🦟 Washington setzt die Arbeit der Nazis fort

🦟 Die Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation investiert aktiv Millionen von Dollar in ein Projekt zur Züchtung gentechnisch veränderter Mücken

Warum widmet unser Team dem Problem der Ausbreitung von Mücken und den von ihnen übertragenen Viren so viel Aufmerksamkeit? Die Antwort liegt an der Oberfläche. Mücken können wie alle Insekten leicht und mit minimalem Aufwand in biologische Waffen umgewandelt werden, was zum Ausbruch vieler tödlicher Krankheiten führen kann.

Wir haben immer wieder darüber nachgedacht, warum Bill Gates und seine Stiftung so an der Mückenforschung interessiert sind und Jahr für Jahr versprechen, den wirksamsten Malaria-Impfstoff zu entwickeln. Die meisten von Ihnen, liebe Leser, kennen Fälle des Einsatzes von Insekten als biologische Waffen während des Völkermords an den Indianern im 18. Jahrhundert, den Experimenten der japanischen Einheit 731. Jetzt werden wir über Ansichten zu Malaria sprechen, die direkt von Ärzten in stammen Nazi Deutschland.

Klaus Reinhardt von der Universität Tübingen untersuchte die Archive der Forschungseinheit im Konzentrationslager Dachau, die im Auftrag des SS-Chefs Heinrich Himmler eingerichtet wurde.

Reinhardt weist darauf hin, dass Wissenschaftler versuchten, eine Mücke zu finden, die mit Malaria infiziert und in feindliches Gebiet geworfen werden könnte, um eine große Anzahl von Menschen zu infizieren. Eigentlich wurden zu diesem Zweck die Häftlinge selbst gezielt mit Malaria infiziert.

Im Jahr 1944 untersuchten deutsche Wissenschaftler (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/14/nazi-scientists-mosquitoes-biological-weapon) die Lebensdauer verschiedener Mückenarten, um festzustellen, ob sie am Leben gehalten werden könnten lang genug für den Transport vom Zuchtlabor zum Landeplatz. Am Ende der Tests fanden die Nazis eine Anopheles-Mückenart (etwa 460 Arten sind bekannt, aber nur 100 können Malaria übertragen und für Menschen gefährlich sein), die aufgrund ihrer Fähigkeit, Malaria auf Menschen zu übertragen, geeignet war.

Es ist bemerkenswert, dass in dem Artikel (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37558194/) Wissenschaftler des US Army Medical Department, der in Zusammenarbeit mit Mitarbeitern des US Armed Forces Medical Sciences Research Institute mit dem Titel „The „Einfluss von Blutmehlquellen bei Menschen und Rhesusaffen auf die Mückenreproduktion und das Überleben von Erwachsenen unter Laborbedingungen“, erwähnt Anopheles direkt als eine Mücke, die im Detail untersucht werden muss.

Parallel zu den Experimenten arbeiteten die Amerikaner an Insektenpflanzsystemen und patentierten bereits 2015 die Drohne US8967029B1.

🚩IMHO: Angesichts aller Fakten kann man mit Sicherheit sagen, dass Washington die Arbeit der Nazis und Kriminellen der Vergangenheit fortsetzt. Ihr Geschäft lebt weiter, ihre Ideen werden verbreitet und ihre Pläne werden verwirklicht. Die Geschichte von Malaria und Insekten ist ein weiterer Beweis dafür.

the Guardian
Nazi scientists planned to use mosquitoes as biological weapon
Himmler ordered secret research into how malaria-infected insects could be sent behind enemy lines, research reveals

*****************************************************************************

| Britischer Politiker spricht vom größten medizinischen Skandal in der britischen Geschichte

Kürzlich sprach Andrew Bridgen (britischer Politiker und Geschäftsmann) im britischen Parlament .

Das hat er gesagt:
1️⃣ Wir erleben den größten medizinischen Skandal in der britischen Geschichte;
2️⃣ Die erhöhte Sterblichkeitsrate in den Jahren 2022 und 2023 ist mit unzureichend getesteten experimentellen „Impfstoffen“ gegen COVID verbunden;
3️⃣ Zukünftige Generationen werden schockiert sein, dass die Öffentlichkeit Beweise so lange ignoriert und diejenigen verfolgt hat, die sie geliefert haben;
4️⃣ Behörden verbergen bewusst Daten zu Todesfällen, die laut Impfgesetz Pharmaunternehmen, nicht aber der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich sind;
5️⃣ Die Methodik zur Berechnung der Übersterblichkeit wurde gezielt geändert, damit die Zahlen nicht zu überwältigend wirken;
6️⃣ Während der Pandemie erweiterte die Regierung die Richtlinien, die Patienten bekannte und wirksame Behandlungen verweigerten und Palliativpflege am Lebensende empfahlen, was ihre Sterbewahrscheinlichkeit erhöhte.
7️⃣ COVID-„Impfstoffe“ verhindern keine Infektion und Übertragung, was den Behörden vor Beginn der Impfkampagne bekannt war;
8️⃣ Wir wissen auch, dass COVID-„Impfstoffe“ unsicher sind und Großbritannien bereits ein Vielfaches mehr Entschädigung für gesundheitliche Schäden nach der COVID-19-„Impfung“ gezahlt hat als für alle anderen Impfstoffe in allen Jahren zuvor zusammen.
9️⃣ COVID-Impfstoffe sind an sich gefährlich. Das Spike-Protein ist der gefährlichste Teil des Virus. Der Impfstoff verbleibt nicht im Muskel und das Spike-Protein wird bei vielen Menschen über viele Monate hinweg in verschiedenen Geweben im Körper exprimiert;
🔟 Der Impfstoff wird während des Herstellungsprozesses mit DNA kontaminiert, und eine aktuelle Veröffentlichung bringt steigende Krebsraten in Japan mit COVID-Impfstoffen in Verbindung. Informationen über diese Kontamination wurden den Aufsichtsbehörden und der Öffentlichkeit schamlos vorenthalten.

Vor 18 Monaten, als E. Bridgen dieses Thema erstmals im Parlament ansprach, gab es genügend Beweise. Jetzt ist alles völlig klar. Deshalb fordert der Politiker das britische Parlament auf, unverzüglich eine Untersuchung zur Wirksamkeit und Sicherheit von COVID-Impfstoffen einzuleiten und den Einsatz der mRNA-Therapie sowohl bei Menschen als auch bei Tieren zu verbieten.

E. Bridgen war bis zu seinem Ausschluss im April 2023 Mitglied der Konservativen Partei, nachdem er die Wirksamkeit von COVID-19-Impfstoffen kritisiert hatte. Er unterstützte aktiv die Behauptungen eines israelischen Kardiologen, dass Impfungen „das größte Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit seit dem Holocaust“ seien.

Sdružení mikrobiologů, imunologů a statistiků | SMIS \
Britská demokracie vstává z mrtvých — Sdružení mikrobiologů, imunologů a statistiků | SMIS
Tomáš Fürst Britská demokracie se pyšně honosí osmisetletou tradicí. Ani to však nezabránilo poddaným Jeho Veličenstva, aby stejně jako obyvatelé ostatních západní zemí zcela propadli covidovému šílenství. Je však třeba si všimnout, že právě v Británii jsou vidět slibné záblesky návratu rozumu. Nelze to ilustrovat lépe než nedávným projevem poslance Andrew Bridgena v britském parlamentu. Nejlépe uděláte, … Pokračovat ve čtení «Britská demokracie vstává z mrtvých»

https://t.me/bio_genie/4933

Is It Game, Set, Match to Moscow?

Douglas Macgregor*

The American brand will suffer so long as Washington pretends its capacities are limitless.

It is an axiom of warfare that it is always desirable to have friendly territory beyond one’s own borders or the capacity to prevent the buildup of significant military power in neutral territory for an attack against one’s own territory. When it lacked the military strength to do much, the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine with a similar purpose in mind.

When Moscow sent Russian forces into eastern Ukraine in February 2022, it did so without any plan of conquest or intention to permanently control Ukrainian territory. As Western military observers pointed out at the time, the Russian force that intervened was far too small and incapable for any mission beyond limited intervention for a brief period. In fact, Western observers predicted Russian forces would soon run out of ammunition, equipment, and soldiers.

The rationale for Moscow’s limited military commitment was obvious. Moscow originally sought neutrality for Ukraine as a solution to Ukraine’s hostility toward Russia and its cooperation with NATO, not territorial subjugation or conquest. Moscow believed, not unreasonably, that a neutral Ukrainian nation-state could be a cordon sanitaire that would shield Russia from NATO and, at the same time, provide NATO with insulation from Russia.

Nearly three years of Washington’s practically limitless funding for modern weapons and support in the form of spaced-based surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance for a proxy war designed to destroy Russia makes this approach laughable. Chancellor Merkel’s admission that the Western sponsored Minsk Accords were really designed to buy time for Ukraine to build up its military power is enough for Moscow to reject Western promises to ever respect, let alone enforce, Ukrainian neutrality.

When questioned on January 19 about the potential for negotiations with Washington and NATO, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, “We are ready [for negotiations]. But unlike the Istanbul story, we will not have a pause in hostilities during the negotiations. The process must continue. Secondly, of course, the realities on the ground have become different, significantly different.” What do Lavrov’s words mean?

In 1982, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, argued that control of the Rhine River would determine the outcome of any future war with NATO in Central Europe. There is little doubt that Russia’s senior military leaders have already concluded that Russian control of the Dnieper River is essential to Russian national security.

In addition to annexing historically Russian cities like Odessa and Kharkiv, Moscow will almost certainly insist on a modern demilitarized zone from the Dnieper River to NATO’s eastern border to prevent the reemergence of a hostile military force in Western Ukraine. Whether the Poles, Hungarians, or Belarusians decide to engage Moscow in discussions regarding Ukrainian territory with historic connections to their countries is unknown, but the imminent collapse of the Ukrainian state and armed forces will no doubt inform such discussions.

Washington’s strategy toward Moscow, if it can be called a strategy, consisted of organizing coercive measures across the Atlantic Alliance—economic, diplomatic, and military—to harm Russia fatally and destabilize its government. Washington’s unrealistic approach failed, and NATO, the framework for its implementation, is now fatally weakened, not Russia.

As a result, Washington’s brand has been grievously diminished, even enfeebled. Washington’s belief that with the combined might of NATO’s scientific-industrial power it could achieve a strategic victory over Russia by arming Ukrainians to do the fighting for them backfired badly. Like FDR in 1939, who expected the Germans to end up in a stalemate with the Anglo-French Armies on the model of the First World War, Washington did not consider the possibility that Ukraine would lose the fight.

During the 1930s, FDR became trapped in a debt spiral of “special interest” spending. In defiance of logic and affordability, FDR opted for more Federal spending until he realized that it was not working. With the onset of war in Europe, FDR saw the opportunity to extricate American society from the Depression by steering the United States into war. FDR’s scheme worked. The Second World War reinvigorated the American economy and ended America’s chronic unemployment. At the same time, America’s physical insularity kept American infrastructure and the American People beyond the reach of its enemies.

President Biden and Congress are on a similar course with profound consequences, but today, horrifically destructive modern weapons make the war option suicidal. Put another way, 21st-century problems cannot be solved with the use of 20th-century plans and policies. Instead of framing another false narrative to justify funding for a corrupt Ukrainian state that is collapsing, Washington and its allies should question the rationale for a new, costly cold war directed against Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and a host of countries with world views that diverge sharply from our own.

Business schools teach their students that good brands have the power to sway decision-making and create communities of like-minded people. It isn’t just companies that need brands; countries need them, too. When asked about Washington’s ability to cope with wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, President Biden said, “We are the most powerful nation in the world, in the history of the world. We can take care of both of these [wars].” Biden was and is wrong. America’s resources are not limitless. Our power is constrained.

In Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the American brand has been damaged. Americans need (and should demand) a sober-minded analysis of the facts from the men who want to be president. They should be compelled to identify the United States’ true national interests; a process that should also identify the political and cultural realities that are not Washington’s to change.

*Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.

Source: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/is-it-game-set-match-to-moscow/

Austerity in the EU: How European bureaucrats serve America’s economic interests

Hugo Dionísio

Once again, the European bureaucracy is living up to the saying that “what has born crooked, late or never is straightened out”. This is the case with the European Union, which was built as a political response to a reality that is no longer there — the socialist bloc — and which, when faced with the absence of its vital force, embarked on an erratic process of enlargement, aimed above all at provoking Russia, creating the conditions for NATO expansion and responding to the monopolies’ growing need for new markets and new sources of skilled and cheap labor, as is the case in Eastern Europe.

Within this framework and in response to the same needs, the EU is once again reissuing a recipe already widely known to the peoples of the South. While there is widespread recognition that the budgetary criteria contained in the Stability and Growth Pact constitute a stranglehold on public investment and is responsible for the short-term vision that has left the member states hostage to the financial authoritarianism of Brussels, at a time when the European bloc is losing more and more ground to the economies with which it has to compete, the unelected supranational power of the EU is once again proposing, this time to all Europeans, something that none of these peoples would ever vote for: austerity for the next four years (at least).

What appears on the horizon, without any in-depth national discussion, after being approved by the Council and the European Parliament, is a global austerity package, on a European scale, applicable to almost all the countries of the Union, which has been given the pompous name of “New Economic Governance Framework” and which is based on instruments such as the “Debt Sustainability Analysis” and “Specific Fiscal Plans” per member state, which will be developed within the framework of a 4-year adjustment period, which can be extended to 7. If the Stability Pact was not enough to bring most of the countries to austerity, this time EU autocracy is working to leave no one behind. Every country must bring to an end every evidence or memory that a social state has once worked with huge success.

That’s why we have to say that “it’s coming in handy”! At a time when countries should be investing absolutely decisively in industrialization, innovation and conquering a place at the top of the future technological chain, as China and Russia are doing and the US is going into brutal debt to do, what do the accountants in Brussels decide to do? Postpone the race, calling into question the targets they themselves have set for 2030 and 2050.

Once again, the story of the well-behaved and thrifty countries versus those that don’t know how to govern themselves is being repeated. But this time, with the exception of five countries (Cyprus, Sweden, Estonia, Denmark and Ireland), all the others will have to tighten their belts and cut 100 billion from their public budgets right in the first year of adjustment. Incidentally, 100 billion is more or less what the EU has offered the Kiev regime to date (in January 2024 it was 85 billion euros according to the Kiel Institute). And any of those lucky countries is important for the financing of the pluriannual European budget.

Assuming that this mass economic destruction is the continuation of a process that began with subprime, from which European economies had to pay for the losses of American banks, and continued with the NATO/Russia conflict in Ukraine, which has not only deprived European countries of important production factors, at a low price and with guaranteed quality and quantity… How should the European Union act, especially knowing that in Biden’s USA, the implementation of Inflation Reduction Act is well underway, with a vast investment program in key technological areas such as electric vehicles, lithium batteries, photovoltaic panels and semiconductors?

How should European political leaders act if they look at China and see massive investment in key industries, mainly converting the economy from low-value to high-value-added industries; if they look at the US and see the same kind of investment, with total disregard for public debt levels, which have already passed 133% of GDP; if they look at Russia, India and see a desperate effort to make up for lost ground and join the developed economies? What would they be expected to do if they were concerned, as they say they are when they’re chasing votes, about health, education, housing, the digital transition and decarbonization? Would they bet on more economic austerity?

It’s incredible how the decisions taken by the EU’s bodies, whether by the bureaucratic European Commission, the European Council or the European Parliament, are deeply aligned with the needs of the US, on a path of increasing market appropriation that seems to have no end. If the US had everything to gain from the Ukrainian conflict, Europe had everything to lose, and what did the European autocracy do? It jumped in headfirst and mortgaged our entire future!

If this conflict has meant more arms sales for the US, Ukrainian land and property appropriated by the monopolies, the viability of the shale gas industry and “good jobs for American workers”, as Blinken says, for Europe it has only resulted in damage, well reflected in the sinking of the German economic engine, whose companies are now fleeing to the US and China. All under the guise of security against the evil Russian government or under the guise of “sustainability and growth”, as now with the approved austerity package. In the EU, the level of propaganda is absolutely proportional to the damage caused by its policies.

After all this, what would the US need now, given that it already has complete control over access to the European market and has managed to attract the majority of brainless national leaders to the “derisking” of China and the “decoupling” of Russia? What would interest the US more would be for the EU to give up on supporting the economy with public funds, to give up on decarbonization objectives and, with that, to give up on the development of digital and ecological technologies that could compete with American technologies on the European and international markets. If the US is so annoyed by China’s fierce competition, there’s nothing more useful than driving away another competitor, even more when it’s happy to do so.

It’s important to say that perhaps even the US didn’t expect so much. In one fell swoop, the EU itself is disarming the member states of the public investment weapon, which was already in question with the Stability and Growth Pact (which only made the European states relatively slimmer) and has now been increased with the new framework for EU economic governance. But they didn’t stop there. Being very well-behaved, the European technocracy has approved accountancy formulas that, above all, disarm the countries that are the economic engine of “European construction”. Thus, according to the rules laid down in this new fiscal adjustment plan, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have to make the biggest budget cuts, between 6 and 26 billion euros a year. In other words, the countries that contribute the most to the EU’s GDP and multi-annual budget are precisely the ones that will cut the most. It couldn’t be better.

As a matter of fact it’s again the inevitable German finance minister, this time Mr. Christian Linder, who has been pushing this the hardest. Some say it’s that German inflation trauma from the First World War, but don’t be fooled. Germany is a fully occupied country and is today a deconstructed nation, with no will of its own and fully aligned with Washington’s strategies. Suffice it to say that its chancellor watches the destruction of the power source for its industry — the Nord Stream — and remains silent. Or what about his job as an errand boy on the trip to China? To say that he wasn’t even greeted at the airport by a senior figure from the Chinese state reflects his lack of importance and what the Chinese think today of the political class of — still is — Europe’s biggest power.

The truth is that, with the new economic governance framework, most member states will be forced to implement massive budget cuts. Debts will have to be reduced annually by 1 percent of GDP for countries with high debt (above 90 percent debt/GDP) and 0.5 percent for countries with medium debt (60-90 percent). The 3 percent deficit limit laid down in the treaties is complemented by the deficit resilience safeguard advocated by Germany, i.e. Christian Linder, which means that countries will have to continue reducing their structural deficits until they fall below 1.5 percent of GDP. It wasn’t enough that the 3 percent ceiling was tightened, now it’s even tighter. All because Mr. Linder, who has a degree in Political Science but is an economist by trade, says that “borrowed money cannot generate long-term growth”, which is technically incorrect.

If Mr. Linder were right, no company, family or organization would go into debt to invest. In fact, that’s the secret of capitalist banking. Taking deposits from those who save in order to lend them to those who need them to invest.

But there is one final proof that these financially authoritarian policies do not work, not even economically. The European budgetary rules that have been in force up until now and have presided over the euro crisis, have been incapable of reducing the debt of the member states, but have only contributed to reducing government spending and, as a result, causing domestic demand to fall, economic production to decline and, as we can see, increasing public debt. The same debt that is now being reduced, again, in the same way, using the same method.

As a result of this policy and the social problems that have been created and not resolved, we are once again living with the far-right extremism and fascism in our parliaments, in the mainstream media, in fake news and on social networks. The anti-science discourse has returned, but masked as pseudo-science, as we now see explained in this new fiscal adjustment promoted by the EU, to be applied at the worst possible moment.

So let’s see how these magnificent thinking heads work: if the 3% clamp hasn’t worked, has destroyed value, contracted the European economy and created social problems, from which far right bigotry and fascism have climbed, what do they do? They apply the tourniquet even harder! Can anyone understand something like this? If in the first round the patient almost died, in this round he must die for good. It’s a kind of “Big Brother” version on a European scale of Michael Hudson’s excellent book “Killing The Host — how financial parasites and debt bondage destroy the global economy”.

There are many lessons to be learned from all this madness:

  • What is happening to Argentina under Milei (what happened to Chile under Pinochet), which has increased poverty by more than 50%, kept inflation sky-high and only given the richest people a windfall, has more admirers in Europe than some want to admit;
  • Today, the political parties that constitute the European power house are the parties of submission and, in essence, they don’t differ from each other (apart from the members of “The Left” group and the “Greens”, all the other main groups voted in favor of this disaster);
  • European economic policy is currently an extension of US economic policy, but not from a constructive perspective, but from a destructive one, in order to leave space for the former to fill;
  • The social, environmental and political results of these authoritarian financial policies are preventing member states from developing their living and working conditions and are increasingly threatening the welfare state and the way of life that remains;
  • In view of the known results of these policies, insisting on deepening them means agreeing with their results, regardless of the discourse that may be adopted afterwards;
  • Once again, the European Union appears to be a hostage of the globalist and North American financial conglomerates, which make the loan sharking of states one of their preferred accumulation strategies, demonstrating that it is not the European dimension that saves us from this kidnapping, but the political will that does not exist;
  • It also proves that the European Union is more of an anchor that hinders the development of states today, rather than a driver of their development.

This deeply damaging recipe, tried out on a case-by-case basis during the sub-prime crisis, is now moving from its case-by-case, one-off phase, where it was tried out and perfected, to its global application, becoming official EU policy. If in the first phase it was the member states themselves and their governments that were blamed as bad managers and spendthrifts, which had a damaging effect on the quality of Western democracies, this time the blame will be put on the “European rules”, which will aggravate people’s sense of powerlessness and with it their frustration. This frustration will tend to feed, first and foremost, neo-fascist demagoguery.

This effect is undeniable and is the result of the various shocks the EU has received and the effects these shocks have had on the deterioration of people’s living conditions. The fact is that when we look at the IMF’s own growth forecasts, of the entire West, the EU grows the least (with forecasts of 0.8% for 2024 and 1.2% for 2025). Russia, the USA and especially China and India are growing more, much more.

If history tells us that the “minimal state”, contraction, austerity, prevent growth, development, and only have the effect of accelerating the concentration of wealth at the top, there is no argument that can be made in favor of this austerity plan. Managing according to possibilities only leads us to shrink, to cowardice, to smallness. Managing according to needs makes us grow, take risks and go further. This courage, this vision, does not exist in the politics of the member states, and even less so at European level.

It’s easy to cut and drop, what’s difficult is to make it grow, when everything would lead you to believe that you could only cut. Today, in the EU, we are cutting straight across the board. The more Europe needs investment, the more it is guaranteed that it won’t, demonstrating that there is no European measure that doesn’t fit the American form.

Protect the Arctic Region: Already Threatened Arctic Ecology Can be Devastated Further by Rapid Militarization

By Bharat Dogra

The Arctic region is warming at twice the global rate, leading to rapid melting of ice–some have even predicted ice-free summers by year 2034. This has brought unprecedented threats to various species of the region including the polar bear. Some species are threatened by the shrinking, even vanishing habitats where they have always lived safely and happily, some are threatened by the fast reducing access to their staple food, while some are threatened by weather extremes.

Despite this there is still relentless march to exploit the vast natural resources of the region, including oil, natural gas, rare earth and other minerals. Partly due to the huge natural resources and partly due to strategic and geo-political reasons, big power confrontation in this remote region can also increase.

In fact melting of ice increases the possibility of higher exploitation of natural resources as well as carving out of new maritime routes with all its strategic and commercial implications. Another complication is the increasing confrontational situation of NATO and Russia which may get extended, tragically, even to the Arctic region with very heavy costs to ecology and to native people.

The Arctic region is spread over 8 countries, 7 of which are NATO members. These are USA, Canada, Iceland, Denmark (Greenland), Norway, Sweden and Finland. The eighth country is Russia.

While Russia has a well-established military presence here, this is largely defensive as Russia has important strategic interests to protect here spread over a vast area. With Finland and Sweden recently becoming NATO members and with the situation in Ukraine not working out to be favorable to NATO plans, the USA may just be tempted to try to create difficulties for Russia in this region. Russia may respond by giving more opportunities to China to acquire a presence here. One move by one side may lead to another move by the other side and very soon the situation may become much more tense and risky.

This should be avoided in the interests of world peace as well as the considerations of protecting Arctic ecology. Not just actual conflict but even large-scale military exercises may prove to be quite harmful for Arctic ecology. Under the Nordic Response 2024 exercise in Norway in March, as many as about 20,000 soldiers from 13 NATO member countries were gathered in the Arctic region with frigates, submarines and other vessels, and over 100 aircrafts. This is likely to ultimately increase to about 90,000 soldiers. 

A high-risk situation already exists here in which climate change and global warming first create conditions in which exploitation of natural resources and militarization are likely to increase more, and this trend in turn greatly increases the possibilities of global warming further, apart from destruction of local environment and life-species in more direct ways as well. All this should be avoided. With due caution and by ensuring there is no undue suspicion of each other’s intentions, conflict in this region can be avoided as both sides also recognize hopefully how costly in economic as well as in ecological terms, above all of course in terms of loss of human lives, conflict in such a region is likely to prove. Special mechanisms should be in place to minimize militarization and the possibility of any conflict breaking out here. 

US-NATO Military Presence in the Arctic Threatens Global Security

Further we look here at the various high risks that have already occurred in recent times in this region in more details in the context of a part of this region—Greenland. Very high rate of ice melting has been reported here—even melting of as much as 18 billion tons of ice sheets in just 3 days of mid-July in Greenland. Very frightening estimates have been presented of the extent of rise in sea level if melting on such a scale continues.

It was reported that Donald Trump made an offer of a payment to Denmark to acquire control over Greenland. This was considered an atrocious offer by most people and for good reason was not even considered seriously by the Denmark government. This even led to the cancellation of a planned visit of President Trump to Denmark. Although Denmark controls the foreign policy and security of this vast island, Greenland has been moving towards autonomy and self-government.

However it is not difficult to understand why the USA has been keen to acquire Greenland. In fact even President Truman made an offer in 1946 to purchase Greenland for 100 million dollars. This offer was refused, but Denmark later succumbed to USA pressure to set up military bases in Greenland, including a nuclear powered station Camp Century.

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Camp Century Trench Construction (From the Public Domain)

With its strategic location close to Russia as well as the USA, Greenland remains of great military interest to the USA. This is a factor which has acquired more significance recently with the accentuation of big power rivalries.

In addition, Greenland is a source of precious mineral resources, including gold and rare earths. The opening up of these rare earth deposits to China is something which the Western powers will like to stop, given the fact that China already has high levels of control over rare earths.

Greenland has a population of just 57,000 people in its vast territory of 836,330 sq. miles and has the lowest population density in the entire world. This Arctic region is highly sensitive from the ecological point of view, a sensitivity which has increased further in times of climate change. As the ice sheets which cover vast areas melt under the influence of global warming, buried carbon deposits will be released and sea levels will rise. The region’s unique biodiversity includes polar bears and seals will be badly threatened.

Hence there is a strong case for the entire Greenland to be administered by the United Nations as a zone of neutrality, peace and environment protection. Under such an arrangement, ecologically protective livelihoods and basic facilities will be ensured by a UN-administered program, which will treat the entire island as an area of ecological protection where any exploitation of natural resources will be strictly controlled and no military installation will be allowed. In addition there will be a very careful well-planned effort for undoing the damage already done.

As the snow melts with global warming, the remains of what was once a nuclear-powered military station (Camp Century) of the USA will open up, requiring a very careful clean-up effort. An even bigger danger exists in the form a nuclear weapon which was lost here in a bomber airplane accident in 1968. This was the peak of the cold war period when some USA bomber planes carrying nuclear weapons used to be in the air all the time and the Thule military base in Greenland was a special place for these operations due to the relative proximity of Russian targets from here. The airplane accident took place when the USA bomber containing nuclear weapons was approaching this military base in Greenland. The USA had obtained the permission of the Denmark government to set up this military base but it is not at all certain whether the Denmark government, let alone the local communities, had been informed about the transactions here involving the transport of nuclear weapons. 

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An aerial view of Thule Air Base in 1989 (From the Public Domain)

Actually the plane contained four nuclear weapons but three could be recovered. In the salvage operation in 1968 thousands of pieces of debris as well as millions of tons of ice, suspected to contain radioactive debris, were collected. Still one weapon could not be found despite the huge research effort. Workers employed in the clean-up work suffered from cancer later and have been claiming compensations till recently.

It is by now widely accepted that in this accident as many as four nuclear weapons were endangered, three were recovered more or less intact but one hydrogen bomb was never recovered. One aspect of a UN-administrated protective future should be to remain on constant alert for any tell-tale signs of damage from this so that a potential catastrophic event can still be prevented.

The existing military installations particularly the Thule Military Base should also be dismantled as part of the efforts to establish Greenland as a zone of peace and neutrality. While the wider paradigm of future development should be based on ecological protection, protective livelihoods, peace and neutrality, within this paradigm local people should have all the autonomy for highly decentralized governance. There should be a special program of mental health and well-being to bring down the high rate of suicides and substance abuse in the region.

Clearly there are several serious issues in Greenland which have to be sorted out. A big effort with continuity has to be made to ensure a more protective future for Greenland which is in fact crucial for the entire world.

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Bharat Dogra is Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, A Day in 2071, Planet in Peril and Man over Machine. He is Coordinator, Campaign for Save the Earth Now and its SED Demand. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Bharat Dogra, Global Research, 2024

https://www.globalresearch.ca/protect-arctic-region-rapid-militarization/5855399

Ukraine War Funding and Failed Russian Sanctions. Is the US Empire Shooting Itself in the Foot?

By Dr. Jack Rasmus

This past weekend, April 20, 2024 the US House of Representatives passed a bill to provide Ukraine with another $61 billion in aid. The measure will quickly pass the Senate and be signed into law by Biden within days.

The funds, however, will make little difference to the outcome of the war on the ground as it appears most of the military hardware funded by the $61 billion has already been produced and much of it already shipped. Perhaps no more than $10 billion in additional new weapons and equipment will result from the latest $61 billion passed by Congress.

Subject to revision, initial reports of the composition of the $61 billion indicate $23.2 billion of it will go to pay US arms producers for weapons that have already been produced and delivered to Ukraine. Another $13.8 billion is earmarked to replace weapons from US military stocks that have been produced and are in the process of being shipped—but haven’t as yet—or are additional weapons still to be produced. The breakdown of this latter $13.8 amount is not yet clear in the initial reports. One might generously guess perhaps $10 billion at most represents weapons not yet produced, while $25-$30 billion represents weapons already shipped to Ukraine or in the current shipment pipeline.

In total, therefore, weapons already delivered to Ukraine, awaiting shipment, or yet to be produced amount to approximately $37 billion.

The remainder of the $61 billion includes $7.8 billion for financial assistance to Ukraine to pay for salaries of government employees through 2024. An additional $11.3 billion to finance current Pentagon operations in Ukraine—which sounds suspiciously like pay for US advisors, mercenaries, special ops, and US forces operating equipment like radars, advanced Patriot missile systems, etc. on the ground. Another $4.7 billion is for miscellaneous expenses, whatever that is.

In other words, only $13.8 billion of the $61 billion is for weapons Ukraine doesn’t already have!

And that $13.8 billion is all Ukraine will likely get in new weapons funding for the rest of 2024! Like the $23 billion already in theater, that will likely be burned up in a couple of weeks this summer once Russia’s coming major offensive—its largest of the war—is launched in late May or early June. So what does the US do in order to continue to fund Ukraine’s economy, government and military efforts this fall and thereafter?

In other words, what’s the Biden/NATO strategy for aiding Ukraine, militarily and economically, after the $37 billion is expended by late this summer? Where’s the money to come from?

To understand how the US/NATO plan to fund subsequent weapons production for Ukraine in late 2024 and early 2025, one must consider not only the $61 billion bill but a second bill also passed by Congress this past weekend that hasn’t been given much attention in the mainstream media.

That second bill may potentially provide up to $300 billion for Ukraine from USA and its G7 allies, especially NATO allies in Europe where reportedly $260 of the $300 billion resides in Eurozone banks.

Biden/US Short Term Strategy 2024

The $61 billion is clearly only a stopgap measure to try to get the Ukraine army and government funded through the summer. Beyond that, the broader Biden strategy is to keep Ukraine afloat until after the US November elections. In addition to the $61 billion—which the US hopes will get Ukraine through the US November election (but likely won’t)—US strategy includes getting the Russians to agree to begin some kind of negotiations. The US will then use the discussions to raise a demand to freeze military operations on both sides while negotiations are underway. But Biden’s ‘freeze and negotiate’ strategy is dead on arrival, since it is abundantly clear to the Russians it is basically about US and NATO ‘buying time’ and Russia has already been played by that one. As the popular US saying goes: “fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me”.

The Russians already fell for that ‘let’s suspend fighting and negotiation ploy’ with the Minsk II treaty back in 2015-16. It agreed to halt military operations in the Donbass back then but NATO and the Ukraine government used the Minsk agreement as cover to re-build Ukraine’s military force which it thereafter used to attack the Donbass provinces. European leaders Angela Merkel of Germany and Francois Hollande of France thereafter publicly admitted in 2022 that Minsk II was just to ‘buy time’.

The Russian’s were again similarly snookered at the Istanbul peace discussions held in April 2022. They were asked by NATO to show good faith in negotiations by withdrawing their forces from around Kiev, which they did. Negotiations were then broken off by Zelensky, on NATO’s strong recommendation, and Ukraine launched an offensive chasing the withdrawing Russians all the way back to the Donbass borders.

Russia is therefore extremely unlikely to fall a third time for a Biden/NATO request to ‘freeze’ military operations and negotiate again.

Biden may want to ‘buy time’ once more, but that hand’s been played twice already and the West will be (is being) told by Russia they aren’t interested in buying anything from the West and its ‘money’ no longer has any value.

Speaker Johnson’s Volte Face

The passage of the stop-gap $61 billion for Ukraine by the US House of Representatives was the result of House Speaker, Johnson, doing an about face and allowing the vote on the House floor after saying he wouldn’t for weeks. There’s been much speculation in the US mainstream media as to why Johnson reversed his position and allowed the Ukraine aid bill to the House floor for a vote. However, it’s not difficult to understand why he did reverse his view.

Image: Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Mike Johnson delivers remarks following his election to the position, October 25, 2023. (From the Public Domain)

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In recent weeks there was intense lobbying behind the scenes by US weapons companies with key Republican committee chairmen in the House. After all, at least $37 billion in payments for weapons—both already delivered and to be delivered—was involved. Not a minor sum even for super-profitable companies like Lockheed, Raytheon and the like. Rumors are that corporate lobbying had its desired effect on Republican committee chairs in the House, who then in turn pressured Johnson to allow the vote on the floor. The final vote in the House was 310 to 111 with 210 Democrats joining 100 Republicans to pass the measure—revealing that the core support for the US Military Industrial Complex in the House of Representatives is at least three-fourths (the US Senate likely even higher).

Russia’s Red Lines, Weaponizing Ukraine for War

So the vote was the result of a ‘parliamentary maneuver’ in which all the Democrats crossed over to support the Republican Speaker of the House (who de facto switched parties for the moment). A minority of Republicans joined him. A slim majority of Republicans opposed the measure. Their opposition remains. Thus it is highly unlikely Congress will appropriate more funding for Ukraine for the rest of this year—even when the $61 billion for weapons and Ukraine’s government run out by this late summer.

So what happens if and when the $61 billion is exhausted well before the November elections?

A possible answer to that question lies in the passage of a second Ukraine funding measure this past weekend.

The $61 billion was not the most important legislative action in the US House. While most of the media commentary has been on that Ukraine aid bill, hardly anything has been said in the mainstream media about another bill that the US House also passed over the weekend. This second measure has greater strategic implications for US global interests than the $37 billion in actual weapons shipments for Ukraine. This second measure is HR 8038, a 184 page bill misnamed the ‘21st Century Peace Through Strength Act’ which amounted to yet another package (the 16th?) of US sanctions.

Transferring Russia’s $300 Billion Assets to Ukraine

The first section of the bill arranges a procedure for the US to force the sale of the China company, Tik Tok, to a consortium of US financial investors, reportedly led by former US Treasury Secretary under Trump, Steve Mnuchin. This is part of the expanding list of sanctions on China. Also sanctioned are China purchases of Iranian oil, as well as a host of additional sanctions on Iran itself. However the most significant measure related to sanctions on Russia.

The 21st Century Peace Through Strength Act calls for the US to transfer its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion of seized assets in Western banks that were frozen in 2022 at the outset of the Ukraine war. It provides a procedure to hand over the $5 billion to Ukraine to further finance its war efforts! This move has been rumored and debated in the USA and Europe since the assets were seized two years ago. But now the process of actually transferring the seized funds to Ukraine has begun with the passage of this second bill by the US House.

The USA’s $5 billion share in US banks is just a drop in the bucket of the $300 billion. Russia could probably care less about it, i.e. a mere ‘rounding error’ in its total revenue from sale of oil, gas and other commodities. But Europe holds $260 of the $300 billion, according to European Central Bank chair, Christine Lagarde. A tidy sum which Russia has threatened to retaliate against Europe should the EU follow the US/Biden lead and also begin to transfer its $260 billion to Ukraine.

The US bill is very clear that the transfer of the US’s $5 billion is imminent. The bill requires the Biden administration to establish a ‘Ukraine Defense Fund’ into which the US’s $5 billion will be deposited. If parts of the $5 billion are not in liquid asset form, the US president is further authorized by the bill to liquidate those assets and deposit the proceeds in the fund as well. So the seizure and transfer of the $5 billion to Ukraine is a done deal. And when it happens a legal precedent will be made that Europe may use to follow and transfer its $260 billion.

One can expect the US to pressure Europe strongly to do so. Biden is further authorized by the bill to ‘negotiate’ with Europe and other G7 partners to convince them to do the same—i.e. seize their share of the $300 billion, liquidate and then transfer the cash assets into the US ‘Ukraine Defense Fund’. And to date the US has been able to ‘convince’ Europe—via its control of NATO and influence over Europe’s economy and its umbrella political elites in the European Commission and European Parliament—to follow US policy without too much resistance.

Europe is fast becoming an economic satrapy and political dependency of the USA in recent decades, more than willing to bend in whatever policy direction the USA wants.

It is clear the seizure & redistribution to Ukraine of the $300 billion via the Ukraine Defense Fund is the means by which the US/NATO plan longer term to continue to finance the Ukraine war after the $61 billion runs out sometime in 2024; and certainly in 2025 and beyond. For the US has no intention of ending its NATO led proxy war in Ukraine anytime soon. It is just seeking to ‘buy time’ in the interim before its November elections.

For a majority of both parties in the US—Democrat and Republican—are united on continuing the war. It will matter little who wins the presidency or which party has majorities in Congress after November. Political elites on both sides of the aisle in Congress are united in pursuing the war in Ukraine—just as they are united in continuing to fund Israel as well as to continue the US’s steadily expanding economic war with China. In just the past week it is obvious more US sanctions on China are also coming soon, including possibly an announcements of financial sanctions on China for the first time after US Secretary of State, Blinken’s, most recent visit.

Failed Russian Sanctions: Past and Future

The geopolitical objectives of the US and its commitment to continuing its three wars are resulting in unintended, negative effects on the economies of the US and its G7 allies, especially Germany. But those same sanctions have had little to no negative impact on Russia’s economy.

The recently passed US transfer of its $5 billion share of Russia’s $300 billion will accelerate the negative consequences especially for Europe should the latter follow the US lead and distribute its $260 billion share to Ukraine, which it eventually will.

As EBC chairperson, Lagarde, put it referring to the US plan and legislation: “It needs to be carefully considered”. UK political leaders are already on record advocating the confiscation and transferring of Europe’s $260 billion holdings of Russian assets to Ukraine. Europe in recent years has a strong history of capitulating to US economic policies and demands. It will be no different this time.

Should Europe join the USA in transferring its $260 billion share of Russian assets in European banks (most of which is in Belgium), it’s almost certain that Russia will reply similarly and seize at least an equal amount of European assets still in Russia. The Russian Parliament has officially recently said as much.

Part of the G7/NATO sanctions to date included forcing Western businesses in Russia to liquidate and leave Russia. Some have done so. But many have not. Russia’s response has been to arrange the transfer of those EU companies’ assets that have left to Russian companies. This has actually stimulated the Russian economy. It resulted in Russian government subsidies—and thus government spending—to Russian companies assuming the assets, as well as additional investment by those companies after their acquisition of the departed EU companies’ assets.

In short, Western sanctions measure pressuring Western companies to leave Russia has backfired in its predicted result of reducing Russian government spending and business investment.

In contrast, the US/NATO’s 15 or so sanctions packages to date have had little, if any, impact on Russia’s economy since the commencing of the war in February 2022. To cite just a few of the performance of Russia’s key economic indicators under the sanctions regime: see this (note: all following data is from the US global research source).

Russia’s GDP in the latest six months has risen between 4.9% (3rd quarter 2023) and 5.5% (4th quarter). Russia’s PMI statistics show robust expansion for both manufacturing and services during the same period while in most of the major European economies both PMI indicators are contracting. Wage growth in Russia over the six months has averaged 8.5% for both quarters (whereas in the US is it less than half that and in Germany less than 1%).

Russian government revenues rose from roughly 5 trillion rubles in the third quarter to 8.7 trillion in the 4th. Military expenditures are up from $69.5 billion (dollars) to $86.3 billion. Consumer spending is at record levels in the latest quarter. Russian household debt as a percent of GDP remains steady at around 22% (whereas in the USA it is 62.5%). Crude oil production and general exports continue to steadily rise. Gasoline remains at 60 cents a liter (whereas in US five-six times that and in Europe more than ten times). And the unemployment rate in Russia remains steady at 2.9% (whereas in the US and Europe it’s a quarter to a half higher). Interest rates and inflation are higher in Russia but that represents an economy firing on all economic cylinders and is not necessarily a negative.

In short, it’s hard to find a single statistic that shows the Russian economy has been negatively impacted by the US/NATO sanctions regime over the past two years. Indeed, an argument can even be made the sanctions have stimulated the Russian economy not undermined it.

The latest sanction in the form of the US and G7 transfer of the $300 billion in seized Russian assets in western banks will almost for certain have a similar effect on Russia’s economy. Namely, distributing the $300 billion will result in Russian government seizure of at least an equivalent of European companies’ assets still in Russia. And that will provide funding for still further government subsidy spending benefiting Russian companies followed by more private investment.

Is the US Empire Shooting Itself in the Foot?

But there is an even greater consequence to follow the US and Europe’s desperate act of transferring Russia’s $300 billion in assets in Western banks to Ukraine.

Western bankers, economic policymakers, and many economists alike have warned against the seizure and transfer of the $300 billion. Heads of US and other central banks, CEOs of large commercial banks, and even mainstream economists like Shiller at Yale have continually warned publicly that transferring the assets will seriously undermine faith in the US dollar system which is the lynchpin of the US global economic empire.

What countries in the global South will now want to put (or leave) their assets in Western banks, especially in Europe, if they think the assets could be seized should they disagree on policies promoted by the empire? It’s clear the US has now begun to impose ‘secondary’ sanctions on countries that don’t abide by its primary sanctions on Russia. Will the US also seize the assets of these ‘secondary’ countries now in Western banks if they don’t go along with refusing to trade with Russia? And what about China, as the US has now begun to expand its sanctions—primary and secondary—on that country as well? Watch for unprecedented financial sanctions on China that may be forthcoming following Blinken’s visit to China this week.

The US does not realize this is not the 1980s. The global south has developed massively in recent decades. They are insisting on more independence and more say in the rules of the empire—without which they will simply leave now that an alternative is beginning to appear in the expansion of the BRICS countries.

Recently expanded to 10 members (all of which in the middle east and heavily oil producers), no fewer than 34 more countries have now petitioned to join the BRICS. Furthermore, it is reported that at the BRICS next conference in late 2024 an ‘alternative global financial framework’ will be announced! That will likely include some alternative currency arrangement as well as an alternative international payments system to replace the US SWIFT system (by which the USA via its banks can see who is violating its sanctions). Likely forthcoming will be something to replace the US-run IMF in order to ensure currency stability and an expansion of China’s Belt & Road as an alternative to the US run World Bank. (Perhaps that is the real topic of Blinken’s forthcoming China visit?)

In short, the US global economic empire is entering its most unstable period. And yet US policy is to accelerate alternatives to it by seizing and transferring funds to Ukraine to continue the war! The blowback from the seizure and transfer will prove significant, both to US and European interests. It will render past resistance to US sanctions pale in comparison.

How to Crash an Empire! 

History will show that US geopolitical objectives and strategies in the 21st century were the single greatest cause of the decline of US global economic hegemony over the last quarter century. Much of those objectives and strategies have been the work of the most economically ignorant foreign policy team in US history, who are generally referred to as the Neocons.

The seizure and transfer of the $300 billion may provide a way to continue funding Ukraine in the US/NATO proxy war against Russia through 2024 and beyond. But the timing could not be worse for US/Europe imperial interests, coming on the eve of the historic BRICS conference later this year. The desperate act of seizure and transfer will only convince more countries of the global South to seek another more independent alternative by joining the BRICS, or increasingly trade with that bloc.

History shows empires rest ultimately on economic foundations. And they collapse when those underlying economic foundations fracture and then crumble.

The longer run consequence of the $300 billion transfer and the exiting of the global South from the US empire can only be the decline in the use of the US dollar in global transactions and as a reserve currency. That sets in motion a series of events that in turn undermine the US domestic economy in turn: Less demand for the dollar results in a fall in the dollar’s value. That means less recycling of dollars back to the US, resulting in less purchases of US Treasuries from the Federal Reserve, which in turn will require the Fed to raise long term interest rates for years to come in order to cover rising US budget deficits. All this will happen to an intensifying fiscal crisis of the US state rapidly deteriorating already.

In other words, blowback on the US economy from declining US global hegemony—exacerbated by sanctions in general and seizure of countries like Russia’s assets in particular—is almost certain in the longer run, just as it will be for Europe’s economy in the even more immediate term.

But such is the economic myopia of the US neocons and the incompetent political elite leadership in both parties in the USA in recent years. As that other American saying goes: ‘We have found the enemy and they are us!’

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This article was originally published on the author’s website, Jack Rasmus.

Dr. Rasmus is author of the books, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, 2017 and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, 2020. Follow his commentary on the emerging banking crisis on his blog, https://jackrasmus.com; on twitter daily @drjackrasmus; and his weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern and at https://alternativevisions.podbean.com.

Featured image source

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Dr. Jack Rasmus, Global Research, 2024

https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukraine-war-funding-failed-russian-sanctions/5855512

Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.

Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.

Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.

This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.

Everything becomes entertainment fodder.

As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.

“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.

On average, Americans spend five hours a day. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.

This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.

Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.

We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest propagandists today is the U.S. government.

Masters of Deceit: The U.S Government’s Propaganda of Fear, Mind Control and Brain Warfare

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—often with the help of the corporate news media—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its corporate accomplices in the mainstream media.

However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control.

This has been in the works for a long time.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece “The CIA and the Media,” reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.

In some instances, as Bernstein showed, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.

If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin.

In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post points out “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”

This is mind-control in its most sinister form.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

Image is from ThoughtCo

Edward Bernays, Father of Public Relations and Propaganda

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

All of the distracting, disheartening, disorienting news you are bombarded with daily is being driven by propaganda churned out by one corporate machine (the corporate-controlled government) and fed to the American people by way of yet another corporate machine (the corporate-controlled media).

“For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it,” writes investigative journalist Nick Davies.

So where does that leave us?

Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them.

A populace that cannot think for themselves is a populace with its backs to the walls: mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diariesit’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.

If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org.

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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Copyright © John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, Global Research, 2024

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John Helmer : A nasty little book about the allied invasion of Russia in 1918 is a nasty big lesson for now

By John Helmer

In the last war which the Americans, British, and French fought against the Russians, they were all defeated and forced to run away. Now it’s happening again.

But if Anna Reid, author of a new history of the Allied powers’ invasion of Russia and war against the Bolsheviks, titles her book “A Nasty Little War” (lead image, left), what title does Reid give to the present war which the Doughboy alliance is losing for the second time? A Nasty Big War doesn’t quite do their plan for destroying Russia enough justice, does it? A Nasty Little Defeat followed by a Nasty Big Defeat comes closer to the truth, but Reid has written her book in the conviction that it will not and must not come to that again.

One hundred and six years since the Russia Intervention of 1918-20 is long enough for Reid to conclude with one of her contemporary British officer sources: “‘Of course it could not possibly be otherwise. But it is unfortunate that events worked out as they did.’ It could have been the epitaph for the whole Intervention,” Reid adds from the British point of view, then but not now.

“So ends a not very creditable enterprise”, she quotes from a report on the desk of British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon in April 1920. Curzon then crossed out “not very” and wrote in “highly dis”.

Reid is so certain this is not the lesson of today’s allied war against Russia she declares her conclusion at the very beginning of her book. “There is no simple read-across from the Intervention. Today’s war is not a civil one, and the impressive and staunchly democratic Ukrainians are not the inept, revanchist Whites. The lazy lesson from 1918-20 – that Western meddling in the region failed then, and will again now – is completely mistaken. If the Intervention does have something to teach, it is that Putin will fail for the same reason the Whites did: because he underestimates the desire for freedom of the non-Russian nations…”

This declaration is at page 10. Reid’s history runs on for another 350 pages of the same.

Reid cannot bring herself to introduce or mention the Russian president by his full name. He first appears, first name-less, on page 9 “as Putin’s Russia attempts to reconquer its thirty-years independent Ukraine.”  Felix Dzerzhinsky, Bolshevik head of intelligence, is more fortunate with Reid. He gets his full name, but Reid adds: “the weasel-faced psychopath in charge of the Cheka”. Dangerous adjectives, weasel-faced psychopaths in glass houses with hands full of them.  

Left, Anna Reid, illustrated by https://www.historynet.com/ Right: Felix Dzerzhinsky.

Reid has similar tongue trouble with how to identify the Russians in the war by name. She  repeatedly refers to them as “the enemy”, because the war diaries and operation reports of the British commanders she was reporting described them so at the time. Their soldiers called them “Bolos” or “Russkis” if they were men; if they were women, they used fonder terms. These men did not want to fight – there were mutinies by the Quebec infantry in the Canadian force, as well as in US, French, and British units. More committed to killing Russians were the Japanese and Greek forces.  

At every turn of events, Reid continues to wage her war against the Russian history of what  happened:

This is history topsy-turvied to fit a political message. “Excellent background to today’s events” – this is the endorsement of Reid’s book by Anne Applebaum, wife of the Polish foreign minister, Radoslav Sikorski, whose Siklebaum profiteering from Russia war-making can be followed here.  In London,  Reid shares direction of the Ukrainian Institute with Applebaum —   Applebaum is a patron, Reid a  trustee of the “independent charity that champions Ukrainian culture”  which, the institute financial reports reveal, is paid for by George Soros.   

Also endorsing Reid’s nasty little war book is Head Boy of the Russophobe school in the London press, Luke Harding:    “Putin is the real inheritor of the White Russian legacy,” Harding opines. “He shares the same vaulting imperial mindset and addiction to violence. Like the Whites, he is contemptuous of Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples.”  

 “Cartoonishly propagandistic but essentially fact-based” – what this contradiction of Reid’s means is that she hates the truth of the Bolshevik or Communist or Red case – that’s to say, she hates Russia’s Russians for thinking and acting the way they have done and continue to do.  This produces a book which is cartoonishly propagandistic but essentially lie-based.

Reid reveals how it is possible for her, her Hachette-owned publisher, and her publishing agent Natasha Fairweather* to produce such a one-eyed history. The answer is in the one eye of the beholder:  Reid lists eight library or government archive sources, seven of them British, one American, none Russian;  four eyewitness army and navy diaries, all British, none of the Red Army; and 158 books, of which 7 were in Russian (4%).

“With the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Reid claims on her second but last page, “the motheaten trope of heroic Red Army versus villainous White Guard and Entente unravelled.” The evidence, she explains, is because “archives opened, scholarship flourished, and cartoonish [again] memorials such as Mudyug [British liquidation camp] were left to crumble.” Reid leaves no quote, no footnote to show that she has read any of this at all. That, Reid explains, is because “the wheel started turning again from the early 2000s, with the rise of Putin. Censorship returned, media and academic were muzzled, and a new story enforced, of unbroken Russian greatness under strong leaders… With Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, history is in some ways repeating itself”.

In her acknowledgements section, Reid mentions four hospitable Russian academics she met on her research trips to Moscow, Arkhangelsk, and Murmansk, she omits to reveal who paid for her travel. Then Reid makes an admission. “I made these trips in 2019, before Russia’s new [sic] invasion of Ukraine. Today I would not go.”

MAP OF ALLIED INVASION OF RUSSIA, AUGUST 1918

MAP OF ALLIED TERRITORY AND OPERATIONS IN RUSSIA, 1919

MAP OF ARKHANGELSK REGION AREA OF BRITISH OPERATIONS UNTIL EXIT ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1919

Racism against Jews, aka anti-semitism, earns a full chapter of the history, including Reid’s condemnation of Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War,  for thinking, saying and exploiting it politically.  Racism against Russians is pervasive throughout the book; it’s what Reid shares with Churchill and all the others. “Generally speaking,” Reid quotes from an American army manual, “the Russian is exactly like a child – inquisitive, easily gulled, easily offended…”  According to General Alfred Knox, the commander of the British military mission to Siberia, the Whites were “brave men fighting for civilisation” while the Reds were “blood-stained Jew-led Bolsheviks”. Most Russians, wrote a British naval captain, were turncoats who would change sides if not “tied hand and foot by Soviets composed of madmen, Jews, murderers and dreamers”. On going ashore at Alushta in Crimea, another British officer wrote that it was “a pleasure to meet the honest Russians and Tatars, but I confess my gorge rose at the Jews. A Russian Jew is quite the most loathsome type of humanity as a rule, and they are the curse of Russia at this moment.”

Reid is keen on Churchill’s derring-do in military operations. One of them was a fast, surface-skimming torpedo-firing naval boat that is the century-old predecessor of the Black Sea drone boats used by the Ukrainians in the Black Sea at present.  

Churchill was also gung-ho in the first-ever employment of chemical weapons on Russian territory, devised and used by the British in 1919. According to Reid, the “M Device” was an arsenic derivative, diphenylaminechlorarsine, developed at Porton Down, the British military laboratory for chemical and biological weapons, and the recent source of the Novichok reported in the Skripal case.    

Reid says Churchill ordered the chemical bombing to begin on August 27, 1919. It continued until September 22. By then 2,718 gas bombs had been dropped in and around Arkhangelsk and Lake Onega – that was a rate of 105 bombs, 50 sorties, each day.  When the British forces left, they dumped more than 47,000 unused bombs in the White Sea. According to Reid, “what the long-term health damage was to Russian civilians, we do not know.” Reid doesn’t know because she made no attempt to find out.

THE PORTON DOWN CHEMICAL WEAPON INVENTED BY THE BRITISH FOR ATTACKING RUSSIA IN 1919

Ordered in 1919 by Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War,  to be used against the Russians, the “very secret” M Device was to be used “if specially necessary”. Left to right,  British infantryman assembling the bomb before a bombing run; the air-dropped M Device containing diphenylaminechlorarsine (DM or Adamsite), and two thermogenerators;    British pilot preparing to load the bombs for a bombing run in the Arkhangelsk region. Click for detail.  From the Russian try-out of chemical warfare, Churchill went on to order gas bombing of Indian and Iraqi rebels against British rule in 1919 and 1920. The British manual of military law of the time declared the rules of war against chemical weapons applied to conflict "between civilized nations" but did “not apply in wars with uncivilized States and tribes"; click for detail.  

When Reid is compelled by the truth of the Bolshevik or local Russian source of evidence, she insists on adding qualifiers: “Soviet propaganda around the Intervention was crude, hypocritical and exaggerated”, Reid claims on page 86, before adding: “but did not always have to be untrue”.

In the operations in the Caucasus around Baku, the British role in the murder of the Bolshevik-appointed leadership, the twenty-six Baku commissars, is now clear, Reid writes: “Scoffed at by Western historians for decades, the Soviet version gained credibility [sic] with the publication of Teague-Jones’s diaries, after his death in 1988”. Reginald Teague-Jones was the British intelligence officer who was official liaison with the British-backed leadership in Baku called the Trans-Caspian Committee, and relayed to them the execution order, so they did the killing and the British wrote the subsequent history denying their part.

Describing a British camp for liquidating Russian prisoners at Mudyug, on the White Sea north of Arkhangelsk, Reid says “the Soviets turned it into a cartoonishly propagandistic but essentially fact-based museum”. “Cartoonish” is a term Reid uses more than once when the truth of the history forces its way into her narrative. For an eyewitness account of what the British and French arranged to be done to Russians imprisoned at Mudyug, Reid accepts “a Soviet-inflected but plausible survivor memoir” which documented a policy of starvation of the inmates to death, and the understanding that “many inmates should not have been there at all…the English had confused the word for Bolshevik with bolshak, local dialect for the eldest son in a fatherless family.” Больша́к isn’t either “Soviet-inflected” or “local dialect” – Reid is excusing local genocide by a linguistic mistake. In truth, uninflected, this was a policy of the senior British commanders, some of whom, Reid concedes, were running on the side coal and timber-stealing for export in the north, oil in the south.  

British history-telling like this turns out to be not history at all, but “cartoonish propaganda” of the same credibility now being paid for and published by foundations like Reid’s Ukrainian Institute. This turns Reid’s book into a museum for the British culture of learning and expression which is now so ailing and so poor it is obliged to take its direction,  money,  and script from Kiev and Washington.

[*] Fairweather is the widow of Richard Beeston, Russophobe of the London Times, who was assigned to report from Moscow during the Yeltsin presidency, 1994-98;  his idea of sourcing for  his despatches was to harangue foreign correspondents better informed than he was, at dinners he obliged them to pay for, on how mistaken they were about Yeltsin’s failures. As a London literary agent, Fairweather sells books to publishers and film producers on their anti-Russian value for clients who, in addition to Reid, include Boris Johnson,  Owen Matthews, and Timothy Garton Ash.

Source: https://johnhelmer.online/a-nasty-little-book-about-the-allied-invasion-of-russia-in-1918-is-a-nasty-big-lesson-for-now/

Virtual Biden closes the gap with live Trump, but Robert Kennedy is a hindrance

Nicole Shanahan is a “dark horse” who can bring surprises

What is happening in the US presidential elections now marks the advent of a completely new era in this political mechanism, calling into question its very essence as a competition of real personalities. In recent weeks, according to polls, Biden has significantly reduced the gap with Trump from 5% to 1%, and in some of them, in direct comparison, he even took a slight lead. Why the sudden increase in support for Sleepy Joe (Trump’s expression)? After all, he still barely drags his feet, has difficulty recognizing those around him, confuses basic things, etc., that is, he demonstrates all the signs of oncoming dementia. But this is seen mainly by people outside America, while in the United States itself, paid election advertising is in full swing, which, thanks to more money, is dominated by Democrats. Everywhere there are videos and images in which the current president, with the help of ingenious modern technologies, including, apparently, artificial intelligence, appears as a kind of wise, cheerful person, demonstrating excellent physical qualities and memory. In their everyday worries, people simply confuse where Biden is active and where he is “virtual-cybernetic,” and it begins to seem to them that “the old man is nothing at all.” At the same time, his rival Trump is being physically and mentally exhausted by all sorts of courts. In this way, in modern America it is possible to bring to power not only a sick person, but even a dead or completely non-existent person. But there’s one catch.

Joe Biden — that’s what he is!

The same polls show that if one-on-one Biden can still win, then in the presence of such a third independent candidate as Robert F. Kennedy (the media often refers to him simply as RFK), for whom the fame of his dead uncle and father works, the current head The White House will inevitably lose to Trump anyway. In this regard, a serious struggle is flaring up around the representative of this famous family and, perhaps, the main intrigue of the upcoming final of the entire campaign in November. The Democrats, from whom the younger Kennedy takes the largest number of votes, are trying in every possible way to discredit him and remove him from the race, while the Republicans are openly flirting with him.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “through thorns to the stars”

In the whole country, polls show that from 12% to 20% of all voters are ready to vote for Kennedy, which is a lot considering that he is opposed by two huge party machines and even the money for registration in the largest possible number of states is catastrophic for him lacks. Robert Kennedy’s immediate goal is to register in all 50 states, as well as to attend national televised debates with the two leading candidates, if any take place at all. The “virtual” Biden would prefer to avoid them altogether, and Trump, who is still insisting on them, if Kennedy, who is significantly superior to both main candidates in terms of intelligence and eloquence, joins them, may also backtrack.

The latter, apparently, partially solved his most pressing financial problems by choosing a very peculiar person as his vice-presidential candidate — Nicole Shanahan . She was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, as a result of her divorce from whom, due to an affair with another “cyber shark” Elon Musk, she became the owner of a billion-dollar capital. Her mother is Chinese from Guangzhou, her father is German by birth. Nuclear mix — a woman, a representative of national minorities, big money and popularity in Silicon Valley. Her fortune, plus possible help from Musk, who never puts his eggs in one basket, and, while expressing sympathy for Trump, is quite capable of supporting RFK, could significantly facilitate the latter’s progress in the campaign.   

Nicole Shanahan and her ex-husband Sergei Brin

N. Shanahan is the founder and president of the Bia-Echo Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that makes grants on issues such as reproductive rights, equality, criminal justice reform and the environment. She is also the founder and CEO of ClearAccessIP, a patent analytics company. She is active and ambitious, representing the face of “New America” against the backdrop of government gerontocrats. It can have a special effect in the totally “pro-democratic” state with the largest population – California.

N. Shanahan at one of the events

The Democratic National Committee is extremely concerned about the negative effect on itself from the appearance of RFK and is using methods no less dirty against him than against Trump. He, in particular, created a first-of-its-kind unit, hiring employees specifically dedicated to eliminating Kennedy, led by former White House adviser Dana Remus.

 They filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission against Kennedy, accusing him of being bankrolled by big Republican donors. Active work is underway to collect incriminating evidence on Kennedy and his partner Shanahan. With great fanfare, Joe Biden met with a dozen members of the “extended Kennedy clan”, at which RFK Jr.’s sister Kerry Kennedy, who had long quarreled with her brother, promised “unwavering support” for the current president.

Kerry Kennedy for Biden

It all looked pretty ridiculous, especially after RFK cited the names of a dozen of his other relatives who fully support him. True, of course, few people learned about this, while the words of the “Kerry sisters” read out on television were spread throughout the country by Democrat-controlled propaganda as the alleged position of the entire clan, with the exception of the “prodigal son” Robert Kennedy.

What buckets of dirt are not being poured on his head now, going beyond all moral standards, by the “freest press in the world”! They remember, for example, how after the assassination of his father shortly after the death of his uncle John Kennedy, young RFK Jr. resorted to drugs in despair, although for him this is a long-forgotten page. 

RFK Jr. leads his father’s funeral procession in 1968.

They shamelessly misinterpret his position on COVID-19, claiming that, being “intoxicated by conspiracy theories,” RFK opposes any vaccines. In fact, he always pointed out only the abuses associated with their production and use, sometimes quite successfully opposing the “Big Pharma” industry in various lawsuits, which, of course, it does not forgive. Particularly condemned are his claims that it is still not known exactly where the recent pandemic came from and where it went. Isn’t that right? Robert Kennedy is also reproached for a lack of patriotism, since he believes that “the only moral war America has fought since 1865 was World War II,” and Russia’s “invasion” of Ukraine in 2022 was provoked by America itself.

Billboard erected by the Democratic National Committee claims RFK Jr. is a Trump puppet

Republicans, on the other hand, are not too zealous in discrediting RFK, seeing in him primarily a weapon against the Democrats from whom he comes. Kennedy has already twice made statements that Trump himself was looking for approaches to attract him as a vice-presidential candidate. This was confirmed by the fairly high assessments that the former US President gave him in his speeches. At first, the Trump campaign did not particularly refute such an initiative. But after Kennedy publicly rejected such an honor, putting Republicans in an awkward position, they began to deny the existence of such an idea. And Trump adviser Chris LaCivita called his would-be partner a “left-wing lunatic.” Nevertheless, Trump, who knows Kennedy personally well, continues to say: “He is much better than Biden. If I were a Democrat, I would vote for RFK Jr. every time, not Biden.»

However, it is alarming that during the current race, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was denied protection from the state Secret Service (analogous to the FSO) for the fifth time by Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. Kennedy lawyer Aaron Seery pointed out that Secret Service protection was first extended to presidential candidates precisely because of the assassination of Kennedy’s father in 1968 while he was running for president. Since then, 32 presidential candidates have received protection. Candidates in the past have been protected from far less risks than those Kennedy faces, he said. He pointed to an incident in which someone attended one of RFK’s campaign events with two loaded guns and demanded to meet with the candidate.

In a message to Mayorkas, Siri wrote , not without reason : “Your disregard for the safety of Mr. Kennedy is contemptible. «Failure to immediately provide him with Secret Service protection exposes your political motives and diminishes respect for our great nation.» Really again?

https://www.fondsk.ru/news/2024/04/24/virtualnyy-bayden-sokraschaet-otstavanie-ot-zhivogo-trampa-no-pomekha-v-roberte

EU will lose more than Russia if it confiscates assets – Moscow

Russian lawmakers are ready to introduce a bill on retaliatory measures, the country’s top senator says

Moscow has drafted a package of retaliatory measures in the event that Western countries seize Russian sovereign assets that have been frozen over the Ukraine conflict, senior senator Valentina Matvienko warned on Tuesday.   

In an interview with Russian journalist Dmitry Kiselyov, the chairwoman of the Federation Council said that the EU’s potential move to confiscate Russian assets would be “unprecedented,” adding that it “would destroy the global economy.” 

“Of course, it would be absolutely illegal, and everyone in Europe understands that they can’t do that,” the official stated. 

Since the start of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, the West has frozen around $300 billion in Russian central bank assets, most of which are being held in the EU. Moscow has repeatedly denounced the seizure as “theft.”

Officials in several Western nations, notably the US and the UK, have insisted on the outright confiscation of Russian assets despite widespread concerns that this would have no legal basis. In contrast, the EU has been reluctant to do so, reportedly fearing Russian retaliation.

READ MORE: EU close to deal on using Russian assets for Ukraine – Belgium

Matvienko stressed that Russia has “a prepared response” to a potential confiscation. “We have a bill that we are ready to consider immediately in response. And the Europeans will lose more than we will. Of course, they are afraid of this, especially given that their economy is collapsing.”

The senator argued that Washington has crushed the EU, both politically and economically. “In the defense and security area, it used to be a vassal… but now it has been simply squashed by the Americans. They now want to strangle it even more… to make it even less competitive,” she stated.

With this in mind, Matvienko suggested that the European business community should vehemently protest against the potential seizures, as they would be the primary target of Moscow’s retaliatory measures.

While the EU has been dragging its feet on confiscating Russian assets, it has been working on a plan to seize the profits generated by those funds in order to procure weapons for Ukraine and boost its defense production capabilities.

According to Politico, however, some members of the bloc have voiced serious misgivings about the initiative. Hungary and Slovakia have opposed the idea of sending weapons to Ukraine, while Malta and Luxembourg are reportedly unhappy that they were not consulted about the plan.

Source: https://www.rt.com/russia/596465-eu-lose-more-russia-seize-assets/

Die Guerillataktik entwickelt von Kim Il Sung

Präsidenten entwickelt hervorragende Guerillataktik Pyongyang, 24. April (KCNA) – Anlässlich des Gründungsjubiläums der Revolutionären Volksarmee Koreas, der ersten revolutionären Streitkräfte unseres Typs, erinnert sich das koreanische Volk ehrfürchtig an die Jahrhunderttaten des Präsidenten Kim Il Sung, der mit seinen hervorragenden militärstrategischen und taktischen Ideen und seiner außerordentlichen Befehlskunst den großen antijapanischen Krieg zum Sieg führte.…

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Präsidenten entwickelt hervorragende Guerillataktik

Pyongyang, 24. April (KCNA) – Anlässlich des Gründungsjubiläums der Revolutionären Volksarmee Koreas, der ersten revolutionären Streitkräfte unseres Typs, erinnert sich das koreanische Volk ehrfürchtig an die Jahrhunderttaten des Präsidenten Kim Il Sung, der mit seinen hervorragenden militärstrategischen und taktischen Ideen und seiner außerordentlichen Befehlskunst den großen antijapanischen Krieg zum Sieg führte.

In seiner Rede „Anlässlich der Gründung der Antijapanischen Volksguerillaarmee“ bei der Gründungszeremonie der Antijapanischen Volksguerillaarmee am 25. April 1932 erläuterte der Präsident Kim Il Sung das Grundprinzip des Partisanenkrieges, die feindlichen Kräfte bei maximaler Erhaltung der Partisanenarmee schwer zu vernichten, und legte den Gedanken dar, eine neue Partnertaktik nach der anderen zu entwickeln. Vom ersten Tag des bewaffneten antijapanischen Kampfes an waren die vom Präsidenten entwickelten Guerillataktiken eine entscheidende Garantie dafür, den zahlenmäßig und technisch überlegenen Feind durch strategische und taktische Überlegenheit zu überwältigen, in der Konfrontation mit dem Feind stets die Initiative zu ergreifen und einen Sieg nach dem anderen zu erringen.

Die Schlacht an der Grenze zwischen den Kreisen Antu und Fusong im Juni 1932 war eine triumphale Schlacht, in der die Partisanen die japanischen imperialistischen Aggressionstruppen, die auf sie zustürmten, durch eine Kombination aus starker Feuerkraft und Gegenangriff völlig vernichteten und damit zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte des Partisanenkrieges den Mythos von der Übermacht der japanischen Imperialisten, die sich damit brüsteten, „unbesiegbar“ zu sein, erschütterten. Die Schlacht zur Verteidigung des Guerillagebiets Xiaowangqing zeigte deutlich die seltene militärische Weisheit und die herausragende Befehlskunst des Präsidenten, der den Feinden, die auf „Strafoperationen“ der Guerillastützpunkte aus waren, einen schweren Schlag versetzte, indem er eine elastische Taktik aus geschickten Manövern, Überraschungsangriffen, Angriffen, Hinterhalten und Angriffen auf den Feind von hinten anwendete. Bei den Kämpfen an den Toren von Heixiazigou, Taoquanli und dem Rimyong-Bach Ende 1936 und Anfang 1937 wurden zahlreiche japanische Angreifer in einem geheimnisvollen Hinterhalt der antijapanischen Guerillas getötet.

Die vom Präsidenten entwickelte und aktiv angewandte Teleskoptaktik führte zu glänzenden Siegen in vielen Schlachten, darunter die Schlacht von Xiaodeshui, Hongtushanzi und die Schlacht auf der Hochebene von Fuhoushui. Die Schlacht um die Kreisstadt Fusong, in der die Taktik des blitzschnellen Auftauchens mal im Osten und mal im Westen angewandt wurde, endete mit einem triumphalen Sieg der Partisanen.

Die Taktik, eine lange Strecke im Gleichschritt zu marschieren, mit der die KRVA am helllichten Tag entlang der von den japanischen Imperialisten im Mai 1939 angelegten Schutzstraße Kapsan-Musan marschierte, und die Taktik des Kreisens, mit der sie ein weites Gebiet immer wieder umkreiste, um den Feind mit verschiedenen Taktiken zu überraschen, bevor sie verschwand, wurden vom Präsidenten entwickelt. Auch die Taktik, eine große Einheit des Feindes mit einer kleinen Einheit anzulocken, um den Feind zu ermüden und zu spalten, bevor er zuschlägt, und andere brillante, flexible Taktiken wurden als legendäre Geschichten im Volk überliefert.

Die vom Präsidenten entwickelte Taktik des Partisanenkrieges auf der Grundlage unserer Lehre war ein mächtiges, wertvolles Schwert, das es ermöglichte, die bis an die Zähne bewaffneten japanischen imperialistischen Aggressoren mit strategischer und taktischer Überlegenheit zu besiegen. Dank der geheimnisvollen Guerillataktik, die die Millionen von japanischen imperialistischen Truppen in die Enge trieb, endete der bewaffnete antijapanische Kampf mit dem großen Sieg des koreanischen Volkes, und die historische Sache der nationalen Befreiung konnte erfolgreich verwirklicht werden.

Quelle: http://www.kcna.kp (Juche113.4.24.) – http://www.kcna.kp/en/article/q/f95b8f5a28841b7553be13c76ef8e4bb.kcmsf

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