politico. Biden’s re-election hinges on the success of this campaign after NATO already sent over $165 billion in taxpayer-provided aid to Kiev, the vast majority of which came from the US. He needs anything that his perception managers can spin as a victory to justify this ahead of next year’s election.

It’s not just for the sake of placating taxpayers either in this increasingly partisan conflict that’s seen a rising number of Republicans calling for more pragmatism and restraint as opposed to their Democrat rivals who remain gung-go about going all in for as long as it takes. Biden presided over the US’ most humiliating military loss in history after August 2021’s chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, which infamously resulted in leaving a large number of Americans and allied locals behind to an unknown fate.

He and his team don’t care how many tens of thousands of Ukrainians have to be sacrificed in this conflict so long as they can achieve something that the Democrats can distort as having made the most geostrategically significant conflict since World War II worth provoking. A failed raid into Russia and an unsuccessful assassination attempt against President Putin aren’t considered by most Americans to be worth the risk of a Third World War by miscalculation.

After 15 months of fighting, Kiev has only managed to reconquer part of the territory that it claims as its own, which is unimpressive when considering that it has the full backing of what the US portrays as supposedly being the world’s most powerful military alliance in history. The NATO chief’s self-proclaimed “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with Russia that he declared in February inadvertently proved that Russia’s military-industrial complex can compete with the entire West’s.

That was an unintended self-inflicted blow to this de facto New Cold War bloc’s reputation of being a military superpower and also thus discredited their information warfare narrative that the Russian economy is collapsing. In late January, the New York Times admitted that the West’s sanctions failed, and then they admitted at the end of February after the NATO chief’s dramatic declaration that they also failed to isolate Russia too.

The abovementioned facts already make Biden look like a bumbling fool for provoking this conflict, which only proved just how limited the US’ influence and power have become in recent years, but he looks even worse when considering the bigger picture. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, former US National Security Council member Fiona Hill, and Goldman Sachs’ President of Global Affairs Jared Cohen all acknowledged earlier in May that multipolarity is now a geopolitical reality as a result of this conflict.

It’s only the Biden Administration and allied propagandists abroad that remain in denial about this, which places even more pressure on their proxies in Kiev to achieve something tangible throughout the course of its counteroffensive that they can then spin as having made it worth provoking this conflict. The clock is ticking too since there’s a growing consensus across the globe that this is their side’s “last hurrah” prior to likely commencing ceasefire and peace talks by year’s end or early 2024 at the latest.

The West’s military-industrial crisis will inevitably limit the pace, scale, and scope of armed aid to Kiev, not to mention the US’ election season that’ll see this conflict unprecedentedly politicized. Instead of soberly admitting his side’s shortcomings and proactively trying to reach some sort of peace agreement that could then be exploited as the pretext for him winning the Nobel Peace Prize and thus boosting his re-election prospects, Biden is gambling against the odds that the counteroffensive will succeed.

Even Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley foresaw in late January that it’ll likely be impossible for Kiev to remove Russia from all the territory that it claims as its own by this year, which means that Biden and his team are trying to prove the US’ top military official wrong. This in turn confirms that they’re prioritizing politics over military advice, thus extending credence to the claim that this counteroffensive is all about Biden’s re-election and not pushing Russia back to its pre-2014 borders.

If it fails to achieve this maximum objective as expected by Milley and the earlier cited US media, then the Republicans will rightly pounce on Biden to accuse him of cooking up the worst conflict since World War II in a desperate bid to win re-election by deflecting from his humiliating loss in Afghanistan. With his back against the wall, it can’t be discounted that his team will advise him to escalate to unthinkable levels, though Russia’s hypersonic missiles will likely keep him from crossing the ultimate red line.

Whichever way one games it out, there’s close to no chance that Kiev’s counteroffensive will meet the Western public’s expectations absent some black swan event, which means that Biden will be running for re-election with two losses under his belt in Afghanistan and Ukraine. It’s difficult to imagine that Americans will give him and his team another four years in office after they humiliated the US so badly, but tens of thousands more might still die before these warmongers are removed from power.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

US military aid to Ukraine could be suspended due to debt ceiling – media

By Ahmed Adel | May 25, 2023

The Hill reported that US military funding to Ukraine could be suspended indefinitely due to proceedings in Washington over the public debt ceiling. Effectively, the public debt situation will force the US to reduce its financial support to Ukraine since it is no longer possible to expect as much support as before.

Congressman Andy Kim, a House Armed Services Committee (HASC) member, was quoted by The Hill as saying that lawmakers had conversations about what needs to be a part of the following package but expressed doubts about the timing of the legislation and highlighted that the ongoing fight over the debt ceiling was putting Ukraine aid at risk.

“It’s delaying our ability to focus on these issues,” Kim said. “That really shows that it has national security implications because we’re not able to have that kind of earnest conversation about Ukraine or the [National Defense Authorization Act] until they’re done with that.”

For his part, Congressman Bill Keating said aid to Ukraine would ultimately depend on its counteroffensive, something that will seemingly miss its long-anticipated spring deadline.

“It’s not a precise science to say what because it could be gains that were made that make more support less necessary,” Keating said. “Or there could be damage inflicted where there has to be more” assistance.

Ukrainian authorities have been promoting its upcoming counteroffensive, and NATO officials have indicated Ukraine has nearly all the promised weapons and equipment needed. Last year’s support was phenomenal, but sustaining such aid at this level is difficult. The public debt situation has affected and will continue affecting public opinion because out of all the spending, people will sacrifice those least sensitive to American society, and not such huge expenses as funding a war in Eastern Europe.

Congress is determined to cut spending, making funding difficult for Ukraine. The only thing that was announced by Congress Speaker Kevin McCarthy and confirmed by the White House was the spending cuts. Military spending is not discussed, but the funding for Ukraine now is many times less than last year. Ukraine can hardly expect the same funding it received as in the past.

The Treasury Department warned in a letter to Congress that as early as June 1, the US may not be able to fully meet its obligations if lawmakers do not authorise an increase in the borrowing limit by that time. Normally, Congress almost automatically raises the borrowing limit, but this time, the Republican opposition, who controls the House, has demanded that it reduce spending by several trillion dollars. The Republican bill passed the House of Representatives but has no chance of being approved in the Senate by Democrats, and even if the document reaches Biden, he will most likely veto the bill.

At the same time, the US finds it very difficult to accept the loss of Artemovsk (Bakhmut). With Ukrainian forces losing control of Artemovsk, the long-mooted counteroffensive becomes more politically urgent than ever for Kiev.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to keep his promise to launch a counterattack and for this reason, he continually requested the West for more weapons. As they lost control of Artemovsk, launching an offensive operation is the best way for Kiev to restart its plea for weapons from its NATO allies.

Zelensky is clearly in a difficult situation because the Ukrainian army is not ready for a counterattack and desperately needs ammunition. However, the Russian army almost immediately destroys any weapon concentration, which is starting to raise a series of questions about the success or failure of the Ukrainian counterattack.

This comes as many high-ranking military officials, including Polish Chief of the General Staff Rajmund Andrzejczak and US General Christopher G. Cavoli, acknowledged Russia’s ability to continue fighting without significant loss. Meanwhile, 40% to 60% of Ukrainian soldiers who completed their training in France in 2022 have no contact with their trainers and have likely died in battle or abandoned the battlefield.

Despite the propaganda pushed by the Kiev regime and Western media, Ukraine is clearly unable to launch its long-awaited spring offensive, and instead this is all a show to procure more weapons. The desperate situation for Ukraine coincides as Republicans and Democrats face off over the debt ceiling, proving problematic for Kiev’s quest to rearm.

House Republicans insist on spending cuts before they approve raising the nation’s debt ceiling past $31 trillion. Democrats claim Congress has already spent the money and must be allowed to repay America’s debtholders without leading to an economically disastrous default.

Negotiations are continuing to unfold to reach a debt limit deal, but the US default clock is ticking down despite it not being entirely clear when the US will officially run out of cash. When seen through this context, it is understandable why massive and reckless funding of the Ukrainian military is increasingly scrutinised.

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

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

British special forces deployed to 19 countries since 2011 – Report

RT | May 23, 2023

The UK has sent its special forces to 19 countries since 2011, according to a report by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV). These British operatives trained foreign militants, carried out assassinations, and reportedly fought alongside child soldiers.

In a report published on Tuesday, AOAV stated that British operatives have been deployed to fight or surveil hostile forces in Algeria, Cyprus, Estonia, France, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Russia, Somalia, the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.

Some of these deployments were into locations in which British troops were already fighting, as was the case in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, UK Special Forces (UKSF) continued their operations in both countries long after regular forces withdrew. In Afghanistan, hundreds of civilian deaths were attributed to night raids by British and American special forces between 2009 and 2012.

While parliament authorized military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, UKSF have deployed to other active conflict zones without the assent of lawmakers. Three days before parliament voted against a deployment to Syria in 2013, UKSF and MI6 operatives were on the ground targeting Syrian air defense installations and calling in American airstrikes, the report stated. Within months, they were training anti-government militants while assassinating Islamic State fighters.

In Yemen, UKSF operatives conducted raids on Al Qaeda-linked militants, but, in some cases, fought alongside jihadists who had been recruited by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to attack Houthi rebels. Up to 40% of these jihadi forces, AOAV noted, were child soldiers.

Training missions and hostage rescue operations made up most of the rest of the deployments, while the UKSF operation in Russia focused on providing security for British athletes at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Recently leaked Pentagon documents suggest that the UK has deployed 50 special forces personnel to Ukraine since Russia launched its military operation last February. Prior to the leak, multiple media outlets reported the presence of British and American special forces in Ukraine, while one general told The Times last year that as many as 300 British commandos were conducting “discrete operations” alongside Kiev’s forces.

“The extensive deployment of Britain’s Special Forces in numerous countries over the past decade raises serious concerns about transparency and democratic oversight,” said AOAV Director Iain Overton. “The lack of parliamentary approval and retrospective reviews for these missions is deeply troubling.”

May 23, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , | Leave a comment

Betting on Russian Submission? Don’t Roll Those Dice

By Derek Wheeler | The Libertarian Institute | May 23, 2023

As we enjoy our lives within the neocon utopia that’s been carefully crafted for us, let us set aside, for a moment, all basic morality and the natural rights of life, liberty, and property. Surely, if we put on the same hegemonic blinders worn by the likes of John Kirby, Victoria Nuland, Lindsey Graham and the rest, their plans in Ukraine will make perfect sense.

In his February 2022 speech concerning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden said, “Today, I’m authorizing additional strong sanctions and new limitations on what can be exported to Russia. This is going to impose severe costs on the Russian economy, both immediately and over time.” In an April 2022 speech to reporters in Kiev, Defense Secretary Austin expanded on this sentiment, explaining, “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

Essentially, the U.S. government’s goal has been to drain Russia of personnel, financial and military resources, the end result being preservation of the unipolar world. Doesn’t seem like a bad plan—as long as you ignore the human toll. However, there are multiple historical precedents that provide insight into whether or not this plan can work.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Non Aggression Pact was hashed out in summer 1939 between the USSR and Nazi Germany, wherein secret protocols allowed both sides to dominate eastern Europe without fear of reprisal from each other. Not long after, of course, Germany invaded Poland from the west, followed by the Soviet invasion from the east.

Stalin knew he couldn’t trust Hitler, and became increasingly concerned that Finland may be used as a base to launch an attack. But the Soviets were unprepared for such an assault. Due mostly to the Bolshevik collectivization of agriculture, an extensive famine began in 1930, which included the Holodomor of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. The result would be upwards of 5 million deaths in Ukraine and 8 million overall. Just a few years later, Stalin would begin the Great Purge, killing somewhere in the range of one million of his own people. This didn’t just include religious leaders, Trotsky supporters, and Kulaks (landowning farmers), but the majority of marshals, commanders, and admirals in the Red Army.

After failed negotiations with Finland—due to unreasonable requests which would have undermined their sovereignty—Stalin invaded, kicking off the Winter War in November 1939. Although a spring offensive may have fared better, Stalin was worried about possible threats to his defense industry, of which 30-35 percent was housed in Leningrad, the second Soviet capital near the Finnish border. He felt they couldn’t wait, stating in an April 1940 debriefing, “It would be great stupidity, political short-sightedness to miss the moment and not try as soon as possible, while there is a war going on in the West, to raise and resolve the issue of Leningrad’s security.”

The end result of Stalin’s missteps were three months of humiliation and more than 320,000 casualties compared to Finland’s 70,000. Although they gained more concessions than originally requested, the damage to the Soviet reputation was immense. This demonstrated weakness contributed to Adolf Hitler’s decision to execute Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and invade the Russian motherland.

Following a famine most of us could never comprehend, a purge of political opponents that makes Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre look like a seasonal layoff, and a three month skirmish that took more young lives than U.S. troops lost in every conflict since Korea combined, the USSR was still able to become “the main engine of Nazism’s destruction,” according to historian Max Hastings. Three quarters of German losses were at the hands of the Red Army.

The USSR spent nearly 27 million lives to retain their place in the pecking order and expel the Wehrmacht from their borders. What better time for the United States to put them out of business for good? It would, however, take 46 more years of technological one-upsmanship, nuclear brinksmanship, and back and forth proxy wars of attrition between the U.S. and USSR before an open dialogue between leaders would finally break up the Communist Bloc.

Contrarians and critics may point out that today’s Russian Federation is no Soviet Union. By population alone there is a significant difference. The 1939 Soviet population was near 170 million while current Russian estimates hover around 143 million and dropping, due in part to negative birth rates (which is the case for most of the developed world). The loss of tens of millions of Russian lives, or even a humiliating defeat to a smaller nation, would certainly pose an “existential threat.” But “existential threats” aren’t what they used to be. The key difference being that Stalin didn’t possess nuclear weapons until 1949, while Putin has nearly 6,000 at his disposal and a reluctant willingness to use them.

The economic security of Russia also comes into question, with an overreliance on natural resources where oil, natural gas, and coal account for more than 50% of their exports. However, this would only be a valid concern if we ignore the importance of these fuel supplies to the economies of the importing nations. Not only is affordable fuel a key factor for developing countries as they lift their people out of poverty, but it remains essential to emerging superpowers like China and India. Russia’s exports of crude oil to these countries have only increased since their invasion of Ukraine, becoming the leader in both markets.

Since their switch to an oligarchical, mixed-market economy, a mirror of the United States, Russia has maintained their place of geopolitical importance with an increase in the standard of living for Russian citizens. These are a resilient people. I know my fellow Americans, and I’m not convinced most of us could handle anything like what the Russians have seen in the last century. And I don’t believe our benevolent leaders, pushing and extending this provoked war, know so little about history that they actually envision a permanently weakened Russia by way of Ukrainian lives. This has always been about regime change, because a nationalist like Vladimir Putin will never kowtow to Washington’s demands, and for them, this is unacceptable.

I understand why neocons on both sides of the aisle are foaming at the mouth. Smedley Butler said it best:

“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”

What’s troubling is all the sycophantic drones, all too eager to trust the same people who lie with every exhale; those who picture a day when a nation with the largest nuclear arsenal will submit; those who actually think it’s in their best interest to consolidate and centralize power. The same people who will speak out against monopolies in business but clamor for monopoly in governance.

With the coming collapse of the U.S. dollar, an absurd debt-to-GDP ratio, unbridled intelligence agencies, politically motivated investigations into opposition parties, social discord and division, depleted military stockpiles, and entangling alliances across the globe, it is the United States, not Russia, with the earmarks of an imperial collapse. When it all comes down, Joe Biden or Mitch McConnell or whichever other mediocre “elites” take their place will be standing on the rubble with a solution, in front of a welcoming crowd of uninformed and disjointed citizens. Let’s just hope there’s an “encouraged and braced up” remnant ready to pick up the torch of liberty and rebuild.

May 23, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Former DOD Insiders Accuse US Arms Manufacturers of Price Gouging Amid Ukraine Proxy War

By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | May 22, 2023

American military-industrial complex firms are guilty of “price gouging,” amidst the exponentially rising demand for weapons systems to both bolster Taiwan as a counter to Beijing and support NATO’s proxy Kiev during its war with Russia, former Pentagon insiders told Newsweek.

The Ukraine policy of providing massive quantities of arms “no matter the expense,” in particular,  is weakening America’s national security and combat readiness by depleting stocks which cannot be easily replenished due to the weapons firms’ skyrocketing prices, according to the former officials.

For four decades, Shay Assad worked as a contract negotiator at the Defense Department. He recently sounded off about these “astronomical price increases” and the resultant detrimental effect on the military, during a recent report on 60 Minutes, the CBS news program.

“The gouging that takes place is unconscionable,” Assad said. “There’s no doubt about it,” he continued, “You just can only buy so much, because you only have so much money. And that’s why I say, is it really any different than not giving a Marine enough bullets to put in his clip? It’s the same thing.” Assad previously worked for Raytheon as well, the arms industry giant on whose board Lloyd Austin sat before becoming the Pentagon chief.

According to Assad, the DOD overpays for “for radar and missiles … helicopters … planes … submarines… down to the nuts and bolts.” The report highlighted the fact that a shoulder-fired Stinger missile, produced by Raytheon, which cost $25,000 in 1991 is now priced at more than $400,000. Newsweek described the price rise as an “eye-watering increase,” even when taking inflation into account as well as interim technological advancements.

He went on to explain the Pentagon’s accountability system, such as it is, is completely “broken.” Assad said, “No matter who they are, no matter what company it is, they need to be held accountable. And right now that accountability system is broken in the Department of Defense.” Moreover, Assad cited two more instances of gouging on the part of arms industry behemoths Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon.

Lockheed and Boeing were found to have yielded an over 40 percent profit on sales of PAC-3 surface to air missiles to Washington and its allies. Assad explained the companies saw a windfall of hundreds of millions on the deals over seven years, and “based on what they actually made, we would’ve received an entire year’s worth of missiles for free.” Lockheed protested to 60 Minutes that the deals had been negotiated “in good faith.”

Both by overstating the cost and time needed to produce the radar equipment, Raytheon was also alleged to have taken obscene profits from the Patriot air defense system. The reporters were told by a company spokesman that Raytheon was working to “equitably resolve” the dispute. It is also noted that, in 2021, CEO Greg Hayes notified his investors that Raytheon schemed to put aside nearly $300 million for probable liability.

Assad demonstrated to the 60 Minutes host that an oil pressure switch was selling for over $10,000, when he claimed the switch should cost $328. The host asked Assad a question regarding the huge discrepancy, to which the former official responded “Gouging. What else can account for it?”

Assad went on to say that this widespread practice shows arms firms are hoodwinking and taking advantage of the American taxpayer. “We have to have a financially healthy defense industrial base. We all want that. But what we don’t want to do is get taken advantage of and hoodwinked […] We have nowhere else to go. For many of these weapons that are being sent over to Ukraine right now, there’s only one supplier. And the companies know it.”

Retired Air Force Lieutenant Gen. Chris Bogdan, who oversaw weapons purchases during his time in the military, further explained his concerns over the fact that when companies sell their weapons to the DOD, they retain the proprietary information required to fix the systems themselves, precluding the Pentagon, in some cases, from doing its own repairs.

“It’s not really a true capitalistic market because one company is telling you what’s going to happen. [It’s a] monopoly,” retired DOD auditor Mark Owen told CBS.

These reports come as tensions between Washington and Russia as well as China are growing at a rapid clip. The US is planning on fighting a hot war with China. Concurrently, the White House is committing billions of dollars in unprecedented military aid to Taipei, some of which is being drawn from the same dwindling DOD stocks used to prop up Kiev’s war against Moscow via the “Presidential Drawdown Authority.”

Since 2018, the Pentagon has been shifting its focus away from counterterrorism in the Middle East and North Africa, to focus primarily on so-called “great power competition” with China and Russia, pegged respectively as the number one and number two targets.

This has been reaffirmed in subsequent national defense strategies, as the shift in 2018 was codifying renewed Cold Wars against Russia and China launched by the US years and, in the case of Moscow, decades prior to the officially adopted national defense strategy.

It is also critical to note, that as the new Cold Wars get hotter, the nominal Pentagon budget is nearing a whopping $900 billion and will soon surpass the previously unthinkable $1 trillion mark. However, a closer look reveals the real national security state budget is already fast approaching $1.5 trillion.

This larger figure includes not only the mammoth War Department’s budget but – among a plethora of other expenses – the Department of Veterans Affairs, interest on the warfighting share of the national debt, nuclear weapons, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Congress recently simulated a Chinese attack on Taiwan and came to the conclusion that Taipei should thus be armed “to the teeth” by Washington. Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the ultra-hawkish think tank which has members and associates planted throughout the Joe Biden administration, carried out the exercise with the lawmakers on the House Select Committee on China.

CNAS is funded by Taiwan via the island’s de facto embassy in the United States, as well as the Pentagon, the State Department, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. In August 2021, investigative journalist Dan Cohen reported CNAS “has taken more money from weapons companies over the last several years than any other think tank in Washington… At least 16 CNAS alumni are now in key positions in the Biden Pentagon and State Department.”

May 22, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Biden unveils new $375 mln military aid package for Ukraine

Press TV – May 21, 2023

US President Joe Biden has announced a new $375 million package of military aid to Ukraine on Sunday despite warnings from Russia, saying that the United States was making every effort to “bolster Ukraine’s defense” in its war against Russia.

“Together with the entire G7, we have Ukraine’s back and I promise we’re not going anywhere,” Biden told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as they met on the sidelines of the G7 summit of world leaders in Hiroshima, Japan.

The latest military aid package will include ammunition, artillery, armored vehicles, and training of forces, according to Biden.

Biden emphasized during the meeting that his nation was prepared to assist in enhancing Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself against and deter Russian forces, the White House said in a statement.

The US president also talked about his country’s support for a coordinated effort with allied and partner nations to train Ukrainian pilots on fourth-generation fighters like the F-16, the White House added.

Zelenskiy thanked the US for the latest military aid package, and also for all the assistance of a whopping $37 billion to date, according to his office.

The US and its Western allies have kept feeding Ukraine with massive amounts of arms since the start of the Ukrainian conflict last year, which according to Russia is the sole reason that the conflict is not coming to an end.

Russia has repeatedly warned the Western governments such as the US and UK against arming Ukraine and fanning the flames of war.

Apart from sending lethal armaments, the Western countries have supported Ukraine by imposing a raft of sanctions against Russia.

May 21, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment