Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin (photo from 2018).

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have officially begun negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Whatever the territorial solutions, they will not resolve the entire dispute. It will probably persist beyond peace.

Three problems overlap:

1) NATO’s expansion to the East and the Brzeziński Doctrine

When the East Germans themselves tore down the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989), the West, taken by surprise, negotiated the end of the two Germanys. Throughout 1990 the question arose whether German reunification would mean that East Germany, by joining West Germany, would enter NATO or not.

When the Atlantic Alliance Treaty was signed in 1949, it did not protect certain territories of certain signatories. For example, the French territories in the Pacific (Réunion, Mayotte, Wallis and Futuna, Polynesia and New Caledonia) were not covered. It would therefore have been possible that, in a unified Germany, NATO would not have been allowed to deploy in East Germany.

This issue is very important for the Central and Eastern European states that were attacked by Germany during the Second World War. In the eyes of their populations, seeing sophisticated weapons being installed on their borders was worrying. Even more so for Russia, whose immense borders (6,600 kilometres) are indefensible.

At the Malta Summit (2-3 December 1989) between the US and Russian Presidents, George Bush (the father) and Mikhail Gorbachev, the US argued that it had not intervened to bring down the Berlin Wall and that it had no intention of intervening against the USSR at that time [1].

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stated that "the changes in Eastern Europe and the process of German unification must not lead to an ’attack on Soviet security interests’". Consequently, NATO should rule out an ’expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. a rapprochement with the Soviet borders’"

The three occupying powers of Germany, the United States, France and the United Kingdom, therefore made repeated commitments not to expand NATO towards the East. The Moscow Treaty (12 September 1990) assumed that a reunified Germany would not claim territory from Poland (Oder-Neisse line), and that no NATO bases would be present in East Germany [2].

At a joint press conference in 1995 at the White House, President Boris Yeltsin described the meeting they had just had as "disastrous", provoking laughter from President Bill Clinton. It is indeed better to laugh than to cry.

However, the Russians were informed that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was touring the capitals to prepare the NATO membership of former Warsaw Pact states. President Boris Yeltsin therefore harangued his counterpart, Bill Clinton, at the Budapest summit (5 December 1994) of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). He declared: "Our attitude towards NATO’s enlargement plans, and in particular the possibility of infrastructure progress to the East, remains and will remain invariably negative. Arguments such as: enlargement is not directed against any state and is a step towards the creation of a unified Europe, do not stand up to criticism. This is a decision whose consequences will determine the European configuration for years to come. It may lead to a slide towards the deterioration of trust between Russia and the Western countries. […] NATO was created at the time of the Cold War. Today, not without difficulty, it is seeking its place in the new Europe. It is important that this approach does not create two zones of demarcation, but on the contrary, that it consolidates European unity. This objective, for us, is contradictory to NATO’s expansion plans. Why sow the seeds of distrust? After all, we are no longer enemies; we are all partners now. The year 1995 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Half a century later, we are increasingly aware of the true significance of the Great Victory and the need for historic reconciliation in Europe. There must no longer be adversaries, winners and losers. For the first time in its history, our continent has a real chance of finding unity. To miss it is to forget the lessons of the past and to call into question the future itself. Bill Clinton replied: "NATO will not automatically exclude any nation from membership. […] At the same time, no external country will be allowed to veto expansion.” [3].

At this summit, three memoranda were signed, including one with independent Ukraine. In exchange for its denuclearization, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States committed to refraining from resorting to the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.

However, during the Yugoslav wars, Germany intervened, as a member of NATO. It trained Kosovar fighters on the basis of the Incirlik Alliance (Türkiye), then deployed its men there.

However, at the NATO summit in Madrid (8 and 9 July 1997), the heads of state and government of the Alliance announced that they were preparing for the accession of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. In addition, they are also considering that of Slovenia and Romania.

Aware that it cannot prevent sovereign states from entering into alliances, but worried about the consequences for its own security of what is being prepared, Russia intervened in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) at the Istanbul summit (18 and 19 November 1999). It had a declaration adopted establishing the principle of free membership of any sovereign state in the alliance of its choice and that of not taking measures for its security to the detriment of that of its neighbours.

However, in 2014, the United States organised a colour revolution in Ukraine, overthrowing the democratically elected president (who wanted to keep his country halfway between the United States and Russia) and installing a neo-Nazi regime that was publicly aggressive against Russia.

In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO. In 2009, it was Albania and Croatia. In 2017, Montenegro. In 2020, North Macedonia. In 2023, Finland, and in 2024, Sweden. All promises have been broken.

To understand how we got to this point, we also need to know what the United States was thinking.

In 1997, former security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, the Polish-American Zbigniew Brzeziński, published The Grand Chessboard. In it, he discusses “geopolitics” in the original sense, that is, not the influence of geographical data on international politics, but a plan for world domination.

According to him, the United States can remain the world’s leading power by allying itself with the Europeans and isolating Russia. Now retired, this democrat offers the Straussians a strategy to keep Russia in check, without however proving them right. Indeed, he supports cooperation with the European Union, while the Straussians wish on the contrary to slow its development (Wolfowitz doctrine). In any case, Brzeziński would become an advisor to President Barack Obama.

Monument in Lviv to the glory of the criminal against Humanity Stepan Bandera

2) Nazification of Ukraine

At the beginning of the special operation of the Russian army in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin declared that his first goal was to denazify the country. The West then pretended to ignore the problem. They accused Russia of exaggerating some marginal facts although they had been observed on a large scale for a decade.

This is because the two rival US geopoliticians, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzeziński, had formed an alliance with the “integral nationalists” (i.e. with the disciples of the philosopher Dmytro Dontsov and the militia leader Stepan Bandera) [4], at a conference organized by the latter in Washington in 2000. It was on this alliance that the Department of Defense had bet, in 2001, when it outsourced its research into biological warfare to Ukraine, under the authority of Antony Fauci, then Health Advisor to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It was also on this alliance that the State Department had bet, in 2014, with the Euromaidan color revolution.

The two Ukrainian Jewish presidents, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky, allowed memorials to be built throughout their country paying tribute to Nazi collaborators, particularly in Galicia. They allowed Dmytro Dontsov’s ideology to become the historical reference. For example, today, the Ukrainian population attributes the great famine of 1932-1933, which caused between 2.5 and 5 million deaths, to an imaginary desire of Russia to exterminate the Ukrainians; a founding myth that does not stand up to historical analysis [5], in fact, this famine affected many other regions of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is on the basis of this lie that Kyiv managed to make its population believe that the Russian army wanted to invade Ukraine. Today, several dozen countries, including France [6] and Germany [7], have adopted, by overwhelming majorities, laws or resolutions to validate this propaganda.

Nazification is more complex than we think: with NATO’s involvement in this proxy war, the Centuria Order, that is to say the secret society of Ukrainian integral nationalists, has penetrated the Alliance forces. In France, it is already present in the Gendarmerie (which, by the way, has never made public its report on the Boutcha massacre).

The contemporary West wrongly perceives the Nazis as criminals who primarily massacred Jews. This is absolutely false. Their main enemies were the Slavs. During the Second World War, the Nazis murdered many people, first by shooting and then, from 1942, in camps. The Slavic civilian victims of Nazi racial ideology were more numerous than the Jewish victims (about 6 million if we add the people killed by shooting and those killed in the camps). Moreover, since some victims were both Slavic and Jewish, they are included in both assessments. After the massacres of 1940 and 1941, approximately 18 million people from all backgrounds were interned in concentration camps, of whom 11 million in total were murdered (1,100,000 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp alone) [8]..

The Soviet Union, which was torn apart during the Bolshevik revolution, did not reunite until 1941 when Joseph Stalin formed an alliance with the Orthodox Church and put an end to the massacres and political internments (the "gulags") to fight against the Nazi invasion. The victory against racial ideology founded today’s Russia. The Russian people see themselves as the slayers of racism.

3) Russia’s rejection from Europe

The third bone of contention between the West and Russia arose not before, but during the Ukrainian war. The West adopted various measures against what symbolized Russia. Of course, unilateral coercive measures (abusively called “sanctions”) were taken at the government level, but discriminatory measures were also taken at the citizen level. Many restaurants were banned for Russians in the United States or Russian shows were canceled in Europe.

Symbolically, we accepted the idea that Russia is not European, but Asian (which it also partially is). We rethought the Cold War dichotomy, opposing the free world (capitalist and believer) to the totalitarian specter (socialist and atheist), into an opposition between Western values (individualist) and those of Asia (communitarian).

Behind this shift, racial ideologies are resurfacing. I noted three years ago that the New York Times’ 1619 Project and President Joe Biden’s woke rhetoric were in reality, perhaps unwittingly, a reverse reformulation of racism [9]. I note that today President Donald Trump shares the same analysis as me and has systematically revoked all of his predecessor’s woke innovations. But the damage is done: last month, Westerners reacted to the appearance of the Chinese DeepSeek by denying that Asians could have invented, and not copied, such software. Some government agencies have even banned it from their employees in what is nothing other than a denunciation of the “yellow peril.”

Should Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), the author of "War and Peace", be censored as Ukraine does, where his books are burned because he was Russian?

4) Conclusion

Current negotiations focus on what is directly palpable by public opinion: borders. However, the most important thing is elsewhere. To live together, we need not to threaten the security of others and to recognize them as our equals. This is much more difficult and does not only involve our governments.

From a Russian point of view, the intellectual origin of the three problems examined above lies in the Anglo-Saxon refusal of international law [10]. Indeed, during the Second World War, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed at the Atlantic Summit that after their common victory, they would impose their law on the rest of the world. It was only under pressure from the USSR and France that they accepted the UN statutes, but they continued to flout them, forcing Russia to boycott the organization when they refused the People’s Republic of China the right to sit on it. The glaring example of Western duplicity is given by the State of Israel, which tramples on a hundred resolutions of the Security Council, the General Assembly and opinions of the International Court of Justice. This is why, on December 17, 2021, when the war in Ukraine was looming, Moscow proposed to Washington [11] to prevent it by signing a bilateral treaty providing guarantees for peace [12]. The idea of this text was, nothing more, nothing less, that the United States renounce the "rules-based world" and fall in line with international law. This right, imagined by the Russians and the French just before the First World War, consists solely of keeping one’s word in the eyes of public opinion.

by John Helmer, Moscow
[@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

The war to destroy Russia has been an evil in which the British, Americans, Germans and French have combined for more than a century now. In the present stage on the Ukrainian battlefield, every weapon and force fielded by the Anglo-Americans and their allies has been defeated; the Ukraine itself, territorially and politically, has been destroyed.

No serious Russian believes this war will be over when the incoming US president claims the personal credit for negotiating end-of-war terms short of the US side’s capitulation.

About men like him and negotiations like his, it was the Irishman Edmund Burke who in his 1770 essay “Thoughts on the Present Discontents” issued this warning: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”* In the present war against Russia, the bad men have combined across the Atlantic and the Pacific. Against them on the information war front, there are very few good men – not one in the mainstream media, almost none in the alternative media.

The power of state repression is only half the reason. The other half is the competition for money. In competing for internet media subscribers, even those tempted to be good will be motivated not to associate, to compete against each other instead, and thereby “fall, one by one in the contemptible struggle.”

In propaganda war, the bad men must convince their paymasters more than their audience that they are winning. Reaching this point today has required a series of confidence-building, warmaking preparations – the putsch in Kiev of February 2014; the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine in July 2014; and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury, England, in March 2018. The official narrative of Novichok, the Russian chemical warfare weapon allegedly used against the Skripals, has just reached its climax in London. A state-sponsored report will be published in a few weeks’ time. It will conclude that President Vladimir Putin had the means, opportunity and motive to kill the Skripals, and is guilty of attempted murder on English soil.

But the forensic evidence which has slipped into the public record from the British intelligence and security services, the chemical warfighters at Porton Down, and the Whitehall staffs advising the prime minister proves the narrative and the indictment are false. Weapon, crime scene, victim, killer, motive – all have been faked. By the Anglo-American and Canadian law standards of reasonable doubt and balance of probabilities, the prosecution of the case against Russia should have collapsed. Except, of course, that in the present state of war,  this hasn’t happened.

The new book, _Long Live Novichok! The British poison which fooled the world_is the lone voice to explain for the time being at least; it is also the only platform to defend Sergei and Yulia Skripal as political prisoners of the British for the past seven years. Because they didn’t die after they had been sprayed with a British poison, they have been kept in hospital under forced sedation and tracheostomy; then held under guard, in isolation, incommunicado. Their telephone calls to family in Russia, made in a hurry and in secret, stopped five years ago.

For the first time the book documents the British presentation in public of the poison weapon itself, revealing the clue of the colour of Novichok. This is the evidence that the murder weapon wasn’t Russian, it wasn’t Novichok at all.

In today’s podcast from Canada, Chris Cook and I discuss the reasons for the failure of Novichok to kill anyone, and its success at brainwashing everyone, or almost everyone.  

The contrast with other media campaigns of resistance to western information warfare is a glaring one. For example, the campaign to defend Julian Assange and free him from a British prison and trial in the US has turned out to have been a popular success. However, Assange himself, his Wikileaks platform, and his London advocates have done nothing to expose the Novichok deception operation. They are good men who have done nothing — their media success has failed to deter or stop the Anglo-American march to war in the Ukraine; Assange’s lawyers are supporters of the war against Russia. Assange’s alt-media reporters have pretended they are the only truth-tellers in the present discontents; their war is against their media competitors.  

For their names; for the truth of the Novichok story; and for the after-life of the Novichok poison in the coming war against Russia, click to listen.

Begin at Minute 31:00. Source: [https://gradio.substack.com/](https://gradio.substack.com/p/gorilla-radio-with-chris-cook-jeremy-c35)

For the introduction to this broadcast, access to the 20-year Gorilla Radio archive, and Chris Cook’s blog, click here and here.

[*] It is usually believed that what Edmund Burke (_right_) said was: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” As a warning against inaction or apathy, it’s salutary, if not quite right. But Burke didn’t say this. Instead, what he wrote was the line quoted in the lead. He then elaborated on how the moral duty of good men should be exercised in action. “It is not enough in a situation of trust in the commonwealth,that a man means well to his country; it is not enough that in his single person he never did an evil act, but always voted according to his conscience, and even harangued against every design which he apprehended to be prejudicial to the interests of his country. This innoxious and ineffectual character, that seems formed upon a plan of apology and disculpation, falls miserably short of the mark of public duty. That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated. When the public man omits to put himself in a situation of doing his duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he had formally betrayed it.” Read Burke’s essay in [full](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2173/2173-h/2173-h.htm).

by Editor - Thursday, January 16th, 2025

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.

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On 4 October I spoke to a meeting of the United European Left group of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Arriving a bit early, I sat through a presentation by a Moldovan judge, Victoria Sanduta, who was formerly the President of the Association of Judges in Moldova.

She had recently been dismissed, along with other judges, after investigation by a committee set up by the President to vet judges. She said the “vetting” was openly political, and the purpose was to remove any judges who were not “Western-oriented” and who might query the process in a forthcoming EU referendum and Presidential election.

You might think that this was an operation to clear out legacy judges hanging on since the days of the Iron Curtain. It was not; Victoria Sanduta is quite young. There had been no criticism of her judicial decisions. Her fault was that she was suspected of not supporting the President and lacking “Western orientation”.

Both the EU referendum and Presidential election were remarkably close. The EU referendum was “won” by the pro-EU side with 50.34% of the vote. The Presidential election was “won” by pro-EU President Sandu with 55.35% of the vote.

In both elections, the pro-Western side lost substantially on the votes of those living in Moldova, but won with the addition of hundreds of thousands of votes from the diaspora overseas.

There were 235 overseas voting stations in countries outside of Moldova, the large majority within the EU. There were however only two voting stations in Russia – the country where the majority of the Moldovan diaspora live, over half a million of them. Those voting stations (both in Moscow) were provided with only 5,000 ballot papers each. The official justification for this is that that’s the number of Moldovans living in Moscow itself, the majority being in the south of Russia.

As a result, approximately half a million Moldovans living in Russia were disenfranchised, while hundreds of thousands living in the EU voted.

In total 328,855 Moldovans living outside Moldova voted. Only 9,998 of those were in Russia, where most of the diaspora live.

Almost 300,000 of the permitted diaspora votes were for joining the EU – won with a majority of 10,555 – and for President Sandu – majority 179,309. If votes from the diaspora in Russia had been permitted on an equal footing with votes from the diaspora in the West, the EU would certainly have lost and Sandu would very probably have lost.

It was therefore very useful that Sandu sacked any judge who might entertain a challenge to the outcome.

This naturally recurred to me when I saw that pro-Western judges had disqualified the frontrunner in the neighbouring Romanian general election on the grounds of not being a Russophobe and being popular, which is an offence.

Călin Georgescu is not a supporter of the war in Ukraine. His socially conservative views are popular in Romania but are not EU-friendly. However he is absolutely not the far-right nutter he has been portrayed as across the Western media.

In fact Georgescu is a highly regarded developmental economist and a former United Nations Special Rapporteur. His expertise is in sustainable development, and he is one of those who wishes nations to move away from use of the US dollar as the primary medium of trade.

Georgescu has some views with which I agree and some with which I do not, but that is not the point. He won the first round of the Romanian Presidential Elections with a clear lead, and the decision of the judges of the Constitutional Court to disqualify him is clearly wrong and disproportionate.

The main offence he is accused of is sending lines to take to supporters and asking them to post these on social media. But almost every election candidate in the world nowadays does exactly this. It is further claimed that some of his supporters were paid by Russia, and the Constitutional Court was given evidence which originated from “Western security services” of Russian online campaigning for him.

Note the accusation here is not vote-rigging or electoral fraud. The accusation is of people saying things online to try to persuade voters to vote.

Which is what an election is.

It is the same as the Cambridge Analytica scandal which was so hysterically hyped by the Guardian and their deranged Russophobe Carole Cadwalladr (friend of Christopher Steele, author of the famous fabricated Trump “pee dossier”). There was a scandal, which was that Facebook was selling clients’ personal data to enable better targeting of political adverts.

But Cambridge Analytica was never Russian-funded, and the notion that some Facebook posts, among the massive sea of advertising and campaigning of every kind, had swung the Brexit vote is nonsense clung to by losers who cannot get over being defeated.

Targeted advertising, and the sale of your online data, is a horrible, everyday feature of modern life. All political parties and all causes use it nowadays.

I have no doubt Russia does interfere to try to influence elections overseas. So does every major country. I did it myself for the UK – unsuccessfully in Poland when Kwaśniewski was elected and successfully in Ghana when Kufuor was elected. The EU and Western powers fund NGOs and fund journalists all over the world to sway opinion, openly, and covertly Western security services fund “agents of influence”. Let me say it again. I have done it personally.

However it becomes somehow uniquely wrong when Russia does it.

That is not even to mention the absolutely massive role of the Israeli lobby in buying political influence all over the world. That is a far greater threat to democracy than Russia ever is.

I don’t know how Romania’s judges were curated to get the right result, as they were in Moldova, or how they were forced or bribed to change their original decision not to annul the election, just four days later.

I do know that regime change propaganda is in full swing in Georgia, where again the “wrong” party, insufficiently hostile to Russia, had the temerity to win the election. The French President of Georgia is hanging on. Not even large sums of CIA money nor funds channelled through CIA NGOs, nor beautifully printed English language placards, have been able to get enough people out on the streets to make the “colour revolution” demonstrations look convincing.

Georgian opposition supporters rally to protest results of the parliamentary elections that showed a win for the ruling Georgian Dream party, outside the parliament building in central Tbilisi on October 28, 2024. (Photo by Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE / AFP)

Meanwhile back in France, Macron refuses to accept he lost the election and insists on appointing a series of right-wing ministers that cannot possibly get support in the National Assembly.

The pretence of Western Democracy is falling apart, just as the pretence of international law is falling apart, abandoned by the Zionist-bought politicians in their desire to further the genocide and annexation of Gaza.

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Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen.

The transition from years of confinement in a maximum-security prison to standing here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and surreal shift.

The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence.

I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured – the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can i speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.

I apologise in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect in such a distinguished forum.

Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.

However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly. I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today.

Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank PACE for its 2020 resolution (2317), which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noted that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture called for my release.

I’m also grateful for PACE’s 2021 statement expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release.

And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights.

However, like so many of the efforts made in my case – whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens – none of them should have been necessary.

None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day.

This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.

I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism – to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now.

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better.

Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.

Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none.

We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance.

We revealed not just when and where these things happened but frequently the policies, the agreements, and structures behind them.

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world.

But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval.

In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing these policies.

The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations is simple: Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest.

WikiLeaks’ work was deeply rooted in the principles that this Assembly stands for.

Journalism that elevated freedom of information and the public’s right to know found its natural operational home in Europe.

I lived in Paris and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers in based in France, Germany, and Norway.

But 14 years ago the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, PFC Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq.

The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues.

The US government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and freeze our accounts.

The UK government took part in some of this retribution. It admitted at the European Court of Human Rights that it had unlawfully spied on my UK lawyers during this time.

Ultimately this harassment was legally groundless. President Obama’s Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed.

The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution.

In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA Director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of French political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.

We revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.

It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.

My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy.

This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.

The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain.

This Assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA.

PACE’s groundbreaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centres and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law.

In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to forty years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation.

His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it.

These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.

Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes.

The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and extradition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe.

In Mike Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA Director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA.

Indeed, acceding to Pompeo’s efforts, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness.

Manning was held in prison for over a year and fined a thousand dollars a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me.

She ended up attempting to take her own life.

We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources. But Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist.

By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way, and the US government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition.

The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years, while it, the US government, and the new president of Ecuador moved to shape the political, legal, and diplomatic grounds for my arrest.

When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without them no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy.

If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to – perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he may be extradited just like me.

Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit.

The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalisation of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my extradition, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users, by claiming that their secrecy laws have been violated.

The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here.

As one of the world’s two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere.

I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.

Journalism is not a crime; it is a pillar of a free and informed society.

Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone else.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this assembly, to the conservatives, social democrats, liberals, leftists, greens, and independents – who have supported me throughout this ordeal and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release.

It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties.

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads. I fear that unless norm setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late.

Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

Heinrich von Kleist was a prolific German writer of the late eighteenth century whose work often focussed on the consequences of rhetorical confusion, the serious problems and personal suffering caused by writing or speaking incorrectly. In 1811, at the age of thirty-four, he formed a suicide pact with a close friend, Henriette Vogel, and shot her before turning the gun on himself. On the hundredth anniversary of his suicide, the district of Schöneberg in Berlin gave Kleist’s name to a small, charming park outside the Kammergericht (Chamber Court), the highest court in the state.

Germany is a place of dark irony.

The Chamber Court occupies a huge Neo-Baroque building that takes up an entire city block, bordered on three sides by the aforementioned park and facing a quiet cobble-stoned street. I’m standing outside on a crisp blue-sky morning in September, waiting for a thought criminal named CJ Hopkins.

CJ Hopkins is an American writer, an old-school lefty liberal with “an aversion to totalitarians, fascists, and other such authoritarian control freaks who get their rocks off intimidating, and dominating, and preying on the weak.” In 2004, he emigrated “because of the fascistic atmosphere that had taken hold of the USA at that time,” believing “that Germany, given its history, would be the last place on earth to ever have anything to do with any form of totalitarianism again.”

For thirty-odd years, twenty of which he has spent in Berlin, CJ has cranked out award-winning theatre, satire, dystopian fiction, and acid-sharp commentary on political and social issues. It’s the latter which has earned him, at the age of sixty-three, a sizeable international following, mostly centred on his Substack which has thousands of paid subscribers. He’s been called “a forbidden wit” and “an expert forecaster” by Matt Taibbi. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once referred to him as “our modern Jeremiah.”

He arrives at the courthouse in a brown trenchcoat, black beret, and sunglasses. He gives me a nod.

“Welcome to New Normal Berlin, Mike,” he says as he walks past me.

We’ve met twice before. I interviewed him remotely for my podcast, and I attended his first trial, in January 2024, at the Tiergarten District Court in Moabit, next to the infamous prison where the Nazis incarcerated and executed political prisoners.

The Crime

In May 2022, Hopkins published a book called The Rise of the New Normal Reich, the cover of which features a medical mask through which a swastika is faintly visible. In August 2022, he posted that image twice on Twitter (now X), accompanied by text.

In the first tweet, Hopkins wrote:

The #masks are symbols of ideological conformity. That's all they are. They always were. Stop pretending they're ever something else or get used to wearing them.

#Masks are not a mild remedy

In the second tweet, he quoted Karl Lauterbach, the Health Minister at the time, who had declared that “The mask always sends a signal”.

That’s it. That’s the crime.

In response, the public prosecutor’s office filed a criminal charge against CJ for “disseminating propaganda, the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”

Thus began what CJ has referred to as a “Kafkaesque mockery of justice.”

The Law

When people hear about how CJ ended up in court, they’re usually surprised to find out that using a Nazi symbol such as the swastika is not absolutely banned in Germany. It actually depends on context and intent, and there are significant protections for creative, editorial, and educational purposes.

Clivia von Dewitz, a German judge who wrote her doctoral thesis on the ban of Nazi symbols, explained the law under which the charge was brought in an article for Berliner Zeitung:

According to the ban on [Nazi] insignia (§ 86 Para. 1 No. 4, 86a Para. 1 No. 1 StGB), only those who distribute or publicly display Nazi symbols “which, based on their content, are intended to reflect the efforts of a former National Socialist organization” are liable to prosecution. This means that not every use of a Nazi symbol falls under the ban. On the contrary, the law confirms that only material, the content of which is directed against the free democratic basic order or the concept of understanding among nations, is considered [criminal] propaganda media (Section 86 Para. 3 StGB).

And, according to the criminal statute (Section 86 Para. 4 StGB), criminal liability is also excluded if the material serves the purposes of civic education, defense against unconstitutional efforts, art or science, research or teaching, or reporting on current events or history, or similar purposes (the so-called social adequacy clause).

It was in the 1970s that Nazi symbols were first used in a critical or ironic way. In these cases, jurisprudence failed to establish criminal liability, either at the level of the offense or by virtue of the application of the social adequacy clause, because a critical and distanced use of Nazi symbols is not punishable, especially in view of Article 5 of the Grundgesetz [i.e., the German constitution, literally “Basic Law”]. The fundamental right of freedom of expression and freedom of art enshrined therein is constitutive of a democracy.

The law is also recognised by the courts as having a “protective purpose”, a raison d’etre that comes into play when examining whether the use of a proscribed symbol falls within or outside of what is permitted. The general understanding is that the protective purpose of the ban on Nazi symbols in Germany is to prevent the minimisation or, as the Germans call it, “normalisation” of the horrors of the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and to prevent a situation in which it becomes socially acceptable for Nazis or Nazi sympathisers to begin using those symbols more widely.

“You can’t use it, for example, for fun, and CJ agrees with that,” says Friedemann Däblitz, the fresh-faced attorney defending him. “If you write a book about history you can use the symbol. If it is clear that you are using it in a ‘distant’ manner, if everyone can see that this guy doesn’t support Nazism, in those situations, the risk of normalisation is not that big.”

So how normal is the use of the swastika in German media?

Normalisation For Me, Not For Thee

In May 2024, the cover of the German magazine Der Spiegel featured a flag draped over a swastika to illustrate its lead story, an essay by Dirk Kurbjuweit titled 75 Years of the Federal Republic — and nothing learned?

Here are the covers of Der Spiegel and CJ’s book, side by side:

Both CJ and Der Spiegel used the swastika to imply that something is amiss in the world of German politics, with a subtle but crucial difference.

Der Spiegel used the swastika to suggest that the increasingly popular political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), “a party with extreme right-wing tendencies,” represents a nascent form of Nazism.

CJ, however, riffed on the cover of William L. Shirer’s famous 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich to criticise the German government’s pandemic policies as “a nascent form of totalitarianism.”

The German magazine Stern has also featured the swastika and the Nazi salute on its cover.
May 2024

August 2017

Der Spiegel and Stern were not directly criticising the current German government, nor were they pressing on the sore spot of controversial pandemic policies. CJ did both. Those magazines have had no legal repercussions for their use of the swastika. Only CJ has been prosecuted.

“[M]y personal impression is this law is used completely arbitrarily against dissidents,” Däblitz tells me in an interview. “For me, everything got much worse with the beginning of the pandemic.”

The Pandemic

Pandemic restrictions in Germany were harsh. Citing advice from the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s equivalent of the CDC), the Merkel and Scholz governments put stringent limits on the rights of the unvaccinated, in addition to lockdowns and mask mandates.

Critics at the time drew comparisons with the Nazi era, often by likening the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis to the government and media discrimination and rhetoric against the unvaccinated. In 2021, BBC News reported on the use by German Covid protestors of the infamous yellow Star of David armband with the word ‘Jew’ replaced by ‘Unvaccinated’.

While perhaps distasteful or inappropriate depending on one’s perception, it remains the case that the social repercussions of the German government’s pandemic policies are still being felt. In Germany, the loss of faith in government and the corrosion of the perception of the legitimacy of authority has been real and widespread, regardless of whether one believes the pandemic policies were well-intentioned or reasonable. The public’s (and CJ’s) suspicion regarding those policies also may not have been entirely spurious.

In late July 2024, the freelance journalist Aya Velásquez received unredacted copies of internal documents from a whistleblower at the Robert Koch Institute and published them. Sebastian Lucenti and Dr. Meyer-Hesselbarth, respectively a lawyer and a former judge writing for Cicero, claim that “the RKI protocols that were released and leaked show that a large proportion of the freedom-restricting norms created between 2020 and 2023 were tainted by the stigma of unconstitutionality from the outset.” Judge von Dewitz, in her article for Berliner Zeitung, wrote that the leaked documents “suggest that the government ordered significant parts of the measures restricting fundamental rights from 2020 to 2022 not on the basis of scientific findings, but out of political calculation, such that a new assessment of the government's actions from 2020 to 2022 is necessary.”

The First Trial

At his first trial, in Room 500 of the Tiergarten District Court, the prosecutor asked CJ if he understood the law in Germany with regards to the use of Nazi symbols. If he had played dumb and pretended to be an ignorant foreigner unaware of the rules of his host nation, the charges would probably have been dropped. Instead, he was honest. He said that he knew full well the history and weight of Nazi symbolism in Germany, and he knew the law as well, including the prohibited and permitted uses of the swastika.

“I don't want Nazis, neo-Nazis parading around in Germany with swastikas either,” CJ told me in an interview before the trial. “And I have to say, although I'm generally a free speech absolutist, I understand that law and I actually agree with it.”

When asked by the judge to give his intentions in posting the image, he stated that it was “to warn people about the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism that is hidden behind the official corona narrative just as the swastika is hidden behind the mask in my artwork.” This drew an involuntary derisory guffaw from the judge. He continued: “I absolutely compared a new form of totalitarianism to Nazi Germany, a twentieth century form of totalitarianism.”

In his opening argument, the prosecutor suggested that CJ was “relativising the Holocaust,” “relativising the Nazi tyranny which is also the aim of supporters of this ideology in a different form,” and equating the Nazi regime to “civic management of 2020 to 2022 which came about within constitutional procedures and was enacted through democratically legitimised institutions...and thus contributes, regardless of his intention, to the normalisation of National Socialist ideas.”

Permitted to respond, CJ pointed out that the well-documented rise of the Nazis likewise took place “within constitutional procedures” and “through democratically legitimised institutions,” closing by saying “I think I'm allowed to compare these [pandemic] measures with measures which took place in the twentieth century.”

He went on to describe instances where public figures had compared current events to the Nazis without subsequent charges from the German authorities, to which the judge responded by saying “We're talking about symbols, not words.”

Speaking of symbols, in that particular courtroom, the ornate ceiling featured two plaster rosettes with fasces in-set, and there were two more examples of the fasces at the entrance to the building. The name of the fasces symbol, a bundle of sticks bound together with an axe head attached, is the root from which the word ‘fascism’ is derived. If you squint, you’ll also see the fasces on either side of the Speaker of the House’s dais in the US Congress.

At the end of the proceedings, CJ read a prepared statement to the court, his voice occasionally betraying his emotions.

“The German authorities have had my speech censored on the Internet, and have damaged my reputation and income as an author,” he said. “One of my books has been banned by Amazon in Germany. All this because I criticized the German authorities, because I mocked one of their decrees, because I pointed out one of their lies. This turn of events would be absurdly comical if it were not so infuriating. I cannot adequately express how insulting it is to be forced to sit here and affirm my opposition to fascism.”

At the end of his statement, the thirty-seven members of the audience in the gallery broke out in applause and calls of “Bravo!” The judge shouted for order and threatened to clear the courtroom. Everyone was ordered to stand up. The judge delivered a stern chiding and, after a moment of suitable silent contrition, the room was allowed to be seated and the door was closed.

She then pronounced her verdict: “Freispruch”. Not guilty.

The judge dedicated half the time spent in delivering the verdict to ensuring CJ was made aware of how little she thought of him. She considered him to be arrogant, ideologically-driven, and incorrect in his views on the pandemic. He was wrong to claim that mask mandates and similar policies were driven by the government's desire to force compliance, and to equate safety measures with brainwashing. She told him that his was a “subjective emotional position” but that “objectively, the German public doesn't agree with you.” By acquitting him, she said, she was proving him wrong in his assessment of Germany as a nascent totalitarian state.

Upon delivering the verdict and ending the proceedings, the judge put on a medical mask and exited the courtroom. You couldn’t make it up.

In the written verdict published after the trial, the judge made it clear that, "when taking into account the text associated with the use of the mask, it can easily be seen that the connection to National Socialism is made in an emphatically negative sense."

Within the seven-day period allowed by law, the public prosecutor’s office applied to the Chamber Court for a “revision” of the verdict using a line of reasoning that Däblitz found highly questionable.

“The prosecutor…decided that if you use the symbol to bring a criticism, this criticism has to be against Nazism,” he explained. “It’s not okay if this criticism is directed against, for example, the government, because in this case it is not clear enough that you are also opposing Nazism.”

The prosecution had pivoted from arguing that CJ was disseminating Nazi propaganda to claiming that he was breaking the law by not specifically criticising Nazis.

“[T]he prosecutor in Germany is not free, it's part of the executive,” Däblitz told me during a podcast recording with him and CJ several months later. “It's part of the government, and they execute what the government wants.”

“The prosecutor is trying to rewrite the law in a much narrower way than it is written,” CJ added. “I believe that the prosecutor just wants to punish me. And so they're pulling arguments out of their ass. And this was really the only argument that they could try to make to continue this prosecution.”

The Second Trial

I join around two dozen familiar faces from the first trial in January, as well as journalists from Berliner Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, Der Spiegel, The Epoch Times, and Legal Tribune Online, in shuffling through airport-style security during which we are emptied, searched, patted, and prodded. A maximum of thirty observers are allowed into Room 145a of the Chamber Court, and no personal items are permitted. We are issued with a blue biro and a handful of blank looseleaf paper on request. The cause of the heightened security is described by Lisa Jani, the court’s press liaison, as being due to an ongoing espionage trial of a German intelligence agent who is accused of colluding with a Russian businessman on behalf of the FSB, Russia’s security service. To prevent anyone placing listening devices in the courtroom, we all have to submit to special measures.

“It would only make sense if this is really the only room available and it's not possible to get another room,” Däblitz tells me in an interview. “So I numerous times had some contact with the people working there and found out there are actually other rooms at least of the same size.”

“It's absolutely unnecessary,” CJ adds. “I see it as just a bald, a blatant attempt to discourage public attendance and to discourage press coverage.”

Once inside, the first thing that catches the eye is a wall of bulletproof glass about fifteen feet high separating the gallery from the area where the proceedings will be held. CJ, Däblitz, and a translator sit at the defendant’s table, set at the foot of a raised dais from which three judges and a new prosecutor frown down.

The ceiling is cross-hatched with a grid of clouded glass through which diffuse light falls. The carpet is a hotel-style mash-up of turquoise, puce, and duck egg, clashing with the wooden benches that we shuffle along to take our seats.

The prosecutor trying the case, which involves the use and interpretation of a symbol, is named Jung. The universe is not without a sense of humour.

In a British or American courtroom, the judge is seated in front of and above both the defendant and the plaintiff. Both parties come before the court as supplicants, pleading for justice, and the judge sits apart, emphasising their (hopeful) impartiality.

A German courtroom makes a strikingly different impression. The judges and the prosecutor sit on the same level, above the defendant, separated only by several metres of wooden panelling. It lands immediately: The prosecutor and the judges are on one side, the defendant on the other. Something about the layout makes me wonder if the fix is in.

Kathrin Jung, the prosecutor, opens with a desultory run-through of her side’s revised argument, which has already been submitted to the judges in writing, along with Däblitz’s defence. It is a scant few minutes before it is over.

Däblitz makes the argument that the prosecutor is attempting “a blurring of the law” and that “[t]he protective purpose of the law is, above all, to preserve the constitutional order” which “is therefore also to preserve the freedom of expression.” The purpose of CJ’s tweets was “to ward off unconstitutional efforts,” he adds. “Those who are determined to support the values ​​of the free democratic basic order should not have to face the risk of prosecution.”

At the end, CJ is given the opportunity to make a statement. Reading from a printout in German, he once again presents his position to the court.

“[H]ere I am, on trial in criminal court for the second time. The German authorities had my Tweets censored. They reported me to the Federal Criminal Police Office. They reported me to The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic Intelligence agency. My book is banned in Germany. The German authorities investigated me. They prosecuted me. They put me on trial for tweeting. After I was acquitted, that wasn’t enough, so they have put me on trial again. They defamed me. They have damaged my income and reputation as an author. They have forced me to spend thousands of Euros in legal fees to defend myself against these clearly ridiculous charges.”

While he reads, I see a couple of the journalists sitting in front of me chuckle or sigh dismissively.

“Why, rational people might ask, have I been subjected to this special treatment, while Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Tageszeitung, and many others who have also tweeted swastikas, have not?”

Five feet away from me, the reporter from Der Spiegel squirms a little while taking notes.

“It has nothing to do with punishing people who disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing political dissent, and intimidating critics into silence. I’m not here because I put a swastika on my book cover. I am here because I put it behind a “Covid” mask.”

Just like the first trial, at the end of his statement the gallery erupts in applause and cheers to the annoyance of the judges.

The presiding judge, Delia Neumann, declares a forty-five minute break so that her and the other two judges, Dr. Ammann and Dr. Brunozzi, can deliberate and return a verdict.

In the corridor outside, I notice that on the clipboard showing the docket for today’s trial, the names of CJ and his lawyer have been misspelled: ‘Hopkings’ and ‘Däbitz’. CJ sits on a bench with his wife and tries to relax.

The time passes surprisingly quickly.

After we’re all seated, the judge begins to read her verdict. She reads for twenty minutes with barely any inflection or pauses. I find myself wondering how the judges managed to deliberate, reach a consensus, and write a twenty-minute verdict in forty-five minutes. Judge Neumann stops reading abruptly, stands up and leaves. We’re ushered out of the gallery. I turn to the person next to me and ask what happened. He shrugs.

“Guilty,” a helpful fellow observer says, leaning over.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

The Verdict

The official statement of the Chamber Court declares that CJ Hopkins has been found “guilty of using symbols of unconstitutional organizations.”

Referring to the judge’s ruling in the first trial, the Chamber Court calls her line of reasoning “legally incorrect” because “[t]he protective purpose of the law is to banish the use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations from the picture of political life, regardless of the intention behind it.” The Court’s statement continues by emphasising that “the communicative taboo” preventing the use of the swastika in daily life “must be maintained so that people do not become accustomed to such symbols.”

Däblitz is taken aback. “They left out what my core argument was,” he says. “My core argument was he was objecting to unconstitutional activities and in these cases it is explicitly allowed to use the swastika, and they didn’t say anything about that.”

When asked about “the communicative taboo”, Däblitz is adamant that according to the law as written “you can use [the swastika] to speak up against unconstitutional activities because this law, basically, wants to protect a free order, with freedom of speech, because a free democratic society needs freedom of speech, so basically that’s the ultimate goal and that’s why they want to ban Nazis and also Nazi symbols.”

The Chamber Court, it would seem, has either changed the law or is at odds with it.

Milling around on the steps of the block-sized building, nobody who attended the trial, from the Court’s press liaison to journalists to members of the public, gives the same answer when asked what the verdict actually meant, what the reasoning behind it was, how it related to the law in question, and what the implications are going forward. Confusion reigns.

Däblitz confirms that he and CJ will be applying to have the case heard at the Constitutional Court, the highest legal authority in the country. It’s their last chance, a Hail Mary, and, as he puts it, “they’ll probably refuse to hear the case.” The alternative is that the lower court will now decide on a sentence.

What Now?

Over wine and flammkuchen at a café in the Neukölln neighbourhood, I ask CJ what he thinks his sentence will be if the Constitutional Court doesn’t accept his case.

“They could do anything,” he says. “I could get three years in jail.”

His wife, who happens to be Jewish, holds his hand and watches him lovingly. I can see that she’s worried.

I ask him how it feels to have moved here from America specifically because of what he felt was a rising tide of fascism, only to have this happen.

The convicted thought criminal shakes his head. “This country broke my heart.”

In the famous German novella Michael Kohlhaas, published in 1810, the eponymous protagonist is wronged and sets out for justice, only to find that the system will not let him have it. In despair, he cries out: “I will not abide in a country in which my rights are not protected.”

That novella was written by Heinrich von Kleist, the suicidal author whose name adorns the park that surrounds on three sides the courthouse where Germany broke CJ’s heart.

Germany is indeed a place of dark irony.

_You can make contributions to CJ’s defense fund here, read his work on Substack and Consent Factory, and follow him on X where he is @CJHopkins_Z23.

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.” This is how Khaled Mahajneh describes the Sde Teiman detention center as the first lawyer to visit the facility. More than 4,000 Palestinians whom Israel arrested in Gaza have been held at the military base in the Naqab/Negev since October 7; some of them have subsequently been released, but most remain in Israeli detention.

Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was initially approached by Al Araby TV, which was seeking information about Muhammad Arab, a reporter for the network who was arrested in March while covering the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “I contacted the Israeli army’s control center, and after providing them with a photo and an ID card of the detainee, as well as my official power of attorney document, I was informed that [Arab] was being held at Sde Teiman and that he could be visited.”

When Mahajneh arrived at the base on June 19, he was required to leave his car far away from the site, where an army jeep was waiting to transport him inside. This was “something I had never encountered on any previous visit to any prison,” he told +972. They drove for about 10 minutes through the facility — a sprawling network of trailers — before arriving at a large warehouse, which contained a trailer guarded by masked soldiers.

“They repeated that the visit would be limited to 45 minutes, and any action that may harm the security of the state, the camp, or the soldiers will lead to the immediate cessation of the visit. I still don’t understand what they meant,” Mahajneh said.

Soldiers dragged out the detained journalist with his arms and legs tied, while Mahajneh remained behind a barrier. After soldiers removed his blindfold, Arab rubbed his eyes for five minutes, unaccustomed to the bright light. “Where am I?” was the first question he asked Mahajneh. Most Palestinians at Sde Teiman do not even know where they are being held; with at least 35 detainees having died in unknown circumstances since the war began, many simply call it “the death camp.”

“I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7,” Mahajneh noted. “I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”

Khaled Mahajneh, a lawyer who visited Sde Teiman detention center. (Courtesy)

‘Even the courts are rife with hatred’

Mahajneh told +972 that Arab was nearly unrecognizable after 100 days in the detention facility; his face, hair, and skin color had changed, and he was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings. The journalist had not been given new clothes for nearly two months, and was only allowed to change his pants for the first time that day because of the lawyer’s visit.

According to Arab, detainees are continually blindfolded and tied up with their hands behind their backs, forced to sleep hunched over on the floor without any bedding. Their iron handcuffs are removed only during a weekly, minute-long shower. “But the prisoners began refusing to shower because they don’t have watches, and going beyond the allotted minute exposes prisoners to severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain,” Mahajneh said.

All detainees, Mahajneh noted, face deteriorating health conditions due to the poor quality of the daily prison diet: a small amount of labaneh and a piece of cucumber or tomato. They also suffer from severe constipation, and for every 100 prisoners, only one roll of toilet paper is provided per day.

“The prisoners are prevented from talking to each other, even though more than 100 people are kept to a warehouse, some of them elderly and minors,” Mahajneh told +972. “They are not allowed to pray or even read the Qur’an.”

Arab also testified to his lawyer that Israeli guards sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders. “When he talked about rapes, I asked him, ‘Muhammad, you’re a journalist, are you sure about this?’” Mahajneh recounted. “But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there.”

Multiple media outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, have reported on instances of rape and sexual assault at Sde Teiman. In a video circulating on social media earlier this week, a Palestinian prisoner recently released from the detention camp said that he had personally witnessed multiple rapes, and cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.

Muhammad Arab, a Palestinian journalist with Al Araby TV. (Courtesy)

In just the past month, according to Arab, several prisoners were killed during violent interrogations. Other detainees who had been wounded in Gaza were forced to have their limbs amputated or bullets removed from their bodies without anesthesia, and were treated by nursing students.

Legal defense teams and human rights organizations have been largely unable to counter these serious violations of prisoners’ rights at Sde Teiman, and most are prevented from even visiting the facility to prevent greater scrutiny. “The State Prosecutor’s Office said that this detention center was going to be closed after harsh criticisms, but nothing happened,” Mahajneh said. “Even the courts are rife with hatred and racism against the people of Gaza.”

Most of the detainees, Mahajneh noted, are not formally accused of belonging to any organization or participating in any military activity; Arab himself still doesn’t know why he was detained or when he may be released. Since arriving at Sde Teiman, soldiers from the Israeli army’s special units have interrogated Arab twice. After the first interrogation, he was informed that his detention had been extended indefinitely, based on “suspicion of affiliation to an organization whose identity was not disclosed to him.”

‘To take revenge on whom?’

In recent months, international media outlets have published several testimonies of released prisoners as well as doctors who worked at Sde Teiman. For Israeli doctor Dr. Yoel Donchin, who spoke to the New York Times, it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had detained many of the people he treated, some of whom were “highly unlikely to have been combatants involved in the war” based on pre-existing physical ailments or disabilities.

The Times also reported that doctors at the facility were instructed not to write their names on official documents or address each other by name in the presence of patients, for fear of being later identified and charged with war crimes at the International Criminal Court.

“They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings,” one witness who worked as a medic at the facility’s makeshift hospital told CNN. “[The beatings] were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge,” another witness said. “It was punishment for what they [the Palestinians] did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp.”

Members of the Keter unit, an Israeli prison service response unit, seen while detainees put their hands on their heads, at a prison in southern Israel, February 14, 2024. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

Since his visit to Sde Teiman, Mahajneh has felt deep frustration and anger — but above all, horror. “I have been in this profession for 15 years … I never expected to hear about rape of prisoners or humiliations like that. And all this is not for the purpose of interrogation — since most prisoners are only interrogated after many days of detention — but as an act of revenge. To take revenge on whom? They are all citizens, young people, adults, and children. There are no Hamas members in Sde Teiman because they are in the hands of the Shabas [Israeli Prison Service].”

In its response to queries for this article, the Israeli army stated: “The IDF rejects allegations of systematic ill-treatment of detainees, including through violence or torture … If necessary, military police investigations are opened when there is suspicion of unusual behavior justifying it.” The army denied Arab’s and Mahajneh’s accounts of deprivation, and insisted that detainees are provided with sufficient clothing and blankets, food and water (“three meals a day”), access to toilets and showers (“between 7 and 10 minutes”), and other amenities.

The army also added: “Since the beginning of the war, there have been deaths of detainees, including detainees who arrived wounded from the battlefield or in problematic medical conditions. Every death is investigated by the military police. At the end of the investigations, their findings will be forwarded to the Military Advocate General’s Office.”

Prominent Canadian physician Dr. Charles Hoffe has spoken out courageously to warn people of the very serious dangers of the Covid mRNA genetic “vaccines”. He now faces trial from the Canadian health authorities aiming to silence him and effectively destroy his medical practice.

What is most disturbing about this unprecedented case is that, if the prosecution gets its way, all the evidence produced by the State claiming the Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” will be deemed indisputable, irrefutable — and Dr. Hoffe would not be able to defend himself or call expert witnesses!

In other words, a totalitarian show trial designed to intimidate all doctors and patients who value medical freedom of choice, the right to a fair trial, freedom of speech, and medical ethics.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia, where Dr. Hoffe practices, had scheduled the disciplinary hearing for March 4th through March 15th. But at the last minute, the College pulled a fast one.

“When [the College] saw the mountain of evidence stacked against them, and against the public health narrative, obviously they panicked because I don’t think they realized how vigorous our opposition was going to be,” explains Hoffe in a March 7th interview.[1]

As a countermeasure, the College dumped a massive trove of documents on Dr. Hoffe’s lawyer AND invoked an almost unheard-of legal trick called Judicial Notice, which means the disciplinary Panel would accept all the College’s basic assertions as uncontestably true. Hoffe’s voluminous evidence — both from his own private practice as a family doctor and from the scientific literature — that the Covid mRNA vaccines cause widespread death, neurological problems, micro-clotting, infertility, immune-system damage, and other severe adverse side effects would be inadmissible.

Given this outrageous legal trick, Dr. Hoffe’s lawyer had no choice but to request an adjournment and hire four more attorneys to sift through the College’s eleventh-hour document-dump.

If the Disciplinary Committee implements Judicial Notice, explains Dr. Hoffe,

“I would have no opportunity to testify in my defense, nor would any of [my eight] expert witnesses….It would render this literally a kangaroo court. This is an astonishing act of injustice, where you literally accuse somebody of something and then remove their ability to defend themselves.”[2]

The government’s objective, he says, is “to try to make an example of me and make sure all the other doctors toe the line and keep quiet and just obey.” Dr. Hoffe, who is widely regarded as a heroic truth-teller across much of Canada, comes across as a down-to-earth man of great integrity, honesty and humility. An outspoken advocate for patient safety, medical ethics, and the Hippocratic oath (“First, do no harm”), he is accused by the medical authorities of spreading “misinformation,” putting people at risk, and encouraging “vaccine hesitancy.” After 31 years as an emergency room physician with not a single patient complaint against him, he was fired from his ER position for telling a nurse that somebody who had natural immunity didn’t need to get the Covid jab.

Exposing the Medical Cartel’s Coverup

In a speech delivered at the site of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Vancouver in August 2022, Dr. Hoffe declared:

“What we have seen in the last 18 months since the start of the vaccine rollout is the biggest disaster in medical history. Never before in medical history has any medical treatment killed and maimed so many people….You only have to look at the OpenVAERS.com in the USA. 30,000 people dead, 55,000 permanently disabled, 50,000 cases of myocarditis, and 1.3 million vaccine injuries…This is an utterly failed experiment, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons here in B.C. is the one organization who could have and should have said no.”[3]

OpenVAERS.com is an easy-to-access version of the US Centers for Disease Control’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. VAERS vastly underreports the number of vaccine-induced injuries and deaths, capturing an estimated 1% to 10% of adverse events.

In his March 7, 2024 interview about the upcoming trial, Hoffe notes that OpenVAERS currently reports “almost 70,000 permanently disabled and about 2 million vaccine injuries, and yet Health Canada and the FDA look the other way and continue to tell us it’s safe and effective.” At the time of this writing, OpenVAERS registered 37,231 COVID vaccine reported deaths.

The Covid vaccine manufacturers admit that their poorly tested, highly experimental injections do not prevent infection with Covid and do not stop transmission of the (alleged) SARS-CoV-2 virus.

And yet the charade goes on….in Canada, the United States, most of Europe, Australia and the no-longer “free world.”

Dr. Hoffe has repeatedly pointed out these facts as well as the fact that the more Covid shots you get, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with Covid. This is true of individuals and whole nations. As Hoffe cogently observes, “Every vaccine injury reporting system across the world reports record numbers of deaths and disabilities and vaccine injuries that we’ve never seen the likes of from any medical treatment in history. And yet they completely turn a blind eye and they just carry on recommending that people get vaccinated. It’s absolutely absurd.” [4]

Micro-clots

Dr. Hoffe determined that up to 62% of his patients who got the Covid mRNA vaccine develop micro-blood-clots too small to detect on MRI or CT scan. He was the first medical expert to state publicly that these blood clots are not rare.

According to Hoffe, these micro-clots permeate the capillary network in the vaxxed, resulting in blockage of capillaries (pulmonary arterial hypertension); this condition usually kills people within 3 years, and those who survive may suffer steady deterioration, especially if they take another Covid shot. The only way you can find out if the Covid “vaccine” gave you micro-blood clots is to ask your doctor to give you a D-dimer test, like the one Dr. Hoffe has performed on his patients.[5]

This finding alone should have led to the immediate withdrawal of all the Covid-19 genetic “vaccines.” They are indeed “clot-shots” as the critics have warned repeatedly. But the Pharma-controlled mainstream media lies and assures us that both large and tiny blood clots are “extremely rare,” when the opposite is true.

Most of Dr. Hoffe’s patients developed micro-clots within 7 days after the jab, but others may well experience micro-clotting later on as the genetic cocktail (“vaccine”) wreaks its harmful effects on the body.

Another Canadian doctor, Rochagné Kilian, an emergency medicine specialist in Ontario, sounded the alarm on the astronomical rise in D-dimer levels she observed in patients shortly after they received a Covid-19 vaccine. She links this phenomenon to micro-clotting, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and autoimmune disease in the vaxxed. Dr. Kilian lost her job and had her license to practice medicine suspended for warning the public about the very serious risks of the Covid shots.[6,7]

Support

To voice support for Dr. Charles Hoffe, please write concise, polite, yet strong letters to:
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC
300–669 Howe Street
Vancouver BC V6C 0B4
Canada

You could also fax them at 604-733-3503. FaxZero.com lets anyone send up to five free faxes per day to anywhere in the U.S. or Canada. The FaxZero website is easy to use and has no gimmicks or ads. Again, send polite, concise, powerfully worded faxes. The College’s website also has a Message facility (https://www.cpsbc.ca).

Let’s let the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC know what people think of their outrageous, underhanded ‘lawfare’ tactics and their persecution of an outstanding physician/healer.

The necessity of Dr. Hoffe to hire four additional lawyers will involve significant new legal expenses..

To help Dr. Hoffe with this burden, please go to:

https://www.givesendgo.com/GANZA or

https://www.fundingthefight.ca/donate

*

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Notes

1. Dr. Charles Hoffe Trial Update – March 7, 2024 (video). Interview with Derek Sloan https://rumble.com/v4hvp8x-dr.-charles-hoffe-trial-update-march-7-2024.html

2. Ibid.

3. Covid mRNA Vaccine. Biggest Disaster in Medical History: Dr. Charles Hoffe. Hoffe Gives Riveting Speech In Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-biggest-disaster-medical-history/5790270

4. https://rumble.com/v4hvp8x-dr.-charles-hoffe-trial-update-march-7-2024.html

5. Canadian Doctor: 62% of Patients Vaccinated for COVID Have Permanent Heart Damage. By Brian Shilhavy https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/canadian-doctor-62-of-patients-vaccinated-for-covid-have-permanent-heart-damage

6. Emergency Medicine Doctor shows Micro Blood Clots in D-dimer Tests Following COVID-19 Shots https://www.bitchute.com/video/RwKbDnR8BOzg

7. Government’s Own Data Proves COVID-19 Shots Are Causing Blood Clots, Heart Disease, and DEATH. Brian Shilhavy https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/governments-own-data-proves-covid-19-shots-are-causing-blood-clots-heart-disease-and-death

Given the large population in the UK of Pakistani origin, the lack of serious media coverage of the overthrow and incarceration of Imran Khan, and the mass imprisonment of his supporters, is truly extraordinary.

Imran Khan was last week sentenced to three years in prison – and a five year ban from politics – for alleged embezzlement of official gifts. This follows his removal as Prime Minister in a CIA engineered coup, and a vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters.

It is currently illegal in Pakistan to publish or broadcast about Khan or the thousands of new political prisoners incarcerated in appalling conditions. There have been no protests from the UK or US governments.

Imran Khan is almost certainly the least corrupt senior politician in Pakistan’s history – I admit that is not a high bar. Pakistan’s politics are, to an extent not sufficiently understood in the west, literally feudal. Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.

There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resource. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.

Imran Khan’s incredible breakthrough in the 2018 National Assembly elections shattered normal political life in Pakistan. Winning a plurality of the popular vote and the most seats, Khan’s PTI party had risen from under 1% of the vote in 2002 to 32% in 2018.

The dates are important. It was not Khan’s cricketing heroics which made him politically popular. In 2002, when his cricket genius was much fresher in the mind than it is now, he was viewed as a joke candidate.

In fact it was Khan’s outspoken opposition to the United States using Pakistan as a base, and particularly his demand to stop the hundreds of dreadful US drone strikes within Pakistan, that caused the surge in his support.

The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the USA had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the “War on terror”, it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the CIA and US military.

The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the USA, which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.

In power, Imran proved much more radical than the CIA, the British Tories and the Pakistani military had hoped. The belief that he was only a playboy dilettante at heart was soon shattered. A stream of Imran’s decisions upset the USA and threatened the income streams of the corrupt senior military.

Khan did not only talk about stopping the US drone programme, he actually stopped it.

Khan refused offers of large amounts of money, also linked in to US support for an IMF loan, for Pakistan to send ground forces to support the Saudi air campaign against Yemen. I was told this by one of Imran’s ministers when I visited in 2019, on condition of a confidentiality which need no longer apply.

Khan openly criticised military corruption and, in the action most guaranteed to precipitate a CIA coup, he supported the developing country movement to move trading away from the petrodollar. He accordingly sought to switch Pakistan’s oil suppliers from the Gulf states to Russia.

The Guardian, the chief neo-con mouthpiece in the UK, two days ago published an article about Khan so tendentious it took my breath away. How about this for a bit of dishonest reporting:

in November a gunman opened fire on his convoy at a rally, injuring his leg in what aides say was an assassination attempt.

“Aides say”: what is this implying?

Khan had himself shot in the legs as some kind of stunt? It was all a joke? He wasn’t actually shot but fell over and grazed a knee? It is truly disgraceful journalism.

It is hard to know whether the article’s astonishing assertion that Khan’s tenure as Prime Minister led to an increase in corruption in Pakistan, is a deliberate lie or extraordinary ignorance.

I am not sure whether Ms Graham-Harrison has ever been to Pakistan. I suspect the closest she has been to Pakistan is meeting Jemima Goldsmith at a party.

“Playboy”, “dilettante”, “misogynist”, the Guardian hit piece is relentless. It is an encapsulation of the “liberal” arguments for military intervention in Muslim states, for overthrowing Islamic governments and conquering Islamic countries, in order to install Western norms, in particular the tenets of Western feminism.

I think we have seen how that playbook has ended in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, amongst others. The use of the word “claim” to engender distrust of Khan in the Guardian article is studied. He “claimed” that his years living in the UK had inspired him to wish to create a welfare state in Pakistan.

Why is that a dubious comment from a man who spent the majority of his personal fortune on setting up and running a free cancer hospital in Pakistan?

Khan’s efforts to remove or sideline the most corrupt Generals, and those most openly in the pay of the CIA, are described by the Guardian as “he tried to take control of senior military appointments and began railing against the armed forces’ influence in politics.” How entirely unreasonable of him!

Literally thousands of members of Khan’s political party are currently in jail for the crime of having joined a new political party. The condemnation by the Western establishment has been non-existent.

It is difficult to think of a country, besides Pakistan, where thousands of largely middle class people could suddenly become political prisoners, while drawing almost no condemnation. It is of course because the UK supports the coup against Khan.

But I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India.

We should not forget New Labour have also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Musharraf.

On my last visit to Pakistan I went to Karachi, Abbottabad and the Afghan border. I hope to return in the spring, should the new government let me in.

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The uncritical, blind faith in vaccines is the preeminent sacred cow of modern medicine. (It happens to be its preeminent cash cow as well.) It is a quasi-religious, dogmatic article of conviction, rather than a sound scientific theory or an empirically-based clinical precept.

Vaccines have been controversial since their introduction centuries ago. Only in very recent history has there been a rigidly enforced orthodoxy of belief within the medical establishment that vaccines must be unanimously regarded as “safe and effective,” no questions asked.

Even more recent is the practice of smearing and labeling anyone questioning this doctrine as a heretic: an “anti-vaxxer.” In fact, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the earliest known use of that now-ubiquitous epithet was only in 2001. 

Religious faith has tremendous potential for good in society, but when it is misrepresented as science, its track record is miserable and deadly. “Safe and effective” is not scientific shorthand, or even an advertising slogan; it is a mantra. “Anti-vaxxer” is not a category of person, it is a charge of heresy. And just as vaccine critics are heretics, so the high priests of vaccines, the Faucis of the world, the people who in their own words “represent science,” are fanatics.

Does that really sound like science to you? Galileo, Semmelweis, and a few others might disagree.

Any honest person who lived through the COVID-19 era in the United States will acknowledge that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with its lengthy “alphabet soup” of agencies (CDC, NIH (with its NIAID), FDA (with its CBER), etc., etc.), promoted and repeated the “safe and effective” mantra regarding the COVID-19 vaccines throughout an era of intense public fear. 

Any honest person will also acknowledge that the mainstream media avidly repeated and amplified the “safe and effective” mantra and stoked the fear, all while ruthlessly attacking anyone questioning that same dogma, labeling them “anti-vaxxers,” or sometimes even “murderers.”

Little to no mention was made – or allowed – of the gigantic financial incentives and other entanglements these powerful entities have with the vaccine manufacturers, nor the trillions of dollars involved. 

Religious dogmas, especially those relentlessly inculcated by powerful forces under extreme conditions, are hard to break free from.

To readers who may know people caught in the rigid, dogmatic belief in the infallibility of vaccines, I offer the following 10 sentences.

Share them with friends, family, and colleagues who cannot seem to reconsider vaccine dogma, especially those with an uncritical view of the current vaccine schedules. Ask them to carefully read each of the 10 sentences below, one at a time, and ask themselves: does this sentence seem true or false to me? If it seems false, on what basis do I think it is false? Then move on to the next one and do the same.

(Some of the sentences are complex, but I am confident an intelligent layperson can understand them all.)

When they are finished with all 10 sentences, encourage your friends to ask themselves: 

• Do they truly believe that every child in the United States should receive 20 or more different vaccines before age 18? 
• Should vaccines ever be mandated? 
• Shouldn’t we, as an educated, free society, systematically review the official vaccine recommendations, and, just as we would do with Grandma’s overflowing pill box, reduce them to the truly necessary minimum?
• Shouldn’t we reassert the autonomy of patients over their own bodies?

Here is the trouble with vaccines, in 10 sentences:

1. Like “antibiotics,” “vaccines” are a large and diverse class of medicines, and as with all large classes of medicines, different products in the class work by different mechanisms, some being quite effective while others are ineffective, some being reasonably safe for appropriate human use while others are fraught with side effects and toxicities, and therefore to assume that any large class of medicines – including vaccines – is categorically “safe and effective,” is naïve, illogical, false, and dangerous.

2. While the full extent of vaccine toxicity is undetermined, it is a historical fact that numerous vaccines have been proven to be highly toxic and even deadly to patients, via multiple pathophysiological mechanisms, including: a) direct contamination of the vaccine (e.g. the Cutter Incident), b) disease caused by unintended, pathological immune response to the vaccine (e.g. Guillain–Barré syndrome caused by the swine flu vaccine), c) unintended contraction and/or transmission of the disease the vaccine was designed to prevent, caused by the vaccine itself (e.g. the current oral polio vaccine), and d) vaccine toxicity of unknown or uncertain cause (e.g. intestinal intussusception with the rotavirus vaccine, and fatal blood clots with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine).

3. In fact, the known toxicity of vaccines is so well-established that a Federal law – the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) was passed to specifically exempt vaccine manufacturers from product liability, based on the legal principle that vaccines are “unavoidably unsafe” products.

4. Since the 1986 NCVIA act protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines on the market, as well as the number of vaccines added to the CDC vaccine schedules, with the number of vaccines on the CDC Child and Adolescent schedule rising from 7 in 1986 to 21 in 2023. 

5. Of the 21 vaccines on the 2023 CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, only a small minority (e.g. measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, and HiB) are capable of providing genuine herd immunity, a fact that negates the common, population-based arguments for mandating the other vaccines, which comprise the sizable majority of the vaccines on the schedule.

6. The pharmaceutical industry has established an almost unimaginable degree of media control, institutional influence, and regulatory capture, via its funding of other entities, as it is a) the largest industry lobby in Washington, DC, b) the second largest industry in TV advertising, c) a major source of personal revenue for high-level HHS “alphabet soup” agency bureaucrats, many of whom hold patent and royalty rights on pharmaceutical products, d) a major funder of influential physician organizations (e.g. the American Academy of Pediatrics and prominent medical journals, and e) involved in payment-based incentivization of practicing physicians, who frequently receive monetary bonuses for high rates of vaccination in their patient panels.

7. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were developed and administered to the public a) much faster and with much less testing than any other vaccines on the market, b) under Emergency Use Authorization, c) utilizing a technological platform that had never seen commercial use before, and, despite generating reports of vaccine-related deaths and serious adverse events at much higher rates than traditional vaccines, and despite the fact that they have been removed from the pediatric market in multiple other developed countries, the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have already been placed on the CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule, just a little over 2 years after their introduction to the public.

8. There has been no systematic public accounting by the CDC (or any of the HHS agencies) for the more than 35,000 reported COVID-19 vaccine-related deaths and more than 1,500,000 reported COVID-19 vaccine-related adverse events reported as of July 7, 2023, to the CDC’s own Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), nor for the corresponding numbers of COVID vaccine-related deaths and adverse events reported to Eudravigilance (the European Union’s equivalent to VAERS), even as the CDC continues to strongly promote these vaccines for use, including placing them on the CDC Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule.

9. By labeling the novel COVID mRNA products as “vaccines,” the definition of the term “vaccine” has become so broadened that essentially any medication that induces an immune response against a disease may now be dubbed a “vaccine,” thereby shielding pharmaceutical companies from liability under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 to a previously unimagined extent.

10. Vaccine mandates thereby compel citizens to submit to medical treatments a) that are regarded under Federal law to be “unavoidably unsafe,” b) that because they are unavoidably unsafe, their manufacturers are protected by Federal law from liability for harm done to citizens, c) whose manufacturers and government agencies nevertheless promote publicly as “safe and effective,” in direct contradiction to their legal status as “unavoidably unsafe,” and d) that have increased tremendously in number in recent decades, and, with mRNA technology and a broadened definition of the term “vaccine,” stand to multiply at an even greater rate in the future.

I hope these 10 sentences will help the unconvinced to reconsider the central dogma surrounding vaccines. We, as a society, need to reject the article of faith that vaccines are fundamentally “safe and effective.” 

Vaccines, due to their unavoidably unsafe nature, should NEVER be mandated, and a thorough, product-by-product accounting of the individual vaccines needs to be done outside of government agencies.

How can we accomplish this?

Please forgive me if you thought I was done. I have 10 more sentences listing my proposed solutions to the trouble with vaccines. I ask you to trudge through these as well. Most of them are shorter than the first 10. Thank you.

A Proposed Solution to the Trouble with Vaccines in 10 (more) Sentences:

1. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34) should be repealed, returning vaccines to the same liability status as other drugs. 

2. Federal law should be passed prohibiting the mandating of any and all vaccines at all levels of government.

3. Federal law should be passed prohibiting all direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs.

4. Federal law should be passed prohibiting all collaboration between the Department of Health and Human Services’ “alphabet soup” agencies (FDA, CDC, NIH, etc.) and either the Department of Defense (US Army, DARPA, etc.) or the Federal Intelligence Agencies (CIA, DHS, etc.) with regard to vaccine development or vaccine distribution to the public.

5. Federal law should be passed prohibiting all persons working within the HHS agencies from gaining any personal financial benefit from vaccines, including the gaining and holding of patents or royalties, and civil servants in those agencies should be required to take an oath of office not to profit off  of any products they approve, regulate, or about which they advise the public.

6. A thorough and public investigation, including criminal prosecutions where appropriate, should be made regarding the key players (both public and private) involved in the development, marketing, manufacture, sale, and administration of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, and following the investigation, there should be appropriate reform within the HHS agencies.

7. Detailed, independent, Cochrane-style reviews of every vaccine on the CDC vaccine schedules should be undertaken and made public, and no scientists with financial interests within the pharmaceutical industry should conduct these reviews.

8. Detailed, independent reviews of all reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) related to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should be undertaken and made public, and appropriate reforms to VAERS should be made.

9. A detailed Congressional review of the money trails related to COVID-era programs, including Operation Warp Speed and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, should be conducted, focusing on fraud and abuse at all levels, including how private companies such as Pfizer and Moderna profited so enormously from taxpayer-funded initiatives.

10. A open, public discussion and debate should be undertaken on the appropriate role of vaccines in public health, including, among other issues, a) a critical review of the current medical dogma on vaccines, b) an accounting of the mistakes, abuses, and potential lessons of the COVID-19 era, and c) a thorough discussion of the undeniable conflicts between public health as it is now practiced and the fundamental civil rights of citizens.

The medical establishment’s current dogma on vaccines (“safe and effective,” no questions asked) and its corresponding catechism (the ever-expanding vaccine schedules) are in desperate need of reform. I submit that we begin with the above steps.

Reformers are not heretics, although they are commonly labeled as such by powerful persons resisting reform. I, for one, am not a heretic, nor am I an “anti-vaxxer.” I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The problem is, when one looks closely at the vaccine schedules, there turns out to be a lot more bathwater and a lot less baby than advertised.

It is time for the profession of medicine, and society as a whole, to come out of the Dark Ages on this topic. It is time for an open, forthright reevaluation of vaccines and their role in public health.

Clayton J. Baker, MD

C.J. Baker, is an internal medicine physician with a quarter century in clinical practice. He has held numerous academic medical appointments, and his work has appeared in many journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. From 2012 to 2018 he was Clinical Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

Bibi is by nature cautious – even timid. His radical ministers, however, are not, Alastair Crooke writes.

Michael Omer-Man writes: Almost exactly 10 years ago, a young star rising in the Likud party, spoke to an audience committed to the outright annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories, laying out his blueprint. A year later, this same speaker set out certain prerequisites to full annexation: Firstly, a shift in the way the Israeli public thinks about a ‘two-state solution’ for Palestine; and secondly, a radical recast of the legal system “that will allow us to take those steps on the ground … that advance sovereignty”.

What was reflected in this statement is the structural dichotomy inherent within the ‘idea’ of ‘Israel’: What then is ‘Israel’? One side holds that Israel was founded as a ‘balance’ between Jewishness and Democracy. The other says ‘nonsense’; it was always the establishment of Israel on the “Land of Israel”.

Ami Pedahzur, a political scientist studying the Israeli Right, explains that the religious Right “has always considered the Israeli Supreme Court to be an abomination”. He points out that the extremist Meir Kahane “once wrote extensively about the tension between Judaism and democracy and the need for a Sanhedrin [a biblical system of judges] instead of the extant Israeli judicial system”.

In Israel’s attempt to balance these opposing visions and interpretations of history, the Israeli Right sees the judiciary as deliberately having been tilted toward democracy (by one part of the Israeli élite). This simmering tension finally exploded with the 1995 Supreme Court claim that it possessed power of judicial review over Knesset (parliamentary) legislation deemed to be in conflict with Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. (An Israeli constitution has been considered since 1949, but never actuated.)

Well, that ‘young star’ of 10 years ago – who asserted so forcefully “We cannot accept … a judicial system that is controlled by a radical leftist, post-Zionist minority that elects itself behind closed doors – dictating to us its own values – today is Israel’s Justice Minister, Yariv Levin.

And with time, Netanyahu has indeed already brought about that first prerequisite (outlined by Levin almost a decade ago): The Israeli public perspective on the two-state Olso formula is radically changed. Political support for that project hovers close to zero in the political sphere.

More than that, today’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu, explicitly shares the same ideology as Levin and his colleagues – namely that Jews have a right to settle in any, and all, parts of the ‘Land of Israel’; he also believes that the very survival of the Jewish people is dependent on the actuation of that divine obligation into practice.

Many on the Israeli Right, Omer-Man suggests, therefore see the Supreme Court as “the central impediment to their ability to fulfil their annexationist dreams, which for them are a combination of messianic and ideological commandments”.

They saw the 1995 Supreme Court ruling as ‘a coup’ that ushered in the judiciary’s supremacy over law and politics. This is a view that is hotly contested – to the point of near civil war – by those who advocate for democracy versus a strict Judaic vision of religious law.

From the perspective of the Right, Ariel Kahana notes that although

“they have continued to win time and again – but they have never held power in the true sense of the word. Through the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the defence establishment, academia, cultural elites, the media, and some of the economic wheelers and dealers, the Left’s doctrine continued to dominate Israel’s power foci. In fact, regardless of who the cabinet ministers were, the old guard has continued with its obstructionist insurgency”.

Today, however, the numbers are with the Right – and we are witnessing the Israeli Right’s counter-coup: a judicial ‘reform’ which would centralize power in the Knesset – precisely by dismantling the legal system’s current checks and balances.

Ostensibly this schism constitutes the crisis bringing hundreds of thousand Israelis on to the street. Prima Facie, in much of the media, at issue is who has the final word: the Knesset or the Supreme Court.

Or, is it? For, beneath the surface, unacknowledged and mostly unsaid, is something deeper: It is the conflict between Realpolitik versus Completion of the Zionist project. Put starkly, the Right says it’s clear: Without Judaism we have no identity; and no reason to be in this land.

The ‘less said’ fact is that much of the electorate actually agrees with the Right in principle, yet opposes the full annexation of the West Bank on pragmatic grounds: “They believe that the status quo of a “temporary” 55-plus-year military occupation is the more strategically prudent”.

“Formally [annexing West Bank] would make it too difficult to convince the world that Israel is not an apartheid regime in which half of the population — Palestinians — are denied basic democratic, civil, and human rights”.

That other unresolved contradiction (that of continuing occupation within ‘democracy’) is also submerged by the prevalent mantra of ‘Right wing Orbánism versus democracy’. Ahmad Tibi, an Palestinian member of the Knesset earlier has wryly noted: “Israel indeed is ‘Jewish and democratic’: It is democratic toward Jews – and Jewish toward Arabs”.

The mass of protestors gathered in Tel Aviv carefully choose to avoid this oxymoron (other than around the kitchen table) – as a Haaretz editorial a few days ago made clear: “Israel’s opposition is for Jews only”.

Thus, the crisis that some are warning could lead to civil war at its crux is that between one group – which is no longer content to wait for the right conditions to arrive to fulfil the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel – versus an outraged opposition that prefers sticking to the political tradition of buying time by “deciding not to decide”, Omer-Man underlines.

And although there are ‘moderates’ amongst the Likud lawmakers, their concerns are eclipsed by the exultant mood at their party’s base:

“Senior Likud officials, led by Netanyahu, have incited Likud voters against the legal system for years, and now the tiger is out of control. It has its trainer in its jaws and threatens to crush him if he makes concessions”.

The flames lick around Netanyahu’s feet. The U.S. wants quiet; It does not want a war with Iran. It does not want a new Palestinian Intifada – and will hold Netanyahu’s feet to the flames until he ‘controls’ his coalition allies and returns to an Hebraic ‘quietism’.

But he can’t. It’s not possible. Netanyahu is held limp in the tiger’s jaws. Events are out of his control.

A prominent member of Likud’s central committee told Haaretz this week:

“I don’t care if I have nothing to eat, if the army falls apart, if everything here is destroyed … The main thing is that they not humiliate us once again, and appoint Ashkenazi judges over us”.

The ‘second Israel’ genres have wailed against ‘the ten Ashkenazai judges’ who discredited their leader (Arye Dery), whilst breaking into a song of praise for the ‘only Sephardic judge’ who was sympathetic to Dery. Yes, the ethnic and tribal schisms form a further part of this crisis. (A bill that effectively would reverse the Supreme Court decision barring Dery from his ministerial position over previous corruption charges is currently making its way through the Knesset).

The appeal of Religious Zionism is often attributed to its growing strength amongst the young – particularly ultra-Orthodox men and traditional Mizrahi voters. What became abundantly clear and unexpected in recent weeks, however, is that the appeal of a racist such as Ben-Gvir, is spreading to the young secular left in Israel. Among young Israelis (ages 18 – 24), more than 70% identify today as Right.

Just to be clear: The Mizrahi ‘underclass’, together with the Settler Right, have ousted the ‘old’ Ashkenazi élite from their hold on power. They have waited many years for this moment; their numbers are there. Power has been rotated. The fuse to today’s particular crisis was lit long ago, not by Netanyahu, but by Ariel Sharon in 2001, with his entry to the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif).

Sharon had earlier perceived that a moment would arrive – with a weakened U.S. – when it might prove propitious for Israel to complete the Zionist project and seize all the ‘Land of Israel’. The plans for this venture have been incubating over two decades. Sharon lit the fuse – and Netanyahu duly took on the task of curating a constituency towards despising Oslo and the judicial system.

The project’s content is explicitly acknowledged: To annex the West Bank and to transfer any political rights of Palestinians remaining there to a new national state to the east of the River Jordan, on the site of what now is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. In the confusion and violence which would accompany such a move, Palestinians would be ‘persuaded’ to migrate to the ‘other bank’. As Hussein Ibish warned two weeks ago:

“We’re getting awfully close to the point where the Israeli government, and even Israeli society, could countenance a big annexation – and even expulsion [of Palestinians] – done in the middle of an outbreak of violence, and it would be framed as a painful necessity,” Ibish said. Such a move, he added, would be justified “as the government saying ‘We’ve got to protect Israeli settlers – they are citizens too – and we can’t let this go on anymore. Therefore we have to annex and even expel Palestinians.’”

To be fair, the unspoken fear of many secular protesters in Israel today, is not just that of being politically deposed, and their secular lifestyle circumscribed by religious zealots (though that is a major driver to sentiment), but rather, by the unspoken fear that to implement such a radical project against the Palestinians would lead to Regional war.

And ‘that’ is far from an unreasonable fear.

So there are two existential fears: One, that survival of the Jewish people is contingent on fulfilling the obligation to establish ‘Israel’ as ordained; and two, that to implement the consequent exodus of the Palestinians would likely result in the demise of the Israeli State (through war).

Suddenly and unexpectedly, into this fraught situation – with Netanyahu buffeted by a whirlwind of external and internal pressures – arrived a bombshell: Netanyahu was stripped of his ace card – Iran. In Beijing, China had secretly orchestrated not just the resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but laid down the framework for a regional security architecture.

This represents a nightmare for Washington and Netanyahu – particularly for the latter, however.

Since the early 1990s, Iran has served both these parties as the ‘bogey man’, by which to divert attention from Israel and the situation of the Palestinians. It has worked well, with the Europeans acting as enthusiastic collaborators in facilitating (or ‘mitigating’ – as they would see it), Israel’s ‘temporary’, 55-year occupation of the West Bank. The EU even financed it.

But now, that is blown away. Netanyahu may ‘huff and puff’ about Iran, but absent a Saudi and Gulf willingness to lend Arab legitimacy to any military action against Iran (with all the risks that entails), Netanyahu’ s ability to distract from the domestic crisis is severely limited. Any call to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities is an obvious non-starter in the light of the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement.

Netanyahu may not want a show-down with Team Biden, but that’s what is coming. Bibi is by nature cautious – even timid. His radical Ministers, however, are not.

They need a crisis (but only when the ‘prerequisites’ are all lined up). It is clear that the wholesale stripping of Palestinian rights, in tandem with the emasculation of the Supreme Court, is not a project that can be expected to quietly proceed in normal circumstances – especially in the present emotive state across the global sphere.

No doubt, the Israeli Right has been watching how the Lockdown ‘Emergency-crisis fear’ in Europe was used to mobilise a people to accept a compulsion and restrictions to life that in any other circumstance they would never rationally accept.

It won’t be a new pandemic emergency, of course, in the Israeli case. But the new Palestinian Authority-led ‘SWAT-squads’ arresting Palestinian resistance fighters in broad daylight is bringing the West Bank ‘pressure-cooker’ close to blow-out.

Ben Gvir may simply decide to follow in Sharon’s footsteps – to allow and participate in the Passover ceremony of sacrificing a lamb on Al-Aqsa (the Temple Mount) – as a symbol of the commitment to rebuild the ‘Third Temple’, permission for which, hitherto has always been denied.

So what happens next? It is impossible to predict. Will the Israeli military intervene? Will the U.S. intervene? Will one side back-down (unlikely says ex-Head of Israel’s National Security Council, Giora Eiland)? Yet even if the ‘Judicial reform’ is somehow halted, as one exasperated Israeli forecast, “Even if this time the attempt does not succeed, it’s likely that they [the Right] will try again in another two years, another five years, another 10 years. The struggle will be long and difficult, and no one can guarantee what the result will be.”

After the Second World War, modern international law was established with the idea of countering "war propaganda" United Nations General Assembly Resolution 110 of November 3, 1947 and Resolution 381 of November 17, 1950 “Condemnation of propaganda against peace”. International legislators, i.e. sovereign states, soon agreed that war could only be fought against by ensuring the "free flow of ideas" resolution 819 of 11 December 1954 “Strengthening of peace through the removal of barriers to free exchange of ideas".

In recent years, however, we have witnessed an extraordinary backsliding that deprives us of the thoughts of others, exposes us to war propaganda, and ultimately leads us to a global conflict.
This phenomenon began with the private censorship on social networks of the incumbent president of the United States, and continued with the public censorship of Russian media in the West. Now the thoughts of others are no longer seen as a tool to prevent wars, but as a poison that threatens us.

Western states are setting up bodies to "rectify" information that they consider falsified (Fake News)“The West renounces freedom of expression”, by Thierry Meyssan. NATO is considering the creation of a unit, called Information Ramstein, which will be responsible for censoring not Russian information sources, but Russian ideas within the 30 member states of the Atlantic Alliance "A ’Ministry of Truth’ soon to be created within NATO".

This is a complete reversal of the values of the Atlantic Alliance, which was founded in the wake of the Atlantic Charter, which incorporated President Franklin Roosevelt’s "four freedoms". The first of these freedoms was the freedom of expression.

However, before the invention of the Internet, when the United States and the Soviet Union had just guaranteed the "free circulation of ideas" with the Helsinki Agreements, the United Nations and more particularly its agency in this field, UNESCO, were worried about "information imperialism". The technical superiority of the West allowed them to impose their view of the facts on developing countries.

In 1976, during the Nairobi conference, the UN raised the question of the functioning of the media with regard to "the strengthening of peace and international understanding, the promotion of human rights and the fight against racism, apartheid and incitement to war.

Former Irish Foreign Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride formed a 16-member commission at Unesco. It included the Frenchman Hubert Beuve-Mery (founder of Le Monde), the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize for Literature) and the Canadian Marshall McLuhan (communication theorist). The United States was represented by Elie Abel, then dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Russia by the director of the Tass agency, Sergei Losev. Only the fifth and final part of the report (Communication Tomorrow) was the subject of a general debate. The MacBride commission discussed the draft of the other parts, but could not question their final wording. In any event, its report, issued in 1978, seemed to be a consensus.

In fact, by pointing out that the same facts can be perceived differently and by opening up the question of the means of the media of the North and those of the South, he was opening a Pandora’s box. At the same time, Unesco was confronted with the propaganda of the South African apartheid regime and the propaganda of Israel, which denies Muslim and Christian cultures. In the end, the United States and the United Kingdom ended the debate by withdrawing from Unesco. We know today that the British Empire had ensured its intellectual domination by creating news agencies. Whitehall closed the Information Research Department (IRD) just before the MacBride report was published "Britain’s secret propaganda war, Paul Lashmar & James Oliver, Sutton". But the war against Syria has shown that the whole system has been reconstituted in another form “The fabrication of the myth of the "Syrian revolution" by the United States. Westerners continue to falsify information at its source.

In forty years, the media landscape has been transformed: the emergence of international television news channels, websites and social networks. At the same time, there has been a huge concentration of media in the hands of a few owners. However, none of the problems listed in 1978 have changed. On the contrary, with the unipolar world, they have become worse.

The journalistic profession today consists of either writing agency reports or contextualizing the news for the media. News agencies are factual and unsourced, while the media offer commentary and analysis by referring to news agencies. Contextualization requires a great deal of historical, economic and other knowledge, which today’s journalists are largely lacking. The immediacy of radio and television does not give them the time to read books and even less to consult archives, except during in-depth investigations. Commentary and analysis have thus become considerably impoverished.

The dominant ideology in the West, which tends to become "global", has become a religion without God. There are now only two camps: that of the Good and that of the apostates. Truth is determined by a consensus among the elites, while the people reject it. Any criticism is considered blasphemous. There is no more room for debate and therefore for democracy.

The alternative press has become just as poor because it relies on the same data as the international media: news agency reports. It is indeed enough to control AFP, AP and Reuters to impose a vision of the facts on us. You can season it according to this or that tendency, Republican or Democrat, conservative or progressive, etc., but it will always be the same dish.

Since the September 11 attacks, those who challenge the official version of events have been called "conspiracy theorists ». Since the election of Donald Trump, those who contest the data of press agencies are accused of distorting reality and imagining Fake News. Journalists, after refraining from relaying the thoughts of "conspiracists", i.e. dissidents, try to correct Fake News with Checked News.

Yet, at the same time, belief in the versions of the mainstream media has collapsed. In the United States, the Gallup Institute has been measuring trust in the print media since 1973 and in the broadcast media since 1993. Trust in newspapers has fallen from 51 percent to 16 percent, and trust in radio and television has fallen from 46 percent to 11 percent.
The only solution is to increase the number of news agencies, i.e. the sources of information. Not to make them numerous, but diverse. Only then will we realize that the way an event is reported determines the way we think about it.

For example, today the three news agencies mentioned above present the conflict in Ukraine as a "Russian invasion". They claim that Moscow has not been able to take Kiev and overthrow President Zelenky, but commits war crimes every day. This is one way of looking at it. We don’t have the means to publish dispatches all the time, but we publish a weekly identical bulletin. Our criterion is different. We refer to "International Law" and not to Western "rules". Therefore, we describe the same conflict as the application of the Security Council resolution 2202 and the "responsibility to protect" the oppressed populations since 2014. The events are the same, but for some the way they tell them leads to think that the Russians are wrong, while ours leads to think that the Russian position is legal. To tell the truth, there is another difference: we interpret the facts over time. For us and for the Security Council, there has been a civil war in Ukraine for eight years with 20,000 deaths, the three major agencies pretend to ignore it. For us, the "integral nationalists" have a long criminal history, having cost the lives of 4 million of their fellow citizens, the Western agencies also pretend to ignore it “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists?”.

This difference can be applied to all subjects. For example, the major news agencies tell us that the West has imposed sanctions to punish Russia for invading Ukraine. We do not read events in this way. Once again, referring to "International Law" and not to Western "rules", we note that the decisions of the Anglo-Saxons and the European Union violate the UN Charter. These are not "sanctions", since there has been no judgment, but economic weapons to wage war against Russia, just as castles were besieged in the past to starve those who had taken refuge there.

Each difference in the interpretation of events provokes another. For example, when we point out that the Western pseudo-sanctions have not been endorsed by the Security Council, we are told that this is quite normal since Russia has a veto right in the Council. This is to forget why the UN was organized the way it was. Its purpose is not to say what is right, but to prevent wars. This is precisely what allowed the Council to adopt resolution 2202 to resolve the civil war in Ukraine. However, the West, despite the commitment of Germany and France, did not apply it, forcing Russia to intervene.

We could go on endlessly with this double reading. The important thing to remember is that the presentation of the facts radically changes the way they are perceived. To conclude, I invite you to found news agencies that describe the facts in their own way and not in the way of our leaders. It is in this way and not by glossing over biased information that we will regain our lucidity.

The heads of state and government present at the Minsk II Agreement.

For the past seven years, it has been the responsibility of the guarantor powers of the Minsk II Agreement (Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia) to enforce it. They had been endorsed and legalized by the United Nations Security Council on February 17, 2015. But none of these states have done so, despite the rhetoric about the need to protect citizens threatened by their own governments.

While there was talk of possible Russian military intervention, on January 31, 2022, the Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, defied Germany, France, Russia and the UN Security Council by stating, "Compliance with the Minsk agreements means the destruction of the country. When they were signed under the armed threat of the Russians - and under the eyes of the Germans and the French - it was already clear to all rational people that it was impossible to implement these documents" [[1](#nb1 ""Ukraine security chief: Minsk peace deal may create chaos, Yuras Karmanau, (...)")].

When, after seven years, the number of Ukrainians killed by the Kiev government amounted to more than 12,000 according to the Kiev government and more than 20,000 according to the Russian Investigative Committee, only then did Moscow launch a "special military operation" against the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (as they claim), who were described as "neo-Nazis".

Russia declared from the start of its operation that it would stick to rescuing the populations and “denazifying” Ukraine, not occupying it. Yet the West accused it of trying to take Kiev, overthrow President Zelensky and annex Ukraine, which they obviously never did. It was only after the execution of one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Denis Kireev, by his own country’s security services (SBU) and the suspension of talks by President Volodymyr Zelensky that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, announced that he was toughening his demands. From now on, the Federation claims Novorussia, that is to say all of southern Ukraine, historically Russian since Tsarina Catherine II, with the exception of thirty-three years.

It should be understood that if Russia did nothing for seven years, it was not because it was insensitive to the massacre of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, but because it was preparing to face the predictable Western response. According to the classic quotation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tsar Alexander II, Prince Alexander Gortchakov: "The Emperor is determined to devote, preferably, his solicitude to the well-being of his subjects and to concentrate, on the development of the internal resources of the country, an activity which would be poured outside only when the positive interests of Russia would require it absolutely. Russia is reproached for isolating itself and keeping silent in the presence of facts that are not in accordance with either law or equity. Russia is said to be sulking. Russia is not sulking. Russia is taking stock".

This police operation was called "aggression" by the West. One thing leading to another, Russia was portrayed as a "dictatorship" and its foreign policy as "imperialism". No one seems to have read the Minsk II Agreement, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council. In a telephone conversation between Presidents Putin and Macron, revealed by the Élysée Palace, the latter even expressed his lack of interest in the fate of the population of Donbass, i.e. his contempt for the Minsk II Agreement.

Today, the Western secret services are coming to the aid of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (the "neo-Nazis" in Russian terminology) and, instead of seeking a peaceful solution, are trying to destroy Russia from within [2].

In international law, Moscow has only implemented the 2015 Security Council resolution. It can be blamed for its brutality, but neither for rushing (seven years), nor for being illegitimate (resolution 2202). Presidents Petro Poroshenko, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Angela Merkel had pledged, in a joint statement attached to the resolution, to do the same. If any of these powers had intervened earlier, they could have chosen other modalities of operation, but none did.

Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine has been reported by the Western establishment and its mainstream media (MSM) as an unprovoked act of naked aggression. Writing in The New York Times the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said:

Never in my life have I seen an international crisis where the dividing line between right and wrong has been so stark.

This story has been presented to us in order to maintain our trust in the institutions of our government. The Russian people have been given a different story, but for the same reason.

As discussed in Part 1, what we are told about the social, political and ethnic tensions in Ukraine by the Western hegemony isn’t accurate. This article will explore the wider geopolitical context within which Russia’s military action military action can be at least understood, even if we regard then as illegitimate.

Some of the terms used in this article, such as “Euromaidan coup,” directly contradict the Western MSM narrative. Please read Part 1 to familiarise yourself with some of the historical background and the named individuals and organisations.

Only Fools Rush In

In the West, the public is expected to accept the given narrativ without question. Anyone who challenges it is accused of being a Putin apologist or a far-right conspiracy theorist. Most Brits appear to have gone along with Johnson’s proffered fairy tale. This is unfortunate, because the reality is far more complex than he would have us believe.

To see celebrities and social media influencers uniformly demonstrating their compassion for the Ukrainian people is touching. But when reports of these virtue-signalling displays are used as propaganda to convince the public that they, too, should jump on the West-approved bandwagon, swaths of the population are at risk of forming a potentially dangerous opinion based upon nothing but pretension.

Currently the UK government, with celebrity assistance, is encouraging us to welcome Ukrainian refugees with open arms via its Homes For Ukraine scheme. The government has said that the Ukrainian applicants “will be vetted and will undergo security checks.”

Most of the people applying for refugee status will be in desperate need, and we certainly should do everything we can to assist them. However, there is also good reason for very careful vetting and security checks.

Stephen Fry has “open arms”

Ukraine does have a Nazi problem, and it is the Nazis who have most to fear from the Russian forces. In 2013, five days after his arrival in the UK, Ukrainian Nazi Pavlo Lapshyn murdered by an 82-year-old man before embarking upon a bombing campaign of British mosques. It was only thanks to sheer luck that he didn’t murder many more British people.

Lapshyn is only one man out of approximately 44 million people living in Ukraine. Unfortunately, he is also one among hundreds of thousands who share his extremist views. Then there’s the small minority of Ukrainians—which can nonetheless be measured in the millions—who have a degree of sympathy with those views.

For reasons we will discuss in Part 4, the UK government’s commitment to security checks is highly questionable. We are being asked to trust the UK government, but doing so is unwise, given its record. Of course we should act compassionately and help suffering people, but only fools rush in.

For those who believe the propaganda of the Western establishment, Russian president Vladimir Putin is a comic book villain whose evil intentions will stop at nothing short of creating a new Russian empire. The West’s propagandists depict Ukraine as the victim of Putin’s allegedly insane bloodlust and portray Russian military actions as unjustified and unlawful.

Swallowing their story leads us to believe that the US-led NATO alliance and the Kyiv government are the defenders of democracy. Russian actions, perceived as an attack on Ukrainian democracy, are therefore an assault upon the principle of democracy. This view is essentially the single version of the truth being peddled in the West.

The alternative view of Putin as some sort of bogatyr (heroic warrior) is equally callow. It wrongly assumes that Putin embodies Russia, thus ignoring a nation of 146 million people and the globalist forces that maintain Putin’s power for their benefit.

Initially, currently, and most acutely, it is the people in Ukraine who suffer as a result of this conflict. Ultimately however, we all will.

NATO Expansionism

When the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, listed Russia’s claimed reasons for the invasion of Ukraine, he stressed NATO expansionism. Russia has repeatedly warned that Ukrainian membership in NATO, which would almost certainly see US troops and offensive weapons deployed on Russia’s southwestern border, was a redline that Russia would not allow NATO to cross. Putin said:

I spoke about our biggest concerns and worries, and about the fundamental threats which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia consistently, rudely and unceremoniously from year to year. I am referring to the eastward expansion of NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border. [. . .] [T]he North Atlantic alliance continued to expand despite our protests and concerns. Its military machine is moving and, as I said, is approaching our very border.

Russia has warned repeatedly that it would “react” if Ukraine joined NATO. As yet, Ukraine has not done so. Russia’s attack is preemptive, and, despite Putin’s claimed “compassion” for the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR & LPR), Russia’s primary concern is for its own security and that of its ruling class. Even prior to Russian recognition, the DPR and LPR were de jure Russian satellite states and pawns in a greater game seemingly played out between Russia and NATO.

Equally, there has been a genuine humanitarian crisis in the DPR and LPR for eight years. Russia’s military operation has come as a relief to the people of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Regrettably, Russia has also escalated the conflict beyond Donbas borders, killing more innocent people.

In February 1990, during the “perestroika” reformation of the USSR, then-US Secretary of State James Baker met with the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. He famously gave Russia assurances that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.” At the time, that meant no eastward expansion—except for by Turkey—in mainland Europe beyond Germany’s border.

Baker’s words weren’t the only reassurances the Russians received. In 1990, then-West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher gave a keynote speech with regard to German reunification, during which he said:

[T]he changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’

Prior to signing the Two-Plus-Four Treaty reunifying Germany, the Russians sought and were given explicit commitments regarding NATO expansionism. In the rounds of diplomacy leading up to the agreement, Russia was offered assurances by political leaders from the US, France, the UK, Germany and other NATO aligned states. Russia agreed to German reunification only after German Chancellor Helmut Kohl convinced Gorbachev that NATO would not expand toward Russian borders.

This was an opportunity for the US, Europe and Russia to capitalise on the new, relatively open and transparent (glasnost) USSR as it transitioned to become the Russian Federation. In retrospect, it is now clear that the US-led NATO alliance took a triumphalist view. It embraced its own unipolar world order as the bipolar Cold War order evaporated.

From 1991 onwards NATO completely ignored both the assurances it had given and Russia’s security concerns. It systematically rolled eastward, and by 2005 Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria had become members of NATO.

In 2007, in response to NATO’s obvious expansionism, Vladimir Putin delivered a cutting speech at the Munich Security Conference:

[W]hat is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making. It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. [. . .] And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. [. . .] I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world. [. . .] [T]he model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation. [. . .] We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. [. . .] [F]irst and foremost the United States has overstepped its national borders in every way. [. . .] [O]f course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasise this – no one feels safe! [. . .] I understood that the use of force can only be legitimate when the decision is taken by NATO, the EU, or the UN. [. . .] [W]e have different points of view. [. . .] The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN. And we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for the UN. [. . .] I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. [. . .] [W]e have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? [. . .] I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees?

In response, the NATO Council, as if to validate everything Putin said, issued a statement at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. Clause 23 of the statement read:

NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.

In the decade-long lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, NATO had been pushing for Ukrainian membership. Indeed, in 2018 NATO added Ukraine to its list of so-called aspiring nations. In 2019, then-President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko signed a constitutional amendment committing Ukraine to membership in both the EU and NATO. This was swiftly followed in 2020 with the decision by NATO and Ukraine to enhance their partnership.

The current invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been presented by Western governments to their respective electorates in disingenuous and puerile terms. The West’s narrative was encapsulated by Johnson in his New York Times piece:

This is not a NATO conflict, and it will not become one. [. . .] The truth is that Ukraine had no serious prospect of NATO membership in the near future. [. . .] I and many other Western leaders have spoken to Mr. Putin to understand his perspective. [. . .] It is now clear diplomacy never had a chance. [. . .] Mr. Putin is attempting the destruction of the very foundation of international relations and the United Nations Charter: the right of nations to decide their own future, free from aggression and fear of invasion.

Contrary to Johnson’s deception, NATO and its member states have not only enticed, cajoled and encouraged Ukraine’s “aspirations” to join, they have taken firm steps to make it a reality. They did so in the certain knowledge that Russia could never countenance the move. This fact in no way excuses Russia’s actions, but it goes some way in explaining them.

From an official military perspective, NATO has seemingly abandoned Ukraine to its fate. We will discuss in Part 4 why what NATO is doing is not quite as it seems.

Thus far, NATO has ruled out any attempt to establish a no-fly zone (NFZ). As pointed out by 80 foreign policy experts who have written to advise the Biden administration, any attempt to impose an NFZ would necessitate NATO or US forces shooting down Russian military planes. This would almost certainly trigger a global war.

It is mind-blowing that this letter was written in response to a similar endeavour from 27 foreign policy experts who advocated the physically impossible concept of a “limited” NFZ. Judging the risk to be worth it, they suggested the West should call Russia’s bluff. This pro- NFZ lobby has close financial ties to the military-industrial complex. What these lunatics imagine they will spend their money on in the smouldering rubble of a post-nuclear holocaust is difficult to say.

Johnson’s point that the Ukraine has the right to determine its own future with regard to NATO membership is childish—and, from an international law perspective, wrong. Nation-states are not free to do whatever they like if their actions threaten the security of neighbouring states.

Article 2.3 of the United Nation’s Charter states:

All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.

With NATO membership distinctly possible, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking at the 2022 Munich Security Conference just before the Russian invasion, said:

Ukraine has received security guarantees for abandoning the world’s third nuclear capability. We don’t have that weapon. We also have no security. [. . .] Therefore, we have something. The right to demand a shift from a policy of appeasement to ensuring security and peace guarantees. Since 2014, Ukraine has tried three times to convene consultations with the guarantor states of the Budapest Memorandum. [. . .] I am initiating consultations in the framework of the Budapest Memorandum. [. . .] If they do not happen again or their results do not guarantee security for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the Budapest Memorandum is not working and all the package decisions of 1994 are in doubt.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy

The 1994 Budapest Memorandum was a security assurance given to the Ukraine (and others) by the existing nuclear powers, including the Russian Federation, that their integrity and sovereignty would not be threatened in exchange for them giving up their nuclear arsenals. In Ukraine’s case, theirs was potentially the third largest in the world as they were left with more than 2000 strategic nuclear warheads after the dissolution of the USSR.

Zelenskyy was claiming that Russia had already breached the Budapest Memorandum when it “annexed” Crimea and supported the separatists in the Donbas. Therefore, he was threatening Russia, not only with a nuclear armed Ukraine, but a nuclear armed NATO power on its border.

Regardless of the intricacies of the Budapest deal, this was a clear threat to Russian security and an obvious provocation. One has to ask why Zelenskyy thought this wise.

Ukraine and Russia had been in international dispute for at least eight years but realistically for more than thirty. From both the Russian and the Ukrainian side, the manner of that dispute had consistently endangered international peace and security. Zelesnkyy’s threat appeared to take that risk to a new level.

In addition, NATO member states have been in dispute with Russia since 1991. Their total disregard for Russia’s security concerns also endangered international peace. Moreover, NATO expansionism was not in keeping with the principles of the UN Charter.

The Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, has unequivocally condemned the Russian invasion. This appears to be a reflection of the UN’s partisan bias toward the US-led NATO military alliance and the EU rather than any genuine attempt to faithfully interpret the UN Charter. Guterres said:

The use of force by one country against another is the repudiation of the principles that every country has committed to uphold. This applies to the present military offensive. It is wrong. It is against the Charter. It is unacceptable.

Yet when the US decided it had the right to launch preemptive wars in the “war on terror,” the UN did not condemn that claim of right. For example, when the US-led coalition launched a “preemptive” invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in contravention of the UN Charter, the UN said little and did nothing.

In 2004, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged that the invasion and subsequent war in Iraq was illegal. Yet the UN has consistently ignored Article 39 of the UN Charter that would allow it to rule on the legality of the Iraq war. No one has ever imposed sanctions on the US or its allies for the war crimes they have committed.

Who Cares About International Law?

Lex iniusta non est lex is a fundamental principle of law. Translation: unjust law is not law. If we are going to suffer the violence of governments, then the concept of international law is certainly welcome. Unfortunately, that’s all it is: a concept.

The UN’s formal and public condemnation of preemptive wars is reserved for the actions of some nations but not others. Consequently, international law, partly encapsulated by the UN Charter, is practically meaningless.

Because it is applied neither equally nor reasonably, it has become little more than a big stick, currently in the hands the Western-led international rules-based order, used to beat opponents. This is what happens when juries are excluded from alleged justice. There is no “law.”

Prior to the Secretary-General’s statement, the globalist foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, had already ruled that Russia’s military action in Ukraine violates international law. The CFR pointed out that the action contravenes Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter, which states:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

Russia has certainly breached Article 2.4. Its war in Ukraine is therefore “illegal.”

However, Article 1.1 of the UN Charter also places an onus on the UN “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace.” Persistent NATO expansionism and the threat of a NATO nuclear power on Russia’s border are breaches of the peace and a direct threat, from a Russian perspective. The UN has done nothing either to prevent or remove this threat.

US President Joseph Biden, upon announcing sanctions in response to Russia’s military action, said:

Who in the Lord’s name does Putin think gives him the right to declare new so-called countries on territory that belonged to his neighbours? This is a flagrant violation of international law, and it demands a firm response from the international community.

But Russia did not “declare” DPR and LPR territorial legitimacy. Biden was deceiving his international audience.

In his speech on the 21st February, Putin said that the Russian Federation had decided to “immediately recognize the independence and sovereignty of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic.” Under international law, recognition is distinct from declaration.

Vladimir Putin

There are two schools of legal thought on statehood. The “constitutive” approach suggests that a state can only be a state if it is recognised as such by other sovereign nations. In that case, with Russian recognition, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) are now “legal” states.

However, the “declaratory” notion of a state usually takes precedence in international law. It defines a state as any autonomous territory that meets the criteria necessary for the formation of said state.

As defined by the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of a State, a sovereign state must have a population, a defined territory and a government able to engage in dialogue with other states. This makes the state a “sole person” in international law, and its existence is independent of recognition by other states. Such a state has the right to defend itself, irrespective of recognition.

On 7th April 2014 the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) declared itself a state. Its territory, within the Donetsk Oblast, extends for just under 9,000 square kilometres. Its capital is Donetsk. At the time, its population was approximately 2.4 million. The Donetsk People’s Militia is the military force that defends it. In 2018 the people of the DPR elected Denis Pushilin as the DPR’s head of state and 100 delegates were elected to form a government in the People’s Council in Donetsk.

Similarly, the Luhansk (or Lugansk) People’s Republic (LPR) consists of 17 administrative regions and encompasses just under 8,400 square kilometres inside the Luhansk Oblast. Its capital is Luhansk (Lugansk), and in 2014 the population was approximately 1.6 million. Leonid Pasechnik is the head of state, and 50 delegates form the government of the People’s Council in Luhansk.

Following the LPR independence referendum, held on 11th May 2014, Pasechik and the People’s Council were subsequently elected to form a government in November 2018. The Luhansk Peoples Militia defends the LPR.

Today approximately 1 million people have fled the region to escape the war. As a result, the combined population of both oblasts is probably closer to 5 million, down from 6.2 million. The populations of the DPR and LPR combined represent a percentage of the total population of the Donbas.

Recognition of a nation-state is ostensibly a political act that clarifies the official view of the nation-state (or nation-states) that are conferring that recognition. In this case, Russia was stating to the international community that it supported the right to independence of the DPR and LPR. Both new states have met the criteria for recognition under international law. Of course, the decision to not recognise them is equally a political act.

In 1992, the United States and the European Community “recognised” the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina without declaring Bosnia-Herzegovina an independent state. What followed was US—and later NATO—bombing as well as the training, arming and equipping of Islamist extremists—all part of a concerted effort to balkanise the entire European region previously called Yugoslavia.

Similarly, Russia acknowledges the independence of the new unitary republics of DPR and LPR but has not declared them independent states. Following recognition of their status, Russia launched a military attack on Ukraine. Truth be told, neither the Russian nor the US/NATO actions show any particular respect for international law.

Biden’s words were nothing more than propaganda. His legal interpretation was, at best, incomplete. So was Putin’s when he claimed that Russian military action was in keeping with Article 51 of the UN Charter, which states:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.

An armed attack had not been launched against Russia, and the DPR and LPR are not members of the United Nations. Putin’s citation of Article 51 doesn’t legitimise Russian military actions under international law. So what?

Claims and counterclaims concerning international law are merely attempts by global military powers to gain public support for their wars. Combined with propaganda and censorship, these claims convince some of the people some of the time.

The supposedly binding bilateral agreements between nation-states, the UN Charter, and the decisions of international courts and treaties form so-called international law. Unless this alleged “law” is applied equally and fairly, it is not law.

Nation-states like the US, UK, EU member states and Russia use international law merely as weapon of convenience to justify the killing and maiming of human beings or to berate other states when carnage doesn’t suit their objectives. This is the reality of nominal “international law.” It is no law at all.

Exactly the same can be said for the “morality” on display from most of those who now pontificate about welcoming Ukrainian refugees “with open arms.” This appears to be due either to ignorance or acceptance of the unconscionable concept of moral relativism.

While they proudly signal their moral virtue in regard to Ukraine they have said nothing about the horror that continues to unfold in Yemen, which is wholeheartedly backed by the US-led western alliance they continue to support. Just as law applied unfairly is no law at all, so morality that chooses a cause, while ignoring suffering elsewhere, has no value at all.

Gas, Gas, Gas

When Barack Obama became the 44th US President in 2009, Russia had been using its economic influence as the world’s largest crude oil and second largest dry gas producer to push back against NATO expansionism. Ukraine was the main transit hub for Russian gas pipelines to Europe, but it was politically unstable.

The political divisions in Ukraine, broadly pro-EU and anti-Russian on one side and pro-Russian and anti-EU on the other, became the focus of a tug of war for European influence between the US and Russia. The Obama administration wanted to maintain the transatlantic alliance, affording U.S. dominance and NATO cohesion in Europe, while Putin’s clique aimed to enhance Russian control of the European energy market to strengthen Russian security and weaken NATO.

For its part, the EU hierarchy was eager to establish its bloc as an independent military superpower. The 2007 Treaty of Lisbon came into force in December 2009, effectively creating the European Union and its Common Security and Defence Policy. The EU were then able pursue military defence union, potentially undermining US control and bolstering the EU’s hold on NATO.

Russia openly declared its support for Yanukovich in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. Its access to the Ukrainian pipelines and retention of its Sevastopol naval base were crucial to its—and, to a large extent, the EU’s—interests. In exchange for below- market, subsidised Russian gas, the Yanukovich government extended Russia’s Sevastopol lease until 2042, resulting in physical fights breaking out in the Verkhovna Rada.

In 2011, Russia and Germany opened the first Nord Stream gas pipeline, which runs under the Baltic Sea and supplies Russian gas to Germany. Nord Stream 1 runs from Vyborg to Greifswald. The proposed Nord Stream 2 will run from Ust-Luga. The purpose of Nord Stream pipelines was to enable Russia to sell much cheaper gas to the EU, via Germany, while eliminating both the EU’s and Russia’s 80% reliance upon the precarious Ukrainian pipelines. For obvious reasons, this aim had wide support among other EU member states.

The Nord Stream pipelines were not in the interest of the US, however. Consequently, its foreign policy objectives were to stop Nord Stream 2 (which would double the pipelines’ gas flow to Europe from Russia) and install a Ukrainian government amenable to Washington’s demands.

If the US could break the EU’s blossoming trade relationship with Russia, it would not only secure US dominance over Europe, both in economic and collective defence terms, but would also open up the EU market to the US’ pricier Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) exports—an added bonus.

Initially, the US feted the Yanukovich government in hopes of convincing Ukraine to join NATO and the EU. Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was dispatched to Kyiv, where she held discussions with Yanukovich. Among her comments:

We discussed ways that Ukraine and the United States can deepen and expand our strategic partnership. [. . .] [We hope] Ukraine will pursue close, constructive relationships with the United States and countries of the European Union. [. . .] We discussed energy reform and its potential to transform Ukraine into an energy producer and becoming more energy efficient. [. . .] We also discussed the importance of protecting Ukraine’s democracy. [. . .] [W]e thank Ukraine and the Ukrainian people for your important contributions to NATO and other international security operations.

The diplomacy failed. Despite fluffy rhetoric about “protecting Ukraine’s democracy,” the US turned to distinctly undemocratic methods when it decided to back a Ukrainian coup. In order to achieve this goal, the US empowered the darkest forces in Ukrainian politics: the neo-Nazis.

Something we will explore in Part 3: Ukraine War! What is It Good For? The Ukrainian Nazi Agenda

Please Note: The PDF (Book) will be available following publication of Part 4

STATE OF MAINE SUPERIOR COURT
KENNEBEC, ss. CIVIL ACTION
DOCKET NO. CV-21-158

COALITION FOR HEALTHCARE
WORKERS AGAINST MEDICAL
MANDATES, et al,

Plaintiffs

v.

JEANNE M. LAMBREW and
NIRAV D. SHAH,

Defendants

AFFIDAVIT OF DR. MERYL JAE NASS, M.D.
IN REBUTTAL TO NIRAV DINESH SHAH, M.D., J.D.

(The graphics and footnotes are missing. I will try to provide them later.)

BEFORE ME, the undersigned person, duly authorized to administer oaths, personally appeared, Dr. Meryl J. Nass, M.D., J.D., who, after being first duly cautioned and sworn, deposed and stated as follows:

1. My name is Meryl Jae Nass, M.D. I practice internal medicine in Ellsworth, Maine.

2. I have a Bachelor's degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

3. I attended New Jersey Medical School and transferred to the University of Mississippi Medical School when my husband became a professor there. I received my medical degree from the University of Mississippi and did a residency in internal medicine there.

4. I am board certified in internal medicine.

5. In addition to a 40 year career practicing medicine, I developed expertise in the identification, response and amelioration of bioterrorism and pandemic diseases, Gulf War syndrome, anthrax, and in the evaluation of vaccines and vaccine safety.

6. I am the first person in the world to have investigated an outbreak and proved it was due to biological warfare. The outbreak occurred in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) during its civil war in 19978-80, and my research was published in 1992. I have been referred to as a "biowarfare epidemiologist" ever since.

7. I was a consultant to the Ministry of Health of Cuba in 1993 regarding an epidemic of optic and peripheral neuropathy, correctly diagnosing it as the result of cyanide exposure coupled with nutritional deficiency and advising on mitigation strategies.

8. I am considered an expert on the anthrax letters attacks of 2001 and the anthrax vaccine. I consulted for the World Bank's Interamerican Development Bank in 2002 regarding the evaluation and amelioration of anthrax and other potential bioterrorism and chemical weapon events.

9. I consulted for the U.S. Director of National Intelligence regarding the prevention and identification of domestic terrorism events, in 2008.

10. I have given requested testimonies to six different Congressional committees between 1999 and 2007.

11. I have provided expert testimony to two National Academy of Science committees and to a UK committee headed by its Law Lord investigating Gulf War syndrome.

12. While I have testified to state legislative committees on a variety of medical issues, in recent years I have testified in Vermont, Massachusetts, New Brunswick and Maine on the specific issue of vaccine mandates.

13. Since the 2020 start of this pandemic, I have been providing almost daily information and analysis to the public on all aspects of the pandemic, the pandemic response, potential COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. This information is posted on my website. Many of my articles have been reposted on other websites. I have also written original articles for websites and magazines. I have written the most comprehensive article on the deliberate suppression of hydroxychloroquine for the treatment of COVID, to date. I edited one Citizen Petition to the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") regarding the polymerase chain reaction ("PCR") tests that have been used to diagnose COVID-19, and I coauthored another Citizen Petition to the FDA challenging its response to the pandemic and its issuance of Emergency Use Authorizations ("EUA") for COVID-19 vaccines.

14. I have been interviewed by all major US newspapers and TV networks, as well as by many alternative media.

15. I am listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World.

16. The COVID-19 pandemic is due to a coronavirus which most likely was developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory, in collaboration with Professor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina. This research was partly funded by U.S. federal agencies, especially the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, which has devoted up to 51 million dollars/year to coronavirus research over the past 20 years, preceding the current pandemic.

17. I was asked to review and comment on Dr. Nirah Shah's affidavit and the following remarks provide my response to his statements. Unless stated otherwise, when I use the term "CDC" in the following discussion, it refers to the federal Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA and not the Maine CDC, which Dr. Shah directs.

18. Dr. Nirav Shah is incorrect in his discussion of the means of spread (#17) of SARS-CoV-2, the virus said to cause the disease called COVID-19. He has omitted aerosol spread, in which particles much smaller than droplet size can travel across a building and cause infection at a distance far greater than six feet. This is well known in the scientific literature, and it is the reason the CDC advised improved ventilation and opening windows to reduce the burden of virus suspended in air, potentially for hours. Even coughing and sneezing have been shown to spread droplets over a distance exceeding 20 feet.

19. The so-called Delta variant (#22) is defined differently in different countries. There is not just one Delta variant, because coronaviruses are continuously mutating. It is true that current variants, which the CDC defines as one entity, are more contagious than earlier variants. While some cases are indisputably very severe, detailed information from the United Kingdom ("UK") regarding 7 different variants that are being closely observed has revealed that overall, the Delta variant has the lowest mortality rate of all. For most individuals it is less severe. For some it is more severe than earlier variants.

20. It is true that the CDC has claimed that unvaccinated Americans are much more likely to be hospitalized than vaccinated Americans. However, data from the UK and Israel fail to confirm this. In fact, Israeli statistics show that both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals are approximately equally likely to be hospitalized for COVID at the present time.

21. This Israel Ministry of Health graph makes this clear. While the number of cases was approximately the same in the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, there were nearly twice as many vaccinated Israelis hospitalized as unvaccinated Israelis. Israel used the Pfizer vaccine almost exclusively.

22. The UK data tracks the Israeli data, and can be found at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1018547/Technical_Briefing_23_21_09_16.pdf

23. How is it that the federal CDC and Dr. Shah can claim otherwise? Unfortunately, the CDC is captured by pharmaceutical companies, which donate to the CDC Foundation.

24. CDC produces data that invariably support Executive branch policies. Dr. Shah is a liaison representative for CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and hews closely to the CDC's talking points.

25. CDC has employed several strategies to reduce artificially the number of reported breakthrough cases, and I have written about most of these. On May 1, 2021, the CDC stopped accepting reports of breakthrough (fully vaccinated but infected) cases from states and hospitals unless these cases died or were hospitalized and had been proven to be positive for COVID by using a PCR test with a strict cycle threshold of 28 or less. Unvaccinated cases, however, could be diagnosed using a highly permissive cycle threshold of 40 or even 45, even though Dr. Tony Fauci himself pointed out early in the pandemic that at cycle thresholds over 35, all you were finding were "dead nucleotides" rather than evidence of live virus.

26. Furthermore, CDC defines patients as fully vaccinated only two weeks after their final vaccination. Americans who developed COVID-19 between vaccine doses or before two weeks had elapsed after their last dose were defined as not fully vaccinated, and in some circumstances as unvaccinated.

27. CDC also employs a leaky method of collecting cases from hospitals, as described in a recent article in Politico.

28. Unless patients have their vaccination status clearly listed in their hospital record, they are probably going to be classified as unvaccinated. Hospital reporting of breakthrough cases to CDC is extremely patchy.

29. Unfortunately, while over 6,000 reports of U.S. deaths following vaccination have been submitted to the VAERS system, managed jointly by the FDA and CDC, 80% occurred within 2 weeks of a vaccination. It seems the CDC may be defining them as deaths in the unvaccinated. Otherwise it is difficult to understand how CDC claims none have been proven to be caused by vaccination. This CDC conclusion flies in the face of studies by a prominent pathology professor in Germany who found, based on autopsy studies he conducted, that 30-40% of deaths occurring soon after a COVID-19 vaccination were due to the vaccine.

30. Dr. Shah (#27) stated that the treatment of COVID-19 consists mainly of supportive care. While the federal CDC and recent NIH guidelines have made this claim, it is not supported by the medical literature, including the literature generated by these two agencies. CDC and NIAID have known about the benefits of chloroquine drugs for coronaviruses for many years. Hydroxychloroquine, chloroquine and ivermectin are very effective treatments for COVID when used early, during the first week of illness. The effectiveness of chloroquine antimalarial drugs (chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine and mefloquine) against coronaviruses, especially SARS-1 and MERS, was known by the CDC and NIH long before the current pandemic, since papers were published beginning in 2004 through 2014 about their success, in vitro, using acceptable doses against these deadly viruses.

31. Remdesivir (#28) is a controversial drug that the US Department of Veterans Affairs found did not improve mortality and extended length of hospital stay in a recent study.

32. Remdesivir was ushered through its pivotal trial by NIAID Director Tony Fauci, and only succeeded because the desired endpoint was changed during the study, not once but twice.

33. The NIH Guidelines committee, formed by NIAID, included 16 members with financial conflicts of interest with Gilead, the maker of Remdesivir. This is the most likely explanation for why this committee supported the use of Remdesivir but failed to support its competitors ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

34. The W.H.O. recommends against the use of Remdesivir for COVID.

35. Hydroxychloroquine (#32), as I noted above, was known to be effective against SARS coronaviruses since 2004. Vast efforts were put in place at the start of the current pandemic to prevent its use for COVID-19. These efforts included using borderline lethal doses of the drug in several large clinical trials, and using too low a dose in others. Starting the drug in hospital, when viral replication was already over and the disease process was later due to autoimmunity, cytokine storm and thromboses, was a guaranteed way to demonstrate lack of efficacy, since the drug only acted to stop the growth of virus. The NIAID promised a large study of outpatient use in 2,000 patients early in the illness, then inexplicably cancelled the trial after only 20 subjects had been enrolled.

36. Early treatment works, as evidenced by the forest plot meta-analysis below:

37. Importantly, there is suggestive evidence that hydroxychloroquine is also effective for prophylactic use. The biggest study in this regard is COPCOV MORU, undertaken by Oxford University professor Nicholas White in countries around the world. The study is not yet completed. The principal investigators felt it important to dispel the myth that hydroxychloroquine was ineffective for prevention of COVID, and posted a critique of the flawed methodologies used in studies that claimed this.

38. Dr. Shah claims (#34) that Vitamin D has failed to show effectiveness in the treatment of COVID. However, a compilation of the studies (which can be found at vdmeta.com) on Vitamin D shows otherwise:

39. Ivermectin (#35-37) is a very useful drug in the treatment of COVID that I use regularly. It is highly effective, as shown in the following meta-analysis for early treatment, in which only 4 of 28 studies failed to show benefit. While Dr. Shah correctly notes that Merck, which developed the drug and got a Nobel prize for it in 2015, has advised against its use, he failed to tell you that Merck has developed a new drug for COVID, Molnupiravir, which will compete with ivermectin for market share. Ivermectin is a cheap, off-patent generic drug. According to the Washington Post, "The U.S. government made an advance purchase of 1.7 million treatment courses of the drug [Molnupiravir] at a cost of $1.2 billion."

40. It should be obvious from the forest plot below that ivermectin shows strong evidence of efficacy for COVID-19.

41. Ivermectin is on the WHO list of essential drugs. Over 3 billion doses have been used, and Merck has donated most of them to Africans in a joint venture with the WHO to prevent onchocerciasis, or River Blindness. It is used over the counter and is an exceedingly safe drug.

42. Only because Americans have been stopped from obtaining the drug through normal means have some sought to buy a veterinary version over the counter in farm stores. There has not been a single reported death in the US from such irregular use of the drug, nor from its use as prescribed.

43. Dr. Shah is probably aware that the Maine Board of Pharmacy recently encouraged pharmacists to refuse to dispense ivermectin. Dr. Shah was perhaps instrumental in encouraging the Maine Board of Pharmacy to interject itself and interfere with the doctor-patient relationship when it comes to doctors prescribing human ivermectin.

44. A few overdoses by consumers of animal ivermectin became the justification to refuse legitimate prescriptions for the pharmaceutical drug ivermectin. This does not make sense. FDA has used the same rationale to discourage physicians from prescribing it. Apparently conflating safe physician prescriptions with overdosing on over-the-counter horse paste was the best excuse CDC and FDA could come up with to issue warnings and proscriptions for legitimate prescriptions.

45. It seems ingenuous of Dr. Shah to note that ivermectin "carries a risk of side effects when not dosed properly." So do all drugs:

    "Nearly 500 years ago, Swiss physician and chemist Paracelsus expressed the basic principle of toxicology: “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”

46. It is the actions of public health officials such as Dr. Shah to prevent patients from obtaining effective COVID-19 drugs that have led patients to seek out inferior veterinary products, because they cannot obtain this potentially life-saving medicine from their physicians and pharmacies due to interference by public health authorities. It has now become impossible for me to obtain the drug for my patients in a timely manner when they develop COVID-19. This is criminal negligence or worse, in my opinion.

47. U.S. public health professionals, including Dr. Shah, created an artificial shortage of a drug that is most effective at treating COVID-19. Then they used the fact that desperate patients have purchased the animal medication as their justification for stopping use of the drug. I am not an attorney like Dr. Shah, but this seems to me to be criminal behavior, which will predictably result in patient deaths.

48. Regarding the prophylactic use of ivermectin (#37), the data are highly supportive. Many US physicians have used it to prevent infection in themselves. A meta-analysis of prophylaxis studies of ivermectin reveals that using ivermectin reduces your risk of developing COVID-19 by 86%. Why did Dr. Shah say "there are no data supporting the use of ivermectin as a prophylactic for those who have been exposed" unless he was aware that there is a plethora of literature regarding the benefit of the drug in those using ivermectin before they were exposed--and he wished to avoid including these studies? Should we refer to his carefully chosen verbiage as legalese or sophistry? Regardless, neither befits a physician who has taken the Hippocratic oath and whose primary responsibility is to heal patients, not hinder their care.

49. Dr. Shah claims that taking ivermectin "does not reduce the risk of transmission of COVID-19 in the way a vaccine does." This is a spurious claim, since I have shown that the drug is about 86% effective in preventing infection. Preventing infection prevents transmission.

50. The COVID vaccines, on the other hand, do not claim to stop transmission. Currently the head of the federal CDC says they prevent severe illness but no longer prevent infection or transmission.

51. A large outbreak of COVID-19 in July in Banstable County, MA that was well documented in the CDC publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Review revealed that 74% of COVID cases were fully vaccinated according to the CDC definition. Cycle thresholds, used as a surrogate for viral titers and infectivity, were the same in both vaccinated and non-vaccinated cases. Breakthrough cases (a.k.a. vaccine failures) had received each of the 3 vaccines types authorized for use in the US.

52. This extremely well done study provides solid evidence that vaccination did not and cannot break the chain of transmission and cannot generate herd immunity. Surely Dr. Shah is familiar with this widely read report by CDC, MIT, Harvard and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

53. Regarding calls to poison control centers, it appears that the Associated Press was given false information. It claimed that 70% of calls to the Mississippi poison control center were about ivermectin. However, the story was later corrected, when Mississippi's state epidemiologist said ivermectin calls only accounted for about 2% of total calls.

54. Additional false information regarding overdoses of ivermectin in Oklahoma made the international news, only to be later corrected as false news.

55. Both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are WHO essential drugs that are used over the counter in much of the world. Both are considered extremely safe when taken at recommended doses. Hydroxychloroquine is even recommended during pregnancy.

56. Dr. Shah makes an interesting point in #38, in which he compares ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine prophylaxis with the prophylaxis gained through COVID-19 vaccination. Why compare them to each other? Dr. Shah is in fact addressing a statutory problem for the vaccine EUAs that was posed by the 2 mentioned drugs. Each of these drugs has an extremely long half-life in tissue (probably greater than a month) and therefore each is used routinely for prophylaxis of (respectively) river blindness and malaria. Were they to be used in this way to prevent COVID-19, and if their success at preventing and treating COVID-19 was acknowledged, no EUAs could have legally been issued for other, more expensive on-patent drugs and vaccines. In order to issue an EUA there must be "no adequate, approved, and available alternatives."

57. Had our federal public health agencies acknowledged that ivermectin and hydroychloroquine were effective prophylactics and treatments for COVID-19, no EUAs for remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, other drugs, convalescent sera, and vaccines could have legally been issued. This appears to be the primary reason that knowledge about and use of these drugs has been suppressed. The fact that Dr. Shah raised the issue suggests he is well aware of this legal matter and is actively involved in these drugs' suppression.

58. In #39, Dr. Shah admits foreknowledge about these drugs before promulgating the Emergency Rule, Immunization Requirements for Healthcare Workers, 10-144 Code of Maine Rules, Chapter 264. One wonders what information he used to draw his conclusions, when the bulk of the published literature, as I have shown, suggests he should have drawn a very different conclusion about the respective benefits of these drugs versus COVID-19 vaccines. His claims are belied by the evidence.

59. In #38, Dr. Shah alleges that the drugs produce more side effects than the vaccines. This is untrue. One need only look at reports of myocarditis in boys aged 12-17 after COVID-19 vaccination: they report myocarditis cases at a rate 50 times that of men over 65. FDA's Doran Fink noted at the last CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meeting that we do not know the rate of subclinical myocarditis caused by the COVID-19 vaccines. Furthermore, FDA admitted in its letter to Pfizer on August 23, 2021 that it was unable to determine the extent of myocarditis from Pfizer's vaccine, and would be unable to do so in future as well.

60. We also do not know the rate of thrombosis, heart attacks and strokes after vaccination, but reports to VAERS suggest they are high following COVID-19 vaccinations. We do know that anaphylaxis rates after the mRNA vaccines are about 100 times higher than expected from other vaccines, based on a Harvard study of employees at Mass General Hospital and the Brigham Hospital. No wonder the vaccines must be given only when resuscitation equipment and staff are on site.

61. I agree that safe and effective vaccines are a marvelous achievement of mankind and have made a huge difference in our quality of life and our longevity.

62. Herd immunity is achieved when a population is sufficiently immune (due to cross-immunity from related infections, recovered immunity from having had the disease, or vaccine-induced immunity) that it no longer supports continuing transmission of an infectious agent and an outbreak ends or never gets started. The definition of immunity inexplicably changed in the past year in some places to exclude the first two types of immunity I mentioned. This definitional change, used by Dr. Shah in #41, is duplicitous and unscientific. The definitions in my medical textbooks accord with what I have written above.

63. In number #43, Dr. Shah reveals he is not very cognizant of the details regarding vaccine induced immunity. Immunity from the Mumps and chickenpox vaccines probably never reaches 90-92%, or if it does, does not remain there for long. Most chickenpox cases in the U.S. occur in vaccinated children whose immunity has waned over time. The same is true for mumps. Rubella vaccine is probably more effective, as there is no transmission of rubella within the U.S. Measles vaccine was thought to provide very high protection, but it too wanes over time. That is why we now give 2 or 3 MMR vaccines to children, when initially it was believed one alone would convey life-long immunity.

64. If COVID-19 vaccines provided strong and long-lasting immunity from infection and transmission, and were very safe, then Dr. Shah would be correct in statement #44. But unfortunately, the vaccines fail to prevent transmission, as admitted by federal CDC Director Walensky and a recent CDC publication.

65. Their protection wears off quickly, and they have profound safety problems. Had they undergone the normal FDA approval process rather than a "warp speed" simulation of a rigorous approval process, they would never have been licensed or used beyond the clinical trials. The asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 was the basis for locking down and restricting the basic liberties of all of Maine's citizens, even the healthy, for over a year. But the makers of the COVID-19 vaccines state that they only reduce symptoms, rather than conferring immunity, or preventing infection or transmission. Vaccines for COVID-19 provide us with a charade of protection and a charade that the vaccinated cannot be asymptomatically infected and transmitting virus to patients. If the vaccines reduce symptoms but not infection or viral load (as suggested by a rigorous study in a hospital in Vietnam) then vaccinated individuals may actually be more likely to spread the disease than the unvaccinated.

66. We simply do not know if this is the case in the U.S., due to CDC's successful efforts to corrode the statistics on cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

67. The bottom line is that even if everyone in the U.S. was vaccinated, the flaws in the vaccines and the leaky protection they convey would prevent us ever achieving high levels of population immunity. Dr. Shah pretends that the COVID-19 vaccines work as well as the measles vaccine. But they most certainly do not. The massive numbers of "breakthrough" cases (which used to be called "vaccine failures") in the UK and Israel, with vaccination rates in their populations higher than ours, make clear that high rates of vaccination are not the solution to the spread of COVID-19. This is why the U.S. government just spent 1.2 billion dollars on Merck's Molnupiravir pill. For treatment. Federal agencies have begun to acknowledge that vaccinations will not end the pandemic. It seems Dr. Shah has not kept up with recent policy changes.

68. Regarding #52, I have reviewed the Pfizer filing to the European Medicines Agency and the Japanese agency. In them, I learned that Pfizer's lipid nanoparticle contains two novel ingredients, not used previously in any vaccines. I believe Dr. Shah is grossly mistaken regarding his assurance that these ingredients are commonly used. While PEG is commonly used, it is also the cause of life-threatening anaphylactic reactions, which Dr. Shah fails to acknowledge.

69. Furthermore, FDA and CDC have access to over a dozen databases from which calculations of vaccine safety should be derived. However, the public has only been given information from VAERS, V-safe and the VSD. Inappropriate algorithms have been employed by CDC and FDA to analyze the data.

70. As I noted earlier, FDA instructed Pfizer on August 23, 2021 that its surveillance systems are unable to assess the risk of myocarditis from Pfizer's vaccine, and therefore FDA asked Pfizer to assess the risk. Pfizer has reported anticipated earnings from its COVID-19 vaccines in 2021 of $33 billion dollars. Do you think Pfizer will identify a problem with myocarditis under these circumstances?

71. Regarding #54-63, it is certainly true that COVID-19 continues to spread in Maine, although given the federal CDC's idiosyncratic method of counting breakthrough cases in the vaccinated, there are doubts about the veracity of the statistics Dr. Shah provides. I agree that the methods that have been employed for the past 1.5 years, including injection with the COVID-19 vaccines, have not worked very well. Why are we continuing to use them?

72. Why are we continuing to prevent the use of medications that appear to be much more effective than the COVID-19 vaccines?

73. Why are so many healthcare workers still unvacccinated? The simple answer is that they are the people seeing the side effects from these vaccines. Healthcare workers are required to be vaccinated with many vaccines. They have never refused in large numbers like this before. They get yearly flu shots, and must have had the childhood shots and a hepatitis B series.

74. Why do 10-15% of those who got the first mRNA shot fail to return for the second shot? This does not happen with other vaccines. Clearly, thousands of Maine healthcare workers have direct knowledge of something that is being denied by our public health professionals. Why else would so many healthcare workers give up their careers, when they will go to less prestigious and remunerative jobs instead?

75. The Emergency Rule was promulgated in the absence of science, common sense, and a review of the existing literature on COVID-19. This is what happens when there are no checks and balances in the system, no legislative involvement, and our unelected public health professionals (who do not treat patients and may not even be physicians) are allowed to rule by fiat.

76. While they may, as Dr. Shah has, try to hide behind claims that they are acting to protect patients, healthcare workers, the healthcare infrastructure and reduce facility outbreaks, all 4 claims are fraudulent.

77. Clearly the infrastructure will be hard hit when 10 or 20% of healthcare workers are fired from their jobs. How does Maine CDC propose to ameliorate this mess and keep the infrastructure functioning?

78. How does Maine CDC propose to rebuild relationships with healthcare workers after imposing this draconian and scientifically insupportable mandate on them? Trust is gone.

79. Why has the administration of Governor Janet Mills made it impossible to use hydroxychloroquine for prophylaxis of COVID-19? Why has it warned pharmacists not to dispense ivermectin? Are these the acts of an administration concerned with the health of the public and its healthcare workers? Or are these political acts that resulted from backroom deals to promote expensive but poorly effective drugs and vaccines--and the only way to do so is to suppress the already licensed, safe, cheap and effective treatments?

80. Furthermore, the FDA has allowed COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to use antibody tests to determine immunity from previous infections in subjects in clinical trials. FDA accepts these results as valid. However, regular Americans are not being allowed to use a single test (and there are dozens available) to demonstrate that they are already immune, and would obtain no benefit from vaccination, only risk of an adverse event. The new technical procedural rulemaking being undertaken by Maine's Department of Health and Human Services to finalize the Emergency Rule expressly eliminates "proof of immunity" as a basis for exemption from the COVID-19 mandate. Why have the federal government and the Maine CDC and DHS adopted a new definition of immunity, reminiscent of Orwell's book 1984, that precludes immunity from prior infections? 2 + 2 = 5? This is nonsensical. It only makes sense if the inexorable drive to vaccinate everyone, regardless of their immune status, is being done for an ulterior motive. That motive might be to gain obeisance. It might be to justify vaccine passports. We simply do not know why it is being done. But we must not ignore these vitally important questions, simply because they are uncomfortable or run counter to a prevailing narrative.

81. #72, which claims that prior immunity resulting from a COVID-19 infection is uncertain, is a gross falsehood. There are now dozens of studies that show immunity after COVID-19 infection is strong, durable and long-lasting. There are just as many studies showing that the immunity obtained from existing vaccines is neither durable nor long-lasting.

82. But what we do know is that forcing immune Americans to be vaccinated with a risky vaccine is not medicine. It is the antithesis of medicine.

83. Testing alone is not the solution either. The tests are not perfect. One UK study showed that rapid tests might be only 58% accurate and it was suggested that they are not ready for use. However, they were rolled out anyway, in the UK and here, despite widespread knowledge of their flaws. Why were millions of tests thrown away at the Abbott plant in Westbrook? We have not been told the reason, and only learned of this when concerned employees told the press about it.

84. The solution to the pandemic has been known since 2004. It was demonstrated by CDC scientists in 2005, and by NIAID scientists in 2014. No doubt they have access to chloroquine and/or ivermectin drugs for their families. Recall that during Senate testimony 2 months ago, we learned that only about 60% of CDC, FDA's CBER and NIAID employees had been vaccinated.

85. Dr. Shah's affidavit is a tissue of lies that are consistent with the lies promulgated by federal agencies. Perhaps that is why he failed to cite a single reference to back up the claims in his affidavit. Unfortunately, these lies have created a huge rift between our patients and our medical establishment. They are about to create a crisis in healthcare when many healthcare workers have their employment terminated. These lies have led to a prolongation of the pandemic and a steep increase in morbidity and mortality.

    Maine deserves and can do a lot better than this.

Let's open this posting with a definition:

"Antibody-Dependent Enhancement or ADE occurs when the antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but they are unable to prevent infection. Instead, these antibodies act as a “Trojan horse,” allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.

On a few occasions ADE has resulted from vaccination:

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — RSV is a virus that commonly causes pneumonia in children. A vaccine was made by growing RSV, purifying it, and inactivating it with the chemical formaldehyde. In clinical trials, children who were given the vaccine were more likely to develop or die from pneumonia after infection with RSV. As a result of this finding, the vaccine trials stopped, and the vaccine was never submitted for approval or released to the public.

Measles — An early version of measles vaccine was made by inactivating measles virus using formaldehyde. Children who were vaccinated and later became infected with measles in the community developed high fevers, unusual rash, and an atypical form of pneumonia. Upon seeing these results, the vaccine was withdrawn from use, and those who received this version of the vaccine were recommended to be vaccinated again using the live, weakened measles vaccine, which does not cause ADE and is still in use today.

A more recent example of ADE following vaccination comes from dengue virus:

Dengue virus — In 2016, a dengue virus vaccine was designed to protect against all four serotypes of the virus. The hope was that by inducing immune responses to all four serotypes at once, the vaccine could circumvent the issues related to ADE following disease with dengue virus. The vaccine was given to 800,000 children in the Philippines. Fourteen vaccinated children died after encountering dengue virus in the community. It is hypothesized that the children developed antibody responses that were not capable of neutralizing the natural virus circulating in the community. As such, the vaccine was recommended only for children greater than 9 years of age who had already been exposed to the virus."

Here is another quote about ADE and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines from a paper entitled "Antibody-dependent enhancement and SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and therapies" by Wen She Lee et al as found in Nature Microbiology with my bolds throughout:

"Antibody-based drugs and vaccines against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) are being expedited through preclinical and clinical development. Data from the study of SARS-CoV and other respiratory viruses suggest that anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies could exacerbate COVID-19 through antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). Previous respiratory syncytial virus and dengue virus vaccine studies revealed human clinical safety risks related to ADE, resulting in failed vaccine trials."

Here is the conclusion from the paper:

"ADE has been observed in SARS, MERS and other human respiratory virus infections including RSV and measles, which suggests a real risk of ADE for SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and antibody-based interventions. However, clinical data has not yet fully established a role for ADE in human COVID-19 pathology. Steps to reduce the risks of ADE from immunotherapies include the induction or delivery of high doses of potent neutralizing antibodies, rather than lower concentrations of non-neutralizing antibodies that would be more likely to cause ADE.

Going forwards, it will be crucial to evaluate animal and clinical datasets for signs of ADE, and to balance ADE-related safety risks against intervention efficacy if clinical ADE is observed. Ongoing animal and human clinical studies will provide important insights into the mechanisms of ADE in COVID-19. Such evidence is sorely needed to ensure product safety in the large-scale medical interventions that are likely required to reduce the global burden of COVID-19."

To put it very simply, ADE can occur in vaccinated humans and animals when they are exposed to the wild virus (the challenge).

With that background, let's look at a very little-reported article that appeared on the National Institutes of Health National Liberary of Medicine website entitled "Informed consent disclosure to vaccine trial subjects of risk of COVID-19 vaccines worsening clinical disease" by Timothy Cardozo and Ronald Veazey as shown here:

The authors open by noting the following:

"Patient comprehension is a critical part of meeting medical ethics standards of informed consent in study designs. The aim of the study was to determine if sufficient literature exists to require clinicians to disclose the specific risk that COVID-19 vaccines could worsen disease upon exposure to challenge or circulating virus."

Here is another definition, also from the NIH website:

"Informed consent is the process in which a health care provider educates a patient about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of a given procedure or intervention. The patient must be competent to make a voluntary decision about whether to undergo the procedure or intervention. Informed consent is both an ethical and legal obligation of medical practitioners in the US and originates from the patient's right to direct what happens to their body. Implicit in providing informed consent is an assessment of the patient's understanding, rendering an actual recommendation, and documentation of the process. The Joint Commission requires documentation of all the elements of informed consent "in a form, progress notes or elsewhere in the record." The following are the required elements for documentation of the informed consent discussion: (1) the nature of the procedure, (2) the risks and benefits and the procedure, (3) reasonable alternatives, (4) risks and benefits of alternatives, and (5) assessment of the patient's understanding of elements 1 through 4.

It is the obligation of the provider to make it clear that the patient is participating in the decision-making process and avoid making the patient feel forced to agree to with the provider. The provider must make a recommendation and provide their reasoning for said recommendation."

In other words, medical practitioners have the legal and moral obligation to ensure that the people that they are treating understand the risks and benefits of the medical procedure (including vaccinations) and that they do not feel coerced into receiving the medical procedure.

Let's go back to the article by Cardozo and Veazey. The authors reviewed published literature and clinical trial protocols to identify evidence that COVID-19 vaccines could worse disease if the vaccine recipients are exposed to the wild virus. Here are the results of the study:

"COVID-19 vaccines designed to elicit neutralising antibodies may sensitise vaccine recipients to more severe disease than if they were not vaccinated. Vaccines for SARS, MERS and RSV have never been approved, and the data generated in the development and testing of these vaccines suggest a serious mechanistic concern: that vaccines designed empirically using the traditional approach (consisting of the unmodified or minimally modified coronavirus viral spike to elicit neutralising antibodies), be they composed of protein, viral vector, DNA or RNA and irrespective of delivery method, may worsen COVID-19 disease via antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This risk is sufficiently obscured in clinical trial protocols and consent forms for ongoing COVID-19 vaccine trials that adequate patient comprehension of this risk is unlikely to occur, obviating truly informed consent by subjects in these trials."

Since the technocracy has a way of making things disappear from the internet in this post-truth era, here is a screen capture of the entire article:

The authors concluded that the specific risk of ADE linked to the COVID-19 vaccines should have been prominently and independently disclosed to research subjects in trials and for future patients after the vaccines are approved for use. Given that the current crop of COVID-19 vaccines are not scheduled for completion for at least another year and that they are currently being used under an Emergency Use Authorization, one would think that providing informed consent to all vaccine recipients would be critical.

In closing, as one example, let's look at the COVID-19 vaccine consent form for the State of New York:

This is the only warning given to vaccine recipients about the nature of the COVID-19 vaccine that they are about to receive:

Here is Walgreen's Informed Consent document for COVID-19 and other vaccines:

I wonder how many recipients actually read all of the fine print which, as you will notice, says nothing about ADE? Note that recipients are stating that they were given the "chance to ask questions which were answered to my satisfaction" and that they "understand the benefits and risks of the vaccination as described". How many laypeople actually understand the risks and benefits of the mRNA vaccine technology let alone know what questions to ask? How many laypeople understand that the "jab" could well lead to a greater susceptibility to ADE, making future exposures to the new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus even riskier?

This study is the smoking gun in the COVID-19 narrative and is should be of particular interest to all of us given that it appears on the website of Anthony Fauci's employer. Recipients of COVID-19 vaccines are not properly being informed of the risks of antibody-dependent enhancement by governments, vaccine manufacturers, the mainstream media and public health officials. Most people have absolutely no concept of ADE and its potential impact on their future health and are being coerced into accepting an unproven vaccine with the promise of a return to societal normalcy by their governments (the carrot) and the threat of having their freedom restricted for the indefinite future (the stick), contradicting the very concept of informed consent.

John Cunnington is a dear friend, and former McMaster University associate professor. After a 38-year career as a respirologist and internal medicine physician, he retired in 2018.

_Long before COVID-19 appeared, I benefited from John’s insight into how the medical system works. I_n recent months, my mild-mannered friend has grown increasingly concerned. It seems to him that the medical ethics that guided his entire career are being tossed aside. I invited him to write down his thoughts. This is the first guest essay published on this blog:

By John Cunnington, MD

At the top of the medical hierarchy is the neurosurgeon. Neurosurgeons are surrounded by a mystique of omniscience and omnipotence. Imagine my surprise, therefore, as a lowly medical student, to discover that the senior neurosurgeon in our institution, Robert Hughes, was being sued for malpractice. In fact, Robert Hughes, to his chagrin, went on to make Canadian medical and legal history on the issue of informed consent.

In 1970 Hughes performed a carotid endarterectomy (cleaning out of the carotid artery to the brain) on a 44-year-old man, John Reibl, who then went on to suffer a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and unable to continue working. Reibl sued Hughes, claiming that he was not informed that he might suffer a stroke from this elective surgery, and that had he known this he would have delayed the surgery until he’d become eligible for a Ford Motor Company pension less than two years later.

Here is Reibl’s testimony to the Court:

Q. Did he talk to you about what would happen if you didn’t have the operation?

A. Yes, he said, “It is up to you if you want to have it or not. You can live a few years. You can live about 7 or 10 years or longer. One of these days you are going to fall on your nose, and that’s it. If you are going to do it now in the beginning you are not going to have any problem later.”

Q. Did Dr. Hughes say anything else about any risks of the operation?

A. He didn’t mention anything.

Reibl v Hughes went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada and in 1980 the Court articulated the current standard for informed consent, specifically that the physician (or other health care provider) “must give the patient sufficient information so that an objective, reasonable person in the patient’s position would be able to make an informed choice about a medical procedure”. The court defined failure to disclose the attendant risks as negligence.

Thus, in Canada, to receive a treatment or procedure, the subject must not just verbally agree and sign a consent form, but must give informed consent after having the risks explained to them.

Forty-one years after the Supreme Court decision our federal and provincial governments are engaged in a program of administering to the entire Canadian population above the age of 12, a completely new, untried, experimental, non-FDA approved, gene therapy treatment. This therapy, according to US and European government adverse vaccine reaction databases, is reasonably suspected of having killed thousands of people, and created serious injury in tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the long-term consequences of the therapy are simply unknown.

Are Canadians who are receiving this treatment getting this information? Are they being told what they need to know to give informed consent? A friend of mine recently got the injection. I asked him if he was informed of the possibility of side effects. He said none were mentioned!

As far as I can determine, Canadians are not being informed that there are risks. When they show up at the injection site it appears that they are told to sign a form and hold out their arm. Those giving the treatment are not discussing with them the pros and cons, the risks and benefits of the injection prior to “vaccine” administration. Most Canadians taking the shot have no idea that there is a risk of blood clotting disorders, such as pulmonary embolism and stroke, of life-threatening immune processes such as vaccine-induced thrombocytopenia, or that young people taking the shot are at risk of the potentially fatal complication of myocarditis (nor are they informed that the risk of Covid itself is almost negligible for the young and healthy). Such lack of information is a violation of the Supreme Court decision on consent. If you are injured by the vaccine and did not provide informed consent, you have grounds to sue your health authorities for negligence and damages.

Note: The onus is not on patients to do their own research. The onus is on the health care provider to inform patients of the risks so that an objective, reasonable person in the patient’s position would be able to make an informed choice. Does anyone really believe that a 12 to 15-year-old child is able to sufficiently understand the complex issues involved in experimental gene therapy to give informed consent? Does enticing children with ice cream (Toronto), or adults with a lottery (Alberta), constitute informed consent?

If Reibl v Hughes sets the standard for approved treatments, what then should be the standard for unapproved treatments, for experimentation on humans with new and untried technologies? As a consequence of experiments performed by Nazi doctors on concentration camp prisoners and the subsequent Nuremberg trials, that Court articulated ten research ethics principles to guide medical experimentation in humans. The first principle is that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential”. Although the Nuremberg Code, created more than 70 years ago, did not use the word “informed”, it did use the word “consent,” and it is hardly a stretch to conclude that the consent they spoke of was “informed consent”. Most Canadians taking these novel gene therapy injections have no idea that these “vaccines” are not an approved therapy, like a flu shot, and they are unaware that they are in fact being enrolled in clinical trials which are still ongoing.

Our federal and provincial governments, premiers, public health administrators and personnel are negligent in administering the Covid vaccines to tens of millions of Canadians without clearly informing them that this is an experimental therapy, one which could result in serious adverse events, including life-altering injuries or death, and that the long-term side effects, for example potential auto-immune diseases, are as yet unknown.

When governments use all the means in their power, including control of the media and widespread censorship of dissenting voices, to induce people to get a medical treatment without adequately informing them of the risks, they are violating the fundamental trust between the people and their government.

Joanna Sharp

I had not planned to travel abroad this year, especially after the UK government’s announcement in early 2021 that foreign holidays were forbidden. Even heading towards the airport with an intent to go on a foreign holiday could result in a £5000 fine or imprisonment! Surreal.

Where we live in London under a flight path to Heathrow, we notice that although there are fewer flights, they have not ceased completely. So how do people travel? It’s not something I have thought about.

One day at the end of April I receive a message that my elderly father’s condition is critical. Within an hour I am looking at flights back home in Eastern Europe and checking the UK government travel ‘advice’ webpages.

I say ‘advice’ but that word belongs to the past. Today, ‘command’ might be more appropriate. According to the government, only “essential” international travel is permitted for named valid reasons; ‘medical and compassionate’ is the category which applies to me.

I wonder whose compassion this is a reference to: mine, for wanting to be with my sick father, or the government’s for including this as a possibility. Reassured that I can go, it is now a question of buying the plane tickets, checking in and packing, right? Not quite.

Wading through the red tape

Since holiday travel has effectively been banned, the government created intricate webpages full of information on what is and what is not allowed, where citizens cannot travel, and if they must, what documents they need to prepare. So complicated travel advice alone has become that the webpage now includes a step by step flowchart with endless links within each step to be followed.

Getting through this information would take at least a day. It’s like a cross between a maze and a vortex. I soon understand that I cannot buy my tickets until I have uploaded the right Covid related paperwork onto the airline website!

First, I need to fill a Declaration for International Travel (since the 17th May it is no longer required) which asks for personal details including my date of birth, passport number, home address and destination.

The key question is the reason for international travel – and in the actual online questions, the phrase is: ‘What is your excuse for travel?’ My excuse? What kind of language is that? Am I asking a teacher to let me leave the classroom? Am I asked to explain why I haven’t done my homework?

That really shocks me, although I have already noticed my own reaction to the very idea that I need permission to leave the country, as if I was back in Eastern Europe before 1989…I read the following declaration and tick the right box out of the given options.

I hereby declare that my reason for being outside my home to travel internationally is for:

– Work
– Volunteering
– Education
– Medical or compassionate reasons
– Funeral
– Ending a temporary visit (non-UK resident)
– Allowing access to parents with children who do not live in the same country
– Other reasonable excuse – please specify

Next, I am required to sign to ‘certify that the information I have provided is true. I understand that if I provide false or misleading information, I may be issued with a fixed penalty notice and/or a direction to return home or be arrested’.

So, by signing this, and I have no choice not to if I want to get my ticket, I have given the UK authorities permission to arrest or fine me should my excuse to travel turn out to be incorrect. What if my father is not that ill, then what?

But of course, that is not enough. I now need to provide evidence of my father’s illness. How do you do that when the whole of the world is still in lockdown; imagine having to get a doctor’s note on demand. I am still just trying to get a ticket.

I want to travel tomorrow morning, my sister-in-law tells me, Dad is given a couple of days. I ask my brother to send me an email confirming the family crisis, he does that within an hour. He is also trying to copy the notes from my father’s last doctor’s visit and the most recent diagnosis.

Then, still before I buy a return ticket, I need to get a kit of two Covid tests which I will need to take upon return to UK. Another link takes me on to a list of government-approved Covid test providers. A whole list of them, each can be accessed via a separate link. I try a few. They average around £200 each. The cheapest ones are £99 but are sold out.

Why can’t I see any free NHS ones? The ones given out like sweets in schools and local pharmacies? Why are these not available? Why could I not just pick a free one at the airport?

But of course, there is no to answer these questions, I am desperate to leave so agree to this, too. No test, no flight. So, I order one of these almost £200 test kits, get an email confirming the order, upload all the documents and finally I can complete the purchase of my tickets which, as usual, turn out not so low cost after all.

I check in. My boarding card (lucky I had just bought a printer the previous week) says at the top of the page ‘Covid Documentation Uploaded’. So, now I have the boarding card and a pile of printed pages which presumably I will need to show at UK border control in order to prove my excuse for leaving the country is legitimate.

Finally, I download and fill in the compulsory Passenger Locator Form for the destination country that will enable the system to track and trace me. It is nearly bedtime and I now need to pack.

On the go

My husband drives me to Stansted in the middle of the night. An early morning flight, no public transport available but at least it’s quiet and there is no traffic. The airport is still closed; a group of families with young children are waiting for the door to open.

These are not holidaymakers breaking the law to get some forbidden fun. No idea where they are travelling but they look like they are going home somewhere south, southeast perhaps? Turkey, Bulgaria or Ukraine? No idea but they do look like part of the globalised chain of workforce escaping poverty and perhaps the lockdown has pushed them to return. Better to be jobless and poor in your own village. The weather tends to be better and the environment less hostile.

Finally, the doors open. I push the scarf up over my face, my hand clutching a plastic folder with a wad of documents allowing me to leave. It is quiet, no waiting. I go through security, passport control seems non-existent, shops still closed so nothing to stop for. I wonder at which point someone will ask me to see the papers. Ask me what my excuse for leaving is. Strangely, that never happens. I am almost disappointed. I spent about four hours sorting out all that paperwork the night before and now this is not even checked!

Immediately I catch myself: why am I disappointed? Because no one will give me the all-clear? Have I been conditioned to want to be waved through the green light already?

Perhaps that is how normalising oppression works. But of course, there is no need to check, the documents been uploaded and recorded somewhere and someone now knows everything about me, my plans, my reason (“excuse”) for leaving the country. Or perhaps the intimate details of my family crisis; my father’s terminal illness and my attempt to get to him before it’s too late have now just been converted into big data slushing around the corpo-government’s control AI machine, and turned into useful predictions.

I guess this type of authoritarianism does not even need stern looks from border control officials, no need to divulge private dramas in public. Hours of stress of getting the documents turned into a discreet but vital small print on my boarding card; the only visible proof that my travel is acceptable to the corpo-state. It is all so neat, tidy, hi-tech and invisible that we can just pretend that all is just normal.

After all, the airport trimmings look all the same; with adverts, duty-free shopping, same old queues at departure gates and same safety drills on the plane, down to the irritating Ryanair voice thanking us for choosing to fly with them (no one chooses to fly with Ryanair, just like no one chooses to go to the dentist, you do it because you have to and you hope it won’t be too unpleasant).

We can pretend nothing has changed. Except the masks on faces, of course. Slow drinking and eating is my solution. During the flight many noses protrude against the regulations, of course. People do need to breathe.

We land on time. I send a message to my father, anxious, hoping he is still there. He is not responding. I am worried. From the tarmac I can see the arrivals hall is full. There is no way of entering so the crowd from my plane stops outside and waits in the drizzle. I wonder why that is. Is that Brexit or is it that people’s papers are now checked after all?

The queue moves very slowly, twenty minutes after landing I send my father another message saying that I’m still waiting for border control. I have no idea why this is so slow; each person seems to spend a good few minutes at the control desk. Finally, an hour and a half after landing I get into the taxi. As the driver pulls away, I notice a long queue of passengers outside the arrivals hall waiting to get a Covid test. I arrive home and find my father hanging on.

My father’s illness

There is a twist to this story. My father has been treated for cancer but has been still doing quite well and has been planning to spend the summer away from his flat, in the countryside. His sudden deterioration it unexpected to me but I have not had time to think of reasons. I only learnt of this yesterday. But now I am in the flat, taking my shoes off when my brother drops the bombshell: ‘you know, Dad took the vaccine’.

I am shocked. He told me he was not going to, because he found the registration process too difficult, so he decided to stop trying. I was relieved; I had been persuading him that he should not, that being immunocompromised, his system might not cope. I told him what I knew and what I worried about. My brother tells me another family member helped organize his jab and took him there. Jesus. But I am to pretend I don’t know about it; Dad asked my brother not to tell me.

So, I learn that the day after the Pfizer jab he started to feel weak, and within ten days he was prescribed blood thinning injections, a daily drip and he became bedbound. My brother has hired a hospital-style bed and an oxygen machine, set them up in father’s bedroom and organized a private nurse for daily visits. Dad had not wanted to go to hospital: he believed that hospitals were overrun by contagious Covid patients and that going to hospital would mean certain death under a ventilator.

Luckily (I never thought I would say this), unlike the UK, this ex-communist country never managed to build up its own national health service to a level able to deliver comprehensive care, so a secondary private sector filling the gaps exists and is not beyond the means of many people. So here he is, in his own bedroom and getting care at home.

He is happy to see me but asks me not to touch him. I feel sad, guessing he might worry I am bringing contagion. That hurts. I pretend I know nothing about the jab. Later, much later, I remember this moment and think that, he might have wanted to protect me. He knew the jab made him ill and he worried he was fighting vaccine induced-Covid and did not want to give it to me.

He never told me about the vaccine, I never told him I knew.

Sunset in quarantine

Quarantine One: The App

The day after arriving I receive a text message telling me I am now under statute of law obliged to download a particular app and use it during my 10-day home quarantine. I start the download but can’t complete it. Something is stuck and I have no idea how to fix it. I try for a while and then abandon it. I spend most of the time caring for my father who now slips in and out of consciousness.

The next morning I get a phone call but it stops ringing before I have time to answer it. The following day the same happens. I realise this is the local track and trace. They ring but don’t wait for me to answer. Their call is logged, the box gets ticked but the robot or a human cannot be bothered to do the job properly. Actually, it must be a human as a robot would not give up. Good. The tyranny will fail due to human error or sheer laziness.

I don’t know what possessed me but somehow, I manage to complete installing the Quarantine App. The system springs into action. I get a message from the app that I must take a selfie within the next 30 minutes and submit it. I take a selfie from the app which gives me as many times as I like to choose the best shot. I choose the worst shot.

Of course, there is a way to cheat: after doing my selfie I could leave the phone at home and go out for a walk. Trouble is, the selfie demand comes at a different time each day, usually towards the end of the day. But I have no reason to go anywhere, really, I have come here to be with him, and his condition continues to be critical. And at some point, during this journey I decided that I would do everything by the book, just to see what the new normal travel feels and looks like, and what exactly they want us to experience.

Well, here I am, in a 10-day quarantine in a flat with my dying father. We are lucky. I have my brother to get the shopping in and kind neighbours ready to help. We are lucky my father is at home. What would be the point of coming here all this way, only to be stuck in quarantine if he was in a hospital with no visitors allowed? So, all in all, we are lucky.

Difficult days

Days go by, my father’s condition improves a little, I am his nurse, and of course I touch him – he stopped protesting as soon as he needed a glass of water; I continue to take my selfies. We talk, I read to him, feed him, then he sleeps. He dies two days after my quarantine ends. That is good timing.

There is a lot to do now, and I will not be breaking the law trying to organize the funeral…I remember my favourite literature lesson at school when we debated who was right: Creon or Antigone. Even then, I was in team Antigone.

A doctor arrives to certify death. She is nice and takes her time. Talks a little. Does not look like a corporate bot. She is sitting at a coffee table doing the paperwork. For the cause of death, she writes ‘Thrombosis’. I ponder for a bit and then hesitatingly say: ‘Did you know he was vaccinated?’.

Her face changes and she asks: ‘No, when?’ We tell her, ‘Four weeks ago, exactly’.

‘I am not allowed to say anything,’ she says, ‘but I can tell you I have seen a lot lately. A lot!’ We try to encourage her to talk more but she is cautious. I just ask her: ‘Why would a person on cancer treatment be given a vaccine? Surely that had not been done before?’ She looks at me and says: ‘Because they want to vaccinate us all.’ So, she knows.

This kind of conversation would have been typical in the days of strict communist authoritarianism before 1989. You never knew whom you could trust so you just dropped hints and checked for people’s response. In those days careless talk was dangerous, and I am too young to remember the worst times: the Stalinist years when children were encouraged to denounce their parents; many were imprisoned, tortured and killed.

Now the threat is only a loss of income and public humiliation and yet the new order based on lies, fraud and corrupt science is already in place. Everyone is just doing their job. A perfect example of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil in which those, following orders in this elaborate house of cards, often do not even know their active contribution to harm inflicted on others. They do not realise because they refuse to look and to know. They stopped taking responsibility for their individual part in the whole.

There is a small group of doctors in the country who are challenging the official narrative, attempt to offer treatment for Covid patients and warn against the untested ‘vaccines’, particularly now that governments want to jab children. Their voices are censored, the people get smeared, ridiculed and shamed by the professional licensing medical body. The modern-day governance in Western democracies!

Travelling home

As the funeral preparations get underway, I need to organise my return travel. I check the UK government website again. Travelling from an ‘amber’ coded country, I must test negative for Covid within 72 hours prior to departure. Tricky when the flight is on Monday afternoon.

I start to search for UK government-approved tests available in the city. Only a handful provide the specified UK approved antigen test with results in English. They are also open only in the mornings so if I test on Friday morning, I might be testing a few hours too early to fit within the 72 hours.

After hours of online searching, I find one that looks almost right. I pay the equivalent of £35 online and am told to come on the day, without an appointment. The laboratory website provides useful advice, how to prepare for the test. I learn that I should not brush my teeth or use mouthwash on the morning of test. So now I know what to do.

I arrive at the testing centre early, having heard that queues can be quite long. It is, and it is in the street. The lab’s waiting room only allows three people at a time so the rest stand outside. After about an hour it is my turn. I am allowed inside the surgery.

On the right, by the door, a masked man sitting at a desk behind a glass screen is checking my name and the type of test I have purchased. Then, a young tall, man in full white hazmat suit, his face covered, and in protective glasses ushers me to sit on a chair and tip my head backwards.

This is my first Covid test ever and I am terrified. I have rehearsed telling them how sensitive my face feels and asking not to go deep but there is no eye contact, no talk trying to help me feel comfortable, no attempt to put me at ease. He just tells me to tip my head back far.

I just manage to ask him to go into the left nostril as my right one is not straight. He happily obliges and shoves the long stick into my nostril. As soon as the tip enters my nose I feel shock, a feeling of something unnatural, wrong and threatening happening. The area he just touched is too soft, sensitive and the sensation so unfamiliar I involuntarily, and to my own shock, find myself pushing the man’s arm away. He moves back and looks at me, his body language (there is no face available) disapproves of my behaviour.

I say, please don’t go that deep, you already have some but he insists, tells me not to defend myself and does it again. And again, that feeling that a part of me which is vulnerable and should not be touched, gets scraped. He gets his sample and nods for me to go. I am frozen in that chair, unable to move for what seems like a while. I have tears in my eyes, and I am alone with two hazmat wearing robots. No word is uttered as I leave.

I get my negative result within hours. I recover with an old friend. By then I have a splitting headache and my left nostril is moist with a slight leak. The headache lasts for a couple of days but the leak persists for at least ten.

I arrive at the airport early because I have difficulties completing the UK Passenger Locator Form which UK needs from all passengers. I pass through a manned gate with an automatic wrist temperature check. The airport is unusually quiet, and the staff help me identify the problem which stops me from completing the form. The reference number for the double Covid test needed for the Passenger Locator Form is wrong. I ring home and ask my husband to read the reference number off the Covid test kit. Surely it has arrived now. It hasn’t. It looks like the Day 2 and 8 Test I ordered has not been paid for.

I am told I need to buy a new kit if I want to get this flight. I do as I’m told. No form, no flight. I stand next to the luggage drop off counter feeling sweats, and with my hands shaking I battle the website on my phone. Again, all the ‘cheap’ ones are sold out and somehow, at the last minute I manage to make a purchase for £180, get an email, a reference number, complete the form and have my luggage accepted.

I hurry to my gate and make it just in time as passengers are starting to board. I slow down to join the Ryanair herd waiting on the tarmac for the aircraft to be processed before we are told we can travel.

The pavement is marked with lines at 2-meter intervals. Two men behind me are joking loudly that we must stand on the lines correctly, otherwise the virus will jump on us. I turn and smile (no mask, we are still outside) and make eye contact with the fellow humans.

Quarantine Two: Track and Trace

Back home in London, the following day I get my first out of ten phone calls from Track and Trace. Each time a different voice reads the same script.

I am contacting you on behalf of the NHS Test and Trace as you have recently travelled into the UK from abroad. Are you happy to continue in English?”

No idea what would happen if I said ‘no’.

Before we proceed, I need to make you aware that this call will be recorded for training and quality improvement purposes and should just take a few minutes of your time. I can confirm I have completed the necessary data security training and all information you provide today will be stored securely. NHS Test and Trace may need to share your details with other organisations including the Home Office, and further information on data security and privacy can be found on www.gov.uk/coronavirus. Sharing information in the call today means you consent for it to be stored in the ways I have described. Are you happy to proceed with the call?”

I wish I could say, no, I am not. Once or twice I ask how long the data is going to be stored. The caller is not sure and advises me to find this out from the government website. The call proceeds with them checking my year of birth. Then they ask if I have opted into a ‘test to release’ – I frankly don’t even know it is my option, so I say ‘no’.

I later learn that the Test to Release scheme does not replace the compulsory Day 2 and 8 test. The ten-day quarantine can be shortened to 5 days by ‘opting into’ Test to Release for an additional £99. I realise they ask this question to advertise another product!

Can you confirm that you are quarantining at the address you provided on the passenger locator form and will continue to do so for ten days starting on the day after you arrive in the UK.”

So, again, I confirm, yes. What would happen if I said no?

As part of the Covid 19 response you are legally required to take the test on Day 2 and Day 8 and a failure to do so may result in prosecution.”

That answers my previous question…

Has your test arrived? And have you taken or do you intend to take your test?”

Yes.

Then I am asked if I got my test from the NHS or from a private provider. I am confused as I had no option to get an NHS test and I tell the caller. They seem happy with my answer and continue:

If your Day 2 test is positive confirming Covid 19, you do not need to take another test on Day 8.”

I think, on one occasion, I ask how I am expected to post the test if I am not allowed to leave the house. Of course, the assumption is there is someone else in the house, and if I still have difficulties, again, the go-to place is another NHS number. Amazing what they can do these days; they can even pick up your mail for you!

The call continues:

If you develop any of the three coronavirus symptoms which are: a new continuous cough, a high temperature, or a loss or change to your sense of taste or smell, please visit www.gov.uk/coronavirus for further advice. You should not go to the GP, hospital or a pharmacy. If you require medical advice, please ring the NHS on 111 or in an emergency dial 999”.

So here we have the admission of medical malpractice: if I fall ill, I must not seek help from NHS, not even by going to my local pharmacy. I must stay home without help, except of course, if I qualify for 999 ie, a ventilator…

The call continues:

I must advise you that if you test positive for coronavirus or are identified as a close contact of someone who has coronavirus you will be notified by NHS Test and Trace and may be contacted again. Is there anything you would like me to repeat?”

Of course, if someone I sat next to on the (half-empty) plane gets a positive result, my quarantine will stretch to a fortnight or longer! Each time, the call ends with a friendly, youthful, ‘have a great day’. All those who have called me are young voices, all kinds of accents, probably desperate for any job in the current climate. They are trained to stick to the script and any departure from it by my questions seems to trip them up.

And most of them probably think they are doing something socially useful and valuable.

The quarantine DIY tests

The one I have purchased in haste at the airport is a kit with two PCR tests to be administered at home on Day 2 and Day 8. The instructions tell me that the test is run at less than a 30-cycle value threshold.

The first thing to say about the swab is that it is long. It looks like a cotton bud used for everyday use, but on closer inspection it is different. The stick itself is about 12 cm long, that’s 6”, and designed to break off after the sample is collected and put into a small tube provided. The tip itself is 2 cm long, quite thin and covered in almost translucent spiky bristles protruding outwards. It looks a bit like a miniature harsh brush designed to scratch the delicate tissue inside the mouth and nose.

I am told to swab the back of the throat for 3-5 seconds over the posterior pharynx and tonsillar areas but to avoid tongue, teeth and the sides of the mouth. Then I am told to insert the same swab to each nostril about 2 cm deep and to rotate it for 3-5 seconds each time.

The form which I have to complete for each test is yet another mandated opportunity for the corpo-government to harvest my personal data, to store it for as long as it sees fit, yet, as is often the case in abusive relationships I have to (I repeat:) I have to give my consent for all this to happen, and even consent for my possible positive test result which may include my personal details: name, date of birth, gender, home address, telephone number, occupation, place of work, ethnicity and the fact that I have tested positive for Covid 19 to be communicated to Public Health England. Luckily, both of my test results are negative.

Eleven days after arrival in the UK my quarantine is officially over. It takes me a couple of days before I venture outside, I detect a bit of agoraphobia. In the last six weeks I spent twenty days in house arrest. They say it takes six weeks to develop a new habit.

Postscriptum

I doubt very much I will travel internationally any time soon. Not planning to take the experimental Covid jab and so will not be enjoying the privilege of freedom promised to those with the vaccine passport. At the time of writing, it is no longer illegal to leave England but the elaborate hoops and the red tape remain and the government website reminds us that “to protect public health in the UK and the vaccine rollout, you should not travel to countries or territories on the red or amber lists”.

The ‘red and amber’ lists cover most countries of the world and returning from an amber list country will involve three or four tests which could come to £240-£340 per person plus the time spent completing all the online forms.

As to the red list countries; even a short spell there ends in an expensive £1750 per person prison-like stay at an airport hotel, as can be seen here.

So whilst not forbidden, even essential travel has been made into a series of expensive, degrading and time-consuming obstacles. Vaccine passports are being rolled out precisely to convince people they will magically bring freedom back to their lives. Do they not realise, that once they have their passports, the vaccine will need regular boosters?

Those still asleep; trusting the governments and the mainstream media think that easy travel is only temporarily put on hold but once the pandemic is ‘under control’, things will get back to the way they used to be. They do not realise the plan is to make travel an exclusive and rare event beyond reach of ordinary people.

This is done to us not just by the predatory elite class. Disappointingly, the pro-lockdown left continues to cheer these restrictions on and dismiss people’s desire and need to travel, as undeserved indulgence or middle-class privilege (interestingly, unrestricted travel around Europe was, until so recently, one of the main reasons for their fierce anti-Brexit position. What happened to their cherished principle of freedom of movement?). They could not be further from the truth.

They forget that, according to official migration data for the end of 2019, the UK is home to 6.2 million people – that is 9% of the total population – who have the nationality of a different country! And that data does not even include naturalised UK citizens like me, first-generation settled migrants who have close relatives all over the world and that unrestricted travel is an essential means to family life, something which is protected by Human Rights Act 1998.

The irony for those like myself, who grew up in communist Eastern Europe, is that freedom of movement, so taken for granted in the West, the right to travel and to have your own passport at home at all times is what we did not have then. The state set limits on where ‘citizens’, treated like its property, could travel.

For many who experienced those times, even as children, a return to state-mandated travel restrictions will feel like going back into tyranny.

As for my own journey: I will never forgive those responsible and all those lockdown fanatics for stealing my Dad’s, and so many other elderly people’s, last year by locking them up in the prison of fear and isolation, and then for pushing them to take the dangerous experimental jab which – for so many – was the last straw in their already weakened bodies.

Joanna Sharp is an academic living in London.

Imagine a world where you can be jailed for attempting to protect your child from medical assault. A future where you can no longer object to your child being subjected to medicalized gay conversion ‘therapy.’ A country where the government can legally enforce a belief system and criminalize anyone who goes against that system of belief. No, I’m not talking about Iran… I’m talking about Canada.

On Friday, April 16, a father in Canada, Rob Hoogland, was sentenced to serve 6 months in jail for the crime of attempting to protect his child from medical assault, for speaking up, for refusing to abide by a legally enforced belief system — gender ideology. For parents in Canada, this is their new reality. And other countries, like the US, aren’t far behind.

The ordeal began several years ago, when Hoogland discovered that his 12-year-old daughter’s name had been changed in the 7th grade yearbook. From there, the truth unraveled — His child had been shown SOGI 123 ‘education’ videos (gender ideology indoctrination propaganda) at her school. She then decided she was a boy, the school ‘affirmed’ the child as a transexual and ‘socially transitioned’ her without informing her parents. The school kept this all a secret from the parents in accordance with the B.C. Ministry of Education’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Policy, which dictates that parents have no right to know what their child’s “preferred sex, gender, or name” is at school.

The school sent the child to see a psychologist, Wallace Wong, who treats “transgender” children as young as 2, and who, at an event hosted by Vancouver Public Library, admitted that he advises kids to fake being suicidal. Wong sent the family to the endocrinology unit at the B.C. Children’s Hospital.

“So what you need is, you know what? Pull a stunt. Suicide, every time, [then] they will give you what you need…” — Wallace Wong

On their first visit to the endocrinology unit, the doctor laid out a plan to medically ‘change’ Hoogland’s, then 13-year-old, child’s sex (to male), including injections of testosterone. Hoogland wouldn’t sign off. He noted his child said she was a lesbian, prior to deciding she was a boy, and thought she might be going through a phase. He also noted his child had obsessive tendencies and mental issues — His daughter had been infatuated with 2 male teachers, to the extent the school had to intervene, and in the 8th grade, while being ‘affirmed’ as a boy, his daughter had attempted suicide.

When his daughter was 14, the hospital informed Hoogland that they would be medicalizing his child in accordance with the B.C. Infants Act, and that according to the B.C. Infants Act, they didn’t need parental consent to do so.

Young people do not reach full cognitive brain development till around the age of 25, yet the B.C. Infants Act says a minor can consent to medical treatments. While this makes sense in the context of life-saving surgery (where, for example, a Jehovah’s Witness can otherwise prevent a hospital from saving their child’s life), when it comes to something as serious as chemical castration or the surgical removal of a minor’s sex organs, a young person can not possibly give “informed consent.” The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that determines our ability to understand repercussions, consequences, and develops our sense of identity, among other things, simply isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties.

Furthermore, most youth who are diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” would otherwise grow up to be LGB, if they are allowed to grow up — Statistically speaking, 75% would grow up to be LGB, and 85% would grow up to be LGB or straight. What’s being legally enforced is a massive human rights violation of gay and lesbian youth, and a human rights violation of youth in general. Not to mention a violation of every single adult forced, legally, to lie and go along with it.

In 2019, Judge Francesca Marzari convicted Hoogland of “family violence” for using female pronouns when speaking about his daughter, and signed an order authorizing the police to arrest him if he was caught using language in a way that acknowledged his child as biologically female.

In March, Hoogland was arrested and held behind bars without bail. Hoogland’s lawyer, Carey Linde, commented, “He’s been sitting out in a government-supplied bed cot, in a small cement cubicle with iron bars, for speaking his mind, and he will stay there until the trial starts at 2 p.m. on the 12th of April.”

On Friday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Michael Tammen, said Hoogland had “blatantly, willfully and repeatedly” broken the rules, speaking out, and that a “strong denunciatory sentence” was necessary.

Hoogland has been ordered to serve six-months in jail. Additionally, the judge — noting the father’s crowdfunding website, which raised $56,000 to help him in this case — was ordered to donate $30,000 to Ronald McDonald House of B.C. and the Yukon, after he is released from jail.

Youtube: Rob Hoogland

On April 16, Chris Elston, a father and activist who sat in on the hearings, tweeted that Hoogland “pleaded guilty to violating the gag order by speaking out, naming the doctors involved, and publishing documents like this consent form that his daughter signed when she was only 13 years old,” commenting, “many young women get prophylactic hysterectomies after about 5 years on testosterone because the risk of cancer is so high. Prolonged testosterone use also causes abdominal pain, and vaginal and uterine atrophy, requiring hysterectomies. Can a 13-year-old girl consent to her own sterilization? The doctor at B.C. Children’s Hospital thought so after meeting with the child for just one hour.”

On April 14, Elton tweeted “Linde gets back to the Tavistock decision. The issue at the heart of this is whether a child can give informed consent. Seeing as we know very little about the long-term effects of these drugs, obviously they cannot.” However, it seems as though the judge wasn’t all too interested in whether or not a young person can give “informed consent.”

Landmark Case in the Fight to Protect Nonconforming Youth

Tavistock decision

While it may be clear, to anyone logical, that this father was speaking out in an attempt to protect his child from medical malpractice, the judge said he didn’t accept that the father’s “intention was otherwise than to attempt to undermine the authority of the courts and overall administration of justice.”

After the judge implied that he planned to inflict a longer jail term than the Crown recommended, the father took another turn on the stand and explained that during his time held in jail, he thought about his actions and realized he might’ve been used as a “pawn” and “played,” and influenced by new friends.

On Friday, the judge said he went with less jail time than he initially considered, due to the father’s last minute expression of remorse, his agreement to make efforts to remove information on his case from the internet, and the “eloquent” plea made on his behalf by Jenn Smith (a trans-identified advocate who publicly challenges gender ideology).

In recent years, a number of clinicians have come forward to say they left their jobs because their gender clinic was knowingly performing gay conversion therapy. A modest number of independent doctors have stepped up and spoken up as well.

In October, the Keira Bell (Tavistock) case demonstrated that young people have been subjected to medical malpractice. We have been seeing, and will be seeing a lot more, young people come out of this system feeling deeply violated. And rightly so… They’re being sexually and medically assaulted by the medical field.

Parents who send their kids to school, and let their kids access the internet, where gender ideologists run rampant, now run the risk of being forced to watch (or worse still, be jailed) as their children are ripped away, drugged, sterilized, and assaulted by the medical field — a field that’s forever been obsessed with pathologizing and medicalizing those who don’t conform.

The efforts to require every American to be injected with an experimental vaccine for Covid-19 are based on the false notion that vaccination will protect recipients from becoming infected with SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, or protect them from passing along the infection to other people.

The FDA, the CDC, the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies involved have all stated very clearly that there is no evidence to support this idea.

None of the three experimental Covid-19 vaccines now being distributed in the United States have been demonstrated to protect against infection with or transmission of the virus believed to cause Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2), or even prevent symptoms of Covid-19 disease from developing.

This fact is indisputable, yet media, medical providers, and politicians continue to repeat the lie that vaccination provides “immunity to Covid” and even sources like the Mayo Clinic make irresponsible and unsubstantiated claims that vaccination “might prevent you from getting” or “spreading” Covid-19. The same lies are the basis for President Biden’s hard press for mass vaccination to “make this Independence Day truly special.”

On February 27, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced it had “issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the third vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),” the Janssen (Johnson&Johnson) Covid-19 vaccine.

This announcement is virtually identical to the EUAs previously issued for Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer-Biontech and Moderna.

In each of the EUAs, the FDA has been careful to avoid any claim that the vaccines provide protection against infection or transmission of the virus. Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have each publicly stated that the vaccines have NOT been shown to prevent infection or transmission.

All of their regulatory documents and commentary addressing the issue state clearly that there is no evidence that the vaccines affect either infection with or transmission of the virus, nor do they prevent symptoms of Covid-19 from appearing.

The US Government Position

The FDA’s Briefing Document analyzing clinical trial data for the Pfizer vaccine, released the day before the FDA’s issuance of an EUA for that vaccine, noted (on page 47):

Data are limited to assess the effect of the vaccine against asymptomatic infection

And:

Data are limited to assess the effect of the vaccine against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 [virus] from individuals who are infected despite vaccination.”

The FDA Briefing Document on the Moderna vaccine stated the same fact, while also describing plans for a future clinical trial to measure infection prevention, but that will not be completed until December 31, 2023 (p.47). The FDA’s review of the Janssen vaccine noted the same “limited” data…

to assess the effect of the vaccine in preventing asymptomatic infection… and definitive conclusions cannot be drawn at this time.”

“Limited data” means there is in fact no evidence to support those conclusions.

The CDC Advisory Committee that recommended emergency use of the Moderna vaccine noted:

“the level of certainty for the benefits of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was… type 4 (very low certainty) for the estimates of prevention of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and all-cause death.”

The CDC guidance to Covid vaccine administrators (January 2, 2021) asks:

Can a person who has received a Covid-19 vaccine still spread COVID-19? At this time, we do not know if COVID-19 vaccination will have any effect on preventing transmission.”

The World Health Organization (WHO) on January 26, 2021 similarly admitted:

We do not know whether the vaccines will prevent infection and protect against onward transmission.”

This is all very confusing due to the language the FDA, NIH and other agencies use to describe the potential effectiveness of the vaccines. For example, in the NIH analysis of the Janssen vaccine data, the authors note the vaccine’s reported effectiveness in “preventing moderate and severe COVID-19 in adults.”

This deliberately blurs the distinction between infection with a virus (SARS-Cov-2) and the illness called Covid-19.

The NIH claims the Janssen vaccine prevents or lessens symptoms of the illness Covid-19, but is silent on whether the vaccine prevents infection or transmission of the virus said to cause Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2). The similar analysis for the Moderna vaccine notes, however:

“[T]here is not yet enough available data to draw conclusions as to whether the [Moderna] vaccine can impact SARS-CoV-2 transmission.”

Unfortunately, we have seen many reports over the last few months of deaths attributed to Covid-19 days and weeks after vaccination (see here and here (video)), confirming that vaccinated people can and do become infected with the virus.

Health officials have avoided blaming these deaths on side effects from the vaccines themselves. Instead, they say these deaths are the result of infections with the virus (SARS-Cov-2) acquired after receiving the vaccines.

Particularly devastating reports from an isolated Kentucky monastery describe how two nuns died of Covid-19 after receiving Covid-19 vaccines, despite the complete absence of any cases of infection in the monastery during the ten months prior to vaccination.

Moderna’s chief science officer was quoted in the British Medical Journal about the clinical trials in 2020 that resulted in the FDA’s decision to grant a EUA to the Moderna shot:

Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission,” Zaks said, “because in order to do that you have to swab people twice a week for very long periods, and that becomes operationally untenable.”

The most important questions about the experimental Covid-19 vaccines were not even asked during the clinical trials: Do these experimental vaccines prevent infection with the virus and do they prevent transmission of that virus? The short answer is No.

The FDA has stated clearly in each of the Covid vaccine Briefing Documents (see Moderna document here, Pfizer here, Janssen here) that the trials were not even designed prove or disprove a hypothesis that the vaccines prevent infection or transmission of the virus, or even prevent symptoms of Covid-19 from developing.

The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for the Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen vaccines on December 11 and December 18, 2020, and on February 27, 2021, respectively.

The EUAs indicate that the vaccines “prevent severe Covid-19,” that is, they don’t prevent infection or development of symptoms after infection, but they may make the illness less severe.

The EUAs explicitly deny any evidence that the Pfizer, Moderna or Janssen vaccines prevent infection, or prevent hospitalization or even death from Covid-19 after vaccination. The highly publicized “success rates” of the vaccines refer only their potential ability to lessen the severity of those symptoms, but there is “no data” that they prevent the infection that could cause those symptoms.

Mandating Vaccination Under Emergency Use Authorization is Impermissible

An EUA is not “FDA Approval.”

An EUA indicates that a product has not been fully tested but, despite the obvious risks, distribution is permitted because the government declared a “public health emergency” in January 2020.

As the FDA notes in its Information Sheet for the Moderna shot:

The Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA- approved or cleared product.”

The FDA granted EUAs for all three experimental vaccines after less than five months of clinical trials, with most of trial data still to be collected. All three vaccines will be in clinical trial status through January 31, 2023.

According to comments from vaccine scientists in September 2020 (prior to the Covid-19 EUA issuances), no vaccine had ever before been distributed on an EUA basis.

“We don’t do EUAs for vaccines,” [Dr. Peter] Hotez said, “It’s a lesser review, it’s a lower-quality review, and when you’re talking about vaccinating a large chunk of the American population, that’s not acceptable.”

Three months later, the FDA issued EUAs for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but with explicit guidance that the vaccine “has not undergone the same type of review as an FDA- approved or cleared product.”

Indeed, the highly experimental nature of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine, in particular, is extraordinary as that vaccine is the first and only product the company has ever been allowed to distribute, and it was allegedly developed in only two days.

Any use of an experimental vaccine under an EUA must be voluntary and recipients must be informed “of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product, of the consequences, if any, of refusing administration of the product, and of the alternatives to the product that are available and of their benefits and risks.

This information is repeated in small print on each of the FDA Covid-19 vaccine Fact Sheets, but it is largely ignored.

Dr Amanda Cohn, the executive secretary of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, was asked in October 22, 2020, if the new Covid-19 vaccines could be legally required. She responded that, under a EUA:

Vaccines are not allowed to be mandatory. So, early in this vaccination phase, individuals will have to be consented and they won’t be able to be mandatory.”

Under EUA status, the government is not permitted to require Covid-19 vaccinations because the vaccines are not FDA-approved and recipients are clinical trial participants. This is why states cannot legally require vaccination, despite suggestions by some legislators to do just that.

Indeed, the US military is barred from mandating the vaccines. This ban on government vaccine mandates explains why some private companies are trying to require vaccination of employees, which makes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on this issue potentially relevant.

The EEOC Guidance on Covid-19 Vaccination Does Not Authorize Vaccine Mandates

The EEOC updated its guidance on the issue of Covid-19 vaccination on December 16, 2020.

This update appeared five days after the FDA issued an EUA for the Pfizer vaccine and two days prior to issuing the Moderna EUA. Based on this timing, we can safely assume that the EEOC was well-aware of the contents of the FDA briefing documents and Fact Sheets, specifically the FDA statements about the lack of proof that the vaccines prevent infection with or transmission of the virus (SARS-CoV-2).

The EEOC guidance evaluates the idea of employer Covid-19 vaccine mandates under the Americans with Disabilities Act’s (ADA) “direct threat” analysis:

The ADA allows an employer to have a qualification standard that includes ‘a requirement that an individual shall not pose a direct threat to the health or safety of individuals in the workplace.’“

But the EEOC’s analysis presupposes that vaccines protect against infection, which is false.

The “direct threat” doctrine is an employer’s potential defense to a claim of disability discrimination under the ADA. According to the EEOC, “A conclusion that there is a direct threat would include a determination that an unvaccinated individual will expose others to the virus at the worksite.”

The specific but theoretical “direct threat” described here is one allegedly posed by an unvaccinated person who might become infected with the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and then spread infection to the workplace.

But no “determination” of such a threat is possible. The EEOC was careful to state only that a direct threat defense “would include” such a “determination.” The EEOC took no position on this issue because officials there were likely aware there has been no determination that vaccination prevents infection or transmission, and none is possible with current data.

Aspirational claims that vaccination “might” [be eventually be shown to] prevent infection or that “some data tends to show” such an effect are insufficient bases for a direct threat defense.

The US Supreme Court ruled in Bragdon v Abbott (1988) that the assertion of a direct threat defense must be evaluated “in light of the available medical evidence,” noting that “the views of public health authorities, such as the U.S. Public Health Service, CDC, and the National Institutes of Health, are of special weight and authority.”

Overcoming the long-standing protections of the right to bodily integrity and informed, voluntary consent to medical treatment requires articulation of an actual and imminent, not theoretical, threat presented by an unvaccinated person in the workplace.

The CDC, the National Institutes of Health and numerous other “public health authorities” have all stated that there is no evidence to show that vaccination prevents viral infection or transmission, a fact the EEOC should have presented but did not.

The EEOC guidance does not provide any legal cover for employers to require vaccination. The guidance proposes that employers might be successful in proving a direct threat if they were able to prove facts which, it turns out, cannot be proven.

Even more importantly, according to the CDC, more than 29 million Americans (and likely many, many more) have already contracted the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and recovered from it.

A recent NIH study demonstrates that these millions of “recovered” people have long-lasting, and likely permanent protection from re-infection. They present no threat of infection or transmission of the virus. However, under a blanket employer vaccine requirement, these people who are already immune would still be required to get vaccinated. It makes no sense logically or legally to require the vaccination of people who already have more protection from the virus than people who get vaccinated.

What is the Threat Prevented by Mandatory Vaccination?

Outside the employment context, companies are demanding proof of vaccination from travelers and even movie- and concert-goers, based on the same debunked idea that vaccination with one of the Covid-19 vaccines will prevent the theoretical spread of the virus in trains, planes, movie theaters and concert halls among low-risk populations. But the relevant government agencies have all stated clearly that that the vaccines do not prevent infection or the spread of infection.

The benefit from any vaccination lies with the recipient of the vaccine. In the case of Covid-19 vaccines, vaccinated people may have fewer symptoms after becoming infected. While this is an important consideration for many people, this benefit has nothing to do with preventing the spread of the virus SARS-Cov-2.

A vaccinated person presents at least the same “risk” of infection and transmission of the virus (if not more risk) as a person who is not vaccinated. At best, vaccination might prevent a more serious case of Covid-19 illness from developing. The vaccines do not prevent infection or the spread of the virus that causes Covid-19. They can have little or no impact on stopping transmission.

Because no one has shown that vaccination prevents infection or transmission of the virus SARS-CoV-2, a fact undisputed by all official sources, this also means that vaccination cannot help to achieve the goal of herd immunity.

“Herd immunity” means that a population can be protected from a virus after enough of the population has become immune to infection, either through exposure to the virus and later recovery, or through vaccination.

But with Covid-19, there is no proof that vaccination makes anyone immune to the virus SARS-CoV-2. Covid-19 vaccination cannot play any meaningful role in the pursuit of herd immunity because the Covid-19 vaccines do not provide immunity from infection.

Oddly, the WHO contradicts itself in arguing that Covid-19 vaccination promotes herd immunity to the virus that causes Covid-19, claiming:

To safely achieve herd immunity against COVID-19, a substantial proportion of a population would need to be vaccinated, lowering the overall amount of virus able to spread in the whole population.”

This statement is simply false. It also contradicts the WHO’s prior admission that “We do not know whether the vaccines will prevent infection and protect against onward transmission.”

If the WHO has already acknowledged that it “does not know if” the Covid-19 vaccines protect people from becoming infected or transmitting the virus, it is a deliberate lie to claim that somehow these vaccines can lead to herd immunity.

A far more useful strategy than forcing people to accept an experimental vaccine that does not even protect them from infection would be to instead protect those most vulnerable to serious illness or death as a result of infection. Tens of thousands of renowned doctors and scientists in the U.S. and around the world proposed such a strategy in October 2020.

Unfortunately, the media and Silicon Valley tech monopolies attacked and effectively censored discussion of this common sense approach as “anti-science” and “right wing” by removing discussion of the proposal from nearly all media platforms.

Yet the fake “scientific” approach to herd immunity touted by the WHO, US government agencies and politicians, and media monopolists is blatantly dishonest, and has nothing to do with “science.” The push by private companies to require vaccination and “immunity passports” is similarly based on private financial interests, not scientific research.

Government scientists admit that the Covid-19 vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of the virus they say causes Covid-19, but many of these same scientists also dishonestly claim the vaccines will somehow prevent the spread of the virus, leading to herd immunity.

Such an approach is not only unscientific and dishonest. It’s nonsense.

P Jerome is civil rights attorney based in Washington, D.C. He can be reached at [email protected]