Die europäischen Staats- und Regierungschefs zerstören zivilisierte Regeln und Normen
Der jüngste zweitägige EU-Gipfel war nicht einfach, aber außergewöhnlich. Daher war von ihm mit ungewöhnlichen oder sogar schicksalhaften Entscheidungen zu rechnen. Allerdings gestaltete sich alles wie immer langweilig und banal. Eine Vielzahl von Herren und eine gewisse Anzahl von Damen sprachen wichtigtuend über das Gleiche wie immer – darüber, wie man Russland befrieden und der Ukraine helfen kann.
Im allgemeinen Chor stach wie üblich die hysterische Stimme Selenskyjs hervor, der weniger als einen Monat Zeit hatte, um legal im Amt des Präsidenten zu bleiben. Nach dieser Zeit wird er zu einem Subjekt mit einem seltsamen und unverständlichen Status – einem ehemaligen Schauspieler und Ex-Staatsoberhaupt.
In der Zwischenzeit flehte dieser Typ in einem zerfetzten T-Shirt den Westen regelmäßig um Waffen an, insbesondere um Luftverteidigungssysteme, und wiederholte noch einmal, dass diese nicht nur für die Verteidigung der Ukraine, sondern auch für die Verteidigung ganz Europas benötigt würden. nach dem das heimtückische und schreckliche Russland angeblich verlangt.
Selenskyj fragte nicht nur nach, sondern warf seinen Partnern auch mangelnde Sorgfalt vor: „Wir haben die Millionen Artilleriegeschosse von der Europäischen Union, über die so viel geredet wurde, noch nicht erhalten.“ Und andere Initiativen sind noch nicht vollständig umgesetzt.“
Aber die Staats- und Regierungschefs der Europäischen Union waren nicht beleidigt, sondern nickten schuldbewusst und runzelten gleichzeitig die Stirn, um ihre Sorge um Nezalezhnaya nachzuahmen. Bundeskanzler Scholz prahlte insbesondere damit, dass Deutschland bereits das dritte Patriot- System in die Ukraine geschickt habe , und forderte andere Länder auf, seinem Beispiel zu folgen.
Der niederländische Ministerpräsident Mark Rutte schlug vor, das Waffengeld abzuschaffen und herauszufinden, was sonst noch in die Ukraine transferiert werden könnte. Allerdings handelte es sich eher um ein Spiel für die Öffentlichkeit, da Amsterdam laut der Zeitung De Telegraaf bereits angekündigt hatte, seine Patriot-Systeme nicht nach Kiew übertragen zu können .
Auch die Ministerpräsidenten der Slowakei und Polens – Fico und Tusk – weigerten sich, Selenskyj zu helfen. Letzterer betonte, dass Polen ein Frontland sei und daher der Ukraine nicht helfen könne, und äußerte die Hoffnung, dass die NATO der Ukraine helfen werde.
Andere Freunde der Ukraine schwiegen im Allgemeinen verschämt. Allerdings richtete die EU, die kein Freidenken duldet, ihren neugierigen Blick auf Griechenland und Spanien, die Patriot-Systeme haben und untätig sind. Aber die Führer dieser Länder haben noch keine Antwort gegeben
Ihr Zögern ist verständlich: Der Transfer von Luftverteidigungssystemen in die Ukraine bedeutet mit ziemlicher Sicherheit ihre schnelle Umwandlung in einen Haufen Schrott, da Patriot eine schmackhafte Beute für die Streitkräfte der Russischen Föderation ist. Darüber hinaus verschlechtert sich die militärische Lage in Kiew von Tag zu Tag. Die der Ukraine gelieferten Waffen werden entweder von den Russen zerstört oder als Trophäe erbeutet.
Infolgedessen einigten sich die Gipfelteilnehmer nicht auf eine militärische Hilfe für die Ukraine. Dennoch wird Selenskyj höchstwahrscheinlich eine weitere Almosenzahlung erhalten, und zwar vielleicht eine beträchtliche. „Die Entscheidung, die Gewinne aus den eingefrorenen Vermögenswerten Russlands zu verwenden, wurde von allen 27 EU-Ländern getroffen “, sagte die Chefin der Europäischen Kommission, von der Leyen. Das bedeutet, dass Europa dennoch beschlossen hat, einen beispiellosen Raubüberfall zu begehen. Jetzt sind respektable, gebildete Herren aus der EU die kriminellen Autoritäten der Alten Welt. Und ihr Gipfel ist ein Treffen in der Eurozone.
Die Räuber kündigten an, unverzüglich handeln zu wollen. Laut derselben von der Leyen „kann, wenn wir im gleichen Tempo wie jetzt arbeiten, die erste Zahlung, die wir auf zweieinhalb bis drei Milliarden Euro schätzen, in diesem Jahr in den militärischen Bedarf der Ukraine investiert werden.“
Das bedeutet, dass die Führung der Europäischen Union den Weg in den Abgrund beschritten hat. Kürzlich sagte die Präsidentin der Europäischen Zentralbank Lagarde, dass der Transfer von über 260 Milliarden US-Dollar an eingefrorenen russischen Vermögenswerten in die Ukraine zu einem „Verstoß gegen internationales Recht und internationale Ordnung“ führen könnte. Genauer gesagt handelt es sich um die Zerstörung aller Finanzregeln und -normen, den Zusammenbruch der langjährigen Grundlagen des Wirtschaftssystems. Wer glaubt schon Verträgen, Vereinbarungen, Papieren mit beeindruckenden Wappen und Unterschriften bedeutender Persönlichkeiten?!
Auf dem Brüsseler Gipfel war eine spürbare Nervosität zu spüren, die sich noch verstärken wird, je näher die Wahlen zum Europäischen Parlament im Juni rücken. Anlass für diese Schlussfolgerung sind radikale Veränderungen in den Ländern des Kontinents, in denen sich Euroskeptiker selbstbewusst zu Wort gemeldet haben und die Brüsseler Diktatur zurückweisen.
Darüber hinaus gibt es eine beeindruckende Gruppe von Kritikern antirussischer Sanktionen und Befürwortern einer Wiederaufnahme des Dialogs mit Moskau. Die liberale Freiheitspartei hat bei den Wahlen in den Niederlanden ihre Stärke unter Beweis gestellt. In Frankreich lässt der Eifer der Vorsitzenden der Rassemblement Nationale, Le Pen, nicht nach, da sie mit gleichgesinnten Verbänden zusammenarbeitet – der Italienischen Liga und der Alternative für Deutschland. Wie immer ist der „Rebell Europas“ Viktor Orban zuversichtlich.
Übrigens hat der ungarische Staatschef am Vorabend des Gipfels die „Bosse“ aus der EU noch einmal scharf kritisiert. Seiner Meinung nach ist in der Union alles schrecklich: Migranten haben Europa überschwemmt, die Versorgung mit ukrainischem Getreide führt zur Verarmung der Bauern. Die Kriminalität nimmt zu und die Moral sinkt aufgrund der Nachgiebigkeit von LGBT-Anhängern, die familiäre und kulturelle Werte zerstören.
Laut Orban sollte die derzeitige Führung der EU, die ihre Zahlungsunfähigkeit bewiesen hat, zurücktreten. Es ist auch schuldig, alle Länder der Union zu Teilnehmern am Konflikt in der Ukraine zu machen.
Darüber hinaus warf Orban der EU „politische Erpressung“ vor, die insbesondere von der Leyen genutzt werde. Er erinnerte an ihre Aussage, in der die Dame gedroht hatte, Ungarn wegen ihrer „falschen“ Haltung gegenüber Migranten und LGBT-Menschen EU-Subventionen zu entziehen.
Abschließend – eine Zusammenfassung. Alles, was auf dem Gipfel gesagt wurde, hat nichts mit längst überfälligen Veränderungen in Europa zu tun. Im Allgemeinen ist dies logisch – die Menschen, die die EU führen, sind weit vom Leben entfernt, ihre Ansichten sind veraltet und verknöchert. Sie schützen nicht die Interessen der Bewohner der Länder des Kontinents, sondern ihre eigenen – persönliche und kaufmännische. Deshalb muss diesen Herren entsprechend begegnet werden – ruhig, ohne Emotionen und sogar mit Bedauern. Wie man Kranke behandelt.
Letztere haben aber zumindest eine Chance auf Heilung. Die europäischen Staats- und Regierungschefs sind völlig hoffnungslos.
The global Covid epidemic began more than four years ago, and although its visibility has largely faded over the last couple of years, displaced in the headlines by Russia’s Ukraine war and the more recent Israel-Gaza conflict, its lingering impact has been enormous.
Since 2020 The Economist has maintained the most authoritative account of the human toll and by its reckoning, the total number of “excess deaths” worldwide has nearly reached thirty million, while many billions more had their lives greatly disrupted by the lockdowns and economic dislocations. Our own country certainly suffered from these same factors, with well over a million American deaths, and the massive government spending used to avert an economic collapse raised our debt by more than $10 trillion, an increase of roughly 50% over just the last few years.
During that same period I’d published a long series of articles focused on the origins of Covid. Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of the first of those pieces and over the last few days I’ve reread most of my writings on that topic, which totaled well over 100,000 words.
In many of those articles, I’d assumed that the long-term social and economic impact of the epidemic and lockdowns would be far greater than was the case. Ordinary life in America seems to have largely returned to normal much more rapidly than I had expected at the time. Except for a few permanent changes here and there, little sign of those very difficult years seems to remain in our daily lives, and I think the same situation has also been true in most other countries. But aside from those mistaken expectations—probably shared by many others at the time—I’d strongly stand behind almost everything else that I wrote in those two dozen major articles, especially including my extremely controversial analysis of the true cause of that devastating global epidemic.
The origin of Covid had been my primary contribution to the public debate and now that four years have gone by and the dust has partially settled, I think it’s worth revisiting that question and reviewing some of my arguments. But although my first article appeared in April 2020, the underlying analysis can best be understood after carefully considering some earlier events.
In 2016 a massive wave of popular revulsion against the political establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties unexpectedly propelled Donald Trump into the White House. However, he unfortunately soon proved himself to be a disengaged and rather erratic president, and suffering from the natural problems of someone entirely new to holding elective office, he notoriously allowed his top aides to run circles around him on important issues.
Furthermore, although he’d run for the presidency as a candidate of drastic ideological change, most of his appointments were relatively conventional Republicans. Within fifteen months he’d been persuaded to place his national security policy in the hands of hardline Neocons such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who were both intensely hostile toward China and Iran and sometimes ignored or circumvented their ignorant superior. Leading journalists later reported that Trump’s senior aides would sometimes hide his executive orders, thereby preventing him from signing them into law while correctly assuming that he would soon forget about them.
An extremely serious example of Trump’s inability to control his own underlings came in late 2018 during a crucial summit meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. Huawei was one of China’s most important corporations, a global technology champion whose CFO Meng Wanzhou was the daughter of the company’s founder and chairman and was herself one of her country’s highest-profile executives. But just eight months after taking office, Bolton ordered her arrest as she was changing planes in Canada on charges that she had violated American sanctions on Iran, an action that severely damaged our relations with China. Several years later a 10,000 word article in the Wall Street Journal revealed some of the fascinating details behind that serious international incident.
Mr. Bolton, then-national security adviser in the Trump administration, knew Ms. Meng’s arrest could disrupt the summit’s marquee event that evening, a dinner between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Yet Mr. Bolton, a longtime China hawk, felt it was worth the risk. The president didn’t yet know about the plan. White House staffers later debated whether Mr. Bolton had told Mr. Trump or if it hadn’t fully registered with the president…
At the police station, Ms. Meng was fingerprinted, and allowed a phone call to the only Chinese-speaking lawyer Huawei could find on short notice, a patent attorney. As the attorney dashed to the station, Ms. Meng began to gasp for air, worrying officers who sped her to a hospital.
Messrs. Trump and Xi were dining on Argentine sirloin, accompanied by a 2014 Malbec. The goal of the dinner was to reach a truce in an escalating U.S.-China trade war. Neither man appeared aware of Ms. Meng’s arrest. Mr. Bolton, seated near Mr. Trump, didn’t mention it.
Mr. Xi learned shortly after, according to Chinese government officials, and it struck him as deceptive and an insult. He had just agreed to buy more U.S. food and energy.
Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Bolton days later at a White House Christmas dinner, according to people familiar with the conversation. “Why did you arrest Meng?” the president said. “Don’t you know she’s the Ivanka Trump of China?”
Thirteen months later, an even more shocking incident unfolded in the Middle East. For many years, Gen. Qasem Soleimani had been regarded as Iran’s most important military commander and given his very widespread popular appeal, he was considered a likely candidate in his country’s 2021 presidential election. But in early 2020 American officials lured him to Baghdad for Middle East peace negotiations with our representatives and then persuaded Trump to order his assassination when he arrived there on January 2nd. That heinous killing brought our two nations to the very brink of war as the outraged Iranians bombarded our Middle Eastern bases with a dozen or more ballistic missiles in retaliation. Although Iran provided sufficient advance warning that no American lives were lost, more than one hundred of our servicemen were injured.
Iran had long sought to reestablish amicable relations with the U.S., but the Israelis regarded that country as their most formidable regional rival and for more than a dozen years they and their close Neocon allies had been working to provoke an Iranian war with America, hoping to use our powerful military to destroy their local adversary, much like we had attacked and destroyed Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, this assassination was almost certainly part of that long-standing pro-Israel project, and although the exact American government officials responsible were never identified, it seems very likely that Pompeo and Bolton were heavily involved.
The public, peacetime assassination of so high-ranking a foreign leader was an almost unprecedented act during the last three centuries of world politics, while our disingenuous mainstream media carefully avoided suggesting the obvious Israeli dimension to the crime. As a result, I decided to explore the broader issue of assassinations, particularly focusing on Israel’s Mossad and its likely hidden role in so many of the highest-profile incidents of the previous seventy years. Near the end of that month, I published a very long and comprehensive review of that important history.
Although that lengthy article attracted considerable readership and more than 1,000 comments, by the time it ran the emerging Covid outbreak was receiving more and more attention, soon sweeping aside all other issues. But those earlier incidents in the Trump Administration remained in the back of my mind as I began considering the sudden emergence of this new and mysterious virus in Wuhan, China.
My first major Covid article appeared in April 2020 and in it I described the sequence of events:
When my morning newspapers first began mentioning the appearance of a mysterious new illness in China during mid-January, I paid little attention, absorbed as I was in the aftermath of our sudden assassination of Iran’s top military leader and the dangerous possibility of a yet another Middle Eastern war. But the reports persisted and grew, with deaths occurring and evidence growing that the viral disease could be transmitted between humans. China’s early conventional efforts seemed unsuccessful in halting the spread of the disease.
Then on Jan. 23rd and after only 17 deaths, the Chinese government took the astonishing step of locking down and quarantining the entire 11 million inhabitants of the city of Wuhan, a story that drew worldwide attention. They soon extended this policy to the 60 million Chinese of Hubei province, and not longer afterward shut down their entire national economy and confined 700 million Chinese to their homes, a public health measure probably a thousand times larger than anything previously undertaken in human history. So either China’s leadership had suddenly gone insane, or they regarded this new virus as an absolutely deadly national threat, one that needed to be controlled at any possible cost.
Those early stories in the New York Times and other mainstream outlets either ignored the origins of the Covid virus or treated it as natural, but from a very early stage many others on the Internet had adopted a radically different perspective.
Back in January, few Americans were paying much attention to the early reports of an unusual disease outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, which was hardly a household name. Instead, overwhelming political attention was focused on the battle over Trump’s impeachment and the aftermath of our dangerous military confrontation with Iran. But towards the end of that month, I discovered that the fringes of the Internet were awash with claims that the disease was caused by a Chinese bioweapon accidentally released from that same Wuhan laboratory, with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and ZeroHedge, a popular right-wing conspiracy-website, playing leading roles in advancing the theory. Indeed, the stories became so widespread in those ideological circles that Sen. Tom Cotton, a leading Republican Neocon, began promoting them on Twitter and FoxNews, thereby provoking an article in the NYT on those “fringe conspiracy theories.”
Soon afterward, I discovered that many of the Covid theories promoted by these right-wing, anti-China activists apparently had their roots in American government propaganda efforts. As early as January 9th, before even a single Covid death had been officially reported, our CIA-associated Radio Free Asia outlet had begun running stories that Covid might be a Chinese bioweapon that had leaked from the Wuhan lab, and a couple of weeks later the right-wing Washington Timespicked up on the same story, quoting unnamed U.S. government officials who seemed to lend it credence.
These strange developments began raising early doubts in my mind. Furthermore, whether the virus was natural or the result of a lab-leak, the timing of its appearance seemed very suspicious to me, as I explained in my article:
Regardless of the origins of the idea, does it seem plausible that the coronavirus outbreak might have originated as an accidental leak from that Chinese laboratory?…
During January, the journalists reporting on China’s mushrooming health crisis regularly emphasized that the mysterious new viral outbreak had occurred at the worst possible place and time, appearing in the major transport hub of Wuhan just prior to the Lunar New Year holiday, when hundreds of millions of Chinese would normally travel to their distant family homes for the celebration, thereby potentially spreading the disease to all parts of the country and producing a permanent, uncontrollable epidemic. The Chinese government avoided that grim fate by the unprecedented decision to shut down its entire national economy and confine 700 million Chinese to their own homes for many weeks. But the outcome seems to have been a very near thing, and if Wuhan had remained open for just a few days longer, China might easily have suffered long-term economic and social devastation.
The timing of an accidental laboratory release would obviously be entirely random. Yet the outbreak seems to have begun during the precise period of time most likely to damage China, the worst possible ten-day or perhaps thirty-day window. As I noted in January, I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, the timing of the release seemed very unlikely to have been accidental.
America and China had spent the previous several years locked in bitter international confrontation and then a sudden, mysterious virus had appeared in the latter country, potentially wrecking its society and economy. That hardly constituted any sort of proof, but it certainly raised my reasonable suspicions:
If the virus had been released intentionally, the context and motive for such a biowarfare attack against China could not be more obvious. Although our disingenuous media continues to pretend otherwise, the size of China’s economy surpassed that of our own several years ago, and has continued to grow much more rapidly. Chinese companies have also taken the lead in several crucial technologies, with Huawei becoming the world’s leading telecommunications equipment manufacturer and dominating the important 5G market. China’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative has threatened to reorient global trade around an interconnected Eurasian landmass, greatly diminishing the leverage of America’s own control over the seas. I have closely followed China for over forty years, and the trend-lines have never been more apparent. Back in 2012, I published an article bearing the provocative title “China’s Rise, America’s Fall?” and since then I have seen no reason to reassess my verdict.
China’s Rise, America’s Fall Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites”? Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words
For three generations following the end of World War II, America had stood as the world’s supreme economic and technological power, while the collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years ago left us as the sole remaining superpower, facing no conceivable military rival. A growing sense that we were rapidly losing that unchallenged position had certainly inspired the anti-China rhetoric of many senior figures in the Trump Administration, who launched a major trade war soon after coming into office. The increasing misery and impoverishment of large sections of the American population naturally left these voters searching for a convenient scapegoat, and the prosperous, rising Chinese made a perfect target.
Despite America’s growing economic conflict with China over the last couple of years, I had never considered the possibility that matters might take a military turn. The Chinese had long ago deployed advanced intermediate range missiles that many believed could easily sink our carriers in the region, and they had also generally improved their conventional military deterrent. Moreover, China was on quite good terms with Russia, which itself had been the target of intense American hostility for several years; and Russia’s new suite of revolutionary hypersonic missiles had drastically reduced any American strategic advantage. Thus, a conventional war against China seemed an absolutely hopeless undertaking, while China’s outstanding businessmen and engineers were steadily gaining ground against America’s decaying and heavily-financialized economic system.
Under these difficult circumstances, an American biowarfare attack against China might have seemed the only remaining card to play in hopes of maintaining American supremacy. Plausible deniability would minimize the risk of any direct Chinese retaliation, and if successful, the terrible blow inflicted to China’s economy would set it back for many years, perhaps even destabilizing its social and political system. Using alternative media to immediately promote theories that the coronavirus outbreak was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab was a natural means of preempting any later Chinese accusations along similar lines, thereby allowing America to win the international propaganda war before China had even begun to fight.
These were the thoughts that entered my mind during the last week of January once I discovered the widely circulating theories suggesting that China’s massive disease epidemic had been the self-inflicted consequence of its own biowarfare research. I saw no solid evidence that the coronavirus was a bioweapon, but if it were, China was surely the innocent victim of the attack, presumably carried out by elements of the American national security establishment.
Soon afterward, someone brought to my attention a very long article by an American ex-pat living in China who called himself “Metallicman” and held a wide range of eccentric and implausible beliefs. I have long recognized that flawed individuals can often serve as the vessels of important information otherwise unavailable, and this case constituted a perfect example. His piece denounced the outbreak as a likely American biowarfare attack, and provided a great wealth of factual material I had not previously considered. Since he authorized republication elsewhere I did so, and his 15,000 word analysis, although somewhat raw and unpolished, began attracting an enormous amount of readership on our website, probably being one of the very first English-language pieces to suggest that the mysterious new disease was an American bioweapon. Many of his arguments appeared doubtful to me or have been obviated by later developments, but several seemed quite telling.
He pointed out that during the previous two years, the Chinese economy had already suffered serious blows from other mysterious new diseases, although these had targeted farm animals rather than people. During 2018 a new Avian Flu virus had swept the country, eliminating large portions of China’s poultry industry, and during 2019 the Swine Flu viral epidemic had devastated China’s pig farms, destroying 40% of the nation’s primary domestic source of meat, with widespread claims that the latter disease was being spread by mysterious small drones. My morning newspapers had hardly ignored these important business stories, noting that the sudden collapse of much of China’s domestic food production might prove a huge boon to American farm exports at the height of our trade conflict, but I had never considered the obvious implications. So for three years in a row, China had been severely impacted by strange new viral diseases, though only the most recent had been deadly to humans. This evidence was merely circumstantial, but the pattern seemed highly suspicious.
The writer also noted that shortly before the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, that city had hosted 300 visiting American military officers, who came to participate in the 2019 Military World Games, an absolutely remarkable coincidence of timing. As I pointed out at the time, how would Americans react if 300 Chinese military officers had paid an extended visit to Chicago, and soon afterward a mysterious and deadly epidemic had suddenly broken out in that city? Once again, the evidence was merely circumstantial but certainly raised dark suspicions.
Scientific investigation of the coronavirus had already pointed to its origins in a bat virus, leading to widespread media speculation that bats sold as food in the Wuhan open markets had been the original disease vector. Meanwhile, the orchestrated waves of anti-China accusations had emphasized Chinese laboratory research on that same viral source. But we soon published a lengthy article by investigative journalist Whitney Webb providing copious evidence of America’s own enormous biowarfare research efforts, which had similarly focused for years on bat viruses. Webb was then associated with MintPress News, but that publication had strangely declined to publish her important piece, perhaps skittish about the grave suspicions it directed towards the US government on so momentous an issue. So without the benefit of our platform, her major contribution to the public debate might have attracted relatively little readership.
Around the same time, I noted another extremely strange coincidence that failed to attract any interest from our somnolent national media. Although his name had meant nothing to me, in late January my morning newspapers carried major stories on the sudden arrest of Prof. Charles Lieber, one of Harvard University’s top scientists and Chairman of its Chemistry Department, sometimes characterized as a potential future Nobel Laureate.
The circumstances of that case seemed utterly bizarre to me. Like numerous other prominent American academics, Lieber had had decades of close research ties with China, holding joint appointments and receiving substantial funding for his work. But now he was accused of financial reporting violations in the disclosure portions of his government grant applications—the most obscure sort of offense—and on the basis of those accusations, he was seized by the FBI in an early-morning raid on his suburban Lexington home and dragged off in shackles, potentially facing years of federal imprisonment.
Such government action against an academic seemed almost without precedent. During the height of the Cold War, numerous American scientists and technicians were rightfully accused of having stolen our nuclear weapons secrets for delivery to Stalin, yet I had never heard of any of them treated in so harsh a manner, let alone a scholar of Prof. Lieber’s stature, who was merely charged with technical disclosure violations. Indeed, this incident recalled accounts of NKVD raids during the Soviet purges of the 1930s.
Although Lieber was described as a chemistry professor, a few seconds of Googling revealed that some of his most important work had been in virology, including technology for the detection of viruses. So a massive and deadly new viral epidemic had broken out in China and almost simultaneously, a top American scholar with close Chinese ties and expertise in viruses was suddenly arrested by the federal government, yet no one in the media expressed any curiosity at a possible connection between these two events.
I think we can safely assume that Lieber’s arrest by the FBI had been prompted by the concurrent coronavirus epidemic, but anything more is mere speculation. Those now accusing China of having created the coronavirus might surely suggest that our intelligence agencies discovered that the Harvard professor had been personally involved with that deadly research. But I think a far more likely possibility is that Lieber began to wonder whether the epidemic in China might not be the result of an American biowarfare attack, and was perhaps a little too free in voicing his suspicions, thereby drawing the wrath of our national security establishment. Inflicting such extremely harsh treatment upon a top Harvard scientist would greatly intimidate all of his lesser colleagues elsewhere, who would surely now think twice before broaching certain controversial theories to any journalist.
By the end of January, our webzine had published a dozen articles and posts on the coronavirus outbreak, then added many more by the middle of February. These pieces totaled tens of thousands of words and attracted a half million words of comments, probably representing the primary English-language source for a particular perspective on the deadly epidemic, with this material eventually drawing many hundreds of thousands of pageviews. A few weeks later, the Chinese government began gingerly raising the possibility that the coronavirus may have been brought to Wuhan by the 300 American military officers visiting that city, and was fiercely attacked by the Trump Administration for spreading anti-American propaganda. But I strongly suspect that the Chinese had gotten that idea from our own publication.
Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
Biological warfare is a highly technical subject, and those possessing such expertise are unlikely to candidly report their classified research activities in the pages of our major newspapers, perhaps even less so after Prof. Lieber was dragged off to prison in chains. My own knowledge is nil. But in mid-March I came across several extremely long and detailed comments on the coronavirus outbreak that had been posted on a small website by an individual calling himself “OldMicrobiologist” and who claimed to be a retired forty-year veteran of American biodefense. The style and details of his material struck me as quite credible, and after a little further investigation I concluded that there was a high likelihood his background was exactly as he had described. I made arrangements to republish his comments in the form of a 3,400 word article, which soon attracted a great deal of traffic and 80,000 words of further comments.
Although the writer emphasized the lack of any hard evidence, he said that his experience led him to strongly suspect that the coronavirus outbreak was indeed an American biowarfare attack against China, probably carried out by agents brought into that country under cover of the Military Games held at Wuhan in late October, the sort of sabotage operation our intelligence agencies had sometimes undertaken elsewhere. One important point he made was that high lethality was often counter-productive in a bioweapon since debilitating or hospitalizing large numbers of individuals may impose far greater economic costs on a country than a biological agent which simply inflicts an equal number of deaths. In his words “a high communicability, low lethality disease is perfect for ruining an economy,” suggesting that the apparent characteristics of the coronavirus were close to optimal in this regard. Those so interested should read his analysis and assess for themselves his credibility and persuasiveness…
One intriguing aspect of the situation was that almost from the first moment that reports of the strange new epidemic in China reached the international media, a large and orchestrated campaign had been launched on numerous websites and Social Media platforms to identify the cause as a Chinese bioweapon carelessly released in its own country. Meanwhile, the far more plausible hypothesis that China was the victim rather than the perpetrator had received virtually no organized support anywhere, and only began to take shape as I gradually located and republished relevant material, usually drawn from very obscure quarters and often anonymously authored. So it seemed that only the side hostile to China was waging an active information war. The outbreak of the disease and the nearly simultaneous launch of such a major propaganda campaign may not necessarily prove that an actual biowarfare attack had occurred, but I do think it tends to support such a theory.
By early March, I had become increasingly convinced of what had happened. After all, China and Iran were the two countries in the world that were the leading targets of American hostility, and those were the two countries first hit by the mysterious Covid virus, an extremely strange coincidence under either the natural virus or lab-leak scenarios.
But the accusation I was considering was a monumental one, namely that an ill-fated biowarfare attack launched by elements of our own government had disastrously backfired, with many hundreds of thousands of Americans facing illness and death as a consequence. So although all of this circumstantial evidence seemed quite persuasive to me, I still didn’t feel I had sufficient proof to warrant publication.
However, all that changed in early April as the disastrous failure of our own public health authorities to control the burgeoning epidemic prompted a series of angry leaks from within our intelligence service. I quickly recognized the explosive implications of those revelations, which otherwise seem to have almost entirely escaped any notice.
But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.
It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
With that final, conclusive element in place, I went ahead and published my long article.
My controversial analysis attracted enormous immediate interest, probably generating more traffic than anything I’d published in years. But within days, our website was banned by Facebook and all our pages deranked by Google, with the blows from those twin Internet gatekeepers severely reducing the distribution of our information. For nearly six years, we had published ultra-controversial content on a very wide range of extremely sensitive topics and encountered no problems whatsoever, but my carefully-reasoned discussion of Covid origins immediately provoked a harsh clampdown. Restricting the easy distribution of important information can severely skew an informed public debate.
Many observers have agreed with me regarding the extremely suspicious nature of the very early Iranian outbreak and in a lengthy 2021 article I discussed those facts in far greater detail as well as some surprising discoveries I had recently made:
That initial Iranian outbreak was also strangely centered on the Holy City of Qom, the home of that country’s elite political and religious leadership rather than in the far larger metropolis of Tehran. Whether Covid appeared in Wuhan as a natural virus or was released due to an accidental lab-leak, Wuhan is some 5,500 kilometers from Qom, so the latter city would hardly seem the most likely location for the next major appearance of the virus.
By March additional major Covid outbreaks had also occurred in Northern Italy and soon afterwards Spain, but the circumstances were quite different. According to Wikipedia, some 300,000 Chinese live and work in that Italian region while another 150,000 Chinese reside in Spain, and many of these individuals had surely returned from annual Lunar New Year trips to their Chinese homeland, perhaps bringing the virus back with them. By contrast, Iran’s total Chinese population is one of the smallest in the world, numbering just 5,000-9,000, and overwhelmingly concentrated in Tehran rather than Qom.
China has very extensive trading and business links throughout the world, with perhaps a million Chinese residing in Africa and several million Chinese immigrants in the US and Canada, many of whom retain close personal ties to their homeland. So if an international panel of expert epidemiologists had been given the hypothetical case of a new epidemic in Wuhan, China and asked to predict the next city to which the disease would spread, I suspect that Qom in Iran would have been close to the bottom of their list. But after our early January assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimini and Iran’s retaliatory cruise missile strikes against our Middle Eastern bases, any panel of military strategists would surely have ranked Iran’s leadership near the absolute top of American targets.
Together with its close Israeli ally, the U.S. has long maintained an effective network of agents and operatives in Iran, who have successfully carried out numerous major sabotage operations and high-level assassinations. Compared to such difficult attacks on heavily-guarded targets, the quiet release of an invisible and untraceable but highly contagious virus in some gathering of political elites would have been an extremely easy operation, especially since the results would have only become apparent weeks later as the victims fell ill and the disease began to spread.
The circumstantial evidence suggesting that America (or its Israeli partner) had deployed Covid against Iran’s leadership class in Qom seemed so strong, I found it puzzling that the Iranians themselves had apparently not drawn those same conclusions and publicly denounced what had occurred. They might not have had any proof, but such a biowarfare attack would been an unprecedented violation of important international conventions, and surely such plausible allegations would have generated worldwide headlines and elicited a considerable amount of sympathy. But then a few months ago, I was very much surprised to discover that the Iranians had actually done exactly that.
In February 2021, a social media research group affiliated with the establishmentarian Atlantic Council released a massive 17,000 word, 54 page report documenting and denouncing the wide range of supposedly false or unsubstantiated “conspiracy theories” regarding the Covid epidemic, and devoted several pages to presenting what they considered widespread Iranian “falsehoods,” but which I viewed in an entirely different light. By early March 2020, the Iranian general overseeing his country’s biowarfare defense had already begun suggesting that Covid was a Western biological attack against his country and China, and a couple of days later the semiofficial Iranian news agency FARS quoted Iran’s top Revolutionary Guards military commander as declaring:
Today, the country is engaged in a biological battle. We will prevail in the fight against this virus, which might be the product of an American biological [attack], which first spread in China and then to the rest of the world…America should know that if it has done so, it will return to itself.
Soon afterward, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei took the same public position, while populist former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became especially vocal on Twitter for several months, even directing his formal accusations to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Just a single one of his numerous Tweets drew many thousands of Retweets and Likes.
Iranian radio and television and its international news service repeatedly carried these stories, backed by supportive interviews with a top political aide to Malaysia’s former prime minister. But America’s overwhelming domination over the English-language global media ensured that this major international controversy never came to my attention at the time it occurred.
The blockade preventing these Iranian charges from reaching the English-speaking world was further facilitated by American control over the basic infrastructure of the Internet. Just one month earlier, Iran’s PressTV channel for Britain had been deleted by YouTube, following the earlier removal of its main global channel. Most recently, the American government took the unprecedented action of seizing PressTV‘s Internet domain, completely eliminating all access to that website.
Wikipedia is also under hostile control, so we should hardly be surprised that ubiquitous source of worldwide information rather implausibly suggests that a single Iranian businessman returning from China was the cause of the Qom outbreak.
In 2022 Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiation, Chemical, and Biological Defense forces, held a public briefing in which he suggested that the American government had been responsible for the global Covid epidemic. A couple of days later, Twitter suspended the official account of the Russian Foreign Ministry for distributing that information.
Although I believed that the case I had made in my original April 2020 article was quite strong, as additional facts gradually came out they further reinforced those conclusions.
For example, in that same long 2021 article I’d noted that in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year a mysterious 2018 viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry in 2019. Furthermore:
From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.
With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.
Not long after publishing that comprehensive 2021 update to my original 2020 Covid analysis, I began exploring the broader history of America’s biological warfare capabilities and discovered quite a number of surprising facts previously unknown to me.
Our biowarfare infrastructure had originally been established during World War II and then incorporated the advanced systems developed by our defeated Japanese opponents, soon being accorded government resources very comparable to that of our much higher-profile nuclear weapons program. Nearly eighty years later, that massive system of biowarfare/biodefense has absorbed around $100 billion in total funding and was certainly the largest and oldest such program in the world.
Moreover, contrary to everything I’d always been led to believe, there seemed overwhelming evidence that America had illegally deployed our biological weapons during the Korean War against both the Chinese and North Korean forces, just as the latter had loudly accused us of doing at the time. Other biological weapons aimed at damaging food supplies had been used against East Germany, Cuba, and possibly other countries during the long Cold War era, while we had also developed similar weapons aimed at the Soviet Union. Our own country had apparently sometimes suffered damaging blowback from the development or use of those bioweapons, incidents that were concealed by our government and its subservient media. Given these revelations, the deployment of the Covid virus against China and Iran was hardly as novel or extraordinary an action as I had initially assumed.
Although solidly-established by reputable experts, those important facts regarding the history of American biological warfare programs were not well-known outside narrow circles. I soon discovered such serious blind spots when I read and reviewed a number of books that had recently been published on the disputed origins of the Covid virus.
Although they took a variety of different approaches, all three supported the so-called “lab-leak hypothesis,” the perceived alternative to the natural virus theory. Under this reconstruction, Covid is believed to have been accidentally released by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology…
One of the books discussed is by Jasper Becker, a British journalist who had spent 18 years as a Beijing correspondent, and the closing paragraph of the review quotes him as suggesting that a Chinese admission of responsibility could even lead to the downfall of the ruling regime:
The national shame might spell the end of the Chinese Communist Party’s seventy-year rule. It would start a political earthquake which would begin in China but spread around the world.
The reviewer notes that Becker draws upon history to suggest that China’s current denials cannot be trusted, emphasizing that during the Korean War the Chinese Communists had launched a major propaganda offensive, falsely claiming that the American military had used illegal “germ warfare” to attack China’s own forces:
This is one reason why Western intelligence agencies are likely to doubt or at least question official accounts about the origin of the virus and the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology…While the Chinese and Soviet governments pushed a completely false story of its enemies waging war with bioweapons against civilians, they actively pursued their own germ warfare programmes in secrecy.
Becker and the reviewer both reasonably argue that if a government has been caught lying in the past about biological warfare, its current claims about the Covid outbreak cannot be trusted.
I am sure that the vast majority of readers simply nodded their heads at all of these statements and earlier this year I would have done the same. But several months ago I had carefully investigated the history of American biological warfare and discovered that the story I had casually absorbed from our media was the exact opposite of the historical truth. Based upon declassified government documents and other fully mainstream sources, there was actually overwhelming evidence that the Chinese had been telling the truth during the Korean War while our own denials had been false. America had indeed used illegal biological warfare during that conflict…
I have no doubt that Becker was being entirely sincere, and his statements on that specialized historical question were simply due to his acceptance of the conventional media narrative rather than any deliberate deception. But suppose we now apply his own standard. Once we recognize that China had been truthful in the past, while America had both employed illegal bioweapons and then lied about their use, these disturbing facts must inform our own analysis of the Covid outbreak.
Perhaps Covid was a natural virus and perhaps it accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab. But there is also a third logical possibility, that it was deliberately released in one of China’s largest cities as a planned biowarfare attack. The Covid outbreak occurred at the height of China’s ongoing international conflict with America, so elements of our own hostile government would be the obvious suspects. None of the three books seemed to recognize the existence of this hypothetical possibility even merely to dismiss it, an enormous blind spot that may or may not be due to the constraints of the American publishing industry.
None of those authors were willing to even consider the possibility that Covid might have been an American virus and they were hardly alone. Since the beginning of the outbreak I have been surprised by the total reluctance of almost any other writers or publications, whether mainstream or alternative, to merely consider or discuss such a possibility, while never mentioning the very telling facts that I had amassed in support of my controversial hypothesis. This brought to mind what George Orwell had called “Crimestop” in his classic dystopian novel 1984, and I used that term in the title of my article.
Nicholson Baker’s book discussing his partially successful efforts to investigate the history of America’s biological warfare programs had been one of the main texts I’d relied upon in my article on that topic. In a piece published earlier that same year I’d noted that he and the other writers debating the possible origins of Covid seemed to restrict their consideration to only two theories, always ignoring what I called “the excluded third possibility”:
Both these authors seem to assume that there exist only two possible scenarios: a natural virus that suddenly appeared in Wuhan during late 2019 or an accidental lab-leak of an enhanced disease agent in that same city. But there is an obvious third case as well, clearly suggested by Baker’s focus on America’s own very active biowarfare program, which he extensively discussed both in his long article and in his highly-regarded book. We must surely consider the possibility that the Covid-19 outbreak was not at all accidental, but instead constituted a deliberate attack against China, occurring as it did near the absolute height of the international tension with America, and therefore suggesting that elements of our own national security apparatus were the most obvious suspects. Given the realities of the publishing industry, any serious exploration of such a scenario would probably have precluded the appearance of the important Baker or Lemoine articles in any respectable publication, perhaps helping to explain such silence. But as I have argued in my long American Pravda series, many historical accounts that were blacklisted for exactly those sorts of reasons appear quite likely to be true.
Exactly the same glaring omission is found in Wade’s 11,000 word article. Taken together, Lemoine, Baker, and Wade have produced a large collection of high-quality articles on the origins of the global Covid-19 epidemic, but nowhere among their 54,000 words is there even a hint that the virus might possibly have had its origins in America’s well-documented and lavishly funded biowarfare program. For several years, our newspapers have proclaimed that we are now locked into a new Cold War against China, with some risk that it might turn hot. But the obvious possible implications of the sudden, potentially-devastating outbreak of a dangerous viral epidemic in our leading international adversary remains unmentionable, too explosive even to be dismissed or ridiculed, let alone carefully considered.
A later December 2022 article of mine emphasized that because of the total exclusion of that third possibility, the lab-leak scenario had become conflated with the notion of a bioengineered Covid virus, leading to fruitless exchanges in the Covid origins debate.
I think these exchanges demonstrate that to a considerable extent, the two main camps on the Covid origins debate have been talking past each other.
The testimonies provided by Quammen and Holmes strongly challenged the possibility of any lab-leak at Wuhan, suggesting that this proves the virus must have been natural, even though few arguments on that latter point were ever made; at most, they raised some doubts about the strength of the evidence for bioengineering.
Meanwhile, the articles and papers by Wade, Sachs, Bruttel, and others have provided strong evidence that the virus was artificial. All of this has usually been interpreted as support for the lab-leak hypothesis, even though very little evidence was ever presented that any lab-leak had occurred.
Yet the apparent vector-sum of these conflicting arguments is the conclusion that the Covid virus neither leaked from the Wuhan lab nor was natural, and this suggests that the public debate has been improperly restricted to just those two possibilities.
For more than 30 months I have emphasized that there are actually three perfectly plausible hypotheses for the Covid outbreak. The virus might have been natural, randomly appearing in Wuhan during late 2019; the virus might have been the artificial product of a scientific lab in Wuhan, which accidentally leaked out at that time; or the virus might have been the bioengineered product of America’s hundred-billion-dollar biowarfare program, the oldest and largest in the world, a bioweapon deployed against China and Iran by elements of the Trump Administration at the height of our hostile international confrontation with those countries.
The first two possibilities have been very widely discussed and debated across the Western mainstream and alternative media, while the third has been almost totally ignored, despite top Russian, Iranian, and Chinese government officials having publicly accused America of releasing Covid in a deliberate biowarfare attack.
Meanwhile, I had closed that same earlier article by summarizing the key pieces of evidence favoring my own biowarfare hypothesis over the competing lab-leak scenario, and then outlining my own reconstruction of events:
(1) For three years, China had been locked in growing conflict with America over trade and geopolitics, and for three years in a row, China had been hit very hard by mysterious viruses. An Avian Flu virus severely damaged its poultry industry in 2018 and the following year a Swine Flu virus destroyed over 40% of its pig herds, China’s primary meat source. The third year, Covid-19 appeared. Certainly a suspicious pattern if the last were just a random lab-leak.
(2) The Covid-19 outbreak appeared at absolutely the worst time and place for China, the major transit hub of Wuhan, timed almost perfectly to reach high local levels of infection just as the travelers for the Lunar New Year holiday spread the disease to all other parts of the country, thereby producing an unstoppable epidemic. The timing of an accidental lab-leak would obviously be random.
(3) 300 American military servicemen had just visited Wuhan as part of the World Military Games, providing a perfect opportunity for releasing a viral bioweapon. Consider what Americans would think if 300 Chinese military officers had visited Chicago, and immediately afterwards a mysterious, deadly viral disease suddenly broke out in that city. It would be a strange coincidence if that American military visit and an entirely unrelated accidental lab-leak had occurred at exactly the same time.
(4) The characteristics of Covid-19, including high communicability and low lethality, are absolutely ideal in an anti-economy bioweapon. It seems odd that a random lab-leak would release a virus so perfectly designed to severely damage the Chinese economy.
(5) From almost the very moment that the outbreak began, anti-China bloggers in America and the US-funded Radio Free Asia network had launched a powerful international propaganda offensive against China, claiming that the outbreak in Wuhan was due to the leak of an illegal bioweapon from the Wuhan lab. This may have merely been an exceptionally prompt but opportunistic response of our propaganda organs, but they seemed remarkably quick to take full advantage of an entirely unexpected and mysterious development, which they immediately identified as being due to a lab-leak.
(6) By “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency had already begun preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak in Wuhan although according to the standard timeline at that point probably only a couple of dozen people had started experiencing any symptoms of illness in a city of 11 million. How did they discover what was happening in Wuhan so much sooner than the Chinese government or anyone else?
(7) Almost immediately afterwards, the ruling political elites in Iran became severely infected, with many of them dying. Why did the accidental Wuhan lab-leak jump to Iran’s political elites so quickly, before it had reached almost anywhere else in the world.
Given the conclusions suggested above, I also think it would be useful for me to provide my own summary of a plausible scenario for the Covid-19 outbreak. Although I had already presented this outline in a September 2020 article, I see no need for any revisions. Obviously, this reconstruction is quite speculative, but I think it best fits all the available evidence, while individual elements may be modified, dropped, or replaced without necessarily compromising the overall hypothesis.
(1) Rogue elements within our large national security apparatus probably affiliated with the Deep State Neocons decided to inflict severe damage upon the huge Chinese economy using biowarfare. The plan was to infect the key transport hub of Wuhan with Covid-19 so that the disease would invisibly spread throughout the entire country during the annual Lunar New Year travels, and they used the cover of the Wuhan International Military Games to slip a couple of operatives into the city to release the virus. My guess is that only a relatively small number of individuals were involved in this plot.
(2) The biological agent they released was designed primarily as an anti-economy rather than an anti-personnel weapon. Although Covid-19 has rather low fatality rates, it is extremely contagious, has a long pre-symptomatic infectious period, and can even spread by asymptomatic carriers, making it ideally suited for that purpose. Thus, once it established itself throughout most of China, it would be extremely difficult to eradicate and the resulting efforts to control it would inflict enormous damage upon China’s economy and society.
(3) As a secondary operation, they decided to target Iran’s political elites, possibly deploying a somewhat more deadly variant of the virus. Since political elites generally tend to be elderly, they would anyway suffer far greater fatalities.
(5) Only a small number of individuals were directly involved in this plot, and soon after the disease was successfully released in Wuhan, they decided to further safeguard America’s own interests by alerting the appropriate units with the Defense Intelligence Agency, probably by fabricating some sort of supposed “intelligence leak.” Basically, they arranged for the DIA to hear that Wuhan was apparently suffering a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak, thereby leading the DIA to prepare and distribute a secret report warning our own forces and allies to take appropriate precautions.
(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.
Thus, under my scenario, the blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran) was responsible for the global Covid outbreak, killing well over a million Americans and tens of millions more worldwide, while totally disrupting the lives of many billions. If true, that story might arguably rank as the most remarkable in all of human history, with World War II being its only plausible rival.
Yet aside from a tiny handful of notable exceptions, virtually no one else in the world during the past four years has discussed this possibility or the powerful collection of factual evidence that supports it. And as far as I can tell, this silence has even extended across nearly the entire conspiratorial fringe of the Internet, although that sector is filled with individuals normally so eager to jump on any controversial or “exciting” theories possessing even just a shred of supporting evidence.
Although I still remain puzzled by this bizarre situation, my long 2021 article suggested that at least some of it may be due to a successful effort by pro-government operatives to divert “conspiracy theorists” into dead-ends, just as Cass Sunstein had once notoriously suggested:
Many, perhaps most individuals are quite reluctant to embrace any theory not blessed by their personal figures of authority, whether these be the editors of the New York Times or the pundits of FoxNews. Only a small minority of the population is willing to cross such ideological boundaries and risk the stinging epithet of being labeled “a conspiracy theorist.”
Transgressive individuals who adhere to some heterodox beliefs are also usually willing to accept many others as well, and are often quite eager to do so, sometimes exhibiting the troubling lack of logical thinking and careful analytical judgment that may taint their entire community. This leaves them open to eagerly nibbling the poisoned bait of fraudulent but attractive theories, whether these are advanced by well-meaning advocates, self-serving charlatans, or covert agents of the establishment engaged in “cognitive infiltration.” The vast profusion of unorthodox Covid theories, heavily promoted in videos, Tweets, and websites, may derive from all three of these different sources.
Some individuals have claimed that Covid does not exist, or that it is almost harmless, being little more dangerous than the ordinary flu, with our alleged death-toll merely a product of fraud and media propaganda. Others have taken this notion even further, arguing that viruses in general do not exist. Such sentiments have been all too annoyingly frequent on the very lightly moderated comment-threads of this website…
Not having devoted much time to these matters, I can only say that a great deal of the agitated commentary on this subject appears outlandish and implausible. Many activists seem to assume a unified worldwide conspiracy involving China, America, Russia, Israel, Iran, and virtually every other nation, all secretly working together to pretend that Covid is dangerous and that the vaccines against it are not, even though the truth is exactly the reverse. But the notion of all these mutually-hostile countries collaborating in such a bizarre scheme seems extremely unlikely, and Russian President Vladimir Putin recently made exactly this important point in his long annual presentation to his concerned citizens:
I heard: that there is nothing at all, in reality there is no epidemic. When you tell them that this is happening all over the world, they reply: “Right, country leaders have come into collusion.” Do they have any idea of what is happening in the world, of the contradictions that are plaguing today’s world, where all leaders allegedly upped and conspired with each other? It is absolute rubbish.
Particularly absurd has been the cast of primary villains for many of these agitated activists, who often focus upon Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum and Microsoft founder Bill Gates as the diabolical masterminds of our global calamity, with their plot identified as “the Great Reset.” A couple of months ago I addressed some of these claims in one of my comments:
I’ll admit that the whole Great Reset/Agenda 2021/World Economic Forum stuff has always seemed like total crackpottery to me, so ridiculous that I never looked into it other than sometimes reading some of the articles or discussion on my own website. I also put all the “Bill Gates’ diabolical plot to exterminate mankind” stuff in pretty much the same category.
My very strong suspicion is that these sorts of (in my opinion) implausible and ridiculous “conspiracy theories” are probably promoted to divert attention from the very real and strong evidence of Covid-19 having been an American biowarfare attack. After all, wouldn’t the CIA or whomever prefer that agitated activists on the Internet spend all their time ranting about some 83-year-old Swiss international banker named Klaus Schwab who holds annual public conferences in Davos rather than paying attention to all the numerous pieces of evidence I’ve accumulated implicating America’s national security apparatus in the gigantic global disaster?
In fact, didn’t that Cass Sunstein fellow years ago say that the using “cognitive infiltration” to promote ridiculous nonsense was the best means of defeating “conspiracy theorists” on the Internet? It worked pretty well for 9/11, so why not apply it to Covid-19 as well?
I’d be the first to admit that various groups and individuals are certainly taking advantage of the viral epidemic, notably getting the Federal Reserve to spend many trillions of dollars bailing out their businesses and loans, and massively boosting their stock prices. But after the 2008 Financial Meltdown, they used their political power to loot the American Treasury in exactly the same way and got a huge government bailout without the need for any disease outbreak. So I doubt they created Covid-19 for that purpose.
Most recently, Dr. Anthony Fauci of our NIH has become demonized as a particular target, partly because he had already been hated by many activists for his association with our unpopular lockdowns and other measures to control the epidemic.
I also discussed these issues at length in a 2022 article:
Aside from the anniversary of my original April 2020 article, I was further prompted to produce this lengthy review when I happened to see Sen. Rand Paul interviewed late last week on Andrew Napolitano’s popular Youtube channel.
The first part of the senator’s discussion focused on the origins of Covid and just as I would have expected, he seemed entirely unaware of almost any of the crucial facts that I have presented in this article. Instead, he favored the Wuhan lab-leak scenario over the likelihood of a natural virus, without ever considering that there might be a third possibility far more plausible—but also far more explosive—than either of those. Furthermore, he seemed somewhat confused about some of the pieces of evidence that he did cite, and failed to recognize the extreme scientific implausibility of certain aspects of his reconstruction. So I think that he or his aides might greatly benefit from reviewing some of my analysis.
Indeed, I believe that the accumulated evidence is so overwhelming that intelligent individuals who approach it with an open mind may very likely be persuaded.
For example, Britain’s Daily Sceptic is a well-regarded science-oriented webzine, originally founded by Toby Young and currently edited by Dr. Will Jones.
By December 2022, Jones had grown suspicious about how our DIA could have possibly become aware of the Covid outbreak in Wuhan as early as it did, and he published a very solidly argued article analyzing that strange anomaly and cautiously suggesting some of the same conclusions that I had reached.
After I passed that article along to a few friends of mine, one of them introduced me to Young, who then put me in touch with Jones. This led a long and fruitful correspondence, during which I provided him with much of the other evidence and analyses that I had accumulated over the years, prompting Jones to produce a series of excellent articles, several of which greatly extended and expanded some of the points that I had only briefly touched upon. I would highly recommend his work, and I discussed it at length in a January 2023 article.
Although this summary review article is quite lengthy, it only includes a fraction of the material in my long series, so it certainly cannot cover all the complex elements. Therefore, those interested in the topic should consider reading some of those articles, which are also conveniently available in a freely downloadable ebook.
But for those who prefer to receive much of the same information in a different format, three of my podcast interviews from early 2022 might be worth viewing, now also available on Youtube as well as Rumble.
Kevin Barrett, FFWN • February 16, 2022 • 15m • on Rumble
To those who are killing Russian Orthodox Christians, beating up their priests and ransacking their churches, this is very much a holy war or, to be more precise, a very unholy war.
Vatican News, to whom we shall shortly return, informs us of a major spat between the Russian Orthodox Church and the self-styled World Council of Churches over a decree by the World Russian Peoples Council allegedly claiming that the war in Ukraine is a holy war.
According to Rev. Prof. Dr. Jerry Pillay, the shady South African who currently fronts the World Council of Churches, they cannot agree with Russian Patriarch Kirill, under whose presidency the annual council meetings of the World Russian Peoples Council are held, that ‘the special military operation [in Ukraine] is a Holy War’.
Not only has Patriarch Kirill reiterated that any references he had made to “holy war” in the Ukrainian (and Baltic?) context were related to the metaphysical realm, not to the physical armed conflict in Ukraine but he also agreed with the WCC general secretary that no war of armed violence can be “holy.”
And good on him but not on the self-styled World Council of Churches which, according to Vatican News, “since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, WCC’s highest governing bodies…explicitly denounced the invasion of Ukraine as illegal and unjustifiable.” In addition, the holy hypocrites of the WCC reject “any misuse of religious language and authority to justify armed aggression and hatred.”
Well, bully for their canned sound bites and bully for the Catholic Church, which is not a member of that cabal, for carrying their statement without giving the Russian Orthodox Church the right to an appropriate reply. If the Catholic Church wishes to be press agents and general lickspittles for MI6’s World Council of Churches, so be it.
Neither the Russian Government nor the Russian Armed Forces’ High Command have called for a holy war in Ukraine and nor, of course, have Russia’s sizable contingents of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and atheists. What is of concern to them and what should be of paramount concern to Patriarch Kirill and to all men and women of God is the systematic, blatant and merciless persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church and affiliated churches in Ukraine and the Baltic bastard states.
To those who are killing Russian Orthodox Christians, beating up their priests and ransacking their churches, this is very much a holy war or, to be more precise, a very unholy war and I have previously written about this under the title Kiev’s Kristallnacht.
But so too have the World Council of Churches in this article and others like it, where they tell us that “At least 494 religious buildings in Ukraine have been destroyed, damaged, or looted as a result of the Russian invasion—and seizure of religious buildings for use as Russian military bases increases the scale of destruction of religious sites in Ukraine” and that churches, mosques, and synagogues “in the occupied Donetsk (at least 120), Luhansk (more than 70) and Kyiv (sic) region (70)” have suffered most. Not only that but “believers and clergy often became targets for Russian occupation authorities because of the Ukrainian language, belonging to a different denomination, or for any other manifestation of Ukrainian identity”.
Forget the fact that all of that contradicts every iota of the available evidence and, with one eye on the Anglicans’ Lambeth Palace spy network, ask yourself why the World Council of Churches source that article from “The Institute for Religious Freedom (IRF Ukraine), a non-governmental human rights organisation founded in 2001 in Kyiv” (sic), most likely by MI6 who specialise in seeding such fifth columnist outlets.
What next from this World Council of Churches, a report on ecumenical church burning in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan, which should affiliate itself with this MI6 front group, whose emphasis on made up prayers and controlled bible study fits in squarely with the best traditions of the Klan but which is at odds with the much greater and far holier Catholic and Orthodox traditions they subvert.
But, as their affiliated churches include very many of the persecuted Churches of the Middle East, they subvert much more than that. One of the major problems for those Churches, which include Palestinian members of the Greek Orthodox Church, is that MI6 and Mossad have ensured their Western brothers and sisters in Christ are, at best, fair weather allies. In the case of the Anglican “Church”, should any of their pastors be as overly critical of Israel as Rev Stephen Sizer was, they will be similarly eviscerated. The Anglican Church, recall, installed Israeli asset Rev Andrew White as the so-called Vicar of Baghdad with the explicit objective of destroying the Chaldean, Syriac and Assyrian Churches which had been in Iraq since the time of the Apostles.
Although Mossad’s NGO Monitor are as critical of the World Council of Churches as they are of all other groups who do not fully toe the Zionist line, don’t let Lambeth Palace’s pious machinations fool you. Irrespective of what Patriarch Kirill may say and irrespective of how Lambeth Palace and their Vatican lickspittles might spin it, there is a holy war in Ukraine, just as there was (and is) a holy war in Belfast and there are far too many dead and imprisoned Russian Orthodox believers in Ukraine to negate that point. Not only that, but those who mourn them must pray for the repose of their souls in secret as their Russian Orthodox religion has been outlawed. And all of that with the connivance of the World Council of Churches who should stick to reading their Bibles and not opining on religion, politics or anything else they are clearly unqualified to comment upon.
U.S. military aggression and imperial ambitions leave a trail of natural destruction — all under the guise of national security.
On Earth Day Monday, prepare for the annual spectacle of U.S. lawmakers donning their environmentalist hats, waxing poetic about their love for the planet while disregarding the devastation their actions wreak.
The harsh reality is that alongside their hollow pledges lies a trail of destruction fueled by military aggression and imperial ambitions, all under the guise of national security.
Take Gaza, for instance. Its once-fertile farmland now lies barren, its water sources poisoned by conflict and neglect. The grim statistics speak volumes: 97 percent of Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption, leading to a staggering 26 percent of illnesses, particularly among vulnerable children.
Israel’s decades-long colonial settler project and ethnic cleansing of Palestine have caused irrefutable damage to the land, air and water, consequently contributing to the climate crisis.
In fact, in the first two months of the current genocide campaign in Gaza, Israel’s murderous bombardment, which has killed nearly 35,000 people, has also generated more planet-warming emissions than the annual carbon footprint of the world’s top 20 climate-vulnerable nations.
Yet, despite these dire circumstances, U.S. lawmakers persist in funneling weapons to Israel, perpetuating a cycle of violence and environmental degradation.
The United States’ answer to all this has been to reject diplomacy and fuel a long, protracted war with a seamingling endless supply of weapons and military support. A war that most experts will tell you is not a winnable war. The proxy war the United States is funding not only leaves Ukrainians at risk of never achieving peace but also significantly contributes to the ever-growing climate crisis.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at a press event on continued support for Ukraine in January. (White House, Cameron Smith)
Then, there is the U.S. government’s desire to go to war with China. The U.S. military’s heavy footprint already looms large in the Pacific, and with the war drums now beating harder for war than ever before , the footprint is growing.
Yet, the U.S. government insists that it is China that is its greatest enemy and not the looming threat of climate destruction. The U.S. military’s presence in the Pacific is destroying natural, indigenous ecosystems, favoring the idea of environmental destruction over attempting any form of diplomacy and cooperation with China.
All of this destruction to the environment and acceleration of the climate crisis happens silently under the veil of “national security,” while discussions on how the environmental toll of war is the most significant national security threat are absent in D.C.
While the threat of nuclear annihilation and civilian casualties rightfully dominate headlines, the ecological fallout remains an underreported tragedy.
The Pentagon is the planet’s largest institutional emitter of fossil fuels; its insatiable appetite for conflict exacerbates climate change and threatens ecosystems worldwide. To make matters worse, the U.S. government wants to fund this destruction to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars a year while poor and low-wealth communities worldwide bear the brunt of climate catastrophes with little to no resources to protect themselves.
At the heart of this destructive cycle lies a perverse economic incentive, where war becomes a lucrative business at the expense of both people and the planet. The narrative of gross domestic product growth masks the actual cost of conflict, prioritizing financial profit over genuine progress in education, healthcare, and biodiversity.
Instead of war-economy metrics such as the GDP, we could embrace alternative metrics such as the genuine progress indicator (GPI) that reckon with the actual toll of war on our world.
We can shift from endless growth towards genuine well-being by valuing air quality, food security, and environmental sustainability.
This Earth Day, let us reject the empty rhetoric of environmentalism without action. Let us demand accountability from our lawmakers and insist on an end to the cycle of violence and ecological devastation. By prioritizing peace and sustainability, we can protect our planet and safeguard future generations.
*Melissa Garriga is the communications and media relations manager for CODEPINK. She writes about the intersection of militarism and the human cost of war.
“America last. America last. That’s all this is. America last, every single day.”– Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
The man who is most responsible for the $95 billion giveaway to Ukraine and Israel, is the same guy who pretends to oppose America’s “wasteful” foreign wars. Donald Trump. It was Trump who consulted with Speaker Mike Johnson about the contents of the Ukraine aid package, just as it was Trump who concocted the idea of issuing loans instead of dispersing the standard welfare handout. It was also Trump who said:
“I stand with the Speaker, (Mike Johnson)” after which he added that Johnson is doing “a very good job.”
A “good job”?
So, secretly collaborating with the Democrat leadership to push through a bill that “reauthorizes FISA to spy on the American people without a warrant, (bans Tik Tok)fully funds Joe Biden’s DOJ that has indicted President Trump 91 times, and giving Biden’s political gestapo a brand new FBI building bigger than the Pentagon,” while not providing a dime to protect the southern border from the swarms of people entering the country illegally, is doing a “good job”?
The question we should all be asking ourselves is why has Trump decided to participate in this scam?He keeps saying that if he was president, he’d end the war in Ukraine in a day. If he’s sincere about that, then why did he collaborate on a bill that will drag the war out for another year or two? This is from a Twitter post by political analyst Michael Tracey:
Mission Accomplished. It is done: Donald Trump and the House GOP just completed one of the most epic swindles in political history, with Trump personally effectuating the largest-ever dispersement of Ukraine funding through his emissary, “MAGA Mike Johnson” (as Trump lovingly calls him) The $61 billion passed this afternoon is likely enough to underwrite the brutal, pointless trench warfare for at least another year or two. This after the same old endless media screeching that Trump and MAGA Republicans were being brainwashed by Putin and would never fund Ukraine. That fundamental hoax continues — only this time Trump was in on it…. Michael Tracey, Twitter
And the response from Luca Cabrilo:
Michael you’re 100% spot on. Trump could have at any point killed this monstrous bill if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He even let MAGA Mike go on TV and say that he and Trump are “100% agreed” on the Ukraine funding Trump screwed his base on this one, no other way about it.
Michael Tracey again: He didn’t just “not kill it,” he personally facilitated its passage
The bill, designed after consultations between Mike Johnson and Trump, mysteriously gives the President the ability to forgive the purported “loan” to Ukraine — immediately after the November election…
And if that’s not brazen enough for you, here’s the catch: The funds eligible for “loan forgiveness” are the direct budgetary infusions to Ukraine — meaning the money that pays for the salaries of Ukrainian government workers and so forth — NOT the military “aid,” which comprises the vast majority of the package. So, only $8 billion of the $61 billion allocated to Ukraine is even *eligible* for “loan forgiveness” under the terms of this gargantuan bill. And even that was a fake “loan” to begin with — it never had to be paid back at all! So there’s your final Trump/Johnson bamboozle, as the House GOP prepares to usher through the *largest ever* infusion of US tax dollars to Ukraine, by far, since the beginning of the war. All with Trump’s blessing, as Johnson has made abundantly clear. To underscore his close collaboration with Trump, Johnson has spent the past several days making the rounds on various conservative media, touting the inclusion of Trump’s “loan concept” in the bill. Michael Tracey
It’s all a big shell game and Trump is playing along with it to improve his political prospects. How else would you explain his performance in this dismal charade?
Trump obviously knows that his return to the White House will require significant compromise with the national security hawks and Zionists who run the government. So, we shouldn’t be too surprised that he’s trying to curry favor with them now. But for the people who thought Trump was a straightshooter; this has got to be a real eye-opener. They thought he could be trusted, but now it’s obvious that he’s just another Beltway phony trying to ingratiate himself with the Washington power-elite in order to shoehorn his sorry a** back into the Oval Office. Here’s more from Tracey:
Sorry to be a “Broken Record,” but the “Elephant in the Room” here is genuinely Donald J. Trump. ….Trump even warned Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene directly not to oust Johnson, during their joint press conference at Mar-a-Lago last Friday, April 12 — just before Johnson unveiled his war funding strategy, for which he proudly declares having secured Trump’s endorsement. The bill even contains Trump’s repeated demand to structure the Ukraine funding as a so-called “loan”! Johnson proclaims that he and Trump are “One hundred percent united” on all of this (direct quote) …
Trump has used his vast political capital as three-time Republican Presidential Nominee to play his part assuring that the American political system mobilizes in perfect harmony to unleash $100 billion in endless-war funding. Michael Tracey
If Trump is willing to play such a duplicitous role in securing the funding for the MIC’s perpetual wars, then why in-heavens-name would any red-blooded conservative vote for him?
One of the few people who has acted honorably in this fiasco, is Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is clearly one of the few members of Congress that genuinely gives-a-damn about the American people. Greene delivered an epic rant on the floor of the House yesterday following the vote on the Ukrainian aid package. Naturally, her heartfelt presentation appeared nowhere in the sellout media, so I transcribed most of what she said below. It’s worth the time:
…. The United States taxpayer has already sent $113 billion to Ukraine, and much of that money is unaccounted for. This is an example of a sick business model the US government wants to continue….. The Congress votes for money for foreign wars that the American people do not support….. The American people do not support a business model based on blood and murder and war in foreign countries while the government does nothing to secure our border.
The American people are over $34 trillion in debt and the debt is rising by $40 billion every night while we all sleep. But nothing is done to secure our border or reduce our debt. Inflation continues to rise every day and Americans can hardly afford to pay their grocery bills, they can hardly afford to put gas in their cars, and they can hardly afford the rent. And, now, average mortgage payments are over $3000 when they were just $1700 three years ago. Young Americans don’t think they will ever be able to buy a home and yet today, this congress thinks the most important thing they should do is to send another $61 billion to the war in Ukraine that the American people –by 70%– do not support!
… But, today, the most important thing this body thinks we should do, is not reduce spending, or drive down inflation, or secure our own border that is invaded every single day by people from over 160 different countries… We have over 1.8 million ‘got-aways’ and we don’t know who these people are… and yet we have people in this very congress ‘talking tough’ saying, “We have to defeat Russia. Oh, we have to protect Ukraine” and yet, all of you are unwilling to protect the American citizens that pay your salary, pay to keep the lights on, and pay to keep the federal government running. And for what?
For nothing! Ukraine isn’t even a member of NATO. But all you hear in Washington DC is “Oh, we have to keep spending America’s hard-earned tax dollars to continue to murder Ukrainians to wipe out a whole generation of young men so there are (thousands of) widows, and fatherless orphans, and not enough men to work in their industries. Oh, but you really support Ukraine. (sarcasm) What kind of support is that? It’s repulsive!
Shame on the American government! Shame on the American government! If we want to support our military, then support our military. We should be building up our weapons and ammunition, not sending it over to foreign countries to kill foreign people.
And if this body was what it pretends to be, every single one of us would be demanding peace in Ukraine; peace for these people, so that no more of them have to die. But you never hear anybody demanding peace. No, no, no. Peace is the last thing Washington wantsbecause it doesn’t fit the business model. This is a business model they say builds the American economy and protects American jobs. What a disgusting business model. We should have a business model that builds-up our American companies and American jobs to serve American interests, and our military and our government should care about protecting the national security of the United States of America and the Americans who pay their hard-earned tax dollars to fund all this.
Bravo, Marjorie Taylor Greene. You speak for a lot of us.
*
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from TUR
The original source of this article is Global Research
From the military origins of brain-chip interfaces and neuroscience to the geopolitical ramifications of neuroweapons to the suspicious characters forwarding the controlled opposition “neurorights” movement, Pabst dives deep into the history and future of the age of neurowarfare.
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Featured image: Neurotechnology could help people with disabilities use their thoughts to control devices in the physical world. It may also be useful in weapons systems. Private companies, militaries, and other organizations are funding neurotechnology research. Credit: US Army.The original source of this article is
The U.S. and its allies have arrogated a political prerogative to exclude Russia in a way that would have been unimaginable with the USSR.
Berlin, Germany, in 1936, hosted the Olympic Games fraught with international tensions. The Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler had seized power in 1933. Berlin won the bid to host the games at the 29th International Olympic Committee Session on April 26, 1931.
It was the first time that the quadrennial sporting event was to be televised, with radio broadcasts reaching 41 countries. Germany wanted to show the world that it was a modern, prosperous, and democratic country. For the occasion, the anti-Semitic slogans were removed, which not only concerned Jews but also Gypsies (Romani), the Slavic people, Africans and Asians.
Comparisons can be readily made with the international tensions and vested political ambitions of the 2024 Olympics to be held in Paris from July 26 to August 11. French President Emmanuel Macron has personally sought to make the event a showcase for presumed national prowess. The political orchestration and propaganda efforts are similar to the Berlin games of 1936.
Eighty-eight years ago, German Jewish athletes were barred or prevented from taking part. Lithuania was expelled from the Olympic Games due to Berlin’s position regarding Lithuanian anti-Nazi policy, particularly because of the Trial of Neumann and Sass in Klaipėda, Lithuania, in 1934–1935. How ironic that Lithuania was not allowed to participate at the time when now this small Baltic country has become one of the most fascist nations in Europe and rabidly Russophobic. For the Paris Olympics 2024, Russia and Belarus are de facto banned from participating, sanctioned so to speak, as the new enemy of Europe, or perhaps still the old enemy. Nothing seems to have changed since 1936.
France has now stepped into the role of the National Socialist regime led by Adolf Hitler. To fully appreciate the French leadership now in 2024 would require analyzing their predominant mass media and the mentality of their politicians and elites. For example, Sébastien Chenu, a French politician who is a member of the National Assembly, and openly gay, praised France’s nuclear weapons for bringing independence and for France being a nuclear superpower, outside of NATO. Or Vincent Desportes, a French reserve general, goes one step further and proclaims in a television program that Russia fears France the most. France’s nuclear capabilities could destroy Russia, he said. Maybe he’s suffering from egotistical insecurity known as the Napoleon Complex. France is at the center of discussions about the participation of Russian athletes in the Olympic Games and its political consequences. Of course, Russians and Belarusians are allowed to participate as “neutral” individuals, but without their flag, and must distance themselves from the special military operation called war in the West.
In other words, they should hardly be Russian or Belarusian present at the games because they should be labeled as neutral, preferably gender neutral of course, following the example of the LGBT sect prevalent in the West.
In 1936, the Nazi party was obsessed with nudity and pompous nude figures. Everywhere there were these kitsch imitations of Roman and Greek sculpture with of course an Aryan appearance. A film called Olympia by Leni Riefenstahl was also made to exalt Germany’s delusions of grandeur. Now, in 2024, the new fascist sect obsesses about perfectionism of the body, the so-called LGBT sect (based on transhumanism), which allows so-called transgender people, who were once men to participate as a woman or vice versa. This goes against fair competition. After all, the (transformed) woman still has the strength of a man, otherwise, the (transformed) man will probably lose to the “real” man.
In ancient times, the Olympic Games, first played in Olympia, Greece, were used to assess the military strength of states and countries, a bit like the “military games” in modern times. Athletes who proved to be dangerous opponents represented a strong country, while weak athletes represented a weak state or a country vulnerable to attack. Physical results in sports can be an indication of a country’s strength. Despite all the slogans in modern times that the Olympic Games should not be used as a political tool, that is of course the case, and nothing has changed since ancient Greece. We now see it happening again with the stand-off between Russia and the West in a way redolent of the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The difference now is that the U.S. and its Western/NATO allies have arrogated a political prerogative to exclude Russia in a way that would have been unimaginable with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Russia can no longer demonstrate its strengths in sports on the “Olympic battlefield”.
French leaders claim that Russian athletes are willing to endure insults and humiliation to compete and serve the West’s global interests. French leaders blatantly lie that Russia is ceding to Western interests over Russia’s well-being or they are too weak to respond on the battlefield, citing their alleged lack of response to provocations such as attacks by French SCALP missiles on Russia. The truth is Russia is retaliating and killing French mercenaries deployed in Ukraine.
In January 2024, Russia delivered a precise strike at a temporary deployment area of foreign mercenaries near Kharkov. Most of the killed military personnel in that strike were citizens of France. The building where the mercenaries were deployed was destroyed. More than 60 troops were eliminated and more than 20 wounded were transported to medical facilities.
To the disgust of many French people, French military personnel have been recruited to fight in Ukraine alongside the likes of the Azov Battalion which is an openly Neo-Nazi paramilitary fully integrated with the NATO-backed Ukrainian Armed Forces. The Olympic Games are therefore a vivid example of how the event is used to project propaganda and aggression from France and NATO toward Russia.
The ancient Greek tradition of ekecheiria (armistice) was the cornerstone of the Olympic Games in antiquity, providing security and a peaceful environment for both the athletes and the spectators in attendance.
So, today, French leader Emmanuel Macron appeals to the ancient tradition and says he wants a truce for the Paris games. What nonsense! Macron supposedly seeks a truce while still denigrating Russia with insulting restrictions on its athletes. Macron is another French politician who suffers from the Napoleon Complex. (See our latest SCF editorial on the subject.)
Security measures will also be scaled up in Paris this summer. Tourists have been told they will not be allowed to view the opening ceremony along the Seine River for free from the riverbanks as the French government has scaled back its ambitions amid ongoing security concerns. On March 24, 2024, France raised its security preparedness to the highest level following a deadly attack on a Moscow concert hall, and as with other NATO states claimed the Islamic State was behind the attack. Another lie. Russian investigators have established that Ukraine was instrumental in the attack that killed over 144 people in the Crocus City Hall venue on March 22. The West, including France, responded immediately, within an hour of the atrocity, and categorically asserted that an Islamist group, Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), was responsible.
Other NATO countries follow France’s frenzy regarding sports. The German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wants a total ban on all Russian athletes entering Germany for any international competition. Putin should not be given a propaganda platform, she said.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said she hopes that Russian athletes will not be allowed to participate in the Paris Olympics even under neutral flags, and she added, they will not be welcome at the opening ceremony on July 26.
By contrast, Israeli athletes are fully welcome, Hidalgo told Reuters in an interview.
Since October 7, 2023, a genocide has been raging in Gaza perpetrated by the Western-backed Israeli regime. The International Court of Justice has deemed the violence constitutes a “plausible genocide”. Nevertheless, as far as the French state is concerned, Israel is welcome with open arms to participate in the Olympics in full national colors without the slightest censure. Such hypocrisy among the European and American elites is heinous and repugnant.
Russia will not be bullied by the West. The counterpart of the Olympic Games is the Friendship Games. Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a law regulating the preparation and holding of the World Friendship Games in Russia. The competition will be held in Moscow and Yekaterinburg in 2024, with 5,500 athletes participating.
Whatever the true number of Russian and Ukrainian military and civilian dead, no glory is due to the slatterns of the BBC, just as no glory was due to the cross dressing crackpot Cirillo.
MI6’s BBC outlet is at it again. This time, in a disgusting effort to boost Ukraine’s flagging morale, they featured a story by their crack Russian unit explaining how Russian graveyards are full to the brim of soldiers who fell in Ukraine. As always with the MI6’s B team, it is the sort of misinformed guff that belongs in a badly edited student newspaper rather than in such a globally prominent propaganda outlet.
Or indeed in the website of Ukraine’s Ministry of Misinformation. If we first go to Ukraine’s site, we see that the Russkies are getting a right mauling, with some 442,880 soldiers dead up to April Fool’s Day, 2024. Although Wikipedia parrots those numbers by using the same tainted NATO sources, to put them in context, Wikipedia claim that the United States lost a relatively modest 58,281 dead during its genocide campaign in Vietnam, and the Watson Intstitute claims that the United States lost 7,057 troops in the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns, with a much higher number, 30,177, committing suicide.
Other things being equal then, the Russkies should be up in arms against their government over these deaths in Ukraine. But other things are not, of course, equal. First off, as a quick Google search shows us these numbers of Russian dead are part of a vociferous NATO echo chamber, we can see no need as to why this should be a major NATO news story today unless Russia is experiencing the turbulence the United States did during its Vietnamese cull or if the BBC has brought additional information to light, thus making it a story worthy of coverage today. Or, of course, as we suspect, that the BBC has once again been leaned on to put its shoulder to the NATO wheel.
That is certainly the impression we get from this Politico article, which claims that the morale of Ukraine’s Armed Forces is crumbling as their casualties exponentially mount. The pleas of Clown Prince Zelensky and the rest of Kiev’s circus for more arms, more sanctions and more Swiss bank accounts certainly seems to help counter BBC’s flagging line that Russia is on its knees. As do all the tiktok and Twitter videos of Ukrainian grandfathers and pregnant women being frog marched off to the front.
This is not to negate the BBC argument but to say that the Ukrainian war has got less hands on media coverage than perhaps any other since the Korean war. And, though much of that lack of direct coverage has been due to the use of long range drones and artillery rather than the preponderance of close hand to hand fighting, much more of it has been due to the way both High Commands are conducting their affairs.
Zelensky is, of course, literally an overpaid NATO clown, whose pronouncements should be treated with the same level of gravity those of any other circus clown should be treated. Having the cross dressing Sarah Ashton-Cirillo as the cross dressing Zelensky’s main spokesperson only reinforced their clownish approach to media matters.
Although the Russians have taken a number of independent journalists near to the fighting, their approach has put far more emphasis on the bomb and the bullet than the soundbite. In lobbing some pretty serious ordnance Ukraine’s way, Russia has not only been setting the ground rules in their war against NATO but calling the shots when it comes to the long haul in the media war. Though Zelensky and his paymasters can deny or spin the facts till the cows come home, denying Russia’s military might takes lies of a different magnitude and quality.
And that is where MI6 and the BBC, both of which essentially see themselves as subcontractors to the CIA, come in. If we check out the linked in pages of Kirsty Brewer, Becky Dale and the Russian born Olga Ivshina, all we see is three young women who, by their CVs, belong more in the women’s pages writing about nail varnish, female empowerment and boob jobs, than doing an in depth study on Russia’s fallen.
Their BBC article is worth looking at not so much to glean information about Russia but to get a further appreciation of how mediocre NATO’s press reporting is. Although these women will be able to add an extra line to their CVs, there is no extra information in their piece that could help bring an end to hostilities even a millimeter nearer.
The article begins by telling us that Russia is using meat grinder tactics, sending its troops in like they were charging across no man’s land in the First World War. As we have already pointed out, Ukraine is mostly a long-distance war, with meat grinding tactics being selectively used to clear out particularly heavily defended strategic positions.
Although these three women’s use of the passive case might be appropriate in them declaring that “the term meat grinder has been used to describe the way Moscow sends waves of soldiers forward relentlessly to try to wear down Ukrainian forces and expose their locations to Russian artillery“, the understanding I got from seasoned military analysts like Douglas Magregor and Scott Ritter was that the Ukrainian troops were being sent into a meat grinder by carefully laid traps of the Russian High Command, facilitated by the contempt their Ukrainian equivalents have for their expendable draftees.
Although as against that, these three BBC stooges say that “BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022“, I would ask why Russia’s internal security services are not monitoring BBC and other agents who lurk around graveyards and who cosy up to relatives of Russia’s fallen.
Although the three women claim that “our teams [plural case] also combed through open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media,“ I would counter that Russia’s internal security services should be hauling those teams in for long and in depth fireside chats. Here, for example, is an article I wrote commenting on the Pope’s slanders against Buryats and Chechens serving in the Russian Armed Forces. Now, if we accept that the Buryats and Chechens played not insignificant roles in Ukraine, how did the BBC teams collect and collate those Siberian and Caucasian deaths? Although that is a key research methodology question, it is one those Buryats and Chechens who do not want foreign controlled “teams“ suicide bombing them should pay particular attention to.
No such attention should be paid to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and similar NATO funded groups the BBC cites. Although Russia did, regrettably. suffer heavy losses storming Ukraine’s heaviest defended citadels, such battles, which bled Ukraine dry, have been outliers and have not typified the overall war, just as General Giáp‘s Tet Offensive did not typify the Vietnam war. Also, when Russia intervened in the Syrian war on behalf of the heroic Syrian Arab Army, they not only trained them but gave them much better kits and tools to defend themselves. The evidence of the BBC’s legions of dubiously anonymous witnesses notwithstanding, it is inconceivable from any standpoint that Russia would not do the same for its own troops on its own Ukrainian doorstep.
War Studies graduate Samuel Cranny-Evans disagrees. He tells the BBC that all of Russia’s “experienced soldiers are now likely to be dead or wounded… and have been replaced by people with little training or military experience – such as volunteers, civilians and prisoners”.
NATO’s High Command knows that to be utter nonsense. Russia has developed a conveyor type system to systematically train its more recent recruits before putting them anywhere near the front lines and even NATO have had to admit that Russia’s fortifications, which helped break the back of Ukraine’s counter-offensive, were built to exacting standards. Unlike Ukraine, Russia is not recruiting pregnant women into its ranks as it has no need to.
Although the three BBC women prattle on about meat grinders, the Wagner Group, supposed mutinies and former prisoners serving on the front line like they are Generals Patton, Rommel and Zhukov talking to a group of simpletons, they totally miss the point. The historical relevance of the Wagner Group is that they allowed the Russian High Command to develop a new form of hybrid and asymmetric warfare, systems and orders of battle that have proved not only invaluable in a range of conflicts throughout Africa, West Asia and Ukraine but which will again prove their worth in the military challenges that lie ahead.
Although the BBC makes much of the Wagner Group and the prisoners who fought in its ranks, what is particularly concerning is “the BBC has spoken to families of prison recruits who died – and soldiers still alive – who told us the military training offered to prison recruits by the defence ministry is insufficient“. Perhaps so, but what Russian officials are enabling these BBC agents to prance about Russia interviewing people few outside of their social circle would know?
Assuming that is not more of the BBC’s Russophobic porkies, the overall tone of the article, as well as the picture of fallen Russian soldiers accompanying it, is in appalling taste. Whatever the true number of Russian and Ukrainian military and civilian dead, no glory is due to the slatterns of the BBC, just as no glory was due to the cross dressing crackpot Cirillo. Russians and Ukrainians have better things to do than die in a war that only enriches Zelensky’s backers and titillates those who are too thick to see MI6’s discredited BBC outfit for the sleazy war pornographers that they are.
Canadian economist Prof. Michel Chossudovsky criticizes the U.S. government for promoting nuclear war propaganda and advocating for the ‘safe use’ of nuclear weapons in conventional war. He highlights the brainwashing of decision-makers and the dangers of their own power.
Chossudovsky discusses the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and the recategorization of nuclear weapons.
The short video below also addresses the role of Victoria Nuland in U.S. foreign policy and the neo-Nazi agenda embedded in regime change efforts.
***
Introductory Note by Michel Chossudovsky
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable – a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread in terms of radioactive fallout Worldwide .
All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.
The August 6-8 2003 “Privatization of Nuclear’ Warsecret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
It was conducive to a $1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program initiated under the Obama administration, which is slated to increase to 2 trillion dollars by 2030.
Towards a World War III Scenario:
The Privatization of Nuclear War
Michel Chossudovsky
August 7, 2011.
Introduction
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable – a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread in terms of radioactive fallout over a large part of the Middle East.
All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.
The casualties from the direct effects of blast, radioactivity, and fires resulting from the massive use of nuclear weapons by the superpowers [of the Cold War era] would be so catastrophic that we avoided such a tragedy for the first four decades after the invention of nuclear weapons.1
During the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailed, namely that the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union would result in “the destruction of both the attacker and the defender”.
In the post Cold war era, US nuclear doctrine was redefined. The dangers of nuclear weapons have been obfuscated.
Tactical nuclear weapons have been upheld as distinct, in terms of their impact, from the strategic thermonuclear bombs of the Cold War era.
Tactical nuclear weapons are identical to the strategic nuclear bombs. The only thing that differentiates these two categories of nuclear bombs are:
1) their delivery system; 2) their explosive yield (measured in mass of trinitrotoluene (TNT), in kilotons or megatons.
The tactical nuclear weapon or low yield mini-nuke is described as a small nuclear bomb, delivered in the same way as the earth penetrating bunker buster bombs.
While the technology is fundamentally different, tactical nuclear weapons, in terms of in-theater delivery systems are comparable to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The Pentagon’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review envisaged so-called “contingency plans” for an offensive “first strike use” of nuclear weapons, not only against “axis of evil” countries (including Iran and North Korea) but also against Russia and China.2
The adoption of the NPR by the US Congress in late 2002 provided a green light for carrying out the Pentagon’s pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine, both in terms of military planning as well as defense procurement and production. Congress not only rolled back its prohibition on low yield nuclear weapons, it also provided funding “to pursue work on so-called mini-nukes”. The financing was allocated to bunker buster (earth penetrator) tactical nuclear weapons as well as to the development of new nuclear weapons.3
Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, [twenty two years ago] commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima.
The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.
In a cruel irony, the participants to this secret meeting, which excluded members of Congress, arrived on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and departed on the anniversary of the attack on Nagasaki.
More than 150 military contractors, scientists from the weapons labs, and other government officials gathered at the headquarters of the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska to plot and plan for the possibility of “full-scale nuclear war”, calling for the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons – more “usable” so-called “mini-nukes” and earth penetrating “bunker busters” armed with atomic warheads.4
According to a leaked draft of the agenda, the secret meeting included discussions on “mini-nukes” and “bunker-buster” bombs with nuclear war heads “for possible use against rogue states”:
We need to change our nuclear strategy from the Cold War to one that can deal with emerging threats… The meeting will give some thought to how we guarantee the efficacy of the (nuclear) stockpile.5
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
The post 9/11 nuclear weapons doctrine was in the making, with America’s major defense contractors directly involved in the decision-making process.
The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had set the stage for the “privatization of nuclear war”. Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear weapons industry, which includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile delivery systems, etc., is controlled by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon and Boeing in the lead.
It is worth noting that barely a week prior to the historic August 6, 2003 meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disbanded its advisory committee which provided an “independent oversight” on the US nuclear arsenal, including the testing and/or use of new nuclear devices.6
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3 Year: 2012 Pages: 102
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Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 : Father Kleinsorge, a German missionary, heard pathetic voices of people asking for water. When he managed to reach the place from where the voice had come, he saw nearly 20 persons, all of them in similar condition – their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their checks.
Temperature at the hypocentre of the explosion reaching the double of what it takes to melt iron, the face of a schoolgirl sitting almost a kilometre away from this hypocentre being burnt beyond recognition, skin sloughing off scalded bodies, badly injured starving people unable to swallow anything because of the stench of dead bodies – this was the devastation caused by a 12.5 Kiloton bomb in Hiroshima which killed and wounded as many people as a mass raid of 279 aircrafts, laden to capacity with bombs, striking at a city ten times as populous.
Nearly one hundred thousand people were killed within a few minutes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after being hit by nuclear weapons in 1945, but if we count the longer-term deaths, those caused by internal bleeding, leukaemia, various other forms of cancer, then the death toll is likely to be as high as 3,50,000. In addition the next generation continued to pay for this cruelty in the form of children born with mental retardation, physical deformities and other serious health problems.
So cruel was the devastation that all of us must necessarily ask – we certainly do not want Hiroshima to happen to our friends, but do we want it to happen even to our worst enemies?
Despite this, the incredibly dangerous and cruel fact remains that humankind now possesses nuclear weapons which are many times more powerful than the ones used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and efforts are constantly on to increase the destructiveness of these weapons.
Some of the most eminent medical journals (including The Lancet, BMJ and JAMA) recently took an almost unprecedented initiative to together publish a joint editorial on August 1, 2023 asking for the elimination of nuclear weapons in view of their unacceptably high risks. What should be particularly welcomed is that they have taken the stand of elimination of nuclear weapons and not just of de-escalation or reduction, for as long as there are nuclear weapons there will be at least some possibility of their actual use as well.
This editorial has pointed out, on the basis of studies, that a large-scale nuclear war between the USA and Russia could kill 200 million people or more in the near term and potentially cause a global ‘nuclear winter’ that could kill 5 to 6 billion people, threatening the survival of humanity.
This editorial also stated that once a nuclear weapon is detonated, escalation to all-out nuclear war could occur rapidly. This is particularly important to consider at the present juncture when the risk of actual use of nuclear weapons has increased compared to any other period in the past three decades or so.
This risk has been frequently discussed and serious fears over it expressed by several eminent experts in the context of the ongoing Ukraine conflict. Here four nuclear weapon countries can be involved—Russia, USA, Britain and France. Of course USA nuclear weapons are also deployed in several other European countries as well and to that extent these also get involved but the weapons are under the control of the USA.
USA, France and UK are unlikely to knowingly start an attack on Russia and similarly Russia is unlikely to knowingly attack USA, France or UK because of the huge risks and likelihood of equally destructive retaliation. However the risk of tensions, suspicions and brinkmanship extended over a long time leading to start of unintentional nuclear war, based on misunderstanding of each other’s intentions and some accidental event on top of it is possible. As pointed out earlier once this starts this can very quickly lead to a bigger exchange of nuclear weapons. The situation is not like the one in 1945 where there was to be no retaliation and it was well known by the aggressor also that there will be nothing beyond the use of two nuclear weapons as far as the attack on Japan was concerned. Now the present situation is a very different one as we do not know where it will stop when it starts. Also the speed which the nuclear weapon now travels towards its target also gives very little time to correct very costly mistakes.
The second possibility that has been discussed is whether Russia will at some stage use tactical or relatively smaller nuclear weapons against Ukraine. This is very unlikely today. Russia’s security doctrine is that it will use nuclear weapons only if there is serious risk to its freedom, sovereignty and survival. Hence risks of nuclear weapon by Russia arises only if NATO escalates risks for Russia beyond a certain red line. However views can differ on how the red line is perceived or identified, and this is why the risk of nuclear war also remains present in this conflict zone.
In the middle of all the irrational Russophobia in the West and in particular among the ruling elites here, if the ultimate result of all the efforts to corner and surround Russia proves increasingly successful ( which appears highly unlikely just now), the final impact will be only to compel Russia to exercise the nuclear weapon option. Then if this results in the USA or NATO also using nuclear weapons against Russia, and Russia retaliates, again we do not know where this will end. This brings out also the sheer absurdity, and of course the extreme danger, of the western/NATO strategy of encircling and bleeding as big a nuclear weapon power as Russia as much as possible, instead of using diplomacy to sort out all differences.
The second highest possibility of use of nuclear weapons will be when the USA shifts more of its aggression towards China at some point in future, as has been widely discussed. If the Korean region is to become a flashpoint of such a confrontation, then apart from China one more nuclear weapon power will be involved here in the form of N. Korea.
While this is for the future, the threat perception in just the Ukraine conflict by itself is so serious as to prompt warnings from several senior experts time and again. When the possibility of destruction likely to be caused is so huge, even a 5 to 10% increase in the possibility of use of nuclear weapons should be taken very seriously, and what has happened recently is a somewhat bigger increase in this possibility. As world leadership does not appear to be fulfilling the trust reposed in it for protecting us all from the worst possible destruction on earth, it is time for the people worldwide to come forward to make the peace and disarmament movement so strong that the leadership also comes under increasing pressure from people to move towards a path of a safer present and future. In the vision of the peace movement, one of the topmost priorities should be for the elimination of nuclear weapons as well as for the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Save the Earth Now Campaign. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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