Children, as any parent knows, are not small adults. Their brain is growing and being acutely shaped by their environment and experience. Social skills and values are learnt from those around them, with teamwork, risk-management, personal boundaries, and tolerance being learned through play with other children. Their immune system is imprinting environmental contact into a set of responses that will shape health in later life. Their bodies grow physically and become adept at physical skills. They learn both trust and mistrust through interaction with adults.
This rapid physical and psychological growth makes children highly vulnerable to harm. Withdrawal of close contact with trusted adults and enforced distancing has large emotional and physical impacts, in common with other primates. Lack of experience also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by adults who are pushing certain attitudes or beliefs – often called ‘grooming.’ For these reasons, our forebears put specific protections and norms of behaviour in place that elevated the needs of children above adults.
However, protecting children did not involve enclosing them in a padded cell – policy-makers knew this to be harmful to psychological and physical development. It involved allowing children to explore their environment and society, whilst taking measures to shield them from malfeasance, including from those who would harm them directly or through ignorance or neglect.
The act of imposing risks on children for the perceived benefit of adults was therefore considered one of the worst crimes. The most cowardly use of ‘human shields.’
Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child places children at the centre of public decision-making:
“In all actions concerning children…. the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.”
When we are complicit in acts that we know are wrong, we naturally look for ways to avoid acknowledging our part in it or excuse the actions as being ‘for a greater good.’ But lying to ourselves is not a good way to correct a wrong. As we have seen in other acts of institutionalchild abuse, it allows the abuse to fester and expand. It advances the interests and safety of the perpetrators over that of the victims.
Covid as a means for targeting children
In early 2020, a virus outbreak was noted in Wuhan, China. It was soon clear that this relatively novel coronavirus overwhelmingly targeted the sick and elderly, particularly those on unhealthy Western diets. The Diamond Princess incident showed, however, that even among the elderly the vast majority would survive the illness (Covid-19), with many not even becoming ill.
In response, Western public health institutions, politicians, and media turned on children. Society implemented policies never seen before; a whole-of-society approach that was expected to increase poverty and inequality, particularly targeting lower-income people. and disrupt childhood development. It included restrictions on children’s play, education, and communication, and used psychological manipulation to convince them that they were a threat to their parents, teachers, and grandparents. Policies such as isolation and travel restriction, normally applied to criminals, were applied to whole populations.
The novel public health response was designed by a small but influential group of very wealthy people, often called philanthropists, and international institutions which they have funded and co-opted over the past decade. These same people would go on to be greatly enriched through the ensuing response. Encouraged by these same but now even wealthier people governments are now working to entrench these responses to build a poorer, less free and more unequal world into which all children will grow.
Whilst rarely discussed in public spaces, strategies of targeting and sacrificing children for the gratification of adults are not new. However, it is a practice that normally elicits disgust. We can now understand better, having been part of it, how such actions can creep into a society and become integral to its character. People find it easy to condemn the past, whilst excusing the present; asking reparations for past slavery whilst advocating for cheaper batteries produced through current child slavery, or condemning past institutionalized child abuse whilst condoning it when it happens within their own institutions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was not asking us to look to the past, but to the present. The most mature society is one that can face itself, calmly and with its eyes open.
The abandonment of evidence
Aerosolized respiratory viruses, such as coronaviruses, spread in tiny airborne particles over long distances and are not interrupted by cloth face coverings or surgical masks. This has been long- established and has been confirmed again by the US CDC in a meta-analysis of influenza studies published in May 2020.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus was somewhat unusual (though not unique) in its targeting of a cell receptor in the lining of the respiratory tract, ACE-2 receptors, to enter and infect cells. These are expressed less in children, meaning children are intrinsically less likely to be severely infected or transmit large viral loads to others. This explains the study outcomes early in the Covid-19 epidemic that demonstrated very low transmission from children to school teachers, and adults living with children having a lower-than-average risk. It explains why Sweden, following former evidence-based recommendations from the World Health Organization (WHO), kept schools open with no ill effects on health.
Armed with this knowledge, we (as a society) closed schools and forced children to cover their faces, reducing their educational potential and impairing their development. Knowing that school closures would disproportionately harm low-income children with poorer computer access and home study environments, we ensured that the children of the wealthy would widen their advantage for the next generation. In low-income countries, these school closures worked as expected, increasing child labour and condemning up to 10 million additional girls to child to child marriage and nightly rape.
Abusing children at home
For many, school provides the only stable and secure part of their lives, providing the vital pastoral and counselling work which identifies and supports children in crisis. When pupils are out of school the most vulnerable are the most affected, teachers can’t pick up the early warning signs of abuse or neglect, and children have no one they can tell. For children with special needs, essential access to multi-agency support frequently ceased.
Sport and extracurricular activities are important in children’s lives. Events such as school plays, school trips, choirs, and the first and last days at school mark out their lives and are vital for their social development. Friendships are crucial for their emotional development, particularly during the crucial stages of growth – childhood, adolescence and young adulthood – and especially when there are vulnerabilities or special needs, children need access to family, friends, services, and support.
The result of this neglect, as highlighted by a recent a UCL study on the outcomes of UK government restrictions on children in 2020-2022, was nothing short of a disaster:
“The impact of the pandemic will have detrimental consequences for children and young people in the short and long-term, with many not yet visible, it will have continuing consequences for their future in terms of professional life trajectories, healthy lifestyles, mental well-being, educational opportunities, self-confidence and more besides.”
“Children were forgotten by policymakers during Covid lockdowns.”
Infants, children, and teenagers endured numerous lockdowns during their most formative years, despite accounting for a diminutive proportion of Covid hospitalisations and deaths. The UCL study found that politicians did not consider children and young people a “priority group” when English lockdowns were enforced. Infants born into the Covid restrictions have marked delays in brain and thought development.
Education is provided to children as it benefits their educational and psychological development, provides a safe and protective environment, and is a way of improving equality. So it was to be expected that when schools closed there would be development losses in very young children, reduced education attainment throughout the age profile, mental health issues, and a rising tide of abuse.
In the UK, 840 million school days were lost to the class of 2021 and nearly two million of England’s nine million pupils are still failing to attend school regularly. As early as November 2020, Ofsted, the body which inspects and reports on schools in England, reported that the majority of children were going backwards educationally. Regression was found in communication skills, physical development, and independence. These impacts are seen across Europe, and are likely to be lifelong. Despite this, the policies continued.
In the United States, school closures affected an estimated 24.2 million US schoolchildren absent from school (1.6 billion worldwide) and the educative deterioration there is particularly clear. Schoolchildren have fallen behind in their learning by almost a year according to the latest assessments from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). About a third of the students didn’t reach the lowest reading benchmark and maths saw the steepest decline in history. As poorer students will have less access to the internet and support for remote learning, school closures also widen racial and ethnic inequalities.
And when schools did reopen in the UK a damaging and restrictive set of regulations were introduced wearing masks, testing, bubbles, playground restrictions, and static timetables. Post-primary children were spending all day in the same room, masked for 9 hours per day if they used public transport to get to school. Isolation and quarantining led to continual absences. Teachers trained to know this approach was harmful continued to implement it.
The recent Ofsted report from Spring 2022 highlighted the damaging effects of the restrictions on the development of young children and should have been enough to set alarm bells ringing as it recorded:
Delays in babies’ physical development
A generation of babies struggling to crawl and communicate
Babies suffering delays in learning to walk
Delays in speech and language (noted to be partly attributable to imposition of facemasks).
This latter has also been noted by practitioners such as the Head of the Speech and Language unit in N. Ireland:
“A growing number of young children are experiencing significant communication problems following the lockdowns and some who can’t talk at all, they grunt or they point at things they want and who don’t know how to speak to the other children.”
A study by Irish researchers found that babies born during March to May 2020, when Ireland was locked down, were less likely to be able to say at least one definitive word, point, or wave goodbye at 12 months old. A further study published in Nature found children aged 3 months – 3 years scored almost two standard deviations lower in a proxy measurement of development similar to IQ. With 90 percent of brain development taking place in the first five years of life, this has been tragic. Many children in this age group are now starting school far behind, biting and hitting, overwhelmed around large groups and unable to settle and learn with the social and educational skills of a child two years younger.
From a mental health viewpoint, we as a society attacked the mental health of children, following policies we knew were harmful and even designed to stoke fear; a direct form of abuse. Children were shut away in their bedrooms, isolated from friends, told they were a danger to others and that non-compliance may kill granny. An agenda of fear was imposed on them.
In the UK there are an astonishing one million children awaiting mental health support, whilst more than 400,000 children and young people a month are being treated for mental health problems – the highest number on record. More than a third of young people said they feel their life is spiralling out of control and more than 60 percent of 16-25-year-olds said they were scared about their generation’s future, 80 percent of young people reporting a deterioration in their emotional well-being.
As early as autumn 2020, UK’s Ofsted had identified:
In addition, five times more children and young people committed suicide than died of COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic in the UK. In the US, CDC reported that emergency department visits were 50.6 percent higher among girls aged 12–17 due to suicide attempts From early 2020, it was known that children were barely affected by the virus, having a 99.9987 percent survival chance, while they were not a danger to others.
Abusing children far away
Numbers are not people, so when we discuss dead or harmed children in large numbers, it can be difficult to understand the real impact. This allows us to gloss over the impact. However, UNICEF tells us that almost a quarter of a million children were killed by the lockdowns in 2020 in South Asia alone. That is 228,000, each with a mother and father, probably brothers or sisters.
Most additional child lockdown deaths will have been particularly unpleasant, as malnutrition and infections are hard ways to die. These deaths were anticipated by the WHO and the public health community in general. They would have lived without the lockdowns, as (so) they were ‘added’ deaths.
The WHO estimates about 60,000 additional children are dying each year since 2020 from malaria. Many more are dying from tuberculosis and other childhood illnesses. With about a billion additional people in severe food deprivation (near starvation), there will probably be some millions more hard, painful deaths to come. It is hard to watch a child dying. But someone like us, often a parent, watched and suffered through each of these deaths.
While many in the public health and ‘humanitarian’ industries tell tales about stopping a global pandemic, those watching these deaths knew they were unnecessary. They knew that these children had been betrayed. Some perhaps can still claim ignorance, as the Western media has found discussion of these realities awkward. Their main private sponsors are profiting from the programs causing these deaths, as others once benefitted from the abuse and killing to secure cheap rubber of the Belgian Congo or the mining of rare metals in Africa today. Exposing mass child deaths-for-profit will not please the investment houses that own both media and media’s Pharma sponsors. But deaths are the same whether the media covers it or not.
Why we did this
There is no simple answer as to why society reversed its norms of behaviour and pretended, en masse, that lies were truth and truth was a lie. Nor a simple answer as to why child welfare came to be considered dispensable, and children a threat to others. Those who orchestrated the closing of schools knew that it would increase long-term poverty and, therefore, poor health. They knew of the inevitability of increased child labour, child brides, starvation, and death. This is why we run clinics, support food programmes, and try to educate children.
None of the harms from the Covid response were at all unexpected. The children of the wealthy benefitted, whilst the children of the less well-off were disproportionately harmed. This is the way society has worked historically – we just fooled ourselves that we had developed something better.
What is most concerning is that three years in, we are not just ignoring what we did, but are planning to expand and institutionalize these practices. Those who gained most financially from Covid-19, who backed this society-wide attack on the most vulnerable, wish this to be a permanent feature of life. There is no serious enquiry into the harms of the global response because these were expected, and those in charge have profited from them.
The desired reset was achieved; we have reset our expectations regarding truth, decency, and the care of children. In an amoral world the happiness, the health, and the life of a child only carries the importance we are told to attach to it. To change that, we would have to stand against the tide. History will remember those who did and those who did not.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
“What the West has, and has had for some time now, is a single-shot military. One serious campaign, whether finally won or lost, would disarm the West for a decade.” — “Aurelien“
This, folks, is the simple truth of the matter.
The US simply could not, at this moment — nor at any time in even the medium-term future — mount and sustain a campaign the size, intensity, and duration of what we have seen in Ukraine for the past 18 months.
US logistical chains would have long-since broken down; losses in men and equipment — including LOTS of cargo ships and their warship escorts — would have been calamitous.
Oh, sure, there’s the huge chorus of people who are gung-ho convinced that US air and naval power would overcome all obstacles in a matter of days, bringing the presumptuous Russians to their knees.
That’s not what would happen, you dopes.
What would happen is that, despite a few spectacular successes to stuff the first 24-hour news cycle, the “full-spectrum dominance” everyone believes the US wields would suffer severe immediate losses across the entire military spectrum.
Dozens of US aircraft of all types would be shot down in the first 100 hours of war. Several US ships would be damaged or sunk. US bases in both Europe and around the globe would be struck. US airborne ISR assets would be aggressively targeted; military and communications satellite arrays would be disabled.
Within literally just a few days, the US would start to experience severe stand-off strike munitions shortages, greatly exacerbated by the high interception rate Russian air defenses would achieve.
The Russians have already demonstrated, over the past 18 months, that they can shoot down ANY manner of strike missile the US can field against them — not all of them all the time, but most of them most of the time.
No other military on the planet has previously attested this level of capability. The US does not have it, and is almost certainly at least a decade away from developing it.
And, make no mistake, if the US were to strike at targets on Russian soil, the Russians would strike back at targets on US soil. I do not believe they would launch a nuclear “first-strike” against the US, but I can guarantee they would use their submarine fleet and conventional long-range airstrike capability to hit strategic targets on US soil.
It would be a shocking exhibition of 21st century great power warfare.
Both sides would be hurt badly, but the Russians would not be even severely depleted, let alone defeated, whereas the US would be hurt in a fashion it has never experienced in its history, only to then look around and discover itself in a state of acute logistical crisis after only a fortnight of high-intensity combat operations.
That will be the moment of decision; the last stop before Willoughby, as it were.
And, if the scenario I have sketched were to actually develop, there will come a moment, fairly early on, when saner heads within the halls of empire — those who have, hitherto, acquiesced as this catastrophe unfolded — well, they will have to choose to finally act to stop the madness, or stand idly by as they and all the rest of us are acted upon by events that spiral out of control.
Four hundred ninety-eight electric vehicles (EVs) and over 3,200 other vehicles, including 350 Mercedes Benzes, were bound for Egypt on the Fremantle Highwaywhen one or more of the EVs caught fire, costing at least one seaman his life and injuring several others. Curiously, the Dutch coast guard had initially reported that only 25 of the vehicles were battery-electric models.
At last report, the Dutch coast guard admitted that it has been unable to put out the fire and that the ship has taken on water and is “listing” and on a trajectory toward a capsize. Should the ship sink, the total loss would also threaten the Frisian island of Ameland, part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to over 10,000 aquatic and terrestrial species and located near one of the world’s most important migratory-bird habitats.
On a global scale, of course, 3,000 vehicles are but a drop in the bucket, and in insurance terms, the loss of one 18,500–ton transport ship and one human life (all the wounded are expected to survive, despite broken bones, burns, and respiratory problems) is only so much. To compute a total cost, the ecological devastation would also have to be factored in, along with the cost of rescue, firefighting, and salvage operations.
But all in all, this was a freak accident, a one-off. This stuff never happens. Right?
Actually, it does. Just a year ago, the “Felicity Ace” sank as it was being towed from the site where 13 days earlier a fire had broken out on board. That ship, too, was transporting EVs and internal-combustion vehicles – including 15 Lamborghini Aventador LP 780-4 Ultimae supercars valued at half a million dollars apiece. Also lost were 1,117 Porches, 1,944 Audis, 561 Volkswagens, 189 Bentleys, and 70 other Lamborghinis.
And just a month ago, two firefighters died battling flames that broke out on another roll-on, roll-off (RORO) cargo ship docked at Port Newark in New Jersey. Firefighters arrived at the scene when just five to seven vehicles on the 10th floor of the ship were on fire, but the fire quickly spread to the 11th and 12th floors.
One commenter explained that on a RORO ship, vehicles are chain-shackled on all four wheels to the deck, creating trip hazards for firefighters. There are multiple decks, ramps, ladders, confined spaces, low overhead, and solid metal all around (like a gigantic oven). Fighting such fires is a very dangerous challenge, even if the deck plan of the ship is well known.
The port authority assured reporters that no EVs numbered among the 5,000 vehicles (bound for Africa) on board, but just imagine if the fire had begun with the ship far out at sea. Or imagine the horror should an EV fire break out on a ferry boat carrying hundreds of vehicles and thousands of passengers? Or in an underground parking garage in a New York high-rise?
Olivia Murray notes that automakers have largely replaced steel and metal with plastic, and that a huge fire could unleash immeasurable quantities of synthetic chemicals into the atmosphere from the burning plastic. A total capsize would send millions of pounds of debris and spilled motor oil (from the non-EV autos) to the sea floor along with any toxic flame retardants. The impact on sensitive marine life would not be known for years.
Even at $80,000 per vehicle (a low number, perhaps), the insurance loss for the nearly 4,000 vehicles on the “Felicity Ace” alone would be $320 million – and this does not include the loss to end-buyers of the opportunity to drive a vehicle that they may have already purchased.
But massive fires are not the only insurance concern with EVs. The New York Timesrecently reported the sad story of a Rivian owner whose electric pickup truck was involved in what would normally be considered “a minor fender bender.” The owner’s insurance company gladly offered to pay about $1,600 for the repairs, but the certified repair shop produced a bill for $42,000 – about half the cost of the vehicle.
The Times reporter explained: “A key reason is that the accident damaged a sleek panel that extends from the truck’s rear to front roof pillars.” To repair and repaint the vehicle, mechanics had to remove the interior ceiling material (the headliner) and the front windshield. Indeed, the State of New York’s consumer guide for auto insurance lists many models as “difficult-to-insure vehicles” simply because they are electric.
But that’s still better than the news reported in March that insurance companies are having to write off EVs with just a few miles – leading to higher premiums – because of the many EVs for which there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents. EV battery packs are ending up in junkyards in multiple countries.
According to the Agent Support Network of America, the intense impact of a crash can be much more devastating to EVs, increasing the likelihood of a totaled versus repairable car. EVs, according toConsumer Reports, may not withstand an accident as well as traditional gasoline-powered vehicles. EV batteries are vulnerable to damage, and with any indication of a compromised battery, insurance companies will likely declare an EV crash a total loss.
An overlooked insurance cost for EVs involves towing, which many insurance customers (and AAA members) take for granted as an inexpensive add-on to their policies. But EVs can be safely towed only on a flatbed truck with enough load capacity to handle the extra weight of the vehicle. Drivers are warned not to allow anyone to try to tow their EV with its wheels on the ground. Improper towing can damage, even total, the vehicle.
The higher costs for auto insurance only add to the already-higher costs of purchasing an EV, then procuring a personal charging station and spending more money to upgrade home wiring boxes (especially for older homes). The inconvenience of having your nearly new vehicle totaled – and then having to wait perhaps months for a replacement – further adds to the “buyer avoidance” that has frustrated those who demand an immediate end to the traditional gasoline-powered vehicles that most people around the world rely upon.
As automakers continue to lose money on EVs and consumers worldwide continue to prefer the vehicles they have learned to trust over decades, will EV mandates fall by the wayside – or will elites again double down, believing that “resistance is futile”?
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and a frequent writer on public policy issues.
Traditionally, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) were Chemical, Biological, Radiologic and Nuclear (CBRN).
The people of the world don’t want them used on us—they are cheap ways to kill and maim lots of people at once. And so international treaties were created to try to prevent their development (sometimes) and use. First was the Geneva Protocol of 1925, banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in war. The US and many nations signed it, but it took 50 years for the US to ratify it, so we believed we were not bound by it.
The US used chemical weapons subsequently. The US probably used biological weapons in the Korean War, and perhaps in Vietnam, which experienced an odd outbreak of plague during the war. The use of napalm, white phosphorus, agent orange (with its dioxin excipient causing massive numbers of birth defects and other tragedies) and possibly other chemical weapons led to much pushback, especially since we had signed the Geneva Protocol and we were supposed to be a civilized nation.
In 1968, a young Seymour Hersh wrotea book about the US chemical and biological warfare program. In 1969 Congressman Richard D. McCarthy wrote the book “Ultimate Folly” about the US production and use of chemical and biological weapons. Prof. Matthew Meselson’s review of the book noted,
Our operation, “Flying Ranch Hand, ” has sprayed anti-plant chemi-
cals over an area almost the size of the state of Massachusetts, over
10 per cent of it cropland. “Ranch Hand” no longer has much to do with
the official justification of preventing ambush. Rather, it has become
a kind of environmental warfare, devastating vast tracts of forest in
order to facilitate our aerial reconnaisance. Our use of “super tear
gas” (it is also a powerful lung irritant) has escalated from the originally
announced purpose of saving lives in “riot control-like situations” to the
full-scale combat use of gas artillery shells, gas rockets and gas bombs
to enhance the killing power of conventional high explosive and flame
weapons. Fourteen million pounds have been used thus far, enough
to cover all of Vietnam with a field effective concentration. Many
nations, including some of our own allies have expressed the opinion
that this kind of gas warfare violates the Geneva Protocol, a view
shared by M cCarthy.
A Biological Weapons Convention
Amid great pushback over US conduct in Vietnam, in November 1969 President Nixon announced to the world we were going to end the US biowarfare program (but not the chemical program). In February 1970 Nixon announced we would also get rid of our toxin weapons (snake, snail, frog, fish, bacterial and fungal toxins that could be used for assassinations, etc.). Furthermore, Nixon said the US would initiate an international treaty to prevent the use of these weapons ever again. And we did: the 1972 Convention on the prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological (biological) and toxin weapons and on their destruction, or Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) for short, which entered into force in 1975.
The BWC established conferences to be held every 5 years to strengthen the Convention. The expectation was that these would add a method to call for ‘challenge inspections’ to prevent cheating and would add sanctions (punishments) if nations did not comply with the treaty. However, the US has consistently blocked the addition of protocols that would have an impact on cheating. By now, everyone knows that cheating occurs and is likely widespread.
A leak in an anthrax production facility in Sverdlovsk, USSR in 1979 caused the deaths of about 60 people. A clear BWC violation. US experiments with anthrax production during the Clinton administration, detailed by Judith Miller et al. in the 2001 book Germs were also thought by experts to have transgressed the BWC.
In 1997 a Chemical Weapons Convention came into force. It took over 20 years, but all official stocks of chemical weapons have been destroyed by the USA and by Russia and the other 193 member nation signatories.
Pandemics or Biological Warfare?
So here we are. It is 2023 and the WHO Director General has declared 2 pandemics (the current terminology is ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’) over the past 3 and a half years: COVID-19 and monkeypox, which was renamed MPOX to “avoid stigma.” I am sure the monkeys were relieved by the name change.
I have previously (in my substack) described why I believe both SARS-CoV-2 and MPOX were bioengineered pathogens that came from labs. I do not know if they leaked or were deliberately released, but I am leaning toward deliberately released for both of them, based on where they appeared, how they spread, and in particular the official responses to each—neither of which was explained accurately to the public, and yet we never changed course, even when the lack of efficacy with masks, social distancing, EUA drugs and vaccines had become clear.
Vaccines: the Chicken or the Egg?
Both the monkeypox vaccines (there are two, Jynneos and ACAM2000) are known to cause myocarditis, as do the two COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and the Novavax vaccine. The Novavax vaccine was first associated with myocarditis during its clinical trial in Australia. I have written about all this previously on substack.
How frequently does myocarditis occur after these vaccines? If you use elevated cardiac enzymes as your marker, ACAM2000 caused this in one in thirty people receiving it for the first time. If you use other measures like abnormal cardiac MRI or echo, according to the CDC it occurs in one in 175 vaccinees. We do not know the number for Jynneos, but there was some degree of elevation of cardiac enzymes in 10% and 18% of recipients in two small prelicensure studies. My guess for the mRNA vaccines is that they are somewhere in this range. I don’t know about Novavax’ vaccine.
Why would our governments push 5 separate vaccines all known to cause myocarditis on young males who have been at extremely low risk from COVID, and who simply get a few pimples for 1-4 weeks from monkeypox unless they are immunocompromised? It’s an important question. It does not make medical sense. Especially when the vaccine probably does not work — Jynneos didn’t on the monkeys in whom it was tested. And CDC has clammed up about the 2,000 Congolese healthcare workers on whom CDC tested it for efficacy and safety in 2017. (I have detailed this too in earlier substacks.)
The health authorities could have just been ignorant—that could explain the first 8 months of the COVID vaccines’ rollout. But once they figured out, and even announced in August 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent catching COVID or transmitting it, why did they still push it on low risk populations who were clearly at greater risk from a vaccine side effect?
Once this is acknowledged, you realize that maybe the vaccines were not made for the pandemic, and instead the pandemic was made to roll out the vaccines. I’m not sure. But I’m suspicious. And the fact that multiple countries contracted for 10 doses per person makes me even more suspicious—for vaccines whose safety and efficacy had not been established. WHY would you want ten doses apiece? Three maybe. But ten?
Furthermore, you don’t need a vaccine passport aka digital ID aka justification to convert to all-electronic money unless you are giving out regular boosters. Were the vaccines conceived of as the pathway to getting our vaccinations, health records, official documents and financial transactions all online—as Ukraine has already done?
A Pandemic Treaty and Amendments: Brought to you by the same people who mismanaged the past 3 years, to save us from themselves?
The same US government and western governments that imposed draconian measures on their citizens to force us to be vaccinated and take dangerous, expensive, experimental drugs and withheld the good drugs, decided in 2021 we needed a pandemic treaty to prevent and ameliorate future pandemics or biological warfare events… so we would not suffer as we did with the COVID pandemic.
Except COVID was a disaster due to its mismanagement (or should I say dismanagement or malmanagement?) by our nations’ rulers, their bosses and the WHO. Hundreds of millions of our fellow human being were slammed into extreme poverty—by nations following guidelines issued by the WHO, whose main job it was to protect exactly those people. Tens of millions died from starvation as a result. Yet the WHO blathers on about equity, diversity and solidarity—having itself caused the worst (manmade) food crisis in our lifetimes. Have you heard any apology or explanation?
How can anyone with a brain believe the public health officials who messed up COVID so badly want to spare us from another medical and economic disaster, after they imposed the last one on us? And the fact that no governments or health officials will admit their mistakes — especially how they made it nearly impossible to obtain the cheap and safe drugs that effectively treat COVID — why would we let them plan anything, let alone an international treaty that will bind our governments to obey the WHO’s dictates? How thoughtful of these officials to want to spend a king’s ransom of our money to prevent the next government-caused disaster.
We are fed up with secret vaccine contracts, waivers of liability for junk medical products, and spikes in sudden deaths and chronic disabilities. No more secret negotiations. Please shove your pandemic planning where the sun…
The Gain of Function farce
Obviously, the best way to spare us from another pandemic is to immediately stop funding “Gain of Function”* research, and get rid of what has already been funded and created. Let all the nations make big bonfires and burn up their evil creations at the same time, while allowing other nations to inspect their biological facilities and records.
But the WHO in its Bureau Text of the draft Pandemic Treaty has a plan that is the exact opposite of this. In the WHO’s world, which almost all nations’ rulers have bought into, all the governments will share any and all viruses and bacteria they come up with that have “pandemic potential” — share them with all the other governments. They are supposed to sequence them and then put the sequence online. No kidding. Then the WHO and all the Faucis of the world would gain access to every Frankenstein virus, at once. Presumably a bunch of hackers would also gain access to the sequences. Does this make you feel more secure?
The WHO Treaty draft incentivizes Gain Of Function research
At least this plan makes clear whose side everyone is on. Fauci, Tedros and their ilk at the WHO, and those managing biodefense and biomedical research for nation states are on one side, the side that gains access to even more biological weapons, and the rest of us are on the other, at their mercy.
This crazy plan used to be called proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—and it is almost certainly illegal. But it is their plan. Governments will all share the weapons. And they are to put a lot more money into biolabs, and especially into genomic sequencing. Presumably so they can make even better weapons, and maybe they will even get around to cures or antidotes. But who will get the cures? It wasn’t us during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here is where you can read the current Treaty draft:
What else is in the Treaty? Gain of Function research (designed to make pathogens more transmissible or more virulent) is explicitly incentivized. Administrative hurdles to it must be minimized, while unintended consequences (pandemics) should be prevented: (page 14)
Vaccines will be rolled out speedily under future testing protocols
Just in case you thought the COVID vaccines took too long to be rolled out, the WHO has plans to shorten testing. There will be new clinical trial platforms. Nations must increase clinical trial capacity. (Might that mean mandating people to be human subjects in out-of-the-way Africa, for example?). And there will be new “mechanisms to facilitate the rapid interpretation of data from clinical trials” as well as “strategies for managing liability risks.” (page 14)
Manufacturer and government liability will be “managed”
Nations are supposed to use existing models as a reference for compensation of injuries due to pandemic vaccines. Of course, most countries do not have vaccine injury compensation schemes, and when they do the benefits are usually minimal. The US government scheme for injuries due to COVID pandemic products (the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program or CICP) has compensated 4 (yes, FOUR) people as of July 1, 2023. All pandemic EUA drugs and vaccines fall into this program (monoclonal antibodies, early remdesivir, paxlovid, molnupiravir, some ventilators and all COVID vaccines). There have been nearly 12,000 claims made to the CICP related to a COVID product. Slightly over 1,000 have been adjudicated while 10,886 are pending review. Twenty claims were deemed eligible and are waiting to see whether they can collect. A total of 983 people, or 98% had their claims denied. About 90% of all claimants filed for a vaccine injury.
The treaty draft also demands weakening the regulation of medical drugs and vaccines during emergencies under the rubric of Regulatory Strengthening. As announced in the UK last week, where ‘trusted partner’ approvals will be used to speed licensure, this is moving toward a single regulatory agency approval or authorization, to be immediately adopted by other nations (p 25)
Why would any developed country sign up for this? Is this what we the people want?
The WHO did sweeten the pot, however. Remember how the need to respect “human rights, dignity, and freedom of persons” was removed in the WHO’s draft IHR Amendments that are being negotiated? Well, WHO apparently did not like us pointing that out—so the old human rights language that was removed from the International Health Regulations draft has been added to this newest version of the Treaty.
There is much more I could say about problems with this draft of the Treaty, but I will save them for another time.
Please share this brief analysis of the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. We must EXIT the WHO.
*Gain of Function is a euphemism for biological warfare reserch or germ warfare research. It is so foolhardy that it was banned in the US for SARS coronaviruses and avian flu viruses from 2014-2017 due to public outcry by scientists. Then in 2017 Fauci and Collins lifted the moratorium, claimed they were putting safeguards in place, which were just a handwaving exercise, and off we were to the races: creating new bioweapons. Fauci and Collins had the nerve to publish their opinion that the risk was ‘worth it.’
The annual Paul Homewood review of the BBC’s climate howlers is always an enjoyable read, even for those keen students who follow his investigative work during the year. But with the consensus starting to crumble for the insane Net Zero collectivist project, this latest instalment of Tall Climate Tales from the BBC seems to have attracted a wider audience. Talk TV and the Daily Express have both given extensive coverage to the latest set of BBC bloopers.
How we laughed when Julia Hartley-Brewer read from the list on her TalkTV morning show. Such as the report from the Norfolk village of Happisburgh where “extreme weather linked to climate change” has eroded the soft sand cliff rock. No mention of the finding of the British Geological Society that it is likely the Norfolk cliffs have been “eroding at the present rate for about the last 5,000 years”.
Or the report that the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season was the third most active on record. Nothing of the sort, of course, with Homewood observing that since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count of hurricanes. There was also an evidence-free claim in September 2022 on the BBC Verify that hurricanes were getting more powerful. The U.S. weather service NOAA states in its latest review that “there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity”.
Your own correspondent’s personal favourite made the list with news that bee-eaters had turned up in Norfolk to the delight of local twitchers. But the BBC was worried, reporting that rare ‘rainbow birds’ trying to breed in the UK was a worrying sign of how our climate is changing. It was an “unmissable sign”, no less, that the climate emergency had reached our shores. As any half-knowledgeable bird watcher could have told the BBC, bee-eaters have frequently visited England in the past. One archive alone lists 80 sightings between 1793 and 1957. Then there’s a story about trees in British cities that a study said were at risk of drought due to climate change. There is no evidence that the areas were getting drier, nor is there any evidence they will. “Once again, the BBC is uncritically presenting a controversial study as factual,” commented Homewood.
It is the common practice of the BBC to reproduce the most extreme climate claims without challenge, without providing supporting data, and without reporting on the views of scientists who disagree, writes Homewood. In fact, the practice continues almost daily. In March, the BBC said that Antarctica ocean currents were heading for collapse – “a new report warns”. The article proceeded to go into full Day After Tomorrow mode with “previous research” suggesting a slowdown in the North Atlantic current causing Europe to become colder.
Modern climate science/activism is awash with clickbait predictions looking for a suitable home in useful idiot mainstream media. As recent research from the Clintel Foundation revealed, about 42% of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate impact statements are based on a computer model that assumes temperatures will climb by 5°C in less than 80 years. Even the IPCC itself admits this is of “low likelihood”. About half the published climate papers are thought to use this 5°C input, leading to a festival of misinformation for gainfully employed journalists content to append “scientists say” to fanciful copy. The latest giant of modern science to rain on this parade is last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics Dr John Clauser, who calls the climate emergency narrative a “dangerous corruption” of science that threatens the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”, he observes.
The state broadcaster has followed this path of eco-extremism for over 20 years, providing covering fire for politicians to promote a Net Zero project. As audiences continue to decline, the BBC increasingly operates as a club of eco-fanatics intent on signally their virtue to fellow members of the cult. It fails to cover the scientific process at almost every level, discounting the views of any scientists that don’t adhere to the party political line. As with Covid, there seems to be an irrational belief in the output of computer models. Such belief leads to a preposterous acceptance that ‘attribution‘ models can link individual weather events to supposed human involvement.
As we have noted, large areas of science are now closed for debate for fear that any competing views will cast doubt on the unproven but ‘settled’ hypothesis that humans cause all or most climate change. Natural variation in the climate is largely ignored, while stories of once fanatical interest suddenly disappear from the carefully constructed catastrophe playlist. These include polar bears – more than you can shake a stick at these days – the recovery in Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and spectacular coral growth on the Great Barrier Reef.
In Homewood’s view, the BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues such as energy “has long been of serious and widespread concern”. In his latest review, Homewood notes that all of the BBC’s factual errors could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. And he asks, who is editing all this “fake reporting”? Where are the highly paid executives who let all this continue? “It is apparent that nothing has changed in the last 12 months,” he says.
One more for the road – another personal favourite of mine. It was dry in February this year, despite an average amount of rainfall over the winter. Banging the drum for drought, the BBC produced a picture of an empty reservoir labelled “water levels in rivers, reservoirs and groundwater levels were abnormally low in February”. Alas, the picture showed trees in full leaf, which wasn’t surprising since it was taken in September 2021, a time when reservoirs can be seasonably low. “There’s nothing like a fake image to fool the public,” comments Homewood.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: Paul Homewood has produced a summary of his latest report about the BBC’s climate howlers for the Express.
America’s 9th/10th March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo was the single most destructive air raid in military history, with over 100,000 murdered and more than a million made homeless. Along with the Americans’ carpet bombing campaigns in North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it remains one of the most egregious war crimes in human history, not least because Imperial Japan was already a beaten docket.
Even as the last of their kamikaze fighters prepared to repel the Americans from the Japanese mainland in those first days of August 1945, Japan’s government was frantically searching for a way out of the morass. Knowing that the Soviet Red Army would soon descend on Manchuria, they knew that time was of the essence if the Americans were to be stopped raping and slaughtering yet more defenceless Japanese women and children, like they had previously done in Guam, Saipan and Okinawa.
Though the Japanese were at a loss to understand why the Americans would not accept their surrender, that answer came shortly afterwards in the form of two mushroom clouds, one in Hiroshima and the other in Nagasaki, the centre of Catholicism in The Land of the Rising Sun. Those two war crimes were accompanied by the Red Army cutting a swathe through the remnants of Japan’s once-mighty but now much-depleted Kmantung Army.
With McArthur gloating on the USS Missouri that Japan was defeated, the Yanks colonised not only Japan and the Pacific Basin, but also South Korea, the Philippines and Taiwan before setting their sights on ridding South East Asia of the Dutch and especially the French. The Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bomb war crimes were done to tell the Soviets that all of Asia was now under the Yankee jackboot and that, in contravention to the Yalta and other treaties, only the Yanks would rule there.
America’s Pacific War was a racist war of annihilation both before and after Japan’s surrender. The American and British media — the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Time, and Life being among the more prominent — painted their Japanese foes out as subhumans, as monkey men fit only for extermination. Buoyed by such propaganda, the United States Marine Corps (USMC) went on monkey hunts; in the main, they took no prisoners. Even Percival’s craven capitulation in Singapore was depicted as being the work of armed monkeys, not of a hopelessly outnumbered foe that deserved respect for the most pragmatic of self-survival reasons.
The Marines, America’s greatest generation mutilated, as a matter of course, Japanese war dead for souvenirs, they attacked and sank hospital ships, they shot, tortured and executed their prisoners. They harvested gold teeth from both the living and the dead, they urinated both on their prisoners and on the corpses of those they had killed. In their idle moments, they carved the bones of their Japanese prisoners into little forget-me-nots and sent them home to their loved ones. President Roosevelt got a letter opener made from the bones of a captured Japanese officer but returned it to the sender — if not the rightful owner — for his own reasons.
Rationality in the Pacific was so rare during WWII that, ironically, it required as a mouthpiece none other than prominent racist Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr. to blow the whistle on the barbarities America’s greatest generation were routinely committing. Repelled by what he saw and heard of U.S. treatment of the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, the aviator spoke out. His sentiments are summed up in the following journal entry: “It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Jap prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs themselves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be civilized.” When Lindbergh left the Pacific and arrived at customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any Japanese bones in his baggage. It was, by then, a routine question.
Eugene B. Sledge, author of With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, wrote of his comrades harvesting gold teeth from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed a Marine officer, one of America’s greatest generation of Goodfellas, stand over a Japanese corpse and urinate into its mouth.
Perhaps Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”
Churchill and MacArthur ordered their troops to summarily execute any Japanese combatants who tried to surrender. They spread rumours of the Kyoto ear mound, where the Japanese, cannibal fashion, supposedly stored 40,000 pickled ears and noses that they collected following the 1598 Japanese invasion of Korea. Kyoto, for some perverse humanitarian desire on behalf of America’s leaders to preserve Japan’s imperial culture, her mounds of Korean noses included, was spared the blanket bombing Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka suffered. Kyoto was, unlike the good, human people of Nagasaki and Tokyo, of cultural importance and both its architecture and its ear mound had therefore to be preservedi. Meanwhile, the marines made their own inhumane mound. They spliced off the ears and noses of their captives and engaged in wide scale scalping as well. In Okinawa, America’s Greatest Generation also proved themselves to be the world’s most accomplished serial rapists.
Although John Pilger’s excellent documentaries tell us how the 4th Psychological Operations Group and the 101st Airborne (Tiger Force) made their own ear necklaces in Vietnam where they routinely beheaded Vietnamese babies to teach the locals who ruled the roost, Pilger, for a good half century now, has been a bad man, as he doesn’t sing from the NATO hymn sheet.
Pilger looks for shades of grey. He incorporates into his analysis the psychological insights of sociopaths like Edward Bernays, who taught the Yanks how to sell their self-serving wars more effectively than Goebbels or his pale Japanese imitators ever could. As he also always makes sure to mention the collateral damage of Yankee war crimes in places like Falluja, Vietnam, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not least because civilians now form far in excess of 90% of all American kills, and as he seldom goes easy on the media’s hypocrites he is, to repeat, a bad man.
To see how bad, just read this FBI inspired EU notice lambasting Russia Today and Sputnik because they “gravely distorted and manipulated facts and have repeatedly and consistently targeted European political parties, especially during election periods, as well as civil society, asylum seekers, Russian ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and the functioning of democratic institutions in the [European] Union and its Member States”. Because such outlets would be as harmful to us as would have been regarding the “Simian” Japanese or Vietnamese as humans when the USMC was exterminating them, our fragile minds must be protected by the Google search engines of today’s Edward Bernays, who are here to tell us that only unelected war-mongers like Ursula von der Leyen or her morally challenged minions can spout the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Because John Pilger is now in his 80s, he is given a pass, as long as he does not stray into the rump Zelensky Reich or into rebel-held Syria, where he would be quickly dispatched. But woe betide anyone younger like Gonzalo Lira, Julian Assange, Gary Webb or Alina Lipp who might try to divine the truth about the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, MI6 agent Zelensky, the Bidens, Obamas, Clintons or any of America’s other organised crime families for, in their regurgitating of Russian propaganda, they are playing Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Russian Roulette and that, as countless corpses attest, never ends well for NATO’ beleaguered truth tellers.
Oppenheimer is part of the cultural zeitgeist at the moment and is receiving a lot of attention from the establishment media hype machine. But what is being left out of Hollywood’s latest piece of historical revisionism? Joining James today is Patrick MacFarlane of VitalDissent.com, whose new documentary, The Truth About Oppenheimer, purports to answer that question.
In 2013 The Guardian wrote an article saying that the Arctic would be ice-free in two years. Does anybody remember the ice-free Arctic in 2015?
Professor Peter Wadhams was heralding a methane catastrophe. I guess after such a terrible prediction, Wadhams retired? Of course not, he is still a professor at Cambridge University and he’s still writing books and recording videos in which he tries to terrify everyone about the impending ice free Arctic (in another two years of course).
In 2018, Jeff McMahon wrote an article in Forbes claiming that “We have five years to save ourselves from climate change, Harvard Scientist Says”.
The Harvard scientist was a chap called James G. Anderson. He said “the chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero”. Don’t tell Anderson but it’s 2023 and there is plenty of ice left in the Arctic.
When the article was written, Anderson prosecuted a moral argument that implicates university administrators who refuse to divest from fossil fuels, journalists who fail to fact-check false statements made by political candidates and executives of fossil fuel companies who continue to pursue activities that are exacerbating climate change. “I don’t understand how these people sit down to dinner with their kids because they’re not stupid people”, he said.
I don’t understand how end-of-the-world doomsters such as Anderson sleep at night. Climate anxiety is a major mental illness in the young, all because of failed predictions such as his. I know lecturers at my local university who have to give climate counselling before and after each lecture, just in case something they talk about triggers an anxiety attack in their students – bonkers.
Furthermore, young adults are deciding not to have children because of climate change and instead gluing themselves to runways, begging their governments to impoverish them further. The only global catastrophe there will be is when there aren’t enough humans being born.
I guess Anderson must have retired now, after so many failed predictions. Once again, of course not, he is still a professor at Harvard. And the Forbes reporter, Jeff McMahon, is still at Forbes, still telling us the world is going to end.
These people expect us to take them seriously and listen to their dire warnings. ‘But but this time I am 100% definitely right, my models were not adjusted correctly last time, you need to listen to me now’. It seems that if you are part of the climate death cult, you can make as many false predictions as you like and you still keep your job. Just as long as you keep making scary predictions to control the masses.
Americans hear about a new “information war” strategy, formally known as wartime propaganda. Most don’t realize that it is a disinformation war, and they are the target. Most Americans don’t understand that the corporate media does not exist to inform them, but to mislead them. The US military has formed huge propaganda units, with each service training thousands of military personnel and paying contractors to influence social media. They post information on-line and make comments as regular anonymous folks to support the official government narrative. They demean truth tellers, target them with complaints that they violate comment guidelines, and pressure websites to censor comments.
Last week was the 70th anniversary of the armistice that ended the fighting between North and South Korea. In a low-key commemoration, the White House Press Office issued a statement from President Biden calling to “renew our commitment to the democratic values for which [American troops] served and sacrificed.” In reality, almost 40,000 American soldiers died pointlessly in that conflict to buttress the principle that presidents could deceive the nation and intervene wherever they damn well chose.
If politicians and policymakers were honest and prudent, the Korean War would have vaccinated America against the folly and evil of foreign intervention. Instead, the war was retroactively redefined. As Barack Obama declared in 2013, “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory.”
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army across the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War Two. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, founder of antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military: “From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do — where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after Gen. Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war. By the time the U.S. forces drove the North Korean army back across the border between the two Koreas, roughly 5,000 American troops had been killed. The Pentagon had plenty of warning that the Chinese would intervene if the U.S. Army pushed too close to the Chinese border. But the euphoria that erupted after Inchon blew away all common sense and drowned out the military voices who warned of a catastrophe. One U.S. Army colonel responded to a briefing on the Korea situation in Tokyo in 1950 by storming out and declaring, “They’re living in a goddamn dream land.”
The Chinese military attack resulted in the longest retreat in the history of America’s armed forces — a debacle that was valorized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood movie, Heartbreak Ridge. By 1951, the Korean War had become intensely unpopular in the United States — more unpopular than the Vietnam War ever was. Truman insisted on mislabeling the war as a “police action,” but it destroyed his presidency regardless. When the ceasefire was signed in 1953, the borders were nearly the same as at the start of the war.
While the Friends of Leviathan paint Truman as the epitome of an honest politician, he was as demagogic on Korea as Lyndon Johnson was on Vietnam. When Republicans criticized the Korean war as useless, President Harry Truman condemned “reckless and irresponsible Republican extremists” and “the false version of history that has been copyrighted by the extremists in the Republican Party.”
Perhaps the biggest disaster of the Korean war was that intellectuals and foreign-policy experts succeeded in redefining the Korean conflict as an American victory. As Georgetown University professor Derek Leebaert noted in his book Magic and Mayhem, “What had been regarded as a bloody stalemate transformed itself in Washington’s eyes; ten years later it had become an example of a successful limited war. Already by the mid-1950s, elite opinion began to surmise that it had been a victory.” Leebaert explained, “Images of victory in Korea shaped the decision to escalate in 1964-65 helping to explain why America pursued a war of attrition.” Even worse, the notion that “‘America has never lost a war’ remained part of the national myth, and the notion of having ‘prevailed’ in Korea became a justification for going big in Vietnam.” But as Leebaert noted, “in Vietnam, [the U.S. Army] had forgotten everything it had learned about counterinsurgency in Korea as well.”
On last year’s armistice anniversary, President Biden proclaimed, “During the Korean War, nearly 1.8 million Americans answered the call to serve and defend the freedoms and universal values that the people of South Korea enjoy today.” The “call to serve” mostly came from summons from draft boards for military conscription. American media commemorations of the Korean War have almost entirely ignored perhaps the war’s most important lesson: the U.S. government has almost unlimited sway to hide its own war crimes.
During the war, Americans were deluged with official pronouncements that the U.S. military was taking all possible steps to protect innocent Korean civilians. Because the evils of communism were self-evident, few questions arose about how the United States was thwarting Red aggression. When a U.S. Senate subcommittee appointed in 1953 by Sen. Joseph McCarthy investigated Korean War atrocities, the committee explicitly declared that “war crimes were defined as those acts committed by enemy nations.” This same standard prevailed in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and practically any other place where the U.S. militarily intervened.
In 1999, forty-six years after the cease fire in Korea, the Associated Press exposed a 1950 massacre of Korean refugees at No Gun Ri. U.S. troops drove Koreans out of their village and forced them to remain on a railroad embankment. Beginning on July 25, 1950, the refugees were strafed by U.S. planes and machine guns over the following three days. Hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were killed. The 1999 AP story was widely denounced by American politicians and some media outlets as a slander on American troops.
The Pentagon promised an exhaustive investigation. In January 2001, the Pentagon released a 300-page report purporting to prove that the No Gun Ri killings were merely “an unfortunate tragedy” caused by trigger-happy soldiers frightened by approaching refugees.
President Bill Clinton announced his “regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri.” In an interview, he was asked why he used “regret” instead of “apology.” He declared, “I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high-enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible.” Clinton specified that there was no evidence of “wrongdoing high-enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the Government was responsible.”
But the atrocities against civilians had been common knowledge among U.S. troops 50 years earlier. As Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza noted in their 2001 book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri, the Pentagon in 1952 “withdrew official endorsement from RKO’s One Minute to Zero, a Korean War movie in which an Army colonel played by actor Robert Mitchum orders artillery fire on a column of refugees.” The Pentagon fretted that “this sequence could be utilized for anti-American propaganda” and banned the film from being shown on U.S. military bases.
In 2005, Sahr Conway-Lanz, a Harvard University doctoral student, discovered a letter in the National Archives from the U.S. ambassador to Korea, John Muccio, sent to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the day the No Gun Ri massacre commenced. Muccio summarized a new policy from a meeting between U.S. military and South Korean officials: “If refugees do appear from north of U.S. lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot.” The new policy was radioed to Army units around Korea on the morning the No Gun Ri massacre began. The U.S. military feared that North Korean troops might be hiding amidst the refugees. The Pentagon initially claimed that its investigators had never seen Muccio’s letter. Louis Caldera, who was Army secretary in 2001, declared, “Millions of pages of files were reviewed and it is certainly possible they may have simply missed it.” But Muccio’s letter was in the specific research file used for the official exoneration report.
Conway-Lanz’s 2006 book Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II quoted an official U.S. Navy history of the first six months of the Korean War stating that the policy of strafing civilians was “wholly defensible.” An official Army history noted, “Eventually, it was decided to shoot anyone who moved at night.” A report for the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge justified attacking civilians because the Army insisted that “groups of more than eight to ten people were to be considered troops, and were to be attacked.”
In 2007, the Army recited its original denial: “No policy purporting to authorize soldiers to shoot refugees was ever promulgated to soldiers in the field.” But the Associated Press exposed more dirt from the U.S. archives: “More than a dozen documents — in which high-ranking U.S. officers tell troops that refugees are ‘fair game,’ for example, and order them to ‘shoot all refugees coming across river’ — were found by the AP in the investigators’ own archived files after the 2001 inquiry. None of those documents was disclosed in the Army’s 300-page public report.” A former Air Force pilot told investigators that his plane and three others strafed refugees at the same time of the No Gun Ri massacre; the official report claimed that “all pilots interviewed … knew nothing about such orders.” Evidence also surfaced of massacres like No Gun Ri. On September 1, 1950, the destroyer USS DeHaven, at the Army’s insistence, “fired on a seaside refugee encampment at Pohang, South Korea. Survivors say 100 to 200 people were killed.”
Slaughtering civilians en masse became routine procedure after the Chinese army intervened in the Korean war in late 1950. MacArthur spoke of turning North Korean-held territory into a “desert.” The U.S. military eventually “expanded its definition of a military target to any structure that could shelter enemy troops or supplies.” Gen. Curtis LeMay summarized the achievements: “We burned down every town in North Korea … and some in South Korea, too.” Yet, despite the hit-anything-still-standing bombing policy, most Americans believed the U.S. military acted humanely in Korea. Historian Conway-Lanz noted: “The issue of intention, and not the question of whose weapons literally killed civilians or destroyed their homes, became the morally significant one for many Americans.”
A million civilians may have been killed during the war. A South Korean government Truth and Reconciliation Commission uncovered many previously unreported atrocities and concluded that “American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 separate occasions during the Korean War,” the New York Times reported.
Truth delayed is truth defused. The Pentagon strategy on Korean War atrocities succeeded because it left facts to the historians, not the policymakers. The truth about No Gun Ri finally slipped out — ten presidencies later. Even more damaging, the Rules of Engagement for killing Korean civilians were covered up for four more U.S. wars. If U.S. policy for slaying Korean refugees (or anyone who “moved at night”) had been exposed during that war, it might have curtailed similar killings in Vietnam (many of which were not revealed until decades after the war).
Former congressman and decorated Korean War veteran Pete McCloskey (R-Calif.) warned, “The government will always lie about embarrassing matters.” The same shenanigans permeate other U.S. wars. The secrecy and deceit surrounding U.S. warring has had catastrophic consequences in this century. The Bush administration exploited the 9/11 attacks to justify attacking Iraq in 2003, and it was not until 2016 that the U.S. government revealed documents exposing the Saudi government’s role in financing the 9/11 hijackers (15 of 19 whom were Saudi citizens). The Pentagon covered up the vast majority of U.S. killings of Iraqi civilians until Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks exposed them in 2010.
When politicians or generals appear itching to pull the United States into another foreign war, remember that truth is routinely the first casualty. Governments that recklessly slay masses of civilians won’t honestly investigate and announce their guilt to the world. Self-government is a mirage if Americans do not receive enough information to judge killings committed in their name.
A video of Klaus Schwab’s daughter, Nicole, giving a talk in June of 2020, is getting a lot of attention. Nicole is co-director of the Platform to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions & 1t.org, at the World Economic Forum, Switzerland.
In the video, she can be seen and heard saying the following:
This [Covid] crisis has shown us how, first of all, things can shift very rapidly when we put our minds to it and when we feel the immediate emergency to our livelihood. And second, that clearly the system—I mean you mentioned it earlier—that we had before is clearly not sustainable. So, I see it as a tremendous opportunity to really have this Great Reset, and to use this, you know, huge flows of money, to use the increased levers that policymakers have today in a way that was not possible before to create a change that is not incremental, but that we can look back and we can say that this is the moment where we really started to position, you know, nature at the core of the economy.
Note the elements of her assertion:
1). The Covid Crisis and response provide a model response for the Climate Crisis.
2). Both crises are emergencies that provide tremendous opportunities for the Great Reset agenda.
3). The huge flows of money resulting from the Covid emergency may flow again in response to the Climate emergency.
4). Both emergencies produce increased levers that policymakers can use to force immediate and dramatic change instead of the sort of incremental change that is less disruptive to the economic lives of ordinary citizens.
In other words, with the “tremendous opportunity” of the Covid Crisis now a thing of the past, it appears that the Olympians at Davos and their well-positioned friends are making arrangements for the Climate Crisis and the huge flows of money that will go to them for their “solutions” to the crisis.
Get ready for a coming propaganda blitz, an Emergency Declaration, and huge money flows from public coffers for Emergency Countermeasures to deal with the Climate Emergency.
If you are in the business of providing emergency countermeasures to the climate crisis, you will do well. If not, you will probably be tormented and burdened with onerous and arbitrary restrictions that do nothing for the environment but that make your life more expensive and difficult.
Previously I argued whether Saudi Arabia’s repeated involvements in U.S. interventions and wars stem from free national will or in response to a specific condition. For starters, in Saudi Arabia there is no national will. In Saudi Arabia, the national will is the will of the Al Saud clan. Still, when a major Arab state allies itself with a superpower that committed unspeakable crimes against humanity in almost every Arab country, then something is wrong. This fact alone should compel us to examine the U.S.-Saudi relation for one exceptional reason. As a result of the U.S.-Saudi wars, hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia have lost their lives. Millions became displaced in their own homelands. And millions more rendered refugees.
Attributing the Saudi policies to the bonds of “partnership” with the U.S. is frivolous. There are no bonds between these two thugs except those of business, military deals, secret plots, and wars. Proving this point, bonds such as these have no space for the American and Saudi peoples to share significant cultural or societal exchanges. If partnership is not the reason for the Saudi contribution to the U.S. strategy of empire and imperialism, then another reason must exist.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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