Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc. Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.

Living in a technological world of the internet divorces us from real life as it passes into inert, abstract, and dead screen existence. It should not be surprising that people grow sick and tired of the steady streams of “news” that fills their days and nights. So much of the news is grotesque; propaganda abounds. Stories twisted right and left to tie minds into knots. After a while, as Macbeth tells us, life seems like “a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world. This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda. A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely. Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness. Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.

Jonathan Crary, in a scathing critique of the digital world in Scorched Earth, puts it thus:

For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear.

I agree with Crary. During my sickness, I did manage to read a few brief pieces, an essay, a short story, and a poem. Serendipitously, each confirmed the trend of my thinking over recent years as well as what my bodily discomfit was teaching me.

The first was an essay by the art critic John Berger about the abstract expressionist, avant-garde painter Jackson Pollock, titled “A Kind of Sharing.” It struck me as very true. Pollock came to prominence in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was described as an “action” painter who poured paint on large canvases to create abstract designs that were lauded by the New York art world. Some have sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. The description of Pollock as an untalented pourer, Berger says, is false, for Pollock was a very precise master of his art who was aware of how he was putting paint to canvas and of the effects of his abstractions. His work made no references to the outside world since such painting at that time was considered illustrative. Berger says that Pollock’s paintings were violent in that “The body, the flesh, had been rejected and they were the consequence of this rejection.” He argues that Pollock, who died in a drunken car crash in Easthampton, Long Island on August 11, 1956, was committing art suicide with his abstract paintings because he had rejected the ancient assumption of painting that the visible contained hidden secrets, that behind appearances there were presences. For Pollock, there was nothing beyond the surfaces of his canvases. This was because he was painting the nothingness he felt and wished to convey. A nihilism that was both personal and abroad in the society.

Pollock’s story is a sad one, for he was praised and used by forces far more powerful than he. Nelson Rockefeller, who was president of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) that his mother had cofounded, called Pollock’s work “free enterprise paintings,” and the CIA, through its Congress for Cultural Freedom, secretly promoted it as a Cold War weapon against the Soviet Union’s socialist realism art, even as right-wing congressmen ripped Pollock as a perverse artist. So in the name of openness, the CIA secretly promoted Pollock’s avant-gardism as real America art in a campaign of propaganda, while the right-wing bashed him as a perverted leftist. This sick double game became a template for future mind-control operations that are widespread today.

As was his habit, Berger brilliantly places Pollock’s work within social and political history, a description of a time very similar to today when the word “freedom” was bandied about. Then it was the freedom of the Voice of America extolling the Cold War tale of freedom of the “Free World”; freedom for artists to be free of rhetoric, history, the past, and to jettison the tyranny of the object; freedom of the market amidst a strident yet incoherent sense of loss. He writes:

At this moment, what was happening in the outside world? For a cultural climate is never separate from events. The United States had emerged from the war as the most powerful nation in the world. The first atom bomb had been dropped. The apocalypse of the Cold War had been placed on the agenda. McCarthy was inventing his traitors. The mood in the country that had suffered least from the war was defiant, violent, haunted. The play most apt to the period would have been Macbeth, and the ghosts were from Hiroshima.

Today’s ghosts are still from Hiroshima and Macbeth is still apposite, and the ghosts of all the many millions killed since then haunt us now if we can see them. Although their bodies have disappeared out the back door of the years – and continue to do so daily – true art is to realize their presence, to hear their cries and conjure up their images. While the word freedom is still bandied about in this new Cold War era where the sense of social lostness is even more intense than in Pollock’s time, it often comes from a nihilistic despondency similar to Pollock’s and those who used atomic weapons, a belief that appearances and surfaces are all and behind them there is nothing. Nada, nada, nada. A society that Roberto Calasso calls “an agnostic theocracy based on nihilism.” Berger concludes:

Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times that nourished him, to refuse this act of faith [that painting reveals a presence behind an appearance]: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us. This simple, terrible reversal, born of an individualism that was frenetic, constituted the suicide.

This short essay by Berger about Pollock’s denial of the human body struck me as my own body was temporarily failing me. It seemed to contain lessons for the augmented realities of the internet and the new Cold War being waged for the control of our minds and hearts today. Inducements to get lost in abstractions.

Then one day I picked up another book from the shelf to try to distract myself from my physical misery. It was a collection of stories by John Fowles. I read the opening novella – “The Ebony Tower” – haltingly over days. It was brilliant and eerily led me to a place similar to that of Berger’s thoughts about Pollock. Fowles explores art and the body against a dreamy background of a manor house in the French countryside. As I read it lying on a couch, I fell in and out of oneiric reveries and sleep, induced by my body’s revolt against my mind. Trying to distract myself from my aches and pains, I again found myself ambushed by writing about corporality. Both Berger and Fowles sensed the same thing: that modernity was conspiring to deny the body’s reality in favor of visual abstractions. That in doing so our essential humanity was being lost and the slaughters of innocent people were becoming abstractions. Then the Internet came along to at first offer hope only to become an illusion of freedom increasingly controlled by media in the service of deep-state forces. Soon the only way to write and distribute the truth will be retro – on paper and exchanged hand to hand. This no doubt sounds outlandish to those who have swallowed the digital mind games, but they will be surprised once they fully wake up.

Fowles’s story is about David, an art historian who goes to visit a famous, cranky old painter named Henry Breasely. The younger man is writing about the older and thinks it would be interesting to meet him, even though he thinks it isn’t necessary to write the article he has already composed in his mind. The art historian, like many of his ilk, lives in his mind, in academic abstractions. He is in a sense “pure mind,” in many ways a replica of T.S. Eliot’s neurotic J. Alfred Prufrock. The old painter lives in the physical world, where sex and the body and nature enclose his world, where paint is used to illuminate the physical reality of life, its sensuousness, not abstractions, where physical life and death infuse his work, including political realities. Obviously not new to William Butler Yeats’ discovery as expressed in the conclusion to his poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”:

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

The old man fiercely defends the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” against all abstractions and academic bullshit, which are the young man’s métier. He accuses the young critic of being afraid of the human body. When the critic responds, “Perhaps more interested in the mind than the genitals,” the caustic and funny painter says, “God help your bloody wife then.” He accuses the younger man of being in the game of destruction and castration, of supporting abstractions at the expense of flesh and blood life. “There are worse destroyers around than nonrepresentational art,” the critic says in his defense. To which the painter roars, “You’d better tell that to Hiroshima. Or to someone who’s been napalmed.”

Back and forth they go, as a nubile art student, who is there to help the elderly artist, acts as a sort of interlocutor. Her presence adds a sexual frisson throughout the story, a temptation to the milk-toast critic’s life of sad complacency. The wild old man’s rants – he calls Jackson Pollock Jackson Bollock – are continually paraphrased by the girl. She says, “Art is a form of speech. Speech must be based on human needs, not abstract theories of grammar. Or anything but the spoken word. The real word. . . . Ideas are inherently dangerous because they deny human facts. The only answer to fascism is the human fact.”

The old painter’s uncensored tongue brought tears of laughter to my eyes and a bit of relief to my aches and pains. I was primarily taken aback by the weirdness of haphazardly reading a second piece that coincided with my deepest thoughts that had been intensified by my body’s revolt. The narrator’s words struck me as especially true to our current situation:

What the old man still had was an umbilical chord to the past; a step back, he stood by Pisanello’s side. In spirit, anyway. While David was encapsulated in book knowledge, art as social institution, science, subject, matter for grants and committee discussion. That was the real kernel of his wildness. David and his generation, and all those to come, could only look back, through bars, like caged animals, born in captivity, at the old green freedom. That described exactly the experience of those last two days: the laboratory monkey allowed a glimpse of his lost true self.

The Internet life has made caged monkeys of us all. We seem to think we are seeing the real world through its connectivity bars, but these cells that enclose us are controlled by our zoo keepers and they are not our friends. Their control of our cages keeps increasing; we just fail to see the multiplying bars. They have created a world of illusions and abstractions serving the interests of global capitalism. Insurgent voices still come through, but less and less as the elites expand their control. As internet access has expanded, the world’s suffering has increased and economic inequality heightened. That is an unacknowledged fact, and facts count.

Toward the end of my two-week stay in the land of sickness, I read this poem by the Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. My sickness turned to rage.

The USSR collapsed in on itself, not from the war in Afghanistan (1979-89), but from the Chernobyl disaster (April 26, 1989). The Soviets suddenly realized that the state was no longer in control. The members of the Warsaw Pact, whom Leonid Brezhnev had made vassals, revolted. The churches, the Communist Youth and the gays of East Germany brought down the Berlin Wall [1]. Not only did the USSR not react, but also it abandoned its allies outside Europe, especially Cuba. The First Secretary of the party, Mikhail Gorbachev, turned from a reformer into a liquidator. The USSR broke up, creating many new independent states. Then it was a descent into hell. A few "New Russians" appropriated the collective assets and waged a machine-gun war in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Production collapsed. It became difficult to find food in many Russian regions. Life expectancy dropped sharply by about 15 years. The fall was so sharp that no one thought the country would recover quickly.

At the same time, the United States imagined what it could do without a rival. President George H. Bush Sr. addressed a full Congress on September 11, 1990, and floated the idea of a "New World Order. He had just staged a war in the Gulf that almost every state in the world joined. Even before the dissolution of the USSR, the United States had become the hyperpower that no one contests [2]. The Straussian Paul Wolfowitz elaborated a doctrine aimed at preventing the emergence of a new competitor, which would take the place of the Soviet Union. He unhesitatingly designated the political project of François Mitterrand and Helmut Köhl, the European Union, as the enemy to be destroyed. The European Union was flawed from the start, with the obligation to bring in all the Warsaw Pact states and the former USSR until its institutions became unworkable and the Maastricht Treaty stipulated that Washington would defend the EU.

The Pentagon was so sure that it no longer had an adversary that it demobilized one million men once Iraq was crushed. The research and development units of the armies were disbanded. President Bush Sr. believed that this was the last war and that an era of prosperity was beginning.

Although no one threatens the supremacy of the US, it feels that its internal balance is fragile. Their jobs have been relocated and their economy is based more on the internationalization of their currency, the dollar, than on the wealth they produce.

In 2001, the Straussians organized the September 11 attacks [3] and adopted the Rusmfeld/Cebrowski doctrine [4]. They suspended fundamental freedoms at home with the USA Patriot Act and wage an "endless war" that ravaged the "wider Middle East".

Russia, however, did not see it that way. In a speech given on February 11, 2007 at the Munich Security Conference [5], President Vladimir Putin denounced the Bush New World Order as "unipolar". According to him, it would be more accurate to describe it as "monopolistic". He notes that far from bringing peace, it sowed misfortune.

During the subprime crisis, the Russian intellectual Igor Panarin, who was working for the secret service at the time, studied the hypothesis that the dollar would collapse and the US population would be divided along ethnic lines, so that the country would eventually break up [6]. His work was wrongly interpreted as a replica of the hypothesis of the Frenchwoman Helène Carrère d’Encausse, who envisaged a break-up of the Soviet Union, also on an ethnic basis. None of this happened, nor was my hypothesis that the "American empire" would not survive the "Soviet empire" verified.

So what did happen?

In the 15 years since the Munich speech, Russia’s priority has been to rebuild its power. In 2012, it promised to protect Syria from Anglo-Saxon-backed jihadists (the so-called "Arab Spring"), but waited two years before intervening. When it came out of the shadows, it had plenty of new weapons. On the battlefield, it learned how to use them and trained its personnel, which it renewed every six months. Although Vladimir Putin, in his Munich speech, named Brazil, India and China as his privileged partners in building a multipolar world, he waited a long time before sealing a privileged relationship with Beijing. China, which is still partly developing, is putting a lot of demographic pressure on Russian Siberia, but it has understood that, in order to get out of the "monopoly dictatorship," it must be Russia’s ally. Both countries have suffered from the West and have experienced their lies. They have no future without each other.

Western defeat in Ukraine should be an eye-opener for the United States. The tensions examined by Igor Panarin are resurfacing. The attacks of September 11 and the "endless war" will have been nothing more than a diversion. They gave the "American empire" a reprieve, but nothing more.

In the 35 years since the collapse of the USSR, the United States has wrongly convinced itself that it has defeated its rival. In reality, it was the Soviets themselves who overthrew it. They believed that the Russians would need a century to recover from their mistakes. In fact, they have become the world’s leading military power. The United States has succeeded in subjugating Western and Central Europe, but today it must confront all the states it has bullied, led by Russia and China.

During this period, the Republicans and Democrats have given way to two new currents of thought: the Jacksonians around Donald Trump and the Wokists, puritans without God. We are currently witnessing an intensification of population movements in the USA. Electoral specialists note that many Americans are leaving the Woke regions and joining the Jacksonians [7]. Moving companies report that their clients are leaving large cities for smaller ones where life is cheaper and more pleasant. However, they all note that their customers increasingly cite a new motive: they are moving to join family members. This explanation is consistent with what Colin Woodard observed a decade ago [8]: U.S. citizens are clustering by community of origin. Real estate developers are observing the multiplication of gated communities. Their clients are grouping together with people like themselves, having inherited the same culture and belonging to the same social class. They often worry about the rise of insecurity and talk about a possible civil war.

Let’s not be blind. All empires are mortal. So is the "American empire".

[1] « À l’Est : la Révolution Gay », par Didier Marie, Rebel (France), Réseau Voltaire, 1er mars 1993.

[2] “Bush’s Strategic Doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 9 July 2004.

[3] “Everything points to Thierry Meyssan being right today”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 3 September 2021.

[4] “The Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 25 May 2021.

[5] “The unipolar governance is illegal and immoral”, by Vladimir Putin, Voltaire Network, 11 February 2007.

[6] The crash of the dollar and the disintegration of the USA (only in Russian), Igor Panarin (2008).

[7] «On the move», Jennifer Harper, The Washington Times, April 14, 2023.

[8] American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America, Colin Woodard, Penguin Group (2011).

Last week on October 19 the US Navy announced that “General Michael ‘Erik’ Kurilla [lead image, lower right] , commander of CENTCOM, conducted a visit aboard the USS West Virginia [top], a U.S. Navy Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine at an undisclosed location at sea in international waters in the Arabian Sea. Kurilla was joined on the USS West Virginia by Vice Admiral Brad Cooper [lower left], commander of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet and NAVCENT.”   

The Fifth Fleet and the Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) are headquartered at Bahrain on the Persian Gulf.  From Bahrain down the Gulf to the Masirah Island airbase, off Oman, is a flight distance of 1,047 kilometres. From Masirah to the West Virginia and its escort was within helicopter flight range.

Two days later,  the Pentagon reported that “on October 21, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke by phone with Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoygu. Secretary Austin emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine.”  They spoke again on October 23, according to Austin’s spokesman, because Shoigu had “requested a follow up call.”  

Less than 24 hours elapsed before Austin telephoned his Kiev counterpart, Alexei Reznikov,  to “reiterate[d] that the United States rejects the public and false allegations by Russia about Ukraine and any attempt to use them as a pretext for further Russian escalation of its unlawful and unjustified war against Ukraine.”  

The same day, in the Moscow evening,  the US Joint Chiefs of Staff issued a communiqué confirming that “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley spoke with Chief of Russian General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov today by phone. The military leaders discussed several security-related issues of concern and agreed to keep the lines of communication open. In accordance with past practice, the specific details of their conversation will be kept private.” RIA, the Russian state news agency,  reported that in their conversation the generals “discussed the possibility raised by Moscow that Ukraine might use a ‘dirty bomb’.”  

“The call took place shortly after a similar conversation between Gerasimov and his British counterpart.”

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the British chief of staff, announced that Gerasimov had requested their conversation. According to Radakin,  he had “rejected Russia’s allegations that Ukraine is planning actions to escalate the conflict, and he restated the UK’s enduring support for Ukraine. The military leaders both agreed on the importance of maintaining open channels of communication between the UK and Russia to manage the risk of miscalculation and to facilitate de-escalation. The conversation followed the Defence Secretary’s call with his Russian counterpart yesterday and a call between the Foreign Ministers of France, the UK, and the USA last night.”  

That preceding call of foreign ministers, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken for the US, produced a joint statement of “committ[ment]  to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory for as long as it takes. Earlier today, the defense ministers of each of our countries spoke to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu at his request. Our countries made clear that we all reject Russia’s transparently false allegations that Ukraine is preparing to use a dirty bomb on its own territory. The world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation. We further reject any pretext for escalation by Russia.”   

Blinken then telephoned his Kiev counterpart, Dmitry Kuleba, to repeat both parts of the message – that the Ukraine should not escalate to using a nuclear weapon, and that Russia should do likewise.  

In case there was hardness of hearing or weakness of command and control in Kiev, or ambiguity between what Reznikov and Kuleba thought they were hearing from Washington and London, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace had met Austin at the Pentagon on October 18.  They then telephoned to talk again on Sunday, when they “reaffirm[ed] the U.S.-UK defense relationship and the importance of transatlantic cooperation. Their conversation today was a continuation of their discussion at the Pentagon last week, which covered a wide range of shared defense and security priorities, including Ukraine.”  

Austin telephoned Kiev again yesterday to repeat to Reznikov that he should make sure the allegation of a Ukrainian nuclear weapon escalation was “false”;  and that the allies had given Moscow this assurance in exchange for Moscow’s undertaking against “further escalation” – read Russian nuclear response.    

At the same time yesterday, Vzglyad, the Moscow security publication, published its assessment of the escalating nuclear threat to Russia from the US, as the Kremlin, Defence Ministry, General Staff and the Stavka see it now.  A translation into English follows.

Left to right: General Valery Gerasimov; General Mark Milley; Admiral Sir Tony Radakin; General Lloyd Austin. 

Source: [https://vz.ru/](https://vz.ru/world/2022/10/24/1183495.html)

The US has shown its readiness to launch a nuclear strike on Russia.  
October 24, 2022
Text: Alexander Timokhin 

Does the United States have the ability to instantly, within a few minutes, launch a disarming and unreciprocated nuclear strike on Russia? For decades, it was assumed that no, any US attack would cause an immediate similar response from the Russian armed forces. But now there is reason to believe that Washington has come to a different conclusion – and brazenly demonstrates it.

On Thursday, October 20, an exceptional event took place in the Arabian Sea. It was publicly announced that Michael Kurilla, commander of the US Central Command, paid a visit to the Ohio-class West Virginia SSBN (submarine with ballistic nuclear missiles), which specially surfaced in the Arabian Sea. This submarine, like all its ‘sister ships’, is armed with 24 Trident II ballistic missiles, each of which can carry 10 warheads at a maximum,  which in total gives the vessel an ammunition supply of 240 strategic nuclear warheads.

But the fact is that the purpose of such vessels is always to be secretive and never to reveal the location of their patrol. The fact that now the location of this SSB [ballistic missile submarine] is expressly highlighted, it is impossible to understand otherwise than a special signal. It is difficult to remember when earlier in this way any American military commander so clearly and openly visited a boat at sea on combat duty. All this is directly related to the nuclear deterrence system that exists between Russia and the United States.

Nuclear deterrence and nuclear attack

Nuclear war, the preparation for it and its conduct, is not as simple as the average person thinks. Let’s briefly list the key concepts.

When two sides – in this case, Russia and the United States – both have nuclear weapons, and the means of their delivery to enemy territory, a missile attack warning system, and the technical capability to launch ballistic missiles after this system detects the launch of enemy missiles, then a simple missile attack becomes suicide for the attacker. If the United States or Russia launches their ballistic missiles at the enemy, the enemy will be able to launch their missiles before the attacking side’s missiles reach their target.

Such a strike, when a counterattack is carried out before the enemy’s missiles have reached target, is called a ‘counter-counter’ [ответно-встречным]. It is applied with the help of intercontinental ballistic missiles based in deep underground silos and ready to launch immediately.

The problem is that the interval from launch command to the counter-strike takes time. And besides, it is necessary that someone from among the leaders who have the authority to order such a strike would be physically able to do it — that is, would be alive, conscious, and so on.

This vulnerability can be exploited by delivering a so–called обезглавливающий удар (for Americans, the term is decapitation strike). A strike aimed at destroying the leadership. There are various ways to prevent or to balance the consequences of such a strike — we will not list them, nor the methods of their application (not only by missile strike).

In addition to the decapitating blow, there is such a thing as a disarming blow (удар обезоруживающий — counterforce strike). Its goal is to attack the nuclear arsenal of the victim country in such a way that the enemy, even with a workable leadership, simply does not have time to launch its missiles in response. To do this, the time for which the blow is struck should be less than the enemy needs to make a decision and pass the order to the launchers.

Therefore, in addition to providing a retaliatory nuclear strike, the country’s nuclear forces have been invested with the means of ensuring the guaranteed possibility of a retaliatory strike. Which will be produced even if the enemy struck first, and all his missiles hit their targets before at least something was launched in response. The most common way to ensure a retaliatory strike is  strategic submarines. As a result, the enemy’s attack in any case causes a counter-counter or retaliatory strike. Nuclear war turns out to be a dead end;  it cannot be won;  and even the initiator who has attacked successfully also dies.

This principle is called “mutually assured destruction”. It was this, and not anything else, that guaranteed the absence of major wars on our planet since 1945.

However, today the situation is somewhat different. The number of nuclear warheads has become such that the exchange of nuclear strikes cannot lead to the guaranteed death of all living things. The number of carriers of nuclear weapons has fallen to such numbers that even after a massive, all-out strike, wildlife, untouched cities and towns, and people will remain in the Northern Hemisphere. A nuclear war without the death of all participants has become possible.

The second problem is the combat stability of the Russian nuclear forces in their current configuration. Russia was able to revive the Missile Attack Warning System (SPRN). The missiles that are supposed to retaliate and counter-strike are regularly updated.

But now our fleet has fewer ships than Japan. There is no possibility to intercept or block all dangerous waters with the operations of Russia’s anti-submarine forces. And this means that, as in the case of the Arabian Sea, the Americans and the British who can hold the area, will be free to manoeuvre there in order to strike from locations where the missiles can reach us too quickly. For example, in the Northern, Norwegian, Barents, Mediterranean and Arabian Seas.

Russian strategic submarines are few in number today compared to the Soviet times. Together with the qualitative superiority of the US Navy, this creates an environment where the Americans can destroy our submarines immediately before the attack begins. This, alas, is a fact known to specialists. At the same time, 44% of all strategic nuclear warheads in Russia are placed on submarines. And almost all of them are in two (!) fleet bases vulnerable to the first strike. The Russian strategic aviation has never learned to fight like the American one, and it is not a means of guaranteed retaliation.

The combination of these factors creates a technical opportunity for the United States to launch a successful disarming nuclear strike against Russia without receiving a significant blow in response. At the same time, the intensity of anti-Russian propaganda is such that the western man in the street will not have to justify anything — from that  perspective everything is already prepared. And right now there is the hint of the possibility of such a strike when the West Virginia surfaced in the Arabian Sea.

Chinese factor, flight time and impact mechanics

Some experts believe that the American SSB was carrying out tasks to put pressure on China during the CPC [Chinese Communist Party] Congress. On the one hand, it is indeed easy to attack China from the Arabian Sea ‘from the rear’ – the approach of missiles to its populated areas will be from its deserts in the west of the country.

But there is no logic in such pressure. The Americans don’t know exactly where the Chinese have missiles. In addition, China does not have its own full-fledged SPRN [missile attack warning system]. The Americans can organize a sudden strike on this country with Pacific submarines from other directions. They simply do not need to threaten China from the Indian Ocean, and without this, they have a full array of threats.

In contrast to China, the coordinates of Russian underground launchers and the corridors along which mobile installations moved until recently are known to the Americans extremely accurately. We gave them all the information ourselves during mutual inspections of each other’s missile positions. Thus, the strategic missile submarine in the Arabian Sea is a hint not to China, but to Russia. At the very least we should not rule it out.

In order for the strike on our country to be successful, it must be delivered faster than we will have an alarm, an assessment of the situation for the command to launch. To do this, the distance from which the strike is carried out must be about 3,000 kilometres, otherwise the flight time of the missiles will be too long. So now let’s look at the map.

When the SSB is deployed in the northern part of the Arabian Sea, it just happens to be at about such a distance from the installations of the 31st Missile Army of the RVSN [Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, HQ Orenburg] and some parts of the 33rd Guards Army of the RVSN [Russian Strategic Rocket Forces, HQ Omsk], which allows the submarine to deliver the same disarming blow in the minimum flight time.

It is clear that such a task cannot be solved by one submarine. And it is clear that such a task cannot be solved solely from the Arabian Sea. But no one is talking about ‘one’ and ‘only’. The deployment of SSBMS in this sea area is not a preparation for a strike against Russia. But this is a demonstration that technically the United States can strike such a blow if it sees fit. And they’re not bluffing.

There is one technical aspect that is little-known to the layman. A ballistic missile can fly not only along the normal trajectory for itself, when the payload is lifted into the upper point of the trajectory and drops down from there. In addition to ballistic trajectories, missiles can also fly along the so-called flat (depressed in English terminology). The meaning of the flat trajectory is that the rocket goes very low, not even rising to 300 kilometres.  With such a trajectory, ranges and accuracy suffer greatly, the dispersion of combat warheads increases, but this turns out to give a serious gain in flight speed to the target and a very small flight time.

If during a strike from the Arabian Sea, for example on the 13th missile division [13th Orenburg Red Banner Rocket Division] in the Orenburg region, employing a conventional trajectory, the flight time of the missiles is comparable to the time required for making a decision and passing the command for a counter-strike. However, when striking from there by a flat trajectory, the picture changes dramatically, and not in our favour.

At the same time, there are ways to compensate for the dispersion of interceptors.  Firstly, these are the new fuses in the W76-2 combat warheads, which allow for time-synchronized detonation of the warheads, preventing them from flying past the target. Secondly, there is the mutual overlap of the affected areas when working on a target from several submarines. Thirdly, the US has made progress in hypersonic gliding attack warheads.

A clear sign of the ambition of the United States to deliver such disarming strikes sometime in the future would be evidence that they are firing missiles along flat trajectories, and there is such evidence. Since 2015, three videos of such tests have been filmed by random eyewitnesses – and have become publicly available.

The Americans are clearly working on launching missile strikes using such schemes. And now they are showing us their readiness to bring a strategic submarine to the point of a salvo ‘at point-blank range’. Across Russia.

Of course, it’s easier said than done. One still needs to deploy a sufficient number of submarines to strike. It is necessary not to frighten the enemy and not to cause an emergency exit to the sea of all its strategic missile carriers, not to cause the dispersal of strategic bombers, tankers and cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. What is necessary is that that the mobile ground-based missile systems do not have time to ‘run away’ too far for the inconspicuous B-2 and B–21 bombers, which will go in the second wave to mop up those remnants of the strategic missile forces that would have survived the missile strike – unless the [US] launch team still did not pass through the [Russian] system known as Perimeter [western name, Dead Hand]  or otherwise.

It’s all very complicated, and the risks of loss of surprise are very high. But their chances of success are not zero. With the visit of West Virginia to our ‘soft underbelly’, the Americans clearly show how far they are willing to go if they deem it necessary. The Americans are sending an extremely clear signal – for them, nuclear war is no longer unthinkable, and not impossible.

Some readers have commented in direct emails to me that they have taken comfort from my writings insofar as I have been a moderate voice, avoiding alarmism over the often troublesome daily news in and around the Russian war with Ukraine, or more properly speaking today, Russia’s proxy war with NATO in and about Ukraine.

For this very reason, I hesitated whether to share with readers the deep pessimism that overcame me a couple of days ago over our chances of avoiding nuclear Armageddon. This followed my watching the latest Solovyov political talk show on Russian state television. I have used this show regularly as a litmus test of the mood of Russian social and political elites: that mood has turned black.

Whereas in the past, going back six months or more, I had reported on the open contempt which leading and highly responsible Russian academics from university circles and think tanks were showing for the American political leadership in their statements on the political talk shows, this contempt has moved into an actionable phase, by which I mean that serious, God-fearing Russians are so furious with the rubbish propaganda coming out of Washington, repeated with bullhorns in Europe that if given the chance they would personally “press the button” and unleash nuclear attacks on the United States and Britain, in that order notwithstanding the possibility, even probability of a return strike, which, however enfeebled, would be devastating to their own country. That is to say, deterrence as a policy is fast losing its psychological impact on the Russian side of the argument.

Whatever the words of the Biden Administration about nuclear war being ‘off the table,’ America’s aggressive and threatening behavior, including the ongoing ‘training in nuclear weapons’ currently going on in Europe under U.S. direction, has made rational and very serious Russians ready to give it a try.

One of the most sober-minded international affairs experts to appear on the Solovyov show, Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Institute of the Near East think tank, contained his rage with some difficulty, saying only that while he had once held some sympathy for the United States, he would see its utter destruction now with little regret; he left no mention where his feet are pointed when he added that he could say no more on air for fear that he will be censored and his words removed from the video.

For these reasons, I have given to this essay addressed to the Collective West, and in particular to the fomenters of world disorder in Washington and London, a title that fits the current situation. 

As we have seen from even before the launch of the ‘special military operation,’ Russian talk programs identify by name individuals in the Biden team whose outstanding stupidity, obtuseness and rank ignorance they find unbearable, with the likes of Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Lloyd Austin among those coming in for special mention. We are left with the impression that when Biden calls in his advisers to the Oval Office, he, senile dimwit that he is, is the bright light in the room. The Russians conclude from this that they have no one to negotiate with.

Now the naming of idiots in high places carries over to all discussion of European Union and British leaders. The denunciation of incompetence, rank stupidity and, yes, neo-colonialist or fascist mindsets among European leaders was well reflected in the latest Solovyov show. The most discussed whipping boy was the EU’s commissioner on external action, Josep Borrell, who seems to be speaking to the world daily and acknowledges no limits on what he may proclaim, as if it were official EU policy in defense as well as diplomacy.

The Solovyov show put up on screen a brief video recording of Borrell expounding smugly on Europe’s privileged position as ‘a garden of liberal democracy, good economic prospects and social solidarity’ which is surrounded by ‘the jungle.’  That jungle reference fits in well, Solovyov remarked, with the colonialist mindset of Rudyard Kipling and is deeply offensive to the Rest of the World, of which Russia is a part. More to the point, Borrell was also notorious in Russia this past week for his statement that any use by Russia of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be met by a massive non-nuclear attack from Europe which would ‘annihilate’ the Russian army. However, Borrell was not alone in the stocks: other European leaders who were decried for their stupid policies this past week included German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emanuel Macron.

So you have no bomb shelter? Then, as the Russians said decades ago, it is high time to throw a bed sheet over your shoulders and slowly walk to the nearest cemetery.

One of the two latest fake news stories being disseminated simultaneously and ubiquitously in Western major media this past week is that Russia is considering using against Ukraine ‘tactical nuclear weapons,’ meaning warheads with a destructive force equivalent to the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs mounted on cruise or medium range ballistic missiles.  Our print and electronic media speculate on the numbers of warheads Russia currently possesses (2,000 or more), as if that would make any difference in an assault on Ukraine.

Rubbish say the Russians on Solovyov’s show: we have no need of nuclear arms to finish off the Ukrainians. The only nuclear forces we would deploy in the current situation are strategic arms, and they are directed against….Washington with the help of the Sarmat and Poseidon delivery systems.

The other major fake news disseminated massively by Western media in recent days was the allegation that the Russians are seeking to freeze the Ukrainians to death by their strikes against power generation infrastructure. Images of Stalingrad were evoked by our broadcasters. A similar freeze is said to be inflicted on Western Europe by the cut-off of Russian energy supplies to the EU.

More rubbish say the panelists on the Solovyov program. The attack on the electricity grid in Ukraine is not directed against civilians per se; it is intended to halt rail deliveries of advanced weapons systems and munitions coming into Ukraine at the Polish border and being moved by train to the fronts in the east and south of the country.  Without these inputs, the Ukrainian army will be kaput and the war can come to an early conclusion with the capitulation of Kiev.  As regards the EU, whatever chill out may be coming this winter is due solely to the unprofessional and ignorant decisions of the Commission on imports of Russian hydrocarbons that have been blindly followed by the Member States without due consideration of consequences for their own populations.

The Collective West speaks of ‘sham’ referendums in the four Ukrainian oblasts that have now been reintegrated into (or annexed by, depending on your politics) the Russian Federation. In this spirit, in the middle of the past week the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a U.S. sponsored resolution refusing to recognize the legality of this annexation. Among those who voted against Russia were such prominent ‘friendly states’ as Serbia and Hungary. One hundred forty states voted with the United States; four states, including the pariah regimes in Venezuela and North Korea, joined Russia in voting ‘nyet,’ and thirty-five states abstained.

The United States trumpeted this victory at the UN over the mischievous and rules-breaking Russians. EU chief of diplomacy Borrell was also gloating, though he expressed regret that 20% of the member states had not voted for the resolution.

The Russians, for their part, insist that this vote was a sham, given the carrots and sticks that U.S. and European diplomats used to get the results desired. Blackmail of all kinds was applied, say the Russians. Morever, the number of states in each tally tells only part of the story: among the 35 abstaining countries were India and China, which between them alone account for 35% of humanity.

Meanwhile, over in Europe, on the next day the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg adopted a resolution condemning Russia for its alleged aggression against Ukraine with a bill of particulars several pages long and including a call for the 46 member states to declare Russia a ‘terrorist state’ as Zelensky had requested of them. The vote as published was said to be 99 for the resolution, 1 opposed.  No mention was made in the announcement of vote results that the actual number of deputies in PACE is 306. The point was not missed by the Solovyov panel, who here too cried ‘foul.’

Putting aside these two votes that garnered so much attention in the propagandistic Western media, there were other international developments bearing on the relative standing of Russia in the global community which Western media chose to ignore, but Russia media, featured prominently. 

I think in particular of the three days of summitry in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The first of these gatherings brought together 27 heads of state from across Asia, running from Israel and Palestine, Qatar and the Emirates in the west to Korea in the east. Let us remember that a goodly number of the participants were from countries that voted against Russia in the UN General Assembly. Their presence in Astana gave the lie to the notion that they were expelling Russia from polite society.

The key personality at the meeting of 27 was clearly Vladimir Putin. Film footage on Russian television showed him in animated conversation with these leaders in group and bilateral formats. Of these the most significant was likely the face-to-face with Turkish president Erdogan, during which the two discussed immediate steps to implement the Russian proposal that a new pipeline be added to Turk Stream so as to greatly increase possibilities for delivering gas to Europe by this southern route through the Balkans. In this concept, Turkey will become a major gas hub, which represents fulfillment of a long-held dream by the Turkish leader.

In its capacity as hub, Turkey would be able to mix Russian gas with flows from Azerbaijan and possibly later from Turkmenistan, so that the product sold as a Turkish export would be bullet proof against American or European sanctions. The additional line could probably be laid down within a year, that is to say, more quickly than the problematic repairs to the damaged Nord Stream 1 pipelines.

The next day in Astana, another summit was held between leaders of the Community of Independent States. This reduced circle of members was also of great importance insofar as it confirms Russia’s standing as facilitator of diplomatic solutions between member states experiencing armed conflict with one another, the Azeris and Armenians being first in line. And the final summit, among the leaders of Central Asian republics with Russia had yet another important agenda:  agreeing security measures to defend against spillover into their region of the developing civil war in Afghanistan, where the U.S. and Britain are aiding extremist groups seeking to overthrow Taliban rule. From the body language of leaders, it would seem that Putin’s ear was much in demand. Relations with Kazakhstan leader Tokaev appeared to be solid once again after a trying period of several months earlier in the year.

In considering the meaning of these gatherings, I think that a remark made several days ago on another Solovyov show and with regard to the decision of the Saudis and Gulf States to snub the insistent demands of Biden that oil production be raised: the decision to make common cause with Russia came not out of pity for the weak but out of Realism, namely the assessment that Russia will win the military contest with NATO/Ukraine.  These rulers in Opec, like the rulers who came to Astana this past week, back winners not prospective losers.

If I may draw any positive conclusions from the otherwise bleak analysis in the foregoing, they are that Russia is successfully resisting massive U.S. and E.U. pressures, and that the world is realigning before our eyes in a more multi-polar and democratic direction.  And yet, the fears of miscalculations on one side or another in this tense and unparalleled contest mean Armageddon constantly threatens in the background.

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.

Russia’s war with Ukraine is first and foremost a tragedy for the people of both countries, especially those who live—and die—in the battle zones. The priority for humanity, though apparently not for the political class, is to encourage Moscow and Kyiv to stop killing men, women and children and negotiate a peace deal.

Beyond the immediate confines of the conflict, the war is also seen by some as representative of an alleged clash between great powers and, perhaps, between civilisations. All wars are momentous, but the ramifications of Ukrainian war are already global.

Consequently, there is a perception that it is the focal point of a confrontation between two distinct models of global governance. The NATO-led alliance of the Western nations continues to push the unipolar, G7, international rules-based order (IRBO). It is opposed, some say, by the Russian and Chinese-led BRICS and the G20-based multipolar world order.

In this 3 part series we will explore these issues and consider if it is tenable to place our faith in the emerging multipolar world order.

There are very few redeeming features of the unipolar world order, that’s for sure. It is a system that overwhelmingly serves capital and few people other than a “parasite class” of stakeholder capitalist eugenicists. This has led many disaffected Westerners to invest their hopes in the promise of the multipolar world order:

Many have increasingly come to terms with the reality that today’s multipolar system led by Russia and China has premised itself upon the defense of international law and national sovereignty as outlined in the UN Charter. [. . .] Putin and Xi Jinping have [. . .] made their choice to stand for win-win cooperation over Hobbesian Zero Sum thinking. [. . .] [T]heir entire strategy is premised upon the UN Charter.

If only that were so! Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be the case. But even if it were true, Putin and Xi Jinping basing “their entire strategy” upon the UN Charter, would be cause for concern, not relief.

For the globalist forces that see nation-states as squares on the grand chessboard and that regard leaders like Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping as accomplices, the multipolar world order is manna from heaven. They have spent more than a century trying to centralise global power. The power of individual nation-states at least presents the possibility of some decentralisation. The multipolar world order finally ends all national sovereignty and delivers true global governance.

World Order

We need to distinguish between the ideological concept of “world order” and the reality. This will help us identify where “world order” is an artificially imposed construct.

Authoritarian power, wielded over populations, territory and resources, restricted by physical and political geography, dictates the “world order.” The present order is largely the product of hard-nosed geopolitics, but it also reflects the various attempts to impose a global order.

The struggle to manage and mitigate the consequences of geopolitics is evident in the history of international relations. For nearly 500 years nation-states have sought to co-exist as sovereign entities. Numerous systems have been devised to seize control of what would otherwise be anarchy. It is very much to the detriment of humanity that anarchy has not been allowed to flourish.

In 1648, the two bilateral treaties that formed the Peace of Westphalia concluded the 30 Years War (or Wars). Those negotiated settlements arguably established the precept of the territorial sovereignty within the borders of the nation-state.

This reduced, but did not end, the centralised authoritarian power of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). Britannica notes:

The Peace of Westphalia recognized the full territorial sovereignty of the member states of the empire.

This isn’t entirely accurate. That so-called “full territorial sovereignty” delineated regional power within Europe and the HRE, but full sovereignty wasn’t established.

The Westphalian treaties created hundreds of principalities that were formerly controlled by the central legislature of the HRE, the Diet. These new, effectively federalised principalities still paid taxes to the emperor and, crucially, religious observance remained a matter for the empire to decide. The treaties also consolidated the regional power of the Danish, Swedish, and French states but the Empire itself remained intact and dominant.

It is more accurate to say that the Peace of Westphalia somewhat curtailed the authoritarian power of the HRE and defined the physical borders of some nation states. During the 20th century, this led to the popular interpretation of the nation-state as a bulwark against international hegemonic power, despite that never having been entirely true.

Consequently, the so-called “Westphalian model” is largely based upon a myth. It represents an idealised version of the world order, suggesting how it could operate rather than describing how it does.

Signing of the Peace of Westphalia, in Münster 1648, painting by Gerard Ter Borch

If nation-states really were sovereign and if their territorial integrity were genuinely respected, then the Westphalian world order would be pure anarchy. This is the ideal upon which the UN is supposedly founded because, contrary to another ubiquitous popular myth, anarchy does not mean “chaos.” Quite the opposite.

Anarchy is exemplified by Article 2.1 of the UN Charter:

The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.

The word “anarchy” is an abstraction of the classical Greek “anarkhos,” meaning “rulerless.” This is derived from the privative prefix “an” (without) in conjunction with “arkhos” (leader or ruler). Literally translated, “anarchy” means “without rulers”—what the UN calls “sovereign equality.”

A Westphalian world order of sovereign nation-states, each observing the “equality” of all others while adhering to the non-aggression principle, is a system of global, political anarchy. Unfortunately, that is not the way the current UN “world order” functions, nor has there ever been any attempt to construct such an order. What a shame.

Within the League of Nations and subsequent UN system of practical “world order,”—a world order allegedly built upon the sovereignty of nations—equality exists in theory only. Through empire, colonialism, neocolonialism—that is, through economic, military, financial and monetary conquest, coupled with the debt obligations imposed upon targeted nations—global powers have always been able to dominate and control lesser ones.

National governments, if defined in purely political terms, have never been the only source of authority behind the efforts to construct world order. As revealed by Antony C. Sutton and others, private corporate power has aided national governments in shaping “world order.”

Neither Hitler’s rise to power nor the Bolshevik Revolution would have occurred as they did, if at all, without the guidance of the Wall Street financiers. The bankers’ global financial institutions and extensive international espionage networks were instrumental in shifting global political power.

These private-sector “partners” of government are the “stakeholders” we constantly hear about today. The most powerful among them are fully engaged in “the game” described by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard.

Brzezinski recognised that the continental landmass of Eurasia was the key to genuine global hegemony:

This huge, oddly shaped Eurasian chess board—extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok—provides the setting for “the game.” [. . .] [I]f the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity [. . .] then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically. [. . .] That mega-continent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically pre-eminent global power. [. . .] Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. [. . .] [I]t would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.

The “unipolar world order” favoured by the Western powers, often referred to as the “international rules-based order” or the “international rules-based system,” is another attempt to impose order. This “unipolar” model enables the US and its European partners to exploit the UN system to claim legitimacy for their games of empire. Through it, the transatlantic alliance has used its economic, military and financial power to try to establish global hegemony.

In 2016, Stewart Patrick, writing for the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign policy think tank, published World Order: What, Exactly, are the Rules? He described the post-WWII “international rules-based order” (IRBO):

What sets the post-1945 Western order apart is that it was shaped overwhelmingly by a single power [a unipolarity], the United States. Operating within the broader context of strategic bipolarity, it constructed, managed, and defended the regimes of the capitalist world economy. [. . .] In the trade sphere, the hegemon presses for liberalization and maintains an open market; in the monetary sphere, it supplies a freely convertible international currency, manages exchange rates, provides liquidity, and serves as a lender of last resort; and in the financial sphere, it serves as a source of international investment and development.

The idea that the aggressive market acquisition of crony capitalism somehow represents the “open markets” of the “capitalist world economy” is risible. It is about as far removed from free market capitalism as it is possible to be. Under crony capitalism, the US dollar, as the preferred global reserve currency, is not “freely convertible.” Exchange rates are manipulated and liquidity is debt for nearly everyone except the lender. “Investment and development” by the hegemon means more profits and control for the hegemon.

The notion that a political leader, or anyone for that matter, is entirely bad or good, is puerile. The same consideration can be given to nation-states, political systems or even models of world order. The character of a human being, a nation or a system of global governance is better judged by their or its totality of actions.

Whatever we consider to be the source of “good” and “evil,” it exists in all of us at either ends of a spectrum. Some people exhibit extreme levels of psychopathy, which can lead them to commit acts that are judged to be “evil.” But even Hitler, for example, showed physical courage, devotion, compassion for some, and other qualities we might consider “good.”

Nation-states and global governance structures, though immensely complex, are formed and led by people. They are influenced by a multitude of forces. Given the added complications of chance and unforeseen events, it is unrealistic to expect any form of “order” to be either entirely good or entirely bad.

That being said, if that “order” is iniquitous and causes appreciable harm to people, then it is important to identify to whom that “order” provides advantage. Their potential individual and collective guilt should be investigated.

This does not imply that those who benefit are automatically culpable, nor that they are “bad” or “evil,” though they may be, only that they have a conflict of interests in maintaining their “order” despite the harm it causes. Equally, where systemic harm is evident, it is irrational to absolve the actions of the people who lead and benefit from that system without first ruling out their possible guilt.

Since WWII, millions of innocents have been murdered by the US, its international allies and its corporate partners, all of whom have thrown their military, economic and financial weight around the world. The Western “parasite class” has sought to assert its IRBO by any means necessary— sanctions, debt slavery or outright slavery, physical, economic or psychological warfare. The grasping desire for more power and control has exposed the very worst of human nature. Repeatedly and ad nauseam.

Of course, resistance to this kind of global tyranny is understandable. The question is: Does imposition of the multipolar model offer anything different?

Signing the UN Charter – 1948

Oligarchy

Most recently, the “unipolar world order” has been embodied by the World Economic Forum’s inappropriately named Great Reset. It is so malignant and forbidding that some consider the emerging “multipolar world order” salvation. They have even heaped praise upon the likely leaders of the new multipolar world:

It is [. . .] strength of purpose and character that has defined Putin’s two decades in power. [. . .] Russia is committed to the process of finding solutions to all people benefiting from the future, not just a few thousand holier-than-thou oligarchs. [. . .] Together [Russia and China] told the WEF to stuff the Great Reset back into the hole in which it was conceived. [. . .] Putin told Klaus Schwab and the WEF that their entire idea of the Great Reset is not only doomed to failure but runs counter to everything modern leadership should be pursuing.

Sadly, it seems this hope is also misplaced.

While Putin did much to rid Russia of the CIA-run, Western-backed oligarchs who were systematically destroying the Russian Federation during the 1990s, they have subsequently been replaced by another band of oligarchs with closer links to the current Russian government. Something we will explore in Part 3.

Yes, it is certainly true that the Russian government, led by Putin and his power bloc, has improved the incomes and life opportunities for the majority of Russians. Putin’s government has also significantly reduced chronic poverty in Russia over the last two decades.

Wealth in Russia, measured as the market value of financial and non-financial assets, has remained concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. This pooling of wealth among the top percentile is itself stratified and is overwhelmingly held by the top 1% of the 1%. For example, in 2017, 56% of Russian wealth was controlled by 1% of the population. The pseudopandemic of 2020–2022 particularly benefitted Russian billionnaires—as it did the billionaires of every other developed economy.

According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2021, wealth inequality in Russia, measured using the Gini coefficient, was 87.8 in 2020. The only other major economy with a greater disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the population was Brazil. Just behind Brazil and Russia on the wealth inequality scale was the US, whose Gini coefficient stood at 85.

In terms of wealth concentration however, the situation in Russia was the worst by a considerable margin. In 2020 the top 1% owned 58.2% of Russia’s wealth. This was more than 8 percentage points higher than Brazil’s wealth concentration, and significantly worse than wealth concentration in the US, which stood at 35.2% in 2020.

Such disproportionate wealth distribution is conducive to creating and empowering oligarchs. But wealth alone doesn’t determine whether one is an oligarch. Wealth needs to be converted into political power for the term “oligarch” to be applicable. An oligarchy is defined as “a form of government in which supreme power is vested in a small exclusive class.”

Members of this dominant class are installed through a variety of mechanisms. The British establishment, and particularly its political class, is dominated by men and women who were educated at Eton, Roedean, Harrow and St. Pauls, etc. This “small exclusive class” arguably constitutes a British oligarchy. The UK’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has been heralded by some because she is not a graduate of one of these select public schools.

Educational privilege aside, though, the use of the word “oligarch” in the West more commonly refers to an internationalist class of globalists whose individual wealth sets them apart and who use that wealth to influence policy decisions.

Bill Gates is a prime example of an oligarch. The former advisor to the UK Prime Minister, Dominic Cummings, said as much during his testimony to a parliamentary committee on May 2021 (go to 14:02:35). As Cummings put it, Bill Gates and “that kind of network” had directed the UK government’s response to the supposed COVID-19 pandemic.

Gates’ immense wealth has bought him direct access to political power beyond national borders. He has no public mandate in either the US or the UK. He is an oligarch—one of the more well known but far from the only one.

CFR member David Rothkopf described these people as a “Superclass” with the ability to “influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis.” They do this, he said, by using their globalist “networks.” Those networks, as described by Antony C. Sutton, Dominic Cummings and others, act as “the force multiplier in any kind of power structure.”

This “small exclusive class” use their wealth to control resources and thus policy. Political decisions, policy, court rulings and more are made at their behest. This point was highlighted in the joint letter sent by the Attorneys General (AGs) of 19 US states to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

The AGs observed that BlackRock was essentially using its investment strategy to pursue a political agenda:

The Senators elected by the citizens of this country determine which international agreements have the force of law, not BlackRock.

Their letter describes the theoretical model of representative democracy. Representative democracy is not a true democracy—which decentralises political power to the individual citizen—but is rather a system designed to centralise political control and authority. Inevitably, “representative democracy” leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of the so-called “Superclass” described by Rothkopf.

There is nothing “super” about them. They are ordinary people who have acquired wealth primarily through conquest, usury, market rigging, political manipulation and slavery. “Parasite class” is a more befitting description.

Not only do global investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street use their immense resources to steer public policy, but their major shareholders include the very oligarchs who, via their contribution to various think tanks, create the global political agendas that determine policy in the first place. There is no space in this system of alleged “world order” for any genuine democratic oversight.

As we shall see in Part 3, the levers of control are exerted to achieve exactly the same effect in Russia and China. Both countries have a gaggle of oligarchs whose objectives are firmly aligned with the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. They too work with their national government “partners” to ensure that they all arrive at the “right” policy decisions.

US President Joe Biden, left, and CFR President Richard N. Haass, right.

The United Nations’ Model of National Sovereignty

Any bloc of nations that bids for dominance within the United Nations is seeking global hegemony. The UN enables global governance and centralises global political power and authority. In so doing, the UN empowers the international oligarchy.

As noted previously, Article 2 of the United Nations Charter declares that the UN is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” The Charter then goes on to list the numerous ways in which nation-states are not equal. It also clarifies how they are all subservient to the UN Security Council.

Despite all the UN’s claims of lofty principles—respect for national sovereignty and for alleged human rights—Article 2 declares that no nation-state can receive any assistance from another as long as the UN Security Council is forcing that nation-state to comply with its edicts. Even non-member states must abide by the Charter, whether they like it or not, by decree of the United Nations.

The UN Charter is a paradox. Article 2.7 asserts that “nothing in the Charter” permits the UN to infringe the sovereignty of a nation-state—except when it does so through UN “enforcement measures.” The Charter states, apparently without reason, that all nation-states are “equal.” However, some nation-states are empowered by the Charter to be far more equal than others.

While the UN’s General Assembly is supposedly a decision-making forum comprised of “equal” sovereign nations, Article 11 affords the General Assembly only the power to discuss “the general principles of co-operation.” In other words, it has no power to make any significant decisions.

Article 12 dictates that the General Assembly can only resolve disputes if instructed to do so by the Security Council. The most important function of the UN, “the maintenance of international peace and security,” can only be dealt with by the Security Council. What the other members of the General Assembly think about the Security Council’s global “security” decisions is a practical irrelevance.

Article 23 lays out which nation-states form the Security Council:

The Security Council shall consist of fifteen Members of the United Nations. The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [Russian Federation], the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council. The General Assembly shall elect ten other Members of the United Nations to be non-permanent members of the Security Council. [. . .] The non-permanent members of the Security Council shall be elected for a term of two years.

The General Assembly is allowed to elect “non-permanent” members to the Security Council based upon criteria stipulated by the Security Council. Currently the “non-permanent” members are Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.

Article 24 proclaims that the Security Council has “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” and that all other nations agree that “the Security Council acts on their behalf.” The Security Council investigates and defines all alleged threats and recommends the procedures and adjustments for the supposed remedy. The Security Council dictates what further action, such as sanctions or the use of military force, shall be taken against any nation-state it considers to be a problem.

Article 27 decrees that at least 9 of the 15 member states must be in agreement for a Security Council resolution to be enforced. All of the 5 permanent members must concur, and each has the power of veto. Any Security Council member, including permanent members, shall be excluded from the vote or use of its veto if they are party to the dispute in question.

UN member states, by virtue of agreeing to the Charter, must provide armed forces at the Security Council’s request. In accordance with Article 47, military planning and operational objectives are the sole remit of the permanent Security Council members through their exclusive Military Staff Committee. If the permanent members are interested in the opinion of any other “sovereign” nation, they’ll ask it to provide one.

The inequality inherent in the Charter could not be clearer. Article 44 notes that “when the Security Council has decided to use force” its only consultative obligation to the wider UN is to discuss the use of another member state’s armed forces where the Security Council has ordered that nation to fight. For a country that is a current member of the Security Council, use of its armed forces by the Military Staff Committee is a prerequisite for Council membership.

The UN Secretary-General, identified as the “chief administrative officer” in the Charter, oversees the UN Secretariat. The Secretariat commissions, investigates and produces the reports that allegedly inform UN decision-making. The Secretariat staff members are appointed by the Secretary-General. The Secretary-General is “appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”

Under the UN Charter, then, the Security Council is made king. This arrangement affords the governments of its permanent members—China, France, Russia, the UK and the US—considerable additional authority. There is nothing egalitarian about the UN Charter.

The suggestion that the UN Charter constitutes a “defence” of “national sovereignty” is ridiculous. The UN Charter is the embodiment of the centralisation of global power and authority.

UN Headquarters New York – Land Donated by the Rockefellers

The United Nations’ Global Public-Private Partnership

The UN was created, in no small measure, through the efforts of the private sector Rockefeller Foundation (RF). In particular, the RF’s comprehensive financial and operational support for the Economic, Financial and Transit Department (EFTD) of the League of Nations (LoN), and its considerable influence upon the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), made the RF the key player in the transformation of the LoN into the UN.

The UN came into being as a result of public-private partnership. Since then, especially with regard to defence, financing, global health care and sustainable development, public-private partnerships have become dominant within the UN system. The UN is no longer an intergovernmental organisation, if it ever was one. It is a global collaboration between governments and a multinational infra-governmental network of private “stakeholders.”

In 1998, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the World Economic Forum’s Davos symposium that a “quiet revolution” had occurred in the UN during the 1990s:

[T]he United Nations has been transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a “quiet revolution”. [. . .] [W]e are in a stronger position to work with business and industry. [. . .] The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world. [. . .] We also promote private sector development and foreign direct investment. We help countries to join the international trading system and enact business-friendly legislation.

In 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO), a specialised agency of the UN, published a report on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in healthcare titled Connecting for Health. Speaking about how “stakeholders” could introduce ICT healthcare solutions globally, the WHO noted:

Governments can create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.

The 2015, Adis Ababa Action Agenda conference on “financing for development” clarified the nature of an “enabling environment.” National governments from 193 UN nation-states committed their respective populations to funding public-private partnerships for sustainable development by collectively agreeing to create “an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development;” and “to further strengthen the framework to finance sustainable development.”

In 2017, UN General Assembly Resolution 70/224 (A/Res/70/224) compelled UN member states to implement “concrete policies” that “enable” sustainable development. A/Res/70/224 added that the UN:

[. . .] reaffirms the strong political commitment to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development [—] particularly with regard to developing partnerships through the provision of greater opportunities to the private sector, non-governmental organizations and civil society in general.

In short, the “enabling environment” is a government, and therefore taxpayer, funding commitment to create markets for the private sector. Over the last few decades, successive Secretary-Generals have overseen the UN’s formal transition into a global public-private partnership (G3P).

Nation-states do not have sovereignty over public-private partnerships. Sustainable development formally relegates government to the role of an “enabling” partner within a global network comprised of multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations and other actors. The “other actors” are predominantly the philanthropic foundations of individual billionaires and immensely wealthy family dynasties—that is, oligarchs.

Effectively, then, the UN serves the interests of capital. Not only is it a mechanism for the centralisation of global political authority, it is committed to the development of global policy agendas that are “business-friendly.” That means Big Business-friendly. Such agendas may happen to coincide with the best interests of humanity, but where they don’t—which is largely the case—well, that’s just too bad for humanity.

Kofi Annan (8 April 1938 – 18 August 2018)

Global Governance

On the 4th February 2022, a little less then three weeks prior to Russia launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued an important joint statement:

The sides [Russian Federation and Chinese People’s Republic] strongly support the development of international cooperation and exchanges [. . .], actively participating in the relevant global governance process, [. . .] to ensure sustainable global development. [. . .] The international community should actively engage in global governance[.] [. . .] The sides reaffirmed their intention to strengthen foreign policy coordination, pursue true multilateralism, strengthen cooperation on multilateral platforms, defend common interests, support the international and regional balance of power, and improve global governance. [. . .] The sides call on all States [. . .] to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) defined “global governance” in its 2014 publication Global Governance and the Global Rules For Development in the Post 2015 Era:

Global governance encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which States and their citizens try to bring more predictability, stability and order to their responses to transnational challenges.

Global governance centralises control over the entire sphere of international relations. It inevitably erodes a nation’s ability to set foreign policy. As a theoretical protection against global instability, this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but in practice it neither enhances nor “protects” national sovereignty.

Domination of the global governance system by one group of powerful nation-states represents possibly the most dangerous and destabilising force of all. It allows those nations to act with impunity, regardless of any pretensions about honouring alleged “international law.”

Global governance also significantly curtails the independence of a nation-state’s domestic policy. For example, the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda 21, with the near-time Agenda 2030 serving as a waypoint, impacts nearly all national domestic policy—even setting the course for most domestic policy—in every country.

National electorates’ oversight of this “totality” of UN policies is weak to nonexistent. Global governance renders so-called “representative democracy” little more than a vacuous sound-bite.

As the UN is a global public-private partnership (UN-G3P), global governance allows the “multi-stakeholder partnership”—and therefore oligarchs—significant influence over member nation-states’ domestic and foreign policy. Set in this context, the UN-DESA report (see above) provides a frank appraisal of the true nature of UN-G3P global governance:

Current approaches to global governance and global rules have led to a greater shrinking of policy space for national Governments [. . . ]; this also impedes the reduction of inequalities within countries. [. . .] Global governance has become a domain with many different players including: multilateral organizations; [. . .] elite multilateral groupings such as the Group of Eight (G8) and the Group of Twenty (G20) [and] different coalitions relevant to specific policy subjects[.] [. . .] Also included are activities of the private sector (e.g., the Global Compact) non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and large philanthropic foundations (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Turner Foundation) and associated global funds to address particular issues[.] [. . .] The representativeness, opportunities for participation, and transparency of many of the main actors are open to question. [. . .] NGOs [. . .] often have governance structures that are not subject to open and democratic accountability. The lack of representativeness, accountability and transparency of corporations is even more important as corporations have more power and are currently promoting multi-stakeholder governance with a leading role for the private sector. [. . .] Currently, it seems that the United Nations has not been able to provide direction in the solution of global governance problems—perhaps lacking appropriate resources or authority, or both. United Nations bodies, with the exception of the Security Council, cannot make binding decisions.

A/Res/73/254 declares that the UN Global Compact Office plays a vital role in “strengthening the capacity of the United Nations to partner strategically with the private sector.” It adds:

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development acknowledges that the implementation of sustainable development will depend on the active engagement of both the public and private sectors[.]

While the Attorneys General of 19 states might rail against BlackRock for usurping the political authority of US senators, BlackRock is simply exercising its power as valued a “public-private partner” of the US government. Such is the nature of global governance. Given that this system has been constructed over the last 80 years, it’s a bit too late for 19 state AGs to complain about it now. What have they been doing for the last eight decades?

The governmental “partners” of the UN-G3P lack “authority” because the UN was created, largely by the Rockefellers, as a public-private partnership. The intergovernmental structure is the partner of the infra-governmental network of private stakeholders. In terms of resources, the power of the private sector “partners” dwarfs that of their government counterparts.

Corporate fiefdoms are not limited by national borders. BlackRock alone currently holds $9.5 trillion of assets under management. This is more than five times the size of the total GDP of UN Security Council permanent member Russia and nearly four times the GDP of the UK.

So-called sovereign countries are not sovereign over their own central banks nor are they “sovereign” over international financial institutions like the IMF, the New Development Bank (NDB), the World Bank or the Bank for International Settlements. The notion that any nation state or intergovernmental organisation is capable of bringing the global network of private capital to heel is farcical.

At the COP26 Conference in Glasgow in 2021, King Charles III—then Prince Charles—prepared the conference to endorse the forthcoming announcement of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). He made it abundantly clear who was in charge and, in keeping with UN objectives, clarified national governments role as “enabling partners”:

The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global systems level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel based economy. [. . .] So ladies and gentleman, my plea today is for countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required. We know this will take trillions, not billions of dollars. [. . .] [W]e need a vast military style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector, with trillions at [its] disposal far beyond global GDP, and with the greatest respect, beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders. It offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.

Unless Putin and Xi Jinping intend to completely restructure the United Nations, including all of its institutions and specialised agencies, their objective of protecting “the United Nations-driven international architecture” appears to be nothing more than a bid to cement their status as the nominal leaders of the UN-G3P. As pointed out by UN-DESA, through the UN-G3P, that claim to political authority is extremely limited. Global corporations dominate and are currently further consolidating their global power through “multi-stakeholder governance.”

Whether unipolar or multipolar, the so-called “world order” is the system of global governance led by the private sector—the oligarchs. Nation-states, including Russia and China, have already agreed to follow global priorities determined at the global governance level. The question is not which model of the global public-private “world order” we should accept, but rather why we would ever accept any such “world order” at all.

This, then, is the context within which we can explore the alleged advantages of a “multipolar world order” led by China, Russia and increasingly India. Is it an attempt, as claimed by some, to reinvigorate the United Nations and create a more just and equitable system of global governance? Or is it merely the next phase in the construction of what many refer to as the “New World Order”?

The pdf will be available after publication of Part 3.

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It may seem strange to invite an economist to give a keynote speech to a conference of the social sciences. Economists have been characterized as autistic and anti-social in the popular press for good reason. They are trained to think abstractly and use a priori deduction – based on how they think societies should develop. Today’s mainstream economists look at neoliberal privatization and free-market ideals as leading society’s income and wealth to settle at an optimum equilibrium without any need for government regulation – especially not of credit and debt.

The only role acknowledged for government is to enforce the “sanctity of contracts” and “security of property.” By this they mean the enforcement of debt contracts, even when their enforcement expropriates large numbers of indebted homeowners and other property owners. That is the history of Rome. We are seeing the same debt dynamic at work today. Yet this basic approach has led mainstream economists to insist that civilization could and should have followed this pro-creditor policy from the very beginning.

The reality is that civilization could never have taken off if some free-market economist had got into a time machine and travelled back in time five thousand years to the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Suppose that he would have convinced ancient chieftains or rulers how to organize their trade, money and land tenure on the basis of “greed is good” and any public regulation is bad.
If some Milton Friedman or Margaret Thatcher had persuaded Sumerian, Babylonian or other ancient rulers to follow today’s neoliberal philosophy, civilization could not have developed. Economies would have polarized – as Rome did, and as today’s Western economies are doing. The citizens would have run away, or else backed a local reformer or revolutionist to overthrow the ruler who listened to such economic advice. Or, they would have defected to rival attackers who promised to cancel their debts, liberate the bondservants and redistribute the land.

Yet many generations of linguists, historians and even anthropologists have absorbed the economic discipline’s anti-social individualistic world view and imagine that the world must always have been this way. Many of these non-economists have unwittingly adopt their prejudices and approach ancient as well as modern history with a bias. Our daily discourse is so bombarded with the insistence by recent American politicians that the world is dividing between “democracy” with “free markets” and “autocracy” with public regulation that there is much fantasy at work about early civilization.

David Graeber and I have sought to expand the consciousness of how different the world was before Western Civilization took the Roman track of pro-creditor oligarchies instead of palatial economies protecting the interests of the indebted population at large. At the time he published his Debt: The First Five Thousand Years in 2011, my Harvard group of assyriologists, Egyptologists and archaeologists was still in the process of writing the economic history of the ancient Near East in a way that was radically different from how most of the public imagined it to have occurred. David’s and my emphasis on how royal Clean Slate proclamations cancelling debts, liberating bond-servants and redistributing the land were a normal and expected role of Mesopotamian rulers and Egyptian pharaohs was still not believed at that time. It seemed impossible that such Clean Slates were what preserved liberty for the citizenry.

David Graeber’s book summarized my survey of royal debt cancellation in the ancient Near East to show that interest-bearing debt originally was adopted with checks and balances to prevent it from polarizing society between creditors and debtors. In fact, he pointed out that the strains created by the emergence of monetary wealth in personal hands led to an economic and social crisis that shaped the emergence of the great religious and social reformers.

As he summarized “the core period of Jasper’s Axial age … corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented. What’s more, the three parts of the world where coins were first invented were also the very parts of the world where those sages lived; in fact, they became the epicenters of Axial Age religious and philosophical creativity.” Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Confucius all sought to create a social context in which to embed the economy. There was no concept of letting “markets work” to allocate wealth and income without any idea of how wealth and income would be spent.

All ancient societies had a mistrust of wealth, above all monetary and financial wealth in creditor hands, because it generally tended to be accumulated at the expense of society at large. Anthropologists have found this to be a characteristic of low-income societies in general.

Toynbee characterized history as a long unfolding dynamic of challenges and responses to the central concerns that shape civilizations. The major challenge has been economic in character: who would benefit from the surpluses gained as trade and production increase in scale and become increasingly specialized and monetized. Above all, how would society organize the credit and debt that was necessary for specialization of economic activities to occur – and between “public” and “private” functions?

Nearly all early societies had a central authority in charge of distributing how the surplus was invested in a way that promoted overall economic welfare. The great challenge was to prevent credit leading to debts being paid in a way that impoverished the citizenry, e.g., through personal debt and usury – and more than temporary loss of freedom (from bondage or exile) or land tenure rights.

The great problem that the Bronze Age Near East solved – but classical antiquity and Western civilization have not solved – was how to cope with debts being paid – especially at interest without polarizing economies between creditors and debtors, and ultimately impoverishing the economy by reducing most of the population to debt dependency. Merchants engaged in trade, both for themselves and as agents for palace rulers. Who would get the profits? And how would credit be provided but kept in line with the ability to be paid?

Public vs. private theories of how land tenure originated

Ancient societies rested on an agricultural base. The first and most basic problem for society to solve was how to assign land tenure. Even families who lived in towns that were being built up around temples and civic ceremonial and administrative centers were allocated self-support land – much like Russians have dachas, where most of their food was grown in Soviet times.

In analyzing the origins of land tenure, like every economic phenomenon, we find two approaches. On the one hand is a scenario where land is allocated by the community in exchange for corvée labor obligations and service in the military. On the other hand is an individualistic scenario in which land tenure originated by individuals acting spontaneously by themselves clearing land, make it their own property and producing handicrafts or other products (even metal to use as money!) to exchange with each other.

This latter individualistic view of land tenure has been popularized ever since John Locke imagined individuals setting out to clear the land – apparently vacant wooded land – with their own labor (and presumably that of their wives). That effort established their ownership to it and its crop yield. Some families would have more land than others, either because they were stronger at clearing it or had a larger family to help them. And there was enough land for everyone to clear ground for planting crops.

In this view there is no need for any community to be involved, not even to protect themselves from miliary attack – or for mutual aid in times of flood or other problems. And there is no need for credit to be involved – although in antiquity that was the main lever distorting the distribution of land by transferring its ownership to wealthy creditors

At some point in history, to be sure, this theory sees governments enter the picture. Perhaps they took the form of invading armies, which is how the Norman ancestors of landlords in John Locke’s day acquired English land. And as in England, the rulers would have forced landholders to pay part of their crops in taxes and provide military service. In any case, the role of government was recognized only as “interfering” with the cultivator’s right to use the crop as he saw fit – presumably to trade for things that he needed, made by families in their own workshops.

My Harvard-sponsored group of assyriologists, Egyptologists and archaeologists have found an entirely different genesis of land tenure. Land rights seem to have been assigned in standardized plots in terms of their crop yield. To provide food for these community members, late Neolithic and early Bronze Age communities from Mesopotamia to Egypt allocated land to families in proportion to what they needed to live on and how much they could turn over to the palace authorities.

This tax yield turned over to palace collectors was the original economic rent. Land tenure came as part of a quid pro quo – with a fiscal obligation to provide labor services at designated times of the year, and to serve in the military. It thus was taxation that created land-tenure rights, not the other way around. Land was social in character, not individualistic. And government’s role was that of coordinator, organizer and forward planner, not merely predatory and extractive.

Public vs. private origins of money

How did early societies organize the exchange of crops for products – and most important, to pay taxes and debts? Was it simply a spontaneous world of individuals “trucking and bartering,” as Adam Smith put it? Prices no doubt would have varied radically as individuals had no basic reference to cost of production or degrees of need. What happened as some individuals became traders, taking what they produced (or other peoples’ products on consignment) to make a profit. If they traveled large distances, were caravans or ships needed – and the protection of large groups? Would such groups have been protected by their communities? Did supply and demand play a role? And most important, how did money emerge as a common denominator to set prices for what was traded – or paid in taxes and to settle debts?

A century after Adam Smith, the Austrian economist Anton Menger developed a fantasy about how and why ancient individuals may have preferred to hold their savings in the form of metals – mainly silver but also copper, bronze or gold. The advantage of metal was said to be that it did not spoil (in contrast to grain carried around in one’s pocket, for instance). It also was assumed to be of uniform quality. So pieces of metal money gradually became the medium by which other products came to be measured as they were bartered in exchange – in markets in which governments played no role at all!

The fact that this Austrian theory has been taught now for nearly a century and a half is an indication of how gullible economists are willing to accept a fantasy at odds with all historical records from everywhere in recorded world history. To start with, silver and other metals are not at all of uniform quality. Counterfeiting is age-old, but individualist theories ignore the role of fraud – and hence, the need for public authority to prevent it. That blind spot is why U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was so unprepared to cope with the massive junk-mortgage bank crisis peaking in 2008. Wherever money is involved, fraud is omnipresent.

That’s what happens in unregulated markets – as we can see from today’s bank frauds, tax evasion and crime that pays very, very well. Without a strong government to protect society against fraud, lawbreaking, the use of force and exploitation, societies will polarize and become poorer. For obvious reasons the beneficiaries of these grabs seek to weaken regulatory power and the ability to prevent such grabitization.

To avoid monetary fraud, silver and subsequently gold coinage from Bronze Age Mesopotamia down through classical Greece and Rome was minted in temples to sanctify their standardized quality. That is why our word for money comes from Rome’s temple of Juno Moneta, where Rome’s coinage was struck. Thousands of years before bullion was coined, it was provided in metal strips, bracelets and other forms minted in temples, at standardized alloy proportions.

Purity of metals is not the only problem with using bullion money. The immediate problem that would have confronted anyone exchanging products for silver is how to weigh and measure what was being bought and sold – and also to pay taxes and debts. From Babylonia to the Bible we find denunciations against merchants using false weights and measures. Taxes involve a role of government, and in all archaic societies it was the temples that oversaw weights and measures as well as the purity of metallic metals. And the denomination of weights and measures indicate their origin in the public sector: fractions divided into 60ths in Mesopotamia, and 12ths in Rome.

Trade in basic essentials had standardized customary prices or payments to the palaces or temples. Taxes and debts were the most important used for money. That reflects the fact that “money” in the form of designated commodities was needed mainly to pay taxes or buy products from the palaces or temples and, at the end of the harvesting season, to pay debts to settle such purchases.

Today’s neoliberal economic mainstream has created a fairy tale about civilization existing without any regulatory oversight or productive role for government, and without any need to levy taxes to provide basic social services such as public construction or even service in the military. There is no need to prevent fraud, or violent seizure of property – or the forfeiture of land tenure rights to creditors as a result of debts. But as Balzac noted, most great family fortunes have been the result of some great theft, lost in the mists of time and legitimized over the centuries, as if it were all natural.

These blind spots are necessary to defend the idea of “free markets” controlled by the wealthy, above all by creditors. This is claimed to be for the best, and how society should be run. That is why today’s New Cold War is being fought by neoliberals against socialism – fought with violence, and by excluding the study of history from the academic economics curriculum and hence from the consciousness of the public at large. As Rosa Luxemburg put it, the fight is between socialism and barbarism.

Public vs. private origins of interest-bearing debt

Interest rates were regulated and stable for many centuries on end. The key was ease of calculation: 10th, 12th or 60th.

Babylonian scribes were trained to calculate any rate of interest as a doubling time. Debts grew exponentially; but scribal students also were taught that herds of cattle and other material economic output tapered off in an S-curve. That is why compound interest was prohibited. It also was why it was necessary to cancel debts periodically.

If rulers had not cancelled debts, the ancient world’s takeoff would have prematurely suffered the kind of decline and fall that impoverished Rome’s citizenry and led to the decline and fall of its Republic – leaving a legal system of pro-creditor laws to shape subsequent Western civilization.

What makes Western civilization distinctly Western? Has it all been a detour?

Civilization could not have developed if a modern Milton Friedman or kindred Economics Nobel Prize winner had gone back in time and convinced Hammurabi or the Egyptian pharaoh to just let individuals act by themselves and let wealthy creditors reduce debtors to bondage – and then to use their labor as an army to overthrow the kings and take over government for themselves, creating a Roman-style oligarchy. That is what Byzantine families tried to do in the 9th and 10th centuries.

If the “free enterprise” boys had their way there would have been no temple coinage or oversight of weights and measures. Land would belong to whomever could grab, foreclose on or conquer it. Interest would have reflected whatever a wealthy merchant could force a needy cultivator to pay. But to economists, everything that occurs is a matter of “choice.” As if there is no outright need – to eat or to pay.

An economic Nobel Prize was awarded to Douglass North for claiming that economic progress today and indeed throughout all history has been based on the “security of contracts” and property rights. By this he means the priority of creditor claims to foreclose on the property of debtors. These are the property rights to create latifundia and reduce populations to debt peonage.

No archaic civilization could have survived for long by following this path. And Rome did not survive by instituting what has become the distinguishing feature of Western Civilization: giving control of government and its lawmaking to a wealthy creditor class monopolizing the land and property.

If an ancient society had done this, economic life would have been impoverished. Most of the population would have run away. Or else, the Thatcherite/Chicago School elite would have been overthrown. The wealthy families that sponsored this grabitization would have been exiled, as occurred in many Greek cities in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Or, discontented populations would have walked out and/or threatened to defect to foreign troops promising to free the bondservants, cancel their debts and redistribute the land, as occurred with Rome’s Secessions of the Plebs in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.

So we are brought back to David Graeber’s point that the great reformers of Eurasia rose at the same time that economies were becoming monetized and increasingly privatized – an epoch in which wealthy families were increasing their influence over how city-states were run. Not only the great religious reformers but the leading Greek philosophers, poets and dramatists explained how wealth is addictive, and leads to hubris that leads them to seek wealth in ways that injure others.

Looking over the sweep of ancient history, we can see that the main objective of rulers from Babylonia to South Asia and East Asia was to prevent a mercantile and creditor oligarchy from emerging and concentrating ownership of land in their own hands. Their implicit business plan was to reduce the population at large to clientage, debt bondage and serfdom.

That is what occurred in the West, in Rome. And we are still living in the aftermath. Throughout the West today, our legal system remains pro-creditor, not in favor of the indebted population at large. That is why personal debts, corporate debts, public debts and the international debts of Global South countries have mounted up to crisis conditions threatening to lock economies into a prolonged debt deflation and depression.

It was to protest this that David helped organize Occupy Wall Street. It is obvious that we are dealing not only with an increasingly aggressive financial sector, but that it has created a false history, a false consciousness designed to deter revolt by claiming that There Is No Alternative (TINA).

Where Western civilization went wrong

We have two diametrically opposed scenarios depicting how the most basic economic relationships came into being. On the one hand, we see Near Eastern and Asian societies organized to maintaining social balance by keeping debt relations and mercantile wealth subordinate to the public welfare. That aim characterized archaic society and non-Western societies.

But the Western periphery, in the Aegean and Mediterranean, lacked the Near Eastern tradition of “divine kingship” and Asian religious traditions. This vacuum enabled a wealthy creditor oligarchy to take power and concentrate land and property ownership in its own hands. For public relations purposes, it claimed to be a “democracy” – and denounced any protective government regulation as being, by definition, “autocracy.”

Western tradition indeed lacks a policy subordinating wealth to overall economic growth. The West has no strong government checks to prevent a wealth-addicted oligarchy from emerging to make itself into a hereditary aristocracy. Making debtors and clients into a hereditary class, dependent on wealthy creditors, is what todays economists call a “free market.” It is one without public checks and balances against inequality, fraud or privatization of the public domain.

It may seem amazing to some future historian that the political and intellectual leaders of today’s world hold such individualistic neoliberal fantasies that archaic society “should” have developed in this way – without recognizing that this is how Rome’s oligarchic Republic did indeed develop, leading to its inevitable decline and fall.

Bronze Age debt cancellations and modern cognitive dissonance

So we are led back to why I was invited to speak here today. David Graeber wrote in his Debt book that he was seeking to popularize my Harvard group’s documentation that debt cancellations did indeed exist and were not simply literary utopian exercises. His book helped make debt a public issue, as did his efforts in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The Obama administration backed police breaking up the OWS encampments and did everything possible to destroy awareness of the debt problems plaguing the U.S. and foreign economies. And not only the mainstream media but also academic orthodoxy circled their wagons against even the thought that debts could be written down and indeed needed to be written down to prevent economies from falling into depression.

That neoliberal pro-creditor ethic is the root of today’s New Cold War. When President Biden describes this great world conflict aimed at isolating China, Russia, India, Iran and their Eurasian trading partners, he characterizes this as an existential struggle between “democracy” and “autocracy.”

By “democracy” he means oligarchy. And by “autocracy” he means any government strong enough to prevent a financial oligarchy from taking over government and society and imposing neoliberal rules – by force. The ideal is to make the rest of the world look like Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, where American neoliberals had a free hand in stripping away all public ownership of land, mineral rights and basic public utilities.

The World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative has been responsible for seeding many of the ruling elite into positions of power and influence within the worlds of business, civil society and, most importantly, politics. The fall of the Soviet Union soon became the apparent catalyst for the creation of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program, which was the precursor to the Young Global Leaders initiative over a decade later.

However, the supposed mastermind of the project, the WEF’s lifetime leader Klaus Schwab, had himself already been helped into his own influential position by a very similar program run out of Harvard University that was heavily funded by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Harvard initiative in question, often referred to as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, was one of several programs set up by senior members of organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the newly created CIA. In fact, during the post-World War II era, the United States was proactively creating many such programs with the intention of grooming potential young foreign leaders and installing them into positions of power. The main motive behind the establishment of these programs was ostensibly to combat and prevent communist infiltration of foreign states while also assuring that future global leaders would be amenable to US interests.

Originally, the United States created these secretive youth organizations with the aim of targetting potential future European leadership candidates. Yet, soon, no country in the world would be safe from possible CIA-sponsored political infiltration. In this article, we will examine one of the front organizations which used vast amounts of CIA money to fund various Harvard projects including Kissinger’s International Seminar. We will learn who the people were who created these funding platforms, and we’ll also look at other such educational initiatives, some still in existence today, which have helped American intelligence infiltrate governments worldwide.

The American Friends of the Middle East

In 1967, it was Harvard’s own Humphrey Doermann who exposed that certain Harvard Summer School courses and initiatives were actually being funded via CIA conduits. Even though almost a decade of funding throughout the 1950s remained undeclared, it was revealed that, between 1960 and 1966, Kissinger’s International Seminar received funding from three CIA conduits: The Asian Foundation, The Farfield Foundation, and The American Friend’s of the Middle East, the latter being one of the more well-known, influential and successful CIA conduits of the era.

The CIA funded Harvard-based International Seminar, and the conduits which the Central Intelligence Agency used to supply the forum with the necessary funds to run the program, are of great historical significance.

The American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) was not just a simple front organization used to funnel secret CIA money into their various projects, in fact, there were some very big names attached to this prominent post-war organization. The AFME was considered to be an “international educational organization” and was formed the same year that Henry Kissinger launched the International Seminar at Harvard, in 1951. There were 27 men and women who made up the AFME, which was led by Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of former-American President Theodore Roosevelt. The CIA had been formed in 1947 from what was originally the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Kermit Roosevelt Jr. was extremely influential in the early years of both organizations.

Kermit Roosevelt had been recruited by the mastermind behind the OSS, General William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, in 1941 and he was soon placed into the newly-created Office of the Co-ordinator of Information— the precursor to the OSS—as a special assistant to Dean Acheson. Working out of the State Department, Acheson, who was then Assistant Secretary of State, had been tasked during World War II with implementing President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of undermining Axis powers while at the same time supplying economic aid to Great Britain. Kermit Roosevelt, who was distantly related to the president, had had an affinity with the Middle East from a very young age with the Daily Mail of Hagerstown in Maryland reporting in September 1948 that: “Mr. [Kermit] Roosevelt’s career as a writer began when he was a child with the composing of a prophetic poem, ‘The Lure of the East,’ for the ‘American Boy’ magazine. He was eleven at the time.” Kermit’s father, also named Kermit, had been in the “shipping business,” as mentioned in the latter article. This had meant that Kermit Jr. had travelled around the world at an early age.

A 1950 photo of Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of US President Theodore Roosevelt, and a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Source: National Security Archive, GWU

Kermit spent the war years serving in the Middle East and Italy, travelling extensively throughout the war and was reported to have toured Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Iran and Ethiopia. His father, had spent the war fighting mainly in Norway and Finland, but also served briefly in Egypt, and died tragically in Alaska in 1943. The Abilene Reporter newspaper reported on Sunday 6 June 1943 that Kermit Sr. had passed away in Alaska the day before the article was published, with the paper noting: “Ordinarily, the phrase ‘killed in action’ is used to report a death in combat.” It was later confirmed that he had actually committed suicide. By this time, Kermit Jr. had already been recruited by the OSS. Kermit Jr. continued to work for the OSS as a Middle East expert once the war had ended and he also began writing and editing the history of the secretive organization. By 1947, the OSS had become the CIA and Kermit was on the forefront of designing projects and programs for the newly-founded intelligence agency. He also seemed genuinely concerned for the situation in the Middle East, and soon took part in a lecture tour. That tour, whether sponsored by the CIA or not, saw Kermit argue passionately on behalf of those who were suffering in Palestine.

In December 1947, Kermit began a lecture tour on a paper he had written concerning the Middle East, entitled, “The Arabs Live There Too,” which discussed the “Palestinian problem” and looked at the basic issues between the Arabs and Jews who inhabited the region. The report, which was published in the Evening Post, warned that the situation deserves “more than a cursory glance from Americans.” Kermit described Palestine as “the UN’s baby” and stated that America had taken over the job as “nurse and governess” of the region. The lecture tour was advertised in the Waukesha Daily Freeman on 22 December 1947, with Roosevelt stating within the articles: “Applying the principle of one of their proverbs, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ the Arabs might move into closer alignment with the Soviet Union,” going on to warn that “Arabs will not blame Russia (who voted for partition in the UN) half as much as they will blame Britain and the United States.” Kermit Roosevelt believed that the Arab league would stop short of all out war, describing an official declaration of war by any of the seven Arab nations as being “extremely unlikely.”

Roosevelt was eventually proved correct about the Arab nations not declaring war immediately and predicted instead that: “Any time the Arabs felt themselves strong enough, they would surely try to recover Palestine.” Before Kermit began his first covert operation in an Arabic country, he had been initially sent to Tibet by then-President Harry Truman to help ward off communist influence. The Delta Democrat Times of Mississippi reported on 9 April 1950 that: “Kermit Roosevelt, son of a G.O.P. President, is also being used on a confidential mission to block Communism in Tibet.”

Kermit Roosevelt believed that forming alliances with Arab countries as they emerged from British and French rule would pay dividends for America while also preventing Soviet infiltration of Arabic nations. However, that strategy would rely on the Western powers’ ability to keep Arab nationalism at bay, whether by diplomacy or subterfuge.

During 1943, Kermit worked for the State Department in Cairo and this was one of the first Middle East countries in the post-war years to experience a CIA-backed coup d’etat. At the same time as Kissinger was commencing the pilot of the Harvard International Seminar in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt was deeply involved in overthrowing the ruling Egyptian regime, running a special covert operation which was gingerly named “Operation Fat Fucker”, normally referred to as simply “Operation FF.”

Egypt, at the turn of the 50s, was ruled by King Farouk, a notorious ruler who was already seen as corrupt in the eyes of most Egyptians. The project to depose him was led by the CIA’s then-director Allen Dulles, alongside CIA Station Chief in Cairo, Miles Copeland, Jr.; Secretary of State, Dean Acheson; and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.—who was officially a CIA Operative at that time—with the original aim of applying pressure on Farouk to enact certain political reforms within his country. When the initial “pressure” phase had failed, resulting in Farouk rejecting the American proposals, Kermit Roosevelt came up with an idea of how to orchestrate a peaceful revolution which would see both the required reforms enacted and the country more open to “American control,” as historian Matthew F. Holland puts it.

Roosevelt met in secret with the Free Officers Movement, a nationalist revolutionary group, which was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Naguib, and which was already planning to overthrow the government. On 23 July 1952, the coup d’etat, which had been the brainchild of Roosevelt, saw Farouk forced into abdicating power and he was sent into exile in Italy. The CIA-led coup had successfully installed a new government, which they believed would be more amenable to further American infiltration. The CIA would then help the newly installed Egyptian government to establish the General Intelligence Agency, Egypt’s own CIA clone organization.

The following year, in March 1953, the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, directed the CIA, which was still headed by his brother, Allen Dulles, to begin preparing a similar coup in Iran. The same people who had successfully installed Nasser in Egypt were given $1 million in funds—equivalent to $12,128,464.73 in 2022—which were to be used to bring about the fall of the Iranian leader Mohammed Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh was successfully deposed on 19 August 1953 in a coup orchestrated by both the CIA and MI6, again led by AFME’s Kermit Roosevelt Jr., in a project entitled “Operation Ajax.” The successful coups in Egypt and Iran were not spontaneous events but were instead well executed and intricately planned operations. However, the Americans were soon to learn that, if they were to continue to overthrow governments, they would first need to have effective American-aligned leaders already trained-up and ready to install into their target countries.

Before the newly-created CIA had begun to enact the aforementioned coups in Egypt and Iran, Roosevelt had founded the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land with many of the same people who would later make up the American Friends of the Middle East. The Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land was formed in February 1948 by Roosevelt and a woman named Virginia Gildersleeve whose sympathies, according to historian Robert Moats Miller, “were indeed overwhelmingly with the Arabs,” and was a leading figure in the Christian opposition to the creation of the Israeli state.

Gildersleeve had been the long-term dean of Barnard College, but—in 1947—she had stepped down from her position to concentrate on other activities. In February 1948, the New York Times reported that she led a group opposed to the creation of a UN police force in Palestine. The article, entitled 7 Leaders Propose Truce in Palestine, also stated that the group’s members were: “Terming the present conflict in Palestine far more dangerous to world peace than most Americans realize,” with the group stating: “We feel a moral and civic obligation to urge that the most serious attention be given to our national policy with respect to Palestine,” with that statement also being cosigned by Kermit Roosevelt. Also prominent alongside Gildersleeve and Roosevelt in the creation of the AFME was Harry Emerson Fosdick, an American pastor described as an “active anti-Zionist” and who later became a major influence to Martin Luther King Jr.

Another notable member of the AFME was the controversial Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster who had the honour of being the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Thompson was described in a 1939 Time magazine piece as being equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt and was often referred to as the “First Lady of American Journalism.” However, Thompson also held extreme views concerning America’s black voting population, describing them as: “Notoriously venal. Ignorant and illiterate, the vast mass of Negroes are like the lower strata of the early industrial immigrants, and like them are ‘bossed’ and ‘delivered’ in blocs by venal leaders, white and black.”

Thompson was a vocal anti-Zionist, coming to the conclusion that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war. But, even though Roosevelt, Gildersleeve and Thompson all publicly opposed Zionism, the CIA in general would reap many benefits by creating a world which, if not in a state of perpetual war, was nearly always on the brink of perpetual war. The AFME included some of the key people who were moulding and influencing the post-war intelligence push. Even though we could find many interesting facts in studying all 27 members of the AFME, we now know that their interests focused on education and eventually resulted in the funding of a specific Harvard project that would create cadres of future international leaders who were amenable to America’s political interests and desires, including Klaus Schwab.

Just after World War II, there were many differing opinions within the American political establishment concerning what should be done about the “Palestinian problem.” Although many of the members of the AFME may have been publicly anti-Zionist, an upsurge in Arab nationalism had been triggered by the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948. This initially resulted in a divide in public opinion, with many Americans eventually siding with the newly founded Israeli state and their occupying force.

Popular opinion among the Arabic countries was much less divided. The Arab League closed their offices in Washington DC—referred to as the Arab Office—in 1947, stating publicly that the United States had shown a “complete and arrogant disregard for Arab rights, Arab interests, and Arab feelings.” At this time, the United States were still heavily dependant on Arab oil and the supply of this oil also relied on America having good relations with the Arabic world. The US oil consortium ARAMCO could only continue benefiting from Arab petroleum if the US stayed on good terms with the Saudi king, Ibn Saud, who was an extreme anti-Zionist. ARAMCO soon setup an office in Washington so as to lobby government on behalf of the Arabs while also putting funds into educational institutions such as the Middle East Institute. Yet, it wasn’t only the Arab contingent of the American population who were concerned about the rise of Zionism, with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) objecting to Zionism because they believed that it conflated religion and nationality. Rabbi Elmer Berger of Michigan, who was an ACJ leader at the time, campaigned for American Jews to stop supporting the creation of the state of Israel. At the time, the State Department had also been worried about throwing their lot in with the Zionists. They were mainly concerned with the potential for the growth of communist influence in Arab countries if the US showed too much support for the newly created state of Israel.

According to historian Hugh Wilford, it was to be the Cairo-based former-OSS members who acted as “the nexus of the network that would become the American Friends of the Middle East” as he makes note of in his paper entitled, American Friends of the Middle East: The CIA, US Citizens, and the Secret Battle for Public Opinion in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1967. Wilford also points out that Kermit Roosevelt associated with many anti-Zionists of the period. For example, he was actually under the command of an anti-Zionist descendent of missionaries named Stephen B. L. Penrose Jr. Roosevelt had also shared a room with George L. Levison, a State Department officer of Jewish descent who later introduced Roosevelt to such leaders as the aforementioned Elmer Berger. Roosevelt, Levison and Berger all became close friends, with Levison eventually being godparent to one of Roosevelt’s children.

Roosevelt was not only vital in setting up the original iteration of the AFME, the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, he also ran the organization out of his Washington home alongside the organization’s secretary, Garland Evans Hopkins. Eventually the anti-Zionist activists within the government failed in their efforts to prevent the creation of the state of Israel when President Harry Truman officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty. Roosevelt continued to undermine future support for Israel and, a year after Truman’s recognition of the country, Roosevelt and others formed the Holy Land Emergency Liaison Program (HELP), which was to coordinate aid for displaced Arabs in the region while also working to, as Hugh Wilford puts it: “Reduce US support for Israel.” It is also around this time where Dorothy Thompson and others began to raise the profile of Roosevelt’s organization.

The Battle for the Hearts, Minds and Souls of the Future Global Leaders

The Harvard Summer School had been running for over 75 years by the time Henry Kissinger was finishing his studies at the university. In 1950, Kissinger achieved his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and, during his studies, he received much attention from some very powerful Harvard grandees. In 1951, Kissinger launched the Harvard magazine entitled “Confluence,” which was to run alongside the International Seminar, and became the publication’s editor. This quarterly magazine was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and received contributions from others who were described as “various luminaries who had previously been lecturers or students at the Summer School.”

The International Seminar was later boosted by extra funding totalling at least $135,000—$1,637,342.74 in 2022—by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1960 and 1966 alone, with any previous CIA funding since the seminar’s creation in 1950 being left undeclared. Harvard Summer School’s International Seminar Forum had originally been the brainchild of William Yandell Elliott, an important mentor of Kissinger who took a back seat and remained out of the public eye. After the pilot event for the International Seminar Forum in 1951, the young Kissinger wrote to William Yandell Elliott, saying: “I was very much embarrassed to hear myself described as the guiding genius of the Seminar,” going on to say: “I, for one, have no illusions on this score.” Subsequently, the majority of participants would recall the influence of Kissinger rather than Elliott, with the forum eventually being commonly referred to as “Kissinger’s International Seminar.”

The CIA money for what was described as the “foreign seminar” came via a known CIA conduit, the aforementioned Kermit Roosevelt’s American Friends of the Middle East. Kissinger and his biographers would claim that he was unaware of the organization’s intelligence ties, describing Kissinger as “flying into a rage” upon learning that the AFME was actually a front for the CIA. However, Kissinger’s letters to H. Gates Lloyd during this period told a different story. They show that Kissinger had carefully itemized the expenses of the Summer School. Other documents within William Yandell Elliott’s papers also revealed that Kissinger may have even acted as a contract consultant for the Office for Policy Coordination (OPC) which was the covert operation wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, Elliott had written a letter to Lloyd on 15 November 1950, which urged progress with the Summer School proposal and the creation of Kissinger’s International Seminar. With that letter came certain papers directed to Kissinger himself which showed he had discussed the proposals with Cleveland Cram, an infamous and powerful early member of the Central Intelligence Agency. Cram had originally sought a career in academia but was recruited by the CIA in 1949. He was soon liaising with Yandell Elliott and Kissinger concerning the Harvard Summer School project and, after it was up-and-running, Cram was sent to London to become the Deputy Station Chief and the official liaison between the CIA, MI5 and MI6. In this CIA/Harvard nexus of the late 1940s and early 1950s, came the formation of what would, a generation later, evolve into the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader initiative.

One of the original reasons for the creation of the CIA had been to counter Soviet influence in foreign countries and they used multi-pronged attack strategies to achieve their aims. While Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt Jr., and their secret army, were organizing and enacting coup d’etats in country after country, other CIA-linked organizers and contributors were beginning to create the infrastructure that would allow them to recruit, train and install young European leaders into positions of power, leaders who they believed were unlikely to be susceptible to potential Soviet influence. Harvard was not alone in its funding of such projects. In fact, as Hugh Wilford noted in his fascinating and informative book The Mighty Wurlitzer, Yale was: “The single most fertile recruiting ground for the Agency in its first years, yielding among others Cord Meyer and two of the brightest stars of the ‘Golden Age’ of covert operations, Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes.” Also noted by Wilford are Yale’s James J. Angleton and Norman Holmes Pearson. The latter, Wilford notes, had graduated from Yale before serving in the OSS and returned to the university after the war in order to set up his “American Studies” program. The CIA were essentially trying to win the hearts and minds of young foreigners in direct competition with the Soviet Union.

The communists had already been busy targetting the impressionable youth for over 25 years before the end of WWII with Wilhelm “Willi” Münzenberg, a German-born communist activist, being the first leader of the Young Communist International (Comintern) as early as 1919. In 1945, a conference took place in London which saw the launch of the anti-imperialist World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). The following year saw the founding of other groups with some members sympathetic to communist ideals such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the International Union of Students (IUS). The latter had been created in Prague and saw a 25 member intelligence-linked US delegation attend.

As these entities were created, they each became virtual battlegrounds for East vs West ideology and the clash of Rhodesian Imperialist Capitalism and Soviet Communism. In fact, the World Federation of Democratic Youth saw Cold War rifts in their organizations soon fester and, by 1949, the non-communists had publicly withdrawn from the group, going on to create the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions instead. These sorts of organizations were valuable instruments for spreading communist propaganda and had been defined by Lenin as “levers” or “transmission belts” because of the way they can connect the Communist Party with the masses and were often referred to as “democratic” or “mass” organizations in Communist Jargon, as a pamphlet entitled, Facts About International Communist Front Organisations described in April 1957. In that particular pamphlet a quote from Lenin, which also appeared in Lawrence and Wishart’s 1947 book, The Essentials of Lenin, volume II, states: “Every sacrifice must be made, the greatest obstacles must be overcome, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly and patiently, precisely in those institutions, societies and associations—even the most reactionary—to which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses belong.” In essence, the CIA’s creation and funding of youth organizations and their wider infiltration of American universities was a strategy that essentially came straight out of Lenin’s own play book.

Before the CIA’s involvement, the British had been the ones taking the initiative by targetting the youth of Europe with the aim of countering Communist Party infiltration. The Cultural Relations Department was tasked with developing strategies relevant to Western-aligned youth groups, organizations and conferences. The first of such groups was the World Assembly of Youth (WAY) which had been given a draft charter in England in February 1949. All youth related member organizations of the United Nations were invited to attend an international conference held at Westminster Hall in August the same year. Here, they officially established WAY and elected their first president, Mr. Maurice Sauvé of Canada. It was around this time that the Americans first began organising their own efforts to “educate the youth,” which eventually led to such initiatives as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar. At Harvard, the International Affairs Committee (HIACOM) began gathering a group of young veterans who had worked within intelligence during World War II, in an effort to rival the much more advanced communist propaganda efforts.

In December 1946, HIACOM officers were involved in organising a meeting in Chicago which discussed the idea of creating a national body to represent American students, as well as wider American interests, at international events. As a result, by the summer of 1947, the United States National Student Association was born. For the two years prior to the launch of Kissinger’s International Seminar, Harvard students had conducted surveys of international student opinion in order to identify potential anti-communist allies overseas while also poaching potential members from rival organizations such as the International Union of Students.

The National Student Association had their second survey funded by two very interesting private donors via the Office for Policy Coordination. The Chicago lawyer and President of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Laird Bell, and a Wilmington industrialist named Thomas Brittingham, each provided the princely sum of $6000 to the organization specifically to carry out the survey. Laird Bell was an extremely influential and well-connected lawyer who had found himself frequently visiting Nazi Germany just before World War II in order to represent the interests of US bondholders who had lost more than $1 billion to the German Reichsbank. Bell would not be alone while working in pre-war Nazi Germany, as his co-counsel for these cases was John Foster Dulles, who was representing the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. By 1945, Bell was officially serving in post-war occupied Germany, and Eisenhower soon appointed him as a delegate to the United Nations. In 1948, Laird Bell became an “Overseer” of Harvard College, where he stayed until 1954, throughout the creation of the International Seminar.

Thomas Brittingham was extremely important in the development of America’s effort to win over sceptical foreign youth, especially in Northern Europe. Setting up “The Brittingham Scholarships” just after the war, he targeted the youth in Scandinavian countries. Also referred to as the “Viking students,” he would attract young men to his collection of scholarship programs which would eventually become named the “Brittingham Viking Scholarships” and which were run out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of “Tom’s Vikings”—as they were also called—would become successful in organizations that the program’s current website describes as: “their various industries, academic fields, and politics.”

Although there were many different youth groups throughout the various educational establishments across the United States, Kissinger’s International Seminar at Harvard’s Summer School was a very unique project. It was a focused event with a limited number of participants who were carefully chosen by a select few. The Harvard Crimson reported on 1 February 1956 that: “A group of approximately 50 men and a few women from the Orient, Middle East, and Europe, including members of various parliaments, editors, artists, writers, and other cultural leaders will once more come together to form the International Seminar, a regular feature of the Summer School.” This was a special elite group, selected, groomed and trained for powerful positions, with their allegiances forever tied to the interests of the United States government, and those interests would soon begin to fluctuate wildly over the following decades.

The Kissinger Continuum

By 1992, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the education of Schwab’s specially selected globalist politicians of the future was just about to begin. During this time of great political change, Schwab’s World Economic Forum had become a powerful globalist entity and Schwab was ready to begin following the model first established by Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. As Herman Kahn and his Hudson Institute colleagues had mapped out in a 1967 document entitled, _Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Center Program. Final Report,_ training a comprehensive future leadership group outside of the normal educational frameworks was of the highest priority. As previously reported, Kahn was yet another mentor to Klaus Schwab.

The first iteration of the WEF’s Young Global Leader program, called “Global Leaders for Tomorrow,” was launched in 1992 and was described as “a new community” which saw its first gathering of future leadership candidates take place in 1993. Some of the people who attended this first event were soon placed into top positions of power in their respective countries. For example, Tony Blair was a participant in the first event and, only 4 years later, he began his decade long rule of the UK. Gordon Brown also attended in 1993 and then served alongside Tony Blair, eventually becoming Prime Minister directly afterwards. This initial group was full to the brim with other future leaders with many members who were destined to soon become heads of states in their respective countries. Well-known leaders who attended include Angela Merkel [Germany], Victor Orban [Hungary], Nicholas Sarkozy [France], Guy Verhofstadt [Belgium], Lee Hsien Loong [Singapore], Cyril Ramaphosa [South Africa] and José Maria Aznar [Spain]. Alongside the politicians in this first group, there were also notable business leaders in attendance, such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Summers and Edgar Bronfman. In total, the first year of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program was comprised of 200 potential candidates who were all under 43 years-old at the time. For over a decade, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program trained various leaders who often found themselves subsequently installed into various positions of power, including many elected officials. In 2004, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program was rebranded as the Forum of Young Global Leaders and was re-launched after Schwab found funding from an old friend.

The Harvard Kennedy Magazine of Summer 2009 starts their lead article by stating: “Through Alumni and Teaching Harvard Kennedy School plays a central role in the Forum of Young Global Leaders Program,” with the author, Steve Nadis writing: “In 2004, Klaus Schwab MC/MPA 1967, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who founded the World Economic Forum (WEF), won a $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation and tried to think of the best use to which he could put that money. Schwab decided to start a WEF-affiliated program called the Forum of Young Global Leaders (YGL), which, as the name implies, would bring together a new generation of leaders from across the globe and turn them loose on the biggest problems of the day.” Astoundingly, the Tel Aviv-based Dan David Foundation that awarded Schwab the $1 million which was directly used to create the Young Global Leaders program had one extremely significant member of note on their board, Henry A. Kissinger.

Harvard’s International Seminar and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders initiative were created to be extremely powerful vehicles for training and installing world leaders who would be sympathetic to a Kissinger-style globalist government. They were also both made possible by organizing assistance and funding from Kissinger himself. It isn’t a surprise that Schwab’s links with Kissinger prevailed throughout both their lifetimes, Schwab was a student of Henry Kissinger and the two men also appeared to share many similar views.

Yet, what is really notable about Harvard’s Summer School, and Kissinger’s International Seminar in particular, is that the programs, conferences and the basic elements involved were very similar to what the World Economic Forum still presents to their members annually to this day. They are extremely similar projects aimed at achieving similar agendas. When the World Economic Forum began their Global Leaders for Tomorrow initiative in the early 1990s, Klaus Schwab’s organization implemented a program of recruitment and training for global leaders which was almost indistinguishable from Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. Schwab was treading in the footsteps of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, and it was the Dan David Foundation, while Kissinger was seated on their board, which eventually awarded Schwab with the initial funding required to create the current iteration of the program, the Forum for Young Global Leaders.

Klaus Schwab and others board a flight to Ukraine for the 1993 World Economic Forum annual meeting, Source: WEF

The World Economic Forum has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers, business leaders, entrepreneurs and other powerful actors, through their Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders initiatives. Schwab has even spoken openly on how his organization has gone on to “penetrate the cabinets” of supposedly sovereign states, and we should not be naive, as he has been planning on doing exactly this for at least three decades. However, it isn’t the thousands of participants who have completed these programs who we should be most concerned about. Our real concern should be with the billions of democratic voters who have been tricked into believing that any of the leaders produced by either Schwab or Kissinger have their best interests at heart.

Klaus Schwab became the heir to Henry Kissinger’s most important project, the infiltration of individuals and organizations in countries around the world with the aim of creating globalist-aligned governments built within the framework of an outdated and soulless conceptualization of American imperialism. Klaus Schwab’s activities since his time at Harvard can be seen as simply a direct continuation of Kissinger’s work during the 1950s and 1960s, and it would be naive of us to believe that there is not someone else, already groomed and trained, who is ready and willing to pick up Kissinger’s political baton from Schwab and continue in their joint mission towards globalist governance.

Introducing the Grand Jury

For those of you who have no clue what this is about, you would benefit from this twitter thread breaking the players down:

International Grand Jury investigating Crimes Against Humanity has begun!

Supported by the Berlin Corona Committee @CoronaAusschuss, Day 1 Opening Statements were made on February 5th, 2022

Brief 🧵 on crucial background information pic.twitter.com/2ostsnbCZH

— Remnant | MD (@RemnantMd) February 6, 2022

In brief, four German lawyers with experience in consumer protection and medical legal cases formed an investigative committee in July 2020, with the goal of understanding what events had transpired surrounding the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. They witnessed and broadcast testimony from experts across the globe with a diverse set of knowledge concerned with microbiology, outbreaks, and global interventions.

For a summary of the people interviewed, I discuss in a prior article everyone from Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Catherine Austin Fitts to infamous professor of psychology Mattias Desmet and his discussion of Mass Formation.

After the legal team gathered this information, the Corona Investigative Committee collaborated with lawyers around the world in prosecuting governments for violating their constitutional rights. Unfortunately, they met great resistance.

Most recently, they created a sort of Peoples’ Court, in which they have lawyers from several countries collaborating in a model grand jury.

From Wikipedia:

A grand jury is a jury—a group of citizens—empowered by law to conduct legal proceedings, investigate potential criminal conduct, and determine whether criminal charges should be brought. A grand jury may subpoena physical evidence or a person to testify. A grand jury is separate from the courts, which do not preside over its functioning.

The purpose of a grand jury is to accuse persons who may be guilty of a crime. It is a means for lay citizens to participate in the administration of justice. Watergate, for example, had involvement of grand juries. More recently, the prosecution of Purdue Pharma also developed from grand jury investigations.

The juries are ‘grand’ because they are larger than typical jury trials, about 23 jurors. In this case, however, the jurors are the world. Today, tens of thousands of people watched the livestream.

This is what they heard.

Day 2: Historical Background

Before these proceedings began, my goal was to provide highlights of the Day for people to digest. Lo and behold, the first day was about 6 hours long.

So, I shifted to a less unwieldy approach. I’ll be discussing what I believe to be the most valuable pieces of information presented.

You can watch the full proceedings here.

Alex Thomson

Alex Thomson was an officer in Britain’s national intelligence agency, GCHQ. In one of his roles, he served as the transcriber of Russian and German intel. He also has a decorated upbringing, including boarding school and Oxford University. He is also a journalist and writer.

The perspective Alex provides completely floored me. This account is the ultimate historical backdrop to all that has taken place in recent years, and in decades past.

According to Alex, there is a history that lies behind the post-WWII era of health crises which we find ourselves in. Furthermore, the City of London has readied itself for this very moment with efforts that began in the 1870s. From this time, the consuming cartelization of the world began.

Everything that we see unfolding in modern history, points back to the period of 1870. At this time, the British elite instantiated several revolutions concerning the containment of productivity, and prevention of the growth of intellectual property among the native people of the Empire, and its competing nations.

These include revolutions in:

• Education
• Intellectual Property
• Healthcare
• …and Governance

The City of London - the Square Mile

The central node of the Commonwealth is the City of London - henceforth referred to as The City. This square mile at the heart of Greater London, is home to about 9000 people. It also happens to be home to the families of the British Elite.

The City and the Church of England are the only two institutions that have endured every constitutional revolution in the British Isles with their wealth and privileges intact.

The City still has legal status independent of all the boroughs of London. Its privileges date back to the Magna Carta, approximately 1215. Its self-government has never been challenged. Its power has varied across time, but peaked at around the 17th century, during which it challenged the Crown for absolute dominance - thereby having power over a huge portion of the Earth. The City went as far as abolishing the Crown for about a decade.

The British Cabinet Office is the repository of Crown prerogatives. When lay people think of the Crown, they think of the Monarch. In practice, however, this is merely a front. Since 1870, the financiers of political parties are those who pull the levers of the “Crown.”

The City even has a designated seat in Parliament, entitled the Remembrancer. The sitting Monarch of Britain does not have such a privilege.

The model of government which Britain has exported to the Commonwealth includes a Privy Council which governs in the name of the Crown. For example, here is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau swearing an oath to the Crown & Privy Council:

In Britain, however, Parliament and government departments are merely consulted. There is a veneer of separation between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government. As concerns the new Crown and The City, this is merely a show - well documented in the 1873 book entitled The English Constitution.

the dignified parts of government - the show - the attractive parts do have a purpose, but only to attract national support to the working parts behind the scenes.

The City, thus, can be likened to a deep state.

A New Britain

The modern era of Cartelization began around 1870. Up until this point the might of the British Empire and navy was largely unchallenged. The British elite realized they would rapidly face competition from foreign entities.

Starting from the mid-19th century, British foreign policy was primarily concerned with making allies with rivals of the past (France & the Ottomans) in an effort to prevent the future rise of a Russio-German alliance.

Unfortunately for Britian, there was another threat to the West. Namely, the rise of intellectual productivity and the democratization of innovation called the United States.

These changes in the global landscape brought about an existential crisis for Britain. Thus, The City’s trade model had to adjust.

The City adopted a model in which true wealth was to be found in ownership of the mind and body. This model of the world provided the added benefit of preventing the productive class from outproducing and overthrowing their bosses.

Thomson adds:

It is the consistent finding of allied researchers and commentators, that The City and its soft power institutions (BBC, Academia, & Church) continue to regard the battle for the mind as their top priority. Health is regarded merely as a subset of that broader battle.

MINDSPACE

Mindspace is a termed used by The City. It was formalized in the British Cabinet Office’s 2010 publication: Mindspace: Influencing behavior through public policy

MINDSPACE is actually a mnemonic for a checklist. The purpose of this checklist is to guide development of policy to influence behavior.

…we set out nine of the most robust (non-coercive) influences on our behavior, captured in a simple mnemonic - MINDSPACE

• Messenger --| we are heavily influenced by who communicates information
• Incentives -- our responses to incentives are shaped by predictable mental shortcuts such as strongly avoiding losses
• Norms -- we are strongly influenced by what others do
• Defaults -- we „go with the flow‟ of pre-set options
• Salience -- our attention is drawn to what is novel and seems relevant to us
• Priming -- our acts are often influenced by sub-conscious cues
• Affect -- our emotional associations can powerfully shape our actions
• Commitments -- we seek to be consistent with our public promises, and
  reciprocate acts
• Ego -- we act in ways that make us feel better about ourselves

The British elite regard themselves as the world’s leading power in Mindspace.

The purposes of Mindspace are particularly interesting abroad. The City influences other countries by tricking its own population and the elites of other nations to assume the perspective and narrative of The City in place of their own sovereign interests.

It is not a strategy that is formally taught, but is the credo of leading elite families that run The City, and the modus operandi of the Anglo-American tax-exempt foundations & think-tanks (NGOs) that push the agenda of these families upon Western governments.

All this suggests that our political discourse has veered astray. This perspective of forming public policy is a betrayal of the governmental enterprise, in my estimation.

Here are the Elite in question, at the World Economic Forum, opining on the loss of trust…

The World Economic Forum's Great Narrative Conference: "The good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more... the bad news is that the majority of people trusted that elite less..." pic.twitter.com/c4I4zlew1p

— James Lindsay, fun (@ConceptualJames) January 21, 2022

On the one hand, culture evolves by the interaction of humans in enterprise. The evolving culture, then, influences legislation.

On the other, you have a governance structure which aims to mold culture by the inaction of public policy. These approaches to governance can be at odds.

As Alex Thomson put it:

If your mindspace is controlled by the Anglosaxon liberal democratic model, then you are going to find a club with self-interest will run the world, even in areas such as healthcare. People will wrongly assume that their best interests are kept at heart.

These MINDSPACE tactics, however, must appear to be legitimate. Otherwise, people get suspicious and resist.

Even if people agree with the behaviour goal, they may object to the means of accomplishing it. The different MINDSPACE effects will attract different levels of controversy.254 There are several factors that determine controversy:

Degree of conscious control. As noted, MINDSPACE effects depend at least partly on the Automatic System. This means that citizens may not fully realise that their behaviour is being changed – or, at least, how it is being changed. Clearly, this opens government up to charges of manipulation. People tend to think that attempts to change their behaviour will be effective if they are simply provided information in an “above board” way - people have a strong dislike of being “tricked”. This dislike has a psychological grounding, but fundamentally it is an issue of trust in government. A lack of conscious control also has implications for consent and freedom of choice. First, it creates a greater need for citizens to approve the use of the behaviour change – perhaps using new forms of democratic engagement. Second, if the effect operates automatically, it may offer little opportunity for citizens to opt- out or choose otherwise; the concept of “choice architecture” is less use here. Any action that may reduce the “right to be wrong” will be very controversial. Of course, some traditional attempts to change behaviour are not explicit (as noted in the „Salience‟ section, some incentives are effectively invisible), and these have attracted controversy. But they rarely attract the charge of „manipulation‟ because they are based on conscious actions to supply and register information, rather than relying on unconscious reactions.

By influencing the cultural institutions of authority, they can capture the peoples’ mind.

Implications for Western Democracy

In the Commonwealth & coastal jurisdictions (e.g. NYC), we are trained by the soft power institutions of The City to think we are in control of our destiny. The strength of The City’s model is the ability to operate at arm's length. To persuade people that what they wanted before, is not what they want now.

Consequently, the MINDSPACE is the most powerful weapon that Britain can wield. The British establishment has not fought fairly since about 1870. Most of the revolutions it hoped to bring about, were all in place by the post-WW2 era.

Thomson continues:

The sovereign power of The City is learned by most by the time they are in boarding school, let alone matriculants of Oxford & Cambrdige. According to this understanding, the rest of the British empire does not have self-determination.

The City owns the population’s body, mind, & soul.

From The City’s perspective, its livestock are not performing in a manner which they deem competitive on the world stage.

Usage of the term livestock is explicit. Up until the 1990s, boarding schools used it to describe the British population. This revolved around the idea that people were cattle, and that their place in the world was under the direction of the Elite.

In effect, the City of London (and its US hub, Wall Street) is battling with the American experiment of self-determination, intellectual productivity and the democratization of innovation. Whilst simultaneously competing with the East.

We are witnessing the evolution of a meta Civil War. Not within a country, but within the western hemisphere. A war which will determine which ethos within the West will rise to contend against the slavish productivity of the East.

I, for one, believe in the American experiment.

Freedom is good for the Soul.

The Reasons For And Dangers Behind The War In Ukraine

The war in the Ukraine continues but the propaganda hysteria around it seems to have calmed down a bit as reality is setting in.

This gives room from more sane voices to be heard by the public. I will start with the Russian ones.

The Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Antonov, was interviewed by Newsweek. He explained Russia's political and judicial reasoning behind the war:

"The special operation in Ukraine is the result of the unwillingness of the Kiev regime to stop the genocide of Russians by fulfilling its obligations under the international commitments," Antonov told Newsweek. "The desire of the NATO member states to use the territory of a neighboring state to establish a foothold in the struggle against Russia is also obvious."
...
To Russia, Antonov said that the [Maidan] revolution was a "bloody coup d'état instigated by the West" in which "ultranationalist ideas came to power in Kiev." He said that policies viewed by Moscow as hostile such as the removal of Russian as a national language and the rehabilitation of nationalist Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, had "taken root in Ukraine under external administration."
...
Antonov argued that it was the "nationalist frenzy and revanchist sentiments of the Kiev regime" that resulted in the effective death of the Minsk deals as Ukraine chose "the path of rapid militarization" with help from abroad.

"The NATO member countries have commenced a military exploration of Ukraine," Antonov said. "It was flooded with Western weaponry while President Vladimir Zelensky announced Kiev's plans to acquire nuclear weapons which would threaten not only neighboring countries, but also the entire world."
...
"In this context, Russia had no other choice but to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics," Antonov said. "Then, in accordance with Chapter VII, Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with the authorization of the Federation Council of Russia and in execution of the Treaties of Friendship and Mutual Assistance with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin made a decision to begin a special military operation."

"Its aim is to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine in order to reduce military threats posed by the Western states that are trying to use the fraternal Ukrainian people in the struggle against the Russians," he added.

Sergey Karaganov is a high level Russian political scientist and commentator who is also a presidential advisor in Moscow. He was interviewed (in English) by the Italian Corriere Della Sera

Sergey Karaganov: «We are at war with the West. The European security order is illegitimate»

An excerpt:

How can an attack be justified on such grounds?

«For 25 years people like myself have said that NATO expansion would lead to war. Putin said several times that if it came to Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, there would be no Ukraine anymore. In Bucharest in 2008 there was a plan of quick accession of Ukraine and Georgia to NATO. It was blocked by the efforts of Germany and France, but since that time Ukraine has been integrated into NATO. It was pumped up by weaponry and its troops were trained by NATO, their army getting stronger and stronger day by day. In addition we saw a very rapid increase of neo-Nazi sentiment especially among the military, the society and the ruling elite. It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937. The war was inevitable, they were a spearhead of NATO. We made the very hard decision to strike first, before the threat becomes deadlier».

I recommend to read the whole Karaganov interview to better understand the Russian thinking.

"It was clear that Ukraine had become something like Germany around 1936-1937," said Karaganov. The 'western' public has difficulties to understand that. But it is the prevailing Russian view and when analyzing the developments in the Ukraine over the last years with Russian history in mind one can easily come to the same conclusion.

It is also what the Canadian Russia expert Patrick Armstrong had mentioned as the most important item after he had read Putin's speeches at the start of the war:

Had I been at home I would have read Putin’s speech earlier and understood sooner. What he is talking about is what the Soviet Union tried to do from 1933 onwards: namely to stop Hitler before he got started. This time Russia is able to do it by itself. In other words, Putin feels that he is making a pre-emptive attack to stop June 1941. This is very serious indeed and indicates that the Russians are going to keep going until they feel that they can safely stop.

The Russian view is not really that far fetched.

Here is a recent news agency video of officials of the Ukrainian Security Service SBU in front of a destroyed house seemingly praying with a priest for the deceased.

bigger

Note the fascist Right Sector patch the official carries on his arm and back. The SBU has become a kind of Gestapo tasked with eliminating opposition elements in Ukraine. The UN's OHCHR, the OSCE, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International have all reported about the SBU's many crimes.

There is also an 'SS Galizien' patch on the officers back which refers to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) which fought with Nazi-Germany against the Soviet Union. Like many other SS division the 1st Galician was involved in serious war-crimes but later mostly whitewashed. After the war many of its surviving officers fled to Canada and to the United States.

The offspring of those officers and other immigrants from the Ukraine played a noticeable role in lobbying for the war.

That has been successful as the U.S. had chosen to support extreme elements in Ukraine in opposition to peace. This has, as Aaron Maté writes, moved president Zelensky from an election campaign position of finding peace with Russia to becoming a war maniac:

On a warm October day in 2019, the eminent Russia studies professor Stephen F. Cohen and I sat down in Manhattan for what would be our last in-person interview (Cohen passed away in September 2020 at the age of 81).
...
"Zelensky ran as a peace candidate," Cohen explained. "He won an enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin." But there was a major obstacle. Ukrainian fascists, Cohen warned, "have said that they will remove and kill Zelensky if he continues along this line of negotiating with Putin… His life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine."

Peace could only come, Cohen stressed, on one condition. "[Zelensky] can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back," he said. "Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war. So the stakes are enormously high."
...
Although Trump's impeachment failed to remove him from office, it succeeded in cementing the proxy war aims of its chief proponents: rather than support Zelensky's peace mandate, Ukraine would instead be used to "fight Russia over there."

I had earlier quoted an interview with Dmytro Yarosh, then the leader of the fascist Right Sector, who just a week after Zelenski had become president threatened him with death should he try to make peace with the eastern Ukrainian rebels. Yarosh later became an advisor to the chief general staff of the Ukrainian military. He is the main person behind the ongoing nazification of the Ukrainian military.

As ambassador Antonov has said the war in Ukraine is not only about the Ukraine.

Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, is correctly pointing out the two levels of the war we see:

It is not that the empathy for Ukraine or support for Zelensky’s national resistance is misplaced, but that it has the appearance of being geopolitically orchestrated and manipulated in ways that other desperate national situations were not, and thus gives rise to suspicions about other, darker motives.

This is worrisome because these magnified concerns have acted as a principal way that the NATO West has gone out of its way to make the Ukrainian War about more than Ukraine. The wider war is best understood as occurring on two levels: a traditional war between the invading forces of Russia and the resisting forces of Ukraine as intertwined with an encompassing geopolitical war between the US and Russia. It is the prosecution of this latter war that presents the more profound danger to world peace, a danger that has been largely obscured or assessed as a mere extension of the Russia/Ukraine confrontation.
...
If this two-level perception is correctly analyzed in its appreciation of the different actors with contradictory priorities, then it becomes crucial to understand that in the geopolitical war the US is the aggressor as much as in the traditional war on the ground Russia is the aggressor.

Falk concurs with professor John Mearsheimer who fears that the larger U.S. Russia conflict hidden behind the war in Ukraine may lead to widening of the conflict into a potential nuclear war.

Summarizing Mearsheimer's recent talk with Katrina vanden Heuvel and ambassador James Matlock, the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern writes:

Speaking at an April 7 webinar, Mearsheimer was, true to form, "offensively realistic". He explained: (1) the root cause lies in the April 2008 NATO summit Declaration that Ukraine (and Georgia) "will become members of NATO"; and (2) that Russia sees this as an "existential threat" and therefore "must win" this one.

For President Joe Biden and the Democrats, even though Ukraine poses zero strategic threat to the U.S., a Russian "win" would be, politically, a "devastating defeat", says Mearsheimer. In that sense, the conflict is a "must-win" for the US as well. Underscoring the obvious, he noted it is impossible for both sides to "win" – at least not in current circumstances.
...
Noting that US academics and policy makers don’t believe NATO’s designs on Ukraine represent an existential threat to Russia, Mearsheimer is as blunt as his courteous mien permits. "What people in Washington believe is irrelevant. What matters is what Russia believes." He rejects the "mainstream" view that Putin’s Russia is motivated by expansionist aims, and asks the savants in Washington to put concrete evidence behind their claims. Moreover, "There is no evidence in what Putin has said that he wants to make Ukraine part of Russia," Mearsheimer adds.

Towards the end of a talk with Gonzalo Lira former Marine officer and UN Inspector Scott Ritter disputes the potential for escalation. The Pentagon, he says, knows the real situation on the ground and that the Ukrainian army will lose the war. Neither NATO, nor the U.S. nor single countries like Poland have their forces configured in a way that would allow them to successfully wage war against Russia. They would need more time to get ready than Russia will need to win the war in Ukraine.

Ritter predicts that the Pentagon will overrule any escalation the Ukraine warmongers in the State Department and National Security Council may plan and that those responsible for the current mess, Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, will get silenced or removed after the midterms.

I hope he is right.

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?

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been presented to us, in the West, as unprovoked and unjustified. We have not been told about Russia’s legitimate security concerns in the face of NATO expansionism. Nor has Ukraine’s significant Nazi problem been honestly reported, with some Western propagandist even promoting them.

The Russian government claims that its recognition and defence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) are born from “compassion” for the people who have been under siege for eight years. However, Russia also needs the new republics as satellite states, providing a foothold for its own national security as it opposes NATO’s advance.

It should be noted that Russia’s military actions, in trying to oust Nazis from their strongholds in Mariupol, Kharkiv and elsewhere, has led to the near destruction of many cities and towns in Eastern Ukraine. As of the 19th March the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCR) estimate that 847 civilians were killed in three weeks, primarily as a result of shelling.

The OHCR noted that the “actual figures are considerably higher” but could not be verified. Credible eye witness reports and video evidence indicate that the Nazis in Mariupol and other besieged areas had stopped civilians leaving through humanitarian corridors opened by Russia. There are many reports of Nazi (Asov) atrocities, including the murder of fleeing civilians.

NATO has courted Ukraine as a future alliance member for decades, taking firm steps to admit Ukraine along the way. This has never been acceptable to Russia, whose national security concerns have been consistently ignored.

Only days prior to the Russian attack, the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, delivered a speech at the Munich Security Conference threatening Russia, not only with a nuclear armed Ukraine, but a NATO nuclear power on Russia’s south-western border.

Ukraine is a pinch-point for Russia’s natural gas trade with the European Union. The purpose of the Nord Stream pipelines, constructed in partnership with Germany, was to circumnavigate that problem. It raised the potential for greater EU independence from the US and, with an EU commitment to defence union, presented a possible threat to the US dominance of NATO.

Consequently, the US applied unrelenting pressure on the EU, including enforcing sanctions on German companies, to halt the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In response to Russia’s official recognition of the DPR & LPR, German Chancellor Olaf Sholtz immediately announced that Germany would not certify Nord Stream 2 for operational use. Russia began it’s military operation in Ukraine three days later.

Please read Parts 1-3 of this series for an exploration of the evidence informing this analysis. This provides us with what we might call the “official-unofficial” explanation for Russia’s aggression. It is an appraisal founded upon the established, accepted concept of international relations.

However, any such investigation is necessarily incomplete. It fails even to describe the globalist forces that are both ripping Ukraine apart and propelling Russia to act. We will explore these in Parts 5 – 6.

Before we do it is important to appreciate just how far we, as supposed democratic societies, have strayed from democratic ideals. This can be understood if we consider the extreme propaganda and censorship our governments are using, hobbling our ability to discern reality.

The Propaganda Environment

There is little chance that the issues we have already discussed will receive fair coverage in the Western mainstream media (MSM) and none at all that it will cover what we are about to consider. The West’s propaganda, in a rapidly evolving conflict, has at times been absurd.

Immediately following the launch of Russia’s military operation the Western MSM reported the unbelievable bravery of the Ukrainian border guards defending Snake Island in the Black Sea. They stated that 13 died in their valiant defence against a Russian “air and sea bombardment.” Ukrainian President Zelenskyy said he would award the guards posthumous medals for gallantry. It soon emerged that this was a fabrication. None of them died and Russia took the Island without harming anyone.

The MSM reported that Russian forces deliberately targeted a Mosque in Mariupol where civilian woman and children were said to be sheltering. The Turkish media later revealed that the Mosque had not been struck by anything.

The BBC were among a wide number of Western MSM outlets that reported an alleged Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol. This apparent outrage, deliberately targeting pregnant women and their babies, led the BBC to report the comments of the Deputy Mayor who said:

We don’t understand how it’s possible in modern life to bomb a children’s hospital. People cannot believe that it’s true.

Indeed not, because there is considerable evidence to suggest it isn’t. When the claimed airstrike occurred the Russian state officials engaged in some ham-fisted disinformation themselves, alleging that the whole thing was staged using “crisis actors.” They also noted that the hospital had been occupied by the Ukrainian forces, thus presumably making it a military target and undermining their own propaganda.

A subsequent account from the most famous eyewitness, Mariana Vishegirskaya, who Associated Press (AP) publicised as the face of the alleged Russian war-crime, paints a very different picture. There were certainly explosions but no evidence of an airstrike, as no one heard or saw any planes. The hospital had been occupied by the Asov regiment three days earlier. Tellingly, Mariana stated that the Asov Nazis wouldn’t allow people to leave the city through the humanitarian corridors agreed by Russia.

There have been widespread Western reports of destruction of Mariupol and other cities by Russian forces. However, civilian witness testimony from Mariupol notes that Ukrainian forces also shelled Mariupol, causing much of the destruction. Mariupol civilians reported that Ukrainian forces placed their defences in civilian areas, occupied their homes and other municipal locations including kindergartens, hospitals and office buildings, and even blew up buildings with tanks.

Even the Western MSM acknowledged that the Ukrainian military (including the Nazis) were effectively using the civilian population as a human shields by placing their assets in civilian areas. The Washington Post noted:

Increasingly, Ukrainians are confronting an uncomfortable truth: [. . .] Virtually every neighbourhood in most cities has become militarized, some more than others, making them potential targets for Russian forces trying to take out Ukrainian defenses.

French Military – Map 27th of March 2022

Analysis by French military observers clearly showed that Russia had secured significant military control in eastern and north-eastern Ukraine. On March 29th 2022, during ongoing peace talks between the Russian and Ukrainian authorities in Turkey, Russia announced that it would withdraw its forces from around Kyiv as a sign of “good faith.”

A few days later video evidence emerged from town of Bucha, lying west of Kyiv, appearing to show the aftermath of a Russian war-crime. The horrific footage showed apparent carnage in the body strewn streets of Bucha. The Ukrainian government blamed this butchery on the retreating Russian forces. The Western MSM immediately reported everything that they were told, accusing Russia of the Bucha massacre.

There were some suspicious anomalies in the footage that required explanation. An unusually high percentage of the bodies were lying face down, ruling out identification, and there was an inexplicable lack of blood or other signs of obvious injury on the corpses. Most of the corpses appeared with hands bound behind their backs and many were wearing the white arm bands which Russia gave to civilians in order for them not to be confused with combatants.

In one of the four main videos, unquestioningly accepted as evidence of the Russian atrocity, an alleged corpse appears to get to its feet, observed in the wing mirror of one of the filming vehicles. It is possible that mirror distortion accounts for this. However, these unexplained inconsistencies weren’t the primary reason to doubt the Western MSM’s account.

The Mayor of Bucha gave a video interview which aired on April 1st where he appeared happy, praising the Ukrainian forces for the liberation of the town. He noted that the Russian forces had vacated Bucha prior to March 31st. As of the 31st there were no Russian troops left in Bucha. The Mayor said:

March 31st will go down in the history of our settlement, the entire territorial community as a day of liberation from the Russian orcs [. . .] a great victory in the Kyiv region.

Reporting his statement, the local media claimed that Russian forces had left unexploded mines in a local factory. Neither the Mayor nor the local news reports said anything about a massacre. Two days later Reuters reported the same mayor, Anatoly Fidoruk, this time alleging that Russia had engaged in the mass slaughter of civilians. Something he was either unaware of or forgot to mention two days earlier.

This unfathomable oversight by the entire population of Bucha, none of whom posted anything on social media even hinting at the supposed mass slaughter during the Russian occupation, casts significant doubt upon the story presented by the Western MSM. The “Bucha-Live” Telegram channel didn’t mention the massacre until the story broke internationally.

Initially it was reported across the West that 400 bodies were scattered throughout the streets and basements of Bucha. We know that Russian forces completed their withdrawal on the 30th of March. Yet the Western reports of the killing spree didn’t emerge for a further four days.

Following the agreed Russian exit, on the 31st of March it was reported in Ukraine that the first Ukrainian forces to enter Bucha were Ukrainian special forces (the SAFARIS.) They posted a video of their operation on the 1st of April. One body was observed in the video, no executions sites or any evidence of mass killings were filmed.

These “specialist units” were said to be tasked with clearing Bucha of “saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.” Again there was no mention of any massacre in the further reports published on the 2nd of April.

On the same day, the 2nd of April, the New York Times reported:

Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov battalion walked through the remnants of a Russian military convoy in the recently liberated town of Bucha. [. . .] For the past five weeks, photographers with The New York Times and other news organizations throughout Ukraine have chronicled the invasion.

Yet none of these reporters or photographers “chronicled” the Bucha massacre that allegedly occurred at least three days before they arrived in the town. The New York Times (NYT) then tried to double-down on their incomprehensible failure to spot the biggest story in the World, by changing it. They published purported US satelite images that allegedly pinpointed the position of the bodies. The NYT claimed they had lain there for more than three weeks.

It seems extremely unlikely that this story is true. The bodies had supposedly been lying in the streets, undisturbed for three weeks, and yet there was no sign of decomposition. The NYT article implied that neither human nor animal activity had disturbed the location of a single body for the best part of a month. It also required readers to believe that US officials and military personnel knowingly ignored an alleged Russian massacre, without saying a word, not just for 4 days but for weeks.

Regardless of which version of the story people may choose to believe, there is another incongruous aspect. The Russian military, having committed a war-crime either four days or more than three weeks earlier, left the scene without trying to hide any of the evidence. If the NYT’s second version of events is to be believed, they also exposed their own troops to the severe risk of disease for practically the entire period of their occupation of Bucha.

While there is no evidence that the Asov Nazis staged the alleged bloodbath, circumstantial evidence suggests that possibility. It is notable that no one reported the massacre prior to their arrival in Bucha.

On the 3rd April the world was suddenly regaled with fresh tales of Russian barbarity. It would be good to know what happened to the suspected “saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces” that were “cleared” from Bucha by SAFARI and Asov troops.

Russian military actions have included heavy bombardment of cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv. There is no doubt that they have killed many Ukrainian citizens. However, if we discard the NYT’s rather silly claims, unless Russia commanders lost control of their troops in Bucha, the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians, following an agreed withdrawal and their identification as non-combatants, makes no sense either from a military or propaganda perspective.

It served only to undermine the peace negotiations. As we will discuss in Part 5, prolonging the conflict is in the US-led NATO alliance’s interests, not Russia’s.

This does not rule out the possibility that Russian troops were responsible, but further investigation is certainly necessary. This appeared to be the position of the Russian government who, having strenuously denied the Bucha allegations, requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to discuss the matter. For some reason, the UK government blocked Russia’s request.

Initially it appeared that the US-led NATO alliance were less eager to discuss the evidence. However, acting as the president nation of the Security Council, the UK’s UN ambassador, Barbara Woodward, then announced that the UK would convene a session to discuss Bucha on the 5th. Woodward changed the story yet again. This time 800 people had been murdered.

Prior to examining any of the evidence, and relying solely upon videos provided by the Ukrainians, Woodward stated that the footage was evidence of war-crimes. This had in no way been established. No one knew what they were evidence of. Woodward clearly implicated Russia and predetermined the outcome of the discussions, so there wasn’t really any point in holding them.

This illustrates the problem we have discussed previously. The institutions, mechanisms and rulings that combine to form so-called international law are worthless. There is no justice to be found anywhere within a system that is shaped by nothing but hard-nosed realpolitik. It is just another weapon to be used in a global power struggle. International law, as it stands, is no law at all.

The US Bio-lab Conspiracy Theory

Initially the Western MSM furiously denied Russian reports of US controlled bio-labs and chemical warfare research facilities discovered in Ukraine. They said that this was part of an elaborate plot by Russia to stage a biological “false-flag” attack, to be blamed on the Kyiv government by Putin.

The presence of the labs was then ostensibly admitted by the US Under Secretary for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, in a Senate committee hearing. The 2005 signed treaty between the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, establishing the labs, is a public document. These are, or were, US funded labs conducting secret experiments. The 2005 treaty decrees:

Information marked or designated by the U.S. Department of Defense as “sensitive” should be withheld from public disclosure by the Government of Ukraine.

These labs were managed by the DoD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). Obviously a partnership between a US defence agency and a Ukrainian public health agency appears, on its face, to be an unusual arrangement. The DTRA’s own training material states that they are “a combat support agency.” They add that their role includes:

Developing, testing and fielding [using] offensive and defensive technologies

Other documents have exposed years of U.S. led biological and chemical warfare experiments on Ukrainian soldiers. Yet we are supposed to believe that US and Ukrainian documents, statements confirming the presence of the labs, their funding, their clandestine nature and the objectives of the Pentagon directorate overseeing them, is somehow evidence of Russian “disinformation.”

Perhaps so, but Occam’s Razor would suggest a different conclusion: the Russian’s have exposed US funded Ukrainian bio-labs engaged in secret bio-weapons research. If this claim by Russia is true then the US and Ukraine have broken so-called international law. Not that it matters.

As we have already discussed, Nazis control Ukrainian national security infrastructure and, as we will discuss, The US-led NATO alliance have a history of working with Nazis to run false-flag terrorist attacks in Europe. If the unthinkable happens and there is a biological or chemical weapons attack in Ukraine, which is then automatically blamed upon Russia, all of us should insist upon a thorough investigation before we believe anything we are told about it.

In a fairly typical example of the Western MSM response to this evidence, the UK based Guardian published How ‘Ukrainian bioweapons labs’ myth went from QAnon fringe to Fox News. Alleging the claims were Russian disinformation, or part of “far-right” conspiracy theories, the Guardian opined:

The Russian propaganda machine is so engaged in sowing disinformation [. . .] The conspiracy theory began in seeming obscurity. [. . .] [T]his theory was just a remix of an allegation that Moscow has made for years. [. . .] This disinformation laid the groundwork for the QAnon-linked conspiracy theory about Ukrainian bio-labs.

It may be the case that the evidence substantiating the presence of US funded illegal weapons programs in Ukraine (and elsewhere) is all just the product of Russian disinformation or so-called “conspiracy theory.” However, the only way to find out is to examine that evidence and investigate it further.

Nuland Acknowledges Presence of Labs

The Guardian chose not to report any of the facts we have just discussed. Instead it dismissed all of it as a Russian “propaganda effort.” In an attempt to deal with all of the documents, freely available in the public domain, the Guardian added:

The very core of the story is true: the Department of Defense funds biological research and laboratories in Ukraine. [. . .] Washington insists that it does not fund biological weapons research anywhere.

That was enough for the Guardian to conclude its investigation and claim that the whole story was just Russian nonsense. Sadly, this is the standard of journalism that epitomises the Western “free press.” Simply repeating a denial from the Pentagon is not journalism and nor is failing to honestly report the facts to your readers while covering them up with a slew of unsubstantiated allegations and innuendo.

Certainly China weren’t convinced by the Guardian’s argument. Seemingly taking a more deliberative approach, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said:

[W]e call on relevant sides to ensure the safety of these labs. The US, in particular, as the party that knows the labs the best, should disclose specific information as soon as possible, including which viruses are stored and what research has been conducted. [. . .] The US has 336 biological labs in 30 countries under its control. [. . .] What is the true intention of the US? [. . .] [T]he US has kept stonewalling, and even dismissing the international community’s doubts as spreading disinformation. Besides, the US has been standing alone in obstructing the establishment of a Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) verification mechanism and refusing verification of its biological facilities [. . .] This has led to deeper concern of the international community. Once again we urge the US to give a full account of its biological military activities at home and abroad and subject itself to multilateral verification.

The US has declined to engage with the any UN-led BWC verification mechanism. For example, the US government blocked attempts to establish one in 2001. The US has continued to delay the development of an independent, UN oversight for more than 20 years. Rather than allow international investigators to rule out the existence of the suspected US bio-weapons programme, the US has established its own verification process and has found itself to be in full compliance:

There are processes and controls within the U.S. Executive Branch [. . .] that operate to ensure that plans and programs under those departments’ and agencies’ purview remain consistent with U.S. international obligations. [. . .] All U.S. activities during the reporting period were consistent with the obligations set forth in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). [. . .] Russian accusations are groundless.

While this public statement is more than enough to convince the “journalists” at the Guardian, it is perhaps understandable that the international community, outside of the US-led NATO alliance, still has its doubts. The US government’s behaviour is suspicious, to say the least.

In an amusing irony, the Guardian stated that the Russian news agency, Tass, was “a mouthpiece for the Kremlin.” It’s true, Tass often is a mouthpiece for the Kremlin, just as the Guardian is often a mouthpiece for the White House, Brussels and Downing Street.

The propaganda in the Western MSM, spread by the likes of the CNN, CBC, the BBC, the Times and the Guardian, is just as thick as anything disseminated by Pravda or the Xinhua News Agency. The key advantage the Western MSM had previously enjoyed, over its Eastern propaganda counterparts, was that western populations were “educated” to believe they had a free and pluralistic media. However, that advantage is diminishing rapidly.

The frankly bizarre attempt by Western leaders, and their MSM propagandists, to turn Russia’s probable exposure of US bio-labs into a suggested Russian plot to justify a false-flag attack, was encapsulated by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Speaking to Sky News on 10th March he said:

The stuff that you’re hearing about chemical weapons, this is straight out of their [Russia’s] playbook.

Johnson’s claim followed a previous statement by UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace who said that he was seeing “elements of the Russian playbook;” Jens Stoltenberg, the General Secretary of NATO, also preceded Johnson’s comment by saying that he too could “foresee the playbook of Russia;” Josep Borrel, the EU’s High Representative (effectively the EU Defence Minister), similarly preempted Johnson by noting that developments in the Ukraine were part of “the Kremlin’s playbook.”

These remarkably similar comments indicate a coordinated, scripted narrative. It could be a coincidence, but there are other reasons why we might suspect that Western politicians are working to a pre-approved script.

The Rapid Response Mechanism & the Trusted News Initiative

The rhetoric about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, pouring out of the western establishment, is a product of the G7’s (including the EU) Rapid Response Mechanism (RRM). It is designed to ensure that designated hostile state and non-state “actors” face a rapid and unified response. The purpose of the RRM was outlined in the 2018 Charlevoix G7 Summit Communique:

“We commit to take concerted action in responding to foreign actors who seek to undermine our democratic societies [. . .] We recognize that such threats, particularly those originating from state actors, are not just threats to G7 nations, but to international peace and security and the rules-based international order.”

Announcing the RRM, the UK Government added:

Hostile state activity will be met with a rapid and unified G7 response. [. . .] The move will also see hostile states publicly ‘called out’ for their egregious behaviour – with coordinated international attribution of cyber and other attacks.

The purpose of the RRM is to defend the current, US-led international rules-based order (IRBO). It has nothing to do with protecting democracy. Quite the opposite, the RRM works to undermine democratic principles.

The RRM is an agreement to respond to global events with a fixed narrative designed to promote the interests of the G7’s unipolar world order. Through the RRM, Western governments attribute blame to state or non-state actors and, where there is insufficient evidence to support their proclamations, they work with their MSM “partners” to produce the necessary propaganda and disinformation.

Commercial media is owned by a small handful of global corporations. For example, a 2021 report from the Media Reform Coalition found that just three companies (News UK, the Daily Mail Group and Reach) owned and controlled 90% of the UK national newspaper and 80% of the online news market. Similarly, the US media landscape is controlled by just five media corporations. Often local and state news readers, across the US, deliver the same, single script, word for word.

In 2019 The UK’s state broadcaster, the BBC, launched the Trusted News Initiative (TNI). This represented a further consolidation of Western media. The BBC joined AP, AFP, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, First Draft, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Reuters, Twitter and The Washington Post to form the TNI.

The TNI demands that readers and audiences trust its members. They say that they are “a unique global partnership” and that their role is to “tackle the harmful spread of disinformation.” The TNI have essentially claimed to be the arbiters of all truth. Were he alive today, George Orwell would almost certainly have called them the “Ministry of Truth.”

The TNI is a partnership between the Western MSM and the social media giants whose aim is to remove free speech and silence dissent. They state:

The partnership focuses on moments of potential jeopardy. [. . .] Partners alert each other to high risk disinformation so that content can be reviewed promptly by platforms, whilst publishers ensure they don’t unwittingly share dangerous falsehoods.

In July 2020, the UK government’s Select Committee for Culture Media and Sport noted:

Resources developed by public service broadcasters such as the Trusted News Initiative show huge potential as a framework in which public and private sector can come together to ensure verified, quality news provision. [. . .] The Government and online harms regulator should use the TNI to ‘join up’ approaches to public media literacy and benefit from shared learning regarding misinformation and disinformation. It should do this in a way that respects the independence from Government.

The TNI has no independence from government. All of its leading members are partner organisations of government.

The TNI: Neither trustworthy nor independent

The BBC are funded by the UK government and receives further money, for its international charity BBC Media Action, directly from the UK, US, Swedish, Canadian, Norwegian, EU governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Google, another TNI core member, was a start up funded by the CIA’s venture capital company In-Q-tel and is a UK government precurement partner. Another, Microsoft, proudly announces how it is a “partner with government,” helping them to protect democracy .

Reuters has a long history of working directly with institutions of the state. For example, during the 1960’s and 70’s it was paid to spread anti-Soviet propaganda by the UK government. The Washington Post is owned by Geoff Bazos (Nash Holdings) and his AWS (Amazon Web Services) competency partnership works with governments around the world.

The RRM denies the most essential of all democratic principles, namely questioning government authority. There is no room in the RRM for the foundational democratic conventions of free speech and expression. It is an anti-democratic project and a commitment, by G7 and EU governments, to destroy democracy and establish totalitarian rule.

Totalitarianism can be defined as:

A political system in which those in power have complete control and do not allow people freedom to oppose them.

The RRM and the TNI are totalitarian. Combined with censorship legislation, the existence of this nexus demontrates that the G7 political establishment is pursuing policies of intolerance and despotism. It is opposed to democratic accountability.

The TNI are providing the “verified, quality news provision” that supports Rapid Response Mechanism declarations. When Russia stated that “denazification” was one of the goals of its military operation, the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, called Russia’s claim a “grotesque lie;” US President Joe Biden said, in regard to the same, that “it’s a lie” and Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, again in reference to Russian denazification claims, said “it’s a lie.”

The RRM narrative was set. Russia’s stated concerns were totally groundless and nothing more than an excuse for unprovoked, naked aggression. Therefore, it was the role of the TNI to push this disinformation. This necessitated the whitewashing the Nazis and the downplaying their control of the of Ukraine’s national security.

Among many examples of the TNI doing precisely this, the Financial Times (FT) published Don’t Confuse Patriotism With Naziasm: Ukraine’s Asov Forces Face Scrutiny. The FT claimed that the Azov Regiment were a “diverse” crowd who had gone “mainstream.” Engaging in Holocaust revisionism, the FT added that Stepan Bandera was a “nationalist figure” who had only been “accused” of collaborating with Nazis.

The BBC depolyed the baseless argument that Nazi influence was impossible without electoral success. They highlighted that the election of a Jewish President was “proof” that the Ukrainian Nazis had no power. The BBC then wheeled out some “experts” who were willing to claim that the Nazis were an inconsequential minority within the Ukrainian military and that their ideology had been “watered down” by new recruits.

Fellow TNI founding member, the Guardian, produced Is There Any Justification for Putin’s War? They also exploited the Nazis lack of electoral success, in a country that voted for a Jewish President, to deny that they had any real power. The Guardian added commentary suggesting that the Nazis were suffering from a reputation problem and that the OUM and UPA were simply “nationalists” who came to be “seen as aligned with the Nazis.”

In order to “protect democracy,” other founding members of the TNI are seemingly happy to promote Nazis. Meta (formerly Facebook) banned the Azov Regiment from their platform in 2019 because they are Nazis who publicly incite appalling crimes, such as genocide, on social media. However Meta has now changed its policy to allow its users to show their support for Nazis. Meta condones calls for violence against Russians, including advocating assassination of Russian officials and promoting the killing of Russian soldiers.

While Google, another TNI founder, have censored leading scientists and doctors for questioning COVID-19 policies, Nazis are welcome to host their propaganda channels on YouTube. The Asov Regiments, who murder Ukrainian citizens and use them as human shields, can post as many videos as they like.

This is not to suggest that lawful content, that does not directly incite a crime, should be censored. It merely illustrates that the founding members of the TNI are hypocrites who have no moral compass. The TNI is a propaganda and surveillance cartel whose role is to sell Rapid Response Mechanism “truth” to Western populations. It is undeserving of anyone’s “trust.”

Rampant Censorship And the End of Representative Democracy

Democracy is the best form of government ever devised. Unfortunately, it is not a system of government any of us are familiar with. The word “democracy” (demokratia) derives from “demos” (people) and “kratos” (power). Literally translated as “people power,” democracy means government by trial by jury.

Instead we have something else called “representative democracy,” which is not democracy at all. Representative democracy is a so-called “democratic system” where the people are permitted, by the state, to select their political leaders once every 4 or 5 years.

In the intervening period this tiny group of “special people” exercise executive power and rule over everyone else. This is called an oligarchy and it is the antithesis of democracy. However, as the vast majority call this oligarchical system “democracy” that is how we shall reference it here.

People in the West have been told to believe in, what they call, democracy and have consequently become attached to the idea. The Western oligarchy supposedly maintains some foundational principles which are, in and of themselves, valuable and worth protecting. These are often referred to as democratic ideals.

Democratic ideals have been shaped over thousands of years by political leaders and philosophers. The British sociologist T. H. Marshall, in his 1949 essay Citizenship and Social Class, described democratic ideals as a functioning system of civil, political and social rights.

Civil rights include the right to individual freedom (liberty), exercised through freedom of speech, of thought and faith, etc; political rights enable all the opportunity to participate in and exercise political power, from standing for election to universal suffrage, and social rights afford every citizen basic economic security (welfare) and opportunities (healthcare, employment and education).

To erode any of these rights is to undermine representative democracy (nominally democracy). Both the Western hegemony and the Eurasian alliance between Russia and China, which we will cover in some depth, lay claim to models of democracy.

Neither practice democracy in any recognisable form. Both operate oligarchical political structures and both rule be force. Neither have any commitment to democratic ideals.

Russia is a representative democracy of sorts, but it is certainly not a democracy. In 2019 the Russian state Duma passed its initial “disrespect” and “fake-news” laws. This legislation means that Russians could face a large fine or up to 15 days in prison for showing “blatant disrespect” to the Russian state or its leaders. The “fake-news” laws empower the Roskomnadzor (the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media) to act as Russia’s “Ministry of Truth.”

These anti-democratic censorship laws, information control systems and suppression of Russian’s inalienable rights to free speech and expression, have progressed. The 2020 law, effectively outlawing public dissent against Russia’s draconian COVID-19 measures and, more recently, the 2022 law silencing opposition to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine, are typical examples.

The Russian government’s opposition to free speech, freedom of thought and expression includes the blocking of social media companies and the expulsion of foreign journalists. It’s harsh penalties, of up to 15 years in prison for inconvenient journalists, effectively made it impossible for many foreign new outlets to operate in Russia.

In one of the most stunning examples of rank hypocrisy written in recent years, the NYT wrote that Russia had taken censorship to “new extremes.” Perhaps Russian government disdain for democratic ideals could be considered “extreme,” but it is no more so than the equal disregard exhibited by western governments.

Through the totalitarian RRM and TNI the West operates a propaganda operation unparalleled in human history. While the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea and other tyrannies have deployed overwhelming propaganda campaigns, nothing compares to the scale of the RRM/TNI. It is trans-continental, covers print, broadcast and online media and is led by private corporations, working in collaboration with government, who exercise their control through the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P).

Censorship in the West is just as severe, if not more so, than anything seen in Russia. In 2021 the US Department of State shut down a number of US-based middle-eastern news outlets. Emphasising the propaganda strangle hold, in response to this attack upon the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution by the US government, the US so-called free press didn’t even mention the constitutional implications.

In 2017, to be able to continue its broadcasting and online publishing operation in the US, serving a Russian community of around 3 million US citizens, the Russian Media outlet RT was compelled to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In March 2022 US and Canadian cable providers effectively banned Russian media in their respective countries.

Mel Dawes

The censorship in Europe, in both the EU and especially in the UK, is even more oppressive. The EU has banned a number of Russian outlets outright. They are also surging ahead with their plans to censor the Internet. The Digital Services Act (DSA) will see the EU work with their social media “partners” to remove whatever Brussels’ bureaucrats identify as “disinformation.”

The most anti-democratic countries among the former western liberal democracies is the UK. It has gone further than any other to create a dictatorship.

Having already passed legislation to give itself unlimited authority to commit any crime, the UK government is pushing through with laws to end the right of protest, it is removing the defence of “in the national interests” from whistleblowers and investigative journalists, and it is planning a new Bill of Rights that will enshrine the authority of the state over and above everything else, including citizen’s inalienable rights.

Like the EU the UK has banned Russian media. Justifying the decision the chief executive of the Ofcom (the UK’s broadcast regulator) Dame Melanie Dawes, said:

Freedom of expression is something we guard fiercely in this country [. . .] [W]e have today found that RT is not fit and proper to hold a licence in the UK. As a result we have revoked RT’s UK broadcasting licence.

Vacuous platitudes from the nobility are meaningless. This becomes even more evident when we consider the UK government’s plan to completely shut down freedom of speech online.

Ofcom has been appointed as the regulator for the UK’s Internet under the imminent Online Safety Act. It is nothing less than a government plan to control our ability to communicate and freely share information and ideas online. The UK state’s equivocation about protecting freedom of speech is a damnable lie.

The Western political establishment has no intention to uphold democratic ideals. Freedom of speech and expression, and the liberty that representative democracy is supposedly based upon, means nothing to the ruling class. It is no longer convenient and now they are simply casting it aside.

Representative democracy is itself a sham, but at least there was some vague promise to uphold democratic ideals. We, in the West, can now put aside any lingering, childish notion that we live in democratic societies.

The Ukrainian government have not only banned all Russian media but also outlawed political parties. Ukraine is no democracy either. The absurd suggestion, propagated by the likes of Ursula Von der Leyen, that the West is defending democracy from autocracy, is pure disinformation. There is no such thing as democracy to be found in any nation-state.

We are seeing a struggle for supremacy between global power blocs in Ukraine. The political structure they each hope to rule is a single, cohesive system of global governance. No matter who wins, it’s implementation is assured, unless we act on a population wide scale to stop it.

Ukraine is the current focal point for this struggle. World War III started in 2001 and 2030 is the first waypoint along the path to true global governance.

The West is exploiting the conflict to deliberately speed up the planned destruction of its own economy, a process that began in earnest with the policy response to the pseudopandemic. The East is seeking to establish itself as the driver for the New World Order.

The globalist forces overseeing this struggle care little for the outcome. What matters is that the war is fought, because it is the conflict itself that will deliver the global governance they desire. It is this global confrontation that we will explore in Part 5.

This article is a follow-up to :

1. "Russia wants to force the US to respect the UN Charter," January 4, 2022.
2. "Washington pursues RAND plan in Kazakhstan, then Transnistria," January 11, 2022.
3. "Washington refuses to hear Russia and China," January 18, 2022.
4. "Washington and London, deafened", February 1, 2022.
5. "Washington and London try to preserve their domination over Europe", February 8, 2022.
6. “Two interpretations of the Ukrainian affair”, 16 February 2022.
7. “Washington sounds the alarm, while its allies withdraw”, 22 February 2022.
8. “Russia declares war on the Straussians”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 5 March 2022.
9. "A gang of drug addicts and neo-nazis”, 5 March 2022.
   10 “Israel stunned by Ukrainian neo-Nazis”, 8 March 2022.
10. "Ukraine: the great manipulation", March 22, 2022.

Russia’s military operations in Ukraine have been going on for more than a month and Nato’s propaganda operations for a month and a half.

As always, the war propaganda of the Anglo-Saxons is coordinated from London. Since the First World War, the British have acquired an unparalleled know-how. In 1914, they had managed to convince their own population that the German army had carried out mass rapes in Belgium and that it was the duty of every Briton to come to the rescue of these poor women. It was a cleaner version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s attempt to compete with the British colonial empire. At the end of the conflict, the British population demanded that the victims be compensated. A census was taken and it was found that the facts had been extraordinarily exaggerated.

President Zelensky declared war on Russia by ordering the Banderist troops incorporated into his army to attack Russian citizens in the Donbass from February 17. Then he waved the red rag in front of the political leaders of NATO member countries and declared that he was going to acquire the atomic bomb in violation of international treaties.

This time, in 2022, the British managed to convince the Europeans that on February 24 the Russians had attacked Ukraine to invade and annex it. Moscow was trying to reconstitute the Soviet Union and was preparing to attack all its former possessions in succession. This version is more honorable for the West than evoking the "Thucydides trap" - I will come back to this -. In reality, Kiev’s troops attacked their own population in Donbass on the afternoon of February 17. Then Ukraine waved a red rag in front of the Russian bull with President Zelenski’s speech to the political and military leaders of Nato gathered in Munich, during which he announced that his country was going to acquire nuclear weapons to protect itself from Russia.

Don’t believe me? Here are the OSCE readings from the Donbass border. There had been no fighting for months, but the observers of the neutral organization observed 1,400 explosions per day as of the afternoon of February 17. Immediately, the rebel provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk, which still considered themselves Ukrainian but claimed autonomy within Ukraine, moved more than 100,000 civilians to protect them. Most retreated to the interior of Donbass, others fled to Russia.

Number of explosions recorded in Donbass (February 14-22, 2022)

Source: OSCE SMM Daily Report

In 2014 and 2015, when a civil war had pitted Kiev against Donestk and Lugansk, the material and human damage was only a matter of Ukraine’s internal affairs. However, in the course of time, almost the entire Ukrainian population of Donbass considered emigrating and acquired dual Russian citizenship. Therefore, Kiev’s attack on the population of Donbass on February 17 was an attack on Ukrainian-Russian citizens. Moscow came to their rescue, in an emergency, from February 24.

The chronology is indisputable. It was not Moscow that wanted this war, but Kiev, despite the predictable price it would have to pay. President Zelensky deliberately put his people in danger and bears sole responsibility for what they are enduring today.

Why did he do this? Since the beginning of his term, Volodymyr Zelensky has continued the support of the Ukrainian state, which began with his predecessor Petro Poroshenko, for the embezzlement of funds by his American sponsors and for the extremists in his country, the Banderists. President Putin called the former "a bunch of drug addicts" and the latter "a bunch of neo-Nazis" [[1](#nb1 "See the ninth article in this series: "A bunch of drug addicts and (...)")]. Not only did Volodymyr Zelensky publicly declare that he did not want to solve the conflict in Donbass by implementing the Minsk Agreements, but he banned his fellow citizens from speaking Russian in schools and administrations and, worse, signed a racial law on July 1, 2021, de facto excluding Ukrainians claiming their Slavic origin from the enjoyment of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

The Russian army first invaded Ukrainian territory, not from the Donbass, but from Belarus and Crimea. It destroyed all Ukrainian military installations used by Nato for years and fought the Bandit regiments. It is now dedicated to annihilating them in the east of the country. The propagandists in London and their almost 150 communication agencies around the world assure us that, pushed back by the glorious Ukrainian Resistance, the defeated Russian army has given up its initial goal of taking Kiev. However, never, absolutely never, did President Putin say that Russia would take Kiev, overthrow the elected President Zelensky and occupy his country. On the contrary, he has always said that his war aims were to denazify Ukraine and eliminate foreign (NATO) weapons stockpiles. This is exactly what he is doing.

The Ukrainian population is suffering. We are discovering that war is cruel, that it always kills innocent people. Today we are overwhelmed by our emotions and, as we ignore the Ukrainian attack of February 17, we blame the Russians, whom we wrongly call "aggressors". We do not feel the same compassion for the victims of the simultaneous war in Yemen, its 200,000 dead, including 85,000 children, who died of hunger. But it is true that the Yemenis are, in the eyes of the West, "only Arabs".

The fact of suffering should not be interpreted a priori as proof that one is right. Criminals suffer like the innocent.

The Ukrainian delegation to the International Court of Justice succeeded in obtaining not a judgment on the merits, but an order for a provisional measure against Russia.

How is such manipulation of the court possible? [[2](#nb2 ""Allegation of genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and (...)")] Ukraine referred to the fact that President Putin, during his speech on the Russian military operation, said that the people of Donbass were victims of "genocide". She therefore denied this "genocide" and accused Russia of having used this argument improperly. In international law, the word "genocide" no longer refers to the eradication of an ethnic group, but to a massacre ordered by a government. Over the past eight years, between 13,000 and 22,000 civilians have been killed in the Donbass, depending on whether one refers to Ukrainian or Russian government statistics. Russia, which had sent its plea in writing, argues that it is not relying on the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, but on Article 51 of the UN Charter, which authorizes war in self-defence, as President Putin had explicitly stated in his speech. The Tribunal did not attempt to verify anything. It stuck to the Ukrainian denial. It therefore concluded that Russia had improperly used the Convention as an argument. Moreover, as Russia did not consider it necessary to be physically represented at the Court, the Court used its absence to impose an aberrant provisional measure. Russia, sure of its good right, refused to comply and is demanding a judgment on the merits, which will not be given before the end of September.

All this being said, we can only understand the duplicity of the West if we put the events in their context. For a decade, American political scientists have been telling us that the rise of Russia and China will lead to an inevitable war. The political scientist Graham Allison created the concept of the "Thucydides trap" [[3](#nb3 ""The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?", Graham T. (...)")]. He was referring to the Peloponnesian wars that opposed Sparta and Athens in the fourth century BC.. The strategist and historian Thucydides analyzed that the wars had become inevitable when Sparta, which dominated Greece, realized that Athens was conquering an empire and could replace its hegemony. The analogy is telling, but false: while Sparta and Athens were close Greek cities, the United States, Russia and China do not have the same culture.

China, for example, rejects President Biden’s proposal for trade competition. Instead, it has the opposite tradition of "win-win". In doing so, it is not referring to mutually beneficial trade contracts, but to its history. The "Middle Kingdom" has an extremely large population. The emperor was forced to delegate his authority to the maximum. Even today China is the most decentralized country in the world. When he issued a decree, it had practical consequences in some provinces, but not in all. The emperor therefore had to make sure that each local governor would not consider his decree irrelevant and forget his authority. He then offered compensation to those who were not affected by the decree so that they would still feel subject to his authority.

Since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, China has not only taken a non-aligned position, but has protected its Russian ally in the UN Security Council. The United States has wrongly feared that Beijing would send weapons to Moscow. This has never been the case, although there is logistical assistance in the form of prepared meals for the soldiers, for example. China is watching how things are going and deducing how they will go when it tries to get the rebel province of Taiwan back. Beijing has kindly declined Washington’s offers. It is thinking in the long term and knows from experience that if it allows Russia to be destroyed, it will once again be plundered by the West. Its salvation is only possible with Russia, even if it must one day challenge it in Siberia.

Let’s go back to Thucydides’ trap. Russia knows that the United States wants to erase it from the scene. It anticipates a possible invasion/destruction. But its territory is immense and its population insufficiently large. It cannot defend its overly large borders. Since the 19th century, it has imagined defending itself by hiding from its adversaries. When Napoleon, then Hitler, attacked her, she moved her population further and further east. And it burned its own cities before the invader arrived. The latter found himself unable to supply his troops. He had to face the winter without means and, finally, retreat. This "scorched earth" strategy only worked because neither Napoleon nor Hitler had logistical bases nearby. Modern Russia knows that it cannot survive if US weapons are stored in Central and Eastern Europe. That is why, at the end of the Soviet Union, Russia demanded that NATO never expand eastward. French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Köhl, who knew history, demanded that the West make this commitment. At the time of German reunification, they drafted and signed a treaty guaranteeing that Nato would never cross the Oder-Neisse line, the German-Polish border.

Russia set this commitment in stone in 1999 and in 2010 with the OSCE declarations in Istanbul and Astana. But the United States violated it in 1999 (accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to Nato), in 2004 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia), in 2009 (Albania and Croatia), in 2017 (Montenegro), and again in 2020 (Northern Macedonia). The problem is not that all these states have allied themselves with Washington, but that they have stored U.S. weapons at home. No one is criticizing these states for choosing their allies, but Moscow is blaming them for serving as a rear base for the Pentagon in preparation for an attack by Russia.

Victoria Nuland did not know Leo Strauss personally, but was trained in his thinking by her husband, Robert Kagan. Together they founded the Project for a New American Century, the think tank that called for a Pearl Harbor-like catastrophe in order to impose their policies. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a "divine surprise" for them. Like the war in Ukraine, these despicable attacks did not shake the US power, but on the contrary allowed it to last.

In October 2021, the Straussian Victoria Nuland [4], the State Department’s number 2, came to Moscow to urge Russia to accept the deployment of US weapons in Central and Eastern Europe. She promised that Washington would invest in Russia in return. Then she threatened Russia if it did not accept her offer and concluded that he would have President Putin tried before an international tribunal. Moscow responded with a proposal for a treaty guaranteeing peace on the basis of respect for the United Nations Charter on December 17. This is what has caused the current storm. Respecting the Charter, which is based on the principle of the equality and sovereignty of states, implies reforming NATO, whose operation is based on a hierarchy among its members. Caught in the "Thucydides trap", the United States then fomented the current war in Ukraine.

If we admit that their goal is to remove Russia from the international scene, the way the Anglo-Saxons react to the Ukrainian crisis becomes clear. They are not trying to push back the Russian army militarily, nor to embarrass the Russian government, but to wipe out all traces of Russian culture in the West. And secondly, they are trying to weaken the European Union.

They started with the freezing of the assets of Russian oligarchs in the West, a measure that was applauded by the Russian population, which considers them illegitimate beneficiaries of the plundering of the USSR. Then they imposed on Western companies to stop their activities with Russia. Finally, they continued by cutting off Russian banks’ access to Western banks (the SWIFT system). However, if these financial measures were disastrous for Russian banks (but not for the Russian government), the measures against companies working in Russia are on the contrary favorable to Russia which recovers their investments at lower costs. Moreover, the Moscow Stock Exchange, which had been closed from February 25 (the day after the Russian response) to March 24, recorded an increase as soon as it reopened. The RTS index fell by 4.26% on the first day, but it measures mainly speculative stocks, while the IMOEX index, which measures national economic activity, rose by 4.43%. The real losers of the Western measures are the members of the European Union who had the stupidity to take them.

Paul Wolfowitz was introduced to the thought of Leo Strauss by his philosophy professor, Alan Bloom. He later became a student of the master, working directly with him at the University of Chicago. Leo Strauss had convinced him that Jews should not expect anything from democracies. In order not to endure another Shoah, they must build their own Reich. It is better to be on the side of the handle than of the axe.

Already in 1991, the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz wrote in an official report that the USA should prevent a power from developing to the point of competing with it. At the time, the USSR was in tatters. So he named the European Union as the potential rival to be destroyed [[5](#nb5 "This document was revealed in "US Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No (...)")]. This is exactly what he did in 2003, when, as number 2 in the Pentagon, he forbade Germany and France to participate in the reconstruction of Iraq [6]. This is also what Victoria Nuland talked about in 2014 when she instructed her US ambassador in Kiev to "fuck the European Union" (sic) [7].

The European Union has now been ordered to stop its imports of Russian hydrocarbons. If it complies with this injunction, Germany will be ruined and with it the whole Union. This will not be collateral damage, but the fruit of structured thinking, clearly expressed for thirty years.

The most important thing for Washington is to exclude Russia from all international organizations. It has already managed, in 2014, to exclude it from the G8. The pretext was not the independence of Crimea (which it had been demanding since the dissolution of the USSR, several months before Ukraine thought of its own independence), but its membership in the Russian Federation. Ukraine’s alleged aggression provides a pretext for excluding it from the G20. China immediately pointed out that no one could be excluded from an informal forum without a constitution. However, President Biden returned to the charge on March 24 and 25 in Europe.

Washington is increasing its contacts to exclude Russia from the World Trade Organization. In any case, the principles of the WTO are being undermined by the unilateral "sanctions" implemented by the West. Such a decision would be detrimental to both sides. This is where the writings of Paul Wolfowitz come into play. He wrote in 1991 that Washington should not seek to be the best at what it does, but to be the first in relation to others. This implies, he noted, that in order to maintain its hegemony, the United States should not hesitate to hurt itself, if it does much more to others. We will all pay the price for this way of thinking.

The most important thing for the Straussians is to exclude Russia from the United Nations. This is not possible if one respects the UN Charter, but Washington will not bother with it there any more than elsewhere. It has already contacted every member state of the UN with a few exceptions. The Anglo-Saxon propaganda has already succeeded in making them believe that a member of the Security Council has embarked on a war of conquest against one of its neighbors. If Washington succeeds in convening a special UN General Assembly and changing the statutes, it will succeed.

A kind of hysteria has taken hold of the West. Everything Russian is being hunted down without thinking about its links with the Ukrainian crisis. Russian artists are forbidden to perform even if they are known to be opposed to President Putin. Here a university bans the study of the anti-Soviet hero Solzhenitsyn from their curriculum, there another bans the writer of debate and free will Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) who opposed the tsarist regime. Here a conductor is deprogrammed because he is Russian and there Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) is removed from the repertoire. Everything Russian must disappear from our consciousness, just as the Roman Empire razed Carthage and methodically destroyed all traces of its existence, to the point that today we know little about this civilization.

On March 21, President Biden made no secret of the fact. In front of an audience of business leaders, he said, "This is the moment when things change. There is going to be a New World Order and we have to lead it. And we have to unite the rest of the free world to do it" [8]. This new order [[9](#nb9 "« Histoire du "Nouvel ordre mondial" », par Pierre Hillard, Réseau Voltaire, (...)")] should cut the world into two hermetic blocks; a cut such as we have never known, without comparison with the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. Some states, such as Poland, believe that they can lose a lot like the others, but also gain a little. Thus, General Waldemar Skrzypczak has just demanded that the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad become Polish [10]. Indeed, after the world has been cut off, how will Moscow be able to communicate with this territory?

The war in Ukraine is only a bloody pretext, devised by Washington, to exclude Russia from all international organizations, weaken the European Union and, ultimately, preserve Anglo-American domination over the entire West. Don’t be fooled!

I wish to talk to you not about the war in Ukraine, but about the New World Order that the United States is organizing right before your eyes – but without your realizing it – while this war in Ukraine is taking place. ‎

First of all, you should know that since mid-February, the media have been relaying a completely distorted narrative because they do not report all the facts, but only those messages that NATO wants to convey. Since mid-February we have all been “one-eyed”, only seeing half the picture and, consequently, we make the mistake of thinking that we can interpret it. ‎

The second thing you must bear in mind is that your emotions are being manipulated. Every day we are shown Ukrainians who suffer – indeed, it is horrible and we must help them, it is a human obligation to do so. But their suffering does not prove them right. Suffering and being right are two different things. ‎

With that said, let’s get down to the facts. ‎

This war did not start on 24 February with the Russian intervention, but several days earlier, on 18 February, with the intervention of the United States, an intervention that no one has ever told you about. ‎

On 18 February, according to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) - comprising 57 participating states, it was created during the cold war and all European states are members, as well as non-European states, such as the United States: its neutrality is indisputable! - although there had been no fighting in Ukraine, on 18 February fighting resumed between the Ukrainian provinces of Donbass and the rest of Donbass. ‎

The OSCE does not say that the Ukrainian army was responsible, but it could only be the Ukrainian army. The shelling of the Ukrainian population of Donbass began on 18 February. 1,400 shells rained down on the population that day ... 1,400 shells! ‎

A war was started on 18 February! And in a few hours, two days at the most, about 100,000 Ukrainians from Donbass fled from the front line. They retreated to the countryside or crossed over into Russia. All Russia did was to respond to that attack.

But the attack didn’t end there. The Ukrainians acted like someone waving a red flag in front of a bull. The next day, on 19 February, at the Security Conference that brings together political leaders from NATO member countries every year in Munich, President Zelensky announced that he wanted to acquire the atomic bomb enabling him to threaten Russia. ‎

Seen from Moscow: Ukraine engages in war against Russia and announces that it is going to obtain the atomic bomb.

It was clear that there would be a Russian response. Russia had to protect its citizens and you should know that the civil war in Ukraine started in 2014… it is a civil war we are talking about because Ukrainians are pitted against other Ukrainians! And in the past 8 years that war has left, according to the Kiev government, at least 13,000 dead, at least 13,000 dead!... all civilians, in addition to a thousand soldiers, again according to Kiev. ‎

According to the Russian government, which conducted an official investigation on the ground, the number of dead civilians is not 13,000 but 22,000! Whatever the case, the Donbass has been witness to a butchery that doesn’t seem to dismay anyone. ‎

Now back to what I was saying.

For the past 8 years, Russia has granted Russian citizenship to almost the entire population of the Ukrainian Donbass, who since childhood speaks Russian on a daily basis, a population that has now been prohibited by the Kiev government from speaking Russian in schools and public administrations, although this was always authorized in the past. Therefore, on 24 February, the Moscow government stepped in to support this population militarily. ‎

But what us most important is to understand the context. ‎

Why did the United States arm Kiev to attack Donbass? ‎

It’s very simple. For ten years, the domination of the United States has been threatened by the rise of Russia and China. ‎

On Voltaire Network we have argued for a long time that the first military power is no longer the United States but Russia. ‎

This has been an absolutely irrefutable fact since 2018, but the United States refuses to admit it, despite the fact that, on the battlefield – mainly in Syria – it was demonstrable that the Russian army is tactically superior to the military forces sponsored by the United States. ‎

Their technologies cannot be compared. That of the United States dates back 30 years. It is completely obsolete. ‎

The Russians have completely revamped their army and replaced their personnel. The army they had inherited from the Soviet Union frankly consisted of … a gang of alcoholics. Today it is made up of young people, with very good training, with experience in real war situations, taking on jihadists ... jihadist armies! In Syria. ‎

In economic terms, China has long surpassed the United States, which is now only a consumer, not a manufacturer. ‎

Feeling threatened, the United States has itself explained what it calls "the Thucydides trap". Thucydides is an ancient Greek historian who described the confrontation between Sparta and Athens. Sparta dominated all of Greece, but Athens, which was inferior, began to develop an empire abroad, so that Athens had an economic influence that Sparta no longer had, and war between the two cities became inevitable. ‎

US political scientists have been telling us for ten years now that a war between the United States on one side and Russia and China on the other side was going to become inevitable. In the Pentagon there are even people who assert that this war should already have broken out and that it had been planned for 2015.

Over the past few years, the United States has positioned troops and weapons throughout central and eastern Europe. It has done so in violation, firstly, of the German reunification treaty and, secondly, of the Istanbul and Astana declarations adopted within the OSCE. ‎

Let’s fully understand! Russia is a huge country, with the largest land area in the world. To defend itself… Russia must be able to defend its borders, but it does not have enough troops for that. In that sense, it is a small town in a huge country. So to defend itself, Russia uses the scorched earth technique. If an invader penetrates her territory, Russia pulls back her population from the border as far as possible – inside her huge territory – and burns down her own cities so that the invader cannot subsist there. Therefore, the invaders have to take with them everything they need if they want to continue advancing. It is an impossible logistical challenge to solve. Napoleon and Hitler failed at it. ‎

To overcome this problem, the United States has been sending troops and weapons to Central and Eastern Europe.

Russia responded:
"You cannot do that, in light of what you signed at the time of the German reunification. You have no right to extend NATO to the East."

But the United States went ahead anyway… on several occasions. ‎

Russia does not dispute the right of Central and Eastern European countries to ally themselves with the United States. It is their prerogative. It is the right of each State. Russia doesn’t dispute it in the case of Ukraine either. ‎

What she challenges is Ukraine’s right to host US military bases, which is an entirely different matter.

In a similar context, General Charles de Gaulle as President of France decided to remove NATO troops from French territory – there used to be American bases in France which are no longer there. But that did not prevent General de Gaulle from maintaining an alliance with the United States. France has always been a signatory to the North Atlantic Treaty. But she wasn’t always a member of NATO’s Integrated Military Command Structure. The French armed forces were not always under the command of an American general, as they are today. ‎

Let’s go back to what I was saying about Russia and China. ‎

Their culture is fundamentally different from the Anglo-Saxon culture. The Chinese, for example, explain that they do not want to compete with the United States. They are not interested in that! They are not ‎competing!‎

‎The Chinese say: "We want a relationship in which everyone wins (“win win”).”‎

It does not involve commercial competition, nor does it mean that each side, when signing a contract, will have a vested interest in that contract. Nothing of the sort! It is in reference to Chinese ‎history.‎

China is, above all, a country with a gigantic population ... gigantic! The emperor of China was not in a position to know what were the concerns of certain groups of individuals at the opposite end of the country and left the administration of the territory in the hands of regional governors. ‎

This is how it still works in China! The government in Beijing is oblivious to what is happening in the different regions. There is considerable decentralization. No country is more decentralized than China!‎

But when the emperor issued a decree, he had to make sure that each of the regional governors would grasp the importance of what was at stake. Because if the governor considered that it was not relevant to his province, he would stop paying attention to other decrees, thus failing to recognize the authority of the emperor. Therefore, when the emperor decreed something which could not be applied in one or more provinces, he would grant something extra to the governor of that province so that he would continue to respect the imperial authority. ‎

I am explaining all this because what Russia and China want to create is a multipolar world, a world where there is no power that decides for the others, but where each power decides for itself. ‎

And what Washington wants to do is, on the contrary, preserve the predominance of the United States over the world so that it alone can decide and no one else. ‎

What is the United States doing in the midst of a conflict of its own making in Ukraine? ‎

It is dividing the world in two. It is ejecting Russia from all intergovernmental organizations. It will start with the World Trade Organization [WTO] and end with the United Nations Organization [UN]. Of course, the UN statutes do not allow this, but the United States does not care and will try through thick and thin to achieve its goal. ‎

That process began by explaining that trade with Russia had to end. Stopping trade with Russia! For example, [French car manufacturer] Renault has just decided to shut its factory in Moscow. ‎

But Renault had already closed down its factories in Iran, when it was pressured to do so, and it was an economic catastrophe, an economic catastrophe for Renault. But the United States couldn’t care less! What it wants is for the European Union to undergo an economic shock so that the European Union will be forced to accept US domination. ‎

Paul Wolfowitz had explained it very clearly 30 years ago, in 1991. That “Straussian” [disciple of the philosopher Leo Strauss], who later became the Pentagon’s number two official, explained that the true enemy of the United States – at that time Russia and China posed no real threat – was the European Union and that the European Union had to be prevented from becoming politically and economically independent. ‎

Over time, the European Union developed economically a little, but not much, while Russia and China expanded exponentially. So the United States now wants to erase the very existence of Russia – and very soon that of China – from our field of consciousness and downgrade the European Union. ‎

Just look at the consequences of all the economic and financial sanctions already adopted! They are not “against Russia”. They are directed against the European Union. ‎

The Moscow Stock Exchange closed on 25 February – the day following Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. It reopened yesterday, 24 March, and so now we know how the Russian economy has reacted to these sanctions. What can be seen is that all foreign service activities collapsed, especially all Russian international banks. ‎

But production activities in Russia, on the contrary, developed! ‎

In other words, yesterday the Moscow Stock Exchange did not collapse. On the contrary! It was up by 4.5% [1]. That is no small thing!

The United States will not be satisfied with excluding Russia from international organizations. What it wants is to delete her from our minds! ‎

Notice. They expelled all the oligarchs who were staying on the French Riviera. What relationship did they have with Vladimir Putin, who hates them all? None! But they don’t want any Russian patrons on the beaches in the south of France. That’s all!‎

I am not defending those people. They don’t interest me in the least. But they are unconnected with what is happening. What they are doing to them is illegitimate. ‎

And it will not stop there. Then will come the suppression of all references to Russian culture in the West. Note that they are already banning Russian orchestra conductors … who had no ties whatsoever with the government! And might even be against what Vladimir Putin is doing! But that does not matter! And they are prevented from giving concerts. ‎

Leading universities in the United States have recently prohibited the study of Solzhenitsyn, [Russian writer] who was hailed as a hero against the Soviet Union. The same applies to the work of Dostoevsky, a writer of the Tsarist era! ‎

An exclusively Western, new world order is being established. Above all, don’t be taken in! ‎

We have to remain human beings. We have to remain friends with the Russians and the Chinese. ‎

Don’t think that the Chinese are going to stand for it. They know very well that this begins with Russia now but that they will be next. ‎

Yesterday, at NATO, the request was made for Russia to be excluded from the WTO, the International Trade Organization. But already two days earlier, China had put its foot down, saying that nothing could legitimize such a measure. ‎

The Chinese know that they themselves will be the target of Western imperialism after the Russians. History has already taught them the lesson and they will not allow that to happen again. ‎

So keep all the friends that you may have in Russia and China. ‎

See you soon. ‎

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 15, 2017, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona.

Vladimir Putin is a powerful ideological symbol and a highly effective ideological litmus test. He is a hero to populist conservatives around the world and anathema to progressives. I don’t want to compare him to our own president, but if you know enough about what a given American thinks of Putin, you can probably tell what he thinks of Donald Trump.

Let me stress at the outset that this is not going to be a talk about what to think about Putin, which is something you are all capable of making up your minds on, but rather how to think about him. And on this, there is one basic truth to remember, although it is often forgotten. Our globalist leaders may have deprecated sovereignty since the end of the Cold War, but that does not mean it has ceased for an instant to be the primary subject of politics.

Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.

By American standards, Putin’s respect for the democratic process has been fitful at best. He has cracked down on peaceful demonstrations. Political opponents have been arrested and jailed throughout his rule. Some have even been murdered—Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading Chechnya correspondent shot in her apartment building in Moscow in 2006; Alexander Litvinenko, the spy poisoned with polonium-210 in London months later; the activist Boris Nemtsov, shot on a bridge in Moscow in early 2015. While the evidence connecting Putin’s own circle to the killings is circumstantial, it merits scrutiny.

Yet if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that. In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.

***

Why are American intellectuals such ideologues when they talk about the “international system”? Probably because American intellectuals devised that system, and because they assume there can never be legitimate historic reasons why a politician would arise in opposition to it. They denied such reasons for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. They do the same with Donald Trump. And they have done it with Putin. They assume he rose out of the KGB with the sole purpose of embodying an evil for our righteous leaders to stamp out.

Putin did not come out of nowhere. Russian people not only tolerate him, they revere him. You can get a better idea of why he has ruled for 17 years if you remember that, within a few years of Communism’s fall, average life expectancy in Russia had fallen below that of Bangladesh. That is an ignominy that falls on Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s reckless opportunism made him an indispensable foe of Communism in the late 1980s. But it made him an inadequate founding father for a modern state. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose writings about Communism give him some claim to be considered the greatest man of the twentieth century, believed the post-Communist leaders had made the country even worse. In the year 2000 Solzhenitsyn wrote: “As a result of the Yeltsin era, all the fundamental sectors of our political, economic, cultural, and moral life have been destroyed or looted. Will we continue looting and destroying Russia until nothing is left?” That was the year Putin came to power. He was the answer to Solzhenitsyn’s question.

There are two things Putin did that cemented the loyalty of Solzhenitsyn and other Russians—he restrained the billionaires who were looting the country, and he restored Russia’s standing abroad. Let us take them in turn.

Russia retains elements of a kleptocracy based on oligarchic control of natural resources. But we must remember that Putin inherited that kleptocracy. He did not found it. The transfer of Russia’s natural resources into the hands of KGB-connected Communists, who called themselves businessmen, was a tragic moment for Russia. It was also a shameful one for the West. Western political scientists provided the theft with ideological cover, presenting it as a “transition to capitalism.” Western corporations, including banks, provided the financing.

Let me stress the point. The oligarchs who turned Russia into an armed plutocracy within half a decade of the downfall in 1991 of Communism called themselves capitalists. But they were mostly men who had been groomed as the next generation of Communist nomenklatura­—people like Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. They were the people who understood the scope and nature of state assets, and they controlled the privatization programs. They had access to Western financing and they were willing to use violence and intimidation. So they took power just as they had planned to back when they were in Communist cadre school—but now as owners, not as bureaucrats. Since the state had owned everything under Communism, this was quite a payout. Yeltsin’s reign was built on these billionaires’ fortunes, and vice-versa.

Khodorkovsky has recently become a symbol of Putin’s misrule, because Putin jailed him for ten years. Khodorkovsky’s trial certainly didn’t meet Western standards. But Khodorkovsky’s was among the most obscene privatizations of all. In his recent biography of Putin, Steven Lee Myers, the former Moscow correspondent for the New York Times, calculates that Khodorkovsky and fellow investors paid $150 million in the 1990s for the main production unit of the oil company Yukos, which came to be valued at about $20 billion by 2004. In other words, they acquired a share of the essential commodity of Russia—its oil—for less than one percent of its value. Putin came to call these people “state-appointed billionaires.” He saw them as a conduit for looting Russia, and sought to restore to the country what had been stolen from it. He also saw that Russia needed to reclaim control of its vast reserves of oil and gas, on which much of Europe depended, because that was the only geopolitical lever it had left.

The other thing Putin did was restore the country’s position abroad. He arrived in power a decade after his country had suffered a Vietnam-like defeat in Afghanistan. Following that defeat, it had failed to halt a bloody Islamist uprising in Chechnya. And worst of all, it had been humiliated by the United States and NATO in the Serbian war of 1999, when the Clinton administration backed a nationalist and Islamist independence movement in Kosovo. This was the last war in which the United States would fight on the same side as Osama Bin Laden, and the U.S. used the opportunity to show Russia its lowly place in the international order, treating it as a nuisance and an afterthought. Putin became president a half a year after Yeltsin was maneuvered into allowing the dismemberment of Russia’s ally, Serbia, and as he entered office Putin said: “We will not tolerate any humiliation to the national pride of Russians, or any threat to the integrity of the country.”

The degradation of Russia’s position represented by the Serbian War is what Putin was alluding to when he famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This statement is often misunderstood or mischaracterized: he did not mean by it any desire to return to Communism. But when Putin said he’d restore Russia’s strength, he meant it. He beat back the military advance of Islamist armies in Chechnya and Dagestan, and he took a hard line on terrorism—including a decision not to negotiate with hostage-takers, even in secret.

***

One theme runs through Russian foreign policy, and has for much of its history. There is no country, with the exception of Israel, that has a more dangerous frontier with the Islamic world. You would think that this would be the primary lens through which to view Russian conduct—a good place for the West to begin in trying to explain Russian behavior that, at first glance, does not have an obvious rationale. Yet agitation against Putin in the West has not focused on that at all. It has not focused on Russia’s intervention against ISIS in the war in Syria, or even on Russia’s harboring Edward Snowden, the fugitive leaker of U.S. intelligence secrets.

The two episodes of concerted outrage about Putin among Western progressives have both involved issues trivial to the world, but vital to the world of progressivism. The first came in 2014, when the Winter Olympics, which were to be held in Sochi, presented an opportunity to damage Russia economically. Most world leaders attended the games happily, from Mark Rutte (Netherlands) and Enrico Letta (Italy) to Xi Jinping (China) and Shinzo Abe (Japan). But three leaders—David Cameron of Britain, François Hollande of France, and Barack Obama of the United States—sent progressives in their respective countries into a frenzy over a short list of domestic causes. First, there was the jailed oil tycoon, Khodorkovsky; Putin released him before the Olympics began. Second, there were the young women who called themselves Pussy Riot, performance artists who were jailed for violating Russia’s blasphemy laws when they disrupted a religious service with obscene chants about God (translations were almost never shown on Western television); Putin also released them prior to the Olympics. Third, there was Russia’s Article 6.21, which was oddly described in the American press as a law against “so-called gay propaganda.” A more accurate translation of what the law forbids is promoting “non-traditional sexual relations to children.” Now, some Americans might wish that Russia took religion or homosexuality less seriously and still be struck by the fact that these are very local issues. There is something unbalanced about turning them into diplomatic incidents and issuing all kinds of threats because of them.

The second campaign against Putin has been the attempt by the outgoing Obama administration to cast doubt on the legitimacy of last November’s presidential election by implying that the Russian government somehow “hacked” it. This is an extraordinary episode in the history of manufacturing opinion. I certainly will not claim any independent expertise in cyber-espionage. But anyone who has read the public documentation on which the claims rest will find only speculation, arguments from authority, and attempts to make repetition do the work of logic.

In mid-December, the New York Times ran an article entitled “How Moscow Aimed a Perfect Weapon at the U.S. Election.” Most of the assertions in the piece came from unnamed administration sources and employees of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm hired by the Democrats to investigate a hacked computer at the Democratic National Committee. They quote those who served on the DNC’s secret anti-hacking committee, including the party chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the party lawyer, Michael Sussmann. Then a National Intelligence Council report that the government released in January showed the heart of the case: more than half of the report was devoted to complaints about the bias of RT, the Russian government’s international television network.

Again, we do not know what the intelligence agencies know. But there is no publicly available evidence to justify Arizona Senator John McCain’s calling what the Russians did “an act of war.” If there were, the discussion of the evidence would have continued into the Trump administration, rather than simply evaporating once it ceased to be useful as a political tool.

There were two other imaginary Putin scandals that proved to be nothing. In November, the Washington Post ran a blacklist of news organizations that had published “fake news” in the service of Putin, but the list turned out to have been compiled largely by a fly-by-night political activist group called PropOrNot, which had placed certain outlets on the list only because their views coincided with those of RT on given issues. Then in December, the Obama administration claimed to have found Russian computer code it melodramatically called “Grizzly Steppe” in the Vermont electrical grid. This made front-page headlines. But it was a mistake. The so-called Russian code could be bought commercially, and it was found, according to one journalist, “in a single laptop that was not connected to the electric grid.”

Democrats have gone to extraordinary lengths to discredit Putin. Why? There really is such a thing as a Zeitgeist or spirit of the times. A given issue will become a passion for all mankind, and certain men will stand as symbols of it. Half a century ago, for instance, the Zeitgeist was about colonial liberation. Think of Martin Luther King, traveling to Norway to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, stopping on the way in London to give a talk about South African apartheid. What did that have to do with him? Practically: Nothing. Symbolically: Everything. It was an opportunity to talk about the moral question of the day.

We have a different Zeitgeist today. Today it is sovereignty and self-determination that are driving passions in the West. The reason for this has a great deal to do with the way the Cold War conflict between the United States and Russia ended. In the 1980s, the two countries were great powers, yes; but at the same time they were constrained. The alliances they led were fractious. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, their fates diverged. The United States was offered the chance to lay out the rules of the world system, and accepted the offer with a vengeance. Russia was offered the role of submitting to that system.

Just how irreconcilable those roles are is seen in Russia’s conflict with Ukraine two years ago. According to the official United States account, Russia invaded its neighbor after a glorious revolution threw out a plutocracy. Russia then annexed Ukrainian naval bases in the Crimea. According to the Russian view, Ukraine’s democratically elected government was overthrown by an armed uprising backed by the United States. To prevent a hostile NATO from establishing its own naval base in the Black Sea, by this account, Russia had to take Crimea, which in any case is historically Russian territory. Both of these accounts are perfectly correct. It is just that one word can mean something different to Americans than it does to Russians. For instance, we say the Russians don’t believe in democracy. But as the great journalist and historian Walter Laqueur put it, “Most Russians have come to believe that democracy is what happened in their country between 1990 and 2000, and they do not want any more of it.”

The point with which I would like to conclude is this: we will get nowhere if we assume that Putin sees the world as we do. One of the more independent thinkers about Russia in Washington, D.C., is the Reaganite California congressman Dana Rohrabacher. I recall seeing him scolded at a dinner in Washington a few years ago. A fellow guest told him he should be ashamed, because Reagan would have idealistically stood up to Putin on human rights. Rohrabacher disagreed. Reagan’s gift as a foreign policy thinker, he said, was not his idealism. It was his ability to set priorities, to see what constituted the biggest threat. Today’s biggest threat to the U.S. isn’t Vladimir Putin.

So why are people thinking about Putin as much as they do? Because he has become a symbol of national self-determination. Populist conservatives see him the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him. You didn’t have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country.

In the same way, Putin’s conduct is bound to win sympathy even from some of Russia’s enemies, the ones who feel the international system is not delivering for them. Generally, if you like that system, you will consider Vladimir Putin a menace. If you don’t like it, you will have some sympathy for him. Putin has become a symbol of national sovereignty in its battle with globalism. That turns out to be the big battle of our times. As our last election shows, that’s true even here.

Secretary Antony Blinken @SecBlinken - 1:34 UTC · Aug 31, 2021

I want to drive home today that America’s work in Afghanistan continues. We have a plan for what’s next, and we’re putting it into action.

The codename for the plan which Secretary Blinken is putting into action has not been officially released. It will likely be called "Eternal Revenge" or something similar.

The U.S. is not a good loser. Nor are President Biden and Blinken. They will take revenge for the public outcry their chaotic evacuation of troops and civilians from Afghanistan has caused. The Taliban will be blamed for it even as they, following U.S. requests, had escorted groups of U.S. citizens to the gates of Kabul's airport.

One can anticipate what their plan entails by looking at the process that led to yesterdays UN Security Council resolution about Afghanistan. The full resolution has not been published yet but the UN reporting on it gives the gist:

Security Council urges Taliban to provide safe passage out of Afghanistan

Thirteen of the 15 ambassadors voted in favour of the resolution, which further demands that Afghanistan not be used as a shelter for terrorism.

Permanent members China and Russia abstained.

As the resolution only 'urges' it is obviously minimal and not binding. It is not what the U.S. had set out to achieve. It wanted a much stronger one with possible penalties (see 'holding ... accountable' below) should the Taliban not follow it.

Prior to the UNSC meeting France and Great Britain had proposed to create a 'safe zone' in Kabul. That request has been silently dropped - likely over Chinese and Russian concerns about Afghanistan's sovereignty.

On August 29 Blinken had talked with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi about a binding resolution. The State Department readout of the call was minimal:

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke today with PRC State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi about the importance of the international community holding the Taliban accountable for the public commitments they have made regarding the safe passage and freedom to travel for Afghans and foreign nationals.

The readout by China reveals that much more than that was discussed:

Wang said that the situation in Afghanistan has undergone fundamental changes, and it is necessary for all parties to make contact with the Taliban and guide it actively.

The United States, in particular, needs to work with the international community to provide Afghanistan with urgently-needed economic, livelihood and humanitarian assistance, help the new Afghan political structure maintain normal operation of government institutions, maintain social security and stability, curb currency depreciation and inflation, and embark on the journey of peaceful reconstruction at an early date, he said.

The U.S. has blocked Afghanistan's Central Bank reserves, has stopped any budgeted payments to Afghanistan and ordered the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to block their Afghanistan programs.

This will paralyze all functions of the Afghan state. The World Bank is for example currently responsible for paying Afghan teachers and medical personnel. Afghanistan is experiencing a drought and will need to import large amounts of food. With its foreign assets blocked it has no way to do that.

China is clearly aware that Afghanistan will experience a human catastrophe should the U.S. continue its economic blockade.

There is also the danger of terrorism which the U.S. failed to address:

Wang urged the United States, on the premise of respecting Afghanistan's sovereignty and independence, to take concrete actions to help Afghanistan combat terrorism and violence, instead of practicing double standards or fighting terrorism selectively.

The U.S. side clearly knows the causes of the current chaotic situation in Afghanistan, Wang noted, adding that any action to be taken by the UNSC should contribute to easing tensions instead of intensifying them, and contribute to a smooth transition of the situation in Afghanistan rather than a return to turmoil.

China is specifically concerned about the "East Turkestan Islamic Movement" (ETIM) in east Afghanistan which the Trump administration had last year taken off its terrorist list even though the organization continues to target China. The Biden administration has made no attempt to revive the terrorist designation of ETIM.

Russia has similar concerns as its Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia explained after abstaining from the resolution:

We had to do this because the authors of the draft had ignored our principled concerns.

Firstly, despite the fact that the draft resolution was proposed against the backdrop of a heinous terrorist attack, the sponsors refused to mention ISIL and “Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement” – the organizations that are internationally recognized as terrorist – in the paragraph on counter-terrorism. We interpret it as unwillingness to recognize the obvious and an inclination to divide terrorists into “ours” and “theirs”. Attempts to "downplay” threats emanating from these groups are unacceptable.

Secondly, during the negotiations we emphasized the unacceptability and negative impacts of evacuation of Afghan highly qualified personnel for Afghanistan’s socio-economic situation. If experiencing a “brain drain”, the country will not be able to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. These elements that are vital for the Afghan people were nor reflected in the text of the resolution.

Thirdly, the authors ignored our proposal to have the document state the adverse effects that freezing of Afghan financial assets had on the economic and humanitarian situation in the country, and mention the fact that humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan must imperatively comply with the UN guiding principles, stipulated in UNGA resolution 46/182.

The first concern Nebenzia mentions is a node to the Chinese concerns. The second one is based on a concern the Taliban had raised when they declined to prolong the U.S. evacuation of educated Afghan people. The third one is the most important.

Russia had proposed to lift the block on Afghan assets. The U.S. has rejected that. That makes it quite obvious that the U.S. intends to keep these in place. It will use them to make demands which the Taliban will be unable to fulfill.

At the same time the U.S. will uses its ISPK (ISIS-K) and 'Northern Alliance' assets in Afghanistan to continue the war and to make successful efforts to govern Afghanistan impossible.

It will then blame the Taliban for the inevitable results.

Nation-building in Afghanistan arrived in 2001. Western interventions into the old Eastern bloc in the 1980s and early 1990s had been spectacularly effective in destroying the old social and institutional order; but equally spectacular in failing to replace imploded societies with fresh institutions. The threat from ‘failed states’ became the new mantra, and Afghanistan – in the wake of the destruction wrought post-9/11 – therefore necessitated external intervention. Weak and failed states were the spawning ground for terrorism and its threat to the ‘global order’, it was said. It was in Afghanistan that a new liberal world vision was to be stood-up.

At another level, the war in Afghanistan became another sort of crucible. In very real terms, Afghanistan turned into a testbed for every single innovation in technocratic project management – with each innovation heralded as precursor to our wider future. Funds poured in: Buildings were thrown up, and an army of globalised technocrats arrived to oversee the process. Big data, AI and the utilization of ever expanding sets of technical and statistical metrics, were to topple old ‘stodgy’ ideas. Military sociology in the form of Human Terrain Teams and other innovative creations, were unleashed to bring order to chaos. Here, the full force of the entire NGO world, the brightest minds of that international government-in-waiting, were given a playground with nearly infinite resources at their disposal.

This was to be a showcase for technical managerialism. It presumed that a properly technical, and scientific way of understanding war and nation-building would be able to mobilize reason and progress to accomplish what everyone else could not, and so create a post-modern society, out of a complex tribal one, with its own storied history.

The ‘new’ arrived, as it were, in a succession of NGO boxes marked ‘pop-up modernity’. The 18th century British statesman Edmund Burke, of course, had already warned in Reflections on the Revolution in France, as he witnessed the Jacobins tearing down their old order: “that it is with infinite caution” that anyone should pull down or replace structures that have served society well over the ages. But this managerial technocracy had little time for old ‘stodgy’ ideas.

But, what last week’s fall of the western instituted regime so clearly revealed is that today’s managerial class, consumed by the notion of technocracy as the only means of effecting functional rule birthed instead, something thoroughly rotten — “data-driven defeat”, as one US Afghan veteran described it — so rotten, that it collapsed in a matter of days. On the extended blunders of the “system” in Afghanistan, he writes:

“A retired Navy SEAL who served in the White House under both Bush and Obama reflected,[that] “collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions.” That “system” is best understood, not simply as a military or foreign policy body, but as a euphemism for the habits and institutions of an American ruling class that has exhibited an almost limitless collective capacity for deflecting the costs of failure.

“This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and sta­tistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own provi­dential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures”.

Whatever was not corrupt before America arrived, became corrupt in the maelstrom of that $2 Trillion of American money showered on the project. American soldiers, arms manufacturers, globalised technocrats, governance experts, aid workers, peacekeepers, counter-insurgency theorists and lawyers — all made their fortunes.

The flaw was that Afghanistan as a liberal progressive vision was a hoax in the first place: Afghanistan was invaded, and occupied, because of its geography. It was the ideal platform from which to perturb Central Asia, and thus unsettle Russia and China.

No one was truly committed because there was really no longer any Afghanistan to commit to. Whomsoever could steal from the Americans did so. The Ghani regime collapsed in a matter of days, because it was ‘never there’ to begin with: A Potemkin Village, whose role lay in perpetuating a fiction, or rather the myth of America’s Grand Vision of itself as the shaper and guardian of ‘our’ global future.

The true gravity for America and Europe of the present psychological ‘moment’ is not only that nation-building, as a project intended to stand up liberal values been revealed as having ‘achieved nothing’, but Afghanistan débacle has underlined the limitations to technical managerialism in way that is impossible to miss.

The gravity of America’s present psychological ‘moment’ – the implosion of Kabul – was well articulated when Robert Kagan argued earlier, that the ‘global values’ project (however tenuous its basis in reality) nonetheless has become essential to preserving ‘democracy’ at home: For, he suggests, an America that retreats from global hegemony, would no longer possess the domestic group solidarity to preserve America as ‘idea’, at home, either.

What Kagan is saying here is important — It may constitute the true cost of the Afghanistan débacle. Every élite class advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating myths can take many forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted, or lose their credibility – when people no longer believe in the narrative, or the claims which underpin that political ‘idea’ – then it is ‘game over’.

Swedish intellectual, Malcolm Kyeyune writes that we may be “witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades”:

“Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs visibly have been multiplying over many years. When Michael Gove said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss”.

There is therefore, little mystery as to why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. Not only did the project per se lack legitimacy for Afghans, but that aura of claimed expertise, of technological inevitability that has protected the élite managerial class, has been exposed by the sheer dysfunctionality on display, as the West frantically flees Kabul. And it is precisely how it has ended that has really drawn back the curtain, and shown the world the rot festering beneath.

When the legitimating claim is used up, and people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular élite, Kyeyune writes, becomes a foregone conclusion.

On June 24, 1717, representatives of English Masonic lodges established the Grand Lodge of England. From this day on they use to trace the history of modern Freemasonry.

It should be noted that the corporation of masons (“Freemason”, «le maçon» in French means "stonecraft worker", “builder”) were known in the Middle Ages, as well as representatives of other professions, united in closed corporations - the workshops. These corporations were secret and could be reached only by passing a special initiation.

In addition to the masons themselves, there were secret lodges of shoemakers, painters, casters, wine-makers, glassblowers, and even scavengers and beggars. They were sometimes called by generic term “companionship”, “le compagnonage”.

Each profession had its own rituals and symbols, most often traced back to biblical history, but often in its apocryphal version. In addition, pre-Christian symbolism could easily be found everywhere.

They main feature of Masons and companions was their belongness to the Third Estate. Priests and aristocracy had their own special orders and secret unions. At the same time, medieval corporations of artisans, living mostly in cities, differed also from peasant communities, which in this period also sometimes united in mystical groups with their legends, symbols, rites and doctrines.

On June 24, 1717, the ancient Freemasonry, previously called “operative masonry”, that is, associated with a particular profession - the construction of temples, castles and palaces - was reformed. Now it became “speculative”. And it could be joined by representatives of any class - all the rites were henceforth considered allegories, and the secrets of craftsmanship - mystical metaphors. But even in this state Freemasonry retained the main thing - orientation on the Third Estate, the Tiers -État.

Thus it became the vanguard of the new capitalist class, rushing to power. Among the Masonic lodges were both moderate and quite radical. For example, the Bavarian Illuminati or the French Masonic lodges responsible for the great French revolution and the bloody terror associated with it.

This radical revolutionary Freemasonry rejected God and became the main ideological and political enemy of the whole traditional order in Europe. The Third Estate under the Masonic leadership and guidance destroyed the Church, overthrew the Monarchy and still more enslaved the peasants. The materialistic science of the Encyclopedists all directly connected with Masonry and inspired by it replaced sublime idealism of the Christian Middle Ages.

True Europe fought a desperate battle in the Vendée, where the priesthood, the aristocracy loyal to the monarch, and the peasantry – all three classical functions of Indo-European society (according to G.Dumezil) united against bloody Masonic terrorism, the vanguard of liberal-capitalist materialist civilization, which was advancing on Europe. And, in the end, conquered it.

The modern West has followed the Masonic path of development.

In the 20th century, almost all the plans of speculative Freemasonry came to fruition. The lodges themselves, with their archaic rituals, moralism and symbolism, became from now on obsolete. But the Masonic ideology of progress, evolution, human rights, materialistic science, the secular State, and civil society have become principles and norms for virtually all of humanity.

Ideas that originally originated in secret Masonic ateliers are now openly inculcated in the minds of schoolchildren and define the agenda of science and culture policy.

And it is no accident that almost all U.S. presidents, starting from the first - George Washington, were activists of Anglo-Saxon Freemasonry and held leadership positions in it.

Today, those who call themselves Freemasons (and there are some) are either atavistic rudiments or clowns. They have no reason more to exist. Their historical program is accomplished on the planetary scale:

All of humanity has gradually become one Masonic lodge.

It's just a matter of time before the last step of the Masonic program will become the reality: the establishment of a worldwide dictatorship of the World Government.

But we see certain obstacles along the way. And I hope you know what I mean.

We are this obstacle. You and I.

The new coming race – the race of Awakening.

LONDON — According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, an economy is “the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used.” For the last few centuries, this system has been dominated by the paradigm of capitalism, in which the private owners of capital, and not the state, control the trade of goods and services.

The slave trade and plantation economy of the early colonial period in America were among the original manifestations of this economic paradigm, as the European propertied classes asserted their newfound power over dwindling tributary systems and the interim feudal arrangements were replaced with John Locke’s quasi-religious notions of private property, which would come to conquer Western economic theory for the next three hundred years.

Today, that paradigm has exhausted the moral justifications its proponents have relied upon to maintain its supremacy and the naked truth of capitalism’s rapaciousness is laid bare, once again, as wealth inequality skyrockets while millions sink into poverty and resource wars continue to ravage entire nations across the world.

Having squeezed every last drop of “value” from the earth, and with no more land to settle or markets to discover, capital’s approaching apotheosis finds it looking for a lifeline by creating a virtual copy of itself, where intellectual property supplants physical property and human biological and behavioral processes are recast as a grotesque form of human labor.

Efforts are now underway to “translate” the real world into a digital counterfeit that can provide financial markets with the figures and statistics it needs to execute the contracts of the incipient human capital markets – an insidious new form of capital assembled from our genetic code and other kinds of data that will form the basis of a financialized wonderland, enforced by blockchain technology and constantly monitored and updated through the burgeoning biosecurity state.

Led by the world’s most powerful hedge funds and transnational corporations, the so-called Great Reset amounts to little more than a campaign to turn humanity into datasets, which they can use to create more profits for themselves and their clients.

For now, they don’t have enough to make it happen and we still have the power to make sure they can’t.

Step right up

A return “to anything like normal” will require a Covid vaccination certificate, according to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been among the many world leaders advocating for vaccine passports, which the European Union expects to roll out as soon as this summer across its member states. The need for “a digital vaccination certificate” has reached total consensus in Europe, according to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, while countries outside of the EU might soon get standards and enforcement protocols for vaccine credentials designed by a team of researchers and academics from the UK, Australia, Canada and the Caribbean.

Andy Knight, the University of Alberta political scientist who is leading the latter endeavor, funded by the Worldwide Universities Network’s (WUN) Research Development Fund, stressed in a recent interview that vaccination should not be treated as “a nationalistic issue,” asserting that global “security is no longer about military threats — it’s about health threats,” and warned against “a splintering of international cooperation,” which he said should be met through “an intersection between the public and the private” sectors.

Indeed, Knight’s sponsors are committed to the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDG) – a set of 17 climate change-centered objectives, planned around public-private-philanthropic partnerships, which his research team will also knit into the six-month policy study. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and its associated philanthropic organizations, the UN’s SDG program stands out as one of the cornerstones of the Great Reset, which now features Covid-19 as the fulcrum of that project and underlies what pioneering independent researcher Alison McDowell, interviewed by MintPress for this article, calls “theological technofascism.”

Christened as the fourth sector, this merger of “the corporate state […] with nonprofits and religion,” as McDowell puts it, operates through so-called “benefit corporations,” a novel incorporation structure the rules of which were developed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s B Lab. Based on the “environmental social governance” or ESG framework, Certified B Corporations allow company executives to be shielded to a considerable extent from their shareholders and, therefore, provided with an unprecedented measure of freedom as a result of the ostensibly socially and environmentally beneficial entity.

This new face of capitalism intends to function under the aegis of what is referred to as the “Impact Economy” — an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the world of global capital. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone Group Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet.

The manufactured outrage of the richest banks and regulatory institutions in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime mortgage lending debacle elicited calls for a more “humane” capitalism. As the Great Recession was unfolding, the term “impact investment” was introduced to describe an economic model that delivers “social value through market-based practices” while birth was given to the buzzwords, like “sustainable development” or “carbon neutral,” coming out of organizations like the World Economic Forum (WEF) or the United Nations.

Sir Ronald Cohen, whom McDowell identifies as one of the key figures in its development, as recently as 2019 declared that the impact economy was “overthrowing the dictatorship of profit and putting impact firmly by its side to keep it in its place.” The sophistry in this statement may not be immediately apparent, but the cunning words spoken by the chairman of an impact investment firm called Global Steering Group (CSG) reveal the magic trick the owners of capital want to pull on the world.

The Global Steering Group, funded by some of the world’s most powerful interests, hope to make “social justice” profitable. Source | GSG

Yet, despite Cohen’s brash confidence and that of his fellow evangelizers on the impact investment bandwagon, not everyone is convinced. Even the Rockefeller Foundation has found that bringing major players on board can be an uphill battle, admitting that it has yet to garner “support from funder collaboratives, despite trying for some of the well-known ones like MacArthur Foundation” and others. Nevertheless, perhaps no one understands that “upheaval can yield new understanding and opportunity” better than the Rockefeller Foundation.

The impact investment model is facing a challenge many startups do, which is a problem of scale. However, that’s a challenge it is well-positioned to meet and a problem that the model’s agents have been making sure they overcome by tapping into the largest horizontal market of all time: healthcare.

The God complex

In October 2020, MintPress covered an organization called The Commons Project, which at the time was carrying out the first official tests of its CommonPass health passport app in Newark, New Jersey in the presence of CDC officials and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. A cursory look at the founders’ backgrounds revealed their ties to the CDC and covert intelligence operations around the world. One of the project’s founders, in particular, bears closer examination as we stand on the eve of a worldwide biosecurity regime.

Dr. Bradley A. Perkins led the CDC’s investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks as its Meningitis and Special Pathogens chief, making him the agency’s top anthrax expert. He would later be appointed as the agency’s Deputy Director of the Office of Strategy and Innovation, eventually heading the division, placing him in charge of a $11.2 billion budget and over 50 branch offices around the world. Perkins had risen in the ranks from his 1989 stint supervising a team of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), a special unit originally formed to “catch the communists if they started spreading plague over the Korean peninsula.” Perkins was head of the CDC’s bioterrorism unit when he was tapped, along with five of his colleagues, to lead the anthrax investigation.

One could say that Perkins had reached the peak of his public service career during that time, working closely with then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding to create a “state-of-the-art” $2 billion emergency response capability for the Bush administration in the wake of the H5N1 Avian Flu epidemic. He would remain an influential voice at the nation’s top disease prevention outfit, where he seemed to be very intent on radically overhauling the country’s approach to public health – a desire he has carried over to his endeavors in the private sector, which include nearly four years as Chief Medical Officer of Human Longevity, Inc, a DNA sequencing firm founded by Dr. Craig Venter, the first man to sequence the human genome.

In 2017, just before Perkins would step down as Human Longevity’s CMO, he gave a rather enlightening presentation at the Aspen Institute’s Abu Dhabi Ideas conference. held at NYU that year, in which he went into considerable detail about what he and his colleagues in the DNA sequencing business really mean when they talk about changing public health. Sharing the panel session with other transhumanists pushing the genomic revolution on the world, like Aubrey de Grey, who currently serves as science advisor to Jeffrey Epstein’s transhumanist project, (now renamed Humanity +), Perkins expounds on the virtues of genomics as the next frontier in healthcare.

In a talk titled “Synthetic Life to Human Health,” Perkins explains how genomics is “going to be the next accelerant in extending high-performance human lifespan” and the four factors that have made this possible. First and foremost is the “radical decrease in the cost of whole genome sequencing,” which fell from approximately three billion dollars initially to roughly one thousand dollars or “about three thousand dollars if you include the analytic component” per DNA code map. The advent of cloud computing, which according to Perkins is “just barely adequate to begin to host this voluminous data, [which allows] us to manipulate and analyze it,” and the mainstream adoption of machine learning (AI) to “interpret” the data round out the next two factors.

Lastly, Perkins highlights the critically important shift from “volume-based health care to value-based health care.” Perkins is referring here to cold, hard cash as the rest of his seminar makes clear, given how genomics “will drive tremendous progress in life and health insurance [as well as] tremendous progress in healthcare delivery by powering a next generation of healthcare and healthcare models.”

“What we are about to embark on,” Perkins boldly predicts, is nothing less than “hacking the software of life,” and “for the first time, trying to understand all the instructions that build, operate and reproduce us as humans.” He illustrates his point with a disturbing anecdote about how genomic pioneer Venter “sat down at a computer with the notion that he could actually design a genome, a sequence of DNA letters; produce that genome artificially; insert it into a membrane and boot up life from scratch.”

Perkins considers that Venter’s 2010 brainstorm might have been even “more important” than the sequencing of the human genome, itself. The eureka moment when a Western scientist developed a God-complex is what will change “medicine from a clinical science supported by data to a data science supported by clinicians,” according to Perkins, who goes on to warn of the “profound disruption in our current format for the practice of medicine,” that he confidently states will no longer “be possible in the place that we’re going very shortly.”

Stored in Amazon’s cloud servers, Human Longevity’s bioinformatics platform is only one of several next-generation sequencing technologies designed to perform the type of comparative genome sequencing work Perkins and his life science industry colleagues are counting on to carry out what he estimates is “probably the largest scale enterprise ever” of “translating the language of biology in the form of linear DNA code into the language of health and disease.”

Perkins admits that “the genome in isolation, it’s not very useful” and that what the business of genomics basically boils down to is the “building [of] integrated health records,” in order to be able to correlate “high-quality clinical data” with the whole genome sequence. “We’re in the business of building a large database,” Perkins reveals. Without that, the genomic revolution is dead in the primordial waters, so to speak.

But, with CommonPass, Perkins is continuing to do all he can to build that database. After all, a biometric passport required at all ports of entry would go a long way to procuring a goldmine of genomic data. An opportunity not lost on the majority shareholders of another company Perkins was involved with even before launching the nonprofit or joining Human Longevity.

Fresh out of his long career at the CDC — and just a year after exhorting his fellow federal employees to pay heed to the “serious game” the agency was rolling out to “examine the estimated health impacts and costs associated” with major policy and health system changes “over a five-decade period” — Perkins joined Vanguard Health System as its Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer.

The publicly-traded cross-national operator of hospitals and clinics was controlled by The Blackstone Group from 2004 until it was sold off to Tenet Healthcare in 2011, forming the third largest investor-held hospital network in the United States. Tenet, like many other private equity-owned healthcare operations, has been roiled by controversy and corruption. Perkins took a tidy $1.9 Million package and moved on from Vanguard just before the merger. Just last year, Blackstone acquired Ancestry.com Inc. for a cool $4.7 billion, making the world’s largest private landlord the owner of the largest private DNA database in the world as well, containing the genome of 18 million people across 30 countries.

The new wine of slavery

“Everything [needs to be] big and fast and scalable,” asserts Alison McDowell, who has been following the development of the burgeoning impact investment models being piloted across multiple verticals on her blog “Wrench in the Gears.” Named in honor of Mario Savio’s emotional speech to his fellow Berkeley students at the height of the anti-war movement in the United States, McDowell has managed to expose many of the “gears” that are moving this reinvention of capitalism based on the aggregation and manipulation of data in all its forms.

McDowell credits a talk she attended in 2017 at The Whitney Museum of American Art called “Race, Finance and the Afterlife of Slavery,” delivered by UC Davis professor Justin Leroy, for waking her up to the machinations behind the emerging models of financial exploitation and, in particular, the racialized nature of the novel financial instruments created for them, such as social impact bonds or SIBs.

Leroy presciently describes them as “racial capitalist instruments” and traces their lineage to maritime insurance and other financial innovations of the slave trade, positing that it was the slave trade itself that served as the “primary motivator leading to the development of robust insurance networks.” His citation of the Zong slave ship massacre – where hundreds of captive men were thrown overboard and later claimed as insured property by the ship’s captain – dovetails perfectly with the reality of how social impact bonds replicate capitalism’s penchant for commodifying human life.

In layman’s terms, a social impact bond secures funding for a given social program from private investors, who “risk” their money for a return based upon the “successful” completion of the program’s stated goals. As with any bond, these forms of securitized debt can be traded on the open market just like a repackaged subprime mortgage loan. More specifically, social impact bonds are investment vehicles that are tied to the value of a social service provided by a government entity, such as healthcare, or a function of the state, such as incarceration. It’s net effect, as Leroy points out, results in the transfer of public wealth into private hands.

Alison McDowell’s great contribution has been to track down how and where these kinds of impact investment tools are being tested — drawing the vital link between smart contracts, which rely on blockchain technology, and these new forms of dynamic securitized debt. “The data analytics informs the value of the securitized debt,” she told MintPress, stressing that the data itself will necessarily “be based on ‘baseline’ predictive profiling,” using “very simple and narrow” metrics in order to satisfy the scale and speed required by institutions like Goldman Sachs, which will be handling these assets.

“These are not meaningful numbers in terms of the person who’s in the [social] program,” McDowell says; since the success metrics will not be based on “an individual [data] quarry, it would be [from] groups of people” instead. This crucial fact — reflecting the predatory, common-denominator nature of capitalism — is vital to grasping the inherent danger built into these forms of “social finance” and how the noble-sounding names they’re wrapped in do not mitigate the harm that will inevitably result.

Nowhere is this more relevant than in the healthcare space, where massive quarries of genomic data are being hoarded by Blackstone and others, like Richard Branson’s recent acquisition of 23andMe in January through a special-purpose vehicle, in order to take the consumer DNA company public.

“When it comes to genetics, you need extraordinarily large data sets,” says Federation Bio CEO Emily Drabant Conley in regard to questions about Blackstone’s DNA trove. The former 23andMe executive explains that since “the genome itself is so vast and complicated and there’s so many differences between people,” the “low end of the bar” for potential customers like Big Pharma hovers around datasets of 10 million people.

Blackstone’s ability to monetize our DNA is not limited by existing markets, however. Its significant stake in healthcare, insurance and retail companies gives the private equity firm the capacity to mix-and-match the collective data sets they own to spin off new segments, along the lines of Ancestry.com’s Spotify partnership to design “DNA-designed music playlists” and other less benign behavioral and genetic dataset combinations.

An “all-encompassing picture of consumer behavior,” as a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business finance professor describes Blackstone’s enviable position, is only one side of the dystopian coin. Merged with genomic data, these data can produce truly nightmarish scenarios of fascist control. Much of McDowell’s research has focused on the education side of impact investing, which relies heavily on behavioral data via facial recognition and AI to create the financial social investment instruments around schooling.

Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman (left), pictured with the prime minister of Singapore and his wife, Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Henry Kissinger at an event for the “Appeal of Conscience Foundation.” Diane Bondareff | AP

Initiatives like the World Bank’s Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition (BSIC) are promoting the creation of “Ethereum blockchain solutions and applications that address global social and environmental issues” through its IXO protocol, which “enables anyone to deliver, evaluate or invest in sustainable development impacts, with crypto-economic proof of Impact.” Outfits like Social Finance Israel, founded by Sir Ronald Cohen, are driving the implementation of such protocols through multiple pilot programs to assess metrics like real-time data analytics, last-mile impact verification, and the viability of impact tokens (bond-specific cryptocurrencies) in education and other areas.

The Hong Kong-based Impact Oxygen Foundation (iO2) operates a social impact service platform in China called ShanZhai City, which deploys blockchain-based impact projects in that country as well as in Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Brazil. In 2018, the social impact startup’s CEO was invited to attend a two-day workshop created by banking giant UBS and the IXO Foundation “to create the next generation of impact financing mechanisms, using Web3 and blockchain technologies.” Earlier that year, ShanZhai City entered into a “strategic partnership” with IXO to “revolutionize social finance infrastructure.

This revolution entails the ability to “measure, evaluate, value, and tokenize verified impact data” obtained through our ubiquitous data-gathering, surveillance technologies, which will, in turn, hand it over to financial institutions to profit from the bets they make on poverty and misery around the world. In the meantime, the problem of scale persists and, as McDowell points out, all of their pilot programs put together do not add up to anything substantial. “My sense,” McDowell proposes, “is that the biometric health passport is what they’ll need” to achieve critical mass and finally kick off the fourth industrial revolution.

Interlocking Web of deceit

When Donald Trump cut funding to USAID’s PREDICT program in March 2020, there was some chatter about the irresponsibility of ending a program that for the last ten years had focused on collecting bat-borne coronaviruses in Asia just as a coronavirus pandemic was being declared. But, for all intents and purposes, the program had long been concluded.

The program’s creator Dr. Dennis Carroll; its global director Dr. Jonna Mazet; and Peter Daszak, the star scientist who had deposited thousands of coronavirus samples in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s database, had already gone on to form a new nonprofit to develop “a strategic response to the growing need to better predict, prevent, and respond to future viral pandemic threats and to protect us all from their worst consequences.”

Named the Global Virome Project (GVP), it quickly partnered with The Trinity Challenge, a global coalition “of partners united by the common aim of developing insights and actions to contribute to a world better protected from global health emergencies.” Its “founding members” include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, Google, The London School of Economics, Glaxo-Smith Klein, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, Tencent and many others.

Perhaps more interesting is its list of ostensibly regular members, among whom we find

Pierre Omidyar’s Palantir, which has a controversial data management deal with the UK’s NHS; the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), whose board member and former chief medical advisor to the UK, Dame Sally Davies, leads the Trinity Challenge itself; and the ever-present Tsinghua University, to name just a few.

The web of interlocking memberships and associations between virtually all of these groups is an interminable and recursive rabbit hole, that eventually leads to the conclusion that it is all one big club striving to reach the same goal. In one particularly salient case, one of the most notorious names associated with the drive for global vaccination regimes, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is linked to a “boutique” social impact investment firm that backs a Trinity Challenge member.

The Trinity Challenge’s web of interlocking memberships. Source | thetrinitychallenge.org

Global Impact Advisors is a consulting firm out of San Mateo, California, which is headed by CEO Amy Adelberger, a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alum who had the unique distinction of launching a $33 million tuberculosis mitigation partnership with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology during her time there. Focusing “on the application of market-based solutions to global health and development challenges,” Adelberger’s firm seems to draw most of its clients from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and — given her role as the program manager of the TB program in China, her company’s continued focus on TB-related issues, and a nuanced reading of the section on public-private partnerships on the company website — it seems more than likely that Adleberger is simply fulfilling Gates Foundation’s own “hope” to effectuate the “national scale-up of [the] innovations across China” for which this and other multi-million-dollar partnerships with the same Chinese government entity were intended.

The Commons Project, as well, shares many of the same intertwining relationships with Big Pharma, Big Tech, academia and federal organizations on its board, leaving us with the inescapable feeling that a very well-organized, but relatively small collection of power brokers are hell bent on fashioning a data-driven economy in a desperate attempt to breathe new life into a system that nobody can buy into any more.

The missionaries of “free-market economics” are pulling out all the stops to convince us that they really do have the people’s best interest at heart this time, after centuries of ceaseless war, ruthless corruption and environmental devastation. Suddenly, a public health emergency has managed to peer into their soulless chasm and not only sparked a long-dead sense of compassion, but coincidentally provided them with all the solutions. The only catch is that we have to give up our humanity and live behind screens and speak to each other via encrypted messaging apps only.

Other than that, they assure us, everything is as it always should have been. They’ve seen the error of their ways and are ready to usher in a more humane, a more “sustainable” economic paradigm, in which the wealthy finally invest in the poor, the sick and the homeless as part of a new “moral” economy. But, the obvious question is, if misery becomes profitable, what incentive is there for its eradication?

A human economy

Capitalism has invested in misery as long as it has existed and always found it immensely profitable. Creating a “digital twin” of the world affords immeasurably greater opportunities for profit, but also takes real human life offline and replaces it with “dots and dashes and electrical signals” that McDowell understands are of any use only to the financial markets.

A long, protracted, manufactured Cold War with China and revamped Eastern bloc has the potential to produce more refugees, more poverty, more trauma and more prisoners. In other words, more assets for the human capital markets. But, before that happens, they need our DNA to scale the pilot project and feed the starving leviathan as it thrashes about in a finite planet.

In his moving presentation about race, slavery and finance, Justin Leroy quoted America’s first African American doctor, James McCune Smith, to elucidate how the true nature of capitalism is never lost on its most exploited classes. The relevance of Smith’s exposition demands that this, the third and final part of “Dragon’s Blood Harvest at the Dawn of Human Capital Markets,” end with the physician’s seminal words published just before the end of the Civil War in 1864.

Smith’s clarity of vision allowed him to appreciate the treacherous heart of the system he knew was a slaver’s system, no matter what it chooses to label itself:

There is no political, religious or philanthropic agency at work that can encompass the entire abolition of slavery. In slave society, labor lies prostrate and capital dictates its own terms, which are perpetual subjugation. In other words, perpetual slavery. Far from this war diminishing the wish or power for capital to own labor, it will increase both. Colossal monopolies are parceling out even the free states for their ownership. The slave in the South will have namesakes in fact, if not in title, north of the Mason/Dixon line.”

Feature photo | Graphic by Antonio Cabrera

Raul Diego is a MintPress News Staff Writer, independent photojournalist, researcher, writer and documentary filmmaker.