On Tuesday in response to Pelosi’s affront to Chinese sovereignty, the PLA began conducting live-fire maritime and aerial drills around Taiwan — surrounding the island.
According to China’s Global Times, they feature “J-20 stealth fighter jets and test-firing of conventional missiles…with additional important drills announced for days to come.”
Beginning moments after Pelosi arrived in Taipei, they’re ongoing in waters and airspace “north, southwest and southeast of the island…”
They include “live-fire shooting…in the Taiwan Strait and…missile test launches…east of the island.”
While ongoing for a number of days, “Taiwan will be surrounded by PLA drills in five directions.”
Drills are likely designed to develop PLA capabilities to seize the island militarily if unable to do it peacefully.
According to PLA Eastern Theater Command deputy chief of staff, Gu Zhong, as reported by GT:
Drills involve “courses like joint blockade, sea assault, land attack and air superiority seizing plus live-fire shooting of precision weapons.”
They’re “comprehensively test(ing) the performance of weapons and equipment as well as the troops’ joint operational capabilities, making preparations for all crises.”
Separately, Xinhua reported that live-fire drills are being conducted in six maritime and air space areas around Taiwan — north, northeast, east, south, southwest and northwest of the island.
Entry into areas where they’re ongoing is prohibited.
Last Sunday, China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier embarked from its Qingdao homeport to waters near Taiwan — accompanied by “a Type 075 amphibious assault ship.”
Chinese military expert, Song Zhongping, said the purpose of ongoing drills is to enhance the PLA’s military preparedness in light of Pelosi’s unacceptable visit to Taiwan.
During her meeting with Taiwan’s so-called president Tsai Ing-wen on Wednesday — in a display of imperial arrogance — Pelosi assaulted China’s sovereignty again as follows, saying:
Hegemon USA’s vow to preserve (fantasy) democracy in Taiwan and around the world (is) ironclad.”
She barely stopped short of vowing to defend the island if China uses military force to reunite it with the mainland.
In cahoots with dominant Biden regime and congressional hardliners, Pelosi is pushing things recklessly for possible direct confrontation between two nuclear powers — ones able to transform cities of targeted nations into smoldering rubble.
Indeed, hostile-to-peace-and-stability Pelosi and the Biden regime are playing with fire against Russia, China and Iran — humanity’s fate hanging in the balance.
Separately in response to Taiwan’s complicity with Pelosi’s effrontery, Beijing retaliated by suspending exports of certain food products to the island.
According to Bloomberg News, the suspension includes “some fish and fruit imports,” as well as “natural sand used in construction.”
The Financial Times said that China “suspend(ed) (imports of) 2,000 food products,” along with “suspend(ing) exports of natural sand” to Taiwan.
Beijing’s Mainland Affairs Council deputy chair, Chiu Chui-cheng, said the following:
“In the past, China hit single products from the primary sector such as specific fruit or fish.”
In “that way, (it) kept the overall macroeconomic impact on Taiwan limited but could target regions where the (ruling) Democratic Progressive party is strong.”
“But now (Beijing is) broadening this immensely as (it’s) targeting processed foods, so what’s going on is much more broad-based.
“This is probably only the beginning.”
“We are certain that (China) will further step up (its) economic coercion measures.”
According to the FT, Beijing’s suspension “cover(s) 35 categories including fish and seafood, edible oils, citrus fruits and biscuits and cakes, hitting publicly listed companies such as instant noodle and soy sauce producer Ve Wong and Chi Mei, which makes frozen foods.”
At this time, China’s likely short-term import and export suspensions are largely shots across the bow warnings to Taiwan.
Economist Ma Tieying said the following:
“What needs to be watched is whether Beijing will broaden the trade bans into the manufacturing sector, particularly semiconductors/electronics going forward.”
China is Taiwan’s largest trade partner, bilateral volume last year totaling $328.3 billion, around 52% from the island to the mainland.
Beijing relies on imports of Taiwanese semiconductors.
The island exports about one-fifth of its agricultural products to the mainland.
Chinese media reported that the country’s General Administration of Customs suspended imports of “refrigerated large-head hair-tail and frozen Japanese horse mackerel from Taiwan.”
Taiwan’s state-controlled CNA said that the mainland temporarily halted imports of from “over 100 Taiwanese food manufacturers, including the well-known brands I-Mei Foods, Wei Chuan and Kuai Kuai Co.”
According to Taiwan’s Council of Agriculture (COA):
Hundreds of temporarily “blacklisted companies include producers of tea leaves, dried fruits, honey, cocoa beans, and vegetables, as well as catches from around 700 fishing vessels.”
Separately, CNA said China largely, but not entirely, suspended imports of coffee beans, stuffed pasta and bread, health foods and supplements, baby food and formula, foods for medicinal purposes, plant based oil, candy, beverages, cereal-based products, seasonings and condiments.
Center for Counter Hegemonic Studies’ director, Tim Anderson, believes that Pelosi’s provocative visit was planned to trigger US confrontation with China in similar fashion to its proxy war on Russia, adding:
“Imagine if the Chinese military went into Puerto Rico or some other part of the US territories.”
“It’s unacceptable, and I can’t say that any good would come out of it.”
The Biden regime provoked Russia to launch its SMO in self-defense.
When major events impact millions, and even billions, of people, there will, inevitably, be a wide range of opinions put forth to explain the crisis. From political explanations to religious testimony, thinkers from all walks of life seek to deconstruct those events which alter the lives of the masses.
When it comes to what I will call the “conspiracy research community”, one theory often proposed as an explanation to the chaos of our world is known as predictive programming. When searching for specific definitions of this theory you find derogatory analyses, true believers, and the curious.
“Predictive Programming is theory that the government or other higher-ups are using fictional movies or books as a mass mind control tool to make the population more accepting of planned future events. This was described by researcher Alan Watt who defines Predictive programming as “Predictive programming is a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.”
Essentially, the idea is that operations being conducted by a hidden elite are shown to the public in advance via popular media such as books and films. These clues and references are meant to “soften” the public to the ideas presented. By introducing concepts that seem fantastic and then constantly reintroducing the concepts they appear more likely, or at the least, acceptable.
The belief is that the “predictive programming” in media can speak to the subconscious in a way that causes the public to passively accept the events when they unfold in real life, rather than offering resistance or opposition.
The Ohio University writer states, “I found that most commonly people believe the government creates a problem so the population will look to the government for a solution. However, because the government planned for the crisis the government will offer a solution that has been planned long before the crisis ever happened.” What they are describing is often known as “problem-reaction-solution”.
The TV show The Simpsons is often a source for such predictive programming claims. Various episodes show Donald Trump running for President, and references to September 11, 2001. For example, The Simpsons 1997 episode titled “The City of New York vs Homer Simpson” features the Simpson family visiting Manhattan where the World Trade Center factors heavily into the story. In one often touted scene, Lisa holds a brochure for a $9 bus fare with the World Trade Center shown in the background. Together the $9 and the twin towers make 9/11, a reference to the 9/11 attacks.
In 2010, Bill Oakley, an executive producer on the show at the time, told The New York Observer, “$9 was picked as a comically cheap fare,” he said. “And I will grant that it’s eerie, given that it’s on the only episode of any series ever that had an entire act of World Trade Center jokes.”
Another example of this alleged predictive programming comes from the pilot episode of “The Lone Gunmen,” a short-lived spinoff of the popular “The X-Files”. The pilot for The Lone Gunmen — which aired aired six months before the September 11th attacks — includes a plot where a hijacked plane is aimed at the World Trade Center. The terrorist attack is averted in the end and the towers are not hit.
Here is a sample of the dialogue from one scene of The Lone Gunmen pilot:
“Your saying our government plans to commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline – “
“There you go, indicting the entire government as usual. A faction, a small faction. “
“For what possible gain?”
“The Cold War is over, John, but with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market is flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility and begging to be smart bombed.”
The lazy response to claims of predictive programming is to dismiss them as the workings of a paranoid, tinfoil hat wearing, “conspiracy theorist”. Numerous theories have been proposed to explain predictive programming.
Some researchers dismiss the claims as simple coincidences. The Simpsons has been on air for 30 plus years now and some of their thousands of episodes are bound to reflect reality at some point, they say. Others contend that there are some eerie examples of art “predicting” reality, but they believe theorists are suffering from Pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing patterns in random stimuli. Those who are looking for patterns are more likely to see them because of this, as well as confirmation bias.
Revelation of the Method
Another theory which has been proposed by believers of predictive programming is the idea that these so-called elites must show the public their plans for one reason or another. This theory has come to be known as “Revelation of the Method”. The first person who appears to have popularized the use of this term was researcher James Shelby Downard.
Downard’s claim to infamy came as a result of his writing the controversial essay King-Kill 33, which accuses a network of Freemasons of being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In subsequent writings, Downard further explored his ideas around revelation of the method. In Sorcery, Sex, Assassination, and the Science of Symbolism, he writes, “acts concerning the assassination are on ice and will be be revealed in the future in the so-called ‘Revelation of the Method.’”
He continues, “this method and process of Masonic machinations is summed up in the principle of the “Making Manifest of All That is Hidden.”
Michael A. Hoffman II, was a student and friend of Downard and continued to write about the concept. Writing in the book Apocalypse Culture, Hoffman says, “We come to the current unfoldment in “Must Be,” an alchemic term Mr. Downard translates as “the Revelation of the Method.” This alludes to the process wherein murderous deeds and hair-raising conspiracies involving wars, revolutions, decapitations and every manner of horror-show are first buried beneath a cloak of secrecy and Harpocrates’ hushed- finger, and then, when finally accomplished and secured, slowly revealed to the un- suspecting populace who watch in deep-frozen apathy as the hidden history is unveiled.”
“The Revelation of the Method actually comes from my mentor, James Shelby Downard. I met him in Saint Petersburg, Florida in the mid-1970s and he was a very unusual man. He walked the razor edge between genius and eccentricity, but he had a mind where he was able to see and detect patterns. And also, he had an historian’s mind in terms of the research that he did, and he was the one that set me on this path of the Revelation of the Method. He also called it “Must Be” or “The Making Manifest of All that is Hidden.”
Some researchers of the so-called “Revelation of the Method” also believe there is a spiritual or religious element of the practice. They believe that by sharing clues or foreknowledge of their plans, the elitists somehow absolve themselves of wrong doing in the eyes of their Creator.
COVID-19
This bring us full circle to COVID-19 and claims of predictive programming in various media which foreshadowed the claims of a worldwide pandemic, and the subsequent authoritarian measures.
For example, the 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz talks about a deadly virus used as a biological weapon named Wuhan-400. There’s also the 2011 film Contagion with a story of a deadly pandemic involving a virus originating from a bat and social distancing.
In an interview withThe Washington Post, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns said, “It is sad, and it is frustrating… It is also surreal to me that people from all over the world write to me asking how I knew it would involve a bat or how I knew the term “social distancing.” I didn’t have a crystal ball — I had access to great expertise. So, if people find the movie to be accurate, it should give them confidence in the public health experts who are out there right now trying to guide us.”
Perhaps the most striking example of potential predictive programming, or a coincidence, if you prefer, is the film Songbird. The film’s IMDB description states:
“In 2024 a pandemic ravages the world and its cities. Centering on a handful of people as they navigate the obstacles currently hindering society: disease, martial law, quarantine, and vigilantes.”
The wikipedia description further outlines the similarities to what would unfold in 2020 and 2021:
“By 2024, the COVID-19 Coronavirus has been mutated into COVID-23 and the world is in its fourth Quarantine year. In the United States, the nation’s government is converted into a fascist police state and the people are required to take temperature checks on their cell phones while those infected with COVID-23 are taken from their homes against their will and forced into quarantine camps, also known as “Q-Zones” or concentration camps, where some fight back against the brutal restrictions. In these camps, the infected are left to die or forcibly get better. “
While it’s odd enough that a film came out in 2020 “inspired” by the COVID-19 event, it’s even more unnerving knowing the film included scenes of “immunity passports” using cell phones, forced quarantines and lockdowns of the vast majority of the population, and even a black market for the digital passports.
The timing of the filming is also a bit difficult to understand considering the fact that most of the world was experiencing lockdowns. The film makers claim they had their first call about the project on March 14, 2020, around the time the world was learning about the COVID-19 situation. They claim by June, major actors like Demi Moore had been cast in their roles, with production beginning in Los Angeles on July 8, 2020.
By August 3, 2020, the film wrapped, making it the first film to be shot in L.A. during lockdown. While the public was forced to stay inside, and work from home, Hollywood actors and a crew of 40 people were allowed to continue working on their film. The film was eventually released on December 11, 2020 and has received very poor reviews.
If there is any predictive programming in Songbird, it might relate to events yet to come. For example, the movie takes place in 2024, with a virus known as COVID-23 rampaging the planet.
What does this mean for our future? Should we live in fear of what might come?
In the film’s version of events, things do not end well. While the young couple in love manages to acquire blackmarket passports and escape to somewhere more free, the rest of their family and friends remain prisoners of their governments. The rest of the people shown in the film continue to live in the bio-fascist tyrannical nightmare.
Whether predictive programming is true, or simply a matter of coincidence and confirmation bias, we should not allow ourselves to live in fear. However, we should do everything in our power to make sure these fantasy worlds do not become our reality.
The US financial sector has long looted other countries. A number of participants have described the process. First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid. Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population. Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan. Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.
As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation. It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy. If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.
Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary. The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions. Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.
The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent. Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments. Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners. The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values. That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out. When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.
The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors. This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent. Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown. Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system. The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation. The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.
As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy. A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt. With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.
If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction. The fact is that the United States does not have an economy. Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.
The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states. While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders. How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad? How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?
You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse. And what are the fools in Washington doing? The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran.
“There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. One of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. We must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.” ― Philip K. Dick
Nothing is private.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.
Nothing that was once private is protected.
We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.
AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.
Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.
As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”
Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.
It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.
Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.
After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”
In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.
Surveillance is the key.
We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.
It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.
On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.
The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.
“From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”
China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”
While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”
Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.
According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.
You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.
The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
The White House keeps insisting that it will not directly involve American soldiers in the war in Ukraine, but it keeps taking steps that will inevitably lead to a large-scale open combat role for the US against Russia. Among the most recent moves to increase the pressure on the Kremlin, Biden revealed at a NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 29th that the US will establish a permanent headquarters in Poland for the Fifth Army Corps, maintain an additional rotational brigade of thousands of troops in Romania and bolster other deployments in the Baltic states. Also, the number of US troops in Europe, currently approaching 100,000, will be increased. Biden also was pleased to learn that Turkey had been enticed to drop its objection to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
On the way to the NATO summit aboard Air Force One, Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan advised that “By the end of the summit what you will see is a more robust, more effective, more combat credible, more capable and more determined force posture to take account of a more acute and aggravated Russian threat.” Presumably Sullivan was reading from a prepared script, but the objective surely seemed to be to heighten tension with Moscow rather than attempt to reduce it and come to some kind of diplomatic settlement.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also did his bit. In an astonishing display of derriere kissing, he responded that the new US force posture commitments were demonstrative of Biden’s strong leadership. What Stoltenberg did not mention was that Biden has been lying for some time about the presence of US military personnel in Ukraine. He let the cat out of the bag back in March, when he told troops belonging to the 82nd Airborne division in Poland that they would soon be going to Ukraine, observing that “You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see —” It was an admission that US forces are already in place inside Ukraine even though the White House quickly did damage control, asserting that the president continues to be opposed to American soldiers being directly engaged in the fighting. Biden also claimed that the US was working to “keep the massacre [of Ukrainians] from continuing.” Again, the language was hardly designed to make some room for a possible accommodation with Russia to negotiate an end to the fighting.
And now there is a New York Times report entitled “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say: A secretive operation involving US Special Operations forces hints at the scale of the effort to assist Ukraine’s still outgunned military.”
The article describes a more active US role in Ukraine than the Biden Administration has been willing to admit publicly. Back in February, before intervened in Ukraine, the US reportedly withdrew its own 150 military instructors, many of whom were training Ukrainian soldiers on newly acquired American produced weapons. However, some Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) paramilitary operatives and special ops troops continued their service in the country secretly, directing most of the intelligence flow the US is sharing with Ukrainian forces. In addition to that, special ops soldiers from Washington’s NATO allies have been managing the movement of weapons and equipment into Ukraine and providing some specialized training. It has also been reported that British SAS commandos are actually guarding President Volodymyr Zelensky. The NYT specifies, citing American and other Western officials, that the soldiers and CIA officers are currently not on the front lines with Ukrainian troops. Also according to the Times, even though the US and NATO member states have not acknowledged the presence of their paramilitaries soldiers in operational roles in Ukraine, Russia and other intelligence services around the world are aware of this.
The New York Times report appears to be generally correct, though it does omit some details, some of which I have been hearing from former colleagues in the intelligence services. There has been considerable overt training at the Grafenwoehr German army base as well as at the Ramstein US Air Base to familiarize the Ukrainians with the new weapons arriving. Other NATO countries are also participating in the training. Meanwhile, the cadres of special operations soldiers and intelligence personnel operating primarily in western Ukraine are not in uniform and many of them are working under various contrived cover designations, including sometimes loose affiliations with foreign embassies and NGOs. There are also a conventional CIA Station, a group from the National Security Agency and a Military Attache’s office in the recently reopened US Embassy in Kiev.
All of the above means that Biden and other western leaders have been dissimulating regarding their active participation in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Apart from his possible gaffe, Biden will not admit that there are American boots already on the ground, but they are there and are playing a major role in both logistics and intelligence sharing. The potential downside for the president could come when some of these soldiers in mufti get killed or, worse, captured and start to talk about their role.
Retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, observes that deploying plausibly deniable non-uniformed personnel “is completely typical of the initial stages of a US-backed long war, and for long-term political manipulation of the target country. This is the future that neoconservative ‘strategists’ in DC and their British and European allies imagine for Ukraine. Rather than a negotiated conclusion, with a new Ukrainian role as a neutral and productive country, independent of both Russian and US political influences, the US government and CIA see Ukraine as an expendable yet useful satrap in its competition with the Russian Federation.”
Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson sees the activity in stark terms, while also commenting that the CIA has not won a semi-clandestine insurgent war in forty years. He observes that “Ukraine is a proxy; the West is trying to destroy Russia, it’s that simple. It would be one thing if Russia was the most evil, oppressive, authoritarian regime in the world. It’s nowhere even close. Even though the West keeps trying to portray Russia as such. The fact of the matter is, the West wants the resources that Russia has and it wants to control Russia. [But] Russia is not about to be controlled.”
In other words, Washington might be seeking an unending war entangling Russia and limiting its options globally. The Biden Administration has staked its reputation and possible political future on enabling Ukraine to survive without succumbing to Russian territorial demands. It is a risky and even dangerous policy, both in practical terms and politically. The persistence of the Ukrainians in their defense is largely a product of US and Western Europe guarantees that they will do all that is necessary to support Zelensky and his regime, which is already seeking $750 billion in aid for “reconstruction.” If western military casualties begin to surface, the political support for the Ukraine war will begin to fade in Washington and elsewhere and there will be consequences in the upcoming midterm US elections in November.
A final comment on the Times piece is in response to the question why it has appeared at all at the present time. The mainstream media has been a cheerleader for aggressive US support of Ukraine and Zelensky, but now it is beginning to step back from that position, as have also the Washington Post and other media outlets. Perhaps they are becoming convinced that the game plan being promoted by Washington and its European allies is unlikely to succeed at great cost to the respective economies. Larry Johnson puts it this way: “I think the purpose of this article coming out now is just to lay the groundwork for why we can’t put or shouldn’t put any more US military personnel or even CIA personnel inside Ukraine because continuing to put US personnel…inside Ukraine to train is becoming too risky because of Russia’s success on the battlefield.” One might also add that it is exceptionally dangerous. A misstep or even a deliberate false flag coming from either side could easily make the war go nuclear.
The poorest country in the Caribbean has a problem according to Western governments and its global institutions. That problem is with Haiti, a country that does not trust anything that comes out of the West including media propaganda and its experimental injections or what is known as the “Covid-19 vaccines.” Haitians do not accept the West as a savior when it comes to their health or security, they don’t even trust their own government especially since most of them take orders from Washington and Paris. The last president that the Haitian people supported overwhelmingly was ousted by a US-backed coup in 2004 and he was Jean Bertrand Aristide. However, there is some positive news coming out of Haiti regarding Covid-19 and its experimental injections according to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) own words:
In Haiti, from 3 January 2020 to 5:16pm CEST, 13 July 2022, there have been 31,980 confirmed cases of COVID-19 with 837 deaths, reported to WHO. As of 8 July 2022, a total of 348,769 vaccine doses have been administered
It should not be a surprise that Haiti, a country with a population of more than 11 million people has a low vaccination rate since most Haitians do not want the experimental injections to begin with. An article from a liberal website called Coda which you can find online under http://www.codastory.com published a propaganda piece from August 13th, 2021, titled ‘The origins of Haiti’s vaccine hesitancy’ by Erica Hellerstein on why the Haitian population refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccination shots which according to their logic, Haiti is listening to disinformation or conspiracy theories from Russia:
Facebook unearthed a vast Russia-based anti-vaccine disinformation campaign this week. On Tuesday, the social media giant announced that it had removed 65 Facebook and 243 Instagram accounts amplifying anti-vaccine content. Investigators from the company linked the network to British marketing firm Fazze and operated from Russia. The campaign — dubbed a “disinformation laundromat” by Facebook — primarily targeted users in Latin America, India, and the U.S. through fake articles and petitions circulated on Medium, Reddit and Change.org, and then spread on social media via fake Facebook and Instagram accounts. One of the conspiracies, often accompanied in this campaign by images from the “Planet of the Apes” movies, is the claim that the AstraZeneca jab would turn people into chimpanzees – an old favorite of Russian state propaganda
Codastory.com is owned by Coda Media which is managed by a group of people who originally worked for the US mainstream-media such as Natalia Antelava, a former BBC correspondent who is the head of the organization and Ilan Greenberg who was a former staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal is the publisher and editorial director of the news outlet which already shows you the bias reporting they hold against Russia. Hellerstein mentioned Jean-Claude Louis who was speaking to an acquaintance working in the medical field about the Covid-19 vaccine, according to Hellerstein, the acquaintance told Louis, “I will never get the vaccine,” she continued “You don’t know what you’re getting.” Jean-Claude Louis is a coordinator for the Panos Institute which is described as “a Haitian nonprofit that trains journalists and youth on media literacy and identifying disinformation,” The Panos Institute is a non-profit organization that was originally based in the UK is now operating worldwide. Louis has obviously fallen for Western propaganda on the efficacy and safety of the Covid-19 experimental injections:
Louis has been paying close attention to the vaccine myths circulating online and in-person. And he is worried about how much of it is spreading inside Haiti’s medical community. “The problem is there are so many false rumors about vaccines,” he added. “People are very hesitant about getting the vaccines”
Hellerstein said that “I approached Louis after coming across a dataset laying out vaccination rates for the Americas. Topping the list was Uruguay, where nearly 75% of the population has gotten at least one vaccine dose. All the way at the bottom was Haiti, with just 0.14% of the population inoculated against Covid-19.” She also mentioned that Haiti was the last country in Latin America and the Caribbean to receive Covid-19 vaccines from the US and the United Nations (UN) through the COVAX program:
Haiti was one of the last countries in the world –and the last in Latin America and the Caribbean –to begin distributing the shot. In fact, it hadn’t gotten any at all until last month. Then, on July 14, a shipment of 500,000 doses from the United States via the United Nations-backed COVAX program arrived in the country. The delivery came a week after Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was brazenly assassinated in his home, plunging the country into political crisis
According to Hellerstein’s assessment, Haiti’s distribution of the vaccine was a “Bright spot” during the country’s political upheavals, but there was a statistic that was troubling to her:
The vaccine rollout was hailed as a “bright spot” during an otherwise tumultuous moment in Haiti. But another statistic caught my eye: according to a June survey by UNICEF and the University of Haiti, just 22% of adults said they were interested in getting the shot. Compare that with this February survey of global vaccination attitudes, where 88% of Brazilian adults, 85% of Chinese and Mexican adults, and 80% of Spanish and Italian adults said they intended to get the Covid-19 jab. Even in Russia, where vaccine acceptance was the lowest of all countries polled, 42% of adults said they would get a shot if made available — nearly double Haiti’s openness rate
There was an ounce of truth exposed by the article when UN peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti where close to 10,000 people died from the outbreak:
Haitians have good reasons to distrust international institutions; after all, experts have determined that United Nations peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti, where at least 10,000 people died of the disease, despite years of vehement denial from U.N. officials
Distrust of the UN and its Western backers is a major issue for the Haitian people:
The incident has left many Haitians deeply distrustful of the very institutions leading the global vaccination drive through the COVAX program. As Brian Concannon, founder of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, a coalition of Haitian and U.S. human rights advocates, told me: “Basically the international community burned all its credibility on public health messaging by lying about cholera.”He added: “They don’t trust the U.N., they don’t trust the government. The messenger is the problem”
On April 7th, 2021, Haiti has refused a donation of more than 756, 000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the WHO also through the COVAX program as reported by Spain’s EFE from a reliable source:
According to this source the Haitian Government refused to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured under license by “Serum Institute of India” because of “the global unrest surrounding this vaccine”, considering that the population of Haiti “would not accept it”
In an interesting turn of events “The Haitian authorities have asked the WHO to send vaccines from other laboratories to Haiti, including the vaccine from Johnson & Johnson laboratories which requires only one injection and which can be stored at temperatures between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius.” However, WHO officials are pushing back against Haiti’s demands since the Johnson & Johnson vaccine takes only one shot. However, the J&J vaccine can be just as dangerous as Pfizer and Moderna’s experimental injections, but the idea is maybe that one shot is more convincing to the public than having multiple shots for the long-term, perhaps they just wanted to avoid pushing “forever boosters” on their population who are already skeptical on any vaccine produced by the West to fight Covid-19 or any other disease.
Whatever people say about Haiti and their reaction to Covid-19 in the West and elsewhere may be negative, but one thing is certain, anything to do with Western governments and their institutions such as the WHO or the CDC concerning Covid-19 or any other new disease whether they are promoting vaccines or facemasks have resulted in more deaths and injuries.
Haiti’s example should be proof that whatever the “health authorities” such as the Anthony Fauci’s of the world and their institutions are suggesting have no credibility and whatever they are promoting should be taken with a grain of salt.
Although this news video is typical US mainstream media propaganda, you can watch this video to get a different perspective on the attitude towards Covid-19 in Haiti:
The western capitalist axis of domination is responsible for most of the world’s crises. The crisis of legitimacy extends from the UK to Japan, and U.S. imperialism is involved in every new catastrophe.
To say that the West, currently led by the dictates of U.S. imperialism, is in trouble would be an understatement. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned on July 7th amid an escalating political crisis of legitimacy . Three weeks before Johnson announced his departure, Emmanuel Macron’s so-called centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority in France. U.S. President Joe Biden continues to face his own crisis of legitimacy in the form of declining favorability ratings and public humiliation from Democratic loyalists such as Debra Messing . For the West, political crisis is undergirded by an unprecedented level of system chaos which has given the vast majority of workers and oppressed people little confidence in the future.
That chaos was compounded by the murder of Japan’s former Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe on July 7th. Abe was an imperialist, a neoliberal, and the highest expression of what it means to be a puppet of the American Empire . Abe’s so-called Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was a literal creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Other detestable qualities of Abe include his worship of Japan’s fascist war criminals, his membership in the fascist cult Nippon Kaigi, and his unapologetic defense of Japan’s history of brutalizing and super exploiting “comfort women” from its colonies. Most important to the United States, however, was Abe’s unquestionable loyalty to the New Cold War and the military encirclement of China.
Abe’s murder and the attendant political crises in the West are a clear demonstration that U.S.-led imperialism is the world’s leading purveyor of chaos in the world. At the economic base, the U.S. and the E.U. continue to prolong their proxy war with Russia through massive arms transfers and sanctions that have boomeranged back to spur shortages and inflation. Inflation has come with political costs. Already unpopular capitalist regimes in the West are finding themselves increasingly exposed as incapable of addressing the rising cost of living. It doesn’t help matters that the so-called military superiority of the United States and its imperialist partners is also being challenged by Russia’s successful special military operation in Ukraine.
Thanks to the U.S. obsession with NATO expansion, the future is bleak for Ukraine’s U.S.-backed coup government established in 2014. Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has made immense progress in the Donbass region. An already fragile and privatized vassal Ukrainian economy can only look forward to more pain once the U.S. and its junior partners in NATO come looking for repayment on its exorbitant aid packages. And Ukraine is just the beginning. The recent admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO is yet another declaration of war with Russia which opens the door to future conflicts even more destructive than the ongoing U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.
It is an undeniable fact that chaos follows U.S. imperialism wherever it goes. In Latin America, stability exists only where leftist governments have secured sufficient sovereignty . In Africa, the spread of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has led to widespread destabilization and political insecurity in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO-AFRICOM invasion of Libya in 2011. In Asia, U.S. militarism has facilitated war in the West and attempted to organize a coalition of vassal states against China in the East. U.S. meddling in Taiwan has created a dumping ground for defense contractors and prompted Joe Biden to articulate on three occasions that the U.S. is willing to militarily intervene to “defend” the island , a guaranteed nuclear exchange scenario.
U.S. militarism is the principal barrier to political stability around the world which is a prerequisite to addressing global challenges such as climate change and poverty. U.S. and E.U. sanctions murder thousands of people in poorer, non-white countries. U.S.-sponsored color revolutions and “soft power” maneuvers are preludes to regime change. So-called U.S. “soft power” strengthens the most reactionary forces in the world. The far right and fascistic Contras in Latin and Central America , ISIS in West Asia, and the Azov Regiment in Ukraine are all outgrowths of U.S. interference disguised as “soft power.”
A dialectical relationship exists between the U.S.’s domestic and foreign policy. U.S. imperialism is an advanced stage in the system of capitalism predicated upon slavery, colonialism, and racism. Jayland Walker’s brutal murder at the hands of Akron police is a near daily occurrence in the United States. Black Americans and Indigenous peoples have been subject to the cruelest forms of racist violence for centuries. The U.S.’s endless wars are an expression of this violence turned toward imperialist ends.
The chickens of chaos have come home to roost. The Euro-American imperialist world order is suffering from terminal contradictions. Political instability reigns supreme. Another economic crisis is said to be looming but is more than likely already here. Imperialist wars no longer hold any prospect for any real “victory” without serious consequences for the war-maker.
While material conditions are pregnant with possibilities, there is no organized and independent left challenge to the supremacy of U.S. capital and its armed guards of the state. That is the task ahead of the people’s movement residing in the belly of the imperialist beast. In the face of the unprecedented chaos produced by its leading purveyor, the United States, this is no doubt the most difficult one that the working class and oppressed in the long and storied history of resistance. But such a task is not a choice. It is forced upon us by the weight of imperialism bearing down on our necks.
We must not rest until we get the boot off by any means necessary.
Danny Haiphong’s work can be followed on Twitter @SpiritofHo and Telegram at The Haiphong Press. You can support Danny on Patreon by clicking this link.You can contact him at haiphongpress@protonmail.com.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
NATO expanded its footprint, violatingpromises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes. It is building a military footprint in Africa and Asia. It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called “Asia Pacific Four,” to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June. It has expanded its reach into the Southern Hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia, in December 2021. It has backed Turkey, with NATO’s second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria as well as Iraq. Turkish-backed militias are engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Syrian Kurds and other inhabitants of north and east Syria. The Turkish military has been accused of war crimes – including multiple airstrikes against a refugee camp andchemical weapons use – in northern Iraq. In exchange for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s permission for Finland and Sweden to join the alliance, the two Nordic countries have agreed to expand their domestic terror laws making it easier to crack down on Kurdish and other activists, lift their restrictions on selling arms to Turkey and deny support to the Kurdish-led movement for democratic autonomy in Syria.
It is quite a record for a military alliance that with the collapse of the Soviet Union was rendered obsolete and should have been dismantled. NATO and the militarists had no intention of embracing the “peace dividend,” fostering a world based on diplomacy, a respect of spheres of influence and mutual cooperation. It was determined to stay in business. Its business is war. That meant expanding its war machine far beyond the border of Europe and engaging in ceaseless antagonism toward China and Russia.
NATO sees the future, as detailed in its “NATO 2030: Unified for a New Era,” as a battle for hegemony with rival states, especially China, and calls for the preparation of prolonged global conflict.
“China has an increasingly global strategic agenda, supported by its economic and military heft,” the NATO 2030 initiative warned. “It has proven its willingness to use force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience, safeguard critical infrastructure, address new and emerging technologies such as 5G and protect sensitive sectors of the economy including supply chains. Longer term, China is increasingly likely to project military power globally, including potentially in the Euro-Atlantic area.”
The alliance has spurned the Cold War strategy that made sure Washington was closer to Moscow and Beijing than Moscow and Beijing were to each other. U.S. and NATO antagonism have turned Russia and China into close allies. Russia, rich in natural resources, including energy, minerals and grains, and China, a manufacturing and technological behemoth, are a potent combination. NATO no longer distinguishes between the two, announcing in its most recent mission statement that the “deepening strategic partnership” between Russian and China has resulted in “mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order that run counter to our values and interests.”
On July 6, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, and Ken McCallum, director general of Britain’s MI5, held a joint news conference in London to announce that China was the “biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security.” They accused China, like Russia, of interfering in U.S. and U.K. elections. Wray warned the business leaders they addressed that the Chinese government was “set on stealing your technology, whatever it is that makes your industry tick, and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market.”
This inflammatory rhetoric presages an ominous future.
One cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The political and social turmoil in the U.S., coupled with its diminishing economic power, has led it to embrace NATO and its war machine as the antidote to its decline.
Washington and its European allies are terrified of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) meant to connect an economic bloc of roughly 70 nations outside U.S. control. The initiative includes the construction of rail lines, roads and gas pipelines that will be integrated with Russia. Beijing is expected to commit $1.3 trillion to the BRI by 2027. China, which is on track to become the world’s largest economy within a decade, has organized the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world’s largest trade pact of 15 East Asian and Pacific nations representing 30 percent of global trade. It already accounts for 28.7 percent of the Global Manufacturing Output, nearly double the 16.8 percent of the U.S.
China’s rate of growth last year was an impressive 8.1 percent, although slowing to around 5 percent this year. By contrast, the U.S.’s growth rate in 2021 was 5.7 percent — its highest since 1984 — but is predicted to fall below 1 percent this year, by the New York Federal Reserve.
If China, Russia, Iran, India and other nations free themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network financial institutions use to send and receive information such as money transfer instructions, it will trigger a dramatic decline in the value of the dollar and a financial collapse in the U.S. The huge military expenditures, which have driven the U.S. debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire GDP, will become untenable. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military in 2021, $ 801 billion which amounted to 38 percent of total world expenditure on the military, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. The loss of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency will force the U.S. to slash spending, shutter many of its 800 military bases overseas and cope with the inevitable social and political upheavals triggered by economic collapse. It is darkly ironic that NATO has accelerated this possibility.
Russia, in the eyes of NATO and U.S. strategists, is the appetizer. Its military, NATO hopes, will get bogged down and degraded in Ukraine. Sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the plan goes, will thrust Vladimir Putin from power. A client regime that will do U.S. bidding will be installed in Moscow.
NATO has provided more than $8 billion in military aid to Ukraine, while the US has committed nearly $54 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to the country.
China, however, is the main course. Unable to compete economically, the U.S. and NATO have turned to the blunt instrument of war to cripple their global competitor.
The provocation of China replicates the NATO baiting of Russia.
NATO expansion and the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv led Russia to first occupy Crimea, in eastern Ukraine, with its large ethnic Russian population, and then to invade all of Ukraine to thwart the country’s efforts to join NATO.
The same dance of death is being played with China over Taiwan, which China considers part of Chinese territory, and with NATO expansion in the Asia Pacific. China flies warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense zone and the U.S. sends naval shipsthrough the Taiwan Strait which connects the South and East China seas. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May called China the most serious long-term challenge to the international order, citing its claims to Taiwan and efforts to dominate the South China Sea. Taiwan’s president, in a Zelensky-like publicity stunt, recently posed with an anti-tank rocket launcher in a government handout photo.
The conflict in Ukraine has been a bonanza for the arms industry, which, given the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, needed a new conflict. Lockheed Martin’s stock prices are up 12 percent. Northrop Grumman is up 20 percent. The war is being used by NATO to increase its military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. The U.S. is building a permanent military base in Poland. The 40,000-strong NATO reaction force is being expanded to 300,000 troops. Billions of dollars in weapons are pouring into the region.
The conflict with Russia, however, is already backfiring. The ruble has soared to a seven-year high against the dollar. Europe is barreling towards a recession because of rising oil and gas prices and the fear that Russia could terminate supplies completely. The loss of Russian wheat, fertilizer, gas and oil, due to Western sanctions, is creating havoc in world markets and a humanitarian crisis in Africa and the Middle East. Soaring food and energy prices, along with shortages and crippling inflation, bring with them not only deprivation and hunger, but social upheaval and political instability. The climate emergency, the real existential threat, is being ignored to appease the gods of war.
The war makers are frighteningly cavalier about the threat of nuclear war. Putin warned NATO countries that they “will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history” if they intervened directly in Ukraine and ordered Russian nuclear forces to be put on heightened alert status. The proximity to Russia of U.S. nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey mean that any nuclear conflict would obliterate much of Europe. Russia and the United States control about 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads, with around 4,000 warheads each in their military stockpiles, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
President Joe Biden warned that the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “completely unacceptable” and “entail severe consequences,” without spelling out what those consequences would be. This is what U.S. strategists refer to as “deliberate ambiguity.”
The U.S. military, following its fiascos in the Middle East, has shifted its focus from fighting terrorism and asymmetrical warfare to confronting China and Russia. President Barack Obama’s national-security team in 2016 carried out a war game in which Russia invaded a NATO country in the Baltics and used a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon against NATO forces. Obama officials were split about how to respond.
“The National Security Council’s so-called Principals Committee—including Cabinet officers and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—decided that the United States had no choice but to retaliate with nuclear weapons,” Eric Schlosser writes in The Atlantic. “Any other type of response, the committee argued, would show a lack of resolve, damage American credibility, and weaken the NATO alliance. Choosing a suitable nuclear target proved difficult, however. Hitting Russia’s invading force would kill innocent civilians in a NATO country. Striking targets inside Russia might escalate the conflict to an all-out nuclear war. In the end, the NSC Principals Committee recommended a nuclear attack on Belarus—a nation that had played no role whatsoever in the invasion of the NATO ally but had the misfortune of being a Russian ally.”
The Biden administration has formed a Tiger Team of national security officials to run war games on what to do if Russia uses a nuclear weapon, according to The New York Times. The threat of nuclear war is minimized with discussions of “tactical nuclear weapons,” as if less powerful nuclear explosions are somehow more acceptable and won’t lead to the use of bigger bombs.
At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.
“A simulation devised by experts at Princeton University starts with Moscow firing a nuclear warning shot; NATO responds with a small strike, and the ensuing war yieldsmore than 90 million casualties in its first few hours,” The New York Times reported.
The longer the war in Ukraine continues — and the U.S. and NATO seem determined to funnel billions of dollars of weapons into the conflict for months if not years — the more the unthinkable becomes thinkable. Flirting with Armageddon to profit the arms industry and carry out the futile quest to reclaim U.S. global hegemony is at best extremely reckless and at worst genocidal.
After the Crash 