But it can’t be caused by the vaccines, masks, or swabs since all are “safe and effective” according to the CDC. My experts think it is all 3. Infectious disease docs say nothing is wrong, ignore it.
I got the message below from one of my followers. It’s an anecdote, but it is not an isolated incident as you’ll agree from reading the comments. A 60-fold increase in intracranial infections (5/month vs. 1 per year). Nobody can figure out why. Only started happening after the vaccines rolled out.
You won’t hear of this since the surgeons aren’t going to speak out since they’ll lose their license (as noted in the message). That doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Steve, I got this message from my neurosurgeon friend…
“I just took care of an 11-year-old African American cheerleader (she is a “flyer” which means she is the person who is lifted up into the air during a stunt; they are usually very strong and have excellent balance while in the air) in amazing health who had a headache. She got worse and mother brought her to my hospital. She was in a coma and had a brain abscess. I had to put a tube in her head to save her life. Pure pus from her head… And MRI showed a brain abscess as well as sinusitis, and she had a tooth infection.”
So I called my friend (the anti-Vax NS) and said WTF: she said she operated in 5 kids like this in the past month! We see normally one a year. We both said at the same time, “Masks!”
So I wrote to another ped NS friend in the Midwest and this is what he just sent me:
“Yes, it is raining intracranial infections here. We just did one and have done 10-12 since October. This is weird as it’s the wrong season for them. We get them in spring and only a sprinkling of them. ENT is having a similar issue with severe sinusitis’s in kiddies. We asked ID and they just shrug their shoulders”. [Ed note: ID is short for infectious disease ]
Steve, I asked my neurosurgeon friend to call you as she is still pro vaccine despite what she is seeing with her own eyes, but she is afraid that she could jeopardize her license. The other NS recently got fired for not getting the jab, so maybe she would speak with you. Thank you.
Masks? Vaccine? COVID test swabs stuck up your nose? All three?
The vaccination status of the patients wasn’t known (since we all know that the COVID vaccines never cause any bad effects, the physicians didn’t bother to ask such irrelevant questions).
According to my neurologist, the most likely cause is the vaccine, but masks could also be implicated (sinus infection that goes to the brain). She gave it 60:40 odds, where 60% it is the vaccine, 40% it is masks. Then I asked her about the COVID test swabs they stick up your nose and she said, “YES, that is a huge possibility.”
In short, it can be a combination of things. The vaccine weakens your immune system, the masking and/or swabs can initiate the infection, and perfect storm time… you get the result we see today.
In reading the comments, it’s also a mixed bag. Some implicate masks, others the vaccine (since it crosses the BBB and can cause inflammation). But it could potentially be PCR tests as well if you get a swab placed up your nose all the way.
Of course the CDC is never going to tell you any of this.
Message from Dr. Ryan Cole
I was hypothesizing with the Mrs. I think it may be all 3.
In the lab, we saw in increase of unusual organisms on sinus infection and throat infection cultures pre-vaccine. We cultured several masks and grew several diverse organisms and environmental pathogens.
So, first, we know the masks were/are a breeding ground for an atypical mix/ratio of microbes, where they don’t belong.
Second- you and I well know that the vaccines alter the immune system’s ability to fight off many organisms. T cell and till like receptor dysregulation, lead to a weaken of our innate immune response.
Third- add to the perfect storm, of wrong flora, in the wrong location, a trauma to the nasal mucosa, allowing those organisms into a broken small vessel, adjacent to the olfactory bulb. The fatty rich nerve sheath gets secondarily colonized and allows the organisms to now climb into the usually sterile intra cranial space causing abscesses.
Children normally have a strong innate immune response. It is altered after the shots.
Kelli (the Mrs.) being reasonably mask compliant (probably microbially shifted in her flora), had a tech that ramroded her sinus and caused bleeding for our last Maui trip, where you and I spoke. After that, she had a persistent gasoline smell. She and I had Covid a month ago. While in the antibiotic azithromycin, her smell returned to normal. She has had to mask for a few things recently and the gasoline smell is returning (naso biome microbial bad shift again).
I think the cause can be one and two, two and three, or all three.
I would like to know from the neurosurgeons what organism(s) were cultured and grew from the abscess in each case, and assess the commonalities and differences of the microbial milieu.
The study would be-
Culture the throat and sinuses, to assess the microbial flora, of age controlled cohorts of
– non maskers
– persistent compliant unvaccinated maskers (Such as a school district that requires them)
-compliant vaccinated maskers.
Compare the results to the organisms reported in the cases you presented from the docs and surgeons.
Something is indeed rotten in state of “the neuronal vaults of” Denmark.
Comments from doctors
Retired neurosurgeon wrote:
We need more data re this.
Brain abscess is typically a bacterial infection, and often can be related to otitis/ oral cavity infection. It can also be fungal. My guess is that if indeed there is an uptick in cases, the vaccine itself is unlikely to be a direct culprit; more likely some environmental factor, or potentially masking, if that can be shown to actually somehow be increasing cases of otitis media, or oropharyngeal infections, tooth decay, etc. Masking obviously is ineffective in mitigating upper respiratory dz transmission, but it’s actual harmfulness in the general healthy population running around with their faces covered with cloth beaks emblazoned with icons and butterflies, alone in their cars, and in supermarkets, etc, half off their nose, is hard to prove conclusively.
Brain abscess used to be more common a few decades ago, and has steadily decreased in frequency. We image people much sooner, and hygiene, in general, has improved. I do agree the CDC has proven quite unreliable, an understatement, in so many ways. If there is an increased incidence, it will probably be in the CDC data, they just may well not call attention to it, and hope it goes under the radar.
ER doc wrote:
I called this out a year ago. Seems like so many patients were coming into the clinic with “sinusitis” – patients tend to overcall head congestion with a cold as sinusitis, but so many patients with the same complaint. I said I thought it was the masks but everyone shrugged it off. We know that anytime there is obstruction of normal outflow from the body, bacteria tend to colonize that area. And in a few unlucky people an infection can spread. I have never seen a brain abscess in someone who was not immunocompromised or an IV drug user. It can occur with protozoal infection but very rare in US. When you mess with Mother Nature, there are consequences. There’s a reason the Greeks saw hubris as a fatal character flaw.
Amid the pandemic media storm in January 2021, a study1 published in the journal Atherosclerosis quietly revealed that people taking statin medications had a higher rate of cardiovascular events than those who were not on statins.2
In the study, the researchers separated the participants by assigning them a coronary artery calcium (CAC) score. This is a noninvasive CT scan designed to detect plaque buildup in your coronary arteries. It is also called a cardiac calcium score,3 calcium scan or Agatston score.4
Doctors use this score to calculate your risk of developing coronary artery disease as it measures calcified plaque within the arteries. Data has shown your risk of heart disease correlates with this score. The lower the score, the less likely you are to have a cardiac event when compared against other men and women your age. The score ranges from zero to over 400.5
Zero — No plaque with a low risk of a heart attack.
1-10 — Small amount of plaque and less than 10% chance of heart disease.
11-100 — Some plaque with mild heart disease and a moderate risk of a heart attack.
101-400 — Moderate amount of plaque that may block a coronary artery, with a moderate to high risk of a heart attack.
400+ — Large amount of calcified plaque is found in the coronary arteries with more than a 90% chance it is blocking an artery.
Doctors consider a CAC test if you are between 40 and 70 with an increased risk for heart disease but do not have symptoms.6 People with a family history of heart disease, who are a past or present smoker, are overweight, are inactive or have a history of high cholesterol, diabetes or high blood pressure have factors that increase their risk of heart disease.
Yet, not all physicians use the CAC score as recommended. Writing for the Texas Heart Institute, the assistant medical director, Dr. Stephanie Coulter, says, “When my high-risk patients are not taking their cholesterol-lowering statin medicine, the calcium score can be a very powerful motivator for them to follow my professional advice and prescription.”7
However, further into her article, she stresses the test is only appropriate for moderate-risk patients, and those with a low or high risk of heart disease do not benefit from the scan. The study published in Atherosclerosis indicates that even with a high CAC score, taking statins does not reduce your risk of a cardiovascular event and may, in fact, increase it.8,9
Data Show Statins Increase Your Risk for Heart Events
The researchers were working under the premise that statins do not decrease the CAC score and may increase calcification.10 They used the prognostic significance of CAC when compared against statin users in 28,025 patients ages 40 to 75 years. The researchers adjusted the data for traditional cardiovascular disease risk factors and examined the performance of CAC volume, density and area.
Nearly 11 months after the results were published, Tucker Goodrich11 extracted the data from Table 1 into a graphic representation that demonstrated only in the highest CAC score range of 400 or greater were the data nearly identical between those taking statins and those not taking statins. Otherwise, those taking statins always had more cardiac events than those who weren’t. The researchers concluded that:12
“CAC scoring retains robust risk prediction in statin users, and the changing relationship of CAC density with outcomes may explain the slightly weaker relationship of CAC with outcomes in statin users.”
The researchers acknowledged that true to the recommended use of CAC scoring, only a baseline score was known, so they were unable to evaluate whether statins influenced the progression of calcification. There was limited race and ethnic diversity within the study group.
Yet, despite the limitations of the design and the results, they believe the analysis used data from one of the largest samples available to date and provides “both real-world and investigational support for the role of CAC in risk stratifying patients taking statins.”13
Tucker Goodrich14 quotes from an article in the American College of Cardiology published January 2021, in which the writers analyzed the data. They wrote:15
“The findings confirm that CAC does have prognostic value among statin users, although the association is attenuated. Complicating interpretation is the inclusion of only fatal events and the relatively elevated, but still low, mortality rate in statin users versus non-users with a zero CAC score.
A key mechanism underlying this phenomenon is that statins increase plaque density thereby paradoxically raising the Agatston CAC score — as density is upweighted.”
There appears to be some discrepancy. First, the data that show people with a CAC score of zero — no plaque and low risk — were inexplicably taking statins. Secondly, the study acknowledges that there was one baseline CAC score taken, so how much the plaque density increased or didn’t increase in this population could not be ascertained.
And finally, the raw data showed people on statins died more frequently than those who didn’t take the drug in nearly every CAC category. However, the writers postulated that the increasing plaque density that raises the CAC score may be overcome by expanding the scoring method and investigating the protective role that densely calcified plaque may play in cardiovascular health:16
“However, this is hampered by a current lack of reference values, limited supportive research, and validation; implementation limitations include software update requirements and standardization.”
In other words, expanding the CAC scoring, which should be taken before prescribing statins and is not recommended as a follow-up since it exposes patients to the same radiation as 10 X-rays,17 may possibly alter the results enough that it reflects greater benefit to using statins.
Statins Are More Than a Colossal Waste of Money
Despite decades of statin drug use and vilification of saturated fats and cholesterol, heart disease remains the No. 1 cause of death.18 Although the researchers in the featured study do not mention it, their data support past research that shows statins are a colossal waste of money, and likely more.
In 2014, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., produced a documentary, “Heart of The Matter: Dietary Villains.” The film exposed the myths behind the statin fad and the financial links that drove the industry. It was so thorough that vested interests convinced ABC-TV to rescind the two-part series and got the documentary expunged.19
Since the release of that documentary, the evidence against the cholesterol theory and statins has only grown. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, a general practitioner with the British National Health Service, expressed his disbelief at how widely statins are used despite research evidence they are not effective, and possibly worse. He wrote:20
“New research shows that the most widely prescribed type of drug in the history of medicine is a waste of money. One major study found that the more ‘bad’ cholesterol was lowered, the greater the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, almost every other medical condition has been shoved onto the sidelines. However, in the UK last year, heart attacks and strokes (CVD) killed well over 100,000 people — which is at least twice as many as have died from COVID-19.
CVD will kill just as many this year, which makes it significantly more important than COVID-19, even if no one is paying much attention to it right now.”
What data have demonstrated is that statin medications are not inert, and in fact can damage your health while not protecting your heart. One of the side effects of lower cholesterol levels is impaired cognitive performance.21
One study22 showed patients with mild cognitive impairment had double the risk of dementia when using lipophilic statins, such as atorvastatin (Lipitor), simvastatin (Zocor), Fluvastatin (Lescol), and lovastatin (Altoprev), which dissolve more readily in fats.23
This Harvard article claims those same drugs that increase the risk of dementia may lower your risk of liver cancer, which is not a choice any patient should have to make. There is also evidence to suggest people taking statins have twice the risk of being diagnosed with diabetes than those who do not and taking the drug for longer than two years triples the risk. One of the scientists from The Ohio State University explained in a press release:24
“The fact that increased duration of statin use was associated with an increased risk of diabetes — something we call a dose-dependent relationship — makes us think that this is likely a causal relationship.”
Not all data show that people taking statins have more heart events than people not taking statins. Some, like this systematic review25 published in 2015, found that despite the added risks of dementia and diabetes, people taking statins could live an average of only 3.2 to 4.1 days longer than if they didn’t take the drug.
Your Body Requires Cholesterol to Live
The triggers for cardiovascular disease are more complex than just lowering cholesterol levels. As data have shown us, lowering cholesterol is not the panacea for avoiding heart disease and extending your life. Kendrick refutes the idea that the LDL-cholesterol hypothesis is accurate, writing:26
“For the LDL hypothesis to be correct, it requires that LDL can travel past the lining of the artery, the endothelial cells, and into the artery wall behind. This is considered the starting point for atherosclerotic plaques to form. The problem with this hypothesis is that LDL cannot get into any cell, let alone an endothelial cell, unless that cell wants it to.”
However, damage to the arterial walls can be induced by several factors, including high blood pressure, inflammation, elevated blood sugar and smoking.27 Once damaged, plaque begins to build up as a protective mechanism. The problem arises when the rate of damage and result in clot formation outpace your body’s ability to repair it.
Instead, it’s crucial that you understand how important cholesterol is to the human body. In fact, according to Zoe Harcombe, Ph.D., nutritional researcher, author and public speaker, “If you had no cholesterol in your body, you would be dead.”28
As noted by Harcombe, the notion that there is good and bad cholesterol is also wrong. LDL and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) are not even cholesterol but, rather, carriers and transporters of cholesterol, triglycerides (fat), phospholipids and proteins. “LDL would more accurately be called the carrier of fresh cholesterol and HDL would more accurately be called the carrier of recycled cholesterol,” she says.29
How to Identify and Lower Your Risk for Heart Disease
Using simple strategies at home may help normalize your cholesterol and blood sugar levels. I believe a total cholesterol measurement has little benefit in evaluating your risk for heart disease unless the total number is over 300.
In some instances, high cholesterol may indicate a problem when your LDL or triglycerides are high, and your HDL is low. You’ll be better able to evaluate your risk by looking at the two ratios below, in combination with other lifestyle factors such as ferritin and gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) tests. To calculate your cholesterol ratios:30,31,32
Cholesterol:HDL ratio — Divide your total cholesterol by your HDL level. Ideally, the ratio should be below 5-to1; a ratio below 3.5-to1 is considered optimal
Triglyceride:HDL ratio — Divide your triglyceride level by your HDL. This ratio should ideally be below 2
However, rather than focusing on cholesterol, there are two tests far more important for assessing your CVD risk. These are the serum ferritin33 and gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT) tests.34 The GGT test can be used as a screening marker for excess free iron and is a great indicator of your sudden cardiac death risk.
To protect yourself against heart disease, here are several suggestions that help lower your insulin resistance and restore insulin sensitivity, among other heart-protective mechanisms:
Avoid environmental pollutants and toxins, including smoking, vaping, heavy metals, herbicides and pesticides, especially glyphosate.
Minimize your exposure to electromagnetic fields and wireless radiation from cellphones, Wi-Fi, routers, smart meters and more, as this kind of radiation has been shown to cause serious free radical damage and mitochondrial dysfunction.
Eat an unprocessed whole food-based diet low in net carbs and high in healthy fats. A ketogenic diet — which is very low in net carbohydrates and high in healthy fats — is key for boosting mitochondrial function.
When your body can burn fat for fuel, your liver creates water-soluble fats called ketones that burn far more efficiently than carbs, thereby creating fewer reactive oxygen species and secondary free radicals. Ketones also decrease inflammation and improve glucose metabolism.35
Eat nitrate-rich foods to help normalize your blood pressure. Good sources include arugula, cilantro, rhubarb, butter leaf lettuce, mesclun mixed greens, beet greens, fresh beet juice, kvass (fermented beet juice) and fermented beet powder.
Get plenty of non-exercise movement each day; walk more and incorporate higher intensity exercise as your health allows.
Intermittently fast. After you’ve become accustomed to intermittently fasting for 16 to 18 hours, you can try a stricter fast once or twice a week, when you eat a 300- to 800-calorie meal loaded with detox-supporting nutrients, followed by a 24-hour fast. So, in essence, you’re then only eating one 300- to 800-calorie meal in 42 hours.
If you have heart disease, consider enhanced external counterpulsation (EECP). To find a provider, see EECP.com.36
Get sensible sun exposure to optimize your vitamin D status and/or take an oral vitamin D3 supplement with magnesium and vitamin K2.
Implement heart-based wellness practices such as connecting with loved ones and practicing gratitude.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and Anthony Fauci appeared before a Senate Committee Hearing this week regarding the “Omicron Response,” and both of them lied under oath.
They both claimed that they “didn’t know” how many deaths were recorded in VAERS following COVID-19 vaccines, and Walensky stated the COVID-19 vaccines are “incredibly safe” and “protect us against Omicron, they protect us against Delta, they protect us against COVID.”
She also stated that all reported COVID-19 vaccine deaths have been “adjudicated,” when in fact not a single COVID-19 vaccine injury, let alone a death, has been tried in the Government CounterMeasures Injury Compensation Program, the only place where a vaccine death or injury following a COVID-19 shot can be “adjudicated.”
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville either displayed his complete ignorance regarding VAERS, or colluded with Walensky and Fauci to ask them a meaningless question which then gave them the opportunity to control the narrative.
Tommy asked:
Dr. Walensky, it has been reported by some virologists and scientists that this year around 170 people have died from taking the regular flu vaccine.
The Vaccine Adverse Reporting System reported that the number of people dying after or following the COVID vaccine is actually in the thousands.
Now this is what I am hearing. I’ll give you a chance to refute that or confirm it here. Is this true?
Are we having that many people die after taking one of these vaccines?
This is a meaningless question because the answer is already public knowledge!
The VAERS database is open to the public, and anybody can search it. You don’t need a “virologist” or “scientist” to tell you how many deaths there are following COVID-19 shots. Anyone can make that search, and it takes less than 60 seconds to find the answer.
As of this recorded Senate Hearing, the total deaths following COVID-19 shots in VAERS was 21,382. (Source.)
So what he should have asked was:
Dr. Walensky, VAERS is reporting 21,382 deaths following the emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccines for the first year, which is more deaths than following all FDA-approved vaccines for the past 31 years combined, since VAERS started recording deaths following vaccines in 1990.
Why are we still injecting these experimental products into Americans?
But instead, he questioned whether or not VAERS was actually reporting this, which led to a canned response by both Walensky and Fauci that VAERS is not reliable, because someone can get the vaccine and then walk outside and get hit by a car, and that is recorded as a vaccine death.
So let’s fact check this new narrative that people getting hit by a car after getting a COVID-19 shot are being entered into VAERS.
VAERS does have a “symptom” that is called “Road traffic accident.”
So if we search for “Road traffic accident” following COVID-19 vaccines that result in a death, we get 20 listed deaths out of the current 21,382 deaths recorded following COVID-19 shots that are associated with a “Road traffic accident.” (Source.)
Of those 20 cases, two of them appear to have listed “Road traffic accident” by mistake because nothing in the description mentioned a traffic accident.
Of the remaining 18, it appears that most, if not all of them, happened with the person driving the car (or motorcycle), not being hit by a car.
She started having breathing problems/heart attack appearance. on 1/22/21 and went to the ER. Upon admittance was told it was an anaphylactic shock from the Covid shot. They kept her in ICU and released her 1/23/21. At 12:45 am on 1/24/21 she passed out and we called the ambulance. Hospital admitted her and worked through multiple organ failure issues and thought her numbers were under control. She was released on 1/27/21 and was driving on 1/28/21 around 4:15 pm and appears to have had heart failure and had a wreck. She passed away that day.
People having heart attacks while driving their vehicles shortly after getting injected and then crashing doesn’t quite fit the new narrative that Walensky and Fauci are claiming regarding “getting hit by a car,” does it?
THE period 2020-2022 is remembered as the Great Covid Madness.
History has witnessed many periods of mass hysteria including plagues of dancing, witch trials, alien invasion and ghostly apparitions, not to mention the Seattle Windscreen Pitting Epidemic. However, it is likely that the hysteria witnessed during the Great Covid Madness surpassed anything that had gone before or since.
The delusions included:
The belief that the UK’s National Health Service was the ‘envy of the world’.
The belief that propaganda from the BBC, state-controlled media and the Chinese Communist Party was true.
The belief that a rich software salesman was a philanthropist and also an expert on vaccines and the transmission of viruses.
Decisions by managers at so-called ‘Health Trusts’ to send hospital patients with the virus back to care homes to infect other vulnerable old people who did not have the virus.
The insatiable desire to hoard toilet paper.
Banning the sale of ‘non-essential’ items such as shoes, and closing small retailers.
The introduction of pointless and discriminatory ‘health passports’.
The reliance on the accuracy of discredited PCR and LF tests.
Everything associated with Test and Trace.
Quarantine for healthy international travellers.
The persistent belief in discredited statistics from Imperial College London and Sage.
The belief in the proven lies of politicians, and most journalists.
The belief that a dirty rag placed over the mouth and nose was healthy and could stop the inhalation of a microscopic virus.
The belief that a piece of plastic between tables in a cafe could stop the transmission of a virus.
The belief that a sitting person would not transmit a virus whereas a standing person would.
The belief that a healthy person was a threat and could transmit a virus.
The belief that flu had disappeared and that a cold was something to dread.
The banning of healthy exercises such as team sports, golf, swimming and park runs.
Picnics and sunbathing viewed as dangerous to health.
Park benches and playgrounds regarded as disease vectors.
The refusal to distribute effective anti-viral medicines.
The isolation of lonely, sick and vulnerable people.
The closure of churches.
The belief that unjabbed health-care workers posed a greater risk to patients than those who had accepted the experimental gene therapy.
The ruination of the education and life chances of young people who were in no danger from the virus.
The belief that it was safe for six people to meet but not seven or more.
The belief that the indiscriminate injection of an untested experimental gene therapy was sensible.
The belief that mixing and matching the unproven gene therapies was sensible.
The belief that subsequent injections of the experimental gene therapy (which after two injections had not stopped infection or transmission) would prevent infection by and transmission of mutations of the virus.
The refusal to acknowledge or investigate the injuries and deaths caused by the experimental gene therapies.
The dismissal of the concept of naturally acquired immunity.
Willingly sacrificing the health of children and young people on the altar of ‘Community Safety’.
The creation of an unsustainable National Debt.
Footnote:
History records that the tyranny lasted far longer than the virus. Many of those who participated in the hysteria also believed that the tiny increase in atmospheric CO2 caused by human activities would cause catastrophic climate change.
By the time solar energy reaches Earth’s surface it is spread very thin – even midday sunshine will not boil the billy or make toast. And solar collectors will only convert about 20% of that weak energy into electricity. Thus thousands of solar panels are needed to collect significant energy, and lots more to charge the expensive batteries needed to maintain electricity supply overnight and during cloudy weather. Despite these disadvantages, force-feeding of “green” energy by all levels of government has given Australia nearly three million solar collectors (mainly imported from China).
It requires scads of land to generate significant electricity from the sun’s weak rays. But even in sunny weather they produce nothing for 16 hours every day. And a sprinkling of dust, pollen, ash or salt, or a few splatters of poop from birds or flying foxes can reduce output by 50%, while night, snow or heavy cloud cover snuffs them out completely.
Solar energy collection is maximised if the panels face the sun exactly and follow the daily and seasonal movements of the sun across the sky. No rooftop collectors and only 40% of ground facilities can do this. Thus to produce the planned energy requires an even bigger area of collector panels, covering even more land.
More interested in propaganda than science, greens call land-based arrays “solar farms” suggesting they are plant-friendly places. However solar panels steal sunlight, leaving real plants beneath them to die. Solar “farms” have nothing in common with real farms except the need for large areas of open countryside – usually consuming valuable flattish cleared farmland or open grassland.
In fact growing plants are a liability to solar “farms” because they can block solar energy, so the operators must prevent grass, weeds and bushes from shadowing the panels and stealing their sunshine. Thus most plant-life in solar “farms” is killed – either by the blocking of the sun, or by regular applications of herbicide, or by roadways.
A big solar “farm” in Australia could contain one million solar panels and smother 2,000 acres of land. Each operation also needs miles of cleared access roads and transmission lines to maintain the facility, collect the electricity and transmit it to urban demand centres. Most of the time these transmission lines are operating well below capacity, creating an expensive web of inefficient maintenance liabilities.
Australia is also a world leader in installing subsidised rooftop solar. But a quick drive around the suburbs will show that few panels have the size, the ideal orientation or the cleanliness to be efficient collectors of solar energy – they are green status symbols designed to collect subsidies. Many will fail to recover the real cost of manufacture, transport, installation, maintenance and restoration. They destabilise the electricity network and elevate average electricity prices for industry and for those who cannot afford a house, let alone one with its own solar panels.
All for ZERO climate benefits.
Intermittent “green” energy forces coal and gas plants to operate at full capacity to cover peak demands around sunrise and sunset, but to wind back or shut down when solar energy pours into the system around midday. Recently in just one week in South Australia (Australia’s green energy guinea pig), electricity generation went from “over 130% renewables to less than 4%, renewables with everything in between”. Despite South Australia being home to “the biggest battery in the world”, the energy regulator has been forced to lease diesel back-up generators and to order gas-fired plants to stand by in case the wind suddenly drops – this encourages mechanical and financial breakdowns, and high electricity costs.
Europe has also gone out onto the green energy limb, but this is no comfort for Australians who cannot import nuclear power from France, gas from Russia or hydro-power from Scandinavia.
Every solar installation consumes energy to mine metals, manufacture, transport and erect panels and to build access roads and transmission lines over long distances. Careful analysis will show an energy deficit over their short lifetimes. And when an earthquake, hailstorm, cyclone or hurricane smashes these exposed rows of solar panels, rubbish dumps of mangled trash will be left. Most of this debris cannot be recycled and tonnes of metals, glass and plastic are destined to end their life as toxic, non-degradable land fill.
Bureaucrats will try to force solar operators to clean up, but smart operators will have bankruptcy petitions prepared for such emergencies.
Proven and reliable electricity generators, driven by coal, gas, hydro or nuclear, with a small land footprint and housed in storm-proof structures, are far less damaging to the green environment than these landscapes of inefficient, intermittent, expensive plant-killing “farms”.
MORE evidence of a damaging cover-up by top British and American scientists of the laboratory origin of the Covid-19 virus has emerged in emails released in the US under Freedom of Information laws.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser, and Sir Jeremy Farrar, a former senior member of the advisory body Sage and boss of the powerful Wellcome Trust research fund, are among those mentioned.
The emails show that as far back as February 2, 2020, Farrar knew the SARS-CoV-2 virus was unlikely to have arisen naturally. He suggested to Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s ‘Covid czar’, that it may have evolved ‘accidentally’ from a SARS-like virus in human tissue in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
But he was told by Dr Francis Collins, then director of the US National Institutes of Health: ‘I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voicers of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.’ Dutch virologist Dr Ron Fouchier (who has subsequently claimed that the Covid pandemic proves the necessity for animal research) wrote that ‘further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular’.
The following month Farrar was among 27 scientists who signed a letter published by the Lancet dismissing as ‘conspiracy theories’ claims that Covid-19 had a laboratory origin. The signatories included two other Wellcome scientists.
Farrar has subsequently continued to claim that ‘the best scientific evidence available’ is that the virus crossed from animals to humans.
The Lancet letter set back by more than a year official discussion around the lab origin of the pandemic – vital information for governments globally in deciding how best to respond.
Farrar was also involved in initiating a World Health Organisation inquiry, subsequently dismissed as a ‘whitewash’, which cleared the Wuhan lab of involvement. He wrote to Collins and Fauci on February 5, 2020:
Francis and Tony
Couple of things
*I spoke again with WHO this morning. I believe they have listened and acted. Let me know if you agree.
At the WHO meeting next week they will set up the Group who will ‘look at the origins and evolution of 2019n-Cov’
They have asked for names to sit on that Group – please do send any names
We can have a call this week with a core group of that to frame the work of the Group including – if you could join?
I think this puts it under the umbrella of WHO, with action this week and into next
With names to be put forward into the Group from us and pressure on this group from you and our teams next week.
*The team will update the draft today and I will forward immediately – they will add further comments on the glycans
Does that sound reasonable to you?
Jeremy
(‘Glycans’ is a reference to glycosylation, a key feature of the genetic modification that made a bat virus capable of infecting human cells.)
The email followed an urgent February 1 teleconference, involving both Vallance and Farrar, called to discuss how to respond after WHO declared Covid a global health emergency on the previous day.
Farrar issued a note warning that ‘information and discussion is shared in total confidence and not to be shared until agreement on next steps’. It went to Fauci and Vallance, copied to six others including Paul Schreier, chief operating officer at Wellcome.
The call centred on a document entitled ‘Coronavirus sequence comparison’ and was triggered by a note from immunologist Kristian Anderson of the Scripps Research Institute in California saying that the virus had features which might make it look as if it had been genetically engineered.
In addition, Fauci drew attention to a November 2015 article written by Ralph Baric, an immunologist based in the US and long-term recipient of funds from Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The paper was described in the email as ‘Baric, Shi et al – Nature Medicine – SARS gain of function’. Shi Zhengli is the scientist who became known as ‘batwoman’ through her research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
‘Gain of function’ is the term used to describe laboratory modification of viruses to alter their transmissibility and infectivity. The US government banned such research in 2014 because of concerns about the dangers it could present to human health, such as we have seen with SARS-CoV-2.
Fauci is alleged to have circumvented the ban by paying for work initiated in America to continue at the Wuhan institute.
The case against him was further strengthened this week by the release of documents showing that in 2018 a US Defense Department agency refused to fund the same research on safety grounds. The documents also reveal concern over the suppression of potential treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and about the mRNA vaccines.
The revelations of cover-up and deception at the highest level call into question whether the UK Government should continue to take advice from Farrar and Vallance over the handling of the pandemic response.
If it had been known that research by US and Chinese scientists gave rise to the pandemic, would governments worldwide have put their trust in the lockdown and mass vaccination policies that have proved so damaging? Especially when promoted by scientists such as Fauci who were among those funding the research.
Farrar, who was a member of Sage from the start of the pandemic, left the advisory body in October, saying he wanted to devote more time to the Wellcome Trust.
As Paula Jardine has described in TCW Defending Freedom, even as the Wuhan lockdown was being imposed by the Chinese government as far back as January 23, 2020, Farrar appeared at a press conference convened at the World Economic Forum in Davos by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), promoting the idea that dramatic interventions of social control might be the only way to control a pandemic pending the development of a vaccine.
Vallance, the UK’s chief scientific adviser since March 2018, is former president of research and development at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmith Kline (GSK). It was announced last June that he is to oversee the new National Science and Technology Council ‘to put science and technology right at the heart of policymaking and strengthen the way we work across government to reinforce the position of the UK as a science superpower’.
Over the past several days, the news story that has dominated British news headlines, and consequently, the news headlines of the rest of the Western world, is controversy over a leaked email confirming Boris Johnson’s attendance at a Downing Street garden party in May 2020 – a time when the Summer weather is usually at its peak in Britain, and incidentally, the same time when the entire country was under stringent lockdown measures.
In spite of offering an almost immediate apology in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Johnson has faced intense calls to resign from his position.
Not only from the opposition of Keir Starmer’s Labour, Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats and Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP, but also from prominent members of his own Conservative Party such as Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross. With the main point of contention being that members of the British public were prohibited from seeing gravely ill loved ones at the same time as Johnson’s attendance of said garden party due to the restrictions put in place.
The ongoing controversy over ‘partygate’ however is in stark contrast to the minuscule Western media coverage of Boris Johnson’s key role in what is currently the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the now seven-year long Saudi Arabia-led war on Yemen.
A conflict that has resulted in the worst Cholera outbreak of all time, the deaths of 10,000 children directly through the ensuing violence, and the further deaths of more than 85,000 children through the mass-starvation the conflict has triggered.
In July 2016, following his appointment as Foreign Secretary under the then-government of Theresa May, Johnson approved the sale of more than £1.2bn worth of British made-weaponry to Downing Street-ally Saudi Arabia – the Gulf Kingdom immediately putting it to use on Yemen’s agricultural, health and sanitation infrastructure.
This lead directly to the aforementioned Cholera outbreak and famine in what is already the most impoverished nation on the Arabian Peninsula, a situation exacerbated even further by a Saudi blockade preventing food and medical supplies from entering the country.
British support for the Saudi-led conflict goes far beyond lucrative arms sales to Riyadh however, with British military advisors on hand alongside their US counterparts in the Saudi command room to assist in the selection of targets for the Royal Saudi Air Force – more than 100 Saudi pilots have also been trained at RAF airbases in Britain over the past decade alone.
With both policies remaining in place since Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019, alongside the aforementioned arms sales which have resulted in significant profit for British defence contractors such as BAE Systems.
Perhaps the most crucial role in Britain’s decision to support the Yemen war however, is a geopolitical ambition that Downing Street shares with the United States and Israel – the containment of Iran within the region.
The Islamic Republic, a long-time Western foe since the 1979 Islamic Revolution saw the US-UK aligned Shah deposed and replaced with the anti-Western and anti-Zionist Ayatollah Khomeini, is widely accused of backing the Ansar Allah rebel movement, more commonly known as the Houthis. Whose seizure of the Yemeni capital Sana’a and overthrow of the then pro-Saudi President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in early 2015 would result in Riyadh launching its US-UK backed air campaign in March of that year in a bid to restore the government of its favoured candidate.
It is also the reason why, in addition to multi-billion pound arms deals between London and Riyadh, that what has now amounted to a seven-year long US and UK backed genocide of the Yemeni people, has received scarce media coverage in the West – in stark contrast to a Summer garden party held by a British Prime Minister who has himself played a key role in the slaughter.
Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook.
To deceive, telling half-truths, or a complete lie is nothing new in politics, particularly security in politics. But until some 20-30 years ago, I would – perhaps naively – see it as an exception. Tragically – and perhaps to many readers’ surprise – it is now the rule. At least in U.S. and NATO circles, and that is particularly regrettably since The West professes to be a democratic system with specific values and even a moral leader to The Rest.
Lying systematically about facts – historical facts – and other countries and cultures should be incompatible with The West’s perception of itself. But, today, it isn’t.
Lies are widespread in so-called security politics when some militarist project doesn’t make any (common) sense to intelligent people, when the real motives have to be covered up and war is being prepared or when the sociological cancer called the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, and the elites it consists of, try to squeeze out even larger military expenditures from their taxpayers.
You lie to manufacture an enemy that can justify what you will do and enrich yourself. With 40+ years of experience in security politics in general and NATO/US policies in particular, I know too much – sorry for the arrogance – and have become too cynical to believe that what goes on goes on for the sake of self-defence, security or peace.
Some quick examples of gross empirically-revealed lying to the word – all the liars still at large:
• In the 1990s, Yugoslav President Milosevic was Europe’s new Hitler (Bill Clinton) and planned a genocide on the Albanians in Kosovo.
• Saddam Hussein’s soldiers threw babies out of their incubators in Kuwait City.
• Afghanistan had to be destroyed because of 9/11.
• Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
• The US-led Global War On Terror – GWOT – has been about reducing terrorism.
• The US/NATO orchestrated regime-change attempt in Syria from 2011 to 2016 was exclusively about Dictator al-Assad’s sudden sadist “killing of his own.”
• Gaddafi was just about to murder all who lived in Benghazi.
• The conflict around Ukraine was started by Putin’s “aggression” on Crimea, nothing preceded it.
• Iran has always plotted and lied to acquire nuclear weapons.
• There are only bad things to say about Russia and China and…
You may continue on your own.
A recent lie is particularly nasty because it is not about some limited event or pretext. It is a cynical attempt to rewrite contemporary history to justify (even further) NATO expansion and intimidate Russia.
The lie is this:
• The West’s leaders never promised Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze not to expand NATO eastward. They also did not state that they would take serious Soviet/Russian security interests around its borders. And that, therefore, each of the former Warsaw Pact countries has a right to join NATO if they decide to freely.
It is this lie I am going to deal with below, and you can hear these lies presented by Antony Blinken and Jens Stoltenberg – in slightly different versions – with crystal clarity in the following two videos.
Before I start, let me say that it has never been my style to focus on or attack individuals. I’ve always been more interested in structures and processes and in how they shape people. But there comes a time when leaders must be held accountable because they choose to lie repeatedly, although they do have the choice not to.
And because lies have often been war crimes in the making.
Antony Blinken
First, US Secretary-of-State, Antony Blinken on January 7, 2022 – scroll the video below to 38:30 where he begins to speak and distorts the Ukraine conflict history and then, at 43:00-45:00, continues to say that Russia is driving the false narrative that the West had given assurances to Russia/Gorbachev about not expanding NATO back in 1989-90. It wouldn’t and couldn’t, he says. And all the claims Russia makes are false and shall not permit “us” to be diverted from the main thing: Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine.
Right after (45:40) comes another lie – Russia also invaded Georgia. Anyone who has studied the U.S. Congressional Research Service’s analysis of 2009, “Russia-Georgia Conflict in 2008: Context and Implications for U.S. Interests“, knows that this issue was vastly more complex and that it was Georgia – led by hotheaded U.S. friend Mikheil Saakashvili whose political life ever since has resembled a tragicomic farce – that had occupied the larger part of South Ossetia before Russia intervened massively. The responsibility for the war and violence can not seriously be placed on the Russian side alone.
And he continues his self-righteous accusations. Blinken’s list is long, and he reads his accusation list with a submachinegun speed, sometimes so stumbling and unclear that one must wonder whether he is uncomfortable because he is subconsciously aware that he lies, deceives and omits to make his psycho-political projections of the U.S.’s own dark sides sound intelligent, logical and truthful.
This U.S. Secretary of State can’t be bothered by facts or nuances. Neither could his predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who was proud to say that at the CIA, he directed “We Lied, We Cheated, We Stole. We had entire training courses…“. Mr Blinken continues reading his obsessive, hateful listing of all the sins of Russia. As if the US/NATO did not exist and, therefore, there was no conflict which normally takes a least two parties. In his comprehensive conflict illiteracy, this conflict has only one party: Russia.
The intellectual level is deplorable. NATO allies and mainstream media have no public opinion or critical views on any of it. One must assume that they agree and can make no better analyses themselves.
Now, take a look – at least at the sequences, I’ve mentioned above. Then, I show you how Mr Blinken is lying deliberately under the video.
Now, how can Mr Blinken flatly deny that assurances were given to Gorbachev?
The only source I have been able to find is an article by Steven Pifer from 2014, which argues that Gorbachev himself denies that NATO expansion was ever discussed, “Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says “No” which refers to an interview with Gorbachev in Russia Beyond.
But this is a piece of citation fraud.
Steven Pifer quotes from it but stops right before the well-known statement in the interview article by then U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, that “NATO will not move one inch further east.” He also omits these words by Gorbachev himself:
“The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.”
Can this really be interpreted to mean that Gorbachev says that no assurances were ever given?
We get a key to why Blinken uses a fake analysis: Because it fits his posturing as a paragon of truth and because Mr Pifer is a senior fellow at Brookings but also a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and adviser to one of the most hawkish think-tanks, Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington.
A slight twist, omission or interpretative casuistry isn’t that important, is it? Well, if you are not yet convinced that Mr Blinken lies deliberately, I ask you to now go to the authoritative National Security Archive at George Washington University. It’s an incredible source of facts, and we should thank it for making the truth available through comprehensive documentation on so many security-related issues.
TFF has reproduced two essential pieces from that archive of irrefutable documentation that Gorbachev indeed was given such assurances – “cascades” of them! as is stated in the article – by all the most influential Western leaders at the end of 1989 and into 1990:
“Woerner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990 in which he argued: “The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system. If you consider the current predicament of the Soviet Union, which has practically no allies left, then you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.“
Now in mid-1991, Woerner responds to the Russians by stating that he personally and the NATO Council are both against expansion – “13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view” – and that he will speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries’ leaders as he has already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Woerner emphasizes that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.”
This is just one of the “cascades” of statements and assurances given to the Russians at the time. Over 30 years ago, 13 out of 16 members were against NATO expansion because they respected Russia’s crisis and legitimate security interests! Today – 2022 – NATO has 30 members.
Is the U.S. Secretary of State, his advisors and speechwriters unaware of the next-door National Security Archives and what is in them concerning one of contemporary history’s most important events: the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact? Are we really to believe that they have no clue about the conditions and dialogues at the end of the first Cold War? If so, they ought to resign or be fired for their unbelievable incompetence.
If not so – if they know the content of these historical documents – Mr Blinken, his advisors and speechwriters know that they lie.
Their words, therefore, should never be trusted. Neither should the media that avoid highlighting these lies and thereby become complicit. The task of a supposedly free press is to reveal the power abuse of democratically elected people who deliberately fill their constituencies with lies.
Simple as that.
Jens Stoltenberg
In this press conference video from January 7, 2022, NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states some of the same rhetoric, distortions, simplifications and lies. Not to mention platitudes accompanied by an almost funny body language of bombastic gestures to compensate for his weak content, mantras and repetitions.
Listen at around 19:00 minutes how he maintains that NATO enlargement has been “extremely important for stability and peace and freedom and democracy in Europe” where it can indeed be argued that that enlargement is the main reason that Europe is now in a situation which can reasonably be called the 2nd Cold War.
Why else has NATO not created the desired and stipulated peace and stability since it was created in 1949? So, no, Mr Stoltenberg, you cannot continue – like your masters in Washington – to argue that the present war risks are caused by Russia and Russia alone? If that’s what they order you to say, you have the option to choose decency and resign.
The NATO Secretary-General repeats that each state has a sovereign right to decide its own course and choose its own security arrangements. And that NATO has not dragged in anybody, and they have all just decided democratically to become a member.
That is simply not true.
NATO as an alliance has enormous resources to influence opinions in potential member states. Contrary to his open door talk, NATO’s Charter speaks only about inviting new members, not about holding a door open for anyone who might want to join.
It should be well-known by now – but isn’t – that in the late 1990s, Vladimir Putin asked to join NATO – but it didn’t happen, did it, Mr Stoltenberg? And why not? Because Putin – Russia – wanted to be invited as an equal partner and not sit and wait till Montenegro had become a member, to put it bluntly. NATO decided to close the door at Putin’s request.
And what an exciting thought: Russia in NATO! Who would Mr Stoltenberg and Mr Blinken – and all the rest of the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, then have to put all the blame on? How then legitimate NATO’s permanent armament and 12% higher military expenditures than Russia’s?
Mr Stoltenberg must know that he lies when saying NATO has an open door. It doesn’t for Russia. It doesn’t even have open ears for Russia’s security concerns (which each and every NATO member, the U.S. in particular, would consider reasonable if a Russian military alliance incrementally crept close to their borders).
And he must know that he lies when he acts as though he does not know that Russia has been against that very NATO enlargement that he fakes has been so positive for all of Europe during no less than 30 years.
Funnily, Stoltenberg first emphasises (around 19:30) that all new NATO members have freely decided to join. Then he boasts about all NATO does to train, help, support candidates and how important Ukraine is as a NATO partner while not a member. As he says, candidates need to carry through reforms to meet NATO standards. And NATO gives them “practical and political support” so they can – later – meet NATO standards and become members.
What an extraordinary altruism NATO radiates! Are we really to believe that NATO certainly drags in no one, as he maintains?
NATO set up an office in Kyiv, Ukraine, already in 1994, and here you can see how – incrementally – Ukraine has been dragged in, seduced, and promised a great Euro-Atlantic future in one document after the other.
And here you’ll see how Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, standing at NATO’s H.Q. with Stoltenberg, consistently talks about NATO as Ukraine’s “allies,” expect all kinds of guarantees and – in Foreign Policy of course – argues that Ukraine Needs a Clear Path to NATO Membership in the face of Russian aggression.
And now, the integration process has probably gone so far that neither NATO nor Ukraine would be able to see any other alternative but full membership at some point. Being fiancées, why not marry through a formal membership – as has been said about Sweden?
In its Russia-humiliating policies, NATO has not even seen it coming: That with all the promises, structures and processes accumulating and creating expectations, the alliance would, at some point, run into serious conflict with Russia. If so, the entire alliance suffers from conflict illiteracy and a tremendous lack of foresight.
An that is why you have to construct Russia as a huge militarily aggressive state with an unsympathetic leader – one “we” can freely demonise and don’t even have to listen to.
Now, listen then to this Stoltenberg statement about the – real – importance of NATO’s help (20:45): “…It also makes the societies of Ukraine and Georgia stronger. So resilient, well-functioning societies are also less vulnerable from interference from Russia.”
Just a welcoming open NATO door to countries that decide freely and democratically that they want to knock on it?
It’s time for a reality check in NATO Realpolitik’s – outdated – world. If you do not manifestly want to provoke and increase war risks, you would do it completely differently every day since 1989.
The NATO expansion basis is obvious: Get as many as possible into NATO, demonise Russia and Putin and make it impossible for Russia to have any influence in Europe and on its future.
How strange, indeed, that Russia perceives the Alliance’s expansion right up to its borders as a deliberate military threat and a politically motivated undermining of its status and power!
How surprising that it thinks its security interests in its near-abroad should be respected, just because it has been invaded historically from the West and contained all along its borders since the Second World War in which, by the way, it lost some 24 million people!
It is tragic beyond words that the West has not a single politician today like Willy Brandt, Egon Bahr, Olof Palme or any of the real statesmen who gave Gorbachev cascades of assurance because they possessed two essentially important qualities: intellectual competence and empathy, a wish and ability to try to live themselves into the situation of “the other” and thereby think in terms of common security at lower military levels.
They were mature personalities basing their policies on analysis and consultations. They knew that you can only achieve security with and not against “the other”.
Instead, NATO has only anti-intellectual, self-centred and -aggrandising militarists running the self-defeating “know-everything-listen-to-nobody” show foolproven by history to lead to war.
And it is tragic beyond words that the peoples of Europe do not debate these issues and that all alternatives to militarism have been deprived of all their resources while NATO militarism costs trillions of dollars what are desperately needed in all other sectors of Western society.
In summary, the US/NATO world threw away the most significant and precious opportunity to create peace in Europe after 1945, when it decided to take advantage of Russia’s weakness. As suggested by Gorbachev and many security and peace intellectuals at the time, the members of the old blocs could have joined forces and created an entirely new all-European security and peace architecture.
We are now facing the tragic consequences of the arrogant winner-takes-it-all policy manifested by the US Clinton administration’s decision to ignore all the assurances and begin expanding NATO eastward in 1994, helped by submissive European allies that had neither the intellectual capacity nor political will to manifest their own interests.
That is why they have to lie to us today.
Notes
1. Over the years, TFF has published numerous analyses that can serve as supplements to this article. Several of them contain predictions and early warnings about the situation we are now facing:
2. When you see the two videos above, note that all questions from the media are very understanding of the two speakers’ statements. Like – how will NATO ensure that it can react swiftly if Russia should invade Ukraine, etc. Press conferences have become carefully planned stage events with written statements being read allow and carefully selected pro-military media – critical questions a prior cancelled by organisers and reinforced by self-censorship. Where did we see that before? In the Soviet Union, but just done more clumsily.
With Russia challenging Western unilateralism in a way not seen since the end of the Soviet Union, two major issues keep coming to the fore. Both, it seems, are centered on America’s flagship military bloc, NATO.
First, there is Moscow’s claim that there was a Western promise not to expand NATO beyond its Cold War area. Second, there is a Western claim that NATO cannot, let alone will not, put an end to admitting new member states.
This is no mere rhetoric; these are crucial points. Russia’s insistence on a thorough review and comprehensive, bindingly codified reset of post-Cold War security relations with the West hinges on its claim that prior Western assurances were broken. Talk and informal promises, the Kremlin says, are not enough anymore because they have turned out to be unreliable. On the other side of the quarrel, the West is rejecting a Russian key demand – to stop NATO expansion – by entrenching itself behind its claim that NATO simply must keep the door open to new members.
Both claims can be verified. Let’s take a look at the facts. Moscow is right in its assertion that the West has broken its promises.
Such pledges were made twice to Russia, as a matter of fact. In 1990, during the negotiations over the unification of West and East Germany, and then, again, in 1993, when NATO was extending its Partnership for Peace policy eastward. In both cases, the assurances were given by US secretaries of state, James Baker and Warren Christopher, respectively. And in both cases, they took it upon themselves to speak, in effect, for NATO as a whole.
Despite clear evidence, there are still Western publicists and even active politicians who deny or relativize these facts, such as, for instance, Cold War Re-Enactor and former American ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. Let’s address their objections.
Regarding the 1993 promises, the case is extremely simple. As Angela Stent – a widely recognized American foreign policy expert and practitioner with no bias in Russia’s favor – has summarized it in 2019, two “US ambassadors… later admitted that Washington reneged on its promises” – of 1993, that is – “by subsequently offering membership to Central Europe.” Then-Russian president Boris “Yeltsin was correct in believing that explicit promises made… about NATO not enlarging for the foreseeable future were broken when the Clinton administration decided to offer membership,” – and not merely partnership, as Christopher had assured Yeltsin – “to Central Europe.”
The 1990 case is a little more complicated, but not much. There, too, the evidence for an explicit promise is clear. Here is the foremost American expert, Joshua Shifrinson – like Stent beyond any suspicion of favoring Russia – on the issue, writing in 2016:
“In early February 1990, U.S. leaders made the Soviets an offer… Secretary of State James Baker suggested that in exchange for cooperation on Germany, [the] U.S. could make ‘iron-clad guarantees’ that NATO would not expand ‘one inch eastward.’… Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to begin reunification talks. No formal deal was struck, but from all the evidence, the quid pro quo was clear: Gorbachev acceded to Germany’s western alignment and the U.S. would limit NATO’s expansion.”
To be clear, Shifrinson, a careful scholar, has also explained that American negotiators and leaders started going back on this promise very quickly. But that makes zero difference to two facts: First, the promise was made, and timing suggests strongly that it mattered to Russia’s acquiescence to German unification on entirely Western terms. In other words: Moscow kept its part of the deal, the West did not. Second, even while rapidly backpedaling internally, American politicians continued to give Russia the – false – impression that its security interests would be considered. Put differently, the initial – and consequential – promise was not only broken; the deception was followed up with even more deception.
Those representatives of the West still in denial of what happened in 1990, such as Mark Kramer, for instance, also often quote former Soviet president Gorbachev: He has stated, after all, that the infamous “not-one-inch” promise referred strictly to East Germany only. Hence, the West’s defenders argue, it wasn’t about NATO beyond East Germany at all.
Frankly, though popular, that is an extraordinarily silly argument: First, Gorbachev has an understandable interest in not being held responsible for the security-policy fiasco of letting NATO expand as it liked. Secondly, even if the 1990 negotiations were strictly about East Germany, please remember their real context: The Soviet Union was still there and so was the Warsaw Pact. Thus, two things are obvious – as long as we all argue in good faith: First, in specific terms, the 1990 promise could only be about East Germany. And, second, it of course clearly implied that anything east of East Germany would be, if anything, even more – not less – off-limits to NATO.
Another line of Western defense can only be described as fundamentally dishonest: NATO itself – and apparently the current American secretary of state Antony Blinken as well – now quite suddenly remember that “NATO Allies take decisions by consensus and these are recorded. There is no record of any such decision taken by NATO. Personal assurances from individual leaders cannot replace Alliance consensus and do not constitute formal NATO agreement.”
That sounds great! If only James Baker and Christopher Warren had known about it when making their promises about NATO to Gorbachev and then Yeltsin!
Seriously? Two US secretaries of state address Moscow as if they had the right to speak for and shape NATO. Moscow, very plausibly – given the way NATO really works – assumes that they can. And when these promises are then broken, that is Russia’s problem? News flash: If you really follow that twisted logic, you would have justified the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as “fraternal help” as well. Because formally that’s what it “was.”
What about the West’s contention that NATO must maintain an “open door” policy, or, put differently, cannot possibly agree with Russia to stop expanding? That claim, unlike Moscow’s about NATO promises, is incorrect. Here’s why:
NATO argues that its inability to ever close its doors is based on the NATO treaty, its constitution, as it were. Here is NATO’s argument in the original:
“NATO’s ‘Open Door Policy’ is based on Article 10 of the Alliance’s founding document, the North Atlantic Treaty,” which “states that NATO membership is open to any ‘European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area’.” And that “any decision on enlargement must be made ‘by unanimous agreement.’… Over the past 72 years, 30 countries have chosen freely, and in accordance with their domestic democratic processes, to join NATO. This is their sovereign choice.”
If all of the above were correct, it would still be a stretch to believe that such things can never be changed – as if they were a natural force akin to gravity – but, at least, we could understand why it is a challenge to make such changes.
Yet, in reality, in this case there is no reason to accept NATO’s surprisingly far-fetched and inconsistent interpretation of its own founding document. Because what Article 10 actually says is that the door is open to every European state that can “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area” and that the admission of any such state to the bloc can only happen by the “unanimous consent” of all current NATO members.
None of this, actually, contradicts the possibility of NATO one day stating that for the future (unlimited or with precise dates) no further states can possibly help “contribute” to its security and therefore no further states can be admitted. NATO would be entirely within its rights doing so; and Article 10 would be perfectly fine.
Regarding NATO’s statement that it is every European state’s sovereign right to “join,” it does not withstand elementary scrutiny: If that were so, then both the “unanimous consent” of all current members and the distinction between applying and joining would be meaningless. That is an obviously absurd position. In reality, states have a right to apply, not to join – by NATO’s own rules, which someone at NATO seems to very badly misunderstand.
Put differently: NATO’s “Open Door Policy” is exactly that: a policy. It is not a natural law or even something that NATO is obliged to do by its own founding document (which would still not bind anyone else, actually). A policy, however, is, of course, open to revision. NATO’s claims that it “cannot” stop admitting is, therefore, strictly nonsensical. In reality, it chooses not to want to stop admitting, unfortunately.
In sum, Russia is right: The West promised not to enlarge NATO, and these promises were broken. NATO is wrong: It can, actually, shut the door; it just doesn’t feel like it.
These things are, actually, not hard to grasp. Hence, what is perhaps most worrying about the currently dominant Western narratives on these issues is not even that they are incorrect but that, apparently, parts of the Western elites, intellectual and political, really believe their own nonsense. But let’s hope they are deliberately distorting the truth. Because otherwise they have started buying into their own propaganda. And if that is the case, it is very hard to see how negotiations will ever succeed.
Tarik Cyril Amar is an historian from Germany at Koç University in Istanbul working on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Two members of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform want the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce the transcript of a conference call between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins during which the two discussed possible origins of COVID-19.
In a letter this week to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote:
“It was on this conference call that Drs. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and, further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.”
Reps. Comer and Jordan also wrote that despite Fauci’s claims to the contrary, he knew the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain of function research in Wuhan through a grant to Eco-Health Alliance.
“It is unclear if Dr. Fauci reported any of these issues to his superiors,” Comer and Jordan wrote. “We need to know the entirety of what Dr. Fauci knew and when he knew it.”
The letter followed the release of emails revealing Fauci may have withheld information pointing to the possibility that the SARS Co-V-2 virus originated in the lab in Wuhan, China.
The Congressmen gave HHS until Jan. 18 to respond to questions put forth in the letter, including:
Did Drs. Fauci or Collins warn anyone at the White House about the potential COVID-19 originated in a lab and could be intentionally genetically manipulated?
If these concerns were not shared, why was the decision to keep them quiet made?
What new evidence, if any, came to light about COVID-19 between Feb. 1, 2020, and Feb. 4, 2020, to alter the belief it originated in a lab?
Did Drs. Fauci or Collins edit the Nature Medicine paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2”?
Would having this knowledge earlier have benefitted either vaccine or treatment development?
By February 1, 2020, were Drs. Fauci or Collins aware of the State Department’s warnings about Wuhan Institute of Virology safety?
Would this warning have changed the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
The letter concluded:
“By continuing to refuse to cooperate with our request, your agencies are choosing to hide information that will help inform the origins of the ongoing pandemic, prevent future pandemics, respond to future pandemics, inform the United States’ current national security posture, and restore confidence in our public health experts. HHS and NIH’s continued obstruction is likely to cause irreparable harm to the credibility of these agencies.”
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