Soon after American combat troops arrived in Vietnam, a strategy debate began. One faction wanted American combat forces to only protect large cities and dispatch units to rural areas only when enemy forces converged to battle local forces. American aid would focus on improving the economic infrastructure and local militia forces. Another faction favored securing all of southern Vietnam with hundreds of American bases. This “search and destroy” strategy was selected because most American Generals favored offensive operations. Yet each base required clean water, electricity, security, and frequent resupply, which required guarding bridges, road mine clearing, weekly convoys and helicopter runs. This was expensive, required much manpower, left forces dispersed, provided ample targets for the enemy, and alienated the population with frequent combat operations that caused much death and destruction. Small bases with artillery covered their area and supported adjacent bases to rain heavy firepower upon the enemy within minutes. These firebases were effective and hundreds of attacks were repelled. However, bases were vulnerable to surprise attacks so constant patrolling was required around each base. This allowed enemy forces inflict casualties with mines and ambushes. In several cases, the enemy quickly amassed forces who overran American bases.
In 2000, experts said snow was a thing of the past.
“According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.”
But the reality is that September-March snowfall has been increasing for 50 years, and climate academics and journalists are science fiction writers with no connection to reality.
The top-down reorganization of the world economy by a cabal of technocratic corporativists, led by the group around the Davos World Economic Forum– the so-called Great Reset or UN Agenda 2030– is no future proposal. It is well into actualization as the world remains in insane lockdown for a virus. The hottest investment area since onset of the coronavirus global lockdowns is something called ESG investing. This highly subjective and very controlled game is dramatically shifting global capital flows into a select group of “approved” corporate stocks and bonds. Notably it advances the dystopian UN Agenda 2030 or the WEF Great Reset agenda. The development is one of the most dangerous and least understood shifts in at least the past century.
The UN “sustainable economy” agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008. This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked “woke” companies, and away from the “not woke” such as oil and gas companies or coal.
What the bankers and giant investment funds like BlackRock have done is to create a new investment infrastructure that picks “winners” or “losers” for investment according to how serious that company is about ESG—Environment, Social values and Governance. For example a company gets positive ratings for the seriousness of its hiring gender diverse management and employees, or takes measures to eliminate their carbon “footprint” by making their energy sources green or sustainable to use the UN term. How corporations contribute to a global sustainable governance is the most vague of the ESG, and could include anything from corporate donations to Black Lives Matter to supporting UN agencies such as WHO.
The crucial central goal of ESG strategists is to create a shift to inefficient and costly alternative energy, the Zero Carbon promised utopia. It is being driven by the world’s major financial institutions and central banks. They have created a dazzling array of organizations to drive their green investing agenda.
In 2013, well before the coronavirus, the major Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, created its own Institute for Sustainable Investing. This was soon expanded in 2015 when Morgan Stanley joined the Steering Committee of the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). On its website they state,
“PCAF is based upon the Paris Climate Agreement’s position that the global community should strive to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and that society should decarbonize and reach net zero emissions by 2050.”
By 2020 the PCAF had more than 100 banks and financial institutions including ABN Amro, Nat West, Lloyds Bank, Barcylays, Bank of America, Citi Group, CIBC, Danske Bank and others. Several of the PCAF member banks have been indicted in money laundering cases. Now they sense a new role as virtue-models to change the world economy, if we are to believe the rhetoric. Notably, former Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney is an “Observer” or consultant to the PCAF.
In August 2020 the PCAF published a draft standard outlining a proposed approach for global carbon accounting. This means the bankers are creating their own accounting rules for how to rate or value a company’s carbon footprint or green profile.
The Central Role of Mark Carney
Mark Carney is at the center of reorganizing world finance to back the UN 2030 green agenda behind the WEF Davos Great Reset, where he is a member of the Board of Trustees. He also is Adviser to the UN Secretary General as United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action. He has described the PCAF plan as follows:
“To achieve net zero we need a whole economy transition – every company, every bank, every insurer and investor will have to adjust their business models, develop credible plans for the transition and implement them. For financial firms, that means reviewing more than the emissions generated by their own business activity. They must measure and report the emissions generated by the companies they invest in and lend to. PCAF’s work to standardise the approach to measuring financed emissions is an important step to ensuring that every financial decision takes climate change into account.”
As Governor of the Bank of England Carney played a key role getting world central banks behind the Green Agenda of the UN 2030 scheme. The major central banks of the world, through their umbrella Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basle, created a key part of the growing global infrastructure that is steering investment flows to “sustainable” companies and away from those like oil and gas companies it deems “unsustainable.” When then-Bank of England Governor Mark Carney was head of the BIS’ Financial Stability Board (FSB) he established something called Task-force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) in 2015.
The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, it included in addition to BlackRock, JP MorganChase; Barclays Bank; HSBC; Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance; China’s ICBC bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical, mining giant BHP and David Blood of Al Gore’s Generation Investment LLC.
Anne Finucane, the Vice Chair of the Bank of America, a member of both the PCAF and the TCFD, noted, “we are committed to ensuring that climate-related risks and opportunities are properly managed within our business and that we are working with governments and markets to accelerate the changes required… climate change presents risks to the business community, and it is important for companies to articulate how these risks are being managed.”
The Bank of America vice chair describes how they assess risks in its real estate loan portfolio by assessing, “… acute physical risk analysis on a sample portfolio of Bank of America residential mortgages across the US. Each property was given a score based on the level of risk associated with 12 potential hazards: tornado, earthquake, tropical cyclone, hailstorm, wildfire, river flood, flash flood, coastal flood, lightning, tsunami, volcano, and winter storm.” As well, the banks’ investment “risk” in oil and gas as well as other industrial sectors is reviewed using the criteria of Carney’s TCFD. All risks are defined as related to CO2, despite the fact there is no conclusive scientific proof that manmade CO2 emission is about to destroy our planet by global warming. Rather evidence of solar activity suggests we are entering an unstable cooling period, Grand Solar Minimum. That’s of no concern to the financial interests who stand to reap trillions in the coming decade.
Another key part of the financial preparation for the Great Reset, the fundamental transformation from a high-energy intensity economy to a low and economically inefficient one, is the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). SASB says it “provides a clear set of standards for reporting sustainability information across a wide range of issues… “ This sounds reassuring until we look at who makes up the members of the SASB that will give the Climate-friendly Imprimatur. Members include, in addition to the world’s largest fund manager, BlackRock (more than $7 trillion under management), also Vanguard Funds, Fidelity Investments, Goldman Sachs, State Street Global, Carlyle Group, Rockefeller Capital Management, and numerous major banks such as Bank of America and UBS. Many of these are responsible for the 2008 global financial collapse. What is this framework group doing? According to their website, “Since 2011, we have been working towards an ambitious goal of developing and maintaining sustainability accounting standards for 77 industries.”
Where this is all going is to create a web of globally-based financial entities who control combined wealth including insurance and pension funds into what they claim to be worth $100 trillion. They are setting the rules and will define a company or even a country by the degree of carbon emission they create. If you are clean and green, you potentially get investment. If you are deemed a carbon polluter as the oil, gas and coal industries are deemed today, the global capital flows will disinvest or avoid funding you.
Hydrocarbons Under Attack
The immediate target of this financial cartel is the backbone of the world economy, the oil, coal and natural gas sector. Oil industry analysts predict that over the next five years or less investment flows into the world’s largest energy sector will fall dramatically. “Given how central the energy transition will be to every company’s growth prospects, we are asking companies to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net zero economy,” BlackRock’s chairman and CEO Larry Fink wrote in his 2021 letter to CEOs. Blackrock is the world’s largest investment group with over $7 trillion to invest. Another BlackRock officer told a recent energy conference, “where BlackRock goes, others will follow.”
“To continue to attract capital, portfolios have to be built around core advantaged assets – low-cost, long-life, low carbon-intensive barrels,” said Andrew Latham, Vice President, Global Exploration at WoodMac, an energy consultancy.
The Biden Administration is already making good on his pledge to phase out oil and gas by banning new leases in Federal lands and offshore and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The oil and gas sector and its derivatives such as petrochemicals are at the heart of the world economy. The 50 largest oil and gas companies in the world, including both state-owned and publicly traded companies, recorded revenues of about $5.4 trillion in 2015.
As a new Biden Administration pushes their ideological opposition to so-called fossil fuels, the world will see a precipitous decline in oil and gas investment. The role of the Davos globalists and the ESG financial players are out to guarantee that. And the losers will be us. Energy prices will skyrocket as they did during the recent Texas blizzards. The cost of electricity in industrial countries will become prohibitive for manufacturing industry. But rest well. This is all part of the ongoing Great Reset and its new doctrine of ESG investing.
In 2010 the head of Working Group 3 of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Otmar Edenhofer, told an interviewer, “… one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore…” The WEF Great Reset is not simply a big idea of Klaus Schwab reflecting on the economic devastation of the coronavirus. It has been long planned by the money masters.
When doctors drink the Kool-Aid, it’s not a good thing. Patients deserve better. Anybody who glibly claims that science supports their perspective should transparently support their position.
Einstein is said to have observed that insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting a different result. What a perfect description for U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan is not enough: keep doing it. Sanctions on Russia haven’t made any difference, keep doing them. Beijing is not the least deterred by “freedom of navigation” cruises, keep doing them. Iran won’t bend to Washington’s will, keep doing the same thing.
What should that role be? Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the “evil empire,” the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America’s security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world.
The enormous web of the global economic system, with the United States at the center, combined with the pervasive influence of American ideas and culture, allowed Americans to wield influence in many other ways of which they were entirely unconscious.
Kagan’s piece this year – no doubt penned to celebrate the departure of Trump and the return of his wife to power – was titled A Superpower, Like It or Not. The title itself gives a hint of doubt – no longer a proud assertion, it’s a defiance.
The only hope for preserving liberalism at home and abroad is the maintenance of a world order conducive to liberalism, and the only power capable of upholding such an order is the United States.
Two decades earlier it was the promise of a better world, now it’s the fear of a worse. Obviously so – not that Kagan sees it this way – but obviously nonetheless: the past two decades have not been successful for the project. Kagan’s unacknowledged fear of the worse is hammered home again and again:
The time has come to tell Americans that there is no escape from global responsibility… the task of maintaining a world order is unending and fraught with costs but preferable to the alternative.
The U.S. is sitting on a dragon and it daren’t get off or the dragon will kill it. But because it can’t kill the dragon, it must sit on it forever: no escape. And dragon’s eggs are hatching out all around: think how much bigger the Russian, Chinese and Iranian dragons are today than they were a quarter-century ago when Kagan & Co so confidently started PNAC; think how bigger they’ll be in another.
A dispiriting state of affairs – not that Kagan is capable of perceiving it. Past failures – like the Iraq war – are brushed off as “relatively low cost” because their failure cannot be admitted: the wars must trudge on. And what’s Kagan’s advice to his fellow Americans? They must get used to shipping their children off to the forever wars because the alternative is worse. No “benevolent global hegemony” now, just sitting on dragons forever. A very gloomy outlook indeed. Doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different outcome.
Take Russia, for example. I’ve written elsewhere about the American obsession with Putin, its complete ignorance of what’s happening in Russia. Russia and China are listed routinely as Washington greatest enemies/opponents and Russia has been on that list for a long time. NATO has expanded, Russia has been accused, Russia has been sanctioned. But Russia is still there and more powerful than ever – quite a large dragon now. To say nothing of China, a mighty dragon indeed. Here’s their latest piece of wishful thinking – separate Moscow and Beijing, maybe they can bribe Moscow by letting it have Ukraine. Andrei Martyanov eviscerates this bird-brained attempt to emulate Kissinger and Nixon.
Can one venture the thought that the Kagan/PNAC strategy of hegemonic aspirations based on military power isn’t working very well and that U.S. auctoritas is receding? From another ur-neocon source, the Atlantic Council, two writers dare to suggest that Washington should change the way it deals with Moscow: “a reality check” they call it. A minor change; well hardly any change, really. No attempt to use their supposed better vision to ascertain Moscow’s view of things, or try to envision what Moscow might want, no discussion of what Moscow regards as its grievances; no, none of that:
Instead, the Biden administration should seek to build a less aspirational policy toward Russia, minimize the use of sanctions, and look for incentives that might induce Moscow to take steps in line with U.S. interests.
Different means, same ends. Russia is still bad, “human rights” are something from the U.S. Patent Office. (Obviously the authors haven’t seen the video about police violence that Moscow is passing around.) Again the tedious assumption of superiority – indispensability – only a dim realisation that lecturing all the time isn’t working and an occasional carrot should be added to the mix. But Moscow still has to be pushed into line.
But even this milquetoast suggestion outraged twenty-two of their colleagues who issued a rebuff: “misses the mark… premised on a false assumption … disagree with its arguments and values and we disassociate ourselves from the report”. Absolutely no reason to change anything, keep doing the same thing; bound to be a different result this time. Let’s try sanctions again on the latest excuse; didn’t work before, maybe they will this time. But the more sanctions, the stronger Russia gets: as an analogy, think of sanctions on Russia as similar to the over-use of antibiotics – Russia is becoming immune.
Has there ever been a subject on which people have been so wrong for so long as Russia? How many times have they said Putin’s finished? Remember when cheese was going to bring him down? Always a terminal economic crisis. A year ago they were sure COVID would do it. A U.S. general is in Ukraine and Kiev’s heavy weapons are moving east but, no, it’s Putin who, for ego reasons – and his “failing” economy – wants the war. Why do they keep doing it? Well, it’s easy money – Putin (did we tell you he was in the KGB?) wants to expand Russia and rule forever; therefore, he’s about to invade somebody. He doesn’t, no problem, our timely warning scared him off; we’ll change the date and regurgitate it next year. In the meantime his despotic rule trembles because of some-triviality-of-the-moment. These pieces write themselves: the anti-Russia business is the easiest scam ever. And there’s the difficulty of admitting you’re wrong: how can somebody like Kagan, such a triumphantasiser back then, admit that it’s all turned to dust and worse, turned to dust because they took his advice? Much better to press on – it’s not as if anybody in the lügenpresse will call him out or deny him space. Finally, these people are locked in psychological projection: because they can only envisage military expansion, they assume the other guy is equally obsessed and so they must expand to counter his expansion. They suspect everybody of suspecting them. Their hostility sees hostility everywhere. Their belligerence finds belligerence. The hyperpower is forever compelled to respond to lesser powers. They look outside, see themselves and fear; in their mental universe the USA is arrogantly strong and fearfully weak at the same time.
Their learning curve is absolutely flat – the USA must expand into the South China Sea to stop Chinese expansion, expand up to the borders of Russia to stop Russian expansion, expand into the Gulf to stop Iranian expansion, expand into Africa because someone else might want to expand there. All of it wrapped in sickening protestations of innocence – read any State Department briefing on Venezuela – like this one from 25 February:
international champions standing up for democracy… human rights… calling for a return to democracy… accountability for these human rights abuses… millions of Venezuelans are suffering.. support the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people.
In their minds the USA has to move far away from its borders to defend itself; they cannot comprehend that other powers see Americans at their borders as aggression. The mighty USA is the blameless victim of other countries’ suspicions. Anyone who dares suggest trying something else is de-platformed, scorned and calumniated – we must keep failing because we cannot succeed. It’s repeated by all the West’s rulers: the walking dead.
There’s a historical curiosity here. Five hundred years ago Columbus had an idea that you could sail west to China, and he hawked it around the capitals of Europe looking for someone to bankroll him. He was wrong, as all educated people knew: China was to the west all right, but any ship would have run out of food and water and all the crew died of scurvy long before it travelled 180 degrees of latitude. Finally he found a backer, discovered the Americas (going to his death certain it was China) and all else followed. About fifty years earlier, the Chinese sailor Zheng He made enormous voyages of discovery. But the new Emperor wasn’t interested and that was that. One of the strengths of Europe in those days was its diversity – Columbus failed to sell his idea to Portugal, Genoa, Venice, England but, finally, Spain took the bet. Of the many fish in the European pond, he needed to catch only one. China, centrally ruled, had only one and his no was final.
In the West, and especially the USA, today, we observe an inability to imagine, understand, come to terms with or tolerate difference. The “diversity” being pushed today all over the West is the pseudo-diversity of different faces with the same approved thought. Today it’s the West that insists on the uniformity of the so-called Rules-Based International Order (the West makes the rules and gives the orders) while it’s China that calls for “seeking harmony without uniformity“.
The Kagans dimly perceive that things haven’t gone quite the way they were supposed to but they have no idea of what to do except more of the same. Zombies.
You’ve heard of them, no doubt, the U.S. rulers who can’t rule too well and are always getting surprised by events or fed bad advice by their underlings. Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned. They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence. They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the elites whom allegedly they oppose while ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail. They never see the storm coming, even as they create it. Their incompetence is the retort to all those nut cases who conjure up conspiracy theories to explain their actions or lack thereof. They are innocent. Always innocent.
They and their media mouthpieces offer Americans, who are most eager to accept, what Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed at age thirty-nine by Hitler, called cheap grace: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance…”
These incompetents are, in the immortal words of the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
Except they could and can.
They’ve actually shot a lot of people, here and abroad. It’s one of their specialties. But they mean well. They screw up sometimes, but they mean well. They care, even while they kill millions with their guns and bombs. But they have their followers.
As another dissident thirty-nine-year-old pastor, executed by the American state, Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
Mainstream Media Pseudo-Debates
The U.S. rulers have their defenders. Most are corporate mainstream journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political parties. They will criticize across the political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it. So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.
These days such massive media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as adjuncts of one political party or the other. They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else. They speak to their respective audiences in self-enclosed vacuums. They promote the divide that runs down the middle of the USA, a divide they helped to create.
Some have argued that this radical division of the media turf is because of economic and business factors; that the media organizations and their “journalists” have seen this strategy as the path to greater profits. There is probably some truth in this. But it is a small part.
For all sides of the corporate media serve the same overarching political function: to divide and conquer the population; to set the so-called left against right; middle America against the east and west coasts; white against black; working class against middle-class; men against women; husbands against wives, etc. To keep people, who in reality should be allies, fighting with each other. It is a classic strategy of divide-and-conquer that is carried out by the mainstream media pursuant to their unstated mandate. It is not an accident and has been conducted with a vengeance in recent years.
And crucially, it is anchored in the false premise of the myth of left vs. right with a reasonable center somewhere between. Such a center has never existed. While left and right might once have been useful categories, they have long since outlived their usefulness. They now just serve to engender pseudo-debates.
Pseudo-debates are not new but they are highly effective. They are debates based on false premises. In this case, the premise is that the massive corporate media conglomerates are not part of the same system of control and containment of the population, but are genuine opponents in the battle for truth and democracy. Accept this premise and you have entered into endless debates leading nowhere. It is a classic method of intelligence agencies to sow uncertainty and confusion and to have people following Alice down the rabbit hole, tumbling and tumbling into an endless void as they argue continually about nothing.[1]
Dr. E. Martin Schotz has brilliantly explicated this trick in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy (“Certainly no honest person could ever accept the ‘single bullet theory’.”) where people are still debating a false mystery almost sixty years after the fact. He writes:
The lie is that there is a mystery to debate. And so we have pseudo-debates. Debates about meaningless disputes, based on assumptions which are obviously false… Perhaps many people think that engaging in pseudo-debate is a benign activity. That it simply means that people are debating something that is irrelevant. This is not the case. I say this because every debate rests on a premise to which the debaters must agree, or there is no debate. In the case of pseudo-debate the premise is a lie. So in the pseudo-debate we have the parties to the debate agreeing to purvey a lie to the public. And it is all the more malignant because it is subtle. The unsuspecting person who is witness to the pseudo-debate does not understand that he is being passed a lie. He is not even aware that he is being passed a premise. It is so subtle that the premise just passes into the person as if it were reality. This premise—that there is uncertainly to be resolved—seems so benign. It is as easy as drinking a glass of treated water. But the fact remains that there is no mystery except in the minds of those who are willing to drink this premise. The premise is a lie, and a society which agrees to drink such a lie ceases to perceive reality. This is what we mean by mass denial.[2]
The entire corporate media ideological spectrum operates under the umbrella of oligarchic control, something that is not new, just more egregious with every passing day. More in your face. The corporate media serve as the mouthpieces for those oligarchs, but they try to convince their separate audiences that this isn’t so. They give people enemies – false ones. Objects to hate.
But just like symptoms are not the disease, they give people a focus upon which to rivet their attention while the disease goes unattended. As with a drug addict, the taking of drugs is not the fundamental problem, although it becomes one and might kill you. The problem is why one takes drugs; what is it that is one feels needs to be tranquilized and silenced. Or, as the writer William Saroyan once flippantly said regarding the claim that smoking causes cancer: “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke, not from the smoking itself.”
The corporate mainstream media are the drug that serves to hide the core truth of an oligarchic cancerous warfare state drunk on power and using propaganda to play both sides. Everyone has become pawns in their game.
A recent example serves to illustrate a method in their madness There is a new, ongoing Spotify podcast – “Renegades: Born in the USA” – featuring Barack Obama and the singer Bruce Springsteen in conversation. Two rebels – it’s of course ridiculous – but there it is. Two super rich celebrities stroking each other’s egos in an upper class setting. One a singer, who rose to prominence out of nowhere as the voice of the small-town beleaguered working class; the other, a mixed-race politician who rose to prominence out of nowhere from a family background redolent of the CIA. Two icons of popular and political culture crossing over with a smooth patina of mixed-arts bullshit telling listeners they we need to return to the good old days when political centrism served the great American ideal that they both share. People are supposed to take this conversation between “buddies” seriously, as the two sit mask-less with their feet seemingly touching at a time when people are told to wear masks and avoid close contact with those outside their households. As Bruce strums his guitar, any half-way sentient person would realize he was being played, even while the meaning of the song was so twisted that he was enjoying it.
Left-wing Gatekeepers
Then, if we switch from the mainstream corporate media to alternative voices, especially prominent ones on the left, we notice something even stranger.
I think most readers would agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The latter, not only because of all the victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout the world institute unprecedented measures of control, etc. Clearly these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and civil liberties for all.
And as everyone knows, September 11th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of varying political perspectives. At the very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic articles about them.
But for a core group of prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence, as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the government has spoken. Let us move on to more important matters.
But that is wrong. For example, in about a dozen closely reasoned books of his own and with other international researchers, David Ray Griffin has raised innumerable questions that show that the official September 11 story is full of holes. Canadian writer Graeme MacQueen has written a devastating exposé of the linked anthrax attacks that followed September 11, showing clearly that they were a U.S. government operation. I myself have raised significant questions about what I call the linguistic mind-control associated with the attacks in “Why I Don’t Speak of 9/11 Anymore.” The dissident literature is enormous.
A few of Griffin’s points are illustrative of the many anomalies in the official account. There are so many, and not just from Griffin but from other researchers, that I will mention just a few about the building collapses, what Griffin calls “miracles of science.” The contradictions about the hijackers are also voluminous.
Here are a few such scientific miracles:
The Twin Towers and WTC 7 were the only steel-framed high-rise buildings ever to come down without explosives or incendiaries. The Twin Towers, each of which had 287 steel columns, were brought down solely by a combination of airplane strikes and jet-fuel fires. WTC 7 was not even hit by a plane, so it was the first steel-framed high-rise to be brought down solely by ordinary building fires. These World Trade Center buildings also came down in free fall – the Twin Towers in virtual free fall, WTC 7 in absolute free fall – for over two seconds. Although the collapses of the of the WTC buildings were not aided by explosives, the collapses imitated the kinds of implosions that can be induced only by demolition companies. In the case of WTC 7, the structure came down symmetrically (straight down, with an almost perfectly horizontal roofline), which meant that all 82 of the steel support columns had to fall simultaneously, although the building’s fires had a very asymmetrical pattern. The South Tower’s upper 30-floor block changed its angular momentum in midair. This 30-floor block then disintegrated in midair.
I could go on and on with examples. The simple point is that there are so many absurdities in the official story that to ignore them is an act of intellectual and moral betrayal. Anyone who has closely studied the government’s 9/11 Commission Report knows it is highly fictional.
The same is true for dissenting voices on the COVID-19 issue. Three publications in particular have published an enormous amount of well-reasoned critiques of the official version of the COVID-19 narrative: GlobalResearch, Off-Guardian, and Children’s Health Defense. All present many articles by serious writers who raise innumerable questions and make irrefutable points about this matter.
And again, the point is not simple agreement with the dissenters’ arguments, but the need to engage their critiques. Here too the silence is resounding, for it says “we buy the official account.”
Consider these few:
The man who invented the test used to determine the so-called COVID positive test results, the Nobel Prize winning chemist, Kary Mullis, has said that the test cannot do that, it is not a diagnostic test, and therefore all the test results are meaningless. Additionally, there is serious doubt that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease called COVID 19 since there is no evidence that the virus has ever been isolated. Assuming for argument’s sake, however, that the PCR test can detect a specific virus, even Anthony Fauci himself, and the World Health Organization (one hour after Biden was sworn into office), have both said that the PCR test in order to have any accuracy must be performed at cycles below 35 thresholds while for a year those tests have been done at thresholds much higher, resulting in vast numbers of false positives. Cycle thresholds are the level at which the PCR test is said to detect a sample of the COVID-19 virus.
Furthermore, eminent voices such as Michel Chossudovsky and Peter Koenig at Global Research, Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Children’s Health Defense, and Catte Black and Kit Knightly at Off-Guardian have for a long time been vociferously objecting to the official narrative with a vast amount of additional analyses involving the consequences of the wide-spread lockdowns. Such dissidents have had to fight against an organized campaign of censorship that should raise the alarm for anyone who cares about truth.
For leftists who remain silent on these fundamental issues, I can assure them that these critiques of the official explanations of September 11, 2001 and COVID-19 are not right-wing conspiracies but are the work of leftists digging deep for truth.
It is therefore more than odd that certain left/liberal writers completely avoid these issues. One must assume, therefore, that they accept the official explanations for these events, just as this coterie of leftist/liberal critics dismiss the voluminous and detailed critiques of the Warren Commission and the assassination of President Kennedy. From their silence one can assume that these matters are of no importance because the authorities have given us the truth.
One such deceased left-wing writer, who can stand in for the group of living writers I allude to, was the well-known and often brilliant journalist Alexander Cockburn, the founder of Counterpunch Magazine. In Cockburn’s case, however, and to his credit even though he had no idea what he was talking about regarding September 11, 2001 and the JFK assassination, he did not remain silent but expressed his bile in ways he thought piercing but which made him appear quite ignorant. Cockburn had a sharp tongue and liked to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him. He excoriated all who questioned the JFK assassination or September 11 as “conspiracy nuts,” “lunatics” involved with “kookery.”
Echoing the CIA’s conspiracy meme, his name calling was offensive and his ignorance of these matters extraordinary. But he was a star leftist, an untouchable. Few wished to criticize him. He started with the assumption that government stupidity, incompetence, and screw-ups allow these terrible events to happen, and then without a shred of evidence, concluded that is why they happened. All evidence and logic to the contrary, he derisively dismissed as the work of fools. Only Cockburn and a government that admits mistakes were made were right. His arguments on these matters were pseudo-debates based on a premises he conjured out of thin air.
He was a master incompetent of the incompetence theory, one that many prominent leftists follow today, such as a recent passing comment by one of them on the COVID-19 matter as a mishandling by the ruling elite. The implicit assumption being that the basic government and mainstream media tale is correct and all would be far better if the Trump administration hadn’t screwed up. Nothing further is forthcoming or necessary. Let us proceed on the assumption that the official account is true and that the government’s inept response is the problem. Failure of leadership. Government negligence. Incompetence.
And anyone who even harbors a suspicion that there may be more to the story is engaging in conspiratorial thinking. Of course this is the same response given to those who for twenty years have researched and questioned the government’s account of September 11, 2001. The 9/11 omission story. The fictional account that will dominate the news as the twentieth anniversary approaches this September. Will any of those liberal/leftists who have remained silent all these years let it pass as truth? I suspect so but hope not.
The Need for Dialogue
So we have pseudo debates on one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 when he condemned the Vietnam War and broke his own silence in opposition to many of his advisers. A year later to the day, like JFK, he was murdered by the warfare state he condemned. Like Senator Robert Kennedy two months later. They were killed by very competent people.
Dr. Martin E. Schotz wrote twenty-six years ago in History Will Not Absolve US that those he had in mind for their defense of the Warren Commission were “such individuals as Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, the editors of The Nation magazine, and, if everyone remembers, I.F. Stone as well. I think the positions of these individuals are very important because in their surprising (to us) dishonesty and willingness to cooperate with the warfare state in covering up the crime, there is obviously something to be learned.”
Yes, there is. It is time for all people of good will to stop finding excuses for the ruling elites, whether through incompetence theories or the silent refusal to publicly engage the government and its critics on the most important issues of our time – September 11, 2001 and COVID-19. Those Schotz names above are heroes for many on the liberal/left today who follow in their stead. It’s as though they have found it necessary to mimic their teachers’ lessons. Better logic would have them analyzing the premises of September 11 and COVID-19. Start with the basics. Be explicit. Tell us why you are silent.
One year ago this week the world embraced a lockdown strategy premised on the epidemiology modeling of Imperial College-London (ICL). In a March 16, 2020 report by physicist and computer modeler Neil Ferguson, the ICL team predicted catastrophic death tolls in the United Kingdom and United States unless both countries adopted an aggressive policy response of mandating social distancing, school and business closures, and ultimately sheltering in place.
Ferguson’s model presented a range of scenarios under increasingly restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Under its “worst case” or “do nothing” model 2.2 million Americans would die, as would 510,000 people in Great Britain, with the peak daily death rate hitting somewhere around late May or June. At the same time, the ICL team promised salvation from the coronavirus if only governments would listen to and adopt its technocratic recommendations. Time was of the essence to act, so President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson both listened. And so began the first year of “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
It took a little over a month before we saw conclusive evidence that something was greatly amiss with the ICL model’s underlying assumptions. A team of researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden adapted Ferguson’s work to their country and ran the projections, getting similarly catastrophic results. Over 90,000 people would die by summer from Covid-19 if Sweden did not enter immediate lockdown. Sweden never locked down though. By May it was clear that the Uppsala adaptation of ICL’s model was off by an order of magnitude. A year later, Sweden has fared no worse than the average European lockdown country, and significantly better than the UK, which acted on Ferguson’s advice.
Pressed on this unexpected result, ICL tried to distance itself from the Swedish adaptation of its model in May. The records from the March 21st supercomputer run of the Uppsala team’s projections belie that assertion, linking directly to Ferguson’s March 16th report as the framework for its modeling design. But no matter – the ICL team’s own publications would soon succumb to a real-time testing against actual data.
A second ICL report, attempting to model the reopening of the United States from lockdowns, wildly exaggerated the death tolls that were expected to follow. By July, this model too had failed to even minimally correspond to observed reality. ICL attempted to save face by publishing an absurd exercise in circular reasoning in the journal Nature where they invoked the unrealized projections of their own model to supposedly “prove” multiple millions of lives had been saved by the lockdowns. That study soon failed basic robustness checks when the ICL team’s suite of models were applied to different geographies.
Another team of Swedish researchers then noticed oddities in the ICL team’s coding, suggesting they had modified a key line to bring data from their own comparative analysis of Sweden into sync with other European countries under lockdown after the models did not align. A published derivative of this discovery showed that ICL’s own attempts to validate the effectiveness of its lockdown strategies does not withstand empirical scrutiny.
Finally, in November, another team of researchers from the United States compared a related ICL team model for a broader swath of countries against five other international models of the pandemic, examining the performance of each against observed deaths. Their results contain a stunning indictment: “The Imperial model had larger errors, about 5-fold higher than other models by six weeks. This appears to be largely driven by the aforementioned tendency to overestimate mortality.”
The verdict is in. Imperial College’s Covid-19 modeling has an abysmal track record – a characteristic it unfortunately shares with Ferguson’s prior attempts to model mad cow disease, swine flu, avian flu, and countless other pathogens.
After a year of model-driven lockdowns, we may also look back to the original March 16, 2020 report to see yet another failure of its predictive ability. Recall that this is the model that fueled the alarmist rush to shut everything down last March, all to avert a 2.2 million death toll that would presumably peak around June.
(Source: Imperial College Report #9, March 16, 2020)
As noted above, the 2.2 million figure for the US (and corresponding 510,000 figure in Britain) were “worst case” scenarios in which the pandemic ran its course. According to the underlying theory of the ICL model, these catastrophic totals could be reduced by the adoption of NPIs – the escalating suite of social distancing measures, business and school closures, and ultimately full lockdowns that we observed in practice over the last year.
Aside from its 2.2 million worst case scenario, ICL offered no specific projections for how its proposed mitigation measures would work in the United States. Ferguson did however tell the New York Times on March 20, 2020 that a “best case” American scenario would still yield “about 1.1 million deaths,” giving us a glimpse of what he believed to be possible under NPI mitigation. The March 16th report similarly “predict[ed] there would still be in the order of…1.1-1.2 million in the US” under the most optimistic mitigation strategy, barring a large increase in hospital ICU bed capacity.
By contrast, ICL did publish an extensive table showing the results of its model run for Britain over a group of four increasingly stringent NPI scenarios. These range from the “worst case” projection with half a million deaths (the figures vary depending on assumptions about the virus’s reproduction rate) to a more stringent model where four NPIs (public school closures, case isolation, home quarantine, and social distancing) are simultaneously enacted. The results are depicted below.
(Source: Imperial College Report #9, March 16, 2020)
Note that the UK enacted policies based on all four measures recommended by the March 16th report, as well as an even more stringently enforced general lockdown on three separate occasions. After one year of following and expanding upon the Imperial College strategy, an unusual result appears in the data: not only have the UK’s numbers come up far short of Ferguson’s most alarmist scenario (depicted in the first column), but the UK has actually done much worse than the other NPI mitigation models in the ICL report.
As of the 1-year anniversary, the UK had a little over 125,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths. By implication, the UK death toll has exceeded the mildest of the other three NPI scenarios from the ICL model (column 2) and blown past its heavier NPI recommendations (columns 3 and 4), even while operating under a more stringent set of lockdowns than ICL originally contemplated.
The implications are clear. While Ferguson wildly exaggerated the “worst case” scenario for the UK, he also severely overestimated the effectiveness of NPIs at controlling the pandemic.
By building its policy response around the Imperial College model, the UK government delivered the worst of both worlds. It imposed some of the most severe and long-lasting lockdowns in the world based on the premise that NPIs would work as Ferguson’s team predicted, and that such actions were needed to avert a catastrophe. Except the lockdowns did not work as intended, and the UK also ended up with an abnormally high death count compared to other countries – including locales that did not lock down, or that reopened earlier and for longer periods than the UK.
Why were the Ferguson/ICL predictions so far off base on both ends? The answer likely derives from two central flaws in their model design.
First, Ferguson adapted the model directly from a 2006 influenza pandemic model that he published in the journal Nature. As with the March 16th Covid report, this study aimed to predict the spread of a virus across the general population, subject to a suite of increasingly stringent NPI countermeasures. As the second-to-last paragraph of the study reveals though, it only modeled general population spread. In doing so, the authors acknowledged that “Lack of data prevent us from reliably modelling transmission in the important contexts of residential institutions (for example, care homes, prisons) and health care settings.”
With Covid-19 however, nursing homes have emerged as one of the greatest vulnerabilities in the pandemic. In many locales, nursing home deaths alone account for almost half of all Covid-19 fatalities despite housing only a tiny fraction of the population. While the latest nursing home figures for the UK are as of yet hard to come by, reports from last year suggest they are not only a large share of the country’s Covid-19 deaths but also severely undercounted in official records. Using a preliminary count from last year, the UK had one of the worst nursing home shielding ratios in Europe – a measure that compares a country’s death toll in its care facilities to the general population. The ICL projections likely missed this problem entirely due to a defect in the 2006 model it was built upon.
Second, Ferguson’s model severely overstated the effectiveness of NPIs at mitigating general population spread. Part of the appeal of the ICL report from last March came from its succinct portrayal of the available policy options and their claimed effects. The modelers presented political leaders with a menu of escalating measures to adopt with mathematical precision, each linked to an associated projection of its effectiveness at staving off the pandemic. All the politicians had to do was select from the menu and implement the prescribed course.
Except it wasn’t that simple in practice. ICL’s recommended NPI measures baked assumptions about their own effectiveness into the model. In reality, most of these assumptions had never been tested or even minimally quantified. As a key chart from the March 16th report illustrates, the supposed effect of each NPI was little more than a guesstimate – a set of nice, round numbers that purported to show the change in social interactions after its adoption.
A 2019 report by the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of the flimsy empirical basis for epidemiology models such as the one developed by ICL. “Simulation models provide a weak level of evidence,” the report noted, and lacked randomized controlled trials to test their assumptions. The same report designated mass quarantine measures – what we now know of as lockdowns – as “Not Recommended” due to lack of evidence for their effectiveness. Summarizing this literature, which included the same 2006 influenza model that Ferguson adapted to Covid-19, the WHO concluded: “Most of the currently available evidence on the effectiveness of quarantine on influenza control was drawn from simulation studies, which have a low strength of evidence.”
The UK’s experience under the ICL model therefore demonstrates not only Ferguson’s propensity toward wildly alarmist disease forecasting – it also illustrates the abject failure of lockdowns and related NPI measures to mitigate the pandemic. As a revealing point of comparison, the UK’s population-adjusted daily death toll under lockdowns has been consistently higher than no-lockdown Sweden for most of the pandemic, despite both countries following a nearly identical pattern of timing in both the first and second waves.
The repeated failures of the Ferguson/ICL model point to a scientific error at the heart of the theory behind lockdowns and similar NPIs. They assume, without evidence, that their prescriptive approach is correct, and that it may be implemented by sheer will as one might achieve by clicking a check-box in a Sim City-style video game. After a year of real-time testing, it is now abundantly clear that this video game approach to pandemic management ranks among the most catastrophic public health policy failures in the last century.
Phil Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of numerous works on economic history, taxation, economic inequality, the history of slavery, and education policy in the United States.
The National Institute of Justice, the RAND Corporation and the Police Executive Research Forum want to give law enforcement real-time access to autonomous vehicles.
Last month, this so-called expert panel identified 17 high-priority law enforcement needs for autonomous vehicles. And as you can imagine some of them are very disturbing.
Cybersecurity and Vehicle Communication Needs:
Research on systems to enable law enforcement to identify a vehicle’s authorization to run in automated mode.
Research on technology that enables law enforcement to communicate with vehicles in automated mode.
Allowing law enforcement access to a vehicle’s authorization is just a fancy way of saying they want backdoor access to an owners personal information.
If you thought license plate readers were invasive before, just wait until a year or two from now, when they send officers all kinds of personal information related to the vehicle’s owner[s].
Stakeholder Communication Needs:
Surveys to identify the most useful data the autonomous vehicle industry can make available to law enforcement for investigations of crashes and other incidents.
Police working with auto manufacturers to help them identify which embedded telematic surveillance devices they should have access to is not about public safety: it’s about money.
As writer Eduardo Alvarez de Toledo Pinart explains, the real reason police want to be able to pull driverless vehicles over is so they can cite the owner[s] for any number of infractions.
“Operators could face fines to the extent the car is not being operated in fully autonomous mode. For instance, the operator of a SAI L4/L5 car could be to blame if the systems had been inappropriately overridden (speeding due to fabricated medical emergency).”
Back to law enforcement’s 17 high-priority needs.
Standardization Needs:
Model training and guidelines for interacting with autonomous vehicles running in automated mode.
Development of descriptions of standard behaviors (such as pulling off the road in a safe spot) that law enforcement will expect autonomous vehicles to perform across the United States.
Police pull over driverless Tesla Model 3 that was using Smart Summon feature
To reinforce the need to ticket autonomous vehicle owners, these so-called experts want to collaborate with vehicle manufacturers to establish backdoor access to the vehicle’s data.
“The panelists stressed the need for proactive problem solving with law enforcement, autonomous vehicle manufacturers and operators, and communities all working together. Law enforcement would benefit from having a better understanding of autonomous vehicle capabilities, and manufacturers would benefit from insights on the law enforcement implications of autonomous vehicles operating in communities, they said.”
Police view autonomous vehicles as “evidence sources”
Law enforcement’s desire to have backdoor access to autonomous vehicle’s data could not be any clearer.
“Participants also saw opportunities to use data generated by autonomous vehicles — for example, videos from an autonomous vehicle passing an active crime scene — to support public safety and crime investigations.”
As the “Panel Purpose and Process” section explains, law enforcement looks at autonomous vehicles as “evidence sources.”
“Tangential interactions (such as use of autonomous vehicles as evidence sources in investigations or exclusion of autonomous vehicles from zones where traffic is prohibited)”
As the expert panel so eloquently stated, police need to have the ability to securely communicate in real-time with these “evidence sources.”
To law enforcement, autonomous vehicles means lost revenues and that is why they want access to a cars’ windows, cameras and microphones.
“Waymo’s cars are designed to pullover if they detect a police or emergency vehicle flashing from up to 100 feet away. After stopping, the car is unlocked and the windows roll down automatically, allowing Waymo’s support team to interact with law enforcement representatives via an intercom system.”
Giving law enforcement the ability to roll down a motorist’s windows, unlock their car doors and speak to the occupants via an intercom system gives privacy-minded people like myself nightmares.
A group of child rights experts has strongly criticized the UN secretary-general for excluding eight parties, including the Israeli regime and the Saudi-led coalition, from a global blacklist of parties accountable for harming children during conflicts.
In a report, experts from Watchlist on Children, an international child rights group, said at least eight parties to conflicts were found responsible for killing and maiming more than 100 children in a single year but were excluded from the blacklist.
There were “numerous discrepancies and omissions in listing decisions, as well as unwarranted delisting decisions,” the report said, noting that the UN Security Council’s 2001 resolution establishing the list to protect children from the horrors of war “is being seriously undermined” and could result in “putting children at even greater risk.”
“The secretary-general’s 2015 annual report acknowledges that the number of children killed by Israel in 2014 was the third highest in the world and the number of schools damaged or destroyed was the highest anywhere in the world that year, and yet Israel has not been listed in the report’s annexes,” the report said.
It added that at the time the news media reported that Israel and the United States conducted intense lobbying to prevent the regime’s blacklisting.
The child rights experts also cited annual reports that have repeatedly found Israeli forces responsible for high levels of Palestinian child casualties, including over 1,525 killed and maimed in 2020 alone.
“Yet Israeli forces have yet to be included in the annexed list of violators,” they added.
According to the AP, co-author Yanghee Lee, former chair of the committee that monitors implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, said: “We are calling on the secretary-general to urgently address these problems and commit to hold all countries and groups responsible for violations against children accountable without fear or favor.”
In response to the report, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stands by the report’s conclusions, expressing willingness to engage with relevant partners in how to improve the system.
Benyam Dawit Mezmur, another co-author of the report urged the UN to ensure that the list of perpetrators it issues is “more credible, accurate, complete, and evidence-based, or risk pulling apart this unique tool for the protection of children caught in war.”
The report also said the Saudi-led war coalition against Yemen was delisted in 2020 for killing and maiming children in the Arab country, despite being responsible for a documented 222 child casualties during the reporting period.
“With this delisting, the Saudi-led coalition has been removed from the Secretary-General’s list altogether,” it noted.
Citing the Secretary-general’s reports that said the Saudi-led coalition was delisted due to a “sustained significant decrease” in the number of violations they committed, the rights experts said such argument runs counter to the established delisting criteria.
“This runs counter to the delisting criteria established in 2010 and the Security Council’s stated expectations that listing is based on whether or not grave violations against children took place in violation of international obligations,” they maintained.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the Saudi war on Yemen has killed a quarter of a million people, including women and children, since it was launched in March 2015 with the aim of restoring the Riyadh-friendly government of former President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi.
The arrest of Bolivia’s former interim president Jeanine Áñez and her coup co-conspirators is being painted by pro-Western organizations as political persecution, but it’s far from that.
Bolivian authorities arrested ex-interim president Jeanine Áñez on March 14 for sedition, terrorism and conspiracy for her role in the 2019 coup that ousted former president Evo Morales and ushered in a dark age of violence and repression in the country. Justice Minister Ivan Lima said days after the arrest that he would seek a 30-year sentence for Áñez if found guilty, a sign that the victims of the coup regime’s repression will get the justice they deserve.
There have been many more arrests, including several ministers under the Áñez government and right-wing paramilitary leaders involved, and more are expected to follow. In many of these cases, it’s social movements leading the pressure for charges to be brought against co-conspirators in the coup.
This shows that President Luis Arce, a member of Morales’ Movement toward Socialism (MAS), is serious about getting the country back on its pre-coup developmental path – and keeping criminals accountable.
To be sure, the coup government of Jeanine Áñez tried hard to take Bolivia off of this path and that’s why they worked to radically change the character of institutions in the country. They repressed the MAS and grassroots social movements; allowed street gangs to terrorize and murder dissenters; worked to destroy the free press and opened the country back up to Western capital penetration, which they called a “return to civilization.” (A racist dig at Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous leader).
Now, for Arce and his government, course-correcting will take a correspondingly heavy approach. That being said, it does not mean that one should fall into the intellectual trap of both-sidesism, i.e. that both sides are just as bad as one another. Such a position fails to appreciate exactly how repressive Áñez and her co-conspirators were, and, by comparison, how orderly the judicial process they face is.
Just look at the 2019 Senkata and Sacaba Massacres that occurred immediately after Áñez took power. With Decree 4078, a license to kill that was so blatant it was even denounced by Amnesty International, Áñez absolved armed forces of any criminal liability in their actions and they immediately massacred anti-coup protesters. That same month, family members carried the coffins of those killed in the attack through the city of La Paz and Áñez ordered a crackdown on the march.
This isn’t even to speak of the violence that took place during the events of the coup. Áñez was actually able to seize power in the first place after the resignation of Victor Borda, former president of the lower house representing MAS, after protesters tortured his brother and burned his family home down.
Despite these extraordinarily well-documented crimes, many in the Western media and Western-backed institutions are painting the arrests of the former coup government officials and their street militias as political persecution against the MAS’ opposition.
These are the same kinds of people that have criticized independent governments for decades, who have apparently no limit to the amount of empathy they can express for murderers and traitors, and whose barometer for democracy is whether pro-Western radicals are allowed to carry on with impunity.
Just look at the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization that was one of the main drivers of the 2019 coup when it falsely claimed there were election irregularities during that year’s presidential election. The OAS recently called on Bolivia to release Áñez and the other coup co-conspirators because of supposed problems in the country’s judicial system, saying they should be tried before the International Criminal Court (ICC) instead to provide a “fair” trial.
Likewise, this sentiment was followed by Human Rights Watch. For its part, this human rights NGO denounced Bolivia last week for giving amnesty to those arrested by the coup government. According to them, the amnesty decree issued by President Arce was too broad and could allow for serious crimes to be dismissed.
Western media outlets are predictably condemning the arrests, labeling them as persecution. The AP ran with the headline, “Bolivia’s ex-interim president arrested in opposition crackdown,” which was reprinted as-is in many major English language media publications.
For her part, Áñez is also actively fielding support from foreign governments. A letter sent by Áñez to OAS chief Luis Almagro dated March 13, a day before her arrest, described the charges as political persecution. The memo apparently got through to at least an imaginary government since Venezuela’s “Legitimate Government,” the one headed by Venezuelan non-president Juan Guaidó issued a statement of support for Áñez.
Pro-Western organizations and media have little concern for “democracy” or “human rights” and only truly care about supporting governments that kowtow to the interests of multinational corporations. Holding their favored leaders accountable for crimes is “political persecution” and apparently in the same category as street violence, torture and mass murder. The hypocrisy never ends.
When President Arce took office in November, he promised to “rebuild the country in unity.” What he did not say was that Bolivia would allow murderers to roam freely, because surely that would only set the country up to be further divided by external forces. That is exactly what happened the whole year before he took office.
Bolivia is showing the world what justice and the rule of law look like, whether Western countries like it or not.
Bradley Blankenship is a Prague-based American journalist, columnist and political commentator. He has a syndicated column at CGTN and is a freelance reporter for international news agencies including Xinhua News Agency.
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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