Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 on X:

The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza 🏳️‍🌈 Yoav Atzmoni who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community wanted to send a message of hope to the people of Gaza living under Hamas brutality. His intention was to raise the first pride flag in Gaza as a call for peace and freedom.

To His Majesty King Charles III,

On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.

You will no doubt recall the wise words of a renowned playwright: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.”

Ah, but what would that bard know of mercy faced with the reckoning at the dawn of your historic reign? After all, one can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard.

Your Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh is located at the prestigious address of One Western Way, London, just a short foxhunt from the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. How delightful it must be to have such an esteemed establishment bear your name.

“One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners”

It is here that 687 of your loyal subjects are held, supporting the United Kingdom’s record as the nation with the largest prison population in Western Europe. As your noble government has recently declared, your kingdom is currently undergoing “the biggest expansion of prison places in over a century”, with its ambitious projections showing an increase of the prison population from 82,000 to 106,000 within the next four years. Quite the legacy, indeed.

As a political prisoner, held at Your Majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign, I am honoured to reside within the walls of this world class institution. Truly, your kingdom knows no bounds.

During your visit, you will have the opportunity to feast upon the culinary delights prepared for your loyal subjects on a generous budget of two pounds per day. Savour the blended tuna heads and the ubiquitous reconstituted forms that are purportedly made from chicken. And worry not, for unlike lesser institutions such as Alcatraz or San Quentin, there is no communal dining in a mess hall. At Belmarsh, prisoners dine alone in their cells, ensuring the utmost intimacy with their meal.

Beyond the gustatory pleasures, I can assure you that Belmarsh provides ample educational opportunities for your subjects. As Proverbs 22:6 has it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Observe the shuffling queues at the medicine hatch, where inmates gather their prescriptions, not for daily use, but for the horizon-expanding experience of a “big day out”—all at once.

You will also have the opportunity to pay your respects to my late friend Manoel Santos, a gay man facing deportation to Bolsonaro’s Brazil, who took his own life just eight yards from my cell using a crude rope fashioned from his bedsheets. His exquisite tenor voice now silenced forever.

Venture further into the depths of Belmarsh and you will find the most isolated place within its walls: Healthcare, or “Hellcare” as its inhabitants lovingly call it. Here, you will marvel at sensible rules designed for everyone’s safety, such as the prohibition of chess, whilst permitting the far less dangerous game of checkers.

“My late friend Manoel Santos…took his own life just eight yards from my cell”

Deep within Hellcare lies the most gloriously uplifting place in all of Belmarsh, nay, the whole of the United Kingdom: the sublimely named Belmarsh End of Life Suite. Listen closely, and you may hear the prisoners’ cries of “Brother, I’m going to die in here”, a testament to the quality of both life and death within your prison.

But fear not, for there is beauty to be found within these walls. Feast your eyes upon the picturesque crows nesting in the razor wire and the hundreds of hungry rats that call Belmarsh home. And if you come in the spring, you may even catch a glimpse of the ducklings laid by wayward mallards within the prison grounds. But don’t delay, for the ravenous rats ensure their lives are fleeting.

I implore you, King Charles, to visit His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh, for it is an honour befitting a king. As you embark upon your reign, may you always remember the words of the King James Bible: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). And may mercy be the guiding light of your kingdom, both within and without the walls of Belmarsh.

Your most devoted subject,

Julian Assange

This is a third talk in a series that began with Relationship Based Medicine , continued with Beware of Doctors Bearing Gifts and concludes with this talk, which could called History of a Medical Psychosis, Medical Neoliberalism, Evident versus Evidence Based Medicine, A Lutheran Moment, or Does Objectivity Come from using Chance to Control Bias or Bias to Control Chance?

It is the most important talk I have ever given.

The first lecture was delivered to clinicians in New York with a Q and A afterwards.

The second was delivered to the public in Lethbridge Alberta, thanks to Jennifer Williams and Dan Johnson but owing to tech difficulties at the venue (See In Memory of Dexter Johnson), it was difficult to record the Q and A with the public. Suffice to say though between the technical difficuties, the lecture and the Q and A, we were all there for the better part of 3 hours and the discussion was great.

This third lecture was delivered to Aaron Kesselheim’s PORTAL group – Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law. There are two versions. The History of a Medical Psychosis was recorded by Bill James the day before in case of glitches – same day as Putin and Biden gave speeches. The second was recorded by Aaron – Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard.

There are slight differences between them. The text and slides below add some detail to both talks but the tone of voice and gestures in the talks likely convey things not in the text.

Slide 1: Faulty Evidence and Moral Hazard

Welcome to a very conservative talk – based on a belief in the medical model and in evaluating the drugs we use thoroughly.

Slide 2: These quotes are a precis of key points in the deposition of Ian Hudson, Chief Safety Officer of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2000 in the Tobin v SmithKline trial.

Forty-Eight hours after starting Paxil Don Schell shot his wife, daughter and granddaughter and then himself. Hudson is being asked – Can SSRIs cause Suicide?

The jury dismissed Hudson’s Evidence Based Medicine view in favor of Evident Based Medicine and in this Civil trial found GSK guilty of negligence that resulted in the death of this family.

Hudson’s view, however, remains ensconced at the top of Britain’s drugs regulator, of which he was later the CEO – as well as FDA, EMA, TGA, Health Canada, WHO, and Boston institutions like Harvard, MRCT, and Vivli. Joe Biden and the Pope’s advisers will also endorse and tell their bosses to say – Yes RCTs are the Way the Truth and the Light.

Slide 3: Hudson’s views originate 70 years earlier in the work of a strange man – Ronnie Fisher.

Here you see Fisher smoking a pipe. He dismissed the later link between smoking and lung cancer, saying personality types predisposed to both cancer and smoking. Evidence was not Fisher’s strong point.

He had nothing to do with medicine and never ran an RCT. Controlled trials and randomization were there before Fisher and were no big deal but for no clear reason his book the Design of Experiments transformed what came next.

Fisher ran a thought experiment to characterize expert knowledge. He mentioned randomization as a means to control for any trivial unknown unknowns. Randomization later became semi-mystical.

Fisher’s expert knew parachutes worked so if we set up two groups, one with parachutes and the other not, we might randomize in case there was someone with webbed feet who might behave differently when falling. Otherwise, we would expect those wearing parachutes to live and those not to die – unless a chance strong wind lands a person in snow covered trees.

If randomization eliminated webbing as a factor, the only thing that could get in the way of an expert being right was chance and this could be assigned a statistically significant value. If 1 in 20 of those without parachutes lived we wouldn’t say the expert didn’t know what he was talking about. Fisher was characterizing expertise rather than characterizing an exploration of the unknown.

Randomization can’t control for ignorance.

Slide 4: Fisher’s expert is a Robin Hood who 19 times out of 20 can split a prior arrow lodged in the Bull.

Slide 5: But the trials done to license drugs especially antidepressants look more like this. A mismatch on this scale indicates medical RCTs are nothing like what Fisher had in mind.

Slide 6: The first RCT in medicine was a trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis. Tony Hill used randomization as a method of fair allocation – he was not managing mystical confounders. Hill helped put the effects of smoking on the map. He had no time for Fisher. He also knew doctors were not experts. His trial was not a demonstration of expertise.

Hill’s RCT found out less about streptomycin than a prior non-randomized trial in the Mayo Clinic, which showed it can cause deafness and tolerance develops rapidly.

Slide 7: Twenty years later, here is Tony Hill taking stock of controlled trials. In this 1965 lecture, he mentions that it is interesting that the people who are most heavily now promoting controlled trials are pharmaceutical companies.

Hill didn’t think trials had to be randomized. He thought double-blinds could get in the way of doctors evaluating a drug. He was a believer in Evident Based rather than Evidence Based Medicine.

Hill said we needed RCTs around 1950 to work out if anything worked. By 1960 he figured we had lots of things that worked – none of which had been brought on the market through an RCT – and he thought the need was to find out which drug worked best. This is not something RCTs can do – there is no such thing as a best drug. RCTs have instead become a way for companies to get weaker drugs on the market.

He said that RCTs produce average effects which are not much good in telling a doctor what to do for the patient in front of them.

All drugs do 3000 + things – one of which might be useful for treatment purposes. In focusing on one element, by default, Hill is saying RCTs are not a good way to evaluate a drug. All RCTs generate ignorance. But we can bring good out of this harm if we remain on top of what we are doing. Hill never saw RCTs replacing clinical judgement.

Slide 8: This 1960 RCT run by Louis Lasagna makes Hill’s point well. Thalidomide has therapeutic efficacy as a sleeping pill but the trial missed the SSRI-like sexual dysfunction, suicidality, agitation, nausea and peripheral neuropathy it causes.

Two years later, Lasagna was responsible for incorporating RCTs in the 1962 Food and Drugs Act Amendments – in order to minimise the chance of another thalidomide. By doing this, more than anyone else, Lasagna was the man who got us using RCTs

This trial would have licensed thalidomide today. The 1938 Act had no requirement for RCTs.

Slide 9: Many claim RCTs demonstrate cause and effect in a way no other study design can.

The 1950s was a golden age of new drugs that gave us the best antihypertensives, hypoglycemics, antibiotics and psychotropic drugs we have ever had without RCT input into any discoveries.

Imipramine was the first antidepressant. It and other antidepressants beat SSRIs in later RCTs. It can treat melancholia – SSRIs can’t. Melancholia comes with a high risk of suicide.

Imipramine was launched in 1958. At a meeting in 1959, European experts made clear that while it was a wonderful treatment imipramine made some people suicidal. Stop the drug and it clears. Re-introduce and it comes back. This was Evident Based Medicine showing this drug can cause suicide.

Like Fisher, let’s do a thought RCT of imipramine versus placebo in melancholia. The red dots here are suicides or suicide attempts.

Even though it can cause suicide, we would expect it to reduce the number of suicides because it treats this high risk condition. If you didn’t know better, this RCT would look like evidence antidepressants do not cause suicide.

Slide 10: Here is the data on the trials in mild depression that brought the SSRIs to market – mild depression because SSRIs are no use in melancholia. You see an increase of suicidal events compared to placebo in people at little or no risk of suicide.

Slide 11: This is what the data for imipramine look like in the same mild depressions. This is not a thought experiment – it was used as a comparator in SSRI trials. Now it too causes suicides.

RCTs can give us diametrically opposite answers. This is because these are not Drug Trials. They are Treatment Trials and if the condition and treatment produce superficially similar effects, randomized trials cause confounding rather than solve it. This is true for most medical conditions and their treatments.

People evaluating drugs in traditional clinical trials, before RCTs, knew this. When a patient becomes suicidal in a trial you have to use your judgement to work out what is happening but in RCTs clinicians are not supposed to use their judgment. RCTs are more objective than our judgments – supposedly.

Slide 12: Here is what a Drug Trial looks like. In healthy volunteer studies in the 1980s, companies found SSRIs cause volunteers to become suicidal, dependent and sexually dysfunctional. We heard nothing about these problems when the drugs launched in part because Drug Trials enabled companies to engineer Treatment Trials to hide these problems.

Slide 13: If you break a limb and get recruited to an RCT randomly applying casts to one limb – not necessarily the broken one – the trial will show random application beats placebo. Practicing Evidence Based Medicine rather than Evident based Medicine here would clearly be crazy.

Slide 14: Here is a James Webb telescope image. James Webb is marvellously bringing out the infinite individuality of stars.

In addition to randomization, Fisher put a premium on Statistical Significance. By 1980 every leading medical statistician was saying we need to get rid of statistical significance in favor of Confidence Intervals.

Confidence Intervals had been introduced by Gauss around 1810. Because of measurement error, the telescopes in use often failed to establish whether there was one or two stars in a location. Measurement errors should distribute nornally and so constructing confidence intervals could help us distinguish individual stars.

We have moved a long way forward in this respect with the James Webb telescope you see here.

Slide 15: Confidence intervals rushed into medicine in the mid-1980s. All the authorities on the right – many linked to Boston – argued they were much more appropriate than significance testing. They are appropriate for measurement error but are they any more a cure for ignorance than statistical significance?

Slide 16: Confidence intervals we are told allow us to estimate the size of an effect and the precision with which it is known. We have much more precise details on the likelihood of the Red Drug here killing you than we have for the Yellow Drug. The best estimate of the lethal effect for the Yellow Drug however is greater. The standard view is that if we increase the size of the Yellow Drug Trial we will have greater precision and know better what the risks are. As we shall see, this is wrong.

As things stand, if you are asked to take one of these drugs, should you be guided by precision or effect size? Ian Hudson, FDA and WHO say the only dangerous drug here is the Red One. This is because more than 95% of the data, more than 19 out of 20 lie to the right of the line through 1.0 – confidence intervals have defaulted into statistical significance.

I would take the Red rather than the Yellow one. This is not measurement error and we don’t know what confidence intervals represent when they are not representing measurement error.

Slide 17: Faced with claims Prozac causes suicide, Lilly analysed their clinical trials and claimed there is no evidence their drug causes suicide. Confidence Intervals are being spun here as indicating we don’t know Prozac causes suicide as nothing is statistical significant. This is Ian Hudson thinking – at odds with all statistical expertise. It’s wrong. The consistency across young and old, depression and eating disorders strongly suggests in real life there is an excess of suicidal events.

Slide 18: There is an intriguing mystery behind these figures. Here you see a representation of suicidal events that happened in the trials that brought Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft to market around 1990. You’ll note there are events under the word screening here. There is a 2 week washout period before a trial starts where people are whipped off their prior drugs before being put on the new treatment or placebo. This is a highly dangerous phase where people are in withdrawal and very likely to go on to a suicide attempt.

Slide 19: And here you see the moves companies made to avoid having a confidence interval excess of suicidal events on treatment. Companies only moved the events – not the people.

These moves were justified on the basis that people in the run in phase were not on active treatment – which is equivalent to being on placebo – but they often were withdrawing from active treatment which is highly dangerous. Some who stopped treatment at the end of the active phase of the trial committed suicide and were designated placebo too. Some on placebo, put on active treatment in the follow up period, committed suicide and were designated as placebo suicides on an intention to treat basis.

There are two articles from 2006 that bring out this point Did Regulators Fail and The Antidepressant Tale: Figures Signifying Nothing. The Antidepressant Tale gives other examples of confidence interval abuse.

After all these maneuvers, there was still an excess of suicidal events on these SSRIs but the confidence interval was no longer entirely to the right of 1.0. Confidence intervals have degenerated into statistical significance tests because regulators need a Stop-Go mechanism and statistical significance provides this. But doctors don’t need an external Stop-Go mechanism to replace their clinical judgement, so why do they go along with this?

Slide 20: Nobody noticed these maneuvers around 1990, but fourteen years in a crisis about children becoming suicidal on antidepressants, questions began to be asked. GSK and Pfizer responded:.

‘GSK did not intentionally submit any erroneous or misleading information to FDA. The suicide data submitted to FDA explicitly identified when events occurred during the placebo run-in period. FDA had all this information right from the beginning.’

“Pfizer’s 1990 report to FDA plainly shows … that 3 placebo attempts as having occurred during single blind placebo phases… FDA has neither criticized these data or the report as inappropriate, nor required additional analyses”.

These maneuvers breach FDA regulations and FDA staff noted this in memo’s at the time. But not only did FDA ignore these breaches of regulations senior figures, like Tom Laughren, put their name to articles that embraced these breaches of regulation – in one case in the cause of showing it was not unethical to have placebo controls in RCTs, as those on placebo were not at any greater risk than those on treatment.

There was much back and forth between FDA and companies in 1990. Was it criminal? Perhaps. I prefer the idea of strategic ignorance.

What I think we are seeing are events circling around a major crisis in knowledge production. This is not something you can expect FDA to take a lead on – they are not political actors, they are bureaucrats. Companies create knowledge or were creating the appearances of knowledge at this point, but doctors are surely primarily responsible for the creation of medical knowledge and doctors were missing in action around 1991– other than as spokespeople for companies.

Slide 21: The Sacred Mantra is that randomization controls for all possible confounders in all possible universes. The reality is randomization introduces confounders into clinical trials.

The images for the next 3 slides come from a GSK paper prepared in 2006 for submission to FDA. The small print is hard to read – the bold at the bottom gives you the key details.

The data for suicidal events on Paxil in Major Depressive Disorder trials in this first slide show it causes suicidal events. Even Ian Hudson would have to agree and these data were available at the time of the Tobin trials. But randomization is about to come to GSK’s rescue.

Slide 22: Faced with a problem like this, had GSK consulted me I’d have said do a trial in Intermittent Brief Depressive Disorders (IBDD). They might have said but there are trials of SSRIs in IBDD and they don’t work. I’d have said do one. They did and it had to be terminated early, Paxil did so poorly. I’d have said do another. Why – the figures for Paxil still look bad in this group?

Slide 23: But when you add the IBDD data to the MDD data, all of a sudden the figures say Paxil protects against suicidal events.

This scenario can happen every time a condition we are treating is heterogenous – that is dementia, diabetes, parkinson’s disease, breast cancer, back pain, hypertension – pretty well everything in medicine. In these cases randomization will act to hide effects good and bad and leave us able to use a problem a drug causes to hide a problem a drug causes.

Slide 24: Graphically this is what it looks like. The Red Drug here is the MDD curve alone – more than 95% of the data are to the right of the 1.0 line. The traditional wisdom is that adding some more events to the Red Drug above should give us a more precise version of the same estimate

In fact when you add a few more people, about 3%, we have shifted the curve to the opposite side of the 1.0 line. Its far a more precise confidence interval but this is a precision that speaks to our ignorance rather than to better knowledge. No medical statistics book ever hints at this possibility.

We could add 40 suicidal events to the paroxetine IBDD arm before Ian Hudson would have to admit paroxetine causes a problem – on the basis that the results are now statistically significant.

IBDD patients could be admitted to MDD trials – we have no way to distinguish them. Some patients become IBDD by virtue of a poor response to an SSRI.

Randomization in heterogenous conditions will hide effects drugs cause. It allows us to use an adverse effect a drug causes to hide the same adverse effect that drug causes. Confidence intervals do not help us work out what is going on in these cases.

Nor do they help in heterogenous drug responses. Lets take 20 Aarons who are all sedated by a Red Drug and 20 Davids all stimulated by it. The best estimate in the confidence interval in this case will lie on the 1.0 line, showing the drug has no effect. A method to distinguish between one and two stars should not produce an answer that there are no stars here. Algorithmic judgements cannot substitute for a human judgement.

Slide 25: Here is another problem with Confidence Intervals. Young men take Finasteride to restore a thick head of hair. We could count hairs and build confidence intervals around before and after hair follicle numbers.

Finasteride also causes suicide and permanent sexual dysfunction and like most drugs has 3,500 other effects. Confidence intervals for hair numbers before and after is one thing, but applying them to suicidality or sexual function, which were not measured in the trial, and for Merck to then claim on this basis that the science does not support a link between finasteride and suicide on the basis that not all the data lie to the right of the 1.0 line isn’t managing measurement error. It’s a confidence trick – that happens all the time.

Slide 26: There are more dead bodies on antidepressants in trials than on placebo, yet the RCTs as Ian Hudson told you show the drugs work. This is because most RCTs have a surrogate outcome. For antidepressants its the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression.

Fifteen years after its creation, Max Hamilton commented on his scale:

It may be that we are witnessing a change as revolutionary as was the introduction of standardization and mass production in manufacture. Both have their positive and negative sides

Hamilton saw this scale as a checklist of things to ask about in an interview – a mixed blessing.

Slide 27: Checklists are now viewed as more scientific than David Healy in a clinic asking you about your family. They will produce standardized but possibly disastrous interviews.

For instance, on this scale, there is a suicide item. Suicidality can stem from the illness or the drug. This needs a judgement call. If caused by the drug you should rate a Zero. If caused by the illness you might rate 3 or 4. If you just check yes for suicidality, the default is to the illness. Ditto for sex, and for sleep.

In the case of sleep, the illness can produce too much sleep or not enough sleep and each of the medicines can inhibit sleep or heavily sedate. There are 3 sleep questions. A scientific interview has a multitude of options requiring judgement calls.

In the 1980s, we brought problems to doctors needing help to get on with the lives we wanted to live. Since then, for drug companies, rating scales, sometimes left in the waiting room, ensure you do an interview that produces figures for which a company drug might seem an answer. Your interview will help you to help your patient to live the life Pfizer want him to live. Do that and you are no longer practicing medicine.

Slide 28: Many think RCTs are fine if only they were done by angels.

Study 329 was conducted in the very best university centres in North America. It has an authorship line to die for, starting with Marty Keller and including a Canadian Liberal Party Senator – Stan Kutcher. It was published in the Journal with the highest impact factor in child psychiatry. The article claims Paxil works wonderfully well and is safe for depressed teens.

What I am about to tell you applies to all industry trials across medicine.

Slide 29: Three years earlier, in 1998, GSK concluded Paxil didn’t work in Study 329 and was not safe. That could not be published so they were going to pick out the good bits of the data and publish them. The good bits formed the Keller et al 2001 paper.

This 1998 internal SKB document led New York’s Attorney General to file a fraud action against GSK. As part of the resolution of this, GSK agreed to make their Paxil trial data public. A decade later, GSK resolved a Dept of Justice action, which also involved Study 329, for $3 Billion dollars.

Slide 30: These actions gave a team of us an incentive to Restore Study 329 and we now had more raw data from this study than FDA or other regulators had seen for this or any company study.

Slide 31: In contrast to Keller, we found the 8-week acute phase showed no difference between Paxil or placebo. We found the same for the never published 6 month continuation phase – never published till we published it 18 years after the trial ended.

Slide 32: Keller noted 6 emotionally labile events in the trial, some of which might have been suicidality, 4 on paroxetine. But in our hands a fifth of the children on Paxil had a behavioral event mostly suicidality – 18 out of 93 children.

Suicide is not what I want to focus on. It’s the ability of company studies to hide adverse events. Our paper lists 10 ways to hide things. Coding – as in calling suicidality emotional lability, is top of this list – this is the first act of authorship but no reviewer or journal pays any heed to it.

Slide 33: In a Pfizer trial, at the same time, a man on active drug got agitated, poured gasoline/petrol on himself and set fire to it intending to kill himself but he only died from his burns 5 days later. Pfizer coded him as death by burns. Once the coding is done, the paper is all but written.

There is some chance FDA found out about this man because if you have to go to hospital or you die companies had to file a report outlining what happened and did so for this man.

Slide 34: But in Study 329, FDA know nothing about a 15 year old boy, 2 weeks after being put on Paxil, who was out on the street waving a gun, threatening to kill people. He was brought to hospital by the police. There was no report to tell FDA what happened. Thirty years ago companies found a way to legally avoid filing these reports. Companies are still using this trick in trials published this year in all major journals and regulators either don’t spot or are not bothered to close a very obvious loophole. In Study 329, 4 children vanished through this loophole.

Slide 35: The sentences on the right are the 3 sentences with which this article ends – the message is companies have created an impression that RCT articles are like tablets of stone brought down from the mountain top, commanding doctors to prescribe and us to take. But when we have access to RCT data, this raises questions – as science should – rather than issues commands.

In addition to Coding, Grouping is also an act of authorship. If you have 500 events in 93 children on Paxil, rather than list them all, cardiac events are usually grouped in a Cardiac group etc. Behavioral events are usually grouped in a Psychiatric group. GSK grouped all behavioral events under Neurological. This groups emotional lability with headaches and dizziness, which are very common. Grouped this way the behavior problems disappear. Grouped as Psychiatric, the problem is immediately clear.

The Restoring Study 329 article took over a year to get it published. What was fascinating was the BMJ did not contest the data but they were very exercised by the act of interpretation. They appeared to assume that the data had spoken and GSK faithfully transmitted what they had heard. They found it heard to grasp that GSK used a coding dictionary that even FDA had never heard of.

Any scientific analysis inevitably involves an act of authorship or interpretation. But BMJ found it hard to let us author the behavioral events out of the neurological group into a Psychiatry group. There is no such thing as data without an interpretation. Ideally the interpretation should command consensus but for BMJ this appeared to mean that we should adopt what GSK had done without question.

Slide 36: Everyone knows Prozac was approved for children who are depressed but not that Paxil was too. A year after the Keller paper came out, this is part of an FDA approvable letter for Paxil.

It says GSK have told FDA Study 329 is negative. FDA agree its negative – in fact all 3 trials are negative – but FDA will still approve Paxil for kids. FDA also agree with GSK’s suggestion not to mention the negative trials in the label of the drug. Why would FDA agree to this?

Before answering that, let me note FDA also viewed the Prozac trials in teens as negative.

Slide 37: This slide from Erick Turner’s 2008 article shows published adult ‘trials’ on various antidepressants, almost all indicating the drugs work well and are safe. Look at the sertraline column – 3 from the right. It shows two studies – the minimum needed for approval.

Slide 38: Another slide shows the trials as FDA viewed them. 46% of these trials are negative. Many published as positive were negative to add to the unpublished negative trials. Look at the sertraline column – only one positive study.

Why do FDA say nothing about this? Well if FDA said trials are negative – the companies might get sued for fraud or fined – as happened for Study 329.

Slide 39: Here you see the PTSD page of a 30 page document listing Zoloft articles in progress. These papers aim at capturing markets not at informing us on how to use Zoloft safely.

Pfizer did 4 Zoloft PTSD trials. All negative. FDA approved it on the basis of 2 trials with a minimal benefit for women. These good bits plucked out are what’s being published. You see under Status on the right two articles are complete and will be sent to the very best journals. On the left you see TBD – to be determined – when Pfizer decide which names would sell most Zoloft.

You saw a 24 person authorship line for Study 329 but the real author is not there. Across medicine studies of on-patent drugs are ghostwritten.

In the case of children’s antidepressant trials the entire literature was written by ghosts and there is a complete mismatch between the published claims and the data – the greatest mismatch in all of science. On the basis of published claims the use of these drugs is escalating rapidly in teenagers with predictably bad results.

Slide 40: Fifty years ago, Britain joined the EU and ran into trouble. Cadbury’s chocolate, their favorite chocolate, they were told, could not be called chocolate. It didn’t have the right quota of cocoa solids. British consternation over chocolate led to Brexit some decades later.

What FDA do is in their name – they regulate Food and Drugs. Faced with butter or chocolate or drugs, companies must meet an assay standard – so much cocoa solids, animal fats, or so many points on a Depression rating scale in 2 trials. Meet that and FDA let you use the words chocolate, butter, or antidepressant. It’s not FDA’s job to decide if this is good butter, or if chocolate is good for you, or to police the medical literature.

Sllide 41: Since 1990, however, regulators increasingly say they approve drugs on the back of a supposed positive Benefit-Risk ratio. This is Ian Hudson thinking. If there are no proven adverse effects and just a benefit then of course there is a positive Benefit-Risk ratio.

The medical act of bringing good out of the use of a poison is incompatible with all this.

We would all agree there is a positive benefit-risk ratio for parachute approval in terms of lives saved versus lives lost – even though some men might have difficulties making love in the weeks afterwards, owing to harness effects. If things aren’t clear enough for us all to endorse, regulators are de facto getting us to live the lives companies want us to live when they make Benefit-Risk claims.

Unlike parachutes, SSRI RCTs have more dead bodies on SSRIs than placebo. In addition. the commonest effect of an SSRI is to cause genital numbness in close to everyone who takes one within 30 minutes of a first tablet. Almost everyone will have the way they make love changed while on an SSRI and they may later find themselves unable to make love ever again, either because they can’t stop or because the drugs can wipe out sexual function for ever. This may be far more important to a person than any mood benefit.

But the focus on the mood effect, means the sexual effect was missed entirely in the trials regulators scrutinized both because that’s how trials work but also with a little extra gaming from companies.

Some years ago treating a man with OCD, I tried an SSRI – the first line treatment and then more heavy duty drugs when the SSRI didn’t work. All made him worse. One day he came in much better – he had stopped all his drugs but he was cured by going back smoking. He had also googled nicotine and OCD and found studies showing nicotine and related drugs can help OCD.

When I say the Art of Medicine lies in Bringing Good out of the Use of a Poison, people hiss at me but everyone would likely agree this man was bringing good out of the use of a poison. SSRIs however are prescription-only because we expect them to be more dangerous than over the counter alcohol and nicotine.

The important thing is that this man (perhaps with input from me) is the only person in a position to make a meaningful Benefit Risk call. I can’t see what role FDA could have in this. Benefit-Risk calls are an individual matter. Making the claims FDA now make puts them in a role of getting people to live the life Pfizer want them to live.

Am I making all claims on the basis of Citizen Research more than Expert input? No – among the articles this man found about nicotine and OCD was one whose significance passed him by. One of the authors was Arvid Carlsson, who created SSRIs and won a Nobel Prize for Medicine.

But when you have Skin in the Game, Motivation can be worth just as much as Expertise.

Slide 42: As a result of Ian Hudson’s views, as I wrote 25 years ago, everyone who participates in a company trial today puts all the rest of us in a state of Legal Jeopardy. We should boycott trials, until this changes. See Clinical Trials and Legal Jeopardy.

Slide 43: That article was 25 years ago, this is 25 days ago and argues everyone entering a trial now are deceived by consent forms that promise coverage for injuries, unaware that there are no injuries on modern treatment, or no injuries that can be admitted. See The Coverage of Medical Injuries in Compary Trial Informed Consent Forms.

Slide 44: However, since 2010, the US Supreme Court in the Matrixx case made it clear that Ian Hudson’s views do not apply to investors wanting to make up their mind about the Benefits and Risks of investing. We who are investing our lives in these treatments still do not have such rights.

Slide 45: The beating Tell Tale Heart of this talk came with the publication of this article 33 years ago this month, in which 3 Boston clinicians claimed fluoxetine caused 6 people to become suicidal. Analyzing the cases closely and following traditional clinical approaches for determining causality, this article nailed beyond doubt that fluoxetine could cause some people to become suicidal.

Lots of other groups reported similar findings. I published 2 cases of men, who were challenged, dechallenged and rechallenged with an SSRI. There was no other way to explain what happened them except that fluoxetine had caused it. This was Evident Based Medicine .

Slide 46: Almost the same week as my article came out, BMJ published an article in which Lilly claimed an analysis of their clinical trials showed no evidence fluoxetine made people suicidal. The cases being reported, therefore, were sad but anecdotal – and the plural of anecdote is not data. Depression was the problem not fluoxetine. Clinical trials are the science of cause and effect. Doctors, the public, media, and politicians were being asked – are you going to believe the science or the anecdotes?

This was a knowledge creation moment that likely had input from all companies and perhaps FDA. This article created Evidence Based Medicine and just as with RCTs 30 years earlier, the people most commonly exhorting doctors to practice EBM today are Pharma companies.

In fact, the original phrase is the plural of anecdotes is data – otherwise Google wouldn’t work.

The idea the disease is responsible for suicide attempts and suicides in healthy volunteers is hard to believe but companies can wheel out experts to say just that.

My key point is that the Teicher paper is the science – the Lilly data is an artefact. My challenge to you is which are you going to believe the Science or the Artefact?

The Science of Medicine lies in making hard judgement calls. The made by algorithm approach, combined with inappropriate statistics, creates artefacts not science.

You’ve seen earlier how Lilly cooked the books. When you get the trial data, the Evident Based Medicine and Evidence Based Medicine approaches here can be reconciled – as you might expect with real science.

But even there was an incompatability there isn’t a problem. Resolving discrepancies is how we do science.

This points to a deep problems with Lilly’s argument. They are not in the business of being scientific – resolving discrepant observations. Lilly’s argument is a religious one – a dogmatic one – they forbid us to believe the evidence of our own senses.

This is papal infallibility riding again.

Peter Drucker, the doyen of marketing gave us a secular update – the goal of marketing is not to increase the sales of Prozac, its to own the market. This was the moment Pharma took ownership of the market.

This ownership allows companies to dictate what the risks, the benefits and the trade-offs of drugs are. Allows them to force us to live the lives they want us to live rather than engage with the risky and unprofitable business of producing products that will help us to live the lives we want to live. Following this Artefact is profoundly alienating.

Slide 47: This faces us with a what is science question? The usual histories start with the foundation of The Royal Society in 1660, which established the ground rules for Science. Science would deal with matters that could be Settled by Data. Participants could be Xtian, Hindu, Jew, Muslim, or Atheist, but participants were called on to leave these badges at the door and make a consensus based judgement call about the best way to explain the experimental outcome in front of them.

The histories of science emphasize the word Data. Settled is the more important word. Statistics played no part in this science. The experiments were events and didn’t need the descriptions statistics can provide. Science was emphatically not about replacing judgment calls with a statistical artefact. It only became so 33 years ago.

Slide 48: This account of our history overlooks an earlier event. In 1618, Walter Raleigh was executed – for being too close to those pesky Europeans. Raleigh was convicted on the basis of things said about him by people who did not come into court to be cross-examined.

Legal systems worldwide recognized the injustice of this and introduced Rules of Evidence. Hearsay could not be used as evidence. Jurors – a group of 12 people, Xtians, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists and Jews, can only base a verdict on material put in front of them that can be examined and cross-examined. The process of forcing 12 people with very different biases to come to a Verdict about what is in front of them is the essence of science.

Verdicts and diagnoses are provisional – the view that best fits the current facts. This might appear to contrast with the objectivity of science, but scientific views are similarly provisional. Scientists attempt to overturn verdicts with new data.

Let’s say I gave Aaron fluoxetine 33 years ago and he became suicidal. I could examine and cross-examine him, run labs and scans, raise the dose, stop the drug, add an antidote, check with colleagues has anyone else seen anything like this or can they explain it in any other way. Aaron is the data – all of the data. He is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place.

If Aaron and I conclude fluoxetine made him suicidal and report this to FDA, the first thing FDA does is to remove his name. No-one can now examine or cross-examine him and come to a scientific view about whether there is a link or not. His injury has been made Hearsay – indeed misinformation.

If you are later injured in the same way and see tens of thousands of reports of suicidality on SSRIs on FDA’s adverse event reporting system, you cannot bring this into court because no-one can be brought into court. It’s Hearsay not Evidence.

Company RCTs are equally hearsay and should not be let into Court as evidence. Accessing the data in this case means accessing people – like Aaron or me – and we cannot do that with the people in company trials, who often don’t exist. Except rarely, the authors on the articles have seen none of these people and cannot speak to what happened either.

In contrast, if Aaron and I report his case in he New England Journal or the American Journal of Psychiatry as a Case Report, with our names on it, we can both be brought into Court.

Slide 49: By 1983 the view was emerging that RCTs offered the scientific and sophisticated way to establish if a drug had adverse effects as this quote by Rossi et al indicates:

Spontaneous reporting is “the least sophisticated and scientifically rigorous . . . method of detecting new adverse drug reactions.

A mid-career Lasagna, the man who more than anyone introduced RCTs, responded:

This may be true in the dictionary sense of sophisticated meaning ‘adulterated’ . . . but I submit spontaneous reporting is more ‘worldly-wise, knowing, subtle and intellectually appealing’ than grandiose, expensive RCTs.

Slide 50: Here you have an older Louis Lasagna saying:

In contrast to my role in the 1950s which was trying to convince people to do controlled trials, now I find myself telling people that it’s not the only way to truth.

Evidence Based Medicine has become synonymous with RCTs even though such trials invariably fail to tell the physician what he or she wants to know which is, which drug is best for Mr Jones or Ms Smith – not what happens to a non-existent average person.

Slide 51: Here is James Webb again to remind you that confidence intervals were a step on the way to revealing the individuality of stars. In medicine, statistical approaches operate against individuality.

Using Chance to control Bias does not foster clinical science, especially when we allow a mindless algorithm to replace clinical judgement. Clinical medicine, like law, and the first 300 years of science uses Bias to Control Chance and both medicine and law need to assert the validity of this approach.

Slide 52: Using Bias to control Chance rather than some algorithmic method of controlling Chance is critical when numbers enter the frame. This is our only defense against medical neo-liberalism.

Around 1980 Pharma began treating healthy people. They discovered that numbers for our peak flow rates, bone densities, blood pressure, lipids, or sugar provided opportunities to sell drugs. Up to 1980, we brought our problems to healthcare – seeking help to live the lives we wanted to live. After that health services began to give us problems and the amount of medicines consumed rose dramatically. We began treating numbers rather than people.

Remaining on top of data like this is difficult. Just after weighing scales for people were introduced in the 1860s, we got the first descriptions of anorexia nervosa. In the 1920s, weighing scales in drug stores came with norms for our ideal weight given our height and sex and eating disorders mushroomed. When scales migrated into our homes in the 1960s eating disorders became epidemic – in the countries that had weighing scales. Measurements can make both us and our doctors neurotic.

Slide 53: There is an extra element to the equation. The service industries emerged in the 1950s. Through to 1980, no-one viewed health as a service industry – doctors were professionals who exercised judgement the way a Judge might. But service industries have managers and health got managers. With this the exercise of clinical discretion, the jewel in the crown of Health Care became a problem for those who manage services.

The idea of bringing good out of the use of a poison does not compute for managers, insurers, politicians or increasingly the public.

Before 1980, clinicians mobilized the resources of the organization they worked to handle the risks your condition posed to you. Now instead you can palpably feel the clinicians you meet are managing the risks you pose to the organization we work for.

Slide 54: Managers manage what they can measure. For them figures have a sheen of scientific gold. We are re-running the King Midas story – this gold coating is incompatible with Human Care and Life.

This governance by numbers is the essence of the neoliberalism that began in Chile and Britain – treat the money supply numbers or inflation numbers regardless of what is happening a country. Medicine is the best place to see this and its deleterious effects in action – aggravated by the fact that bowing down before a golden algorithmic idol inhibits anyone from leading us out of this desert in which we now wander.

Slide 55: When the pilot here reports problems, safety systems pay heed because they know she won’t fly if they don’t because of the consequences for her.

Jane Frazer is the CEO of Citibank. Since the financial crisis, bankers have an Early Warning System. Who knows if it helps? The financial crisis was linked to a moral hazard. Bankers were outsourcing risk, knowing that if things crashed you and I would suffer but they would continue to collect their bonuses. This made it hard for them to do the right or brave thing.

If the doctor on the left reports a problem, no-one pays any heed. She too outsources risk putting pills that like mortgages look too good to be true in our mouths. This is morally hazardous. Like a mortgage, if a drug looks too good to be true it probably is. If we blow up, she continues to be well paid. There is no incentive for her to do the right thing.

Slide 56: This moral hazard is leading to a pharmaceutical crisis that maps onto the financial crisis of 15 years ago. Here is a recent New York Times image of Life Expectancy in the US. You’ll see it began dropping in 1980, when we began treating numbers rather than people and converted health into a service industry. This Fall cannot be attribued to COVID. My view is that it is most likely linked to polypharmacy. The UK has similar falling Life Expectancy data – again pre-COVID.

Slide 57: Drugs like guns are techniques – amoral. The morality of their use lies in us. If we stop thinking about what we are doing when we use them, we are highly likely to be diminished.

Like Guns, Drugs create an arms race. The country with the best Medical Techniques and Guns wins wars and both armament and medical developments have been driven forward by military needs – to keep men able to fight in the case of drugs.

There is difference between Guns and Drugs. The chemicals in drugs are always risky. The information that transforms those chemicals into medicines has become increasingly dangerous. At the moment, the Drugs Race is not a better Chemical Race – it’s about creating more effective propaganda. The best propaganda is invisible – in this case it masquerades as science. The greatest concentration of fake literature on earth now centers on the reports of RCTs on the Drugs our doctors give us.

With both Guns and Drugs there is a limit to effectiveness. In the case of the Atom Bomb it is so effective that it cannot be used. It is the same with Drugs, if you are on more than 3, the effectiveness of each falls off as you add more meds into the mix.

To get the most effectiveness you need to be on 3 or less. As of 2016, over 40% of over 45s in the United States were on 3 or more drugs every day of the year – this figure includes the people who never come to see doctors. Over 40% of over 65s are on 5 or more drugs every day of the week. Knowing what is happening teenagers, this can only increase.

We know that reducing medication burdens can increase life expectancy, reduce hospitalizations, and improve quality of life.

Slide 58: Reducing a medication burden is not easy – as this image from the movie The Hurt Locker illustrates. Many of these drugs explode on attempting to withdraw them. This is the primary medical task of our age and there will never be any RCTs to help us out. The best evidence will likely lie in clinical experience of tackling similar situations. Great if I have a walkie-talkie to clinical colleagues but my key partner in this is you – you bring cues from missing doses of some of these drugs, and your sense of what they are doing that I can only access through you. And of course you ultimately dictate which risks we take.

In the 1940s and 1950s, RCTs had a role when we didn’t know if things worked. From the 1960s we had so many good drugs that worked – brought on the market without an RCT in sight – a new role beckoned for RCTs – to work out what worked best. RCTs cannot do this and besides it did not suit company interests. Companies instead created Randomized Controlled Assays which among other things allow weaker and weaker drugs on the market.

The pressing medical need now is to get people off the meds they are on and RCTs and what is called EBM have little or no role to play in helping us with this.

Slide 59: If a doctor tries to modestly reduce medication burdens or recognize that in some cases a treatment might have become a problem, current public health systems will not accommodate her. In the US, it is current culture that will mobilize against this. The doctor will be told this would be a good private practice offer that people can choose, but the public health system expectation is that people want and should get more diagnoses and drugs.

This is because getting treatment to save our lives was once a privilege and wealth and public health systems want everyone to be able to access treatment. They cannot now see that these good intentions are killing people. Now we have to be wealthy to get off medicines to save our lives.

Canada now leads the world in MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying. In places like Belgium and Holland young women are getting MAiD because they have drug induced treatment resistant depression. While there must be concerns when young women in their 20s get MAID for treatment resistant depression – an antidepressant induced illness – I’m not quibbling about the morality of MAiD – any good doctor will almost certainly have cases where MAiD is the caring thing to do.

What I am quibbling about is the morality of a system that encourages us to have any service we want, including MAiD, but denies us the option of having less services. Denies us a Greener, more sustainable HealthCare. At the moment, not even Green parties have got a handle on this.

Slide 60: This lady comes from an Arthurian Legend. Arthur has been out-fought by a Black Knight who spares his life if he can answer a riddle – What do Women Most Desire. He has a year to find the answer. He and his court hunt desperately for it. The day he is due to die, Arthur and his troop meet this woman who tells him that she has the answer to the riddle but one of his knights must become her husband. Gawain jumps down and offers himself up. Arthur answers the riddle, and a furious Black Knight lets him go.

Slide 61: Gawain gets married. Everyone at the Court is unhappy for him.

Slide 62: In the bedchamber Gawain can’t bear to look at her. She takes control and asks him – do you want me to look like this by night with you and the way I was by day in court or like this by day in court. He has no idea and says – whatever you want. This is the right answer.

The answer to both riddles is she, like us, wants to control her own life. There may be a disease that needs treating – but she doesn’t want us to tell her how to live life, or want her negative emotions eliminated with a pill. She may be doing better at living life than you or I.

The evidence based medicine we now practice creates a False We – a non-existent average person – a fairy tale.

Rather than paying heed to the non-existent average person who comes out of clinical trials, when we relearn that we can learn much more from the person right in front of us, she and others who come to see us will seem more interesting and as they sense that we will be more attractive to them – easier to work with.

A relationship based medicine is the only validly scientific form of clinical practice. If you can’t build up a relationship with people because you and they see a different doctor every time, a relationship in which you are looking closely at and listening attentively to them – perhaps even detecting if there is a change in their smell, you are not doing science. The person in front of you is the apparatus in which the experiment is taking place. The computer screen is not.

Both science and morality depend on collaboration. Collaboration creates a virtuous circle – an Us – that leaves us all better placed to live the life we want to live. It creates Social Capital.

Redesignate Company Trials as Assays

Government of the People by the People has been replaced by governance.
If it is not to perish entirely from the earth…
We need to do…

Footnotes

This may be the most important lecture I have ever given – it’s the longest at least. It has been heavily shaped by Dee Mangin, Peter and Julie Wood and everyone linked to RxISK – Bill James, Johanna Ryan, Peter Selley, Sarah Tilley, Mary Hennessey, Annemarie Kelly and many others who have worked behind the scenes but don’t want to be named and others whose comments on posts are often more illuminating than the posts themselves.

It has been shaped over a 25 year period by Andy Vickery, Cindy Hall, Skip Murgatroyd and Michael Baum who in the legal cases they involved me in brought me face to face with the many issues covered here.

It has been shaped by Jon Jureidini, Melissa Raven, Joanna Le Noury, and Elia Abi-Jaoude, who along with Mickey Nardo and Catalin Tufanaru, both now dead, were the team behind the Restoration of Study 329 – see the final article at Restoring Study 329.

It would not be possible to leave Peter Goetzsche out of the frame and an intense struggle to restore the Prozac trials in adolescents – along with the bravery of Ralph Edwards in publishing this paper. See Flat as Kansas.

Finally to complete a set of Peters, Peter Doshi has been one of the most remarkable people working on all these issues extraordinarily effectively.

There have been any number of fabulous media people like Shelley Jofre and Andy Bell who brought key issues to light, along with Ariane Denoyel and others who have grappled with the issues outlined here.

More recently, Dan Johnson, along with Yoko Motohama and Vincent Schmitt who have lost teenage sons to the drugs mentioned here, triggered the series of lectures noted above of which this is the third in the series. Jon Thompson and his colleagues in the math department in the University of New Brunswick, along with Peter Selley and colleagues in the Devon and Exeter Medical Society allowed me to dress rehearse and improve the talk.

I have stolen ideas from lots of people such as Steve Lanes – too many to acknowledge. As Steve’s example shows, some of the best help has come from people working in industry.

The Q and A after this talk in Boston reveals a tendency we all have to say things would be fine if industry just weren’t involved in trials. This is not my view. Industry don’t help but they are primarily exploiting medical failures to get to grips with the faultlines in RCTs – and a medical willingness to accept a simplistic solution to the problem of objectivity rather than engage with others in establishing what is objective or at least the best provisional version of objectivity.

Now that my piece on Exogenous Moral Orientation has accumulated many views and comments, I want to respond in a general way to the objections raised by my readership.

When you write an essay putting forth a Broad Theory of How Things Are, nobody will read it unless it has a lede that speaks to contemporary interests and a concrete focus on current events. That’s the only reason I opened with Bill Gates and his rumoured ambition to depopulate the earth. I ought to have anticipated that this would prove as much a distraction as an enticement. In answer to the many emails and comments taking issue with my statements here, I would observe that theories of Gates and the vaccines must be brought into alignment with several basic facts: Vaccination rates across Africa and the third world are truly dismal, Gates himself has repeatedly criticised the mRNA vaccines for their inability to stop transmission, and the earth’s population has continued to increase since the pandemic began, undaunted by all public health policies. 1 If the plan is indeed depopulation via the mass administration of shitty pharmaceuticals, we can take some solace in the boundless idiocy of our shadowy overlords.

Beyond those specifics, it is incredibly important to realise that the political order of the West is marked by affinities and proclivities; it tends in specific directions. In an attempt to make sense of pandemic policy, many try to find the single point of manipulation – the PCR test fraud, the false study that sabotaged hydroxychloroquine, or the key vaccinator responsible for steering early funding to BioNTech. You must widen your view to see that these are single plots in a much broader nexus of policies and scheming that all strive in the same direction, while lacking any single point of control or direction.

What is Bill Gates trying to do? Many will doubt that he really wishes “ to create a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life ,” but the inverse image of the man as an aspiring global depopulator will not convince very many people beyond our circles either. Like other philanthropists, Gates has very mundane and self-interested aims:

By attaching his name to initiatives that are already highly regarded – that the cultural system already prefers – he hopes to achieve broader relevance and transform his personal wealth into a form of cultural and political influence. This doesn’t mean that Gates isn’t bad or that he shouldn’t be stopped. It just means that he is a follower more than he is a leader, and that we shouldn’t expect this sad, weak, bloated man to explain very much.

I was pleased to see that some left-leaning readers of the plague chronicle happily identified with the exogenous moral orientation, more or less as I described it. They objected, however, that they didn’t recognise their own political preferences in the decisions of our elite at all.

It’s an old and extremely interesting political illusion, that for those on the left, something akin to a “corporate right” appears to be steering the world, while those on the right see the establishment as primarily leftward tending. Aware of this strange fact, both sides will often use words like “neoliberal” to characterise elite political orientation as something separate from or beyond the conventional political spectrum. The problem is that leftism is not well understood. It is actually a kind of ideological technology, optimised to displace a prior ruling aristocracy and seize control of institutions via alliances of opportunity with disadvantaged social groups. Appeals to economic justice and redistributive policies are simply a means of forming these alliances, which are then used to empower a new managerial elite. This doesn’t mean that many leftists aren’t totally sincere and committed to their vision of equality, but as in all political movements, it is the opportunists and the cynics who run the show. These kinds of people have no interest in any egalitarian utopia, were that even possible, and this gives rise to our optical illusion: From the left, the new elite, which consolidates power for its own purposes, seems to have an aura of “the right” about it, while those on the right are most sensitive to the leftist ideological tactics that brought this new elite to power.

But, that’s just leftism as an ideology. The EMO is a moral instinct prior to ideology, and it can fit any number of different ideological systems. The EMO operates as a taste or a preference, which returns specific answers to specific policy questions. These answers change easily depending upon the scope and the framing of a given problem, leading to a wealth of inconsistencies. If the choice is between the native population of a Western country and third-world immigrants, the EMO will demand that the third-worlders be favoured. If the choice is between reliable power generation in the third world and the environment, the EMO will demand that the environment be favoured. What is apparently very difficult to squeeze past the EMO, are things which look like pragmatic compromises, such as endeavouring to improve third-world conditions via conventional power plants. This path, even though it is the most promising both for the environment and for real people in the world, fails to satisfy the operative moral demands and is eschewed. 2 Contradictions like these are clues, which reveal that we’re dealing here not with any coherent agenda, but rather with moral instincts and unexamined preferences.

Various commenters insist on the reality, the urgency and even the existential crisis posed by climate change. In fact, I formulated these thoughts while reading climate change literature, and I think nothing reveals the reality of the EMO so clearly as this subject. Even if, for the sake of argument, we posit that all of the climate models are correct and that the earth is steadily warming as a result of human CO2 emissions, we still lack a good explanation for Western climate policies, which are only secondarily interested in reducing emissions, and which deploy CO2 primarily as a pretence to circumscribe human impact on the environment. German emissions would be substantially lower, had we invested the billions we put into wind and solar into nuclear power generation instead. In that case, we would have the capacity to scale heat pumps and electric vehicles without threatening to break the grid, confining emissions still further. Instead, Green policies effectively demand an indefinite, continued reliance on natural gas and coal, which is acceptable, because the danger of nuclear power in their minds is not so much the overhyped threat of another Chernobyl, as it is the very real prospect of enabling further civilisational and industrial expansion at the expense of “nature,” which the EMO cannot countenance.

Another clue that something is not quite right with climate change, is that, as an area of cultural and political anxiety, it exists only in the EMO thought-world. This is in contrast to other issues, which prompt varying responses in those with endogenous and exogenous moral inclinations. Consider the war in Ukraine. Those with a pronounced endogenous moral orientation will be sceptical of the conflict and demand that military resources be conserved for national defence. Those with a pronounced exogenous moral orientation will be more likely to appeal to abstract universals like democracy and demand empathy with out-group Ukrainians. 3 We would expect climate change, as an objective problem, to provoke endogenously oriented solutions, and we would expect these to be very extreme, given the alleged immediacy and gravity of the threat. If we are indeed on the brink of triggering a climate “tipping point” (the concept is far more controversial even within the halls of Science than you have been led to believe), limpwristed Paris Agreements would be the least of it. Major powers would be imposing industrial limits on their rivals via sanctions and threats, to reserve the remaining CO2 capacity of the atmosphere for themselves. But, we see nothing like this at all, which suggests that the cluster of prognostications, beliefs and prescriptions around climate change are themselves the exogenously oriented moral response to a totally separate issue, which I will leave my readers to ponder. 4

Finally, because many objected that I overestimate Gates’s sincerity, I’d like to emphasise that I’m not making any claims about the subjective, inner life of anybody. I’m merely trying to articulate the moral system that explains the actions and professed beliefs of philanthropists, policymakers and many ordinary people in the West. By encouraging elites to ally themselves with immigrants or other more endogenously oriented outsiders against their native populations, the EMO definitely has malicious effects. The depressing truth is that people will be inclined to buy into moral systems which benefit them in other ways, and it is very hard to know where sincerity ends and cynicism begins, or to what degree sincerity can ever be an excuse.

Footnotes:

1. The growth rate – which has been in long-term decline – decreased by a barely-perceptible 0.1% since 2020 . 1

2. Third-worlders are typically favoured only when this redounds to the disadvantage of westerners; they are generally disfavoured on environmental and human-impact questions. Pragmatic environmentalists who subscribe to the theory of demographic transition ought to support any means of improving third-world conditions, as even relatively modest environmental impacts here promise to lower the birth rate. Instead, they favour hugely increasing the environmental impact of millions of third-worlders via mass immigration to the developed West, while they perpetuate third-world poverty via things like unworkable energy leapfrogging schemes, thus (at least in their framework) ensuring that birth rates and mortality remain elevated.
   Note that that the moral dynamic surrounding Covid – rooted particularly in a kind of hygiene purity mania – prevented pragmatic solutions to the pandemic in much the same way. The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration tried to sell their alternative to mass containment under the rubric of “focused protection,” but in fact it is better to say that their plan hinged on building natural immunity in the youngest and least vulnerable demographics via “focused exposure.” The moral instincts governing pandemic policy made accepting any infections impossible, even at the cost of higher mortality. 2

3. These are of course only two of various possible constellations. More endogenously oriented Americans, who want to expand American influence in the world or who hold specific anti-Russian animosities, may well find themselves on the Ukrainian side. The same goes some endogenously oriented Eastern Europeans, who perceive the war as a national threat. 3

4. This is true whatever you think about the empirical reality of claims that atmospheric CO2 from human industrial activity is responsible for some portion of industrial-age warming – a proposition I tend to accept in broad terms. 4

One of the things that the plague chronicle aims to do, is draw back the curtain on the institutional or cultural roots of particular malignancies, which seem at first to be contingent on specific bad actors. While I understand that some of you find this irritating, it’s not my purpose to let anybody off the hook. It’s rather to point out that the very real villains we’re all concerned about are mere expressions of much deeper forces, and that fixing things will involve a lot more than rounding up all the Anthony Faucis of the world and trying them for crimes against humanity.

One vein of Corona analysis sees the entire pandemic as the plot of globalist conspirators who are interested in reducing the world population. There are many variations on this theory, but the most basic would hold that lockdowns and the rest were a means of driving us to accept harmful vaccination, which will cause a massive die-off among the vaccinated in the coming years and prepare the way for whatever netzero sustainable future Klaus Schwab has planned for the survivors.

My readers often send me links to podcasts, videos and other media providing proofs of this Global Depopulation Agenda. Clip compilations like this one constitute an important genre in this area. They generally feature globalist goons – in this case, Bill Gates – saying ominous things about the overabundance of humans at different interviews and panel discussions.

I have a look at almost everything you send me, and by now I’ve seen enough to note that the internet case against Gates rests heavily on the same dozen or so video statements. Some of these items, for example the third one in that link (where Gates is talking about reducing childhood mortality), are deliberately deceptive, and it’s an important question, why this area is so awash in clearly manipulated media . The rest of the clips are more or less accurate representations of Gates’s arguments, the only problem being that they’re presented too narrowly.

The fourth at that link, for example, is from a TED talk, where Gates opines that

The world today … is headed up to about nine billion [people]. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent.

The fifth is very similar. Here, Gates pleads:

The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where the people are the least able to deal with it, so it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050. And so their ability to feed, educate, provide jobs, stability, protect the environment, in those locations means they’re facing an almost impossible problem.

If you read these statements carefully, you’ll see they don’t actually support the idea that Gates wants to reduce the world population by vaccinating people to death. First, he could hardly be expected to air such plots in a public forum; and second, Gates almost always pairs his remarks about population with other concerns about healthcare, food and education. These are strange scruples for a homicidal maniac bent on killing billions.

These statements only begin to make sense, when you realise that they’re rooted in the sociological theory of demographic transition . This theory observes that, as societies advance technologically and economically, they shift from an order of high birth rates and high death rates, to an order of low birth rates and low death rates. Gates, who like all globalist elites is worried about environmental impacts from there being too many humans, believes that he can reduce the total peak population in places like Africa by introducing medical interventions to lower mortality and thereby guide populations to a low-birthrate, post-transition demographic pattern. Whether this theory is right, or whether this makes Gates’s interventions morally defensible, are separate questions. What is beyond dispute, is that this is what Gates is arguing and what everybody in his audience understands him to be arguing.

The banal truth is that Gates is an unoriginal flabby Western liberal. He’s worried about the environment, about population and about disadvantaged brown people, and he thinks he can solve all these problems by improving healthcare. This isn’t a defence of him. I happen to think he’s a malign influence and that if we can’t rein in the Gates’s of the world we’re finished, but that’s not because he’s bent on using mRNA vaccines to decimate humanity.

Those concerned about the Global Depopulation Agenda will not be appeased by these clarifications, of course. They’ll point to anti-natalist messaging and policy in Western nations, and also to organisations like the Club of Rome and establishment intellectuals like Paul Ehrlich , who have openly railed against the spectre of overpopulation. They’ll argue – rightly – that our entire political culture is in thrall to a green movement which opposes any technology that might further human flourishing via reliable energy, regardless of its carbon impact. They’ll say I myself have frequently complained that countries like Germany are doing permanent damage to their economies by pursuing an energy transition which will make no difference in the longer term, because future carbon emissions are almost entirely a function of increasing prosperity and population growth in the developing South and East.

If there isn’t a Global Depopulation Agenda, what’s going on, and how are all these ominous developments to be explained?

The answer is very important, and it lies in the peculiarities of postwar political ideology and the moral instincts which this ideology expresses.

There are many ways to illustrate this, but the most efficient is probably this classic Nature paper on Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle .

Among other things, the authors asked study participants identifying as “conservatives” and “liberals” (in the American sense) to indicate their spheres of primary moral concern. “Conservatives” tended to emphasise those spheres nearest to themselves – their immediate family, their more extended relatives, their friends – as bearing the greatest moral weight. “Liberals,” meanwhile, expressed the greatest moral interest in those spheres furthest from themselves – “all people on all continents,” for example, or “all mammals.”

Plotted as heat-maps on 16 concentric circles, where the first circle is “immediate family” and the sixteenth is “all things in existence”, the comparative results look like this:

Because the future survival of humanity is at stake here, we should drop the dumb “conservative” and “liberal” labels.

The heatmap on the left is not “conservative.” It reflects the ordinary, unremarkable moral orientation of almost all human beings who have ever lived, and almost all currently living humans across the entire world. Without a moral orientation that somehow prioritises your progeny and your relatives (however widely understood), your genes will get nowhere.

The heatmap on the right, meanwhile, represents the anomalous exogenous moral orientation (EMO) of politicial and cultural elites in the developed West, which “liberal” cannot even begin to describe, and which applies primary moral emphasis to circles 13 and 14. These are “all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms” and “all living things in the universe including plants and trees.” Substantial moral value is also attached to things in the twelfth circle, “all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae,” and in the fifteenth circle, “all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.” These are people who, strictly speaking, claim to feel morally bound to family, friends and relatives primarily to the extent that these fall within the “living things” or “things in existence” categories.

While we aren’t exactly governed by shape-shifting lizards , we are governed by completely insane ideologues who would do the bidding of shape-shifting lizards – if necessary at our dire expense – were these ever to be discovered.

Now, it’s not quite as bad as it seems. Remember above all that these are moral aspirations and ideals; they are how study respondents claim to feel. Revealed preferences show that most of these people, in their personal lives, still attach substantial moral weight to their immediate friends, family and community. They probably feel qualms about this, however, and when the context is not so immediate – when, for example, they’re making policy decisions for millions of citizens – they’ll compensate by caving to their idealised EMO wherever possible. Put another way: Bill Gates likes the convenience of his private jet , even as he hopes to discourage people from flying.

Remember also that it is the dose which makes the poison. Some degree of EMO isn’t bad. It’s one reason that we look down on littering, for example. An important expression of growing Western EMO would be the European interest in other peoples and cultures, including much-maligned colonialism and the less-maligned British campaign to abolish the slave trade after the later eighteenth century. Particularly since 1900, however, the EMO of Western governing elites has grown ever more extreme, to the point that it has begun to constitute an existential threat for human civilisation.

How this radical and historically unprecedented EMO came to be so ingrained is a complex question. Putting it down to the media or to propaganda is not fully satisfying, because we’d have to ask where the media and the propagandists got these ideas in the first place.

A prerequisite is technology and our growing alienation from nature. Anyone who has spent a rough week or two on the face of a mountain will come away from the experience personally enriched, but perhaps also doubtful that unmanaged unmitigated nature is every bit as friendly, good and deserving of moral concern as his immediate family. Tropes which locate wisdom in distant indigenous peoples and on foreign continents likewise betray a naivete about the realities of hunter-gatherer existence and a lack of experience with life beyond the prosperous West.

A more important, immediate causal factor, is the upset in established social orders since the Industrial Revolution, which has coincided with the rise of liberal democracy, and the replacement of the traditional aristocracy with new managerial elites. The latter have frequently pursued tactical alliances with outsiders or the lower classes to displace prior establishments – including, as the quiet revolution continues, prior managerial establishments. This is the primary function of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives in America today, and it obviously encourages and depends upon both orchestraters and beneficiaries to engage in radical EMO rituals.

As the problem seems to be growing worse over time, self-reinforcing selection effects probably also play an important part. The more pronounced EMO is favoured by the governing elite, the more all politicians and persons of prominence in the West are specifically selected for this trait, or at least for their willingness to pantomime it. While people with these moral tendencies have always existed, they’ve never been so heavily concentrated in positions of influence before, and the more concentrated they become, the more aggressively they filter for like-minded radicals like themselves, even in the absence (and in excess) of any specific objective.

Once you have seen this simple dynamic at work, you cannot unsee it.

It explains the increasing prominence of animal (and even alien) protagonists in entertainment media, the overt preference for fringe sexual minorities, the predilection for supranational global political bodies and non-governmental organisations which transcend borders and national institutions.

It explains, in particular, why governing elites are so open to insane unprecedented policies like mass immigration. They no longer have particular national moral categories at all, and so they reluctantly embrace all of humanity, and preferentially all living things everywhere. Similarly, it explains why mainstream liberal policies happily enlarge the carbon footprints of millions of third-world immigrants by welcoming them into the industrialised West, while simultaneously waging war on all aspects industrial society for their supposed negative impacts on nature.

Less obviously, the radical EMO of our leaders and their supporters explains the increasing willingness of elites to tolerate suboptimal and actively harmful policies at home. The moral world of the people who run our countries has grown enormously in size, leaving the spheres of their direct jurisdiction almost microscopic in comparison. Why not shut down all of society in an effort to kill (a likely man-made) virus? Why not inject poorly tested mRNA novelty vaccines in billions and suppress all evidence of negative population-wide effects? That elites increasingly treat their populations like cattle is a direct expression of their expanded moral universe. They have so many other things to care about.

It took a while for these moral sentiments to find their proper ideological articulation. In the early 1970s, people with radical EMO signalled, for a brief time, about the dangers of human overpopulation, and there ensued a moment of moral hysteria in which people like Paul Ehrlich wrote books like The Population Bomb . The years since have seen the emergence of a more differentiated ideological system, which extends lesser but still privileged consideration to third-world populations. Thus antinatalist systems are confined mostly to the West, where the most zealous environmental policies are also implemented. That Europe could disappear tomorrow with minimal effects on long-term global population projections or the future composition of the atmosphere is irrelevant. It is the fact that this is the circle of least moral concern, which is determinative.

In the nineteenth century, somebody like Bill Gates would be far more likely to run domestic charities, but in our present hyper-EMO world, he spends every waking moment thinking about Africa, and how he can help Africans, and in the process also save nature by hastening the African transition towards lower birthrates and bringing the netzero ideal closer to reality. All the policy documents and aspirational statements produced by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and other bodies are animated by a similar spirit.

A globalist cabal plotting the depopulation of the world would be a grave problem, but one with a clear enough solution. We’re facing, instead, an entire moral and ideological system, with very deep roots in prosperous Western culture. This isn’t a universe where everybody wakes up tomorrow, elects to put Bill Gates on trial for his crimes against humanity, and returns thereafter to sensible public health policy. It’s a world where millions of people share the ideological anxieties of eccentric children like Greta Thunberg, manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries, and dream of a future earth devoid of humans like themselves. Because the driving forces operate at the level of moral instinct and emotion, no amount of evidence or appeals to reason that can stop this. Probably the best hope lies in its naivete and idealism. Worsening conditions will ultimately deprive these ideologies of their cultural appeal; how bad things have to get before this happens, is the terrifying question.

UPDATE: A lot of comments are querying Gates’s sincerity, suggesting ulterior motives, and so forth. I have no direct insight into the man, but I suggest that his interior state is a peripheral matter here. The problem is to understand under what moral orientation he is claiming to operate, and why that moral orientation resonates so broadly with elite Western culture.

Note: This article is primarily a human story. The most important parts of this article are the videos (if you only have time to watch one, watch Maddie’s, below) that were compiled and edited for this article. The written details are just to provide the necessary context for the significance of their testimonies.

In the first part of this series, I discussed how the gross malfeasance observed by many in the COVID-19 vaccine trials did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it is yet one more occurrence in a chronic pattern of egregious conduct by the pharmaceutical industry, which has progressively worsened because there has not been the political will to address the growing corruption within the biomedical establishment.

There, I focused upon the events within the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine trials (and the subsequent red flags which emerged after they entered the market), because many at the time had difficulty believing something like that could even happen and it was possible to sweep the issue under the rug, since the vaccines were only targeted on one segment of the population—women. Now, not only has the exact same thing happened (to a very eerie degree) with the COVID vaccines across the globe, but what is happening now is even worse than what happened less than a decade ago.

The best metaphor I have come up with to describe what I’ve observed in the pharmaceutical clinical trial process is that enrolling in one is akin to entering an abusive relationship. The abuser will initially flatter you and promise you one thing after another in return for your consent to enter their web of deception. Then, once they have you, they will break each promise they made, gradually treating you worse and worse, and gaslight ing you into believing that those issues are not really happening. Finally, once they no longer need you, they will discard you and leave you to pick up the pieces (which is often almost impossible if you have a life-changing medical injury).

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In the previous article , I introduced the concept of two different types of scientific fraud:

• Soft fraud is when the data is presented misleadingly to propose a conclusion that's not supported by the data, or some of the data is intentionally omitted (e.g., you do not publish an incriminating study or you find a way to reclassify an adverse event so it does not show up in the final clinical trial report).
• Hard fraud is when the data itself is just fabricated.

While many are comfortable with committing "soft” fraud, very few will commit “hard” fraud (although this cannot necessarily be said of India or China ). Instead, most of the fraud we encounter is soft fraud (e.g., this characterizes many of the studies used to try to debunk hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19). This, in turn, makes it possible for outside investigators (e.g., this community) to read between the lines, identify what actually happened, and determine what the results of a given study should have been, had it not been twisted to provide the results desired by its sponsor.

Conversely, I believe that the general reluctance to commit hard fraud exists because it crosses a line that even the fairly corrupt academic and legal systems still stand behind. However, we frequently see things that come quite close to that line, such as dishonest researchers altering a trial midway through so it arrives at the needed results. Fauci, for example, did this repeatedly with remdesivir to get it onto the market, and similarly, the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer ended their previously promised long-term placebo groups once they got their emergency-use authorizations (which should have required that long-term follow-up), so the long-term side effects of these vaccines could never be assessed.

Note: Although you can conceal most things by manipulating clinical trials, the one thing that is very difficult to hide is the total number of deaths (as they cannot be reclassified to something else). When Pfizer prematurely ended their trial at 6 months, more people had died in the vaccine group than the placebo group (and I suspect that this would have further worsened with time). The report disclosing this inconvenient fact (which destroyed the entire rationale for vaccine mandates) was released over a year ago .

Much of modern (industry-sponsored) science is designed to conceal things that would create problems for those sponsoring the science. Similarly, an ethos has been installed within our culture to doubt our own observations, and instead defer to the evidence-based scientific consensus, as the former, but not the latter is allegedly highly susceptible to biases that invalidate its conclusions. I disagree with this, and would argue that important things can often only be discerned by perceptive anecdotal observations.

Many organized religions throughout history have sought to control their populations by monopolizing the truth, and modern science is no different, monopolizing the evidence so that only a costly industry narrative can constitute "truth.” All of this is why we repeatedly see situations where someone has an undeniable medical injury, and afterwards, every professional they talk to tells them the injury could not have possibly been linked to the medication because there is “ no evidence ” it could have happened (also known as medical gaslighting ).

With the COVID-19 vaccines, we have seen alarming evidence of their harm across the board. For example, so many people are being harmed that VAERS has received more serious adverse events from the COVID vaccines than all other vaccines in history-- 28% of Americans know someone whom they believe the vaccines killedThe life insurance industry shows an unprecedented spike in deaths amongst working-age Americans following workplace-mandated vaccines being forced upon them. However, all of these safety signals are being ignored and dismissed as erroneous products of cognitive biases because they don’t meet the elusive bar for “evidence.”

Our current society has been conditioned to worship “evidence-based” science, and believes that it should be the sole arbiter of truth. One of the core tenets of evidence-based medicine is that the best available evidence should be used to inform clinical decisions. This is now widely interpreted to mean that large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) or clinical guidelines produced by committees of ( often corrupt ) experts are the “best” forms of evidence, and thus are the only things allowed to inform clinical decisions.

One of my largest disagreements with this dogma occurs when a situation arises where observations suggest something inconvenient to commercial interests, but the question at hand has not been formally assessed by large RCTs. The observations are summarily dismissed because “there is no evidence” for them. In these cases, I believe that the more limited data point (e.g., a series of similar clinical cases) constitutes the best available evidence, and should be treated as such until more comprehensive evidence is arrived at through a clinical study.

Much of my success as a clinician has arisen from utilizing more “limited” forms of evidence to inform my clinical decisions rather than waiting for an RCT (which may take years to be done) to settle the question—unfortunately many doctors become paralyzed and cannot act unless they have something like that to back them up. In contrast, if you read medical journals from earlier eras, physicians regularly made remarkable discoveries utilizing inductive reasoning, which is why I frequently study those ancient documents.

Overall, I believe there are three major issues with relying excessively upon RCTs:

• The first, summarized in this essay by Harvey Risch, is that the value of (perfect) RCTs is heavily over-emphasized. In my eyes, most individuals who fixate on RCTs view an investigation being randomized and controlled as a necessary box to check off, rather than (like Risch) actually understanding what it entails from a statistical perspective.

• Secondly, if the magnitude of an effect is small (e.g., this drug might reduce your risk of a heart attack years down the road by 5%), it takes an elaborate and costly trial to detect that faint effect, and it is very likely that you will have a greater chance of being harmed by a side effect than benefiting from the drug. Conversely, if the effect is large (e.g., shooting someone with a gun typically kills them), you don’t need an elaborate trial to detect the effect; a very small one will suffice to identify it. I subscribe to the belief that many useful medical interventions have a large enough magnitude of effect that it is not necessary to do complex testing to tease out their benefits.

• The third point is that large RCTs are extremely expensive to conduct (meaning that only industry and occasionally vested interests within the government can fund them, which is why many therapies I stand behind have never been able to achieve this gold standard in research performed for them). The rarely considered cost of doing an RCT frequently invalidates the entire RCT model, because study after study has shown that the financial interests of a study’s sponsor heavily influence its conclusion, and that influence is much greater than any benefit that can be obtained through randomization or controlling for the placebo effect.

Because of the “sponsor bias”, large studies need to have a way to arrive at a sponsor’s desired conclusion without committing hard scientific fraud. Over the years, a relatively consistent toolbox has evolved for committing soft scientific fraud, and those familiar with it were able to immediately recognize it being applied throughout the COVID-19 clinical trials

The COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

The essential purpose of the COVID-19 vaccine trials was to do the following:

• Be completed in a much shorter time frame than normal so that the vaccines could make it to the market before the pandemic ended on its own (which is essentially what has happened in Africa where vaccines were never used ).

  Note: The FDA also understood the urgency to open this long-term marketplace and waived a variety of oversights that would normally be required using the present “emergency” as the justification for doing so.

• Come up with something that could be used to justify that the vaccines were “effective” so that the medical profession would wholeheartedly support and promote them.

• Conceal any adverse reactions from the vaccines that would make the medical profession reluctant to recommend the vaccines, and, more importantly, ensure doctors would deny any harms they observed in patients during the rollout could be linked to the vaccine (as doctors acknowledging widespread injuries would destroy the public’s willingness to continue vaccinating).

Long before the vaccines entered the market, I started to see the signs that an elaborate publicity campaign was being put together to frame the vaccines as the miraculous “ solution ” to the horrific pandemic situation we were experiencing (which was largely self-inflicted). Once the vaccines became available, that publicity campaign kicked into high gear and became the most aggressive propaganda campaign we had ever witnessed in our lifetimes. I tried to cover some of the most insane examples here:

Not surprisingly, this scheme also led to the vaccine manufacturers having the audacity to use titles like “ Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 [Pfizer] mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine ” for the publications of their trials . Simultaneously, we were hit with the same soundbite over and over “ well we had hoped the vaccines would be effective, but we never imagined they would be this effective .” My colleagues ate that up, and it became nearly impossible to provide any piece of evidence with which to challenge this modern-day miracle.

Problems With Pfizer’s Trials

_Note: I mostly critique Pfizer. This is not because Pfizer is the only bad actor. It’s because I’ve spent the majority of my time reviewing their work (I can’t read everything), and because Pfizer received full approval for their vaccine, it was possible to view many of their regulatory submissions through FOIAs (and their equivalents)_

When I read through the Pfizer trial , a few red flags jumped out at me:

• The vaccines were never tested for preventing transmission, and based on their design and my knowledge of precisely how previous vaccines failed to prevent transmission , I did not believe you could take it on faith that the vaccine's efficacy in reducing symptoms translated to the benefit all my colleagues ultimately cared about (reducing the transmission of COVID-19).

• The actual benefits provided by the vaccine were very small. You had to vaccinate 119 people to prevent one minor case of COVID-19 (e.g., a sore throat + a positive test), 2711 people to prevent one “severe” case of COVID-19, and since no deaths were prevented in the trial, well over 21,720 people needed to be vaccinated (21,720 is the total number who were vaccinated in the trial) to prevent a single death from COVID-19.

• Most of the suspected adverse reactions to these vaccines did not appear to have been amongst the adverse events that were monitored (they were also unlikely to appear in the brief timespan of symptoms being monitored within this trial).

• The adverse events that were reported were much higher than what has typically been reported in trials for other vaccines [e.g., 59% experienced fatigue after Pfizer's vaccine, whereas around 10-15% experience fatigue after an influenza vaccine].

• The actual benefit that the vaccines provided was much less than these adverse events that were acknowledged within the trial report. Arkmedic did an excellent breakdown of it here .

• The noteworthy adverse events about which I remembered reading in the online support groups I had joined in 2020 for vaccine trial participants were not accounted for in any of the trial reports I read (Pfizer included). I had joined these online groups because I was suspicious of the vaccines and felt that doing this would be the only way to find out what the pharmaceutical companies had actually done.

From looking at all of this, my immediate thought was “if this was the best they could do using every possible trick at their disposal to rearrange their data to paint a positive picture of the vaccines, just how bad was the actual trial data ?”

Unfortunately, my physician colleagues (who frequently lectured us on how to skeptically dissect scientific publications) were so enraptured by the “the vaccine is even more safe and effective than we imagined” meme, that all these points fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, some did notice these issues, and Peter Doshi published a series of editorials (summarized here ) in the British Medical Journal (BMJ - considered to be one of the top 5 medical journals in the world ) that explained why the design of the vaccine trials and the evidence for Pfizer’s vaccines was very poor, and could not justify an FDA approval. Sadly, his experience with his colleagues mirrored my own, and his points were almost entirely ignored by the medical profession.

One of Doshi’s many observations was that there were signs in the data that the trial was not blinded, and the entire benefit of the vaccine may have been due to a failure to test vaccinated individuals for COVID-19 (thus creating the illusion that vaccinated individuals were less likely to have laboratory-confirmed COVID-19).

Subsequently, a whistleblower, Brook Jackson , who helped run one of Pfizer’s clinical trials, came forward and testified to the following:

• The COVID-19 vaccine trial she participated in was run in a much more haphazard way than any others she had worked on throughout her career.

•The trial was not blinded, and protocols that should have been followed to ensure blinding were flagrantly violated.

• Vaccinated individuals with COVID-19 were not being tested for COVID-19.

• Adverse reactions in vaccinated individuals were not adequately recorded.

Due to a concern that this conduct would violate the FDA’s requirements for clinical trial sites, Brook alerted her superiors about what was happening so that these issues could be addressed. After her pleas repeatedly fell on deaf ears, she eventually notified the FDA directly. Although the FDA did not investigate her concerns, they appeared to have informed her employer, as Brook was terminated the same day.
Note: As detailed by Doshi , there has been a longstanding issue with the FDA providing insufficient oversight for clinical trial sites, and as a separate investigation into vaccine oversight revealed, it was suspected that their laxity in oversight would dramatically worsen during Operation Warp Speed, which was the partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Defense(DOD) aimed at helping to accelerate the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

After these events transpired, Brook submitted her story to the BMJ who corroborated her allegations through documents she provided, and through other employees at the trial site. I would strongly recommend reading the BMJ’s investigation to understand exactly what happened there. Since her termination, Brook filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Pfizer which is presently in the federal courts.

Later, when I reviewed the events with Brook, one of the most interesting things I learned is that most of the data which is collected at clinical trial sites never even makes it to the FDA. Instead the FDA only receive a very small sample of it that is trusted to be representative of everything that occurs. I suspect this is one of the many reasons why the FDA could truthfully claim they had no knowledge any of this happened, although as this article shows they are clearly also culpable since they did not choose to pursue getting the reports for adverse events (like Maddie’s) they knew were happening.

In summary, as you can see from the above information, there was a real risk that soft fraud would occur during the clinical trials. However, unlike the many cases in which this has happened in the past, for the COVID-19 vaccine, we also had the unique opportunity to have numerous whistleblowers come forward and corroborate that this happened for the COVID-19 vaccines.

[

A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc

Whistleblowers are critical for righting the wrongs in government and healthcare. They always pay a steep price, but still would choose to do it again. Gøtzsche's presentation provides the best explanation I have ever seen on what drives the heroes we need now more than ever.

](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1609225914885476353)

The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Strategy

Pfizer and Moderna knew quite early on (although exactly how early is a matter of speculation) that there were serious risks involved in using the mRNA spike protein platform for vaccination (this was also most likely the case for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson with their spike protein vaccine). This left them in a bit of a bind; how could the vaccines they were committed to making for Operation Warp Speed be “safe” enough to win the vaccine race and get the market share they wanted?

As far as I can tell from reading the preclinical documents (e.g., this one ), this was initially accomplished by opting out of much of the safety testing on non-human subjects, which would normally be required before proceeding to human studies (e.g., Pfizer was allowed by regulators to exempt itself from testing for autoimmunity or cancer risks). I took this as a tacit admission that it was known that there were serious issues here (given that there were major concerns with these issues and they have since become some of the most common serious complications of the vaccines). In turn, they concluded that their best option was to never formally test for them so they could plausibly deny knowing that the issue existed (this is a common industry tactic) and claim that there was no evidence that the issue exists.

Once the human trials began, the goal shifted to doing everything possible to minimize the number of inevitable adverse events which occurred. This was essentially accomplished by:

• Making it very difficult for trial subjects to report any complications from the vaccines except for a very narrow subset of symptoms that were not a major publicity issue for the vaccine manufacturers. This characterizes both the limited V-safe data (which was still incriminating enough that a lawsuit was needed to get it from the CDC) and the even more limited list of adverse reactions found within the main section of Pfizer’s clinical trial report [fever, headache, fatigue, chills, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain, joint pain, or use of a fever medication along with pain, redness, or swelling at the vaccination site]. Furthermore, all of these symptoms were only monitored for 7 days post- vaccination (many vaccine injuries do not occur within this brief window, which was a well known fact prior to the COVID-19 vaccines).

  _Note: the more severe injuries in Pfizer’s study were reported in an extremely vague manner ( see page 9 ), which made it impossible to determine anything._

• Aggressively reclassifying each serious complication as unrelated to the vaccines (typically by claiming it was in fact due to a pre-existing psychiatric condition or COVID-19).

• Avoiding any type of long-term followup on patients which could provide incriminating safety data, regardless of prior commitments to do so.

Because of this strategy, the vaccine manufacturers could not acknowledge any complications that research participants experienced as being related to the vaccines. Instead, all they could do was gaslight the patients into believing that the injury was unrelated to the vaccine, and have healthcare providers collude to create the narrative that the injury was not related to vaccination.

One of the cruel complications of this approach was that it required reneging on the promises that were given to the trial subjects at the start of the research study—any medical complications they received would be covered (because providing any type of help would require acknowledging that there were potential complications from the vaccine). The one, possibly unanticipated, downside of choosing not to help with medical expenses accrued in the trial is that it could solicit the outrage necessary for trial participants to speak out publicly about what happened to them, and for the public to listen…which to some extent has now happened.

All of these potential issues were why the BMJ has repeatedly called for the raw data for the COVID-19 vaccine trials to be released. It is almost certain that the scant clinical trial data we have been provided by the pharmaceutical companies is highly misleading, and that lack of information makes it completely unethical to mandate the vaccines on the population. This is especially true because the lack of data acknowledging the injuries makes it impossible for those who are injured to receive any type of medical care or support (hence, why many providers are now labeling vaccine injuries as long-covid, because it represents the best shot they have of getting help).

The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participants

When you review these cases, it does appear that they were all coordinated as a very similar playbook was used on each participant. However, I believe this was more of an emergent phenomenon because very similar things to the approaches used here have occurred in the past. Much of what follows is déjà vu from Merck’s HPV vaccine trials, and to a lesser extent these examples also match what friends of mine experienced with complications from other pharmaceuticals that were already FDA approved (as doctors are often very resistant to believing drugs they prescribed could cause harm).

For example, many of the adverse events shown below were reclassified as being a complication of pre-existing psychiatric conditions, and this has been the default strategy for gaslighting patients throughout the history of medicine . I believe the new emphasis on reclassifying injuries as COVID-19 resulted from a climate of hysteria, where anything could be labeled as COVID-19 and there is enough of an overlap between spike protein injuries from COVID-19 to the vaccine itself, that it could be rationalized that many vaccine injuries were actually due to the virus.

Maddie’s story

To expand the market for the COVID-19 vaccines, a case needed to be made that they were safe and effective for children (who had for all practical purposes a 0% chance of dying from COVID-19). For this reason, we saw a variety of predatory advertisements such as this one from Pfizer:

An individual who was severely injured in the above trial has dedicated her life to making her story known around the world:

Much of the time that went into this article came from editing Maddie de Garay’s story on the Highwire into a shorter version (as I recognize that while the entire presentation is extremely compelling, far fewer people will watch a full episode—as you’d guess it was extremely challenging to decide which parts to cut out of it).

Because of how important I felt this story was for the world to see, I emailed it to Pierre Kory for him to share it (he has a lot more followers), and I would request that you both watch this and consider sharing it as well, because it has a really powerful message:

[

Pierre Kory, MD MPA @PierreKory

Pfizer's trial only vaccinated 1,131 children so a single serious injury would have made the vaccine too dangerous. Maddie's story shows just how far medicine will go to betray and gaslight patients who threaten its narrative. We may never know who else was swept under the rug.

](https://twitter.com/PierreKory/status/1613319015178330113)

Most of what is in this video should speak for itself. A few additional things I’d add though:

• Maddie’s attitude is remarkable. I am genuinely amazed that she is not more bitter about her situation, especially given how healthy and active she was before her injury (it is incredibly difficult for people who have serious injuries to come to terms with what has happened to them, and accept that they can no longer do what they had previously been able to do). Instead, she is almost entirely focused on preventing others from also experiencing her nightmare.

• One of the issues highlighted in the Real Anthony Fauci is that Fauci has developed a network of principal investigators (PIs) to conduct questionable research trials for his drugs.

• There is absolutely no question that Maddie’s PI, Dr. Frenck, knew what her injury was the moment it started (as it had previously been reported in many adults), knew what it meant for Pfizer if the injury was acknowledged by the trial (given how few people were in the trial), and that he had enough influence to shape the medical process which Maddie received so that it would not be something that had to go in the clinical trial report. His choice to initiate this coverup resulted in necessary care (which could have prevented her paralysis) being delayed until it was too late, and he is directly responsible for what happened to Maddie.

• The allergist that Maddie worked with who diagnosed her with a faux condition, Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) to conceal the adverse event, according to Open Payments (a required database for pharmaceutical payments to physicians), from 2015-2021, had received $652,650.65 for associated research funding (with the amount increasing year by year).

• FND is an extremely disingenuous disease that is frequently used to gaslight patients who have received severe neurological injuries. I wrote much more about it here , including how neurologists lack the insight to recognize what they are doing when they authoritatively throw this diagnosis around.

• The experience Maddie had at the hospital was awful, and to some extent surreal, but for length considerations, I cut it from the presentation. Amongst other things, Maddie became much worse after she was at the hospital (e.g., she lost her ability to walk), and believes it was due to her MRI. I periodically encounter people with complex issues who get much worse from MRIs (especially the COVID-19 vaccine injuries). I’ve seen a few explanations for this, and of those, the most likely (but not only) explanation is it being due to the MRI’s contrast agent. Gadolinium is quite toxic for some, but this toxicity is rarely considered in medicine.

• Maddie was very fortunate to have a parent who was a nurse. Similar situations are even worse for those who have no direct experience in health care.

• They also provided the information at the end of the episode for Maddie’s lifefunder .

Brianne’s story

[

A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc

Exactly what happened in the clinical trials is critical to uncover as they are the basis for the lie the vaccines are safe and all other evidence is "anecdotal." Dressen (and others she's found) were erased and left to fend for themselves once their reactions raised red flags.](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1613370463958212608)

Many of the key points that needed to be made are contained within the above clip (I put two different presentations together). The key points I had to edit out to shorten it were:

• Brianne was actively communicating with the National Institute of Health (NIH) as part of a study for treating COVID-19 neurological injuries, which were repeatedly delayed by the NIH for political reasons (but was eventually published). In that study, they eventually settled on using intravenous immunoglobulin to treat the injury (which interestingly, also sometimes helps HPV vaccine injuries, but is also an expensive treatment requiring a large donor pool, and thus has limits to its scalability ). I wrote more about Brianne’s experience with the NIH and their study here .

• Brianne founded an organization dedicated to helping COVID-19 vaccine injury victims. According to their organization (this was in response to Maddie’s story):

In the longer version of the above presentation, she mentions she and three other individuals injured in the clinical trials (each detailed in this article) all had their injuries classified as something innocuous to conceal them (e.g., Maddie’s injury was functional abdominal pain, Olivia’s T-cell lymphoma was lymphadenopathy). If I find out who the other 3 participants were, I will update the article to include them.

Note: The reason I now post tweets with videos throughout these articles is because Substack only allows videos from a few platforms to be embedded in articles (this matters because most people understandably won’t click through to outside videos). Of those platforms, Twitter is the only one that does not censor or delete controversial videos (I thought Vimeo worked as well, but a month and a half ago Vimeo deleted my entire channel).

Olivia’s story

Olivia’s story is the video at the top of this article (presented in that way due to its length) and in the Rumble video below:

Although her story is very similar to the others, there are a few important takeaway points from Olivia’s story which may not be immediately apparent.

First, for a variety of reasons detailed here, it’s often difficult for doctors to recognize subtle medical injuries unless they have been specifically trained to look for them . Instead, doctors tend to rationalize all of them as being due to psychiatric issues . What is unique about Olivia’s situation is that because everything that happened to her was so unusual, and most importantly, could be directly observed visually (so you could not deny it was happening), outside doctors were actually willing to acknowledge her injuries. Despite that, this is how Moderna’s PI treated her (clipped from the above video):

[

A Midwestern Doctor @MidwesternDoc

If you are injured in a vaccine clinical trial, they will deny your injury, not help you as promised, and not report it. This story is remarkable because Olivia had such strong evidence linking her injury to Moderna, outside doctors agreed, but even then, this is what happened](https://twitter.com/MidwesternDoc/status/1612625075022491648)

Nonetheless, despite it being unambiguous that her injury was due to the vaccine, Moderna did not pay for her medical care as promised, and did not report her injury. Additionally, the clinical trial site director said she would only be able to acknowledge that the cancer Olivia had was linked to the vaccine if “ more research emerged in the future linking it ” even though this happened at the trial that was supposed to determine if this could happen ( note: this example illustrates a common deficit in critical thinking that exists throughout my profession ).

Although her shoulder injury is alarming (and like Maddie, the physical therapy Olivia was forced to go through to “address” it should never have been conducted), the cancer she has is much worse. Based on her history, there is a very strong case that it was linked to her vaccination, and had this been presented in Moderna’s trial report, would have had huge implications for the many patients now developing cancers who are told they cannot possibly be related to the vaccine, and thus these victims are denied the support they need.

Unnamed Moderna Trial Participant’s Story

A while back, I was requested to review 865 vaccine injuries that were submitted in a survey to assess the plausibility thatthe deaths described were due to the vaccine. One of the reports caught my eye since it represented a critical incident that was not reported within Moderna’s trial report (see page 40 ), so I reached out to the doctor (who will remain unnamed) who submitted the report and had good reason to be knowledgeable of this patient’s history.

According to the doctor, the gentleman who passed away was part of the clinical trial at Research Atlanta that was paid for by Moderna. He developed atrial fibrillation after the vaccine, and approximately 3 months after vaccination, he was hospitalized (but never vented or sent to the ICU) at Grady Memorial Hospital (which is very close to the CDC).

At the hospital, he received a CT scan, which revealed blood clots in his lungs. At the time, no one was aware that the vaccine could cause blood clots (both Moderna and the CDC had insisted that the vaccine was safe, and had not revealed it was associated with blood clots). The blood clots were then assessed to have been due to metastatic cancer, as there was no other explanation for them, despite the fact that a full cancer workup was conducted which could not detect any signs of cancer in the patient. The doctor I corresponded with (who I deemed competent to assess this question) is certain that the patient did not have metastatic cancer.

The patient was then assessed to be terminally ill, discharged to hospice, and then died in hospice care (which may have been partly due to respiratory difficulties resulting from the opioids he was given for hospice). As you might expect, the clinical trial contacts were notified of what happened to this patient, but they ignored the report.

Augusto’s Story

Augusto was another clinical trial participant who was abused by Pfizer. Fortunately, he was a lawyer and did everything he could to hold them accountable.

The only direct summary I have found of Augusto’s experience can be found within this (shortened) interview (an article was also written documenting his experience here ):

Although Augusto had the same experience as everyone else (e.g., they tried to say his issues were due to psychological problems and his adverse event never ended up in Pfizer’s final clinical trial report), there were also some remarkable aspects of his case:

• His hospitalization was initially documented by a senior specialist as an adverse reaction to a coronavirus vaccine (although as the previous examples have shown, this did not ultimately change the course of things).

• In addition to the team erroneously reporting the hospitalization which Augusto had directly told them about, the PI who was supervising his case fabricated a medical record to claim Augusto had an anxiety disorder. His injury (a pericardial effusion suggestive of pericarditis) was attributed to COVID-19 (even though Augusto had a negative test) and anxiety (even though anxiety cannot to my knowledge cause a pericardial effusion).

• The PI who was supervising his clinical trial site was also the lead author of Pfizer’s New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study . Augusto’s experience and the documentation he had to support the lead author's misconduct is most likely the strongest argument for NEJM retracting Pfizer’s pivotal vaccine study ( note: in addition to the erroneous COVID-19 studies mentioned here, the NEJM also previously published Merck’s highly questionable HPV vaccine study ).

• Augusto obtained the record of another participant who died from a heart attack at the same hospital to which he was admitted, but was not registered in the final Pfizer clinical trial report.

• Augusto formally complained to the Department of Justice about this clinical trial conduct, but the government decided to avoid addressing it, despite their conduct being unlawful.

Pfizer vs. Moderna

Although many things could be said about these cases (which I suspect also holds true for the other ones I am not yet familiar with), one of the things that stands out to me from these reports is the differences in how Pfizer and Moderna conducted their trials.

In Pfizer’s case, they had a robust apparatus in place to have a team of physicians immediately neutralize any claims that the vaccine could be harmful. However, in Moderna’s case, they just told the doctors involved that the events could not be related to the vaccine and most doctors took those claims at face value (as they did not want to believe the vaccine could be harmful). Moderna, in effect, succeeded through inaction (by not documenting injuries or paying compensation for medical care they were obligated to).

I suspect this difference in strategies was due to Moderna being a fledging pharmaceutical company without an apparatus like the one Pfizer had developed over decades. Fortunately for Moderna, their laid-back approach ended up working out just as well since the FDA just rubber-stamped both of their vaccines.

Regardless of the approach that was followed though, I hope this examination into their mutual research misconduct helps to explain how these “impossible to predict” side effects that were never detected in the “robust” clinical trials could have suddenly emerged once the vaccines entered the market.

Conclusion:

Typically, it is nearly impossible to identify clinical trial participants and attempt to re-create what happened within a clinical trial. Due to the diligent work of leaders in this area like Del Bigtree , Aaron Siri , and a few clinical trial participants being brave enough to speak out publicly, we have been able to establish that serious adverse events occurred in all of the spike protein-producing vaccine trials.

More importantly, it should be apparent by now that the FDA has deliberately ignored this misconduct and tried to sweep the known adverse events under the rug. Based on all of this, I can state with near certainty there are other significant adverse reactions that did not make it to the final clinical trial reports.

Note: The fact that news stories like the above (the HPV vaccine trial malfeasance was the focus of the previous article ) received mainstream coverage (e.g., ABC news ) a mere decade ago goes to show just how rapidly the censorship of the media has increased in recent years. It also highlights how consequential failing to report the adverse events from a clinical trial can be for everyone injured after the fact .

Although exactly what degree of underreporting research fraud has occurred will probably never be known unless a legal investigation interviews each participant, as the examples in this article demonstrate, what is already known demonstrates that the vaccines are both ineffective and too dangerous to have on the market. On a more human level, what was done to these trial participants was appalling and needs to be prosecuted, and in the future may even happen if it becomes necessary to restore the public’s willingness to participate in the clinical trials which our medical system depends upon.

A major challenge of politics is catering a message to different political tribes, as each one will support certain messages and vehemently reject others. Most of the work we have done on the vaccine issue has been targeted to further convince those who already have doubts about the vaccines or sway those in the middle (which now represents a large portion of America ). Very little work however has been directed to those who are already committed to the vaccines (since it is largely a lost cause to try to change their minds).

For a variety of reasons detailed in a recent article , I believe the message that has the best shot at reaching those already committed to the vaccines (and motivating congress and the courts to do something) is to prove that fraud was committed by the manufacturers. This is why I attempted to present some of the best evidence we have currently for that assertion here (that Pfizer did not report what is actually in their vaccines). An even more important part of proving that case is showing exactly what actually happened in the clinical trials.

My sincere hope is that this article will inspire others who participated in the trials to come forward, and it is something that can be cited when people (especially doctors) try to argue that the clinical trials proved that the vaccines were “ safe .” I also faintly hope that awareness of this issue can inspire congressional hearings (which did happen previously with the disastrous anthrax vaccines that were forced on the military ). Although I doubt it would ever happen, I believe that the best solution to all the issues outlined in this article is to give trial participants the legal right to sue pharmaceutical companies for compensation if the severe adverse reactions they experience are not included in the final trial report.

Because of the videos, this article was an enormous amount of work to put together. I sincerely believe these stories need to be heard, so if you take the time to listen to them and share the ones that speak to you with others, many would sincerely appreciate that.

Lastly, on a lighter note, one of the practices I occasionally do to calibrate my medical intuition is to guess which fortune cookie best fits each member of a group I am with and then see how accurate the pairings were once they are opened. Sometimes I also go a step further and guess what specific subject the future fortune will address. The one I got today tested as being directed at the readers of this article:

”A dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine.”

On January 8, 2023 the US has to release a federal prisoner who is known as one its most notable opponents of treatment of Cuba since its revolution. She is Ana Belén Montes, and she will be freed after over 21 years in a federal military prison.

She was a top official on Latin America in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who, solely out of moral conviction, gave Cuba information on top secret US military plans and operations. Unrepentant in her trial, she defended herself saying, “I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. … I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it.”

Ana Belén is one of the many Americans who have taken a moral stance in opposition to the actions of their government, and who were subsequently hunted as traitors or spies. Edward Snowden was another such figure, having exposed how the National Security Agency’s spying on the US population and leaders of other countries. Rather than spend much of his life in a federal prison, Snowden has opted to live in exile in Russia.

While the US movement in defense of Cuba did not champion the case of Ana Belén as with the very similar situation of the Cuban Five, she is recognized as a hero in Cuba. In 2016, the famed Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodriguez dedicated a song to her, explaining, “The prisoner I mentioned yesterday… is Ana Belén Montes and she was a high official of the US secret services. When she knew that they were going to do something bad to Cuba, she would pass on the information to us. That is why she is serving a sentence of decades…Much evil did not happen to us because of her. Freedom for her.”

Silvio Rodríguez le dedicó esta canción a la presa política del imperialismo Ana Belén Montes, quien saldrá libre este fin de semana después de pasar 20 años de prisión en aislamiento total #FreeAnaBelen #FreeLeonardPeltier #FreeJulianAssange #FreeAlexSaab pic.twitter.com/4OphzkUXVp

— Roi Lopez Rivas (@RoiLopezRivas) January 4, 2023

Ana Belén did not receive any money from Cuba for her 16 years of work. Knowing the dire risks she faced, she acted out of a belief in justice and solidarity with Cuba. For over 60 years, the country has suffered under a US blockade – repeatedly condemned by the United Nations – imposed in retaliation for choosing national sovereignty over continued neocolonial status. US supported terrorism against Cuba has killed 3,478 and caused 2,099 disabling injuries over the years.

One of the charges brought against Ana Belén was having helped assure Bill Clinton and George W. Bush that Cuba represented no military threat to the US, and therefore contributed to avoiding another US regime change war that would have meant the death of countless Cubans. She also acknowledged having revealed the identities of four American undercover intelligence officers working in Cuba.

“The Queen of Cuba” hailed from a family of feds

Born in West Germany on February 28, 1957, a Puerto Rican citizen of the United States, and a high official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Belén was convicted as a spy for alerting Cuba to the interventionist plans that were being prepared against the Cuban people.

In 1984 while working as a clerk in the Department of Justice, Ana Belén initiated her relationship with Cuban security. She then applied for a job at the DIA, the agency responsible for foreign military intelligence to the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The DIA employed her in 1985 until her arrest at work 16 years later. She became a specialist in Latin American military affairs, was the DIA’s principal analyst on El Salvador and Nicaragua, and later Cuba.

Because of her abilities, Ana Belén became known in US intelligence circles as “the Queen of Cuba”. Her work and contributions were so valued that she earned ten special recognitions, including Certificate of Distinction, the third highest national-level intelligence award. CIA Director George Tenet himself presented it to her in 1997.

“She gained access to hundreds of thousands of classified documents, typically taking lunch at her desk absorbed in quiet memorization of page after page of the latest briefings,” which she would later write down at home and convey to Cuba.

Avoiding capture through discretion, until the intercept came

On February 23, 1996, the Cuban Ministry of Defense asked visiting American Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll to warn off Miami Brothers to the Rescue planes that planned to again fly over Havana. Carroll immediately informed the State Department.

Instead of ending the provocations, the US let the planes fly, and two “Brothers to the Rescue” planes were shot down over Cuba the next day. The US exploited the flare-up to sabotage the growing campaign to moderate the US blockade of the island. The US official who arranged Admiral Carroll’s meeting was Ana Belén. Her explanation that the date was chosen only because it was a free date on the Admiral’s schedule was accepted.

Nevertheless, a DIA colleague reported to a security official that he felt Ana Belén might be under the influence of Cuban intelligence. He interviewed her, but she admitted nothing. She passed a polygraph test.

Ana Belén had access to practically everything the intelligence community collected on Cuba, and helped write final reports. Due to her rank, she was a member of the super-secret “inter-agency working group on Cuba”, which brings together the main analysts of federal agencies, such as the CIA, the Department of State, and the White House itself.

The Washington Post reported, “She was now briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council and even the president of Nicaragua about Cuban military capabilities. She helped draft a controversial Pentagon report stating that Cuba had a ‘limited capacity’ to harm the United States and could pose a danger to U.S. citizens only ‘under some circumstances.'”

Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a US agent in Cuba’s Ministry of Interior that Cuba had uncovered and imprisoned, was released and traded for three of the Cuban 5 in 2014. He had “provided critical information that led to the arrests of those known as the “Cuban Five;” of former State Department official Walter Kendall Myers and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers; and of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s top Cuba analyst, Ana Belén Montes.”

In 1999 the National Security Agency intercepted a Cuban communication. It revealed a spy high in the hierarchy, who was associated with the DIA’s SAFE computer system. It meant the spy was likely on staff of the DIA. The suspect had also traveled to Guantánamo Bay in July 1996. Coincidentally, Ana Belén worked in the DIA and had traveled to the Bay on DIA business. The spy was using a Toshiba laptop, and it was discovered she had one. A decision was taken to break into her flat and copy the hard drive.

Since the case being put together indicated she was providing information to Cuba, she was arrested by FBI agents on September 21, 2001 while in her DIA office. She was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage for Cuba. “She told investigators after her arrest that a week earlier she had learned that she was under surveillance. She could have decided then to flee to Cuba, and probably would have made it there safely.” But her political commitment made her feel “she couldn’t give up on the people (she) was helping.”

Nigerian commentator Owei Lakemfa presented ten reasons he thought Ana Belén Montes avoided detection during her 16 years in the DIA. Among the most important was that she was extremely discreet and kept to herself. She lived alone in a simple apartment north of the US capital, and memorized documents, never taking any home. And she never received unexplainable funds.

Ironically, her brother was an FBI special agent, and her sister an FBI analyst who “played an important role in exposing the so-called Wasp Network of Cuban agents [the Cuban 5 and 7 others] operating in Florida.”

Ana Belén avoided the death penalty for high treason, highly likely in the post September 11 atmosphere, by pleading guilty before the US federal court handling her case. Since she acknowledged her conduct, and told the court how she worked, she was sentenced to “only” twenty-five years. However, she was imprisoned in conditions designed to destroy her, as the case with Julian Assange today. She was sent to special unit of a federal prison for violent offenders with psychiatric problems.

“I obeyed my conscience rather than the law”

In her October 16, 2002 trial statement, she declared that she obeyed her conscience:

“There is an Italian proverb that is perhaps the one that best describes what I believe: The whole world is one country. In that ‘world country’, the principle of loving your neighbor as much as you love yourself, is an essential guide for harmonious relations between all our ‘nation-neighborhoods’.

This principle implies tolerance and understanding for the different ways of others. It mandates that we treat other nations the way we wish to be treated – with respect and compassion. It is a principle that, unfortunately, I believe we have never applied to Cuba.

Your Honor, I got involved in the activity that has brought me before you because I obeyed my conscience rather than the law. Our government’s policy towards Cuba is cruel and unfair, deeply unfriendly; I feel morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values ​​and our political system on it.

We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to make its own journey towards its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders cannot be, and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let Cuba pursue its own internal journey, as the United States has been doing for more than two centuries?

My way of responding to our Cuba policy may have been morally wrong. Perhaps Cuba’s right to exist free of political and economic coercion did not justify giving the island classified information to help it defend itself. I can only say that I did what I thought right to counter a grave injustice.

My greatest wish would be to see a friendly relationship emerge between the United States and Cuba. I hope that my case in some way will encourage our government to abandon its hostility toward Cuba and work together with Havana in a spirit of tolerance, mutual respect and understanding.

Today we see more clearly than ever that intolerance and hatred – by individuals or governments – only spreads pain and suffering. I hope that the United States develops a policy with Cuba based on love of neighbor, a policy that recognizes that Cuba, like any other nation, wants to be treated with dignity and not with contempt.

Such a policy would bring our government back in harmony with the compassion and generosity of the American people. It would allow Cubans and Americans to learn from and share with each other. It would enable Cuba to drop its defensive measures and experiment more easily with changes. And it would permit the two neighbors to work together and with other nations to promote tolerance and cooperation in our one ‘world-country,’ in our only world-homeland.”

Brutal prison conditions aimed to destroy Ana Belén

Jürgen Heiser of the German solidarity Netzwerk-Cuba reported that “Ana Belén has been isolated in conditions that the UN and international human rights organizations describe as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ and torture. Her prison conditions were further exacerbated after her trial, when she was placed in the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Carswell, outside of Fort Worth, Texas. The FMC is located on a US marine compound and previously served as a military hospital… It includes a high security unit set aside for women of “special management concerns” that can hold up to twenty prisoners. A risk of “violence and/or escape” are specified as grounds for incarceration in the unit. This is where the “spy” Ana Belén is being held in isolation, in a single-person cell.”

Her cell neighbors have included one who strangled a pregnant woman to get her baby, a longtime nurse who killed four patients with massive injections of adrenaline, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson follower who tried to assassinate President Ford.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram has regularly covered the abuses against the women inmates at Fort Carswell Carswell prison, which has also housed two other political prisoners Reality Winner and Aafia Siddiqui. Detainees have suffered gross violations of their human rights, including documented cases of police abuse, suspicious deaths where the investigations into them have been blatantly obstructed, deaths due to the denial of basic medical attention, rape of prisoners by guards, and exposure to toxic substances. In July 2020, 500 of the 1400 prisoners had Covid. The Star Telegram reported “the facility showed a systemic history of covering misconduct up and creating an atmosphere of secrecy and retaliation…”

Ana Belén wrote, “Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in, but some things in life are worth going to prison for, or worth doing and then killing yourself before you have to spend too much time in prison.”

She has been subjected to extreme conditions in that prison, akin to those imposed on Assange. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has reported that:

She can only have contact with her closest relatives, since her conviction is for espionage.

No one can inquire about her health or know why she is in a center for people with mental problems, when she does not suffer from them.

She cannot receive packages. When her defenders sent her a letter, it has been returned by certified mail.

Only people on a list (no more than 20 who have known her before her incarceration and have been approved by the FBI) ​​can correspond, send books, and visit Ana. Few people have visited her besides her brother and niece.

She cannot interact with other detainees in jail, and was always alone in her cell.

She is not allowed to talk on the phone, except to her mother once a week for 15-20 minutes.

She could not receive newspapers, magazines or watch television. After a dozen years in prison, the restrictions were slightly relaxed.

Karen Lee Wald noted in 2012, “If she is taken out of her cell in the isolation unit for any reason, all other prisoners are locked in their cells so they cannot speak to her. Basically, she has been buried alive.”

David Kovics, the renowned leftist songwriter, was moved to pay tribute to her in song. Oscar Lopez Rivera, who was jailed by the US during his fight for Puerto Rican independence, said, “I think that every Puerto Rican who loves justice and freedom should be proud of Ana Belén. What she did was more than heroic. She did what every person who believes in peace, justice and freedom and in the right of every nation to govern itself in the best possible way and without the intervention or threat of anyone, would have done.”

An anonymous tip from December of 2020 aged exceptionally well, with bad repercussions for the female fertility in girls born to both Covid-19 vaccinee parents.

Although it has been reported on by Igor Chudov a few days ago, I would like to add a bit more beef to this uncorroborated (so far) information, as it is the news no one wants to believe, but it deserves further investigation for the reasons outlined below.

The original Moderna insider tip from Dec. 2020, from two anonymous engineers working there, goes like this:

I'm an industrial engineer at Moderna and the other one of us is a process development engineer. I'm sure the same thing is happening with Pfizer-BioNTech. It was hard to put things together based on the small quantities of additions happening in manual step (highly unorthodox for a continuous process production). The explanation we got was highly sensitive trade secret adjuvants being added. Digging in deeper showed how sensitive it actually was. Most people's understanding of this novel vaccine type is that it works as follows:`

1. Make mRNA coding for S protein
2. Make lipid nanoparticle delivery system
3. Profit

How it actually works from what we've uncovered:

1. Make mRNA coding for S protein
2. Make mRNA coding for mutant versions of CYP19A1 and CDKN1B in smaller amounts
3. Make sure that while delivery system for (1) mostly ends up in liver, most of (2) ends up in the gonads
4. Make sure form and quantity of additive upregulating LINE-1 reverse transcription activity makes it hard to detect among legit adjuvants
5. Effects from (2) integrated by (4) are recessive; mildly oncogenic effects in vaccine recipients unlikely to be noticed for many years
6. (5) recessive but since most of population vaccinated, in next generation female offspring have premature ovarian failure

The beef of this tip is that, in addition to the mRNA code for S spike, the vaccine vials will contain additional mRNA that codes both for a mutant version of CYP19A1 and a mutant version of CDKN1B. Both these mutant proteins are implicated in the female infertility issues. From the advantage of hindsight in March 2022, this information is credible for the following reasons:

• The pharmacokinetics information of the LNPs in mRNA vaccines has been spilled by the Japanese only in May 2021. As it turned out, the LNPs with the mRNA in them do not stay at the injection site, as CDC and other agencies postulated. Instead, they accumulate in the liver and the gonads of the vaccinees in high concentrations. Surprise! So, the tipsters have been confirmed correct in this regard.

• The studies regarding LINE-1 enzymes being able to reverse transcribe the vaccine mRNA back into human DNA appeared much later as well:

  1. Reverse-transcribed SARS-CoV-2 RNA can integrate into the genome of cultured human cells and can be expressed in patient-derived tissues ( Jaenisch et al., 2021.05.21)
  2. Coronavirus gene findings are no cause for alarm, says leading scientist (ABS-CBN, 2021.01.30): The discovery by Professor Rudolf Jaenisch and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stirs up a hornet's nest because mRNA vaccines, including those made by Pfizer/ BioNTech and Moderna, operate in similar ways to the virus to trigger an immune response.
  3. Intracellular Reverse Transcription of Pfizer BioNTech COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine BNT162b2 In Vitro in Human Liver Cell Line (Aldn et al., 2022.02.25).
  4. Moderna finally cracks into gene editing with Metagenomi pact thanks to 'irresistible' data (Fierce Biotech, 2021.11.02): We finally know who Moderna has been courting behind the scenes to make the big jump into gene editing. The famed biotech has signed a research partnership with CRISPR gene editing company Metagenomi. Metagenomi will offer up access to its gene editing tools. The company recent unveiled data on its CRISPR-associated transposases system that can be used to "precisely integrate large DNA fragments into genomes", allowing for new editing techniques beyond the currently available technology.
  5. Metagenomi Presents New Findings on CRISPR-associated Transposases (CAST) that Allow for Targetable Genomic Integration of Large DNA Fragments (Metagenomi.co, 2021.05.14): Our research presented at ASGCT describes how our first-in-class programmable CAST gene editing system can be used to precisely integrate large fragments of DNA into target genomes and the potential of these systems in the development of both ex vivo and in vivo gene therapies. CRISPR-associated transposases can be reprogrammed to integrate at specific genomic sites using guide RNAs. Target genomes, eh? Transhumans, anyone? A.k.a. mutants?

  Another solid confirmation that the tipsters knew what they were talking about way before this information went public.

• As the reader Jeff C pointed out (and I quote verbatim from here on), the tipsters not only said that LINE-1 could facilitate reverse transcription but that the vaxx has a hidden additive that specifically upregulates LINE-1 (point #4)). The Aldn et al. paper using the BioNTech vaxx clearly showed a high presence of LINE-1 when the vaxx was added that was not there in the control. So something about the vaxx significantly increases LINE-1 just like the tipster said. The fact that the tipster knew this before any of this was publicly known is pretty impressive. If you look back at the Covid virus reverse transcription study (Jaenisch et al - looked at Covid itself, not the vaxx) they artificially increased LINE-1 in the cells via transfection [To increase the likelihood of detecting rare integration events, we transfected HEK293T cells with LINE1 expression plasmids prior to infection with SARS-CoV-2]. That was a key criticism of the study in that it wasn't a real world case. This is in stark contrast to the vaxx study where LINE-1 increased solely due to the vaxx itself. Wasn't that the role of one of the "highly sensitive trade secret adjuvants being added", as hinted by the tipster?

• In Oct. 2021, a former Pfizer quality control manager and a whistleblower, Melissa Strickler, spilled beans on the unusual manufacturing process at the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine plant in a series of interviews. Pfizer's processes for its vaccine are strangely deviating from usual norms. The compounding room has no idea what are the components they are mixing into the product. This secrecy about what goes into the vials is unprecedented. Furthermore, the vaccine manufacturers are not controlled by any independent bodies as to the quality control, the vials being shipped directly to the vaccine administration locations. This lends credence to the assertion that the mRNA vaccines may contain undisclosed constituents.

• The leak of EMA-Pfizer correspondence in Nov.-Dec. 2020, when EMA was working on Pfizer's vaccine authorization, revealed that EMA was concerned that the mRNA in the vaccine vials contains only 55% of the intended S spike code, the rest being truncated species blamed on the faults in the manufacturing process. Pfizer placated these concerns by pushing the S spike code proportion up to 75%, at least for the time being. After that, EMA stopped looking and declared the jabs kosher. More on this in my post Zeroing in on Gifts from Science to Humanity from Nov. 2021. So, another score for the tipsters - the jabs do contain some exogenous mRNA code that no one analyses or scrutinizes.

• If that is not enough, BigPharma, in collaboration with WHO and NIH, has a long tradition of adding undisclosed ingredients harming female fertility into the vaccines going all the way back to 1970s:

2017: HCG Found in WHO Tetanus Vaccine in Kenya Raises Concern in the Developing World. Baby-Killing Vaccine: Is It Being Stealth Tested?: During the early 1990s, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been overseeing massive vaccination campaigns against tetanus in a number of countries, among them Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Philippines. In October 1994, Human Life International (HLI) received a communication from its Mexican affiliate, the Comite Pro Vida de Mexico, regarding that country's anti-tetanus campaign. Suspicious of the campaign protocols, the Comite obtained several vials of the vaccine and had them analyzed by chemists. Some of the vials were found to contain human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), a naturally occurring hormone essential for maintaining a pregnancy. Here are the known facts concerning the tetanus vaccination campaigns in Mexico and the Philippines:

• Only women are vaccinated, and only the women between the ages of 15 and 45. (In Nicaragua the age range was 12-49).
• Human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone has been found in the vaccines.
• The vaccination protocols call for multiple injections-three within three months and a total of five altogether. But, since tetanus vaccinations provide protection for ten years or more, why are multiple inoculations called for?

Allied with the WHO in the development of an anti-fertility vaccine (AFV) using hCG with tetanus and other carriers have been UNFPA, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank, the Population Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and a number of universities, including Uppsala, Helsinki, and Ohio State.[5] The U.S. National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (part of NIH) was the supplier of the hCG hormone in some of the AFV experiments.

Again, a corroboration of the thrust of the allegations by the Moderna insiders.

• The strange, irrational drive to vaccinate every last person on Earth, especially children and pregrant women, with the untested and clearly dangerous injections is another huge red flag as to the true goals of the Covid-19 vaccination of the world population. Especially that the population control has been a holy grail for the eugenicist cabal since the 19th century, and in the form of vaccines, no less. Read my post Going for Jugular Take 2 - All Ducks in Row (Dec. 2021) for complete, more or less, disclosure.

• The new plant-based Canada-made non-mRNA vaccine still contains LNP material, for some inexplicable reason. Or should we suspect that it will also contain fertility-harming mRNA?

So, lots of indirect evidence that the Moderna insiders are trustworthy and that their whistle blowing deserves all the attention it can garner. In the form of vial analysis and vaccinee testing, for starters.

In the meantime, this post should serve as a fair warning and one of the elements on which to base your informed decision as to whether to accept any vaccine in 2022 and going onward. Or any injection, for that matter, from your caring health authorities and governments.

Continued in How Will We Know?

Intellectual curiosity can takes us in unexpected directions. This particular journey started with my learning that the word “Cajun” is a contraction of “Canadian”.

Nine years after Culloden, 300 British troops under Lt Col John Winslow entered the town of Grand Pre in Acadia, Nova Scotia. They constructed a palisade fort which enclosed both the church and cemetery. They then summoned all males aged ten and over to the church to hear a proclamation. Disarmed and surrounded, the Acadians were all registered, then told they were to be deported immediately.

Here is that register. Remember many of these were children as young as ten years old. About a quarter did not survive the brutal deportation.

[788 names listed]

In the next year 40% of the 15,000 population of Acadia were forcefully deported, deliberately dispersed to British colonies around the globe, in such dreadful conditions that over 1,200 died on the journeys. Males over ten, and females and small children, were bundled into separated random groups and those groups sent off to different destinations.

In Grand Pre itself, the British troops burnt down the church and destroyed the homes, and then smashed the system of dykes and sluices that the Acadians had built for their highly productive agricultural system.

Almost all of the remaining Acadians were dispersed over the next few years. Traveling through the wilds, some who left “voluntarily” eventually found their way to Louisiana. Hence “Cajun”. In 1758 it was made illegal in Nova Scotia for Catholics to own land. In 1759 a further Act was passed:

“An Act for the Quieting of Possessions to the Protestant Grantees of the Lands, formerly occupied by the French Inhabitants, and for preventing vexatious Actions relating to the same.” The legislation prohibited “any troublesome or vexatious Suits of Law” by Acadians trying to recover their lands and made it illegal for any courts in the province to hear cases brought “for the Recovery of any Lands” by “the former French Inhabitants.”

The preamble to Act recounted the “Manifest Treasons and Rebellions” of the Acadians against a British crown to which they had never in truth had the slightest duty of allegiance.

The Acadians had arrived in modern Nova Scotia from 1608. There were three unusual things about them.

i) From the start they had been focused on land reclamation in the coastal marshlands, rather than moving inland cutting down forests for agricultural land as was the prevalent pattern across North America. Historians have calculated they reclaimed in total 5,261 hectares of land. Their achievements in land reclamation were quite startling, especially as in the Grand Pre marsh they were dealing with tidal flows in the Bay of Fundy of over 15 metres, said to be the world’s highest.

Acadian reclaimed marshland at the town of Saint Pre

Modern scholarship has emphasised that their land reclamation skills were brought with then from the Western French seaboard, and then developed in a local vernacular. The unique feature of Acadian land reclamation, as opposed to French or Dutch, is that it was a communal effort and not dependent on central finance and hierarchical organisation. That is because of their second special feature:

ii) The Acadians arrived as individuals or families with no hierarchy. They acknowledged no nobility and crucially they did not acknowledge any Crown. Occasionally they were obliged temporarily to pay lip service to the French or British crown when military forces passed through, but until their deportation they were never successfully subjected to any central authority.

iii) They enjoyed consistently friendly relationships with the local Mik’maq nation and intermarried without apparent prejudice on either side, developing a large Creole component. Historians have generally explained this as due to Acadian agriculture being on reclaimed land and thus not competing for resources. However that ignores the fact the salt marshes they were reclaiming were themselves a very valuable source of food for the Mik’maq – birds and eggs, fish shellfish and crustaceans, samphire etc.

I rather tend to the view that it was the lack of hierarchy and crown allegiance that also led to good relationships with the native people. The Acadians made no claim to conquer the land, impose a new king or create a state. They were just settling non-aggressive farming communities.

Historians are at pains to counter the idyllic portrait of the Acadians. We are told they were very poor, lived in squalid conditions, tended to inbreed, left no cultural legacy and were often led by their Catholic priests. There is validity in all those points, but in the historical context such criticisms cannot help but come over badly. The imperfections of a society do not justify genocide.

In reading about the Acadians, I was struck by this passage:

“When the first New England colonists came to Nova Scotia five years after the Acadians were expelled, they encountered a landscape littered with bleached bones of livestock and burned ruins of houses.”

Anyone who has hill walked in the Highlands of Scotland knows just how frequently you come across the low walls of the base of old homes, often grouped together in small settlements, and sometimes in desolate moor many miles from the nearest habitation or cultivated land. These of course date from the Highland Clearances, some contemporary with the genocide of the Acadians.

One obvious fact had leapt out at me since childhood. The depopulation of the Highlands was a political choice, and the vast managed hunting estates were perfectly capable of supporting large populations through livestock and arable in the past. The notion they can only sustain grouse and small numbers of deer is evidently nonsense.

I am currently researching a biography of the Jacobite General George Murray, and was looking at a journey he took from Blair Atholl to Braemar. There is absolutely no public road there any more – not within twenty miles of most of his route – and the places he stayed including manses seem to be wiped from the map. There was a population – indeed he later raised troops there.

Go to google maps, trace a straight line Blair Atholl to Braemar (yes, obviously you can get there the long way round) and see what you can find today in the middle. But this is not wilderness, it is completely habitable and was populated.

I could recount a thousand or more atrocities across the history of the British Empire as bad as the Acadian genocide. Many are completely forgotten, like the massacre of the Murree tribe in Balochistan under a flag of truce, or the Sierra Leone Hut Tax war. Some are startlingly recent, like the Chagos Islands. But I recount the Acadian story because of its resonance to the Scottish Highlands, with that justification of treason and rebellion, and because of the furious denial in recent days after Scottish colonisation was asserted in the House of Commons.

The tone of much of that reaction is essentially that white people were not the victims of Empire. Well, I give you the Acadians. It is also worth pointing out the very basic fact that there was never the kind of expulsion and depopulation anywhere in England that occurred in both Scotland and Ireland. What happened to the Gael was much worse than effects of agricultural enclosure.

It is Armistice Day today and Remembrance Sunday shortly. What was in my childhood an occasion for reflection, grief and thanksgiving for peace has been turned into an orgy of militarism.

We are supposed to think of those who “gloriously” gave their lives for Britain, perhaps while shooting up Afghan civilians in a village or destroying the infrastructure of Iraq. Have a look through that list of names from the town of Grand Pre, and wonder which ones were ten year old boys separated from their mothers. Ponder which died on their hideous deportation journeys. The victims of Empire deserve remembrance too.

Please read this story, and note your reaction. Then read Expulsion of the Acadians - Wikipedia; Does knowing more context affect your judgment of these events?

Dear readers, to my great regret, I am once again duty bound to walk the streets bearing the sign ‘The End of the World is Nigh’.

I watched the news digest program Sixty Minutes yesterday on Russian state television’s smotrim.ru platform. Before turning the microphone over to the panelists in talk show format, the first 30 minutes of the show presented a hair-raising video montage of excerpts from US, German, European, British news  reporting about dirty bomb accusations, about the current exercises of the aircraft carrier George Bush Sr. in the Eastern Med and its loud message to Mr Putin about nuclear attack capabilities, about the 2400 American ground assault troops just delivered to Romania and placed at the border with Moldova, ready to move in there and, one may safely assume, to continue up into Ukraine to face off with Russians around Odessa – Nikolaev at a moment’s notice.    Well, the impression of this pending escalation was overwhelmingly that we are on the cusp of the war to end all wars.  The US is game for it, whatever Biden mutters to the contrary reading from his teleprompter. The Russians are game for it.  And so here we go!

On a less dramatic note but one from the same musical composition, I have just felt obliged to add a Postscript to my last essay on Rushi Sunak, noting that I was wrong about the kind of marching orders he has from the City of London:  while he replaced most of the Truss cabinet ministers, he has retained Ben Wallace at Defense. Note that  Wallace is calling for large increases in defense spending to support Britain’s contribution to the Ukrainian armed forces at the same time that Sunak is about to wield the knife on social services in the name of a balanced budget and austerity in times of inflation. The Sunak premiership will not last a year, assuming we have a year ahead of us before all hell breaks loose.  He shares with Macron a background in working for US international bankers and the fact of being the youngest head of government in his respective country in two centuries.  He also apparently shares the status of political lightweight, but unlike Macron, his position is very fragile because of British constitutional practices. I say that these developments fall in line with the general musical composition, because they show that the marching orders he had received from those who installed him in power, the City of London, are as ideologically driven as the newspaper they all read daily, the viciously anti-Russian Financial Times. And so I conclude that in the U.K., too, Capital is as removed from the real world as the lightweight and incompetent politicians who rule over us on the Continent.

What I cannot understand is how India, China and other big, serious players on the world stage do not take note that the rising escalation in the Russia-NATO confrontation and the lurch towards nuclear exchange will mean the end of life on the planet, their lives as well as ours.  Why are they all silent?  And where is the United Nations before the looming Armageddon? When General Assembly votes are dictated by one global hegemon and its lackeys, the U.N.’s relevance to keeping the peace is vitiated.

The avoidable tragedy of WWI is something that is foremost in my thoughts every time I stay in my Pushkin apartment outside Petersburg.  We live 200 meters away from an entrance to the Catherine Palace park and less than a kilometer from the separate palace which Nicholas II used as a family home. Each time there I wonder to myself  how they could have been so foolish as to throw European civilization to the winds, and, as regards the tsarist family, to throw away their own lives.    Now I see similar foolishness daily watching the news, whether it is Russian news or Western mainstream broadcasters. I see the growing likelihood of our collective suicide in the weeks if not months before us.

Among patriotic Russians, there has long been a lot of criticism about the way the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine has been waged. People say that Putin has been too soft on the Ukrainians, that he should have destroyed the energy infrastructure in the first days of March, without waiting seven months and allowing the escalation to reach its present critical point.  However, that is to ignore the political dimension of war making. And it is to ignore the reality that public opinion is a major restraint on what its President can or cannot do, irrespective of constitutional provisions and supposed authoritarianism at the top.

The Russian public was not ready to accept an all-out war on Ukraine in February. The personal, familial and historic ties binding the Russian and Ukrainian peoples together were simply too strong. Russians, including those in power, could hold out the hope that once the campaign ended, the sides would kiss and make up.  It took all this time, it took the crossing of all Russian red lines in terms of attacks on the Russian homeland by artillery and rockets from across the border with Ukraine, it took the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and the terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge for the Russian people to be psychologically prepared to murder Ukrainians by the tens of thousands of soldiers on the battlefield as you do in any normal war and to inflict great hardships on the civilian population.

However, the Kremlin cannot be let off so easily for its share of the blame as the world teeters towards nuclear war.  I find it incredible that the professional intelligence analyst Vladimir Putin, whom all of our biographers describe only in relation to his KGB career, could have allowed himself to be so misled by his own intelligence advisers about Ukrainian capabilities and intentions before he decided to go in and denazify, demilitarize Ukraine on 24 February. That was a miscalculation of colossal proportions that resulted in serious military setbacks in the opening weeks of the war, which in turn emboldened United States and NATO decision-makers to go for the jugular and finally ‘take out’ Russia. I will say no more.

• Nazi “hero” of Ukrainian nationalists murdered 100,000 Poles
• The Banderites’ unspeakable torture and mass murder of civilians
• US supports neo-Nazis resurrecting Bandera’s reign of terror

“The Snake From His Lair.” Ukrainian poem. Photo credit: Public domain

**“The Snake from his Lair”

Do you recognize this snake?
The bloody devouring beast is crawling.
His protection is a spidery sign,
His name is Stepan Bandera.

His name is Judas, Cain.
These are the deeds of his snaky hands:
Fires and blazes over our land,
The spilled blood of innocent children.

And the people stood up to defend.
The country gave its verdict:
To crush the serpent in his lair
And pull out his sting and fangs.**

The above poem, written in Ukrainian on a poster in the years following World War Two, provides only dark glimpses of a time many in this age appear to have forgotten.

Generations after the end of that bloody war, which claimed an estimated 27 million Soviet lives, the fangs of the murderous Nazi, Stepan (or Stefan, or Stephan) Bandera maintain their venomous grip on Ukraine.

Even Bandera’s Wikipedia page, at the time of this writing, still notes that Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), was a mass murderer, though his devotees, the Banderites, seem to be doing all they can to scrub information about his pogroms from the internet.

Screen-print of Stepan Bandera’s Wikipedia page.

Indeed, today Bandera is practically worshipped by Ukrainian nationalists, who have named streets after him and erected statues in his honor, in some cases on the very pedestals where statues once memorialized the Soviets who gave their lives driving the Nazis back to Berlin. Bandera’s cold eyes even gaze out from Ukrainian postage stamps, a fact not missed by purveyors of internet memes.

Ukrainian postage stamp featuring Bandera, used in a meme.

Statue of Bandera in Ukraine. Photo Credit: The Times of Israel

This may not mean much to you if you are American or even western European. But to those in many former Soviet republics whose grandparents and great-grandparents sacrificed everything to rid the land of Bandera’s ilk, and to Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors, the honoring of this Nazi collaborator said to be responsible for the mass murder of 100,000 people in Poland is offensive beyond words.

The poorly-reasoned argument that “Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a Jew, so how can he be a Nazi,” is a figurative slap in the face of Jews outraged about the resurrection of Nazi heroes in Ukraine. A simple cursory search on Google reveals reams of horrified headlines in Israeli media concerning the rise of nationalism in Ukraine and the honoring of Bandera and other Nazi leaders.

In 1941, Bandera mobilized Ukrainian troops, outfitted them in standard Wehrmacht infantry uniforms with the blue and yellow ribbon of Ukraine on their shoulders, and followed them as they rolled into Poland on June 22, 1941, launching Operation Barbarossa.

And that was only the beginning of Bandera’s reign of terror.

Polish victims of a massacre committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the village of Lipniki, Wołyń, 1943. Photo credit: Public domain

Between 1943 and 1945, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (abbreviated UPA in Ukrainian) slaughtered thousands of Poles in towns and villages throughout Wołyń, a region in Nazi-occupied Poland that is now part of present-day Ukraine.

It’s estimated that during this period, more than 100,000 Poles died at the hands of radical Ukrainian separatists, members of Bandera’s OUN and its military arm, the UPA. Their goal was simple: Eradicate all non-Ukrainians from future Ukrainian lands.

On June 16th, 1944, the UPA attacked a train carrying women and children. Few survived. Photo credit: IPN

Victims of the train attack taken away to be buried. Photo credit: KARTA Center

The most horrific genocidal massacre, known as “Bloody Sunday,” was carried out on July 11, 1943 when right at dawn, Ukrainian insurgent detachments, aided by local Ukrainians, simultaneously surrounded and attacked 99 Polish villages in the Kowel, Włodzimierz Wołyński, Horochów and Łuck districts. They brutally slaughtered Polish civilians and destroyed their homes.

Whole villages were burned to the ground and property was looted. Investigators estimate that as many as 8,000 people — mostly women, children, and elderly — were killed on that day alone.

Their remains are still being found today.

The remains of an estimated 300 people were found by archaeologists in 2011 at a mass grave in the village of Ostówek in Ukraine where they were massacred in 1943 by the UPA. Photo credit: Darek Delmanowicz/PAP

And it didn’t end there.

It didn’t even end when Hitler’s armies withdrew in 1944.

The mass murders continued. Between 1943 and 1945, Poles were murdered in 1,865 different places in the Wołyń region. Hundreds of Poles were murdered in each of the communities of Wola Ostrowiecka, Gaj, Ostrówki and Kolodno.

The murders were carried out with shocking brutality. People were burned alive or thrown into wells. Axes, pitchforks, scythes, knives and other farming tools were used instead of guns to make the massacres look like spontaneous peasant uprisings.

The Ukrainians tortured their victims with a cruelty scarcely imaginable. People were scalped. Their noses, lips and ears were chopped off. Their eyes were gouged out, hands cut off, heads squashed in vices. Women’s breasts were sliced off and pregnant women were bayonetted in the belly. Men’s genitals were cruelly hacked off with sickles.

The Polish “Association of Memory of Victims of Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists” (SUOZUN) is putting together a forensic reconstruction of the events surrounding the Wołyń Massacre. The evidence they have collected is shocking, revealing children that were run through with stakes, people’s throats sliced open, their tongues pulled out through their necks. People sawn in half with a carpenter’s saw. A child nailed to a door.

One woman, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, had her abdomen cut open, the fetus removed and replaced with a live cat, which was sewn inside of her. Another pregnant woman’s uterus was cut open and filled with broken glass.

According to some Polish historians, even the German butchers were shocked by these atrocities and began to protect the Poles from the Ukrainian “axe.”

The bloody frenzy of torture and murder continued well after the Nazis had left the region, only now the Ukrainian militants attacked citizens of Soviet Ukraine, specialists such as agronomists, engineers, doctors, and teachers sent in by the government to restore the republic after the war. Though the majority of these people were ethnic Ukrainians, the nationalists killed them and any villagers who cooperated with them.

These atrocities were ordered by the head of the UPA, a former Wehrmacht captain named Roman Shukhevich, who is now idolized by many Ukrainians. “The OUN should act so that all those who recognized the Soviet government are destroyed. Not intimidated, but physically destroyed! Do not be afraid that people will curse us for cruelty. Let half of the 40 million Ukrainian population remain — there is nothing terrible in this,” he wrote.

Wołyń is a region that was once part of Nazi-occupied Poland and is now part of present-day Ukraine. Photo credit: Public domain

Stepan Bandera. Photo Credit: Public domain

Polish President Andrzej Duda lays a wreath at the Wołyń Massacre memorial in Warsaw, 2019. Photo credit: Tomasz Gzell/PAP

In July of 2019, Polish President Andrzej Duda laid a wreath at the Wołyń Massacre memorial in Warsaw and gave a speech about the future of Polish-Ukrainian relations:

“If we are talking today about the building of relations between our nations, between the Polish and Ukrainian people, between our states — and let me stress here, that we want […] these to be the best possible relations — there is one thing known for sure. We need remembrance so that what happened then, will never repeat itself between our nations and our people.”

He added: “The Ukrainian side should permit the exhumations, which are necessary to mark the graves, so that the descendants [of victims] can know the places, where they can go to light a candle. And this is the condition under which the massacre could be commemorated in Wołyń.”

Bandera’s Vile Legacy Continues

Ukrainian nationalists today are not exhuming the victims of Bandera, they are resurrecting Bandera himself, perpetuating his sadistic crimes upon the blood-stained fields and communities of Eastern Ukraine.

Russian media and independent journalists have reported a wide range of atrocities committed against Russian-speaking civilians and Roma people as well as the tortures inflicted upon Russian prisoners of war.

There is video evidence of Russian captives screaming in pain as they are shot in the legs and left to bleed out and die with no medical assistance. One Russian soldier was crucified and then burned alive. The luckier ones have returned to Russian-controlled lands bearing the scars of their torture, like swastikas carved or burned into their flesh, and nightmarish memories which will never fully fade away.

The footage of these atrocities is only shocking to those unfamiliar with the brutal and inhumane tactics of the Banderites, who are picking up from where they left off in the 1950’s after the Soviet occupation of Ukraine forced their movement underground.

Civilians in the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk have been struggling for independence from their Banderite overlords since 2014, when the coup known as Maidan tore Ukraine apart. The Russian-speaking population which makes up the majority in the region known as the Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine, have been under attack for eight years by the neo-Nazis in Western Ukraine, who spread the ideology of Bandera and the Nazis, with support from the United States and other NATO countries.

If you want evidence of US involvement, there is no lack of that to be found. You can begin with the leaked conversation, intercepted by Russian intelligence, of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, where they plan the Maidan coup as casually as you might plan a dinner party.

Western media reacted to Victoria’s explosive comment, “Fuck the EU,” but ignored the real meat of the conversation, which was the naming of the puppet leaders subsequently installed in Kiev.

And there was certainly nothing casual about the bloodletting inflicted on minorities of Ukraine once the Banderites seized power.

Anti-government protesters clash with police at Independence Square on February 19, 2014 in Kiev. Photo credit: Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

The initial Maidan protests were violent and terrifying. Video footage and photographs from the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” show police bullied and attacked, in some cases shielded by medics who were trying to prevent the mob from massacring them. A TV channel captured another medic, a supporter of the revolutionaries, refusing to allow people to call an ambulance for a police officer who had lost an eye in the fighting.

Kiev journalist Sergey Rulev described his brutal torture at the hands of the Banderites:

“Four people beat me. There was a woman in a headscarf with them, who kicked me in the groin without saying a word. Then they dragged me to the occupied Ministry of Agriculture, where they searched me, took away my documents, a press pass, accreditation to the Verkhovna Rada, business cards, two phones, and two cameras. When they dragged me back to Khreshchatyk, I started screaming and calling for help. I fell to the ground and was kicked again, but no one reacted. At about noon, I was dragged into the burned-out House of Trade Unions. In the lobby, I was immediately beaten up. In the courtyard, unknown people in camouflage fatigues bound my hands, stripped me to my underwear, and continued to beat me… After that, the four of them pinned me to the floor, injected something into my arm again, and said, ‘Now you’re going to talk to us, bitch! Which special services do you work for?’”

While he was tied up, a woman began ripping out Sergey’s nails with pliers. He later identified her as Amina Okuyeva, a medic in the “Eighth Hundred” who was later awarded the title “People’s Hero of Ukraine,” after she joined what Ukrainian nationalists refer to as the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” and fought for the neo-Nazi Kiev-2 and Dzhokhar Dudayev Battalions.

Young people take part in a nationalist march on Stepan Bandera’s 109th birthday, in Lvov. Photo Credit: Sputnik/Stringer

From the first days of its existence, horror stories emerged about the so-called “Anti-Terrorist Operation” and atrocities committed by the Banderites in Donbas. Though authorities and media ignored these stories at first, eventually the cries of international human rights organizations could no longer be silenced and some of the most egregious cases had reached the courts.

Though there were some convictions in those days, a lot of people got away with serious crimes on the grounds that they were “Patriots of Ukraine.” For example, a “Right Sector” nationalist named Sergey Sternenko who was convicted of abducting one man and killing another, had his seven-year sentence reduced to one year probation on the merits of his “patriotism.”

Given this climate, it’s not surprising that 48 people were burned alive in the Trade Union Building in Odessa in May of 2014. And those responsible still await justice.

Perhaps the most horrifying crime committed by the Banderites was the creation of a “prison” in the refrigerator of the airport in Mariupol in June of 2014, which jailers referred to as “the library.” Inside, residents of Mariupol were raped, beaten or tortured to death if they were suspected of harboring any sympathies for Russia or the unrecognized republics in Donbas. The “library” was run by members of “Right Sector” and “Svoboda” (Freedom) party. One of them named Yuri Mikhalchishin, a nationalist who goes by the pseudonym “Nahtigal88” (referring to the letters “HH,” denoting Heil Hitler), openly asserts that he has followed the teachings of Mein Kampf since he was 16.

The United States’ decades-long support of the Banderites

The US political agenda in Ukraine is no secret. You can read all about it in a study produced by RAND Corporation, a DC think-tank which explored how NATO could over-extend Russia by applying economic sanctions and using Ukraine, Syria and other countries to stage proxy wars. You can download the extensive 354-page study for free, directly from RAND Corp’s site, or you can download the 12-page briefing here.

Cover of the RAND Corporation briefing “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” Photo credit: RAND Corp.

An excerpt from the RAND Corporation briefing “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” Photo credit: RAND Corp.

Bear in mind that this study was published in 2019, well before Russia began its “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine in February of this year, and yet it explores the possibilities of providing lethal aid to Ukraine.

But US support of neo-Nazis in Ukraine goes back much further, to the years following World War Two. And you can find the evidence of that on the CIA’s own website.

Secret documents declassified in 2007 tell of the Banderites’ association with the CIA in the years following the war, of the CIA’s early interest in retaining Bandera as an asset followed by their eventual discard. His followers’ blatant loyalty to the recently-defeated Nazis of the Third Reich was a political millstone around the CIA’s neck, which in those days was not as robust and muscular as it is now, to brazenly support neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

The entire sordid story of the CIA’s affair with Bandera is encapsulated in a thirty-three-page “draft working paper,” which is great late-night reading if you enjoy having nightmares about Nazis.

I leave you with the following screen prints taken from that document, and I will continue this investigative report on Stepan Bandera in my next article.

To be continued…

About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.

The Nightingale’s Bloody Roost

• The wanton atrocities of Bandera and Shukhevich
• Bandera’s assassination by a love-torn KGB spy

Ukrainian auxiliary police execute a mother and child in Miropol, USSR, 1941. Photo credit: static01/nyt.com

“The OUN values the life of its members, values it highly; but — our idea in our understanding is so grand, that when we talk about its realization, not single individuals, nor hundreds, but millions of victims have to be sacrificed in order to realize it.”
— Stepan Bandera

In part one of this investigative report, we took a look at just some of the atrocities committed by Stepan Bandera and his followers — Nazi collaborators who tried to purge all Jews, Romani, Poles and Russians from future Ukrainian lands.

There was, as you saw, no crime too vile for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists — the OUN. The sheer brutality of these crimes cannot be over-emphasized, and bodies are still being dug up today.

Exhumed remains of OUN victims, Poland, 1990s. Photo credit: kresky.pl

One of the most comprehensive articles I came across while researching Bandera was published by Covert Action Magazine, in three parts. I highly recommend this article, written by Evan Reif, to anyone who is serious about understanding these dark chapters of Ukraine’s history. Much of the information to follow was gleaned from this seminal work. Reif’s article delves more deeply into the origins and history of the OUN, which I will summarize here.

The OUN was founded in 1929 from the ashes of the Ukrainian Military Organization, the UVO. The UVO was formed in 1920 by right-wing Austro-Hungarian veterans of the First World War. The UVO waged a terrorist campaign against the Soviets and the Poles, operating primarily in western Ukraine, which was occupied by Poland in those days.

The Polish government at that time was an unpopular far-right regime which implemented land reform and language laws. However, it was not the government which the UVO primarily targeted, but civilians. The Ukrainian militants worked like bandits, hitting villages, towns, and small farming communities. They tortured, raped, killed, looted, burned everything to the ground, and moved on. They knew better than to attack the military or police, which might have decimated their numbers. They were a scourge on the countryside, waging a war on farmers and peasants — men, women and children of all ages.

It was in the early 1920’s when the UVO began its official collaboration with the Germans. From 1921 until 1928, the UVO received millions of marks in aid from Germany. Due to pressure from the Soviet and Polish governments, the leaders of the UVO were eventually moved to Berlin and when the Nazis came to power, the collaboration continued.

As the years went by, the OUN took center stage, led by ever-younger, more radical members, and the UVO fell to the wayside, its role diminished. One of those young leaders was Stepan Bandera, a fascist since childhood. Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 to a Greek Catholic family, the son of a priest.

Bandera in his Plast uniform. Photo credit: Wikipedia

Original “Plast” symbol. Photo credit: Livejournal

As a child, Bandera was a member of “Plast,” a fascist youth group. That group has been reestablished in recent times, though its webpage makes it appear friendly enough, with wholesome pictures of children learning scouting skills, canoeing, and performing good deeds for the community. The same symbol appears on Plast uniforms today, only without the swastika of old. But the topic of fascist indoctrination of children in Ukraine will have to be reserved for another article.

As a young adult, Bandera moved up quickly in the ranks of the OUN, first serving as the chief propaganda officer in 1931, at the age of 22. He quickly became the second in command of the OUN in Galicia 1932 and was named head of the OUN National Executive in 1933.

Bandera was a rabid fascist who despised Jews, communists, Gypsies, Hungarians, Poles and Russians. He wanted to reclaim lands which had not been Ukrainian for centuries and violently purge all non-Ukrainians from the territory. Bandera radicalized the OUN, adding to its membership, making it larger and more efficient. In 1934, members of the OUN-B (the B denoting Bandera’s leadership) assassinated Polish foreign minister Bronisław Pieracki by shooting him at close range with a pistol.

Bandera was captured by Polish authorities and sentenced to die with other OUN leaders, but the death sentence was commuted to life and when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Bandera was released. The Nazi Abwehr, German intelligence, employed Bandera and the OUN in 1940 and began preparing for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR.

Bandera and the OUN were chosen by the highest-ranking German officers including Adolf Hitler, who instructed them to carry out brutal reprisals and terrorism against civilians in the Soviet Union. General Erwin von Lahousen testified about this at the Nuremburg trials.

But Bandera’s antagonistic personality style and his demands for Ukrainian independence at any cost split the OUN in two, with Bandera leading the OUN-B, and Andriy Melnyk, who favored a more subservient role with the Nazis, leading OUN-M.

The rift between the two groups became violent. The most radical members joined with Bandera and launched terrorist attacks against the elderly Melnyk’s group. Though OUN-M survived the war, it was clear that Bandera, and not Melnyk, now controlled the Ukrainian fascist movement.

Under the leadership of the Wehrmacht, two OUN units were formed, code-named “Roland” and “Nightingale,” led by Roman Shukhevych, a mass murderer commemorated on Ukrainian postage stamps in 2007. The two units, alongside Nazi forces, were sent to Lvov in 1941.

Roman Shukhevich on a Ukrainian postage stamp in 2007. Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Nightingale’s Bloody Roost in Lvov

Under specific orders to slaughter Jews, Poles and Russians, Nightingale entered the city of Lvov in 1943. It was a city of about 500,000 people, more than half of them Polish Catholics, with a Jewish population that had swollen to as much as 160,000 as refugees flooded in from Nazi-occupied Europe. Only twenty percent of the city was Ukrainian.

Hitlists in hand, the OUN began its bloody harvest on June 30th, abducting Polish professors suspected of harboring “anti-Nazi views” and torturing them in dorm-rooms for hours before executing them and raiding their apartments, which were then taken over by SS and OUN officers.

And that was only the first blood.

Next, Nightingale began a holocaust which lasted over a month. The group seized a castle on a hilltop overlooking Lvov and set up its “roost” there, rounding up Jews and ordering them to clear the streets of corpses and debris from bombs. That very first night there were random murders of Jews and the looting of their homes and property.

In the days before the attack, the OUN had circulated leaflets in Lvov telling the residents “Don’t throw away your weapons yet. Take them up. Destroy the enemy… Moscow, the Hungarians, the Jews — these are your enemies. Destroy them.”

A woman desperately attempts to flee attackers in Lvov. Photo credit: Wikipedia

The more bloodthirsty and criminal members of the population apparently took the advice to heart, and in the bloody weeks that followed, thousands of Jews were terrorized throughout the city. Women were driven into the streets where they were stripped, raped and murdered. Men were kicked and beaten with fists and clubs. Throngs of nationalists threw trash at them as Nazi photographers went around gleefully filming the horror.

The Wehrmacht was eager to document these atrocities which were published in newspapers or shown in news reels back in Germany, to prove that the Nazis were serious about their plans to exterminate the untermenschen — the undesirables.

On that first bloody day alone, up to 5,000 Jews were massacred by the OUN, the Nazis and those who supported them.

Nazi photographers document atrocities in Lvov. Photo credit: Vintag.

Jewish man attacked in the street in Lvov. Photo credit: Wikipedia

The Einsatzgruppen came next. These were “professional” killers. Nazis who had already “cleansed” many villages, towns and cities in Poland and the USSR. They went door to door, dragged out their targets, marched them to pits which had already been prepared, forced them to their knees and executed them with bullets to the head. Nightingale and the OUN militias assisted them every step of the way, loading Jews onto trucks, then driving them to stadiums and executing them en masse with machine guns.

The Nazis stole everything of value, down to the gold fillings in their victims’ teeth, and sent it back to Germany where the money was used to fund industrialists who made enormous profits from Nazi extermination programs.

Thousands of people were slaughtered each day as Nightingale’s bloody talons tore into Lvov. As leaders of the OUN, including Shukhevich and Bandera, reigned in their high castle above the city, making their plans for an independent, Nazi-aligned Ukraine, the streets of Lvov and the surrounding region flowed with blood. By the time the Red Army arrived to liberate Lvov in 1944, only around 150,000 people remained and only 800 of them were Jews. The rest were either murdered or shipped off to the Belzec concentration camp, a slaughter-house so efficient that fewer than a dozen survivors were ever found.

The First Deputy Chief of the OUN under Stepan Bandera was Yaroslav Stetsko, who was named the first prime minister of the short-lived “Independent State of Ukraine” in 1941. In his “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” he wrote:

“The newly-formed Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to free itself from Muscovite occupation.”

Photo credit: Twitter

But…but… Bandera was sent to a concentration camp, so he couldn’t be bad!

Though the establishment of an independent Ukraine angered the OUN’s Nazi allies, who did not agree to it, it is grossly inaccurate to proclaim the OUN innocent of wrongdoing or to claim it was not a fascist organization. Even if the group had never collaborated with the Nazis, which it did, the OUN is guilty of enough atrocities against Jews, Poles, Russians, communists and Romani people to blacken its name forever in history as a brutal fascist organization.

In part one of this article, we looked at what the OUN did in Wołyń, where at least 100,000 people were massacred, most of them women and children. This was how the OUN operated. With brutality and hatred and no mercy whatsoever. They were violent fascists in their own right even if they had not collaborated with the Nazis. But of course, they did.

A Ukrainian Jew named Moshe Maltz wrote in his journal, later published as a memoir, while he was hiding from the Banderites:

_“Bandera men … are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down the populations of entire villages.… Since there are hardly any Jews left to kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking Poles to pieces. Every day … you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires around their necks, floating down the river Bug.”

_After the declaration of Ukrainian independence, tensions rose until the Nazis arrested Bandera, Stetsko and other leaders of the OUN, and sent them to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1943.

Bandera, however, was not treated like a Jew, a Russian or any other untermensch. He was given a two-room suite with paintings and rugs and was not forced to perform any labor. He wore no uniform, ate with the guards and did not even lock his cell door at night. And he was allowed to have conjugal visits with his wife.

After less than a year, in 1944, Bandera was released and the Nazis recruited him, along with Stetsko, to carry out terrorist acts against the Red Army, which was now advancing on Germany.

The OUN did take minor retaliatory action against the Nazis in 1943, but it was slight compared to the campaign of terror the organization had previously waged against the Poles, Jews, Romani and other minorities.

Once again, it was civilians who bore the brunt of the OUN’s cruelty. In 1943, the Ukrainian nationalists killed around 12,000 “Germans” — mostly farmers and peasants under Nazi control. Only around 1,000 of these victims were actual Wehrmacht. Indeed, Soviet partisans reported that the OUN only engaged with Germans when the Germans mocked or attacked Ukrainians.

The Nazis handled this by simply transferring the more expendable Polish collaborators to the region to fight the OUN. And following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, the OUN renewed its pact with the Nazis and reaffirmed the Soviets as their common enemy. There were little skirmishes between Nazis and OUN after that, but they were insignificant in the overall scope of their greater collaboration.

In 1943, the SS formed its Galicia Division, which incorporated members of the OUN. Modern Ukrainians have attempted to whitewash Galicia’s reputation, and marches in honor of this SS unit are a common sight in western Ukraine today.

Ukrainian youth marching with the banner of the Galicia SS in 2018. Photo credit: RIA Novosti

_“Russian Ukraine cannot be compared to Austrian Galicia… The Austrian-Galician Ruthenians are closely intertwined with the Austrian state. Therefore, in Galicia it is possible to allow the SS to form one division from the local population.”
— Adolf Hitler, 1942.

_The OUN continued its terrorist rampage in western Ukraine until Soviet occupation of the region drove the fascist movement underground. In 1944, the OUN merged with other nationalist groups to form the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, the UHVR, headed by Ivan Hrinioch, who had previously served as a chaplain in the Nightingale unit. Roman Shukhevich was killed in a raid by Soviet forces in 1950, bringing an end to the UPA for all intents and purposes.

But there always seem to be willing sponsors available to support Ukrainian fascists. If not overtly, then covertly.

Mykola Lebed became the foreign minister for the UHVR. As head of the OUN secret police, he was a known sadist and collaborator of the Germans, according to the US army. He later became a collaborator of the CIA, according to 1953 documents declassified in 2007.

But Bandera’s antagonism and volatility split the UHVR just as it had split the OUN previously. In 1947 Bandera and Stetsko fought with Lebed and Hrinioch over the issue of the largely Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. Bandera demanded a purely Ukrainian state, purged of all Russian influence. Lebed and Hrinioch insisted that the help of eastern Ukrainians was needed for the success of the movement. Bandera expelled them in 1948, which led to the breakup of his brief courtship by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

It was not long after the war when US Army Counterintelligence found Bandera in the American occupation zone, hiding from the Soviets who wanted him to face trial for his crimes. In 1946, the Soviets made a failed attempt to capture him in Munich, where he was working under the protection of Reinhard Gehlen, a Nazi spy-turned-CIA agent. Gehlen helped countless Nazis to escape justice, including Adolf Eichmann, with the full support and backing of the CIA. In 1946, he was paid $3.5 million and he had 50 employees including 40 former SS. The CIA, in turn, used the Nazis as assets.

Bandera and the OUN secret police, the SB, formed by Lebed, served as assassins for MI6 as part of “Operation Ohio,” as it was codenamed. They hunted the refugee camps in post-war Germany for their targets, which included thousands of communists and anyone who might know too much about the OUN’s brutal reign of terror. Their terrifying reputation as hitmen earned Lebed the codename “Devil.”

The CIA valued Bandera as a potential asset because of the respect he commanded among the fascist underground. But he was far too extreme, unruly, and downright dangerous to work with, as he was uncooperative and often refused to use encrypted communications. He was just too much of a risk for the CIA to gamble with.

By 1954, the CIA forced MI6 to stop working with Bandera. That same year, Bandera was finally removed from OUN leadership. However, the CIA and the Germans continued to protect him from assassination attempts. He was guarded by Gehlen’s SS, the CIA, and the US Army Counterintelligence Corps.

The Soviets, meanwhile, had made repeated attempts to extradite Bandera so he could face trial for his war crimes. Every attempt was refused, so the KGB tried on several occasions to assassinate him, in 1947, 1948, 1952 and 1959.

Bandera continued his work for Gehlen for the remainder of his life, which ended in 1959 when a KGB agent named Bohdan Stashinsky finally succeeded in killing him. Stashinsky was an experienced assassin who had infiltrated the Bandera group in 1957 as a “German” and had already eliminated another leader of the OUN, Lev Rebet, using the same technique he was about to use on Bandera.

On October 15th, he followed Bandera to his home at Kristmanstrasse 7 in Munich where the mass-murderer was living under a false name. As his target reached the porch, Stashinsky quickly swallowed an antidote, then approached Bandera, who was struggling with the lock on the door. He asked his quarry if the key was working alright, and when Bandera raised his head to answer, Stashinsky blasted him in the face with a double-barreled cylinder loaded with ampoules of potassium cyanide. The instant he pressed the trigger, the powder charge broke the ampoules and the poison flew out. Bandera inhaled the toxic mist, causing his heart to stop. He collapsed, blood pouring from his mouth, and cracked his skull on the stairs.

The antidote protected Stashinsky, who quickly walked out of the entryway and disappeared into the night.

Initially, the cause of Bandera’s death was believed to be a stroke, which had caused him to fall. But investigators later discovered the traces of potassium cyanide in his system. The name of his assassin was unknown until 1961, when love led Stashinsky to his eventual capture.

Bohdan Stashinsky, upper right, and a diagram of the specially-made poison gun he used to kill Bandera. Photo credit: RBTH

Cupid’s arrow captures a spy

In Moscow, Bohdan Stashinsky was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. His handlers at the KGB, against their better judgment, also gave him permission to marry Inga Pol, an East German who had strong anti-communist leanings.

The couple settled in Moscow, but Inga returned to Germany to give birth to their son. Only four months later, their infant son died, and Stashinsky was allowed to go to the funeral in Germany. But he used the opportunity to flee to the west, instead.

On August 13, 1961, Stashinsky and his wife sneaked out of their house, leaving behind an unburied coffin containing their dead son. The smitten Stashinsky had confessed to his wife, against KGB instructions, of his involvement in the assassination of Bandera. Inga feared for her husband’s safety and convinced him to flee.

Stashinsky gave himself up to police in West Germany and was handed over to the CIA. He gave them detailed information about his activities in the KGB including the assassination of Stepan Bandera. He was sentenced to eight years in prison and Inga divorced him in 1964.

After his release in 1967, Stashinsky disappeared. Some sources claimed he stayed in the US and others claimed he fled to South Africa, perhaps changing his appearance with plastic surgery.

But no one knows if the man who killed Bandera is still alive today.

Bohdan Stashinsky and his wife, Inga. Photo source: RBTH

About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.

Twice in the late winter and early spring of 2018, I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, a Venetian-Gothic jewel box designed by Frank Furness as the main library of the University of Pennsylvania’s West Philadelphia campus in 1890. It had been years since I’d been inside the building whose open stacks of books I haunted in the early 1990s as a graduate student in the historic preservation program. It is there, for better or worse, that I learned about decoding symbols and interpreting diverse landscapes of industrialization and predatory finance.

I hold a crisp memory of my thesis advisor, a striking German woman with long white hair tucked into a tidy bun originally from the Palatinate who relocated to Oley, PA. We were walking down Walnut Street when she paused to look at me, put her hand on my shoulder, and tell me that one day I would see it; that my family would be protected because I could see it. Thirty years later the ability to sense worrisome artifacts lurking behind consensus reality is a burden I’d like to abandon, but I can’t. I’m still waiting for the upside. I don’t feel protected at all, and my family doesn’t understand me.

The account that follows isn’t about placing blame. I recognize we’re all caught in a terrible machine. Some of us are enmeshed more deeply than others. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. My ability to keep a roof over my head is intimately intertwined with the fate of Philadelphia’s largest private employer. If you believe the press releases, it is one of the best big employers in the nation. I am doing my best to complicate their contrived narratives. My lot is being a gad fly for Ben Franklin’s big project, the University of Pennsylvania.

I consider myself fortunate to have the stability to witness and tell the stories I tell. I harbor some guilt, because many people I care about don’t have that luxury. Still, there is nothing to do but forge ahead honing our skills, learning from our missteps, being human. Hanging back because we are afraid to fail is not an option. So, I choose to chip away at the foundation upon which my world rests with stories and felt dolls and dandelions. This anti-life egregore is nothing you can disarm by military force. Fritz Kunz and Piritim Sorokin were searching for the power of eros, the creative force of the universe. I’ll settle for a tonic of philia, affectionate love, appropriate to Philadelphia.

My significant other regularly points out this institution, one from which we both hold degrees, is not a monolithic presence. Rather it is more like a fractious collection of feuding fiefdoms. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, which is exactly how systems of power like it. University culture is a civilizing force that rewards deep, narrow, often polarizing inquiry. Academic pecking orders are determined by books published, conference papers given, grants secured, patents filed, the robustness of one’s network. Virtuosos of cultivated ignorance are lauded; plausible deniability abounds. Behind ivy-covered walls chosen ones are conditioned to look to experts to define the contours of their character even as the system guts them and hollows their minds to make room for infusions of submission coding.

Look everywhere but inside your heart where you might unearth your moral compass. Ignore the elephants in the room as the acrid odor of dung fills your nostrils. The war on consciousness and natural life is well underway, but few retain sufficient clarity of thought or a firm enough backbone to call a spade a spade. Their boning knives are so sharp, and the cuts so deft, many victims never realize they’ve been gutted. That was me for decades – the good student, the good mom, the good co-worker, plowing ahead until a lattice of fine cracks began to widen revealing socially conditioned “goodness” to be a flimsy veneer under which a deep psychic wound festered.

And it wasn’t one wound, but many wounds. It was a pervasive network of woundedness, riddled with rot, and papered over with progressive social policy. The prognosis is not good. There’s not yet a cure for chronic domination disorder though symptoms may temporarily be alleviated through superficial social justice performances enacted even as most participants know deep inside nothing is actually meant to change. Cycles of harm run on repeat with increasing intensity, a perpetual gas-lit charade.

On that day, February 20, 2018, Neil Kleiman, NYU professor of “what works” government would be presenting on “A New City O/S.” At the time I was new to Twitter, and I distinctly remember tweeting the question, who decided to put behaviorists in charge of our cities? Who had ordered up this new operating system, which I now understand will be blockchain vending machine e-government tied to digital ID and smart sensor networks?

I grabbed a chair up front to record the presentation and got several pointed questions in at the end about social impact finance. As usual, the self-proclaimed experts seemed to know nothing about what was actually going on, upholding the ruse for an audience who would leave thinking they’d learned something when they were simply being managed through fanciful stories.

A lot more ...

I feel I’ve provided a pretty good tour of the University of Pennsylvania. I hope you have gained an understanding of how I see things – cagey financiers, delusional do-gooders, crafty policy makers, ambitious scientists, and digital storytellers each of whom is living their own drama where they hope to be the hero. So why have I taken you down this winding path? Well, I wanted to let you know that Zane Griffith Talley Cooper is the reason I chose to separate myself from Silicon Icarus.

I’d had some communication failures with Raul the previous month, and when I saw his story highlighting Cooper’s work in Greenland my heart dropped. Not because it wasn’t a well written piece or that rare earth mineral mining wasn’t a concern, but I knew that the Annenberg School of Communication, created by Sir Walter Nixon’s ambassador to England and heir to the Daily Racing Form / TV Guide fortune, was a mouthpiece for social impact propaganda. I’d written about it in 2018, including their push for blockchain media and sham social justice outlets. I’d sent Raul the link to, “Don’t Let the Impact Investors Capture the Non-Profit Activist Media,” a week or so prior to his article coming out.

I asked if we could have a conversation about Cooper, because the nature of his inclusion in the piece didn’t make sense to me. Nor did the shout-out given to him on Twitter. It was not the way Raul normally operated, and I pretty much read and uplifted every piece he’d written over the course of the year. I’m not one to let things fester. You may say I’m blunt or direct or even rude. I’ll own that. But I don’t play games, and people know where I stand.

I never got that conversation. The door was closed, a brief message exchange abruptly ended, and at that point I said I felt we were on different paths and it was probably appropriate to remove me as a contributor. Raul never opened the message I sent saying I hoped our paths would cross again, and that I wish him open pathways on his journey. I’m sure he will continue to do important work. I’d love to think impact finance will be a part of it, but it’s not the first time people I thought understood ended up pulling back and repositioning. As I said in the beginning of this post, this is not about assigning blame. I’m in this machine as deeply as anyone. I even have empathy for Zane Talley Griffith Cooper. It can’t be easy on the soul getting paid to study Web 3 while being expected to be an anti-imperialist in your academic circles. But he did do Beckett naked, so I suspect he’ll probably make it through.

https://www.zanegriffintalleycooper.com/pastzane/when-i-used-to-do-commercials-and-make-movies-sometimes

I stepped away from Silicon Icarus not because Raul interviewed Zane or wrote a piece I felt pulled punches, but because my request to talk about it was rejected. I didn’t have ten pages of thoughts when I made that ask, but there were things on my mind – serious things. To my way of thinking friends, real friends, should have enough trust and respect in one another to do the hard work of being human, which can be messy. Two years of support deserved better than ghosting, but we never know what it’s like to walk in another person’s shoes. I know he’s facing challenges. I don’t regret making that ask, because I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t. The hardest part is not knowing if we ever were really friends, and that is the sickness of the Internet folks. It can be a real mind fuck.

But if the past few years have taught me anything, the universe operates according to purposeful if mysterious plans. I’ve had people arrive in my life to teach me and then abruptly leave. Still, we are all connected and so I will end with this passage from Louise Erdrich that I read this past week about waves. The waves are the key – periodicity, cycles, harmony. Edward Dewey knew some things. This paragraph is from “Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country,” page 64.

“Waves – On our way to visit the island and Eternal Sands we experience a confluence of shifting winds and waves. Tobasonakwut shows me how the waves are creating underwaves and counterwaves. The rough swells from the southeast are bouncing against the rocky shores, which he avoids. The wooded lands and shores will absorb the force of the waves and not send them back out to create confusion. Heading towards open water, we travel behind the farthest island, a wave cutter. We slice right into the waves when possible. But we are dealing with yesterday’s wind and a strong north wind and swells underneath the waves now proceeding from the wind that shifted, fresh, to the south. I think if what Tobasonakwut’s father said, “The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake.” The images of complexity and shifting mutability of human nature is very clear today.“

Perfect Louise.

Your words touch my heart.

I wish a wave cutter island for everyone who needs it right now – each and every one.

Hug your people.

You never know what tomorrow will bring.

Some images removed or replaced by links. See original

While claiming to defend democracy, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has outlawed his opposition, ordered his rivals’ arrest, and presided over the disappearance and assassination of dissidents across the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has framed his country’s war against Russia as a battle for democracy itself. In a carefully choreographed address to US Congress on March 16, Zelensky stated, “Right now, the destiny of our country is being decided. The destiny of our people, whether Ukrainians will be free, whether they will be able to preserve their democracy.”

US corporate media has responded by showering Zelensky with fawning press, driving a campaign for his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and inspiring a flamboyant musical tribute to himself and the Ukrainian military during the 2022 Grammy awards ceremony on April 3.

Western media has looked the other way, however, as Zelensky and top officials in his administration have sanctioned a campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination of local Ukrainian lawmakers accused of collaborating with Russia. Several mayors and other Ukrainian officials have been killed since the outbreak of war, many reportedly by Ukrainian state agents after engaging in de-escalation talks with Russia.

“There is one less traitor in Ukraine,” Internal Affairs Ministry advisor Anton Geraschenko stated in endorsement of the murder of a Ukrainian mayor accused of collaborating with Russia.

Zelensky has further exploited the atmosphere of war to outlaw an array of opposition parties and order the arrest of his leading rivals. His authoritarian decrees have triggered the disappearance, torture and even murder of an array of human rights activists, communist and leftist organizers, journalists and government officials accused of “pro-Russian” sympathies.

The Ukrainian SBU security services has served as the enforcement arm of the officially authorized campaign of repression. With training from the CIA and close coordination with Ukraine’s state-backed neo-Nazi paramilitaries, the SBU has spent the past weeks filling its vast archipelago of torture dungeons with political dissidents.

On the battlefield, meanwhile, the Ukrainian military has engaged in a series of atrocities against captured Russian troops and proudly exhibited its sadistic acts on social media. Here too, the perpetrators of human rights abuses appear to have received approval from the upper echelons of Ukrainian leadership.

While Zelensky spouts bromides about the defense of democracy before worshipful Western audiences, he is using the war as a theater for enacting a blood-drenched purge of political rivals, dissidents and critics.

“The war is being used to kidnap, imprison and even kill opposition members who express themselves critical of the government,” a left-wing activist beaten and persecuted by Ukraine’s security services commented this April. “We must all fear for our freedom and our lives.”

Torture and enforced disappearances “common practices” of Ukraine’s SBU

When a US-backed government seized power in Kiev following the Euromaidan regime change operation of 2013-14, Ukraine’s government embarked on a nationwide purge of political elements deemed pro-Russian or insufficiently nationalistic. The passage of “decommunization” laws by the Ukrainian parliament further eased the persecution of leftist elements and the prosecution of activists for political speech.

The post-Maidan regime has focused its wrath on Ukrainians who have advocated a peace settlement with pro-Russian separatists in the country’s east, those who have documented human rights abuses by the Ukrainian military, and members of communist organizations. Dissident elements have faced the constant threat of ultra-nationalist violence, imprisonment, and even murder.

The Ukrainian security service known as the SBU has served as the main enforcer of the post-Maidan government’s campaign of domestic political repression. Pro-Western monitors including the United Nations Office of the High Commission (UN OHCR) and Human Rights Watch have accused the SBU of systematically torturing political opponents and Ukrainian dissidents with near-total impunity.

The UN OHCR found in 2016 that “arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, torture and ill-treatment of such conflict-related detainees were common practice of SBU… A former Kharkiv SBU officer explained, ‘For the SBU, the law virtually does not exist as everything that is illegal can be either classified or explained by referring to state necessity.”

Yevhen Karas, the founder of the infamous neo-Nazi C14 unit, has detailed the close relationship his gang and other extreme right factions have enjoyed with the SBU. The SBU “informs not only us, but also Azov, the Right Sector, and so on,” Karas boasted in a 2017 interview.

Kiev officially endorses assassinating Ukrainian mayors for negotiating with Russia

Since Russia launched its military operation inside Ukraine, the SBU has hunted down local officials that decided to accept humanitarian supplies from Russia or negotiated with Russian forces to arrange corridors for civilian evacuations.

On March 1, for example, Volodymyr Strok, the mayor of the eastern city of Kreminna in the Ukrainian-controlled side of Lugansk, was kidnapped by men in military uniform, according to his wife, and shot in the heart.

On March 3, pictures of Strok’s visibly tortured body appeared. A day before his murder, Struk had reportedly urged his Ukrainian colleagues to negotiate with pro-Russian officials.

Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, celebrated the mayor’s murder, declaring on his Telegram page (see below): “There is one less traitor in Ukraine. The mayor of Kreminna in Luhansk region, former deputy of Luhansk parliament was found killed.”

According to Geraschenko, Strok had been judged by the “court of the people’s tribunal.”

Telegram post

Telegram post by Anton Gerashchenko, advisor to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, celebrating the assassination of “traitor” and Kreminna Mayor Volodymyr Struk

The Ukrainian official therefore delivered a chilling message to anyone choosing to seek cooperation with Russia: do so and lose your life.

On March 7, the mayor of Gostomel, Yuri Prylipko, was found murdered. Prylipko had reportedly entered into negotiations with the Russian military to organize a humanitarian corridor for the evacuation of his city’s residents – a red line for Ukrainian ultra-nationalists who had long been in conflict with the mayor’s office.

Next, on March 24, Gennady Matsegora, the mayor of Kupyansk in northeastern Ukraine, released a video (below) appealing to President Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration for the release of his daughter, who had been held hostage by agents of the Ukrainian SBU intelligence agency.

Then there was the murder of Denis Kireev, a top member of the Ukrainian negotiating team, who was killed in broad daylight in Kiev after the first round of talks with Russia. Kireev was subsequently accused in local Ukrainian media of “treason.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement that “there would be consequences for collaborators” indicates that these atrocities have been sanctioned by the highest levels of government.

As of today, eleven mayors from various towns in Ukraine are missing. Western media outlets have been following the Kiev line without exception, claiming that all mayors been arrested by the Russian military. The Russian Ministry of Defense has denied the charge, however, and little evidence exists to corroborate Kiev’s line about the missing mayors.

Zelensky outlaws political opposition, authorizes arrest of rivals and war propaganda blitz

When war erupted with Russia this February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a series of decrees formalizing Kiev’s campaign against political opposition and dissident speech.

In a March 19 executive order, Zelensky invoked martial law to ban 11 opposition parties. The outlawed parties consisted of the entire left-wing, socialist or anti-NATO spectrum in Ukraine. They included the For Life Party, the Left Opposition, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Union of Left Forces, Socialists, the Party of Shariy, Ours, State, Opposition Bloc and the Volodymyr Saldo Bloc.

Openly fascist and pro-Nazi parties like the Azov National Corps were left untouched by the presidential decree, however.

“The activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response,” President Zelensky stated.

As he wiped out his opposition, Zelensky ordered an unprecedented domestic propaganda initiative to nationalize all television news broadcasting and combine all channels into a single 24 hour channel called “United News” to “tell the truth about war.”

Next, on April 12, Zelensky announced the arrest of his principal political rival, Viktor Medvedchuk, by Ukraine’s SBU security services.

Medvedchuk’s face is clearly bruised, apparently a result of beatings from Zelensky’s SBU goons. Don’t expect any questions about this image to appear in the pages of the NYT or in CNN’s 24 hour media circus. Can’t allow anything to undermine the pro-war narrative. pic.twitter.com/A0qhhmeaj8

— Dan Cohen (@dancohen3000) April 12, 2022

The founder of the second largest party in Ukraine, the now-illegal Patriots for Life, Medvedchuk is the de facto representative of the country’s ethnic Russian population. Though Patriots for Life is regarded as “pro-Russia,” in part because of his close relations with Vladimir Putin, the new chairman of the party has condemned Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine.

Members of the state-sponsored neo-Nazi Azov Battalion’s National Corps attacked Medvedchuk’s home in March 2019, accusing him of treason and demanding his arrest.

In August 2020, Azov’s National Corps opened fire on a bus carrying representatives of Medvedchuk’s party, wounding several with rubber-coated steel bullets.

Zelensky’s administration escalated the assault on his top opponent in February 2021 when he shuttered several media outlets controlled by Medvedchuk. The US State Department openly endorsed the president’s move, declaring that the United States “supports Ukrainian efforts to counter Russia’s malign influence…”

Three months later, Kiev jailed Medvedchuk and charged him with treason. Zelensky justified locking away his leading rival on the grounds that he needed to “fight against the danger of Russian aggression in the information arena.”

Medvedchuk escaped house arrest at the onset of the war between Russia and Ukraine, but is a captive once again, and may be used as collateral for a post-war prisoner swap with Russia.

Under Zelensky’s watch, “the war is being used to kidnap, imprison and even kill opposition members”

Since Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24, Ukraine’s SBU security service had been on a rampage against any and all iterations of internal political opposition. Leftist Ukrainian activists have faced particularly harsh treatment, including kidnapping and torture.

This March 3 in the city of Dnipro, SBU officers accompanied by Azov ultra-nationalists raided the home of activists with the Livizja (Left) organization, which has organized against social spending cuts and right-wing media propaganda. While one activist said the Azov member “cut my hair off with a knife,” the state security agents proceeded to torture her husband, Alexander Matjuschenko, pressing a gun barrel to his head and forcing him to repeatedly belt out the nationalist salute, “Slava Ukraini!”

“Then they put bags over our heads, tied our hands with tape and took us to the SBU building in a car. There they continued to interrogate us and threatened to cut off our ears,” Matjuschenko’s wife told the leftist German publication Junge Welt.

The torture of left-wing activist Alexander Matjuschenko on March 3 in Dnipro, recorded by Azov members and SBU agents, posted on Telegram by the city of Dnipro.

Matjuschenko was jailed on the grounds that he was “conducting an aggressive war or military operation,” and now faces 10 to 15 years in prison. Despite enduring several broken ribs from the beating by state-backed ultra-nationalists, he has been denied bail. Meanwhile, dozens of other leftists have been jailed on similar charges in Dnipro.

Among those targeted by the SBU were Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich, members of the outlawed Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine. Both were arrested and jailed on March 6 and accused of “spreading pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views.”

In the following days, the SBU arrested broadcast journalist Yan Taksyur and charged him with treason; human rights activist Elena Berezhnaya; Elena Viacheslavova, a human rights advocate whose father, Mikhail, was burned to death during the May 2, 2014 ultra-nationalist mob attack on anti-Maidan protesters outside the Odessa House of Trade Unions; independent journalist Yuri Tkachev, who was charged with treason, and an untold number of others; disabled rights activist Oleg Novikov, who was jailed for three years this April on the grounds that he supported “separatism.”

The list of those imprisoned by Ukraine’s security services since the outbreak of war grows by the day, and is too extensive to reproduce here.

Oleg Novikov—opposition activist from my city, Kharkov, persecuted in the past by the Zelensky regime—was kidnapped 5/04/22 at 6am by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and taken to an unknown place. Oleg is disabled and has 3 young children. (Pic is from a previous arrest) pic.twitter.com/KSeHYC7DWJ

— Gonzalo Lira (@realGonzaloLira) April 9, 2022

Perhaps the most ghastly incident of repression took place when neo-Nazis backed by the Ukrainian government kidnapped Maxim Ryndovskiy, a professional MMA fighter, and brutally tortured him for the crime of training with Russian fighters at a gym in Chechnya. Ryndovskiy also happened to be Jewish, with a Star of David tattooed on his leg, and had spoken out on social media against the war in eastern Ukraine.

In Kyiv, local [I don’t know to fucking call them] extremists caught and brutally torture a famous Ukrainian athlete, MMA fighter, Maxim Ryndovsky. All his fault is that he trained with the Chechen club "Akhmat". pic.twitter.com/og1Psly7SE

— Maria Dubovikova (@politblogme) March 5, 2022

Ukraine’s SBU has even hunted opposition figures outside the country’s borders. As journalist Dan Cohen reported, Anatoly Shariy of the recently banned Party of Shariy said he was the target of a recent SBU assassination attempt. Shariy has been an outspoken opponent of the US-backed Maidan regime, and has been forced to flee into exile after enduring years of harassment from nationalists.

This March, the libertarian politician and online pundit received an email from a friend, “Igor,” seeking to arrange a meeting. He subsequently learned that Igor was held by the SBU at the time and being used to bait Shariy into disclosing his location.

For his part, Shariy has been placed on the notorious Myrotvorets public blacklist of “enemies of the state” founded by Anton Geraschenko – the Ministry of Internal Affairs advisor who endorsed the assassination of Ukrainian lawmakers accused of Russian sympathies. Several journalists and Ukrainian dissidents, including the prominent columnist Oles Buzina, were murdered by state-backed death squads after their names appeared on the list.

Common Ukrainian citizens have also been subjected to torture since the start of the war this February. Seemingly countless videos have appeared on social media showing civilians tied to lamp posts, often with their genitals exposed or their faces painted green. Carried out by Territorial Defense volunteers tasked with enforcing law and order during wartime, these acts of humiliation and torture have targeted everyone from accused Russian sympathizers to Roma people to alleged thieves.

Roma people (“gypsies”) left Kiev as refugees and went to border town, Lviv, where they are facing discrimination by Ukrainians. Like here, tied to poles. A popular Ukrainian Telegram channel celebrates this action and mocks the victims.#Kyiv #Ukraine #Russia #Nazi pic.twitter.com/3cWZ9a78uA

— Global Politics (@Geopol2030) March 21, 2022

This is the human rights that Zelensky brought to Ukrainian civilians#Mariupol #StandWithUkraine #RussiaUkraineWar pic.twitter.com/EWFC048M2q

— UN voice of Justice (@TheUN_voice) April 3, 2022

Ukraine’s SBU studies torture and assassination from the CIA

Vassily Prozorov, a former SBU officer who defected to Russia following the Euromaidan coup, detailed the post-Maidan security services’ systemic reliance on torture to crush political opposition and intimidate citizens accused of Russian sympathies.

According to Prozorov, the ex-SBU officer, the Ukrainian security services have been directly advised by the CIA since 2014. “CIA employees have been present in Kiev since 2014. They are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding, for example, specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”

Below, Russia’s RIA Novosti profiled Prozorov and covered his disclosures in a 2019 special.

Journalist Dan Cohen interviewed a Ukrainian businessman named Igor who was arrested by the SBU for his financial ties with Russian companies and detained this March in the security service’s notorious headquarters in downtown Kiev. Igor said he overheard Russian POWs being beaten with pipes by Territorial Defense volunteers being coached by SBU officers. Pummeled to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem, the Russian prisoners were brutalized until they confessed their hatred for Putin.

Then came Igor’s turn. “They used a lighter to heat up a needle, then put it under my fingernails,” he told Cohen. “The worst was when they put a plastic bag over my head and suffocated me and when they held the muzzle of a Kalashnikov rifle to my head and forced me to answer their questions.”

Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the first head of the SBU after the Euromaidan regime change operation of 2013-14, nurtured close ties to Washington when he served as general consul to the Ukrainian embassy to the US during the George W. Bush administration. During that time, Nalyvaichenko was recruited by the CIA, according to his predecessor at the SBU, Alexander Yakimenko, who served under the Russian-oriented government of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.

In 2021, Zelensky appointed one of Ukraine’s most notorious intelligence figures, Oleksander Poklad, to lead SBU’s counterintelligence division. Poklad is nicknamed “The Strangler,” a reference to his reputation for using torture and assorted dirty tricks to set-up his bosses’ political rivals on treason charges.

This April, a vivid illustration of the SBU’s brutality emerged in the form of video (below) showing its agents pummeling a group of men accused of Russian sympathies in the city of Dnipro.

Ukrainian SBU is arresting civilians in Dnipropetrovsk.

pic.twitter.com/bbHFeADnqg

— Vera Van Horne (@VeraVanHorne) April 5, 2022

“We will never take Russian soldiers prisoner”: Ukraine’s military flaunts its war crimes

While the Western media has focused squarely on alleged Russian human rights abuses since the outbreak of war, Ukrainian soldiers and pro-Ukrainian social media accounts have proudly exhibited sadistic war crimes, from field executions to the torture of captive soldiers.

This March, a pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel called White Lives Matter released a video of a Ukrainian soldier calling the fiancee of a Russian prisoner of war, seen below, and taunting her with promises to castrate the captive.

Ukrainian soldiers’ use of the cellphones of dead Russian soldiers to mock and hector their relatives appears to be a common practice. In fact, the Ukrainian government has begun using notoriously invasive facial recognition technology from Clearview AI, a US tech company, to identify Russian casualties and taunt their relatives on social media.

#ukraine soldiers calling family of deceased to mock and swear at them. Knowing modern phones – the soldier in question must’ve been alive before they unlocked his device. That’s another POW #warCrime to their repertoire. pic.twitter.com/D55T6Hu0se

— Lukasz Raczylo 🐭 🅨 (@raczylo) March 27, 2022

This April, a pro-Ukrainian Telegram channel called fckrussia2022 posted a video depicting a Russian soldier with one of his eyes bandaged, suggesting it had been gouged during torture, and mocked him as a “one-eyed” pig.

Perhaps the most gruesome image to have appeared on social media in recent weeks is the photo of a tortured Russian soldier who had one of his eyes gouged before he was killed. The accompanying post was captioned, “looking for Nazis.”

Video has also emerged this April showing Ukrainian soldiers shooting defenseless Russian POWs in the legs outside the city of Kharkov. A separate video published by Ukrainian and US-backed Georgian Legion soldiers showed the fighters carrying out field executions of wounded Russian captives near a village outside Kiev.

Ukrainian and Georgian Legion fighters celebrate after executing captive Russian soldiers on video

It is likely that these soldiers had been emboldened by their superiors’ blessings. Mamula Mamulashvili, the commander of the Georgian Legion, which participated in the field executions of wounded Russian POW’s, boasted this April that his unit freely engages in war crimes: “Yes, we tie their hands and feet sometimes. I speak for the Georgian Legion, we will never take Russian soldiers prisoner. Not a single one of them will be taken prisoner.”

Similarly, Gennadiy Druzenko, the head of the Ukrainian military medical service, stated in an interview with Ukraine 24 that he “issued an order to castrate all Russian men because they were subhuman and worse than cockroaches.”

Ukrainian officials present woman tortured and killed by Azov as victim of Russia

While Western media homes in on Russian human rights violations at home and inside Ukraine, the Ukrainian government has authorized a propaganda campaign known as “Total War” that includes the planting of bogus images and false stories to further implicate Russia.

In one especially cynical example of the strategy, Ukraine 24 – a TV channel where guests have called for the genocidal extermination of Russian children – published a photo this April depicting a female corpse branded with a bloody swastika on her stomach. Ukraine 24 claimed that it found this woman in Gostumel, one of the regions in the Kiev Oblast that the Russians vacated on March 29.

Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament, and Oleksiy Arestovych, the top advisor to President Zelensky, published the photo of the defiled female corpse on social media. While Vasylenko left the photo online, Arestovych deleted it eight hours after posting when confronted with the fact that he had published a fake.

In fact, the image was pulled from footage originally recorded by Patrick Lancaster, a Donetsk-based US journalist who had filmed the corpse of a woman tortured and murdered by members of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion in a Mariupol school basement they had converted into a base.

At 2:31 in Lancaster’s video, the woman’s corpse can be seen clearly.

Ukrainian political operative @lesiavasylenko is spreading an especially cynical fake:

The original image was captured by @PLnewstoday and showed the corpse of a woman tortured and murdered in a Mariupol school basement by Ukrainian Nazis – the allies of Vasylenko. pic.twitter.com/gRnURAAaQ9

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) April 4, 2022

As weapons pour into Ukraine from NATO states and the war intensifies, the atrocities are almost certain to pile up – and with the blessing of leadership in Kiev. As Zelensky proclaimed during a visit to the city of Bucha this April, “if we do not find a civilized way out, you know our people – they will find an uncivilized way out.”

Via Steve Kirsch, I just saw this substack article about a scary topic that many of us have been following for a few months: international voting on giving up sovereignty to the World Health Organization (WHO).

James Roguski -
WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution
This is the fourth article in this series. Pandemic Treaty The People’s Treaty Speaking Truth To Power WAKE UP and Smell the Burning of Our Constitution Abolish the WHO Pandemic Mitigation Project An Open Letter to the WHO…
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The very idea of doing this is mind-boggling insane. But I want to take a moment and break down why it's a terrible idea, and in a way that will hopefully clarify (to me if nobody else) what this chaotic and hard-to-define struggle we're in is all about.

The End of Nations

How do you feel when you read that phrase?

Would you have felt differently reading it 20 years ago?

I think that's a good exercise because many of us do not fall into overly simple categories like liberal/convervative/left/right/centrist/moderate, as if there were ever a committee somewhere who defined how each category of people would think and in all situations. But whatever skin we're wearing (and some people try on more than others) may cause us to either embrace or recoil from the idea. Though personally, I think that ideology is not so much the point at this juncture.

Can we ever get political language correct?

Rounding the Earth Newsletter
The Wisdom of Getting Language Right
"Humor is the good natured side of truth." -Mark Twain I guess I'm going to discuss nationalism. Except that, as with many words, there are many versions of it. Let's start with the very Woke Merriam-Webster: Meh. Too biased. If a definition does not allow for better self-definition by the people it describes, it's a pejorative. Somebody who feels pride fo…
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The more local politics is, the less confusing the language, but the politics of nations is already very large, and world politics is ever larger.

But let's back up before we take discussions of the value of nations too far. Let's make a simple assumption that requires no definitions or ideological acceptance either way:

One day will be the last day in which rival nations exist on Earth.

Maybe that'll be a few months from now. Maybe it'll be closer to the time when the sun burns out. I really don't know, and I'm not particularly worried about it happening thousands of years after I die. But I feel existentially concerned with whether it happens this year or any time soon.

Why?

Because if it happens, I don't want for it to happen the wrong way. And if it happens so quickly that endangers billions of people, and in a way that suits powerful psychopaths, then it's happening the wrong way.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up

The bottom-up discussion isn't exactly "simple" per se. The game theory of how organic circles of trust grow is a richly complex subject. But that is to say that nations (as rivalrous organizations) may one day become irrelevant as the need for militaristic distrust (yes, you need to protect your children from strangers) diminishes in relative influence, while the grand game of healthy human economic growth keeps sovereign people stocked with all the resources they can handle. That may only happen on a very long time horizon, though I personally suspect that absent current corporatist powers, it might happen over a few short decades. Perhaps that is why the world's most powerful people feel the need to rush their own top-down plan?

This is the proper description of what I (believe I) am seeing in the world.

1) The fiat currency system is failing. Centralized systems always attract parasites that consume until the top-heavy Molochian monstrosity fails. Moloch eats itself. Now the Bitcoiners (or other, but I doubt the competitors) threaten the entire systemic revolution from one fiat currency to the next. This time might be different: a truly new era.

2) There is a plan known only at high levels. We could talk about evidence of plandemic or plandemonium (my preferred term) all day. We could speculate about what exactly it entails. But let's start simple: there is a plan. That is to say, there is a high level conspiracy.

If the plan involves ending the sovereignty of nations in favor of a New World Order (NWO), then what we're talking about is one world government. That's no longer a controversial statement. The rhetoric at the World Government Summit 2022 demonstrates that.

World Government Summit 2022 Livestream

Look past the virtue signaling words like "empowerment" (in well-designed commercials that play between the discussion) that seem designed to coopt a more democratic discussion, and the power behind the curtain is boldly advertised.

I added the pointer to the WHO, but we'll come back to that. It is interesting to see that, aside from the consulting firms and media enterprising listed at the bottom, the world's real corporate powerhouses seem to be hiding behind the NGOs. That is to say that the NGOs have been erected as the centerpieces within the NWO.

This is the moment when you may wish to reread The Doctrine of Fascism.

The Fascism of the NWO is the same as that of Mussolini in its architecture. And remember what happened to Mussolini, whose early rhetoric was that of hyper-compassionate leftist who was only kicked out of the Socialist Party due to his desire to take down the national hegemon of the day, Britain, on equal footing. Mussolini laid out an Italy in which all the ethnic groups could be humanized as Italians: whether Greek, visigoth, North African, Jewish, or whoever/wherever their ancestors might have originated.

And then he shook hands with the devil and none of that commitment to the value of every individual in Italy meant anything, anymore, except for the industrial influencers and select insiders.

Even worse, we might note that Hitler was somewhat like the Trudeau of his day. We're told in the history books (or "history" books) that Hitler was a painter, but the more relevant truth is that Hitler was a film actor (which Western academic and media sources go to great lengths to hide). In fact, his head propagandists were mostly the directors of the films in which he had appeared. There is very good reason to suspect that Hitler was a front for more powerful men, including the American banking network that funded his ascension, but that's a discussion for another day. The larger point is that the virtue signaling of ideological platforms gets laundered through a chain of idealists and literal actors to engineer a facade for the politics of the world's oligarchs.

And now that the world currencies are dying, they are working at a breakneck pace to organize top-down governance before their ability to print all the money they want turns into commodity money and Bitcoin.

The Insanity of WHO Governance

Let's be clear: the power to take control over governments is the power to govern. The requirement of a pandemic to trigger the event is the ultimate moral hazard. Power attracts the Kunlangeta, and those are people who cannot resist a lever whose instructions say, "Caution, pull this only when you're ready to commit genocide in return for control over hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of wealth."

Rounding the Earth Newsletter
The Kunlangeta and Pharmaceutical Medicine
“The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.” -Adolf Hitl…
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It's that simple. Need I go on? For whom? For the people who aren't wary of a health NGO now run…not by a doctor, but by a Marxist revolutionary with blood already on his hands? And where in the years leading up to the plandemonium, nobody there was interested in or aware enough to throw a flag on the play?

If you haven't figured this out yet: work backward. Where did the problem begin?

Answer: a long time before now. Also, I'm not even sure when. All I know is that working backward, I just keep finding years and years, maybe even centuries of institutional capture.

This is the ultimate fascist war against all free people. No matter what any of us think, we don't fully understand it yet. But if you sit and meditate on the reality, it's undeniable. Of course, that's for people who didn't have the ability to meditate beaten out of them.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter
Meditation and the Art of War
“I never let schooling interfere with my education.” Mark Twain If you've never read Sun Tzu's The Art of War, you've surely seen it quoted. Maybe you've seen it on a shelf at the bookstore. Why have generals like Douglas MacArthur and Colin Powell, not to mention intelligence officials and business moguls, consistently praise the 2,500 Chinese relic in …
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Addendum: Personally, I don’t think that Tedros’s Marxist path is the point so much as the power-seeking is. He is one of many opportunists in the world, and he is now in position to take all manner of bribes, and probably doesn’t even realize his negotiating potential. But the larger point is that the power to declare pandemic and take control of governments would be in the hands of a lever that is bought through a private bidding process. World government then becomes explicitly part of the corporate profit feedback loop. How well could anybody who understands that sleep at night?

Meeting the Goddess Gaia in a Supermarket, Italy. Frankly, as a mystical experience, it left much to be desired.

On September 13, 258, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was imprisoned on the orders of the new proconsul, Galerius Maximus. The public examination of Cyprian has been preserved.

Galerius Maximus: "Are you Thascius Cyprianus?"
Cyprian: "I am."
Galerius: "The most sacred Emperors have commanded you to conform to the Roman rites."
Cyprian: "I refuse."
Galerius: "Take heed for yourself."
Cyprian: "Do as you are bid; in so clear a case I may not take heed."

Galerius, after briefly conferring with his judicial council, with much reluctance pronounced the following sentence: "You have long lived an irreligious life, and have drawn together a number of men bound by an unlawful association, and professed yourself an open enemy to the gods and the religion of Rome; and the pious, most sacred and august Emperors ... have endeavoured in vain to bring you back to conformity with their religious observances; whereas therefore you have been apprehended as principal and ringleader in these infamous crimes, you shall be made an example to those whom you have wickedly associated with you; the authority of law shall be ratified in your blood." He then read the sentence of the court from a written tablet: "It is the sentence of this court that Thascius Cyprianus be executed with the sword."

Cyprian: "Thanks be to God.”

There are plenty of documents about martyrs from early Christianity that look to us as naive and exaggerated. But this one, no. This is so stark, so dramatic, so evident. You can see in your mind these two men, the Imperial procurer Galerius Maximus and the Bishop of Carthage, Thascius Cyprian, facing each other in anger, a clash that reminds to us the story of the aircraft carrier that tried to order a lighthouse to move away. It was an unstoppable force, the carrier, meeting an unmovable object, the lighthouse. It is the kind of clash that leads to human lives blown away like fallen leaves in the wind.

Galerius plays the role of the carrier, bristling with weapons, power, and movement. He is not evil. He does what he has to do. For him, just as for most Romans of the time, performing the "sacred rituals" was a simple way to show that one was part of society, willing to do one's duty. It implied little more than small offerings to the deities that would bring luck and prosperity to everyone. Doing that was the basis of the virtue carried "pietas," a virtue that later Christians would call "Caritas" and that in our terminology we might call "empathy." Why would anyone refuse to do such a simple thing? He had to be truly evil, wicked, and a criminal.

But Galerius must also see that he has a force in front of him that he cannot overcome. The lighthouse doesn't move. It cannot be moved. A man like Cyprianus, alone, was worth more than a Roman Legion. It was worth more than all the Roman Legions. A few decades later, the Empire would be ruled by a Christian Emperor, Constantine. More decades in the future, the Empire would collapse and be replaced by Christianity to start the flowering of that delicate and sophisticated civilization we call the "Middle Ages" in Europe.

In the end, the essence of the conflict that put Galerius and Cyprianus in front of each other was about the role of a totalitarian state. By the 3rd century AD, when this story took place, the Roman Empire had been a prototypical totalitarian state for at least three centuries. It means that the state recognizes nothing but itself as a source of law: there is nothing, strictly nothing, that can stop the state from doing what the state wants to do. In the Roman laws, there was no such thing as "human rights," and nothing like a "Constitution." The law was the law, and it had to be obeyed.

It was only much later that the Roman Emperors started understanding that the laws that they cherished so much had been turned into a tool of oppression and mistreatment of the poor and the weak. It was Empress Galla Placidia the first to say that "That the Emperor profess to be bound by the laws is a sentiment worthy of the ruler's majesty, so much is our power dependent on the power of law and indeed that the imperial office be subject to the laws is more important than the imperial power itself."

Nowadays, we tend to see religion as a set of various superstitions, something that gives people some delusionary belief on the after-death world, maybe some philosophic reasoning on how to live a virtuous life. But if you think about the clash between Galerius and Cyprianus, you see what it was about. Religion was a tool to keep people free from the arbitrary laws of the totalitarian state. Christianity established the basic dignity of every human being, and gave people an alternative social structure that they could use to fight back. The holy books were the "Constitution" of the Christian state.

Over the years, this concept of what it means to be a Christian in a secular state has been gradually lost. The last time when Christianity and the State clashed against each other was with the "Controversy of Valladolid," when the Christian Church tried to prevent the European States from enslaving and exterminating the Native Americans. It was a victory for the Church that led to its disappearance as an independent force in the Europe we call "modern." Under the onslaught of the state propaganda that completely inverted the roles in the common perception, we thought that we needed different structures to defend the people from oppression. That the totalitarianism of the state could be kept at bay using popular parties, constitutional laws, statements about human rights, and the like.

It didn't work, Today, we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as when Emperor Decius imposed on every Roman Citizen to demonstrate his/her pietas by performing sacrifices to the sacred deity that, in our case, is called "science." But, unlike the times of Decius, we have nothing to oppose to the totalitarian machine of the state that is marching on to crush all of us.

I have been thinking a lot about the Gaian religion, fashionable among Western intellectuals. Would anyone follow the example of Cyprianus and offer his life for his Gaian faith? Right now, obviously not. Gaians had a good occasion with the Covid story to take an independent position about an issue that the ordinary Christian religion was not equipped to take. Facing an epidemic, Christianity could only say that it was the result of the wrath of God because someone had sinned heavily. Gaianism has much more powerful intellectual tools that could have been used. Gaians could have told people that they were damaging their health just while trying to save themselves. That their immune system is a gift from Gaia herself that they must keep strong by keeping it in contact with the external environment. Exactly the opposite of trying to isolate themselves by wearing masks, disinfecting everything, and keeping social distance.

Unfortunately, right now Gaianism is little more than a vaporous set of good feelings. But it is shallow, lightweight, and easily blown out by the first serious gust of wind created by the state machine. And yet we desperately need something that will save us from being crushed by these monstrous machines we call states that are destroying everything. Will Gaia ever gain the strength of Christianity? I am doubtful, but also not without some hope. Things always change, sometimes so fast.

Here is a reflection on Gaianism that I published two years ago on my "Chimeras" blog when the situation was not yet as dramatic as it is today.

Gaia, the Return of the Earth Goddess

House founded by An, praised by Enlil, given an oracle by mother Nintud! A house, at its upper end a mountain, at its lower end a spring! A house, at its upper end threefold indeed. Whose well-founded storehouse is established as a household, whose terrace is supported by Lahama deities; whose princely great wall, the shrine of Urim! (the Kesh temple hymn, ca. 2600 BCE)

Not long ago, I found myself involved in a debate on Gaian religion convened by Erik Assadourian. For me, it was a little strange. For the people of my generation, religion is supposed to be a relic of the past, the opium of the people, a mishmash of superstitions, something for old women mumbling ejaculatory prayers, things like that. But, here, a group of people who weren't religious in the traditional sense of the word, and who included at least two professional researchers in physics, were seriously discussing how to best worship the Goddess of Earth, the mighty, the powerful, the divine, the (sometimes) benevolent Gaia, She who keeps the Earth alive.

It was not just unsettling, it was a deep rethinking of many things I had been thinking. I had been building models of how Gaia could function in terms of the physics and the biology we know. But here, no, it was not Gaia the holobiont, not Gaia the superorganism, not Gaia the homeostatic system. It was Gaia the Goddess.

And here I am, trying to explain to myself why I found this matter worth discussing. And trying to explain it to you, readers. After all, this is being written in a blog titled "Chimeras" -- and the ancient Chimera was a myth about a creature that, once, must have been a sky goddess. And I have been keeping this blog for several years, see? There is something in religion that remains interesting even for us, moderns. But, then, what is it, exactly?

I mulled over the question for a while and I came to the conclusion that, yes, Erik Assadourian and the others are onto something: it may be time for religion to return in some form. And if religion returns, it may well be in the form of some kind of cult of the Goddess Gaia. But let me try to explain

What is this thing called "religion," anyway?

Just as many other things in history that go in cycles, religion does that too. It is because religion serves a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't have existed and been so common in the past. So what is religion? It is a long story but let me start from the beginning -- the very beginning, when, as the Sumerians used to say "Bread was baked for the first time in the ovens".

A constant of all ancient religions is that they tell us that whatever humans learned to do -- from fishing to having kings -- it was taught to them by some God who took the trouble to land down from heaven (or from wherever Gods come from) just for that purpose. Think of when the Sumerian Sea-God called Aun (also Oannes in later times) emerged out of the Abzu (that today we call the abyss) to teach people all the arts of civilization. It was in those ancient times that the Gods taught humans the arts and the skills that the ancient Sumerians called "me," a bewildering variety of concepts, from "music" to "rejoicing of the heart." Or, in more recent lore, how Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humankind. This story has a twist of trickery, but it is the same concept: human civilization is a gift from the gods. Now, surely our ancestors were not so naive that they believed in these silly legends, right? Did people really need a Fish-God to emerge out of the Persian Gulf to teach them how to make fish hooks and fishnets? But, as usual, what looks absurd hides the meaning of complex questions.

The people who described how the me came from the Gods were not naive, not at all. They had understood the essence of civilization, which is sharing. Nothing can be done without sharing something with others, not even rejoicing in your heart. Think of "music," one of the Sumerian me: can you play music by yourself and alone? Makes no sense, of course. Music is a skill that needs to be learned. You need teachers, you need people who can make instruments, you need a public to listen to you and appreciate your music. And the same is for fishing, one of the skills that Aun taught to humans. Of course, you could fish by yourself and for your family only. Sure, and, in this way, you ensure that you all will die of starvation as soon as you hit a bad period of low catches. Fishing provides abundant food in good times, but fish spoils easily and those who live by fishing can survive only if they share their catch with those who live by cultivating grains. You can't live on fish alone, it is something that I and my colleague Ilaria Perissi describe in our book, "The Empty Sea." Those who tried, such as the Vikings of Greenland during the Middle Ages, were mercilessly wiped out of history.

Sharing is the essence of civilization, but it is not trivial: who shares what with whom? How do you ensure that everyone gets a fair share? How do you take care of tricksters, thieves, and parasites? It is a fascinating story that goes back to the very beginning of civilization, those times that the Sumerians were fond to tell with the beautiful image of "when bread was baked for the first time in the ovens," This is where religion came in, with temples, priest, Gods, and all the related stuff.

Let's make a practical example: suppose you are on an errand, it is a hot day, and you want a mug of beer. Today, you go to a pub, pay a few dollars for your pint, you drink it, and that's it. Now, move yourself to Sumerian times. The Sumerians had plenty of beer, even a specific goddess related to it, called Ninkasi (which means, as you may guess, "the lady of the beer"). But there were no pubs selling beer for the simple reason that you couldn't pay for it. Money hadn't been invented, yet. Could you barter for it? With what? What could you carry around that would be worth just one beer? No, there was a much better solution: the temple of the local God or Goddess.

We have beautiful descriptions of the Sumerian temples in the works of the priestess Enheduanna, among other things the first named author in history. From her and from other sources, we can understand how in Sumerian times, and for millennia afterward, temples were large storehouses of goods. They were markets, schools, libraries, manufacturing centers, and offered all sorts of services, including that of the hierodules (karkid in Sumerian), girls who were not especially holy, but who would engage in a very ancient profession that didn't always have the bad reputation it has today. If you were so inclined, you could also meet male prostitutes in the temple, probably called "kurgarra" in Sumerian. That's one task in which temples have been engaging for a long time, even though that looks a little weird to us. Incidentally, the Church of England still managed prostitution in Medieval times.

So, you go to the temple and you make an offer to the local God or Goddess. We may assume that this offer would be proportional to both your needs and your means. It could be a goat that we know was roughly proportional to the services of a high-rank hierodule. But, if all you wanted was a beer, then you could have limited your offer to something less valuable: depending on your job you could have offered fish, wheat, wool, metal, or whatever. Then, the God would be pleased and, as a reward, the alewives of the temple would give you all the beer you could drink. Seen as a restaurant, the temple worked on the basis of what we call today an "all you can eat" menu (or "the bottomless cup of coffee," as many refills as you want).

Note how the process of offering something to God was called sacrifice. The term comes from "sacred" which means "separated." The sacrifice is about separation. You separate from something that you perceived as yours which then becomes an offer to the local God or to the community -- most often the same thing. The offerings to the temple could be something very simple: as you see in the images we have from Sumerian times, it didn't always involve the formal procedure of killing a live animal. People were just bringing the goods they had to the temple. When animals were sacrificed to God(s) in the sense that they were ritually killed, they were normally eaten afterward. Only in rare cases (probably not in Sumeria) the sacrificed entity was burnt to ashes. It was the "burnt sacrifice called korban Olah in the Jewish tradition. In that case, the sacrifice was shared with God alone -- but it was more of an exception than the rule.

In any case, God was the supreme arbiter who insured that your sacrifice was appreciated -- actually, not all sacrifices were appreciated. Some people might try to trick by offering low-quality goods, but God is not easy to fool. In some cases, he didn't appreciate someone's sacrifices at all: do you remember the story of Cain and Abel? God rejected Cain's sacrifice, although we are not told exactly why. In any case, the sacrifice was a way to attribute a certain "price" to the sacrificed goods.

This method of commerce is not very different than the one we use today, it is just not so exactly quantified as when we use money to attach a value to everything. The ancient method works more closely to the principle that the Marxists had unsuccessfully tried to implement "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." But don't think that the ancient Sumerians were communists, it is just that the lack of a method of quantification of the commercial transaction generated a certain leeway that could allow the needy access to the surplus available, when it was available. This idea is still embedded in modern religions, think of how the Holy Quran commands the believers to share the water of their wells with the needy, once they have satisfied their needs and those of their animals. Or the importance that the Christian tradition gives to gleaning as a redistribution of the products of the fields. Do you remember the story of Ruth the Moabite in the Bible? That important, indeed.

But there is more. In the case of burnt sacrifices, the value attributed to the goods was "infinite" -- the goods consumed by the flames just couldn't be used again by human beings. It is the concept of Taboo used in Pacific cultures for something that cannot be touched, eaten, or used. We have no equivalent thing in the "market," where we instead suppose that everything has a price.

And then, there came money (the triumph of evil)

The world of the temples of the first 2-3 millennia of human civilizations in the Near East was in some ways alien to ours, and in others perfectly equivalent. But things keep changing and the temples were soon to face competition in a new method of attributing value to goods: money. Coinage is a relatively modern invention, it goes back to mid 1st millennium BCE. But in very ancient times, people did exchange metals by weight -- mainly gold and silver. And these exchanges were normally carried out in temples -- the local God(s) ensured honest weighing. In more than one sense, in ancient times temples were banks and it is no coincidence that our modern banks look like temples. They are temples to a God called "money." By the way, you surely read in the Gospels how Jesus chased the money changers -- the trapezitai -- out of the temple of Jerusalem. Everyone knows that story, but what were the money changers doing in the temple? They were in the traditional place where they were expected to be, where they had been from when bread was baked in ovens for the first time.

So, religion and money evolved in parallel -- sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in competition with each other. But, in the long run, the temples seem to have been the losers in the competition. As currency became more and more commonplace, people started thinking that they didn't really need the cumbersome apparatus of religion, with its temples, priests, and hierodules (the last ones were still appreciated, but now were paid in cash). A coin is a coin is a coin, it is guaranteed by the gold it is made of -- gold is gold is gold. And if you want a good beer, you don't need to make an offer to some weird God or Goddess. Just pay a few coppers for it, and that's done.

The Roman state was among the first in history to be based nearly 100% on money. With the Romans, temples and priests had mainly a decorative role, let's say that they had to find a new market for their services. Temples couldn't be commercial centers any longer, so they reinvented themselves as lofty places for the celebration of the greatness of the Roman empires. There remained also a diffuse kind of religion in the countryside that had to do with fertility rites, curing sickness, and occasional cursing on one's enemies. That was the "pagan" religion, with the name "pagan" meaning, basically, "peasant."

Paganism would acquire a bad fame in Christian times, but already in Roman times, peasant rites were seen with suspicion. The Romans had one deity: money. An evil deity, perhaps, but it surely brought mighty power to the Romans, but their doom as well, as it is traditional for evil deities. Roman money was in the form of precious metals and when they ran out of gold and silver from their mines, the state just couldn't exist anymore: it vanished. No gold, no empire. It was as simple as that.

The disappearance of the Roman state saw a return of religion, this time in the form of Christianity. It is a long story that would need a lot of space to be written. Let's just say that the Middle Ages in Europe saw the rise of monasteries to play a role similar to that of temples in Sumerian times. Monasteries were storehouses, manufacturing centers, schools, libraries, and more -- they even had something to do with hierodules. During certain periods, Christian nuns did seem to have played that role, although this is a controversial point. Commercial exchanging and sharing of goods again took a religious aspect, with the Catholic Church in Western Europe playing the role of a bank by guaranteeing that, for instance, ancient relics were authentic. In part, relics played the role that money had played during the Roman Empire, although they couldn't be exchanged for other kinds of goods. The miracle of the Middle Ages in Europe was that this arrangement worked, and worked very well. That is, until someone started excavating silver from mines in Eastern Europe and another imperial cycle started. It is not over to this date, although it is clearly declining.

So, where do we stand now? Religion has clearly abandoned the role it had during medieval times and has re-invented itself as a support for the national state, just as the pagan temples had done in Roman times. One of the most tragic events of Western history is when in 1914, for some mysterious reasons, young Europeans found themselves killing each other by the millions while staying in humid trenches. On both sides of the trenches, Christian priests were blessing the soldiers of "their" side, exhorting them to kill those of the other side. How Christianity could reduce itself to such a low level is one of the mysteries of the Universe, but there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. And it is here that we stand. Money rules the world and that's it.

The Problem With Money

Our society is perhaps the most monetized in history -- money pervades every aspect of life for everyone. The US is perhaps the most monetized society ever: for Europeans, it is a shock to discover that many American families pay their children for doing household chores. For a European, it is like if your spouse were asking you to pay for his/her sexual services. But different epochs have different uses and surely it would be shocking for a Sumerian to see that we can get a beer at the pub by just giving the alewives a curious flat object, a "card," that they then give back to us. Surely that card is a powerful amulet from a high-ranking God.

So, everything may be well in the best of worlds, notoriously represented by the Western version of liberal democracy. Powerful market forces, operated by the God (or perhaps Goddess) called Money or, sometimes, "the almighty dollar," ensure that exchanges are efficient, that scarce resources are optimally allocated, and that everyone has a chance in the search for maximizing his/her utility function.

Maybe. But it may also be that something is rotten in the Great Columned Temple of Washington D.C. What's rotten, exactly? Why can't this wonderful deity we call "money" work the way we would it like to, now that we even managed to decouple it from the precious metals it was made of in ancient times?

Well, there is a problem. A big problem. A gigantic problem. It is simply that money is evil. This is another complex story, but let's just say that the problem with evil and good is that evil knows no limits, while good does. In other words, evil is equivalent to chaos, good to order. It has something to do with the definition of "obscenity." There is nothing wrong in human sex, but an excess of sex in some forms becomes obscene. Money can become obscene for exactly this reason: too much of it overwhelms everything else. Nothing is so expensive that it cannot be bought; that's the result of the simple fact that you can attribute a price to everything.

Instead, God is good because She has limits: She is benevolent and merciful. You could see that as a limitation and theologians might discuss why a being that's all-powerful and all-encompassing cannot be also wicked and cruel. But there cannot be any good without an order of things. And order implies limits of some kind. God can do everything but He cannot do evil. That's a no-no. God cannot be evil. Period.

And here is why money is evil: it has no limits, it keeps accumulating. You know that accumulated money is called "capital," and it seems that many people realize that there is something wrong with that idea because "capitalism" is supposed to be something bad. Which may be but, really, capital is one of those polymorphic words that can describe many things, not all of them necessarily bad. In itself, capital is simply the accumulation of resources for future use -- and that has limits, of course. You can't accumulate more things than the things you have. But once you give a monetary value to this accumulated capital, things change. If money has no limits, capital doesn't, either.

Call it capital or call it money, it is shapeless, limitless, a blob that keeps growing and never shrinks. Especially nowadays that money has been decoupled from material goods (at least in part, you might argue that money is linked to crude oil). You could say that money is a disease: it affects everything. Everything can be associated with a number, and that makes that thing part of the entity we call the "market". If destroying that thing can raise that number, somewhere, that thing will be destroyed. Think of a tree: for a modern economist, it has no monetary value until it is felled and the wood sold on the market. And that accumulates more money, somewhere. Monetary capital actually destroys natural capital. You may have heard of "Natural Capitalism" that's supposed to solve the problem by giving a price to trees even before they are felled. It could be a good idea, but it is still based on money, so it may be the wrong tool to use even though for a good purpose.

The accumulation of money in the form of monetary capital has created something enormously different than something that was once supposed to help you get a good beer at a pub. Money is not evil just in a metaphysical sense. Money is destroying everything. It is destroying the very thing that makes humankind survive: the Earth's ecosystem. We call it "overexploitation," but it means simply killing and destroying everything as long as that can bring a monetary profit to someone.

Re-Sacralizing The Ecosystem (why some goods must have infinite prices)

There have been several proposals on how to reform the monetary system, from "local money" to "expiring money," and some have proposed simply getting rid of it. None of these schemes has worked, so far, and getting rid of money seems to be simply impossible in a society that's as complex as ours: how do you pay the hierodules if money does not exist? But from what I have been discussing so far, we could avoid the disaster that the evil deity called money is bring to us simply by putting a limit to it. It is, after all, what the Almighty did with the devil: She didn't kill him, but confined him in a specific area that we call "Hell" -- maybe there is a need for hell to exist, we don't know. For sure, we don't want hell to grow and expand everywhere.

What does it mean limits to money? It means that some things must be placed outside the monetary realm -- outside the market. If you want to use a metaphor-based definition, some goods must be declared to have an "infinite" monetary price -- nobody can buy them, not billionaires, not even trillionaires, or any even more obscene levels of monetary accumulation. If you prefer, you may use the old Hawai'ian word: Taboo. Or, simply, you decide that some things are sacred, holy, they are beloved by the Goddess, and even thinking of touching them is evil.

Once something is sacred, it cannot be destroyed in the name of profit. That could mean setting aside some areas of the planet, declaring them not open for human exploitation. Or setting limits to the exploitation, not with the idea of maximizing the output of the system for human use, but with the idea to optimize the biodiversity of the area. These ideas are not farfetched. As an example, some areas of the sea have been declared "whale sanctuaries" -- places where whales cannot be hunted. That's not necessarily an all/zero choice. Some sanctuaries might allow human presence and moderate exploitation of the resources of the system. The point is that as long as we monetize the exploitation, then we are back to monetary capitalism and the resource will be destroyed.

Do we need a religion to do that? Maybe there are other ways but, surely, we know that it is a task that religion is especially suitable for. Religion is a form of communication that uses rituals as speech. Rituals are all about sacralization: they define what's sacred by means of sacrifice. These concepts form the backbone of all religions, everything is neatly arranged under to concept of "sacredness" -- what's sacred is nobody's property. We know that it works. It has worked in the past. It still works today. You may be a trillionaire, but you are not allowed to do everything you want just because you can pay for it. You can't buy the right of killing people, for instance. Nor to destroy humankind's heritage. (So far, at least).

Then, do we need a new religion for that purpose? A Gaian religion?

Possibly yes, taking into account that Gaia is not "God" in the theological sense. Gaia is not all-powerful, she didn't create the world, she is mortal. She is akin to the Demiurgoi, the Daimonoi, the Djinn, and similar figures that play a role in the Christian, Islamic and Indian mythologies. The point is that you don't necessarily need the intervention of the Almighty to sacralize something. Even just a lowly priest can do that, and surely it is possible for one of Her Daimonoi, and Gaia is one.

Supposing we could do something like that, then we would have the intellectual and cultural tools needed to re-sacralize the Earth. Then, whatever is declared sacred or taboo is spared by the destruction wrecked by the money-based process: forests, lands, seas, creatures large and small. We could see this as a new alliance between humans and Gaia: All the Earth is sacred to Gaia, and some parts of it are especially sacred and cannot be touched by money. And not just the Earth, the poor, the weak, and the dispossessed among humans, they are just as sacred and must be respected.

All that is not just a question of "saving the Earth" -- it is a homage to the power of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty, and to the power of maintenance of the Holy Creation that belongs to the Almighty's faithful servant, the holy Gaia, mistress of the ecosystem. And humans, as the ancient Sumerians had already understood, are left with the task of respecting, admiring and appreciating what God has created. We do not worship Gaia, that would silly, besides being blasphemous. But through her, we worship the higher power of God.

Is it possible? If history tells us something is that money tends to beat religion when conflict arises. Gaia is powerful, sure, but can she slay the money dragon in single combat? Difficult, yes, but we should remember that some 2000 years ago in Europe, a group of madmen fought and won against an evil empire in the name of an idea that most thought not just subversive at that time, but even beyond the thinkable. And they believed so much in that idea that they accepted to die for it

In the end, there is more to religion than just fixing a broken economic system. There is a fundamental reason why people do what they do: sometimes we call it with the anodyne name of "communication," sometimes we use the more sophisticated term "empathy," but when we really understand what we are talking about we may not afraid to use the word "love" which, according to our Medieval ancestors, was the ultimate force that moves the universe. And when we deal with Gaia the Goddess, we may have this feeling of communication, empathy, and love. She may be defined as a planetary homeostatic system, but she is way more than that: it is a power of love that has no equals on this planet. But there are things that mere words cannot express.

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Nothing is lost with peace. All can be lost with war. Let men return to understanding. Let them resume negotiating. Negotiating with good will and with respect for each other’s rights, let them realize that an honorable success is never precluded when there are sincere and active negotiations. And they will feel great – with true greatness – if imposing silence on the voices of passion, whether collective or private, and leaving reason to its proper domain, they will spare their brothers bloodshed and their homeland ruin.

Thus it was that on August 24, 1939, Pius XII addressed both rulers and peoples as war was imminent. These were not words of empty pacifism, nor of complicit silence about the multiple violations of justice that were being carried out in many quarters. In that radio message, which some people still remember hearing, the appeal of the Roman Pontiff invoked “respect for each other’s rights” as a prerequisite for fruitful peace negotiations.

The Media Narrative

If we look at what is happening in Ukraine, without being misled by the gross falsifications of the mainstream media, we realize that respect for each other’s rights has been completely ignored; indeed, we have the impression that the Biden Administration, NATO and the European Union deliberately want to maintain a situation of obvious imbalance, precisely to make impossible any attempt at a peaceful resolution of the Ukrainian crisis, provoking the Russian Federation to trigger a conflict. Herein lies the seriousness of the problem. This is the trap set for both Russia and Ukraine, using both of them to enable the globalist elite to carry out its criminal plan.

It should not surprise us that pluralism and freedom of speech, so praised in countries that claim to be democratic, are daily disavowed by censorship and intolerance towards opinions not aligned with the official narrative. Manipulations of this kind have become the norm during the so-called pandemic, to the detriment of doctors, scientists and dissenting journalists, who have been discredited and ostracized for the mere fact of daring to question the effectiveness of experimental serums. Two years later, the truth about the adverse effects and the unfortunate management of the health emergency has proven them right, but the truth is stubbornly ignored because it does not correspond to what the system wanted and still wants today.

If the world media have so far been able to lie shamelessly on a matter of strict scientific relevance, spreading lies and hiding reality, we should ask ourselves why, in the present situation, they should suddenly rediscover that intellectual honesty and respect for the code of ethics widely denied with Covid.

But if this colossal fraud has been supported and disseminated by the media, it must be recognized that national and international health institutions, governments, magistrates, law enforcement agencies and the Catholic Hierarchy itself all share responsibility for the disaster – each in its own sphere by actively supporting or failing to oppose the narrative – a disaster that has affected billions of people in their health, their property, the exercise of their individual rights and even their very lives. Even in this case, it is difficult to imagine that those who have been guilty of such crimes in support of a pandemic that was intended and maliciously amplified could suddenly have a jolt of dignity and show solicitude for their citizens and their homeland when a war threatens their security and their economy.

These, of course, can be the prudent reflections of those who want to remain neutral and look with detachment and almost disinterest at what is happening around them. But if we deepen our knowledge of the facts and document them, relying on authoritative and objective sources, we discover that doubts and perplexities soon become disturbing certainties.

Even if we only want to limit our investigation to the economic aspect, we understand that news agencies, politics and public institutions themselves depend on a small number of financial groups belonging to an oligarchy that, significantly, is united not only by money and power, but by the ideological affiliation that guides its action and interference in the politics of nations and the whole world. This oligarchy shows its tentacles in the UN, NATO, the World Economic Forum, the European Union, and in “philanthropic” institutions such as George Soros’ _Open Society_and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

All these entities are private and answer to no one but themselves, and at the same time they have the power to influence national governments, including through their own representatives who are made to be elected or appointed to key posts. They admit it themselves, when they are received with all the honors by Heads of State and world leaders, beginning with Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi (here), respected and feared by these leaders as the true masters of the fate of the world. Thus, those who hold power in the name of the “people” find themselves trampling on the people’s will and restricting their rights, in order to be obedient like courtiers to masters whom nobody has elected but who nevertheless dictate their political and economic agenda to the nations.

We come then to the Ukraine crisis, which is presented to us as a consequence of Vladimir Putin’s expansionist arrogance towards an independent and democratic nation over which he is trying to claim absurd rights. The “warmonger Putin” is said to be massacring the defenseless population, who have courageously arisen to defend the soil of their homeland, the sacred borders of their nation and the violated freedoms of the citizens. The European Union and the United States, “defenders of democracy,” are therefore said to be unable not to intervene by means of NATO to restore Ukraine’s autonomy, drive out the “invader” and guarantee peace. In the face of the “tyrant’s arrogance,” it is said that the peoples of the world ought to form a common front, imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation and sending soldiers, weapons and economic aid to “poor” President Zelensky, “national hero” and “defender” of his people. As proof of Putin’s “violence,” the media spread images of bombings, military searches, and destruction, attributing responsibility to Russia. And there’s still more: precisely in order to guarantee a “lasting peace,” the European Union and NATO are opening wide their arms to welcome Ukraine as members. And in order to prevent “Soviet propaganda”, Europe is now blacking out Russia Today and Sputnik, in order to ensure that information is “free and independent.”

This is the official narrative, to which everyone conforms. Being at war, dissent immediately becomes desertion, and those who dissent are guilty of treason and deserving of more or less serious sanctions, starting with public execration and ostracism, well experienced with Covid against those who are “un-vaxxed”. But the truth, if you want to know it, allows us to see things differently and to judge the facts for what they are and not for how they are presented to us. This is a true and proper unveiling, as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word ἀλήθεια. Or perhaps, with an eschatological gaze, a revelation, an ἀποκάλυψις.

The expansion of NATO

First of all, it is necessary to remember the facts, which do not lie and are not susceptible to alteration. And the facts, however irritating they are to recall to those who try to censor them, tell us that since the fall of the Berlin Wall the United States has extended its sphere of political and military influence to almost all the satellite states of the former Soviet Union, even recently, annexing into NATO Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary (1999); Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania (2004); Albania and Croatia (2009); Montenegro (2017); and North Macedonia (2020). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is preparing to expand to Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. Practically speaking, the Russian Federation is under military threat – from weapons and missile bases – just a few kilometers from its borders, while it has no military base in similar proximity to the United States.

To be considering the possible expansion of NATO into Ukraine, without thinking that it will arouse Russia’s legitimate protests, is nothing short of puzzling, especially given the fact that in 1991 NATO pledged to the Kremlin not to expand further. Not only that: at the end of 2021, Der Spiegel published drafts of a treaty with the United States and an agreement with NATO on security guarantees (here, here and here). Moscow demanded legal guarantees from its Western partners that would prevent NATO from further eastward expansion by adding Ukraine to the alliance and also from establishing military bases in post-Soviet countries. The proposals also contained a clause on the non-deployment of offensive weapons by NATO near Russia’s borders and on the withdrawal of NATO forces in Eastern Europe back to their 1997 positions.

As we can see, NATO has failed to keep its commitments to Russia, or has at least forced the situation at a very delicate moment for geopolitical balances. We should ask ourselves why the United States – or rather the American _deep state_which regained power after the electoral fraud that brought Joe Biden to the White House – wants to create tensions with Russia and involve its European partners in the conflict, with all the consequences we can imagine.

As General Marco Bertolini, former commander of the Joint Summit Operational Command, has lucidly observed: “The United States did not just win the Cold War but also wanted to humiliate [Russia] by taking everything that in a certain sense fell within its area of influence. [Putin] bore with the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria [joining NATO]. Faced with Ukraine [joining NATO], which would have taken away any possibility of access to the Black Sea, he reacted” (here). And he adds: “There is a problem of the regime’s stability, a situation has arisen with a fairly unlikely prime minister [Zelensky], one who comes from the world of entertainment.” The general does not fail to recall, in the case of a US attack on Russia, that “the Global Hawks flying over Ukraine depart from Sigonella [Italy]; Italy is an American military base in large part. The risk is there, it is present and real” (here).

Interests arising from the blockade of Russian gas supplies

We should also ask ourselves whether, behind the destabilization of the delicate balance between the European Union and Russia, there are also economic interests, deriving from the need of EU countries to obtain American liquid gas (for which we also need the regasification plants which many nations are deprived of, and for which in any case we will have to pay much more) instead of Russian gas (which is more ecological).

The decision of Italian oil and gas company ENI to suspend investments in Gazprom’s Blue Stream pipeline (from Russia to Turkey) also entails the deprivation of an additional source of supply, since it feeds the Trans-Atlantic Pipeline (from Turkey to Italy).

It therefore does not sound like a coincidence if, in August 2021, Zelensky declared that he considered the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany as “a dangerous weapon, not only for Ukraine but for all of Europe” (here): bypassing Ukraine, it deprives Kiev of about one billion euros per year in revenue from transit tariffs. “We view this project exclusively through the prism of security and consider it a dangerous geopolitical weapon of the Kremlin”“ the Ukrainian president said, agreeing with the Biden administration. American Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said: “If Russia invades Ukraine, Nord Stream 2 will not go forward.” And so it has happened, not without serious economic damage to German investments.

The Pentagon’s virological laboratories in Ukraine

Still on the subject of American interests in Ukraine, it is worth mentioning the virological laboratories located in Ukraine which are under the control of the Pentagon and where it seems that only US specialists with diplomatic immunity are employed directly under the American Ministry of Defense.

We should also remember the complaint made by Putin regarding the collection of genomic data about the population, which can be used for bacteriological weapons with genetic selection (here, here and here). Information about the activity of laboratories in Ukraine is obviously difficult to confirm, but it is understandable that the Russian Federation considered, not without reason, that these laboratories could constitute an additional bacteriological threat to the safety of the population. The U.S. Embassy has removed all files related to the Biological Threat Reduction Program from its website (here).

Maurizio Blondet writes: “Event 201, which simulated the pandemic explosion a year before it happened, was attended (along with the usuals, Bill and Melinda) by the apparently inoffensive John Hopkins University with its blessed Center for Health Security. The humanitarian institution had for a long time a less innocent name: it was called Center for Civilian Biodefence Strategies and did not deal with the health of Americans, but rather with its opposite: the response to military attacks of bio-terrorism. It was practically a civil-military organization. When it held its first conference in February 1999 in Crystal City in Arlington [Virginia], where the Pentagon is located, it brought together 950 doctors, military personnel, federal officials and health officials to participate in a simulation exercise. The aim of the simulation is to counter an imagined “militarized” smallpox attack. It is only the first of the exercises that will blossom in Event 201 and in the Pandemic Imposture” (here).

Experiments also emerge on the Ukrainian military (here) and interventions by the American Embassy regarding the Ukrainian Prosecutor Lutsenko in 2016 so that he would not investigate “a billionaire round of funds between G. Soros and B. Obama” (here).

An indirect threat to China’s expansionist ambitions on Taiwan

The current Ukrainian crisis entails secondary, but no less serious, consequences on the geopolitical balance between China and Taiwan. Russia and Ukraine are the only producers of palladium and neon, which are indispensable for the production of microchips.

“Moscow’s possible retaliation has attracted more attention in recent days after market research group Techcet published a report highlighting the dependence of many semiconductor manufacturers on materials of Russian and Ukrainian origin such as neon, palladium and others. According to Techcet’s estimates, more than 90% of U.S. supplies of semiconductor neon come from Ukraine, while 35% of U.S. palladium comes from Russia. […] According to the US International Trade Commission, neon prices rose by 600% before Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014, because chip companies relied on some Ukrainian companies” (here).

“If it is true that a Chinese invasion of Formosa would put the global technology supply chain at risk, it is also true that a sudden shortage of raw materials from Russia could stop production, so as to make the island lose the “microchip shield” and induce Beijing to attempt the annexation of Taipei.”

The Biden’s’ conflict of interest in Ukraine

Another issue that we tend not to analyze in depth is that related to Burisma, an oil and gas company operating on the Ukrainian market since 2002. Recall that “during the American presidency of Barack Obama (from 2009 to 2017) his right hand man with a “delegation” to handle international politics was Joe Biden, and it is since then that the “protection’ offered by the Democrat US leader was given to Ukrainian nationalists, a line that created the irreconcilable disagreement between Kiev and Moscow. […] It was Joe Biden in those years who carried out the policy of bringing Ukraine closer to NATO. He wanted to take away political and economic power from Russia. […] In recent years, Joe Biden’s name has also been associated with a scandal over Ukraine that had also shaken his candidacy. […] It was April 2014 when Burisma Holdings, the largest energy company in Ukraine (active in both gas and oil), hired Hunter Biden as a consultant […] with a salary of $50,000 a month. All transparent, except that during those months Joe Biden continued the American policy aimed at regaining possession by Ukraine of those areas of the Donbass that have now become Republics recognized by Russia. The Donetsk area is believed to be rich in unexplored gas fields that have been targeted by Burisma Holdings. An international policy intertwined with the economic one that made the American media turn up their noses in those years” (here).

Democrats claimed that Trump had created a media scandal to harm Biden’s campaign, but his accusations turned out to be true. Joe Biden himself, during a meeting at the Rockefeller Council for Foreign Relations, admitted to having intervened on then-President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arsenij Yatseniuk to prevent investigations into his son Hunter by Procurator General Viktor Shokin. Biden had threatened “to withhold a billion dollars loan guarantee in the United States during a December 2015 trip to Kiev,” reports the New York Post. (here). “If [the Procurator General Shokin] is not fired, you will not have the money” (here e here). And the Prosecutor was effectively fired, saving Hunter from further scandal, after those involving him.

Biden’s interference in Kiev politics, in exchange for favors to Burisma and corrupt oligarchs, confirms the current US President’s interest in protecting his family and image, fueling disorder in Ukraine and even a war. How can a person who uses his role to take care of his own interests and cover up the crimes of his family members govern honestly and without being subject to blackmail?

The Ukrainian nuclear question

Finally, there is the issue of Ukrainian nuclear weapons. On February 19, 2022, at a conference in Munich, Zelensky announced his intention to end the Budapest Memorandum (1994), which prohibits Ukraine from developing, proliferating and using atomic weapons. Among the other clauses of the Memorandum, there is also the one that obliges Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom to refrain from using economic pressure on Ukraine to influence its policy: the pressure of the IMF and the United States to grant economic aid in exchange for reforms consistent with the Great Reset represent a further violation of the agreement.

The Ukrainian Ambassador in Berlin, Andriy Melnyk, argued on Deutschlandfunk radio in 2021 that Ukraine needed to regain nuclear status if the country failed to join NATO. Ukraine’s nuclear power plants are operated, rebuilt and maintained by the state-owned enterprise NAEK Energoatom, which completely ended its relationship with Russian companies between 2018 and 2021. Its main partners are companies that can be traced back to the US government. It is easy to understand how the Russian Federation considers the possibility of Ukraine acquiring nuclear weapons as a threat and demands Kiev’s adherence to the non-proliferation pact.

The color revolution in Ukraine and the independence of Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk

Another fact. In 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych decided to suspend the association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union and to forge closer economic relations with Russia, a series of protest demonstrations known as Euromaidan began, which lasted several months and culminated in the revolution that overthrew Yanukovych and led to the installation of a new government. It was an operation sponsored by George Soros, as he candidly told CNN: “I have had a foundation in Ukraine since before it became independent of Russia; this foundation has always been in business and has played a decisive role in today’s events” (here, here and here). This change of government provoked the reaction of Yanukovych’s supporters and of a part of the Ukrainian population opposed to the pro-Western shift of Ukraine, which had not been wanted by the population but was obtained by a color revolution, of which there had been general rehearsals in previous years in Georgia, Moldova and Belarus.

Following the clashes of May 2, 2014, in which nationalist paramilitary fringes (including those of Pravyi Sektor) also intervened, there was also the massacre in Odessa. The Western press also spoke of these terrible events in a scandalized way; Amnesty International (here) and the UN denounced these crimes and documented their brutality. But no international court initiated any proceedings against those responsible, as is intended to be done today against the alleged crimes of the Russian army.

Among the many agreements not respected is also the Minsk Protocol, signed on September 5, 2014 by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, composed of representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic. Among the points of the agreement was also the removal of armed illegal groups, military equipment, as well as fighters and mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine under the supervision of the OSCE and the disarmament of all illegal groups. Contrary to what was agreed, neo-Nazi paramilitary groups are not only officially recognized by the government, but their members are even given official assignments.

Also in 2014, Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk declared their independence from Ukraine – in the name of self-determination of peoples recognized by the international community – and declared themselves annexed to the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian government still refuses to recognize the independence of these regions, sanctioned by popular referendum, and leaves the neo-Nazi militias and the regular military forces themselves free to rage against the population, since it considers these entities as terrorist organizations. It is true that the two referendums of November 2, 2014 constitute a stretching of the Minsk Protocol, which provided only for a decentralization of power and a form of special status for the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

As Professor Franco Cardini recently pointed out, “on February 15, 2022, Russia delivered to the United States a draft of a treaty to end this situation and defend the Russian-speaking populations. Wastepaper. This war began in 2014” (here and here). And it was a war in the intentions of those who wanted to fight the Russian minority of Donbass: “We will have a job and pensions, and they will not. We will receive bonuses for having children, and they will not. Our children will have schools and kindergartens; their children will stay in the basements. In this way we will win this war,” said President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 (here). It will not escape notice that these measures are similar to the discrimination against the so-called “un-vaxxed,” who have been deprived of work, pay and education. Eight years of bombing in Donetsk and Lugansk, with hundreds of thousands of victims, 150 dead children, and very serious cases of torture, rape, kidnapping and discrimination (here).

On February 18, 2022 the Presidents of Donetsk and Lugansk, Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik, ordered the evacuation of the civilian population of their provinces into the Russian Federation due to the ongoing clashes between the Donbass People’s Militia and the Ukrainian Armed Forces. On February 21, the State Duma (Lower House of the Russian Parliament) unanimously ratified the treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance introduced by President Putin with the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. At the same time, the Russian President ordered the sending of troops from the Russian Federation to restore peace in the Donbass region.

Here one may wonder why, in a situation of blatant violation of human rights by neo-Nazi military forces and paramilitary apparatuses (who fly flags bearing swastikas and display the effigy of Aldolf Hitler) against the Russian-speaking population of the independent republics, the international community feels obliged to consider the intervention of the Russian Federation worthy of condemnation, and indeed to blame Putin for the violence. Where is the much-vaunted right of the people to self-determination, which was held valid on August 24, 1991 for the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence and recognized by the international community? And why are we scandalized today by a Russian intervention in Ukraine, when NATO carried out the same sort of thing in Yugoslavia (1991), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), and in Libya and Syria (2011), without anyone raising any objections? Not to mention that in the last ten years Israel has repeatedly hit military targets in Syria, Iran and Lebanon to prevent the creation of a hostile armed front on its northern border, and yet no nation has proposed imposing sanctions on Tel Aviv.

It is dismaying to see with what hypocrisy the European Union and the United States – Brussels and Washington – are giving their unconditional support to President Zelensky, whose government for eight years now has continued to persecute Russian-speaking Ukrainians with impunity (here), for whom it is even forbidden to speak in their own language, in a nation that includes numerous ethnic groups, of which those who speak Russian represent 17.2%. And it is scandalous that they are silent about the use of civilians as human shields by the Ukrainian army, which places anti-aircraft positions inside population centers, hospitals, schools and kindergartens precisely so that their destruction can cause deaths among the population.

The mainstream media is careful not to show images of Russian soldiers helping civilians reach safe positions (here and here) or organizing humanitarian corridors, which Ukrainian militias fire upon (here and here). Just as it is also silent about the settling of scores, massacres, violence and theft by fringes of the civilian population, to whom Zelensky has given weapons: the videos that can be seen on the internet give an idea of the climate of civil war that has been artfully fueled by the Ukrainian Government. To this we may also add the convicts released to be drafted into the Army and also the volunteers of the foreign legion: a mass of fanatics without rules and without training that will contribute to worsening the situation, making it unmanageable.

President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelensky

As has been pointed out by many parties, the candidacy and election of Ukrainian President Zelensky corresponds to that recent cliché, inaugurated in recent years, of a comic actor or entertainment personality being lent to politics. Do not believe that being without a suitable cursus honorum is an obstacle to the rising to the top of institutions; on the contrary: the more a person is apparently a stranger to the world of political parties, the more it is to be assumed that his success is determined by those who hold power. Zelensky’s performances in drag are perfectly consistent with the LGBTQ ideology that is considered by its European sponsors as an indispensable requirement of the “reform” agenda that every country ought to embrace, along with gender equality, abortion and the green economy. No wonder Zelensky, a member of the WEF (here), was able to benefit from the support of Schwab and his allies to come to power and ensure that the Great Reset would also be carried out in Ukraine.

The 57-part television series that Zelensky produced and starred in, demonstrates that the media planned his candidacy for President of Ukraine and his election campaign. In the fiction show The Servant of the People he played the part of a high school teacher who unexpectedly became President of the Republic and fought against the corruption of politics. It is no coincidence that the series, which was absolutely mediocre, still won the WorldFest Remi Award (USA, 2016), came among the top four finalists in the category of comedy films at the Seoul International Drama Awards (South Korea) and was awarded the Intermedia Globe Silver award in the entertainment TV series category at the World Media Film Festival in Hamburg.

The media stir obtained by Zelensky with the television series brought him over 10 million followers on Instagram and created the premise for the establishment of the homonymous Servant of the People political party, of which Ivan Bakanov, General Manager and shareholder (along with Zelensky himself and the oligarch Kolomoisky) of Kvartal 95 Studio, and the owner of the TV 1+1 television network, is also a member. Zelensky’s image is an artificial product, a media fiction, an operation of manipulation of consensus that has managed to create the political character in the Ukrainian collective imagination that in reality, and not in fiction, has conquered power.

“Just one month before the 2019 elections that saw him win, Zelensky sold the company [Kvartal 95 Studio] to a friend, still finding a way to get the proceeds of the business he had officially renounced to his family. That friend was Serhiy Shefir, who was later appointed Councilor to the Presidency. […] The sale of the shares took place for the benefit of Maltex Multicapital Corp., a company owned by Shefir and registered in the British Virgin Islands” (here).

The current Ukrainian President promoted his election campaign with a commercial that was disturbing, to say the least (here), in which, holding two machine guns, he fired on members of Parliament, pointed out as corrupt or subservient to Russia. The fight against corruption trumpeted by the Ukrainian President in the role of “servant of the people” does not correspond, however, to the picture that emerges of him from the so-called Pandora papers, in which 40 million dollars appear to have been paid to him on the eve of the elections by the Jewish billionaire Kolomoisky[1] through offshore accounts (here, here and here).[2] In his homeland, many accuse him of having taken power away from the pro-Russian oligarchs not to give it to the Ukrainian people, but rather to strengthen his own interest group and at the same time remove his political adversaries: “He liquidated the ministers of the old guard, first of all the powerful Minister of the Interior, [Arsen] Avakov. He rudely retired the president of the Constitutional Court who was acting as a check on his laws. He closed seven opposition TV channels. He arrested and accused of treason Viktor Medvedcuk, a pro-Russian sympathizer but above all the leader of the Platform of Opposition – For Life party, the second party of the Ukrainian Parliament after his Servant of the People party. He is also placing on trial for treason former President Poroshenko, who was suspicious of everyone except for those who got along with the Russians or their friends. The mayor of Kiev, the popular former world boxing champion Vitaly Klitchko, has already been subjected to several searches and seizures. In short, Zelensky seems to want to make a clean sweep of anyone who is not aligned with his politics” (here).

On April 21, 2019, Zelensky was elected President of Ukraine with 73.22% of the votes, and on May 20 he was sworn in. On May 22, 2019 he appointed Ivan Bakanov, Director General of Kvartal 95, as First Deputy Head of the Security Services of Ukraine and Head of the Main Directorate for the Fight against Corruption and Organized Crime of the Central Directorate of the Security Service of Ukraine. Along with Bakanov, it is worth mentioning Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice President and Minister of Digital Transformation, a member of the World Economic Forum (here). Zelensky himself has admitted to having as his inspiration the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau (here and here).

Il 21 aprile 2019 è eletto Presidente dell’Ucraina con il 73,22% dei voti e il 20 maggio presta giuramento; il 22 maggio 2019 nomina Ivan Bakanov, Direttore Generale della Kvartal 95, primo vicecapo dei Servizi di Sicurezza dell’Ucraina e Capo della Direzione principale per la lotta contro la corruzione e il crimine organizzato della Direzione centrale del Servizio di Sicurezza dell’Ucraina. Assieme a Bakanov, è da menzionare Mykhailo Fedorov, Vicepresidente e Ministro della Trasformazione Digitale, membro del World Economic Forum (qui). Lo stesso Zelenskyj ha ammesso di avere come proprio ispiratore il Primo Ministro del Canada Justin Trudeau (qui e qui).

Zelensky’s relations with the IMF and the WEF

As Greece’s tragic precedent has shown, national sovereignties and the popular will expressed by parliaments are de facto erased by the decisions of international high finance, which interferes with government policies by means of blackmail and outright extortion of an economic nature. The case of Ukraine, which is one of the poorest countries in Europe, is no exception.

Shortly after Zelensky’s election, the International Monetary Fund threatened not to grant Ukraine a $5 billion loan if he did not comply with their demands. During a telephone conversation with the CEO of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, the Ukrainian President was rebuked for replacing Yakiv Smolii with a man he trusted, Kyrylo Shevchenko, who was less inclined to comply with the diktats of the IMF. Anders Åslund writes at Atlantic Council: “The problems surrounding the Zelensky government are mounting alarmingly. First of all, since March 2020, the President has led a reversal not only of the reforms pursued under him, but also those initiated by his predecessor Petro Poroshenko. Second, his government has not presented plausible proposals to resolve IMF concerns about Ukraine’s unfulfilled commitments. Third, the President appears to no longer have a ruling parliamentary majority, and he seems disinterested in forming a reformist majority (here).

It is evident that the IMF’s interventions are aimed at obtaining the Ukrainian government’s commitment to align itself with the economic, fiscal and social policies dictated by the globalist agenda, beginning with the “independence” of the Central Bank of Ukraine from the government: a euphemism with which the IMF calls on the Kiev government to renounce legitimate control over its Central Bank, which is one of the ways in which national sovereignty is exercised, along with the issuance of money and the management of public debt. On the other hand, just four months earlier Kristalina Georgieva had launched the Great Reset together with Klaus Schwab, Prince Charles and UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

What had not been possible with previous governments was brought to completion under the presidency of Zelensky, who entered the good graces of the WEF (here) along with the new Governor of the BCU, Kyrylo Shevchenko. Less than a year later, in order to prove his subjection, Shevchenko wrote an article for the WEF entitled Central banks are the key to countries’ climate goals and Ukraine is showing the way (here). Thus the Agenda 2030 is implemented, under blackmail.

There are also other Ukrainian companies that have ties to the WEF: the State Savings Bank of Ukraine (one of the largest financial institutions in Ukraine), the DTEK Group (an important private investor in the Ukrainian energy sector) and Ukr Land Farming (an agricultural leader in cultivation). Banks, energy and food are sectors perfectly in line with the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution theorized by Klaus Schwab.

On February 4, 2021, the Ukrainian president shut down seven television stations, including ZIK, Newsone and 112 Ukraine, all guilty of not supporting his government. As Anna Del Freo writes: “A harsh condemnation of this liberticidal act has arrived, among others, also from the European Federation of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, who have asked for the immediate lifting of the veto. The three broadcasters will no longer be able to broadcast for five years: they employ about 1500 people, whose jobs are now at risk. There is no real reason why the three networks should be shut down, except for the arbitrariness of the Ukrainian political apex, which accuses them of threatening information security and being under “malign Russian influence.” A strong reaction also comes from NUJU, the Ukrainian journalists’ union, which speaks of a very heavy attack on freedom of speech, given that hundreds of journalists are being deprived of the opportunity to express themselves and hundreds of thousands of citizens are being deprived of the right to be informed. As we can see, what Putin is accused of was actually carried out by Zelensky and, more recently, by the European Union, with the complicity of social media platforms. “Shutting down television broadcasters is one of the most extreme forms of restriction of the freedom of the press,” said EFJ Secretary General Ricardo Gutierrez. “Nations have an obligation to ensure effective pluralism of information. It is clear that the presidential veto is not at all in line with international standards on freedom of expression” (here).

It would be interesting to know what statements were made by the European Federation of Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists after the blackout of Russia Today and Sputnik in Europe.

Neo-nazi and extremist movements in Ukraine

A country that calls for humanitarian aid from the international community to defend its population from Russian aggression should, in the collective imagination, stand out for respect for democratic principles and for legislation that prohibits activities and the spread of propaganda by extremist ideologies.

Neo-Nazi movements engaged in military and paramilitary actions operate freely in Ukraine, often with the official support of public institutions. These include the following: Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a movement with a Nazi, anti-Semitic and racist matrix already active in Chechnya and which is part of the Right Sector, an association of far-right movements formed at the time of the Euromaidan coup in 2013/2014; the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA); the UNA/UNSO, paramilitary wing of the far-right political party Ukraine National Assembly; the Korchinsky Brotherhood, which offered protection in Kiev to ISIS members (here); Misanthropic Vision (MD), a neo-Nazi network spread across 19 countries that publicly incites terrorism, extremism and hatred against Christians, Muslims, Jews, Communists, homosexuals, Americans and people of color (here).

It should be remembered that the government has given explicit support to these extremist organizations both by sending the presidential guard to the funerals of their representatives, as well as by supporting the Azov Battalion, a paramilitary organization that is officially part of the Ukrainian Army under the new name of Azov Special Operations Regiment and organized into the National Guard. The Azov Regiment is financed by the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, the former governor of Dnepropetrovsk, who is also thought to be the financier of the nationalist militias of Pravyi Sektor, which are considered responsible for the Odessa massacre. We are talking about the same Kolomoisky mentioned in the Pandora Papers as a sponsor of President Zelensky. The battalion has relations with several far-right organizations in Europe and the United States.

Amnesty International, after a meeting on September 8, 2014 between Secretary General Salil Shetty and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, called on the Ukrainian Government to end the abuses and war crimes committed by the volunteer battalions that operate together with the Kiev Armed Forces. The Ukrainian government has opened an official investigation into the matter, declaring that no officers or soldiers of the Azov Battalion appear to be under investigation.

In March 2015, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Battalion would be one of the first units to be trained by US Army troops, as part of their Operation Fearless Guard training mission. US training was discontinued on June 12, 2015, when the US House of Representatives passed an amendment banning all aid (including weapons and training) to the battalion because of its neo-Nazi past. The amendment was then revoked under pressure from the CIA (here and here) and the soldiers of the Azov Battalion were trained in the United States (here and here): “We have been training these guys for eight years now. They are really good fighters. That’s where the Agency’s program could have a serious impact.”

In 2016, an OSCE report [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] found that the Azov Battalion was responsible for the mass killing of prisoners, the concealment of corpses in mass graves and the systematic use of physical and psychological torture techniques. Just a few days ago the Deputy Commander of the Battalion, Vadim Troyan, was appointed Chief of Police of the Oblast Region by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

These are the “heroes” fighting together with the Ukrainian Army against the Russian soldiers. And these heroes of the Azov Battalion, instead of protecting their children, dare to make their own flesh into meat for slaughter, enlisting boys and girls (here and here), in violation of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (here), concerning the involvement of minors in armed conflicts: an ad hoc legal instrument that establishes that no child under 18 is to be forcibly recruited or used directly in hostilities, either by the armed forces of a state nor by armed groups.

Inevitably, the lethal weapons provided by the EU, including Draghi’s Italy, with the support of “anti-fascist” political parties, are destined to be used against these children.

The Ukrainian war in the plans of the NWO

The censorship being imposed against Russian broadcasters is clearly aimed at preventing the official narrative from being disproven by the facts. But while the Western media shows images of the video game War Thunder (here), frames from the movie Star Wars (here), explosions in China (here), videos of military parades (here), footage from Afghanistan (here), the Rome metro (here) or images of mobile crematoria (here) by passing them off as real and recent scenes of the war in Ukraine, reality is ignored because it has already been decided to provoke a conflict as a weapon of mass distraction that legitimizes new restrictions of freedoms in Western nations, according to the plans of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset and the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.

It is evident that the Ukrainian people, beyond the issues that diplomacy can resolve, are victims of the same global coup d’état being carried out by supranational powers that intend, not peace between nations, but rather the establishment of the tyranny of the New World Order. Just a few days ago, Ukrainian parliamentarian Kira Rudik told Fox News, while holding a kalashnikov: “We know that we are not only fighting for Ukraine, but also for the New World Order.”

The human rights violations in Ukraine and the crimes of the neo-Nazi militias repeatedly denounced by Putin could not find a political solution because they were planned and fomented by the globalist elite, with the collaboration of the European Union, NATO and the American deep state, with an anti-Russian tone intended to make inevitable a war whose goal is to impose, primarily in Europe, the forced adoption of energy rationing (here),[3] travel restrictions, the replacement of paper money with electronic money (here and here) and the adoption of digital ID (here and here). We are not talking about theoretical projects. These are decisions that are about to be taken concretely at the European level as well as in individual countries.

Respect for the Law and Standards

The intervention in Ukraine by NATO, the United States, and the European Union does not appear to have any legitimacy. Ukraine is not a member of NATO, and as such it should not benefit from the assistance of an entity whose purpose is the defense of its member nations. The same can be said of the European Union, which just a few days ago invited Zelensky to join it. In the meantime, Ukraine has received $2.5 billion from the United States since 2014 and another $400 million in 2021 alone (here), plus other funds for a total of $4.6 billion dollars (here). For his part, Putin has given $15 billion in loans to Ukraine to save it from bankruptcy. The European Union, for its part, has sent $17 million in funding, in addition to funding sent from various individual nations. But this assistance has benefitted the Ukrainian population only minimally.

Furthermore, by intervening in the war in Ukraine in the name of the European Union, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is violating articles 9, 11, and 12 of the Treaty of Lisbon. The competence of the European Union in this area belongs to the European Council and the High Representative. In no case does it belong to the Commission President. In what capacity does President von der Leyen presume to act as if she were the head of the European Union, usurping a role that does not belong to her? Why does no one intervene, especially considering the danger to which European citizens are being exposed due to the possibility of Russian retaliation?

Furthermore, in many cases the constitutions of the nations that are today sending support and weapons to Ukraine do not provide for the possibility of entering into a conflict. For example, article 11 of the Italian Constitution states: “Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offense for the liberty of other peoples and as a means of resolving international controversies.” Sending weapons and soldiers to a nation that is not a part of either NATO or the European Union constitutes a de facto declaration of war on the nation belligerent with it (in this case, Russia), and should therefore require the prior deliberation of declaring war, as is foreseen by article 78 of the Italian Constitution: “The Chambers [of Parliament] deliberate on the state of war and confer the necessary powers on the government.” It does not appear that to date the Chambers have been called upon to express themselves in this sense, or that the President of the Republic has intervened to demand compliance with the constitutional provision. Prime Minister Draghi, appointed by the globalist cabal for the destruction of Italy and its definitive enslavement to supranational powers, is one of the many Heads of national governments who considers the will of the citizens as an annoying obstacle to the execution of the agenda of the World Economic Forum. After two years of systematic violations of fundamental rights and of the Constitution, it is difficult to believe that he will want to place the interests of the Italian nation ahead of the interests of those who have placed him in power. On the contrary: the more disastrous are the effects of the sanctions adopted by his government, the more he can consider himself appreciated by those who have given him power. The coup perpetrated by means of the psychopandemic emergency proceeds today with new unfortunate decisions, ratified by a Parliament without a spine.

It is also a violation of article 288 of the Italian Penal Code to permit Italian citizens – and even members of the majority in the Government and political leaders – to respond to the appeal of the Ukrainian Ambassador for enrollment in the foreign legion: “Anyone in the territory of [Italy] who without government approval enlists or arms citizens to serve [in the military] in favor of a foreign nation, is to be punished with imprisonment for a period of 4 to 15 years.” No magistrate, at least for the time being, has intervened to punish those responsible for this crime.

Another violation is found in the activity of transferring children from Ukraine to Italy (and presumably also to other nations) who have been obtained via surrogate motherhood, ordered by Italian couples in violation of Law 40/2004, without any penalty being imposed on those guilty of this crime, as well as their accomplices.

It should also be remembered that the utterances of members of the Government or of political leaders with regard to the Russian Federation and its President, along with the sanctions that have been adopted against Russia and the repeated instances of arbitrary discrimination against Russian citizens, companies, artists, and sports teams for the sole fact of being Russian, are not only provocations that ought to be avoided in order to allow for a serene and peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis, but also place the safety of Italian citizens in very serious danger (as well as the safety of citizens of other nations who are adopting a similar stance toward Russia). The reason for such rash temerity is incomprehensible, unless there is an intentional desire to trigger reactions from the opposing party.

The Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a very dangerous trap that has been set against Ukraine, Russia, and the nations of Europe.

Ukraine is the latest victim of accomplished executioners

The Russian-Ukrainian crisis did not suddenly erupt a month ago. It has been prepared and fomented for a long time, certainly beginning with the 2014 white coup that was desired by the American deep state in an anti-Russian key. This is demonstrated, among other incontestable facts, by the training of the Azov Battalion by the CIA “to kill Russians” (here), with the CIA forcing the revocation of the amendment banning aid to the battalion made by Congress in 2015. The interventions made by Joe and Hunter Biden have gone in the same direction. Thus there is evidence of long-term premeditation, consistent with NATO’s relentless expansion towards the East. The Color Revolution of Euromaidan, as well as the establishment of a pro-NATO government composed of homines novi trained by the _World Economic Forum_and George Soros, was intended to create the conditions for the subordination of Ukraine to the NATO bloc, removing it from the influence of the Russian Federation. To this end, the subversive action of the Hungarian philanthropist’s NGOs, supported by media propaganda, has kept silent about the crimes of neo-Nazi paramilitary organizations, financed by the same people who sponsor Zelensky.

But if the brainwashing carried out by the mainstream media in Western nations has succeeded in conveying a completely distorted narrative of reality, the same cannot be said for Ukraine, where the population is well aware of the corruption of the political class in power as well as of its remoteness from the real problems of the Ukrainian nation. We in the West believe that the “oligarchs” are only in Russia, while the reality is that they are present above all throughout the entire galaxy of nations that formerly composed the Soviet Union, where they can accumulate wealth and power simply by placing themselves at the disposition of foreign “philanthropists” and multinational corporations. It matters little if their offshore accounts are the primary cause of the poverty of the citizens of these nations, the backwardness of the health care system, the excessive power of the bureaucracy, the almost total absence of public services, foreign control of strategic companies, and the progressive loss of sovereignty and national identity: the important thing is to “make money” and be immortalized along with political personalities, bankers, arms dealers, and those who starve the people. And then to come to the fashionable resorts of Versilia or the Amalfi Coast to flaunt their yachts and platinum cards to the waiter from Odessa or the cleaning lady from Kiev who send their paltry wages to their relatives back home. These Ukrainian billionaires wearing kippahs are those who are selling out Ukraine to the corrupted and corrupting West, trading their own well-being for the enslavement of their compatriots to the usurers who are taking over the world, using the same ruthless and immoral systems everywhere. In the past they cut the salaries of workers in Athens and Thessaloniki; today they have simply enlarged their horizons to the whole of Europe, where the population still looks on incredulously while first a health dictatorship and then an environmental dictatorship is being imposed.

On the other hand, without the pretext of a war, how would they have been able to justify the soaring price of gas and fuels, forcing the process of an “ecological” transition imposed from on high in order to control the impoverished masses? How could they have made the peoples of the Western world swallow the establishment of the tyranny of the New World Order, when the pandemic farce was unraveling and bringing to light crimes against humanity committed by BigPharma?

And while the EU and heads of government blame Russia for the impending disaster, the Western elites demonstrate that they even want to destroy agriculture, in order to apply the horrors of the Holodomor on a global scale (here). On the other hand, in many nations (including Italy) the privatization of waterways is being theorized – and water is an inalienable public good – for the advantage of multinationals and with the aim of controlling and limiting agriculture activities. The pro-NATO government of Kiev did not behave much differently: for eight years the Crimea was deprived of water from the Dnieper River in order to prevent the irrigation of the fields and starve the people. Today, in light of the sanctions being imposed on Russia and the huge reduction of grain supplies, we can understand Bill Gates’ enormous investments in agriculture (here), following the same ruthless profit-making logic already experienced with the vaccine campaign.

The Ukrainian people, regardless of what ethnic group they may belong to, are merely the latest unwitting hostages of the supranational totalitarian regime that brought the national economies of the entire world to their knees through the Covid deception, after publicly theorizing about the need to decimate the world population and transform the survivors into chronically ill patients who have irreparably compromised their immune systems.

The Ukrainian people should think hard about calling upon the intervention of NATO or the EU, provided that it is really the Ukrainian people who do it and not rather their corrupt rulers aided by racist mercenaries and neo-nazi groups in the pay of hierarchs. Because while they are promised freedom from the invader – with whom they share the common religious and cultural heritage of having once been part of Great Russia – in reality what is cynically being prepared is their definitive cancellation, their enslavement to the Great Reset that foresees everything except the protection of their identity, their sovereignty, and their borders.

Let the Ukrainian people look at what has happened to the nations of the European Union: the mirage of prosperity and security is demolished by the contemplation of the rubble left by the euro and the lobbies of Brussels. Nations invaded by illegal immigrants who feed crime and prostitution; destroyed in their social fabric by politically correct ideologies; knowingly brought to bankruptcy by reckless economic and fiscal policies; led towards poverty by the cancellation of labor and social security protections; deprived of a future by the destruction of the family and the moral and intellectual corruption of the new generations.

What were once prosperous and independent nations, diverse in their respective ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious specificities, have now been transformed into a shapeless mass of people without ideals, without hopes, without faith, without even the strength to react against the abuses and crimes of those who govern them. A mass of corporate customers, slaves of the system of detailed control imposed by the pandemic farce, even in the face of evidence of the fraud. A mass of persons without individual identity, marked with QR codes like animals on an intensive farm, like products of a huge shopping center. If this has been the result of the renunciation of national sovereignty for all the nations – every single one, without exception! – that have entrusted themselves to the colossal scam of the European Union, why would Ukraine be any different?

Is this what your fathers wanted, what they hoped for, what they desired, when they received Baptism along with Vladimir the Great on the banks of the Dnieper?

If there is a positive aspect that each of us can recognize in this crisis, it is that it has revealed the horror of the globalist tyranny, its ruthless cynicism, its capacity to destroy and annihilate everything it touches. It is not the Ukrainians who ought to enter the European Union or NATO, it is rather the other nations who ought to finally be jolted by pride and courage to leave them, shaking off this detestable yoke and rediscovering their own independence, sovereignty, identity, and faith. Their own souls.

To be clear: the New Order is not an inescapable destiny, and it can be subverted and denounced, if only the peoples of the world realize that they have been deceived and swindled by an oligarchy of clearly identifiable criminals, who one day will have to answer for those sanctions and those blocks of funds that today they apply with impunity to anyone who does not bend the knee before them.

An appeal to the Third Rome

For Russia too, this conflict is a trap. This is because it would fulfill the dream of the American deep state to definitively oust Russia from the European context in its commercial and cultural relations, pushing it into the arms of China, perhaps with the hope that the dictatorship in Beijing can persuade the Russians to accept the system of social credit and other aspects of the Great Reset that thus far Russia has been able to avoid, at least in part.

It is a trap, not because Russia is wrong in wanting to “denazify” Ukraine of its extremist groups and guarantee protection to Russian-speaking Ukrainians, but because it is precisely these reasons – theoretically tenable – that were created specifically to provoke it and induce it to invade Ukraine, in such a way as to provoke the NATO reaction that has been prepared for some time by the deep state and the globalist elite. The casus belli was deliberately planned by the real perpetrators of the conflict, knowing that it would obtain exactly that response from Putin. And it is up to Putin, regardless of whether he is right, not to fall into the trap, and to instead turn the tables, offering Ukraine the conditions of an honorable peace without continuing the conflict. Indeed, the more Putin believes he is right, the more he needs to demonstrate the greatness of his nation and his love for his people by not giving into provocations.

Permit me to repeat the words of the Prophet Isaiah: Dissolve colligationes impietatis, solve fasciculos deprimentes, dimitte eos qui confracti sunt liberos, et omne onus dirumpe; frange esurienti panem tuum, et egenos vagosque induc in domum tuam; cum videris nudum, operi eum, et carnem tuam ne despexeris. Tunc erumpet quasi mane lumen tuum; et sanitas tua citius orietur, et anteibit faciem tuam justitia tua, et gloria Domini colliget te.

Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the bundles that oppress, let those who are broken go free, and break asunder every burden. Share your bread with the hungry, welcome into your house the afflicted and homeless; when you see a naked man, clothe him, and do not turn your back on your own flesh. Then your light will arise like the dawn, and your wound will quickly be healed. Your justice shall go before you, the glory of the Lord will closely follow you. (Is 58:6-8).

The world crisis with which the dissolution of traditional society is being prepared has also involved the Catholic Church, whose Hierarchy is held hostage by apostates who are courtiers of power.[4] There was a time in which Popes and Prelates confronted Kings without concern for human respect, because they knew they spoke with the voice of Jesus Christ, the King of kings. The Rome of the Caesars and Popes is now deserted and silent, just as for centuries the Second Rome of Constantinople has also been silent. Perhaps Providence has ordained that Moscow, the Third Rome, will today in the sight of the world take on the role of κατέχον (2 Thess 2:6-7), of eschatological obstacle to the Antichrist. If the errors of communism were spread by the Soviet Union, even to the point of imposing themselves within the Church, Russia and Ukraine can today have an epochal role in the restoration of Christian Civilization, contributing to bringing the world a period of peace from which the Church too will rise again purified and renewed in her Ministers.

The United States of America and the European nations should not marginalize Russia, but rather form an alliance with her, not only for the restoration of trade for the prosperity of all, but in view of the reconstruction of a Christian Civilization, which alone can save the world from the globalist techno-health transhuman monster.

Final Considerations

There is great concern that the destinies of the peoples of the world is in the hands of an elite that is not accountable to anyone for its decisions, that does not recognize any authority above itself, and that in order to pursue its own interests does not hesitate to jeopardize security, the economy, and the very lives of billions of people, with the complicity of politicians in their service and the mainstream media. The falsification of facts, the grotesque adulterations of reality, and the partisanship with which the news is spread stand alongside the censorship of dissenting voices and leads to forms of ethnic persecution against Russian citizens, who are discriminated against precisely in the countries that say they are democratic and respectful of fundamental rights.

I earnestly hope that my appeal for the establishment of an Anti-Globalist Alliance that unites the peoples of the world in opposition against the tyranny of the New World Order will be accepted by those who have at heart the common good, peace between nations, concord among all peoples, freedom for all citizens and the future of the new generations. And even before that, may my words – along with those of many intellectually honest people – contribute to bringing to light the complicity and corruption of those who use lies and fraud to justify their crimes, even in these moments of great apprehension about the war in Ukraine.

“May the strong listen to us, so as not to become weak in injustice. May the powerful listen to us, if they want their power not to be destruction but support for the peoples and protection for tranquility in order and work” (Pius XII, Radio message to Heads of State and Peoples of the World in Imminent Danger of War, August 24, 1939).

May Holy Lent lead all Christians to ask pardon from the Divine Majesty for the sins of those who trample His Holy Law. May penance and fasting move the Lord God to mercy, while we repeat the words of the Prophet Joel: Parce, Domine: parce populo tuo; et ne des hæreditatem tuam in opprobrium, ut dominentur eis nationes. Forgive your people, Lord, and do not expose your inheritance to reproach, to the derision of the nations (Jl 2:17).

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop,

Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

March 6, 2022

First Sunday of Lent

[1] In 2011, Kolomoisky was one of the co-founders of the Jewish European Parliament, along with billionaire Vadim Rabinovich. Cf. http://ejp.eu/. Note that Rabinovich is a member of the Opposition Platform – For Life, the Ukrainian pro-Russian political party whose leader Viktor Medvedcuk was arrested by Zelensky.

[2] According to Russian politician Viktor Vladislavovich Zubarev, a member of the State Duma, Zelensky is also said to have $1.2 billion deposited at Dresdner Bank in Costa Rica and a villa in Miami purchased for $34 million (here). For a more comprehensive picture, see the investigation by Slidstvo-info, an independent Ukrainian agency of investigative journalism (here).

[3] It should be noted that the Italian Minister of Ecological Transition, Roberto Cingolani, decided a few days ago to sell a share of oil stocks to Ukraine “as a concrete aid also on the energy front,” exactly as during the pandemic he gave away millions of masks to China, only to then buy them back from Beijing shortly thereafter (here).

[4] In its March 6 issue, Famiglia Cristiana has a headline, commenting on an article by the founder of the Sant’Egidio Community, Andrea Riccardi: “Let’s stop the war and build a new world order” (here).

§§§

Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine's neo-Nazi terror gang C14's speech from Kiev earlier this month. Straight from the horses' mouth, he dispels the many narratives pushed by the left, the mainstream media and the State Department.

He claims:

• Ukraine is being armed as pawns of the West because "we have fun killing"
• "We have started a war"
• "We have the most Javelins on the European continent"
• The European family has already collapsed
• Maidan would've been a "gay parade" if not for Nazi influence

C14 was started as the youth wing of the Svoboda party, founded by Oleh Tyahnybok, pictured here with Biden in April 2014.

C14 signed an agreement with Kiev's city government to patrol its streets in early 2018. Months later it began a campaign of pogroms against Romani camps.

The "14" in C14 refers to 14 words coined by American neo-Nazi David Lane "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

The neo-Nazi Svoboda party was co-founded by Oleh Tahnybok & Andriy Parubiy, who served as the Chairman of Ukraine's parliament (2016-2019) and was welcomed at the US senate by Biden's foreign policy man Michael Carpenter.

Here’s a charming little piece of video.

Get to about 35 seconds when fauci funded peter daszak starts speaking in his own words about working to make SARS like viruses in animals infect humans by hotwiring their spike proteins.

This is what he says (my transcription, may have a couple minor errors, but i think it’s pretty much accurate.)

“you get a virus that looks like a relative of a known, nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS and other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS so we sequenced the spike protein, the protein that attaches to cells.

then we, well, i didn’t do this work but my colleagues in china did (he’s speaking here of wuhan institute of virology) you create pseudo-particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses to see if they bind to human cells.

each step of this you move closer and closer to “this virus could really become pathogenic in people.” so, you narrow down the field, you reduce the costs and you end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers….”

(i have downloaded this video in case it gets pulled. let me know if it does)

January 13th 2022 49 Retweets 57 Likes

this is EXACTLY what i have long said and suspected.

the work in wuhan was absolutely gain of function work. it was NOT work on weaponization. it was the mad scientist lunacy that daszak submitted to DARPA and they rejected but that fauci then funded through the NIAID.

they were making “killers” to see if they could find cures.

oopsie.

peter daszak: supervillain origin story

this was an attempt to predict what viruses MIGHT one day jump from bats to humans and to work on vaccines for them. that’s why he speaks of “narrowing down the field.”

this is literally: let’s find a possible risk and make it real. let’s see if we can add function and virulence to a pathogen until it’s a serious threat to humans and then see if we can immunize against it in case something like that ever happens one day.
talk about a self fulfilling prophesy...

they did it in china because work like this is too crazy to be allowed unsupervised in the US. (or likely allowed at all) and they broke all the rules of their grant and took to 10,000X what should have been limited to 10X (itself already extremely risky). and the NIH knew that. and they did nothing.

more:

“if you go past hotwiring viruses to produce 10X the viral load you need to tell us” that alone is a terrifying basis for a grant’s conditions. “we went to 1,000 to 10,000X and did not tell you.”

it’s also likely why the NIH (of which NIAID is a part) happened to have access to the payload for an mRNA vaccine ready to go and licensed it to moderna an impossible 10 days after SARSCOV-2 was officially claimed to have been sequenced.
this has been in the works for years.
it also looks to have been half baked, untested, and we’ve all seen how THAT worked out.
this makes me suspect that the leak was accidental (though likely telegraphed to a number of insiders well before it was public.)

just how this same sort of tech made it to biontech (who then licensed it to pfizer) and how billy “pandemia” gates knew to buy a big chunk of the company in november of 2019 right before they cut that pfizer deal remains an open and interesting question.

but all pieces keep falling into place.

• this was an ill conceived vaccine program run in china by people who, based on their DARPA submission, were barking mad. (read the daszak piece linked above. what he proposes to do in wuhan was literally mad scientist crazy)

• it was funded by fauci after DARPA said no.

• it was in the EXACT virus that became SARSCOV-2 in the exact location in which it appeared.

• and it used the exact methods that led to the utterly improbable if not impossible gene signatures that many used early on to claim this was a lab escape before being buried under what has now clearly been shown to have been a concerted cover up.

i’m just not seeing any other way to explain this that does not require 3 or 4 ten million to one coincidences piled on top of one another.
we may never get the full story. it’s not like china is going to help.
but it’s all here somewhere and enough has surfaced that the mosaic is getting hard to miss.

it all needs to be dragged out into the light because until it is, we’re not safe.

we’re not safe from this happening again because such research is ongoing.
but we’re also not safe from outright blackmail and espionage.
think about it. china has the NIH over a barrel. they will have to do ANYTHING they are told and NIH funds everything.

they have their fingers in half the early stage disease research in the US.

they are the gold givers of the research system.

nearly every university virology department is beholden and so are all the university researchers that were involved with this wuhan scandal.

imagine you’re someone like professor baric at UNC and you wound up doing something like this:

(from DARPA grant ap)

how you feeling right now? how will you respond when a chinese intelligence agent demands that you procure and provide sensitive data and research from your university or they will leak your actions to the press?

this is precisely how one would cultivate such an asset.
and all this is a wide open, gaping vulnerability until we rip it out and cauterize the wound. it’s a blackmail bonanza.
these guys have been scrambling from the start to hide this.
and this is why we HAVE to get to the bottom of it no matter how embarrassing these revelations may be.

time to put our top people on it and allow no further whitewash.

In my second week in Saughton jail, a prisoner pushed open the door of my cell and entered during the half hour period when we were unlocked to shower and use the hall telephone in the morning. I very much disliked the intrusion, and there was something in the attitude of the man which annoyed me – wheedling would perhaps be the best description. He asked if I had a bible I could lend him. Anxious to get him out of my cell, I replied no, I did not. He shuffled off.

I immediately started to feel pangs of guilt. I did in fact have a bible, which the chaplain had given me. It was, I worried, a very bad thing to deny religious solace to a man in prison, and I really had no right to act the way I did, based on an irrational distrust. I went off to take a shower, and on the way back to my cell was again accosted by the man.

“If you don’t have a Bible,” he said, “Do you have any other book with thin pages?”

He wanted the paper either to smoke drugs, or more likely to make tabs from a boiled up solution of a drug.

You cannot separate the catastrophic failure of the Scottish penal system – Scotland has the highest jail population per capita in all of Western Europe – from the catastrophic failure of drugs policy in Scotland. 90% of the scores of prisoners I met and spoke with had serious addiction problems. Every one of those was a repeat offender, back in jail, frequently for the sixth, seventh or eighth time. How addiction had led them to jail varied. They stole, often burgled, to feed their addiction. They dealt drugs in order to pay for their own use. They had been involved in violence – frequently domestic – while under the influence.

I had arrived in Saughton jail on Sunday 1 August. After being “seen off” by a crowd of about 80 supporters outside St Leonards police station, I had handed myself in there at 11am, as ordered by the court. The police were expecting me, and had conducted me to a holding area, where my possessions were searched and I was respectfully patted down. The police were very polite. I had been expecting to spend the night in a cell at St Leonards and to be taken to jail in a prison van on the Monday morning. This is what both my lawyers and a number of policemen had explained would happen.

In fact I was only half an hour in St Leonards before being put in a police car and taken to Saughton. This was pretty well unique – the police do not conduct people to prison in Scotland. At no stage was I manacled or handled and the police officers were very friendly. Reception at Saughton prison – where prisoners are not usually admitted on a Sunday – were also very polite, even courteous. None of this is what happens to an ordinary prisoner, and gives the lie to the Scottish government’s claim that I was treated as one.

I was not fingerprinted either in the police station or the jail, on the grounds I was a civil prisoner with no criminal conviction. At reception my overcoat and my electric toothbrush were taken from me, but my other clothing, notebook and book were left with me.

I was then taken to a side office to see a nurse. She asked me to list my medical conditions, which I did, including pulmonary hypertension, anti-phospholipid syndrome, Barrett’s oesophagus, atrial fibrillation, hiatus hernia, dysarthria and a few more. As she typed them in to her computer, options appeared on a dropdown menu for her to select the right one. It was plain to me she had no knowledge of several of these conditions, and certainly no idea how to spell them

The nurse cut me off very bluntly when I politely asked her a question about the management of my heart and blood conditions while in prison, saying someone would be round to see me in the morning. She then took away from me all the prescription medications I had brought with me, saying new ones would be issued by the prison medical services. She also took my pulse oximeter, saying the prison would not permit it, as it had batteries. I said it had been given to me by my consultant cardiologist, but she insisted it was against prison regulations.

This was the most disconcerting encounter so far. I was then walked by three prison officers along an extraordinarily long corridor – hundreds of yards long – with the odd side turning, which we we ignored. At the end of the corridor we reached Glenesk Block. The journey to my cell involved unlocking eight different doors and gates, including my cell door, every one of which was locked behind me. There was no doubt that this was very high security detention.

Once I reached floor 3 of Glenesk block, which houses the admissions wing, we acquired two further guards from the landing, so five people saw me into my cell. This was twelve feet by eight feet. May I suggest that you measure that out in your room? That was to be my world for the next four months. In fact I was to spend 95% of the next four months confined in that space.

The door was hard against one wall, leaving space within the 12 ft by 8 ft cell for a 4 ft by 4 ft toilet in one corner next the door. This was fully walled in, to the ceiling, and closed properly with an internal door. This little room contained a toilet and sink. The toilet had no seat. This was not an accident – I was not permitted a toilet seat, even if I provided it myself. It was a normal UK style toilet, designed to be used with a seat, with the two holes for the seat fixing, and a narrow porcelain rim.

The toilet was filthy. Below the waterline it was stained deep black with odd lumps and ridges. Above the waterline it was streaked and spotted with excrement, as was the rim. The toilet floor was in a disgusting state. The cell itself was dirty with, everywhere a wall or bolted down furniture met the floor, a ridge built up of hardened black dirt.

A female guard looked around the cell, then came back to give me rubber gloves, a surface cleaner spray and some cloths. So I spent my first few hours in my cell on my knees, scrubbing away furiously with these inadequate materials.

The female guard had advised me that even after cleaning the cell I should always keep shoes on, because of the mice. I heard them most nights in my cell, but never saw one. The prisoners universally claim them to be rats, but not having seen one I cannot say.

A guard later explained to me that prisoners are responsible for cleaning their own cells, but as nobody generally stayed in a new admissions cell for more than two or three nights, nobody bothered. Cells for new arrivals will be cleaned out by a prisoner work detail, but as I had arrived on a Sunday, that had not happened.

So about 3pm I was locked in the cell. At 5.20pm the door opened for two seconds to check I was still there, but that was it for the day. There I was confused, disoriented and struggling to take in that all this was really happening. I should describe the rest of the cell.

A narrow bed ran down one wall. I came to realise that prison in Scotland still includes an element of corporal punishment, in that the prisoner is very deliberately made physically uncomfortable. Not having a toilet seat is part of this, and so is the bed. It consists of an iron frame bolted to the floor and holding up a flat steel plate, completely unsprung. On this unyielding steel surface there is a mattress consisting simply of two inches of low grade foam – think cheap bath sponge – encased in a shiny red plastic cover, slashed or burnt through in several places and with the colour worn off down the centre.

The mattress was stamped with the date 2013 and had lost its structural resistance, to the extent that if I pinched it between my finger and thumb, I could compress it down to a millimetre. On the steel plate, this mattress had almost no effect and I woke up after a sleepless first night with acute pain throughout my muscles and difficulty walking. To repeat, this is deliberate corporal punishment – a massively superior mattress could be provided for about £30 more per prisoner, while in no way being luxurious. The beds and mattresses can only be designed to inflict both pain and, perhaps more important, humiliation. It is plainly quite deliberate policy.

It is emblematic of the extraordinary lack of intellectual consistency in the Scottish prisons system that cells are equipped with these Victorian punishment beds but also with TV sets showing 23 channels including two Sky subscription channels (of which I shall write more in another instalment). The bed is fixed along one long wall, while a twelve inch plywood shelf runs the length of the other and can serve as a desk. At one end, up against the wall of the toilet, this desk meets a built-in plywood shelving unit fixed into the floor, on top of which are sat the television and kettle next to two power points. At the other end of the desk, a further set of shelves are attached to the wall above. There is a plastic stackable chair of the cheapest kind – the sort you see stacked outside poundshops as garden furniture.

On the outside wall there is a small double glazed window with heavy, square iron bars two inches thick running both horizontally and vertically, like a noughts and crosses grid. The window does not open, but had metal ventilation strips down each side, which were stuck firmly closed with black grime. At the other end of the cell, next to the toilet, the heavy steel door is hinged so as to have a distinct gap all round between the door and the steel frame, like a toilet cubicle door.

Above the desk shelf is fixed a noticeboard, which is the only place prisoners are allowed to put up posters or photos. However as prisoners are not permitted drawing pins, staples, sellotape or blu tak, this was not possible. I asked advice from the guards who suggested I try toothpaste. I did – it didn’t work.

There is a single neon light tube.

The admissions unit has single-occupancy cells, of which there are very few in the rest of the jail. All the prison’s cells were designed for single occupancy, but massive overcrowding means that they are mostly in practice identical to this description, but with a bunk bed rather than a single bed.

The prison is divided into a number of blocks. Glenesk block had three floors, each containing 44 of these cells. Each floor is entered by a central staircase and has a centrally located desk where the guards are stationed. Either side of the desk are two heavy metal grills stretching right across the floor and dividing it into two wings. Within the central area is the kitchen where meals are collected (though not prepared), then eaten back locked in the cell.

The corridor between the cells either side of each wing is about 30 feet wide. It contains a pool table and fixed chairs and tables, and is conceived as a recreational area. There are two telephones at the end of each wing from which prisoners may call (at 10p a minute) numbers from a list they have pre-registered for approval.

The various cell blocks are located off that central spine corridor whose length astonished me at first admission. I did not realise then that this is a discreet building in itself rather than a corridor inside a building – it is like a long concrete overground tunnel.

I should describe my typical day the first ten weeks. At 7.30am the cell door springs open without warning as guards do a head count. The door is immediately locked again. At 8am cereals, milk and morning rolls are handed in, and the door is immediately locked again. At 10am I was released into the corridor for 30 minutes to shower and use the telephone. The showers are in an open room but with individual cubicles, contrary to prison movie cliche. At 10.30am I was locked in again.

At 11am I was released for one hour and escorted under supervision to plod around an enclosed, tarmac exercise yard about 40 paces by 20 paces. This yard is filthy and contains prison bins. One wing of Glenesk block forms one side, and the central spine corridor forms another; the wall of a branch corridor leading to another cell block forms a third and a fence dividing off that block a fourth. The walls are about 10 feet high and the fence about 16 feet high.

In the non-admissions, larger area of Glenesk block the cells had windows with opening narrow side panels. It is the culture of the prison that rather than keep rubbish in their cells and empty it out at shower time, the prisoners throw all rubbish out of their cell windows into the exercise yard. This includes food waste and plates, newspapers, used tissues and worse. At meal times, sundry items (bread, margarine etc) are available on a table outside the kitchen and some prisoners scoop up quantities simply to throw them out of the window into the yard.

I believe the origin of this is that this enclosed yard is used by protected prisoners, many of whom are sexual offenders. Glenesk house has a protected prisoner area on its second floor. “Mainstream” prisoners from Glenesk exercise on the astroturf five-a-side football pitch the other side of the spine corridor. (For four months that pitch was the view from my window and I never saw a game of football played. After three months the goals were removed.) New admissions exercise in the protected yard because they have not been sorted yet – that sorting is the purpose of the new admissions wing. New prisoners therefore have to plough through the filth prepared for protected prisoners.

At times large parts of this already small exercise yard were ankle deep in dross – it was cleaned out intermittently, probably on average every three weeks. Only on a couple of occasions was it so bad I decided against exercise. After exercise getting the sludge off my shoes as we went straight back to my cell was a concern. I now understood how the cell had got so dirty.

After exercise, at noon I collected my lunch and was locked back in the cell. Apart from 2 minutes to collect my tea, I would be locked in from noon until 10am the following morning, for 22 hours solid, every single day. In total I was locked in for 22 and a half hours a day for the first ten weeks. After that I was locked in my cell for 23 hours and 15 minutes a day due to a covid outbreak.

At 5pm the door would open for a final headcount, and then we would be on lockdown for the night, though in truth we had been locked down all day. Lockdown here meant the guards were going home.

Now I want you again to just mark out twelve feet by eight feet on your floor and put yourself inside it. Then imagine being confined inside that space a minimum of 22 and a half hours a day. For four months. These conditions were not peculiar to me – it is how all prisoners were living and are still living today. The library, gym and all educational activities had been closed “because of covid”. The resulting conditions are inhumane – few people would keep a dog like that.

It is also worth noting that Covid is an excuse. In September 2017 an official inspection report already noted that significant numbers of prisoners in Saughton were confined to cells for 22 hours a day. The root problem is massive overcrowding, and I shall write further on the causes of that in a future instalment.

The long concrete and steel corridors of the prison echo horribly, and after lockdown for the first time I felt rather scared. All round me prisoners were shouting out at the top of their voices. That first evening two were yelling death threats at another prisoner, with extreme expressions of hate and retribution. Inter-prisoner communication is by yelling out the window. This went on all night into the early hours of the morning. Prisoners were banging continually on the steel doors, sometimes for hours, calling out for guards who were not there. Somebody was crying out as though being attacked and in pain. There were sounds of plywood splintering as people smashed up their rooms.

It was unnerving because it seemed to me I was living amongst severely violent and out of control berserkers.

Part of the explanation of this is that for most prisoners the new admissions wing on first night is where they go through withdrawal symptoms. Many prisoners come in still drugged up. They are going through their private hell and desperate to get medication. I can understand (though not condone) why the prison medical staff are so remarkably bad and unhelpful. Their job and circumstances are very difficult.

On that first evening I was concerned that I did not have my daily medicines, and by the next morning my heart was getting distinctly out of synch. I was therefore relieved to receive the promised medical visit.

My cell door was opened and a nurse, flanked by two guards, addressed me from outside my cell. She asked if I had any addictions. I replied in the negative. I asked when I might receive my medicines. She said it was in process. I asked if I might get my pulse oximeter. She said the prison did not allow devices with batteries. I asked if my bed could somehow be propped or sloped because of my hiatus hernia (leading to gastric reflux) and Barrett’s oesophagus. She said she didn’t think that the prison could do that. I asked about management of my blood condition (APS), saying I was supposed to exercise regularly and not sit for long periods. She replied by asking if I would like to see the psychiatric team. I replied no. She left.

I was taken out to exercise alone, with four guards watching me. I felt like Rudolf Hess. In the lunch queue I met my first prisoners, who were respectful and polite. The day passed much as the first, and I still did not get my medicines on the Monday. They arrived on the Tuesday morning, as did the prison governor.

I was told the governor had come to see me, and I met him in the (closed) Glenesk library. David Abernethy is a taciturn man who looks like a rugby prop and has a reputation among prisoners as a disciplinarian, compared to other prison regimes in Scotland. He was accompanied by John Morrison, Glenesk block manager, a friendly Ulsterman, who did most of the talking.

I was an anomaly in that Saughton did not normally hold civil prisoners. The Governor told me he believed I was their first civil prisoner in four years, and before that in ten. Civil prisoners should be held separately from criminal prisoners, but Saughton had no provision for that. The available alternatives were these: I could move into general prisoner population, which would probably involve sharing a cell; I could join the protected prisoners; or I could stay where I was on admissions.

On the grounds that nothing too terrible had happened to me yet, I decided to stay where I was and serve my sentence on admissions.

They wished to make plain to me that it was their job to hold me and it was not for them to make any comment on the circumstances that brought me to jail. I told them I held no grudge against them and had no reason to complain of any of the prison officers who had (truthfully) so far all been very polite and friendly to me. I asked whether I could have books I was using for research brought to me from my library at home; I understood this was not normally allowed. I was also likely to receive many books sent by well-wishers. The governor said he would consider this. They also instructed, at my request, extra pillows to be brought to prop up the head of my bed due to my hiatus hernia.

That afternoon a guard came along (I am not going to give the names except for senior management, as the guards might not wish it) with the pillows, and said he had been instructed I was a VIP prisoner and should be looked after. I replied I was not a VIP, but was a civil prisoner, and therefore had different rights to other prisoners.

He said that the landing guards suggested that I should take my exercise and shower/phone time at the same time as other mainstream new admission prisoners (sexual offender and otherwise protected new admission prisoners had separate times). I had so far been kept entirely apart, but perhaps I would prefer to meet people? I said I would prefer that.

So the next day I took my exercise in that filthy yard in the company of four other prisoners, all new arrivals the night before. I thus observed for the first time something which astonished me. Once in the yard, the new prisoners (who on this occasion arrived individually, not all part of the same case), immediately started to call out to the windows of Glenesk block, shouting out for friends.

“Hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s me Joe! I am back. Is Paul still in? What’s that? Gone tae Dumfries? Donnie’s come in? That’s brilliant.”

The realisation dropped, to be reinforced every day, that Saughton jail is a community, a community where the large majority of the prisoners all know each other. That does not mean they all like each other – there are rival gangs, and enmities. But prison is a routine event in not just their lives, but the lives of their wider communities. Those communities are the areas of deprivation of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh is a city of astonishing social inequality. It contains many of the areas in the bottom 10% of multiple social deprivation in Scotland (dark red on the map below). These are often a very short walk from areas of great affluence in the top 10% (dark blue on the map). Of course, few people make that walk. But I recommend a spell in Saughton jail to any other middle class person who, like myself, was foolish enough to believe that Scotland is a socially progressive country.

The vast majority of prisoners I met came from the red areas on these maps. The same places came up again and again – including Granton, Pllton, Oxgangs, Muirhouse, Lochend, and from West Lothian, Livingston and Craigshill. Saughton jail is simply where Edinburgh locks away 900 of its poorest people, who were born into extreme poverty and often born into addiction. Many had parents and grandparents also in Saughton jail.

A large number of prisoners have known institutionalisation throughout their lives; council care and foster homes leading to young offenders’ institutions and then prison. A surprising number have very poor reading and writing skills. The overcrowding of our prisons is a symptom not just of failed justice and penal policy, but of fundamentally flawed economic, social and educational systems.

Of which I shall also write more later. Here, on this first day with a group in the exercise yard, I was mystified as the prisoners started going up to the ground floor windows and the guards started shouting “keep away from the windows! Stand back from the windows” in a very agitated fashion, but to no effect. Eventually they removed one man and sent him back to his cell, though he seemed no more guilty than the others.

By the next week I had learnt what was happening. At exercise the new admissions prisoners get drugs passed to them through the window by their friends who have been in the prison longer and had time to get their supply established. These drugs are passed as paper tabs, as pills or in vape tubes. There appears no practical difficulty at all in prisoners getting supplied with plentiful drugs in Saughton. Every single day I was to witness new admissions prisoners getting their drugs at the window from friends, and every single day I witnessed this curious charade of guards shouting and pretending to try and stop them.

My first few days in Saughton had introduced me to an unknown, and sometimes frightening, world, of which I shall be telling you more.