The created food crisis, whether real or a smoke-and-mirrors psy-op, is all about tearing down the global food system and “building back better” – a new dystopian food system built by corporate monoliths and rigidly controlled in the name of the greater good.
The press has been predicting this for years, but up until now it always appeared to be nothing more than fearmongering, designed to worry or distract people, but the signs are there that this time, to quote Joe Biden, it “is going to be real”.
Nobody knows how bad it could get, except the people who are creating it.
Because the evidence is pretty clear, it is being deliberately & cold-bloodedly created. We’ve been documenting it for months.
We have Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine driving up the price of staple foods, wheat and sunflower oil, as well as fertiliser.
We have the sudden “bird flu outbreak” driving up the price of poultry and eggs.
The soaring price of oil is driving up the cost of food distribution.
The inflation caused by huge influxes of fiat currency means families are spending more money on less food.
And as all this is happening, the US and UK (and maybe others, we don’t know) are literally paying farmers not to farm.
It’s pretty clear this is The Great Reset: Food Edition. The lockdown melody with slightly different lyrics. A process of breaking down the structures already in place so we can “build back better” with a more controlled and more corporatised food system
Just as the Covid “pandemic” was said to highlight “weaknesses in the multilateral system”, so this food crisis will show that our “unstable food systems are in need of reform” and we need to ensure our “food security”…or a thousand variations on that theme.
That’s not supposition. They already started, over a year ago.
The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems & Community Developments published a paper in February 2021 titled:
Dismantling and rebuilding the food system after COVID-19: Ten principles for redistribution and regeneration
In an interview from July last year, Ruth Richardson the Executive Director of the NGO Global Alliance for the Future of Food literally said:
Our Dominant Food System Needs to Be Dismantled and Rebuilt”
Later, in September 2021, the UN convened the first-ever “Food Systems Summit”, whose mission statement included the line:
Rebuilding the food systems of the world will also enable us to answer the UN Secretary-General’s call to “build back better” from COVID-19.
Writing in the Guardian two weeks ago, George Monbiot, weathervane for every deep state agenda, states with his trademark lack of subtlety:
The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same…The system has to change.
But what does “change” and “rebuilt” actually mean in this context?
Well, that’s no mystery, they’ve been talking it up for years.
Almost all of these are stories from just the past month or so, many of them talking points at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Conference.
As is almost always the case, the problem to which they’re currently “reacting” already has a series of pre-ordained solutions.
Just as we saw lockdowns break the economy to pieces whilst the billionaire class land record profits whilst corporate megaliths expanded their monopolies, so too will any proposed food security policies end up benefiting the already mega-rich or installing infrastructure for corporate control.
They just announced the building of the largest “cultured meat factory” in the world. Fake meat, of course, can’t be raised at home and is subject to patented processes of creation. Genetically edited or modified plants and animals are likewise subject to patents.
Supranational companies, with profits larger than the budget of some nations, are developing carbon footprint tracker apps which reward people for making the “right decisions”. That could easily be applied to food.
Are we heading into another real estate bubble / crash? Those who say “no” see the housing shortage as real, while those who say “yes” see the demand as a reflection of the Federal Reserve’s artificial goosing of the housing market via its unprecedented purchases of mortgage-backed securities and “easy money” financial conditions.
My colleague CH at econimica.blogspot.com recently posted charts calling this assumption into question. The first chart (below) shows the U.S. population growth rate plummeting as housing starts soar, and the second chart shows housing unit per capita, which has just reached the same extreme as the 2008 housing bubble.
Demographics and housing do not reflect a housing shortage nationally, though there could be scarcities locally, of course, and other factors such as thousands of units being held off the market as short-term rentals or investments by overseas buyers who have no interest in renting their investment dwellings.
On a per capita basis, housing has reached previous bubble levels. That suggests housing shortages are artificial or local, not structural.
Next, let’s consider how the current housing bubble differs from previous bubbles in the late 1970s and 2000s. In my view, the previous bubbles were driven by demographics, inflation and monetary policy: in the late 70s, the 65 million-strong Baby Boom generation began buying their first homes, pushing demand higher while inflation soared, making real-world assets such as housing more desirable.
Once the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates to 18%, mortgage rates rose in lockstep and housing crashed as few could afford sky-high housing prices at sky-high mortgage rates.
The housing bubble of 2007-08 was largely driven by declines in mortgage rates (as the Fed pursued an “easy money” policy to escape the negative effects of the Dot-Com stock market bubble crash) and a loosening of credit/mortgage standards. These fueled a bubble that morphed into a speculative free-for-all of no-down payment and no-document loans.
This decline in the cost of borrowing money (mortgage rates) enabled a sharp rise in the price of housing, a speculative boom that was greatly accelerated by “innovations” in the mortgage market such as zero down payments loans, interest-only loans, home equity loans, and no-document “liar loans”–mortgages underwritten without the usual documentation of income and net worth.
These forces generated a speculative frenzy of house-flipping, leveraging the equity in the family home to buy two or three homes under construction and selling them before they were even completed for fat profits, and so on.
Needless to say, the pool of potential buyers expanded tremendously when people earning $25,000 a year could buy $500,000 houses on speculation.
Once the bubble popped, the pool of buyers shrank along with the home equity.
If we study this chart below of new home prices (courtesy of Mac10), we can see that the 21st century’s Bubble #2 rose as the Federal Reserve pushed mortgage rates far below historic norms. Once rates reached a bottom, the 7-year inflation of home prices (from 2011 to 2018) began rolling over.
This deflation of home prices was reversed by the pandemic recession, as the Fed’s vast expansion of credit and mortgage-buying, which pushed mortgage rates to new lows. Trillions of dollars in new credit and cash stimulus ignited a speculative frenzy in stocks, bonds and real estate, a frenzy which drove bubble #3 to extraordinary heights.
All this unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus also ignited inflation, and so rates are rising in response. Bubble #3 is already deflating, at least by the measure of new home prices.
But the current bubble has a number of dynamics that weren’t big factors in previous bubbles.
One is the rise of remote work. Many people have been working remotely since the late 1990s enabled Internet-based work, but the pandemic greatly increased the pool of employers willing to accept remote work as a permanent feature of employment.
This trend has been well documented, but the consequences are still unfolding: remote workers are no longer trapped in unaffordable, congested cities and suburbs.
Several other trends have attracted much less attention, but I see them as equally consequential.
1. Housing in many urban zones are out of reach of all but the top 10% without extraordinary sacrifice, and now that employment isn’t necessarily tied to urban zones, the bottom 90% of young people without family wealth or high incomes are coming to realize the benefits of urban living are not worth the extreme sacrifices needed to buy an overvalued house.
A middle-class life–home ownership, financial security, leisure and surplus income to invest in one’s family and well-being–is no longer affordable for the majority of young Americans.
Few are willing to concede this because it reveals the neofeudal nature of American life. Those who bought homes in coastal urban zones 20+ years ago are wealthy due to soaring housing valuations while young people can’t even afford the rent, much less buying a house.
If you’re not making $250,000 or more a year as a couple, the only hope for a middle-class life that includes leisure and some surplus income to invest is top move to some place with much lower housing and other costs. That place is rural America.
2. The benefits of urban living are deteriorating while the sacrifices and downsides are increasing. Urban living is fun if you’re wealthy, not so fun if you don’t have plenty of surplus income to spend.
Urban problems such as homelessness, traffic congestion and crime are endemic and unresolvable, though few are willing to state the obvious. Americans are expected to be optimistic and to count on some new whiz-bang technology to solve all problems.
Unfortunately, problems generated by dysfunctional, overly complex institutions, corruption and unaffordable costs can’t be solved by some new technology, and so the decay of cities will only gather momentum.
The hope that billions of federal stimulus funding would solve these problems is about to encounter reality as the funds dry up and all the problems remain or have actually expanded despite massive “investments” in solutions.
Few analysts have looked at the finances of high-cost cities. The decline in bricks-and-mortar retail, rising crime, soaring junk fees, rents and property taxes have all made urban small business insanely costly and therefore risky.
Small businesses are the core sources of employment and taxes. As high costs, crime, etc. choke small businesses, employment and tax revenues drop and commercial real estate sits empty, generating decay and defaults.
Once office and retail space is no longer affordable or necessary, commercial real estate crashes in value as owners who bought at the top default and go bankrupt.
People need shelter but they don’t need office space or to start a bricks-and-mortar retail business.
As urban finances unravel, cities won’t have the funding to run their bloated, inefficient, overly complex and unaccountable bureaucracies.
3. In geopolitics, we speak of the core and the periphery. Empires have a core (Rome and central Italy in the Roman Empire) and a periphery (Britain, North Africa, Egypt, the Levant).
As finances and trade decay and costs soar, the periphery is surrendered to maintain the core.
In urban zones, the same dynamic will become increasingly visible: the peripheral neighborhoods will be underfunded to continue protecting the wealthy enclaves.
Crime will skyrocket in the periphery even as residents of the wealthy enclaves see little decay in their neighborhoods.
This asymmetry–already extreme–will drive social unrest and disorder. This is a self-reinforcing feedback: as the periphery neighborhoods deteriorate, the remaining businesses flee and the smart money sells and moves away.
Tax revenues plummet and city services decay even further, persuading hangers-on to move before it gets even worse. Cities compensate for the lower revenues by increasing taxes on the remaining residents and cutting services.
Each turn of the screw triggers more closures and selling and fewer tax revenues.
4. Dependency chains will become increasingly consequential: the greater a city’s dependency on essentials trucked/shipped from hundreds or thousands of of kilometers/miles away, the more prone that city will be to disruptions of essentials: food, energy, materials and infrastructure.
Though few are willing to dwell on such vulnerabilities, most cities are totally dependent on diesel fueled fleets of trucks, rail and jet fuel for luxuries flown in from afar for virtually all goods. Cities produce very little in the way of essentials such as food and energy.
The past reliability of long supply chains has instilled a confidence that these supply chains stretching thousands of kilometers and miles are unbreakable and forever. They aren’t, and the initial disruptions will be a great shock to Americans who believe full gas tanks and fully stocked store shelves are their birthright.
5. As I’ve explained in my new book Global Crisis, National Renewal, the era of cheap, reliable abundance has drawn to a close and now we are entering an era of scarcity in essentials.
Another reality few discuss is the relative stability of global weather over the past 40 years. As weather becomes less reliable, so too do crop yields and food supplies.
Globalization has poured capital into expanding acreage under cultivation to the point that the planet’s forests are being decimated to grow more soy to feed animals to be slaughtered for human consumption.
On the margins, land that was once productive has been lost to desertification. Fresh water aquifers have been drained and glaciers feeding rivers are melting away. Soil fertility has declined even as fertilizer use has expanded.
The low-hanging fruit of GMO seeds, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and Green Revolution hybrids have all been plucked. The gains have been reaped but now the downsides of these dependencies are becoming increasingly consequential: fertilizer costs are rising fast, insects and diseases are evading chemicals and vaccines, and the vulnerabilities of mono-crop, industrialized agriculture and animal husbandry threaten to cascade into crop failures, soaring prices and shortages.
6. This will have two consequences: rural incomes which have been falling for decades due to globalization (i.e. bringing in cheap food from places with no environmental standards, cheap labor and few taxes / social costs) will start rising sharply, fueling a reversal in the long decline of rural communities based on agricultural income.
The soaring costs of essentials will reduce the disposable income of the bottom 90%, reducing the money they’ll have to spend on eating out, retail shopping, etc.–all the surplus spending that drives cities’ economies and tax revenues.
Few (if any) commentators forecast a cyclical reversal of the demographic trend of people moving from rural locales to cities. I think this trend has already reversed and will gather momentum as cities become increasingly unlivable, disposable incomes decline as scarcities push prices higher and people flee for lower cost, more secure environs.
7. As I often note, following what the super-wealthy are doing is a pretty sound investment strategy because the super-wealthy spend freely to buy the best advice and are highly motivated to protect their wealth.
People who live in well-known, highly desirable rural towns (Telluride, Jackson Hole, Lake Tahoe, etc.) are describing a feeding frenzy of wealthy urbanites buying multi-million dollar homes. Small cities such as Bozeman, MT and Ashville, NC are experiencing a flood of new residents that is straining infrastructure and pushing housing prices out of reach for local residents with average wages.
8. Rural towns in the U.S., Italy, Japan and even Switzerland are trying to attract new residents with offers of free land, subsidized rent, low cost homes, etc. This shows that the trends are global and not limited to any one nation. Would you take free land in rural America?
The decay of urban life isn’t yet consequential enough to push people into making a major move, but once someone has been robbed, repeatedly found human feces on their doorstep or experienced scarcities that trigger the madness of crowds, the decision to leave becomes much, much easier.
Some cities will manage the decline of employment and tax revenues more gracefully than others. Most will suffer from the dynamic I’ve often described on the blog: the Ratchet Effect. Costs move effortlessly higher as tax revenues have increased in one speculative bubble after another, but once revenues drop, cities have no mechanisms or political constituency to manage a sharp, long-term decline in revenues.
They then become prone to the other dynamic I’ve described, the Rising Wedge Breakdown (see chart below): as agencies and institutions become sclerotic, unaccountable and self-serving, even a relatively modest cut in revenues triggers institutional collapse, as the system requires 100% funding to function. A 10% reduction doesn’t cause a 10% decline in service, it causes an 50% decline in service, on the way to complete dysfunction.
Few believe cities can unravel, but remote work, geographic arbitrage (discussed below), tightening credit, rising crime, the decline of commercial real estate, end of massive stimulus, scarcities, the madness of crowds, the decline of civic services and amenities and an insanely high cost of living all have consequences and second-order effects.
What were beneficial synergies become fatal synergies as dynamics reverse and begin reinforcing each other.
So let’s put all this together.
A. The cycle of declining interest rates and inflation has ended and a cycle of much higher interest and mortgage rates and inflation is beginning. Higher mortgages rates will depress housing prices as only the highest income households will be able to afford today’s prices once mortgage rates rise.
B. The decay of urban finances and quality of life will accelerate as stimulus ends, credit dries up and inflation decimates disposable income.
C. The stress of trying to make enough money to afford the high costs of city/suburban living as the real estate bubble pops and the benefits of city living decline will burn out increasing numbers of people who will have no choice but to find more affordable, more secure and more livable places.
D. While the wealthy have already secured second or third homes in the toniest desirable towns, there are still opportunities for lower cost, more secure residences in rural areas.
E. This migration, even at the margins, will further depress urban housing prices and push prices in desirable rural locales higher.
F. This migration will have regional, ethnic and cultural variations. For example, some African-Americans leaving the upper Midwest are finding favor with communities in the South where family, church and cultural ties beckon.
G. Correspondent John F. used the phrase geographic arbitrage which means earning money remotely in high-wage sectors while living some place that’s low cost and secure.
I wrote about this many years ago in my post about young Japanese maintaining a part-time remote-work gig while pursuing farming in rural communities: Degrowth Solutions: Half-Farmer, Half-X (July 19, 2014).
H. Though monetary / inflationary forces will pop housing prices based solely on low mortgage rates, this doesn’t mean housing everywhere will decline: as burned out urbanites seek lower cost, more secure and livable places in rural locales, homes in desirable towns and small cities could rise sharply because they’re starting from such low levels.
I. If urban areas decay rapidly, housing prices could plummet much faster than most people think possible.
When cities lose employment, tax revenues and desirability, they can go down fast. Property values can fall in half and then by 90%.
How is this possible? Supply and demand: if demand falls off a cliff, there won’t be buyers for thousands of homes that come on the market all at once. This is just like a stock market in which buyers disappear, as no one wants to buy an asset that’s rapidly losing value.
As I’ve noted many times, prices for assets are set on the margins: the last sale of a house resets the price for the entire neighborhood.
The stock market is easily manipulated by the big players, who can stop a slide in prices by buying huge chunks of stocks and call options. There are no equivalent forces which can stop a decline in housing prices.
And since rates will rise regardless of what the Federal Reserve does because global capital is demanding a real return above inflation, then the hope for lower mortgage rates to support bubble-level housing prices will be in vain.
How low could housing go? As explained above, there will likely be very asymmetric declines and increases in housing valuations going forward. But on a technical-analysis level, we can anticipate a general decline to previous lows, first to the 2019 lows and then to the 2011 lows.
Some analysts believe inflation will funnel capital into housing as investors seek assets that will go up with inflation, but this is a murky forecast: the bottom 90% of American households are already priced out of coastal housing, so inflation only robs their wages of purchasing power. They don’t have any hope of buying a house anywhere near current prices.
Corporations are buying thousands of houses for the rental income, but once all the stimulus runs out and the excesses of speculation reverse, they’ll find few renters can afford their sky-high rents. At that point corporate buyers become corporate sellers, but they won’t find buyers willing or able to pay their asking prices, which are based on bubble pricing, not reality.
All these swirling currents will affect housing valuations in different places differently. Some areas could see 50% declines while others see 50% increases, regardless of mortgage rates or Fed policy.
What will become most desirable is a low cost of living, security and livability, which includes community, reduced dependency on long supply chains and local production of essentials.
We are all prone to believing the recent past is a reliable guide to the future. But in times of dynamic reversals, the past is an anchor thwarting our progress, not a forecast.
Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.
The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.
The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.
Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.
There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.
None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”
The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level. The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.
Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.
These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.”
You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.
But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War.
A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.
The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.
“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”
This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos.
The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “TodayShow”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”
This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.
There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.
The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.
Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trumpis the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”
Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.
The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”
“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”
Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.
In the history of civilization, Politics has more often than not, been a matter reduceable to the question of “whose side are you on?”
Granted it is not an easy affair to discern what most-nearly approaches truth in the fog of “the present.” Hindsight is 20/20 they say, although that is also not entirely true, for the interpretation of history is just another battlefield, albeit in much slower motion.
In a world of increased division, where we are told there is only black or white, the best we mere “civilians” can hope for is to not get hit by the crossfire. However, that is becoming increasingly harder to do.
It is not a matter of holding “opinion” any longer, it is about upholding a “conviction,” not earned with your own personal scrutiny and research, but by your “faith” in such a conviction and the authorities who shape it.
Increasingly, it does not truly matter what the “facts” are, but the question of “whose side are you on?”
If that is what “reality” has been reduced to by those forces controlling the state, then any enemy to those forces controlling that state will be a villain, regardless of their actions, regardless of their ideology; and any ally to those forces controlling that state will be a hero, regardless of their actions, regardless of their ideology.
And thus, in our shaped reality of today, what makes a “Hero” or a “Villain” will be determined by the simple question “whose side are you on?”
If this is troubling to you, I suggest we do a little exercise together. Let us dare to discern the “facts” for ourselves. Only then, will we cease being mere cheerleaders for a team; only then, can we qualify ourselves to ask in all honest sincerity, “whose side are we truly on?”
Are Nazis Now the New “Good Guys”?
There is a bit of mixed messaging that has been going on, especially in the last few weeks. Are there significant numbers of Nazis in Ukraine and are these “bad” or “good” Nazis in the context that they are fighting the Russian “invaders”?
In one breath we hear the counter, how can there be Nazis in Ukraine when there is a Jewish President calling the shots? In another breath we hear Facebook is now allowing users to praise the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion while they are fighting Russians. In yet another breath we hear, well its complicated, Ukrainian Nationalism should be considered at the forefront of any debate, even if it overlaps with Nazi ideology.
On Feb. 27, 2022, Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland held a scarf bearing the slogan “Slava Ukraini,” meaning “Glory to Ukraine,” with the “Blood and Soil” colors of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) (who collaborated with the Nazis during WWII and massacred thousands of Jews and Poles).
According to Freeland’s press secretary, this was just another case of a “classic KGB disinformation smear… accusing Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Canadians of being far right extremists or fascists or Nazis,” which is a confusing statement on multiple levels.
It is not clear how this is a case of “Russian disinformation,” since the picture is indeed authentic, Freeland does not deny this. And she is indeed holding a “Blood and Soil” emblem, which originated with the Nazis, clear for everyone to see. Lastly, it is confusing as to why the Canadian government seems to be unaware that the KGB no longer exists. Are they also under the impression that the Soviet Union still exists?
Not irrelevant in all of this is the fact that Freeland’s grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper during WWII in Galicia and that she is indeed aware of this and apparently unapologetic. Whenever she is questioned about this, she does not deny anything, but simply blames such a focus of inquiry on Russian disinformation with the intent to “destabilize Western democracies.” That is, it is not a question of what is one’s historical or ideological background, but a question of “whose side are you on?”
Interestingly, it was the Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” who reported this story, titled “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper,” thus, not a Russian publication last time I checked. And upon whom did they base such information? None other than Freeland’s own uncle, John-Paul Himka, who is now professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
According to the Globe and Mail, Freeland was aware for more than two decades that her grandfather Michael Chomiak, was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper that vilified Jews and supported the Nazi cause.
“Krakivski Visti [Krakow News] was set up in 1940 by the German army and supervised by German intelligence officer Emil Gassert. Its printing presses and offices were confiscated by the Germans from a Jewish publisher, who was later murdered at the Belzec concentration camp.
The article titled ‘Kravivski Visti and the Jews, 1943: A contribution of Ukrainian Jewish Relations during the Second World War’ was written by Ms. Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, now professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
In the foreword to the article, Prof. Himka credits Ms. Freeland for ‘pointing out problems and clarifications.’ Ms. Freeland has never acknowledged that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator and suggested on Monday that the allegation was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
In 1996, Prof. Himka wrote about Mr. Chomiak’s work for Kravivski Visti, a Ukrainian-language newspaper based in Krakow that often published anti-Jewish diatribes including ‘certain passages in some of the articles that expressed approval of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews.’” [emphasis added]
Oddly, Freeland helped to edit and clarify Prof. Himka’s article discussing her grandfather as the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper, however, refused to acknowledge her grandfather’s role publicly and accused any reference to this as part of a “Russian disinformation campaign.” According to this topsy-turvy logic, Freeland’s uncle, Prof. Himka is part of this “Russian disinformation campaign,” and she is guilty of providing assistance to this “Russian disinformation campaign,” all to ruin her political career and “destabilize Western democracies.”
Freeland also told her uncle, Prof. Himka, which is included in his article, that according to her father, her grandfather Michael Chomiak was also working to some extent with the anti-Nazi resistance. However, Prof. Himka was unable to verify this information, which he described as “fragmentary and one-sided.”
This past April, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova delivered an explosive response to Chrystia Freeland’s recent obnoxious efforts to ban Russia from all international organizations and financial institutions, revealing the real sort of work Freeland’s grandfather was in the business of. You can read the full speech here.
Then there is the strange case of NATO tweeting in celebration of international women’s day, this past March 8, a picture of a female Ukrainian soldier wearing the Black Sun symbol which is tied to Nazi occultism, and Satanism. NATO wrote in their post “All women and girls must live free and equal,” sending a very mixed message. NATO also ended up taking down their picture of the Black Sun symbol.
The timing of Freeland and NATO’s twitter posts are most strange. It also begs the question, why post something at all if you are just going to delete it? Is this just a matter of not being aware of such things, or is it a matter of certain groupings getting increasingly bolder and unapologetic as to where their true allegiance lies? Has Chrystia Freeland or NATO undergone any real questioning or backlash for such public displays? Not really.
Fact Checking the “Fact-Checkers” on Ukraine
Before we go through the situation of Ukraine today, I wanted to share with you a very relevant story of how the CIA buys News.
Udo Ulfkotte was a well-known German journalist and author of numerous books. He worked for 25 years as a journalist, 17 of which were for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), including his role as editor. In his 2014 book “Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys News,” Ulfkotte goes over how the CIA along with German Intelligence (BND) were guilty of bribing journalists to write articles that either spun the truth or were completely fictitious in order to promote a pro-western, pro-NATO bent, and that he was one of those bought journalists.
In an interview, Ulfkotte describes how he finally built up the nerve to publish the book, after years of it collecting dust, in response to the erupting 2014 crisis in Ukraine stating:
“I felt that the right time had come to finish it and publish it, because I am deeply worried about the Ukrainian crisis and the possible devastating consequences for all of Europe and all of us…I am not at all pro-Russia, but it is clear that many journalists blindly follow and publish whatever the NATO press office provides. And this type of information and reports are completely one-sided”. [emphasis added]
In another interview Ulfkotte stated:
“it is clear as daylight that the agents of various Services were in the central offices of the FAZ, the place where I worked for 17 years. The articles appeared under my name several times, but they were not my intellectual product. I was once approached by someone from German Intelligence and the CIA, who told me that I should write about Gaddafi and report how he was trying to secretly build a chemical weapons factory in Libya. I had no information on any of this, but they showed me various documents, I just had to put my name on the article. Do you think this can be called journalism? I don’t think so.”
Ulfkotte has publicly stated:
“I am ashamed of it. The people I worked for knew from the get-go everything I did. And the truth must come out. It’s not just about FAZ, this is the whole system that’s corrupt all the way.” [emphasis added]
Udo Ulfkotte has since passed away. He died January 2017, found dead in his home, it is said by a heart attack. His body was quickly after cremated, thus preventing any possibility of an autopsy from occurring. His book has been made pretty much impossible to find available for purchase at this point.
Today’s situation concerning media reporting on Ukraine does not seem to be any different, if anything, it is much much worse.
To bolster support for the Ukrainian military, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.
Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.” The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”
“Key to the propaganda effort is an international legion of public relations firms working directly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to wage information warfare. According to the industry news site PRWeek, the initiative was launched by an anonymous figure who allegedly founded a Ukraine-based public relations firm…
According to the anonymous figure, more than 150 public relations firms have joined the propaganda blitz.
The international effort is spearheaded by public relations firm PR Network co-founder Nicky Regazzoni and Francis Ingham, a top public relations consultant with close ties to the UK’s government. Ingham previously worked for Britain’s Conservative Party, sits on the UK Government Communication Service Strategy and Evaluation Council, is Chief Executive of the International Communications Consultancy Organisation, and leads the membership body for UK local government communicators, LG Comms.”
Thus, Ingham who has been a member of the UK government and continues to have very high-level connections within the British government, is playing a leading role in shaping how the Ukraine war is being represented.
Dan Cohen provides a thorough explanation of how these “PR firms” have been responsible for reporting and spreading fabricated news and that even when such reports are found conclusively to be untrue, they continue to use them nonetheless. These PR tools include propaganda graphics, which are created in order to encourage radicalisation and promotion of ultra-nationalist identity; using xenophobic and racist language (not just to Russians), outright praise of Ukrainian neo-Nazis as heroes, the idolisation of Nazi affiliated Unit-B leader Stefan Bandera, and the encouragement of violent acts against other individuals (see Cohen’s article for examples).
If you have ever wondered who is behind the omnipotent “fact-checkers”, in the case of StopFake who have self-described themselves as such, they are funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) aka the fully-rogue department of the CIA, the Atlantic Council, the International Renaissance Foundation (funded by Open Society Foundation’s billionaire George Soros), the British Embassy in Ukraine, the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the German Marshall Fund, among others.
StopFake was hired by Facebook in March 2020 to “curb the flow of Russian propaganda” but was found to be employing multiple figures closely tied to violent neo-Nazis. This has, however, not deterred Facebook from continuing to work with StopFake.
At the end of the day, it does not seem to matter how many times these arbiters of truth are found to be wrong, for US officials have already admitted that they are literally just lying to the public about what is going on in Ukraine.
Josh Cohen for the Atlantic Council writes [links are from the original article]:
“It sounds like the stuff of Kremlin propaganda, but it’s not. Last week Hromadske Radio revealed that Ukraine’s Ministry of Youth and Sports is funding the neo-Nazi group C14 to promote “national patriotic education projects” in the country…”
Josh Cohen continues [links are from the original article]:
“Since the beginning of 2018, C14 and other far-right groups such as the Azov-affiliated National Militia, Right Sector, Karpatska Sich, and others have attacked Roma groups several times, as well as anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, an event hosted by Amnesty International, art exhibitions, LGBT events, and environmental activists. On March 8, violent groups launched attacks against International Women’s Day marchers in cities across Ukraine. In only a few of these cases did police do anything to prevent the attacks, and in some they even arrested peaceful demonstrators rather than the actual perpetrators.”
After the March 8 2018 attacks against International Women’s Day marchers, Amnesty International wrote “Ukraine is sinking into a chaos of uncontrolled violence posed by radical groups and their total impunity. Practically no one in the country can feel safe under these conditions.”
Josh Cohen writes:
“To be clear, far-right parties like Svoboda perform poorly in Ukraine’s polls and elections, and Ukrainians evince no desire to be ruled by them. But this argument is a bit of “red herring.” It’s not extremists’ electoral prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their impunity.” [emphasis added]
However, we heard it, straight from Yevhen Karas’s mouth, the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi group C14, what determines who holds power in Ukraine has never really been about polls and elections.
Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine's neo-Nazi terror gang C14's speech from Kiev earlier this month. Straight from the horses' mouth, he dispels the many narratives pushed by the left, the mainstream media and the State Department. pic.twitter.com/VWJqWPUGUp
As the famous “f*ck the EU” tape revealed to the dumbfounded world, the Ukrainian people don’t actually have a say in who runs their government. After the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” where Ukrainians literally died for “democracy,” the US went on to “influence” the roster of the newly formed Ukrainian government, specifically around members of Svoboda and Pravyi Sector (Right Sector) who held five senior roles in the new government, including the post of deputy prime minister.
But neo-Nazis have not just been receiving western support in the political sphere.
Just this past October, as a reaction to her failed diplomatic visit to Russia, Victoria Nuland, according to French journalist Thierry Meyssan, went ahead and “imposed” Dmytro Yarosh onto President Zelensky. On Nov. 2, 2021, President Zelensky appointed Dmytro Yarosh (leader of the neo-Nazi affiliated ultra-nationalist paramilitary group Right Sector 2013-2015) as Adviser to the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
This is the very same Dmytro Yarosh who has been on Interpol’s “wanted list” since 2014.
Neo-Nazis have also received ongoing training by the CIA, British SAS (Special Air Service) as well as other NATO countries such as Canada since at least 2014. This training has continued despite Russia’s entry into Ukraine, which has been confirmed by The Times, Ottawa Citizen, CTV News, and Radio Canada.
The Canadian government has attempted to deny any knowledge of training neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine and have made the claim that they are not responsible for verifying who they are in fact training, but that this is the responsibility of the Ukrainian government. However, such claims of ignorance fell through when the very neo-Nazis they were training went ahead and posted pictures on their social media accounts, showcasing their neo-Nazis badges identifying them as such, plain for everyone to see.
US and Canadian military officers meet uniformed members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion during a November 2017 multinational training session in Ukraine.
On the same day as the untoward NATO tweet on International Women’s Day of a Ukrainian soldier with the Nazi Black Sun occult symbol, photographs appeared on NEXTA’s twitter feed showing the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion receiving training by instructors from “NATO countries” on how to use NLAW grenade launchers.
A shipment of NLAW grenade launchers and instructors from #NATO countries arrived in #Kharkiv. The Azov regiment was the first to learn about new weaponry pic.twitter.com/CCzjN40rW7
UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the House of Commons on March 9 that “as of today, we have delivered 3,615 NLAWs [to Ukrainian forces] and continue to deliver more. We will shortly be starting the delivery of a small consignment of anti-tank Javelin missiles as well.”
For a full list of all the weapons sent to Ukraine since 2014 by all involved countries, refer here.
For those especially adamant that neo-Nazis are not “officially” a part of the Ukrainian army, you should be informed that the Azov Battalion is part of Ukraine’s National Guard, and thus, yes it is officially part of Ukraine’s military.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov Battalion’s first commander and later a National Corps parliamentarian previously led the neo-Nazi paramilitary organisation “Patriot of Ukraine,” and once stated in 2010 that it was the Ukrainian nation’s mission to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans].”
“The Azov Battalion is emerging as a critical node in the transnational right-wing violent extremist network… [Its] aggressive approach to networking serves one of the Azov Battalion’s overarching objectives, to transform areas under its control in Ukraine into the primary hub for transnational white supremacy.”
The Soufan Center described how the Azov Battalion’s “aggressive networking” reaches around the world to recruit fighters and spread its white supremacist ideology. Foreign fighters who train and fight with the Azov Battalion then return to their own countries to apply what they have learned and recruit others.
NATO has recently gone so far as to make a short film honoring the Baltic Nazi collaborators the “Forest Brothers.” The NATO film lionises the “Forest Brothers,” former Waffen SS fighters who voluntarily collaborated with the Nazis, as anti-communist heroes.
This is the story of the Forest Brothers who fought the Soviet army for their homelands after WWII pic.twitter.com/4JcfuJPmeO
Dovid Katz, a leading historian and anti-Nazi investigator condemned the NATO film for rewriting history:
“By going beyond turning a blind eye to the worship of pro-Hitler forces in Eastern Europe…[NATO] is crossing the line right into offering its moral legitimization of Nazi forces such as the Latvian Waffen SS.” [emphasis added]
David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist and reliable voice of the US intelligence apparatus, noted that even prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “the United States and NATO allies [were] ready to provide weapons and training for a long battle of resistance.”
This is the very same David Ignatius who was once President of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (aka specialists in color revolutions), who arrogantly stated in a 1991 interview that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA…The biggest difference is that when such activities are done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own protection”.
I guess the NED has had a change of heart on “openness is its own protection.”
Jeremy Kuzmarov for Covert Action Magazine writes in an article titled “National Endowment for Democracy Deletes Records of Funding Projects in Ukraine” [links from the original article]:
The archived webpage captured February 25, 2022 from 14:53 shows that NED granted $22,394,281 in the form of 334 awards to Ukraine between 2014 to the present. The capture at 23:10 the same day shows “No results found” for Ukraine. As of right now, there are still “No results found” for Ukraine…
Who will suffer the most in this plan for a long battle of resistance? The Ukrainian people.
If Putin’s top reason for going into Ukraine is to “denazify” the country, and the CIA, NATO and co. are persistently “nazifying” the political and military components of Ukraine, you can see how this is making a situation for peace in Ukraine impossible, and that it is the CIA and NATO that are to blame for this.
You can also understand how Ukraine’s entry into NATO was unacceptable merely by its geographic location (the distance between Ukraine’s border and Moscow is 450 km), however, add in the fact that NATO is involved in the promotion of neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine and that now both Sweden and Finland have also expressed a desire to join NATO (with no referendum since democracy is officially dead in Cold War 2.0) and we have ourselves a real sh*t storm.
However, this is not just a threat to Russia. The reality of the situation is that Ukraine has been in a civil war these past 8 years, though the western media refuses to acknowledge this very important fact.
“People who take at face value the Western media coverage would have a very distorted perception of the Ukraine conflict and its origin… They omit or deny that there is a civil war in Donbas even though the majority of scholars who [have] published or presented concerning this conflict in Western academic venues classify it as a civil war with Russian military intervention. The Western media also omitted that recent ‘unity marches’ in Kharkiv and Kyiv and a staged training of civilians, including a grandmother, were organized and led by the far right, in particular, the Neo-Nazi Azov [Battalion].”
Robert Parry from Consortium News writes [link is from original article]:
“On Sunday, a Times article by Andrew E. Kramer mentioned the emerging neo-Nazi paramilitary role in the final three paragraphs…In other words, the neo-Nazi militias that surged to the front of anti-Yanukovych protests…have now been organized as shock troops dispatched to kill ethnic Russians in the east [of Ukraine] – and they are operating so openly that they hoist a Swastika-like neo-Nazi flag over one conquered village with a population of about 10,000.
Burying this information at the end of a long article is also typical of how the Times and other U.S. mainstream news outlets have dealt with the neo-Nazi problem in the past. When the reality gets mentioned, it usually requires a reader knowing much about Ukraine’s history and reading between the lines of a U.S. news account.” [emphasis added]
In the above image which outlines the population distribution of ethnic Ukrainians and Russians within Ukraine, you can understand how an ultra-nationalist view that identifies as solely ethnic Ukrainian would be a catalyst for a civil war.
The people of Donbass have understandably asked for independence from Ukraine, yet the Ukrainian government has refused to allow this nor intervene for a peaceful resolution. What does this mean? The war can only end when one side is fully dead.
Not only is it publicly known that the US and NATO have been funding and training neo-Nazis, but they have also been supplying a massive supply of arms (as previously mentioned). It got to such a point where in 2018, Congress had to ban the United States from sending further arms to Ukraine militia linked to neo-Nazis, specifically mentioning the Azov Battalion. For some reason this ban was to only last for three years thus it is apparently fair game now?
But you may say, what about Russia’s crimes against the Ukrainian people, aren’t they far worse than even vicious neo-Nazis? Namely the bombing of the Mariupol theater and the Bucha massacre. Thorough journalistic investigations have already been done on the former, which can be found here, that conclusively shows the bombing of the Mariupol theater was a false-flag.
As for the Bucha massacre, there has been no evidence presented as of yet that conclusively proves who committed this atrocity, there have only been assertions. Recall that the chemical attacks in Syria were also full of assertions, to which investigative journalist Seymour Hersch wrote a report titled “Whose Sarin,” which conclusively proved that the popular assertions being pushed by the Obama government in their attempt to incriminate the Syrian government, were in fact false. Rather, it was pointing to the fact that the actual terrorists were the ones using sarin on the Syrian civilians, who were receiving American and co. funding and arms.
Unfortunately, time is of the essence in investigating crimes such as these, and despite the outcries of the inhumanity of such events, there is always heavy foot-dragging if not outright dismissal over an official and neutral investigation of such crime scenes. Why is this?
Instead, the response to this was for the UN to suspend Russia from its human rights body. Thus, not only denying an official investigation, but denying Russia a voice in responding to the matter.
The disturbing elephant in the room in all of this, is that the Azov Battalion has already been found guilty of similar atrocities against its own Ukrainian people, which has been thoroughly investigated by Max Blumenthal and Esha Krishnaswamy and which can be found here (warning there is graphic content).
The Azov Battalion has also been found guilty of purposefully putting Ukrainian citizens in jeopardy by positioning their artillery and military in residential areas and buildings, including daycares and hospitals, to which even the Washington Post had to acknowledge in their misleadingly titled article “Russia has killed civilians in Ukraine. Kyiv’s defense tactics add to the danger.”
However, these are not simply “defense tactics,” they are blatant war crimes that are recognised as such by international law. These war crimes are publicly acknowledged to be going on, causing the deaths of a significant number of Ukrainians. Just to be clear here, during times of war, to which the Washington Post also acknowledges, Ukrainian soldiers and weaponry are legitimate targets for the Russian military. It is not Russia that is committing the war crime here, it is the Ukrainian government. They have literally been caught using their own people as human shields.
Does this still sound like a patriotic nationalist movement for the welfare and sovereignty of the Ukrainian people?
According to an interview with Scott Ritter, former US Marine Intelligence Officer, the Russian military have made it clear that they are using “Syrian tactics” in Ukraine.
Scott Ritter explains, the Russian military’s tactic in Syria was:
“…to surround urban areas where these jihadists had been gathered, terrorizing the population, surround them and give them the opportunity to evacuate on buses with their security guaranteed by Russian military police. A soft approach that protected civilians, that protected civilian areas.”
It was this tactic that allowed the Russians along with the Syrian army to defeat ISIS and other terrorist affiliates. Today they only occupy the Idlib province. These terrorists who remain would not have been possible without Turkish support. This initiative to rid Syria of ISIS was something that the United States has clearly never been interested in supporting.
In the image on the left the red and largely the blue represent the region controlled by terrorists, or as Obama liked to call them “moderate rebels” in the year 2017, in the image to the right the purple and grey represent the region controlled by terrorists in the year 2021. The green is the United States and co.’s illegal presence in the country.
Interestingly, when the Russians entered Syria to combat the terrorists at the behest of the Syrian government, this was also called a “Russian invasion” by certain quarters of western media. However, it was not the Russians who bombed Syrian cities to the ground, that was the good ol’ US of A.
In the same interview, Scott Ritter stated that these very terrorists who have been stationed in Idlib are now being brought into Ukraine:
“…[Zelensky] has opened the door for illegal warriors, the mercenaries from Europe…the exploiters of conflict…[and] they brought in the jihadists…they brought in the people..[who] ostensibly want to kill Russians…It’s a poison pill…now we are going to have these jihadists, who are being armed by the way with javelin missiles and stinger missiles. Imagine what happens when a bunch of bloodthirsty jihadists take these weapons into Europe. Would you like to be the German Chancellor driving on a highway knowing that up in the hills could be a jihadist hit-team armed with javelins?…This is literally the worst kind of decision-making ever to put that much weaponry into Ukraine in an uncontrolled fashion. Even before the jihadist came in you were giving it to neo-Nazis who can’t surrender. They can’t surrender because they will be killed, rightfully so. So what do desperate people do when they can’t surrender and they don’t die? They run away with the weaponry they have. They’ll be burying it, making caches, falling back on it, continuing the futile resistance and in their anger to the West they’ll lash out at the West…that is how global terrorism is born.”
How is this in the best interest of anyone’s welfare in Europe, let alone Ukraine? It isn’t.
Many have been especially confused as to how Ukraine can have such a serious neo-Nazi problem, when they have a Jewish President.
There is something you should know about the position of “President” of Ukraine since 2014, in a country where neo-Nazis have been made more confident than the mafia ever was, that they literally cannot be touched since they have the direct backing and protection of the United States and NATO.
When President Poroshenko (June 2014 – May 2019) negotiated the Minsk agreements in September 2014, he agreed, with Germany and France, to the special autonomous status of Donetsk and Lugansk, and that under this special condition, they would stay part of Ukraine.
According to an interview[1] with Scott Ritter, this was unacceptable to the neo-Nazis who threatened Poroshenko’s life, if such a thing were to be implemented.
The Minsk agreements were never put into action. Instead, Ukraine entered a civil war that has gone on for 8 years and continues to this day. The Minsk agreements were officially expired on February 21st, 2022, the same day that the State Duma of Russia passed a bill officially recognizing Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states. This ultimate rejection by the Ukrainian government was a clear indication that their war against Donbass would be escalated.
The situation with President Zelensky is no different.
In October 2019, President Zelensky (who assumed office in May 2019), had a recorded face-to-face confrontation with the militants from the Azov Battalion, who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation.”
“’Listen, Denys [Yantar], I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons. Don’t shift the conversation to some protests,’ Zelensky said, videos of the exchange show. As he said this, Zelensky aggressively approached Yantar, who heads the National Corps, a political offshoot of the far-right Azov volunteer battalion, in Mykolaiv city.
‘But we’ve discussed that,’ Yantar said.
‘I wanted to see understanding in your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser standing in front of him,’ Zelensky said.”
The Kyiv Post continues in their article, that this reaction by President Zelensky received a strong backlash from certain quarters of Ukraine:
“Andriy Biletsky, head of National Corps and the Azov Battalion, threatened Zelensky on his YouTube channel that more veterans would head to Zolote if the president tried to evict them from the town. ‘There will be thousands there instead of several dozen,’ he said…
Singer Sofia Fedyna, who is a lawmaker with the European Solidarity party of former President Petro Poroshenko, which has 27 seats in parliament, was particularly aggressive in her response. She issued physical threats against Zelensky.
‘Mr. President thinks he is immortal,’ she said in a video shared on Facebook. ‘A grenade may explode there, by chance. And it would be the nicest if this happened during Moscow’s shelling when someone comes to the front line wearing a white or blue shirt.’
Zelensky has previously visited the front line dressed in civilian clothing, rather than military fatigues.”
Thus, the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion publicly threatened Zelensky if he were to intervene on attempting to negotiate peace and end Ukraine’s civil war.
However, this is not the full story.
President Zelensky is also backed by Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who sponsored Zelensky’s rise to presidency, not just with his presidential campaign, but also in the tv show “Servant of the People,” that Zelensky literally “play-acted” as President for three seasons, which ran from November 16th, 2015 to March 28th, 2019. Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine less than two months after the last episode, on May 20th, 2019.
Former President Poroshenko even publicly called Zelensky “Kolomoisky’s puppet” during the presidential campaign.[2]
“For years, Zelensky’s company has produced shows for Kolomoisky’s biggest TV channel, 1 + 1. In 2019, Kolomoisky’s media channels gave a big boost to Zelensky’s presidential campaign. After, Zelensky’s victory, Kolomoisky kept up his relationship with the president, nominating over 30 lawmakers to Zelensky’s newly established party, and maintaining influence with many of them in parliament.”
Since Zelensky’s presidency, Kolomoisky has been able to secure control over a significant portion of Ukraine’s energy sector, including Ukrnafta and Centrenergo, as well as Burisma Holdings.
A 2012 study of Burisma Holdings done in Ukraine by the AntiCorruption Action Centre (ANTAC) found that the true owner of Burisma Holdings was none other than Kolomoisky.
Recall the Joe and Hunter Biden scandal over Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian gas company. The Bidens ties with Kolomoisky and the situation of Ukraine today is not a coincidence.
In 2016, Ukraine nationalized PrivatBank from Kolomoisky and his business partner, Gennadiy Boholiubov. A U.S. Justice Department civil forfeiture complaint from December 2020, said the two men “embezzled and defrauded the bank of billions of dollars.” [emphasis added]
There is also the matter of the Pandora Papers, which has confirmed that Ukrainian oligarch Kolomoisky was funneling millions of dollars in concealed assets offshore. Zelensky was also implicated in this. And what this of course also means, is that the City of London is tied into all of this.
Kolomoisky has a notorious history of being a literal “raider” of Ukrainian companies, as confirmed by Harper’s Magazine, and Forbes.
“Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky fostered strong reputations as corporate raiders in the mid-2000s, becoming notorious for a series of hostile takeovers. Hostile takeovers Ukrainian style, that is, which often included the active involvement of Privat’s quasi-military teams.”
Kolomoisky, who is Jewish, is also a funder of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion since it was formed in 2014, which has been confirmed by Reuters, Newsweek, and Aljazeera.
He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions and has personally deployed them to protect his financial interests.
In other words, Kolomoisky is funding the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who have been fighting Eastern Ukrainians for these past 8 years, and thus has been directly fueling the civil war in Ukraine. One of the reasons for this, is that Donbass is a region with many natural resources, especially for the energy sector, to which Kolomoisky would very much like to be in possession of. This could only occur with the extermination or occupation of the people of Donbass.
Interestingly, this past Victory Day (May 8th), First Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky’s interview was cut short on Sky News when he brought up that Zelen
After years of civil war, the city of Mariupol has now been liberated. Do you think the people in the West will ever hear about this?
Where do We go from Here?
Well, let me put it this way. The United States and NATO know they cannot defeat Russia or China in a direct war, hence all of these proxy wars these past several years under the guise of “War on Terror.” As David Ignatius honestly expressed, their desire is for a long-drawn war. This is because they believe that they can bankrupt Russia and/or set the stage for internal unrest and eventual coup. However, things are clearly not going as planned.
What has been greatly underestimated in this situation is 1) China’s solid alliance with Russia, 2) that Russia is the most resource abundant country in the world to which Europe is dependant on, and 3) the economic brilliance of Sergey Glazyev.
Russia’s rouble has also not tanked as expected. In fact, it has actually grown stronger than ever.
“Keynesians in the West have misread this situation. They think that the Russian economy is weak and will be destabilised by sanctions. That is not true. Furthermore, they would argue that a currency strengthened by insisting that oil and natural gas are paid for in roubles will push the Russian economy into a depression. But that is only a statistical effect and does not capture true economic progress or the lack of it, which cannot be measured. The fact is that the shops in Russia are well stocked, and fuel is freely available, which is not necessarily the case in the West.
The advantages for Russia are that as the West’s currencies sink into crisis, the rouble will be protected. Russia will not suffer from the West’s currency crisis, she will still get inflation compensation in commodity prices, and her interest rates will decline while those in the West are soaring. Her balance of trade surplus is already hitting new records.”
It is the West who has miscalculated in all of this, and it is their economy that will utterly tank from this “long-drawn” war these oligarchs have been having wet dreams about for God knows how many years.
We have done this to ourselves. And if we truly want to correct the matter, we should first have the respect to admit the truth in our complicity to much of the world’s woes during this Cold War period. Those of us who have lived in abundance, in comfort, and security, should take the first step to speak out and say no more to the rest of the world living in starved war-torn agony.
We must stop caring for ourselves first at the expense of all else. We must start caring for others first and foremost and acknowledge the crimes that have been committed in our name. Only then can we truly have the humility to see that the solution has been in front of our face the whole time.
If we fail in this, the western world will not be able to sustain itself for much longer economically. And when it falls, what sort of people do you think you will be surrounded by after all these years of supporting fascism under your very nose?
The author can be reached at cynthiachung.substack.com
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting for 2022, an event where powerful CEOs and world leaders meet to “find solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki committed to persistent censorship of “misinformation” and praised YouTube’s existing censorship efforts.
Wojcicki made the comments after Alyson Shontell Lombardi, the Editor-in-Chief of Fortune Magazine, asked her whether YouTube’s efforts to censor misinformation will always be a “work in progress.”
“I think there’ll always be work that we have to do because there will always be incentives for people to be creating misinformation,” Wojcicki said. “The challenge will be to keep staying ahead of that and make sure that we are understanding what they are and the different ways that people may use to try to trick our systems and make sure that our systems are staying ahead of what’s necessary to make sure that we are managing that.”
Wojcicki continued by praising YouTube’s 5-6 year initiative of cracking down on content that’s deemed to be misinformation and said that users who look at YouTube search results or the homepage will see content from “authoritative sources” (mainstream media outlets that YouTube designates as authoritative) for “sensitive topics.”
Earlier in the conversation, Wojcicki said YouTube is “investing a huge amount to make sure that we’re fighting misinformation” and discussed the various ways YouTube is cracking down on misinformation. She pointed to YouTube introducing 10 COVID censorship policies, YouTube’s policy of not recommending “borderline content” which doesn’t break YouTube’s rules but is deemed to be “lower quality,” and YouTube’s policy of demonetizing content that’s deemed to be “propagating something that is generally understood as not accurate information.”
Wojcicki also talked about YouTube’s violative view rate (VVR) – a metric that shows how many views come from content that violates YouTube’s rules. The metric indicates how swiftly YouTube is censoring content. A low VVR signals that most of the content YouTube removes is being taken down before viewers have a chance to watch it.
Wojcicki noted that just 10-12 views of every 10,000 come from violative content and that this number has “come down significantly” over time.
“Our plan is to continue to work on it and make sure that we continue to reduce that,” Wojcicki added.
Wojcicki’s commitment to always crackdown on misinformation echoes her and the platform’s previous vows to censor misinformation. Days ago, Wojcicki promised to tackle “misinformation” to win over corporate cash. And earlier this year, she said: “Tackling misinformation and other harmful content is a top priority.”
For all the people outside the UK who don’t understand what the “Queens Speech” actually is, it’s a farcical state occasion in which the Queen (or, in this case, Prince Charles since her majesty is ill/secretly dead/having “mobility issues”) makes a speech about what “her government” intends to do for the next 12 months.
Of course, the Queen doesn’t actually write the speech, or have any input on its content, or have any control at all over what “her” government intends to do. She’s just a mouthpiece in a big gold hat.
It’s the UK equivalent of the State of the Union, only done in Halloween costumes made out of shiny stolen rocks.
The whole thing is nothing but a grand, gilt statement of intent from the British Deep State, wrapped in mink and draped in medals they never earned. It’s a joke, but it is worth listening to.
Or, if you have a sensitive stomach, you can just read the full text the next day on the UK government’s website (that’s what I do).
A lot of the content is entirely predictable.
More money to Ukraine, with a promise the UK will “lead the way in championing security around the world”. More online censorship via the “Online Safety Bill”. A compulsory register for homeschooled children via the “Schools Reform Bill”.
There’s also mention of “securing the constitution” by introducing the UK’s own “Bill of Rights”. We broke down that particular Trojan Horse back in February.
But the part I found most interesting is the stated plan to “encourage agricultural and scientific innovation at home” via the proposed Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill.
To quote the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), the legislation would “take certain precision breeding techniques out of the scope of restrictive GMO rules”.
Essentially, this would see new “gene-edited” foods as distinct from old-fashioned “genetically modified” foods, and therefore not subject to the same rules and oversight.
The claimed distinction is that gene editing, as opposed to genetic modification, doesn’t introduce DNA from other species. Therefore, in effect, is merely speeding up what could potentially naturally happen over time.
Now, you might think this is just semantics, and that such a law will just provide a loophole for ALL “genetically modified” foods to simply rebrand themselves as “genetically edited” foods, and thereby avoid regulation. But that is disgustingly cynical and shame on you for even thinking it.
All in all, this is pretty on-message stuff, and not especially surprising. What’s noteworthy is – by pure happenstance, I’m sure – it appears to coincide with a renewed push on the GM food front in other countries all over the world.
In December 2021, Switzerland added an amendment to its moratorium on GMO crops, permitting the use of certain “gene editing” techniques.
Last month, Egypt announced their new strain of GM wheat. Just two days ago, Ethiopia’s National Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center announced they had researched, and the country will now be growing, genetically modified cotton and maize.
Britain’s deregulation of GM food is always described as a “post-Brexit” move – with the EU chided around the world for its “precautionary principle” on GM crops – and yet as long ago as last April, the EU was calling for a “rethink” on GM crops.
In fact, just today, European Biotechnology Magazine reports:
The EU Commission has launched its final consultation on the deregulation of new breeding techniques in agriculture
WHY THIS? WHY NOW?
So, we’re seeing a sudden increase in the variety of GM crops available and a simultaneous push for deregulation of the industry in Western nations.
Why would they be doing this now?
Well, there is a food crisis.
Or, more accurately, they have just created a food crisis. And as the cliched Hegelian dialectic inevitably goes, their manufactured “problem” is now in need of their contrived “solution”.
We should expect to see genetic engineering pitched as a solution to our food crisis in the very near future…like yesterday. Or indeed, two months ago.
That’s how fast they work now, with barely a pretence at concealing the plan. Spitting out the answer so fast they make it obvious they knew the question beforehand.
On March 15th, when the “special operation” in Ukraine was less than 3 weeks old, the Time was already headlining:
War forces farmers to think again about GM crops
…and reporting:
Genetic modification could make Britain’s food system less susceptible to geopolitical turmoil
A week later Verdict published an article titled“Improving food self-sufficiency with GM crops during geopolitical crises”
Can gene editing help farmers satisfy the rising demand for food?
Four days ago, the Manila Times published an article titled “In times of food scarcity: Revisiting genetically modified crops”.
Two days ago (so before the Queen’s speech specifically mentioning the gene editing bill), Scotland’s Press & Journal ran an opinion piece headlined: “Scottish Government must lift GM crop ban to ease cost of living crisis”.
The Ukraine-Russia conflict has demonstrated the fragility and vulnerability of global and European food supply chains. Around the world, governments in leading agricultural-producing countries are now catching up with the United States, both to better legislate gene-edited (GE) products, as well as differentiate them from the older Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) technology, and its negative connotations to some consumers, commentators, farmers, retailers, politicians and lawmakers.
And just today, the Genetic Literacy Project published an article by Ukrainian-Canadian David Zaruk, railing against the EU’s “precautionary principle” on GMOs and calling for an embracing of “new technology” to prevent widespread hunger and increase food sovereignty.
It goes on and on and on.
…LET’S NOT FORGET CLIMATE CHANGE, GUYS
Of course, it’s not all about the food crisis – giving corporate giants free rein to genetically alter all the food we eat will also be good for the planet. They talk about that a lot recently.
On February 8th this year, the University of Bonn published a new study claiming “Genetic engineering can have a positive effect on the climate”
On February 24th this year, the Cornell-based NGO “Alliance for Science” published an article claiming “GMOs could shrink Europe’s climate footprint”, based on the study mentioned above.
In a response to the Queen’s Speech, the UK’s National Institute of Agriculture and Botany claimed that genetic modification will make farming “more sustainable”.
In a reminder we’re not just talking about crops but genetically engineering livestock as well, in February Deutsche Welle suggested that genetically altered “Climate sheep and eco pigs could combat global heating”.
The narrative is clearly set: Genetically engineered food will save us all from the food crisis, and global warming too. Plus anything else they can think of.
THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR ORGANICS
Not content with the semi-constant fluffing of the GM business, the MSM are also turning their guns on organic farming and giving it both barrels.
Ukraine Crisis Reveals the Folly of Organic Farming: As food prices skyrocket, the world needs to admit it can’t live without modern, efficient agriculture.
The “Allliance for Science” article mentioned above goes out of its way to criticise the EU’s pro-organic “farm to fork” plans, claiming “[organic farming] has lower yields and would be associated with increases in global [greenhouse gas] emissions by causing land-use changes elsewhere”.
Meanwhile, Erik Fyrwald, the CEO of the Swiss agrochemicals group Syngenta (so possessing somewhat of a conflict of interests), told Swiss newspaper NZZ am Sonntag that the West must “stop organic farming to help future food crisis”, adding that organic farming is worse for the planet, because ploughing up fields releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
NOTE: In an interesting (again, probably totally accidental) parallel, the currently simmering “Bird Flu outbreak” has also hit organic and free-range farmers hard, with one (sponsored) Guardian article asking if “year-round” bird flu could spell “the end of free-range eggs”.
CONCLUSION
Having just seen how the Covid19 “vaccine” campaign unfolded, it’s not hard to see how the pro-GM push will go from here. Genome-edited crops and farm animals are going to become the new “settled science”.
They will be sold to the public as cheaper, more nutritious, better for the environment and good for “preventing future pandemics” (yes, they literally did say that already).
Naturally, anyone who resists the push for gene-edited food, and/or mourns the planned death of organic farming, will be accused of “questioning the science”.
Eating British GM foods will be “doing your part” and “helping Ukraine”, while people who want more expensive organic products will be deemed “unpatriotic” or “selfish”.
Just as we saw Covid sceptics denounced as spreading “Russian disinformation”, despite Russia’s willing complicity in the Covid lie, those who argue against genome-edited food will be said to be “sharing Russian talking points” or “doing Putin’s work for him” despite Russia being well onboard the gene-editing train.
It all gets very predictable from there. Organic farmers will probably be “anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist Russian spies” by the end of the summer.
Finland and Sweden are obviously being pushed into a suicide pact for US-NATO expansionist plan towards Russia’s borders. France24reported on the not-so new development, “the Finnish government officially announced its intention to join NATO on Sunday, as Sweden’s ruling party was to hold a decisive meeting that could pave the way for a joint application.” Finland’s announcement ends a 75-year-old policy as a neutral country with no military alignments with NATO. Sweden had a similar policy of its military being non-aligned for centuries is also following in Finland’s footsteps. “Today, the President of the Republic and the Government’s Foreign Policy Committee have jointly agreed that Finland will apply for NATO membership, after consulting parliament,” Finnish President Sauli Niinisto who held a joint press conference with Prime Minister Sanna Marin last Sunday and declared “This is a historic day. A new era is opening”, Niinisto said.
The US-NATO alliance wants a hot war with Russia by pushing Finland and Sweden to join an aggressive military alliance known as NATO. The European military alliance has invaded and literally destroyed several nations in its history including Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq and to an extent, it has helped the US-Israel alliance destabilize Syria for some time, all with Washington’s blessing of course. Finland is now following Washington’s long-term goal of trying to destabilize and turn Russia into a third world country by sacrificing itself as cannon fodder. Seriously, what can Finland do to a superpower with over 6,000 nuclear warheads and a military that can take on NATO even without help from its closest allies in the region including Belarus, China and Iran. But this makes all the sense in the world because Washington and its Military-Industrial Complex will benefit from a new conflict between Finland, Sweden and Russia. The US and its NATO allies will push Finland to fight until the last remaining Finn against Russia just like they did with the Ukrainians. The Kremlin Press Service released a statement on the situation according to the Associated Press (AP) that “Putin told Sauli Niinisto Finland’s abandonment “of its traditional policy of military neutrality would be an error since there are no threats to Finland’s security” and that “Such a change in the country’s foreign policy could negatively affect Russian-Finnish relations, which had been built in the spirit of good neighborliness and partnership for many years, and were mutually beneficial.”
It is important to understand that Finland purchases most of its weapons from the US as well as Israel, Germany, Norway and Sweden which is basically a profitable business opportunity for Western arms manufacturers. Last December, Finland ordered 64 new F-35s to replace their F/A-18 combat jets in a deal worth $9.4 billion that benefits Lockheed Martin, a major US arms manufacturer. According to globalfirepower.com, a website dedicated in accessing the military power of all nations around the world ranks Finland’s military at 53 out of 142 with over 23,000 active personnel, 192 total aircraft, 200 tanks, 63 rocket projectors and a Naval force with 246 total assets including 8 patrol vessels won’t even make a dent against Russia’s military forces. Russia ranks at number 2 with over 850,000 active personal and a wide range of advanced military hardware. Not even NATO would be able to protect Finland from Russia’s military advances if a conflict were to take place.
However, one important fact about Finland that needs to be explained is that the Nordic country has blood on its hands for many years since it signed agreements to cooperate with NATO going back to 1994 including intelligence sharing and participating in military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. For some time, Finland has been slowly integrating its military and intelligence capabilities with NATO while ignoring Russia’s red line following in the footsteps of the neo-Nazi government of Ukraine.
In September 2012, a security policy paper was published by Charly Salonius-Pasternak from the Finnish Institute of International Affairs titled ‘Not Just Another Arms Deal: The security policy implications of the United States selling advanced missiles to Finland’ on the security guarantees the US will provide to Finland after they purchased F/A-18 Hornet fighters and advanced missiles to counter Russia. But it is not just an arms deal, it’s a security policy that ensures the US-NATO alliance will back Finland against a future conflict with Russia “however, it would be a mistake to view this merely as an arms deal. It is much more and has significant political and military implications. The deal is a notable security policy win for Finland.” Clearly the goal is for NATO to expand its presence close to Russia’s borders “The deal does not change the strategic military balance in the region, but it does positively impact Finland’s military capabilities vis-à-vis Russia.” Charly Salonius-Pasternak admits that the US is the “European bulwark” against Russian aggression:
For Russia, the acquisition of these advanced capabilities by Finland is a double-edged sword: it is may delay Finland’s application to become a member of NATO, but at the cost of a drastically improved ability by Finland to withstand and respond to a broader range of military strikes and pressure.
The strengthening bilateral relationship with the United States has improved Finland’s defence. A desire to deepen that bilateral relationship suggests that Finland knows that even NATO membership by itself would not be sufficient for Finnish defence needs; rather, Finland needs a web of multilateral, multinational and bilateral relationships for its security. It also suggests that clear-eyed realism drives Finnish security policy thinking: that Finland knows that it is still the United States that serves as the European bulwark (and provider of guarantees) against potential external aggression; and, that NATO is a necessary but not sufficient component for broader European defence, mainly because most European states have ignored their own defence for too long
The US-NATO alliance just lost a war against the Taliban and now they want a war against nuclear-armed Russian forces. It’s a tragic comedy in the making. The stick has been passed along to the Finnish government to poke the Russian bear; but how far will the US-NATO alliance go in order to de-stabilize Russia? The Finnish people are now at risk of being targeted by Russia because Washington’s reckless foreign policy does not care who will be sacrificed in order to fulfill an agenda of US-NATO global hegemony over Russia and the rest of the world.
It seems that members of the global elite (or the New World Order) don’t care that a world war can take place which can go nuclear since they have bunkers in faraway places like New Zealand to avoid a “global apocalypse” while countries like Finland and Sweden turn into cannon fodder for their global agenda.
While elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it was rapidly accelerated with the dawn of human civilization 7,000 years later. Since that time, ‘ordinary’ human beings like you and me have fought an unending sequence of battles to defend ourselves against these ongoing efforts by elites to kill or control us and capture the bulk of Earth’s resources for their own use.
We have had to fight off elites in a vast range of contexts: Pharaohs and Emperors politically, the Popes and other Vatican officials religiously, the City of London Corporation and other financial elites economically, monarchs and political elites nationally, and now a Global Elite that exercises enormous control technologically, economically, politically, militarily and otherwise over the entire world. For a fuller explanation of this point, see ‘Why Activists Fail’.
But there is a profound difference between all of the battles in earlier eras and the one we are in now.
If we lose this battle, there will be no subsequent battle. The Long War against humanity will have been lost, once and for all.
Why? Because this battle is for everything that it means to be human – human identity, human freedom, human rights, privacy, dignity, free will and anything else that makes life worth living – and for control of the Earth and all its resources.
And while it is true that no human has any of these elements in anything like its entirety – who would claim to be fully ‘free’ in this world? – and many humans still lack all of these elements in any meaningful form, it is nevertheless true that the totalitarian nature of the program being imposed on us will transform the very concept of ‘human’ in a way that has only been conceived in the past 100 years or so and not previously attempted. Moreover, if successful, any ‘free will’ that humans might still possess will be utterly eliminated.
How is this Happening? The Deep Level
Despite the unending efforts of those people aware enough to perceive the true depth of this conflict, elites have been able to use a long series of techniques to ensure that the vast bulk of ‘ordinary’ people either do not perceive the conflict or waste their dissent by expressing it within frameworks designed and controlled by elites for that precise purpose. By doing this, it appears that dissent is ‘allowed’ and valued when, in fact, it is simply dissipated.
A second way in which elites have been able to distract us from where the real power in society lies is by convincing us that we have ‘legal recourse’ against injustice, including against elites who kill and exploit us. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.
A third way in which elites retain control over societies is by designing compulsory education systems that ensure that whatever unique emotional, intellectual, sensory and physical potential a child has at birth is either utterly eliminated within a few years of that birth or channeled to serve elite will. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
And, of course, elites control populations by using extensive propaganda – marketed variously as ‘education’, ‘entertainment’ and ‘news’ – to ensure the passive submission of the bulk of the population to elite directives.
In short, an unending sequence of violence – ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ – is used to terrorize the individual throughout childhood and adolescence into submissive obedience. This violence ensures that only a rare individual survives with any sense of ‘Self’, with the capacity to critique society and resist violence and exploitation strategically. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
So here we are in 2022, deeply engaged in the final battle to defend humanity, with most of the population unaware of what is happening and the bulk of those who are aware dissipating their dissent through elite-controlled channels.
Hence, as the World Economic Forum puts it so clearly in one of its promotional videos: By 2030, ‘You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.’ See ‘8 predictions for the world in 2030’.
And that could well become true for the simple reason that key measures of the transformation taking place are shifting wealth from those with less to those who will shortly own everything, including you, as Dr Joseph Mercola points out – see ‘Who Will Eventually Own Everything, Including You?’ – and the technologies that will destroy your volition will also remove any concept of happiness.
In short, a transhuman slave needs nothing and experiences only those emotions that are programmed. A transhuman slave, whether as worker, soldier or consumer, will simply perform its programmed tasks until it is no longer functional and is ‘decommissioned’.
A human being without free will cannot resist because they do not know that they are enslaved.
Every day, while most people content themselves with trying to get on with living some version of the life that they experienced prior to 2020, another detail is mapped out and another measure is taken by compliant politicians in one or more countries around the world to destroy everything we have ever known. And the noose is ever-tightening.
Let me offer you just a taste of what else is happening, beyond what is ordinarily discussed as part of the ‘Great Reset’, as elements of the Global Elite’s agenda, about which you are not being consulted or even given thoughtful critiques to consider in government and corporate media.
The World Health Organization: International Health Regulations & the Pandemic Treaty
The World Health Organization continues to promote its initiative to create a ‘Pandemic Treaty’. Using wonderful-sounding words such as ‘to build a more robust global health architecture that will protect future generations’, the Treaty sounds like something we have all been dreaming about. See ‘Global leaders unite in urgent call for international pandemic treaty’.
But like all elite initiatives of this nature, the devil is in the detail and, often enough, hidden in plain sight. Rather than offer a detailed critique here, you can consider several fine critiques by thoughtful scholars in the following articles or videos:
Kit Knightly: The ‘Pandemic Treaty’ would ‘hand supranational powers to an unelected bureaucrat or “expert”, who could exercise them entirely at his own discretion and on completely subjective criteria. This is the very definition of technocratic globalism.’ See ‘“Pandemic Treaty” will hand WHO keys to global government’.
But it would be unwise to ascribe too much significance to these latest, ongoing encroachments on national sovereignty. As explained above, the Global Elite has long exercised control over national governments (as well as international organizations) and the ongoing formalization of this process through the various measures outlined immediately above are simply the latest (health) details in this long-standing process.
Consequently, rather than focusing our resistance on these latest details by, yet again, falling for the trap of lobbying elite agents, as suggested by organizations such as the World Council for Health – see ‘#StopTheWHO: How You Can Take a Stand Against International Health Regulation Amendments’ – it is superior strategy to focus our resistance on the entire elite agenda by undermining elite power at its source.
World Government Summit
The World Government Summit was held in Dubai on 29-30 March 2022. See ‘World Government Summit 2022’. The event was sponsored and hosted by the United Arab Emirates, that bastion of ruthless dictatorship and human rights abuses – see ‘United Arab Emirates 2021’ – and brought together ‘thought leaders, global experts and decision makers from around the globe to share and contribute to the development of tools, policies, and models that are essential in shaping future governments.’ See ‘World Government Summit 2022’.
‘The World Government Summit community is an opportunity for thought-leaders from the public and private sectors to join forces with world-renowned experts to design a better life for citizens across the world. Through Memberships and Partnerships, the Summit brings together change makers to shape a better future for humanity.’ See ‘World Government Summit: Community’.
It is reassuring to know that the WGS felt that the views of constituencies of ‘ordinary’ people – women, indigenous peoples, working people, the poor, the homeless, the unemployed, farmers, non-white peoples, religious people… – were not required and that the ‘world renowned experts’ were quite capable of designing ‘a better life for citizens across the world’ without even consulting us. Surely, after all, these high profile people fully understand the daily struggles of those who battle to survive, have a different worldview or are just simply not white, wealthy and ‘well-connected’.
In any case, as the host country’s long record reminds us, human rights are to be eviscerated in the world that is now being introduced, which is why those attending the Summit were obviously very supportive of the UAE’s ruthless approach to human rights.
As Derrick Broze noted in his thoughtful critique of this gathering: ‘Anyone with a functioning brain should… pay attention to this little known gathering of globalist Technocrats… [who] imagine a world where the tyrannical technological systems are invisible and the average person has zero recourse for preventing exclusion or punishment based on their social credit score.’ See ‘While You Were Distracted by Will Smith, the International Elitists Met at The World Government Summit’.
The Great Narrative
The Great Narrative was a forum sponsored by the World Economic Forum from 10-13 November 2021. According to the WEF: It was ‘a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.’ The gathering involved ‘Top thinkers from a variety of geographies and disciplines – including futurists, scientists and philosophers – [to] contribute fresh ideas for the future.’ See ‘The Great Narrative’.
Again, perhaps like me, you find it difficult to identify with the people at this gathering. I wonder if they could see things from your perspective? Or mine?
The good news is that Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, authors of the original book on Covid-19: The Great Reset, also wrote a book about The Great Narrative: For a Better Future. So at least you can read what they are doing to you and plan to do to you. As long as you can read between the lines.
But, again, Derrick Broze has been kind enough to offer a thoughtful critique:
Authoritarians use great narratives to legitimize their own power, and they do this by claiming to have knowledge and understanding that speaks to a universal truth…. With this understanding, the WEF’s call for a ‘Great Narrative’ should be seen for what it truly is – an attempt to displace all other visions of the future of humankind by placing the WEF and their partners at the heart of a narrative which paints them as the heroes of our time. This fits perfectly with the Technocratic philosophy employed by WEF founder Klaus Schwab. He envisions a future where ‘public-private partnerships’ of government and private business and so-called philanthropies use their wealth, influence, and power to design the future they believe is best for humanity. In actuality, the Technocrat philosophy merges with a Transhumanist mindset that sees humanity as limited, flawed, and in need of augmentation by technology in order to accelerate what Schwab calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution…. Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores. See ‘The Great Narrative and The Metaverse, Part 1: A Dystopian Vision of the Future’.
Sound like the sort of world that will be good for you?
Defeating the Global Elite’s Agenda
As you ponder the enormity of this elite project, I hope it will encourage you to deeply consider what meaningful resistance in this context will entail. We cannot succeed if we beg elite agents, including politicians, to fix it for us. In the last 18 months, five presidents who resisted the elite-driven narrative have been assassinated to remind us of that.
So resisting it effectively and, ultimately, defeating its agenda, will require focused, strategic action that undermines the power of the Elite to implement its plan.
If you are interested in being part of this strategy, you can read how to do so on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’website which offers further analysis, resources and a list of 29 strategic goals for doing so.
This includes campaigning to cause all sectors of society to refuse to develop and make available, or to purchase/use, technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and transhumanism (including 5G and 6G, military weapons, artificial intelligence [AI], big data, nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things [IoT], and quantum computing) because these technologies will subvert human identity, human freedom, human dignity, human volition and/or human privacy. See ‘Strategic Goals related to resisting the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism’.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 15 languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
Notably, these latter actions avoid certain problems. Because they involve actions by people dispersed throughout the population, rather than people concentrated in one location (as with rallies), they are extremely difficult to interrupt. Hence, they virtually eliminate the risk of violent repression.
If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link available from the website).
Conclusion
The insane Global Elite has launched the final stage of a long-planned program to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslave those left alive. They have agents (including international organizations such as the UN and WHO, politicians, medical personnel, government and corporate media) throughout society playing a part in implementing this program on their behalf.
If we are to defeat this program we must mobilize sufficient thoughtful and courageous people to act strategically to undermine the power of the Global Elite to inflict this program upon us. This can be done as described above.
As you ponder your involvement, remember this. If we do not fight successfully now to defend our humanity, no human being will have the opportunity to fight in future. It is ‘now or never’ for us all.
In that sense, this is the final battle.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ . His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
After the Crash 