Despite its pedigree as a fundamental element in civilization’s greatest stories, nostalgia has come to be associated with treacly sentimentality, defeatism, and spurious spiritual inclinations. Homer, Vergil, Dante, the Biblical writers, and their ilk would demur, of course, but they have been dead for a few years, so progress’s mantra urges us to get on with it. This is now.
But now is always, and like its twin – exile – nostalgia is perpetual. The aching for “home” – from Greek algos, pain + nostos, homecoming – is not simply a desire for the past, whether in reality or imagination, time or place, but a passionate yearning for the best from the past to be brought into the future.
Nostalgia may be more a long ache of old people, but it is also a feeling that follows everyone along life’s way. Its presence may be shorter in youth, and it may be brief, intermittent, and unrecognized, but it is there. Surely it grows with experience. As everyone knows, a taste, a smell, a sight, a sound, a song – can conjure up a moment’s happiness, a reverie of possibility. Paradise regained, but differently. A yearning recognized, as with seeing for the first time how Van Gogh’s blue paint opens a door to ecstasy or a line of poetry cracks open a space in one’s heart for prospective love. Hope reborn as an aperture to the beyond reimagined and made possible.
There is no need to ever leave where we are to find that we are already no longer there, for living is a perpetual leaving-taking, and the ache of loss is its price.
But like all pains, it is one we wish to relieve in the future; and in order to make a future, we must be able to imagine or remember it first. We are all exiled in our own ways. Home was yesterday, and our lost homes lie in our futures, if we hold to the dream of homecoming, whatever that may mean to each person. But it also has a universal meaning, since we dwell on this earth together, our one home for our entire human family.
You may think I am engaging in fluff and puff and flimsy imaginings. But no.
All across the world there are hundreds of millions of exiles, forced by wars, power politics, poverty, starvation, destructive capitalism, and modernization’s calamitous consequences to leave their homes and suffer the disorientation of wandering. Emigration, immigration, salvaging bits of the old in the new strange lands – thus is their plight. So much lost and small hopes found in nostalgic remembering. Piecing together the fragments.
But in a far less physical sense, the homeless mind is the rule today. There are very few people these days who don’t wish to somehow return to a time when the madness that engulfs us didn’t exist; to escape the whirligig of fragmented consciousness in which the world appears – i.e. is presented by the media – as a pointillistic painting whose dots move so rapidly that a coherent picture is near impossible. This feeling is widespread. It is not a question of politics. It crisscrosses the world following the hyper-real unreality of the technologies that join us in a state of transcendental homelessness and anxiety. All the propaganda about a “new normal” and a digital disembodied future ring hollow. The Great Reset is the Great Nightmare. Nothing seems normal anymore and the future seems even less so.
The world has become Weirdsville. This is something that most people – young and old – feel, even if they can’t articulate it. The feeling that all the news is false and that some massive con game is underway is pandemic.
Here is an insignificant bit of nostalgia. I mention it because it points beyond itself, then and now. It has always been nostalgia for the future. I think it is a commonplace experience.
When I was in high school, there was a tiny cheese shop on Lexington Avenue and 85th St. in New York City near the subway that I took to and home from school. It was the size of a walk-in closet. Thousands of cheeses surrounded you when you entered. The smells were overwhelming. I would often stop in there with empty pockets on my way home from school. The proprietor, knowing I was in awe of the thousands of cheeses, would often give me little samples with pieces of crusty French bread. He would regale me with tales of Paris and the histories of the various European cheeses. He would emphasize their livingness, how they breathed. By the door was a large basket filled with long loaves of fragrant French bread flown in every morning from Paris by Air France. These were the days before every supermarket sold knockoff versions of the genuine thing. Each long loaf was in a colorful French tricolored paper bag.
Those loaves of bread in the French colors always transported me to Paris, a place I had never been, but whose language I was studying. Then, and for years afterwards, I was nostalgic for a Paris that was not yet part of my physical experience. How could this be? I asked myself. One day I realized that I was not nostalgic for Paris or the cheese shop, nor for the cheese or the bread, which I had tasted many times, but for the paper bags the bread came in. Why?
This question perplexed me until I realized my notion of nostalgia was wrong. For those bags had always represented the future for me, the birds of flight a sign of freedom beckoning as my youthful world expanded. My nostalgia for the Air France bags was a way to go back to go forward, not to wallow in sentimentality and the “good old days,” but to read the entrails for their prophetic message: the small-life world is limiting – expand your horizons.
It was not a question of jumping on a plane and going somewhere different, although that in time would also be good. It was not an invitation to revisit that cheese shop, as if that were possible, for the store was long gone and in any case it would not mean the same thing. It was not a desire to become a teenager again. You cannot repeat an experience, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald writing: “You can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can.”
The past in that sense is quicksand, a death wish. For many people (and this is the prevalent understanding of nostalgia as an exclusively negative way of thinking), embittered nostalgia is their way of denying the present and the future, often by the fictitious creation of “the good old days” when everything was supposedly so much better.
But nostalgia can also be an impetus to create a better future, a reminder that good aspects of what has been lost need to be regained to change the course of the present’s future trajectory.
Today most people are bamboozled by world events, as an idiot wind blows through the putrescent words of the media sycophants who churn out their endlessly deceptive and confusing propaganda on behalf of their elite masters. Given a few minutes peace of mind to analyze this drivel – a tranquility destroyed by the electronic frenzy – it becomes apparent that their fear, anxiety, and contradictory reports are intentional, part of a strategy to pound down the public into drooling, quaking morons.
But many people in their better moments do recall times when they experienced glimpses of a better life, transitory as those experiences might have been. Moments when they felt more at home in their skin in a world where they belonged and they could make better sense of the news they received. Not lost and wandering and constantly fearfully agitated by a future seemingly chaotic, leading to dusty death in a story told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
I suggest that those nostalgic moments revolve around the changing nature of our experience of space and time. There was a time when time was time and space and speed had some human meaning, for people lived within the limits of the natural world of which they were a part. As I wrote once before:
In former days you could cross over to other people’s lives and come back with a different perspective, knowing what was obvious was true and that to exist meant to be composed of flesh and blood like all the others in different places and to be bound by the natural cycles of life and death, spring and fall, summer and winter. There were limits then, on the land, water, and even in the sky, where space too had dimensions and the stars and planets weren’t imaginary landing strips for mad scientists and their partners in celluloid fantasies.
In that rapidly disappearing world where people felt situated in space and time, life was not yet a holographic spectacle of repetitive images and words, a pseudo-world of shadowy figures engaging in pseudo-debates on electronic screens with people traveling from one place to another only to find that they never left home. When the mind is homeless and the grey magic of digital propaganda is its element, life becomes a vast circinate wandering to nowhere. The experience of traveling thousands of miles only to see the same chain of stores lining the same roads in the same towns across a country where the same people live with their same machines and same thoughts in their same lives in their same clothes. A mass society of mass minds in the hive created by cell phones and measured in nanoseconds where the choices are the freedom to choose what is always the same within a cage of categories meant to render all reality a ‘mediated reality.’
Nostalgia is always about time and space. In that sense, it is equivalent to all human experience that also takes place within these dimensions. And when technology has radically disrupted our human sense of limits in their regard, it becomes harder and harder to feel at home, to dwell enough to grasp what is happening in the world.
I believe that many people feel nostalgic for slower and more silent days when they could hear themselves think a bit. When the sense of always being on the go and lacking time predominates as it does today, thinking becomes very difficult. To think, one must dethrone King Rush and silence Queen Noise, the two conditions that the speed and noise of digital technology render impossible. Tranquilized by the beeping trivia pouring out of the omnipresent electronic gadgets, the very devices being used by the elites to control the masses, a profound grasp of the source of one’s disquietude is impossible. The world becomes impossible to read. The sense of always being away, ungrounded, and mentally homeless in a cacophonous madhouse becomes the norm. One feels sick in heart and mind.
Most people sense this, and whether they think of it as nostalgia or not, I believe they feel that something important is missing and that they are wandering like rolling stones, as Dylan voiced it so poetically, with no direction home.
How does it feel? It feels lousy.
So it’s not a question of returning to “the good old days.” The future beckons. But if we don’t find a way to rediscover those essential human needs of slowness and silence, to name but two, I am afraid we will find ourselves speeding along into an inferno of our own making, where it’s noisy as hell and not fit for human habitation.
So a congregation of NATO’s top brass ensconced in their echo chambers target the Russian Central Bank with sanctions and expect what? Cookies?
What they got instead was Russia’s deterrence forces bumped up to “a special regime of duty” – which means the Northern and Pacific fleets, the Long-Range Aviation Command, strategic bombers, and the entire Russian nuclear apparatus on maximum alert.
One Pentagon general very quickly did the basic math on that, and mere minutes later, a Ukrainian delegation was dispatched to conduct negotiations with Russia in an undisclosed location in Gomel, Belarus.
Meanwhile, in the vassal realms, the German government was busy “setting limits to warmongers like Putin” – quite a rich undertaking considering that Berlin never set any such limits for western warmongers who bombed Yugoslavia, invaded Iraq, or destroyed Libya, in complete violation of international law.
While openly proclaiming their desire to “stop the development of Russian industry,” damage its economy, and “ruin Russia” – echoing American edicts on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela and others in the Global South – the Germans could not possibly recognize a new categorical imperative.
They were finally liberated from their WWII culpability complex by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Germany is finally free to support and weaponize neo-Nazis out in the open all over again – now of the Ukrainian Azov battalion variety.
To get the hang of how these NATO sanctions will “ruin Russia,” I asked for the succinct analysis of one of the most competent economic minds on the planet, Michael Hudson, author, among others, of a revised edition of the must-read Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.
Hudson remarked how he is “simply numbed over the near-atomic escalation of the US.” On the confiscation of Russian foreign reserves and cut-off from SWIFT, the main point is “it will take some time for Russia to put in a new system with China. The result will end dollarization for good, as countries threatened with ‘democracy’ or displaying diplomatic independence will be afraid to use US banks.”
This, Hudson says, leads us to “the great question – whether Europe and the Dollar Bloc can buy Russian raw materials – cobalt, palladium, etc, and whether China will join Russia in a minerals boycott.”
Hudson is adamant that “Russia’s Central Bank, of course, has foreign bank assets in order to intervene in exchange markets to defend its currency from fluctuations. The ruble has plunged. There will be new exchange rates. Yet it’s up to Russia to decide whether to sell its wheat to West Asia, that needs it; or to stop selling gas to Europe via Ukraine, now that the US can grab it.”
About the possible introduction of a new Russia-China payment system – bypassing SWIFT and combining the Russian SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) with the Chinese CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System) – Hudson has no doubts, “the Russian-China system will be implemented. The Global South will seek to join and at the same time keep SWIFT – moving their reserves into the new system.”
I’m going to de-dollarize myself
So the US itself, in another massive strategic blunder, will speed up de-dollarization. As the managing director of Bocom International Hong Hao told the Global Times, with energy trade between Europe and Russia de-dollarized, “that will be the beginning of the disintegration of dollar hegemony.”
It’s a refrain the US administration was quietly hearing last week from some of its own largest multinational banks, including notables like JPMorgan and Citigroup.
A Bloomberg article sums up their collective fears:
“Booting Russia from the critical global system – which handles 42 million messages a day and serves as a lifeline to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions – could backfire, sending inflation higher, pushing Russia closer to China, and shielding financial transactions from scrutiny by the west. It might also encourage the development of a SWIFT alternative that could eventually damage the supremacy of the US dollar.”
Those with IQs over 50 in the European Union (EU) must have understood that Russia simply could not be totally excluded from SWIFT, but maybe only a few of its banks: after all, European traders depend on Russian energy.
From Moscow’s point of view, that’s a minor issue. A number of Russian banks are already connected to China’s CIPS system. For instance, if someone wants to buy Russian oil and gas with CIPS, payment must be in the Chinese yuan currency. CIPS is independent of SWIFT.
Additionally, Moscow already linked its SPFS payment system not only to China but also to India and member nations of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). SPFS already links to approximately 400 banks.
With more Russian companies using SPFS and CIPS, even before they merge, and other maneuvers to bypass SWIFT, such as barter trade – largely used by sanctioned Iran – and agent banks, Russia could make up for at least 50 percent in trade losses.
The key fact is that the flight from the US-dominated western financial system is now irreversible across Eurasia and that will proceed in tandem with the internationalization of the yuan.
Russia has its own bag of tricks
Meanwhile, we’re not even talking yet about Russian retaliation for these sanctions. Former President Dmitry Medvedev already gave a hint – everything, from exiting all nuclear arms deals with the US, to freezing the assets of western companies in Russia, is on the table.
So what does the “Empire of Lies” want? – Putin terminology, on Monday’s meeting in Moscow to discuss the response to sanctions.
He outlines the three oligarchies in control of US foreign policy:
First is the military-industrial complex, which Ray McGovern memorably coined as MICIMATT (military industrial Congressional intelligence media academia think tank).
Hudson defines their economy base as “monopoly rent, obtained above all from its arms sales to NATO, to West Asian oil exporters, and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus.”
Second is the oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM). Their aim is “to maximize the price of energy and raw materials so as to maximize natural resource rent.
Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major US priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany threatened to link the western European and Russian economies together.”
Third is the “symbiotic” Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which Hudson defines as “the counterpart to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents.”
As he describes these three rentier sectors that completely dominate post-industrial finance capitalism at the heart of the western system, Hudson notes how “Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry namely, the Citigroup, and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates.”
Hudson shows how “the most pressing US strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices. In addition to creating profits and stock market gains for US companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy.”
He warns how food prices will rise “headed by wheat” – Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports. From a Global South perspective, that’s a disaster: “This will squeeze many West Asian and Global South food-deficient countries, worsening their balance of payments, and threatening foreign debt defaults.”
As for blocking Russian raw materials exports, “this threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel, aluminum.”
And that leads us, once again, to the heart of the matter – “The long-term dream of the US new Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its managerial kleptocracy seeking to cash in their privatizations in western stock markets.”
That’s not going to happen. Hudson clearly sees how “the most enormous unintended consequence of US foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia, and countries along the Belt and Road initiative.”
Let’s confiscate some technology
Now compare all of the above with the perspective of a central European business tycoon with vast interests, east and west, and who treasures his discretion.
In an email exchange, the business tycoon posed serious questions about the Russian Central Bank support for its national currency, the ruble, “which according to US planning is being destroyed by the west through sanctions and currency wolf packs who are exposing themselves by selling rubles short. There is really almost no amount of money that can beat the dollar manipulators against the ruble. A 20 percent interest rate will kill the Russian economy unnecessarily.”
The businessman argues that the chief effect of the rate hike “would be to support imports that should not be imported. The fall of the ruble is thus favorable to Russia in terms of self-sufficiency. As import prices rise, these goods should start to be produced domestically. I would just let the ruble fall to find its own level which will for a while be lower than natural forces would permit as the US will be driving it lower through sanctions and short selling manipulation in this form of economic war against Russia.”
But that seems to tell only part of the story. Arguably, the lethal weapon in Russia’s arsenal of responses has been identified by the head of the Center for Economic Research of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO), Vasily Koltashov – the key is to confiscate technology – as in Russia ceasing to recognize US rights to patents.
In what he qualifies as “liberating American intellectual property,” Koltashov calls for passing a Russian law on “friendly and unfriendly states. If a country turns out to be on the unfriendly list, then we can start copying its technologies in pharmaceuticals, industry, manufacturing, electronics, medicine. It can be anything – from simple details to chemical compositions.” This would require amendments to the Russian constitution.
Koltashov maintains that “one of the foundations of success of American industry was copying of foreign patents for inventions.” Now, Russia could use “China’s extensive know-how with its latest technological production processes for copying western products: the release of American intellectual property will cause damage to the United States to the amount of $10 trillion, only in the first stage. It will be a disaster for them.”
As it stands, the strategic stupidity of the EU beggars belief. China is ready to grab all Russian natural resources with Europe left as a pitiful hostage of the oceans and of wild speculators.
It looks like a total EU-Russia split is ahead – with little trade left and zero diplomacy.
Now listen to the sound of champagne popping all across the MICIMATT.
“Minsk, Minsk, Minsk,” they cried after Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk. But those Western diplomats and pundits did not hear those of us in the anti-war, pro-peace and anti-imperialist movements who insisted that Minsk II was the only conceivable way out of the crisis!
There will be reams of words attempting to provide a coherent analysis of the manufactured crisis dramatically unfolding in Ukraine, which took another unanticipated turn when Russia extended recognition to the Peoples’ Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the territory referred to as the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine.
I will not add to that mountain of ink because, for me, the story is relatively simple. I have argued since 2015 that it was greed informed by miscalculations that drove the U.S. — with the support of European capital salivating from prospect of profits generated by gaining full control of the Ukrainian economy through the European Association agreement — to decide to overthrow the government of Viktor Yanukovych when he turned to Russia instead of surrendering Ukrainian sovereignty to U.S. and European capital.
This was the genesis of the crisis. For U.S. policymakers it did not matter that the coup government was made up of literal neo-Nazis and extremist white supremacists and antisemitic ultra-nationalists from the neo-Nazi Svoboda party — the National Socialist Party of Ukraine.
Nor was there any concern that one of the former commanders of the Azov Battalion, a violent right-wing gang that was merged into the Ukrainian National Guard and is now being trained by the British, said that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead in a final crusade … against the Semite-led Untermenschen” (sub-humans).
No concern because aligning with rightist elements in order to advance the economic and geostrategic interests of the U.S. state and capitalist class behind the backs of the U.S. public is nothing new. That is why it is so ironic, or perhaps contradictory, that while Democratic Party activists are mobilized to struggle against the far-right in the U.S., Biden’s Ukrainian policies are affirming once again that the neoliberal right does not mind aligning with naked fascism to advance the imperial interests of capital.
From rightist Islamic forces to right-wing apartheid state of Israel, to anti-democratic monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), there is usually never a state too odious for the U.S. to deal with as long as there was the possibility of a buck to be made.
That is why it is almost surreal to read U.S. propaganda messages that still frame U.S. intentions in themes that suggest a benevolent character to U.S. behavior — and getting away with it! And even among African/Black radicals who should know better, instead of educating Africans on what was in play in Ukraine with the expansion of the white supremacist NATO structure, the gangster move being made on Ukraine in order for U.S. capital to continue to assert control over the European market, and the crude attempt to divert attention away from the failures of Biden’s domestic policies — some Africans, along with elements of the white left, were more interested in having abstract discussions on the class nature of the Russian state and economy — as if there was anything to debate there!
Like other subversive actions by the U.S. state, the destabilization and then capturing of the Ukrainian state, and the installation of a puppet government had nothing to do with any concerns for democracy. It is impossible for the U.S. to be concerned about democracy when it is the principal state undermining democracy around the world. If the U.S. were committed to upholding democratic processes, it would not have overthrown a democratically elected government in Ukraine.
And U.S. policy certainly did not reflect any concern for human rights in Ukraine. The war that was sparked after the coup government decided to attack its own citizens in the Donbas who rejected its legitimacy resulted in thousands of Ukrainians losing their lives.
The U.S. was not concerned with the territorial integrity of Ukraine either, because it was the coup government, backed by their bosses in Washington, that forced the separation of the Donbas from Ukraine by defining them as non-Ukrainians. Ukrainian citizens in Donbas became “pro-Russia separatists and terrorists,” which made them eligible for massive human rights violations, including murder as foreign entities.
Yet, with all of that, up until February 21, 2022, the 57th anniversary of the assassination of Black internationalist revolutionary Malcolm X, a route to a peaceful resolution to the crisis existed — the Minsk II agreement. It was the Minsk II agreement, put in place after the independent republics fought the Ukrainian neo-fascists to a military stand-still, along with provisions for a ceasefire, that provided a path to peaceful resolution. The agreement would have provided political autonomy for the Donbas within the Ukrainian state, thus preserving the existing borders of Ukraine before the coup of 2014.
Unfortunately, with the election of Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration’s point person on Ukraine, the Democrats immediately picked-up where U.S. policy left off in 2016 and started to encourage the Ukrainian government to ignore the Minsk II agreement and to consider taking back the Donbas by force.
Today, after the U.S. flooded Ukraine with weapons, including long-range artillery that was introduced into the conflict area in violation of the Minsk ceasefire deal, the deployment of 150,000 Ukrainian troops positioned along the contact line between Ukraine and Donbas, and the shelling from the Ukrainian forces right during the period that the U.S. predicted that Russia would invade, the Minsk agreement has become another casualty of war.
On February 18, 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he was “alarmed ” by a reported spike in Ukrainian artillery attacks against rebels in the eastern region of Donbas with weapons prohibited by the Minsk agreement. Reports from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was tasked with the responsibility, since 2015, to monitor and report on violations of the agreement, indicated that in Donetsk, between February 18 and February 20, 2022, there were 591 ceasefire violations, and in Luhansk it recorded 975 ceasefire violations, including 860 explosions.
What was the response from the Ukraine government? The government claims that OSCE is biased because the data it is gathering seems to indicate that it is the Ukrainian forces that are responsible for the increase in military actions.
But that controversy and debate over that data failed to find itself in the daily coverage of the situation by the Western press, even though the empirical data clearly showed that Ukrainian forces were responsible for escalating the military engagement.
Ukraine is just the symptom; the Disease is U.S. Doctrine of “Full Spectrum Dominance”
The U.S. has its pretext to move the Europeans to impose economic sanctions against Russia, even though it is clear to many in Europe that the Biden administration’s policies are no more than the “liberal” version of “America First” as it relates to Europe.
European capital, especially the Germans, are expected to take another hit for the team like it did during the first round of sanctions against Russia and the money they all lost with the Trump administration’s abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the Iran Nuclear Deal).
The capitalist oligarchy that is the base of Putin’s governing coalition may understand something that U.S. policymakers in their arrogance are underestimating, namely, that European capital is getting closer to a breaking point with the U.S., especially when money can be made in a context of relative stability in Europe as opposed to the destabilizing effects of conflict.
They also know that the world is changing and that multipolarity is rapidly becoming the new reality and that European capital will have to make careful choices.
China is the number one trade and investment partner with the European Union states, the Chinese inspired “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) ” is the largest “free trade” agreement on the planet constituting one third of humanity and one third of global GDP. Russia is sitting on top of the Eurasia Economic Union that, in terms of land, is the largest trade union on the planet, and of course the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The Russian recognition of the republics of Donbas was no more than the open acknowledgment of the dismembering of Ukraine. A process that started with the U.S. coup and the imposition of a government that completely turned over Ukrainian sovereignty to U.S. and European capital.
The lesson for the colonized, working classes and nationally oppressed? Authentic national liberation, people(s)-centered human rights, and self-determination for peoples and nations are impossible in a world in which capitalist competition and war are the defining characteristics of global relations.
We must, as we say in the Black is Back Coalition and the Black Alliance for Peace, turn imperialist wars into wars against imperialism! That is our task and responsibility. To do otherwise is to fail the historical mission of our generation.
Opposed to vaccine mandates, QR codes and other restrictions on our rights and freedom?
Refusing to wear a mask, have the vaccine and stay locked-down when ordered?
Attended a number of demonstrations protesting the government-imposed restrictions in your country? Involved in or supporting the truckers convoys?
Already celebrating some lifting of restrictions in some countries?
Unfortunately, there is one simple reason why the sorts of actions nominated above cannot win back our rights and our freedom: Our various protests are not integrated parts of a comprehensive strategy designed for the purpose. Moreover, in the case of the truckers convoys, they also complicate one already serious problem: supply chain disruptions that are causing serious food shortages. See ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.
And, rest assured, there is nothing to celebrate unless you do not understand what is happening beneath the surface.
Which, uniquely in this case, requires a strategy that recognizes, and addresses, the technological coup d’état that is being carried out against us.
As anyone conversant with the history of peoples’ struggles is well aware, that history is littered with the ‘bodies’ of failed social movements and national liberation struggles, even if some of these ‘bodies’ are still twitching rather than dead.
Ever wondered why the anti-war movement goes around in circles? Or whatever happened to the Occupy Movement? Or why so many environmental and social justice movements go nowhere? Or even why so many national liberation struggles fail, or lose vital gains subsequently to an initial victory.
Well, there are clearcut reasons for their failure and they can be readily identified. I have previously discussed some key reasons in the article ‘Why Activists Fail’.
So let us consider the current freedom movement and analyze why it is on the course to failure at the moment and see if we can turn it around before it is too late. And to do this, we need a sound strategic framework.
Nonviolent Strategy
Sound nonviolent strategy has twelve components – see the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel – and, unfortunately, most social movements and (nonviolent) national liberation struggles are devoid of a comprehensive strategy simply because only the rarest activist has a sense of what strategy really means.
So what is strategy? Very simply, strategy is a planned series of actions (tactics) conducted over an appropriate timeframe that is designed to achieve the two strategic aims that govern the strategy.
For any strategy to be effective, it must be based on a thorough understanding of the conflict in question.
Analysis
Sound strategy in any conflict begins with a deep analysis of what is taking place so that we can identify who is driving it, why they are driving it, how they are driving it, what they intend to implement and what they intend to achieve if successful?
Hence, if we deeply analyze what is taking place around the world at the moment, we can start by observing that we are being told by the World Health Organization, national governments, medical authorities and the corporate media that the human population is at risk of catching a virus (labeled ‘SARS-CoV-2’) that causes a life-threatening disease (labeled ‘Covid-19’) and that we need a long series of restrictions (including lockdowns and QR codes) as well as several injections to protect ourselves from this alleged disease.
So, obviously, any serious analysis must begin with identifying proof that the virus exists, given that it is the supposed cause of everything that follows. Then we can investigate its projected harm.
However, if we seek proof of the isolation of this virus, we quickly discover that there is none.
However, doctors, scientists and researchers who present evidence such as this are all being censored by government and corporate media and social media. In this context, there is very little space for meaningful debate, let alone space for the truth to emerge into wider view.
If there is no virus, of course, there is no need for any of the restrictions that have been imposed and there is no need for any vaccine. So why have all these restrictions and ‘vaccines’ been imposed?
By this point in any serious investigation, research will have exposed the role of the World Economic Forum in promoting the ‘pandemic’ narrative and, under cover of these ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ lies, progressively implementing its ‘Great Reset’program. Any careful reading of this documentation quickly reveals that the ‘Great Reset’ is designed to utterly transform human society and even human life in accord with elite wishes, which is why the rest of us have not been consulted. This is because the detail outlined in the ‘Great Reset’ documentation, which anyone can investigate for themselves, clearly identifies intended changes to some 200 areas of human activity, essentially characterized as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.
The point is that democratic governance was subverted long ago: it just has many manifestations. As Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum, declared at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2017: ‘What we are very proud of is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders… like Justin Trudeau.’ See ‘WEF’s Klaus Schwab Boasts of Young Global Leaders Penetration of Western Cabinets’.
These ‘Young Global Leaders’, which means those, including politicians, who represent the Global Elite rather than the people of their countries, include a range of current (or immediate past) national leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron (France), Angela Merkel (Germany), Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand). See ‘World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders’ and ‘World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders”’.
So any careful investigation of what is happening globally reveals four fundamental points:
1. Who? The Global Elite is implementing this technological coup d’état. Hence, what little is left of the sovereignty of governments is being destroyed by the coup, and governments are powerless to restore the fundamental rights and freedom that are stake in this conflict. Of course, governments might be allowed to remove particular mandates in some contexts as the importance of particular mandates is superseded by other components of the Elite agenda. Similarly, legal challenges can bear minimal fruit, and not on the primary program.
2. Why? The Global Elite, using the World Economic Forum as its vehicle, seeks total control of the human population and the Earth’s resources.
4. How? The ‘Great Reset’ is being implemented by using elite agents such as the World Health Organization, national governments, official medical associations, the pharmaceutical industry and the corporate media to promote the Elite’s lies – that the deadly SARS-CoV-2 ‘virus’ exists and that an onerous series of measures ranging from mask-wearing to lockdowns to multiple injections are necessary to address it – while employing heavy-handed censorship to ensure that the truth, and the evidence to explain it, about the deeper elite agenda is suppressed. Meanwhile, unaware people throughout society are playing their part in implementing the ‘Great Reset’ on behalf of the Global Elite.
So what can we do?
If we are to defeat this (fundamentally technological) elite coup against humanity, our strategy must undermine the power of the Global Elite to conduct it. Unfortunately, our protests (whether in person or by blockading with trucks) against particular mandates cannot undermine, in a strategic sense, the foundations that make possible the underlying elite agenda being inflicted upon us. Briefly, this is because they are incorrectly targeted (at governments rather than foundational elements of elite power in this context) and they are the wrong tactics in this circumstance (especially because of their failure to identify and address the technological elements of the coup), among other shortcomings.
So we have two choices: We can keep doing things that don’t work or refocus what we are doing so that it does have strategic impact.
Strangely, this doesn’t mean that we should stop conducting rallies or even cease the convoys. But it does mean that we need to use these events to explain the deeper agenda behind what is happening and to raise awareness of the strategic actions the wider public must take if we are to defeat the elite program.
Otherwise, while they build relationships and even a sense of solidarity, rallies and convoys are, strategically speaking, a waste of time.
So what does ‘strategic impact’ mean in this context?
Once we understand that the Global Elite is driving the ‘Great Reset’ to impose a global order that serves elite interests, we can identify the appropriate set of strategic goals for defending ourselves and then thoughtfully consider what actions we might take to achieve these goals, that is, actions that actually make a difference.
So what does ‘make a difference’ mean in this context? It means designing and taking action that undermines the power of those driving what is happening to achieve what they want. If an action is simply designed to allow us to express our complaint (often expressed as a list of specific demands that particular things be changed) – as the mass rallies and truck convoys are essentially doing – there is no reason for anything to be achieved. Elites have enormous experience of ignoring us and understand how well it works.
As former US Secretary of State Alexander Haig once noted about a massive anti-war demonstration: ‘Let them march all they want, as long as they continue to pay their taxes.’ See Alexander Haig. As a four-star general, Haig, not regarded as the most intelligent Secretary of State in US history, certainly understood the importance of tactical choice. Most activists have no idea.
Which is why the history of mass mobilizations in these forms failing to achieve significant change is long. And this list starts with the largest demonstration in human history when, as part of a series of large demonstrations that was occurring, up to 30 million people in 600 cities protested the imminent US invasion of Iraq on 15 February 2003. See ‘The World Says No to War’.
And remember the Occupy Movement in 2011? It was huge, mobilizing people to camp in public places in cities all over the world. It’s focus? The 1% (wealthy individuals who own and control the major corporations and manage the financial system in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority while undermining democracy). Its strategy? Essentially occupying public locations. The movement ended after it had been heavily infiltrated – see ‘FBI Documents Reveal Secret Nationwide Occupy Monitoring’ – and police forcibly removed encampments a few months after it had taken off globally.
So why do these movements fail? It is always the same reason: poor strategy, invariably including inadequate analysis, inaccurate identification of target and wrong tactical choice, and often including failure to deal adequately with infiltrators and provocateurs. Although, it should be emphasized, movements usually make a series of ill-informed decisions so that the details of the poor strategy vary from one movement to the next. The point is that people generally do not understand the concept of strategic resistance; they simply confuse any form of mass mobilization with resisting strategically.
Identifying What We Must Resist
Once we identify who is driving the conflict – in this case, the Global Elite, not governments – as well as why and how they are doing it and what they intend, we can identify those foundational components that make possible what the Elite wants to achieve.
So, as noted above, a careful reading of the key documentation soon exposes that the Global Elite intends to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population (using a variety of measures including the ‘injectables’) and enslave those left alive in a technological prison. And this is now happening.
How, exactly, is the Elite doing this?
In relation to its eugenics program, it is using four primary measures: the injections, the massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, the destruction of global supply chains (including those in relation to food) and the deployment of 5G. For explanations of these measures, see ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.
But even those who resist the injection will be enslaved. Using drones, smart phones, GPS devices, smart TVs, social media, smart meters, surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, online banking, license plate readers and driverless cars, you will live under constant surveillance and be readily controlled whether in your home, car or out in the community. And you will be photographed many times each day. As John and Nisha Whitehead have noted: ‘We’re on the losing end of a technological revolution that has already taken hostage our computers, our phones, our finances, our entertainment, our shopping, our appliances, and now, our cars.’ See ‘The Government’s Kill Switch for Your Car, Your Freedoms and Your Life’.
Moreover, as Whitney Webb has explained, plans are well advanced to ‘require a digital ID to access and use the internet as well as eliminate the ability to conduct anonymous financial transactions. Both policies would advance the overarching goal of both the WEF and many corporations and governments to usher in a new age of unprecedented surveillance of ordinary citizens.’ See ‘Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy’. Obviously, this would also dramatically advance elite control.
In addition, using a combination of technologies largely dependent on 5G, the intention is to digitize our identity and connect it with our bank, health, legal and other records, and create a social credit score that will determine what we can and cannot do and where we can do it. In short, we will be locked in a technological prison, whether it is our own home, our car or our local community, in a ‘smart city’. Physical prisons won’t matter because everywhere will be the prison. Human volition will be unknowingly surrendered by those unaware of the degree of technological control they accepted each time they purchased the latest gadget.
A vital part of this control is explained by Catherine Austin Fitts in this short video on the ‘financial transaction control grid’ being created. See ‘Digital Concentration Camps’.
Welcome to your imminent technocratic dystopia. Human freedom? Gone. Human rights? Gone. Human identity? Gone. Privacy? Gone. Free will? Gone. Anything else that makes life worth living? Gone.
So with this briefest of summaries, hopefully you can see why these rallies and convoys, in themselves, cannot achieve anything significant. Powerlessly begging governments to remove certain vaccine mandates and even other now-familiar restrictions, while ignoring the ongoing technological measures being implemented ‘behind the scenes’, is not impeding, in any way, the elite program to entrap you in a technological prison, assuming you survive the death needle.
Hence, if we wish to resist this elite program effectively, we must identify its foundational components; that is, those components that make what the Elite wants to achieve possible. And then resist these components.
Resisting Strategically So what are the components that give the Global Elite the power to inflict its agenda upon us?
These include the injections; deployment of 5G; the technologies that enable comprehensive (not just mass) surveillance, digitization (of our identity, banking, health, legal and other records to generate our personal social credit score) and robotization of the workforce; measures to restructure the global economy in favour of the mega-corporations and consolidation of ownership and control of agricultural land as well as the production, distribution and even nature of the world’s food supply. It also includes the power to control the narrative by using government and corporate media and social media to promote Elite propaganda while censoring the truth.
Hence, we must resist these if we are to undermine the power of the Global Elite to control us.
As noted above, rallies and convoys are only useful if we use them to educate people about the true nature and full extent of the threat and inform those involved how to effectively resist this threat. To reiterate, while we are focusing on governments, the various lockdown restrictions and ‘vaccine’ mandates, and employing the wrong tactics, people will be mobilized to no avail. This is because there are plenty of tactical options – see ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’ – but understanding what has strategic impact in any context is crucial.
Why? Because the nonviolent actions and the numbers participating, in themselves, are not determinative. It is the strategy that determines the outcome.
In short, we must give people the range of actions that will make a critical strategic difference; that is, the precise actions that will undermine the power of the Global Elite to inflict their overall program on us. Unless we do this, our rallies and convoys (and those people who speak at these events) are simply failing to inform their audiences of the vital information that is necessary for us to be successful.
So mass gatherings of resistance (such as protest demonstrations, truck convoys, religious services…), in whatever variation they take, can be useful because they mobilize people with a shared perspective but they only have strategic impact if these people are then ‘deployed’ to take action that undermines the elite’s power to inflict this coup upon us.
To illustrate this point: What is the value of mobilizing an ‘army’ in war? So that you can send it out to fight a strategically-chosen series of battles. What activists do not understand is that we need to mobilize our activist ‘army’ – which is the primary value of the mass mobilizations – but we need to use these mobilizations to inform activists what tactics we need them to undertake subsequently.
Otherwise we have simply mobilized rally participants to be told to go home again and do nothing or, in the case of the convoys, to remain until a very limited set of demands, which do not address the fundamental technological agenda, are granted (which is one option the Elite might consider as the simplest means of dissipating the dissent in this instance).
If you are interested in strategically resisting the Global Elite’s technological agenda and other measures associated with the ‘Great Reset’, 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 civilian and military scientists and technologists to refuse to do any research or undertake any work associated with the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism, to cause workers to refuse to do any work (by producing, distributing or installing any technology) associated with the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism, and to cause consumers to refuse to buy or otherwise acquire any product associated with the fourth industrial revolution and/or transhumanism.
That is, to campaign 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 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.
For the first time in history, all of humanity is threatened by a coup d’état that is killing vast numbers of people through a complex series of measures while destroying human liberty and human rights for those not killed outright.
Moreover, for the first time in history, this coup is being implemented by a series of technological measures that promise to imprison those left alive in a hi-tech prison from which there will be no escape.
Hence, given that several foundational elements of this coup are not yet quite fully in place, 2022 will be the most critical year in human history to date.
But to defeat this hi-tech coup we need to be strategically savvy and mobilize enough people to participate. You are welcome to join us.
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 here.
As an heir to the most famous political family in modern American history, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is hardly an obscure individual, and recent events have greatly elevated his national prominence.
Although he had spent most of his career as a highly-successful environmental attorney, during the early 2000s he gradually became involved with the grassroots movement questioning the safety and efficacy of our proliferating vaccines, a cause widely ridiculed or ignored by our national elites but increasingly resonating with many worried families.
Then the sudden Covid epidemic moved public health issues to the absolute center of the political debate, including the highly controversial steps taken to control the disease. For the first time in history, most Americans were suddenly subjected to lockdowns, which imposed severe restrictions upon their freedom of movement and assembly, and although these were originally presented as temporary measures expected to last only a couple of weeks, across much of the country they actually remained in place for a year or longer. Moreover, the permanent solution proposed for the crisis was the largest mass-vaccination drive in world history, with the leading vaccines relying upon a new and relatively untested mRNA biotechnology developed by our profit-hungry pharmaceutical giants, a situation that raised deep suspicions among many citizens.
Given these developments, the once marginal anti-vaxxing movement suddenly exploded onto the national stage, cutting across many existing political, social, and ideological fault-lines and encompassing perhaps 20-30% of America’s population, with Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense non-profit soon becoming leading champions of these fearful individuals. Despite lacking any media coverage or a promotional advertising campaign, his book The Real Anthony Faucisold over 500,000 copies by early January, spending two months on the Amazon bestseller list, much of that time at the very top.
The media establishment regards our vaccination drive as an absolutely crucial national priority and is intensely hostile to those who challenge it, so Kennedy soon became one of its leading villains. In mid-December, a team of six journalists and researchers at the Associated Press unleashed a ferocious 4,000 word assault, followed a few weeks later by a similar critique in leftist Counterpunch. But both these pieces attacked Kennedy on rather mundane grounds, claiming that his anti-vaccination arguments were wrong, dangerous, and possibly financially motivated, and neither gained much attention, nor seemed to damage his popular momentum.
When the media targets an individual, it monitors his every utterance, seeking the slightest opening to vilify him, and last week an opportunity came as Kennedy spoke before a crowd of 30,000 anti-vaxxers at a rally in Washington, DC. Indulging in overly-heated rhetoric, he declared “We have witnessed over the last 20 months a coup d’état against democracy, and the controlled demolition of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” He further suggested that that government requirements for vaccinations and mandates were imposing “fascism” on our society, with families having nowhere to escape: “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
In our deeply secular society, Nazi Germany has replaced Satan as the epitome of pure evil, while Anne Frank—a Jewish teenager who died of typhus in a German hospital near the end of the war—has been elevated to the status of a sacred martyr. Although drawing such historical analogies is hardly uncommon in political rhetoric, it can sometimes produce angry reactions, especially if these are orchestrated by a hostile media, and Kennedy’s supposedly scandalous references immediately provoked a firestorm of critical coverage, soon leading him to apologize.
With Kennedy’s enemies fanning the flames, his brief reference to the sad fate of a girl who died three generations ago may have received a hundred times more media coverage than the large rally he had headlined or the huge sales of his national bestseller. When the media seeks to destroy someone’s reputation, it will react with hair-trigger reflexes to his slightest misstep.
Yet oddly enough, the same media organs that created a major national controversy out of a few ill-chosen words at a political rally had previously allowed certain of Kennedy’s other, seemingly far greater vulnerabilities to pass almost entirely unnoticed.
These days being labeled a “conspiracy theorist” is a particularly serious charge, with the slur suggesting dangerous mental illness, and surely stigmatizing Kennedy in such a manner would have been an ideal means of discrediting him. But although the author had publicly proclaimed himself a conspiracy theorist of the most explicit sort last month, almost all our hostile journalists carefully averted their eyes.
In the 1960s the conspiratorial term of abuse was first applied to those who challenged the official story that President Kennedy had died at the hands of a deranged lone gunman, and was later broadened to include the many other assassinations that soon followed, including that of the president’s own brother. And on December 8th, nearly the entire Forum page of the San Francisco Chronicle was filled by a Kennedy column arguing that his father Sen. Robert F. Kennedy had been slain by a group of secret conspirators, with the convicted gunman merely being an innocent patsy who should finally be released from prison.
Yet although Kennedy’s legion of media critics attacked him on almost all other grounds, fair or unfair, they carefully avoided that seemingly easy means of branding him as delusional. The long AP attack that ran a week later mentioned not a word, nor did the January Counterpunch piece. As a consequence, I doubt whether more than a tiny slice of the public is aware that Kennedy is a “conspiracy theorist.”
The obvious reason for this strange media reticence was that Kennedy’s position was very solidly grounded in hard factual evidence. In 2018 I drew upon some of the material in David Talbot’s widely-praised 2008 book Brothers to describe the strange aspects of the assassination.
If the first two dozen pages of the Talbot book completely overturned my understanding of the JFK assassination, I found the closing section almost equally shocking. With the Vietnam War as a political millstone about his neck, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection in 1968, opening the door to a last minute entry into the Democratic race by Robert Kennedy, who overcame considerable odds to win some important primaries. Then on June 4, 1968, he carried gigantic winner-take-all California, placing him on an easy path to the nomination and the presidency itself, at which point he would finally be in a position to fully investigate his brother’s assassination. But minutes after his victory speech, he was shot and fatally wounded, allegedly by another lone gunman, this time a disoriented Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan, supposedly outraged over Kennedy’s pro-Israel public positions, although these were no different than those expressed by most other political candidates in America.
All this was well known to me. However, I had not known that powder burns later proved that the fatal bullet had been fired directly behind Kennedy’s head from a distance of three inches or less although Sirhan was standing several feet in front of him. Furthermore, eyewitness testimony and acoustic evidence indicated that at least twelve bullets were fired although Sirhan’s revolver could hold only eight, and a combination of these factors led longtime LA Coroner Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who conducted the autopsy, to claim in his 1983 memoir that there was likely a second gunman. Meanwhile, eyewitnesses also reported seeing a security guard with his gun drawn standing immediately behind Kennedy during the attack, and that individual happened to have a deep political hatred of the Kennedys. The police investigators seemed uninterested in these highly suspicious elements, none of which came to light during the trial. With two Kennedy brothers now dead, neither any surviving members of the family nor most of their allies and retainers had any desire to investigate the details of this latest assassination, and in a number of cases they soon moved overseas, abandoning the country entirely. JFK’s widow Jackie confided in friends that she was terrified for the lives of her children, and quickly married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek billionaire, whom she felt would be able to protect them.
Over the years, the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination has attracted merely a sliver of the books and research devoted to the earlier killing of his elder brother in Dallas, and Talbot’s text spent only a few pages sketching out the strong evidence that the convicted gunman was merely an innocent dupe, manipulated by the true conspirators. But in 2018, two additional books appeared that were entirely focused on the case.
A Lie Too Big To Fail by longtime journalist and conspiracy researcher Lisa Pease ran 500 pages and covered the events of that fatal California evening in exhaustive detail, winning the endorsements of filmmaker Oliver Stone and renowned JFK researcher James W. Douglass. When I read it a few months ago, I found the huge volume of material quite useful but felt that it relied too heavily upon the recollections of eyewitnesses, which can easily grow attenuated over the decades. I was also disturbed to note that the text sometimes seemed to gradually transform reasonable suspicions into apparent certainties, eventually arguing that 3-4 different gunmen were probably firing at the presidential candidate that evening while Sirhan’s own gun had held only blanks.
At the very end, the author also veered off into building castles in the air with regard to other assassinations, arguing that Oswald probably had multiple personalities and that Jack Ruby was operating under a post-hypnotic suggestion, thinly documented claims that seriously weakened her credibility, as did her earlier suggestion that John Lennon had been killed by a government-programmed assassin in 1980 for his past criticism of the Vietnam War. Sometimes less is better, and I think that Pease’s book would have been much stronger if it had been heavily edited and substantially cut. All those extraneous elements should have been left on the cutting-room floor rather than distracting from the central evidence she provided regarding the existence of an RFK assassination conspiracy and Sirhan’s likely innocence.
Meanwhile, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Tim Tate and the Brad Johnson was released that same year and suffered from none of these flaws. The two conspiracy researchers had spent some 25 years heavily involved in the case, and although their volume was only around half the length of the Pease book, it seemed a far more effective treatment of the topic, including eyewitness accounts but focused primarily upon the undeniable physical and forensic evidence while avoiding any damaging bouts of unwarranted speculation.
While working at CNN, one of the authors had originally obtained the audiotape establishing the number of shots fired, which probably constitutes the single strongest piece of evidence in the case. The book analyzed and evaluated that crucial item in tremendous detail, and also focused upon the fatal shot, which was fired at point-blank range from behind the candidate while Sirhan, the supposed gunman, was standing several feet in front. But since both the publisher and the lead author were British, the work seems to have received much less attention in this country, and I only discovered and read it after Kennedy cited it in his SF Chronicle column.
Unlike many other controversial American killings or terrorist attacks, the powerful evidence of a conspiracy in the case of the RFK assassination was physical and seemingly undeniable. Wikipedia is notoriously reluctant to promote conspiratorial narratives, but in this case the striking facts are presented with only rather weak challenges.
The conclusive proof from the audio recording only came to light in 2004, but I was surprised to discover that all the other strong evidence, including the large number of unexplained bullet holes, had already been known and reported for decades.
Former Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein had been heavily involved in the 1968 election campaign, playing a major role in the effort to unseat incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. In 1977 he published a long cover-story in the influential Saturday Review, setting forth the overwhelming evidence that a second gunman had been involved in the shooting, and my content-archiving system provides a convenient PDF copy. So nearly all the crucial facts in the case have been known for 45 years, but were almost always ignored by our dishonest or cowardly American media.
Three years after publicly revealing that explosive information, Lowenstein himself was dead, supposedly shot at the age of 51 by a deranged lone gunman who had been a former student of his, but I have been informed that his personal friends never believed that story.
Given this massive preponderance of evidence, we can easily understand why the harsh media attacks upon Kennedy had so carefully avoided mentioning his conspiratorial beliefs regarding his father’s assassination. Such criticism would have merely brought the issue to wider public attention, and anyone who began looking into the matter would have quickly concluded that Kennedy was probably correct while our media had spent a half-century covering up the true facts of the 1968 assassination. And if Kennedy were telling the truth and the media lying, many people would begin to wonder if the same might also be true on the vaxxing issue.
Over the last couple of months, I have noted that this pattern of media reticence has been even more pronounced with regard to the actual contents of Kennedy’s landmark book. Perhaps one might argue that his statements about the death of his father were personal matters exempt from media scrutiny, or even that the details of a particular assassination so many decades ago had no relevance to his vaxxing arguments. But it seemed utterly bizarre that all of the harsh attacks on his book had carefully avoided mentioning its major theme.
I had opened Kennedy’s book assuming that it would focus almost entirely on the vaccination issues with which the author had long been identified. Yet I soon discovered that nearly half the text—some 200 pages—was instead devoted to the disease of AIDS, an entirely different topic, and that the claims he made were absolutely incendiary. As I wrote in December:
Yet according to the information provided in Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller, this well-known and solidly-established picture, which I had never seriously questioned, is almost entirely false and fraudulent, essentially amounting to a medical media hoax. Instead of being responsible for AIDS, the HIV virus is probably harmless and had nothing to do with the disease. But when individuals were found to be infected with HIV, they were subjected to the early, extremely lucrative AIDS drugs, which were actually lethal and often killed them. The earliest AIDS cases had mostly been caused by very heavy use of particular illegal drugs, and the HIV virus had been misdiagnosed as being responsible. But since Fauci and the profit-hungry drug companies soon built enormous empires upon that misdiagnosis, for more than 35 years they have fought very hard to maintain and protect it, exerting all their influence to suppress the truth in the media while destroying the careers of any honest researchers who challenged that fraud. Meanwhile, AIDS in Africa was something entirely different, probably caused mostly by malnutrition or other local conditions.
I found Kennedy’s account as shocking as anything I have ever encountered.
In 1985 AZT, an existing drug, was found to kill the HIV virus in laboratory tests. Fauci then made tremendous efforts to speed it through clinical trials as an appropriate treatment for healthy, HIV-positive individuals, with FDA approval finally coming in 1987, producing Fauci’s first moment of triumph. Priced at $10,000/year per patient, AZT was one of the most expensive drugs in history, and with the cost covered by health insurance and government subsidies, it produced an unprecedented financial windfall for its manufacturer.
Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to the story of AZT, and the tale he tells is something out of Kafka or perhaps Monty Python. Apparently, Fauci had been under enormous pressure to produce medical breakthroughs justifying his large budget, so he manipulated the AZT trials to conceal the extremely toxic nature of the drug, which rapidly killed many of the patients who received it, with their symptoms being ascribed to AIDS. So following FDA approval in 1987, hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy individuals found to be infected with HIV were placed on a regimen of AZT, and the large number of resulting deaths was misattributed to the virus rather than to the anti-viral drug. According to the scientific experts cited in the book, the vast majority of post-1987 “AIDS deaths” were actually due to AZT.
Prior to the Covid outbreak, AIDS had spent almost four decades as the world’s highest-profile disease, absorbing perhaps a couple of trillion dollars of funding and becoming the central focus of an army of scientists and medical experts. It simply boggles the mind for someone to suggest that HIV/AIDS might have largely been a hoax, and that the vast majority of deaths were not from the illness but from the drugs taken to treat it.
My science textbooks sometimes mentioned that during the benighted 18th century, leading Western physicians treated all manner of ailments with bleeding, a quack practice that regularly caused the deaths of their patients, with our own George Washington often numbered among the victims. Indeed, some have argued that for several centuries prior to modern times, standard medical treatments inadvertently took far more lives than they saved, and those too poor or backward to consult a doctor probably benefited from that lack. But I had never dreamed that this same situation might have occurred during the most recent decades of our modern scientific age.
Since the 1980s AIDS has been an explosive topic in the public sphere, and anyone—whether scientist or layman—who questioned the orthodox narrative was viciously denounced as having blood on his hands. During the early 2000s South African President Thabo Mbeki had cautiously raised such possibilities and was massively vilified by the international media and the academic community. Yet when Kennedy’s #1 Amazon bestseller went much farther, devoting seven full chapters to making the case that HIV/AIDS was merely a medical hoax, his media antagonists carefully avoided that subject even while they attacked him on all other grounds.
Once again, the only plausible explanation is that the hostile journalists and their editors have recognized that Kennedy’s factual evidence was too strong and any such attacks might prove disastrously counter-productive. As far back as the 1990s, a former Harvard professor had publicly declared that the AIDS hoax was as great a scientific scandal as the notorious Lysenko fraud, and if a substantial portion of the American public concluded that AIDS was indeed a medical phantom that had been promoted for 35 years by our gullible and dishonest media, the credibility of the latter on current vaccination issues might be completely annihilated.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world for the media to accurately blast Kennedy as “a conspiracy theorist whose book claims that AIDS is a hoax,” and that simple, short phrase would have immediately dealt a massive body-blow to his public reputation. But many people would then have begun looking into the facts, and once they did so, the tables might have quickly turned, destroying the credibility of his critics. The total silence of the media suggests that they greatly feared that possibility.
The hostile media demanded that Kennedy immediately apologize for his heated words regarding fascism and Anne Frank, and to his credit he quickly did so. But I believe that he now has every right to demand that the same media publicly apologize for having spent the last fifty years concealing the true facts of his father’s assassination from his own family and from the American people. And he and others should also begin demanding that the media and medical establishments apologize for the catastrophic HIV/AIDS disaster they inflicted upon our society, a disaster that probably led to the horrible deaths of hundreds of thousands of perfectly healthy Americans. These two matters carry vastly greater weight than a glancing spoken reference to the events of World War II.
One reason that the remarkable silence surrounding Kennedy’s controversial disclosures was so easily apparent to me is that I have become familiar with that pattern. Over the last several years both media outlets and activist organizations have similarly shied away from the published contents of this website and my own writings, doing their best to avert their eyes from material that was many times more controversial than what they would have eagerly attacked and denounced elsewhere. I have discussed what I call this “Lord Voldemort Effect,” and have described some notable examples in the media.
Many of my own essays have dealt directly with the same controversial topics highlighted in Kennedy’s writings and public statements, and for those so interested in exploring them, they are conveniently grouped together in these categories:
North Dakota’s Governor ordered the state’s National Guard to clear the protest encampment of Lakota Sioux water protectors and their supporters during the 2016-17 protests against a pipeline through tribal lands. Click on image to play video (video courtesy RT television)
Sometimes the hypocrisy of the US government, especially when it comes to foreign affairs, it just too much to let pass.
The latest example of this is the Ukraine crisis, where the US pretty much stands all alone (unless you count Britain’s embattled and embarrassed Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who parrots US policy like a trained bird), accusing Russia not just of preparing for an “imminent invasion’ of Ukraine, but of violating international law and “rules-based international order,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken likes to put it.
The Biden administration’s top diplomat has made repeatedly blasted both Russia for threatening Ukraine with an invasion by moving troops and equipment to its border and to the border between Ukraine and Belarus, Russia’s ally to the west, and China for its threats to Taiwan and for a rights crackdown in Hong Kong, a Chinese Special Administrative Region that had been promised 30 years or “no change” but was put under new stricter national security laws following violent student protests and university occupations in 2019-20.
But how can the US make such accusations against the Russians and the Chinese governments when the US for nearly eight years, has been bombing, launching rocket and drone attacks, and sending troops, under both CIA and Pentagon control, against both ISIS and Syrian government troops and aircraft — even attacking and killing Russian mercenary troops at one point, who, unlike the US, were in Syria at the request of the Syrian government.
US military actions in Syria are completely outside of any “rules based international order.”
International rules, when it comes to warfare, are crystal clear, enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which is an international treaty signed and ratified by the US government along with most other nations of the world and incorporating all the laws of war. The primary law, violation of which is described as the gravest war crime of all “because it contains with in it all other war crimes.” Called a Crime Against Peace, it states that no nation may attack another except if that nation faces an “imminent threat” of attack.
There are no codicils expanding on or getting around that proscription.
The US has committed that Crime Against Peace countless times, in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Somalia, in Sudan, in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, in Cuba, in Niger, in the Congo, in Panama, in Grenada — indeed in so many places I’m sure I’m not remembering them all. Suffice to say that my whole life (I was born in 1949), my country has been a violator of the UN Charter’s ban on launching illegal wars.
Rules-based order? What the F**k is Blinken talking about? The US makes its own rules. In fact, whenever the US launches some illegal invasion or air attack against a country, the biggest complaint we hear in the US is that the president has ordered up and launched a war “without Congressional approval”
The implication is that if Congressional approves an illegal war or act of war, that makes it legit. It doesn’t.
What makes it worse when the US makes such accusations against Russia and China is that it is accusing two countries which, as objectionable as their actions or threats might be, at least have a better argument for their legality than does the US.
Let’s start with China. The government in Beijing stands accused by Blinken and the US government under a series of presidents, with threatening Taiwan, an island that historically was a part of China, but became functionally independent in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party won its revolution on the mainland, founding the People’s Republic of China, and the remnants of the Nationalist Party and its army fled to Taiwan, murdering tens of thousands of local Taiwanese and Hakka Chinese people, and establishing a brutal dictatorship under Nationalist leader and major domo Chiang Kai-Shek. China has never acknowledged the independence of Taiwan, which for 50 years prior to the end of World War II had been a colony of Japan, a spoil of victory in the China-Japan War won by Japan against the Ching dynasty in 1895.
The US initially recognized Taiwan, after the Chinese Communist revolutionary victory in 1949, as an independent country, but Richard Nixon, in a slick realpolitik maneuver masterminded by his National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in order to recognize China and drive a wedge between that country and the Soviet Union, agreed to cease recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation, removed the US embassy from the island, and set one up in Beijing. In other words, at that point, from the US point of view at least, Taiwan’s status became an internal affair of China’s, not an international affair.
The same applies to the Chinese crackdown on rights in Hong Kong. Since July 1997, Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony, and reverted to being part of China. Now it’s true there were negotiations between the Beijing government and departing British government. During those years of transition, Hong Kong’s appointed colonial Governor Chris Patten, former head of the British Conservative Party, carefully avoided allowing Hong Kongers to obtain long-sought universal suffrage to elect all members of the territory’s legislative council, Legco, before the British departure (a move which would at least have left the Beijing facing a local government that actually represented all the people of Hong Kong, instead of Legco representatives representing various business sectors like banking, the legal profession, the retail industry, property owners, etc).
China agreed during those negotiations to gradually increase the number of Legco members elected from geographic constituencies, and to leave basic freedoms of speech, press, etc. untouched “for 30 years.” But when students rose up to protest the arrests of Hong Kong residents and their deportation to face trials in China, it set in motion a confrontation between democracy advocates in Hong Kong and authoritarians in Beijing, and ultimately to a new Beijing-imposed national security law for Hong Kong that has turned the city into essentially just another bit of China. But again, while it was certainly a draconian over-reaction to legitimate local protests, that action by China is not a violation of international law — just violation of an agreement between a departing (and loathed) colonial power, a legacy of the European Opium War against China, and a new vastly more powerful China. It’s a bit like the US’s brutal crackdown on immigrants at the Mexican border or on Native defenders of water rights in North Dakota. Disgusting, and perhaps criminal under US law, but hardly a violation of some kind of “rules-based international order.”
As for Russia, even the plebiscite in Crimea, some 97% of the population there voted that they wanted to leave Ukraine and return to being part of Russia, as the peninsula had been until 1954, when new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, as a gift to the region he had grown up in, transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet to the Ukrainian Soviet, which the US has criticized as somehow fraudulent (Crimea is about 85% ethnic Russian). With 85% of eligible people voting, that plebiscite provided Russia with the justification for reclaiming jurisdiction over Crimea. Russia’s action, criticized by the US as “aggression,” is less of a violation of democratic norms though than the massive disenfranchisement of blacks and other people of color in Republican-run “red” states of the US — a process that is now being accelerated to warp speed with the approach of the 2022 off-year Congressional elections. If the Biden administration really cared about justice and democracy it would be laser-focused on defending voter rights, not on shipping deadly weapons to Ukraine.
If the US government cared about following a “rules-based international order,” the it would pull all US military forces out of Syria, pull the US Navy out of the Persian Gulf, stop using drones to kill people in Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere, stop sending US Special Forces wherever the president wants to send them, and rejoin the World Court and respect its adjudication of violations of international rules and laws.
Then we wouldn’t have to listen to all the hypocritical crap uttered by Biden, Blinken and their ilk.
Someday, I’m sure there will come a reckoning, when US leaders will finally be held to account for their long record of crimes against humanity. Until then, we will have to endure all this epic hypocrisy.
Joe Rogan has just been cancelled. Again. It’s not about covid “misinformation” this time.
No, now he’s a racist.
Some enterprising young mind combed through 13 years and hundreds of episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience, and cut together around twenty instances of Rogan using “the n-word”.
This video was shared by award-winning musician India Arie, and used to explain her pulling her music from Spotify’s platform in protest of Rogan’s continued presence there.
Rogan claims that these clips are all taken out of context in his recent apology video, and none were ever intended to be racist. This may well be true…we can’t check for ourselves, because Spotify removed all the episodes.
These important bits of context were, naturally, removed from the viral video. Besides, it has since been said that context doesn’t even matter.
And you know what, they’re right. The context doesn’t matter, perhaps the intention doesn’t even matter, what matters is “Why now?”
Some of these clips are over twelve years old, and yet there have never been any calls to boycott Spotify or cancel his show until just the last couple of days.
Were they not racist before? Or was everyone just OK with the racism? Could there be something else behind this?
…but why bother pausing the hate-fest to ask questions, right?
Of course the cyber-torches and internet-pitchforks coming for Joe Rogan is nothing new. Having preached the tenets of a healthy lifestyle, promoted alternate Covid treatments, and invited dissenting experts onto his show, Rogan has obviously been on the establishment’s hit list for a while.
This reached a peak in January when ageing rock royalty Neil Young gave Spotify an ultimatum: Remove Joe Rogan’s “misinformation”, or take my music down.
Despite adding a weasely disclaimer to the beginning of the podcast’s episodes, Spotify essentially sided with Rogan, probably because they couldn’t be seen to bow to that kind of pressure, and because they figured most people had forgotten Neil Young was still alive.
In short, and despite other musicians like Joni Mitchell adding their voices to Young’s, the gambit failed and Rogan remained on the air.
Then, just last week, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki added fuel to the fire by announcing the President would like to see “more done” by tech companies to “limit the amount of misinformation” on their platforms.
Within days of that press conference, the viral video compilation of racial slurs had appeared, and Rogan is now a racist as well as an “anti-vax covidiot” or whatever they are calling us these days.
He’s also an object lesson in the entire purpose of cancel culture, and extreme identity politics in general.
I don’t know how many of our readers are gamers, or remember Half Life 2, but go with me here…
Around two-thirds of the way through the game you encounter giant insect-like aliens called Ant Lions, and soon afterwards get a special attack: The ability to “paint” enemies with pheromones which cause an unending swarm of Ant Lions to attack them.
Of course, the giant insects don’t know WHY they are attacking your enemies, they don’t sympathise with your aims and are not capable of understanding your plans, all they know is the chemical signals driving them to fits of rage.
You probably don’t need me to explain the metaphor.
This is the purpose of rampant, hysterical identity politics. You can paint your enemies as a target and watch the mindless swarm do its work.
As much as “cancel culture” is portrayed as a totally organic process, without any top-down control, this is simply not the case.
It is almost NEVER organic, and seemingly ALWAYS contrived.
If you need to be persuaded of that, simply look at who is immune to it.
Both Joe Biden and Justin Trudeau have got enough racist (or at least racist-seeming) scandals to get them cancelled if the process really was anything but a covert tool of maintaining the status quo. And yet still they stand.
To show how selective it is, we have examples of the same exact behaviour eliciting complete opposite responses depending on the person involved.
When Margaret Hodge made similar comments about Corbyn’s Labour party, there was no rebuke at all.
It seems only people outside the establishment, or promoting the ‘wrong’ opinions, are ever in real danger of falling victim to ‘organic’ cancellation.
Indeed, one can be a totally white-bread member of the entertainment industry for years and be safe in the knowledge your racism/homophobia/misogyny etc will never really come to light, but step out of line on the wrong subject at the wrong time, and you will suddenly find yourself facing a tidal wave of past “sins” about to wash over you.
Look at Donald Trump, an insider to the bone when he was just a billionaire reality TV host, but then he ran against Hillary and became “literally Hitler” overnight.
Rogan is a perfect examplar of this phenomenon. Spend ten years going on about legalising weed, taking DMT and talking about martial arts and you can say “the n-word” as much as you want and nobody notices or cares. But the minute you even mildly interrogate an important media narrative, then the mob ‘organically’ remembers you were a racist the whole time.
The evidence of contrivance is obvious. Simply ask yourself: where did this video compilation of racial slurs actually come from? Who made it?
Rogan’s uses of “the n-word” are not new. They are all several years old and from 23 separate episodes, all multiple hours long. And there are almost 1800 episodes of the show to plough through if you decide to go searching. So making this video is at least two days’ work of simply watching the episodes – and that’s assuming you know where to start looking.
And that’s before editing or trying to make it “go viral”.
Was all this done on a whim by some bored pro-vaxxer?
Does that sound likely?
Far more likely is that it was created and deployed to discredit Rogan’s COVID-questioning without having to engage with the Covid sceptic evidence or arguments.
It’s even possible the video may even have already existed before the current controversy. After all, why create this climate of stifling sensitivity if you don’t have the tools to use it?
Perhaps most authors, actors, comedians etc. have a “tape” in the vault somewhere. A database of racism, homophobia or transphobia just waiting to be released when needed. A collection of neo-kompromat that works best as a deterrent, but is always ready to be loosed if needed.
Those people who do step too far out of their box are taken down, and act as an example to others. Ensuring everyone on the public stage is singing from the same hymn sheet.
Because that, it seems, is what cancel culture is for.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday granted full approval of Moderna’s Spikevax COVID vaccine for people 18 and older. Similar to the agency’s licensing last year of Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine, the approval raised a number of legal questions.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday granted full approval of Moderna’s Spikevax COVID vaccine for people 18 and older.
Similar to the agency’s licensing last year of Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine, the approval raised a number of legal questions related to mandates and product availability.
Spikevax is a two-dose primary series, approved also for administration as part of a heterologous (“mix and match”) single booster dose for individuals who previously completed their original series of vaccinations with the Pfizer or Johnson & JohnsonCOVID vaccines.
According to the FDA, Spikevax “has the same formulation as the [Emergency Use Authorization (EUA)] Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine and … can be used interchangeably with the EUA Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine to provide the COVID-19 vaccination series.”
However, in its approval letter, the FDA said Spikevax is “legally distinct” from the Moderna EUA vaccine:
“The licensed vaccine has the same formulation as the EUA-authorized vaccine and the products can be used interchangeably to provide the vaccination series without presenting any safety or effectiveness concerns. The products are legally distinct with certain differences that do not impact safety or effectiveness.”
The FDA made the same distinction between the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA vaccine and the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine, which the agency fully licensed in August, 2021, a move that raised questions about liability and the legality of vaccine mandates.
After Monday’s announcement, media outlets were quick to reassure the public the two Moderna vaccines are the same and that this was just a marketing ploy, where Moderna simply “rebranded” what is otherwise the same vaccine.
No ‘fully licensed’ COVID actually available
While Moderna’s Spikevax vaccine is now fully licensed, the original Moderna vaccine will remain under EUA. Indeed, the FDA on Jan. 7 reissued the EUA.
The FDA has also made it clear the Spikevax vaccine will not be available to the American public, announcing:
“Although SPIKEVAX (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) and Comirnaty (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) are approved to prevent COVID-19 in certain individuals within the scope of the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine authorization, there is not sufficient approved vaccine available for distribution to this population in its entirety at the time of reissuance of this EUA.”
These claims parallel the chain of events that followed the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine in August 2021.
At the time, Pfizer and the FDA claimed Comirnaty was not yet available, as there were sufficient stocks of the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA vaccine still available to be administered.
As of this writing, the FDA states, via its website, that Comirnaty products are “not orderable at this time.”
The FDA has not indicated when, or if, the Spikevax and Comirnaty vaccines will be available for distribution in the U.S.
Are EUA and fully licensed vaccines really interchangeable?
As reported by The Defender, there is a significant legal distinction between products authorized under EUA and those fully licensed by the FDA.
EUA products are experimental under U.S. law. Under the Nuremberg Code and federal regulations, no one can force a human being to participate in this experiment.
Specifically, under 21 U.S. Code Sec.360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III), “authorization for medical products for use in emergencies,” it is unlawful to deny someone a job or an education because they refuse to be an experimental subject. Instead, potential recipients have an absolute right to refuse EUA vaccines.
That’s an issue military members, unable to find any vaccination sites that offer the fully licensed Comirnaty vaccine, cited in variouslawsuits challenging vaccine mandates.
Notably, on Nov. 12, 2021, a federal judge rejected an argument by the U.S. Department of Defense, in defending the military’s vaccine mandate, that the Pfizer Comirnaty and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are “interchangeable.”
U.S. law also requires the EUA designation be used only when “there is no adequate, approved and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing or treating such disease or condition.”
This means that, in legal terms, all EUA products should be withdrawn once alternative products have received full approval.
Perhaps the most significant legal distinction, however, pertains to the legal protections afforded vaccine manufacturers, depending on how their product is classified.
Under the 2005 Public Readiness and Preparedness (PREP) Act, EUA-approved vaccines enjoy a significant liability shield. Specifically, vaccine manufacturers, distributors, providers, and government officials involved in the policymaking, approval, and distribution process are immune from any legal liability.
Under such regulations, the only way an injured party can sue is if he or she can prove willful misconduct, and if the U.S. government has also brought an enforcement action against the party for willful misconduct.
Conversely, fully licensed vaccines, such as Spikevax and Comirnaty, do not have a liability shield, and are instead subject to the same product liability laws as other products.
This means the Spikevax and Comirnaty vaccines could expose pharmaceutical companies to significant financial claims if individuals injured by the vaccines chose to sue the vaccine makers.
The rush to get COVID vaccines authorized for all ages — a ploy to avoid liability?
There’s another reason Pfizer and Moderna don’t want their fully licensed vaccines to be available yet — they’re waiting for the vaccines to be authorized, then licensed, for children as young as 6 months old.
Why? Because once a vaccine is fully licensed by the FDA, the only way its manufacturer can be shielded from legal liability is if the vaccine is added to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s childhood vaccination schedule.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), passed into law in 1986, provides a legal liability shield to drugmakers if they receive full authorization for all ages and the vaccine is added to the mandatory schedule.
Reporting on the FDA’s approval of Spikevax, investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel wrote:
“Are Pfizer and Moderna waiting for full authorization for children’s shots to distribute Comirnaty and Spikevax to the masses? There’s plenty of litigators who have suggested that this is exactly what is going on in Big Pharma world.”
By creating the public perception that the Pfizer and Moderna EUA vaccines are fully approved, businesses, schools and other institutions are emboldened to impose vaccine mandates that violate existing law and allow the vaccines to be administered without informed consent.
It has also been argued that by relabeling the product, any previous data regarding vaccine injuries and side effects identified in association with the EUA vaccine are not counted in the safety studies for the approved vaccine.
The FDA approval of the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine, its subsequent lack of availability and the continued administration of the Pfizer-BioNTech EUA vaccine led Children’s Health Defense (CHD) to file a lawsuit against the FDA and its acting director, Dr. Janet Woodcock, for their allegedly deceptive and rushed approval of the Comirnaty vaccine, arguing that the approval represented a classic “bait and switch” tactic.
CHD further alleged in its lawsuit that the FDA violated federal law when it simultaneously licensed Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine and extended Pfizer’s EUA — as the agency has now done with Moderna and Spikevax — for a vaccine that has the “same formulation” and that “can be used interchangeably,” according to the FDA.
FDA admits no safety data for Spikevax use among pregnant women
Beyond the legal questions raised by the FDA’s approval this week of Spikevax, the approval also raises safety questions.
For instance, the FDA admitted Spikevax was insufficiently tested on pregnant women, stating that “[a]vailable data on SPIKEVAX administered to pregnant women are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy.”
Furthermore, Spikevax was approved without having been tested for its ability to provide protection against the Omicron variant, which is reported to account for 99.9% of current U.S. COVID cases — it was approved only for providing protection against mutations that are no longer circulating.
And yet, the FDA cited the Omicron variant as the reason behind its decision to pull its EUA for monoclonal antibody products. The FDA claims that these products have not been shown to provide protection against the Omicron variant.
After the Crash 