America First Legal (AFL) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) related to contracts and grants to third parties to censor COVID-19 “misinformation” and criticism of the Biden administration’s response to the pandemic.
The HHS does not have the authority to regulate content or censor misinformation of any kind. However, it has been using grants and contracts to get third parties to do so on its behalf.
It has awarded millions of dollars in grants to fight what it deems “misinformation.” For instance, last October, it awarded a $1.1 million grant to the University of Texas to “better understand patterns of misinformation in social media” with the study focusing on misinformation related to Covid testing and vaccines.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is under the HHS, posted a grant opportunity for “Developing a Public Health Tool to Predict the Virality of Vaccine Misinformation Narratives.” The tool would be used to “predict misinformation trends.”
The purpose of AFL’s FOIA request is to expose the HHS for using federal funds to pay third parties to illegally censor American’s free speech and prevent open scientific debate.
“The absurdity of this Administration’s actions must not be forgotten,” said AFL vice president Gene Hamilton. “It engaged and is likely still engaging in a concerted campaign to identify and censor speech with which it disagrees.
“To silence speech it then labeled as misinformation, and to advance positions that are now known to be demonstrably false, it used private actors and taxpayer dollars to do what it could not on its own–all for the benefit of other private actors and the aggrandizement of government power. We will uncover, expose, and hold accountable these abuses of governmental power.”
Are mRNA vaccines being developed for livestock? You bet they are! So what does this mean? As usual, it depends who you ask. Find out the bad, the worse and the putrid of third generation vaccines and the future of food in this week’s edition of Questions For Corbett.
As glasses help people focus their eyes to see,” medical experts from the American Academy of Pediatrics rule, “medications help children with ADHD focus their thoughts better and ignore distractions.” In their view, as well as in the view of multiple other expert consortiums, the most appropriate way to treat the “lifelong impairing condition” of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is by taking stimulant medications on a daily basis.
Although stimulants, as suggested by their name, are frequently abused for stimulating (potentially addictive) sensations of high energy, euphoria, and potency, they are often compared to harmless medical aids, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches. Numerous studies, we are told, support their efficacy and safety, and evidence-based medicine dictates that these substances will be administered to children with ADHD as the first-line treatment.
There is only one, huge problem. ADHD is currently the most common childhood disorder in Western-oriented countries. Its ever-increasing rates are now skyrocketing. The documented prevalence of ADHD is not about 3 percent, as it used to be when the disorder was first introduced in 1980. In 2014, a survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that over 20 percent of 12-year-old boys were diagnosed with this “lifelong condition.”
In 2020, thousands of real-life medical records from Israel suggested that over 20 percent of all children and young adults (5-20 years) received a formal diagnosis of ADHD. This means that hundreds of millions of children around the world are eligible for this diagnosis and that most of them (about 80 percent), including very young, preschool children, will be prescribed with its treatment-of-choice, as if regular use of stimulants is indeed comparable to eyeglasses.
Stimulant brands for ADHD, such as Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, or Vyvanse rank at the top of the best-selling lists of medications for children. Indeed, the American dream may play a significant role in the proliferation of such cognitive enhancers in the US, but the rush for the magic pills crosses national borders. In fact, the ‘semi-final’ countries that are currently ‘winning’ the Ritalin Olympics, according to the International Narcotics Control Board, are: Iceland, Israel, Canada, and Holland.
But what if the scientific consensus is wrong? What if the medications for ADHD are not as effective and as safe as we are told? After all, stimulant medications are powerful psychoactive substances, which are prohibited to use without medical prescriptions, under federal drug laws. Like all psychoactive drugs, which affect the central nervous system, stimulant medications are designed to penetrate the blood-brain barrier – the specialized tissue and blood vessels that normally prevent harmful substances from reaching the brain. In this way, stimulant medications are essentially impacting the biochemical processes of our brain – that miraculous organ that makes us who we are.
In my new book ADHD is Not an Illness and Ritalin is Not a Cure: A Comprehensive Rebuttal of the (alleged) Scientific Consensus, I do my best to answer these disturbing questions. The first part of the book offers a step-by-step refutation of the notion that ADHD meets the required criteria for a neuropsychiatric condition. In fact, a close reading of the available science suggests that the vast majority of the diagnoses simply reflects common and pretty normative childhood behaviors that underwent unjustified medicalization. The second part of the book uncovers the massive evidence that exists against the efficacy and safety of the treatment-of-choice for ADHD.
Hundreds of studies, published in well-recognized, mainstream academic journals tell a totally different story than the one told by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Stimulant medications are nothing like eyeglasses. Of course, it is impossible to summarize an entire book here, but I do wish to outline three principal failures in the common comparison between stimulant medications and eyeglasses – or any other daily used, harmless medical aids for that matter, such as walking crutches.
Even without considering the specific criticism about the validity of ADHD, the very comparison between organic/bodily conditions, which are typically measured through objective tools, to amorphic psychiatric labels that rely exclusively on subjective assessments of behaviors, is inappropriate and misleading. The ‘brain deficit’ and the ‘chemical imbalance’ that have been associated with ADHD are unproven myths. Stimulants do not ‘fix’ biochemical imbalances and they can easily be used also by non-ADHD individuals to enhance cognitive performance (even though these individuals are not assumed to have this alleged ‘brain deficit’).
As opposed to visual impairments that restrict the individual’s everyday functioning, regardless of school demands, the primary impairment in ADHD is manifested in school settings. Eyeglasses and walking crutches are needed outside of school premises as well, even during weekends and holidays. ADHD, in contrast, seems to be a ‘seasonal disease’ (despite endless efforts to exaggerate and extend its negative outcomes to non-school-related settings). When schools are closed, its daily medical management is often no longer needed. This simple real-life fact is even acknowledged, to some extent, in the official Ritalin leaflet, which states that: “During the course of treatment for ADHD, the doctor may tell you to stop taking Ritalin for certain periods of time (e.g., every weekend or school vacations) to see if it is still necessary to take it.” Incidentally, these ‘treatment breaks,’ according to the leaflet, “also help prevent a slow-down in growth that sometimes occurs when children take this medicine for a long time” – a noteworthy point that brings us to the third, and most important error in the comparison between stimulant medications and other daily, physical/medical aids, such as eyeglasses.
The benign examples used by proponents of the medications, such as eyeglasses or walking crutches are not regulated by the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. Typically, these medical aids do not cause serious physiological and emotional adverse reactions. If stimulant drugs are as safe as experts say, like “Tylenol and aspirin,” why do we insist that they will be medically prescribed by licensed physicians? This question has philosophical and societal implications. After all, if the medications are safe and helpful to various populations (i.e., not only to people with ADHD), what is the moral justification to prohibit their usage among non-diagnosed individuals? This is unjustified discrimination. Moreover, why are we condemning (non-diagnosed) students who use these medications to improve their grades? If regular use of Ritalin and alike is so safe, why not place them on the pharmacies’ shelves, next to the non-prescription pain relievers, moisturizers, and chocolate energy bars?
The last rhetorical questions illustrate how far the eyeglasses metaphor is from the clinical reality and the scientific evidence regarding ADHD and stimulant medications. ADHD medications are not fundamentally different from other psychoactive drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier. At first usage, they may trigger intense sensations of potency or euphoria, but when used for prolonged periods, their desired effects subside, and their unwanted negative effects start to emerge. The brain recognizes these psychoactive substances as neurotoxins and activates a compensatory mechanism in an attempt to fight the harmful invaders. It is this activation of the compensatory mechanism, not the ADHD, that might cause the biochemical imbalance in the brain.
I realize that these last sentences may sound provocative. I therefore encourage readers not to ‘trust’ this short article blindly, but to dive with me into the deep (and sometimes dirty) water of the scientific literature. Despite the academic orientation of my book, I made sure to make the science available to most readers through plain language, illustrative stories, and real-life examples. And even if you disagree with some of its content, I am positive that, by the end of the reading, you will ask yourself, like I did: How is it possible that such critical information about ADHD and stimulant medications is being hidden from us? Does it really make sense to compare these drugs to eyeglasses? Are we medicating millions of ADHD children without proper scientific justification?
The agenda for the subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), focused on government policy pertaining to COVID-19, including vaccine mandates and other public health guidance.
In his opening remarks, Wenstrup said the subcommittee will examine the origins of COVID-19, policies surrounding gain-of-function, research, the impacts of lockdowns and other government policies, including school closures, and “vaccine and therapeutic development and the subsequent mandates.”
“We are here to deliver an after-action review of the past three years,” said Wenstrup. “To learn from the past, not just what went wrong, but what was done right, and to prepare for the future. This is work that must be done, must be done thoroughly, and must be done with reverence with an eye toward the truth and based on facts.”
In introducing the experts, Wenstrup said they can “help us chart a path forward; to help us understand what policies went wrong and how we, as a country, can improve.”
Wenstrup cited examples like the vaccine mandates imposed by the Biden administration, ignoring natural immunity, the harm caused to elders forced into nursing homes, and the consequences of stopping in-person learning and implementing remote work, particularly in the public sector.
“The American people deserve to know and understand how and why these impactful decisions were made,” said Wenstrup. “Did we create unnecessary fear in some, and dangerous ambivalence in others?”
“At the end of this process, our goal is to produce a product, hopefully bipartisan, based on knowledge and lessons learned,” he stated.
Ranking member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) focused on American lives lost during the pandemic, stating that it “was real and not a hoax” and “laid bare vulnerabilities and inequities in our public health infrastructure and our economy.”
“We need to understand the lessons, learn all the barriers of misinformation, disinformation, the politicization of this and avoid those for the fake of our nation, in order to save more lives,” Ruiz said.
Most of the witnesses shared critical words about the overall public health response to COVID-19, which Kulldorff described as “the worst public health mistakes in history.”
Makary said “public health officials have made many tragic mistakes during the pandemic,” including:
“Ignoring natural immunity, dismissing the lab leak as a conspiracy, closing schools, masking toddlers … pushing boosters for young people, bypassing FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] expert panel customary votes that we’ve been using for decades, telling people to wash their hands like crazy.”
Bhattacharya said:
“The American people deserve answers to fundamental questions about the pandemic. On what empirical basis were schools closed? Did public health decision-makers consider the harms of their policies as thoroughly as their putative benefits? Why did authorities ignore recovered immunity or failure of the vaccine to prevent disease transmission?”
“Scientists and people vehemently disagreed about the wisdom of lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates and discrimination and so much else,” he added. “There’s near-universal agreement that what we did failed.”
Benjamin, the only expert who was generally supportive of the overall public health response, said, “We must remember the limited information we had when we made those decisions … and also the fact that our knowledge base and science continues to evolve over time.”
He added, “We created a safe and effective vaccine by every standard that we understand safety and efficacy today, in record time.”
Wenstrup praised the quick development of vaccines, describing it as “amazing,” but added, “but we knew from the trials that even people that were vaccinated got COVID” and “we also knew that vaccines produce variants and we should be expecting that.”
Citing the early public health response focusing on COVID-19 at the expense of other patients and health issues, he said one of his constituents, an elderly man, had an operation for “a painful hernia” canceled, ultimately resulting in his death.
Several experts addressed this type of inflexibility. Makary said that while “public health officials are not wrong for making recommendations based on the knowledge that they had at the time … that’s not actually what happened.”
“They were wrong because they refused to evolve their positions as the data became abundantly clear,” he said.
Nursing home policies, hospital visitation restrictions ‘a human rights violation’
Kulldorff said one of the two “major failures” of the public health response was “the failure to properly and optimally protect older Americans,” including “nursing home residents.” He described “sending sick people to nursing homes” as “criminal.”
“We also didn’t protect older working-age Americans in their 60s and 70s, while the ‘laptop class’ was often working from home, whether they were in their 20s or 30s or 40s,” he said. “The way we dealt with the pandemic was the worst assault on poor people, working Americans, the middle class [since] segregation and the Vietnam War.”
Kulldorff, who along with Bhattacharya helped draft the “Great Barrington Declaration” on “the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies,” said that when the group “proposed very concrete things for how to better protect older Americans” they were “slandered.”
Bhattacharya, in turn, said “the public health establishment … abandoned an essential commitment to science” in “sending COVID-19-infected patients back to nursing homes.”
Experts also addressed broader restrictions on hospital visitation during the pandemic. “To date, no randomized controlled trial has been conducted … against the cruel and inhumane hospital visitation policies that prevented people from seeing their dying loved ones,” said Makary, who described this failure as “a human rights violation.”
‘A house of cards that’s now falling apart’
Several of Tuesday’s witnesses focused on pandemic lockdown policies.
According to Bhattacharya, “By early 2022, about 95% of Americans had contracted COVID, despite the harsh countermeasures in most states.”
Bhattacharya described the policies as a “widespread violation of civil liberties.” He referenced a “Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis [finding] that lockdowns had failed to contain the spread of COVID.”
“At best, [lockdowns] temporarily protected the ‘laptop class’ who could work from home without losing their jobs, perhaps 30% of the population, while being served by the working class,” he added.
“Lockdown harms, school closures, people not going to medical visits … has killed many Americans and will continue to do so in the next few years,” he said, adding that “the lockdowns had enormously negative consequences on public health.”
For example, screening and treatment on cardiovascular disease and other ailments “plummeted,” Kulldorff said.
“The pandemic response is a house of cards that’s now falling apart,” he added.
Several of the experts focused on school closures, with Kulldorff stating, “I don’t think there’s anybody left who thinks that school closures were a good idea.”
Bhattacharya said school closures helped create “tremendous collateral harm” and “have set kids behind in ways that will lead them to worse outcomes as adults, including shorter, poorer lives.”
Mandates ‘ignored clear scientific data’
Bhattacharya questioned why “public health authorities ignore[d] clear scientific data that COVID infection [and] acquired immunity is as strong or stronger than vaccine-acquired immunity.”
“Vaccine mandates forced many frontline workers … to choose between their careers and a vaccine that provides less protection than the natural immunity they already had,” he said.
According to Makary, “Young healthy people were essentially spared from this pandemic,” with “an infection fatality rate no worse than influenza.” However, he said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denied knowledge of studies confirming these findings.
Benjamin said, “We were all kind of surprised the kids did kind of well,” although “there were some children that got … multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
Defending the COVID-19 vaccines, Benjamin said:
“We have learned that if you do get native infection — meaning you aren’t immunized [and get infected], and then if you get vaccinated — you have a really, really, really robust response, and that’s great science and I’m glad we’re learning about that.”
Makary took a different view, saying, “The greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government” when it claimed “vaccinated immunity was far greater than natural immunity” and that “masks were effective.”
Makary referred to the recently published Cochrane meta-analysis showing that masks did not prevent the spread of COVID-19 while pointing out that myocarditis is “four to 28 times more common after the vaccine” but that the government has said “young people benefit from a booster.”
Kulldorff referred to the example of Sweden, describing it as the “one Western country who did very well during the pandemic” and that had “mostly voluntary measures” and a “very light approach,” instead of lockdowns and mandates.
“Sweden, together with other Scandinavian countries, [had] the least excess death in the world,” said Kulldorff.
Prompted by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, M.D. (R-Iowa), who said, “It wasn’t until I came to Congress that I found out infection-acquired immunity was a novel concept,” Kulldorff stated, “I guess we knew about it since 430 B.C., the Athenian Plague, until 2020, and then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.”
Makary said that since the time of the Athenian Plague, natural immunity had been observed, “and yet it was considered a conspiracy theory or something we couldn’t trust or believe in because we didn’t know the long-term protection. Well, we didn’t know the long-term protection of the vaccines either.”
“There has not been recognition that there is immunity after having had an infection,” said Kulldorff. There “was never a reason to mandate that vaccine for people that all had COVID. There was recently a study of mass vaccinations that shows [they] had zero or very little benefit.”
Benjamin, however, argued that in terms of natural immunity, “We generally don’t do that in medicine, particularly when we have a therapeutic option that will prevent it.”
“Many faced with these anti-scientific choices will never trust public health authorities again,” Bhattacharya said. “Public health bureaucrats operated more like dictators than scientists during the pandemic, sealing themselves off from credible outside criticism.”
As a result, said Bhattacharya, “I’ve seen a rise in vaccine hesitancy for essential vaccines like measles [and] DPT,” describing this as “quite alarming.”
Kuldorff concurred. “By forcing children to have a vaccine that they don’t need because they’ve already had the disease, that undermines the trust in other vaccines,” he said, characterizing this as “very, very serious.”
“It’ll take decades to restore some of this damaged trust” in public health authorities, added Makary.
Kulldorff said, “These failures are due to abandonment of basic principles of public health,” including an exclusive focus on one disease at the expense of all others, and “trying to suppress or eradicate COVID, which was impossible.”
Makary asked, “Why do we have the same policies for everybody?” He noted the “biases” of COVID-19 policy decision-makers, whom he described as “a small, non-diverse, like-minded group making all the decisions, and they were HIV researchers” even though “in HIV, there’s no natural immunity.”
“CDC and the FDA and people at the NIH [National Institutes of Health] made up their mind before the trials were completed,” said Makary. “They decided babies were going to get vaccines before the study was done. And then [they] found no statistically significant difference in efficacy between the two groups and they just authorized it anyway.”
“Why are we even doing trials? Why do we even have an FDA?” asked Makary.
Where do scientists whose careers were destroyed go to get their reputations back?
Ruiz said, “We are still dealing with the long-term implications of this public health crisis,” citing “the spread of misinformation or disinformation” as having “undermined the American people’s trust in our nation’s public health institutions and in each other.”
Ruiz said “misinformation” and “disinformation” may “lead to non-compliance or failure of therapeutics where people are making decisions that put themselves and their families in harm’s way.” But most of the experts took a different view.
Bhattacharya said that “under the banner of combating misinformation, government health agencies use their power to collaborate with social media companies to control the public conversation about COVID science and policy,” noting that he was put on a “trends blacklist” by Twitter as a result, leading to his participation in a lawsuit against the Biden administration based on censorship claims.
“I personally have faced censorship,” Bhattacharya said, “from government sources during the pandemic, including … slander and denigration. You need to involve outside voices respectfully in order to get the full set of people … or else bad decisions will get made, just as they were during this pandemic,” he added.
Kulldorff referred to the Great Barrington Declaration, saying that when it was presented, he and its authors were “slandered instead of taking it seriously,” while Bhattacharya said there was “a media campaign to take down our proposal, which tens of thousands of doctors, epidemiologists and scientists endorsed.”
“Where do the scientists whose careers were destroyed … go to get their reputations back?” he asked.
While Benjamin claimed, “There are many people out there who have a large bullhorn who have made it worse,” he conceded that “nobody should be censored.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
All drugs have a pregnancy category designation giving mothers and doctors guidance on what is known and how safe products are during pregnancy.
Category A: The possibility of fetal harm appears remote. Extremely few drugs exist in this category (e.g., multiple vitamins).
Category B: If there is a clinical need for a drug in this category, they are considered safe to use. Examples: acetaminophen, amoxicillin.
Category C:These drugs should be given only if the potential benefit justifies the potential risk to the fetus. Examples: fluoroquinolones, gentamicin, saccharin, aspirin.
Category D:There is positive evidence of human fetal risk, but the benefits from use in pregnant women may be acceptable despite the risk. They should only be used in pregnancy when the alternatives are worse. Examples: tetracyclines, ACE inhibitors, and most antineoplastics.
Category X:The risk of use of the drug in pregnant women clearly outweighs any possible benefit. The drug is contraindicated in women who are or may become pregnant. Examples: thalidomide, oral contraceptives, statins, all COVID-19 vaccines.
I published an article in 2021 with Dr. Raphael Stricker, who advises one of the largest fetal loss centers in the country, warning women that the COVID-19 vaccine should be considered pregnancy category X. This designation should have been assigned by the vaccine manufacturers and agreed to by the FDA and properly placed on all vaccine program documents since pregnancy and childbearing age without contraception were exclusions from the EUA registration trials.
Shockingly, in the very first week of mass vaccination in December of 2020, news reels depicted well-intentioned pregnant mothers getting injected with synthetic lipid nanoparticles laced with long-lasting mRNA coding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology Spike protein. How could this be happening with no mutagenicity or teratogenicity studies? How could good clinical practice by doctors be abandoned?
Pregnant mothers and vaccine center workers didn’t seem to care. There were no assurances of gestational, peripartum, or long-term safety. Would the baby be affected by this brand-new technology? The regulatory agencies and medical colleges appeared to be in a tranced oblivion.
There are more than a dozen papers that extoll the virtues of mass vaccination and quickly conclude that COVID-19 vaccines are “safe” in pregnancy. Each paper has critical flaws including: 1) not randomized, 2) no comparator group, 3) limited time window and not entire term with continued follow-up, 4) incomplete capture of clinical events, 5) conflict of interest with American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) who received an undisclosed sum of money from the White House HHS COVID-19 Community Core Fund to promote vaccination.
In drug safety research, even if it is only one abstract, manuscript, or monograph that raises a serious safety concern, it should be pursued over those which failed to find the signal. Thorp and colleagues used CDC VAERS and compared COVID-19 vaccines to influenza vaccines and found in US cases, a 27-fold higher risk of miscarriage and more than a twofold increased risk across six categories of adverse fetal outcomes. Because the mRNA is now known to circulate for 28 days or more and the Spike protein causes clotting, bleeding, and is known to damage tissues, my conservative conclusion is that COVID-19 vaccination remains pregnancy category X—contraindicated.
In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during Covid: that much of the time, they were wrong – writes Dr. Marty Makary in the New York Post. He sets out “10 myths told by Covid experts — and now debunked”. Here are the first four.
Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary Covid vaccine series.
In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies, despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s ‘misinformation’ policy.
Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected.
That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the Covid pandemic.
Most Americans who were fired for not having the Covid vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralised the virus, but they were antibodies that the Government did not recognise.
Cochrane Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine.
And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on Covid transmission.
When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomised controlled studies.
But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomised studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.
If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channelled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce Covid transmission
They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.
A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite.
We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the Covid vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.
Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a Covid vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had Covid.
Dr. Makary blasts the CDC for weaponising research by “putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR“.
“In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession,” he adds.
Syrian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Faisal Mekdad, claimed at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on 28 February that “well-known countries had used weapons of terrorism against the Syrian people,” in violation of the United Nations charter and their international obligations.
Foreign Minister Mekdad stated in a video address to the conference that, “Syria faced an unjust war, during which well-known countries employed weapons of terrorism against the Syrian people, sent tens of thousands of foreign terrorists, and provided them with various types of support and weapons, including internationally prohibited ones, to serve their aggressive agendas.”
He added that the policies of these countries have led to terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra obtaining chemical weapons and using them repeatedly against Syrians, which highlights the need to address the shortcomings in international instruments governing the use of such weapons. Mekdad also called for joint action to find a politically neutral mechanism to coordinate international efforts to address acts of chemical terrorism.
Not only the Syrian government but independent sources have suggested that armed opposition groups supported by the US, Israel, Turkiye, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia used chemical weapons against the Syrian army and Syrian civilians during the conflict, which began in 2011.
Carla del Ponte, a member of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic and a former war crimes prosecutor, gathered testimonies indicating that opposition armed groups used sarin gas against the Syrian army and civilians in the town of Khan al-Assal in March 2013.
Journalist Seymour Hersh reported that a classified US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) briefing in June 2013 indicated that Nusra maintained a sarin production cell and was attempting a large-scale production effort in Syria.
A report published by Rootclaim in 2021 showed that the Saudi-backed armed opposition group, Liwa al-Islam, launched the sarin-filled rockets used in the chemical attack in East Ghouta in August 2013.
A detailed report from the Libertarian Institute showed that the Ghouta attack was a false flag attack meant to trigger Western military intervention in Syria as part of the broader CIA program known as Timber Sycamore.
Foreign Minister Mekdad pointed out that Syria’s experience with the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) showed that the watchdog group had become politicized and a tool of the Western powers to manufacture hostility toward the Syrian government.
Mekdad called on the states who are party to the OPCW to carry out a responsible and careful review of the work of the organization and to correct errors and clear violations of the provisions of the convention that governs the group.
As reported by journalist Aaron Mate, veteran OPCW inspectors provided evidence showing the Syrian government was not responsible for an alleged chemical attack in Douma in April 2018, but their probe was censored and manipulated by top OPCW officials. Under direct US government pressure, the OPCW concealed this evidence provided by its own inspectors and released a report that suggested the Syrian government was responsible for the attack.
Foreign Minister Mekdad also stressed that the Israeli occupation constitutes a source of permanent and serious threat to regional and international peace and security. In addition to launching repeated attacks on Syrian and Palestinian territories, it continues to modernize and expand its arsenal of all types of weapons of mass destruction.
George Soros is either stunningly prescient or frighteningly influential when it comes to determining who will need to do all the bleeding and dying that he deems necessary to bring about a desirable “new world order.”
Consider the Hungarian-born billionaire’s essay on the future of NATO: “The United States would not be called upon to act as the policeman of the world. When it acts, it would act in conjunction with others. Incidentally, the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act. This is a viable alternative to the looming world disorder.”
Soros deserves credit for neatly describing the US and NATO strategy for bringing about and exploiting the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The Ukrainians are providing the manpower – in other words, the cannon fodder – and the Western puppeteers can endeavor to weaken Russia and enforce their vision of a favorable world order. They also can do this without having to make the case to their citizens that this is a fight for which it is worth tolerating body bags coming home from the front.
Additionally, by sharing the burden of providing military and economic aid to Kiev, the Western powers achieve the dual benefits of prolonging their proxy war and creating the impression that the whole world is steadfastly standing with the blue and yellow. That helps underpin the narrative frame that there is no moral basis for criticizing Ukraine policy and anyone who does so is probably a Kremlin agent.
The thing is, Soros didn’t write his take on the situation this week, this month or even in the past year. He didn’t even write it back in 2014, when he was allegedly backing the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government and might have reasonably anticipated a coming conflict with Russia. No, Soros wrote this assessment in 1993, nearly 30 years ago.
Back then, in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Soros wanted to prevent former Soviet states and Warsaw Pact nations from becoming nationalist countries that would be governed according to their own interests and oppose the global order that he was promoting.
Western leaders had made assurances that NATO wouldn’t expand eastward, but Soros saw the military bloc as “the basis of a new world order.” He conceded that the group would need “some profound new thinking,” given that its original mission was “obsolete,” and he insisted that the alliance must be free to invite any country to join.
In fact, he saw a great opportunity for NATO to take advantage of the security void created by the Soviet collapse if it could act quickly. “If NATO has any mission at all, it is to project its power and influence into the region, and the mission is best defined in terms of open and closed societies.”
“The countries of Central Europe are clamoring for full membership of NATO as soon as possible, preferably before Russia recovers. Russia objects, not because it harbors any designs on its former empire but because it sees no advantage in consenting. Its national pride has been hurt and it is sick and tired of making concessions without corresponding benefits.”
Soros saw NATO as both a viable platform to develop into the anti-Russia enforcer for his new world order and the bright and shiny object to lure Europe’s former Eastern Bloc states into the fold. “NATO has a unified command structure which brings together the United States and Western Europe,” he said.
“There are great advantages in having such a strong Western pillar: It leads to a lopsided structure firmly rooted in the West. This is as it should be, since the goal is to reinforce and gratify the desire of the region for joining the open society of the West.”
The goal became reality. For example, Soros noted that there was nothing to prevent countries such as Poland, Czechia and Hungary from joining NATO. The three nations became the first wave of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, joining the bloc in 1999. In fact, the bloc has since nearly doubled in size, adding 14 members by 2020 and teeing up Ukraine and Georgia as future prospects.
NATO moved right along the Russian frontier, placing strategic weapons and security guarantees on Moscow’s doorstep and helping to trigger the current crisis. As Soros acknowledged in 1993, Russia had no desire to restore the empire of Peter the Great – contrary to a popular CNN talking point. However, as the Kremlin warned repeatedly in the years leading up to the current conflict, Moscow couldn’t stand idly by while its national security interests were trampled.
It’s easy to see why Soros was and is so worried about nationalism: His vision could never sell with a government that served the interests of its own people.
NATO’s expansion binge didn’t make anyone safer. We know the little brothers, like the people of Ukraine, aren’t better off. They have the privilege of bleeding and dying as they provide the “manpower” for NATO’s proxy fight with Russia. As for the big brothers, they undermine their own security. Americans and Western Europeans are suffering the economic effects of the US-NATO sanctions war against Russia, and their governments are pushing them ever closer to a planet-ending nuclear Armageddon.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced last week that its Doomsday Clock had advanced to within 90 seconds of midnight, the latest ever, indicating that humanity stands at “a time of unprecedented danger.” The group cited the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has “challenged the nuclear order – the system of agreements and understandings that have been constructed over six decades to limit the dangers of nuclear weapons.”
Not to worry if you’re George Soros, 92 years old, and watching your geopolitical dreams come true. He and others like him can keep marching onward to perfect their world order as they see fit.
If we wonder whether NATO works on behalf of that order, we need look only at what has transpired and the framing of the current conflict. When Russian forces began their offensive against Ukraine last February, Western leaders and pundits condemned President Vladimir Putin for undermining the “rules-based international order.”
So NATO has emerged as the enforcer of the rules-based international order – the new world order, if you will – just as Soros called for three decades ago. The results of that “profound new thinking” are much the same as the political activist envisioned in 1993. He also called for expanding NATO to Asia, which hasn’t yet happened, but the bloc’s 2022 summit was enlarged to include representatives from Asia-Pacific “sentinel states” – Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Was Soros so much of a visionary that the hedge-fund investor could foresee how geopolitics would play out several decades ahead of time, or does his accuracy reflect the fact that he and his allies tend to get their way? Rather than prescience, is this situation more like the cook being a good predictor of what we’re going to have for dinner?
Soros himself offered a hint on that theory in his essay: “We have to act without full knowledge of the facts because the facts are created by our decisions.”
Anyone who suggests that Soros calls a lot of the policy shots is immediately condemned by the Western media as anti-Semitic because, after all, he has Jewish heritage. Never mind that he’s an avowed atheist who has been accused of undermining Israel’s democratically elected government and funding groups that defame the Jewish state.
So when Moldovan President Maia Sandu returns from a recent trip to Davos and promptly starts hinting about joining NATO – in violation of her country’s constitutional commitment to neutrality – we shouldn’t point out that she met with Alexander Soros, son of George Soros, during the summit. Revealing or trying to connect such dots would be anti-Semitic, according to the Western media.
It couldn’t be that George Soros wields an inordinate amount of influence over world affairs. It couldn’t be that some of his critics have legitimate and unbigoted disagreements with his ideas. It couldn’t be that his immunity to criticism is further evidence of his power.
And shut your eyes when a US watchdog group reveals that Soros has financial ties to at least 253 media organizations worldwide and funding links to 54 prominent media figures, including such names as Christiane Amanpour of CNN, Lester Holt of NBC News and Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee.
So Soros gets to wield his influence with impunity, apparently achieving what he wants in many cases. He gets to serve the interests of billionaires, defense contractors, power-mongering politicians and social engineers. But what about the rest of us, the other 8 billion people in the world? What about those who just want to be able to support our families, pursue happiness and live in peace – without worrying that iodine pills are sold out and there might not be time to build a nuclear fallout shelter?
Soros himself might prescribe us more bread and circuses, to keep the masses distracted – as well as tribalism, to keep the people divided – at least until we’re needed to serve as “manpower” for the cause.
Tony Cox is a US journalist who has written or edited for Bloomberg and several major daily newspapers.
Back in August of 2022, I wrote a piece on Pfizer’s Paxlovid approval. I talked about how the White House awarded Pfizer billions of taxpayer dollars before producing conclusive findings of safety or efficacy to the FDA.
In approving Paxlovid, the Biden White House and the FDA also seemed to deliberately ignore hundreds of clinical trials conducted on hundreds of thousands of patients detailing the established safety and efficacy of IVM and HCQ.
Like many other things the Biden White House implements, they force through a multitude of ideas, concepts and public health mandates which “seem” like they could work, but without the requisite conclusive scientifically obtained evidence that they will work.
On top of that, the White House doesn’t seem interested in learning. They repeat their mistakes in establishing America’s policies time and time again. Emergencies or not; there is no excuse for foregoing the scientific method (or using poor testing methodologies) thereby placing the Americans at risk – especially when it comes to public health.
Paxlovid is just one of dozens of examples of public health mendacity (too many to list here) pushed by the chaotic Biden White House and its ethically pliant partisan marionettes at the FDA. In the case of Paxlovid, not only was evidence of failure deliberately ignored; prospective testing methodologies were altered mid-trial to favor a positive outcome when it became apparent that the Paxlovid trial results would not meet their original endpoints. In fact, Pfizer had already opted to stop its Paxlovid trial, but then changed their minds after the FDA intervened via the White House.
Even worse: Its not the first time the FDA has forsaken science under Biden (I warned this would be a repeating theme in early 2021). Paxlovid was a failure, but the White House had foolishly already paid Pfizer $5.3 Billion in advance. Rather than admit failure and epic waste, the FDA then stepped in and with zero transparency, altered the established clinical trial parameters mid-trial to make Paxlovid’s findings seem better than they were. Pfizer then completed the trial, declared Paxlovid a success and the White House doubled-down on its $5.3 Billion investment, spending a sickening total of $10.6 Billion on Paxlovid.
That moral and scientific decision was approved by America’s insufferable, self-righteous taxpayer-funded civil servants who proclaim the left is “the party of science” and celebrated that when Biden was elected, “the adults are back in charge.”
Even more outrageous were the number of nurses, pharmacists and physicians who witnessed – and fully recognized the scientific misconduct – but remained (and continue to remain) silent, inexplicably choosing to follow clinical recommendations from politicians, bureaucratic hospital administrators, mainstream news or social media. It is impossible to overstate the cowardliness, conformism and malpractice of these professionals in betraying their oaths to protect patients.
In reality, Americans still don’t have answers form the White House, FDA or any other HHS officials on:
1) The White House’s logic of purchasing $10.6 Billion of Paxlovid, and without concrete evidence of safety and effectiveness;
2) How many unused Paxlovid doses remain that will ultimately expire and be thrown away due to non-use, milder disease making it epidemiologically unnecessary;
3) Disclosure of the real-world incidence of “rebound” Paxlovid infections (which would be hard for drug safety epidemiologists to uncover because the White House, Pfizer and FDA have every reason in the world to under-report it, plus “rebound” is not an official [MedDRA] adverse event reporting term);
4) The current/historical prescribing and rates and other Paxlovid adverse event updates;
5) A full disclosure of communications with Pfizer, the White House and FDA officials with a scientifically legitimate explanation of why altered critical parameters of the Paxlovid were made mid-trial and in lieu of starting a completely new trial;
6) An official pharmacologic, mechanistic explanation of “Paxlovid rebound” ;
7) Why the Paxlovid trial was compared to placebo only, and had no IVM / HCQ / other comparator arms.
An interesting story was reported on Feb.26, 2023 by News 8 WTNH, New Haven, CT. They took the story down about 24 hours later but it is still available on EIN Presswire (click here).
“Nearly 500 people from Washington, Oregon and Idaho gathered at the Wenatchee Convention Center in Washington State on Saturday, January 28 to hear and share stories of…injuries and deaths from COVID shots and hospital protocols; careers upended and families torn apart by mandates; and numerous harms from closures of schools, businesses and churches.”
“Heart screening was available and conducted using multifunction cardiogram technology, or MCG, provided by HeartCARE Corp”
“we had the opportunity to perform Multifunction Cardiogram™ screens on a variety of participants…over half of those tested (16 of 30 people) (53%) had positive markers for myocarditis. Two of these were active duty US Military pilots.”
Studies on rates of post COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis
The rates of post COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis are much, much higher than what Public Health Authorities have admitted to (most will admit to about 1:5000).
There are two key studies on what the real rates of post COVID-19 vaccine heart damage may actually be:
Prospective Thailand study of 202 boys showed 1:30 (7/202) boys ages 13-17 developed myocarditis or pericarditis within a week after 2nd dose of Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA (click here).
Professor Christian Mueller, University Hospital Basel Switzerland conducted testing on 777 healthcare workers within a week after COVID-19 booster shot, and found increased troponinemia in 22/777 (1:35) that had no other cause other than the COVID-19 booster shot (click here)
“The actual incidence of post-vaccination myocardial lesions is 2.8% vs 0.0035% of myocarditis in retrospective studies (unvaccinated)”
“The incidence of myocardial lesions is 2.8% (1:35), or 800 times higher than the usual incidence of myocarditis (in unvaccinated)” the researchers add.
My Take…
I believe myocarditis (heart inflammation) is responsible for vast majority of post COVID-19 sudden deaths that we are seeing now, and health authorities have intentionally downplayed the risk of myocarditis post COVID-19 vaccination.
They don’t want to conduct autopsies on sudden deaths now, because they don’t want us to know that the risk of post-vaccine myocarditis and sudden cardiac death was always much higher than what they admitted to publicly.
Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health admitted to a myocarditis risk of 1 in 5000 and he was lambasted by pharma-captured Ontario doctors who didn’t want any truth to be known (click here)
But both the Thailand study and Swiss study suggest a myocarditis risk of 1:30 or 1:35 per vaccine dose. That means 3% of all COVID-19 vaccinated people could be walking around with heart inflammation (myocarditis) they don’t know they have, which puts them at increased risk for sudden cardiac death, during exercise or in the early morning hours (the trigger for sudden cardiac death is a surge of stress hormones).
The Washington event cardiac testing was not scientific and 53% of people walking around with myocarditis seems very unlikely. But it raises a crucial question.
WHAT IF the risk of post COVID vaccine myocarditis actually increases with time?
As reported by Dr.Peter McCullough, we know that spike protein circulates at least 28 days after injection, and gets delivered to the heart during that time (click here).
The Thailand and Swiss studies tested people only within the 1st week after COVID-19 vaccination and 3% had heart inflammation or heart damage.
What if this gets worse as time goes by? What if the risk of myocarditis actually increases from 3% because the spike protein which inflames the heart continues to circulate for 28 days after injection and probably even longer?
That is what this Washington public cardiac testing is suggesting.
I am also concerned about those 2 pilots with inflamed hearts.
“Appetites of the autocrat cannot be appeased. They must be opposed. Autocrats only understand one word: “No.” “No.” “No.” (Applause.). “No, you will not take my country.” “No, you will not take my freedom.” “No, you will not take my future … A dictator bent on rebuilding an empire will never be able to ease [erase] the people’s love of liberty. Brutality will never grind down the will of the free. And Ukraine — Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never”. (Applause.)
“Stand with us. We will stand with you. Let us move forward … with an abiding commitment to be allies not of darkness, but of light. Not of oppression, but of liberation. Not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”.
Biden’s speech at Warsaw, complete with the lighting effects and dramatic backdrop reminiscent of his Liberty Hall speech in which he sought to portray his own domestic MAGA opposition as a grave security threat to America, again resorts to radical Manicheanism to depict (this time) Russia, (the external counterpoint to the related U.S. MAGA threat), as the foundation for the epic battle between light and the forces of darkness. The eternal struggle that persists – that must be fought endlessly and won crushingly.
Again, as with his Liberty Hall speech, Biden offered no concrete plan. Here in Warsaw, with the sands of time running out on his Ukraine ‘project’, and with U.S. ‘Realists’ and China ‘hawks’ gaining more traction at home, Biden elevated the struggle from the literal to the metaphysical plane.
By so doing, he is trying to cement America’s deep-seated missionary ethos to a ‘forever’ cosmic war against Russian ‘evil’. He hopes to tie the American ruling class to the metaphysical struggle for the ‘light’. Should Biden continue in office, he hopes by this means, both to ‘define’ himself, and to set this overarching global struggle as something binding Americans, for the period ahead.
Simply put, his metaphysical framing is intended to trump those Realists calling for policy change.
Manichaeism is nothing new – it is an ancient cult with deep roots in Latin Christianity (and likely, Biden at least partially subscribes to seeing Putin as the Demiurge, the ‘dark’ anti-God).
So will this work? Well, this is the struggle now playing out in U.S. politics. At the upper level, the elites are more concerned with power and money than metaphysics – so, Biden’s attempt to transcend the latter and assemble an army “not of darkness but of light; not of oppression, but of liberation; not of captivity, but, yes, of freedom”, more likely will be regarded as a reflection of Biden’s derangement syndrome – his detachment from reality; his kookiness, in other words.
If many of the overlap establishments (the ‘Uniparty’) want this war, it will not be for virtuousness, but for the enrichment of the Military Industrial Complex. If the latter élites are veering away, it is because they think the MIC needs time to refurbish –and to restock – so as to take on China.
“Democracies of the world will stand guard over freedom today, tomorrow, and forever … That’s what Americans are and that’s what Americans do”, Biden said.
But the political landscape is no longer a Team Biden monopoly. Trump responded: “World War III has never been closer”; and he laid the blame on “all the warmongers and ‘America Last’ globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department and the national security industrial complex”. The former president singled out Victoria Nuland in particular who, he said, was “obsessed with pushing Ukraine towards NATO”.
Florida Governor DeSantis too, insists that the Biden administration has “effectively [given Kiev] a blank check with no clear strategic objective identified”. “I don’t think that it’s in our interest to be getting into a proxy war … over things like the [Ukrainian] borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said.
Republican Senator Hawley a week ago gave an reflective address to the Heritage Foundation:
“It’s hard to challenge the ‘Uniparty’: They’ve gotten very good at telling their favourite story. That’s why anyone who questions them gets called “anti-American” or “Vladimir Putin’s puppet” from a hundred different quarters”.
“But today, I want to tell you something else. I want to tell the truth. And the truth is that Americans have been sold a bill of goods. Our current foreign policy isn’t working”. It’s falling apart at the seams, with the ‘Uniparty’ doing its level best to patch it together by cutting blank checks to other countries”. Simply said: “we’re over-committed, caught in the grip of an ideology of liberal empire”.
Is this enough to ‘turn the worm’? Or, to bring a senior Deep State grandee to Biden’s office to whisper: ‘Remember what happened to Nixon?’ ‘Time for you to let go of Zelensky; (such a pity should Hunter end in jail…!)’.
There is however, another aspect to Biden’s resort to metaphysical Manichaeism that brings real, palpable consequence. Again, not new. Rather, a case of old demons re-surfacing. Here was the Estonian PM, Kaja Kallas, at the Munich Security Conference, saying that ‘NATO countries must take control of Moscow and forcibly rewrite the mentality of Russian citizens’: “The entire population of Russia should be re-educated to root out any traces of imperialistic dreams’ – claiming that absent a mandated rehabilitation, “history will repeat itself” and Europe will never be safe.
“Neutrality is not an option, because then you are standing on the side of the aggressor … take a side, a side for peace, a side for Ukraine, a side for the humanitarian international law, and these times this means also delivering ammunition so Ukraine can defend itself”.
Yes, alongside this European Manichaeism, the edging towards a new racism can be espied: an ancient rhizome that has one tendril long burrowed into radical Ukrainian nationalism and with other tendrils coiling through mainstream EU structures, as the Euro-Élites patiently debate whether Russia was insufficiently ‘pacified’ after WW2, or whether more radical ‘rehab’ is required.
The rise of this class who regard themselves as credentialled to decide whether Russian culture must be cancelled – and ‘re-wired’ – is a particularly pernicious dynamic in global politics. It has been getting worse both in the U.S. and Europe, as its culture-war leaches out into geo-politics. This sense of superiority and impunity, in itself, provokes increased tensions and the risk of war.
Wolfgang Streeck, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, was asked for the meaning of Chancellor Scholtz’s ‘German Zeitenwende’ (turning point). He responded:
“The Zeitenwende speech was a response to intensified pressure … for Germany to fall in line with the foreign policy of the U.S. – and, in particular, with that of the Biden administration. What is clear is that Scholz’s Zeitenwende entails a promise, above all to the United States, that Germany will from now on, unlike in the past, act in line with a view of the world as divided between the West – and an evil empire, or better: several evil empires, from Russia to China to Iran…”.
(Nota Bene: This is pure Leo Strauss, channelling Carl Schmitt’s earlier explicit German Manichaeism.)
“Between [Germany and the U.S.] – and the various evil empires: Peace is possible, only temporarily and intermittently, and only as long as we enjoy military superiority. In principle, we and they are always at each other’s throats. Real peace will require regime change making an evil empire part of our virtuous one – as a result of its conversion to ‘our values’. It is legitimate to use all its political, economic, and military means to bring such conversion about.
“After the Zeitenwende, wars will always be around the corner and we must be prepared for them. What should help is that a virtuous empire’s “value-driven” or “feminist foreign policy” (Baerbock) fights only just wars – as wars against evil cannot be unjust. The underlying world view here is not social-Darwinist, history being a battle for the “survival of the fittest“, but Manichaean, in which history is a relentless struggle between good and bad, in which the forces of virtue must do their utmost to prevail over those of evil. Before they have won, there can be no real peace, only cease-fires for tactical reasons. For real peace we, the forces of virtue, must prepare for war.
“There is a strong and a weak version of Zeitenwende rhetoric. The strong version implies that the world was always like this: ontologically Manichaean. Those who in the past had a different view were either feeble-minded fools, cowards who all-too-willingly let themselves be deceived by enemy propaganda, or traitors. This essentially coincides with the world view of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in the United States.
“The weak version, the one Scholtz obviously prefers, is that the world has recently changed: while in the past it allowed for peaceful coexistence between regimes and countries with different interests or ‘identities’ – so that life in peace could be preferred over victory in war – now the enemy has become so evil that there is no moral alternative to defeating him, cost it what it may.
“Today, American messianism seems to have migrated to Europe. At the same time, Bob Dylan is right. And times continue to be a’changing. How long the German government can remain as subservient to the United States as it has now promised to be is an open question – considering the risks that come with Germany’s territorial closeness to the Ukrainian battlefield – a risk not shared by the U.S.. There is also pressure from France for Germany to become more European and less transatlantic in outlook, and this may, with time, have an impact. Furthermore, it is likely that the U.S. at some point, will try to “Europeanise” the war and bow out, as they tried to “Vietnamise” the Vietnam war in the 1970s – hoping that post-Zeitenwende Germany can take the burden of sponsoring their proxy war from them.
“As for Europe, the United States may not object to Germany, Poland, and others continuing to help the Ukrainian government pursue its dream of a final victory over Russia, at their own cost and risk. With Germany and the EU having turned their political judgment over to Zelenskiy and Biden, and all serious discussion of the aims of the war – the terms of a settlement – being de facto precluded, this is quite a frightening prospect”.
If Streeck’s analysis is correct, the Bidenesque ideology now gripping the upper reaches of Europe suggests that the EU’s conversion to Zeitenwende makes any future relationship with Russia nigh impossible. The conviction this class has of itself as the global future, and of being on the ‘right side of history’, whereas ‘others’ (Russia and the ‘autocrats’) represent only that dark side to history, effectively forecloses on mediation. Mediation with ‘evil’ is a tautology.
The reality is that the EU is gripped by the attempt to impose a ‘cultural revolution’ – in the sense that broad citizen conformity to its cultural norms and ‘emergencies’ is not enough. But rather, it is its’ thought-processes that have to be fully reflected in modes of thinking such that every citizen’s acts and thoughts reflect EU ‘right thinking’.
We see this with the war party’s poster girl, Annalena Baerbock’s, lecturing non-aligned countries that there is no space for neutrality when it comes to Ukraine: ‘You are ‘either with us or against us’; and if the former, then GIVE U.S. AMMO!’.
Well, the cultural revolution already is reversing. Today, the Civilisational States (Russia, China, Iran, etc. and link) see the future as theirs and view the woke globalists – and their financialised economic structures – as passé. This reversal increasingly is evident in the popular war in the U.S., but not in Europe.
But can the EU change? – since all the bridges by which it might reconnect to the future have long since been burned down. In essence, the EU is a steam-roller ‘offensive’ ever incrementally moving towards ‘more Europe’.
Change ultimately will come to the EU as a result of a clash of interests, factiousness, and possibly a big political implosion or two – but above all by events on the ground in Ukraine as the Russian offensive proceeds.
Reality has been so far exorcised from the Credentialled Class ‘bubble’. It is not clear how the latter will react to having their ‘Balloon’ popped. Already, we see signs of incipient hysteria.
But the bottom line is this: When the U.S. begins its pivot away from Ukraine, and looks fully to Europeanise the war, the political class won’t be seen ‘for the dust’. The latter will soon find that for all its florid language of fighting on behalf of the ‘light’, the number of Europeans willing to die so that Sevastopol can become Ukrainian will be few indeed. Baerbock will find herself alone, as the rest of world already has shifted across to Russia (see here), ignoring her taunts.
When it comes to imperialism — i.e., “the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas” — the United States and Europe are quick to label Putin as a rabid practitioner who must be stopped or else he will conquer the world.
This is lazy propaganda on the part of the West and it is a bullshit accusation. Putin is an old school nationalist and an Eastern Orthodox Christian who eschews the Soviet Communist legacy. Since taking power in 1999, Putin has not led unprovoked conquests of adjacent territory. Russia’s military engagements with Georgia in 2008 and with Ukraine are a direct result of U.S. and NATO interference in the region.
But the U.S. and Europe persist in describing Putin as Stalin reincarnated and a man hell bent on imposing Russian sovereignty over the world. This just a 21st century version of the Domino Theory. It is Domino 2.0 and Putin is the new Vietnam. The truth of the matter is that the U.S. and Europe are bona fide imperialists and are ignoring Putin’s actual record. Instead, the West is engaging in gross hypocrisy and psychological projection — attributing to Putin what they themselves have done and are doing.
Here are some recent examples of the imperialist meme the West is pushing with regards to Putin and Russia:
Many observers quickly picked up on one of Putin’s more provocative lines, in which he compared himself to Peter the Great, Russia’s modernizing tsar and the founder of St. Petersburg – Putin’s own birthplace – who came to power in the late 17th century.
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years,” a relaxed and apparently self-satisfied Putin said. “On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was.”
Foreign Policy magazine, an establishment mouthpiece, pushes the same meme:
“Russia’s concept of empire was different from that of the Western powers. Russia did not possess ‘distant colonies’ but expanded across its borders into the depths of Eurasia. It had a better opportunity for the closer integration of native and Russian nobility into one body.”
Did you catch that last paragraph? Mamedov apparently has not studied American history. If Russia is an imperialist because it “expanded across its borders” and exerted authority over adjacent territory, then what is the United States? Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California were not independent free states who voted to join the U.S. They came under U.S. control thanks to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the Mexican–American War and “required Mexico to cede 55 percent of its territory including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and most of Arizona and Colorado. Mexico also relinquished all claims for Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the southern boundary of Texas.”
After sixty years of failed foreign military expeditions, the political class in Washington, D.C. clings tenaciously to the childish notion that if you can just get rid of the “bad man” you can usher in a political utopia. Just consider the list of villains the United States has targeted in repeated bids to change governments and create “democracy or eliminate terrorism, etc. How have those worked out? Did it make the world safer? Is the United States more secure?
Mossadegh, Iran
Arbenz, Guatemala,
Castro, Cuba
Diem, Vietnam
Mao, China
Noriega, Panama
Saddam Hussein, Iraq
Bashir Assad, Syria
The Shah, Iran
The Ayatollah Khomeni, Iran
Osama Bin Laden, ???
Vladimir Putin, Russia
I am amazed that so many so-called foreign policy experts adhere to the magical belief that eliminating a leader will provide a political solution that favors the West. Just listen to Hillary Clinton pleading for the Russian elite to eliminate Putin:
The notion that getting rid of Putin will neuter Russia and make it an obedient serf of the West is profoundly stupid and myopic. Just because people like Clinton and Biden insist that Putin is a dictator in the mold of Stalin, it does not magically transform delusional belief into reality.
The Latin American Information Agency (ALAI) shares my scorn for the West’s double standard when it comes to portraying modern Russia as an amalgam of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union:
The main Western governments and media outlets question Moscow’s incursions while justifying similar actions carried out by their own camp. The deployment of troops in Ukraine, Georgia or Syria is presented as an unacceptable act, but the occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya are interpreted as routine events. The annexation of Crimea is categorically repudiated, but the appropriation of land in Palestine is warmly welcomed.
This hypocrisy is combined with implausible allegations that seek to frighten the population. They describe a gigantic Russian power with immeasurable capacity for harm. Moscow’s manipulation of the US elections through infiltrators and algorithms has been the most absurd accusation in this campaign.
Every diabolical conspiracy is attributed to Putin. The media often portrays him as the embodiment of evil. He is depicted as a despot rebuilding an empire that rests on brutal methods of internal totalitarianism (Di Palma, 2019). Comparisons are never made with the lauded plutocracies of the United States or Europe, which enforces validation of the domination exercised by ruling elites.
Why should you care? If the West persists in demonizing Putin it is creating potentially insurmountable obstacles for future negotiations. This approach makes a diplomatic solution virtually unattainable and is likely to increase Putin’s doubts that the West can be trusted to uphold any agreement short of unconditional surrender.
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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