Tag Archives: Ukraine

Hardly Anyone Is Thinking Logically About The Risk Of Nuclear War

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its symbolic Doomsday Clock to ninety seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been set since its founding after the second world war. Chief among their reasons for doing so is the increasingly dangerous war in Ukraine.

A statement authored by the Bulletin’s editor John Mecklin is as biased against Russia as any mainstream western punditry today and makes no mention of the US empire’s role in provoking, prolonging and benefiting from this conflict, yet it still provides a fairly reasonable appraisal of the magnitude of the threat we’re staring down the barrel of at this point in history:

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.

And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.

Mecklin encourages dialogue between Russia, Ukraine and NATO powers in order to de-escalate tensions in “this time of unprecedented global danger.” He quotes UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who warned last August that the world has entered “a time of nuclear danger not seen since the height of the Cold War.”

We came a hair’s breadth from nuclear annihilation during the chaotic and unpredictable brinkmanship at the height of the last cold war, and in fact had numerous close calls that could have easily wound up going another way. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, humanity survived the Cuban Missile Crisis by “plain dumb luck”.

There’s no logical basis for the belief that we’ll get lucky again. Believing nuclear war won’t happen because it didn’t happen last time is a type of fallacious reasoning known as normalcy bias; it’s as rational as believing Russian roulette is safe because the man handing you the pistol didn’t blow his head off when he pulled the trigger.

But that’s the kind of sloppy thinking you’ll run into when you try to discuss this subject in public; I’m always encountering arguments that there’s no risk of nuclear war because we’ve gone all this time without disaster. One of the reasons I engage so much on social media is that I find it’s a good way of keeping tabs on the dominant propaganda narratives in our civilization and understanding what people are thinking and believing about things, and nowhere have I been met with more fuzzbrained comments than the times I’ve written about the need to prevent an entirely preventable nuclear holocaust.

The most common response I get is something along the lines of “Well if there is a nuclear war it will be Putin’s fault,” as though whose “fault” it is will matter to us while we’re watching the world end, along with the related “Well Russia shouldn’t have invaded then” and “Well Russia should stop threatening to use nukes then.” People genuinely don’t seem to understand that in the event of a full-scale nuclear war, it will really be the end of everyone. They still kind of imagine everyone still being there and shaking their fists at Russia afterward, and themselves sitting there feeling self-righteous and vindicated for correctly saying what a bad, bad man Vladimir Putin is.

They don’t understand that there will be no pundits discussing the nuclear armageddon on Fox and MSNBC, arguing about whose fault it was and which political party is to blame. They don’t get that there won’t be any war crimes tribunals in the radioactive ashes as the biosphere starves to death in nuclear winter. They don’t understand that once the nukes start flying, nobody’s shoulds or shouldn’ts about it will matter at all, and neither will your political opinions about Putin. All that will matter is that it happened, and that it can’t be taken back.

Another common response when I talk about the looming threat of nuclear war is, “Oh so you just don’t care about Ukrainians and you want them all to die.” The other day some lady responded to a Twitter thread I made about the need to avoid nuclear armageddon by saying that I must love rape and war crimes. People sincerely believe that’s a valid response to a discussion about the need to prevent the single worst thing that could possibly happen from happening. It really doesn’t seem to occur to them that they’re not actually engaging the subject at hand in any real way.

Slightly more perceptive interlocutors will argue that if we back down to tyrants just because they have nuclear weapons then everyone will try to get nukes and those who have them will become more belligerent, which will end up making nuclear war more likely in the long run. This response is a straw man fallacy because it misrepresents the argument as “just back down” rather than a call to engage in diplomacy and dialogue to de-escalate and begin sincerely negotiating toward detente, none of which is happening to any meaningful extent in this conflict. More importantly, it pretends that Russia is just invading its neighbor out of the blue instead of the well-documented reality that it is in fact responding to provocations by the US empire. The US has a moral obligation to de-escalate a conflict it knowingly provoked to advance its own interests, especially when that conflict could kill everyone in the world.

The whole “We can’t just back down to bullies like Putin” line of argumentation is further invalidated by the fact that it’s one thing to draw a line in the sand that must never be crossed — even if in the face of armageddon — but it’s quite another to say that line should be over something as small as who governs Crimea. This planet is populated with eight billion humans and countless other sentient creatures, very few of whom care one way or another who governs Crimea and almost none of whom would be willing to watch their loved ones die over it. Wanting to draw the line there is obnoxious, arrogant, and absurd.

And that’s just the shoddy brainwork of the rank-and-file public; the thinking of those who actually got us into this situation is surely just as dogshit. From what I can tell standing on this side of the thick veils of government secrecy which separate us from the truth, it appears to arise predominantly from a combination of immense hubris and zealous groupthink; hubris to think they can control all possible outcomes in a game of brinkmanship with so many small, unpredictable moving parts, and zealous groupthink in mindlessly adhering to the imperial doctrine that US unipolar planetary hegemony must be secured at all cost. They’re playing games with the life of every creature on this planet, and anyone who thinks that’s smart or wise should be as far from such decisions as possible.

The logical faceplants I’m describing here seem to arise partly from the fact that our civilization is completely inundated with empire propaganda about this conflict, and partly from the fact that people just haven’t thought terribly hard about nuclear war and what it would mean. The latter is probably because the prospect of everyone dying horrifically is such a huge, heavy, uncomfortable subject to sit down and deeply grapple with to the extent that it demands. For most people it’s just this vague, blurry mass in the periphery of their awareness, because they’ve been doing all these weird mental gymnastics to squirm and compartmentalize away from this thing rather than facing it.

But if ever there was a time to start doing some rigorous independent thinking and stop trusting the authorities to sort things out, it would be now. They’re showing us every sign that they’re just going to keep ramping up these games of nuclear chicken until they either fill their bottomless need for more complete global control or get us all killed trying. People need to start waking up to what’s going on and start making things uncomfortable for the people who are driving our world toward total destruction.

It does not need to be this way. Peace talks are possible. Diplomacy, de-escalation and detente are possible. Anyone who says otherwise is lying. We need to start building some public pressure to end this madness, because if the mushroom clouds ever show up, there is not one person alive who in that moment will believe that it was worth it.

NATO Panics, Escalates Big Arms to Ukraine; U.S. ‘Will Increase Artillery Production Sixfold’; Brian Berletic: Only MICs gain from all this.

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

On January 20th, the great American military and geostrategic analyst Brian Berletic, who has had a stunningly high percentage of his predictions turning out to have been 100% accurate, did a youtube at his “The New Atlas” Website, headlining “US, Allies Send More Weapons to Ukraine in Absence of Real Solution”, and it had been sparked by Berletic’s advance knowledge that America and its allies would probably decide to send to Ukraine some of the German-manufactured Leopard tanks and some of the U.S.-manufactured Abrams tanks. Near the end of his video, at 25:24 in it, he summarized what the prior portion had already documented to be the case: that these tanks will be useless to turning the tide of this war away from a Russian victory, and into a U.S.-and-allied victory.

Then, on January 25th, came the announcements that America, Germany, and Poland, had, in fact, decided to do this (send those tanks to Ukraine), and the BBC reported that, “Germans endured months of political debate about concerns that sending tanks would escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia.” The reason why Germany’s leaders ultimately decided to go along with these supplies to Ukraine isn’t that they had concluded that doing so wouldn’t “escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia” (and that’s oblique terminology for “globalize the war in Ukraine and turn it into a very hot WW III between NATO (the U.S.) and Russia”) but was instead that “The US and Germany had resisted internal and external pressure to send their tanks to Ukraine for some time.” The BBC, being an extension of Britain’s own military contractors — such as the world’s 7th-largest weapons-manufacturer, BAE Systems — many of which had been lobbying heavily for this decision, refused to define, or to say anything about, what stood behind that amorphous phrase “external pressure”; and, so, as usual, what was causing what was happening here was being ignored; only the result was being reported. Its cause (source) was banned from being even discussed in the ‘news’-media. However, on Tuesday, January 24th, Politico bannered “U.S. closer to approving ‘significant number’ of Abrams tanks to Ukraine”, and reported that, “On Tuesday, shortly after news broke of the possible U.S. move, POLITICO reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz also plans to announce that German Leopards are heading to Ukraine. Last week, Scholz told U.S. lawmakers [in Switzerland, at the pro-imperialist WEF in Davos, where many billionaires and U.S.-and-allied Governments meet privately each year and which has increasingly come to replace the United Nations that the anti-imperialist FDR had initiated to serve as the basis for international laws, and for these imperialists to come to replace those international laws, by imposing America’s “rules-based international order”] that Berlin would approve the transfer only if the U.S. donated its own tanks first.” But, still, the key individuals who stood behind this supposedly crucial international agreement, to possibly start what could quickly become a nuclear World War Three, wasn’t, at all, being indicated; it was, instead, hidden, and that question wasn’t mentioned, at all — as-if it didn’t ‘really’ matter who, or how, and why, this decision to “escalate the conflict and make Nato a direct party to the war with Russia” had been made — what had caused it to be made.

Sending these additional armaments to Ukraine runs exactly opposite to public opinion in at least the imperial country itself.

The news-report on January 18th by the American polling organization Quinnipiac was headlined “Americans On Biden’s Handling Of Classified Documents: Inappropriate & Serious, But Shouldn’t Face Charges, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Biden Handling Of The Mexican Border Hits Record Low While Majority Back His New Immigration Plan”. Buried deep in it was “U.S. AID TO UKRAINE”, reporting that

As Russia’s war against Ukraine approaches its one-year mark, 33 percent of Americans think the United States is doing too much to help Ukraine, 21 percent think the U.S. is doing too little, and 38 percent think the U.S. is doing about the right amount to help Ukraine. This compares to a Quinnipiac University poll on February 28, 2022 after the war started, when 7 percent of Americans thought the U.S. was doing too much to help Ukraine, 45 percent thought the U.S. was doing too little, and 37 percent thought the U.S. was doing about the right amount to help Ukraine.

Buried yet deeper in it was “16. In your opinion, what is the most urgent issue facing the country today: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, COVID-19, inflation, climate change, health care, racial inequality, immigration, election laws, abortion, gun violence, or crime?”

Here were the findings on that:

#1. Inflation 35%; #2. Immigration 10%; #3. Gun violence 8%; #4. Climate change 7%; #5. Something else than these named items 7%; #6. Health care 6%; #7. Crime 6%; #8. Election laws 5%; #9. Racial inequality 4%; #10. Abortion 4%; #11. DK/NA or Don’t know or not applicable 3%; #12. Russia/Ukraine 3%; #13. Covid-19 1%.

So: not only did more Americans want “U.S. AID TO UKRAINE” to be decreased than wanted it to be increased, and not only did Americans rank the issue itself as being # 12 out of 13 options for the U.S. Government to be focusing on, but the U.S. Government is and has been focusing on it more than on any other, and that focus and those expenditures are now soaring — despite what the public wants. This is normal, not unusual in America, because its Government is perhaps the most corrupt on the planet.. And there is lots of other evidence that it is profoundly corrupt and does not represent the American public. Furthermore, new evidence supporting this is coming in all the time. In fact: a higher percentage of Americans are living in prisons than is the case in any other nation on the planet. Is that consistent with America’s being a democracy?

So: Why is America’s NATO driving its members to shovel yet more weaponry into Ukraine? Is it because these countries are “democracies”? Brian Berletic has a different answer — and, unlike the propagandized one, it recognizes that that is a pure scam excuse (like the invasion and occupation of Iraq used in 2003). The “MIC” Military-Industrial Complex (and that’s controlled by the leading stockholders in the top-100 ‘Defense’ firms) is behind it. NATO is the trade-organization for those international corporations, and it (especially in the U.S. and UK) runs their Governments. That’s why this is being done.

Now that Ukraine’s government will be receiving those tanks, Ukraine is expecting ultimately to receive American jet fighters and missiles that will enable Ukraine to invade Russia at least as far as Moscow — which is only 300 miles away from Ukraine. On the afternoon of January 25th, Reuters headlined “Ukraine sets sights on fighter jets after securing tank supplies”, and reported that Yuriy Sak, who advises Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, told Reuters, “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us Himars systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get.” If they get nuclear weapons, those will certainly be operated by Americans. And, of course, that has been the U.S. goal ever since Obama started by no later than June of 2011 to plan his coup to take Ukraine.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

The Ukrainian Solidarity Network: The Highest Stage of White Western Social Imperialism

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Volodomyr Zelensky smirks at December 2019 meeting in Paris as Vladimir Putin discusses the Minsk Agreement (Image: Telegram Zarubin Reporter)

By Ajamu Baraka

Source: Black Agenda Report

The Ukraine conflict was caused by the U.S. backed right wing coup in 2014 and the duplicity of Europeans who claimed to be working for peace. Anyone who supports these actions but claims leftist credentials must be challenged. 

“It is urgent to end this war as soon as possible. This can only be achieved through the success of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion. Ukraine is fighting a legitimate war of self-defense, indeed a war for its survival as a nation. Calling for “peace” in the abstract is meaningless in these circumstances.”(Ukrainian Solidarity Network )

“Social-imperialists,’ that is, socialists in words and imperialists in deeds ( V.I. Lenin) 

“The Western social-imperialist left that is still addicted to its material privileges and illusions of being a part of something called the “West” has a choice that it must make: either you abandon privilege and whiteness and join as class combatants against your bourgeoisie, or you will be considered part of the enemy.” (A.Baraka, The Western Imperial Left’s Collaboration with the Western Bourgeoisie )

The clear implication from this statement issued by the newly formed Ukrainian Solidarity Network is that military victory is the only solution for resolving the conflict in Ukraine. The fact that many of the individuals supporting this network self-identify as leftists, represents a new, perhaps higher form of collaboration with Western and U.S. imperialism that may have ever developed since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945.  I issued an excerpt of my statement in response to the emergence of this network that caused a stir. Here is my statement in full.  

One of the most positive things to emerge from the Collective West’s war in Ukraine is that it helped to expose elements of the U.S. left that have always had a soft, sentimental spot for the West. The arrogance of these Westerners who signed on to this call for more war (see below) is reflected in the fact that they don’t even feel compelled to explain how their morally superior commitment to Ukrainian self-determination against “Putin’s” war is reconciled with the various statements from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former French President Francois Hollande and before them, former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko revealing that the Minsk agreement was just a delaying tactic to prepare for war. 

We ask the Network as we have been asking Zelensky and Biden, the co-coordinators of the White Lives Matter More Movement, how this phase of the conflict that started in 2014 became Putin’s war? Do we just dismiss as Kremlin propaganda that the Russian Federation felt threatened by what appeared to be the de-facto incorporation of Ukraine into NATO as the Ukrainian army was built into the most formidable fighting force in Europe outside of Russia?

Did the Russians not have any legitimate security concerns with NATO missiles facing them from Romania and Poland, a mere six minutes away from Moscow, and that Ukraine was also making a pitch for “defensive” missiles in Ukraine? And how does the Network characterize the conflict in Eastern Ukraine that started in 2014 and produced over 14,000 deaths when the Ukrainian coup government attacked its own citizens, if the current conflict started in February 2022? What happened to the fascist issue in Ukraine that was written about for years but with even more urgency after the coup in 2014? Did the Kremlin plant those stories in the Western press? 

We understand that these are questions that the organizers of the Ukrainian Network will never answer because they do not have to.  As Westerners they can just postulate an assertion and it is accepted. The Network and the Western bourgeoisie declare that the war in Ukraine is Putin’s war and it becomes objective truth – because that is what the West can do and can get away with. It’s called power – white power perhaps? 

The Ukrainian Solidarity Network is the ultimate expression of social imperialism that has become so normalized in the U.S. and Western Europe that it is no longer even recognized. An example from the statement makes the argument that Ukraine has the “right to determine the means and objectives of its own struggle.” That is a recognized left position. But the social imperialists of the West do not extend that principle and right to nations in the global South. In fact, we ask the signers of this call to explain when the coup government of Ukraine became the representatives of the Ukrainian nation and recognized the sovereign will of the people? 

Therefore, it is not a mere coincidence that the main signatories of this Network statement pledging undying support to Ukraine and its project, are also some of the same “left” forces in the forefront of giving left legitimacy to the charge leveled by Western imperialism that the struggling socialist oriented national liberationist states like Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia are nothing more than “authoritarian” states more interested in power than socialist construction. Some of those forces also cheered on the NATO attack against Libya, passionately defended Western intervention in Syria and have been silent on Western plans to violently invade Haiti. 

For the contemporary neocons in the leadership of the Ukrainian network, their commitment to abstract principles, and certainty that they know more than everyone else, objectively place them in the same ideological camp with Obama, Biden, NATO strategists, the Zelensky clown, and Boris Johnson. But they will argue that their positions are different, since they represent something they call the left. 

For a number of individuals who signed on to this pro-Western, pro-war letter, they are in a familiar place. However, I suspect a few of the individuals on that list were probably confused or not paying attention, not thinking about who they would be affiliated with when they signed on.

That of course, is not the case for some of the key supporters of this initiative. Individuals like the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, Eric Draitser of Counterpunch, and Bill Fletcher who normally I would not name specifically but because these individuals and the tendency they represent embody the worst of the arrogant, Western left that in so many cases (not all) objectively provides ideological cover ( rightism with left phraseology) for the imperialist program of Western capital –  they should not be allowed continued left respectability without challenge.

These individuals certainly have not hesitated in offering criticisms of those of us who never wavered from our strategic priority to defeat our primary enemy – the Western white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy. For us everything else represents secondary contradictions at this specific historical moment. And is why we reject the arguments these forces advance about fighting dual imperialisms as anti-dialectical nonsense and a political cover.  

History has demonstrated that it would be a complete disaster if the “collective West” secured a military victory in its proxy war with Russia. For the U.S. empire it would validate their doctrine of “Full spectrum dominance” and the wisdom of their commitment to a military-first strategy to support that doctrine. It would mean that war with China was a certainty.

The commitment to global hegemony by the Western colonial/capitalist elite by any means necessary is why the U.S./EU/NATO Axis of Domination represents an existential threat to the vast majority of humanity. A “left” position on Ukraine should at best be to support a negotiated settlement to end the war before the Dr. Strangeloves making policy in the U.S. create the circumstances that will lead to a nuclear confrontation with either Russia or China. 

The position of support for more war guided by the white-boy fantasy of military victory in Ukraine is madness. For Africans/Black folks, we ask, what self-respecting African would consciously place themselves on the same side with NATO, Europe, and the U.S. settler-state in any conflict? The fact that some continue to end up on the same side with our enemies only affirms that they have made a choice, and that choice is to collaborate with our enemies – which sadly, also makes them the enemy.

‘NATO’s mission’ leaves Ukraine destroyed

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“We are carrying out NATO’s mission.” As Ukraine’s defense minister acknowledges the proxy war, NATO proxy warriors disregard the toll.

(Pierre Crom/Getty Images)

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Unveiling its latest military assistance package to Ukraine – at $3.75 billion, the largest to date — the White House declared that US weapons are intended “to help the Ukrainians resist Russian aggression.”

For their part, Ukrainians on the receiving end see it differently.

“We are carrying out NATO’s mission,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in an interview. “They aren’t shedding their blood. We’re shedding ours. That’s why they’re required to supply us with weapons.” Repeating a rationale offered by his US sponsors in previous wars, including the invasion of Iraq, Reznikov added that Ukraine “is defending the entire civilized world.”

Receiving an endless supply of weapons from NATO countries that shed no blood of their own — all to fulfill their “mission” — is an apt description of Ukraine’s role in the US-led proxy war against Russia. And as one of its staunchest champions, Sen. Lindsey Graham, cheerfully predicted in July, that mission is using Ukraine to “fight to the last person.”

For Ukraine, the costs of fulfilling NATO’s mission are spelled out by former US cabinet secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Today, the pair write, Ukraine’s “economy is in a shambles, millions of its people have fled, its infrastructure is being destroyed, and much of its mineral wealth, industrial capacity and considerable agricultural land are under Russian control. Ukraine’s military capability and economy are now dependent almost entirely on lifelines from the West — primarily, the United States.”

Rather than seeing Ukraine’s war-ravaged, Russian-occupied, Western-dependent condition as a reason to seek a negotiated end, Rice and Gates in fact regard diplomacy as an outcome to avoid.

“Absent another major Ukrainian breakthrough and success against Russian forces, Western pressures on Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire will grow as months of military stalemate pass,” they warn. This result would be “unacceptable”, Rice and Gates conclude, because “any negotiated cease-fire would leave Russian forces in a strong position to resume their invasion whenever they are ready.” That is one possibility. Another possibility, unmentioned by the authors, is that a negotiated cease-fire leads to a permanent one. This would entail finally addressing the grievances of Ukraine’s ethnic Russian population – the proximate cause of the post-2014 Donbas war that preceded Russia’s invasion — as well as addressing Russia’s longstanding security concerns about NATO expansion and advanced weaponry on its borders.

On the latter issue, the Kremlin is far from the only advocate. “One of the essential points we must address — as President Putin has always said — is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia,” French President Emmanuel Macron said last month.

Macron’s comments “appeared to go beyond anything the United States has offered” Russia, the New York Times noted. Unstated by the Times is why such an offer has yet to materialize: as defined by multiple senior US officials right up to President Biden, “NATO’s mission” is not to defend Ukraine, but to use it as a proxy to “weaken” or even cause regime change in neighboring Russia.

Accordingly, the prospect of a negotiated cease-fire must be negated. The US and its allies, Rice and Gates argue, must “urgently provide Ukraine with a dramatic increase in military supplies and capability.” A failure to do so, they warn, could lead to a scenario where “more is demanded of the United States and NATO.” For now, this can thankfully be avoided, because the US enjoys “a determined partner in Ukraine that is willing to bear the consequences of war so that we do not have to do so ourselves in the future.” For proxy warriors, there is indeed no better “partner” than one “willing to bear the consequences of war” fueled from afar.

As a gage of their commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and well-being, consider the merits of Rice and Gates’ attempts to appeal to international law. The US, they write, “has learned the hard way — in 1914, 1941 and 2001 — that unprovoked aggression and attacks on the rule of law and the international order cannot be ignored.” Apparently, the US did not learn the same lesson from invading dozens of countries since 1914 – including under the Bush administration, where the authors played instrumental roles in multiple acts of unprovoked aggression, such as the invasion of Iraq. Gates, who carried on as Defense Secretary under President Obama, continued this legacy by overseeing the US bombing campaign that helped topple Libya’s government.

Predictably, Ukrainian soldiers that “bear the consequences of war” are facing heavy losses. Speaking to Newsweek, retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Andrew Milburn, who has trained and led Ukrainian forces for the private mercenary firm Mozart Group, reports that in the battle for Bakhmut, Ukraine has been “taking extraordinarily high casualties. The numbers you are reading in the media about 70 percent and above casualties being routine are not exaggerated.”

Ukraine is now “taking high casualties on the Bakhmut-Soledar front, quickly depleting the strength of several brigades sent there as reinforcements in the past month,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Western—and some Ukrainian—officials, soldiers and analysts increasingly worry that Kyiv has allowed itself to be sucked into the battle for Bakhmut on Russian terms, losing the forces it needs for a planned spring offensive as it stubbornly clings to a town of limited strategic relevance.” According to one battlefield Ukrainian commander, “the exchange rate of trading our lives for theirs favors the Russians. If this goes on like this, we could run out.”

The prevailing indifference to Ukraine’s death toll was recently underscored when Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, made the mistake of acknowledging it. In a speech, von der Leyen noted that Ukraine has lost 20,000 civilians and 100,000 troops since Russia’s February invasion. The Ukrainian military responded by complaining that this was “classified information,” prompting von der Leyen’s office to edit out the figure from video of her remarks.

https://twitter.com/AZgeopolitics/status/1597913370023579648

Meanwhile, the prevailing rejection of diplomacy has even led one of its staunchest European advocates to effectively renounce it. In an interview with Germany’s Die Zeit, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel claimed that the 2015 Minsk II accords – the internationally backed framework for ending the post-2014 Donbas civil war, premised on granting limited autonomy to Russia-allied eastern Ukrainians – was a ruse.

Minsk, Merkel explained, “was an attempt to give Ukraine time.” And it did so successfully: Ukraine “used this time to get stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today… And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”

Merkel, whose government helped broker Minsk, was one of the few NATO leaders to develop a cooperative relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her comments follow a similar admission from the Ukrainian leader who signed Minsk, Petro Porosenko. “We had achieved everything we wanted,” Poroshenko said in May 2022. “Our goal was to, first, stop the threat, or at least to delay the war – to secure eight years to restore economic growth and create powerful armed forces.” (emphasis added)

The claim by Merkel that Minsk was not intended to make peace, but “to give Ukraine” time to “get stronger” for war has been greeted by Putin and his supporters as confirmation that NATO cannot be trusted to uphold its agreements. (A takeaway newly bolstered by Joe Biden’s recent admission that, despite his campaign promises, the Iran nuclear deal is “dead”).

An alternative explanation is that Merkel is disingenuously attempting to appease pro-war hawks in Germany and beyond, as Moon of Alabama argues. Nicolai Petro, author of the indispensable new book “The Tragedy of Ukraine,” concurs with that interpretation, as he told me in a recent interview. The German and France-brokered Minsk process, Petro argues, were “good faith efforts to bring the hostilities to an end, at least to accomplish a ceasefire from which then further negotiations could be pursued.” The main obstacle, in Petro’s view, came from Ukraine’s far-right Ukrainian nationalists and their allies in Washington, “who basically dismissed the Minsk accords as a non-starter,” and unrealistically sought Ukraine’s complete recapture not only of the Donbas but Crimea as well.

Whether Merkel was being sincere or not, her comments reflect the fact that the aims of the Ukrainian far-right and their DC allies now dominate the NATO states, with voices for peace marginalized and diplomacy shunned.

And now, nearly one year into Russia’s invasion, the proxy war’s NATO cheerleaders have no interest in stopping the bloodshed, despite the open recognition that their mission is helping destroy the country that they claim to defend.

THE WEF AND WHO – ARE THEY RUNNING A DEATH CULT?

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By Peter Koenig

Source: The 4th Media

A falling tree makes more noise than a growing forest
A Tibetan proverb
Let’s hope the silently growing forest represents a mass-awakening.
—-

From the looks and evidence – ever more visible to even the ignorant – we are living in a Death Cult – a Cabal-driven Death Cult, with a key objective to do away with – eliminate – a large segment, if not the majority of the world population.

Who is executing this Death Cult? And on behalf of whom?
Three entities come to mind.

  1. The World Economic Forum (WEF), is a Cologny (lush suburb of Geneva, Switzerland)-registered NGO; a never-voted-for “influencer” organization, that has amassed power and money in the hundreds of millions of dollars, like no other NGO around the word. Its founder and eternal Chairman, Klaus Schwab (84), is an engineer cum economist, with origins linked to the former Third Reich Nazi-leadership.By the way – the WEF is holding their annual Davos conference from 16-20 January 2023. The pathology of this outfit and of those elitist billionaires and corporate honchos attending, is reflected in this year even more dystopian agenda. Have a look at the official program https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2023/about/meeting-overview?gclid=CjwKCAiA8OmdBhAgEiwAShr402rG_ShAgll-Pwx4MjDBTbmhgZDg29ii18ztf-yKlsvgQqdSrVerIBoCCvIQAvD_BwE

This is only the visible agenda. None of us, the commons, know what’s going on behind closed doors in special secretive sessions. We feed on leakages, and as Globalism is fading, they become ever more abundant.

  1. The World Health Organization – WHO – goes as a specialized UN Agency – which in reality it isn’t. It was founded in 1948 by Rockefeller, a eugenist and obsessed globalist, who was (and still is) aiming at controlling the world population through health (and death), and who is hellbent to make the Mother Earth a better place through a One World Order. WHO was then “bought” into the UN system.

At that time, Rockefeller with Standard Oil, had also a monopoly on petrol. He decided that pharmaceuticals, up to the 1950’s, mostly based on plants and plant chemistry – could be made from petro-chemicals.

WHO, according to its bylaws, a disease-preventive health organization, became, thus, largely a curative pharma-based and pharma-pushing organization.

While the bulk of the budget from other UN agencies stems from member countries’ contribution, WHO is funded at least to two thirds or more by the private sector, mostly the pharma industry, as well as the Bill Gates Foundation.

A conflict of interest is more than evident. WHO should not be a UN agency.

WHO – against its scientific staff’s better knowledge, has declared Covid as a deadly pandemic, spreading fear, imposing lockdowns, face masks, social distancing – and more human-denigrating measures.

Eventually, WHO, strongly nudged by the WEF (and the powers behind the WEF), was coercing governments to “vaccinate” their populations with never-before tested genetically modifying mRNA injections, of which nobody but the producing pharma-industry knows the composition – contents that has turned out deadly for tens of millions of people – and mounting.

By the end of 2022, excess mortality in western countries amounts to between 15% and 25% – in some countries even higher.

All of the western used so-called vaccines are, in fact, bioweapons.

This horrendous Vaxx-fraud was also a multi-billion, if not trillion, bonanza for the pharmaceuticals.

The covid jabs also contain sterilization agents for both men and women, resulting already by now in drastically falling birth rates in western countries.

The term “Western Countries” means all of Europe and the worldwide Anglosaxonia. So far, all fits well within the Rockefeller, Gates, Soros et al – eugenist agenda.

WHO is truth censuring through social platforms – NewsGuard, an organization of “True Journalism”, tracking credibility of news and information websites and online misinformation, provides WHO regularly with lists of the most important “influencers” of “misinformation” in matters of health, alias conspiracy theorists; people who do not conform with the official narrative.

WHO forwards this list to the different Social Media Platforms, requesting them to block the accounts of the “perpetrators”, or to clandestinely hide or limit their social media inputs. This is called “shadow banning”.

WHO works closely with the International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. The IFCN has a databank with more than 10,000 “fact-checked false information”, most of them related to WHO dictates.

IFCN is mainly funded by the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Soros Open Society Foundation, Google and Facebook. Coincidentally, the Gates Foundation and the US Government are also the biggest donors of WHO.

This WHO censuring information can be read in full in German, under Point 5 of https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=92120#h05 .

To top it all off, WHO is currently preparing a so-called Pandemic Treaty. Under this Treaty, if approved, WHO’s DG would have the power to declare worldwide pandemics as he, alias the ruling class, sees fit to control the masses.

Compulsory vaccinations could be military enforced. This would be an authority above each of the member countries’ National Constitution. So far trial votations have not succeeded, as several country blocks, for example, in Africa, do not agree.

But the beat goes on with coercing and potentially bribing of country delegates. A final vote should take place in the course of 2023. If approved, the lawless Pandemic Treaty rule should enter into effect at the beginning of 2024.

If so, this is a call on each WHO member to leave WHO.

  1. NATO – the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – has long ceased being a defense alliance of North Atlantic countries. It has become a worldwide war machine with access and use of some 850 US military bases around the world.

NATO is not only a multi-billion-dollar income generator largely for the US Military Industrial Complex (MIC), but it is also an important US GDP engine, contributing an estimated 30% of the US GDP, counting all NATO-related and dependent industries and services.

NATO is the provoker, funder and main executer of the Ukraine-Russia war – the US – Russia proxy-war. Its expansionism has become a monster octopus, stretching its tentacles completely and all-controlling around Mother Earth.

Other than non-stop provoking Russia, NATO also fulfills a role in the Great Reset / UN Agenda 2030 eugenist agenda, as killing is one of its chief purposes.

NATO enters any territory where the “conventional” media lie-machine, and social engineering are failing or not completing their people-ordaining goals fast enough.

Russia, by far the largest and resources-richest country of our planet, was in the US hegemon’s cross-hairs for over a century. The 2014 Maidan Coup, engineered by EU / NATO, was a planned prelude to a war with Russia.

The without scruples NATO war machine would not shy from a hot WWIII – which could easily turn nuclear, all-destructive – and – all-killing.

Playing with Russian ethics, knowing that President Putin has no intention to annihilate a country that up to recently and for over 300 years in the past was an integral part of the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union. Ukraine is inherently, and historically a part of Russia, even as an ally after it became independent in 1991.

Ukraine was forcefully and viciously detached from Russia by western aggression for greed and pathological grandeur.

Now western aggressions may backfire, as President Putin may soon have no other choice than to obliterate what’s left of Ukraine, to finally stop the war – and the senseless killing, the misery of the hapless and suffering population.

Be aware, NATO is ready for weaponized interference wherever a “human-conflict” cannot be resolved by the WEF / WHO oppressive tyrannical means.

——-
We, the People, of the world have largely only little or no saying in how our world, our countries, even our communities are run. And this already for

In the last three years the common People’s exclusion form what is still sold as a democratic process, has reached a pinnacle. With the onset of a fake plandemic at the beginning of 2020 – the beginning of an agenda long ago planned – the UN Agenda 2030 – the beginning of the larger Agenda 21 (all of the 21st Century), officially decided at the UN Environment Conference in Rio in June 1992 – the so-called United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the ‘Earth Summit‘.

The long-haul precursor to his was the 1968 Rockefeller founded Club of Rome’s book “Limits to Growth” (LTG) of 1972. The concepts and principles of this book, LTG, are the blueprint for what is currently – and probably at least for the coming ten to fifty years – being implemented.

LTG is the basis for the Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution — and the UN Agenda 2030, also called WHO’s Decade of Vaccination. Following are the main life-curtailing threats we are facing today – listed not necessarily in order of priority. Remember, they are all inter-linked and inter-acting.

  • Population reduction, a massive genocide, through fake covid “vaxxes” – that are carefully engineered as gene-modifying mRNA killer-injections.
  • The US / EU / NATO provoked war between Russia and Ukraine; a US – Russia proxy-war, pumped up to the tune of about 155 billion dollars-worth of western weaponry and “budget-support” money in less than a year – more than Ukraine’s entire GDP for 2020 ($151 billion).
    Some US$112 billion from the US, the rest from Europe and other western countries.

Most of the money flows right back into the western, mostly US, Military Industrial Complex (MIC), and into the pockets of corrupt politicians (see this interview with Col. Doug Macgregor https://rumble.com/v21yohy-real-america-dan-ball-w-col.-doug-macgregor-zelensky-begs-congress-for-more.html

  • It is about fake “climate change”, fake biodiversity See this https://www.globalresearch.ca/big-hoax-from-climate-change-to-biodiversity/5803442 .
  • Manipulated energy shortages, a proven combined manipulation of “sanctions” on Russia, and the worst western government sponsored terror sabotage act in recent history, the torpedoed Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. Russian hydrocarbons, mostly gas, provided at least 40% of all of Europe’s energy uses.
  • Engineered food shortages, leading to famine – and a new artificial toxic way of food production; geoengineered crop destroying weather catastrophes; food staple speculations; forced supply-chain disruptions and more are responsible for “food shortages”. The world can produce enough food for at least ten billion people, see this https://www.google.com/search?q=fao%3A+there+is+enough+food+in+the+world+to+aliment+12+billion+people&oq=fao%3A+there+is+enough+food+in+the+world+to+aliment+12+billion+people&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.18476j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8; it’s a mere question of banning speculation and introducing a just food distribution system;
  • Compromised banker’s engineered hyper-inflation, leading more rapidly to poverty; crisis after crisis caused demolition of the western economy, bankruptcies, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable food and / or housing, disease and death – genocidal death.
  • Worldwide network of 5G microwaves – and would you believe, and soon to come all-controlling, potentially deadly Sixth Generation – 6G, whose target date is coverage of the entire planet by 2030.
  • Absolute control – via the all-invasive QR-code. See this https://www.globalresearch.ca/beware-qr-code-remember-agenda-id2020/5769266
  • Digitization of everything, the objective of Klaus Schwab’s designed 4th Industrial Revolution (see this https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Industrial-Revolution-Klaus-Schwab/dp/1524758868 ), including
  • Digitization of money – may result in turn-on, turn-off money, expiring money, blocked or canceled money for misbehavior, potentially resulting in lack of sustenance for non-behaviors, no food, no energy, no housing – disease – death
  • Digitization of your brain – transhumanization, robotization – social engineering of the masses, as well as the individual (see Daniel Estulin’s “Tavistock Institute – Social Engineering of the Masses”https://www.amazon.com/Tavistock-Institute-Social-Engineering-Masses/dp/163424043X )
  • Universal Basic Income – (UBI) – can be controlled and is slated to become “You own nothing but are happy” – Klaus Schwab’s glorious ending of the Great Reset, and finally
  • A WHO / pharma controlled worldwide tyrannical “health system” (sic), through a so-called Pandemic Treatywhich – if approved by the World Health Assembly – would overreach every UN / WHO member country’s Constitution, putting the Director General of WHO in charge of health (and death) issues worldwide, in each country.
    It might amount to compulsory vaccination, enforced by the military, for whatever WHO decides is or might be a worldwide threat to health. Even the common flu.

If approved in 2023, the Pandemic Treaty would become effective at the beginning of 2024.

This would be an absolutely lawless rule against the will of ALL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD.

If the Pandemic Treaty is approved – and even if it is not approved – this is a call on all nations to EXIT WHO,which has become a biased pharma-led eugenist-funded terror organization.

The world is faced with a multi-disaster scenario caused by ultra-rich neo-Nazi multi-billionaire elitists and the international data / IT and finance system that controls some 25 to 30 trillion-dollar equivalent of the world’s assets, maybe more – and can leverage every country of this planet to do their bidding.

These are the dark Cult Masters, acting from the shadows of supra-governments, like the US and the European Union, mainly via their well-funded executive, or implementing, instruments – WEF, WHO, NATO.

This is what happened at the beginning of the 2020 covid hoax. The 2010 Rockefeller Report called this first phase – The Lockstep Scenario – see thishttps://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf

Indeed, in unison, all 193 UN member countries (194 WHO members) – their corrupted leaders and media blasted the same fear-imposing message – lockdown, obligatory people-demeaning face masks, social distancing, working from home – so you would lose personal contact with your friends and colleagues.

Today, all these above-mentioned Limits to Growth measures are wrapped in a constant and permanent fear campaign, to demoralize and subjugate people into submission. A fear campaign carried out by mainstream media, all owned by 13 media conglomerates who own 90% of the media worldwide.

In unison they slam down these fear messages in lockstep 24 / 7 / 52 on the world populations. See this https://www.google.com/search?q=13+intenatonal+media+corprations+control+90%25+of+western+world+news&sxsrf=AJOqlzUv_RLeZ5NCjDRAsGdFNNl80bU9AA%3A1673310255329&ei=L7C8Y4rWE4bs1sQPj_G-6AI&ved=0ahUKEwjKqfi63rv8AhUGtpUCHY-4Dy0Q4dUDCA8&oq=13+intenatonal+media+corprations+control+90%25+of+western+world+news&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQDDoKCAAQRxDWBBCwA0oECEEYAEoECEYYAFCqClihC2CFIWgBcAF4AIABjAKIAaEDkgEFMC4xLjGYAQCgAQHIAQjAAQE&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

These corrupt media moguls are paid billions of dollars to comply with the power-money psychopaths’ request, to spread the world with lies – with deadly lies. They are party to the mass-murderers, as they know what they are doing. Their management must face the laws of justice.

Just as a parenthesis, looking at what these US Treasury generated dollars really are: They are worthless, unbacked money – dollars that are simple debt for the US Treasury; debt that is never paid back.

Or as the former FED Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2011, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that”. See this  https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=AJOqlzVj6Us4MQ0TkbEiXYVK4DJ_Yg09Ew:1673221297413&q=greenspan+to+a+journalist:+we+will+never+pay+back+our+debt.+we+will+just+print+new+money&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi8gMCIk7n8AhW1HLkGHRJsAC4QBSgAegQIBxAB&biw=877&bih=412&dpr=2.19#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7d32db1c,vid:Ck3FuTzZvhI

Therefore, money dished out to corrupt organization is worthless for the “spender”- the creator of the money, the US of A, but they buy the world for the recipients.

We are living in the midst of a Cabal-directed Death Cult.

The majority of the people haven’t noticed yet.

But the awakening has begun.

Remember the Tibetan Proverb of the silently growing forest. And as trees connect with each other, so do humans by their spirituality – not transhumans, but humans what we still are.

And let us never an abject power-hungry non-elected criminal like Klaus Schwab, with his roots in the Third Reich, and his by nobody desired NGO, the World Economic Forum – WEF – dominate humanity.

May the forest grow to a critical mass – that can by its sheer solidarity, togetherness of thought and will power overcome the pathological objectives of the psychopaths wish for power and money dominance.

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 lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and 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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

The Democrats Are Now the War Party

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The Democratic Party has become the party of permanent war, fueling massive military spending which is hollowing out the country from the inside and flirting with nuclear war.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost.com

The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested. 

The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide. 

There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present. 

The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war. 

This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

“But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported. “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry. 

“As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network. “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned. 

Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year. 

Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a  circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

“The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year. 

This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled.  In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery. 

“This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.” 

A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.

The Twitter Files reveal influence of Russiagate disinformation

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The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story shows how the Russian boogeyman is wielded to serve political goals and bury inconvenient facts.

(Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

By Aaron Maté

Source: Aaron Maté Substack

Since 2016, US audiences have been flooded with claims that Russia has waged a “sweeping and systematic” interference campaign to influence them, and that Donald Trump and a bottomless cast of associates were somehow complicit.

No “scandal” in US history has yielded such a lengthy rap sheet of falsehoods, debunkings, and retractions. The Mueller investigation and parallel Congressional inquiries found no evidence for the all-consuming theories of a Trump-Kremlin conspiracy. Allegations of Russian government email hacking and social media operations are equally dubious, most notably on the foundational allegation that Russian intelligence stole Democratic Party emails and gave them to Wikileaks.

Even if we were to ignore the evidentiary gaps and accept each assertion about “Russian interference” at face value, the totality could in no way justify even a shred of the multi-year Russia-mania. With no shame and without end, prominent political and media voices have imbued Russian bots, memes, and hackers — real or imagined — with the power to “sow chaos” in US society, swing election results, and even become worthy of comparison to the attacks of Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

Given the Iraq WMD-esque preponderance of hyperbole and outright lies in the incessant claims of Russian subterfuge, it is reasonable to conclude that the US intelligence officials and political-media actors who have spread them are waging exactly what they accuse Russia of: a politically motivated disinformation campaign aimed at influencing the general public.

The newly disclosed Twitter Files — a cache of internal communications from the social media giant — offer new evidence of one of the Russiagate disinformation campaign’s core functions: protecting the rule of domestic elites, particularly in the Democratic Party.

In two consecutive presidential elections, the Russian boogeyman has been invoked to stigmatize and silence reporting on the Democratic candidate. It began in 2016, when journalists who reported on the stolen DNC emails’ revelations about Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches or the DNC’s bias against Bernie Sanders were blamed for Trump’s victory and deemed to be unwitting Kremlin dupes promoting “disinformation” – in reality, factual material that embarrassed the pre-ordained winner.

Four years later, that same playbook was deployed for Clinton’s successor at the top of Democratic ticket, Joe Biden. In the weeks before the November 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook censored the New York Post’s reporting about the contents Hunter Biden’s laptop on the grounds that the computer material could be “Russian disinformation.” The Post’s stories detailed how Hunter Biden traded on his family name to secure lucrative business abroad, and raised questions about Joe Biden’s denials of any involvement.

The US media responded to the suppression of the laptop story with indifference or even approval. In one notable case, Glenn Greenwald resigned from the outlet that he co-founded, The Intercept, after its editors attempted to censor his coverage of the laptop controversy. Even stories that had long been public — such as the unqualified Hunter receiving an $80,000-per-month Burisma board seat just months after his father’s administration helped overthrow Ukraine’s government – were effectively off-limits.

There was never a shred of evidence that Russia was behind the laptop story, but that was of no consequence. Dutiful media editors, reporters, and pundits took their cues from a group of more than 50 former intelligence officials, who issued a statement declaring that the Hunter Biden laptop story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

These intelligence veterans’ claim was in fact a classic Russiagate disinformation operation, as the Twitter files newly underscore.

Hollywood and it’s Useful Idiots: Propaganda for the War in Ukraine, Big Pharma, and Every Other Globalist Agenda

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By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Source: Silent Crow News

Alistair Cooke, a British-born writer who became a BBC film critic early in his career who worked mainly in the United States as a journalist, television personality, radio broadcaster had expressed his honest point of view on Hollywood’s film industry when he said that “I believe that Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings.” Since World War II, Hollywood has been one of the main instruments of propaganda for globalist agendas. It began with US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt who established the US Office of War Information (OWI) from June 1942 until September 1945 whose job was to regulate newspapers, radio broadcasts, Hollywood films and all other forms of media in order to propagandize the public in an effort to gain support for America’s involvement in the war. The OWI launched a global propaganda campaign that oversaw revisions in collaboration with Hollywood producers, and at times, even rejected film scripts that portrayed the US as a negative force on the world stage.  The OWI’s main job was to reject any film that had anti-war material.  There was also the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) which was a division under the OWI that worked with Hollywood executives to decide which movies could benefit the war effort, for example, it authorized several films that had anti-Japanese propaganda, sort of like todays anti-Russia propaganda you find in many Hollywood films. However, over the last 20 years or so, Hollywood propaganda has even become even worse with the help of its Hollywood celebrities who have become mouthpieces for globalist agendas, so let’s call them for what they really are, ‘Useful Idiots.’

It’s amazing that for the last couple of decades many Hollywood celebrities have become self-described experts and spokespeople for US wars, Big Pharma, climate change and other globalist agendas.  Hollywood celebrities act and sing for a living, wear expensive name-brand clothing, and in some cases exploit their children to be part of the new woke culture. The so-called “Hollywood activists” such as George Clooney, U2 lead singer Bono, and the rest of them are phony as they can be. However, in all fairness, there are a handful of celebrities who do not, in any way fall into that category including Mel Gibson who is outspoken critic on Jewish power in Hollywood, comedian and actor George Carlin (R.I.P.), Marlon Brando, John Lennon (R.I.P.) and a handful of others.  When it comes to Israeli occupation and genocide against the Palestinians, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, singer-songwriter and composer Roger Waters, Natalie Portman, and actress Vanessa Redgrave come to mind. In 1978, Vanessa Redgrave won an Oscar for best supporting actress in the film ‘Julia’ gave an acceptance speech at the 50th Academy Awards which she denounced Israel’s war against the Palestinians.  Redgrave said that “a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world.”  The British actress had claimed in the past that far-right Jewish Defense League targeted her for producing the 1977 documentary ‘The Palestinian’. 

Most Hollywood celebrities who toe the line will do and say anything to remain relevant in the film and television industries, so they also follow the mainstream media narratives or listen to their Hollywood bosses, or maybe they are just dumbed-down individuals, just ask outspoken actor and comedian Ricky Gervais who had an iconic opening monologue in the Golden Globe awards ceremony in 2020 that will be remembered for the ages:

So, if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and fuck off, OK? It’s already three hours long. Right, let’s do the first award

Sean Penn and Ben Stiller: War against Russia

Although talented, two of the most idiotic actors in Hollywood when it comes to the war in Ukraine is Sean Penn and Ben Stiller.  Last month, Sean Penn recently visited and lent Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky his Oscar while Zelensky awarded Penn the Order of Merit honor because he is “doing everything to help us gather international support” according to Reuters.  The article ‘Sean Penn visits Ukraine’s Zelensky, loans him an Oscar’ stated that “Hollywood actor and director Sean Penn, sanctioned by Russia for criticizing its war in Ukraine, loaned his Oscar statuette to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy during a visit to Kyiv on Tuesday.” 

The other actor is Ben Stiller who played an idiotic model in Zoolander and many other films called Zelensky his hero.  According to NBC News ‘Ben Stiller meets with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, tells Ukrainian leader ‘You’re my hero’ said that “The comedy star praised the Ukrainian president — himself a former comedian and actor — as a hero during the meeting, telling him: “You’re amazing” and that “It’s a great honor for me,” Stiller, who was appointed a UNHCR goodwill ambassador in July 2018, said in video capturing the meeting. “It’s really wonderful, you’re my hero. You’re amazing.”  So Stiller jumps on the Zelensky bandwagon just like most of his Hollywood friends to help the Western narrative that the war in Ukraine is about “freedom and democracy.”

But I want to go back to Sean Penn and his incredible hypocrisy when it comes to US wars and regime change.  In 2011, US President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton gave US forces and NATO the greenlight to remove Libyan President, Muammar Gaddafi from power which destroyed Libya in the process.  Here is the interview with Sean Penn on CNN on his claim that it was all Gaddafi’s fault:

Obviously, the war on Libya was run by the Democratic Party so for Penn it was justified.  Now here is Sean Penn questioning the Bush Administration on WMDs in Iraq on December 15th, 2002.  The war on Iraq was basically a Republican Party affair under the Bush neocons:

Sean Penn’s hypocrisy is clearly staggering. He is a total propagandist for the US war machine.  Although Sean Penn has supported Venezuela’s revolution and other causes such as the Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 where he founded the J/P Haitian Relief Organization which operated a 55,000 person tent camp for victims of the earthquake, he is still a mouthpiece for the Democratic party and any regime change operation they deem necessary, so it is fair to say that both, Sean Penn and Ben Stiller are useful idiots.

Celebrities who Proudly Received their Covid-19 Vaccines

I am not going to get into the global lockdown and the dangers of the Covid-19 vaccine and the ridiculous enforcement of wearing facemasks or social distancing rules, so here are what several celebrities have posted on Instagram and twitter after they received their shots :

Lady Gaga:

“Double vaxed + boosted…don’t 4get to still wear a mask this sh*ts contagious ,

America Ferrara:

“Boosted for the holidays!  Thankful for the miracle of science and medicine allowing me to be with my loved ones safely this year 

Amber Heard:

 “Did someone say ‘vaccine queen’?! ” 

Sean Penn (No Surprise here!):

“I’m a lucky man. Lucky to work alongside the ⁦@LAFD & our great frontline @CoreResponse staff, our partners at Carbon Health, USC, & Curative Lab,” he tweeted. “We test & vaccinate thousands per day. We need your support to get more people lucky. Text CORE to 707070 to donate.”

*Note: Sean Penn was interviewed by Yahoo Entertainment and said that “My deep belief personally, is that these [vaccines are] no different than having everybody being able to drive 100 miles an hour in a car” he continued “This is one of those things that should be mandatory. That we all get with the exception — the very few exceptions — for those people who, for whatever medical condition, might offset it, but I do think that vaccines need to be mandatory, and I do think that business — all businesses, the movie business, all businesses — need to take the lead and to be not so timid in dealing with their collective bargaining agreement partners.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger:

 “All right, I just got my vaccine, and I would recommend it to anyone and everyone, come with me if you want to live.”

Despite all the evidence that the Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous and that wearing a facemask or social distancing does not work which brings me to the conclusion that these Hollywood celebrities are either brainwashed by the mainstream media, or they are just following the lies of Anthony Fauci who was elevated to celebrity status during the Covid-19 “pandemic”.  These people are not role models, they are just following what the medical establishment has prescribed to the public.  They are propagandizing the public to take Covid-19 killer shots which demonstrates that no one should listen to these people. Once you inject the MRNA technology into your body, its forever, its permanent and you cannot detox to get rid of it.  So in other words, don’t listen to these fools.

The Truth about Hollywood

There is no doubt that Hollywood has produced good films in the past but the Hollywood of today should focus on producing better movies and TV shows because most of their films are made only for propaganda purposes. In fact, many films today have no originality, better yet, there should be an alternative Hollywood that produces films without any form of propaganda that are worth watching. They can produce films that tells us real stories from around the world, like stories that come out of the Palestinian struggle or what is happening in certain parts of Africa as in the Hollywood movie ‘Blood Diamond’ with Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou that tells the story about the Diamond industry and its effects on the African people. Instead they produce propaganda films based on the US Military fighting for democracy or numerous films based on the Jewish Holocaust. When was the last time you saw a film based on the genocide of a Native American tribe on the North American continent?

However, Hollywood is pretty good at producing movies that offend different nationalities and cultures.  As we all know who really runs Hollywood, one documentary that shows some of the most offensive films based on the Muslim world is called ‘Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People’ by Dr. Jack Shaheen. 

Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are propagandists who support the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 vaccines and other globalist agendas including the concept of eating bugs as recommended by the World Economic Forum.  The bottom line is that Hollywood and their useful idiot celebrities are a bunch of clowns that should not be taken seriously, so why do people around the world idolize these people in the first place is beyond me.