‘Hate speech’ laws are not simply censorship. Their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass.
Pawns Take Out the Kings & Queens
Those who have doubted that Western Civilisation is in the process of being dismantled are about to receive their definitive reply. The supposedly ‘unavoidable’ fire-brigade damage inflicted on our freedoms in the Spring of 2020, which has never been repaired or reversed, is about to be consolidated. The shout of ‘Emergency!’ was at that time sufficient to quiet most objections and provide reassurance that this was indeed a temporary imposition. Now, two and a half years later, the maintenance vans pull up and the workmen start to scrutinise the damage done by the firemen — the windows shattered by their axes, the shards of glass still protruding dangerously upwards, the splintered frames. As we look on expectantly, imagining that they are about to replace the broken glass and repair the damaged frames, another convoy of vehicles pulls up, this time bearing men with sledgehammers, crowbars, pneumatic drills, wonder bars, angle grinders — and, bringing up the rear, a scammel transporter with a large crane and wrecking ball. It becomes clear that what the workmen have in mind is not reconstruction, but demolition.
Thus, the ‘emergency’ is signalled as over and the Era of Permanent Despotism begins. Now we move into the world predicted two years ago by one Larry Fink, the CEO of the world’s leading assets management behemoth, BlackRock: ‘Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like, actually . . . totalitarian governments, where you have an understanding of what’s out there, and obviously the whole dimension is changing now with a democratisation of countries. And democracies are very messy.’
Since those fateful days in the Spring of 2020, this was always going to happen, being baked into the lockdown cake. This is because, if an ‘authority’ suspends supposedly inalienable rights and freedoms, and then, after a long period of withholding them without objectively discernible justification, trickles their simulacrum back out under the rubric of concession, it soon becomes clear that these rights and freedoms have ceased to exist. After that, it is only a matter of carting the husks away.
The portents of this were present from the beginning — in the absence of appropriate responses from media and ‘civil liberties’ bodies, in the strange mutism that gripped the familiar voices of objection and dissent — the poets, artists, philosophers — in the vacuum created by dogs not barking. It is like — as we have so often repeated in mutating sentences to ourselves, as though trying to hit upon a new formulation that would magic some new apprehension of the meaning of things — we have awoken in a world after a long, oblivious sleep, to find that the world has not merely changed but turned into something like the opposite of what we recall from the moments before unconsciousness. Out in the street in search of clues as to the dateline, we make eye-contact in the hope of encountering someone as troubled by what we are finding as ourselves, but receive back merely blank, indifferent stares. The New Normal is already normalised, and our memories of freedom and reason are as though increasingly unreliable, if not actual signs of derangement.
On mature reflection, it becomes clear that the era of freedom was not a stage along the way to Utopia, but a brief experiment that has now been abandoned as a failure. Only certain elements of the Freedom Revolution have been deemed worthy of retention: the right of the richest to stay rich; the rights of nonces and perverts to have their evil ways with children; the right of those claiming victimhood to plunder the reserves of those entitled to make no such claim. All this was set out in advance in the loosely framed prospectus known as Cultural Marxism. Even those who took the warnings on this score seriously did not take them seriously enough, for this new formula for human co-existence was in deadly earnest, whereas we thought it had something to do with the passing disgruntlement of the young or the ideological fancy of some of life’s losers. Now, or at least soon, we shall begin to see that it is all meant to be permanent and, once accomplished, irreversible.
Each former nation and its former citizens will soon discover their own concrete examples of what is a universal project of reversing the presumed gains made within Western civilisation going back to the Magna Carta. Some 30 months ago, we passed the terminus of the period of personal freedom, barely even remarking the moment, which occurred on perhaps an evening in late February or early March of 2020. Since then, we may have noticed in fits and starts that most of what we had always taken for granted about our terms of existence in the public world had changed utterly. The assumption that, as free people, we had the right to walk unfettered down a road or street, answerable to no one; or speak our minds on matters that struck discordantly our sense of justice or truth; or speak casually using possessive adjectives like ‘my’ or ‘our’ in respect of a house or a country — all this was coming to an end. In the interval between the initial sledgehammer blows to the windows of our liberty and the arrival of the demolition crews to take down the remnants of Western civilisation, we had gotten accustomed to being, you might say, pampered serfs, a condition that perhaps had some residual harmonic in the tom-tom rifts rippling through from back the ancestral line. We were ready for the next bulletin from on high. And now it has arrived, or is about to arrive, to a notice board near you, and the chief ‘takeaway’ is that the pampering is about to come to an end.
This week, in my country, Ireland, the bulletin board has overnight been posted with a new set of instructions, concerning what may be written, said or — in the first analysis — thought. It is called the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, and relates to the issue that has become known as ‘hate speech’, which refers to the manner in which the citizenry is henceforth to be permitted to speak to and about certain named categories of ‘protected minorities’ whom we awoke not long ago to find unexpectedly in our midst. A quarter of a century ago, most of these minorities were unrepresented in our country, and no one dreamed that it might be necessary to introduce ‘hate speech’ legislation to protect the population from the various categories of ‘hate’ going around at that time. Since the turn of the millennium, however, our political class, under instructions from unseen external masters, has been diluting our population with indifferent aliens, more or less randomly selected or self-selecting, and delivered here for the purpose of sundering the claimed attachment of the Irish to the country they once thought of as ‘theirs’ — this country called ‘Ireland’. The Irish in general did not react with hostility to the newcomers, but that may have been because neither did they understand that the influence of new arrivals here was merely the first step in a much more elaborate and ominous process. This moment of the commencement of the Era of Permanent Despotism, however, brings a new dimension: the news that these outsiders are not merely hopeful newcomers, to be welcomed or tolerated or resented or embraced, but in fact the legal inheritors of what we once thought of as ‘our’ country. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022 makes this abundantly clear: These people are not in any sense to be regarded as having come here as mendicants or aspirants, but as the legally protected instruments of a new order that essentially excludes those who were here all along.
The idea of Ireland belonging to the Irish is now legally dead — the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022 makes that quite clear. The idea of ‘my’ or ‘our’ country is dead too: It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
I confess that, having warned at some length about the dangers of the Irish manifestation of ‘hate speech’ laws — well in advance of their arrival — (see here and here),
I had lapsed into a distracted complacency at the moment of their publication in draft form last week. Bizarrely throwing myself at the mercy of jounaliars — a word I actually invented! — I read a number of media accounts that appeared to suggest that the sting of the proposals had been pulled — possibly on legal advice — and what remained was merely a reheating of existing lip service provision concerning ‘incitement to hatred’, which had barely if ever been used in its prior manifestation.
This article from the Irish Mirror, sent to me by a friend, provides an example.
Its description of the draft legislation expressly states that its primary purpose is to augment existing law with regard to crimes perceived to have an aggravating element of prejudice — or ‘hatred’ — based on, for example, race or sexual identity.
The report states:
The new Bill will create, for the first time in Ireland, specific hate crime offences.
They will be in the guise of aggravated forms of existing criminal offences where offenders are motivated by hatred of a protected characteristic such as race, colour, nationality, religion, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity and disability.
The report, citing a Department of Justice statement, later elaborates:
‘All offences that were aggravated by a hate element will incur penalties that are higher than the ordinary form of the offense [sic], unless the penalties are already set at the maximum possible.
‘The Bill also provides that in any offence, other than the specific aggravated offences, where the Court determines that the perpetrator was motivated by prejudice in carrying out the offence, the Court shall treat that as an aggravating factor in sentencing the person.’
Even allowing for the article’s extreme tendentiousness and sensationalist mode of expression, it was hard, reading it, to see how such a measure could be any more than tedious, a nod toward multiculturalism, progressivism, et cetera, and therefore no great cause for concern. Perhaps our commentaries at the preliminary stages had had some effect? After reading the article, I responded reassuringly to what I thought my friend’s somewhat overwrought response to it, foolishly using the Mirror report as my point of reference:
In my estimation it will have no effect: The new Act is a paper tiger, which has been radically watered down from the early proposals and drafts of the Bill. This legislation requires an actual crime to have been committed, which may then be deemed to be of greater gravity by virtue of some ‘hate’ dimension. So it will only be relevant if, for example, someone assaults another person and it emerges that they were motivated by racism, or whatever. The sole area in which it might have relevance for commentators arises if the police were to engineer a situation where a crime was committed and could be linked to some utterance of a public figure. If someone beats up some nonce, for example, and offers as a defence that he was inspired to do it by Gemma O’Doherty, John Waters [et cetera]. But such prosecutions are already provided for in the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, which has been used about half a dozen times in 33 years, and never for this purpose. It is clear that the legal advice the Government was receiving made clear that they had no constitutional basis for creating the law they were seeking to, in which someone could have someone else prosecuted for ‘hate speech’ on the basis that he or she was ‘offended’ by something that person said, even if the ‘offence’ was targeted at someone else who was not offended. This Act is a very long way from that, and is clearly a face-saving exercise intended to reassure the Combine that ‘something is being done about hate speech’, when in reality little or nothing is altered.
Wrong, wrong, WRONG! I cannot say whether the article — and others of a similar nature that I have come across — was intended as a piece of deliberate misdirection, or whether it was simply a lazy co-option of a departmental press release with perhaps a similar objective, but either way it could scarcely have been pitched at a further remoteness from the truth. Certainly the author of the article does not appear to have had a copy of the draft Bill in front of him as he wrote his prejudicial diatribe, since virtually all of the article is directed at the provisions contained in the second half of the Bill, so that he would have had to plough his way through the most radical and important elements in order to construct the article as he did. This may indeed be part of a deliberate strategy to lull the public into a false sense of complacency — insofar as the public is exercised in the matter at all, which to a high degree it is not. In any event, it briefly lulled me into something that does not flatter me. It was several more days before I came to read the draft Bill, and what I found therein rattled me to the core of my being.
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Having since had an opportunity to read the draft Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, I believe it to be extremely dangerous and, in fact, capable of, in the first instance, entirely deleting what is left of public debate or discussion on a number of issues: viz, race, ‘colour’, sexuality, what is called gender, Islam, atheism, et cetera — i.e. ‘protected characteristics’, which essentially means characteristics protected under Political Correctness/Cultural Marxism — as well as, purely tokenistically, nationality, disability and ‘descent’, whatever that may be.
Essentially, the Bill identifies and lists (though mostly without defining) the qualifying ‘protected characteristics’ which entitle a person to enhanced protection from the critical opinions of others under such headings. Instead of ‘critical opinions’, however, the Bill uses the term ‘hatred’, an amorphous term that is nowhere defined other than tautologously, as follows:
‘hatred’ means hatred against a person or a group of persons in the State or elsewhere on account of their protected characteristics or any one of those characteristics.
The Bill co-opts ideological definitions like ‘colour’ and ‘gender’ without defining them legally or in everyday terms. Instead it presents a series of inter-linking reiterative terms that simply assume the definitions to be already clear.
‘Gender’, for example, is ‘defined’ as follows:
‘gender’ means the gender of a person or the gender which a person expresses as the person’s preferred gender or with which the person identifies and includes transgender and a gender other than those of male and female.
To the apocryphal man arrived from the Moon, this might refer to anything from hair-colour to horsepower.
In some contexts, by way of offering clarification, readers of the Bill are referred to the EU Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of November 2008, dealing with ‘combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law’. (Confirming that the Bill is, accordingly, the expression of EU policy and mandates.) However, the Framework Decision tells us very little else, its ‘definitions’ being just as tautologous as those in the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022, which lazily informs that ‘A word or expression that is used in this Act and is also used in the Framework Decision has, unless the context otherwise requires, the same meaning in this Act as it has in the Framework Decision.’
‘Hatred’, for example, is defined in the Framework Decision as follows:
‘Hatred’ shall be understood as referring to hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin.
This is in no sense a definition of ‘hatred’. In fact, it tells us nothing of what hatred is, assuming that everyone already knows. The trouble is that, when the law starts to trick around with notions that ‘everyone already knows’, we very rapidly descend into subjectivism, arbitrariness, and — yes — prejudice.
Other critical words, terms and concepts are not defined at all. The concept of ‘incitement’, for example, is nowhere spelt out as to its meaning or particularities in either the Bill or the EU Council Framework Decision. What are to be the thresholds between acceptable public discourse (said to be protected in the Bill, but never defined) and what is called ‘hatred’? Who decides, and on what basis, is never specified.
Due to the paucity of adequate definitions, the Bill, once passed, would place virtually all consideration of the relevant issues in the hands of judges — all or most of whom are likely to be in sympathy with the Cultural Marxist agenda, or at least aware of which side their bread is buttered on — or juries likely to be prejudiced by relentless, expensively-purchased propaganda and NGO agitation.
In relation to the headline ‘offence’ of ‘incitement to violence or hated to persons on account of their protected characteristics’, the Bill would in effect render unsafe any commentary at all on certain contentious issues — for example transgenderism, immigration and the activities of homosexuals and/or LGBT activists. This is because the framework of the legislation is so hastily sketched out that it would be a matter ultimately for the subjective appraisal of a judge as to whether the alleged offence constituted a ‘hate crime’ or not, requiring would-be critics of the policy or campaign in question to err on the side of extreme caution. The result would be an inevitable chilling of all commentary in these areas.
The same will apply in respect of the consequence of the section headed ‘Offence of condonation, denial or gross trivialisation of genocide, etc., against persons on account of their protected characteristics’
The introduction of such an offence would, I believe, destroy any possibility of achieving revision of established understandings of key historical events, even if new information were to become available, rendering the existing interpretations cast in stone. Indeed, it is possible that, in certain circumstances, it might open up the possibility of rendering the use of the word ‘genocide’ illegal for all usage except in respect of those formally approved prior episodes in which it is already an agreed definition (i.e. ‘events specified in Article 6 of the Rome Statute’ — issued by the International Criminal Court in Rome on July 17th, 1998). This might mean, for example, that someone describing the Covid vaccination programme as ‘genocide’, in a context in which ‘hatred’ of some individual or group covered by the ‘protected characteristics’ provision was in the mix, might find themselves on the hook under this heading also and thereby liable, on summary conviction, to a sentence of up to 12 months, or, in the case of convictions on indictment, a sentence of five years imprisonment.
The offence of incitement would mean, in effect, that anyone who, in seeking to comment on certain controversial matters, risked ignoring the new underfoot conditions might be subject to prosecution on foot of the actions of random or unknown individuals which had simply been associated by the prosecutorial authorities or some (not necessarily implicated) complainant with some statement of that person at any time in the past. The connection could be made subjectively and would only need to satisfy a test of ‘reasonableness’, whatever that might mean.
It also seems that someone could be convicted under this legislation for simply possessing material likely to incite hatred — for example, a book by an author — such as Douglas Murray’s books about mass immigration and Woke insanity, for example — who is critical of issues implicating individuals or groups with ‘protected characteristics’.
The relevant section here specifies that a person shall be guilty of an offence of inciting violence or hatred if he/she ‘prepares or possesses material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics or any of those characteristics with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by himself or herself or another person . . . or being reckless as to whether such violence or hatred is thereby incited.’ It shall be a defence to plead that the material was purely for the defendant’s own use, but if ‘it is reasonable to assume that the material was not intended for the personal use of the person’, the person shall be presumed, until the contrary is proved, to have been in possession of the material for the purposes of disseminating it to others.
In any particular case where allegations are made under the provisions of this legislation, if passed into law, concerning incitement to violence or hatred, or condoning or trivialising genocide, a search warrant may be obtained to search any premises at which any relevant material is alleged to exist. If a judge of the District Court is satisfied by information on oath of a police officer that there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that evidence of, or relating to, the commission of an offence is to be found in a particular place, the judge may issue a warrant for the search of that place and any persons found there. The investigators may use ‘reasonable force’ to enter the place named in the warrant, to search it and anyone found there, and to ‘examine, seize and retain anything found at that place, or anything found in possession of a person present at that place at the time of the search’, that the investigating officer(s) reasonably believe(s) to be evidence of, or relating to, the commission of an offence.
The legislation will also permit the seizure and retention of any such material — for example a computer or document — ‘for so long as is necessary’. The officer conducting the search may open and operate any computer found at the location or require anyone present to supply relevant passwords or encryption keys, or operate a computer for the purpose of enabling a search of its contents, and, if requested, to produce the information accessible by the computer ‘in a form in which the information is visible and legible, or . . . in which it can be removed and in which it is, or can be made, visible and legible.’
In other words, Welcome to Stasi Ireland, changed utterly in the name of progress and ‘tolerance’: totalitarianism bearing down on all in the name of defending the sensitivities of noisy minorities.
Incidentally, the generality of the Bill’s provisions refers to material being disseminated ‘to the public’ and to ‘a section of the public’, suggesting that it shall not be a defence to argue that the commentary was — in whatever sense — ‘in-house’ — even if the location of the alleged offence was a private house: it is entirely probable that the law will be applied to statements made in a private dwelling where non-family members are present and have elected to file a complaint.
The religious aspects are confusing (religion is, nominally at least, a ‘protected characteristic’) and likely to be of no benefit in protecting any aspects of Christian culture or belief. For the first time, atheism becomes a protectorate of Cultural Marxism. Since the Government has already taken steps to remove anti-blasphemy legislation and its constitutional underpinning, it is scarcely credible that the effect of this law would be to restore it in substance, other than for groups (like Muslims) that are protected under another characteristic as well.
The supposed ‘free speech provision’ of the Bill is meaningless and toothless, since it offers only the promise that consideration of a reference to a person or group on the basis of protected characteristics shall not ‘solely’ be the basis of the court’s decision. Again this is ringed around with non-specific concepts and loose definitions. There is supposedly a provision allowing for ‘reasonable and genuine contributions’, in the contexts of literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse, and we are told that this means ‘a contribution that is considered by a reasonable person as being reasonably necessary or incidental to such discourse.’ Again, who decides this? How is ‘reasonably necessary’ to be measured? In a highly-charged, propagandised culture such as Ireland has recently been converted into, how can this be regarded as offering any guarantee of protection to someone seeking to advance unpopular, untested or culturally unsupported viewpoints? And, since the public discourse occurs primarily to support the advancement of tentative and often esoteric ideas, how can this be described as a protection for freedom of expression and commentary where it might matter? It is interesting, here, that the term ‘reasonable person’ has hitherto been mainly associated, legally speaking, with defamations, where at stake in the judicial process would be the reputation of a specific individual. In such circumstances, the complained-of commentary would be defensible by dint of truth or fair comment, but here, since the entire crucible is decked out in ideology, anyone who detects disparagement of himself under a ‘protected characteristic’ will be able to trump any defence of free expression by virtue of his hurt feelings. Before writing, saying something — and yes, according to the Bill, ‘displaying’, ‘publishing’, ‘distributing’, ’disseminating’, ‘showing’ or ‘playing’ such communications, or ‘making the material available in any other way including through the use of an information system to the public or a section of the public’ — the would-be cultural critic will therefore need to think about how his remarks will go down with the most ideologically-slanted person in the (court)room.
Indeed, the restriction is likely to go much further in practice, since the text of the legislation refers to problematic ‘behaviour’ as well as statements.
For the purposes of this Part, a person’s behaviour shall include behaviour of any kind and, in particular, things that the person says, or otherwise communicates, as well as things that the person does and such behaviour may consist of a single act or a course of conduct.
What this means is anyone’s guess, but it is certain that, by ‘behaving’ — i.e., by being alive and breathing in a public space — a person may be liable to prosecution under this legislation. It all depends on how his ‘behaviour’ or ‘communications’ is/are interpreted by the most angry/paranoid individual in the vicinity. For once in this piece of draft legislation, we have stumbled upon a reliable — if accidental — definition, for this is the precise definition of totalitarianism.
Under the heading of ‘incitement to hatred’, the Bill supplants the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, 1989, which will be repealed in the new law, if it is passed. This crime, it appears, can now be committed either with intent or inadvertently, since the criteria include inciting violence or hatred against a protected group or person with or without the intention of doing so. The criterion, again, will be whether some unspecified observer, applying some unspecified non-definition, believes that such an incident of incitement has occurred. Here, the Bill again provides for the defence of ‘genuine contribution to literary, artistic, political, scientific, religious or academic discourse’, but nothing of this is defined, and already the NGO lobbyists are screaming blue murder against any such defence being permitted. Indeed, the incorporation of ‘bodies corporate’ within the scope of the Bill’s prosecutorial reach will mean that theatres, media organisations, cinemas, art galleries, political organisations, churches, schools and colleges, and scientific bodies may be held responsible for anything said or communicated, or any behaviour of any person on its property, that is found to fall under the heading of ‘hatred’.
A body corporate shall be liable if the relevant offence is ‘attributable to the failure, by a director, manager, secretary or other officer of the body corporate, or a person purporting to act in that capacity, to exercise, at the time of the commission of the relevant offence and in all the circumstances of the case, the requisite degree of supervision or control of the relevant person.’ In such circumstances, the body corporate shall be guilty of an offence.
As regards jurisdiction, the Bill stipulates that its provisions should apply to all material placed on any information system, ‘whether or not the offence involved material hosted on an information system in the State’, or ‘whether or not the person was in the State when the offence was committed.’ This would seem to mean that any person, in any country, might be liable to prosecution in Ireland for anything posted on any such information system, regardless of the location of that system. Again, total totalitarianism.
All in all, it is an extremely dangerous piece of legislation every bit as bad as was promised by the various projections and drafts we saw coming through over the past couple of years. In effect, anyone seeking to speak publicly about any of the issues relating to ‘protected characteristics’ (chiefly Cultural Marxist obsessions) would be taking their liberty in their hands.
Let us be straightforward: The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 is essentially a Bill to protect the pursuit of the externally imposed policy amounting to a programme for the destruction of Ireland from any internal commentary or criticism.
A friend observes: ‘Even in the Arts (theatre, literature, painting, film-making, etc), anything that ‘offends’ those protected anti-Christian minorities will be deemed a hate crime offender, hence, culture is f****d. If they carry out this law in a draconian way and start jailing people, Ireland will become unliveable. Basically, it’s a law that prevents heteronormative people and Christians from expressing the truth.’
This, of course, is entirely correct. The vagueness of the legislation will, if anything, exacerbate its intrinsically tyrannical nature, imposing a chilling cautiousness on those who might be disposed to challenge proposed initiatives and developments, especially those proposing the most radical changes to Irish society. These laws will therefore enable even the most far-reaching of reality-reshaping measures to be pushed through the institutions of society without any possibility of proper discussion or debate.
But, over and above all that, the proposed law is a charter for the disincorporation of each and every existing Irish-born person as a proprietorial shareholder of the nation of Ireland, from which flows the inevitable effect of winding up the Irish nation as a community of people sharing the same island space. ‘Hate speech’ laws are not simply censorship — their deeper purpose is to terminate equality under the law, so that the normative indigenous members of a nation are made to feel like an alien underclass, while the actually imported underclass, and the State-sponsored disaffected, are used as battering rams to decimate the native culture and existing societal structures — the pawns taking out the Sovereign People, Kings and Queens alike.
This has, finally, triggered the vindication of the fear expressed by the great Irish journalist and patriot, Thomas Davis:
‘This country of ours is no sand bank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in its archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of Irish mind. Long wars, vast organisations, subtle codes, beacon crimes, leading virtues, and self-mighty men were here. If we live influenced by wind and sun and tree, and not by the passions and deeds of the past, we are a thriftless and a hopeless people.’
The Government, of course, has such contempt for the intelligence of the Irish public that it will claim that what it is seeking to achieve is a kinder, gentler Ireland for everyone. This is nonsense: The way to achieve a kinder, gentler Ireland would have been to control inward migration to whatever was necessary to meet the needs of the economy, and the limits of what the culture could bear. At the very least, it would have entailed consulting the population concerning what a succession of governments since the turn of the millennium has imposed. By dint of stealth and moral blackmail, the political class has, for more than 20 years, been flooding the country with indifferent aliens who come here seeking benefits and are coached on arrival by NGOs to treat the host population as inherently racist. This, too, is a key element of the Cultural Marxist agenda, which seeks to impose burdens of guilt on ‘white’ populations on foot of the mixed history of Western imperialism. Ireland, however, far from having an imperial past, was itself, for hundreds of years, the casualty of English colonialism, having had much of its culture, including its language annihilated by barbaric laws, and its population periodically decimated by genocide camouflaged as natural disaster. These calamities also, of course, provoked the mass exodus of population to the New World and Britain, leaving Ireland in the early years of the third millennium semantically helpless before the disingenuous charge that, its own people having been ‘welcomed’ in these places, the Ireland of 2010 and 2020 had a responsibility to repay the favour to the universe. What is never allowed is that Irish people went abroad with little or no chance of ever returning home, to work like Trojans in menial jobs in inhospitable places, leaving their native land to stagnate for want of youthful energy and creativity.
Ireland, then, itself a sufferer at the hands of globalist colonialism, has in recent years been force-fed a diet of imported ideology, including Critical Race Theory, which creates a public discussion bearing the almost constant insinuation that Ireland is on a par with Alabama in its past treatment of black and coloured people. The truth could hardly be more different, but truth has been among the most recent emigrants from the Emerald Isle. The result is that the Irish Government, under instructions from the EU bureaucrats, now invites the world to our shores, with promises of free houses, incomes without obligation, immunity from all kinds of legal consequences for wrongdoing — and now: cultural protection from the merest slight of a disgruntled native who is himself entitled to none of these benefits. This week, homelessness among Irish people approached 11,000 — the highest ever recorded — while a massive building near Castlebar was being prepared to house a further tranche of (alleged) Ukrainians. Irish people live in tents and cardboard boxes while Ukrainians, supposedly ‘fleeing a war zone’, but without encountering any process of vetting or verification, move into duplex apartments at the taxpayer’s expense.
Among the true objectives of the ‘hate speech’ legislation is to protect a treasonous political class against criticism from its own taxpaying population for the crimes it is committing against them, its treachery against the heroes of the long struggle to achieve freedom at a cost invariably paid in blood and life-force, and ultimately the destruction of one of the oldest and intellectually richest cultures in human history.
But even this is not the deepest, most malevolent of the reasons why the Irish political class — Irish-born men and women who have been privileged to be entrusted with care of their country and its inheritance, are in 2022 seeking to impose these new Penal Laws on their own people. The deepest reason has to do with facilitating powerful and already wealthy outsiders in plundering Ireland of everything worth taking, nailed down or otherwise.
The proposed law will destroy — as is the uppermost intention behind it — the concept of equality before the law. It need hardly be pointed out that the Bill, while presenting itself as a charter for increased tolerance and societal gentleness, is in reality a charter for the dominance of minorities over the pre-existing population. In each individual case, it will defend, uphold or elevate that which is alien, esoteric or abnormative, which means that the normal, the here-before and the undemanding get stuffed and silenced every time. It is obvious that anyone who imagines they will be able to use the law to defend themselves from attacks on their Catholicism/Christianity would be barking up the wrong tree. Similarly anyone imagining that it offers some kind of protection from what the new gender ideology classes as ‘cis gender’ persons (i.e. those who wish to remain as they were made) had better think again. The law will benefit listed minorities only, and everyone else will be laughed out of court by the occupiers of a now all but totally corrupted Bench. Because this is a Cultural Marxist-inspired law, it is designed to weaponise the grievances of minorities so as to silence and thereafter dispossess the indigenous former majority. The trick is that it empowers each individual only in particular sub-divisions of his existence — sexuality, colour, et cetera — while simultaneously denying him as much as anyone else the generic rights that citizens of Western democracies (now ‘former democracies’) took for granted until the day before yesterday. Even the most ‘protected characteristic’ endowed beneficiaries will be entitled to prosecute their grievance only on the narrow basis of particular, singular characteristics, and in other contexts have the same rights as everyone else, which is to say practically none. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, 2022 will not restore to any person walking upon the sand bank of 2023 Ireland the rights which the political class stole from the Irish people in 2020, with no intention of restoring.
Once the Bill passes into law, what for the moment we might call the ‘native Irish’ will immediately become second-class legal citizens, being in a sense the prisoners and slaves of newcomers boasting legally superior ‘protected characteristics’ that give them exalted protection in any dispute with a native Irish person. Each surviving member of the native Irish will thereafter live on tenterhooks, waiting for the moment of accusation, to be followed hard in the ideological kangaroo courts of post-Irish Ireland by conviction, punishment, incarceration, and thereafter lifetime ignominy. Placing this alongside other imminent measures, such as the banning of public protests under certain headings (abortion, for example), the ‘delimiting’ of private property, and the seizure by the State of rights over every drop of water in the land, what we are observing is the introduction of a new charter of Penal Laws directed at the indigenous people of Ireland, albeit this time framed and implemented not by a monstrous occupier by their own elected ‘representatives’, the ‘monsters with human faces’ who smile as they help the robber barons to steal our children’s birthright. Be in no doubt: The ultimate purpose of this is the wholesale plunder of all resources that have not already been transferred into the ownership/control of the Combine.
What is happening, then, amounts to the final dispossession, re-plantation and re-colonisation of Ireland and the re-enslavement of the indigenous Irish people, using indifferent aliens baited by fistfuls of toytown money, as the principal instrument of plunder.
The present moment is a little analogous to what occurred a decade ago, when the Irish electorate was persuaded to annul the parental rights of parents, essentially transferring them in their entirely to the State, in the name of giving ‘rights to children’. This cleared the way for gay marriage, gay parenting and ‘legal’ gay families, at the expense of the normative and natural definitions arising from procreative heterosexuality. In a somewhat comparable fashion, enforced mass migration is an instrument of rights-stripping in the context of the nationhood of the individual: each newcomer is set against each indigenous person, who is thereby cancelled out and reduced to a free-floating nomad in his own former country. That much of this process will be effected on an ostensibly ‘voluntary’ basis — i.e, people surrendering to the chilling intent of the legislation — is all part of the plan. When it is all done and dusted, and the old Irish take belatedly to recrimination, they will be told that there was nothing in the least coercive about the handover: They went along with everything of their own free will, and have no one to blame but themselves.
It is important to stress that what is happening is in no sense or respect intended to be to the ultimate benefit of the newcomers, who are simply being used as proxy occupiers so as to effect the first, and most difficult, stage of dispossession. To loosen the grip on Ireland of a people who, in many instances, can trace their lineage there for hundreds or thousands of years, is a massive undertaking. The purpose, in the first instance, as already stated, is to dislodge the Sovereign People, and the proxies are here used as pawns to take out the Kings and Queens who have lived here all their lives and thought of this, their metaphysical home, as being no sand bank thrown up by some recent caprice of earth.
November 27, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, Ireland |
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First part of an incredible story that shows just how broken our public “health” apparatus is: very, very broken
Last year, I wrote to let you know that the CDC was refusing to release its post-marketing safety data for Covid-19 vaccines from its v-safe system to the public, despite our legal demands for this data on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).
The CDC refused to release this data even though it had documented the data was in a form that could already be released to the public (meaning, it was “deidentified” or clear of any personally identifying information) because Oracle, a private company, already had access to this deidentified data.
Well, after multiple legal demands, appeals, and two federal lawsuits, the CDC finally capitulated and agreed to a court ordered schedule compelling it to produce the data. Now that ICAN, and therefore the public, have received the check-the-box portions (as opposed to the free-text field portions) of this data, the data itself may explain why the CDC refused to release it without a fight.
V-safe’s data shows that 7.7% of its approximate 10 million users reported having to receive medical care after receipt of a Covid-19 vaccine, and over 70% of those users sought outpatient/urgent clinical care, emergency room care, and/or were hospitalized.
I can already hear the retort: surely these were anti-vaxxers reporting the need for medical care! Far from. All v-safe users received the Covid-19 vaccine. Anti-vaxxers don’t get the shot. Not only were these folks not against the shot – again, because every one of them got the shot – they are likely mostly vaccine enthusiasts. This is evidenced by the fact that most of the individuals who registered for v-safe did so between December 2020 and April 2021; in fact, around 9 million of the approximate 10 million users registered during this period. This was the time, you may recall, when many people were clamoring over each other to get the shot. When they were spending hours online searching for vaccine availability and making appointments. When love songs were literally being sung about the vaccine.
This was also early in the rollout when CDC recommended, and many states followed, a phased rollout, offering the first vaccines to healthcare workers and to long-term care facility residents. It was during this period that people signed up for v-safe to participate in its rollout, excited to be part of the vaccine program. (One can assume that more healthcare workers than elderly long-term care residents signed up for a smartphone-based program). This also pre-dates most vaccine mandates in the country.
The data submitted by the 10 million v-safe users therefore may be a good reflection of the experience of the larger population of 265 million Americans who received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. To the extent it is not, if anything, these people (as enthusiasts and/or healthcare workers) were arguably more prone to underreport symptoms than to overreport.
The data itself is disconcerting but even more incredible is the CDC’s stonewalling the release of the data, the process needed to obtain the data, and how the CDC used, or dare I say misused, the data over the last year and a half. This story, in many ways, reflects all that is wrong with so-called public “health” authorities. It shows the serious danger resulting when the CDC’s policies, public claims, and reputation become indistinguishable from its need to defend a product at almost all costs.
To make it manageable to tell and digestible to folks with busy schedules, I will tell the story in several parts released over the coming days and weeks.
The v-safe story continues in Part 2, which will explain what is in v-safe and why you should care. And trust me, you should care, as v-safe is likely the best evidence that exists regarding the safety profile of this product. As I tell the story, I will endeavor through these posts to respond to the torrent of inquiries regarding v-safe, the fight to get the data, and the data itself, which I have already received.
I will leave you with a short appearance I had on Fox News discussing the v-safe data.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | COVID-19 Vaccine, United States |
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The US admits the “dual-use nature” of its large-scale biological research programs both at home and abroad but still plans to further expand them, the commander of Russia’s Nuclear Biological and Chemical Defense Troops, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, said during a briefing on Saturday. The general demanded broader international oversight of such programs.
“The military biological activities of the Pentagon in various regions of the world” are among the sources of risk threatening the whole international community, Kirillov warned.
The US seeks to “enhance its military biological potential,” as well as “expand its global control over the biological situation in the world,” he noted, citing the US’ own strategic documents.
The US National Biodefense Strategy, adopted in October 2022, does say that the nation “recognizes the dual-use nature of the life sciences and biotechnology” while also stating that Washington “seeks to prevent the misuse of science and technology.” It adds that biological risk management “requires… taking steps to mitigate those risks, regardless of whether they originate in the United States or abroad,” pointing to the need to “evolve” the country’s “biodefense capabilities.”
The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency – a Pentagon body mostly focused on countering threats posed by weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – goes even further in its strategy for the years 2022-2027. It openly identifies expanding the US’ ability to “identify, characterize and exploit adversary WMD vulnerabilities” as one of its goals. Another of its aims is to recognize “potential WMD warfighting obstacles” and find “solutions” to help the US and its allies “win during the conflict.”
Washington’s stated intention of strengthening the implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) has been met with doubt from Moscow. Russia has “repeatedly raised the issue of the real goal of the Pentagon’s research programs at various international sites,” Kirillov stated on Saturday, adding that these questions “remain unanswered to date.”
In late October, Russia filed an official complaint claiming that US-backed biological activities are taking place in Ukraine and requested a UN probe into the matter. The UN Security Council rejected Moscow’s proposal, with the US, UK, and France voting against it.
Kirillov’s statement was made ahead of the upcoming BWC review conference scheduled to take place in Geneva over late November and early December. Held every five years, the event is aimed at ensuring that the convention remains relevant and up-to-date amid the changes in science and technology, as well as in the global security landscape.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Russia, Ukraine, United Nations, United States |
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An investigation into British and American collusion with the terror groups that kidnapped and murdered western hostages in Syria
On 19 August, 2014, ISIS released a video of the beheading of American journalist James Foley who was kidnapped by the terrorist organization in 2012 while reporting on the conflict in Syria.
Foley’s shocking execution became one of the most widely followed news stories of the Syrian war. Foley’s killer, Mohammed Emwazi, popularly known as “Jihadi John” by the western media, was a Kuwaiti-born Brit from West London. In the Foley execution video, Emwazi’s unmistakable London accent can be heard.
However, what is less known about the notorious ISIS member, was that he travelled to Syria as part of a “terror-funnel” established by British intelligence, and abducted Foley while fighting for an armed group known as Katibat al-Muhajireen – or the Emigrants Brigade – which enjoyed direct support from British intelligence. Many members of al-Muhajireen, including Emwazi, then helped lay the foundation for the rise of ISIS by joining the terror group with its establishment in April 2013.
Further, for a period of Foley’s captivity he was being held in a prison jointly controlled by another armed group, Liwa al-Tawhid, or the Monotheism Brigade, which operated under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) umbrella and received aid directly from US intelligence. Some of this included arms being sold onto ISIS, including to the group leader holding James Foley.
In other words, although James Foley’s murder occurred in the deserts of Raqqa, it arguably began in more familiar places, namely London and Washington.
The terror-funnel
In 2009, former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas was told by top UK officials that “Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria.”
This involved sending British jihadis to Syria through a pipeline established by UK intelligence decades before, to fight in Bosnia and Kosovo against Serbia. According to former US federal prosecutor John Loftus, British intelligence had used the London-based Al-Muhajireen Movement to recruit Islamist militants with British passports for the war against the Serbs.
The Al-Muhajireen, later known as al-Ghurabaa and Islam4UK was a Salafist religious movement established in Britain in 1996 by exiled Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, who, as journalist Nafeez Ahmed details, was a long-time informant for UK intelligence, meeting regularly with MI5 agents throughout the 1990s.
Bakri himself acknowledged his role in training jihadists to be dispatched abroad, in an interview with The Guardian in May 2000.
A month after the 7 July, 2005 attacks in London, in which suicide bombers targeted the city’s transport system, killing 52, Bakri left the UK for Lebanon. Although former Muhajireen members participated in the attack, the British Home Office did not prevent Bakri from leaving the country but did ban him from ever returning.
By 2009, Lebanese security forces were accusing Bakri of training Al-Qaeda members, while Bakri himself boasted: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites … Al-Qaeda in Lebanon … are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.”
Jihadi John
But who was Mohammed Emwazi? As the Guardian reported, Emwazi came to Britain with his family from his native Kuwait as a young boy. After attending the University of Westminster to study Information Technology, Emwazi became politically active as part of a group of West Londoners who followed an Islamic preacher named Hani al-Sibai. Some members of the group took part in jihadi training camps in Northern England and Scotland and were being monitored by M15.
In 2009, Emwazi traveled to Tanzania with two friends from the group, Bilal el-Berjawi and Mohamed Sakr. Assumed to be traveling to Somalia to join Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabab, MI5 had the men detained in Dar es Salaam and subjected them to lengthy interrogations before forcing them to return to the UK. Both Berjawi and Sakr later succeeded in traveling to Somalia and were killed in US drone strikes.
Emwazi continued to be monitored by MI5 and was prevented from traveling to his native Kuwait in 2010, where he allegedly wished to marry. Emwazi claimed he was interrogated and harassed at Heathrow Airport by MI5, and complained of his treatment to CAGE, a London-based advocacy group led by former Guantanamo detainee Moazem Begg which focuses on Muslim detainees. CAGE then began an advocacy campaign on Emwazi’s behalf.
Yet Emwazi was then somehow later able to travel to Syria. The Daily Beast reported that this seemed odd, given that Emwazi had been “described as a core member of an extremist network linked to the al Shabab group in Somalia during a court hearing as far back as 2010” and had been tracked by MI5 for at least five years. “His links to terror networks were well known—and yet, he was released by the authorities” to travel to Syria.
Journalist Nafeez Ahmed reports that according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, British authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video and other evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy.”
Ahmed notes this “terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with [the Islamic State] – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria?”
Upon arriving in Syria in August 2012, Emwazi joined an armed group known as Katibat al-Muhajireen. Journalist James Harkin reports that according to Jejoen Bontinck, a Belgian jihadi that fell out with his brigade and was imprisoned for a time with Foley, most British jihadis traveling to Syria joined Katibat al-Muhajireen.
A “deep embarrassment”
Crucially, Katibat al-Muhajireen enjoyed support from UK intelligence services. This is evidenced by the terror trial of Swedish citizen Bherlin Gildo, who according to the Daily Mail fought for Katibat al-Muhajireen as well.
The Guardian reports that Gildo was detained while transiting through Heathrow Airport having been accused by British authorities of attending a terrorist training camp and receiving weapons training between 31 August, 2012, and 1 March, 2013 – as well as possessing information likely to be useful to a terrorist.
However, the terror trial collapsed “after fears of deep embarrassment” to the British security services. This was because, as Gildo’s lawyer explained: “British intelligence agencies were supporting the same Syrian opposition groups as he [Gildo] was.”
British intelligence support for Katibat al-Muhajireen was further confirmed when former Guantanamo detainee Begg of CAGE was also tried on terror charges. Begg had also traveled to Syria several times in 2012 and provided physical training to foreign fighters from Katibat al-Muhajireen in Aleppo, as reported by Foreign Policy. Begg made his latest trip to Syria in December 2012.
As a result, Begg was later detained by British authorities and accused of attending a terrorist training camp. The Guardian reported, however, that Begg was freed after MI5 “belatedly gave police and prosecutors a series of documents that detailed the agency’s extensive contacts with him before and after his trips to Syria,” and which showed that MI5 told Begg he could continue his work for the so-called opposition in Syria “unhindered.”
In short, Emwazi traveled to Syria through a pipeline established by UK intelligence, and then joined an armed group, Katibat al-Muhajireen, that was supported by British intelligence, but which was viewed as a terrorist organization by the British police.
“Kidnapped by the one who killed him”
James Foley was an American freelance journalist who reported from Iraq and Afghanistan before traveling to Libya in 2011 to cover the NATO-led war on Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government. While in Libya, a close colleague of Foley’s was shot and killed by Libyan security forces, who also detained and imprisoned Foley for 44 days.
In 2012, Foley began making trips to Syria to report on the conflict for the Global Post and AFP, including in July when armed opposition groups, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front and the FSA’s Liwa al-Tawhid, invaded the city.
In October 2012, Foley published an article from his time in Aleppo suggesting that the opposition armed groups enjoyed little popularity among the city’s residents. Foley noted that “many civilians here are losing patience with the increasingly violent and unrecognizable opposition,” which was “deeply infiltrated by both foreign fighters and terrorist groups.”
This ran contrary to mainstream narratives about the Syria conflict, which suggested the armed opposition groups were comprised of army defectors fighting for democracy and enjoying strong popular support.
In November 2012, Foley was returning to Turkey after a reporting trip with British journalist John Cantlie. After stopping at an internet café in the town of Binnish, the pair’s taxi began heading for the border when it was overtaken on the road and forced to stop by a van full of armed men. Among them was Muhammad Emwazi.
James Harkin explains that according to two European hostages who had been held with Foley but later freed, the kidnapping gang that took Foley and Cantlie was led by Emwazi. “[Foley] was kidnapped by the one who killed him,” one of the freed Europeans told Harkin: “I am sure of that.”
Emwazi participated in Foley’s abduction just two months after arriving in Syria. Note that this was during the period Katibat al-Muhajireen was receiving support from British intelligence, as shown by the periods when Gildo and Begg attended Katibat al-Muhajireen training camps.
According to a US Department of Justice indictment, Emwazi was joined by two of his fellow Brits, Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, in the operation to abduct Foley. Emwazi, Kotey, Elsheikh, and one other Brit, Aine Davis, were later collectively known as the “Beatles,” initially by their captives due to their British accents, and later by western media.
Foley’s critical coverage of the US and UK-backed armed groups occupying Aleppo, coupled with the British Foreign Office effort to control the narrative of the war in the media – including by “waging information warfare in Syria by funding media operations for some rebel fighting groups” – raises the question of whether UK intelligence officials ordered the Muhajireen militants to kidnap Foley. On this point we can of course only speculate.
Collaborations with ISIS
According to the Belgian jihadi Bontinck, Emwazi and his fellow Beatles continued serving as Foley’s guards at various times, and passed him to Aleppo’s ISIS leader, Abu Athir, sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2013. By this time, they had pledged allegiance to ISIS.
This raises the question of whether Emwazi, and the other British Muhajireen fighters continued to enjoy support from UK intelligence after joining ISIS as well.
By August 2013, Foley was being held by ISIS in a prison in the basement of the Aleppo Children’s Hospital, along with several other foreign hostages.
Another American journalist, Theo Padnos, had previously been held in the same prison, but as a captive of the Nusra Front. As the Washington Post reported, Nusra had established a headquarters at the Aleppo Children’s Hospital in 2012, which it shared with Liwa al-Tawhid, the US-backed FSA faction.
According to the New York Times, after ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi announced the creation of ISIS, the Nusra brigade sharing the children’s hospital headquarters with Liwa al-Tawhid pledged loyalty to ISIS.
Liwa al-Tawhid then continued to share the headquarters with ISIS, and its leader, Abd al-Qader al-Salah was criticized for his cooperation with ISIS. Killed by a Syrian government airstrike in November 2013, the New York Times noted that Salah “ultimately made accommodations with ISIS that, to some of his allies, were at best disappointing and at worst ugly. Though he had welcomed journalists and aid workers, when Islamist groups began kidnapping them, even holding hostages at a compound he shared with ISIS in Aleppo, he made no public moves to stop it.”
Liwa al-Tawhid’s collaboration with ISIS had come into the spot-light in August 2013, while Foley was languishing in prison in the two groups’ Aleppo headquarters.
On 4 August, Tawhid commander Abd al-Jabbar al-Okaidi, who also served as the head of the FSA’s Aleppo Military Council, was filmed celebrating the capture of the Menagh Air Base in the Aleppo countryside with ISIS commander Abu Jandal. Okaidi praised the ISIS fighters and referred to them as “brothers” for their help in capturing the airbase.
The video of Okaidi celebrating with the ISIS commander proved embarrassing to the Obama administration, because US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford had crossed the border to Syria to meet with Okaidi a few months before, in May 2013 – and because Okaidi was considered the main conduit for US–provided non-lethal aid to armed opposition groups in northern Syria.
McClatchy reports that in response to the Menagh video, Ford called Okaidi directly to complain, saying that it had created “a public relations nightmare for the Obama administration, which was trying to show Congress and the American public that it was boosting moderates and isolating extremists on the battlefield.” However, as McClatchy notes, “When the importance of the jihadis became undeniable, Obama administration officials were irate.”
Okaidi had also previously spoken openly of his collaboration with ISIS, again referring to ISIS commanders as “brothers” and indicating that he communicated with them daily in an interview with pro-opposition Orient TV.
Buying weapons from the FSA
Abu Athir, the ISIS leader in Aleppo holding Foley, had similarly kind words for Okaidi’s FSA. Al-Jazeera quoted Abu Athir as stating in July 2013 that, “We are buying weapons from the FSA. We bought 200 anti-aircraft missiles and Koncourse anti-tank weapons. We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA.”
The Koncourse missiles had in turn been provided to Okaidi’s Liwa al-Tawhid courtesy of the CIA. According to reporting by the Los Angeles Times, Koncourse missiles were provided to FSA groups such as Tawhid via the CIA’s regional allies, while CIA officers trained FSA fighters in the use of these weapons in Jordan and Turkey starting in November 2012.
In August 2013, a month after ISIS leader Abu Athir boasted of buying Koncourse missiles from the FSA, a video emerged of Okaidi’s Liwa al-Tawhid fighters also using Koncourse anti-tank missiles in the fight at Menagh airbase.
This suggests that Okaidi was receiving Koncourse missiles from his CIA handlers, and was then selling some of them to his ISIS counterpart, Abu Athir.
Ambassador Ford had himself been involved in the CIA effort to provide these weapons to Okaidi and the FSA. According to journalist Michael Gordon of the New York Times, Ford traveled to Langley, Virginia in 2012 to meet with then-CIA director David Petraeus to plan providing weapons covertly to the Syrian opposition.
Recall that US-favorite Okaidi was the FSA leader in Aleppo and claimed to communicate daily with his ISIS counterparts during this time. If pressed by Ambassador Ford, Okaidi could have therefore inquired with Abu Athir about Foley and the other foreign hostages held by ISIS in August 2013.
Dragging their feet
In January 2014, a civil war broke out between ISIS on the one hand, and Nusra, Liwa al-Tawhid, and other opposition factions on the other, in which ISIS was expelled from Aleppo city but took full control of Raqqa, which would go on to serve as its de-facto Syrian capital. Foley and other foreign hostages were then moved to Raqqa, while ISIS massacred most of the Syrian prisoners it had held in Aleppo before evacuating.
In the following months, ISIS freed 15 European hostages after receiving ransoms averaging some two million euros, whether from the captives’ governments, families, or insurers. However, the US government refused to pay a ransom for Foley.
Further, Ambassador Ford’s State Department threatened to prosecute Foley’s parents if they paid a ransom, which deterred them from raising funds for that purpose.
ISIS pointed to this in their English-language magazine, Dabiq, explaining that “As the American government was dragging its feet, reluctant to save James’s life,” other hostages had been spared after ransoms were paid.
British-backed militants
On 19 August, 2014, Foley was beheaded by Emwazi, who shortly thereafter also executed journalist Steven Sotloff, and aid workers David Haines, Alan Henning, and Peter Kassig, as well as 22 Syrian soldiers. John Cantlie’s fate is still unknown.
Emwazi was killed in a US airstrike in Raqqa on in November 2015. However, two of his fellow Beatles, Alexanda Amon Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, were later captured alive, and stood trial in the US. Both were convicted of participating in Foley’s abduction and killing and sentenced to life in prison.
It is no coincidence that Kotey and Elsheikh were tried in US courts. Any effort to prosecute them in the UK would have quickly collapsed, because British intelligence were supporting the very same armed group – Katibat al-Muhajireen – in which they and Emwazi were members when they abducted Foley. A UK trial would have proved a “deep embarrassment” for British intelligence, just as the attempted prosecutions of Bherlin Gildo and Moazem Begg had been.
In short, James Foley was abducted, held captive, and later murdered by militants from an armed group that received direct support from British intelligence. These militants fought in a dirty war to topple the Syrian government orchestrated by US planners, including Ambassador Ford.
Weapons sent by Ford and his CIA counterparts were given to another armed group, Liwa al-Tawhid, which shared a prison with ISIS during the time Foley was held there, and which sold some of these weapons to the ISIS commander then holding Foley.
Not only Foley but hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed as a result of the US and UK-led dirty war on Syria. The murder of James Foley is just one atrocity among countless others for which both Washington and London are responsible as a result of their effort to effect regime change in Syria.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | CIA, ISIS, Obama, Syria, UK, United States |
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The US’ destructive wars on Muslim countries launched in the wake of 9/11 under the misplaced rubric known notoriously as the “War on Terror” spawned senseless deaths and bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.
The George W. Bush administration, heavily infested with neoconservatives and Likudniks, contemptuously ignored and wilfully disregarded the sovereign status of Muslim lands by unleashing invasions, bombings, massacres and, ultimately, occupying them.
In a gross display of raw power, the US shamelessly sought to demonstrate its unchallenged position as a military superpower to refashion the world in its image.
Since the unmistakable target of US belligerence was Islam and Muslims, it adopted a well-worn Israeli strategy by dehumanising victims as “terrorists”. The tactic was designed to fool the world by claiming that the war was not on “good Muslims” but only the “bad ones” depicted as “terrorists”.
Against this backdrop, one is reminded of the extent of maliciousness associated with the War on Terror paradigm and the abuse of justice flowing therefrom.
A classic example in this regard is the case of what became known as the “Holy Land Foundation Five (HLF5)”.
Fourteen years ago, five highly respected US-based Palestinian academics were unfairly targeted and jailed for providing humanitarian aid to orphans and widows in Palestine.
They have been described as the “Holy Land Five” who were actively involved in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) based in Texas.
The HLF was, at the time, the largest Muslim welfare and charity organisation in the US until it was singled out and hounded by the Bush administration and Israeli forces.
Using the cover of the War on Terror and fuelled by hostile Zionist agencies who profiled the HLF as a “nest of terror”, it was shut down in December 2001 by US authorities.
The case against the “Holy Land five” led to the wrongful conviction and unjust long-term imprisonment of five highly respected Palestinian men. Three of them – Mufid Abdulqader, Ghassan Elashi and Shukri Abu Baker – remain imprisoned today.
The two others, Abdulrahman Odeh and Mohammed El-Mezain, sentenced to 15 years each, were released in 2020 and 2022, respectively.
An intriguing yet deplorable aspect of the highly politically charged case is the fact that these men were convicted on false charges of “providing material support to terrorism,” even though they were never even accused of funding the legitimate armed resistance to Israeli occupation and colonisation.
According to various reports, including by Samidoun, interestingly, the same charities funded by the Holy Land Foundation were also funded by the International Red Cross and even USAID, the US Agency for International Development.
In other words, the criteria for aiding or funding “terrorism” ought to have been applicable to the International Red Cross and USAID, rendering them “guilty” as well.
However, as is known, the Holy Land Foundation was selectively targeted and borne out by the fact that after failing to convict the HLF5 in their first attempt, the US judiciary allowed untested “evidence” by an anonymous Israeli intelligence agent.
The War on Terror has and remains a playbook on how to subvert justice to gain political goals. The dubious, torture-produced “evidence” by a faceless Israeli spook against the HLF5 was typical sensationalism and anti-Palestinian bigotry.
Though Israel’s subversion of US politics is a well-known documented fact, it cannot remain unchallenged. By the same token, the ill-conceived path of destruction known as the War on Terror needs to be derailed, and its perpetrators brought to justice.
And the case of the three men who remain behind bars deserves a global campaign to secure their freedom.
November 26, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Human rights, Middle East, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Fact plus opinion
The injection method
Since I went to medical school, there has always been the instruction to pull back on a needle (aspirate) when giving an intramuscular or subcutaneous injection, to be sure you are not injecting directly into a blood vessel.
This instruction has been omitted from the COVID vaccine guidance, and I have come to think the omission is probably deliberate. If you inject a COVID vaccine directly into a blood vessel (usually a vein, because they are more superficial and the walls are thin) you will give most of the dose directly to the vascular system at once.
If you inject the dose correctly, vaccine components will need to be taken up by cells and lymphatics before some enter the vascular system, both slowing down the process and delivering less to the endothelial cells that line the blood vessles, where we know a lot of direct spike damage is done.
The adenovirus vector vaccines
The DNA adenovirus-vector vaccines (Astra-Zeneca and Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson) both used an adenovirus that had been genetically engineered to produce spike protein. The adenovirus vaccine platform (method) was already known to cause thrmbosis (blood clots) before COVID.
The fact that they caused thrombosis should have been expected, and should have been included on the fact sheet, which is part of the informed consent process for EUAs. Excluding this known complication might be helpful in litigation by the injured parties. I cited the literature on this in my blog when the vaccines came out.
The spike produced is of course an additional cause of injuries, and like the mRNA vaccines, you don’t know how much you make .
There may be other causes of which I am unaware, especially when you consider the speed of manufacture and the fact that some or most of the J and J vaccine was made in the Emergent BioSolutions factory in Baltimore, where about 400 million doses of COVID vaccines (or the ingredients for their manufacture) had to be thrown away due to contamination and other problems.
The mRNA vaccines
The spike proteins cause damage, and as with the adenovirus vaccines, there is no way to know how much your body will make, in which cells it will be made (many of which will be destroyed by the immune system), nor over what duration.
The lipid nanoparticle (LNP) used to coat the mRNA and help get it into cells is made of polyethylene glycol (there are multiple variations of PEG), cholesterol, and in the Pfizer vaccine there are two additional chemicals called ALC 315 and ALC 059. Neither ALC was injected into humans previously and their toxicity is not established. It seems they easily cross the blood-brain barrier.
70% of people have antibodies to PEG, which probably is the cause of most of the immediate anaphylactic reactions to the vaccines. While we have stopped talking about anaphylaxis, some early evidence from the mRNA vaccines suggested that anaphylaxis occurred at a rate 25-100x more than from other vaccines. I discussed this on January 28, 2021 in The Defender.
Then there is the degraded RNA, which was said to be up to 45% of the total RNA in the product at the factory. After the vaccine has been shipped and warmed the degraded RNA is probably a lot more of the total.
The smaller bits of RNA may be simply junk with no effect on us. Or some of this RNA may retain the nucleotide codes that allow it to be transcribed into proteins or peptides—which we know absolutely nothing about.
Some of it may affect which genes are turned on and off. Some may have other physiological functions. Small interfering RNAs are about 20 nucleotides long, are double-stranded, and are used to study the function of genes by turning them on and off.
What is the role of small RNAs?
Small RNAs regulate a multitude of biological processes in plants, including development, metabolism, maintenance of genome integrity, immunity against pathogens, and abiotic stress responses. Increasing evidence suggests that small RNAs play a critical role in regulating the interaction of pathogens with plants.
Some small pieces of RNA could have been included deliberately in the vaccines for a specific purpose. The problem is that with millions of species (different lengths and types) of different RNAs in the vial, there is simply no way known to sort out what exactly is there and how it could affect you.
Addendum: from the Acuitas website, we find that Acuitas, one of the developers of the LNP also works on small interfering RNAs:
TECHNOLOGY FOCUS
- Lipid nanoparticles for intracellular delivery of nucleic acid therapeutics
- Messenger RNA therapeutics
- RNAi therapeutics (siRNA and microRNA)
- DNA therapeutics (plasmids and DNA constructs)
There may be other things in the vaccines. The manufacturing proceses were speeded up and virtually no quality control was done the way it normally is, checking for patency at every step in the process.
I was struck by the number of vaccine reactions that mimic reactions to anthrax vaccines, made with a totally different process and using different materials. Might it be that both types of vaccines simply have a lot of impurities that lead to reactions simply due to how much ‘junk’ is being injected? I can’t give you an answer.
The bottom line is that there are many good reasons to never take any of these products.
November 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine |
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Top public health empty suit is a pandemic planner and propagandist
Dr. Ashish Jha
At at press briefing on November 22, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, reiterated that God gave us two arms in order to receive multiple vaccines and boosters. I write “reiterated” because he made the same stupid remark at a press briefing back in September.
I wasn’t surprised when the Biden Administration appointed Dr. Jha to serve as its Covid Czar. As we recount in our book, Dr. Jha was the minority witness at Senator Ron Johnson’s November 19, 2020 hearing on Early Outpatient Treatment. This hearing began with testimony from Drs. Peter McCullough, Harvey Risch, and George Fareed on the safety and efficacy of repurposed, FDA-approved drugs for treating COVID-19—especially in the disease’s early stage—to prevent hospitalization and death.
Following their testimony, Dr. Jha testified that their observations and findings were erroneous. In fact, he claimed, there were no effective early treatments for COVID-19, and that our best and only hope was the vaccine that was then in development.
An especially dramatic and somewhat comical moment in the hearing occurred when Dr. George Fareed said, “I wonder if Dr. Jha actually treats patients by the way he talks.” Senator Johnson took this remark as a cue for querying Dr. Jha.
“Have you treated any Covid patients,” Senator Johnson asked.
“I have not, sir,” Dr. Jha replied. We recount this scene in the following excerpt from The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex:
Dr. Jha had splendid academic credentials to match his splendid manners, but at this moment he lost a lot of credibility. It was perhaps the equivalent of an aeronautical engineer admitting that he’d never flown in a plane, or a marital counselor admitting he’d never been married.
He implied that Professor Risch—a distinguished epidemiologist twenty years his senior—was categorically wrong in his interpretation of the data. Then he implied that Dr. Fareed’s observations as a treating physician were an illusion—that the high-risk patients who received the Zelenko Protocol would have recovered in the same dramatic way without the intervention.
This was probably the most notable moment in the hearing. Since graduating from medical school in 1970, Dr. Fareed had logged fifty years as a medical researcher and treating physician. It would be hard to find a doctor in the entire country with more clinical experience. He testified to the U.S. Senate that he’d successfully treated 1,000 high-risk COVID-19 patients. A few minutes later, a doctor 25 years his junior—one who’d never treated a single COVID-19 patient—asserted that “there is now clear consensus in the medical and scientific community” that a key ingredient of Dr. Fareed’s treatment protocol doesn’t work. In effect, Dr. Jha told Dr. Fareed to reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears.
Shortly after the hearing, Dr. Jha published an opinion piece for the November 24, 2020, edition of the New York Times titled “The Snake-Oil Salesman of the Senate.” He opened with likening the event to a contagion.
There was a super-spreader event last week in the United States Senate. It wasn’t the coronavirus, however, that was spreading, but misinformation. … The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing about early treatment for COVID-19. Yet instead of a robust discussion about promising emerging therapies or what Congress might do to accelerate such treatments, the conversation was all about the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. … Neither Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican senator nor his chosen witnesses—three doctors who have pushed hydroxychloroquine—displayed more than a passing interest in evidence. Intuition and personal experiences of individual doctors were acclaimed as guiding principles.[i]
Dr. Jha didn’t mention that he himself had focused his Senate remarks on hydroxychloroquine and hadn’t mentioned any “promising emerging therapies” apart from vaccines. He also didn’t state the names or credentials of the hearing’s witnesses or a summary of their findings or experiences. He compared them to the snake oil salesmen from the frontier past with their advocacy of the drug that President Trump had touted in the spring, implying they were equally lacking in medical sophistication.
“I was called reckless because I pointed to facts that could prevent people from getting the treatment,” he wrote, but he didn’t state these facts. The online version of his essay hyperlinked the word “reckless” to a similar hatchet job report on the hearing in the Washington Post. He claimed the witnesses had expressed a distrust of science and had even “suggested that scientists were part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy to deny Americans access to lifesaving therapies.” This was, he asserted, “a powerful reminder that not even Congress is immune to toxic conspiracy theories…”
Dr. Jha’s New York Times opinion was, itself, evidence that early treatment of COVID-19 was the subject of a well-orchestrated smear campaign. Why else would such a distinguished academic pen such rank propaganda against his colleagues and their work? That he was personally stung by the revelation that he’d never treated a single COVID-19 patient could only partly account for it.
A possible answer to this question may be gleaned from Dr. Jha’s remarks at a January 10, 2017, Georgetown University conference titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration.”
Like the participants at the October 2019 Pandemic Simulation Exercise at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Jha predicted that a devastating pandemic “is going to come at some point.” Dr. Fauci, the keynote speaker, made a more precise prediction.
“There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases,” he proclaimed. “The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we’re going to see this in the next few years.”[ii]
As psychiatrist and author Peter Breggin, MD, remarked in his extraordinary book COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, Dr Jha did not speak in a somber tone about the coming devastation. On the contrary, he emphasized that he was excited about the ambitious project of helping the U.S. and other governments, and equally excited about the many pandemic preparation events in Georgetown and Cambridge that lay ahead. The conference was, he said, the “beginning of a journey.”[iii]
Dr. Jha and his colleagues were animated with the same excitement that denizens of the military-industrial complex would feel at the prospect of a coming war in which they would assume leadership positions. At last, they would be able to deploy all of their forces. With the recognition that the coming war was inevitable, they could call upon the government to allocate far more resources for new technologies, weapons systems, bases, and military organizations. In an atmosphere of such heady excitement, the suggestion of defusing the coming war with diplomacy wouldn’t be received with much enthusiasm.
The irony of Dr. Jha’s excitement is that, when the pandemic he predicted arrived three years later, he didn’t attempt to treat patients or scramble to find consultants to intervene against the disease before it wrecked bodies and imprisoned people in hospitals. Instead, he penned propaganda against hydroxychloroquine and against Drs. McCullough, Risch, and Fareed. Why was the New York Times Editorial Board compelled to publish his misleading account of the Senate hearing? Did the editors even watch the C-SPAN recording of it?
It’s not plausible that their motive was a concern about hydroxychloroquine’s safety. Dr. Jha himself conceded in his testimony that he wasn’t particularly concerned about safety, so why the vast and ceaseless quibbling about whether its efficacy for outpatients had been proven? As Senator Johnson had said in the hearing, this makes no sense.
[i] Jha, Ashish, MD. The Snake Oil Salesmen of the Senate. New York Times, Nov. 24, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/hydroxychloroquine-covid.html
[ii] Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science & Security, Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration. January 10, 2017. https://ghss.georgetown.edu/pandemicprep2017/
[iii] Breggin, Peter R, MD and Ginger Ross Breggin, COVID-19 AND THE GLOBAL PREDATORS: WE ARE THE PREY. Ithaca: Lake Edge Press, 2021, p. 259.
November 25, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, New York Times, United States |
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More than two years ago, an Anglo-Norwegian team of scientists demonstrated unique ‘fingerprints’ of laboratory manipulation in the Covid virus. They argued that the evidence as good as proved that the virus had originated in a lab rather than evolving naturally. The manipulation, which made a bat virus a danger to humans, was exactly as envisaged by American and Chinese researchers who had been working on a vaccine aimed at reducing the impact of any such future outbreaks.
A paper describing these findings, co-authored by London University vaccines expert Professor Angus Dalgleish, was suppressed in both the US and UK. Internationally, the World Health Organisation, leading science journals and others made a huge effort to persuade us that Covid was a natural occurrence – and that we should spend a lot more money to fight any such future threats.
However the paper was uploaded by the Norwegian website Minerva in July 2020, and an update appeared on the website in May 2021 which I reported here.
Now an American expert in the field, who previously dismissed the lab-origin theory, has reached exactly the same conclusion. ‘The body of evidence supporting a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is overwhelming, far more so than most realise,’ says biologist and analyst Dr Alex Washburne in a newly published ten-page report.
He studied transmission of infections from bats to people for many years before Covid. ‘Pathogen spillover is common,’ he writes, ‘and so for much of the pandemic I kept an open mind about a laboratory origin yet remained firmly entrenched in my prior belief of a zoonotic [animal] origin. However . . . the totality of evidence has completely changed my mind.’
Before Covid, Dr Washburne was working with a team funded by a US Defense Department grant aimed at pre-empting pandemics by studying whether some strains of animal viruses were more likely to cause human disease than others.
He says it takes a lot of effort to find and examine naturally occurring viruses, and so ‘there is a clear temptation to make new viruses, such as chimeric viruses or viruses passaged in human cells. If we made a virus more capable of infecting people, it might reveal the essence of human-infective viruses and help us prepare vaccines before a pandemic ever happens.
‘Engineer and evolve a novel pandemic-capable virus to create a vaccine against the virus before it causes a pandemic, and you might win a Nobel Prize . . . provided nothing goes wrong.’
He describes how in March 2018 a proposal to do just that was drawn up by EcoHealth Alliance (a global non-profit with the slogan ‘Standing Between You and the Next Pandemic’) with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and other international collaborators.
The plan was to sample bat coronaviruses, assemble cloned copies of the viruses in the lab, introduce genes that might make them a threat to humans, and test the resulting chimeric viruses in the lab at Wuhan.
‘Find, engineer, and evolve human-infectious viruses capable of causing a pandemic, develop a vaccine against them, and pre-empt a pandemic . . . provided nothing goes wrong.’
DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, turned down the proposal on safety grounds.
But the group had alternative sources of funding, including a biodefence grant from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The fact that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in Wuhan, with an exact fingerprint of the proposed manipulation, and a geographic pattern inconsistent with its having emerged from animal trade, ‘ought to tilt the scales towards a laboratory origin’, Washburne says.
He adds that ‘as a scientist, I can’t tell you how badly I want scientists to have not opened Pandora’s Box. It took enormous amounts of self-examination and self-criticism to question my own cherished belief in the theory of a zoonotic origin’.
He might have been able to change his mind sooner if the findings of the Anglo-Norwegian team had been examined at the pandemic’s outset.
The team’s findings were exactly in line with those now highlighted by Washburne. They found that the virus’s so-called spike protein had six inserts, ‘unique fingerprints . . . indicative of purposive manipulation’, which allowed it to infect and damage a wide range of human cells. They showed how these and other features of the virus were linked to laboratory work published by the Chinese and American researchers.
The authors wrote: ‘Since, regrettably, international access has not been allowed to the relevant laboratories or materials, since Chinese scientists who wished to share their knowledge have not been able to do so and indeed since it appears that preserved virus material and related information have been destroyed, we are compelled to apply deduction to the published scientific literature, informed by our own biochemical analyses.
‘We refute pre-emptively objection that this methodology does not result in absolute proof by observing that to make such a statement is to misunderstand scientific logic. The longer the chain of causation of individual findings that is shown, especially converging from different disciplines, the greater the confidence in the whole.’
The team also warned that vaccine-makers who failed to acknowledge the chimeric nature of the virus, and the toxicity of the spike protein, might unwittingly put the public at risk.
We now know that wittingly or not the vaccine-makers put out products which present an even bigger threat to health for some than the virus itself, and have been linked to tens of thousands of deaths and millions of adverse events. But because of the obstacles put in the way of a genuine understanding of the virus’s nature, regulators continue to assure the public that the products are ‘safe and effective’.
I believe there was high-level knowledge from the very start that this was not a naturally evolved virus, but a chimera – originally native to Chinese bats but manipulated in the laboratory to see if it could become a threat to humans.
If Covid really was a straightforward zoonosis – an infectious disease of animal origin – why was a global panic button pressed, leading to the ruinous lockdowns and other crisis measures which were to cost the UK £500billion over the next two and a half years?
Why did top scientists and public health officials persist in demanding panic measures long after it was clear that the threat from Covid was not as bad as had been feared?
Why did the G20 countries at their recent meeting in Bali sing the praises of Covid immunisation as a ‘global public good’, and flag up digital and non-digital ‘proof of vaccinations’ to facilitate ‘seamless international travel’?
Is it because of fears that another, more dangerous genetically engineered pathogen is in the pipeline?
Chinese scientists and public health officials are said to have predicted that World War Three will be fought with ‘a new era of genetic weapons’ which can be ‘artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed in a way never seen before’.
This is clearly a subject with which governments and their intelligence agencies worldwide must be familiar. May I suggest that if that is the real fear, they should come clean about it, and stop treating us like idiots? That would do a lot to improve understanding, and help end a damaging crisis of confidence in science that could prove a lot more damaging than SARS-CoV-2 itself.
November 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine |
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We are assured by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, the G20, and their friends that pandemics pose an existential threat to our survival and well-being. Pandemics are becoming more common, and if we don’t move urgently we will have ourselves to blame for more mass death of the ‘next pandemic.’
The proof of this is the catastrophic harm done to the world by COVID-19, a repeat of which can only be prevented by transferring unprecedented funds and decision-making power to the care of public health institutions and their corporate partners. They have the resources, experience, knowledge and technical know-how to keep us safe.
This is a no-brainer, all of it, and only a fool who desires mass death would oppose it. But there are still people who claim that the link between the public health establishment and large corporations appears to be the only part of this narrative that withstands scrutiny.
If true, this would imply that we are being systematically deceived by our leaders, the health establishment, and most of our media; a ludicrous allegation in a free and democratic society. Only a fascist or otherwise totalitarian regime could run such a broad and inclusive deception, and only people with truly bad intent could nurture it.
So let’s hope such ‘appearances’ are deceptive. To believe that the premise behind our leaders’ Pandemic Preparedness and Response agenda is knowingly based on a set of complete fabrications would be a conspiracy theory too far. It would be too uncomfortable to accept that we are being deliberately misled by people we elected and the health establishment we trust; that the assurances of inclusivity, equity and tolerance are mere facades hiding fascists. We should examine the key claims supporting the pandemic agenda carefully and hope to find them credible.
Myth #1: Pandemics are becoming more common
In its 2019 pandemic influenza guidelines, the WHO listed 3 pandemics in the century between the 1918-20 Spanish flu and COVID-19. The Spanish flu killed mainly through secondary bacterial infections at a time before modern antibiotics. Today we would expect most of these people, many relatively young and fit, to survive.
The WHO subsequently recorded pandemic flu outbreaks in 1957-58 (‘Asian flu’) and 1968-69 (‘Hong Kong flu’). The Swine flu outbreak that occurred in 2009 was classed by WHO as a ‘pandemic’ but caused just 125,000 to 250,000 deaths. This is far less than a normal flu year and so hardly deserving of the pandemic label. Then we had COVID-19. That’s it for a whole century; one outbreak the WHO classifies as a pandemic per generation. Rare, or at least highly unusual, events.
Myth #2: Pandemics are a major cause of death
The Black Death, the Bubonic Plague that swept Europe in the 1300s, killed perhaps a third of the entire population. Repeat outbreaks over the following centuries caused similar harm, as had plagues known from Greek and Roman times. Even the Spanish flu did not compare with these. Life changed prior to antibiotics – including nutrition, accommodation, ventilation and sanitation – and these mass-mortality events subsided.
Since the Spanish flu we have developed an array of antibiotics that remain extremely effective against community-acquired pneumonia. Fit young people still die from influenza through secondary bacterial infection, but this is rare.
The WHO tells us there were 1.1 million deaths from the 1957-58 ‘Asian flu,’ and a million from the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu. In context, seasonal influenza kills between 250,000 and 650,000 people every year. As the global population was 3 to 3.5 billion when these two pandemics occurred, they classify as bad flu years killing about 1 in 700 mostly elderly people, with little influence on total deaths. They were treated as such, with the Woodstock Festival proceeding without super-spreader panic (regarding the virus, at least…).
COVID-19 has a higher associated mortality, but at an old average age equivalent to that of all-cause mortality, and is nearly always associated with comorbidities. Much mortality also occurred in the presence of the withdrawal of normal supportive care such as close nursing and physiotherapy, and intubation practices may have played a role.
Of the 6.5 million that the WHO records as dying from COVID-19, we don’t know how many would have died anyway from cancer, heart disease or the complications of diabetes mellitus and just happening to have a positive SARS-CoV-2 PCR result. We don’t know because most authorities decided not to check, but recorded such deaths as being due to COVID-19. The WHO records about 15 million excess deaths throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, but this includes lockdown deaths (malnutrition, rising infectious disease, neonatal death etc).
If we take the 6.5 million toll as likely, we can understand its context by comparing it with tuberculosis, a globally endemic respiratory disease that few worry about in their day-to-day lives. Tuberculosis kills about 1.5 million people every year, which is almost half the annual COVID-19 toll in 2020 and 2021. Tuberculosis kills far younger on average than COVID, removing more potential life-years with each death.
So based on normal metrics for disease burden, we could say they are roughly equivalent – COVID-19 has had an impact on life expectancy overall fairly similar to TB – worse in older populations in Western countries, far less in low-income countries. Even in the US COVID-19 was associated with less (and older) deaths in 2020-21 than normally occur from cancer and cardiovascular disease.
COVID-19 has not therefore been an existential threat to the life of many people. The infection mortality rate globally is probably around 0.15%, higher in the elderly, much lower in healthy young adults and children. It is not unreasonable to think that if standard medical knowledge had been followed, such as physiotherapy and mobility for frail elderly people and micronutrient supplementation for those at risk, the mortality rate may have been even lower.
Whatever one’s views on COVID-19 death definitions and management, it is unavoidable that death is rare in healthy younger people. Over the past century all pandemic deaths have been very low. Averaging less than 100,000 people per year inclusive of COVID-19, they are a small fraction of that caused by seasonal flu.
Myth #3: Diversion of resource to pandemic preparedness makes public health sense
The G20 has just agreed with the World Bank to allocate $10.5 billion annually to its pandemic prevention and response Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF). There is, in their view, about $50 billion needed in total per year. This is the annual, holding budget for pandemic preparedness. As an example of their preferred response when an outbreak occurs, Yale University modelers estimate that to vaccinate people in low and middle income countries with just 2 doses of COVID-19 vaccine would cost about $35 billion. Adding one booster would total $61 billion. Over $7 billion has thus far been committed to COVAX, the WHO’s Covid vaccine financing facility, vaccinating most who are already immune to the virus.
To put these sums in context, the annual budget of the WHO is normally below $4 billion. The entire world spends about $3 billion annually on malaria – a disease that kills well over half a million young children each year. The largest financing facility for tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria, the Global Fund, spends less than $4 billion per year on these three diseases combined. Other and larger preventable killers of children, – such as pneumonia and diarrhea, receive still less attention.
Malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and diseases of malnutrition are all increasing, while economies globally – the main long-term determinant of life expectancy in lower-income countries – decline. Taxpayers are being asked, by institutions that themselves will benefit, to spend vast resources on this problem rather than on diseases that kill more and younger people. The people pushing this agenda do not appear to be dedicated to reducing annual mortality or improving overall health. Alternatively, they either cannot manage data or have a window on the future that they are keeping to themselves.
Myth #4: COVID-19 caused massive harm to health and the global economy
The age-skewing of COVID mortality has been unmistakable since early 2020, when data from China demonstrated almost no mortality in healthy young to middle-aged adults and children. This has not changed. Those contributing to economic activity, working in factories, farms and transport, were never at great risk.
The economic and personal harm arising from the restrictions on these people, unemployment, destruction of small businesses and supply-line disruption, was a choice made against orthodox policy of the WHO and public health in general. The prolonged school closures, locking in generational poverty and inequality on both a sub-national and international level, was a choice to perhaps buy months for the elderly.
The 2019 WHO pandemic guidelines advised against lockdowns due to the inevitability that they would increase poverty, and poverty drives illness and reduces life expectancy. The WHO noted this disproportionately harms poorer people. This is not complicated – even those at the center of the lockdown and future digital ID agenda such as the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) acknowledge this reality. If the aim of poverty-promoting measures had been to reduce elderly death, the evidence for success is poor.
There seems little reasonable doubt that growing malnutrition and long-term poverty, rising endemic infectious disease, and the impacts of education loss, increased child marriage and increased inequality will far outweigh any possible mortality reduction achieved. UNICEF’s estimation of a quarter-million child deaths from lockdowns in South Asia in 2020 provides a window into the enormity of the harm lockdowns wrought. It was the novel public health response that caused the massive harm associated with this historically mild pandemic, not the virus.
Facing truth
It seems unavoidable that those advocating for the current pandemic and preparedness agenda are intentionally misleading the public in order to achieve their aims. This explains why, in the background documents of the WHO, the World Bank, G20 and others, detailed cost-benefit analyses are avoided. The same absence of this basic requirement characterized the introduction of Covid lockdowns.
Cost-benefit analyses are essential for any large-scale intervention, and their absence reflects either incompetence or malfeasance. Prior to 2019, the resource diversion being contemplated for pandemic preparedness would have been unthinkable without such analysis. We can therefore reasonably assume that their continued absence is based on fear or certainty that their outcomes would scupper the program.
A lot of people who should know better are going along with this deceit. Their motives can be surmised elsewhere. Many may feel they need a good salary, and the resultant dead and impoverished will be far enough away to be considered abstract. The media, owned by the same investment houses who own the Pharma and software companies sponsoring public health, are mostly silent. It is hardly a conspiracy to believe that investment houses such as BlackRock and Vanguard work to maximize return for their investors, using their various assets to do so.
A few decades of our elected leaders trooping off for closed-door sessions at Davos, together with a steady concentration of wealth with the individuals they were meeting, could not really have landed us anywhere else.
We knew this 20 years ago, when the media still warned of the harm that increasing inequality would bring. When individuals and corporations richer than medium-sized countries control major international health organizations such as Gavi and CEPI, the real question is why so many people struggle to acknowledge that conflicts of interest define international health policy.
The subversion of health for profit runs contrary to the entire ethos of the post-World War Two anti-fascist, anti-colonialist movement. When people across politics can acknowledge this reality, they can put aside the false divisions that this corruption has sown.
We are being deceived for a reason. Whatever that is, going along with a deception is a poor choice. Denial of truth never leads to a good place. When public health policy is based on a demonstrably false narrative, it is the role of public health workers, and the public, to oppose it.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is the former Program Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland.
November 24, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, Human rights, WHO, World Bank |
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On 24 Sept 2021, when CDC director Rochelle Walensky was asked if it was safe to receive a covid-19 vaccine while breastfeeding, her reply was unwavering:
“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.
“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, before you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby.”
But Walensky’s advice was not based on science. The safety studies had not been done.
It has been over a year since her comment, and a study published in JAMA found trace amounts of mRNA in the breast milk of mothers who’d received the Pfizer or Moderna covid-19 vaccine.
The researchers speculated that lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, once injected into the arm, are transported via the lymphatic system to the mammary glands and expressed into breast milk.
Yes, it was a small study, and the mRNA was only detected in expressed breast milk for up to two days, but the authors stated:
Caution is warranted about breastfeeding children younger than 6 months in the first 48 hours after maternal vaccination until more safety studies are conducted.
Caution is warranted?
Aaron Kheriaty, psychiatrist and director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy, Washington DC, has been critical of the “jab first, ask questions later” approach.
He says Walensky’s insistence about the safety of mRNA vaccines in breastfeeding women was “completely reckless” in the absence of adequate safety data.
“We don’t have evidence that it’s harmful, but we also don’t have sufficient evidence that it is safe for your baby, so that’s the first thing that needs to be said when there’s an absence of evidence,” says Kheriaty.
There are still many unknowns. Oral ingestion of mRNA bound to lipid nanoparticles has no demonstrated safety, and the pegylated product (a design of the mRNA vaccines) when ingested, can be rapidly absorbed through the gut lining.
“The safety studies should’ve been done right out of the gate. Until you actually do the studies, you cannot, at the same time, come out and say, don’t worry, this is safe. We have to inform people of the state of the science, we should tell them that the evidence is not clear,” he adds.
Public health authorities argued that pregnant women and their babies would face a greater risk of harm from covid than from the vaccine, but Kheriaty says it was guesswork.
“We didn’t know any of that. It was a theoretical risk. Childbearing women were excluded from the clinical trials, so we did not have that data.”
Childbearing women were coerced
Adam Urato, a maternal-foetal medicine specialist at MetroWest Medical Centre, Massachusetts, says vaccines have an important role to play in medicine, but admits that many of his patients have legitimate concerns about the unknown impact of covid-19 vaccines on pregnancy and breastfeeding.
“These women make good points. They should be listened to, and their judgement and decisions respected,” says Urato.
“After all, these vaccines are synthetic chemical structures. They are made in chemical manufacturing facilities. They aren’t ‘all natural’ substances. And, honestly, we just don’t know what all of the effects are going to be from using these vaccines during pregnancy and during breastfeeding,” he adds.
Urato rejects the media narrative that childbearing women are “victims of misinformation” if they have concerns about covid-19 vaccine safety.
“My patients are intelligent, they have good instincts and I think their concerns are valid. The idea that all of these women are misled, and uninformed ‘victims of misinformation’ is an insult to them,” he says.
When vaccine mandates were imposed across the globe, many pregnant and breastfeeding women were forced to get vaccinated under penalty of losing their jobs and those who declined, were accused of being anti-vaxxers.
“Pregnant women should be allowed to make personal health choices and decide what gets injected into their body, and the decision should be free from coercion,” says Urato.
Instead, doctors are being coached on ways to handle vaccine hesitancy. In Canada, for example, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario encouraged doctors to prescribe medication to manage anxieties about the vaccine or to recommend psychotherapy.
The precautionary principle
A recent article by British sociologist Robert Dingwall reminds us of the underlying principle of clinicians primum non nocere; the first duty of a doctor is to do no harm.
Dingwall writes that safety cannot be “assumed” but must be demonstrated. He says, “doing stuff just in case” or because “it might help,” is not sufficient.
“Emergency conditions do not justify the abandonment of the precautionary principle. If action is urgent, but benefits and harms are uncertain, then the actions or innovations must be temporary, provisional, and closely monitored with a view to withdrawing or halting them if their benefits are not proportionate to their harms.
Pandemic policies would have looked very different if the precautionary principle had been applied correctly.”
Urato agrees. He says that we will look back with regret at how public health authorities treated pregnant women.
“Vaccine mandates were a really cruel, uncompassionate, and inhumane way to treat pregnant women. The community needs to really learn from this awful episode and make sure nothing like this happens again.”
November 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Canada, CDC, COVID-19 Vaccine, Rochelle Walensky, United States |
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President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not assassinated with three shots from the book depository fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. And almost all of us know it.
In opinion polls going back to November 29th 1963, just a week after the shooting, at least a sixty-percent majority has rejected the official line every single time.
In short, regarding JFK, the “crazy conspiracy theorists” make up two-thirds of the population, and always have done.
This is a good thing. A victory for truth in the face of stark odds, overcoming fifty-nine years of propaganda.
It doesn’t matter what you think of JFK the man – whether you believe he was trying to change things, or hail from the Chomsky school of “he was just like Obama” – the simple facts reflect he was killed by state agencies of his own government.
It was a coup.
We don’t need to go into the details, it has been endlessly written about, on this site and a million others.
Suffice it to say, nothing about the “official story” has ever made sense. You have to leave rationality behind to believe it.
Much like mask-usage and the “safe and effective” vaccines during the “pandemic”, embracing the mainstream story of the “lone gunman” and his “magic bullet” has passed beyond the realm of thoughts and opinions and become a tenet of a modern-day religion.
Blaming Lee Harvey Oswald is now an oath of fealty, a show of faith. A sign you are one of the initiated – the first and most debased commandment in the book of State Orthodoxy.
Question it, and you question everything. Pull on that thread and six decades of carefully crafted narratives unravel in minutes.
This is why – fifty-nine years after the fact – they are still lying about it.
Those truly responsible are more than likely all dead. The vast majority of the people living on the planet weren’t even born when it happened… and yet the deceptions still come.
Pathetic exercises in propaganda passed around by second and third generations of twisted servants of the establishment. Brainwashed children, repeating the lies their parents told them despite being surrounded by evidence of their delusion.
It would be tragic if it wasn’t so insidious. Its only saving grace is its ineptitude. (See this from the New York Post, or this from The Express ).
It’s all painfully transparent. Exercises in saying, rather than believing.
A common factor in every propaganda narrative is the repetition of “the big lie”. Over and over and over again. In the case of JFK the catechism is a simple one:
Lee Harvey Oswald shot the 35th President in the back and head from the Texas School Book Depository.
The Express even uses that sentence, word for word. Not one part of this mantra has ever been proven. It’s just what you have to say.
Most tellingly it does not even reflect the official position of the US government, with the Church committee having found JFK’s death “a probable conspiracy” forty-six years ago.
As with Covid, when official sources conflict with official “truth” they are written out of the consensus. Rejected by the modern-day Council of Nicea. Left to gather dust in the archives like the gnostic gospels.
In 1992, following the release of Oliver Stone’s simply brilliant film JFK, the US Senate passed a new law, the Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act.
This law “requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full and be made available in the collection no later than the date that is 25 years [after the law was passed]”.
As of October 2017 both the CIA and FBI are in breach of this law.
Politico has a long article about it, carefully explaining to everyone that it’s definitely not because they have anything to hide and they totally didn’t do it, but also acknowledging that the secrecy does feed into “corrosive conspiracy theories”.
In yet another betrayal of his “anti-establishment” image, The Donald let this slide. Biden is apparently going to pressure them to release something… but that’s just theatre.
Nothing will come of it, save perhaps a few pages of token talking points that subtly reinforce the official story.
Agencies like that won’t ever release real evidence of their own guilt, even supposing it wasn’t shredded, burned and buried next to Jimmy Hoffa decades ago.
But you know what? It doesn’t matter.
We don’t need official documents to corroborate the evidence of our own eyes, and we don’t need official permission before we can acknowledge the truth.
Let the media tell their empty stories to their dwindling readership, let their aging lies echo forever in hollow headlines.
None of us believe them. We all know what really happened, and we always have.
For a deep dive on the JFK assassination, we recommend JFK and the Unspeakable, you should also watch JFK by Oliver Stone which is a wonderfully engaging introduction to the topic. You can read all our past articles on JFK here, and Kit’s long essay on it here.
November 23, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | CIA, FBI, United States |
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How do we move ahead in a post-pandemic era? And what are the lessons to be learned from our challenging recent history? Catholic psychiatrist and bioethicist Aaron Kheriaty has thought a great deal about these questions and his answers are found in his just-released book The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (Regnery Publishing, 2022). The result is a brilliant mix of scientific observations, personal experiences, philosophical reflections, prudent policy prescriptions, and even a few speculative hints about dystopian possibilities of the near future.
Kheriaty, who lost his previous job as clinical psychiatrist and teacher at UC-Irvine in a dispute over mandated vaccines and natural immunity, begins the book in an unexpected time and place: 1947 Nuremberg. He does this to provide historical context for threats to freedom in our time. He briefly surveys the eugenics movement and its appropriation by the Nazi regime. Germany’s medical professionals were well-trained and as good as any in the world, but they lost their way. “Instead of seeing the sick as individuals in need of compassionate medical care, German doctors became willing agents of a sociopolitical program driven by a cold utilitarian ethos,” writes Kheriaty (xvii). After the war the revulsion at the perversion of medicine led to the Nuremberg Code, which emphasized informed consent as a cornerstone of ethical medical treatment.
That code and other ethical agreements remained as part of the medical-bioethical landscape… until 2020. Kheriaty asserts that “[d]uring the covid pandemic, the public health and medical establishment once again abandoned the principle of free and informed consent to advance a supposed greater good” (xxi). Having laid the groundwork for his argument and narrative, he sums up by issuing this frightening declaration: “The unholy alliance of (1) public health, (2) digital technologies of surveillance and control, and (3) the police powers of the state—what I call the Biomedical Security State—has arrived” (xxii). While this probably seems like a heavy meal to digest, the reader can be assured that Kheriaty writes clearly and is grounded in scientific medicine and a solid ethical worldview. His story, while alarming, is neither conspiracy theory nor exercise in despair.
After the Nuremberg prologue, Dr. Kheriaty continues with four long chapters and an epilogue: “Locked Up: The Biomedical Security State”; “Locked Down & Locked Out: A New Societal Paradigm”; “Locked In: The Coming Technocratic Dystopia”; “Reclaiming Freedom: Human Flourishing in a More Rooted Future”; and, “Seattle, 2030.” Sprinkled throughout what could be a gloomy read, we encounter stories of solidarity and resilience. The author makes sure to show us that human interaction cannot — must not — be stymied by government interference in our lives and the functioning of society. “Consider the human goods we sacrificed to preserve bare biological life at all costs: friendships, holidays with family, work, visiting the sick and dying, worshipping God, and burying the dead” (14). But to resist or even question, we must know as much of a situation’s history as possible. Kheriaty lays out the pieces of the puzzle: states of emergency, agency capture of regulators by the regulated, loosening bonds of social cohesion, and the religion of scientism.
Scientism is distinct from science and scientific inquiry, Kheriaty points out. “The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility. The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris” (54). In other words, scientism upholds so-called science as the only proper form of knowledge and rejects any questioning or skepticism. It is prone to misuse as a political tool and typically accompanies a materialistic worldview. That heavy-handed framework clashes with how science and medicine have long operated through trial and error, experimentation, imaginative solutions, and, most of all, respect for individual humans as made in the image and likeness of God.
Kheriaty’s own story makes for a fascinating sub-plot. As a doctor, ethicist, and teacher he was closely involved with figuring out how to respond to covid and help patients. As the lockdowns unfolded he encountered staggering amounts of fear, worry, and depression. His grasp of bioethics and knowledge of history led him to speak out against new methods of trying to control spread of the covid virus, especially when they superseded societal freedom and individual liberty. “Freedom of movement, of association, of domicile in one’s country of origin, and access to public spaces and public events—these quickly went from basic rights to special privileges conferred by governments as rewards for good behavior” (68). His medical training also led him to critique the development and imposition of a new and mostly untested vaccine. In his own case, he fought against a mandatory vaccination because of a prior covid infection. His argument at the time did not prevent him from being fired. He also touches on the devastating impact of restrictions on work and supply chains.
Indeed, that is one of the constant themes of this book: technology and safety should never eclipse the humanity of our lives. For instance, “[t]here is clearly no such thing as a medication—or a vaccine—that’s always good for everyone in every circumstance all the time” (137). Technology and cultural immersion endanger our sense of ourselves and nudge us to trade autonomy and dignity for convenience. “Today, routine biometric verification for things from mobile phones to lunch lines gets young people used to the idea that their bodies are tools used in transactions” (155). Connected to abuse of genetic and biometric data is the ominous specter of transhumanism, which Kheriaty characterizes as “clearly a religion—a particular type of neo-Gnostic religion” (167). To all these dehumanizing trends the author counsels resistance, but emphatically “nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience” (184).
The book’s final chapter lays out policy proposals for steering clear of dystopia. I found this chapter to be only somewhat persuasive. Kheriaty’s suggestions are certainly prudent and logical; however, they mostly deal with changing the political and medical climate. But bureaucracy and institutional entropy are like the invasive Japanese Knotweed in my back yard, which is to say impossible to eradicate. On other points Kheriaty is spot-on. “The first and most necessary step is to overcome our fear,” he writes (191). And [t]he enemy is not pain or illness. The enemy is fear. The enemy is hatred or indifference toward our fellow human beings” (192). Fear of death was manifest during the pandemic. As Catholics, we are taught to not fear death, but rather to spend our lives preparing for it and to live in a state of grace. During a pandemic or even “normal” times we can bear witness to Christ by living with courage and fighting fear. We can also resist mask mandates that dehumanize us and separate us from others, covering up our God-created uniqueness. Of importance to religious believers, we can engage with our faith authorities to make sure no one is abandoned again because “too many religious leaders and clergy unfortunately showed themselves during the pandemic to be willing chaplains to the new technocracy” (204).
Readers should not skip the epilogue, in which Kheriaty (a native of the Pacific Northwest) posits a dystopian Seattle in 2030. In this uncomfortable scenario, we are asked to consider what life might be like if current trends in pharmaceuticals and their marketing are joined with further developments in social control to create a two-tiered society reminiscent of many well-known alternative futures in literature and movies. Thankfully, Dr. Kheriaty lightens a somber story with some wry humor.
While The New Abnormal is not an explicitly Catholic book, Aaron Kheriaty founds it in Catholic principles of justice, humanity, clear philosophical first principles, subsidiarity, solidarity, and important spiritual goods. He brings in examples from classical and contemporary philosophy, C.S. Lewis, and George Orwell. The prose is clear but some of the concepts can be a little heady at times. This is a valuable piece of work from a man with unique qualifications. His is a prophetic voice calling us to understand and take action while never forgetting the God Who made us.
Greg Cook is a writer living in New York’s North Country with his wife. He graduated from Plattsburgh State College and The Evergreen State College. He is the author of two self-published books of poetry, Against the Alchemists and A Verse Companion to Romano Guardini’s ‘Sacred Signs’.
November 22, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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