There are glorious stories about American military aircraft bombing North Vietnam. None explain the effort failed. It cost billions of dollars, killed a million people, destroyed a small nation, and had little effect on the final outcome. Some claim the effort failed because of political bombing restrictions. Others claim the bombing was successful because it forced the enemy to accept a peace agreement.
In reality, the bombings were counterproductive to American goals and devolved into bureaucratic games to justify bigger budgets while enhancing military careers. Losses of American military aircraft were staggering. Almost 10,000 airplanes, helicopters and UAVs were destroyed, and another 2500 were lost by allies and the South Vietnamese military. In contrast, North Vietnam lost only around 200 aircraft during the entire Vietnam war!
“Our findings suggest that 2019-nCoV has most similar genetic information with bat coronavirus and most similar codon usage bias with snake.“
The essence of the article was the supposition that Covid-19 made its way from snakes to bats and then to the Wuhan wet market, expressed as follows:
“An origin-unknown homologous recombination may have occurred within the spike glycoprotein of the 2019-nCoV… The squared euclidean distance indicates that the 2019-nCoV and snakes from China have the highest similarity in synonymous codon usage bias compared to those of bat, bird, Marmota, human, Manis, and hedgehog”
This idea subsequently gained little traction, because of the improbability of such a train of interspecies transfer, and because public discussion of its conclusions was vigorously suppressed by fact checkers.
The suggestion of the authors to do more research disappeared from view. It has been largely forgotten until now.
Were Some of These Recombined Genetic Sequences From Snakes?
Recent discussion of the origin of the Covid-19 spike protein has suggested that it could be the result of recombinant techniques in the laboratory which joined a number of genetic sequences together as part of research to develop deadly pathogens, and then investigate possible cures.
“The presence of toxin-like peptides… suggests a possible association between COVID-19 disease and the release in the body of (oligo-)peptides almost identical to toxic components of venoms from animals…. The presence of these peptides opens new scenarios on the aetiology of the COVID-19 clinical symptoms observed up to now, including neurological manifestations.”
What are Some of the Neurological Effects of Snake Venom?
“Myocardial involvement is seen on occasions and may rarely contribute to morbidity and mortality. ECG changes are usually transient but when persistent they are attributed to direct myocardial damage due to the toxin.”
pro and anticoagulant activity leading to ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke,
muscle paralysis through inhibition of neuromuscular transmission leading to respiratory failure.
All of these neurological, thrombotic, and cardiac effects are similar to reported adverse effects of both Covid infection and mRNA vaccination.
Is Covid-19 a Recombination of a Virus and a Toxin?
mRNA vaccines specifically train the human physiology to produce the suspect spike protein. Did this expose vaccine recipients to a toxin? It appears this might be the case.
In which case, the essential design of the mRNA vaccine would have been a grave error. It was training the physiology to produce a toxin.
These discussions are speculative. We now know that early genetic sequences of Covid-19 appear to have been suppressed by NIH on the instructions of the Wuhan Virology Lab.
Was the genetic similarity between snake genetics and Covid-19 too explosive to admit, whether they came from snakes or not? Certainly, this possibility should have been investigated vigorously.
It might have led to an understanding of the origins of Covid, but more importantly, it might have led to more effective treatments for Covid.
It might also have shed light on the source of the wide range of neurotoxic effects of both Covid and mRNA vaccination.
Whatever the eventual conclusion of further investigative research: biotechnology experimentation to research and develop pathogens and toxins must stop now. It amounts to a ticking time bomb.
Advertising / propaganda played a massive part in keeping citizens compliant and afraid. Quite frankly, advertising companies should feel ashamed with the amount of societal manipulation they caused in exchange for government coin.
Early on in the pandemic, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the UK called for an increase in the perceived threat of Covid by using hard-hitting emotional messages. However, it has since been revealed that government contracts and messages were in place weeks before lockdowns were even suggested.
These adverts were produced in collaboration with behavioural scientists, trying to nudge people to do what they wanted using tactics that operate below the level of awareness.
The UK spent over £240 million on these adverts in 2020 and up to £320 million in 2021. Obscene amounts of money. To put this in context, the government spent £46 million on advertising “Get Ready for Brexit” in 2019, the biggest spend since the second world war.
I have posted some of the worst images from the UK below. They made people feel guilty, ashamed, worried that they would kill people and angry against those who did not precisely follow the rules.
Most people will naturally assume that when a doctor prescribes them a drug, it’s because the doctor thinks they will receive a meaningful benefit from it. Most people have never heard the term NNT, which stands for Number Needed to Treat, or to put it another way, the number of people who need to take a drug for one person to see a noticeable benefit. It’s a bit of a counterintuitive concept for people outside medicine, since most people probably assume the NNT for all drugs is 1, right? If I’m getting this drug, it must be because it is going to help me. Well, wrong.
Before we move on, I want you to perform two small thought experiments:
Say you were suffering from depression, and there was a drug that could potentially improve your mood. But it’s not certain that the drug will work for you. And there’s a catch – the drug has side effects, which you are likely to experience regardless of whether you get the benefits of the drug or not. This particular drug causes a reduction in sexual desire and increased difficulty achieving orgasm during sex.
It also causes subtle changes to your personality, making you more prone to take risks, less emotional, and less empathic. It increases your tendency to engage in addictive behaviours, and it’s been known to cause addictions to alcohol and gambling. Additionally, withdrawal is common, so many people have trouble getting off the drug once they’re on it.
How good would the NNT for this drug need to be for you to be willing to take it? Would you want absolute certainty that it would end your depression, considering the harms? or would 50:50 odds be enough? Or even less?
Keep whatever odds you decide on in mind. If you, for example, think one in two odds are good enough, then that gives an NNT of 2 (you need to treat two people to get a noticeable benefit in one of them).
Ok, next scenario. Say you’d had a heart attack, and there was a drug that could decrease your risk of another heart attack. But just as with the previous drug, there are no certainties that you will actually get any benefit from taking this drug. And this drug also has side effects. Many people who take the drug develop chronic aches and pains. The drug also causes noticeable cognitive impairment in a proportion of those taking it, and some even end up being diagnosed with dementia – how big the risk is unfortunately isn’t known, because proper studies haven’t been carried out that could answer that question. Additionally, the drug causes blood sugar levels to rise, resulting in type 2 diabetes in around 2% of those taking the drug – it is in fact one of the most common causes of type 2 diabetes.
How good would the NNT for heart attack prevention need to be for you to take this drug?
Again, keep the number in mind.
As many of you have probably guessed, the first drug I described is an SSRI (examples of this type of drug are sertraline, citalopram, and fluoxetine). Currently, around 15% of adults in western countries take an SSRI every day.
So, what is the actual NNT for SSRI’s when used as a treatment for depression?
It’s seven.
In other words, you need to treat seven people for one to experience a noticeable effect on their depression. The other six just get the side effects but no benefit. And when I say “effect”, I don’t mean that the depression resolved in the one person lucky enough to see a benefit. Far from it. I mean that on a certain numerical rating scale (MADRS, if you must know), they experienced an improvement in mood that was just big enough to be detectable using statistical methods.
What NNT number did you choose? Are 7:1 odds good enough for you to take an SSRI if you get depressed, knowing the harms?
When a doctor prescribes an SSRI to a depressed patient, they (hopefully) know that the odds of the patient benefitting even slightly are only 1/7 (or 14%). Which doesn’t seem like a very good deal to me. Yet SSRI’s are widely considered to be an “effective” drug.
The second drug, as many of you have probably also guessed, is a statin (examples include atorvastatin, simvastatin, and pravastatin). More than a quarter of adults over the age of 40 take a statin every day in western countries.
So, what is the NNT for statins?
Well, if you’ve already had a heart attack, i.e. you’ve already been established to be at high risk for heart attacks, then the NNT over five years of treatment is 40. In other words, 39 of 40 people taking a high dose statin for five years after a heart attack won’t experience any noticeable benefit. But even if they’re not the lucky one in 40 who gets to avoid a heart attack, they’ll still have to contend with the side effects.
What NNT did you decide on personally? Are 40:1 odds good enough for you to decide the benefits of a statin outweigh the harms?
Of course, patients rarely get presented with this type of information, and are thus rarely able to make an informed choice of their own. I once sat in on a conversation between a cardiologist and a patient who’d recently had a heart attack. The patient was skeptical about statins. He said that he’d read on the internet that they had side effects, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to take one.
The cardiologist gave the patient a long, withering stare, and then responded that there’s a lot of misinformation on the internet, and that the statin was the number one most important thing he could do if he wanted to not die prematurely.
Which I thought was a bit arrogant. Why?
Because the probability that the statins would prevent a future heart attack, let alone premature death, was in the low single digits, and the patient might quite reasonably have felt that that marginal benefit was outweighed by the various harms (which the cardiologist incidentally hadn’t mentioned at all – and which the patient thus wouldn’t have even known about if he hadn’t read “misinformation” on the internet).
Doctors have been conditioned by the pharmaceutical industry to think that drugs that provide very low probability of benefit are effective. An NNT of 10 is often considered good, and an NNT of 5 is considered excellent. Even an NNT of over 100 is often considered acceptable! Patients are rarely informed that the odds of them getting any benefit from the new drug they’re being prescribed are far less than 50:50. And they’re rarely informed about what the harms are, and how likely they are to experience them.
Just in case you think I’m picking on a few particularly ineffective drugs with my two examples, I’m not. NNT’s of five or worse are typical for many of the most commonly prescribed drugs.
What that means is that the average 70 year old who is on five drugs continuously will probably at best only benefit in any measurable way from one of those drugs. The other four are not providing any benefit, they’re just contributing to side effects (which become increasingly likely, and increasingly deadly, the older you get). Things get even worse when you consider that drugs interact in unpredictable ways to increase the risk of side effects, so the risk of harms increases exponentially with each additional drug added. Which is why it used to be considered bad form to have a patient on more than five drugs simultaneously.
The number of drugs the average person is on has increased massively over the last few decades. Polypharmacy (people taking multiple different drugs continuously) is now one of the top five leading causes of death in the western world – which is a little ironic when you consider that people are taking all those drugs in order to live longer. The best way to avoid becoming another polypharmacy death statistic is to be careful about which drugs you take, and only take those for which it’s clear that the benefits outweigh the harms.
From my perspective, a good drug is a drug for which the benefits clearly outweigh the harms. I’m not saying that all drugs with high NNT’s are inherently useless. A drug with an NNT of 40 might be worth taking, if the risks of harm are sufficiently low and the outcome is sufficiently important. Only the patient can make that decision.
Whether a drug is good for you as an individual is clearly context specific. The decision whether or not to take a certain drug requires a deep understanding of the drug (provided by the physician) and a deep understanding of personal values and wishes (provided by the patient). It requires a holistic perspective and a meeting of two minds that is literally the opposite of what doctors are asked to practice today, where we’re continuously pestered with various treatment guidelines and targets that turn physicians in to unthinking automatons and patients in to featureless blobs.
Our public health agencies such as the CDC and NIH, and television medical experts seem unable to address key health messages that could have a dramatic effect in reducing risk of severe sequelae in higher-risk populations such as the minority and African-American population to the scourge of SARS-CoV-2.
These agencies and media echo chambers squandered many opportunities to inform the public on simple yet very effective messaging (vitamin D supplementation, obesity control, early treatment etc.) that could have reduced morbidity and saved lives. They continue to. Not just for Covid-19, but for many other illnesses.
For example, obesity emerged as a potent super-loaded risk factor behind age in the harmful sequelae and a human target for SARS-CoV-2 in most studies, in addition to being elderly, frail and having comorbid conditions. Being younger with comorbid conditions also placed one at risk.
We knew this data very early on, maybe one month post-March 2020 yet the CDC etc. failed to either read the data, understand the data, or act on the data. It would have behooved our agencies to have addressed these risks in large-scale education programs for the populace and especially by calling for a reduction in body weight and particularly for the minority sub-groups (African-Americans).
In a similar light, studies showed that vitamin D supplementation for African-Americans has been associated with a lowered risk of severe disease and mortality from SARS-CoV-2. So the evidence was there; just the action by health agencies was absent.
Early ambulatory outpatient treatment with successful combination and sequenced antiviral agents, corticosteroids, and anti-clotting therapeutics should be used (and should have been used) widely to help the people at risk. The African-American community is aware that “Covid (is) a killer for the obese: like pouring gasoline on top of a fire.”
Unfortunately, more than two years into the pandemic, the manifest issue of public health education and sound policy decisions remain absent and aloof, given the erratic and confusing responses from the health and governing officials.
Now we face another looming concern: the potential danger of the chlorine, polyester, and microplastic components of the face masks (surgical principally but any of the mass-produced masks) that have become part of our daily lives due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Emergent reports, albeit nascent and anecdotal but nevertheless vitally important (and will be clarified and defined in time) regarding the manufacture of masks, where, “many of them (face masks) are made of polyester, so you have a microplastic problem… many of the face masks would contain polyester with chlorine compounds… if I have the mask in front of my face, then of course I inhale the microplastic directly and these substances are much more toxic than if you swallow them, as they get directly into the nervous system.”
A very recent 2022 British publication (Jenner et al. Detection of microplastics in human lung tissue using μFTIR spectroscopy) focused on polypropylene that is a component of the face masks and reported that such “microplastics were identified in all regions of the human lungs using μFTIR analysis.” Furthermore, “polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate fibres were the most abundant.” Researchers concluded that inhalation was “a route of MP exposure.” And that this study “is the first to report MPs within human lung tissue samples, using μFTIR spectroscopy.”
There were also early reports of toxic mold, fungi, and bacteria that can pose a significant threat to the immune system by potentially weakening it. Of particular concern to us is the recent report of breathing in synthetic fibers in the face masks. This is of serious concern.
“Loose particulate was seen on each type of mask. Also, tight and loose fibers were seen on each type of mask. If every foreign particle and every fiber in every facemask is always secure and not detachable by airflow, then there should be no risk of inhalation of such particles and fibers. However, if even a small portion of mask fibers is detachable by inspiratory airflow, or if there is debris in mask manufacture or packaging or handling, then there is the possibility of not only entry of foreign material to the airways, but also entry to deep lung tissue, and potential pathological consequences of foreign bodies in the lungs.”
Reports are that “Graphene is a strong, very thin material that is used in fabrication, but it can be harmful to lungs when inhaled and can cause long-term health problems.”
There is a risk of potential inflammatory/fibrotic lung diseases because we are inhaling these materials in the masks now for two years with more duration to come and no end in sight. These substances might also be highly carcinogenic. Not just for us as adults but we must be very concerned about the risks especially to our children since they depend on us as mentors and guides for their decision-making.
These blue surgical masks pervade our lives. They remain ubiquitous. “Health Canadaissued a warning about blue and gray disposable face masks, which contain an asbestos-like substance associated with “early pulmonary toxicity.” The warning is specific to potentially toxic masks distributed within schools and daycares across Quebec. Health Canada (and full praise to them)….“discovered during a preliminary risk assessment that the masks contain microscopic graphene particles that, when inhaled, could cause severe lung damage.”
Reports are and were that “for a while now, some daycare educators had expressed suspicion about the masks, which were causing children to feel as though they were swallowing cat hair while wearing them. We now know that instead of cat hair, children were inhaling the equivalent of asbestos all day long.”It appears to be a substance known as graphene.
What is indeed alarming is that “the SNN200642 masks that were being used all across Canada in school classrooms had never been tested for safety or effectiveness.” This is indeed a catastrophic failure by the regulators as these surgical face masks are linked to early pulmonary toxicity.
What is indeed frightening is that all of these blue and similar surgical face masks cause plastic fiber inhalation and the outcomes could be devastating, especially to our children. Yet it has pervaded and persons making Covid policy decisions do not seem to care about the harmful implications. These face mask plastics will degrade very slowly over time and as such, in the lungs it may remain and just build up to dangerous levels.
We do not even know what is an ‘acceptable’ level, for there should be none. There is debate that the immune system can attack such foreign objects, thus driving prolonged inflammation which may lead to diseases such as cancer. And reused masks which pervade our daily lives, and based on our personal experiences, do produce more loosened fibers.
Dr. Richard Urso showed us just how dangerous these are by putting them under a microscope, revealing the melt-blown polypropylene plastic. Some masks even contain fiberglass and this is very dangerous as we know to inhale. We as parents make these decisions; we have to step back and question many of these decisions we are making that seem suboptimal. If it does not seem right, then you have to push back and question and demand the science, demand the data from these seemingly untethered experts.
We certainly did not get (across the last two years) and are not presently getting the due diligence and protection from public health experts, the relevant health agencies, and policy makers that we need.
Moreover, the mass media seems incapable of doing the investigative type of journalism to fully inform the populace on what the public needs to know. We close by reiterating the warning in the JAMApublication that “Face masks should not be worn by healthy individuals to protect themselves from acquiring respiratory infection because there is no evidence to suggest that face masks worn by healthy individuals are effective in preventing people from becoming ill.”
Every act has a consequence, and there is always risk. It is therefore imperative to weigh the consequences before embarking on a specific course of action. These are risk management decisions especially for parents and not because a Dr. Fauci type tells you to do something means that it is accurate or necessary. Just consider the nonsense we heard about double masking where he said use them one day only to then retract on another day.
Children come with a potent innate immune system that works tremendously well. At the same time and similarly, their immune systems are still being developed, and we have forced lockdowns, school closures, and masking on a developing child. We have no prior experience on the subsequent outcomes pertaining to children’s development, health, and well-being.
We may be faced with catastrophic consequences of what we did to our children over the last two years of unsound Covid restrictive policies, and allowed government technocrats to force these upon them. These are matters too important to nonchalantly disregard.
Dr. Paul Alexander is an epidemiologist focusing on clinical epidemiology, evidence-based medicine, and research methodology. He has a bachelor’s in epidemiology from McMaster University, and a master’s degree from Oxford University. He earned his PhD from McMaster’s Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. Paul is a former WHO Consultant and Senior Advisor to US Department of HHS in 2020 for the COVID-19 response.
Pfizer and BioNTech today said they plan to apply for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of a COVID-19 booster dose for healthy 5- to 11-year-olds based on results of a small study that has not been published or analyzed by independent experts.
The companies also plan to request authorization from the European Medicines Agency and other regulatory agencies around the world as soon as possible.
Pfizer said in a press release the third dose of its vaccine produced significant protection against the Omicron variant in children 5 to 11 in a small Phase 2/3 clinical trial.
The study was based on data from only 140 children 5 through 11 years old who received a booster dose six months after the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine as part of the primary series.
A closer look at 30 children showed a 36-fold increase in virus-fighting antibodies — levels high enough to fight the Omicron variant, ABC News reported.
Pfizer claimed the third dose was “well tolerated with no new safety signals observed.”
Although Pfizer said more than 10,000 children under the age of 12 have participated in clinical trials investigating Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, only 140 were selected for the study forming the basis for the company’s EUA request.
Commenting on the news, Dr. Brian Hooker said, “The clinical trial used to support the notion of a COVID-19 booster for 5- to 11-year-olds is entirely inadequate to make any such recommendation.”
“This small-scale, limited-time trial contains only 140 patients, which is not sufficiently sized to assess vaccine adverse events at all, especially rarer injuries such as the devastating medical maladies sustained by Maddie de Garay — an adolescent injured in the original Pfizer clinical trial.”
Hooker said he was also concerned there are “no data on the prevention of COVID-19 infection, only neutralizing antibody titers, which are not necessarily predictive of transmission and severity of the disease.”
Dr. Liz Mumper, a pediatrician, said, “Once again, Pfizer does science by press release.” Mumper said the rise in antibody titers is just one small piece of the story of kids and COVID.
“The more important issue is that, on the basis of careful risk-versus-benefit analysis, healthy children do not need a COVID vaccine,” Mumper said, because many kids already had COVID and developed robust and durable antibodies.
CHD President Mary Holland accused Pfizer of reaching “a new low” by seeking authorization of booster shots for children based on an “unpublished, non-peer-reviewed study of 140 children.”
Holland said:
“Following the science on COVID vaccination shows that the risks outweigh the benefits for COVID shots for kids, let alone boosters. One suspects this is simply a misguided ploy to use up Pfizer’s vaccine inventory before its expiration.”
Pfizer tested its booster dose while Omicron was the dominant variant this winter. In recent weeks, BA.2 has become the dominant COVID variant. It has not been determined whether a third dose provides any protection against the new variant.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October 2021 authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine for children 5 through 11 and recently authorized a booster dose for teens 12 through 15 and older and also immunocompromised children 5 and older.
According to a study published late last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, Pfizer’s vaccine showed “reduced effectiveness” against the Omicron variant among children 12 and older.
According to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as of April 6, 2022, 9.7 million U.S. children ages 5 to 11 had received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine — representing 34% of 5- to 11-year-olds.
Approximately 7.8 million U.S. children ages 5 to 11 completed the 2-dose primary vaccination series — representing 28% of 5- to 11-year-olds.
About 18.7 million children 5 to 11 had yet to receive their first COVID vaccine dose.
Seventeen million U.S. adolescents ages 12 to 17 have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine — representing 68% of 12- to 17-year-olds.
Only 58% completed the 2-dose vaccination series and 8.1 million adolescents in this age group have yet to receive a COVID vaccine.
There are 72.8 million children under age 18 in the U.S., which is 22% of the U.S. population. Children aged 5 to 11 represent 8.6% of the U.S. population.
The FDA has not authorized any COVID vaccines for use in children under 5.
According to the latest data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), between Oct. 1, 2021, and April 1, 2022, 10,157 adverse events, including 239 rated as serious and 5 reported deaths after COVID vaccines, were reported in the 5- to 11-year-old age group.
Although reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed, the system has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
There’s a chap called Tobias Ellwood who’s spent the past week doggedly promoting his latest idea to save Western civilization. “From a military perspective,” Ellwood explained during a recent speaking engagement, it’s never been more urgent to impose a “humanitarian sea corridor” off the coast of Ukraine. This would involve an outright naval intervention by NATO in the Black Sea — with the objective being to prevent Russia from seizing control of the strategically important city of Odesa. Perhaps upon commencement of this mission, Ellwood suggested, listless denizens of “The West” will finally come to appreciate the existential stakes of the conflict now before us, and “accept that we are actually in a 1938 period, but actually worse.” The double “actually” was presumably included for maximum emphasis.
Notably, Ellwood is not some random crank. He is “actually” a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, and the chairman of the impressively-titled Defence Select Committee. In that latter capacity, he seeks to exert influence over the Defence policy of Her Majesty’s Government, which is currently led by his Conservative Party colleague Boris Johnson.
During the private event, hosted by a Think Tank which unilaterally and hilariously decreed his comments “off the record,” Ellwood described the plan he envisaged for how this new phase of military intervention in Ukraine would unfold. It should be up to the UK to “create a coalition of the willing,” he declared — borrowing the terminology once used for countries that participated in the US invasion of Iraq, which memorably included the UK. Ellwood evidently detected no ignominy at all in this historical association.
On the subject of Ukraine, Ellwood’s view is that the UK and Europe must stop waiting around for the US to get its act together, and instead proactively initiate the kind of muscular, unapologetic military action that is currently needed against Russia. The lesson of last year’s Afghanistan withdrawal, Ellwood charged — as well as Joe Biden’s purported Ukraine-related dithering — has been to “expose America to be very, very hesitant indeed.” He explained: “I see the United States almost catching up with where, from a military perspective, a vanguard may actually go.”
Note that Ellwood’s plan certainly does not assume that the US would somehow just sit out whatever forthcoming war the UK may instigate. With the US as the real firepower behind NATO, that’s obviously not feasible. Instead, his idea would simply be for the UK to place itself at the “vanguard” of precipitating the new military action, after which the US would inevitably be engulfed as well. Time is of the essence, Ellwood contends, because China has ominously joined with Russia to set about “dismantling the liberal world order” — a development Ellwood believes will elevate the conflict to a magnitude on par with the Peloponnesian War of Greek antiquity. “China will exploit the war in Ukraine to hasten America’s inevitable decline,” he warned.
Out of these ashes, at least according to Ellwood’s apparent calculus, will rise the UK: “If we want Putin to fail,” Ellwood declared, “then we need to conclude this in months. We need to vow to press forward.” He added, “I underline how critical it is: if Odesa falls, then I’m afraid it’s going to be very, very difficult for us to turn this around.” (Note his use of the pronoun “us,” as though it should be understood that the UK is already an official combatant.)
In his quest to position the UK at the head of this new “vanguard” for greater military intervention, Ellwood is aided by a supportive clamor emanating from what some might regard as an unlikely quarter: the British Left. Broach the subject of Ukraine with prominent figures in the Labour Party, the trade unions, or the left-wing media, and you might be amazed to find that their critique of current Government policy is not that Boris Johnson has been too cavalier or militaristic with regard to Ukraine. Rather, it’s that Johnson hasn’t been cavalier or militaristic enough. Or in other words, what they’re really taking the Conservative Government to task for at the moment is its alleged unwillingness to escalate the war to their liking.
Adjust the ideological contours slightly, and this new Labour Party line is a mirror image of the Republican Party’s current critique of Joe Biden. According to the incessant shrieks of GOP elected officials, Biden is nothing but a wimpy appeaser — even though he’s escalating US involvement in new and exciting ways virtually every single day. Just this week, Biden rolled out something like a back-to-back escalatory special: on Tuesday he publicly accused Putin of committing “genocide,” and by Wednesday he was announcing yet another $800 million in arms shipments, with this latest tranche featuring heavier weaponry than ever before — including a fleet of attack helicopters. That coincided with a classified meeting held at the Pentagon, where the eight largest US defense contractors had been summoned “in preparation for a protracted conflict against Russia.”
But no matter how much Biden intensifies the military intervention, it’s never enough for the GOP, which constantly needs an angle of attack whereby they’re lambasting Biden for not being sufficiently “tough.” (In a heartwarming display of bipartisan unity, Donald Trump just went on Fox News and repeated Biden’s “genocide” accusation. The jury’s still out on whether Trump accused Putin of committing genocide only because he’s secretly conspiring with Putin: tune in tonight on MSNBC for the latest updates.)
This GOP-esque “never tough enough” oppositional dynamic is also evident in the UK, except with putatively left-wing opposition figures leading the charge. Addressing a pro-war rally in London last weekend was Alex Sobel, a Labour Party MP who serves in the Shadow Cabinet of Keir Starmer, the current Opposition Leader. When I asked Sobel to clarify his policy grievance against Boris Johnson, he told me: “There’s been a lack of military assistance. And there’s been a lack of support within NATO more broadly, in terms of military assistance.” This can be translated as: Boris Johnson, NATO, and the US have not been militarily aggressive enough in Ukraine! That’s the criticism!
Expressing his reluctance to countenance any kind of negotiated resolution to the war, Sobel told me: “The Russians only understand force, they do not understand peace.” This is a weirdly common allusion to a supposed genetic predisposition of Russians that makes them inherently… warlike? Sounds very similar to when James Clapper, the top Intelligence Official in the Obama Administration, would go around intoning that Russians were “almost genetically-driven to co-opt” and “penetrate.”
Much of the UK media shares the view that Boris Johnson has exhibited insufficient “force” in his dealings with Russia. This includes The Observer newspaper — understood to be the UK’s leading bastion of respectable left/liberal opinion — which threw caution to the wind last weekend and published an official unsigned editorial institutionally endorsing “direct intervention” in Ukraine by NATO. In particular, the editorial promoted the very same naval blockade plan touted by Tobias Ellwood — the aforementioned Conservative MP who might otherwise be considered the newspaper’s ideological foe. “Declare the unoccupied city of Odesa off-limits,” the Observer editorial demands of Johnson, “and warn Russia to cease coastal bombardments or face serious, unspecified consequences.” Wariness to start World War III has now turned into a timid “excuse” for inaction, the editorial writers allege.
So that’s the basic gist of the left/liberal position on Ukraine. In order to placate his political opponents, Boris Johnson would have to drastically escalate the UK’s existing military intervention. Jeremy Cliffe, a writer for the left-wing New Statesman magazine, confirmed as much to me directly:
Also behold the recent activism of Owen Jones, the noted left-wing journalist whose “beat” appears to be a never-ending series of exhortatory instructions to some amorphous assemblage he calls “The Left.” Jones is now of the view, amazingly, that supporting the “armed struggle” of Ukraine is the only proper “anti-war” position. So here we have another “anti-war” leftist who happens to be in favor of provisioning tanks, fighter jets, missiles, and grenades into an active warzone, for the purpose of facilitating warfare. As is also the case in the US, these UK left/liberals often find it unpleasant to straightforwardly label themselves “pro-war” — so they have been forced to play word-games galore to avoid acknowledging reality. And the reality is that the policy action they’re advocating must necessarily be enacted by some combination of Boris Johnson, the US military-industrial complex, and NATO — all of whom have now been enlisted to carry out these leftists’ desired war aims.
"Anti-war" doesn't mean being "pacifist".
In the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it means opposing Russia's war of aggression – which means supporting Ukraine's armed struggle of liberation against it, and supporting a Russian military defeat.
The most vivid manifestation of this increasingly incoherent left-wing viewpoint could be observed a few days ago at the pro-war march and rally in Whitehall, the governmental corridor of Central London. I found out about the rally because it was endorsed and promoted by Owen Jones on Twitter. Upon arrival, I discovered that leading the march was another left-wing journalist, Paul Mason, who organized the action in concert with a strange Trotyskist faction called the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. “We support Ukraine’s war and demand the West provides weapons,” the group’s pamphlet declares, along with a bitter condemnation of NATO for “steadfastly refusing to fight.”
Mason had many magical moments as rally leader, but his most comical interlude was when he stopped along the march route to bellow, via bullhorn, in the general direction of the UK Ministry of Defence — shouting for the workers inside to come out and join. I asked Mason if he reckoned this was the first “anti-war” and/or “left-wing” rally in British history for which the Ministry of Defence (of a Conservative government!) was considered a natural ally — but he caustically refused to talk, instead denouncing me as a “Putin shill.” (Direct quote.) Clever guy, that Paul. Supremely confident in his convictions, surely, and quick with the novel insult.
A former employee of the BBC and Channel 4, Mason offered up an inventive rationalization for his pro-war advocacy when it was his turn to clasp the microphone that afternoon. “In a war like this, our natural demand for peace — our natural fear of military action — has to take second place,” he proclaimed. Because don’t you know, according to Mason, this particular war is actually being waged on behalf of the vaunted “Working Class”!
“It is in the interest of working class people to support Ukraine in this war,” Mason beseeched from the rally pulpit, expressing his hope to mobilize the whole of the British Labor Movement behind the pro-war cause. “I know how hard that is for many of us, who’ve stood outside here in so many other wars and said — you know, screw your hypocrisy over Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the rest,” Mason acknowledged. “It’s hard. But the only way to get arms into the hands of the Ukrainian people right now… is to keep the pressure on the government.”
So there you have it, clear as day: the object of this left-wing “anti-war” rally was to “keep the pressure” on the ruling Conservative Government… to continue ramping up weapons shipments to Ukraine. For use in… intensifying warfare. As Mason barreled forward with his speech, the Ukraine flag shimmered triumphantly in the sunlight atop Boris Johnson’s Cabinet Office, located right across the street at 70 Whitehall — a moving symbol of cross-ideological unity.
I found that a very simple line of questioning posed to the assembled leftist demonstrators — merely asking them whether they viewed the event they were partaking in as a “pro-war” rally, or an “anti-war” rally — tended to elicit spells of bewildered anger. When asked this question, a number of the pamphleteers insisted to me that the rally was in fact “anti-war” in nature, even though they were distributing placards featuring the injunction to “Arm Ukraine” — a task which would necessarily have [to be] accomplished by the US, UK, and other governments, in conjunction with NATO. One of the chants fervently screamed on the march went as follows: “Put an end to Putin’s reign! Arm, arm, arm, Ukraine!” That’s the new mantra of the British anti-war movement! If nothing else, one has to appreciate this audacious innovation in the fluidity of language.
Chant at this left-wing “anti war” rally: “Put an end to Putin’s reign, arm arm arm Ukraine” pic.twitter.com/jOhM33Re5Q
Another Labour MP, Nadia Whittome, also addressed the pro-war rally — naturally beginning her speech with a fulsome greeting to her fellow “Comrades.” As the youngest member of Parliament at age 25, she can hardly be accused of representing some stodgy old guard; she even had the presence of mind to tie the cause of battlefield victory for Ukraine with the cause of Palestinians. “Slava Ukraini!” Whittome cried. I would’ve asked her to expand upon her views, but at the time had been temporarily accosted by a duo of pro-war demonstrators who identified me based on my Twitter feed, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to kick me out of the rally. It was pretty funny.
At one point, a woman representing UNISON, one of the UK’s largest trade unions, read aloud a message she’d received from the head of the Federation of Trade Unions in Ukraine — purportedly some bold demonstration of organized labor solidarity. The only catch, at least for anyone who might not be so hot on the idea of World War III, was that this letter from the Ukrainian union leader included a demand to “secure our Ukrainian sky.” Which, of course, is another variation on the No Fly Zone demand that Zelensky and other Ukraine government officials have been lobbying for relentlessly over the past seven weeks. And that was the demand — for World War III, more or less — which was boldly read aloud at this reputedly left-wing “anti-war” rally. At times, you really just had to step back and appreciate the dark humor.
If there’s one figure on the British Left who’s still slightly reticent to support overt cataclysmic warfare, it’s Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party. Though he immediately condemned Russia’s invasion after it was launched in February, Corbyn has also reiterated his longstanding skepticism about the utility of NATO — even “refuting” the idea that NATO is merely a “defensive alliance.” He has further opposed the massive US/UK/NATO arms-funneling operation in Ukraine, and instead indicated a preference for a negotiated resolution to the conflict — positions which put him on the radical fringe in both the UK and the US.
Alex Sobel, the Labour MP I interviewed, had previously served on Corbyn’s front bench in Parliament — so I asked him what he made of Corbyn’s position on Ukraine, which conflicted resolutely with the message being propounded at the left-wing pro-war rally. Sobel replied coldly: “I don’t know what his position is. He’s not a Labour MP.” (Corbyn was expelled from the parliamentary Party in 2020.)
“Arm Ukraine” ralliers in London on April 9, 2022
The left-wing tactic of characterizing overt escalation of warfare as #actually being “anti-war” is firmly in league with the chosen PR strategy of the Ukraine government — keenly aware that they must cater to the sensibilities of liberal Europeans and Americans, most of whom would probably prefer not to think of themselves as disreputable pro-war boors. After the slick visit paid by Boris Johnson to Kiev last weekend, wherein he strode around for the cameras with Zelensky, it was announced that the UK would deploy additional shipments of armored vehicles and missile systems to the warzone. An advisor to Zelenksy heralded the move as further evidence that “The UK is the leader… in the anti-war coalition.”
Has there ever been an “anti-war coalition” that so passionately and openly advocated literal warfare? It’s truly remarkable!
By the way, to any staunch advocates of military intervention who may be reading this: it would be more than possible for you to finally drop the phony “anti-war” pretense, and simply argue in favor of what you believe to be a “just war.” There’s a fairly healthy tradition of such arguments. And in that case, at least the terms of the debate could be clarified!
But, there’s a strong interest among these various factions to ensure that the terms of the debate are not clarified. An old saying goes that the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are really “two cheeks of the same backside.” On the subject of Ukraine, that’s eminently applicable. And you can throw in the Democrats and Republicans as well — another a pair of pimples on the same “arse.”
Whatever the UK’s ultimate designs for future military escalation, it’s very possible that the US won’t need very much cajoling after all. Last week, to conspicuously little fanfare, the US Senate unanimously revived the “lend-lease” program — originally created in 1941 to arm the UK in the Second World War — on behalf of Ukraine. Seems like a potential omen for what’s to come. And who knows what else Joe Biden, who’s already declared his intention to engineer regime change in Russia, has up his crusty old sleeve.
Nevertheless, Boris Johnson has every incentive to go full-steam-ahead and do exactly as he’s been enjoined to do by clamorers on both the Left and Right. Upon receiving a fine this week from the police for partying during COVID lockdown, and thus violating the rules he himself imposed — a scandal that not long ago had him teetering perilously close to being ousted as Prime Minister — Johnson delivered a statement that was really one for the ages. He said that his receipt of the fine now instilled in him an “even greater sense of obligation” to “ensure that Putin fails in Ukraine.” Really, that’s what he said.
It remains to be seen what form this “sense of obligation” will take. Perhaps it will culminate in fulfilling the wishes of Tobias Ellwood and The Observer, and a naval intervention in the Black Sea will be launched. Or perhaps some other plan is in store. Richard Shirreff, a retired British Army officer and former high-level NATO commander, has recently declared that either way, Britons “need to brace ourselves, prepare ourselves for war.” Whichever escalatory option Johnson may choose, it can be carried out with a certain satisfaction in knowing that left-wing activists will be marching right behind him, in unbridled support — apparently on behalf of the “working class.” You really couldn’t make it up.
Sweden and Finland will lose part of their sovereignty while compromising their security if they join NATO, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned on Friday, referring to the two nations’ expected requests for formal membership in the US-led military bloc.
Sweden and Finland have long been close to the organization but have maintained formal nonalignment with NATO since the Cold War. Both may soon apply for membership amid the ongoing security crisis in Ukraine. The Russian ministry warned that Sweden and Finland would not gain anything by moving forward with the plan.
NATO membership “is unlikely to help build Sweden’s and Finland’s international prestige,” spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a comment released by the Russian ministry. She said the two nations will lose the opportunity to act as “conveyors of many constructive, unifying initiatives” as they did in the past.
“Naturally the choice belongs to the authorities of Sweden and Finland. But they should realize the consequences of such a move to our bilateral relations and the European security architecture, which currently is in a state of crisis,” she added.
The official argued that the two nations would become platforms used by NATO to threaten Russia and that neither they, nor the region of northern Europe as a whole, would benefit from it. She added that NATO membership “implies de facto surrender of a part of sovereignty in making decisions on defense, and also on foreign policy.”
Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and prime minister, who is currently deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, implied earlier this week that, if the two nations joined the trans-Atlantic bloc Russia, would deploy nuclear weapons in the Baltic region.
Finland and Russia have a 1,340-km-long land border. Finland used to be part of the Russian Empire before making a successful bid for independence when Russia was torn apart by the revolutions of 1917. The USSR and Finland fought a bloody war in 1939-1940 in the build-up to World War II that resulted in some territorial concessions on Helsinki’s part.
Sweden was Russia’s primary rival in northern Europe for several centuries, with the two powers fighting multiple wars for dominance. The conflict of 1808-1809 ended with the eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden relinquished to Russia as the Grand Duchy of Finland.
Russia attacked Ukraine in late February, following Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the Minsk Agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow’s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French brokered protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.
The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked and has denied claims it was planning to retake the two republics by force.
The prime ministers of Sweden and Finland, Magdalena Andersson and Sanna Marin, both signaled Wednesday that they will likely be applying for membership in NATO.
The “prospect” is most “welcome,” says The Washington Post: “Finland and Sweden Should Join NATO.”
The editorial was titled “A Way to Punish Putin.”
Before joining the rejoicing in NATO capitals, we might inspect what NATO membership for these two Nordic nations would mean for the United States.
Finland is a nation the size of Germany, but with a population only 4% of that of Russia and a border with Russia that is 830 miles long.
Should Finland join NATO, the United States, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, would be obligated to go to war with the world’s largest nuclear power to retrieve Finnish lands that an enraged Russia might grab.
Moscow has already indicated that, should Sweden and Finland join NATO, Russia will introduce new nuclear weapons into the Baltic region.
Why is it wise for us to formally agree, in perpetuity, as NATO is a permanent alliance, to go to war with Russia, for Finland?
Given the war in Ukraine and concomitant crisis in Eastern Europe, it is understandable why Stockholm and Helsinki would seek greater security beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
But why would we voluntarily agree to give Sweden and Finland these war guarantees? Why would we commit to go to war with Putin’s Russia, a war that could, and likely would, escalate to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, especially if Russia were losing?
Finland was neutral during the Cold War. Sweden has been neutral since the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century.
How did we suffer from their neutrality?
In Helsinki and Stockholm, the benefit of a U.S.-NATO commitment to go to war for Finland or Sweden is understandable.
But how does it benefit our country, the USA, to be obligated to go to war with a nation that commands the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons — over some quarrel in the Baltic Sea or Gulf of Finland that does not affect us?
Asked for his view on Sweden and Finland’s campaign to join NATO, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had a note of warning:
“We have repeatedly said that the (NATO) alliance remains a tool geared towards confrontation and its further expansion will not bring stability to the European continent.”
Should Putin’s Russia clash with Finland or Sweden today, the U.S. is free to respond, or not to respond, as it sees fit, depending on our own assessment of risks and rewards.
Why not keep it that way? Why surrender our freedom of action in some future collision involving our main adversary?
History holds lessons for us here.
In March 1939, six months after Munich, when Czechoslovakia disintegrated into its ethnic components, Britain issued an unsolicited war guarantee to Poland, then negotiating with Germany over the port city of Danzig taken from Germany by the victorious Allies after World War I.
When Germany, on Sept. 1, 1939, invaded Poland, Britain was obligated to declare war on Germany over a matter that was not a vital interest of Great Britain or its worldwide empire.
Lest we forget, it was the Bucharest Declaration of 2008, opening the door to membership in NATO for Ukraine and Georgia, that led to the recent crises in Eastern Europe and the current war.
The Russia-Georgia War of August 2008, the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, and Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine all proceeded from NATO’s decision in 2008 to open the door to membership for Georgia and Ukraine.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today is partly due to the U.S. and Ukraine’s refusal to rule out NATO membership for Kyiv.
No NATO nation today has a border with Russia nearly as long as that of Finland. If Finland joins NATO, will we put U.S. boots on the ground along that 830-mile border with Russia? Will U.S. warplanes fly in and out of Finnish airfields and air bases up to the border of Russia?
Collective security is said to be a good idea.
But the core of NATO security is provided by U.S. war guarantees, while most of the collecting is done by our 29 NATO allies, which could become 31 by summer’s end.
Otto von Bismarck predicted that the Great War, when it came, would be ignited by “some damn fool thing in the Balkans.”
And World War I was indeed triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in June 1914. The Germans came in in part because the kaiser had given Austria a “blank check” for war.
What enabled America to stay out of both world wars for years after they began was our freedom of “entangling alliances” when they began.
But today we not only lead an alliance of 30 nations, but we are adding two more members, one of which has a border of 830 miles with Russia.
The top-ranking U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, recently denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, which has resulted in a marked uptick in the usage of that term throughout the media. Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed people in the process. That’s what happens when leaders decide to address conflict through the application of military force: people die. The U.S. government has needless to say killed many people in its military interventions abroad, most recently in the Middle East and Africa. Yet Americans are often hesitant to apply the label war criminal even to figures such as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, whose Global War on Terror has sowed massive destruction, death, and misery, adversely affecting millions of persons for more than twenty years.
Nor do people generally regard affable Barack Obama as a war criminal, despite the considerable harm to civilians unleashed by his ill-advised war on Libya. “Drone warrior” Obama also undertook a concerted campaign to kill rather than capture terrorist suspects in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, with which the United States was not at war, and he armed radical Islamist rebel forces in Syria, which exacerbated the conflict already underway, resulting in the deaths of even more civilians. Obama’s material and logistical support for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen gave rise to a full-fledged humanitarian crisis, with disease and starvation ravaging the population.
Moving a bit farther back in time, U.S. citizens and their sympathizers abroad typically do not affix the label war criminal to Bill Clinton either, despite the fact that his 1999 bombing of Kosovo appears to have been motivated in part to distract attention from his domestic scandal at the time. The moment Clinton began dropping bombs on Kosovo, the press, in a show of patriotic solidarity, abruptly switched its attention from the notorious “blue dress” to the war in progress. Throughout his presidency, Clinton not only bombed but also imposed severe sanctions on Iraq, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of civilians died of preventable diseases.
Despite knowing about at least some of the atrocities committed in their name by the U.S. government (torture, summary execution, maiming, the provision of weapons to murderers, sanctions preventing access to medication and food, etc.), many Americans have no difficulty identifying Vladimir Putin as a war criminal while simultaneously withholding that label from their own leaders. Viewed from a broader historical perspective, none of this may seem new. During wartime, much of the populace dutifully parrots pundits and politicians in denouncing the foreign leaders with whom they disagree as criminals, while supporting the military initiatives of their own leaders, no matter what they do. Is the use of the term of derogation war criminal, then, no more than a reflection of the tribe to which one subscribes?
All wars result in avoidable harms to innocent, nonthreatening people: death and maiming, the destruction of property, impoverishment, psychological trauma, and diminished quality of life for those lucky enough to survive. Given these harsh realities, some critics maintain that all war is immoral. But morality and legality are not one and the same, for crimes violate written laws. In the practical world of international politics, what counts as a criminalwar has been delineated since 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations, which Putin defied in undertaking military action against Ukraine.
According to the U.N. Charter, to which Russia is a party, any national leader who wishes to initiate a war against another nation must first air his concerns at the United Nations in the form of a war resolution. The only exception admitted by the U.N. Charter is when an armed attack has occurred on the leader’s territory, in which case the people may defend themselves, on analogy to an individual who may defend himself against violent attack by another individual in a legitimate act of self defense. Barring that “self-defense” exception, the instigation of a war by a nation must garner the support of the U.N. Security Council, the permanent members of which have veto power over any substantive resolution. Putin knew, of course, that the United States would veto any Russian resolution for war against Ukraine and so did not bother to go to the United Nations at all.
Among the vociferous critics of Putin has been none other than President Joe Biden, who not only supported but in fact rallied for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was equally illegal, by the very same criterion which makes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a criminal war, and by extension, Putin a war criminal. Indeed, Putin arguably followed the U.S. precedent and longstanding practice in “going it alone.” For the very same reason (the likely veto of any possible resolution) President Clinton decided to “go it alone” in choosing to bomb Kosovo in 1999, as did President George W. Bush when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003. President Barack Obama took a slightly different tack in 2011, for he deceptively secured support at the United Nations for a no-fly zone in Libya but then proceeded to carry out a full-on aerial assault in that country over a period of several months, which culminated in the removal of Muammar Gaddafi from power and ultimately his murder by an angry mob.
We know that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal according to the letter of the law not only because former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan plainly stated that it was, but also because the U.S. government drafted a war resolution only to withdraw it when it emerged that they did not have enough support to secure the needed U.N. approval. If U.S. leaders had believed that the invasion was completely legitimate according to the terms of the U.N. Charter, then they would have felt no need to draft a resolution in justifying it. Ex post facto, when it emerged that the alleged WMD serving as one of the primary pretexts for the war were nowhere to be found, the U.S. government claimed that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was simply a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War (which had received the support of the United Nations), or was justified because Saddam Hussein allegedly tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush in 1993, or because previous U.N. resolutions relating to the disarmament of Iraq and the elimination of its biological and chemical warfare capacity implied that military force would be permissible in the event of Saddam Hussein’s noncompliance. On the propaganda front, the administration also pumped through the media pretexts such as that the people of Iraq needed to be liberated from their ruthless dictator, and it was high time to allow democracy to flourish throughout the land.
People have been writing about war crimes for millennia, long before the establishment of the United Nations and the ICC (International Criminal Court). The framework proffered in the 1945 U.N. Charter derives from the classical just war tradition. By definition, a war criminal is someone who commits war crimes, but according to just war theory, there are two ways to become an unjust warrior: one is to wage an unjust war; the other is to conduct a war unjustly. These two forms of injustice are outlined in the jus ad bellum and jus in bello requirements on a just war, the interpretive fluidity of which has often been seized upon by political leaders intent on waging war. Such leaders use just war theory opportunistically as a template in developing pro-war propaganda. The aim of the drafters of the U.N. Charter was to rein in such bellicose tendencies and thereby avert tragic and massively destructive conflicts such as World Wars I and II, by requiring explicit and intersubjective agreement among nations before a war could be waged.
In the modern world, where communication between government administrators is always an alternative to the use of military force, the jus ad bellum requirement of “last resort” has become especially problematic, if not impossible to satisfy, much to the chagrin of war marketers. Some leaders flagrantly refuse to negotiate, as did President George H.W. Bush before launching Operation Desert Storm in 1991. By informing Saddam Hussein (in a letter) that “Nor will there by any negotiation. Principle cannot be compromised,” Bush Senior effectively proclaimed to the world that war had become the last resort. But this was only because the U.S. president himself refused to consider any nonmilitary means to resolve the conflict. Even more dramatically than all of the war criminals to follow in his footsteps, George H.W. Bush demonstrated that modern leaders decide to wage war and then, if pressed, with the aid of their public relations staff and media pundit propagandists, they interpret the tenets of just war theory so as to support their military intervention.
In drumming up support for the first U.S. war on Iraq, the Bush Senior administration deployed a variety of deceptive techniques, including a heartwrenching story about Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. Despite being an utter fabrication, that story was instrumental in garnering international support for Bush Senior’s coveted military campaign. Given the mendacious means by which approval for the 1991 Gulf War was granted by the United Nations, it should come as no surprise that the war was also conducted criminally. Among other atrocities, Iraqi soldiers attempting to retreat were buried alive, and civilian structures such as water treatment facilities were destroyed. Strikingly, even the claims of U.S. soldiers themselves to have been severely harmed by exposure to chemical agents released into the atmosphere during the bombing of factories were denied for years by the very officials who sent them to fight.
Deception is a form of coercion, which implies that a leader who offers false pretexts to secure the approval of the U.N. Security Council, as did George H.W. Bush in 1991, is no less a criminal than a leader whose war abjectly violates the written letter of the law, as in the case of his son George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Indeed, in predicting how leaders will conduct themselves during the prosecution of a war, there may be no more dependable indicator than how they went about garnering support for it. By now it is common knowledge that all of the proffered pretexts for the 2003 invasion of Iraq were bogus, from the nonexistent WMDs to the alleged collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Given the many lies used to persuade politicians and pundits to support the invasion, no one should have been surprised when those who waged a criminal war proceeded to render and torture suspects, kill civilians at checkpoints, deploy white phosphorus and depleted uranium-tipped missiles, raze entire cities, and terrorize civilians with lethal drones.
Fast forward to 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military under Vladimir Putin. President Putin, like everyone, including all warmakers, has his own perspective on what he is doing. Following the example of all recent U.S. presidents in promoting their use of military force, Putin offered a “moral” pretext for his invasion of Ukraine. Among other things, he claimed to be protecting a portion of the Ukrainian people from Nazis. Comparing the various “humanitarian” pretexts offered by the U.S. government for its military interventions over the past three decades, the 1999 bombing of Kosovo probably comes closest to the template brandished by Putin in 2022.
In 1999, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was painted by propagandists as “the new Hitler,” said to be slaughtering the ethnic Muslim population of Kosovars. The bombing campaign was rationalized by the need to stop Milosevic and protect civilians. Because Milosevic was on friendly terms with Russia, which held veto power at the U.N. Security Council, the Clinton administration waged its war, through NATO, without seeking the support of the United Nations. The crisis was depicted as a dire emergency situation requiring immediate action. The manner in which the intervention was conducted, however, with pilots flying high above the ground to avoid being shot down, thereby risking increased civilian casualties, belied those aims. More civilians were killed in the period after the bombing commenced than before, as Serbian soldiers were provoked to fight even more viciously in response to the aerial assault.
Putin’s anti-Nazi rhetoric notwithstanding, it is plausible that the Russian president’s primary concerns are geopolitical. Clearly troubled by the expansion of NATO to the east, right up to Russia’s border, Putin appears to want to secure his territory from any threats from the West. Given the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which was supported if not fully instigated by the U.S. government, Putin is no doubt concerned about the persistent hostility of NATO toward Russia, despite the fact that the U.S.S.R. no longer exists, and Russia is now a capitalist country. The conflict in Ukraine, as portrayed to television viewers, has offered nonstop confirmation of the prevailing picture of Putin as a ruthless dictator, which has been embraced by Western political elites since the 2016 presidential election, and was aggressively promoted by media outlets throughout the years of Russiagate during the Trump administration.
Putin is relentlessly denounced as a war criminal and the evil enemy by warmongers in the United States, even while knowing, as any rational person does, that the war must ultimately end at the negotiation table, given the reality of Russia’s arsenal of nuclear arms. When President Joe Biden angrily pronounced, “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power,” he endangered not only Ukrainians but the very future of humanity by inching the conflict ever closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation. Arguably nothing could have been more reckless than for President Biden to announce to the world that the U.S. government’s intention was to depose Putin. Why? Because Putin has already seen, in recent history, what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. If the Russian leader’s removal from power, indeed his very death, is in fact the foreign policy objective of the U.S. government, then Putin has no reason not to use nuclear weapons and take down as many people with him as possible.
While speaking to troops in Poland (a member of NATO), President Biden effectively informed them that they were being deployed to Ukraine, though earlier he had stated that the United States would not be entering into the conflict, because Ukraine was not a member of NATO and not a U.S. interest. Was Libya a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Of course not. But that did not stop President Obama from using NATO to wage a full-scale, regime-change military campaign in 2011. Biden’s staff immediately clarified that in fact U.S. soldiers were not being sent to Ukraine, thus sending a mixed and extremely confusing message about what the U.S. policy actually was.
To the dismay of the world community, Biden blundered yet again by setting up the operational equivalent to a red-line scenario, asserting that the U.S. military would retaliate “in kind,” should Putin opt to use chemical weapons. To some this may seem less like a red line than a potential tit-for-tat, but either way it is extremely dangerous. Under the ordinary understanding of what those words mean, Biden was stating that a chemical attack by Russia would be countered by a chemical attack by the United States. The hypothetical scenario limned by Biden was doubly dangerous, for it opened up the possibility for false flag attacks to be carried out by parties interested in drawing the United States into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. That sort of provocation strategy has been seen in many contexts throughout history, including both Kosovo and Syria.
We already know from what happened recently in Syria, and many other places since 1945, that the provision of more weapons to a war zone exacerbates violent conflict. Whatever those who furnish military aid may intend, the weapons eventually find their way into the arms of persons willing to use them, for whatever their reasons happen to be. The more savage the war between Russia and Ukraine becomes, and the more civilian casualties reported by the media, the more likely it becomes that the conflict will escalate, drawing in other parties, including neighboring nations. Were NATO to get involved, that would be operationally equivalent to the United States’ overt entry into the war, given that NATO is dominated by the superpower.
When President Biden was asked to clarify all of his troubling remarks—that Putin had to be deposed, that U.S. soldiers were headed to Ukraine, and that the use of chemical weapons would be retaliated against (in kind!), Biden oscillated between reaffirming his statements and denying that he ever made them, leaving the entire world in the uncomfortable position of having to pin their hopes for a rational resolution to the conflict on Vladimir Putin himself, despite his having been relentlessly portrayed as the evil Manichean enemy, a ruthless dictator who is supposedly beyond the reach of reason. In reality, every military conflict ultimately ends, sooner or later, at the negotiating table. Refusal to negotiate belies an utter insouciance toward the plight of people living under bombing and, in this case, given the danger of a nuclear war, the future of humanity itself.
The question now for U.S. government officials such as Secretary of State Blinken, who has shunned negotiation for months, is this: Why allow the destruction of any more human lives and property in Ukraine before agreeing to sit down and talk? Blinken may believe that dead Ukrainians are a small price to pay for U.S. foreign policy objectives, but the victims would surely disagree, as should the rest of the international community. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that so-called diplomats now regard politics as war by other means, having fully inverted the Clausewitzian formula. Nothing could be more obvious than that the longer the conflict is allowed to drag on, and prolonged through the injection of yet more weapons into the region, the more people, including Ukrainian civilians, will be killed. In other words, through postponing negotiation and sending tons of weapons to Ukraine, the U.S. government is using civilian victims as the means to its own foreign policy aims. Such a tactic is no less criminal than is punishing innocent people for the crimes of the guilty, the inevitable effect of economic sanctions against entire countries run by leaders who, in virtue of their position of power, retain privileged access to whatever they might need.
Biden’s debilitated mental state and inability to keep his story straight is the perfect metaphor for the attitude of Americans toward war criminals. They blithely ignore or brush aside the crimes committed by their own leaders while supporting policies which will intensify rather than resolve conflicts abroad. The term war criminal is at this point used as a rhetorical soundbite (à la just war ), bandied about as a way of distracting attention from the speakers, who delusively imply that because they can identify war criminals, the label could not possibly apply to themselves.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.
Washington is not planning to return the assets confiscated from Russian businessmen as part of the latest sanctions imposed on Moscow over the military operation in Ukraine, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Thursday.
“Our goal is not to give them back,” Sullivan said at the Economic Club of Washington, adding that the US authorities would use the seized assets “in a better way.”
“There are authorities we have, and there are further authorities that maybe we could develop, and that’s something we’re actively looking at,” the official added.
The White House has introduced several rounds of sanctions against Moscow since February 24, when Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began. As part of the penalties, the US authorities arrested Russian foreign assets along with those belonging to the country’s businesses and high-profile individuals.
Several US congressmen have already called for the sale or liquidation of Russian assets caught up in the sanctions campaign, stating that the proceeds should be used for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow has no plans to nationalize foreign assets in Russia in response. “Unlike Western countries, we will respect property rights,” he said.
“(D)estroying or seizing the enemy’s property unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.
This rule is included in military manuals.
It’s applicable to armed conflicts.
Its violation is an offense, according to laws of many nation states on what’s permitted or not in armed conflicts.
And this resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in February 1946.
It’s not binding international law like Security Council resolutions but significant nonetheless. … Read full article
There follows a post by Hector Drummond, a former academic who worked in risk, who says when he came to research his new book The Face Mask Cult on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19 the evidence was threadbare.
In 2021 I decided to write an FAQ on all aspects of Covid, lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). I started with face masks, as they seemed to be the easiest issue to deal with, thinking that the whole mask situation could be summed up in five to six pages. After a few days work I had twenty pages of text, and another twenty pages of reminder notes on further aspects of face masks that I needed to consider and research. Those notes ballooned out in the next few weeks, and I realised that the use of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was a far bigger topic than I had appreciated, and would require substantial amounts of writing, and months of research and literature-reading.
It took until the next year before I decided I’d written enough on the topic. I had read an enormous number of scientific papers and other articles on masks, and gone through some of them with a fine-tooth comb (see Part 3 of the book, for instance). I had spent considerable time analysing, synthesising and rewriting, and my short FAQ article had become a comprehensive 400-page book that tackled all aspects of the issue, as well as a unique resource with its extensive scientific literature review section.
In all my researches I failed to come across very much in the way of convincing evidence that masks work. The papers that were supposed to show that they did all turned out to be poor pieces of science. None were randomly-controlled peer-reviewed trials. Some were observational studies, with inadequate controls for dealing with the possibility of faulty or biased recollection. Some were ‘modelling’ studies, in which a computer program was used to ‘model’ the effect of face masks on disease spread. Modelling studies are generally hopeless at providing any confirming evidence for the effectiveness of face masks as they require the modellers to make assumptions about how effective the masks are when writing their programs. Some were mannequin studies, in which a dummy in a lab with artificial breathing functions, rather than a real person in the real world, was used. Some were simply tests of the porosity of various materials in regard to salt aerosols.
Most studies ignored the issue of face mask gaps, despite it being well-known in the field that gaps around the sides of masks will let such large amounts of virions in and out that any effect that the masks do have will be completely negated. (This is why medical institutions require ‘fit tests’ for masks – not that fit tests are very reliable, as I explain in the book.)
Even these dubious studies that claimed to show an effect for masks didn’t show much of an effect. The less wild ones would typically claim that the cloth masks would stop 5% to 15% of virions, but they never presented any reason to believe the further claim that was often made that this would cause a 5% to 15% reduction in cases, or a 5% to 15% reduction in deaths. The closest such studies got to doing so was when an author would occasionally speculate, in an airy fashion, that if the disease in question’s R0 rate happened to be close to 1.0, then maybe widespread mask use (assuming masks had some small effect) would be enough to push the R0 rate below 1.0, in which case the disease would die out, although of course even if all their assumptions were true and masks did push the disease’s R0 rate below 1.0 it doesn’t follow that the disease would die out anytime soon. It could well be that the disease’s R0 rate would quickly come back over 1.0 again as soon as we stop masking, and so in order to stop the disease spreading again we would have to wear masks for years on end, or even indefinitely.
But what about all those government reports written by distinguished scientists assuring us that there were now truckloads of research proving that masks work? This is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole face mask con. The 2020 DELVE report and its updates, the 2020 Royal Society report, and the 2022 Department for Education’s Evidence Summary were disgraceful pieces of misinformation, as I show in detail in the book. Even more shocking, perhaps, is the fact that there have been so many acts of wrongdoing in the last two years that the scientific butchery committed in these reports is completely unknown to the general public. The fact, for instance, that the Royal Society’s report relied heavily upon a low-grade Chinese study, written in Chinese only, and published in an obscure Chinese journal, which reported fantastically unrealistic results, is never even going to briefly flit through the mind of the average person, because the average person will never come across any reference to this shameful affair in the mainstream media.
I felt vindicated as I put the finishing touches to the book when several prominent advocates of masks, such as Trish Greenhalgh, Jeremy Howard and many others, started to admit that cloth masks were useless. Not that they wanted us to stop wearing masks – they now wanted us to move onto medical-grade respirator masks, like N95s and FFP2s, as Germany required. Needless to say, these mask fanatics didn’t bother to mention that Germany’s stringent mask policy has been a complete failure.
The book I finished up with is a serious corrective to the endless propaganda we have been fed about masks. It lays out the case against masks in detail, considers the harms done by mask-wearing (harms which are usually ignored by scientists and governments), closely examines many claims made about masks by both sides, and backs it all up with an enormous number of references to the scientific literature. Whenever anyone who wants you to wear a mask says, “Follow the Science”, just show them this book and say, “I already did”.
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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