Technocensorship: When Corporations Serve As a Front for Government Censors

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”—Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States (August 8, 1950)

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

Unfortunately, the government has become an expert at disregarding constitutional roadblocks intended to protect the rights of the citizenry.

When these end-runs don’t suffice, the government hides behind the covert, clandestine, classified language of national security; or obfuscates, complicates, stymies, and bamboozles; or creates manufactured diversions to keep the citizenry in the dark; or works through private third parties not traditionally bound by the Constitution.

This last tactic is increasingly how the government gets away with butchering our freedoms, by having its corporate partners serve as a front for its nefarious deeds.

This is how the police state has managed to carry out an illegal secret dragnet surveillance program on the American people over the course of multiple presidential administrations.

Relying on a set of privacy loopholes, the White House (under Presidents Obama, Trump and now Biden) has been sidestepping the Fourth Amendment by paying AT&T to allow federal, state, and local law enforcement to access—without a warrant—the phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.

The government used a similar playbook to get around the First Amendment, packaged as an effort to control the spread of speculative or false information in the name of national security.

As the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government revealed, the Biden administration worked in tandem with social media companies to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’

Restricting access to social media has become a popular means of internet censorship.

Dare to voice politically incorrect views in anything louder than a whisper on social media and you might find yourself suspended on Twitter, shut out of Facebook, and banned across various social media platforms. This authoritarian intolerance masquerading as tolerance, civility and love is what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners.”

Social media censorship runs the gamut from content blocking, throttling, and filtering to lockouts, shutdowns, shadow banning and de-platforming.

In fact, these tactics are at the heart of several critical cases before the U.S. Supreme Court over who gets to control, regulate or remove what content is shared on the internet: the individual, corporate censors or the government.

Yet what those who typically champion the right of corporations to be free from government meddling get wrong about these cases is that there can be no free speech when corporations such as Facebook, Google or YouTube become a front for—or extensions of—government censors.

This is the very definition of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technocensorship is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal: to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

This authoritarian impulse to censor and silence “dangerous” speech masquerading as tolerance, civility and a concern for safety (what comedian George Carlin referred to as “fascism pretending to be manners”) is the end result of a politically correct culture that has become radicalized, institutionalized and tyrannical.

You see, the government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

It remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court can see itself clear to recognizing that censorship by social media companies acting at the behest of the government runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Bottom line: either we believe in free speech or we don’t.

The answer to the political, legal and moral challenges of our day should always be more speech, not less.

Any individual or group—prominent or not—who is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

To ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers the government and its corporate operatives are allowed to claim now will eventually be used against the populace at large.

These social shunning tactics borrow heavily from the mind control tactics used by authoritarian cults as a means of controlling its members. As Dr. Steven Hassan writes in Psychology Today: “By ordering members to be cut off, they can no longer participate. Information and sharing of thoughts, feelings, and experiences are stifled. Thought-stopping and use of loaded terms keep a person constrained into a black-and-white, all-or-nothing world. This controls members through fear and guilt.”

This mind control can take many forms, but the end result is an enslaved, compliant populace incapable of challenging tyranny.

As Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry, one that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

The problem is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us, and we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government and its corporate partners to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean. The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.

In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.

As Nat Hentoff, that inveterate champion of the First Amendment, once observed, “The quintessential difference between a free nation, as we profess to be, and a totalitarian state, is that here everyone, including a foe of democracy, has the right to speak his mind.”

What this means is championing the free speech rights of those with whom we might disagree.

That’s why James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, fought for a First Amendment that protected the “minority” against the majority, ensuring that even in the face of overwhelming pressure, a minority of one—even one who espouses distasteful viewpoints—would still have the right to speak freely, pray freely, assemble freely, challenge the government freely, and broadcast his views in the press freely. He understood that freedom for those in the unpopular minority constitutes the ultimate tolerance in a free society.

The government has no tolerance for freedom or free speech of any kind that challenges its chokehold on power.

At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “disinformation,” “hate” or “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or speech transgression or other.

Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

Ultimately, the government’s war on free speech—and that’s exactly what it is—is a war that is driven by a government fearful of its people.

As President John F. Kennedy observed, “[A] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

“WHO OWNS THE WORLD?” A SMALL GROUP OF BIG MONEY

By Peter Koenig

Source: The 4th Media

“Who Owns the World” is the title of an extraordinary documentary, describing how Big-Big Money controls not only every aspect of your life, but has a stranglehold on every government, the political UN body, as well as every UN agency, and all industries and services of this globe.

These largest investors are BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.

These same investment groups also control over 90% of the world’s major media. Even Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is majority owned by BlackRock / Vanguard. It is therefore no miracle that hardly any news penetrates the walls of secrecy about these major shareholders of every aspect of human life and life-related activities and businesses.

It is a monopoly that can literally not be opposed by traditional means. They have also invented the “rules-based order” — overruling every international and national law at their will. They know no limits, no ethics and adhere to no human or human rights standard. POWER is them.

The two most powerful investors and investment managers are BlackRock and Vanguard. They are closely linked, to the point where their management is largely inter-changeable. Vanguard is BlackRock’s largest shareholder, meaning that they control BlackRock.

Though Vanguard is not transparent about its own shareholders, Vanguard is owned by the richest families on earth. Vanguard has been created to hide their investments and money transactions.

Through non-profit organizations, like the Rockefeller Foundation, Gates Foundation, Rothschild Foundation, JPMorgan Foundation, Clinton Foundation, Bush Foundation, Albert DuPont Charity Trust – and so on, billions of “donation” money is transferred – tax-free – to Vanguard, a shield for their potentially criminal transactions and funding.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest funder of WHO. It also controls GAVI, the vaxx-alliance – and is therefore the most influential organization over human health – and death.

These same people, alias Foundations, also own Blackrock – which is why BlackRock and Vanguard are interchangeable or can act as one, if it is to their advantage.

According to Bloomberg, by 2028, the two will own / manage some 20 trillion dollars – about a fifth of the current world GDP.

If joined by State Street, as is often the case, the world’s fourth largest investment manager, you may add another US$ 3 to US$ 4 trillion of managed assets. Sometimes they are joined by Berkshire Hathaway, City Bank, Bank of America, Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs… adding another few trillion of managed assets to their pie.

However, these second or third ranking financial institutions, in turn, are also owned by BlackRock and Vanguard. One might call it an omnipotent vicious circle from which it is almost impossible to escape.

See this one-hour Rumble-video for more details and network of ownership that literally rules the worldhttps://rumble.com/vn7lf5-monopoly-who-owns-the-world-must-see.html .

With that power they can leverage every country in the world, every institution, and every corporation – as they are the largest shareholders of the industrial, military, service and infrastructure investment machine that makes the world turn.

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Please allow just a little detour to Gaza, where the Zionist racist massacre of an entire population has been going on as today for 141 days. Some 30,000 Palestinian have been killed; 70% children and women. Children and women are the prime targets, because children are the next generation and women are the bearer of the next generation – they must be eliminated by the supremacist Zionists.

The horror and inhumanity have no words, cannot be appropriately described with our human vocabulary: Bombs have liquidated an entire family. The mutilated body of a seven-year-old girl, Sidra, is hanging from a wall. Hind, a six-year-old girl, was mercilessly killed by Israeli armed forces, as she was begging for help from an ambulance, surrounded by the cadavers of her killed family. As illustrated by “Hildebrandt”, a Peruvian, renowned non-mainstream news media (23 February 2024).

Tell me, please, are these all-powerful financial conglomerates not powerful enough to stop this massacre at once? They hold entire nations hostage to do their bidding, but they cannot stop Israel, the Zionists behind the State of Israel, from their merciless atrocious killing, murder, massacre of an entire population?

Are they powerful enough to preventing the United States, their Anglosaxon and European puppet governments from halting their money, weapon, and “moral” support of the Zionist onslaught? – Or is their power behind the US veto breaking the UN Security Council’s quest for a Ceasefire in Gaza?

In any case, by not using their power to stop the Zionist war against Palestine, to stop any war, any killing in the world, are they not complicit in the mass-murders in Gaza and around the world by not ending them?

They could. Why are they not doing it?

They are drunk with Power – and as we know, power and money have been derailing humanity for a long time – but now the extent of shame and barbarism has reached a level, where our civilization risks to disappear; and where there is no way to escape – not the traditional ways.

BlackRock / Vanguard are also major shareholders in the secondary and tertiary asset management and banking institutions. So, they control the managed investments of, say, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, City, Chase, Morgan-Stanley – you name it.

If you invest, for example, in a food conglomerate, like Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo, most have no idea that they invest in BlackRock / Vanguard, major shareholders of these food corporations, and by doing so, they also invest in the worldwide military industrial (killing) complex which is too is controlled by BlackRock / Vanguard.

BlackRock / Vanguard / State Street are also the powers behind the power – most often invisible. For example, BlackRock has close links with many Central Banks, especially with the Federal Reserve.

They lend money to the FED – and are a principal adviser to the FED and most likely to other central banks, including they advise on computer systems they use and which connects them.

BlackRock, is by far the largest influencer and donor, or “partner”, as they prefer to call themselves, therefore, also “commander”, of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the entire UN system, its political arm, as well as its sub-agencies – and by proxy, also the World Health Organization (WHO) – and not to forget GAVI, the Vaccination Association, physically located just next door to WHO – and by further extension, Big-Pharma, the pharma industry.

Together with their faithful think-alike executer of WEF’s mandates, Mr. Klaus Schwab, as well as the multibillionaires, such as the Gates, Rockefellers, Soros’ of this world, one can easily deduct – they – BlackRock and Co. – control our lives – health and death.

Through their world-domineering ownership of all that moves, shakes, and produces, they are globalists, eugenists and “green-agenda” eccentrics – pushing the climate change lie – come hell or high water. Costs in money and lives do not matter.

Were these financial monsters behind the covid-plandemic idea? What a question!

Their agenda – eugenist, destruction of current economic structures to rebuild according to this small elite’s criteria – is clearly spelled out by the Club of Rome’s (CoR) “Limits to Growth” (1972), and the follow-on Report “The First Global Revolution” (1991) which claims early on in its text that annihilation of the current system is a MUST, to rebuild, bringing the fundamental changes in favor of the elite – with eugenics and absolute control always in the fore.

Is the CoR at the service of the global financial empire? After all, the same powers are behind both.

Not by coincidence, the Rockefeller Group is the inventor of the Club of Rome, today comfortably seated, tax free and with full diplomatic immunity, in Switzerland.

The fake Covid plandemic is the first building block for this all-destructive mechanism, the “corner stone’ of destruction, so to speak. The lockdowns, the inhuman, totally invalid PCR tests, the fear-mongering – the invented covid-death rates – were very effective in manipulating people, but also in laying the groundwork for the overall annihilation of our society and even civilization, in shifting assets from the bottom to the top – and in abolishing the world economy that carries our civilization.

Once the people were shivering from fear, the deadly “vaxxes” were introduced. Lo and behold, by now, despite ever-louder opposition – about 5.7 billion people – out of the world’s 8 billion (more than 70%) have received at least one jab – and most got 2 or 3 injections.

These poisonous injections are in the human bodies and may most likely react sooner or later. According to Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief scientist of Pfizer – over the next three to ten years, the death-toll will increase probably drastically, but most people will not link it to the “vaxxes” — either because they have been indoctrinated that deaths are due to long or late covid, or because they suffer from and live in cognitive dissonance.

Big Money to own and control it all, must drastically reduce world population. This is propagated by the WEF,  and as of this day by the CoR (see this https://www.globalresearch.ca/author-limits-growth-promotes-genocide-86-world-population/5818133 .

WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab’s top advisor, Israeli Professor, Yuval Noah Harari, asks openly what to do with the “useless eaters” when their “raison d’être” has ben replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Giving them a base salary for (temporary) survival, getting them hooked on violent video games to prep them for the future, and to let them gradually “disappear”?
—–

In addition to severe human injuries and death, the vaxxes also reduce male and female fertility, cause miscarriages, highly aggressive and lethal turbo-cancers, and if course, myocardities and sudden deaths.

Overall excess mortality in the west is as high as 20% in some countries. In the UK, where excess deaths are alarming the common public, they have started modifying statistics to erase surplus mortality.

In parallel, mostly funded by the Soros Open Society Foundation, the Woke movement is ravaging the western world, with promotion of sex changes – and the infamous “multi-letter” agenda – LGBTQIA+ = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual. WOW! – This is promoted in schools, in some countries with strict bans of parents’ interference in their children’s, as young as 11 years, wishes for sex-change.

This agenda reduces birth rates further.

Endless wars – create chaos, confusion, desperation and, of course, also deaths.

The Money Masters have succeeded in creating the first building blocks. WHO may soon become the most powerful health (life and death) tyranny on earth, if the infamous Pandemic Treaty and the harshly modified International Health Regulations (IHR) are approved at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA) in May 2024.

Knowing who is in possession and control of WHO and the WHA, the world is called upon to exit WHO. Internationally renowned Dr Peter McCullough testified in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, about the social and economic consequences of covid vaxxes, as well as the potentially impending WHO tyranny – concluding with a call on the EU and the US – and the rest of the world to exit WHO.

See this https://www.unitedaustraliaparty.org.au/video/dr-peter-mccullough-testified-in-the-european-parliament-in-strasbourg-chaired-by-christine-anderson/ .

To retake the world, by We the People, leaving BlackRock, Vanguard & Co. behind, exiting the UN system and WHO – would be the next step. Most important, and possibly the only way defeating this money power, is withdrawing from the current societal system and start afresh.

Small communal economies – as far away as possible from any digitization – with a dynamic cooperation among themselves, evolving naturally and on a higher spiritual level than the low vibrating one which is typical for our material world and the present strive for ever more material goods.

“Only when we are divided, can the elite retain its power over us.”

“The Wound is the Place, where the Light enters You”. By the great Sufi poet, Rumi

Their weapons are blackmail and fear.

WE MUST NOT FEAR.

We are the 99%.

We can do it.

And we MUST do it for survival of humanity.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020) Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

NATO Is Preparing and Plotting Strategy to Invade Russia: War Is Insanity

By Gary D. Barnett

Source: GaryDBarnett.com

” The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.”

William Ellery Channing

The cursed evil of war, all war, is the sole possession of humankind. Many would claim that it is the sole possession of the State, but they would be mistaken, for if the masses did not support wars, they would never take place. If the soldiers refused to kill on orders, no war could continue. If mothers and fathers refused to allow their sons and daughters to be used as cannon fodder, who would fight the wars? It would never be the politicians or their children, as they are only willing to sacrifice the blood of others and their families in order to satisfy their lust for money and power. If those who plot and sanction war, those who vote to approve and fund war, those who gain great wealth due to war, those who demand war in the name of ‘country,’ and those who applaud war in the name of ‘exceptionalism,’ were responsible for fighting the wars, war would cease to exist on this earth. Kings, princes, monarchs, presidents, and politicians do not actively wage war, they do not risk their own lives, they just fatten their cowardly bellies on the carnage of conflict.

As I write this, the largest NATO war exercise ever to take place since the Cold War is being conducted in Eastern Europe. This is a multi-month exercise through May of this year, that is being staged as preparation for war with Russia. According to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) (actually Offense) this exercise called “Steadfast Defender 24, is based on a ‘fictitious’ Article 5 scenario due to a ‘fictitious’ attack against a NATO member. While the DOD stresses that these exercises “are not directed against any country,” it goes on to say:

 “Still, Russia has launched the largest war in Europe since World War II, attacking neighboring Ukraine. since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, NATO has strengthened defense and deterrence on the continent. While Steadfast Defender has been planned for years, the exercise incorporates defense plans based on Russia’s actions. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine will shape our understanding of conflict for years to come. NATO is observing the conflict in Ukraine closely in order to improve our readiness and refine our future training capabilities and innovation.”

This is what is referred to as doublespeak, contradiction, hypocrisy, and propaganda, all rolled into one. The initial aim of NATO’s founding treaty, was meant to create a mutual assistance pact (warmongering document) to counter so-called risk from the Soviet Union, so the ‘fictitious’ Article 5 reference that this is not directed at any country, is completely bogus, just as the DOD’s language reveals.

This is very serious business, and it is being done in my opinion to solicit a reaction. The entire Middle East is in turmoil, Zionist Israel with total complicity and support of the U.S., is committing mass genocide (a Holocaust) against all Palestinians, while conflict between Israel and Egypt is getting ever closer. This U.S. led NATO operation, a blatant act of force in the region, is a direct threat to Russia and Iran, who have done nothing to warrant any such belligerent and aggressive ‘exercise’ in their own back yard.

This so-called ‘exercise’ will involve almost 100,000 troops from 31 NATO countries and Sweden. It will take place in Finland, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Most of these countries border either Russia or Ukraine, which puts most of this operation right next door to Russia. To put this into perspective for those Americans who have never seen a world map or have no concept of geography, this is akin to a huge Russian military operation in both Canada and Mexico, right on the U.S. border. Try to imagine the insanity that would create, especially considering that this world nearly ended in the 60s simply because the Soviet Union (Russia) was thought to have missiles in Cuba.

What thought process could have possibly been considered in planning such an action as this? There certainly is no basis whatsoever for this kind of combative and hostile challenge to a world power with nuclear capabilities, especially in such a dangerous time in that entire region. The U.S. is surrounding Russia with American military bases, while expanding NATO to include more and more of their direct neighboring countries, and at the same time, is running huge military operations on their border. This is either complete idiocy, or some other plot is being pursued. Either way, the risk is definite, and anything can happen if the proverbial fuse gets too short.

This nation-state called America is the most aggressive empire that has ever existed on earth, has fomented and prosecuted unwarranted war throughout its entire history, all of them, has been responsible for tens, if not hundreds of millions of deaths around the world, and has attempted to rule the entire planet in one way or another under the claim of asinine ‘exceptionalism.’ Now the U.S. is on the verge of total bankruptcy, possible loss of its reserve currency, has unimaginable debt, has become generally speaking, an immoral society, and is threatening more war and killing apparently in order to stoke more fear into the hearts and minds of its blind and dumb citizenry. How else can totalitarian control be preserved in a failing nation?

Watch this situation closely, as it has all the markings of a nation on the verge of collapse attempting to create one more major war in order to survive a bit longer. Any who have the ability to think clearly, would look at this situation and understand that this is the absolute worst way to approach impending doom, and in fact is backward.

There may be other things going on of which we are not aware, but how on earth can this end well? How can actions such as these bring about anything good? I can tell you, they cannot. Only hell comes from aggression and war, and hasn’t there been enough killing in this world to last an eternity?

“War is not a means but an end. It makes violence respectable and makes sadists look like heroes”

Mary Horlock

Julian Assange’s Day in Court

Julian Assange’s lawyers — in a final bid on Tuesday to stop his extradition — fought valiantly to poke holes in the case of the prosecution to obtain an appeal.

And Our Flags Are Still There – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: Scheer Post

By the afternoon the video link, which would have allowed Julian Assange to follow his final U.K. appeal to prevent his extradition, had been turned off. Julian, his attorneys said, was too ill to attend, too ill even to follow the court proceedings on a link, although it was possible he was no longer interested in sitting through another judicial lynching. The rectangular screen, tucked under the black wrought iron bars that enclosed the upper left hand corner balcony of the courtroom where Julian would have been caged as a defendant, was perhaps a metaphor for the emptiness of this long and convoluted judicial pantomime. 

The arcane procedural rules — the lawyers in their curled blonde wigs and robes, the spectral figure of the two judges looking down on the court from their raised dais in their gray wigs and forked white collars, the burnished walnut paneled walls, the rows of lancet windows, the shelves on either side filled with law books in brown, green, red, crimson, blue and beige leather bindings, the defense lawyers, Edward Fitzgerald KC and Mark Summers KC, addressing the two judges, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Johnson, as “your lady” and “my lord” — were all dusty Victorian props employed in a modern Anglo-American show trial. It was a harbinger of a decrepit justice system that, subservient to state and corporate power, is designed to strip us of our rights by judicial fiat.

The physical and psychological disintegration of Julian, seven years trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and nearly five years held on remand in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh, was always the point, what Nils Melzer the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture calls his “slow-motion execution.”  Political leaders, and their echo chambers in the media, fall all over themselves to denounce the treatment of Alexei Navalny but say little when we do the same to Julian. The legal farce grinds forward like the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House. It will probably grind on for a few more months — one can’t expect the Biden administration to add the extradition of Julian to all its other political woes. It may take months to issue a ruling, or grant one or two appeal requests, as Julian continues to waste away in HM Prison Belmarsh. 

Julian’s nearly 15-year legal battle began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists in Baghdad. He took refuge in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, before being arrested by the Metropolitan Police in 2019 who were permitted by the Ecuadorian embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh.

Julian did not commit a crime. He is not a spy. He did not purloin classified documents. He did what we all do, although he did it in a far more important way. He published voluminous material, leaked to him by Chelsea Manning, which exposed U.S. war crimesliescorruptiontorture and assassinations. He ripped back the veil to expose the murderous machinery of the U.S. empire.

The two-day hearing is Julian’s last chance to appeal the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel. On Wednesday the prosecution will make its arguments. If he is denied an appeal he can request the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But the British court may order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January 2021, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, refused to authorize the extradition request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk” Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would endure in the U.S. prison system. At the same time, she accepted all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith. She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S. Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised Julian would be treated well. The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to Special Administrative Measure. They promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado.

The defense must convince the two judges that the District Judge made serious legal errors to see an appeal granted.  

They argued that espionage is, as a matter of law, a political offense and that the extradition treaty with the U.S. prohibits extradition for political offenses. They focused on the extensive UK law, common law and international law that defines espionage as a “pure political offense” because it is directed against a state apparatus. For this reason, those charged with espionage should be protected from extradition. The lawyers spent a long time adjudicating the case of Chelsea Manning to justify her leak of documents that exposed war crimes as in the public interest, then arguing that if she was justified in leaking the documents Julian was justified in publishing them.

As the day wore on it became evident that the two judges were not well versed in the case, constantly asking for citations and expressing surprise that senior officials in the U.S., such as Mike Pompeo when he was head of the CIA, said Julian would not be protected by the First Amendment in an American court because he was not a citizen. Julian’s lawyers brought up past espionage cases, such as that of MI5 agent David Shaylerprosecuted under the Official Secrets Act 1989 for passing secret documents to The Mail on Sunday in 1997 — which included the names of agents. He also disclosed that MI5 (Britain’s domestic intelligence service) kept files on prominent politicians, including Labour ministers, and that MI6 (Britain’s foreign intelligence service) was involved in a plot to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Momar Gaddafi. The British extradition request was rejected by the French Cour d’Appel because it was a “political offense.”  

All 18 counts filed against Julian allege that his purpose was “that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States and the advantage of any foreign nation.”

The hearing was, after those in 2020 that focused on Julian’s mental and psychological health, refreshing in that it discussed the crimes committed by the U.S. and the importance of making them public. The two judges rarely interrupted, unlike other court proceedings for Julian I have attended where the judge often condescendingly cut short the defense. This may be a reflection of the broad public support, including by major media organizations, which have belatedly rallied behind Julian. Hundreds of people thronged the entrance to The Royal Courts of Justice, an expansive Victorian Gothic stone building adorned with statues of Jesus, Moses, Solomon and Alfred the Great, the celebrated pillars of the English legal tradition, to call for Julian’s freedom.

The afternoon session was different. On about a half dozen occasions the judges halted the defense to ask about how the leaks, because they were not thoroughly redacted, had endangered lives, although the U.S. has never been able to provide evidence of anyone whose life was lost as a result of the leaks. This canard has long been the cross on which U.S. officials have sought to crucify Julian. The two judges — one wonders if they had been given instructions during the lunch break — hurled these accusations at the defense lawyers until we adjourned.

“These indiscriminate disclosures were condemned by The Guardian and The New York Times,” Judge Sharp admonished the defense team. “They could have been done differently.”

This reference was especially egregious since the unredacted documents were first made public not by WikiLeaks or Julian but by the website Cryptome after reporters from The Guardian printed the password to the unredacted documents in their book.

The U.S. is officially seeking Julian’s extradition, where he potentially faces up to 175 years in prison, for the 2010 publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs and US diplomatic cables. But the U.S. did not request his extradition until the release in March 2017 of the files known as Vault 7 which detailed how the CIA could hack Apple and Android smartphones and turn internet-connected televisions — even when they were off — into listening devices. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee, was found guilty last year of four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents after handing over classified materials to WikiLeaks. He was given a forty-year sentence in February.

After the release of Vault 7 then CIA Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service.” The Attorney General at the time, Jeff Sessions, said that Julian’s arrest was a priority. By August the U.S. Senate had passed a 78-page intelligence finance bill which included a sentence declaring that “it is the sense of Congress that Wikileaks and the senior leadership of Wikileaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.” In May 2019 the Trump administration accused Julian of violating the Espionage Act and asked the UK to extradite him to stand trial in the U.S. Trump has called the allegations against Julian treason and called for “the death penalty or something.” Other politicians, including former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, have also called for Julian to be executed.

If Julian is extradited and additionally charged for the release of the Vault 7 documents, Fitzgerald told the court, “it could result in additional charges that merit the death penalty for aiding and abetting the enemy.” The U.S., he said, especially if Trump is elected again to the presidency, could easily “reformulate these charges into a capital offense.”

Summers brought up President Donald Trump’s request for “detailed options” of how to assassinate Julian when he was in the Ecuadorian Embassy. “Sketches were even drawn up,” he said, adding that the plot fell apart when the UK authorities backed down, especially over a potential shootout, in the streets of London”.

“The evidence showed that the US was prepared to go to any lengths, including misusing its own criminal justice system, to sustain impunity for US officials in respect of the torture/war crimes committed in its infamous ‘war on terror’, and to suppress those actors and courts willing and prepared to try to bring those crimes to account,” he said.

 The lawyers were right. The CIA is the driving force behind the extradition. The leak was highly embarrassing and to the CIA highly damaging. The CIA intends to make Julian pay. Schulte, who leaked Vault 7, was given a forty year sentence. Julian, if extradited, will be next. 

Southern countries no longer trust the West

By Veniamin Popov

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza against Palestinians under US patronage has had an enormous impact on developing countries. Four months of Israeli military action against the Palestinians had been a watershed in the attitude of the Global South towards the West: the number of civilians killed and wounded, most of them women and children, was approaching 100,000; in an enclave of nearly 2.5 million people, one third of the houses had been completely destroyed. This has not just shown the hypocrisy of the Western Powers with their constant policy of double standards. It has convinced many that the West cannot be at the mercy of the West: it will stop at nothing to impose solutions that are favourable to it.

Many in the Middle East and the Global South were struck both by the brutality of Israel’s military campaign and the unwavering support for it by Western governments. “For them this is as much a war”, wrote the Al Ahram newspaper on 30.01.2024, “as US President Joe Biden’s war as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s, and the continued indifference to the scale of destruction has once again confirmed how cheap Arab life seems to Western leaders”.

As Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, argues in his book What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Collapse of Democracy in the Middle East, the United States and other Western countries, principally Britain, have for nearly a century pursued an interventionist, militaristic and anti-democratic foreign policy that has largely ignored the interests of the Middle East. After the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October, which revealed, in the words of Egypt’s Al Ahram, the folly of Biden and Netanyahu’s approach, there was no restraint or attempt to think through the consequences of the current war. Instead, Biden and his European allies supported Israel’s fatal attack on the Gaza Strip. Despite the fact that the civilian death toll is rising at an unprecedented rate, the humanitarian crisis is becoming more acute by the day, and governments around the world have called for a ceasefire, Biden has shown no willingness to intervene to prevent bloodshed.

It is no coincidence that the media of many nations published articles about Frantz Fanon, an anti-colonial activist who grew up in a black middle-class family in French colonial Martinique: more than any other writer of the time, he captured the rage generated by colonial humiliation in the hearts of colonised people, and was a remarkably astute analyst of contemporary ills – the ongoing psychological traumas of racism and oppression, the enduring power of white nationalism, and the scourge of authoritarian predatory post-colonial regimes. In Fanon’s view, the world then was split in two, which is also absolutely true of today.

The West’s current strategy has failed colossally, and the American-led Anglo-Saxon empire is also failing: the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the Turkish Daily Sabah newspaper reported in early February, have exposed the limits of Western power and its highly duplicitous approach to international law and the laws of war. The decision by some Western states to cut off funding to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA “is a brazen and shameless move to starve the Palestinians and force Hamas to capitulate”.

By supporting Israel and allowing it to kill tens of thousands of civilians, Western countries are putting themselves on the opposite edge of the values and principles of multilateralism and respect for human rights, “they are going against the very foundations on which the UN was built”, the Al Jazeera website wrote on 16.01.24. Another article on the same site noted that Gaza will be the grave of the Western-led world order: by supporting Israel’s atrocities, the West has undermined what is left of its authority and brought the rules-based world order to the point of no return: the authority of the West has been irrevocably undermined.

The United States military strikes on Syria, Iraq and Yemen have caused an explosion of anti-American sentiment throughout the Arab world, once again demonstrating the aggressive nature of US policy in the Middle East and Washington’s complete disregard for the norms of international law.

According to a poll conducted in 16 Arab states on 10.01.24 – 89% of respondents opposed recognising Israel, and 77% considered the US and Israel the biggest security threat to the region.

The Saudi newspaper Arab News emphasised in mid-January this year that many Western leaders are increasingly moving away from their people. In early February, the New York Times reported that more than 800 US and EU civil servants published a protest against their governments’ support for Israel; last November, more than 500 employees of 40 US government agencies sent a letter to President Biden criticising his policies on the Gaza war.

Turkish newspapers have consistently published stories that the Global North should abandon old approaches and rethink its international policies.

Ghassan Charbel, editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, noted on 29.01.24 that the continuation of the Gaza massacre is costing the countries of the region and the world economy dearly, it is also hitting America’s interests and image.

Recent events on the world stage are increasingly convincing the people of developing countries that their interests are at odds with those of the West, and in some issues are diametrically opposed.

How Sad It It Is to Watch America’s Abandonment of Morality and Degeneration into Evil.

By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

To be an American today is to collect a basket full of sadness.  We have been at war forever for the profits of the military/security complex, for the hegemonic ideology of the neoconservatives, for Cold War hysteria, and for Israel.  Huge sums of money have been wasted for no benefit to the American people.  Just yesterday I was listening to a deputy sheriff tell me how frustrating it was that he cannot reach the criminal American elite and bring them home to their crimes, but has, instead, to focus on the minor crimes of their lower class victims.  

I asked him why it is the lower class that most waves the flag, and he said that patriotism is all that they have that gives them meaning.  I responded that this means that they cannot escape their victimhood, and he said “that is what is sad about it.”

Parents have not come home from Washington’s wars to their spouses, children, family, and friends.  They died for the military/security complex’s profits, for Israel, or for some dumbshit ideology.  They did not die for America, but for their deaths to have meaning, their families have to insist that they did.  With the American people trapped in this way, Washington can pile up the deaths, thanking the dead not for defending the military/security complex’s profits, but for “defending America.” In this way Washington can continue its endless wars. Dying for America is a way the lower class can find meaning in their lives. 

Now that Russia has shown that there is to be no American victory in Ukraine, Washington has renewed its war adventures in the Middle East, aligning solidly with Israel’s massacre of the Palestinians and against the Arab and Muslim countries that oppose what is an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Palestinian women, children, hospitals, schools, social infrastructure are being blown to tiny pieces with the American bombs and missiles that Biden is handing to Israel’s Nazi leader, Netanyahu, who is under indictment both in Israel and now in effect by the International Court of Justice.  But this means nothing to Washington, which sees itself as the exceptional, indispensable country unaccountable to any law, domestic or international.

The alleged “moral democracies,” the US, UK, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland, thumbed their noses at the International Court of Justice’s verdict against Israel by suspending their funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the major source of aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.  

What does this tell us about the morality of the Western World.  It tells us that it is worse than in Sodom and Gomorrah. 

How can we be Proud Americans when the suspension of funding by Washington will impact life-saving assistance for over two million civilians, over half of whom are children, who rely on UNRWA aid in Gaza? The population faces starvation and an outbreak of disease under Israel’s bombardment and blockade of aid.

This is the way that Zionist Israel, together with its Biden Regime Democrat ally, intends to accomplish its genocidal elimination of the Palestinian people. 

Israel has blockaded all water, food, electricity, and medical supplies to Gaza for the last 120 days. As a result, a half million Palestinians face starvation. 

The massive and ongoing bombing of Gaza, courtesy of the continuous shipment of US munitions to Israel, has killed and wounded at least 90,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children. More than 1000 children have had to undergo amputations without anesthesia. There is no medicine, no blood for transfusions, no clean water to wash wounds. And no food. Only more bombs falling from the sky each day, thanks to America.

Chris Hedges reports that the West’s alleged humanitarian and medical institutions refuse to denounce Israel’s decimation of human life in Gaza.  We are faced with the stark fact that even Western medical and humanitarian institutions are in the pocket of Israeli Zionists.  Morality cannot be found on the scene.

How is it that a tiny county, the existence of which depends entirely on American support, can force the world to accept genocide at the risk of the war widening into Nuclear Armageddon?

“Not Wanting” A Wider Middle East War, the U.S. Has Started One

By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

You have to hand it to the U.S. and its henchmen for brazenness.  In order to protect their client state Israel and its genocide in Gaza, the U.S., together with the UK, have in one week launched air and sea attacks on the Houthis in Yemen five times, referring to it as “self-defense” in their Orwellian lingo.  The ostensible reason being Yemen’s refusal to allow ships bound for Israel, which is committing genocide in Gaza, to enter the Red Sea, while permitting other ships to pass freely.

To any impartial observer, the Houthis should be lauded.  Yet, while the International Court of Justice considers the South African charge of genocide against Israel that is supported by overwhelming evidence, the U.S. and its allies have instigated a wider war throughout the Middle East while claiming they do not want such a war.  These settler colonial states want genocide and a much wider war because they have been set back on their heels by those they have mocked, provoked, and attacked – notably the Palestinians, Syrians, and Russians, among others.

While the criminalization of international law does not bode well for the ICJ’s upcoming ruling or its ability to stop Israeli’s genocide in Gaza, Michel Chossudovsky, of Global Research, as is his wont, has offered a superb analysis and suggestion for those who oppose such crimes: that Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter – “The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S. soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” – should be used to supplement the South African charges and appeal directly to the moral consciences of those asked to carry out acts of genocide. He writes:

Let us call upon Israeli and American soldiers and pilots “to abandon the battlefield”, as an act of refusal to participate in a criminal undertaking against the People of Gaza.  

South Africa’s legal procedure at the ICJ should be endorsed Worldwide. While it cannot be relied upon to put a rapid end to the genocide, it provides support and legitimacy to the “Disobey Unlawful Orders, Abandon the Battlefield”  campaign under Nuremberg Charter Principle IV.

While such an approach will not stop the continuing slaughter, it would remind the world that each person who participates in and supports it bears a heavy burden of guilt for their actions; that they are morally and legally culpable.  This appeal to the human heart and conscience, no matter what its practical effect, will at least add to the condemnation of a genocide happening in real time and full view of the world, even though no one will ever be prosecuted for such crimes since any real just use of international law has long disappeared.  Yet there is a edifying history of such conscientious objection to immoral war making, and though each person makes the decision in solitary witness, individual choices can inspire others and the solitary become solidary, as Albert Camus reminded us at the end of his short story, “The Artist at Work.”

With each passing day, it becomes more and more evident that Israel/U.S.A. and their allies do want a wider war.  Iran is their special focus, with Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen targets on the way.  Anyone who supports the genocide in Gaza, explicitly or through silence, bears responsibility for the conflagration to come.  There are no excuses.

And the facts show that it is axiomatic that waging war has been the modus operandi of the U.S./Israeli alliance for a long time.  Just as in early 2003 when the Bush administration said they were looking for a peaceful solution to their fake charges against Sadam Hussein with his alleged “weapons of mass destruction,” the Biden administration is lying, as the Bush administration lied about September 11, 2001 to launch its ongoing war on terror, starting in Afghanistan.  Without an expanded war, President Biden – aka the Democrats, since he will most probably not be the candidate – and his psychopathic partner Benjamin Netanyahu, will not survive.  It is bi-partisan war-mongering, of course, internationally and intramurally, since both U.S. political parties are controlled by the Israel Lobby and billionaire class that owns Congress and the “defense” industry that thrives on never-ending war to such an extent that even the notable independent candidate for the presidency, Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is running as an anti-war candidate, fully supports Israel which is tantamount to supporting Biden’s expanding war policy.

Biden and Netanyahu, who are always claiming after the fact that they were surprised by events or were fed bad advice by their underlings, are dumb scorpions. They are stupid but deadly.  And many people in the West, while perhaps decent people in their personal lives, are living in a fantasy world of “sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” in MLK, Jr.’s words, as the growing threat of a world war increases and insouciance reigns.

Neither the Israeli nor American government can allow themselves to be humiliated, U.S./NATO by the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis by the Palestinians.  Like cornered criminals with lethal weapons, they will kill as many as they can on their way down, taking their revenge on the weakest first.

Their “mistakes” are always well intentioned.  They stumble into wars through faulty intelligence.  They drop the ball because of bureaucratic mix-ups. They miscalculate the perfidy of the moneyed elites whom allegedly they oppose while pocketing their cash and ushering them into the national coffers out of necessity since they are too big to fail.  They never see the storm coming, even as they create it.  Their incompetence or the perfidy of their enemies is the retort to all those “nut cases” who conjure up conspiracy theories or plain facts to explain their actions or lack thereof.  They are innocent.  Always innocent.  And they can’t understand why those they have long abused reach a point when they will no longer impetrate for mercy but will fight fiercely for their freedom.

All signs point to a major war on the horizon.  Both the U.S.A. and Israel have been shown to be rogue states with no desire to negotiate a peaceful world.  Believing in high-tech weapons and massive firepower, neither has learned the hard lesson that anti-colonial wars have historically been won by those with far less weapons but with a passionate desire to throw off the chains of their oppressors.  Vietnam is the text-book case, and there are many others.  Failure to learn is the name of their game.

The Zionist project for a Greater Israel is doomed to fail, but as it does, desperate men like Biden and Netanyahu are intent on launching desperate acts of war.  Exactly when and how this expanded war will blaze across the headlines is the question.  It has started, but I think it prudent to expect a black swan event sometime this year when all hell will break loose.  The genocide in Gaza is the first step, and the U.S./Israel, “not wanting” a wider war, have already started one.

(For an excellent history lesson on the Zionist oppression of Palestinians and the current genocide, listen to Max Blumenthal’s and Miko Peled’s impassioned talk – “Where is the War in Gaza Going? – delivered from the heart of darkness, Washington D.C.  Two Jewish men who know the difference between Zionism and Judaism and whose consciences are aflame with justice for the oppressed Palestinians.)

When the Truth Lies Dead and Buried – Resurrect Logic

By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

If you read Western mainstream propaganda these days, you’ll find the truth hidden so deep no archaeologist could unearth it. A case in point is a buried lead in a story from the New York Post suggesting Russia has secret plans to hit NATO hard in the coming months.

According to the Post’s Chris Nesi, leaked secret documents released by German newspaper BILD tell of Europe preparing for Vladimir Putin to expand his military operation in Ukraine and to attack NATO ally countries next year. If readers take the headline and a keen graphic illustrating Putin’s alleged diabolical plan, you’d be in the right stocking up those bomb shelters in Wisconsin and Luxembourg.

Fortunately, Nesi’s story is entirely misleading. It suggests BILD got hold of Russian secret plans, conveniently categorised as a “plot” to sound more sinister, when in fact, German generals made plans to etch out WW3 like some chessboard game. The New York Post super sleuth waited until the article’s end to tell readers the truth about these “plans.” Here’s the passage.

“While the plans obtained by BILD are a potential scenario prepared by generals in the German army, European allies take Russia’s threat seriously and are preparing accordingly.”

The biggest problem with these misleading stories is the downstream effect of main outlets, and their tabloid cousins, spreading the lies to the broader public. Iona Cleave of The Sun titled her version “COUNTDOWN TO CONFLICT Putin’s ‘step-by-step plan to bring West to brink of WW3’ revealed in leaked intel doc…including date of ‘Day X’ in 2025.” In this case, the lead of the story is not just buried. It’s cremated and scattered into the digital air before publication by the tabloid. Still, grocery shoppers in London and Edinburgh catch the stunning revelations about “X-Day” while waiting in the checkout line. The Putin bad man campaign continues, and the everyday citizen wonders what their government will do to protect them.

Then the narrative arrives for curious business people via Banking News: “Britain sends 20,000 troops to mammoth NATO exercise against ‘Putin threat’.” Mail Online takes things further by quoting the former head of NATO forces in Europe, retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, assuring readers the “plot” is actual. So, the German Ministry of Defence’s so-called step-by-step doomsday guide is deftly transformed into a bored staff officer scenario-building game in leather armchairs somewhere beneath the Brandenburg Gate into a bonafide Putin strategy to take over Europe.

The media is not the only conduit for Russophobia these days. Leaders of state like Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the UK, say the Russians will not stop at Ukraine’s borders. American President Joe Biden has warned my people that if Putin wins a victory over Ukraine, Russia will attack a NATO country. And the minions of continual conflict for the Liberal Order are out in force in academia, business, and on the NGO and think tank circuit. One fine example is retired Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, who’s gone on the media/propaganda circuit to sell more gas masks and military headgear via companies he’s affiliated with, told The Telegraph, “Putin may be about to launch an apocalyptic assault.” For those unfamiliar, Colonel Hamish Stephen de Bretton-Gordon commanded NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion between 2005 and 2007. He was in all the right places about the time America was introduced to the post-9/11 idea of a “war on terror.” He later led a company profiting from his and other analysts’ apocalyptic prophecies. When regime change schemes came to Syria, it was the good colonel who “informed” the House of Commons and the waiting BBC audience of Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his people. Bretton-Gordon and many others trained by the spooks and the Anglo-American military-industrial complex play a continuous melody of crisis and fear.

“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” ― Adolf Hitler

Logic, the holy of holies these days, seems as lost as the Ark of the Covenant. Who could fail to notice, for instance, Russia taking up a defensive stance to save her soldiers’ lives and those of countless civilians in Ukraine cities like Kyiv, Karkhov, and Dnipro? With nearly half a million troops held in reserve and with Ukraine’s forces decimated, why haven’t the Russians already pushed through the weak spots on the way to the Dnieper River? And what about the billions and billions in arms and cash Western states have now lost to an impossible cause?

Looking at the latest tally of destroyed Ukraine equipment since the start of the operation tells the real story. So far, the Russians have knocked out almost 600 Ukrainian warplanes, 265 helicopters, almost 11,000 UAVs, 450 SAM systems, 14,645 tanks and armoured vehicles, 1,202 rocket launching systems, 7,750 artillery pieces, and 17,507 special military vehicles. Unbiased experts put the number of Ukraine dead at between 400 and 500 thousand combatants. And the number of wounded surely exceeds a million by now.

And finally, let’s remember that the elitist-controlled Western media, the politicians, and the so-called experts have been telling us Russia was finished for years now. Sanctions, the blown-up pipeline, and the weapons and money dump to Zelensky were supposed to weaken Russia. This is not the truth. Russia is more vital now than ever since the 1980s, militarily and economically. This points to another point of lost logic. Why would Russia want to take over states protected by NATO? Europe is a consumer continent. It’s where a billion people need feeding, not a breadbasket for good Russian families. There is nothing in Europe that Russia needs. It is Europe, on the other hand, that desperately needs Russia and the other BRICS countries. So, who are the most likely aggressors in all this?

Never believe their slogans, especially not NATO/good, Russia/bad.