RT | May 11, 2023
Ukrainian forces have used chemical weapons, which caused loss of consciousness after inhalation, during an attack in the Orekhov sector, military correspondent Alexander Kots reported on Thursday.
The use of substances banned by international conventions appear to be part of the much-anticipated Ukrainian offensive, said the reporter for the outlet KP.
According to Kots, Western-supplied tanks have been spotted outside of Kharkov, while Ukrainian troops have launched attacks on Russian positions north and south of Artyomovsk, which they call Bakhmut.
Multiple Western officials have said over the past week that all the weapons, ammunition and supplies required for Ukraine’s grand counter-offensive had already been delivered. On Thursday, the UK confirmed it had supplied Kiev with long-range ‘Storm Shadow’ missiles.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, however, claimed he needed more time and more armored vehicles before he could launch the assault, in order to avoid casualties. In the same interview, Zelensky claimed Ukraine had nothing to do with the drones that attacked the Kremlin last week.
According to US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose son had volunteered on Kiev’s side for several months last year, Ukraine has suffered around 300,000 military casualties and is taking losses at a far higher rate than Russia.
Donetsk People’s Republic authorities had accused Ukrainian troops of dropping chemical weapons from drones back in February, pointing to frontline reports and videos shared by Ukrainians on social media.
In late February, the Russian military warned that the Ukrainian forces in Kramatorsk had received 16 containers with riot control agents CS (chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile) and CR (dibenzoxazepine), as well as the incapacitating agent BZ (3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate), accompanied by “citizens of foreign countries.” Moscow suggested the US might be planning a “false flag” attack in the Donbass.
Chemical warfare is forbidden under the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), an international treaty that took effect in 1997 and to which both Ukraine and Russia are signatories.
By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | May 11, 2023
A PREPRINT paper published this month highlights just how many unknowns we are dealing with when it comes to assessing the long-term outcomes of mRNA vaccination. It shows that IgG4 antibodies are present in umbilical cord blood of infants born to vaccinated mothers, meaning a theoretical risk to newborns of an ineffective response to Covid infection.
But was this really unknown to those recommending that mRNA vaccination was safe for pregnant women? Documents released by Pfizer under court order reveal that Pfizer and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were well aware of clinical trial results indicating appalling outcomes for babies of pregnant women.
Watch this 20-minute video where dozens of so-called experts in New Zealand are recorded telling us that the mRNA Covid vaccines are completely safe for pregnant women in direct contradiction of Pfizer trial results available in April 2021. These results indicated an unfolding disaster for babies including miscarriage, premature birth, cardiac arrest, toxic breast milk and spike protein crossing the placenta.
In the video, their comments are juxtaposed with scientists exposing the highly disturbing content of the Pfizer trials of pregnancy outcomes.
Was the NZ government aware of this information? Certainly the contractual arrangements that our government had made with Pfizer would have required Pfizer to fully inform the Ministry of Health of all the results of vaccine trials. But the MoH has completely ignored the information which has become public knowledge. Since the start of this month they are again encouraging pregnant and breastfeeding mothers from 16 and up to get a further booster shot. Why? Especially considering the increased incidence of miscarriages and stillbirths since the NZ vaccine rollout began.
I can’t imagine at this time a more important video to watch than this 20-minute film of our experts lining up to misinform prospective mothers of safety. Were they misled by Pfizer, by the MoH, by politicians, by the FDA, or by all of the above? Or did they just decide to promote a safety rating without any evidence to back up their statements? We may never know, but the lesson of this video is clear: we will not be able to trust the medical czars again.
Overview of evidence prior to rollout
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | May 10, 2023
HART have been asked to submit evidence to module 3 of the Covid-19 Public Inquiry. That module is about the impacts on healthcare but we were specifically asked to include evidence around deaths in males aged 15-18 years of age and so provided an overview of the full impact these novel products have had on the healthcare system. What follows are some of the highlights. There will be three parts to this series. Here the evidence on what was known before rollout will be presented. Part two covers the evidence after rollout (excluding deaths) and part three the evidence on deaths.
It is worth remembering how cautious people were about any novel products that might claim to prevent covid. In February 2020, Chris Whitty said,
“The rate limiting steps are late clinical trials for safety & efficacy, & then manufacturing. For a disease with a low (for the sake of argument 1%) mortality a vaccine has to be very safe so the safety studies can’t be shortcut. So important for the long run.”
He was right.
The belief that vaccines were safe had led to a circular belief that vaccines required fewer safety checks than other novel therapies. Novel vaccines take a decade or more to go through safety checks. Flu vaccines don’t. These novel drugs were treated like flu vaccines for regulatory purposes.
The regulators failed us in numerous ways as set out in The Perseus Report. Examples include:
Since 2005 there have been concerns about the regulator losing “sight of the need to protect and promote public health.” The CEO of the MHRA, Dame June Raine, claims the MHRA is now an “enabler” not a “watchdog.” Even before there was political capture there were pre-existing conflicts of interest.
The spike protein is the most toxic part of the virus. It damages lungs, vessel walls and causes clots. Part of the sequence is identical to a region of a bacterial sequence that can bind directly to a particular type of white blood cells resulting in lethal cytokine storms. This part of the sequence was heavily mutated in the Omicron variant making it less lethal. However, even the most recent injections contained the original Chinese spike sequence with this dangerous sequence.
The manufacturers decided to use the WHOLE chinese spike sequence rather than parts of it, or peptides, which have been shown to be safer for vaccine design. Some manufacturers modified the spike so that it could not bind to the receptor and enter a cell. This might have reduced some harm from receptor binding but not from the action of spike within cells. The spike was delivered into cells so spike was produced INSIDE the cells in the first place. AstraZeneca did not modify the sequence. From November 2020 it was clear that parts of AZ spike could be shed outside of cells.
The Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data shows a higher rate of serious adverse reactions from the treatment group (12.5 per 10,000) than any reduction in serious events from covid (2.3 and 6.4 per 10,000 for Pfizer and Moderna respectively). Yet the claim of 90%+ efficacy was all that was reported and all that Dame June Raine claimed she needed to see in order to approve the drugs.
AZ issued a press release claiming 100% efficacy against hospitalisation and death after only two severe covid hospitalisations and one death in the placebo arm. This claim was repeated widely and was believed.
At the time, the priority was to protect the old and vulnerable who accounted for 98% of covid deaths. There were going to be 15 million jabs to freedom:
The evidence presented is damning. The failures of the regulators to adequately test the safety and efficacy of these novel vaccines are shocking. The circular belief that vaccines required fewer safety checks than other novel therapies is a dangerous assumption that has put the lives of millions at risk. The fact that serious adverse reactions were higher in the treatment group than any reduction in serious events from covid is deeply concerning. We must demand accountability from the regulators and demand that the safety and wellbeing of the public is always the top priority, not profit or political gain. There was total regulatory failure in allowing these products to be given to anyone, which was compounded by not withdrawing them promptly once evidence these issues were clinically relevant became clear.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 10, 2023
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week reinstated a controversial federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance to study the risk of bat coronavirus spillover.
EcoHealth is a New York-based nonprofit whose stated mission is to develop “science-based solutions to prevent pandemics and promote conservation.”
In 2014, EcoHealth received $3.7 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to study the risk of bat coronavirus emergence and the potential for outbreaks in human populations — research that included genetically manipulating coronaviruses to make them more infectious to humans.
At the time, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of the NIAID, which operates under the NIH.
Nearly $600,000 of the $3.7 million went to EcoHealth’s collaborator, the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
However, in April 2020, under the Trump administration, the NIH terminated EcoHealth’s grant over concerns the organization had violated the grant terms, using U.S. taxpayer money to fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
EcoHealth on Monday announced that the NIH reinstated the grant, but with new terms, and that EcoHealth will collaborate with the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School to study zoonotic coronaviruses “with the aim of being transparent about the study’s goals.”
Peter Daszak, Ph.D. — who secretly collaborated with Ralph Baric, Ph.D., and Fauci to steer the media and scientific community away from questions about whether COVID-19 could have originated in a lab — is EcoHealth’s executive director and principal investigator on the grant.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee that found multiple serious violations by EcoHealth of the contractual terms and conditions of the 2014 NIH grant, said the decision to reinstate the grant was “absolutely reckless,” given the organization’s “negligence and breach of their contract with the NIH on the coronavirus research done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told The Defender he wasn’t surprised to see the grant reinstated.
“People involved in this, like EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, the Biden administration, et cetera, know they have crossed the Rubicon and there is no turning back. And they don’t intend to turn back unless and until we stop them. It’s as simple as that,” he added.
Boyle, who authored the Biological Weapons Convention known as the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was approved unanimously by both houses of the U.S. Congress and signed to law by President George Bush Sr., also added:
“Clearly, all this gain-of-function work is offensive biological warfare weapons work in violation of the convention and my biological weapons anti-terrorism act, the penalty for which is life imprisonment.”
In January, the Office of Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report outlining missed deadlines, confusing protocols and misspent funds in EcoHealth Alliance’s grant management, particularly as it related to the Wuhan lab.
In response, HHS set new terms for the four-year, now-$2.9 million NIAID grant, under which EcoHealth will receive $576,290 this year.
Under the new terms, EcoHealth is barred from conducting any research in China or collecting any new samples from vertebrates and must implement additional oversight of its finances and accounting practices.
The conditions also prevent EcoHealth from doing any work “involving enhanced potential pandemic pathogens,” although the organization can continue to work with “highly pathogenic agents” or “infectious agent[s] or toxin[s]” that may warrant a biocontainment safety level (BSL) of 3 or higher. The Wuhan lab was a BSL-4 lab.
EcoHealth is the recipient of 17 active U.S. government grants totaling more than $50 million, The Epoch Times reported.
Publications like Nature and Science celebrated the reinstatement of the grant. Nature said the research was “essential for preventing the next pandemic.”
Science wrote that the Trump administration called for the cancellation of the grant, “amid unsupported allegations that a lab leak at WIV started the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The origins of the COVID-19 virus continue to be debated, but evidence has emerged over the past several years that the “lab-leak theory” is a plausible hypothesis despite attempts to dismiss it.
Several U.S. agencies, former agency officials and independent scientists have concluded that a Wuhan lab leak most likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic. A U.S. Department of Energy report released in February and a Senate report released in April both arrived at the conclusion that COVID-19 likely stemmed from a lab leak.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
RT | May 9, 2023
The Israel Defense Forces launched operation ‘Shield and Arrow’ against the leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza on Tuesday morning, allegedly killing several high-ranking militants – as well as their wives, children and other civilians nearby.
A spokesperson for the Palestinian Health Ministry, Ashraf al-Qedra, told RIA Novosti that one of the victims was a citizen of Russia, Jamal Abu Haswan, who “died in Gaza City as a result of shelling by the Israel Defense Forces.”
A neighbor and friend of the deceased told the agency that “a rocket hit the apartment where Abu Haswan lived, which led to his death along with his wife and son.” According to RIA, Abu Haswan worked at a medical facility that “specializes in physical therapy and medical rehabilitation.”
The air raid took place at around 2am local time and left at least 20 people injured in addition to the 12 killed, according to the latest estimates.
The IDF has issued a rare statement confirming its military operation against the PIJ, claiming to have neutralized three top members of the group.
The Palestinian Health ministry said the militants’ families and other civilians were killed in the strikes on an apartment building in Gaza City and a house in the southern city of Rafah.
RT | May 8, 2023
Washington hasn’t responded to Moscow’s demand for an explanation of what happened to the Nord Stream pipelines after veteran journalist Seymour Hersh published a bombshell report blaming the US for destroying the key gas route, high-ranking Russian diplomat Konstantin Gavrilov has said.
“We haven’t received any clarification yet and it’s unlikely that we’ll ever get any,” he told Izvestia newspaper on Monday. “There’ll be nothing new [from the US],” added the official, who heads Russia’s delegation at the Vienna talks on military security and arms control.
Gavrilov said he was surprised by the behavior of the EU nations that were most affected by the sabotage of crucial energy infrastructure, which was built to deliver Russian gas to Europe through Germany.
Germany, Sweden and Denmark, which have been carrying out probes into the explosions on Nord Stream 1 and 2 last fall, have so far been reluctant to open up about their findings. They also rejected offers from Russia to assist with the investigations.
“The stance of Europe, which is being openly humiliated, is something that I can’t fully understand,” Gavrilov said.
In early February, Hersh authored a report claiming that US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives that were detonated last September had been planted at the pipelines in the Baltic Sea back in June 2022 by US Navy divers under the cover of a NATO exercise.
Hersh later suggested that Biden had chosen that very moment to blow up the infrastructure because the conflict between Russia and Ukraine “wasn’t going great” for Kiev and its backers in Washington.
US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson denied the report, calling it “utterly false and complete fiction.”
In late March, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he “fully agreed” with Hersh’s findings that the Nord Stream sabotage had been organized by the American Special Forces.
Other Russian officials have also noted that the only party to benefit from the destruction of Nord Stream was the US, which has seen supplies of its more expensive liquefied natural gas to Europe increase massively since the blasts.
Sputnik – 06.05.2023
Russian investigators have established that over 126,000 residents of the Donbass region became victims of the crimes committed by Kiev since 2014, with the damage to the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics surpassing 228 billion rubles ($2.9 billion), the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, said.
“More than 9,500 civilians were injured in the armed conflict, and over 5,000 civilians were killed. Over the entire period of the investigation in this criminal case, more than 259,000 people were interrogated, and over 126,000 people were recognized as victims, including about 24,000 minors,” Bastrykin said.
Bastrykin also said that the investigation analyzed the destruction in the cities of Mariupol, Rubezhnoe, Schastie, Krasnyi Luch, Stakhanov, Kirovsk, Alchevsk, Lisichansk and others, adding that the damage assessment in other cities was underway.
Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine in February 2022, after the DPR and LPR appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations. In response to Russia’s operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow and have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.
On September 30, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the heads of the DPR and LPR, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, signed agreements on the accession of these territories to Russia, following referendums that showed that an overwhelming majority of the local population supported becoming part of Russia.
Strategic Culture Foundation | May 5, 2023
This week saw the ninth anniversary of a shocking massacre of 42 civilians in Odessa by Ukrainian fascists. Only weeks prior to that, the fascists’ political leaders had carried out a violent coup in Kiev.
The barbarity of the Odessa atrocity was unspeakable but emblematic of the NATO-backed fascist regime that seized power illegally in February 2014.
Significantly, and shamefully, the Western media and governments hardly mention that horror, or if they do, they tend to distort the incident and typically, yet baselessly, accuse Russia of disinformation.
On May 2, 2014, hundreds of protesters in Odessa against the fascist Kiev regime became embroiled in violent clashes with supporters of the regime. Thousands of far-right paramilitaries belonging to the NeoNazi Right Sector had been transported from the north to the southern port city of Odessa on the Black Sea under the guise of attending a football match.
Street battles ensued all day with cobblestones, Molotov cocktails and gunfire exchanged by both factions. By evening, the more numerous pro-regime crowds turned their focus on a tent encampment of anti-regime protesters near the Soviet-era Trade Unions building in the center of Odessa. The encampment was a peaceful gathering which included women and children. It had been set up for several weeks to demonstrate opposition to the Maidan events in Kiev.
The anti-regime protesters were opposed to the coup that had taken place in Kiev weeks earlier by the so-called EuroMaidan movement. On February 20, a gruesome sniper massacre in Kiev (later found to have been carried out by CIA-backed fascists) led to the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych. The latter had maintained friendly relations with Russia which far-right Ukrainian factions abhorred. Yanukovych’s government was strongly supported by Ukrainians of ethnic Russian heritage mainly in the south and eastern parts of the country.
The fascist regime that came to power in Kiev in February 2014 and which prevails till this day – albeit with a president, Vladimir Zelensky, who is nominally of Jewish ancestry – was opposed from the outset by many Ukrainians. They viewed the new rulers as unelected and illegitimate. They were also fearful of the NeoNazi factions that openly glorified Ukrainian figures like Stepan Bandera who had collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War in the mass murder of their own compatriots.
That is why the people of the Crimea peninsula voted in a referendum in March 2014 to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. In other parts of Ukraine, the southeast Donbass region also repudiated the Kiev regime and its “anti-Russian” hostility. In May, 2014, the Kiev regime proceeded to launch its so-called Anti-Terror Operation on the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Lugansk with the backing of then CIA chief John Brennan on a visit to the country. The U.S. vice president at the time was Joe Biden who served as Washington’s point man for the new regime. That aggression marked the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine which culminated in the present conflict with Russia, and the joining last year of the Donbass and neighboring regions with the Russian Federation.
This was the context in Ukraine in May, 2014. The country was in turmoil and splitting into ethnic and political divides. Cities like Odessa had strong historical and cultural connections with Russia. The city known as the Pearl on the Black Sea owing to its storied trading economy was founded in 1795 by Catherine the Great, the empress of Russia.
When the NATO-backed putschists seized power in Kiev in a bloody coup and began organizing Nazi-style torchlit processions, many ethnic Russian people in Ukraine and others were horrified. Odessa was one such city with a large Russian population. The city had suffered mass killings by Nazi Einsatzgruppen SS death squads and their local henchmen.
When the Kiev regime fascists targeted the protest camp in Odessa on the evening of May 2, some 300 of the protesters took refuge inside the Trade Unions building. The mob outside bombarded the historic building with incendiary devices setting it ablaze. The deliberate intention was to incinerate all those inside. The hatred shown by the Right Sector attackers towards the trapped victims was appalling. Several of the people in the building tried to escape the flames by jumping out of high-rise windows. As their bodies smashed the ground below, frenzied crowds clubbed them to death.
In all, 42 people were murdered in the Trade Unions building massacre. Not one attacker was ever prosecuted. The Kiev regime refused to carry out any adequate investigation.
However, the horror of that day was a turning point for many Ukrainians and Russians. It revealed the hideous nature of the regime that had seized power over the country and its vile fascist hostility toward Russia.
This is the regime that was brought to power by Washington and its NATO partners. Since 2014, it has been armed and built up to be a war machine to aggress Russia and obliterate all cultural connections with Russia.
The massacre in Odessa should be remembered for the sake of the victims that day. But also remembered because it helps explain the background of how the present U.S.-led NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine with Russia has come about.
For that reason, Western news media and their governments chose to studiously ignore the Odessa massacre. Their shameful silence is necessary in order to conceal the criminal complicity of the West in Ukraine’s deadly turmoil.
By Dmitry Plotnikov | RT | March 15, 2023
Galicia, a historical region in the West of Ukraine, is currently the center of the country’s nationalist movement. However, things were once very different. A little over a hundred years ago, representatives of opposing Russophile and pro-Ukrainian political movements competed for the loyalty of the local Ruthenian population, also known as Rusyns. Galicia’s Russophiles welcomed the beginning of the First World War as a step toward an anticipated reunion with Russia. However the Ukrainian movement remained loyal to Austria-Hungary. With the help of the latter, Vienna killed off the Rusyn intelligentsia, which it considered a “fifth column”. To accomplish this, the Hapsburgs set up concentration camps.
What happened next amounted to a genocide.
The beginning of the tragedy
By the start of the First World War, the Russophile movement in Galicia was experiencing tough times. As a result of the “divide and rule” policy implemented by the Austrians, the movement suffered a split. The oldest and most respected organizations ended up in the hands of pro-Austrian leaders who advocated Ukrainian, not Rusyn, identity.
After the army of the Russian Empire crossed the border on August 18, 1914, and launched an offensive in Galicia, mass repressions swept through the region. People fell victim to the rage of the Austrian authorities over trifling matters – like possessing Russian literature, being a member of a Russian society, having a Russian education, or just sympathizing with Saint Petersburg. In some cases, people were arrested just for calling themselves Russians. Prisons were full of “enemies of the state” and “dangerous Moscow agents”, and the streets were lined with gallows.
“Those suspected of ‘Russophilia’ were hung on these trees in front of the windows. People were hung right on the trees. They would hang there for a day, then would be taken off and others would take their place… ” recounted one of the peasants in the Gorodetsky district. The repressions primarily affected the intelligentsia and Orthodox priests, most of whom completed spiritual studies in the Russian Empire.
Repressions against the intelligentsia were followed by those against the general public. Anyone who was thought to sympathize with Russia or Russian culture became a suspect. This included people who had once visited Russia, read Russian newspapers, or were just known as “Russophiles.” Military courts worked around the clock and a simplified procedure of legal proceedings was introduced for cases of suspected treason.
Members of Galicia’s Rusyn movement who chose the “Ukrainian way” actively participated in the repressions. Pro-Austrian politicians prepared lists of “unreliable” suspects and based on mere accusations, and arrested anyone who sympathized with Russia. As Russophile public figure Ilya Terekh described, “At the beginning of the war, the Austrian authorities arrested almost the entire Russian intelligentsia of Galicia and thousands of peasants, based on the lists handed over to the administrative and military authorities by the Ukrainophiles.”
“People who recognized themselves as Russian or simply had a Russian name were seized indiscriminately.
Anyone who possessed a Russian newspaper, book, sacred image, or even a postcard from Russia was grabbed, abused, and taken away. And then, there were gallows and executions without end – thousands of innocent victims, seas of martyr blood and orphan tears,” said another Russophile, Julian Yavorsky.
In October 1914, the Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin, who served as a medical assistant at the front, wrote in his diary: “When I got to Galicia … I felt and saw the living images of the times of the Inquisition.” Prishvin described the feelings of the Galician Rusyns toward Russia as follows: “Galicians dream of a great, pure, and beautiful Russia. A seventeen-year-old schoolboy walked with me around Lvov [now Lviv, then Lemberg] and spoke Russian without an accent. He told me about the persecution of the Russian language. Students were not even allowed to have a map of Russia, and before the war he was forced to burn books by Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky.”
Hell on earth
The prisons of Galicia were not big enough to accommodate all the repressed. On August 28, 1914, there were two thousand prisoners in Lviv alone. It was then that the Austrian authorities decided to establish concentration camps. In September 1914, the huge Thalerhof place of incarceration was set up in Styria. The first prisoners were delivered on September 4. According to the testimony of one of the survivors, priest Theodor Merena, prisoners were “people of different class and age”. They included clergy, lawyers, doctors, teachers, officials, peasants, writers, and students. The age of the prisoners ranged from infants to 100-year-olds.
Occasionally, Ukrainian activists who were loyal to the Austrian regime were accidentally placed into Thalerhof. Most of them were removed quickly. One later recalled that all prisoners had a chance to escape by giving up their Russian name and registering as “Ukrainians” in the “Ukrainian list.”
Up to the winter of 1915, there were no barracks in Thalerhof. People slept on the ground in the open air despite the rain and frost. The camp’s sanitary conditions were awful. The latrines were uncovered and used by twenty people at a time. When the barracks were built, they were overcrowded, housing 500 people instead of the intended 200. The prisoners slept on straw beds which were rarely replaced. Naturally, epidemics were widespread. In just two months following November 1914, over three thousand prisoners died of typhus.
“In Thalerhof, death rarely came naturally – it was injected through the poison of infectious diseases. Violent death was commonplace in Thalerhof.
There was no question of any treatment of the sick. Even doctors were hostile toward the prisoners,” wrote imprisoned Rusyn writer Vasily Vavrik.
The prisoners weren’t provided with any adequate medical care. In the beginning, Thalerhof didn’t even have a hospital. People died on the damp ground. However, when the hospital barracks were finally built, the doctors gave almost no medicine to the patients.
To instill fear, prison authorities constructed poles throughout the camp and regularly hung “violators” on these poles. The violation could be a mere trifle, like catching someone smoking in the barrack at night. Iron shackles were also used as punishment, even on women. Moreover, the camp was supplied with barbed wire, observation towers with sentries, barking dogs, posters with slogans, propaganda, torture facilities, a moat for executions, gallows, and a cemetery.
The camp operated for nearly three years and was closed down in May 1917 on the order of Charles I of Austria. The barracks stood on the site until 1936, when they were finally demolished. 1,767 corpses were then exhumed and reburied in a common grave in the nearby village of Feldkirchen.
The exact number of victims in Thalerhof is still disputed. The official report by Field Marshal Schleer dated November 9, 1914, stated that 5,700 Russophiles were imprisoned there at the time. According to one of the survivors, in the autumn of the same year there were about 8,000 prisoners. Twenty to thirty thousand Russian Galicians and Bukovinians passed through Thalerhof in total. In the first year and a half alone, about 3,000 prisoners died. According to other sources, 3,800 people were executed in the first half of 1915. Overall, in the course of the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian authorities killed at least 60,000 Rusyns.
Remembering the forgotten
In the period between the two world wars, the former prisoners strived to preserve the memory of the tragedy that affected Galicia’s Ruthenians and to perpetuate the memory of the victims of Thalerhof. The first monument was erected in 1934, and soon similar memorials appeared in other parts of the region. In the years 1924-1932, the Thalerhof Almanac was published. It provided documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts of the genocide. In 1928 and 1934, Thalerhof congresses, which gathered over 15 thousand participants, were held in Lviv.
Galicia became part of the USSR in 1939. Even before Soviet times, there was an unspoken ban on the topic Thalerhof, because the very fact of Russian existence in Galicia was seen as an impediment to Ukrainization, which was actively cultivated in Western Ukraine following World War Two. After Galicia and Volhynia became part of the USSR, most Russophile organizations in Lviv were closed. However, memorial services by the monuments continued. As the eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the events grew older and died, a new generation of Galicians was brought up in the spirit of atheism and took on a Ukrainian national identity. As a result, fewer and fewer people came to the memorials.
In modern Ukraine, the Rusyn genocide isn’t publicly discussed. Thalerhof is not mentioned in any school textbooks on the history of the country. The idea that Russians once lived in Galicia – the proud center of “Ukrainian culture” – does not fit the nationalistic ideology of contemporary Ukraine. Most young people have never even heard of Thalerhof.
The tragedy marked the end of the Russophile movement in Galicia. All those who did not submit and did not take on a Ukrainian identity were physically annihilated. Just a few years after the tragic events, public views changed. The region came under the influence of other movements and politicians. When Austria-Hungary fell apart after the First World War, Galicia turned into a powerful center of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
Dmitry Plotnikov is a political journalist exploring the history and current events of ex-Soviet states.
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By Jamal Kanj – Intifada-Palestine.com – January 14, 2011
Israel’s survival kit is: perpetuate conflict, insecurity to rationalize collective hate and finally playing victim.
Devoid of conflict, Israel implodes internally; without hate, Zionism loses its justification; and playing eternal victim to continue blackmailing the West. Absence of this holy trinity, Israel ceases to exist.
From its inception, the house of Zion has mastered exploiting adversarial powers to advance Israel’s cause. For instance, their influence over the Democratic Party in the US began with President Truman’s bid for 2nd term election in 1948.
Responding to strong opposition from Secretary of State General George Marshall and Department experts urging against recognition of Israel, President Truman replied: “I’m sorry gentlemen but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands [Jewish voters] who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of [voting] Arabs among my constituents”
Zionists influence over liberal American politics was matched with the doctrinal school of Conservative theoreticians aligning the Republican Party’s platform with Israel’s objectives. The Neoconservative Zionists, coined Zioncons, invented the “Clash of Civilization” concept to fight Israel’s wars. … continue
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