Top LNG Producer Qatar Predicts Return of Russian Gas to European Market Within Five Years
Samizdat – 14.01.2023
Gas prices began creeping up in 2021 amid underinvestment in production and fierce competition for limited supplies between European and Asian markets. The supply crunch was exacerbated in 2022, as European countries began rejecting gas from Russia – which accounts for 15 percent of global natural gas output – over the security crisis in Ukraine.
Global instability in natural gas prices and availability won’t be going anywhere in the near term, and Russia will inevitably resume supplying Europe to restore a sense of equilibrium to energy markets, Qatar’s energy minister has indicated.
“It’s going to be a volatile situation for some time to come. We’re bringing a lot of gas to the market, but it’s not enough,” Qatari Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi said, speaking at an energy forum on Saturday.
Al-Kaabi explained that global energy supply troubles actually started some time before the Ukraine crisis, “where the lack of investment in the oil and gas sector caused really a shortage in gas. And ahead of the Ukraine crisis, the oil and gas prices obviously were clearly going higher due to lack of supply. That lack of investment was driven by many factors, including the bigger push for the green [energy] without having a real plan in how the transition was going to happen. So there was a scarcity of investment over about 5-6 years, and then when the Ukraine situation happened, a big volume was taken out of the market and obviously that would take [prices] even further up.”
Al-Kaabi predicted that the next couple of years would be difficult for Europe, notwithstanding the reprieve granted amid a milder-than-usual winter for much of the region.
“The issue is what’s going to happen when they want to replenish their storages this coming year and the next year. There isn’t much gas coming into the market until 2025, 2026, 2027,” al-Kaabi warned.
The shortages would also mean higher prices, the Qatari official said.
“Prices are a factor of supply-demand. I think some people think that we are very happy for high oil prices and so on. The biggest worry that we would have as oil and gas producers is demand destruction. And you can see that there is demand destruction, whether it’s gas or oil,” he said.
Al-Kaabi also took a jab at Western countries who spent recent years condemning the use of coal for energy on environmental grounds, but turned to the highly polluting resource themselves amid the energy crunch, pointing out that “all the countries that were calling for coal to be stopped are using it at record levels today.”
Buyers Want to Have Their Cake and Eat It Too
Also speaking at the conference was UAE Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei, who echoed al-Kaabi’s concerns about lack of financing in oil and gas, and a basic “lack of understanding what is the future for many countries when it comes to energy strategy – what contributions or what percentages they would have of gas or even the pace of reducing their coal.”
“It’s not clear… And that unclear long-term strategy by many countries put them in a situation where it’s very difficult for them to commit for long-term gas contracts, which has in return made the companies of those who are developing the gas at a very difficult position with their financiers, because they would like to see long-term contracts, and those long-term contracts are not there. Everyone wants to buy, but they want to buy over a two or three year span. And that is not enough for someone to develop gas,” al-Mazrouei said.
Addressing the energy shortages caused by European countries’ politicized decision to reject gas supplies from Russia, the UAE energy minister said the supply crunch was the natural outcome of these policies.
“Of course Russia is a major producer of gas and LNG, and when you shift from one location to another trying to adjust, that takes time. And that’s what happened in 2022 when some of that [Russian] gas had been relocated to another market, and other gas from other markets [was] coming to Europe, especially from the US. But is that sustainable in the longer run? I think you would need more collaboration between the European nations on agreeing on the optimization of the FSRUs [floating storage regasification units, ed.] that are also limited, and also agree on some pipelines. I think that one of the things that contributes to energy security is pipeline gas,” al-Mazrouei said.
Al-Kaabi expressed hope that an “equilibrium” in global energy markets could be achieved after “some kind of a mediation” over Ukraine between Russia and the West, “and the sooner the better.”
“This situation will not last forever, and I understand that the Europeans today are saying there’s no way we’re going back to Russian gas. We’re all blessed to be able to forget and forgive, and I think things get mended with time,” the minister said.
Al-Kaabi clarified that he doesn’t expect countries who relied on Russia for 50, 80, or 100 percent of their gas to return to these same levels of dependence, but emphasized that Russian deliveries will inevitably resume. “They will diversify and they’ll learn from that situation and probably have a much bigger diversity [of supply]. But the Russian gas is going to come back in my view, to Europe. Is it next year, is it in five years, I don’t know, but once this situation is sorted out, and that I think will be a big relief to the whole gas sector, and to the whole market in Europe and will stabilize prices.”
Hypocrisy on Africa’s Energy Needs
Al-Kaabi also addressed the historic underinvestment in energy resources in Africa by Western countries, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on the grounds that they failed to meet the criteria of the global green agenda.
“We need growth. One billion people today are deprived of basic electricity that we all enjoy. So we need to be fair. And I think one point I’d like to just add to that on the investment side: it’s very, very unfair of some in the West to say that African countries should not invest in oil and gas and they should remain green or whatever you want to call it while this is God-given wealth that they can create for their national growth for their national growth and for their prosperity, and it is oil and gas that is needed for the world,” the minister said.
Qatar is the world’s fifth-largest producer of natural gas, and the second-largest exporter of liquefied natural gas after Australia, exporting over 106 billion cubic meters in 2021, behind Australia’s 108.1 billion. Doha has announced plans to invest some $45 billion in its maritime fields to more than double production by 2027. The Gulf state ramped up gas exports to Europe through 2022, but warned its European partners that supplies are limited, as much of the new production capacity being brought online has already been reserved by Asian clients.
Russian natural gas deliveries to Europe plummeted last year, with Moscow accusing the Royal Navy of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines running through the Baltic Sea and their combined 110 billion-cubic-meter annual transit capacity. Poland shut down overland pipeline gas deliveries via the Yamal-Europe pipeline. Flows to Europe are now limited to supplies sent through the Soyuz pipeline network, which runs through Ukraine, but have been restricted to between 35 and 43 million cubic meters of gas per day.
Biden’s Toxic January 6th Demonology
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | January 12, 2023
Last Friday, President Biden held a White House ceremony commemorating the second anniversary of the January 6 Capitol riot. Biden showered a dozen Presidential Service Medals on people connected to the 2020 election or the January 6 events. Biden talked of the anniversary as a “day of remembrance”—perhaps echoing the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Many Americans would be happy to never hear about January 6 again. No such luck. Vice President Kamala Harris equated January 6 with 9/11 and threw in Pearl Harbor to score a trifecta. Biden endlessly invoked January 6 in his speeches supporting Democrats in the mid-term congressional elections. In August, Biden denounced Republicans for “semi-fascism.” In September, he claimed that MAGA Republicans (which effortlessly became all Republicans) “embrace political violence.” In a preview of Biden’s speech last week, Politico accurately forecast that Biden will “again put center stage the danger and chaos posed by election deniers… He will link Republicans to the extremists who attempted to forcibly overturn the results of Donald Trump’s defeat.”
Since Biden is running for re-election, he will likely be perpetually flogging January 6 in his speeches between now and November 2024. Thus, it is worthwhile to have a closer analysis of Biden’s speech and the continuing effort to exploit January 6 to vilify political dissent.
In his White House speech last week, Biden repeated his efforts to portray January 6 as a conspiracy to destroy American democracy. Biden declared that “a violent mob of insurrectionists… vandalized sacred halls,” seeking to “overthrow the will of the people and usurp the peaceful transfer of power.” Biden repeatedly slurred his pronunciation of “insurrectionists” and referred to the attacks on “July the sixth” (instead of January the sixth).
Exploiting the boundless historical illiteracy of his audience, Biden declared, “The U.S. Capitol was breached, which had never happened before in the history of the United States of America, even during the Civil War.” Actually, the British Army burned the Capitol down in 1814. But since none of the British were wearing furry horned hats, it would be unfair to compare their soldiers to the January 6 protestors.
Seeking to vivify the viciousness of the protestors, Biden lamented that a police officer he gave an award to “was tased.” Unfortunately, tasing only counts as a human rights abuse when law enforcement is on the voltage receiving end. Biden listed five police who had died (several by suicide) in the wake of January 6 but did not mention Ashli Babbitt, the only person who was gunned down and killed that day. The Capitol policeman who shot Babbitt (who was unarmed) was hailed as a hero.
Biden, staying on script, repeated his claim that the January 6 clash “was fueled by lies about the 2020 election.” And since the protestors were spurred by false claims, Biden was automatically exempted from any obligation for candor. The January 6 protestors magically become collectively guilty for anything bad that happened inside the District of Columbia for the rest of 2021.
Biden declared:
“Today is a ceremony to honor heroes of January 6th, but we also recognize the late U.S. Capitol Police Officer, Billy Evans. Three months after January 6th, while they were still cordoning off the Capitol because threats these—by these sick insurrectionists continued to be profligated on the Internet, again, all of America saw what happened, what Officer Evans was killed defending a checkpoint you had to go through to get up to the Capitol, because of these God-awful, sick threats that continue to move forth. And the whole world saw it.”
The whole world saw what? If someone relied on Biden’s spiel, they would assume some wacko wearing a MAGA hat brutally killed a cop on Capitol Hill. Actually, Evans was killed by Noah Green, a black 25-year-old Nation of Islam zealot who struggled with hallucinations and drug addiction. After Green smashed his car into a checkpoint, he leaped out with a knife and lunged at officers before he was shot and killed. The effort to blame Evans’ death on the January 6 protestors epitomized Biden’s “close enough for government work” demonology.
Biden claimed that the checkpoint was necessary “because of these God-awful, sick threats that continue to move forth.” The media has memory-holed the militarization of Washington that Biden and congressional allies ordered in 2021. More than 10,000 National Guard troops occupied much of Washington the following months and Capitol Hill was surrounded by fences topped with barbed wire. Some skeptics believed that the ominous trappings sought to frighten members of Congress to support sweeping new anti-terrorism legislation to vilify any American who distrusted Washington.
The so-called “Temple of Democracy” looked like a Beirut bunker. Some members of Congress favored permanently turning Capitol Hill into the equivalent of a supermax prison. The American Civil Liberties Union recognized that Congress hiding behind a fence projects “the kind of message that heads of autocratic regimes send by cloistering themselves away from their populaces in armored fortresses.” The closing off of the Capitol illustrated how far politicians would go to exploit one day’s violence for an extended shutdown of the trappings of democracy.
Some January 6 protestors were violent and destructive and deserve to be sent up the river. But the Biden January 6 narrative is bolstered by endless prosecutions of folks who were little more than hapless bystanders to the violence that day. Attorney General Merrick Garland boasted last Wednesday that the January 6 “investigation has resulted in the arrest of more than 950 defendants for their alleged roles in the attack.” The total arrests far exceed the number of violent private citizens at the Capitol that day. A Justice Department press release noted, “860 defendants have been charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds.” Shades of Lee Harvey Oswald!
“Trespassing plus thought crimes equals terrorism” is the Biden standard for prosecuting January 6 defendants. The FBI treats every individual charged with a January 6 offense “as domestic terrorists.” Prosecutors are not formally charging January 6 defendants with terrorism because that unsubstantiated charge would be laughed out of federal courtrooms. But for Biden scoring of January 6 federal triumphs, “parading without a permit” is close enough to terrorism.
While Biden paints all the January 6 arrestees as deadly perils to democracy, federal judges are scoffing at histrionic Justice Department claims. The Washington Post reported last week that “judges in U.S. District Court in Washington… have gone below federal prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations in more than three-quarters of the cases so far.” While the Justice Department boasts of the total number of arrests, “only 69 have been convicted and sentenced so far [for felonies], mostly for assaulting police or obstructing Congress.”
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack conducted many hearings and issued an 845-page report on their findings. At the behest of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s final report expunged criticism of the failure of law enforcement, enraging Democratic committee staffers. This was a bizarre omission—considering that even the Washington Post condemned “one of the biggest security failures in the nation’s history.” The U.S. Capitol Police have almost 2,000 officers and a budget larger than that of Detroit and St. Louis. However, fewer than 200 Capitol police “were deployed to interior or exterior posts at the US Capitol” January 6 — as if the cops were prepping for the annual visit from the Future Farmers of America.
Nor did the House Select Committee show any interest in the role of federal informants or undercover agents in the Capitol clash. A year ago at a congressional hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked senior FBI official Jill Sanborn: “How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of Jan. 6?” She refused to answer.
Two months ago, it was revealed that the FBI had as many as eight informants inside the Proud Boys, a far right group that has been charged with seditious conspiracy for their January 6 violence. Suspicions have also been spurred by Ray Epps, an Arizona activist who urged people to go inside the Capitol building and boasted that he “orchestrated” January 6 has faced no criminal charges. Epps, a darling witness of the House Select Committee, has been accused of being an informant (which he denies). Nor did the Select Committee push to disclose the thousands of hours of videotape from the Capitol’s cameras that could resolve many of the J6 controversies. According to Darren Beatty, the founder of Revolver News, “Without federal involvement, that rally could not have turned into the riot that it did.” But we have not seen the evidence to confirm or rebut Beatty’s conclusion.
The January 6 prosecutions are part of a growing FBI onslaught against dissent. The FBI crackdown is skewed because “Washington is obsessed with threats to Washington itself,” as a senior government official recently told Newsweek’s William Arkin, one of the best investigative journalists in DC. “We’ve become too prone to labeling anything we don’t like as extremism, and then any extremist as a terrorist,” the official observed. The FBI is expanding its targeting of “Anti-Government or Anti-Authority Violent Extremists (AGAAVEs),” groups or individuals the feds claim “intend to commit violence or criminal activity.” And how will the FBI know their intentions? Trust thousands of FBI informants to gin up the evidence to keep propelling the prosecution juggernaut. And every anti-government “extremist” who is indicted can be portrayed by politicians as a co-conspirator with the January 6 traitors.
Biden will continue to invoke January 6 (or July 6, depending on how he is doing that day) to portray himself as the only thing standing between America and utter chaos. But the Biden storyline hinges on keeping Americans blindfolded on many details that occurred at the Capitol before, during, and after that day. Biden’s pitch also hinges on Americans acquiescing to federal agencies and prosecutors vilifying ever more dissenters. Unfortunately, there is no reason to presume that the coverups and the demagoguery will cease working any time soon.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.
How the EU constructs Israel impunity
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | January 12, 2023
The EU could have availed itself of an opportunity to hold Israel accountable for its violations but, instead it opted for the lesser value of requesting financial reparation for the structures funded by the bloc in the Occupied West Bank and destroyed by the settler-colonial enterprise. Neither is the EU’s request a novelty, since demanding financial compensation from Israel has happened in the past, without any compliance, of course.
Recent focus on Israel’s planned forced displacement of Palestinians living in Masafer Yatta prompted 24 European Parliament members to contact the European Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarcic, regarding financial reparation. The bottom line is that, while the EU is within its rights to demand financial compensation, the issue at stake – which is the Palestinian people being forcibly displaced by Israel – is nowhere on the EU’s agenda.
Lenarcic’s response, partially quoted by Haaretz, confirms the EU’s repetitive requests for financial compensation and that “the European Union is continuing to work in this regard through a range of diplomatic and political channels”. Of little to no consequence was Lenarcic’s reminding that EU representatives often visit areas in the Occupied West Bank that are slated for demolition, ostensibly “to warn against”. Yet, besides the opportunistic exploitation, keeping tally of EU-funded destroyed dwellings is more a case in point and futile, too. As Lenarcic stated, “The list of possible steps to ensure compensation from Israel for European financing that went down the drain in demolitions has not yet come up for discussion.”
If holding Israel accountable for something as basic as a financial transaction for damages it caused prompts so much caution in the EU’s official statements, it is safe to say that human rights in the EU’s repertoire, when it comes to Israel, descends into still silence. The EU still has not addressed the fact that, without holding Israel accountable for forcibly displacing Palestinians, its humanitarian projects for Palestinians is also financing Israel’s violations. Yet it is precisely what the humanitarian project which the international community imposed upon Palestinians intended. By investing a fragment of humanitarian aid aimed at alleviating the suffering caused by Israel’s colonial existence and violence, the international community can bypass the actual violations which go against international law.
The EU is no exception to this imposed rule. Advocacy by EU representatives does not work to hold Israel accountable but to extend a permanent contract of silence which, in turn, also silences Palestinians. Despite having political means at their disposal, EU representatives prefer playing the amateur activists when it comes to Palestine. Funds for travelling to the Occupied West Bank, after all, form part of the humanitarian project which Palestinians are forced to fit into. In the same way, EU-funded dwellings play a role in the humanitarian project but fail to sustain Palestinian autonomy. The latest purported concern has nothing to do with Palestinians, and is only marginally related to the EU-funded dwellings that Israel routinely destroys. Detracting from Israel’s settler-colonial expansion and the EU’s role in maintaining it, however, is a major part of what the humanitarian paradigm constitutes.
Where Have the Voices for Liberty Gone?
By Michael Lesher | Brownstone Institute | January 4, 2023
In early 2020, when American liberals wailed in unison that the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right of free assembly was a prescription for national suicide – and not one significant American civil rights organization protested – I should have known where we were headed.
Still, almost 3three years later, I am dumbfounded by how rapidly a nation that once boasted of its attachment to “liberty” has succumbed to the priorities of totalitarianism. Thought policing on social media, once a dystopian fantasy, is now taken for granted.
So is the massive electronic surveillance system that was hawked to Americans (and others around the world) as a “health” measure, but which actually gives Big Brother a convenient way to monitor people’s whereabouts and which has already been turned against political dissidents in Israel, India and elsewhere. Health care workers – once the heroes of the fear propaganda that rationalized illegal mass quarantines in 2020 – have now been forced from their jobs in alarming numbers for refusing to be injected with experimental drugs that demonstrably protect no one.
Mass media, far from raising questions about all this, are cheering on the juggernaut. CNN’s Michael Smerconish has confessed with chilling directness that the COVID drug experiment is essentially a lesson in Gleichschaltung:
“This is really about which people in this country are going to control virus-related behavior – the unvaccinated or the vaccinated…. [A]llowing the unvaccinated to control virus policy, that’s unjust and unhealthy.”
After all, as Congressman Jamie Raskin put it (in conversation with ex-poisoner-in-chief Deborah Birx), the most important thing for the State is to ensure “social cohesion” – even if it takes some official lying to coax the population into lockstep. Hitler could hardly have put it better.
I might readily fill this column with a catalog of the false statements about COVID-19 that have been peddled to the public over the last three years. But the chicanery of the muzzle-and-lockdown propagandists is not limited to scientific malfeasance.
I do not minimize the importance of demonstrating that we have been fed a steady diet of lies about COVID-19 since the beginning of 2020 (a task that has been ably shouldered by many other Brownstone contributors). But what’s at stake here is not just a debate about medical policy. What is happening involves nothing less than the fundamental reshaping of our body politic, a massive assault on the constitutional system of civil liberties and on the presuppositions undergirding that system.
Add to this the shameful silence of American liberal institutions as the tentacles of a police state wind ever more tightly around us all, and you will understand why my call to the incoming year is: when will I hear more voices raised in resistance?
Or, to put it more bluntly: what are you waiting for, America?
Where were your voices when the suspension of representative democracy made virtual dictators out of some four-fifths of America’s governors in 2020 – an arrangement which, according to Anthony Fauci, could be reimposed at any time?
Where were your voices when state after state discarded the Bill of Rights in favor of some version of the Emergency Health Powers Act – a bill that, when first proposed in 2001, was sharply criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, along with conservative groups like the Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, as “a throwback to a time before the legal system recognized basic protections for fairness?”
Where were your voices when the President of the United States defied the Nuremberg Code by ordering 3.5 million federal employees to submit to the injection of untested drugs, while his administration did its level best to ensure that what little information was available about the safety of those drugs would be concealed from the public for as long as possible? Where were your voices when those who objected to this embrace of a repurposed Nazi war crime were purged from our government?
Where were your voices when the State shuttered your children’s schools, forced muzzles onto two-year-olds, and terrorized young people to the point that fully a quarter of them contemplated suicide? When as many as 23 million children were placed by American school systems under computerized surveillance that monitored their every keystroke and tracked their internet contacts, a 1984-ish scenario for which COVID-driven school closures served as the pretext?
If you ask me, the most important word in the preceding sentence is “pretext:” COVID-19, though in medical terms never nearly as dangerous as we were told it was, has been extremely effective as a battering ram to civil liberties. Once upon a time, government health policy was fashioned to achieve medical goals. Today, factitious medical “goals” are deployed on behalf of a policy aimed at dismantling American democracy.
So please remember: this is not about your health. It’s about your country, whose highest aspirations are under unprecedented assault. If you don’t object now, you may lose your right to object at all.
And don’t think the vaunted liberal media, or civil rights “advocates,” or high-minded academics, or self-aggrandizing “progressive” politicians will speak up for you if you don’t speak up for yourselves.
A few years ago, CNN’s Jim Acosta made his reputation posing as a champion of press freedom (supposedly under mortal threat because Donald Trump had said some unflattering things about American reporters). Yet by the summer of 2021 Acosta was out-Trumping Trump, claiming that Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis had caused the COVID-19 Delta variant and denouncing people who dared to think they had a right to breathe in public.
Have Acosta’s fellow liberals objected to his hypocrisy? On the contrary: his public media profile is a virtual hagiography, even while he’s attacking the free speech rights of press outlets like Fox News for airing commentary he doesn’t agree with. Trusting such people with defending the Bill of Rights is like leaving your wallet with Bernie Madoff.
Nor can you plead a lack of adequate knowledge. Even if you ignore the sources of genuine information about COVID policy – and several are available via internet – there have been epiphanic moments when the propagandists have actually exposed themselves, as when New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul told a megachurch audience that God had commanded Americans to take the COVID-19 “vaccines,” or when an unrepentant Colonel Birx admitted to Congress that she had misrepresented facts when ordering the public to submit to the same experimental drugs.
Do you really need any more evidence of the megalomaniac lust for power driving these democracy-haters, as they dismantle the US Constitution piece by piece?
There can be no doubt about where State power is drifting – if we do nothing to stop it. Writing as far back as 1935, Albert Jay Nock predicted the future of the accelerating centralization of authority:
What we… shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralization; a steadily growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing;… the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income…. Then at some point in this progress, a collision of State interests… will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death of machinery”…
As we enter 2023, we don’t need to read deeply into political theory to understand the threat we face. We only have to review the record of the previous three years.
An accurate assessment of that record, it seems to me, will tell us that we are quite possibly on the cusp of the dissolution of the American republic. Maybe it is already too late to resist the authoritarian Zeitgeist. But I suggest we all ponder the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the failure of the Soviet public to resist the repression that had included his own arrest in the 1940s: “If only we had stood together against the common threat, we could easily have defeated it. So, why didn’t we? We didn’t love freedom enough.”
For us, that “common threat” is much weaker than the one Solzhenitsyn had in mind. We don’t need weapons to fight it; in fact, weapons would only get in the way. What we need are voices – lots of them – raised in protest every time a bureaucrat or a tame Ivy League “expert” or a lying “journalist” or a shyster in sheep’s clothing tries to rob us of one more bit of our human dignity, one more inch of our civil rights.
Then we need to clamor for all we’re worth. While there is still time.
Do we love freedom enough for that?
Michael Lesher is an author, poet and lawyer whose legal work is mostly dedicated to issues connected with domestic abuse and child sexual abuse. A memoir of his discovery of Orthodox Judaism as an adult – Turning Back: The Personal Journey of a “Born-Again” Jew – was published in September 2020 by Lincoln Square Books. He has also published op-ed pieces in such varied venues as Forward, ZNet, the New York Post and Off-Guardian.
The Net Zero death cult taking over ‘our’ NHS
By Stephen McMurray | TCW Defending Freedom | January 3, 2023
The climate change cult is insidious in every government department or institution it infiltrates. However, it is at its most dangerous when those people it infects are members of the medical community. When their apocalyptic hysteria starts affecting their decisions regarding patient care, urgent action is needed.
A disturbing document was recently published in the Lancet, entitled The Report of the Lancet Commission on the Value of Death: bringing death back into life. It was written by numerous medical professionals in the palliative care sector. It is nothing less than a propaganda piece promoting the idea that people who are suffering from possible life-shortening illness should not be given any potential life-saving treatments but, to help reduce our carbon footprint, should be allowed to die and actively encouraged to do so.
The authors make their feelings clear when they say: ‘The commission believes it is healthy to die . . . We are embodied creatures who are ultimately no more important than lizards or potatoes.’
It soon becomes obvious that their Net Zero zeal is driving this agenda when they state: ‘Treatment at the end of life will be an important contribution to the carbon footprint of health care . . . Everything, and especially death, must be thought of in the context of the climate crisis . . . In the report we explore the many values of death.’
The article is replete with climate change apocalyptic rhetoric, saying humanity is near extinction, one of the reasons being overpopulation, so we had better change our ways and stop trying to cure patients with potentially fatal illnesses and let them die.
As is common with the climate change cult, the document is replete with extreme left-wing ideology, promulgating the idea that expecting to be treated in hospital with life-prolonging drugs is a concept founded in racism. As only rich Westerners can afford proper health care, it is an example of a colonialist mindset and to achieve equity we should abandon this idea and die willingly like poor people in less developed countries.
Throughout the report they state how important it is to die at home surrounded by friends and family rather than in a hospital bed. This is not out of compassion but out of their desire to reduce the carbon footprint of end-of-life medication. The same medical profession that ardently supported the closure of hospitals to relatives of dying patients during Covid now pretend to advocate for having loved ones at the dying patient’s bedside. Their hypocrisy is breathtaking.
The authors also have the temerity to infuse the document with references to religious practices and spirituality to convince the reader that death is nothing to fear and that, by medicalising it, we are not having our spiritual and emotional needs met. If this was coming from the head of a religious institution it would possibly be understandable, but this is from a medical establishment who vehemently adhere to the reductionist view that our bodies are mere machines of flesh and bone.
When extolling the virtues of other religions’ treatment of the dying, the report cites a ritual practised by some Indian sects, which ‘entails a person coming to the realisation that they have no responsibilities or desires left. With the consent of religious elders, the person enters a slow process of fasting, where they give up one item of food a time, so that hunger pangs are tolerable. Over a few weeks or months, the person dies, often amid chants’.
Here the commission are implying that once you have supposedly nothing left to offer society, it is perfectly reasonable to want to die. Moreover, they don’t object to the cruel method of causing death by slow starvation. One can only assume that the relatives of those who have starved to death in our own NHS hospitals would be outraged by this callousness.
The document encourages carers to implant a sense of hopelessness in their patients so they more readily accept the idea of dying. ‘There is evidence that the will to live can keep people alive. But the tyranny of “positive thinking” can lead to ambivalence, guilt, and bad decisions . . . Hope increases the likelihood that people will believe that their illness is less serious than objective data might support, allowing patients to hold on to a low possibility of a favourable outcome and disregard the much greater probability of an unfavourable outcome.’ Clinicians sometimes ‘recommend additional treatments as a way for the patient to maintain hope, despite the clinical futility’.
What if treatment is not futile? Cases where patients are wrongly diagnosed with a terminal illness do occur. If we have learned one thing from the Covid era, it is that medical experts are far from infallible.
Their obsession with Net Zero and their disdain for human life is even focused on the patient after death: ‘While the dead consume no carbon, the disposal of bodies does. About three quarters of people in Britain are cremated after death, releasing carbon into the air. Alkaline hydrolysis, in which the body is dissolved, has about a seventh of the carbon footprint of cremation, and the resulting fluid can be used as fertiliser.’
The writers try to justify withholding treatments from patients who are potentially dying by saying the money could be better spent on treating others. This is totally disingenuous. Given vast sums of money for patient care, the NHS chose to spend it instead on pursuing the climate cult’s agenda of Net Zero.
They are going to spend £492million on changing all NHS light bulbs into LED ones. To put that into perspective, take the current outbreak of Streptococcus A infections spreading amongst children. We are being told there is not enough penicillin to go around. The cost of a 14-day course of amoxicillin is £0.18. There are approximately 12.7million under-16s in the UK. Therefore, it would cost under £2.5million to make sure there is enough antibiotics available to protect the entire childhood population.
It will come as no surprise that the report is in favour of legalising ‘assisted dying’. One of its main authors, Richard Smith, chairs the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. In 2017 he wrote an article in the British Medical Journal which began: ‘We should accept that humanity is dying and switch from cure to palliation – just as wise patients do at the end of their lives.’ Smith agrees with another palliative care physician who finds ‘acceptance of our mortality, unimportance, ephemeral nature, infinite ignorance, and futility to be very liberating’. Do we really want people who suffer from existential nihilism and think human life is unimportant and futile, treating anyone, let alone people who may be dying?
The fact that the climate hysteria with its accompanying left-wing, extremist ideology has infected the NHS could have serious consequences for people with potentially life-shortening illnesses. What criteria would the doctors use to decide which patients, if any, are worthy of receiving treatment? Would their decision be based solely on medical grounds or their ideology?
Most people who are diagnosed as being near the end of life are the older generation. It is exactly this demographic that the eco-zealots blame for the so-called climate crisis. What if the doctor or nurse was so indoctrinated by the climate crisis propaganda that their decision to withdraw treatment was based on their radical views rather than purely medical reasons?
Last April, an Extinction Rebellion activist called for the baby boomer generation to be euthanised. A sick joke, maybe, but the UK Health Alliance for Climate Change which is promoting this agenda acknowledges it works with Doctors for Extinction Rebellion.
The Lancet report highlights how deeply the Net Zero cult has infiltrated our health system. The obsession with reducing our carbon footprint is now such an integral part of many medical professionals’ mindset that they openly promote death as a healthy outcome. Do we really want anyone who thinks human life is unimportant and futile, least of all doctors in whom we are meant to put our trust, treating anyone, let alone those who may be dying? Surely such declared inhumane intent, running directly counter to the Hippocratic Oath, should automatically be grounds for being struck off by the General Medical Council.
Documents reveal how ‘Russiagate’ was used for Twitter censorship
RT | January 4, 2023
Internal documents from Twitter made public on Tuesday show how the social media platform was pressured to follow the US intelligence community’s lead on censorship back in 2017. Key Democrats in the US Congress, a British university and two media outlets – Politico and BuzzFeed – played a major role in the process, which revolved around the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory, according to research by Matt Taibbi.
In a pattern established in just six weeks, from August to October 2017, Twitter went from being on nobody’s radar to agreeing to take orders from US spies as to whom to censor, Taibbi wrote on Substack.
“Threats from Congress came first, then a rush of bad headlines (inspired by leaks from congressional committees), and finally a series of moderation demands coming from the outside,” he added.
In a 30-tweet thread, Taibbi showed emails and other internal documents he obtained, thanks to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk.
Democrats had accused Russia of helping Donald Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. Their claim that Trump had ties with Moscow was a “dossier” fabricated by a British spy. From there, they insinuated that WikiLeaks publishing internal DNC documents and personal emails of Clinton’s campaign had something to do with Moscow, while “Russian bots and trolls” posted “misinformation” on social media that somehow undermined the elections.
By August 2017, Facebook was purging accounts accused of being “linked to Russia.” Unconcerned, Twitter sent over a list of 22 “possible” Russian accounts to the Senate Intelligence Committee, only to be denounced by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat.
By the end of September, Twitter VP for Public Policy Colin Crowell was warning that “Warner has political incentive to keep this issue at top of the news, maintain pressure on us and [the] rest of industry to keep producing material for them.” Crowell also noted the Democrats were “taking cues from Hillary Clinton,” and that only Warner and his House counterpart Congressman Adam Schiff were seeking any comments from social media companies.
Meanwhile, as Taibbi put it, “a torrent of stories sourced to the [committee] poured into the news,” while several Senators – including Warner but also John McCain, an anti-Trump Arizona Republican – proposed bills that would have cracked down on social media.
A “Russia Task Force” set up by Twitter on October 2 found “no evidence of a coordinated approach” by October 13. The final report on October 23 found “32 suspicious accounts and only 17 of those are connected with Russia.” Of those, only two spent anything close to $10,000 on advertising – and one of them was RT.
Policy Director Carlos Monje admits in an October 18 memo that “our ads policy and product changes are an effort to anticipate congressional oversight.” One of these changes was the October 26 ban on advertising by RT and Sputnik.
A November 22 internal email accuses the Senate Intelligence Committee of leaking Twitter’s internal report to the media. A Politico story accusing Twitter of deleting files is followed by a BuzzFeed article alleging a German-language bot network with “signs of being connected to Russia.” The committee demands a report based on the story, which Twitter’s Yoel Roth dutifully writes up.
“You can see how the Russian cyber-threat was essentially conjured into being, with political and media pressure serving as the engine inflating something Twitter believed was negligible and uncoordinated to massive dimensions,” Taibbi wrote.
All of this results in the internal instructions to ban anything “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.” It was the first step in the process that would eventually lead to the FBI and the Biden White House telling Twitter exactly whom to censor.
Hamas criticises ‘biased’, ‘contradictory’ EU resolution on two-state solution
MEMO | December 29, 2022
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas issued a statement yesterday criticising the EU over Resolution no. 2949/2022 (RSP), on the prospects for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
In a political memorandum, Hamas said the resolution “contained several inaccuracies and contradictions about the Palestinian issue”, noting that it “is heavily biased against the Palestinians’ inherent and legitimate rights to freedom, return and self-determination.”
Among the issues raised with the resolution, the movement said it has sided with the Israeli occupation’s narrative, while ignoring the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to resistance and self-defence.
“Voting against this right is considered a great sin that Europeans have committed, once again. This vote also reflects the double standards with which the European Union deals with issues of peoples and freedoms around the world.”
“In recent months, we have seen the European position on the crisis in Ukraine, and how the Ukrainian resistance was considered legitimate and supported with money and weapons,” the statement said. The resolution, Hamas insists, has disregarded terrorism practised by the Israeli occupation on a daily basis.
The EU resolution was called out over its double standards in regards to its advocating “customised” democracy for the Palestinians and the issue of the participation of resistance factions in free and fair elections, “despite the fact that most of the candidates for the Israeli Knesset have criminal records and terrorist practices and are labeled on terrorist lists in many countries, including Israel itself.”
Hamas acknowledged the resolution’s demand to end the Israeli blockade, imposed on the people of Gaza since 2006 but concluded that the resolution is further proof of “the European bias towards the Israeli occupation and its racist policies” and the EU’s lack of seriousness in pursuing a just and fair solution to the Palestinian cause.
The movement urged the European Parliament to reconsider Resolution 2949 and to correct its position in order to achieve a just solution for the Palestinian people.
Earlier this month, a senior member of Hamas denounced the EU over its silence concerning the complicity of over 700 European financial institutions in supporting illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands.
Biden pledged to end the war in Yemen, but is doing the opposite
By Robert Inlakesh | RT | December 27, 2022
Two weeks into his term, US President Joe Biden claimed that he would seek a negotiated peace in Yemen, thus shunning Saudi Arabia. Now he is performing a 180-degree pivot. With such arbitrary foreign policy positions the US is causing instability and weakening its own hand.
On December 13, US Senator Bernie Sanders decided to withdraw a War Powers Resolution on ending US support for Saudi offensive efforts in the war in Yemen. Sanders was supposed to put the resolution to a vote, believing it would have passed. However, owing to pressure mounted against him from the White House, he decided to retreat. Instead, the progressive American senator claimed that he was informed that the Biden administration would “continue working” with his office on ending the conflict.
As revealed by The Intercept, which obtained the key talking points distributed by the White House against the resolution, the Biden administration communicated its position that such a resolution would be counterproductive and further exacerbate the crisis in Yemen. However, the ‘Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’ says that Sanders’ decision to withdraw the resolution “may embolden the many members of Washington’s foreign policy elite who would like to ensure that the president’s capability to unilaterally wage war remains unchallenged by Congress’s constitutional prerogative over matters of war and peace.”
The biggest problem here for the US government is that the War Powers Resolution essentially aims to force Biden to implement most of the policies that he himself outlined in February of 2021. Despite Biden having announced that the US was halting all “relevant arms sales” to the Saudi-led coalition – which has been at war with Yemen’s Ansarallah, known commonly as the Houthis, since 2015 – this policy position has never been put into practice.
During his 2020 campaign, Biden claimed that he would make longtime American ally Saudi Arabia a global “pariah.” Yet, when it began to sink in that the powerful oil-producing state was a necessary partner in the Middle East, a realization that came months into the West’s sanctions campaign aimed at Russia, the Biden administration quickly decided to change its stance. In July, the president decided to go on a foreign visit to Saudi Arabia, while in the days prior he entered into discussions about beginning to supply the Saudis with offensive weapons again; the framing of this was a little disingenuous because the weapons sales freeze of February 2021 had effectively been ended by April of the same year anyway. Both of these moves came as a clear attempt to get Saudi Arabia to raise oil-production levels, a goal that failed as the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, refused to pander to the US president.
Since then, the US government approved a potential multibillion-dollar deal with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and in August the Biden administration granted the Saudi Crown Prince immunity from a civil lawsuit over his role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden was reportedly humiliated earlier this year after allegedly bringing up the Khashoggi killing to the Crown Prince, who fired back by citing the Israeli killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, asking why Jamal Khashoggi mattered more. Notably, the US head of state failed a number of times to even pronounce Shireen Abu Akleh’s name correctly when delivering a speech beside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just days earlier and did not bring the killing up to Israeli representatives.
The White House insinuated, in its opposition to Senator Bernie Sanders’ resolution on Yemen, that it had a hand in the six-month long ceasefire between the two primary opposing sides in the war. The reality was that it was the United Nations that brokered the ceasefire, which ended on October 2. In the eyes of Ansarallah, the US government is the primary obstacle to peace in Yemen; Abd al-Wahhab al-Mahbashi, a senior member of Ansarallah, recently warned that “the presence of US troops in the Bab al-Mandab and off the coast of Yemen poses a serious threat to maritime navigation.” In fact, Ansarallah views the conflict as a war on behalf of the US, with Saudi Arabia acting as its proxy, a view held by millions in the region.
The day following Sanders’ withdrawal of his War Powers Resolution, two fuel shipments, carrying tons of diesel, were seized by the Saudi-led coalition and prevented from reaching Yemen. The blockade of Yemen is one of the major factors contributing to the resurgence of tensions – Ansarallah accuses Riyadh and Abu Dhabi of stealing the nation’s oil resources and depriving native Yemenis. In addition to this, when the US is clearly attempting to cozy up to Saudi Arabia, this signals to the leadership of Ansarallah that the Biden administration is favoring Riyadh in the conflict.
The Biden administration has so far proven ineffective at bringing the Saudis under its wing in the way it had hoped, indicating that its foreign policy tactics have proven ineffective at best. The reason for this failure likely comes down to the way the current government has dealt not only with Saudi Arabia, but with all the states of the Arabian Peninsula in addition to Iran. The US has shown that it cannot be trusted to keep its word, as was proven by its Iran nuclear deal blunder. More importantly, Saudi Arabia understands that, when it comes to security, Washington is not the most important player anymore. Instead of following the Biden administration into a dangerous anti-Iran coalition, the Saudis would be a lot smarter to engage diplomatically with Tehran, a step that would be especially helpful when it comes to regional security.
For Washington, meanwhile, an escalation in Yemen at this point would prove advantageous, for it could end up pushing Saudi Arabia closer to it, as the latter needs US help to maintain its war effort, although there is a chance that large-scale ballistic and cruise missile strikes against Saudi Arabia’s vital infrastructure could cause the Kingdom to go straight to the negotiating table. Regardless of how things go, it is clear that US influence in the Arabian Peninsula is rapidly declining and part of its legacy will be this brutal war that has cost upwards of 400,000 lives and that the Biden administration has refused to end.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the Palestinian territories and currently works with Quds News.
German FM Baerbock calls Nigeria a colony of Germany
Free West Media | December 23, 2022
The fact that history and geography are not necessarily among the strengths of German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) has been known at least since her last reports about tank battles in the 19th century or countries that are “hundreds of thousands of kilometers” away. The circumference of the Earth is just over 40,000km, so such countries remain an enigma.
Now Baerbock has added to fresh suspicions about her educational background in a new statement via Twitter. “Today we are taking a step that was long overdue: we are bringing twenty Benin bronzes back to their native Nigeria. That will not heal all wounds of the past. But we are showing that we are serious about coming to terms with our dark colonial history,” wrote the Foreign Minister. The problem: Nigeria was not colonized by Germany, but by Great Britain.
The Benin Bronzes are a group of several thousand metal plaques and sculptures that have adorned the Royal Palace of the Kingdom of Benin since the 16th century. In the era of the colonization of Africa, they were sold as looted art by the United Kingdom in 1897 – to Germany, among others.
Very little is known about Baerbock. The name is a very unusual one in Germany, and there are no other families with this name. Her “biography” and “family” appear to have been fabricated. In his book that has just been published, bestselling author Gerhard Wisnewski has revealed the gaps in the Foreign Minister’s story.
Baerbock herself dismissed her suspicious CV in an “interview” with a kindergarten child, calling herself a little “forgetful”.
The German Foreign Minister might have no clue what she is talking about most of the time, but she is determined to create “good optics” nonetheless. Baerbock employs a personal stylist who receives a monthly flat rate of 7,500 euros. This was first reported by the Bild newspaper. Accordingly, the make-up artist Claude Frommen has been working for the politician for four years.
“Ms. Frommen takes care of Foreign Minister Baerbock’s make-up and hairstyling for picture and television appointments,” confirmed a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry. The stylist also accompanies her on her trips abroad. “I let you shine” is her professional motto.
Frommen is a renowned make-up artist from Berlin whose clients include executives from politics, the media and business. On her website, Frommen lists film productions and photo studios as well as the Green Party among her clients. “Years of traveling all over the world have shaped my thoughts and feelings.”
Previously, Baerbock’s cabinet colleague and party colleague Robert Habeck also drew attention to himself with his tax-financed vanities. The Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology employs a personal photographer for almost 100,000 euros a year.
Olaf Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto in ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine
By Gilbert Doctorow | December 21, 2022
When I first read through Olaf Scholz’s comprehensive foreign policy essay “The Global Zeitenwende” recently published in Foreign Affairs magazine, it brought to mind another sensational manifesto from an international leader in the news published by this very same authoritative journal. That was an essay ‘written’ by then Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko for the late spring 2007 issue.
There are several things these two essays have in common aside from centrality of Ukraine and of Russian malevolence in their thinking about the world. Publication of the Tymoshenko article gave rise to accusations of plagiarism against her for lifting some well known phrases from the writings of Henry Kissinger without attribution. In the case of Scholz, there is a more subtle kind of ‘plagiarism,’ in that he, like Tymoshenko, is clearly not the sole author of the text published over his name. I will go into these matters in some detail below.
Another common feature is the extraordinary way in which these essays were crafted so as to slot into the susceptibilities and preferences of the American foreign policy establishment. The authors seem to have checked every possible box whether or not it was directly relevant to their overriding argument or to the nations they represent.
A third commonality is apt timing of the publication. In the case of Tymoshenko, her fierce denunciation of Russia in which she deployed every calumny invented by the American Neo-Conservatives came just a few months after Vladimir Putin delivered his now famous speech on Russian claims against the US-led West at the Munich Security Conference. The sheer temerity of the Russian leader whose speech was witnessed by Senator John McCain and other American political worthies seated in the front rows left the U.S. Administration of George W. Bush infuriated and confounded over how to respond. As soon as they found their footing and their voice, they initiated what has ever since been a vast Information War directed against Russia.
Tymoshenko’s article in Foreign Affairs was the first cannon shot in this war of words. The publishers were most obliging, because such service to the State Department in disseminating a document they had to know was fake was the price they willingly paid to receive privileged access to high government officials on a regular basis and thereby provide value to their subscriber base at home and abroad numbering in the hundreds of thousands that makes FA the most widely read journal of its kind.
By giving pride of place to Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto today, when the will and strength of European solidarity with the USA over the war in Ukraine is top of mind and is being questioned by some in the mainstream media, FA continues this line of service to the powers that be.
******
I dealt with the peculiarities of the Tymoshenko manifesto in an essay dated 10 November 2009 that I published on my blog and then republished as a chapter (29) in my 2010 book Stepping Out of Line. In that piece, I used close textual analysis to show that many turns of speech and lines of thinking were utterly inconsistent with supposed authorship by a native Ukrainian of her generation while they were second nature to American political commentators.
In this same essay, I emphasized that the kind of misrepresentation practiced in the publication of Tymoshenko’s text by FA was not a one-off development in America’s war of words on Russia. I pointed to an Open Letter to the Administration of President Barack Obama published in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on 16 July 2009 that was signed by Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other well known thinkers and former statesmen who were behind the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination in the late 1980s. This appeal to the American President to ensure greater U.S. attention be given to the security of their region had a number of explicitly Russophobe points, including the insistence that Russia’s policy towards their countries was revisionist and threatening. Russia was said to be using overt and covert economic warfare in pursuit of its aims.
The context for the Open Letter was Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow a couple of weeks earlier to pursue the ‘reset’ of relations and achieve a rapprochement on several issues of strategic importance to the United States. Mainstream media, including The New York Times, carried the Open Letter.
The American public took it to be a cri de coeur of freedom fighters. In reality it was concocted by a team of ghost writers under the supervision of the German Marshal Fund and its boss Ron Asmus. This later came out in an expose written by Jacob Heilbrunn for the journal The National Interest.
For all of the above reasons, my first thoughts about possible American authorship of the Scholz manifesto had to be tested. However, the verdict of two German-speaking experts who examined the texts at my request was that German, not English was the source language and that the points made here were in line with what Scholz has said in speeches he has delivered around Germany in the past few weeks. And yet, I insist, that in its particulars the manifesto was made to appeal to the American readership of FA.
******
Olaf Scholz is notable for his cunning. In short order, as the days of the Merkel chancellorship faded, he leveraged his prominence as a regional politician (mayor of Hamburg) into national standing. And when the Social Democrats emerged from the last elections as the leading party, though one still without a majority in the Bundestag, he succeeded in putting together a governing coalition relying on The Greens. This fox of a man surely recognized The Greens as politically primitive and so, malleable to his purposes, whereas forging yet another Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU, who would be peers in terms of experience in federal cabinets, would have limited his power. Indeed, the outcome has been a federal government in which the highly visible posts of Economic Affairs (Robert Habeck) and Foreign Affairs (Annalena Baerbock) were filled with utterly inexperienced and incompetent high-ranking Greens politicians whose missteps and foolish statements in public space have diminished the Greens’ weight in a government that the Chancellor dominates.
However, cunning is not the same thing as intellectuality. The author(s) of the manifesto published in Foreign Affairs magazine show a mastery of the skills required to write effective propaganda that you acquire in a political science milieu not in an administration responsible for governing one city on a day to day basis, as was the milieu of Herr Scholz for decades before he rose to the chancellorship.
Am I being unfair or pedantic in calling Scholz a plagiarist when he put his name to a paper written by a team under his direction possibly with inputs from overseas friends in the USA? Isn’t that what political leaders do regularly when they stand on the dais and read speeches that were written by their professional speech writers?
Yes, but speeches are not the same thing as contributions to a journal that is published by political scientists with academic credentials for political scientists with academic credentials.
This is plagiarism in a form that is all too widespread in German political culture. Over the past couple of decades there were a number of scandals involving high politicians there whose doctoral theses were exposed as ghost written or plagiarized in the formal sense of the word. This directly results from the high respect that Germans as a society give to the Herr Doktor moniker. Political aspirants with burning ambition are all too tempted to go for broke.
Had he wished to be more honest with his own people and with the world, Scholz could have said his manifesto was co-authored with one or more experts so that everyone could better judge where this thinking was coming from and challenges to the thinking would be less politicized. Joe Biden did as much when he published his own manifesto in 2017-2018 on “standing up to the Russians” in FA with Michael Carpenter presented as co-author.
*****
Now let us look at the content of the manifesto which is firstly a very carefully trimmed narrative of what over the past thirty years has brought us to the present turning point in the road, or “Global Zeitenwende,” and secondly, a road map to the future, which the author(s) say, in the subtitle to the manifesto, will enable us “to avoid a New Cold War.”
In their hands, the narrative of European and world history over the past thirty years is the story of Russian revanchism that exists in a vacuum, without context of provocations and escalations from the USA, the EU and other actors, and propelled by the animus of one man, Vladimir Putin.
The key message about Russian culpability for everything comes in a couple of paragraphs. The original sin was Putin’s evaluation of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” From that the authors fast forward to Putin’s “aggressive speech” at the February 2007 Munich Security Conference, “deriding the rules-based international order as a mere tool of American dominance.” This was followed in short order by the war Russia launched against Georgia in 2008. And from there we are off to the races:
In 2014, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and sent its forces into parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in direct violation of international law and Moscow’s own treaty commitments. The years that followed saw the Kremlin undercut arms control treaties and expand its military capabilities, poison and murder Russian dissidents, crack down on civil society, and carry out a brutal military intervention in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Step by step, Putin’s Russia chose a path that took it further from Europe and further from a cooperative, peaceful order.
This imperial ambition imputed to the Russians culminated in the unprovoked and utterly illegal invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 to which Europe, and in particular Germany must respond by breaking entirely with past efforts at accommodation with Russia. Instead Germany must rearm and become the leading defender of Europe.
The authors walk a thin line between claiming European leadership for Germany and lauding the Americans for saving Europe presently from the Russian assault. They are giving the Americans exactly what Washington has been demanding for more than a decade: the commitment to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP. The text even finds space to go into specific procurement items coming up, such as the “dual purpose” (meaning nuclear enabled) American F-35 warplane. Such details obviously are calculated to bring holiday cheer to the Washington establishment.
It is interesting that the manifesto speaks about avoiding a New Cold War when it is patently obvious that we are in the midst of exactly that and should count ourselves lucky that it has not yet escalated to a hot war that quickly becomes nuclear war. We may assume from the text that Scholz is holding out division into hostile blocs as the defining moment for a Cold War. And while formal declaration of anti-NATO alliances has not and may never emerge, the present reality is precisely the formation before our eyes of the Global South in confrontation with the Collective West. The Russia-Iran-China axis is there for all to see even if it is not a formally constituted military bloc. Moreover, a key constituent element of the Cold War, namely an ideological dimension, has in the past several years taken definitive shape in the notion of free democratic nations versus authoritarian nations. As for declaring a Cold War, what is there more to wait for?
Scholz’s manifesto completely distorts history to the point where it even overlooks the finding by the EU, following an investigation by then French President Sarkozy, that the Georgian War was caused by the military assault by Tbilisi on Ossetia, not by some unprovoked Russian attack on the Georgians. More importantly, it is totally blind to where his thinking would and may yet lead Germany and the world.
First, within Europe, his claim that Germany will be the leader of European defense and have the strongest military on the Continent goes directly in the face of a similar ambition of the Poles, the front-line state in the confrontation with Russia that will be receiving the greatest assistance of Washington, because the Poles, unlike the Germans, are putting their bodies on the line in the fight with the Russians over Ukraine.
The German leader’s hopes to become Washington’s closest ally by unquestioningly signing on to the American propaganda line also runs up against the ambitions of the French. It is no accident that the manifesto was issued so as to compete for attention with the visit of Emanuel Macron to Washington, in the knowledge that Macron was bringing to the overlords Europe’s complaints over unfair trading practices embedded in the latest Congressional legislation.
The biggest problem with Scholz’s road map at this Zeitenwende is that it is blind, as is Washington, to where the armed conflict on Ukrainian territory is taking us all. Ukrainian military victory is simply unattainable and sooner or later Kiev will fold. Scholz’s manifesto makes it plain that what lies ahead is what all sides are now calling a ‘long war.’
Yes, Germany will greatly expand its military spending and make amends for the pitiful forces of the present day Bundeswehr. However, the Russians will not go back to their bear caves and hibernate when the fighting stops in Ukraine. Indeed, what I now see is that progressively, over the past 300 days of warfare, Russian society has moved from consumerism and consolidated around patriotism. The ‘fifth column’ Liberals have now mostly left the country and moved to where their assets have long been kept in the West. Russian industry, under state direction, has risen to the challenge of supplying the army with equipment and munitions that are being expended at the highest daily rate since WWII. This trend will only accelerate going forward, as the Russian economy reorganizes on a war footing. Moreover, and most importantly, the small professional army that Russia built up from the start of Putin’s tenure in the presidency has been replaced conceptually by plans to develop an army scaled to offset the whole of European conventional forces. This means, as we have heard repeatedly from the host of the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show, a standing army of three million men and women. And, against that coming force, Mr. Scholz’s Bundeswehr will be as pitiful in the future as it is today when facing Russia. Meanwhile, hopes for an even partial return to normality in relations between East and West on this Continent will be in vain, to the great loss of all sides.
© Gilbert Doctorow, 2022
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Guatemala: A Test Tube of Repression
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | October 3, 2010
Last week’s grotesque revelation about American public health doctors infecting nearly 700 Guatemalans with venereal disease to test penicillin from 1946-48 marked just the start of the U.S. government’s post-World War II abuse of that Central American country.
Indeed, as troubling as the VD experiments were, U.S. administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan would do much worse, treating Guatemala as a test tube for Cold War counterinsurgency experiments that led to the slaughter of some 200,000 people, including genocide against Mayan Indian tribes. … continue
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