Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Syria seeks probe into US destruction of Raqqah, war crimes in letter to UN

A militant from the US-sponsored and Kurdish-led SDF stands amid the ruins of buildings near Clock Square in Raqqah, Syria. (Reuters)
Press TV – April 19, 2022

Syria has censured the US-led military coalition’s atrocities committed on the pretext of fighting the Daesh (ISIS) Takfiri terrorist group in the northern city of Raqqah, stating that the international community has never known about the full scale of the tragedy.

“The time has come to shed light on the humanitarian, political, and legal aspects of the matter,” the Syrian Foreign Ministry wrote in two identical messages addressed to UN Secretary General António Guterres and the rotating president of the UN Security Council, Barbara Woodward.

The ministry added that the US-led coalition’s aerial attacks in Raqqah took place between June and October 2017 and resulted in the full destruction of the city and the death of thousands of civilians, whose corpses were buried under debris.

It added that similar war crimes were perpetrated by the US-led coalition and the US-sponsored and Kurdish-led militants from the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) between 2018 and 2019 in the northeastern Syrian town of Baghuz as the area was utterly destroyed.

The ministry also invoked a March 18, 2019 airstrike in which US fighter jets killed at least 70 civilians, including women and children, as they were trying to flee Baghuz to save their lives.

It stressed that the enormous volume of damages inflicted upon public and private properties as well as critical infrastructure and the number of casualties in Raqqah, Ayn al-Arab, and Baghuz prove that the US and its allies have committed numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity across Syria.

The Syrian foreign ministry emphasized it will continue to raise at international organizations the destruction and deliberate targeting of civilians by the US-led coalition.

The United States and its allies invaded Syria in 2014 under the pretext of fighting Daesh terrorists. The terrorists had emerged as Washington was running out of excuses to extend its regional meddling or enlarge it in scale.

The military interference was surprisingly slow in confronting the terrorists, despite the sheer size of the coalition that had enlisted scores of Washington’s allied countries.

Numerous reports and regional officials would, meanwhile, point to the US’s role in transferring Daesh elements throughout the region and even airlifting supplies to the terror outfit.

In 2017 and in the height of the coalition’s military campaign in Syria, Russia drew a parallel between the destruction that was being caused by the US-led forces and the wholesale bombing campaign on the German city of Dresden during World War II.

April 19, 2022 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Selling Albright as a ‘Feminist Icon’: Was the Price Worth It?

BY BRYCE GREENE | FAIR | APRIL 13, 2022

When Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright died of cancer last month, a stream of fawning obituaries hailed her as a hero of NATO, a feminist icon and a “champion of human rights and diplomacy” (CNN3/24/22).

Most coverage failed to levy any criticism at all of Albright’s actions in government, despite her presiding over a critical turning point in the American Empire. For the foreign policy establishment, the ’90s under Albright solidified the US self-image as the “indispensable nation,” ready and able to impose its will on the world, a position with repercussions that still echo today. Instead of critically exploring this legacy, corporate media opted for celebration and mythmaking.

‘Icon’ and ‘trailblazer’

Some of the coverage focused on Albright as a “feminist icon” (Reuters3/23/22USA Today3/23/22)  breaking the glass ceiling. A commonly used term was “trailblazer” (e.g., NPR3/24/22Washington Post, 3/23/22).

The New Yorker (3/24/22) declared, “Madeleine Albright Was the First ‘Most Powerful Woman’ in US History.” CNN (3/24/22) went as far as to call Albright an early progenitor of “feminist foreign policy.”

NPR (3/24/22) claimed that Albright “left a rich legacy for other women in public service to follow.” BuzzFeed (3/23/22) found time to discuss the meaning of the jewelry she wore when meeting foreign leaders.

There is nothing wrong with remarking on the significance of a woman taking charge in the historically male-dominated halls of US power. However, it is far more important to take a critical look at her policies, including whether they jibe with the tenets of feminism as generally understood—something few in the media chose to do.

Media fell into this same trap when praising Gina Haspel as the first female head of the CIA, or when they applauded the top military contractors for having female heads (FAIR.org, 6/28/20). Similarly, Albright’s violent legacy is being obscured by seemingly progressive language.

‘More children than died in Hiroshima’

Madeline Albright on 60 Minutes

Madeleine Albright telling 60 Minutes (5/12/96) that half a million dead children is a price worth paying.

One of the first things many progressives think of when they think of Albright is her championing of the sanctions against Iraq during the ’90s. In between the two US wars on Iraq, Albright presided over crushing sanctions aimed at turning the Iraqi population against the Ba’athist government. These sanctions cut off crucial supplies to the nation, starving its people. A UN survey found that the sanctions led to hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children.

When Albright was confronted with this figure in an interview with CBS‘s Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes (5/12/96; Extra!11–12/01), Albright’s response was cold:

“We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

The UN numbers have since been revised downwardbut the unavoidable fact is that Albright accepted the number she was given, took willful responsibility for the deaths and concluded that they were “worth it” for the purpose of turning the Iraqi people against their government.

While so many Americans seem to have forgotten this shameful display, the rest of the world has not. Ahmed Twaij, an Iraqi writing in Al Jazeera (3/27/22), said that his “most prominent memory of Albright” was that notorious interview:

As an Iraqi, the memory of Albright will forever be tainted by the stringent sanctions she helped place on my country at a time when it was already devastated by years of war.

Despite its resonance around the world, the quote wasn’t even referenced in many of the retrospectives FAIR reviewed. USA Today (3/23/22) mentioned that Albright received “criticism” for calling the deaths “worth it,” and Newsweek (3/23/223/25/223/23/22) mentioned the quote in some of its coverage. But it went missing from the New York Times (3/23/223/25/22), Washington Post (3/23/22), NBC.com (3/23/22), CNN.com (3/24/223/26/22), New Yorker (3/24/22) and The Hill (3/24/22).

Guaranteed shootdown

Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recounts in his book how Albright suggested to him that the US fly a plane over Iraqi airspace low enough to be shot down, thus giving the US an excuse to attack Saddam Hussein. Shelton recalls Albright’s words:

What we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event—something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough—and slow enough—so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?

Albright was quickly rebuffed, but she was later able to get her wish of war in Iraq. Her efforts culminated in the Iraq Liberation Act, signed in October 1998, which made seeking regime change in Iraq official US policy.

As the New York Times (3/23/22) mentioned in its obituary, Albright threatened the Ba’athist leader with bombing that year if he didn’t open the country to weapons inspectors. Even though Kofi Annan brokered an agreement on the inspectors, the US bombed anyway in December 1998.

The Times didn’t explore these events further—not mentioning that the administration justified the bombing using the debunked pretext of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction—and instead continued ahead with its largely positive obituary.

Rewriting Yugoslav history

One of Albright’s most notable moments during her tenure as secretary of state was the 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999. Today, the bombing is hailed as a major victory by the forces of democracy, and Albright’s role is cast in a positive light.

NPR’s three sentences (3/24/22) on the subject show the dominant version of the events:

As chief diplomat in the late ’90s, Albright confronted the deadly targeting of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Time magazine dubbed it Madeleine’s War. Airstrikes in 1999 eventually led to the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces.

Americans were told at the time that the war solidified the US as “an indispensable nation asserting its morality as well as its interests to assure stability, stop thugs and prevent human atrocities” (Time5/9/99). The Washington Post (3/23/22) seized on this myth, calling Albright “an ardent and effective advocate against mass atrocities.” In this story, she is a hero for mobilizing the timid American giant to use its military might on behalf of humanitarian and democratic ideals.

But the truth is that the bombing Albright advocated was motivated less by humanitarian concerns and more by the US goal of breaking up Yugoslavia and establishing a NATO-friendly client state via the Kosovo Liberation Army. Indeed, the US’s negotiating tactic with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was to offer the choice of either occupation by NATO or destruction. As a member of Albright’s negotiating team anonymously told reporters (Extra!7–8/99): “We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.”

Exacerbating bloodshed

One fact that quickly debunks the humanitarian pretext is that the US-led bombing greatly exacerbated the bloodshed. According to Foreign Affairs (9–10/99), 2,500 died during the preceding civil war, but “during the 11 weeks of bombardment, an estimated 10,000 people died violently in the province.” And while Albanian civilians bore the brunt of the violence during the NATO attacks, in the year preceding the bombing, British Defense Secretary George Robertson told the Parliament that the NATO-backed KLA “were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been” (Monthly Review10/07).

As Edward Herman and David Peterson wrote in their detailed essay on Yugoslavia in the Monthly Review (10/07), the US and NATO were

key external factors in the initiation of ethnic cleansing, in keeping it going, and in working toward a violent resolution of the conflicts that would keep the United States and NATO relevant in Europe, and secure NATO’s dominant position in the Balkans.

The concern for ethnic minorities was merely a pretext offered to the American people, and lapped up wholeheartedly by a compliant mass media.

Along with liberal hawks like Samantha Power, Albright helped weaponize human rights and legitimize unsanctioned “humanitarian interventions” around the world. This showcase of unilateral and illegal violence has had direct repercussions around the world, paving the way for US interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya—to say nothing of the current Russian attack on Ukraine.

Promoting hawkish policy

Much of the coverage framed Albright’s Clinton-era career arc as one in which she repeatedly failed to get the US to play a larger role in advancing its ideals in the post-Cold War world. This fight included taking on international institutions that didn’t understand American exceptionalism.

Albright clashed with then–UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali “as she advocated fiercely for US and democratic interests,” in the words of CBS (3/23/22). She and Boutros-Ghali butted heads over the US role in peacekeeping operations during crises in Rwanda, Somalia and Bosnia.

In the end, Albright dissented against the entire UN Security Council, using the US veto power to deny Boutros-Ghali a second term as secretary general. His ouster paved the way for the more US-friendly Kofi Annan, as the “Albright Doctrine” took center stage.

In its cover story on “Albright’s War,” Time (5/9/99) described the Albright doctrine as

a tough-talking, semimuscular interventionism that believes in using force—including limited force such as calibrated air power, if nothing heartier is possible—to back up a mix of strategic and moral objectives.

In other words, Albright advocated a policy of unilateral intervention instead of a global order based on international law and mutual obligations. The US could assert itself whenever and wherever it determined the “strategic and moral objectives” were of sufficient importance.

The diplomat was more blunt about the US chauvinism imbued in the doctrine when she spoke to NBC (2/19/98) in 1998:

If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.

CNN:The West would be wise to heed Madeleine Albright’s lessons on foreign policy

CNN op-ed (3/24/22) positively cited Albright’s comment to Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

The media reflect positively on this mindset that “blended her profound moral values from her childhood experience in Europe with US strategic interests,” according to the New Yorker (3/24/22). Some suggested that this mindset should continue to animate American policy.

‘Albright was right’

CNN.com (3/24/22) published an opinion by Elmira Bayrasli that claimed, “The West would be wise to heed Madeleine Albright’s lessons on foreign policy.” She embraced Albright’s hawkish label, saying that “advocating the oppressed and actively upholding human rights… sometimes meant using the might of the American military.”

Hillary Clinton, whose “trailblazing” also obscured the deadly cost of her foreign policy initiatives, published a guest essay in the New York Times (3/25/22) under the headline “Madeleine Albright Warned Us, and She Was Right.” To Clinton, the world still needs Albright’s “clear-eyed view of a dangerous world, and her unstinting faith in… the unique power of the American idea.”

While some pieces were clear in calling her a hawk (e.g., Washington Post3/23/22), CNN (3/24/22) wrote, “It is a mistake to see Albright exclusively as a hawk,” because she sat on the board of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and supported the activities of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The Hill (3/24/22) also highlighted her support for these organizations, noting that for Albright, “democracy and human rights… were integral to American foreign policy.”

The NDI exists under the umbrella of the National Endowment for Democracy, a deceptively named organization that spends tens of millions of dollars annually promoting and installing US-friendly governments around the world. USAID has long been used as a front for intelligence and soft power initiatives. During Albright’s time in office, USAID was heavily involved in facilitating the further destruction of Haitian democracy, among a myriad of similar activities around the world.

These organizations have been well-documented as extensions of US power and bases for subversive activities, but this history is dismissed in favor of the government’s line that they are genuine conduits for democracy. The methods of empire have evolved, but the Albright coverage continues to obscure this fact. Regime change efforts can be recast as efforts to spread democracy around the world if the press refuses to scrutinize the official line.

NATO expansion

NATO expansion, a major initiative during Albright’s tenure, has come to the forefront of US discussion in recent months. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is in part a result of the decades-long expansion of the NATO military alliance, despite the warnings of US foreign policy veterans that the expansion was a “policy error of historic proportions.” (See FAIR.org3/4/22.)

In 1998, legendary diplomat George Kennan (New York Times5/2/98) called NATO expansion “a tragic mistake.” He predicted, “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies… and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.”

Kennan’s words have proven prophetic, but most articles on Albright’s passing wrote fondly of her role in NATO expansion and the accompanying anti-Russian politics. CNN.com (3/23/22), in an article headlined “Albright Predicted Putin’s Strategic Disaster in Ukraine,” declared that the former top diplomat “died just as the murderous historic forces that she had spent her career trying to quell are raging in Europe again.”

MSNBC.com (3/24/22) declared that “​​Madeleine Albright’s NATO Expansion Helped Keep Russia in Check.” Columnist Noah Rothman explained that “only the compelling deterrent power of counterforce stays the hand of land-hungry despots.”

The New Yorker (3/24/22) described NATO expansion as one of Albright’s “major achievements,” despite acknowledging that in the wake of the policy, “​​​​US interests are indeed threatened more than at any time in three decades by Russian aggression in Europe.”

Some pieces were more reflective. The Conversation (3/24/22) went into detail on her role in expanding NATO, acknowledging that “Albright’s curt dismissal of Russia’s security concerns might seem to have been ill-judged… in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

A time for reflection

In the United States, political figures are merged with the culture of celebrity. Too many judge politicos by their force of personality or lines on their resume, rather than the material changes that occurred on their watch. The substantive history of US policymaking is rarely brought up, and political discussion remains surface-level and incomplete.

This celebrity culture is on full display whenever a venerated member of the Washington establishment passes away. We’ve seen similar soft media coverage after the deaths of George H.W. Bush (FAIR.org12/7/18), Colin Powell (FAIR.org, 10/28/21) and Donald Rumsfeld (FAIR.org, 7/2/21).

By now, the idea of the United States as the global policeman has been discredited enough to warrant at least some pushback in the corporate press. The passing of one of America’s leading interventionists should be a time for reflection. How did this person’s policies contribute to what is going on now?

Instead, the media decided to use Albright’s death to reinforce the myths and legitimize the policies that have led to so much destruction around the world.

April 18, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Breaking the Spell

The Holocaust: Myth and Reality, Overview of the book by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom

BY ANTONY C. BLACK • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 17, 2022

Heresy In the 21st Century

Never in my long journalistic career have I ever hesitated to put pen to paper – until now. Indeed, I have delayed writing this overview of Dr. Kollerstrom’s remarkable book for going on six years.[1] Up until now no subject had been too controversial, too sensitive, too beyond the pale as to warrant more than a passing moment’s consideration of consequences. But this is different. In some sixteen countries in Europe one can be put in prison for doing what I am doing now, or even for expressing ‘holocaust denialism’ on social media. In Germany some fifteen thousand people are tried each year for Thought Crime, i.e., for so-called ‘right-wing extremism’. Here in North America it is somewhat better; one merely risks losing one’s job, friends and family – and possibly being blacklisted as a writer from virtually every venue one might have formerly been associated with. No small potatoes.

Dr. Kollerstrom, himself, stumbled rather more naively into this punitive quagmire in 2008 when, after merely reviewing a scientific paper analyzing samples taken from the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, – a paper authored by one Germar Rudolf, a young scientist working at the time at the Max Planck Institute – he found himself summarily dismissed from his erstwhile position as historian and philosopher of science at University College, London (UCL), “the sole member of staff…ever to have been expelled for ideological reasons”. As he recounts,

“I became ethically damned, thrown out of polite, decent groups, banned from forums and denounced in newspapers…..I felt as if some Mark of Cain had been branded onto my forehead. I had done something so awful that we could not even discuss the matter. The Medieval crime of Heresy was back alive and well…”

Heresy, of course, implicates the notion of taboo, and what a society makes taboo is what it feels to be sacred, and what is sacred is beyond question. When dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, then, we are, Kollerstrom assures us, dealing not with historical science, but, essentially, with a religion; the Holo-religion. And as the author repeatedly points out, “There can be no science where doubt is prohibited.”

Of Soap and Lampshades

Before diving into the inky abyss of the various technical strands of argument involving documentary archives, archaeology, chemistry, etc., it behooves us first to take a bird’s eye view of the general evidentiary landscape, this both to assuage immediate curiosity, and to lend a certain clarity and coherence to the narrative.

But before even embarking on that perspectival journey, let me ask a question.

Do you, dear reader, believe that during the Second World War the Nazis plumbed the very depths of human depravity by rendering human fat into soap, of sewing human skin into lampshades and gloves and all manner of similar nightmare horrors? If you do, you would not be alone. Like many others, I believed it – and I confess, completely blindly – all of my life. But I was wrong. If you believe such, you would be wrong. It is not true. It never happened. You can take it to the bank, it is a total myth. And this conclusion is not just one reached by so-called ‘revisionist’ authors, but is rather a simple matter of documented fact admitted to and affirmed by the orthodox holo-historians themselves, e.g., the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.

It is true that during the Nuremberg Trials such alleged items were displayed, but over the years they were all systematically debunked, i.e., found to be made of non-human animal materials, such that, as I say, no orthodox holo-historian maintains the validity of any of them anymore. Now, a critical mind, a curious mind is then led ineluctably to the follow-up query: To wit, if that isn’t true, then what else might not be true that I have been told, and that I have believed, all of my life? And this is where Dr. Kollerstrom – amongst others, naturally – bids us listen to the contrarian general case. But, then, what exactly is that case?

In a nutshell, the author is arguing that the Nazi concentration camps (some in Germany itself, most of the rest in Poland) were slave labour camps – though some of them were, as we’ll see, only temporary transit camps – whose unfortunate inmates were used in the grim service of the German war effort.[2]

Auschwitz, for instance, was located right next door to the large Buna-Monowitz industrial plant run by I.G. Farben, and which produced (from coal) much of the Reich’s synthetic oil and rubber, and without which the German war machine would have ground to a screeching halt – and whose labor force was sourced from the Auschwitz concentration camp itself. Some of them (the Aktion Reinhardt camps) were also part and parcel of a general policy established at the infamous Wannsee conference in January 20, 1942 for the systematic deportation ‘to the east’ of populations of ‘undesirables’ including Jews, Roma, communists and so forth, who were to be deposited east of the Urals once the Soviet Union had been, as the Germans confidently expected, quickly vanquished by the, up until then, entirely successful German war machine. Thus, the term ‘Endlosung’, which has been tendentiously interpreted by the orthodox holo-historians to mean, ‘final solution’, really means ‘end’ or ‘goal’ – in this case, deportation to the east, but which action was thwarted by the unexpected resistance to, and, of course, eventual failure of Operation Barbarossa, i.e., the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

But what these camps were not, according to Kollerstrom, were monstrous extermination factories that took in train loads of human beings and simply ground them up into human corpses. This image, he maintains, is a brutal and inhuman legacy that has come to haunt the Western imagination and form the foundation of a demented sacred myth that has, along with ancillary myths, come to underpin a society based on UnTruth – we are, he says, the The People of the Lie – and which has also expediently come to serve American and Western imperial interests in their truly monstrous culture of ‘endless war’.

None of this, of course, is to condone or fail to recognize the horror and injustice of the systematic detainment of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in slave labor camps where typhus and other diseases ran rampant, and where, if not systematic killings, then certainly sporadic brutalities would have taken place. But, again, they were not, as we have been assured all of our lives, mere factories for processing humans into corpses.

So there you have it, the ‘case’. But what of the evidence?

To begin with there is the, strangely, well-documented fact that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever of any ‘plan’ by the Nazis to systematically exterminate millions of human beings. Thus, of the vast corpus of surviving documents from the Third Reich, there is not one scrap of evidence indicating any such plan; no proclamations, orders, radio transcripts, memos, memoirs – nothing at all. As Kollerstrom says, we are left believing that the engineering and operation of this vast conspiracy was conducted entirely through some form of “telepathy”.

Moreover, and contrary to popular understanding, the Wannsee conference made no mention of any such plan. Holo-historians have, instead, been forced to ‘interpret’ certain ‘code words’ from the conference as meaning other than their dictionary meaning. (Here Kollerstrom reminds the reader that it is not for the historian to impose meaning on the data, but rather to let the data speak for themselves.) Nor is there even a snippet of evidence of either a plan or anything at all to do with ‘extermination’ from the recently released, voluminous diaries of both Himmler and Goebbels. Additionally, the British historian, David Irving in his book, ‘Hitler’s War’, based entirely on primary source material, concluded that Hitler, himself, knew of no such plan (a conclusion, amongst others, which landed Irving in the docket and, like Kollerstrom, condemned to eternal damnation throughout Western society, media and academia.)

Then there is the dean of orthodox holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, author of the supposedly-definitive, three volume history of the Holocaust, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, who was forced by defense counsel at the 1985 Ernst Zundel trial to admit under oath that there was no documentary evidence – not one iota – of any alleged gassings of human beings by the Nazis! The latter fact is also backed-up, as we shall see later, by the Bad Arolsen Archives (which comprise some thirty million documents to do with the camps and are considered the pre-eminent repository on these matters) whose curators released a statement in 2007 saying that they had no evidence – not one document – that suggested any deaths by gassing.

But, then, what of the physical structure of the ‘gas chambers’ themselves? Here, according to Kollerstrom, the evidence is definitive: they could not have been ‘gas chambers’ (i.e., they really were showers) both because their structures (many parts of which have been fraudulently reconstructed post-war) are ludicrously permeable, and because chemical analysis reveals there is no hydrogen cyanide in their walls – whereas the walls of the small delousing chambers used to disinfect the inmates’ clothes, and which everyone agrees were used for this purpose (despite the obvious contradiction of such in an ‘extermination’ camp), are chocker-block full of hydrogen cyanide.

But what of the ‘six million’? Merely a longstanding symbolic meme that represented the traditional number of Jews in Europe and for which references for go back at least a half century prior to the ‘Holocaust’. There were no systematic attempts made nor scientific surveys done at Nuremberg to determine the numbers who died in the camps during the war nor could there have been in the timeframe before which the trials began. Moreover, the Auschwitz Museum itself released a statement in 1989 downgrading the ‘four million’ supposedly killed at Auschwitz to ‘one million’, but which revelation was never factored even then into the official count. Later, as we shall see, the Soviet ‘Death Books’ for Auschwitz became available following the fall of the Soviet Union showing that only some seventy thousand people (approximately half of them Jews) had died at Auschwitz – almost all from typhus – a number which, just happens to coincide with the numbers in the Arolsen Archives.

But what about all the ‘pictures’? The iconic pictures of piles of corpses shown de rigueur in every textbook are from Bergen-Belsen and are known to be victims of typhus, i.e., they were not victims of ‘gas chambers’ – but which photos continue to be paraded to this day as ‘gassing’ victims despite this transparent and matter-of-public-record falsification of documented fact. What are also never shown are the many extant photographs of hail and hearty inmates taken when the camps were liberated by Soviet and Allied forces.

But certainly the ‘eyewitness’ accounts are definitive? Hardly. Most of the core ‘autobiographies’ have been shown to be fakes, and the rest are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour. Moreover, there has arisen an entire cottage industry of fake ‘eyewitness’ accounts and which are part and parcel of a much larger enterprise. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the ‘Holocaust’ is big business. Indeed, there is strong evidence, as we shall see later, that even such famous holo-biographies as that of Elie Wiesel are completely fraudulent. There are also numerous accounts, again which we will soon examine, by quite renowned individuals countering the official ‘Holocaust’ narrative but which continue to be routinely and entirely ignored and suppressed.

Okay, but what about the ‘confession’ of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz and the key witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials? We learn from Kollerstrom of evidence that came to light in the mid-1980s that Hoss had been “tortured for three days and nights by a British hit team” prior to his confession. And that, in any case, there are blatant contradictions in his tortured testimony that demonstrate that he was simply making up what his prosecutors / persecutors wanted to hear. Indeed, threats of either capital punishment or long prison sentences were the overarching context for the rest of the rank-and-file ‘confessions’ in a military tribunal by the victors that accepted as a pre-determined fact the reality of the ‘extermination’ thesis and denial of which could not only not be used as a defense position (a common feature, by the way, of today’s infamous international kangaroo courts / ‘war crimes tribunals’)[3] – but which legal tactic guaranteed one’s conviction! Accordingly, most defendants chose the pragmatic stance of accepting the prosecution ‘thesis’ which opened the door to a lenient plea bargain.

Anyways, enough of the cursory overview. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The ‘Six Million’

A few months following the liberation and occupation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in January, 1945, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced the staggering total of some four million people who had died in the camp. This figure was quickly integrated into the Nuremberg Trials without further ado. But then in 1989, the so-called ‘Death Books’ were released by Soviet President Gorbachev. These documents, which had been captured by the Soviets from Auschwitz, consisted of some 46 volumes cataloguing the individual death certificates of those who had died at Auschwitz – of some 69,000 individuals. Not four million, but sixty-nine thousand – and of whom about twenty-nine thousand were Jews, with the rest comprising a mixture of other ethnic groups and nationalities. We can only speculate as to the whys and wherefores relating to the initial, grossly exaggerated figures, though it hardly stretches the imagination to suppose that, having just lost upwards of twenty-seven million of their countrymen to the German invaders, the Soviets might not have been in a particularly objective, scientific mood, but rather in a propagandistic one.

Nevertheless, the ‘Death Books of Auschwitz’ constitute, en masse, a primary source document.

Another repository of primary source material are the Arolsen Archives, also known as the International Tracing Service, located in Bad Arolsen, in North Germany, and which are run by the International Red Cross. The latter comprises some thirty million files relating to sixteen of the camps in both Germany and Poland. These are considered the preeminent – and objective – data-base relating to the camps.

I say ‘objective’ as the rather more infamous Yad Vashem Museum archives in Israel are considerably less objective. Many of the deaths recorded there are simply taken from deportation lists and, to boot, include deaths before, during and even after the end of the war. Moreover, anyone can simply fill out a form online claiming to be a ‘victim of the Holocaust’ – a surviving victim obviously or perhaps a relative of such – without any documentation whatsoever. There is, thus, nothing to prevent multiple or fraudulent entries, and there is, as we shall comment on further in a bit, the ulterior motivational issue of filing so as to then make a claim for compensation against the German government. As such, the ‘archives’ from Yad Vashem are considered, at least by revisionist holo-historians, to be essentially worthless.

Returning to the Arolsen Archives. In the year 1979 the curators released a figure for the casualties from fifteen of the camps, and which amounted to a total of some 271,000 individuals. Then in 1984 they released a total mortality figure for sixteen of the camps which came to 282,000. These deaths represent all of the deaths in the camps excepting those of the Aktion Reinhardt camps (which comprise Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), which latter were considered to be mere transit camps – but which we shall discuss later on in relation to the archaeological controversy surrounding them. Both the ‘Death Books’ and the Arolsen archives largely agree on the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz, some 30,000 in all – representing less than half the total deaths. Needless to say, these sorts of figures did not go over well in a country, Germany, that had ruled holocaust denialism to be a criminal offense. Accordingly, and as Kollerstrom relates,

“No 21st century statement has ever come out of the Arolsen Archives concerning their total figures. It would just be too risky: the criminal offense of ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in Germany includes, ‘downplaying or trivializing the crimes of National-Socialism’. That law does not specify what exactly would constitute those crimes! Not surprisingly, the Arolsen managers have not dared to make any such statement. (It may also be the case that they have received orders not to make any tallies any more…)”

Nevertheless, in 2006 the managers did release a statement relating to the numbers of those who had died of gassing: there were none, or rather, they had no records of there being any victims of gassing – at all. The ensuing controversy was enough for them to beat a hasty retreat and no further statements have been forthcoming. (We will not be so reticent, but soon discuss the matter thoroughly under the section on ‘science’.)

The official figures for total mortality in each of the camps, however, continue to fluctuate – often wildly, depending on which ‘eyewitness’ account or official pronouncement is prominent at the moment – but mostly downwardly. Thus, whereas the figures for Dachau right after the war numbered some 238,000 deaths, the total today stands at 20,600. This lowering by a factor of ten seems to be heading in the direction indicated by the primary source archives. But what then of the ‘six million’ figure? Surely the initial ‘four million’ proffered by the Soviets at Nuremberg would have played into the grand total. But why exactly ‘six’? Why not seven or eight – or five? And here the author begs us take note of a very peculiar fact: To wit, the undeniable prior existence of a longstanding meme involving precisely the ‘six million’ figure. As Kollerstrom relates,

“So, whence came that totemic number? It began in America around 1900 as a fundraising stunt, and then kept pulsing through the twentieth century like some Hellish mantra. Here are some 166 references, 1900 – 1945. They are overwhelmingly American. At the dawn of the 20th century, the ‘suffering’ of six million Jews became an argument in favour of the new Zionist project…. It helped fundraising, with the number being cited as the total number of Jews in Europe. During World War I it was always six million Jews who were starving, in need of rescue, etc.”

And thence the author dutifully lists 166 references. It is worth taking a brief gander at a few of them, just to get the feel of the matter:

  • 1906 – New York Times, 25 March 1906: “… the condition and future of Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews were made on March 12 in Berlin to the annual meeting of the Central Jewish Relief League of Germany by Dr. Paul Nathan… He left St. Petersburg with the firm conviction that the Russian Government’s studied policy for the “solution” of the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination.”
  • 1913 – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Ind.), 18 October 1913, page 4: “There are six million Jews in Russia and the government is anxious to annihilate them by methods that provoke protests from the civilized world.”
  • 1915 – New York Tribune, 14 October 1915: “What the Turks are doing to the Armenians is child’s play compared to what Russia is doing to six million Jews, her own subjects.”
  • 1918 – New York Times, 18 October 1918: “Six million Souls Will Need Help to Resume Normal Life When War Is Ended… Committee of American Jews Lays Plans for the Greatest Humanitarian Task in History… 6,000,000 Jews Need Help.”
  • 1919 – San Antonio Express, 9 April 1919, page 12: “At no other time in the history of the Jewish people has the need been so great as now. Six million of our brothers and sisters are dying of starvation. The entire race is threatened with extinction.”
  • 1921 – New York Times, 20 July 1921, page 2: “BEGS AMERICA SAVE 6,000,000 IN RUSSIA. Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre.”
  • 1926 – Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition, Vol. 1, 1926, page 145: “While there remain in Russia and Romania over six millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded…”
  • 1931 – The Montreal Gazette, 28 December 1931, page 25: “SIX MILLION JEWS FACE STARVATION,… FEARS CRISIS AT HAND… six million Jews in Eastern Europe face starvation, and even worse, during the coming winter.”

And so on and so forth, for 166 entries.

As mentioned earlier, no attempt was made at Nuremberg to factually determine the total number of people who had died in the camps during the war. Thus, as clearly affirmed by the French historian Vincent Reynouard, “At Nuremberg, no statistical survey was ever undertaken … to determine the number of missing Jews.” What the Trials did rely on (apart from Hoss’ testimony relating to Auschwitz only) was a statement given by SS agent Wilhelm Hottl who testified, on condition of his life being spared, that he had once heard such a story from Adolf Eichmann (attesting to the ‘six million’), in August 1944, but which Eichmann later denied. As Kollerstrom remarks, “That was all! And thereby the magic number came to infest all of our minds.”

We have briefly inspected two primary source documents, namely the ‘Auschwitz Death Books’ and the Arolsen Archives, but there are more.

In the mid-1990s the British Intelligence Decrypts from Bletchley Park were released. These documents comprise the radio intercepts from Auschwitz made possible by the famous breaking of the German Enigma code. The decrypts covered the crucial thirteen-month period from January, 1942 to the end of January, 1943. They record daily arrivals and departures of inmates, shipments of coal and coke etc. Expectant hands combed these priceless archives for what, it was thought, would undoubtedly reveal prima facie evidence of the great crime. It was, however, merely a great embarrassment when no such evidence was forthcoming. Not a crumb.

What these transcripts do speak to are the daily comings and goings of inmates to the giant Buna-Monowitz industrial plant just two miles east of Auschwitz. Thus, one entry records,

“The use of prisoners for war industries on a large scale is discussed below… the largest transference is the move of Jews to AUSCHWITZ for the synthetic rubber works. Another major movement is the transference of sick prisoners to DACHAU.”

They also mention a major outbreak of typhus in the summer of 1942 and measures to contain it. Thus, this quote from the January 1943 summary about Auschwitz,

“The Bunawerk is still employing 2210 men of whom 1100 are on the actual work. Jewish watchmakers are sent to SACHSENHAUSEN where they are urgently needed. Typhus cases continue to be reported although strenuous measures have been adopted and 36 cases were found among the new batch of prisoners on 22 Jan.”

But no evidence of mass killings.

Indeed, there is a fourth primary source archive, to do with the intact coke records from Auschwitz, but one which we shall cover in the next section.

Finally, the ‘six million’ number is not completely without import, as it does register, ironically, according to the author, as roughly the number of ‘holocaust survivors’ who have sued for indemnity claims from the German government post war. In fact, some 4.3 million claims have been paid out amounting to some one hundred billion deutschmarks. It is, then, worth noting at this point that, according to most revisionist authors, the number of Jews under German control in all of the occupied territories never numbered more than 4.5 million, though Kollerstrom sets the figure somewhat lower at 3.5 million.

Now, does this mean that the number of inmates who died in the camps was a ‘mere’ 300,000 or so? Not necessarily. The records from the Aktion Reinhardt camps, being mostly transit camps, have not been preserved and there would likely have been deaths that were not recorded. To give some further perspective on this matter and, possibly, to set some sort of upper bound to the numbers, I cite here yet another revisionist author, Peter Winter, who in his book, ‘The Six Million: Fact or Fiction’[4] cites a quote by Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the US State Department in the occupation forces in Germany for six years after the war, and who made this statement to the Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th, 1959:

“I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany… From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on the subject.”

The mention of ‘crematory’ is, just in passing, significant as most of the camps had them – just as many hospitals and prisons have them to this day. Thus, the mere fact of having crematoria does not in any way whatsoever speak to the notion of ‘gas chambers’. Indeed, for a camp like Auschwitz, situated as it was on swampy ground with a very high water-table, the few that it did have would have been indispensable in disposing of anyone who died there – but only within certain very limited bounds as we’ll see in coming to terms with how much fuel, effort and time it takes to cremate a body.

As for the total numbers, for the moment I think that we need be circumspect and say that, with our present knowledge, these likely range somewhere between 300,000 to perhaps twice that – and which figures would include, of course, all inmates, not just Jews. It would be nice as Kollerstrom points out to be able to do further research on this matter, but given that access to the relevant archives is, effectively, prohibited, and where even attempting to do so is considered a crime or invites career suicide, the prospects for such are, at present, hardly sanguine.

Also, and to lend some perspective on this ‘numbers game’, I reference my own journalistic experience in researching and writing about more modern conflicts. Thus, one of my very first essays as a young, independent journalist was for the Toronto Star in which article I discussed the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia and in which I demolished the official figure of ‘two million’ victims – which yet stands to this day – showing that it arose from just one Italian journalist who later recanted the figure! The true numbers were more likely in the 400,000 range with US propagandists having simply lumped onto the Khmer Rouge scorecard the numbers who died from starvation due to the US ‘secret bombing of Cambodia’ itself. But, again, no one really knows for certain. Just as no one really seems to know how many died in the Korean or Vietnam Wars, or the great US-backed Indonesian massacre of 1965 (the ‘year of living dangerously’ indeed). Figures routinely cited regarding those conflicts vary, depending on the source, literally over millions of human beings!

The same is true today regarding Iraq and other very recent, Western imperial conflicts (dare we all them ‘holocausts’?). It is certainly important to attempt to establish firm figures, both as these represent individual human lives lost, and as these figures are opportunistically used for ideological purposes. But we must, at the end of the day, remain humble before the task set us and, oft as not, be willing to live with uncertainty – whilst yet continuing to press our investigations further.

With that caveat, let us continue with our present inquiry.

In the introduction to ‘Breaking the Spell’, the author reminds us that the ‘Holocaust’ represents a “triune” thesis, i.e., involving a totemic number (the ‘six million’), a diabolical ‘plan’ (to deliberately exterminate an entire ethnic group, the Jews) – and a ruthless ‘methodology’ (‘gassing’ using the infamous ‘Zyklon B’). We have addressed the first two of these sub-theses, and it is to the third that we now turn our investigative attention.

Science Goes to Auschwitz

As Kollerstrom recounts, a turning point in the history of Holocaust Revisionism came in 1985 when the Canadian, Ernst Zundel, was charged with publishing the best-selling booklet, ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’. At his trial he was fortunate, according to the author, to be assisted by the ‘maestro of modern Revisionism’, Robert Faurisson, and together they sought the assistance of the, then, dean of American execution technology, Fred Leuchter, whose especial expertise was in gas chamber design.

In February of 1988, Leuchter was dispatched by Zundel to travel to Auschwitz/Birkenau (and Majdanek) where he, first, studied the archives of the Auschwitz Museum to learn exactly where the alleged ‘gas chambers’ were located; second, inspected the structures through the lens of his own expertise on gassing; and, finally, collected (illegally) thirty or so samples from the walls of the ‘gas chambers’ and from random ancillary structures at Auschwitz, and one sample from one of the much smaller delousing chambers. These samples were then submitted, upon his return, to a firm, Alpha Analytical Laboratories (who had no knowledge of where the samples had come from and who were horrified when they eventually found out), to be analyzed for traces of iron cyanide.

The latter compound is particularly relevant here as hydrogen cyanide is normally fairly short lived on surfaces – unless it happens to bind to iron whence it becomes very long lived, and which also, over time, turns into a bright, turquoise blue, also known as ‘iron blue’. Now, what is evident even to this day throughout many of the camps is the ‘iron blue’ colouring of many of the delousing chambers which is sufficiently dense enough as to, in many cases (where these chambers are made of brick), have permeated right through to the exterior walls and are, thus, clearly visible to the untutored eye. None of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz/Birkenau, however, sport this ‘iron blue’, and true to this tell-tale sign (or rather lack of), none of the samples from the ‘gas chambers’ showed anything more than residual traces of cyanide – whereas the delousing chamber sample was chocker-block full of the stuff. Leuchter also wrote up his survey of the alleged gas chambers concluding that they could not, by any stretch of the imagination, have acted as such as they were spectacularly unsuited for the purpose being clearly and ridiculously leaky to gas.

This, the ‘Leuchter Report’, was published in May of 1988, and it shone the spotlight, for the first time, on the issue of the delousing chambers. As Kollerstrom remarks, “prior to Fred’s Report the human race had merely been disinformed that Zyklon gas = human mass murder.”

The author also comments on Leuchter’s fate regarding his foray into this controversial arena,

“Leuchter should have been knighted for his service to humanity: Sir Fred. But, instead, he had his career terminated, was thrown out of various places, was ethically damned, and he ended up driving a school bus – as he informed me.”

Nevertheless, in 1991 the Report caught the eye of a brilliant young chemist, Germar Rudolf, who was, at the time studying for his PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For Rudolf, the “thorn of doubt” planted in his mind upon reading the Report led he and two colleagues to creep over to Auschwitz and purloin another thirty or so samples from both the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ and from the smaller delousing chambers (and along the way photographing exactly where, how and what they did). The results matched and confirmed those of Leuchter’s, there being a two-thousand-fold differential between the samples taken from the delousing chambers versus the ‘gas chambers’. (Just to note, that there was any ferrocyanide in the walls of the showers, aka ‘gas chambers’, at all – though generally less than 1 ppm – was due to the well-documented fact that many of the camp’s other rooms and enclosures were occasionally sprayed with Zyklon B as part of routine disinfection protocols, and which samples also showed the equal, if very low, levels of cyanide.)

Here Kollerstrom, himself an historian of science, emphasizes an important methodological point. To wit,

“Both the Leuchter and Rudolph reports had their weaknesses, and it is only by integrating the two together – which we can do because their methods were identical – that one attains a firm and clear basis for rational debate.”

The ensuing sequence of events following the publication, first in 1992 of a preliminary report, and then in 1993 of his historic 120-page document, the Rudolf Report, traced the per usual arc of personal ruination that we are, by now, all too familiar with. Rudolf had his career terminated and, eventually, in 2007, found himself, bound in chains, in a German court where he was duly sentenced to four years in prison. As Kollerstom intones once again, “Science cannot exist where doubt is prohibited, let’s be clear about that.”

As a follow-up to these investigations, a chemist-engineer, Dan Desjardins subsequently retraced both Leuchter’s and Rudolf’s steps through Auschwitz so that, as Kollerstrom says, we have good ‘corroboration as regards where the samples came from.’

It is further worth noting at this juncture – and here I tag-team once again with author Peter Winter – that, “The parallels between the real delousing station and the alleged ‘human gas chambers’ are so close that it is clear the homicidal gas chamber story was developed from the real clothing delousing system.”

Turning now to yet another primary source archive, one that I alluded to earlier, i.e., the intact coke records from Auschwitz/Birkenau (the latter camp, just by the by, and also known as Auschwitz II, being located in the immediate environs of Auschwitz I), we find that the amount of coke that would have been necessary to burn hundreds of thousands of bodies simply did not exist. Here Kollerstrom directs us to the dense tome, ‘Dissecting the Holocaust’,[5] edited by Germar Rudolf in which an essay by the meticulous investigator Carlo Mattogno reviews the matter.

Mattogno informs us that it “normally takes 88 to 110 lbs [of coke to cremate] a body.” After accounting for various factors (e.g., how many cremation furnaces are being fired together etc.) he concludes that these coke deliveries, “prove indisputably that only the bodies of the inmates who had died of natural causes could be cremated in the crematoria. Therefore, no mass murders took place in Auschwitz and Birkenau in the time from March to October 1943!”

According to Kollerstrom, Fred Leuchter’s Report also included a similar computation whilst arriving at the same conclusion. Leuchter further noted that the death count for Auschwitz peaked exactly ‘during the worst periods of the typhus epidemic in 1942 and 1943.’ The latter reference is important because it supports the argument – and all the evidence – that the infamous Zyklon B was deployed to the camps precisely to address the typhus outbreaks that began about this time. Additional argument that Zyklon B was not intended as a ‘extermination’ weapon, but merely as what the Nazis said it was for, i.e., disinfestation, is to be found in two related facts. To wit, the hydrogen cyanide concoction was sent to all of the camps, not just to those designated, today, as ‘extermination camps’ – the latter of which, by the way amount only to some six camps in total. Moreover, Zyklon B was discontinued in late 1944 to be replaced by the new-fangled delousing agent, DDT, and which, of course, no one has ever claimed was used for killing people. Kollerstrom notes additionally that microwave disinfestation technology was introduced by the Germans in the camps very late in the war – a technology which became the basis for the, now, ubiquitous microwave oven – though, to date, no ‘eyewitness’ account of being cooked to death by microwaves has been forthcoming.

To conclude this section, it is apropos to remark on the salient fact of the general reluctance by orthodox historiography to introduce such elementary forensic science to this subject. Indeed, that it is so riven with taboo testifies once more to the notion that, in dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, we are no longer in the realm of science, but of sacred myth and of religion. Nevertheless, let us continue our obdurate ways and conduct a brief review of the science as it pertains to some of the other concentration camps.

Of Archaeology, Diesel and Bonfires

In saying that there has been a decided reluctance to engage forensic science in the service of ‘proving’ the Holocaust does not mean that there have been no such attempts.

In 1999, at Treblinka, for example, a team of archaeological researchers led by Australian, Richard Krege, used ground-penetrating radar to try and locate the remains of the officially-estimated 800,000 bodies supposedly buried there. This should not have been difficult as the area in which these remains were allegedly contained covered a relatively miniscule area of just a few hectares. Instead, what the team found was – nothing at all. They found no evidence consistent with the burying of hundreds of thousands of bodies, and, indeed, no evidence of any soil disturbance whatsoever. Thus, as Krege said in a later report,

“From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the campsite. We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this layering is massively disturbed or missing altogether.” He goes on to say,

“Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated towards the end of the Treblinka’s camp’s use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed.”

Naturally, this finding did not sit well with orthodoxy and so in 2010 another team led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls from Staffordshire University conducted their own ground radar survey – and found nothing either. But that’s not what they concluded and later trumpeted to the BBC to whom they claimed to have found a few “pits”. No remains, no large-scale stratigraphic disturbance, just a few “pits”. As if not convinced by her own rhetoric on the matter, Colls returned to Treblinka in 2013 with colleague Ivar Shute where they proceeded to embarrass themselves – having had their findings broadcast on TV documentaries aired both by the BBC and by the Smithsonian channel in the US – by claiming (and here I reference Peter Winter’s work again) to have found a piece of porcelain with a Star of David on it, but which later turned out to be a ‘pierced mullet star’ that just happened to be the brand mark of a famous porcelain factory in Poland.

It is also noteworthy that these researchers, having found nothing more than a few bone fragments – which, without further ado, they claimed were part of “three mass graves” – and a few pieces from a wooden foundation, both items of which one might expect to find in a transit camp such as Treblinka was known to be, and having misidentified a ‘key piece of evidence’, were, nonetheless, given the royal treatment by the media and their work exalted as some sort of definitive proof of the case. Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but rather all puffery and nonsense. No bodies, no fragments of skeletons, no human ashes, no wood ashes and no ground irregularities whatsoever had been called forth by their investigations – investigations which, tellingly, involved no excavations at the site, as this, they lamely claimed, “would be a violation of Jewish law”.

But, then, the entire Treblinka ‘extermination’ thesis was terminally threadbare from the start. Thus, to begin with, the means proffered of killing hundreds of thousands at Treblinka was by steam (even the official account has no ‘gas chambers’ at Treblinka); they had all been ‘steamed like lobsters to their deaths’. According to Kollerstrom, “that phase of the narrative didn’t last too long, and soon the cause of death settled down to being diesel exhaust.” Now, the problem here is that it was first pointed out by Fritz Berg in 1983, and later affirmed in 1992 by Walter Luffl, the President of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Engineers, that mass murder by gassing with diesel fumes is a virtual impossibility. As such the amount of carbon monoxide in diesel fumes is very low (almost always much less than 1% and often no more than 0.1%) and that being subjected to diesel fumes in an enclosed room, even for a full hour, results, for most people, in merely a bad headache, though people with weak hearts might possibly succumb over the course of that timeframe. The key problem, however, is that all of the ‘eyewitness’ accounts – all of them – attest to the notion that death occurred within ten to twenty minutes.

The official narrative was beginning to strain at the seams, especially the failure to find any real prima facie evidence of bodies. No worries. As already mentioned, this part of the story was filled in by having all the bodies, all 800,000 of them, dug up, and burned. (One imagines this might have been a wee problem for the mere twenty or thirty SS administrative staff and one hundred or so Ukrainian guards stationed there, but perhaps they were uber-diligent.) Now it takes about 150 kg (over 300 lbs) of wood to burn just one body and a simple computation reckons the amount of wood needed to burn 800,000 bodies is, well, simply staggering. And, of course, no such wood ashes, even a remote trace of them, have ever been found at Treblinka. As Kollerstrom remarks at this point,

“Treblinka is the site of not one but two awesome Holo-miracles: the miraculous gassing of 800,000 Jews using a non-lethal gas, and then the miraculous burning of some 800,000 Jewish corpses in huge outdoor pyres, thereby igniting the Holo-caust (total-fiery) mythos with its inextinguishably hellish meaning. Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls and her Birmingham science team were indeed treading on hallowed ground, with so many hundreds of thousands of Jews (not) buried there.”

Indeed, the same BBC program that featured Coll et al, ‘casually alluded to “Huge open burning pits of flesh” – the original Holo-hoax image!’ We will come to more such reminiscences of ‘burning and boiling blood’ in the next section. Suffice it to say for now that blood, and human bodies, do not simply burn by themselves, i.e., not without added fuel.

We could go on and look at similar holo-stories and similar demystifying encounters with science (including wildly fluctuating death counts, missing-in-action archaeological evidence, and yet ever more improbable killing methodologies) for many of the other camps including Sobibor, Chelmo, Majdanek, and Belzec. Time and space humble us however, and so we are led to the final strand of our investigation: the ever popular, always entertaining, ‘eyewitness’ testimony.

Fairy Tales From Hell

Let us begin here by reminding the reader of what was said at the outset about the infamous pictures from Bergen-Belsen – the ones that are taken as being symbolic of the entire Holocaust narrative itself; they are real, but they are, at the same time, misrepresentations.

Bergen-Belsen, located in northwestern Germany, was originally a prisoner of war camp that was turned into a concentration camp in 1943. The camp was liberated by British soldiers on April 15, 1945 who just happened to have been accompanied by a large contingent of journalists. It is likely due to the presence of these real eyewitnesses that it has never been claimed that there were ‘gas chambers’ at Bergen-Belsen. However, this did not stop subsequent Western media from portraying the pictures taken there of the thousands of emaciated bodies, of having been gassing victims. The latter’s deaths, it is pertinent to note, resulted from an outbreak of typhus in the closing stages of the war which itself was largely due to the Allied bombing that had fatally disrupted German infrastructure and which had prevented the re-supplying of both food and Zyklon B to many of the camps. [In fact, the camp was so infested with typhus that the British were eventually forced to burn it to the ground.]

Here we have the entire ‘extermination’ thesis seemingly turned on its head; a proposition that might at first blush seem outlandish did we not have yet another primary source document to support it. As Kollerstrom points out,

“Two and half million tons of US/UK bombs destroyed infrastructure and hope. The camps became death camps. We get a glimpse of the unfolding catastrophe from the Red Cross Report [published in 1948]… Thus the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing… and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against the ‘barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies’… In dealing with the Red Cross’ comprehensive three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis-Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report never hints at any human gas chambers.”

And what I neglected to mention earlier in regard to the British Intel Decrypts was that, in August 1943, the head of the British Psychological Warfare Executive, Victor Cavendish-Bentick, sent a secret telegram from the Foreign Office to both Washington and Moscow saying, effectively, that despite the rumours they were hearing, there was not the slightest evidence to support the notion that gas chambers were being utilized to kill anyone let alone millions of people.

Also mentioned prior is the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoss, whose torture-extracted testimony was a pillar for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Apart from the later evidence attesting to his torture, many key components of his testimony were, even at the time known to be falsified – or should have been for any other than a kangaroo court – as they contradicted known, contemporary facts regarding the camps themselves. Thus, Hoss gave affidavit to the court that he had visited Treblinka in June of 1941, where, he said, 80,000 Jews had been “liquidated” in the previous six months. The problem with all this is that Treblinka did not start receiving Jews until late July, 1942. In short, his ‘eyewitness’ account is a whole year and half too early! Indeed, none of the transit camps, including Sobibor and Belzec, even started up until May of 1942. To further complicate the lives of future orthodox holo-historians was Hoss’ insistence that diesel was used as the means of killing – and which, once such methodology was later discovered to be highly improbable if not impossible, was to bedevil the official narrative ever after as abandoning it meant abandoning Hoss’ testimony in its entirety.

Then there is the esteemed Professor Paul Rassinier, a French historian, socialist and anti-Nazi who later became a resistance fighter, but who was eventually captured and imprisoned at Buchenwald. Rassinier survived the war after which he began his lifelong career of debunking the claims of gassing by fellow ‘eyewitnesses’. Kollerstrom cites a quote from one of Rassinier’s published reports which concluded:

“With regard to the gas chambers, the almost endless procession of false witnesses and of falsified documents, to which I have drawn the reader’s attention during this study, proves, nevertheless, one thing: never at any moment did the responsible authorities of the Third Reich intend to order – or in fact order – the extermination of the Jews in this or in any other manner.”

And then there is witness-for-the-defense, the distinguished pathologist, Charles Larson, “sent over by the US army in 1945 to inspect the piled-up corpses in the German labour camps at Dachau, Belsen etc., [who] steadfastly refused to declare that he had seen a pink-coloured corpse killed by cyanide.”

Did I fail to mention? There is yet one more tell-tale piece of forensic evidence attesting to the complete fallaciousness of the gassing thesis. This is the well documented fact that there are no records whatsoever – of pink corpses. It turns out that dying from hydrogen cyanide poisoning turns the body a bright pink hue – and there is no evidence of such having been seen, by anyone, ever. Apparently, none of the ‘eyewitnesses’ were pathologists.

But, then, dear reader, perhaps these are not the sort of eyewitness reports you might have been expecting. So, without further ado, let us get to those, though as the cast of characters here are legion we will have to content ourselves with but a few examples in order simply to capture the flavour of the matter.

Likely the most prominent ‘eyewitness’ account is that of Elie Wiesel whose 1958 book, Night, has sold more than ten million copies, and which eventually led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The problem with the book, apart from its patently hyperbolic narrative, is that it is almost certainly a completely fraudulent account. Thus, in 2009, a fellow Hungarian Jew, Nickolaus Gruner, after twenty years of researching the topic, issued this press release:

“Elie Wiesel A-7713 has never existed, and the man claiming himself to be ‘Elie Wiesel’ with the concentration camp number A-7713, knowing full well that this number belonged to someone else, is an imposter of the worst kind. For this statement, I, Nikolaus Gruner A-11104, have certified and written knowledge of.”

Gruner then went on to publish a book, ‘Stolen Identity A7713’, in which he provided detailed documentation obtained from the Auschwitz Museum archives which show that Lazar Wiesel, and whom Gruner knew, was the real bearer of that number. The former, according to Kollerstrom, was “born September 4, 1913, received the number and tattoo A-7713; as likewise his brother, Abraham, born Oct. 10, 1900, was given the adjacent number A-7712. That latter number is the one that Elie Wiesel claims belonged to his father Shlomo… No such registration records exist for Elie and his father: they are not there.”

Elie Wiesel refused to respond to a formal challenge by Gruner to appear before a Budapest court to combat these charges, just as he always refused to show anyone the alleged tattoo on his arms. But, then, one need only peruse some of the utterly fantastic claims in ‘Night’ to realize that something is seriously askew. As Kollerstrom relates,

“Having been written as early as 1958, Night does not feature any gas chambers! Instead of Zyklon, it has huge Moloch-type pits of burning babies… The wicked Nazis were unloading truckloads of little babies into the huge burning pits and the bodies were flammable. Human bodies are 70% water. They really don’t burn by themselves.

Here it is worth quoting from Night itself just to experience the tenor of the narrative:

“Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”

It is worth reminding the reader at this point that it is these sorts of utterly fantastic statements that characterize much of the ‘eyewitness’ testimonials, but whose uncritical acceptance by generations of readers is, rather, mere testimony to the credulity of the true-believer. Let us move on to our next witness.

On the title page of his memoirs (published in 1946), Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, featured an illustration purporting to be three Jewish inmates shot by the Nazis at Mauthausen. The picture shows the three prisoners tied to stakes and drooping in tragic, if highly dramatic poses, as they lay slumped and dead against the stakes. Wiesenthal claimed that he had “witnessed” the shootings. The problem here is that the tableaux portrayed was clearly lifted from a photograph from the June 11th 1945 edition of Life magazine where the exact same, and very unique, poses are shown of three German prisoners who had been executed as spies – this after having been caught wearing American uniforms whilst attempting to infiltrate Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Once, again, we find a supposedly impeccable ‘eyewitness’ blatantly lying and committing overt fraud, and which lends serious credibility issues to anything else he has to say.

One particularly influential Holocaust potboiler is Philip Muller’s, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers’, (1979) in which the hero claims to have been the ‘sole survivor of the murder operations’ at Auschwitz over three years. He too describes “the burning pits in which Jews were consumed”. This prize-winning best-seller is, according to Kollerstrom, ‘required reading in many Holocaust study courses’. The problem with it, however, is that it wasn’t written by Muller, but by ghost-writer Helmut Freitag who, in turn, had plagiarized it from an equally faked account by Miklos Nyiszli entitled, ‘Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account’ (1947). In that book Nyiszli blithely states that Auschwitz killed 20,000 people per day, every day, from 1940 to 1944 – which adds up to a cool 29 million dead! But, then, who’s counting? Certainly not the dean of Holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, as his supposedly authoritative, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, repeatedly quotes from it.

Let us finish off with one final testimonial, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’; though let me say at the outset here that this tiny deconstruction is meant in no way to impugn Anne herself. Rather the following is testament to just how far those who believe in the philosophy of the-ends-justify-the-means are willing to go.

To critical minds the ‘Diary’ was always somewhat suspect as there are passages, specifically those detailing a brief historical and political account of the German occupation of Holland, that are clearly not from the hand of a 13-year-old girl. This scepticism would later be borne out when it was shown, first in an Amsterdam court and then by a German criminal investigation, that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had, in fact, been the author of substantial parts of the diary, and who had used a ball point pen (not available during the war) to write them. Indeed, Otto Frank – who was treated for typhus at the hospital[6] at Auschwitz and survived the war (dying in 1980) – had, apparently, first published the book as a work of, in his own words, “fiction”, under the title, ‘The Annex: Diary Notes’. The title, ‘Diary of Anne Frank’, was given to the book by its first English publishers.

It is, finally, worth noting, and here I quote from Peter Winter,

“… that Anne Frank died of typhus and was not ‘gassed’. It is one of the horrific ironies that Anne Frank died due to a lack of Zyklon-B at Bergen-Belsen – and this lack was caused directly by the Allied bombing campaign. The real story of Anne Frank is tragic enough, but the cruel exploitation, exaggeration and faking of her diary by the Holocaust storytellers is a scandal of epic proportions.”

Virtually all of the other core ‘autobiographies’ have, as I mentioned at the outset, been shown to be fakes or gross exaggerations, and the rest of the individual testimonies are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour such that when confronted in a court of law by probing inquiry the ‘witnesses’ inevitably fall back on, ‘I heard’ or ‘someone told me’ or ‘It was common knowledge’ etc. It seems Professor Rassinier knew what he was about.

Final Thoughts

In writing a critique of this sort, that is, one that strikes at the heart of such a longstanding and sacred societal myth, such cannot help but conjure at some level, and at certain moments, a measure of doubt. Questions tickle the fancy. Am I wrong? Is the author wrong? Have we all just been seduced by a good story, a coherent but unknowingly flawed argument? And, indeed, if one is an honest person, the answer to those questions must be, ‘perhaps’.

Still, having crossed this bridge many times in my undistinguished muckraking career, I have settled upon a consolatory process of simply sitting back and reviewing the fundaments of the evidence and argument, their weight and measure, all rounded off and seasoned with a certain amount of intangible instinct – and coming to a reasoned decision. In the end, as Nietzsche was so fond of pointing out, we must act – on imperfect knowledge.

But I will confess that even were the Revisionist case eventually be proved to be wrong, and Orthodoxy prevail, I could only but smile and think of Ernst Mach who once said,

“Should these concepts turn out to be true, I shall not be ashamed to be the last one to believe.”

But if the Revisionist case is true, then it is not just the tragic victims of the camps themselves who have been so cynically used in a seventy-five- year game of Western and Zionist imperial propaganda; in a game of smoke and mirrors in the service of deflecting attention from many a real holocaust[7] – like Vietnam, or Indonesia or Iraq – under cover of a fake one; in a game of cruel irony where one historical fascism has been misrepresented and harnessed in the service of a future fascism. No, it is not just they, like Anne Frank herself, who have been so cruelly misused, but it is we, all of us, who have been played like suckers in one of the greatest swindles of all time; one that has warped our minds and souls not only into believing in fairy tale horrors that corrupt our very view of what it means to be human, but that has seduced us into a malignant and fatal self-righteousness where we have arrogantly come to believe that, as Carl Jung once wrote, “All evil lies just a few miles behind enemy lines.”

I hope at this juncture then, having become acquainted with some of the primary source documents, i.e., the Arolsen Archives, the Soviet ‘Death Books’, the Leuchter and Rudolf Reports, the three-volume 1948 Red Cross Report, the British Intel Decrypts, the counter-eyewitness testimony, the origins of the ‘six million’ meme etc., that any reasonable person would now entertain, at the very least, reasonable doubt on this subject. But, of course, in many parts of the world, reasonable doubt is not allowed. In much of Europe, doubt is prohibited by law. Here in North America doubt is not allowed by custom, by ingrained prejudice, and by enforced, widespread censorship.[8]

And perhaps, after all, this is the greatest outrage, for we have been told, yes, told – what we are to believe, and what we are not to believe, and that the matter is not open for discussion – at all. Case closed. Forever. No debate for you. As Dr. Kollerstrom pointedly asks,

“Who is in control of the past? Does somebody own it? Will they put you in jail if you disagree?”

Cast unto a dark, three-quarter century enchantment, the author enjoins us to wave the wand of reason, and break the spell.

Notes

[1] For those wishing to purchase and read the book, here is the link to the Castle Hill Publishing site (and which houses dozens of Revisionist works for those interested in pursuing this subject in more depth; the publishing company is run by Germar Rudolf himself): https://shop.codoh.com/book/breaking-the-spell-en/

[2] And which likely explains why the inmates were tattooed with numbers, as this would have made little sense if the latter were simply going to be killed.

[3] For a classic example of the such kangaroo tribunals see my article, ‘Hotel Propaganda: What Really Happened in Rwanda, circa 1994’ and which subsumes a discussion on the ICTR. Yet another is the similarly compromised, ICTY (the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia).

[4] For those wishing to read Winter’s version of matters – and which largely overlap with those found in Kollerstrom’s book – here is the link: https://thesixmillionfactorfiction.blogspot.com/ You can download this book for free as a PDF document.

[5] Here is the link to ‘Dissecting the Holocaust’, edited by Germar Rudolf (a rather weighty tome that includes a compendium of much more detailed essays by a dozen or so authors): https://shop.codoh.com/book/dissecting-the-holocaust-en/38/

[6] Not only did Auschwitz/Birkenau have a hospital with a dedicated surgical unit, but also a camp library with 45,000 volumes, six inmate orchestras, a kitchen and bakery, a theatre, a post office….and a swimming pool, the remains of which are clearly visible to this day.

[7] Indeed, there is substantive evidence that upwards of a million or so German prisoners of war died in the short few months at the end of the war at the hands of the Allies. The Canadian historian, James Bacque, investigates this in his book, ‘Other Losses’ (and which I may cover in a future essay). In particular, he proffers that in the vast open-air American prisoner of war camp alone, up to 900,000 died, and which deaths were covered up under the obscure bureaucratic heading of ‘other losses’. He further posits that, in this case, if not a ‘plan’, there is certainly evidence of a high-level policy of willful neglect that stemmed directly from Eisenhower himself.

[8] It is further worth noting here that none of these works are generally available either via conventional bookstores or through major online retailers. Indeed, Rudolph has written a small book on the subject entitled, ‘The Day Amazon Murdered History’, which recounts how, ‘in early 2017, a series of anonymous bomb threats against Jewish community centers occurred in the US fueling a campaign by Jewish groups to have all revisionist writings banned, falsely portraying them as anti-Semitic. Amazon complied and banned over a hundred works with dissenting viewpoints on the Holocaust. In April 2017 an Israeli Jew was arrested for having placed the false bomb threats, a paid “service” he had offered for years.’ Despite this revelation, the ban remains to this day.

April 18, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Does Covid-19 Contain Genetic Sequences From Snake Venom?

By Guy Hatchard | April 14, 2022

An article in Scientific American back in January 2020 reported:

“Snakes—the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra—may be the original source of the newly discovered coronavirus that has triggered an outbreak of a deadly infectious respiratory illness in China this winter.”

The article originated from a Chinese authored paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology on 22 January 2020 entitled Cross-species transmission of the newly identified coronavirus 2019-nCoV and said:

“Our findings suggest that 2019-nCoV has most similar genetic information with bat coronavirus and most similar codon usage bias with snake.“

The essence of the article was the supposition that Covid-19 made its way from snakes to bats and then to the Wuhan wet market, expressed as follows:

“An origin-unknown homologous recombination may have occurred within the spike glycoprotein of the 2019-nCoV… The squared euclidean distance indicates that the 2019-nCoV and snakes from China have the highest similarity in synonymous codon usage bias compared to those of bat, bird, Marmota, human, Manis, and hedgehog”

This idea subsequently gained little traction, because of the improbability of such a train of interspecies transfer, and because public discussion of its conclusions was vigorously suppressed by fact checkers.

The suggestion of the authors to do more research disappeared from view. It has been largely forgotten until now.

Were Some of These Recombined Genetic Sequences From Snakes?

Recent discussion of the origin of the Covid-19 spike protein has suggested that it could be the result of recombinant techniques in the laboratory which joined a number of genetic sequences together as part of research to develop deadly pathogens, and then investigate possible cures.

A paper published in F1000Research entitled Toxin-like peptides in plasma, urine, and faecal samples from COVID-19 patients in April 2020 concluded that:

“The presence of toxin-like peptides… suggests a possible association between COVID-19 disease and the release in the body of (oligo-)peptides almost identical to toxic components of venoms from animals…. The presence of these peptides opens new scenarios on the aetiology of the COVID-19 clinical symptoms observed up to now, including neurological manifestations.”

What are Some of the Neurological Effects of Snake Venom?

A study published in 2002 entitled Cardiac Involvement in Snake Bite” reports:

“Myocardial involvement is seen on occasions and may rarely contribute to morbidity and mortality. ECG changes are usually transient but when persistent they are attributed to direct myocardial damage due to the toxin.”

Other reported neurological effects of snake bite include:

  • pro and anticoagulant activity leading to ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke,
  • muscle paralysis through inhibition of neuromuscular transmission leading to respiratory failure.

All of these neurological, thrombotic, and cardiac effects are similar to reported adverse effects of both Covid infection and mRNA vaccination.

Is Covid-19 a Recombination of a Virus and a Toxin?

mRNA vaccines specifically train the human physiology to produce the suspect spike protein. Did this expose vaccine recipients to a toxin? It appears this might be the case.

In which case, the essential design of the mRNA vaccine would have been a grave error. It was training the physiology to produce a toxin.

These discussions are speculative. We now know that early genetic sequences of Covid-19 appear to have been suppressed by NIH on the instructions of the Wuhan Virology Lab.

Was the genetic similarity between snake genetics and Covid-19 too explosive to admit, whether they came from snakes or not? Certainly, this possibility should have been investigated vigorously.

It might have led to an understanding of the origins of Covid, but more importantly, it might have led to more effective treatments for Covid.

It might also have shed light on the source of the wide range of neurotoxic effects of both Covid and mRNA vaccination.

Whatever the eventual conclusion of further investigative research: biotechnology experimentation to research and develop pathogens and toxins must stop now. It amounts to a ticking time bomb.

April 16, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Pfizer to Ask FDA to Allow 3rd COVID Shot for Healthy 5- to 11-Year-Olds, Based on Study of 140 Kids

By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | April 14, 2022

Pfizer and BioNTech today said they plan to apply for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of a COVID-19 booster dose for healthy 5- to 11-year-olds based on results of a small study that has not been published or analyzed by independent experts.

The companies also plan to request authorization from the European Medicines Agency and other regulatory agencies around the world as soon as possible.

Pfizer said in a press release the third dose of its vaccine produced significant protection against the Omicron variant in children 5 to 11 in a small Phase 2/3 clinical trial.

The study was based on data from only 140 children 5 through 11 years old who received a booster dose six months after the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine as part of the primary series.

A closer look at 30 children showed a 36-fold increase in virus-fighting antibodies — levels high enough to fight the Omicron variant, ABC News reported.

Pfizer claimed the third dose was “well tolerated with no new safety signals observed.”

Although Pfizer said more than 10,000 children under the age of 12 have participated in clinical trials investigating Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, only 140 were selected for the study forming the basis for the company’s EUA request.

Commenting on the news, Dr. Brian Hooker said, “The clinical trial used to support the notion of a COVID-19 booster for 5- to 11-year-olds is entirely inadequate to make any such recommendation.”

Hooker, chief science advisor at Children’s Health Defense (CHD), added:

“This small-scale, limited-time trial contains only 140 patients, which is not sufficiently sized to assess vaccine adverse events at all, especially rarer injuries such as the devastating medical maladies sustained by Maddie de Garay — an adolescent injured in the original Pfizer clinical trial.”

Hooker said he was also concerned there are “no data on the prevention of COVID-19 infection, only neutralizing antibody titers, which are not necessarily predictive of transmission and severity of the disease.”

Dr. Liz Mumper, a pediatrician, said, “Once again, Pfizer does science by press release.” Mumper said the rise in antibody titers is just one small piece of the story of kids and COVID.

“The more important issue is that, on the basis of careful risk-versus-benefit analysis, healthy children do not need a COVID vaccine,” Mumper said, because many kids already had COVID and developed robust and durable antibodies.

CHD President Mary Holland accused Pfizer of reaching “a new low” by seeking authorization of booster shots for children based on an “unpublished, non-peer-reviewed study of 140 children.”

Holland said:

“Following the science on COVID vaccination shows that the risks outweigh the benefits for COVID shots for kids, let alone boosters. One suspects this is simply a misguided ploy to use up Pfizer’s vaccine inventory before its expiration.”

Pfizer tested its booster dose while Omicron was the dominant variant this winter. In recent weeks, BA.2 has become the dominant COVID variant. It has not been determined whether a third dose provides any protection against the new variant.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in October 2021 authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine for children 5 through 11 and recently authorized a booster dose for teens 12 through 15 and older and also immunocompromised children 5 and older.

According to a study published late last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, Pfizer’s vaccine showed “reduced effectiveness” against the Omicron variant among children 12 and older.

According to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data by the American Academy of Pediatrics, as of April 6, 2022, 9.7 million U.S. children ages 5 to 11 had received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine — representing 34% of 5- to 11-year-olds.

Approximately 7.8 million U.S. children ages 5 to 11 completed the 2-dose primary vaccination series — representing 28% of 5- to 11-year-olds.

About 18.7 million children 5 to 11 had yet to receive their first COVID vaccine dose.

Seventeen million U.S. adolescents ages 12 to 17 have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine — representing 68% of 12- to 17-year-olds.

Only 58% completed the 2-dose vaccination series and 8.1 million adolescents in this age group have yet to receive a COVID vaccine.

There are 72.8 million children under age 18 in the U.S., which is 22% of the U.S. population. Children aged 5 to 11 represent 8.6% of the U.S. population.

The FDA has not authorized any COVID vaccines for use in children under 5.

According to the latest data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), between Oct. 1, 2021, and April 1, 2022, 10,157 adverse events, including 239 rated as serious and 5 reported deaths after COVID vaccines, were reported in the 5- to 11-year-old age group.

Although reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed, the system has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.


Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.

April 15, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

America’s Exceptional Amnesia (About Those War Criminals…)

By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | April 13, 2022

The top-ranking U.S. diplomat, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, recently denounced Russian president Vladimir Putin as a war criminal, which has resulted in a marked uptick in the usage of that term throughout the media. Putin decided to invade Ukraine in February 2022 and has killed people in the process. That’s what happens when leaders decide to address conflict through the application of military force: people die. The U.S. government has needless to say killed many people in its military interventions abroad, most recently in the Middle East and Africa. Yet Americans are often hesitant to apply the label war criminal even to figures such as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, whose Global War on Terror has sowed massive destruction, death, and misery, adversely affecting millions of persons for more than twenty years.

Nor do people generally regard affable Barack Obama as a war criminal, despite the considerable harm to civilians unleashed by his ill-advised war on Libya. “Drone warrior” Obama also undertook a concerted campaign to kill rather than capture terrorist suspects in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen, with which the United States was not at war, and he armed radical Islamist rebel forces in Syria, which exacerbated the conflict already underway, resulting in the deaths of even more civilians. Obama’s material and logistical support for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen gave rise to a full-fledged humanitarian crisis, with disease and starvation ravaging the population.

Moving a bit farther back in time, U.S. citizens and their sympathizers abroad typically do not affix the label war criminal to Bill Clinton either, despite the fact that his 1999 bombing of Kosovo appears to have been motivated in part to distract attention from his domestic scandal at the time. The moment Clinton began dropping bombs on Kosovo, the press, in a show of patriotic solidarity, abruptly switched its attention from the notorious “blue dress” to the war in progress. Throughout his presidency, Clinton not only bombed but also imposed severe sanctions on Iraq, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of civilians died of preventable diseases.

Despite knowing about at least some of the atrocities committed in their name by the U.S. government (torture, summary execution, maiming, the provision of weapons to murderers, sanctions preventing access to medication and food, etc.), many Americans have no difficulty identifying Vladimir Putin as a war criminal while simultaneously withholding that label from their own leaders. Viewed from a broader historical perspective, none of this may seem new. During wartime, much of the populace dutifully parrots pundits and politicians in denouncing the foreign leaders with whom they disagree as criminals, while supporting the military initiatives of their own leaders, no matter what they do. Is the use of the term of derogation war criminal, then, no more than a reflection of the tribe to which one subscribes?

All wars result in avoidable harms to innocent, nonthreatening people: death and maiming, the destruction of property, impoverishment, psychological trauma, and diminished quality of life for those lucky enough to survive. Given these harsh realities, some critics maintain that all war is immoral. But morality and legality are not one and the same, for crimes violate written laws. In the practical world of international politics, what counts as a criminal war has been delineated since 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations, which Putin defied in undertaking military action against Ukraine.

According to the U.N. Charter, to which Russia is a party, any national leader who wishes to initiate a war against another nation must first air his concerns at the United Nations in the form of a war resolution. The only exception admitted by the U.N. Charter is when an armed attack has occurred on the leader’s territory, in which case the people may defend themselves, on analogy to an individual who may defend himself against violent attack by another individual in a legitimate act of self defense. Barring that “self-defense” exception, the instigation of a war by a nation must garner the support of the U.N. Security Council, the permanent members of which have veto power over any substantive resolution. Putin knew, of course, that the United States would veto any Russian resolution for war against Ukraine and so did not bother to go to the United Nations at all.

Among the vociferous critics of Putin has been none other than President Joe Biden, who not only supported but in fact rallied for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was equally illegal, by the very same criterion which makes Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a criminal war, and by extension, Putin a war criminal. Indeed, Putin arguably followed the U.S. precedent and longstanding practice in “going it alone.” For the very same reason (the likely veto of any possible resolution) President Clinton decided to “go it alone” in choosing to bomb Kosovo in 1999, as did President George W. Bush when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003. President Barack Obama took a slightly different tack in 2011, for he deceptively secured support at the United Nations for a no-fly zone in Libya but then proceeded to carry out a full-on aerial assault in that country over a period of several months, which culminated in the removal of Muammar Gaddafi from power and ultimately his murder by an angry mob.

We know that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was illegal according to the letter of the law not only because former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan plainly stated that it was, but also because the U.S. government drafted a war resolution only to withdraw it when it emerged that they did not have enough support to secure the needed U.N. approval. If U.S. leaders had believed that the invasion was completely legitimate according to the terms of the U.N. Charter, then they would have felt no need to draft a resolution in justifying it. Ex post facto, when it emerged that the alleged WMD serving as one of the primary pretexts for the war were nowhere to be found, the U.S. government claimed that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was simply a continuation of the 1991 Gulf War (which had received the support of the United Nations), or was justified because Saddam Hussein allegedly tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush in 1993, or because previous U.N. resolutions relating to the disarmament of Iraq and the elimination of its biological and chemical warfare capacity implied that military force would be permissible in the event of Saddam Hussein’s noncompliance. On the propaganda front, the administration also pumped through the media pretexts such as that the people of Iraq needed to be liberated from their ruthless dictator, and it was high time to allow democracy to flourish throughout the land.

People have been writing about war crimes for millennia, long before the establishment of the United Nations and the ICC (International Criminal Court). The framework proffered in the 1945 U.N. Charter derives from the classical just war tradition. By definition, a war criminal is someone who commits war crimes, but according to just war theory, there are two ways to become an unjust warrior: one is to wage an unjust war; the other is to conduct a war unjustly. These two forms of injustice are outlined in the jus ad bellum and jus in bello requirements on a just war, the interpretive fluidity of which has often been seized upon by political leaders intent on waging war. Such leaders use just war theory opportunistically as a template in developing pro-war propaganda. The aim of the drafters of the U.N. Charter was to rein in such bellicose tendencies and thereby avert tragic and massively destructive conflicts such as World Wars I and II, by requiring explicit and intersubjective agreement among nations before a war could be waged.

In the modern world, where communication between government administrators is always an alternative to the use of military force, the jus ad bellum requirement of “last resort” has become especially problematic, if not impossible to satisfy, much to the chagrin of war marketers. Some leaders flagrantly refuse to negotiate, as did President George H.W. Bush before launching Operation Desert Storm in 1991. By informing Saddam Hussein (in a letter) that “Nor will there by any negotiation. Principle cannot be compromised,” Bush Senior effectively proclaimed to the world that war had become the last resort. But this was only because the U.S. president himself refused to consider any nonmilitary means to resolve the conflict. Even more dramatically than all of the war criminals to follow in his footsteps, George H.W. Bush demonstrated that modern leaders decide to wage war and then, if pressed, with the aid of their public relations staff and media pundit propagandists, they interpret the tenets of just war theory so as to support their military intervention.

In drumming up support for the first U.S. war on Iraq, the Bush Senior administration deployed a variety of deceptive techniques, including a heartwrenching story about Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by Saddam Hussein’s henchmen. Despite being an utter fabrication, that story was instrumental in garnering international support for Bush Senior’s coveted military campaign. Given the mendacious means by which approval for the 1991 Gulf War was granted by the United Nations, it should come as no surprise that the war was also conducted criminally. Among other atrocities, Iraqi soldiers attempting to retreat were buried alive, and civilian structures such as water treatment facilities were destroyed. Strikingly, even the claims of U.S. soldiers themselves to have been severely harmed by exposure to chemical agents released into the atmosphere during the bombing of factories were denied for years by the very officials who sent them to fight.

Deception is a form of coercion, which implies that a leader who offers false pretexts to secure the approval of the U.N. Security Council, as did George H.W. Bush in 1991, is no less a criminal than a leader whose war abjectly violates the written letter of the law, as in the case of his son George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Indeed, in predicting how leaders will conduct themselves during the prosecution of a war, there may be no more dependable indicator than how they went about garnering support for it. By now it is common knowledge that all of the proffered pretexts for the 2003 invasion of Iraq were bogus, from the nonexistent WMDs to the alleged collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Given the many lies used to persuade politicians and pundits to support the invasion, no one should have been surprised when those who waged a criminal war proceeded to render and torture suspects, kill civilians at checkpoints, deploy white phosphorus and depleted uranium-tipped missiles, raze entire cities, and terrorize civilians with lethal drones.

Fast forward to 2022 with the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian military under Vladimir Putin. President Putin, like everyone, including all warmakers, has his own perspective on what he is doing. Following the example of all recent U.S. presidents in promoting their use of military force, Putin offered a “moral” pretext for his invasion of Ukraine. Among other things, he claimed to be protecting a portion of the Ukrainian people from Nazis. Comparing the various “humanitarian” pretexts offered by the U.S. government for its military interventions over the past three decades, the 1999 bombing of Kosovo probably comes closest to the template brandished by Putin in 2022.

In 1999, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was painted by propagandists as “the new Hitler,” said to be slaughtering the ethnic Muslim population of Kosovars. The bombing campaign was rationalized by the need to stop Milosevic and protect civilians. Because Milosevic was on friendly terms with Russia, which held veto power at the U.N. Security Council, the Clinton administration waged its war, through NATO, without seeking the support of the United Nations. The crisis was depicted as a dire emergency situation requiring immediate action. The manner in which the intervention was conducted, however, with pilots flying high above the ground to avoid being shot down, thereby risking increased civilian casualties, belied those aims. More civilians were killed in the period after the bombing commenced than before, as Serbian soldiers were provoked to fight even more viciously in response to the aerial assault.

Putin’s anti-Nazi rhetoric notwithstanding, it is plausible that the Russian president’s primary concerns are geopolitical. Clearly troubled by the expansion of NATO to the east, right up to Russia’s border, Putin appears to want to secure his territory from any threats from the West. Given the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which was supported if not fully instigated by the U.S. government, Putin is no doubt concerned about the persistent hostility of NATO toward Russia, despite the fact that the U.S.S.R. no longer exists, and Russia is now a capitalist country. The conflict in Ukraine, as portrayed to television viewers, has offered nonstop confirmation of the prevailing picture of Putin as a ruthless dictator, which has been embraced by Western political elites since the 2016 presidential election, and was aggressively promoted by media outlets throughout the years of Russiagate during the Trump administration.

Putin is relentlessly denounced as a war criminal and the evil enemy by warmongers in the United States, even while knowing, as any rational person does, that the war must ultimately end at the negotiation table, given the reality of Russia’s arsenal of nuclear arms. When President Joe Biden angrily pronounced, “For God’s sake, this man [Putin] cannot remain in power,” he endangered not only Ukrainians but the very future of humanity by inching the conflict ever closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation. Arguably nothing could have been more reckless than for President Biden to announce to the world that the U.S. government’s intention was to depose Putin. Why? Because Putin has already seen, in recent history, what happened to Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. If the Russian leader’s removal from power, indeed his very death, is in fact the foreign policy objective of the U.S. government, then Putin has no reason not to use nuclear weapons and take down as many people with him as possible.

While speaking to troops in Poland (a member of NATO), President Biden effectively informed them that they were being deployed to Ukraine, though earlier he had stated that the United States would not be entering into the conflict, because Ukraine was not a member of NATO and not a U.S. interest. Was Libya a member of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Of course not. But that did not stop President Obama from using NATO to wage a full-scale, regime-change military campaign in 2011. Biden’s staff immediately clarified that in fact U.S. soldiers were not being sent to Ukraine, thus sending a mixed and extremely confusing message about what the U.S. policy actually was.

To the dismay of the world community, Biden blundered yet again by setting up the operational equivalent to a red-line scenario, asserting that the U.S. military would retaliate “in kind,” should Putin opt to use chemical weapons. To some this may seem less like a red line than a potential tit-for-tat, but either way it is extremely dangerous. Under the ordinary understanding of what those words mean, Biden was stating that a chemical attack by Russia would be countered by a chemical attack by the United States. The hypothetical scenario limned by Biden was doubly dangerous, for it opened up the possibility for false flag attacks to be carried out by parties interested in drawing the United States into the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. That sort of provocation strategy has been seen in many contexts throughout history, including both Kosovo and Syria.

We already know from what happened recently in Syria, and many other places since 1945, that the provision of more weapons to a war zone exacerbates violent conflict. Whatever those who furnish military aid may intend, the weapons eventually find their way into the arms of persons willing to use them, for whatever their reasons happen to be. The more savage the war between Russia and Ukraine becomes, and the more civilian casualties reported by the media, the more likely it becomes that the conflict will escalate, drawing in other parties, including neighboring nations. Were NATO to get involved, that would be operationally equivalent to the United States’ overt entry into the war, given that NATO is dominated by the superpower.

When President Biden was asked to clarify all of his troubling remarks—that Putin had to be deposed, that U.S. soldiers were headed to Ukraine, and that the use of chemical weapons would be retaliated against (in kind!), Biden oscillated between reaffirming his statements and denying that he ever made them, leaving the entire world in the uncomfortable position of having to pin their hopes for a rational resolution to the conflict on Vladimir Putin himself, despite his having been relentlessly portrayed as the evil Manichean enemy, a ruthless dictator who is supposedly beyond the reach of reason. In reality, every military conflict ultimately ends, sooner or later, at the negotiating table. Refusal to negotiate belies an utter insouciance toward the plight of people living under bombing and, in this case, given the danger of a nuclear war, the future of humanity itself.

The question now for U.S. government officials such as Secretary of State Blinken, who has shunned negotiation for months, is this: Why allow the destruction of any more human lives and property in Ukraine before agreeing to sit down and talk? Blinken may believe that dead Ukrainians are a small price to pay for U.S. foreign policy objectives, but the victims would surely disagree, as should the rest of the international community. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that so-called diplomats now regard politics as war by other means, having fully inverted the Clausewitzian formula. Nothing could be more obvious than that the longer the conflict is allowed to drag on, and prolonged through the injection of yet more weapons into the region, the more people, including Ukrainian civilians, will be killed. In other words, through postponing negotiation and sending tons of weapons to Ukraine, the U.S. government is using civilian victims as the means to its own foreign policy aims. Such a tactic is no less criminal than is punishing innocent people for the crimes of the guilty, the inevitable effect of economic sanctions against entire countries run by leaders who, in virtue of their position of power, retain privileged access to whatever they might need.

Biden’s debilitated mental state and inability to keep his story straight is the perfect metaphor for the attitude of Americans toward war criminals. They blithely ignore or brush aside the crimes committed by their own leaders while supporting policies which will intensify rather than resolve conflicts abroad. The term war criminal is at this point used as a rhetorical soundbite (à la just war ), bandied about as a way of distracting attention from the speakers, who delusively imply that because they can identify war criminals, the label could not possibly apply to themselves.

Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, You Can Leave, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique.

April 15, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

US not planning to return seized Russian assets – Jake Sullivan

Samizdat | April 14, 2022

Washington is not planning to return the assets confiscated from Russian businessmen as part of the latest sanctions imposed on Moscow over the military operation in Ukraine, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Thursday.

“Our goal is not to give them back,” Sullivan said at the Economic Club of Washington, adding that the US authorities would use the seized assets “in a better way.”

“There are authorities we have, and there are further authorities that maybe we could develop, and that’s something we’re actively looking at,” the official added.

The White House has introduced several rounds of sanctions against Moscow since February 24, when Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began. As part of the penalties, the US authorities arrested Russian foreign assets along with those belonging to the country’s businesses and high-profile individuals.

Several US congressmen have already called for the sale or liquidation of Russian assets caught up in the sanctions campaign, stating that the proceeds should be used for the reconstruction of Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow has no plans to nationalize foreign assets in Russia in response. “Unlike Western countries, we will respect property rights,” he said.


Stephen Lendman:

According to the International Criminal Court:

“(D)estroying or seizing the enemy’s property unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts.

This rule is included in military manuals.

It’s applicable to armed conflicts.

Its violation is an offense, according to laws of many nation states on what’s permitted or not in armed conflicts.

And this resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in February 1946.

It’s not binding international law like Security Council resolutions but significant nonetheless. … Read full article

April 15, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Smiling US health chief shrugs off her Covid blunders

By James Rogers | TCW Defending Freedom | April 14, 2022

Dr Rochelle Walensky is director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States.

Just over a year ago, on March 29, 2021, Dr Walensky publicly stated: ‘Vaccinated people do not carry the virus . . . and do not get sick.’ 

She also claimed that the Pfizer jab was 95 per cent effective at preventing Covid-19. Last month Dr Walensky answered questions at Washington University, St Louis, during which she admitted that her claim of 95 per cent Pfizer jab-effectiveness came from CNN, which based its report on a press release from Pfizer.

Walensky also claimed she was unaware the shots might lose effectiveness over time. Yet she’s a highly qualified public health official, and even 15-year-old science students know that cold/flu viruses are prone to mutations, which go a long way to altering a vaccine’s effectiveness. It was quite galling to hear her talk about ‘waning jab efficacy’, then casually smile, shrug her shoulders and say: ‘Science is not black and white, it’s not immediate . . . science is grey’ i.e. that nobody could be certain.

Contrary to Dr Walensky’s position in spring 2022, throughout 2021, the US authorities (and elsewhere) were so certain of jab efficacy that they insisted that everyone had to get jabbed. Never mind the psychological pressure and moral blackmail, they threatened serious consequences: fines, imprisonment, ‘no jab, no job’ and ‘no jab, no school’ mandates. They were so certain about jab efficacy that they threatened peoples’ livelihoods, careers, businesses and education. They were certain enough to foment severe discord in society, creating disputes and anxiety that damaged, fractured and destroyed marriages, families and friendships.

They pushed the jabs this hard, but they had no real idea how well they worked. Now we know that they don’t work at all; we also strongly suspect that the jabs actually make infection levels and illnesses worse, and this does not include jab-related deaths, conditions and illnesses that should result in the total withdrawal of these chemicals.

The Walenskys of this world were so certain, yet it in reality they were so wrong, so her airy dismissal of these errors in her interview was absolutely breath-taking.

A few questions also spring to mind:

Dr Walensky has a BA in biochemistry and molecular biology and a masters in public health from Harvard. She is a scientist. How is it possible that someone with such qualifications, and holding a position of such responsibility, doesn’t know that cold/flu viruses mutate?

Dr Walensky is also a MD. Has she forgotten the ethics and principles of informed consent? We’ll return to this point.

Why was the director the CDC accepting information about a new drug from its manufacturer (Pfizer) via CNN? Should the CDC accept the manufacturer’s own assessment and then tell the whole population with certainty that it is ‘safe and effective’? Shouldn’t they be doing their own thorough investigations and evaluations? Especially since mRNA technology was so new and untested.

Did it not occur to Dr Walensky that if the new, ‘safe and effective’ mRNA-based jab was not ‘effective’, it might not be all that ‘safe’ either? Did the possibility that the drug’s emergency authorisation ought to be withdrawn not occur to her? If it didn’t, her competence must be questioned. If it did, and she discussed it, we need to know a lot more details. If it did, and she dismissed it, she ought to be asked a lot more questions.

The US-based Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) pressure group has obtained data revealing that 70 per cent of the CDC staff who got Covid from August last year onwards were fully vaccinated. This raises other questions:

With such evidence in front of Dr Walensky, why didn’t the CDC withdraw support for government mandates?

Why didn’t Dr Walensky tell President Biden that he might think again before dishonourably discharging members of the armed services for declining a jab?

Why didn’t the CDC inform the American public that claims about jab efficacy were completely and utterly unreliable? Had they known that being jabbed didn’t stop people getting C-19 or passing it on, then many people may well have decided to decline consent to be jabbed – at least to their second and third shots – and thereby avoid post-jab effects, serious medical problems or even death.

Was it not completely unethical for Dr Walensky to withhold this important information? Was she not expressly bound to inform the public that there are risks involved in accepting an untested synthetic compound – and that it did not work as intended anyway? Did she wilfully deprive them of information that would have facilitated ‘informed consent’?

Dr Walensky has also publicly discredited the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is co-administered by the FDA and the CDC. Does she not know that VAERS has revealed that the Covid jabs are the most damaging ever created? How can she pooh-pooh these VAERS figures when they are supported by WHO statistics: 2,457,386 reports of adverse reaction to C-19 jabs 2020-21, against 6,891 adverse reactions after smallpox jabs 1968-2021. Of course, smallpox is/was a much bigger threat than C-19.

How can Dr Walensky not know these numbers? Why has she not halted the jab roll-out? No matter how well she is supported by the American authorities and the MSM – who insist that criticism is ‘misinformation’ – this isn’t going to go away, especially if they insist that more jabs are needed every year or every six months.

People have stopped believing and are recovering belief in their own judgement, hopefully in sufficient numbers that dissuades them from jabbing their kids.

Surely Rochelle Walensky must resign. Given the damage that has been done to the physical, emotional and economic health of tens of millions, it’s not good enough to shrug one’s shoulders and say, ‘We weren’t sure’.

April 14, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Real James Bond villains wear cardigans

Bill Gates, the WEF, and the WHO are not done with us. It’s time we were done with them.

el gato malo – bad cattitude – april 13, 2022

in history as in literature, a special place of contempt is held for the grand vizier, the guy behind the throne, the power behind the power. it’s a position of great influence but zero accountability, especially if you can subvert the ruler you puppet past the point of being able to scapegoat you.

buying or leading a politician and getting goodies is a process as old as politics, probably older as it was likely the reason the first politician was elected in the first place…

but the truly discerning james bond villain level vizier, well, they just go right ahead and buy their own NGO’s. that’s how you take over the world. space lasers and earthquake machines may be cool, but real conquest usually banal.

get to about the 1 minute mark in this video where you can hear bill speak about talking to donald trump in the white house.

trump asks about looking into some of the ill effects of vaccines.

gates tells him “that’s a dead end, that would be a bad thing, don’t do that.”

this is not a man giving well intentioned advice.

this is a man covering up a crime committed in the service of crony capitalism.

the gates foundation has a longstanding relationship with vaccines that is more than a little sketchy. they were pushing oral polio vaccines in africa LONG after they were known to be unsafe and had actually become the leading cause of polio in the world.

“The Gates Foundation is a leading funder of oral polio vaccination in Africa and around the world, having dedicated nearly $4 billion to such efforts by the end of 2018. As discussed in Forbes in May 2019, Gates has “personally [driven] the development” of new oral polio vaccines and plays a “strategic role beyond funding.”

the US uses ONLY injected IPV polio vaccines. both the US and the EU discontinued use of orals because of side effects including actually causing polio.

A year ago, news outlets briefly shone a light on the fact (a fact that makes public health officials squirm) that oral polio vaccines are causing polio outbreaks. With reports streaming in throughout 2019 regarding the circulation of vaccine-derived polioviruses in numerous African and Asian countries, a CDC virologist confessed, “We have now created more new emergences of the virus than we have stopped.”

… there were 400 recorded cases of vaccine-derived polio in more than 20 countries worldwide.

(author’s note: that’s ~3X the total of all natural polio cases worldwide and of those, only 29 occurred outside of pakistan and 100% of those were in afghanistan. this vaccines caused multiples more polio than the virus itself)

This week, the same story is making the same headlines, with the WHO’s shamefaced announcement that the oral polio vaccine is responsible for an alarming polio outbreak in Sudan—“linked to an ongoing vaccine-sparked epidemic in Chad”—with parallel outbreaks in a dozen other African countries. In fact, between August 2019 and August 2020, there were 400 recorded cases of vaccine-derived polio in more than 20 countries worldwide. Ironically, WHO disclosed this “setback” barely a week after it declared the African continent to be free of wild poliovirus—which has not been seen in Africa since 2016. While African epidemiologists cheerily claim that these outbreaks can “be brought under control with further immunization,” and Sudan prepares to launch a mass polio vaccination campaign, WHO is warning that “the risk of further spread of the vaccine-derived polio across central Africa and the Horn of Africa” is high.

but gates kept pushing them in africa anyway, probably because so many of his pals owned the production and that’s what the gates foundation does. that’s what all these guys do. big business and billionaires are not friends of free markets. they want sure things and it’s cheaper to twist and break arms and buy mandated markets than to compete on a fair playing field.

i have (on excellent, direct authority from a personal friend who i trust implicitly and who spoke directly to the folks involved) the following story about the gates foundation in india:

gates himself came in to speak with the health ministers. he offered them a vaccine for a disease they already had one for. they told him, “no thank you, we already have that one covered.” he told them “well, you need to switch to this vaccine or there will be no gates foundation investment for india.” the one he wanted them to switch to was owned by a “friend of his.” this story was relayed by extremely liberal folks who literally run vaccine programs in india. they heard this conversation directly and have no reason to lie. they were horrified. it was a pay to play stick up. (they still declined)

this is not the sort of conflict of interest that’s helpful in a guy telling the president not to look into vaccine issues. it also stands testament to his morality and inclination. bill gates is as amoral as he is rich. always has been. much of microsoft was stolen from his less machiavellian partners.

i’m presuming this interview above and the discussion with trump were pre-covid because it’s never mentioned and had this been post covid, i find it hard to believe that it would not have been, but it seems more apropos now that ever. obviously, the conflicts of interest certainly did not stop back then and vaccine ill effects are looking like quite the hot topic just now.

and gates is, as ever, right smack in the middle of the dirtiest, most profitable part of it.

it was september 2019. SARSCOV-2 was still not really on the radar. according to many, there was not even an outbreak yet.

that same month, billy made a large investment in a company called bioNtech to allegedly pursue HIV and tuberculosis vaccines. if memory serves, he bought about 1/3 of the company which was entirely preclinical in infectious diseases at the time. they were mostly a phase 1-2 oncology company. this looks like a sweetheart valuation.

obviously, this became a very big deal in a very big hurry. it was their mRNA payload that was licensed by pfizer for their vaccine, a product that went on to be the most profitable drug per unit time in human history. (and possibly the most profitable altogether) bioNtech minted money.

lots of things about this investment have long smelled fishier than a sushi bar dumpster.

but then a funny thing happened with a now vexingly familiar cast of characters.

(read more HERE)

even months later in january 2020, folks like osterholm were still buying the “no signs of human to human transmission” line.

yet somehow, 4 months earlier (and who knows when the due diligence started. might have been 6 or more), gates was putting his money right on the one obscure square that would pay out 100 to one. at a company with near zero footprint in infectious disease. for a virus no one was focused on. whose genetic code would not (allegedly) be initially characterized for 4 more months.

then, in the same odd, sudden miracle that got moderna the NIH science they licensed for their vaccine, bioNtech also had a product and pfizer jumped to license it.

alone, having a wargame for the war that had, unbeknownst to most, already started, might raise eyebrows, but it might also be a coincidence.

but when the folks coming to that wargame have been making big bets on the kinds of weapons that that precise (and only that precise) sort of war would use, well, one might start to sharpen the points on one’s pointy questions.

just what was informing what here?

this idea that “mRNA is magic and you can develop a vaccine in weeks” is complete nonsense. it’s never been true and the rest of the mRNA vaccine timelines stand testament to it. no other vaxx has been forthcoming.

this HAD to have been in the works for a significant period beforehand.

the fix appears to have been deeply in here. somebody was getting some VERY early looks at some tech to vaccinate against a virus no one else even had a copy of. the awareness not just of the pathogen, but the way to code for its spike protein and the impending pandemic seems to have been loose in certain circles long before the rest of us were told.

the NIH seeded moderna. i still do not have confirmation on where bioNtech got theirs, but i have a hunch and it rhymes with “silly plates” and that this might explain the sweetheart deal.

there is really only one story that makes sense to me here on covid origins, and that story is this:

NIH funded eco health alliance run by daszak and in cahoots with folks like baric colored outside the lines with fauci’s grant money. they, in collaboration with the wuhan institute of virology hotwired the hell out of covid viruses from bats engaging in gain of function work WAY outside of safe limits. this was not a weapon. it was work on inoculation. that was daszak’s longstanding focus. we’ll probably never know what happened in wuhan, but the breadcrumbs here are AWFULLY provocative and the sudden appearance of 2 mRNA vaccines, one with the NIH folks that funded EHA at the WIV, one with bioNtech, looks like an offshoot of it. (lots of detail HERE and HERE on the breadcrumbs)

wrapped up in this from the very beginning were load of the WEF gang (who had just run an oddly timely pandemic wargame for a disease an awful lot like covid) and the WHO.

billy gates is neck deep in both, a charter member of the cool kids crony capitalist table at davos and a top funding source for the WHO, donating more than 10% of its budget. it’s clearly a great investment for him as it poops golden eggs in terms of early information and hard sell opportunities for poor countries. it’s a seat at every table that makes you look like a philanthropist while in reality being a lead pipe wielding coercive corporatist.

gates is not a good guy.

he’s a sociopathic nerd with the most unsavory of associates.

and he knows how to play the crony capitalist game with the absolute best of them. the gates foundation has become a barely veiled international influence organization masquerading as a charity.

between gates and china, the WHO will dance to whatever song the two play. and oh, how they will dance.

remember this gem? (i do)

this was a big part of what got the out of control abandonment of 100 years of science based pandemic guidelines rolling.

“hey, let’s throw all the science, data, and history out the window and copy a terrifying authoritarian regime with a human rights record that would make myanmar blush!”

yeah, well, we all remember how THAT worked out…

but this is government. it’s worse than government, it’s trans-national organizational government. these are the people who invented “failing up” where the bigger your screw ups, the higher you get promoted. (if you doubt me, look at who runs the IMF and the world bank some time…)

and so, despite having cheer led for nothing uty pseudoscience, failure, and human ruin, the current plan being put forward is, wait for it, “hey, let’s give the WHO massive, unaccountable globalist powers!”

of course, this was clearly the plan all along if you were paying attention.

note the direct parrot of the WEF “build back better” taking point.

this gang sees every crisis as a chance to try to grab control of the world. and they are at it again.

In a consensus decision aimed at protecting the world from future infectious diseases crises, the World Health Assembly today agreed to kickstart a global process to draft and negotiate a convention, agreement or other international instrument under the Constitution of the World Health Organization to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, said the decision by the World Health Assembly was historic in nature, vital in its mission, and represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to strengthen the global health architecture to protect and promote the well-being of all people.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on the many flaws in the global system to protect people from pandemics: the most vulnerable people going without vaccines; health workers without needed equipment to perform their life-saving work; and ‘me-first’ approaches that stymie the global solidarity needed to deal with a global threat,” Dr Tedros said.

they will also force licensing, break patents, and drive health policy at the highest levels.

but here’s the full blown worst of it:

The World Health Organization (WHO) has contracted German-based Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems to develop a global vaccine passport system, with plans to link every person on the planet to a QR code digital ID.

Indeed, despite the minuscule threat posed by new variants and dubious-at-best vaccine efficacy, the WHO is adamant that a global QR code-based vaccine passport system is vital for all future health emergencies, not just COVID.

“COVID-19 affects everyone. Countries will therefore only emerge from the pandemic together. Vaccination certificates that are tamper-proof and digitally verifiable build trust. WHO is therefore supporting member states in building national and regional trust networks and verification technology,” says unit head of the WHO’s Department of Digital Health and Innovation Garrett Mehl.

“The WHO’s gateway service also serves as a bridge between regional systems. It can also be used as part of future vaccination campaigns and home-based records.”

got that? this one is going to be digitally verifiable and global. nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, universal, mandatory, trans-national, and administered by an agency completely unaccountable to you and beholden to proven kleptocrats, authoritarians, and crony corporatists. they are basically a subsidiary of china and gates inc.

they will not get any better or more honest next time.

we’re talking about taking one of the most corrupt, captured, and incompetent agencies in the history of bureaucratic bloviation and giving them the keys to the world crisis machine and to an electronic health passport that will be your right to travel and work and eat out and shop and who knows what else. this is the cornerstone of an international social credit system. wait until they add your ESG score and your carbon footprint.

giving this team universal chicken little rights and direct links at highest levels to public policy is bad enough. letting them enable fine grained access into permission to have anything resembling a life will have you eating bugs and tweeting what you’re told faster than you can say #grasshoppers #yummy!

they promised you that in the future you’d have no privacy and own nothing and that you’d been happy.

guess which two promises they’re going to keep?

and government will fall all over themselves to help and to outsource the imposition of the infinite personal tracking and permissioning they have so long salivated over under the pretext of pandemic preparedness. (oops, look, another trojan framing of subjugating masquerading as safety. told you these were EVERYWHERE…)

this is not going to be acceptable or even tolerable.

this group should be disbanded, not granted greater remit.

and they are not done, because the power behind these thrones is ever hungry.

you might be thinking “wow, that was awful” but they are all thinking “wow, that was surprisingly easy. i wonder what we could do if we had some time to get set up beforehand and really run the table?”

these are not good people.

they do not have noble aims nor your best interests at heart.

they are a global aristocracy of surpassing ruthlessness telling scare stories so they can mandate alleged solutions.

they tell you it’s about saving you.

it isn’t.

read the fine print.

follow the money.

the super rich do not like to guess. they do not like to be surprised by trends. it is far more certain and therefore more profitable to force you to buy that which they are selling. the public health grift and the climate grift are all one grift: use government and trans-government to frighten and force people into buying the needless products that you’re going to produce for them.

small investors talk their book. titanic investors force you to buy it.

  • if it’s a vaccine, mandate it and bar all useful therapeutics from market.
  • if it’s a windmill, kill nuclear and inflict absurdist carbon taxes.
  • never let any of it be properly assessed.
  • use fear to drive compliance and compliance to drive mandate.

they will sell you your own collar and leash and demand your gratitude for having done so.

and if you don’t wake up pretty soon, they’re going to get it from you. by force. and you will be powerless to stop it.

the confluence of a global health passport and central bank digital currencies is an extinction level event for personal liberty and privacy.

and make no mistake: gates wants it. the WEF wants it. and most western governments want it.

but they also know that you do not want it. so they need a pretext and a plan and a pile of boring, technocratic yammering to hide it behind. they learned from last time. they saw the cracks we squirmed through and how we got away. and they do not plan to let it happen again. the next one will be air tight. they’ll have the WHO ready to both be able to declare a global emergency and impose ready made verified global digital ID using that fear as a pretext.

if you let them get these pieces into place, you are NOT going to like the endgame.

this has reached the email length limit. check the substack page for an addendum.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Bill Gates Says “Crazy” Protests Against His Vaccines Are “Kind Of Weird”

By Steve Watson | Summit News | April 13, 2022

While pushing a billion dollar ‘pandemic prevention’ global government health ‘solution’ at a TED Talk this week, Bill Gates addressed ‘conspiracy theories’ regarding himself and COVID vaccines, calling those who speak about them “crazy.”

In an appearance at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, Canada, Gates declared that it was “somewhat ironic” that protesters had gathered outside the venue because he has “saved tens of millions of lives.”

Gates said that “The Gates Foundation is very involved in vaccines, the invention of new vaccines, funding vaccines. So it’s somewhat ironic to have somebody turn around and say we’re using vaccines to kill people or to make money or we started the [Covid-19] pandemic,” Insider reported.

Gates continued, “Or when we started during the pandemic, even some strange things — like that I somehow want to track, you know, the location of individuals — because I’m so deeply desirous of knowing where everyone is.”

Gates also proclaimed that it’s “kind of weird,” that people don’t like him, adding “Does this turn into something where there’s constantly crazy people showing up?”

“Hopefully as the pandemic calms down, people are more rational about, ‘Hey, vaccines are a miracle and there’s a lot more we can do,’” Gates further stated.

Gates spent most of the speech pushing his vision for a global emergency-response squad under the acronym GERM, Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization.

https://twitter.com/ahkashani/status/1513983699146227724

The following footage of protesters, said to be taken outside the venue, was uploaded to social media:

The ‘world’s most powerful doctor’, Gates previously declared that China did “great work” containing the coronavirus, before announcing that “sadly” Omicron is a “type of vaccine” and has “done a better job getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”

He has constantly described anyone who questions his global vaccine push as “crazy,” calling for censorship of dissenting opinion.

Gates, the saviour of the world, also previously mocked anti-mask protesters, declaring that protesting having to wear a mask is akin to being against wearing pants.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

Searching for War Criminals

They are nearer than you think

BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 12, 2022

The United States is now insisting that Russian President Vladimir Putin should be put on trial for “war crimes” committed in Ukraine. As Putin is still insisting that he will attend the upcoming G20 summit in November on the island of Bali, Indonesia, it will be a great opportunity to have US Marshalls snatch him from the stage and whisk him off to a federal courthouse in Virginia for justice to be served. Or a form of justice anyway, since the United States has no actual jurisdiction over where Putin’s alleged crimes might have taken place and it will be impossible to prove that he actually ordered anyone to carry out so-called “crimes against humanity.” We’ll see how it all works out.

Indeed, there is no other phrase that has been more misunderstood and generally abused of late than “war crimes” or “war criminals.” It belongs with several other labels, including “weapons of mass destruction” and “crimes against humanity” that are used to indicate an adversary has crossed a red line and is so deplorable that anything that is done to him either during actual fighting or in the aftermath is completely acceptable. Going back to Greek and Roman times it has always been understood that even in wartime there are certain activities that are unacceptable, but the attempted definition and codification of “war crimes” as a concept is largely a twentieth century creation used to inflict additional punishment on the losers after the fighting is over. The Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War punished Germany far beyond what most would consider reasonable, largely because the victorious powers were able to do so without any consequences until the next war began. Likewise, the linked concepts of war crimes and crimes against humanity came largely out of the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials, which shaped the legal arguments around alleged German behavior, not that of the allies.

The Second World War certainly included atrocities of various kinds on both sides, but the Anglo-American deliberate bombing of German cities has to stand out as particularly disproportionate. Forty-two thousand mostly civilians died in Hamburg in the 1943 firebombing and the bombing of Dresden in 1945, at a point when Germany was on the verge of defeat, was remarkable in that the city was not a military target and was full of refugees from the east. At least 200,000 civilians died. Judge Andrew Napolitano has suggested that the greatest war crime in history, if one makes a case based on unnecessary human suffering, was President Harry Truman’s nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which almost certainly killed more than 200,000 mostly civilians, when Japan was preparing to surrender. As Truman was on the side that won the war and controlled the prosecution process, there were no legal consequences or punishment relating to his decision, though critics since 1945 have sometimes decried the first use of nuclear weapons.

If killing civilians unnecessarily is the standard definition of a war crime, then America’s most recent five presidents have been war criminals. In other words, historically speaking, accusations of war crimes, which have no real meaning in law and are both infinitely elastic and subject to interpretation, have often depended on which side of the fence one is standing on when the war ends. And it gets more complicated than that, given the politics of what is sometimes referred to as the rules based international order, which in theory arose from the ashes of World War Two. The new world order was US-centric from the start, with the United Nations (UN) situated in New York City, the World Bank in Washington, and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. At the UN, American primacy was reinforced through the creation of a Security Council, which alone has the power to authorize military action against a rogue state. The Security Council had five permanent members, each of whom was armed with a veto, meaning that no effective action against them could ever take place no matter what they had done. And so it has played out, with the US plus China, Russia, Britain and France being effectively immune from censure authorizing military action by the United Nations.

It is of particular interest to observe that the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague was set up to deal with “war crimes and crimes against humanity” that were otherwise ignored. Neither the US, nor the Russians nor the Israelis recognize the authority of the court and the US has stated that no ICC investigator will be allowed entry into the United States. Given that, it becomes possible to witness how the whole farce of war crimes and other violations of the new world order have played out in practice.

Currently the US and its allies are waging economic warfare on Russia without an actual declaration of war, to include an avalanche of sanctions plus completely illegal confiscations of the property of Russian citizens. It is also blocking Moscow from the use of the international monetary conventions and systems that it has had access to. The clearly stated intention is to destroy the Russian economy due to Russia having been charged by the US government with the commission of what it is calling war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine. Vladimir Putin argues in turn that Ukraine’s apparent intention to join NATO, which is a hostile military alliance directed against Russia, is a direct threat to his country and is already manifesting itself in military action undertaken against breakaway parts of Ukraine which are largely inhabited by Russian speakers and ethnics.

There are other issues, but those are the most important. It should also be noted that the issues themselves were at least somewhat negotiable prior to the outbreak of fighting, which Putin sought to do but Joe Biden and NATO were not interested. So ultimately the war, from a third-party point of view, is pitting a Russian vital interest against what really amounts to no genuine interest at all for NATO and the US, apart from goading the Russian bear and removing its government as a way to prevent against any change in the international order.

Since objective reality has no place in United States foreign policy, it is interesting to look at how the US sees itself and how it regards other countries that are doing what Russia is doing or worse. When it comes to its own self-perception, America’s so-called leaders believe that their global leadership role is one by right and they can do no wrong by virtue of a quality referred to as “American exceptionalism.” That is of course a mythical attribute created to permit the United States to get away with mass murder and regime change without any consequences.

A principal beneficiary of American financial and political largesse is, of course, Israel, which consists not only of people “chosen” by Yahweh but also by the media, the United States Senate, House of Representatives and the White House. A comparison of what Russia is doing that is being condemned by Washington versus what both what the US and Israel have been able to get away with might be considered to be in order.

Russia has invaded Ukraine after months of warnings that the status quo was untenable in national security terms, largely due to intentionally fruitless negotiations with stonewalling United States representatives and NATO. Israel, widely acknowledged to be an apartheid state, is currently bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, unnoticed by the US media and the Biden Administration. It in the past has attacked all its neighbors, including the renowned Seven Days War in June 1967 which was a surprise attack staged against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Subsequent to that war, Israel occupied nearly all of what had been Palestine. It also seized the Golan Heights belonging to Syria and has recently received consent from Washington to illegally annex Arab East Jerusalem as a part of Israel, making the whole of the city Israel’s capital. The Golan Heights have also recently been annexed with Washington’s approval and there are 700,000 heavily armed and violent Jewish settlers now sitting in 261 settlements on stolen Palestinian land on the West Bank.

And what has the United States and its allies done to dissuade Israel? Well, nothing. One rule for Israel and the US and another quite different Washington dictated “rules based” system for everyone else, most particularly if one is Russian. In fact, the more belligerently Israel behaves, the more it gets in terms of US taxpayer money and made-in-USA weapons. Israel has also been the favored destination for traveling congress-critters of late because it is an election year and Jewish donors are being hotly pursued. Recently, a large group of Democrats was departing just before former Vice President Mike Pence arrived in Tel Aviv on Miriam Adelson’s private jet so he could kiss Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s ring and also spend some quality time with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Ironically, while Joe Biden was turning the screws on Russia, the Congress was showering gifts on Israel above and beyond the billions of dollars in “aid” that the wealthy Jewish state already receives. Alison Weir of IfAmericansKnew has examined the recently signed pork laden 2022 federal government spending bill and has identified numerous line-item instances of money going directly to Israel or in support of causes that benefit Israel in some fashion. She estimates that Israel’s economy, which is able to support both free medical care and higher education, now benefits to the tune of $22 million per day from the United States taxpayer, for a total of $8 billion per year, and the number might actually be much higher. And there are other sources of income indirectly funded by the US Treasury, most notably the ability of Israel-focused charities to contribute tax exempt money to Israeli foundations and groups. Many of the “charities” are essentially fraudulent, funding the illegal settlements, domestic terrorism and other anti-Palestinian activities. Every artifice is used by some Jewish groups and billionaire donors to keep the US dollars flowing to Israel while no one of any significance in the federal government complains about the double standard when one compares Israel to Russia. And the Zionist controlled media are completely silent.

The hypocrisy that pervades United States foreign policy is difficult to ignore, but Washington has successfully manipulated its financial instruments to keep its remaining friends and allies in line. Whether that will survive the inevitable pushback coming from Russia, China and a number of non-aligned nations remains to be seen. At a minimum, the Cold War alignment that was broken in 1991 and which seems to again be taking shape around the Ukraine issue appears to have exceeded its expiry date. Ukraine might indeed wind up doing severe damage to the Russian economy, but it seems plausible that it will also bring with it the long overdue demise of American hegemonistic fantasies and NATO.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.

April 12, 2022 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine ‘seizes foreign ships’

Samizdat | April 10, 2022

The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) said on Sunday that Ukrainian fighters seized two foreign ships in the Azov Sea port of Mariupol and are holding their crews hostage.

DPR forces backed by Russia have been fighting with Ukrainians for control of the port since late February. Mariupol is part of the Donetsk region and has been controlled by Ukrainian forces since 2014.

According to DPR military spokesman Eduard Basurin, “a group of retreating Ukrainian nationalists” from the Azov Battalion boarded two foreign ships, the Lady Augusta and the Tsarevna.

Basurin said the fighters are firing mortars, grenade launchers, and small arms from the vessels while “holding the crews hostage.” He added that DPR forces and Russian troops are trying to rescue the trapped sailors, and that it is unclear if there are any casualties among the crews.

According to tracking website vesselfinder.com, the Lady Augusta is a Jamaican-flagged cargo ship, and the Tsarevna is a Maltese-flagged bulk carrier.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov announced this week that security officials were dispatched to Mariupol to rescue the country’s sailors stranded on the Tsarevna. The PM said the group was in contact with both Russian and Ukrainian commanders.

April 10, 2022 Posted by | War Crimes | | Leave a comment