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Dr. McCullough Fights to Keep his Board Certifications

A doctor who publicly questions COVID-19 vaccine orthodoxy is severely punished

Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo de Fiori in Rome, February 17, 1600.
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | October 30, 2022 

Imagine the history of medicine if—every time a new disease emerged or was described for the first time—an Official Cure was quickly imposed by government authorities, and any doctor who questioned this Official Cure was branded a dangerous spreader of misinformation.

To students of history, such a scenario is reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church’s Holy Office of the Inquisition, founded to prosecute anyone in the church’s jurisdiction deemed to have publicly uttered or written statements that questioned Church orthodoxy on spiritual and temporal matters. In the scientific realm, the Inquisition’s most notorious prosecutions were of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Both were convicted of heresy for their heterodox views. The former was first publicly humiliated by being hanged upside down on Rome’s Campo de Fiori and then burned at the stake. His ashes were then thrown in the Tiber River. The latter spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest.

For a while I lived in Rome in the Via Tor di Nona, in an apartment on the site of the Tor di Nona prison in which Giordano Bruno was incarcerated for seven years before he was put to death, and I often walked past his stately monument on the Campo de Fiori—a monument to his life and death, and also to the inhumanity, illiberality, and shame of the Holy Office.

By all accounts, Bruno was an exceedingly adventurous and courageous man. At his trial, upon receiving his dreadful sentence, he reportedly gazed directly into the eyes of his judges and said, “Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.”

Because the US Constitution was so ingeniously framed, the American people lived in a free republic for over two centuries. Sometime during the last ten years or so, we lost sight of the fact that the great advances our people have made in science, technology, and medicine were entirely predicated on free speech and the free exchange of ideas. James Madison, the author of our constitution, understood that the danger of infringing free speech greatly exceeded the danger of people making erroneous utterances. The reason for his conclusion is simple: The only way to correct erroneous perceptions and beliefs is to discuss and debate them.

Six months ago, Dr. Peter McCullough received a letter, dated May 26, 2022, from Richard J. Baron, M.D., who is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine. The letter was a formal notice that the ABIM was considering potential disciplinary sanction of Dr. McCullough. As Dr. Baron stated:

ABIM has learned that you have made numerous, widely reported and disseminated public statements about the purported dangers or lack of justification for Covid-19 vaccines.

Because of Dr. McCullough’s statements—which the Board deemed to be misinformation—the Board was considering revoking Dr. McCullough’s ABIM certifications in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease. In other words, the ABIM has assumed the function of maintaining/defending the official orthodoxy of Covid-19 vaccines.

It doesn’t matter that these are a based on a novel gene transfer technology, developed at Warp Speed, and deployed on the public by means of an Emergency Use Authorization. According to Dr. Baron, the ABIM’s understanding of these products and how the body reacts to them is a completely settled matter. Therefore, doctors who question the safety and efficacy of these products are, in effect, committing scientific heresy and subject to disciplinary action.

As Dr. McCullough and I document in our book, the COVID-19 vaccines—especially the mRNA products developed by Moderna and PfizerBioNTech—were (already in March of 2020) heralded as the solution to the pandemic, even before they were tested. As Bill Gates proclaimed in a press interview on April 6, 2020, he considered it imperative that mass manufacturing of these vaccines commence even before they were tested. This and countless other statements by Gates and his friends in public health agencies and the mainstream media indicated that the forthcoming vaccines and their mass deployment were a fait accompli.

As a medical scientist and treating physician, Dr. McCullough knew all too well the history of drugs that initially seemed safe and effective, but were later revealed to cause adverse reactions. OxyContin is a notorious recent example. Since SARS-CoV-2 arrived in the United States, Dr. McCullough has been at the forefront of researching the COVID-19 syndrome it causes and how to treat it. When the new vaccines were rolled out, he was at the forefront of investigating their safety and efficacy in the general public.

In the late spring of 2021, Dr. McCullough grew increasingly alarmed about the emerging vaccine safety data. According to the CDC, 6,207 deaths of people who’d received the COVID-19 vaccine were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) up to July 26, 2021. This was a staggering number. By comparison, the 1976 Swine Flu mass vaccination program was shut down after about 25 deaths and 550 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome were reported.

McCullough pointed this out in his media interviews to the consternation of his hospital administrators who regarded his statements as grounds for termination. Since then, he has been systematically stripped of three professorships, multiple editorial positions at academic medical journals, and a host of other professional memberships and benefits. All that remains of his long and distinguished career are his Texas Medical License and his Board Certifications in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease. Now the ABIM wants to strip him of his certifications.

In a letter dated October 18, 2022, the ABIM gave Dr. McCullough notice that its Credentials and Certification Committee (CCC) had “determined to recommend that your board certifications be revoked.”

The ABIM’s CCC claimed that Dr. McCullough’s primary offenses were:

1). Understating the risk of COVID-19 death for people under the age of 50.

2). Overstating the risk of death from COVID-19 vaccines.

In making this determination, the ABIM ignored the obvious fact that both of these risks are highly complex and multifactorial and are therefore matters of ongoing inquiry and debate. Again the ABIM made the erroneous assertion that its understanding of these complex phenomena is final, settled, and therefore codified in official orthodoxy.

By inflicting this grave punishment, the ABIM ignores the other salient fact that Dr. McCullough has, in the course of his career, achieved decades of perfect clinical performance, board scores, and hundreds of peer reviewed publications. His patients—including a growing body of vaccine injured patients—consistently give him glowing reviews as a healer.

Since I started working with him over two years ago, I have gotten to know him not only as a compassionate doctor (who frequently takes calls from sick patients in the evening and makes house calls) but also as a devoted family man and loyal friend. Beyond his boundless passion for medical scholarship, he is deeply interested in the entire human condition and the integrity of our Constitutional Republic. In the two years I’ve known him, I’ve never once heard him complain. He has borne his ongoing persecution with perfect stoicism and dignity.

He and his lawyer are doing everything they can to challenge the ABIM’s determination, but doing so is an extremely time-consuming and costly endeavor. If his stripping is finalized, it will impair his status with medical insurers and therefore his ability to be paid for his services as a physician. Welcome to the New American Inquisition.

October 30, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Exposed: How Anthony Fauci tortured vulnerable children in his obsessive hunt for an HIV vaccine

By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | October 20, 2022

Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden and director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years, has resigned and is leaving his post in December. He also steps down as director of the National Institutes for Health (NIH); both organisations are government-funded.

The 81-year-old virologist, who has served seven presidents, is quitting not because (as he says) he wants ‘new challenges’, but because of two books Robert F Kennedy Jnr (RFK) has written exposing him as a liar and a fraud, says Tony Lyons, President at Skyhorse Publishing, the independent publisher of both books.

Lyons said: ‘He used every available form of censorship to protect himself about the allegations in the first book and he doesn’t have any tools left to combat the likely congressional hearings in January.

‘Censorship as a government weapon against dissent has grown to unprecedented levels in the US. It’s a danger to the future of real science, real freedom, and real democracy.’

RFK’s first book, The Real Anthony Fauci, sold one million copies and topped the New York Times best-seller list despite extreme mainstream media censorship. It exposed Fauci’s role in the Covid pandemic and in the disastrous response to the HIV/Aids crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.

In a second book called ‘The Wuhan Cover Up – How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19’ due to be released next year, RFK uncovers the complex web of control and censorship at the heart of this story. Kennedy accuses Fauci of being the architect of the pandemic by funding ‘gain-of-function’ research – or bioweapon research, in plain English – in China’s Wuhan lab, the source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

If the books were not enough to send Fauci running for cover, this week RFK released a free-to-view documentary The Real Anthony Fauci Documentary (salsalabs.org) based on his first book’s findings.

Here is an extract from The Real Anthony Fauci, which details experiments he sanctioned on vulnerable American children during his HIV research.

***

Warning: Some of the following details are distressing.

In 2004, investigative journalist Liam Scheff chronicled Dr Fauci’s secretive experiments on hundreds of HIV-positive foster children at Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) in New York City and numerous sister facilities in New York and six other states between 1988 and 2002. Those experiments were the core of Dr Fauci’s career-defining effort to develop a second generation of profitable AIDS drugs as an encore to AZT.

Scheff described how Dr Fauci’s NIAID and his Big Pharma partners turned black and Hispanic foster kids into lab rats, subjecting them to torture and abuse in a grim parade of unsupervised drug and vaccine studies: “This former convent houses a revolving stable of children who’ve been removed from their own homes by the Agency for Child Services [ACS]. These children are black, Hispanic, and poor. Many of their mothers had a history of drug abuse and have died. Once taken into ICC, the children become subjects of drug trials sponsored by [Dr Fauci’s] NIAID (a division of the National Institutes of Health), NICHD (the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in conjunction with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies – GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Genentech, Chiron/Biocine and others.”

NIAID’s Pharma partners remunerated Incarnation Children’s Center (ICC) for supplying children for the tests. As usual, Dr Fauci had the safety oversight board rigged with his loyal principal investigators (PIs), foremost of whom was Dr Stephen Nicholas, a generously funded NIAID AIDS drug researcher. “Stephen Nicholas was not only director of the ICC until 2002; he also simultaneously sat on the Paediatric Medical Advisory Panel, which was supposed to oversee the tests—which signifies a serious conflict of interest,” criticizes [Holocaust survivor and medical abuse investigator] Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), a medical industry watchdog organization.

Scheff continued, “The drugs being given to the children are toxic – they’re known to cause genetic mutation, organ failure, bone marrow death, bodily deformations, brain damage, and fatal skin disorders.

“If the children refuse the drugs, they’re held down and force fed. If the children continue to resist, they’re taken to Columbia Presbyterian hospital, where a surgeon puts a plastic tube through their abdominal wall into their stomachs. From then on, the drugs are injected directly into their intestines.

“In 2003, two children, ages six and twelve, had debilitating strokes due to drug toxicities. The six-year-old went blind. They both died shortly after. Another fourteen-year-old died recently. An eight-year-old boy had two plastic surgeries to remove large, fatty, drug-induced lumps from his neck.

“This isn’t science fiction. This is AIDS research.”

Even the foster children who survived Fauci’s experiments reported dire side effects, ranging from skin outbreaks and hives, nausea, and vomiting, to sharp drops in immune response and fevers—all common adverse reactions associated with the drugs he was targeting for development.

During one of his trials involving the drug Dapsone, at least ten children died. A May 2005 Associated Press investigation reported that those “children died from a variety of causes, including four from blood poisoning.” Researchers complained they were unable to determine a safe, useful dosage. Their guessing game cost those children their lives.

“An unexpected finding in our study,” the researchers pitilessly observed, “was that overall mortality while receiving the study drug was significantly higher in the daily Dapsone group.” NIAID researchers shrugged off the deaths as a mystery: “This finding remains unexplained.”

Vera Sharav spent years investigating Dr Fauci’s torture chambers as part of her lifelong mission to end cruel medical experimentation on children. Sharav told me, “Fauci just brushed all those dead babies under the rug. They were collateral damage in his career ambitions. They were throw-away children.” Sharav said that at least eighty children died in Dr Fauci’s Manhattan concentration camp and accused NIAID and its partners of disposing of children’s remains in mass graves.

The BBC’s heart-breaking 2004 documentary, Guinea Pig Kids, chronicles the savage barbarity of Dr Fauci’s science projects from the perspective of the affected children. That year, the BBC hired investigative reporter Celia Farber to conduct field research for the film, which exposes the dark underside of Big Pharma’s stampede to develop lucrative new AIDS remedies. “I found the mass grave at Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, New York,” she told me. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a very large pit with AstroTurf thrown over it, which you could actually lift up. Under it one could see dozens of plain wooden coffins, haphazardly stacked. There may have been 100 of them. I learned there was more than one child’s body in each. Around the pit was a semi-circle of several large tombstones on which upward of one thousand children’s names had been engraved. I wrote down every name. I’m still wondering who the rest of those kids were. As far as I know, nobody has ever asked Dr Fauci that haunting question.

“I remember the teddy bears and hearts in piles around the pit and I recall the flies buzzing around. The job of recording all those names took all day. NIAID, New York, and all the hospital PIs were stonewalling us. We couldn’t get any accurate estimate of the number of children who died in the NIAID experiments, or who they were. I went to check the gravestone names against death certificates at the NYC Department of Health, which you could still do at that time. The BBC wanted to match these coffins to the names of children who were known to have been at ICC. It was a very slow, byzantine project with tremendous institutional resistance, but we did turn up a few names. We learned the story of a father who had come out of prison looking for his son. He was told his son had died at ICC of AIDS and there were no medical records, as they’d all been ‘lost in a fire.’ He was devastated. This story ran in the NY Post, believe it or not. But one after the other, every media outlet that touched this story got cold feet. Even then, the medical cartel had this power to kill this kind of story. Dr Fauci has built his career on that attitude. Nobody even asks him a follow-up question. NIAID’s narrative, at that time, was that these children were among the doomed as they ‘had AIDS,’ so supposedly they were all going to die anyway. When people died, in large numbers, gruesome deaths, NIAID’s medical researchers called it ‘lessons learned.’”

Further reading: https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/exclusive-an-interview-with-faucis-nemesis/

In Part 2: How Fauci ignored ethics and regulations in his experiments on babies and children.

October 30, 2022 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The Video That Got Me Fired: Israel IS An Apartheid State

Katie Halper | September 30, 2022

Here’s the video that got be censored, fired, and canceled by Next Star media, which owns The Hill and Rising, a show I’ve been a weekly contributor to for three years.

Thanks to Breakthrough News for making this video with me and actually being an independent and uncensored media outlet. @BreakThrough News

October 30, 2022 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

FDA Slow-Walked Studies on COVID Vaccine Safety Signals in Elderly

By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 26, 2022

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took more than a year to follow up on a potential increase in serious adverse events in elderly people who received Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to an investigative report published Tuesday by The BMJ.

According to The BMJ, in July 2021, the FDA “quietly disclosed” the findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had received a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia, and pulmonary embolism.

The FDA disclosure lacked specific details, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and the agency said it would “share further updates and information with the public as they become available.”

The FDA did not alert physicians or the public, via a press release or any other means, The BMJ investigator said.

Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document that outlined a protocol for a follow-up epidemiological study for investigating the matter more thoroughly.

The BMJ said:

“This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. (Neither absolute risk increases nor confidence intervals were provided.)”

That was over a year ago. “More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown,” The BMJ reported, adding:

“The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine’s product label.”

The BMJ report also alleged the FDA has not “ publicly acknowledged other published observational studies or clinical trial reanalyses reporting compatible results.”

FDA ‘irresponsible’ for keeping information from scientific community, critics say

Critics of the FDA’s failure to warn the public voiced their concerns about the data to The BMJ and called on the FDA to notify the public immediately.

“To keep this information from the scientific community and prevent us from analysing it ourselves, is irresponsible,” said Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an emergency medicine physician in New Orleans who recently carried out a reanalysis of serious adverse events in Pfizer and Moderna’s randomized trials. “It presumes that these organisations are perfect and cannot benefit from independent scrutiny.”

Dr. Tracy Høeg, an epidemiologist and physician currently conducting COVID-19 vaccine research with the Florida Department of Health and California’s Marin County Department of Health and Human Services, told The BMJ :

“The fact that the FDA found these four safety signals means they should have followed up on the results and I don’t understand why we haven’t had more information since then.

“It has been over a year.”

Fraiman concurred. “The protocols say that they’re looking into these data further, but I’d like to know the results now, it’s been long enough. They need to view this from a public health perspective, they need to consider a person’s right to informed consent.”

“As physicians, we recommend medical therapies and we need to explain the full risks and benefits to the patient. This is not happening,” Fraiman added.

Dr. Dick Bijl, an epidemiologist in the Netherlands, pointed out, “The FDA managed to determine the efficacy of the vaccines in a short period of time, but they have not analysed the pharmacovigilance data with the same speed. If they found signals in July 2021, they should have been analysed and published within months.”

Bijl is the president of the International Society of Drug Bulletins and has campaigned for years to get safety data communicated to doctors in a timely fashion. He told The BMJ he credits his organization for prompting the World Health Organization to begin publishing regular updates about drug safety signals in its WHO Pharmaceuticals Newsletter so that all doctors can take note of them.

Bijl said:

“The FDA should have informed doctors about any early safety signals from the vaccines.

“Most doctors are not trained to, nor are they focused on, recognising side effects, especially because vaccines are generally regarded as quite safe. It’s important that doctors are told what to look out for.”

Why the delay in acknowledging safety signal study results?

The FDA’s July 2021 findings came from the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) “near real-time” surveillance system called Rapid Cycle Analysis (RCA) that the FDA used to monitor a list of 14 adverse events of special interest.

Data obtained from the RCA system is not intended to establish a causal relationship between a vaccine and adverse events but rather is intended to detect potential safety signals rapidly.

The RCA data referenced by the agency in its July 2021 disclosure study appeared to only detect safety signals associated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

“The agency said the associations were not identified for the other two COVID-19 vaccines authorised in the U.S. made by Moderna and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson),” The BMJ said.

The July 2021 follow-up study protocol stated there is a “manuscript in preparation” for the original RCA study but to date, nothing has been published for either that original study or the follow-up study.

According to The BMJ, the FDA’s medical record review and statistical analyses have recently been completed, and the overall study results are “currently under internal review.”

The FDA downplayed the findings:

“The findings to date from the fully adjusted epidemiologic study on the primary series vaccinations do not provide strong support for an association between the vaccine and any of the four outcomes described in the posting to the FDA website. Additional analyses, including evaluation of booster doses, are still being conducted. Release of the study findings is expected later this fall.”

Furthermore, according to The BMJ, the FDA made no public announcement when the results from an unspecified study it conducted raised safety concerns — but instead “buried” the findings in the introduction section of an Aug. 31, 2022, research protocol document:

“In a cohort study of the third dose safety in the Medicare population where historical controls were used, we detected a statistically significant risk for immune thrombocytopenia (incidence rate ratio 1.66, confidence interval 1.17 to 2.29) and acute myocardial infarction (IRR 1.15, CI 1.02 to 1.29) among people with prior covid-19 diagnosis as well as an increased risk of Bell’s palsy (IRR 1.11, CI 1.03 to 1.19) and pulmonary embolism (IRR 1.05, CI 1.0001 to 1.100) in general.”

Additionally, a June 2022 observational study from three Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland and Norway — found statistically significant increases in thromboembolic and thrombocytopenic outcomes following both Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Christine Stabell Benn, M.D., Ph.D., a vaccinologist and professor in global health at the University of Southern Denmark, told The BMJ of yet another study — this one done by her research group that is currently published in preprint.

“The safety signal seems to be gathering around cardiovascular and cerebral vascular events, things to do with circulation and our larger organs, and these are the same signals that appear to be popping up in the FDA surveillance data as well,” Benn said.

She added, “We don’t want to create a lot of unnecessary anxiety and we can’t say there is now proof that the vaccines cause these events because the data are of poor quality, but we can say there is a danger signal, and the medical profession needs to be alerted to this.”

Earlier this year, the CDC admitted to deliberately withholding critical data on the COVID-19 booster shots and hospital admissions, The BMJ reported.

Kristen Nordlund, CDC spokesperson, in February told the New York Times the agency had been slow to release data to the public on breakthrough infections “because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.”

Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

his article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

October 29, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Leaked FBI document lists “misinformation” as an “election crime”

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | October 28, 2022

A whistleblower leaked a document to Project Veritas showing that the FBI is focusing on election misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. The document lists what the agency should categorize as “election crimes.”

Among the election crimes highlighted in the documents is “misinformation.” The document defines misinformation as “false or misleading information spread mistakenly or unintentionally.”

Disinformation is also an election “crime,” and is defined as “false or inaccurate information intended to mislead others.” It adds: “Disinformation campaigns on social media are used to deliberately confuse, trick, or upset the public.”

The document appears to be another effort by the federal government to determine what is true and what is false. A few months ago, the Biden administration created the “Disinformation Governance Board” under the DHS. It dismantled it a few weeks later due to public backlash.

The FBI document lists things to consider, including the 1st and 4th Amendments, the Privacy Act, and protected vs. unprotected speech.

October 29, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

US Pretends to be ‘Open to Talks’ With North Korea While Boosting Sanctions

Samizdat – 28.10.2022

Russia and China will continue to jointly address the North Korea issue. The main cause of tensions on the Korean Peninsula is the pressure exerted on the DPRK and the show of force by South Korea and the United States.

Russia remains committed to a joint plan with China for a Korean settlement.

“We will adhere to the agreed position on this issue”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday at a plenary session of the Valdai Discussion Club.

The Russia-China action plan is based on the principle of reciprocal steps by the United States and the DPRK. These steps could be taken by the United States without damaging its reputation, and on the same basis by DPRK leaders. Moscow and Beijing believe that success in the settlement can only be achieved on the basis of reciprocal movement: action after action, step by step, gradually, and consistently.

At the same time, Moscow and Beijing have repeatedly warned that the formula, according to which North Korea must first completely get rid of its nuclear missile program and only then it will be possible to think about lifting sanctions on the DPRK and ensuring its economic development, is absolutely unsustainable.

“Our roadmap, which we proposed together with China, was that first we should build confidence through mutual meetings, and then we should take some tangible measures, including the suspension of military exercises, tests, and missile launches, and then proceed to negotiations,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier, presenting a joint Russia-China plan for a Korean settlement.

The plan was put forward to the two Koreas, the United States, and Japan in the fall of 2019 after three meetings between the US and DPRK leaders in Singapore, Hanoi, and the demilitarized zone in Panmunjom ended inconclusively. These meetings were held on June 12, 2018, February 27-28, 2019, and June 30, 2019, respectively.

When answering experts’ questions at the Valdai Discussion Club related to the Korea issue, Vladimir Putin said that the unwillingness to talk and the absolutely boorish attitude to North Korea’s interests, including in the sphere of security, has led to the DPRK nuclear issue. In an interview with Sputnik, Alexander Zhebin, director of the Center for Korean Studies and member of the Russian Political Science Association, commented on the Russian president’s statements as follows:

“Vladimir Putin was referring to the boorish behavior of the United States, because the US and the DPRK had an agreement at Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore that Pyongyang would not launch long-range missiles that could reach American territory, and would not test nuclear weapons. The Americans would respond to this, as recorded in the Singapore declaration, by building a new relationship. Instead, the Americans continued to impose more and more sanctions against the DPRK, which means that they have not fulfilled their part of the commitments.”

According to Alexander Zhebin, the US behaves arrogantly towards the DPRK in the UN Security Council as well:

“Each UN Security Council resolution that imposed sanctions on the DPRK stipulated that positive steps by the DPRK to reduce nuclear missile activity must be accompanied by reciprocal steps by those who imposed sanctions and lead to their partial lifting. This has not happened. On the contrary, no matter what the DPRK has done, the US has kept imposing new sanctions, both by Trump and then by Biden.”

Today, instead of negotiations, the US and South Korea are working on scenarios for destroying the top political leadership of the DPRK and the country’s control centers.

“On the one hand, the Americans say they are ready to negotiate with the DPRK at any time, anywhere, and without any conditions. However, at the same time, they have imposed unprecedentedly harsh sanctions on the DPRK and do not intend to lift them. On the contrary, they are obstructing all attempts by China and Russia to reduce the sanctions burden and start a dialog process. In fact, the invitation to negotiations is just talk. Under that guise, the US is implementing a longstanding plan according to which, eventually, the DPRK, under the weight of economic sanctions, will not survive, thus forcing Kim Jong-un to surrender.

They are not hiding the fact that large-scale military exercises carried out by the US and South Korea are used to practice the elimination of the DPRK’s top political leadership and the country’s control centers. The scale of the recent maneuvers is simply off the chart. 240 American and South Korean aircraft, including the latest F-35 stealth fighters, have been deployed off the coast of North Korea. This cannot but cause serious concern to the DPRK leadership, since everything is happening near its borders. The DPRK is very much concerned about its security,” Alexander Zhebin stressed.

The DPRK’s missile launches are a response to US and South Korean military drills, which constantly press Pyongyang to demonstrate its power, Jin Xiangdong, a researcher at Xiamen University’s School of International Relations, said in an interview with Sputnik :

“Since coming to power, the new South Korean government has conducted a series of military exercises near the Korean Peninsula. The DPRK has responded by launching ballistic missiles. The main problem with the situation on the peninsula is that the new South Korean government is constantly putting pressure on North Korea and demonstrating its power. China’s position on the Korean Peninsula issue is consistent and clear. China defends the maintenance of peace and stability on the peninsula, denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula, and the resolution of issues through dialog and consultations. Meanwhile, in general, the solution to the Korean Peninsula problem is still complicated.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff of the South Korean Armed Forces said that North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan on Friday. The launches took place on the last day of South Korea’s Hoguk military exercises, which began on October 17. These maneuvers featured a large-scale amphibious landing exercise near the city of Pohang on the coast of the Sea of Japan.

On October 31, the Republic of Korea and the United States will launch large-scale joint air exercises. The high intensity and scale of the drills provoke growing tensions in Northeast Asia. The US threatening to give a strong response to a possible nuclear test by the DPRK has aggravated the situation.

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

US shuns limits on nuclear weapon use

Samizdat | October 28, 2022

The Pentagon revealed on Thursday in its long-awaited National Defense Strategy (NDS) report that given the growing national security threats posed against the US and its allies, Washington must leave the door open to such options as a nuclear first strike and use of nuclear weapons to prevent non-nuclear attacks. That conclusion was approved by the White House after the Pentagon’s thorough review of “no first use” and “sole purpose” nuclear policies.

“Those approaches would result in an unacceptable level of risk, in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage to the United States and its allies and partners,” the NDS said. “Some allies and partners are particularly vulnerable to attacks with non-nuclear means that could produce devastating effects.”

Biden pledged while running for president in 2020 that he would work to narrow the potential uses of America’s nuclear weaponry. “The sole purpose of the US nuclear arsenal should be deterring — and if necessary, retaliating against — a nuclear attack. As president, I will work to put that belief into practice, in consultation with our allies and military.”

The decision to instead reject limits on use of nuclear weapons comes amid rising tensions with Russia and China. Beijing is investing heavily in expansion and modernization of its nuclear capabilities, the Pentagon said. “By the 2030s, the United States will, for the first time in its history, face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.”

Washington won’t use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that are party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, according to the NDS report. “For all other states, there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which US nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring attacks that have a strategic effect against the United States or its allies and partners.”

The report labeled China as the No. 1 national security threat against the US, despite rising tensions with Moscow over the Ukraine conflict. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said China is “the only competitor out there with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the power to do so.”

The US remains the only nation to have ever used nuclear weapons against another country – the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945.

October 28, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | | Leave a comment

The MSM’s cancer ‘cure’ stories are bio-firm hype, not hope

By Guy Hatchard | TCW Defending Freedom | October 26, 2022

GLOBALISED mainstream media equates not just with a uniform, poorly-informed world, but a manipulated world.

In Britain, the Times runs a story entitled: After centuries of cut, burn and poison, could a jab cure cancer? by Tom Whipple. Eleven thousand miles away in New Zealand, the same story appears in Stuff newspaper.

This is one of those ‘isn’t it wonderful?’ reassuring stories that unfortunately don’t look quite so rosy after close scrutiny, but like bad pennies are turning up everywhere. On the surface informative and exciting, underneath sadly lacking in that investigative depth we were expecting – and certainly over-hyped.

This particular story would not be out of place in a glossy brochure seeking investment funds for BioNTech. According to the Times article, RNA vaccine technology is rather like buying a piece of furniture from Ikea. Each person could very soon have their own personalised cancer vaccine off the shelf. What could possibly go wrong?

The tremendously hopeful note that the story strikes is based on a lot of over-simplified theory and the success (???) of the Pfizer Covid vaccine co-developed with BioNTech. It sounds reassuringly easy to design mRNA vaccines that rush to your aid and eliminate those nasty cancer cells.

Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, founders of BioNTech, are pictured in white coats, and are quoted promising: ‘We stimulate the immune system, do something magic, and the tumour disappears.’

Heady stuff, but the cited evidence is less than thin. A decorated cancer researcher who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, then tried all his innovative ideas out on himself, and died in 2011. In 2020, 16 patients with pancreatic cancer were treated by BioNTech. Eighteen months later, eight have died and eight are cancer-free after 18 months. The details are sadly lacking.

What stage were they at and how does that compare with their expected prognosis? The missing piece of the jigsaw is the article’s lack of scrutiny of the safety of BioNTech’s only commercialised mRNA vaccine product – the Pfizer Covid vaccine.

If you want to ask questions and also seek answers, you will need to turn to a completely different kind of journalism. Igor Chudov is a mathematician – like the Times author – but he writes on Substack and is therefore not constrained by any editorial policy or any no-go areas dictated by the newspaper owners, their advertisers, or subtly imposed government guidelines.

Chudov has published a very different cancer story, headlined: Cancer rates are Increasing and may get much worse. Wiped out immune systems take time to manifest. 

According to the article, we are seeing the first ripple of a coming storm of cancer deaths. Chudov reports the work of the Ethical Skeptic (another Substack researcher) whose analysis of figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – the public health agency of the US – has shown that the rate of US cancer deaths accelerated in 2021 and 2022, coinciding with the rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA Covid vaccine and other biotech vaccines.

It is the effect size that is surprising – 9 sigma. What does this mean? Well perhaps you can remember from your school maths lessons that for a Bell curve, two-thirds of data points lie within one standard deviation of the mean, that is known as 1 sigma. Ninety-five per cent lie within two standard deviations (2 sigma) and 99.7 per cent lie within 3 sigma.

I’m going to translate for you what the observed 9 sigma deviation from the prior pattern of cancer deaths probably implies in very simple layman terms:

1. A hugely statistically surprising number of people already infected with cancer have suffered a rapid progression of their condition to death. Covid vaccination reduced their likely longevity.

2. Some people who previously had no evidence of cancer, and possibly no lifetime expectation of cancer, are becoming ill and dying in the weeks and months following Covid vaccination. And it is not due to Covid infection – it didn’t happen in 2020.

Read Chudov’s article. It is a long read, but well worth the effort. In addition to the US data, he looks at the official UK cancer mortality data, which shows a similar increase. He also quotes another Substack author, A Midwestern Doctor, who analyses and references in detail what it is about mRNA vaccines that causes cancer. The approach is investigative, as we should expect it.

There are concerning issues that Whipple, author of the fawning Times article, chooses not to address. He failed to discuss questions that constitute the normal substance of scientific debate, but his piece was beamed around the world.

We expect the Times to ask questions, but it is not doing so. It has quietly rolled over and followed the biotech PR line. It is not alone – the mainstream media are collectively failing the sniff test.

We are being manipulated. If you want real journalism, it is flourishing elsewhere. GLOBE (the Campaign for Global Legislation Outlawing Biotechnology Experimentation) and other independents are asking vital questions that few are prepared to countenance.

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Biden’s Bivalent Booster Blunder

Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts | October 26, 2022

The Biden administration has made a fool of themselves with their bivalent vaccine roll out. Pretty much all decisions were errors, and very likely these will hurt them politically. The only way for Biden to save himself from his terrible Covid policy is to fire all his advisors and rehire good ones. Let’s review the facts:

The Biden administration granted emergency use authorization to Pfizer and Moderna for a bivalent booster that targeted Wuhan and BA45. That vaccine received EUA based on mouse data (8-10 mice). There were no human data at the time of approval. (Please don’t confuse the BA4/5 with BA1 bivalent)

Since then, both companies have press released results, but do not specificify the numeric values of antibodies generated in people. No one has clinical data– i.e. is there a reduction in hospitalization? Severe disease? And if so, we don’t know which people (how old) have a further reduction in severe disease or hospitalization from this vaccine.

We also know breakthrough can occur. Rochelle Walensky herself received the vaccine and then had COVID one month later. Ironically, this is probably the peak vaccine efficacy (peak Ab). I don’t know what the vaccine effectiveness is, and neither does she, but my guess is it isn’t terrific.

The Biden administration said that we didn’t have time to wait for clinical trials in people. But each passing day reveals that is a lie. The uptake of this vaccine is abysmal. No one wants it. If no one was going to get it then why not take the time to run the proper studies?

A recent pre-print has shown that the bivalent booster is not better at generating BA45 antibodies than getting the old booster one more time. This is the failure of not generating human trial data.

You could have sorted this out pre-market. *Let’s be clear, these are not clinical data (living longer/better) but without better antibodies, clinical endpoints seem unlikely to be met*

Many universities are now requiring this vaccine for 20-year-old college students who have had three prior doses and Omicron. I think you have to be dropped on your head to actually believe a 20-year-old man in good health who’s gotten three doses and just had Omicron will derive any benefit from this bivalent booster. I have never met even one doctor who thinks that that is true. And yet that is the position of the Biden administration.

They are so hellbent on earning Pfizer money– I mean vaccinating people who just had covid —that they are willing to ignore the mountain of data that suggests that’s not what you should be spending your energy on.

More than a year ago, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause the number one and number two at the US FDA vaccine branch resigned, citing White House pressure to approve boosters for all ages. Their published remarks suggest that they wanted to do it only for the elderly and vulnerable. Their message was repeatedly ignored as the Biden administration rammed booster after booster through the US food and drug administration for ultra low risk populations.

They have actually said a 5-year-old who has had three doses and had covid should get this booster. It’s insane.

Their entire vaccine policy seems to be interested in giving Pfizer and Moderna a perpetual market share for a yearly vaccine. But seems to have no interest in generating credible randomized control trial evidence to inform the public. As such, they fail the American people.

I am concerned that after this White House stint: Ashish Jha, Rochelle Walensky, Vivek Murthy, and Peter Marks (post FDA) will work for or consult for Pfizer and Moderna. That would be devastating.

American people obviously do not want to receive a vaccine every year with non-trivial adverse events without knowing that it gives them some benefit. Benefit to third parties cannot be had because it cannot stop transmission.

Some misguided policy makers argue that even a small reduction in transmission is meaningful. That’s nonsense. The problem is that you can get COVID every single day of your life from now until the end of your life. Even changing the probability modestly won’t change the outcome. Because the probability you will get COVID is one over time. Think of it this way:

You can play Russian roulette with one bullet or three bullets. I would much rather play with one bullet, if I had to. But if you have to play a thousand times in a row, we all know how that game ends.

That’s COVID 19. It’s not going anywhere. You’re going to have to play over and over and over again. And that means you’re all going to get COVID. So the only question is how many doses minimize severe disease? And who needs that to be minimized?

Today in the governor’s debate of New York state, only the Republican candidate was opposed to children’s mandates. It’s amazing that the Democrats are clinging to a failed vaccine policy. Their covid-19 policy is going to lead to catastrophic losses.

They need to fire all their advisors and start new. That’s the only way to fix the situation.

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Seventh Nuclear Test? How US and Its Asian Allies are Driving North Korea Into a Corner

By Ekaterina Blunova – Samizdat – 27.10.2022

The US, Japan, and South Korea vowed an “unparalleled” response to a potential seventh nuclear test by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). However, the countries’ officials did not clarify precisely what measures they would take.

“This deterrence through threat of punishment by Washington and its allies is unlikely to succeed,” said Dr. Zhang Baohui, director of the Center for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “Pyongyang follows its own strategic logic when deciding whether to pursue new tests. A rise in tensions on the peninsula will only heighten North Korea’s insecurity, motivating it to continue to pursue the nuclear option.”

The US and its Asian allies reportedly fear that Pyongyang could be planning a nuclear bomb test for the first time since 2017. However, they have yet to provide details backing their concerns. Meanwhile, the US and South Korea have stepped up joint military drills in the region over the past several months.

Earlier, President Donald Trump’s White House tried to facilitate dialogue between Seoul and Pyongyang. These efforts were halted by President Joe Biden, who announced in May 2021 that he would not give DPRK leader Kim Jong-un “recognition” as the “legitimate” head of the state unless the latter denuclearized the country. Washington’s shift under Biden did not go unnoticed by the DPRK, and was followed by eight missile tests by Pyongyang in 2021.

The number of missile tests carried out by North Korea rose steeply in 2022, as Yoon Suk-yeol won the presidency in South Korea in March and declared Communist Pyongyang the “main enemy” of Seoul. Furthermore, the new South Korean president has openly flirted with the idea of a preemptive strike against his country’s northern neighbor.

In August 2022, Washington and Seoul kicked off their largest military exercises since 2018, with Yoon vowing to further boost “deterrence” against the DPRK. Earlier this month, Seoul also launched the 12-day Hoguk exercise with the participation of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and the US military. The Hoguk drills will last until October 28.

Almost simultaneously, South Korea joined a US-led multinational exercise on cyber operations called Cyber Flag for the first time. According to the South Korean Defense Ministry, 18 personnel from the South Korean military are participating in the exercise, held from October 24 to 28 and which involves 25 countries.

Beijing has repeatedly warned Washington and Seoul against provoking Pyongyang and igniting instability on the Korean Peninsula. “All parties concerned should focus on the overall situation of peace and stability on the peninsula and prevent the situation from escalating,” Geng Shuang, China’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, told the international body on October 5. Geng highlighted that the recent bolstering of the US military alliance in the Asia-Pacific region has only increased the risk of military confrontation.

“Historical experience shows that dialogue and consultation are the only correct way to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue,” the Chinese official stressed.

Diplomatic Logjam Between North and South

However, if Pyongyang decides to conduct a seventh nuclear test, there is little if anything that the US and its Asian allies can do to prevent it, according to Zhang.

“Frankly, I don’t see what the three can do with North Korea’s seventh nuclear test,” the Chinese scholar said. “It is already under very systematic sanctions by the United Nations and it is hard to imagine that the US, South Korea, and Japan could pursue additional meaningful sanctions against Pyongyang. Current sanctions were adopted due to China and Russia’s support in 2017. Now, the strategic landscape has completely changed and it is now impossible to expect China and Russia supporting new sanction measures.”

The US and its Asian allies are likely to take a series of measures in response to the DPRK’s potential nuclear test, according to Michael Madden, nonresident fellow at the Stimson Center, leading contributing analyst to 38 North, and director and founder of NK Leadership Watch.
“The ‘unparalleled response’ line comes from remarks made by the Republic of Korea [South Korea] 1st Vice Foreign Minister following interactions with officials from the US and Japan,” said Madden. “The primary response will be an increase in military exercises in and around the Korean Peninsula.”

For its part, the US might also move certain military assets into the area as a warning to the DPRK, according to the analyst.

“There has already been a loose plan to continue some exercises and drills through the middle of November, albeit on a small scale,” he said. “In the event of the seventh nuclear test, the scope and equipment of those exercises will probably be expanded. From the ROK we might also see them scrap some of the agreements they made with the DPRK during the Moon Administration. The Yoon Administration has called attention to the North violating the 2018 inter-Korea military agreement so a seventh nuclear test raises the probability that both Koreas will discard that agreement.”

For its part, the North could launch or attempt to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and additionally carry out intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) drills, according to Madden.

“The North could very well declare itself on a wartime footing which they had done in 2013. If there are additional military exercises from the US, ROK and/or Japan, it is highly probable the DPRK will respond with their own drills and exercises. Of course, all of this activity would be an escalation,” the US analyst projected.

According to Madden, the unfolding situation “is a bit of a diplomatic logjam” between the South and North, as Pyongyang has already announced that it will not negotiate its nuclear weapons program or inventory, while the US, South Korea, and Japan urge it to denuclearize.

However, the analyst did not rule out that South and North Korea could have a meeting or interaction to reduce tensions if military engagement between the two escalates at the border. Another de-escalation scenario could involve another country, like China or Russia, brokering something between the two sides.

“In the current context of the re-rise of tension, a diplomatic option no longer exists,” argued Zhang. “The only viable alternative, as some have suggested in the US, is to accept North Korea’s nuclear status. That would remove a source of conflict between the US and North Korea simply by recognizing and accepting the status quo. However, Washington should not be expected to pursue this option.”

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , | Leave a comment

Abandon the Fetish for ‘Unconditional Surrender’

By Ryan McMaken | The Libertarian Institute | October 27, 2022

On Monday, thirty members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus called on the Biden administration to pursue a negotiated peace settlement or cease-fire with Ukraine. The letter from the Progressive Caucus is careful to praise the administration for its ongoing efforts to fund Kyiv’s war effort, but also concludes that not enough is being done to encourage a negotiated settlement.

This position is heretical in Washington where the narrative is well dominated by the center-left militarist coalition that currently dominates the Democratic Party and the fading neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. In fact, so complete is the hawks’ domination of Democratic Party leadership, the Progressive Caucus was forced to withdraw its letter in less than twenty-four hours. The progressives ended up embarrassingly apologizing for suggesting diplomacy is a good thing.

Indeed, there is certainly no end in sight for U.S. intervention in Ukraine, and little support for a negotiated end to the war among foreign policy elites. The U.S. has sent more than sixty-five billion taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, and given Ukraine’s famously high levels of corruption, there’s no telling where that money ends up. Meanwhile, the U.S. has now deployed the 101st Airborne Division to Europe for the first time in almost eighty years. The division is now conducting training exercises mere miles from the Ukraine border.

The administration is now being pressured by the Democratic leadership in Congress to designate Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. This would further hobble efforts to open negotiations with Moscow and would also trigger even more sanctions against the Russian people. Even worse, Washington insiders and pundits continue to push regime change in Russia. Although he later backpedaled on his comments, President Biden declared in March that “for God’s sake, [Vladimir Putin] cannot remain in power.” Earlier this month, Republican foreign policy advisory John Bolton called for regime change. Even the dismemberment of Russia has long been a stated goal of many American Russophobes.

These calls for regime change tend to steer clear of explicitly pushing military intervention, but a brief look at Iraq, Syria, and Libya makes it clear that when American and agents call for regime change, military interventions tend to follow.

Moreover, American foreign policy hawks have been remarkably casual about the prospects for an accidental escalation into war between nuclear powers. Biden himself has admitted that the risk of “Armageddon” is the highest it’s been since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but the administration has done nothing to change course. A disturbing number of pundits have declared that nuclear war is worth the risks, and a Pew poll shows a full one-third of Americans polled want U.S. intervention in Ukraine even if it risks nuclear war. It seems we’re a far cry from the days of the height of the nuclear disarmament movement in the 1980s when marches against nuclear war could boast hundreds of thousands of people.

The Sane Position Is in Favor of Negotiation

If the U.S. regime actually cared about its alleged constituents, of course, it would withdraw from the conflict entirely. But since Washington insists on partnering with the Ukraine regime in its war, the only sane thing to do is for Washington to push hard for negotiations and to pursue a cease-fire rapidly. This position, of course, is routinely denounced by the usual hawkish suspects as being “pro-Russia.” Thus, war dissenters in Washington such as Rand Paul must state what should be obvious: that preferring negotiations to World War III hardly makes one a Putin sympathizer. Although most American foreign policy elites tend to have no problem at all with spilling copious amounts of blood and treasure in the name of Washington’s global ambitions, many Americans fortunately disagree. A recent poll shows nearly 60 percent of Americans support negotiations with Russia “as soon as possible” and want an end to the Ukraine conflict even if it means Ukraine giving up territory.

Ukraine hawks will decry such a position as a matter of Americans bargaining away Ukraine’s “sacred” territory, and thus have no “right” to do so. Yet, the Ukraine regime forfeits its right to unilaterally decide for itself what concessions must be made so long as Kyiv continues to call for American taxpayers to hand over cash. Moreover, by involving the U.S. in the conflict as a supplier of weaponry, training, and as a potential nuclear backstop, Kyiv is also demanding that Americans be placed in the line of nuclear or conventional fire should the conflict escalate. So long as the U.S. is viewed as a party to the conflict—which it obviously is—this puts Americans in harm’s way. So, yes, Americans have every right to demand a swift end to the conflict, and if necessary—as Henry Kissinger has suggested—that includes Ukraine giving up territory.

If Kyiv doesn’t like those terms, it can start refusing the money and weapons supplied by the American taxpayer.

It’s Time to End the American Preference for “Unconditional Surrender”

The American maximalist no-peace-until-total-defeat-of-Russia has its origins in the now longstanding American obsession with “unconditional surrender.” This is the idea that a military victor is only the victor when it totally dictates terms of surrender and peace. The model for this is often assumed the Japanese surrender to the U.S. at the end of the Second World War. The basic operating procedure in this case is simply to keep bombing the enemy country until its regime gives the victor everything it wants without any conditions. It was the stated policy of the Roosevelt administration during the War.

Of course, as international relations school Paul Poast has noted, “unconditional surrender” wasn’t even the case in the U.S.-Japanese conflict. The Japanese refused to surrender unless the U.S. pledged to not attempt to abolish the Japanese monarchy. Another potential “model” is the Versailles Treaty of 1919 in which the victorious Allies dictated that the defeated parties would accept “war guilt” and that Austria would be dismembered.

The fact that the terms of Versailles treaty were a leading cause of the rise of Hitler and of the Second World War should be reason enough to abandon this model.

But the Japanese surrender and the Versailles treaty are extreme cases. The fact is that very few wars are ended along the lines of anything we would call “unconditional surrender.” This has been known for a long time, and was explored in detail by Coleman Phillipson in his 1916 book Termination of War and Treaties of Peace. Phillipson notes that in cases where total “subjugation” of another state occurs, there was no reason for concluding a negotiated settlement, as the imposition of the conqueror’s will on the conquered nation involved merely a unilateral arrangement.” The normal, far more common mode of bringing about peace in international conflicts, however, is a “compromise ad hoc, involving an agreement as to demands made on both sides, and settling all the matters in dispute.”

Indeed, many military personnel in World War II were alarmed by the administration’s adoption of the new doctrine with General Dwight Eisenhower’s naval aide Captain Harry Butcher stating privately that “any military person knows that there are conditions to every surrender.”

Moreover, the maximalist hawks underestimate costs likely to be incurred by the United States / North Atlantic Treaty Organization faction. If the goal is truly to impose a unilateral peace on Moscow, this is likely to require far more bloodshed and taxpayer treasure than a negotiated settlement. This may be perfectly fine for many American elites, but for many ordinary people who are forced to fund the war and submit to various trade restrictions and shortages, the cost could be sizable.

For these reasons, among others, Berenice Carroll concludes (in “How Wars End: An Analysis of Some Current Hypotheses”) that it is not actually all that easy to determine the “victor” from the “loser” in an international conflict once all of the costs have actually been analyzed. Or, as Lewis Coser has put it, because of this, “most conflicts end in compromises in which it is often quite hard to specify which side has gained relative advantage.” For this reason, it’s important to think long and hard about doubling down on a “strategy” that’s guaranteed to prolong a conflict indefinitely. This is all the more true when nuclear powers are involved.

Yet, from the point of view of the moralizing hawks, no “sacrifice” is too great for ordinary Americans or Europeans to bear in the name of “containing” Russia and hopefully even ending the regime itself. The hawks are always dreaming of great moral victories, no matter the cost. In real life, however, the bloodshed will likely only stop when we ignore the American advocates of nuclear brinkmanship and more pragmatic heads prevail. The proper position now—especially in a nuclear environment—is not to pine for a global moral crusade but to explore ways to bring about the end of active hostilities. This is done through negotiated settlements and compromise. The hawks seeking to “shame” the advocates of peace are really just agents of more war, more bloodshed, and religious fervor in favor of “territorial integrity” and other nationalist myths.

The foreign policy elites, however, only benefit politically and financially from more war, ongoing ad nauseum. There is as of yet no downside for these elites in more war. The fact that they’ve quashed even some small-scale calls for negotiations on the part of some progressives shows that the war party is a long way from abandoning its fetish for “unconditional surrender.”

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

The Pentagon Brought on Both Nuclear Crises

By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | October 26, 2022

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again.

Yes, what I am emphasizing is the Pentagon’s role in ginning up both of these crises that have gotten us so close to nuclear war with Russia.

At the end of the Cold War racket, there was absolutely no reason for NATO to remain in existence. Its purported mission of protecting Europe from a Soviet (i.e., Russian) attack had been fulfilled. The Cold War was supposedly over.

The only problem was that it wasn’t over for the Pentagon and the CIA. If they had had their druthers, their Cold War racket would have gone on forever. After all, what better justification for their ever-increasing budgets and power within the federal governmental structure?

That’s why they kept NATO in existence. While they were engaging in their interventionist antics in the Middle East, which led to their war-on-terrorism racket, they were, at the same time, using NATO to provoke Russia, with the aim of reigniting their old Cold War racket. Instead of dismantling their old Cold War dinosaur, they used it to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact, which enabled the Pentagon and the CIA to move their nuclear missiles and military forces inexorably closer to Russia’s border, over Russia’s vehement objections.

Ultimately, they threatened to absorb Ukraine into their NATO racket, knowing full well that Russia had vowed for some 25 years to invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening. Their scheme succeeded. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, the loyal followers of the Pentagon and the CIA focused exclusively on the invasion and not also on the NATO racket that had provoked the invasion.

It was no different with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The reason that Cuba and the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba was to deter another invasion of the island by the CIA and the Pentagon. Don’t forget that the CIA had already invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and had failed miserably. After that, the Pentagon continually exhorted President Kennedy to initiate a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. That’s what the Pentagon’s fraudulent false-flag operation known as Operation Northwoods was all about, which Kennedy, to his everlasting credit, summarily rejected.

What legal justification did the Pentagon and the CIA have to invade Cuba? None! The fact that Cuba had a communist regime certainly never justified an invasion (or, for that matter, repeated murder attempts against Fidel Castro). Keep in mind that Cuba had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. In the long relationship between communist Cuba and the United States, it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor, including with its old Cold War economic embargo that continues to target the Cuban people with death and impoverishment as a way to achieve regime change on the island.

Cuba and Russia knew full-well that the CIA and the Pentagon were fully determined to invade Cuba again, with the aim of replacing the Fidel Castro regime with another pro-U.S. dictatorship, like the one that preceded the Castro regime. That’s why Cuba and Russia installed those nuclear missiles in Cuba — to deter another illegal U.S. invasion of the island.

Why can’t the loyal acolytes of the U.S. national-security establishment see all this? Because for them, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are their triune god. Who wants to question or criticize god?

But if we are going to put out nation back on the right road — the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world, it is necessary for the American people to not only question this false god but also to toss it and its evil rackets into the dustbin of history and restore America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.

October 27, 2022 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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