Tag: Lockdown

  • In light of the current COVID-related situation in India, Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US adviser on COVID, has called for India to implement a hard lockdown and for the mass roll-out of vaccines.

    However, Fauci has no clue and no authority to lecture on what is good for India.

    That is the view of journalist Ratna Chakraborty. Writing on the Empire Diaries website, she argues that the US is a rich nation, prints the world’s reserve currency, has robust financial coverage for the jobless and its population is spread out.

    On the other hand, India is finance-strained, has a brittle economy that lives on the brink of disaster, does not have any financial coverage for the jobless, is densely populated and its people mostly live in congested clusters.

    Given the government’s incompetence and the callousness demonstrated towards poorer sections of Indian society the first time around, Chakraborty says any new lockdown would again result in disaster. She adds that nothing has been learnt, with no attempt to upgrade the healthcare set-up nationwide.

    It is worth recalling what renowned academic and activist Noam Chomsky said about India’s first lockdown.

    During an interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! back in May 2020, Chomsky said:

    … you can almost describe it as genocidal. Modi gave, I think, a four-hour warning before a total lockdown. That’s (affected) over a billion people. Some of them have nowhere to go.

    He added:

    People in the informal economy, which is a huge number of people, are just cast out. Go walk back to your village, which may be a thousand miles away. Die on the roadside. This is a huge catastrophe in the making…

    During the first lockdown in India, rural affairs commentator P Sainath painted a dreary picture of the impacts, not least the desperate plight of migrant workers, a shortage of cash to buy food and a potential shortage of food as farmers were unable to complete their harvests.

    Sainath also reported the views of Dr. Sundararaman, a former executive director of the National Health Systems Resources Centre, who argued that there was a desperate need to:

    identify and act on the reverse migrations problem and the loss of livelihoods. Failing that, deaths from diseases that have long tormented mostly poor Indians could outstrip those brought about by the corona virus.

    Regardless of the destructive impact of the first lockdown in India and the questionable efficacy of lockdowns in terms of what they are supposed to achieve, another one would further push hundreds of millions towards poverty and hunger. It would merely fuel and accelerate the impoverishment caused by the first lockdown.

    A new report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University (APU) has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels even by late 2020.

    The report, ‘State of Working India 2021 – One year of Covid-19’ highlights how almost half of formal salaried workers moved into the informal sector and that 230 million people fell below the national minimum wage poverty line.

    Even before COVID, India was experiencing its longest economic slowdown since 1991 with weak employment generation, uneven development and a largely informal economy. A recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy highlights the structural weaknesses of the economy and the often desperate plight of ordinary people.

    The study also found that there was a loss in monthly earnings for all types of workers: 13% for casual workers, 18% for the self-employed, 17% for those with temporary salaries, 5% for the permanent salaried and 17% overall.

    The poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%. The study noted the implications for debt traps.

    Six months later, it was also noted that food intake was still at lockdown levels for 20% of vulnerable households.

    How bad is COVID?

    Given this impact, before listening to prominent individuals with apparent conflicts of interest related to vaccine roll-outs (see the editorial in the British Medical Journal ‘Covid-19, Politicisation, Corruption, and Suppression of Science’), the current COVID-related situation in India must be contextualised. The sensationalism needs to be put to one side.

    According to Yohan Tengra, a Mumbai-based political analyst and healthcare specialist, the true number of infection rates can only be known by testing symptomatic people who have tested positive with either a virus culture test or PCR test that uses 24 cycles or less.

    The PCR test has been used as the gold standard for COVID cases around the world. But it has been sharply criticised for being inaccurate, inappropriate, for using cycles in excess of 40 (thereby inflating the numbers) and for producing ‘false positives’.

    It seems that even the Swedish Ministry of Health now thinks that it is not fit for purpose:

    The PCR technology used in tests to detect viruses cannot distinguish between viruses capable of infecting cells and viruses that have been neutralised by the immune system and therefore these tests cannot be used to determine whether someone is contagious or not. RNA from viruses can often be detected for weeks (sometimes months) after the illness but does not mean that you are still contagious.

    We also need to be reminded what the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated about the PCR in December 2020. It is especially important to focus on PCR testing because these tests are the entire basis for restrictions and lockdowns (and vaccination); even when deaths were within normal annual ranges, ‘case’ levels were high and restrictions and ‘tiered lockdowns’ were still being imposed in places like the UK.

    The following extract can be found on page 39 of the report from the CDC 2010-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel:

    Detection of viral RNA may not indicate the presence of infectious virus or that 2019-nCoV is the causative agent for clinical symptoms. This test cannot rule out diseases caused by other bacterial or viral pathogens.

    Perfectly healthy people are being tested and small often insignificant fragments of flu, common cold or some other virus can be detected. People are then labelled as a COVID ‘case’.

    But that is not all. In their recent article ‘The Nuremberg Doctors Trial and Modern Medicine’s Panic Promotion of the FDA’s Experimental and Unapproved COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines’, Dr Gary G Kohls and Professor Michel Chossudovsky state that – with regard to the so-called ‘emergency use authorization’ (EUA) of COVID-19 vaccines – it is now established and confirmed by the WHO (January 20, 2021) that the entire data base pertaining to tabulation of confirmed positive cases (RT-PCR test) (since early February 2020 in 193 member states of the UN) is invalid.

    The two authors note that this flawed methodology cannot be used to confirm the existence of an emergency situation. EUA criterion is therefore not only invalid but illegal.

    Furthermore, there is currently decent scientific evidence to indicate asymptomatic transmission may not be significant.

    According to Tengra, the case numbers being reported in India are mainly asymptomatic cases. The directors of the All India Institute of Medical Science and the India Council of Medical Research both say that there are many more asymptomatic cases this time than in the so-called ‘first wave’.

    As these ‘cases’ comprise most of India’s case numbers, we should therefore be questioning the data as well as the PCR tests being used to detect the virus.

    Tengra says the case fatality rate for COVID-19 in India was over 3% last year but has now dropped to below 1.5%. The infection fatality rate is even lower, with serosurvey results showing them to be between 0.05% to 0.1%.

    As has occurred in many other countries, Tengra notes the way that death certificate guidelines are structured in India makes it easy for someone to be labelled as a COVID death just based on a positive PCR test or general symptoms. It is therefore often difficult to say who has died from the virus and who has been misdiagnosed.

    We should also bear in mind that respiratory diseases like TB and respiratory tract infections such as bronchitis leading to pneumonia are major killers in India. These conditions are severely aggravated by air pollution and often require oxygen which can be in short supply during air pollution crises in places like Delhi at this time of the year.

    Therefore, the current harrowing scenes we see in the media might not necessarily be due to the lethality of the virus but by the numbers who are ending up in hospital.

    Vaccines

    If the pandemic narrative has been constructed on the house of (statistical) cards outlined thus far, then we should be questioning the need for a mass vaccination campaign, which could actually lead to aggravating the current situation.

    This is not lost on Dr Geert Vanden Bossche, a virologist who has held positions at several vaccine companies, carrying out vaccine research and development. He has also been involved with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and has worked with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). Not an ‘anti-vaxxer’ in any sense of the term.

    He offers insight into why it is quite possible that mass vaccine rollouts will actually lead to very disturbing levels of deaths directly related to COVID-19. Far from reducing the numbers and facilitating immunity, he anticipates ‘vaccine assisted immune escape’.

    Vanden Bossche warns that mass infection prevention and mass vaccination with Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic can only breed highly infectious variants. He offers a truly worrying scenario. Of course, not everyone might agree with his analysis but it is certainly a cause for concern.

    There is also the entire issue regarding the necessity, efficacy and safety of the vaccines now being rolled out. The group ‘Doctors for COVID Ethics’ has recently raised serious doubts in all of these areas (its concerns have been published on the UK-based OffGuardian website).

    In finishing, there are two questions we should ask.

    Can we have confidence in science and evidence-based health and social policy where COVID-19 is concerned? And can we just assume – as governments and the media imply we should – that Anthony Fauci and the pharmaceutical corporations have ordinary people’s interests at heart?

    In response to the first question, not much. In response to the second, certain interests have been riding and fuelling a wave of sensationalism and duplicity throughout.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by C.J. Hopkins / April 21st, 2021

    Back in October of 2020, I wrote an essay called The Covidian Cult, in which I described the so-called “New Normal” as a global totalitarian ideological movement. Developments over the last six months have borne out the accuracy of that analogy.

    A full year after the initial roll-out of the utterly horrifying and completely fictional photos of people dropping dead in the streets, the projected 3.4% death rate, and all the rest of the official propaganda, despite the absence of any actual scientific evidence of an apocalyptic plague (and the abundance of evidence to the contrary), millions of people continue to behave like members of an enormous death cult, walking around in public with medical-looking masks, robotically repeating vacuous platitudes, torturing children, the elderly, the disabled, demanding that everyone submit to being injected with dangerous experimental “vaccines,” and just generally acting delusional and psychotic.

    How did we ever get to this point … to the point where, as I put it in The Covidian Cult, “instead of the cult existing as an island within the dominant culture, the cult has become the dominant culture, and those of us who have not joined the cult have become the isolated islands within it?”

    To understand this, one needs to understand how cults control the minds of their members, because totalitarian ideological movements operate more or less the same way, just on a much larger, societal scale. There is a wealth of research and knowledge on this subject (I mentioned Robert J. Lifton in my earlier essay), but, to keep things simple, I’ll just use Margaret Singer’s “Six Conditions of Mind Control” from her 1995 book, Cults in Our Midst, as a lens to view the Covidian Cult through. (The italics are Singer. The commentary is mine.)

    Six Conditions of Mind Control

    1. Keep the person unaware of what is going on and how she or he is being changed a step at a time. Potential new members are led, step by step, through a behavioral-change program without being aware of the final agenda or full content of the group.

    Looking back, it is easy to see how people were conditioned, step by step, to accept the “New Normal” ideology. They were bombarded with terrifying propaganda, locked down, stripped of their civil rights, forced to wear medical-looking masks in public, to act out absurd “social-distancing” rituals, submit to constant “testing,” and all the rest of it. Anyone not complying with this behavioral-change program or challenging the veracity and rationality of the new ideology was demonized as a “conspiracy theorist,” a “Covid denier,” an “anti-vaxxer,” in essence, an enemy of the cult, like a “suppresive person” in the Church of Scientology.

    2. Control the person’s social and/or physical environment; especially control the person’s time.

    For over a year now, the “New Normal” authorities have controlled the social/physical environment, and how New Normals spend their time, with lockdowns, social-distancing rituals, closure of “non-essential” businesses, omnipresent propaganda, isolation of the elderly, travel restrictions, mandatory mask-rules, protest bans, and now the segregation of the “Unvaccinated.”  Basically, society has been transformed into something resembling an infectious disease ward, or an enormous hospital from which there is no escape. You’ve seen the photos of the happy New Normals dining out at restaurants, relaxing at the beach, jogging, attending school, and so on, going about their “normal” lives with their medical-looking masks and prophylactic face shields. What you’re looking at is the pathologization of society, the pathologization of everyday life, the physical (social) manifestation of a morbid obsession with disease and death.

    3. Systematically create a sense of powerlessness in the person.

    What kind of person could feel more powerless than an obedient New Normal sitting at home, obsessively logging the “Covid death” count, sharing photos of his medical-looking mask and post-“vaccination” bandage on Facebook, as he waits for permission from the authorities to go outdoors, visit his family, kiss his lover, or shake hands with a colleague? The fact that in the Covidian Cult the traditional charismatic cult leader has been replaced by a menagerie of medical experts and government officials does not change the utter dependency and abject powerlessness of its members, who have been reduced to a state approaching infancy. This abject powerlessness is not experienced as a negative; on the contrary, it is proudly celebrated. Thus the mantra-like repetition of the “New Normal” platitude “Trust the Science!” by people who, if you try to show them the science, melt down completely and start jabbering aggressive nonsense at you to shut you up.

    4. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments and experiences in such a way as to inhibit behavior that reflects the person’s former social identity.

    The point here is the transformation of the formerly basically rational person into an entirely different cult-approved person, in our case, an obedient “New Normal” person. Singer gets into this in greater detail, but her discussion applies mostly to subcultural cults, not to large-scale totalitarian movements. For our purposes, we can fold this into Condition 5.

    5. Manipulate a system of rewards, punishments, and experiences in order to promote learning the group’s ideology or belief system and group-approved behaviors. Good behavior, demonstrating an understanding and acceptance of the group’s beliefs, and compliance are rewarded, while questioning, expressing doubts or criticizing are met with disapproval, redress and possible rejection. If one expresses a question, they are made to feel that there is something inherently wrong with them to be questioning.

    OK, I’m going to tell you a little story. It’s a story about a personal experience, which I’m pretty sure you’ve also experienced. It’s a story about a certain New Normal who has been harassing me for several months. I’ll call him Brian Parks, because, well, that’s his name, and I no longer feel any compunction about sharing it.

    Brian is a former friend/colleague from the theater world who has gone full “New Normal” and is absolutely furious that I have not. So outraged is Brian that I have not joined the cult that he has been going around on the Internet referring to me as a “conspiracy theorist” and suggesting that I’ve had some kind of nervous breakdown and require immediate psychiatric treatment because I do not believe the official “New Normal” narrative. Now, this would not be a very big deal, except that Brian is impugning my character and attempting to damage my reputation on the Facebook pages of other theater colleagues, which Brian feels entitled to do, given that I am a “Covid denier,” a “conspiracy theorist,” and an “anti-vaxxer,” or whatever, and given the fact that he has the power of the state, the media, etc., on his side.

    This is how it works in cults, and in larger totalitarian societies. It isn’t usually the Gestapo that comes for you. It’s usually your friends and colleagues. What Brian is doing is working that system of rewards and punishments to enforce his ideology, because he knows that most of my other colleagues in the theater world have also gone full “New Normal,” or at least are looking the other way and staying silent while it is being implemented.

    This tactic, obviously, has backfired on Brian, primarily because I do not give a fuck what any New Normals think of me, whether they work in the theater world or anywhere else, but I am in a rather privileged position, because I have accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in the theater, and would rather stick my hand in a blender than submit my novels to corporate publishers for review by “sensitivity readers,” so there isn’t much to threaten me with. That, and I have no children to support, or administrations to answer to (unlike, for example, Mark Crispin Miller, who is currently being persecuted by the “New Normal” administration at NYU).

    The point is, this kind of ideological conditioning is happening everywhere, every day, on the job, among friends, even among families. The pressure to conform is intense, because nothing is more threatening to devoted cultists, or members of totalitarian ideological movements, than those who challenge their fundamental beliefs, confront them with facts, or otherwise demonstrate that their “reality” isn’t reality at all, but, rather, a delusional, paranoid fiction.

    The key difference between how this works in cults and totalitarian ideological movements is that, usually, a cult is a subcultural group, and thus non-cult-members have the power of the ideology of the dominant society to draw on when resisting the mind-control tactics of the cult, and attempting to deprogram its members … whereas, in our case, this balance of power is inverted. Totalitarian ideological movements have the power of governments, the media, the police, the culture industry, academia, and the compliant masses on their side.  And, thus, they do not need to persuade anyone. They have the power to dictate “reality.” Only cults operating in total isolation, like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in Guyana, enjoy this level of control over their members.

    This pressure to conform, this ideological conditioning, must be fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences, both publicly and in our private lives, or the “New Normal” will certainly become our “reality.” Despite the fact that we “Covid deniers” are currently outnumbered by the Covidian cultists, we need to behave as if we are not, and hold to reality, facts, and real science, and treat the New Normals as exactly what they are, members of a new totalitarian movement, delusional cultists run amok. If we do not, we will get to Singer’s Condition 6 …

    6. Put forth a closed system of logic and an authoritarian structure that permits no feedback and refuses to be modified except by leadership approval or executive order. The group has a top-down, pyramid structure. The leaders must have verbal ways of never losing.

    We’re not there yet, but that is where we’re headed … global pathologized totalitarianism. So, please, speak up. Call things what they are. Confront the Brians in your life. Despite the fact that they tell themselves that they’re trying to help you “come to your senses” or “see the truth,” or “trust the Science,” they are not. They are cultists, desperately trying to get you to conform to their paranoid beliefs, pressuring you, manipulating you, bullying you, threatening you. Do not engage them on their terms, or let them goad you into accepting their premises. (Once they’ve sucked you into their narrative, they’ve won.) Expose them, confront them with their tactics and their motives. You will probably not change their minds in the least, but your example might help other New Normals whose faith is slipping to begin to recognize what has been done to their minds and break with the cult.

    C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org. Read other articles by C.J..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • [MATURE]

    Discussion about sexual assault (including against minors), torture; scenes of police brutality, murder.

    In this episode, Dee Dos takes a look at recent developments in the social war in Greece, including the COVID-19 lockdown, the #MeToo movement and the hunger strike waged by 17th of November member Dimitris Koufontinas. We also include an interview with Athens-based anarchist, co-editor of We Are An Image From the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008 and member of the Void Network, Tasos Sagris.

    [embedded content]

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.  My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

    The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants.  Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

    No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

    The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

    Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick, of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

    One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

    These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

    Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

    So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

    Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

    Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

    Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

    Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

    If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”  It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

    Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

    I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

    I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

    I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

    It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

    So let me begin with a few reminders.

    The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

    Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

    Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

    Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

    Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

    Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

    Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

    Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

    Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

    This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

    If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

    But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

    So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

    There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

    It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

    Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

    Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

    He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

    Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

    Resist.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.
    — Gore Vidal, Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia, 2004

    As Americans drown in debt and atomization, the liberal class applauds the arrival of a post-nation-state neo-feudal order which is devoid of checks and balances, integration, national cohesion, or collective memory, rendering any working class resistance to fascism a Herculean task. This has been made possible because of the demise of traditional American liberalism, rooted in the values of the civil rights movement and the New Deal, and its usurpation by the cult of neoliberalism which is anchored in unrestricted immigration, multiculturalism, identity politics, and the nakedly imperialistic policies embraced by the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton. This growing collaboration between neoliberals and the oligarchy has fomented an unprecedented degree of both tribalism and unfettered capitalism, and placed us on a runaway train racing to authoritarianism.

    Identity politics, supported by a cornucopia of faux-left elements since the ‘90s with a cult-like zealotry, has unleashed an apocalyptic counter-revolution that is disintegrating our national identity. The anti-working class has been created to facilitate this dissolution. Children are being indoctrinated in the multicultural curriculum, which is predicated on the idea that white people are the oppressor and people of color are the oppressed. This has made both class consciousness and any understanding of history impossible, while depriving Americans of color and immigrant youth with a proper grounding in American letters and classics of Western Civilization. Such a curriculum constitutes the quintessence of racism, yet has been sold to the masses as “fighting racism.”

    The multicultural society, essentially a Tower of Babel, has transformed the US into a hellscape of ghettoized enclaves which break down along lines of ethnicity, religion, and language. It has also facilitated the rise of the vocational community and the phenomenon of hyper-careerism. This, in turn, poses yet another threat to civil society, as fanatical careerists are generally indifferent to everything outside of their field.

    Indeed, it has become commonplace for Americans who are ensconced in excellent jobs to be so indifferent to life outside of their specialty that they would shrug apathetically if informed that US and Chinese warships had opened fire on one another in the South China Sea. As long as Weill Cornell, Sloan Kettering, Columbia University, or the Metropolitan Opera House don’t get incinerated, they would only feel a vague and abstract connection to such an event. This obsessive single-minded devotion to one’s career, an identity which has come to envelop one’s very soul, is inextricably linked to the multicultural society, as many Americans increasingly feel that no life exists outside of work. As our society disintegrates, the ability of our countrymen to think rationally unravels along with it.

    Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton on January 20, 1993, liberals have collaborated with every reactionary policy that has been promoted by the establishment: illegal wars of aggression, the privatization of the prisons, deindustrialization and offshoring, the oligarchy’s importation of tens of millions of undocumented workers and guest workers to depress wages and foment deunionization, the destruction of the public schools, the Patriot Act (which revoked habeas corpus), the Military Commissions Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the return of Russophobia, the monopolization of the media into just a handful of corporations, the use of academia to generate student loan debt (now in excess of $1.5 trillion), the privatization of health care, the fomenting of unprecedented forms of tribalism and atomization; and more recently, the lockdown. Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet unleashed the dogs of war on the left. In the West today this is unnecessary, for the left has destroyed itself.

    The more liberals sell their souls to the forces of reaction, the more they delude themselves into thinking that they are on the left. This has led to a kind of political schizophrenia, as those who betray the legacies of FDR and Martin Luther King are pulled inexorably into a vortex of ignorance, dogmatism, and superstition. Neoliberals, who should really be called “illiberals,” fail to see the preposterousness of their claiming to combat “the far right,” even as deep state operatives like John Brennan are regurgitating the exact same identity politics language that multiculturalists have been churning out for decades. Furthermore, we have political commentators such as General Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of American forces in Afghanistan, comparing Trump supporters (i.e., the scourge of “white privilege”), to Al-Qaeda. Now replete with its own Green Zone, the Capitol is under martial law.

    Recall that “humanitarian interventions” resulted in civil wars in Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria (granted, many jihadis have been foreigners), and Afghanistan. This pitting of identity politics acolytes against what remains of American society is reminiscent of the way in which Washington pitted Sunnis and Shiites against one another in Iraq.

    The anti-white jihadi is the offspring of ghettoization, the multicultural curriculum, and identity studies, and harbors a deep-seated hostility to Western Civilization. This anti-working class is being used by the establishment not unlike jihadis have been used by the Western elites in Syria: as a battering ram to degrade, destabilize, fragment, and if left unchecked, ultimately obliterate our national identity, thereby granting the oligarchy illimitable powers. Our jihadis are undoubtedly less violent than Syria’s (or even Sweden’s for that matter); and yet the two crusades are not dissimilar, as both are fanatically committed to the destruction of a particular civilization.

    Siccing a majority on a minority is irrefutably reactionary, but doing the inversion is no less so, especially when there are powerful forces at work attempting to transform the minority into a new majority. A significant swath of leftists in the West have been hoodwinked into believing that multiculturalism is diametrically opposed to Nazism, when they are, in fact, two sides to the same coin. The relentless demonization of Trump, coupled with the dubious nature of his removal, mirrors the demonization and removal of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Noriega, and Milošević, where the vilification of a head of state served as a pretext for launching wars on the citizenry of these countries.

    The loathing of liberals for the Orange One, which they petulantly cling to despite his ouster, is tied to the fact that he made a mockery of the idea that liberals represent the lesser of two evils. While indubitably crass and bombastic at times, Trump had the temerity to take a principled stand on a number of key issues, such as pursuing detente with Russia, questioning the need for NATO following the breakup of the USSR, tirelessly ridiculing the lies of the presstitutes, condemning critical race theory, and denouncing the catastrophic offshoring of jobs. Trump’s support for hydroxychloroquine, and his warnings that the lockdowns were destroying New York City, have likewise proved prophetic. Meanwhile, liberals haven’t taken a principled stand on anything in thirty years.

    Don’t misconstrue my intentions: I am not attempting to equate Trump supporters with the supporters of Allende. Undoubtedly, some of his supporters hold certain reactionary beliefs. Yet unlike liberals, whose solution for every domestic problem is to carry out more witch hunts and outsource more jobs, millions of Trump voters have legitimate grievances, as their lives have been upended by deindustrialization and offshoring, the lockdown, the opioid epidemic, inadequate health care, and the systematic dismantling of public education.

    Liberal complicity in sustaining our unconscionable for-profit health care system, as evidenced by their enthusiastic support for Obamacare, has resulted in a demise of medical scientific integrity. Vioxx, the opioid epidemic, the psychotropic drug epidemic, and the anthrax vaccine constitute four of the most catastrophic drug regulatory failures in the history of medicine. The problem is that for the pharmaceutical industry, these aren’t failures at all, but successes, as these drugs have yielded staggering profits. The greatest danger posed by privatized health care is that medicines and procedures which represent the greatest threat to patient health are often extremely lucrative. This medical profiteering is so rampant that it is instigating a weaponization of health care and a restoration of Nazi bioethics, where informed consent and respect for patient dignity are completely jettisoned. Should Covid vaccines become mandatory – and keep in mind that drug companies are shielded from liability in the US should their vaccines cause harm – this would constitute an unequivocal violation of the Nuremberg Code. (A code, incidentally, written by white guys, hence ripe for burning). The SS physician credo, that any medical atrocity is justified as long as it is done “for the greater good,” is thriving under the lockdown.

    A considerable amount of evidence exists that effective and inexpensive Covid treatment options involving hydroxychloroquine, budesonide, and ivermectin were suppressed (see here, here, here, here and here), which could have negated the need for lockdowns altogether and saved many thousands of lives. Granted, these drugs would have torpedoed the pharmaceutical industry’s desire to profit off of the crisis with Remdesivir and mRNA vaccines, the latter of particularly dubious safety and efficacy. (The authorities have explicitly stated that the vaccines, which are experimental and have only been granted an Emergency Use Authorization, will not end social distancing and the mandatory wearing of masks). We have been told that half a million Americans have died from Covid, but how many of these patients were under the age of 70 and had no significant comorbidities?  PCR tests have churned out vast numbers of false positives which has also helped maintain the hysteria and relentless fearmongering, while the notion of asymptomatic spread remains mired in conjecture. According to Reuters, the US lost over 20 million jobs in April of 2020 alone. Nevertheless, the lockdown did what it was designed to do: further erode civil liberties, while exacerbating atomization and economic inequality.

    It is important to note that powerful tycoons that are not ensconced in the medical industrial complex, such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, have profited off of the pandemic, adding even more wealth to their already bloated fortunes. Consequently, lockdown profiteering is not confined to the robber barons within the health care oligarchy.

    Commenting on the draconian lockdown measures, Daniel Jeanmonod, MD, writes in “Lockdowns are a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:”

    The following two examples confirm these results: a country with low lockdown stringency like Sweden has at the moment the same fatality rate per million inhabitants as France, but lower than Spain, Italy and UK, where severe lockdown measures were applied.

    In addition, Sweden has had for the second wave a much smaller excess mortality than France, Italy or Spain, an observation which allows one to suspect that lockdown measures are delaying the establishment of herd immunity. This is not desirable, as the time during which the old, sick and frail can be exposed to the virus gets longer.

    In “The Covid Pandemic Is the Result of Public Health Authorities Blocking Effective Treatment,” Paul Craig Roberts questions the motives behind the lockdown:

    Why are authorities enforcing ineffective measures while ignoring proven successful measures that greatly reduce the Covid threat and perhaps eliminate it altogether? Is it because the proven measures are inexpensive and offer no opportunity for large profits from vaccines?  Is it because the ‘Covid pandemic’ is useful for mandating control measures that curtail civil liberties?  Is it because the lockdowns decimate family businesses and enable further economic concentration?  The answer is ‘yes’ to all three questions.

    Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors (and recently arrested to the delight of MedPage), has reiterated these concerns, tweeting on February 3rd:

    What do lockdowns, masks, and panic all have in common?
    Their positive impact on hospitalization rates is ZERO.
    But their negative impact on life and liberty is severe and totally unnecessary.
    The science doesn’t lie. The ‘scientists’ do.

    Yet liberals continue to support the lockdowns, and in Germany Antifa have marched against their countrymen who have protested against the coercive measures, equating them with “the far right.” The degree to which Western societies have been tribalized by identity politics has made it very easy for the elites to impose what is essentially a collective house arrest on the entire Western world.

    Democracy fell into grave jeopardy when liberals abandoned liberty of thought in favor of genuflecting at the altar of the presstitute priesthood. Indeed, when The New York Times tells liberals to jump they jump, when The New York Times tells liberals to be indifferent they are indifferent, when The New York Times tells liberals to be outraged they are outraged, and when “The Newspaper of Record” tells liberals to be ecstatic they are ecstatic. Can a democracy survive if a vast swath of its inhabitants can no longer differentiate between right and left, journalism and propaganda, psychological operations and intellectual analysis, even day and night? No less worrisome, the majority of American doctors are blindly accepting whatever they are told by the mullahs of FDA, CDC, NIH, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. This is the inevitable result of physicians becoming increasingly specialized while often possessing the humanities education of a junior high school student. In many ways, we have become a nation of Adolf Eichmanns and Albert Speers.

    Those who stray from ideological “norms,” regardless of whether it be the lockdown or identity politics, are increasingly portrayed as either unhinged or guilty of incitement, and this language has become particularly vitriolic following “the riot” on January 6th. As Dmitry Babich pointed out on the January 11th Russia Today Cross Talk episode, the precise details of what transpired during the “storming of the United States Capitol” (to quote Wikipedia) are not of paramount importance. What matters is that the incident is being exploited by the establishment as a neoliberal Reichstag fire.

    When identity politics youth brigades were assaulting people and inflicting billions of dollars in property damage over a period of many months, in an orgy of violence that was clearly designed to pressure the Trump administration to resign, the media applauded enthusiastically, even referring to the rioters as “peaceful demonstrators.” Calls for revenge against Trump administration officials are likewise unprecedented. As the Democratic Party has thrown away the rule book and turned the country into a banana republic, what is to prevent leaders in the Christian Right from meeting with some like-minded generals and doing the same? The peculiar events of January 6th conveniently scuttled an ongoing congressional investigation into serious allegations of voter fraud, and succeeded in transforming the anti-constitutionalists into the constitutionalists in the minds of millions of people, both at home and around the world.

    Those who once sang “Kumbaya My Lord” and “We Shall Overcome” are now calling for dissenting voices to be silenced, either through deplatforming on social media, placing dissidents on a blacklist, or with the iron heel. Writing for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood, in addressing the problem of Americans who object to the dissolution of their national identity, prefers a more refined approach to CIA hit squads: “The proper response to these extremists isn’t counterterrorism. It is mental hygiene.” Having burned their own books, and sworn allegiance to the god of unreason, neoliberals have no other option than to relinquish ties to this death cult or pick up the truncheon of authoritarianism.

    The mindless faux-left support for the most barbaric foreign policies could only lead to their support for lawlessness, violence, and barbarism at home. Indeed, those who kill and torture abroad, if not held accountable, will inevitably seek to do so domestically. This fine line is embodied by the story of Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun who was brutally tortured by US-backed Guatemalan security forces in 1989, and who recently passed away, another soul lost to the cancer wards. That this totalitarianization is being supported in the name of protecting the country from imaginary neo-Nazis signifies the complete moral and intellectual collapse of the liberal class, a pitiable gaggle that will support any domestic policy, provided it is officially carried out in the name of fighting intolerance and bigotry. Such a tactic was glaringly on display when Biden, in condemning violence against women a couple of years ago, remarked that “This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.” Translation: let’s burn the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting racism and sexism.

    What are we to make of this strange country where lawyers are indifferent to the rule of law, doctors are contemptuous of informed consent, journalists regurgitate whatever they are told by establishment spokespersons, and leftists speak of the working class as “deplorables?” As conservatives typically associate privatization with democratization, and nationalization with tyranny, there are no longer any significant firewalls in place to protect the people from despotism. Moreover, due to multiculturalism’s antipathy to all things white and Western, the WASP right in turn has rejected all things foreign, even as this leads them to untenable and patently erroneous conclusions, such as the idea that Americans have the best health care system in the world, a canard parroted ad nauseam in online medical blogs.

    The multicultural society is an anarchic and atomized zone where solidarity, reason, morality, empathy, and any sense of a collective memory cease to exist. Unsurprisingly, this has turned workers into nothing more than plastic cutlery, to be used once and then discarded. Civilization is in grave danger due to the rise of the woke book burners who have declared classics of Western Civilization to be the quintessence of “white supremacy.” Thanks to their implementation of the anti-humanities, the overwhelming majority of New York City public high school graduates have never even heard of Ernest Hemingway, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, John Hersey, Theodore Dreiser, Norman Thomas, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Dalton Trumbo, Gore Vidal, Clarence Darrow and William Kunstler. (I could go on for an entire page, at least). For all their incessant whining about racism, American liberals, who enjoy total ideological hegemony over most urban public schools, look at children of color as less than animals, and take better care of their poodles and dachshunds. Inculcated with the song of anti-whiteness, the post-American, simultaneously ghettoized prisoner and settler, unleashes its rage on America, but in so doing, puts on the shackles of the oligarchy.

    The messianic crusade to eradicate whiteness is destabilizing the country and fomenting an inverted Manifest Destiny. Writing in “Whiteness Is a Pandemic,” Damon Young posits that “Whiteness is a public health crisis.” Continuing, he informs us that “White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect.” (Note how the author uses “whiteness” and “white supremacy” interchangeably). Indeed, this article epitomizes the pathological, anti-Western, and deeply divisive and sectarian dogma being pushed on impressionable young people, both by the media and by the multicultural curriculum.

    The Taliban recently came for Dr. Seuss, who we are now told is “offensive.” Teachers that challenge these pieties and attempt to introduce children of color and immigrant youth to the dreaded “dead white men” incur the wrath of the anti-literacy overseers, and if they continue to flout neoliberal pathologies, invariably face termination. Perhaps we can take comfort in knowing that instead of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the oligarchy has been kind enough to give us a snappy slogan for the counter-revolution: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Just bear in mind that the anti-white jihadi isn’t interested in sending the aristocracy to the guillotine but the working class itself.

    Historically significant black writers and orators such as Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson, all of whom were unwavering in their support for integration, are dismissed as Uncle Toms and Oreos (black on the outside, white on the inside). To quote Captain Beatty, the anti-intellectual pyromaniac of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.”

    As transpires in Orwell’s 1984, the burning of the humanities has turned much of the population into automatons, who are not only illiterate, but who are also stripped of any sense of a cultural identity. Unlike many countries in the global south that have a history of weak democratic institutions, the oligarchy understands that in order to destroy democracy at home they have to sever the link between the American people and their past. Hence, if one were to show a World War II film such as Au Revoir les Enfants to a group of teenagers in an identity politics madrassa, it would be incomprehensible to them, as they aren’t taught anything about fascism, and they wouldn’t understand why on earth white people would be hunting down and murdering other white people. In many ways, both our civilization and our democracy were lost in the classroom.

    Liberal cultists (who are, in fact, doubly enslaved, both to the cult of identity politics and to the lockdown cult), rejoice in the dismantling of the nation-state which has ensued following offshoring, unrestricted immigration, and the rise of the multicultural curriculum and identity studies. What they fail to acknowledge are the devastating consequences, as these policies are inextricably linked with the annihilation of the middle class, the public schools, checks and balances, and any semblance of national cohesion. One could make the argument that in this post-nation-state neo-feudal America, the plutocracy has ceased to be a capitalist class in the Marxist sense and taken on the characteristics of a new baronage. Irregardless of whether the establishment’s endgame is tyranny under identity politics or tyranny under the Christian Right, once freedom of speech lies gelid and lifeless on the bloodstained ground it will be lost forever.

    There is a chilling passage in John Hersey’s epistolary novel The Conspiracy, which opens a window into life in imperial Rome under Nero, where Tigellinus sends a confidential letter to Faenus Rufus, both of whom are co-commanders of the Praetorian Guard. Addressing his fellow totalitarian, he writes, “We believe we are now on the threshold of uncovering certain crimes of opinion, the punishment of which, I am confident, will provide ample propitiation.”

    Aren’t Simone Gold and Julian Assange being prosecuted for “crimes of opinion?” The cruel treatment meted out to Julian serves as a particularly harrowing warning regarding the ongoing implosion of democracy in the West. What a pity that the righteous campaigners who once fought so valiantly for the New Deal and the civil rights movement now look upon those very ideals with sneering, ridicule, and contempt.

    David Penner has taught English and ESL within the City University of New York and at Fordham. His articles on politics and health care have appeared in CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Dr. Linda and KevinMD; while his poetry has been published with Dissident Voice. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books: Faces of Manhattan Island, Faces of The New Economy, and Manhattan Pairs.
    He can be reached at: 321davidadam@gmail. Read other articles by David.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Open Letter to Dr. Nils Melzer, Swiss Human Rights Chair at the Geneva Academy

    Background

    The Geneva Academy of international Humanitarian Law and Human Rights is a postgraduate joint center located in Geneva, Switzerland. The faculty includes professors from both founding institutions and guest professors from major universities.  The Geneva Academy is affiliated with the University of Geneva.

    Dr. Nils Melzer has been the Swiss Human Rights Chair (HR Chair) at the Geneva Academy since March 2016. As HR Chair he develops and promotes the Geneva Academy expertise in HR via policy work, cutting-edge research, expert meetings, the development of partnerships and teaching. Since November 2016, Nils Melzer has also been the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment.

    *****

    Dear Dr. Melzer,

    As UN special Rapporteur on Torture, your mandate comprises three main activities:

    1) transmitting urgent appeals to States with regard to individuals reported to be at risk of torture, as well as communications on past alleged cases of torture;
    2) undertaking fact-finding country visits; and,
    3) submitting annual reports on activities, the mandate and methods of work to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly.

    See a full description of mandate here.

    Dr. Melzer, your first mandate as Special Rapporteur on Torture is appealing urgently on States and Nations with regard to individuals that are at risk of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This is the case with children, being forced to wearing masks, including in class, physical distancing, home schooling, out of touch with their friends and colleagues, but forced to be repeatedly covid tested in schools with the hurtful RT-PCT test (RT-PCT = reverse transcription of the polymerase chain reaction). A case in point – though not exclusive – is Switzerland, where cantonal authorities are compelling schools to periodically test children from as young as Kindergarten to pre-college level.

    Children’s mask wearing (as well as for senior adults) causes chronic headaches and fatigue because blood and brain receive insufficient oxygen which may lead to lasting damage, including memory loss. Children suffer psychological traumas. Depression and suicide rates increase exponentially.

    At the same time, children are increasingly being coerced via teachers and community authorities to be vaccinated against Covid-19, even though the mRNA-type “vaccines” almost the only so-called vaccines available in Europe and the US, are not officially considered as “vaccines” by CDC, but “experimental gene therapies”; i.e., primarily the Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnsons and Johnson and a number of other GAVI-supported COVAX injections, or so-called vaccines.

    These so-called vaccines – or rather gene-therapy experimental inoculations – are known to be dangerous and bear special long-term risks for children.

    Dr. Melzer, this is an Urgent Appeal – to save Human Rights for children around the world from cruel and inhuman covid measures applied to them, including to adolescents and young adults – measures that have nothing but absolutely nothing to do with health protection but everything with oppression towards long-term slavery, and, yes, a systematic and massive-style depopulation.

    You recently said correctly and wisely “Sadly, today, torture remains a very real part of situations of conflict and violence”. What many of the 193 UN member governments are forcing their children to go through is a form of torture, especially considering their potential – and likely long-term effects. (See again the report of Doctors for Covid Ethics here.)

    You added that you won’t be able to “save the world single-handedly as a Special Rapporteur, …..  that there are hundreds of stakeholders – organizations, NGO’s, UN agencies and individual experts – who have been working on torture issues for decades. [However], a Special Rapporteur’s independence means I can pick up issues that have remained under the radar of the international community, bring them to the table and try to drive cooperation.”

    Dr. Melzer, what I described before as cruel and inhuman acts against children, akin to torture, is one of those issues you mentioned. Therefore, my quest today, my Appeal to you as Human Rights Representative, is to please pick up the issue of covid-based Human Rights abuses on the world population, but particularly on children.

    What the absurd covid measures do to the world is a crime, but what they are doing to children is beyond a crime; it is totally immoral, destructive for our powerless children, and for the future of these children, as well as for society as a whole as children are our societies’ future. And worse of all, these measures have nothing to do with health protection – but absolutely nothing. They are sheer tyranny to control.

    Children behind masks, social distancing, locked down, remote schooling, deprived from meeting, talking and playing with their peers, friends — instead scaring them into losing their personalities, their self-assurance and self-esteem — results not only in a physical health problem, but also a psychological health issue which, over time, has untold, uncountable collateral damage, including total submissiveness for today’s children.

    Our children are vulnerable – they are our future.

    They need their Human Rights defended.

    Dear Dr. Melzer,  please speak up for them at the UN, at UNICEF, in front of the 193 UN member governments, which follow all more or less the same insane covid narrative, the same covid Human Rights abuse, and especially the same Human Rights abuse on children.

    Thank you.

    Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.

    We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.

    In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.

    Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

    Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

    Too noisy’ protests

    It is therefore far from surprising that the UK’s draconian new Police and Crime Bill – concentrating yet more powers in the police – has arrived at this moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is likely to be too noisy or might create “unease” in bystanders. Protesters risk being charged with a crime if they cause “nuisance” or set up protest encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.

    And damaging memorials – totems especially prized in a time of fear for their power to ward off danger – could land protesters, like those who toppled a statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a 10-year jail sentence.

    In other words, this is a bill designed to outlaw the right to conduct any demonstration beyond the most feeble and ineffective kind. It makes permanent current, supposedly extraordinary limitations on protest that were designed, or so it was said, to protect the public from the immediate threat of disease.

    Protest that demands meaningful change is always noisy and disruptive. Would the suffragettes have won women the vote without causing inconvenience and without offending vested interests that wanted them silent?

    What constitutes too much noise or public nuisance? In a time of permanent pandemic, it is whatever detracts from the all-consuming effort to extinguish our fear and insecurity. When we are afraid, why should the police not be able to snatch someone off the street for causing “unease”?

    The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation – against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest – is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

    From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make our societies less free. Those warnings soon got submerged in, or drowned out by, much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and mask-wearing.

    Binary choices

    What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this kind.

    The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus’ unchecked spread. We are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting everyone else at risk.

    A central fracture line has opened up – in part a generational one – between those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to their children’s development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.

    The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to prise it open and turn us against each other.

    ‘Kill the Bill’

    Where this leads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did so – in another illustration of binary choices that now dominate our lives – in violation of emergency Covid regulations banning protests. There was a large march through central London, while another demonstration ended in clashes between protesters and police in Bristol.

    What are the protesters – most peaceful, a few not – trying to achieve? In the media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as “anti-lockdown”, appealing to the wider public’s fear of contagion spread. But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate, all protest must first be “anti-lockdown” before it can be protest.

    The truth is that the demonstrators are out on the streets for a wide variety of reasons, including to protest against the oppressive new Police and Crime Bill, under the slogan “Kill the Bill”.

    There are lots of well-founded reasons for people to be angry or worried at the moment. But the threat to that most cherished of all social freedoms – the right to protest – deserves to be at the top of the list.

    If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites, and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.

    Speech and protest are intimately connected. Free speech in one’s own home – like free speech in a prison cell – is a very stunted kind of freedom. It is not enough simply to know that something is unjust. In democratic societies, we must have the right to do our best to fix injustice.

    Cast out as heretics

    Not so long ago, none of this would have needed stating. It would have been blindingly obvious. No longer. Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don’t like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a “nuisance” or are “too noisy” in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy – especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

    That is how fear works. The establishment has been using fear to keep us divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers, loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.

    In a time of pandemic, those who are to be feared can encompass anyone who does not quietly submit to those in authority. Until recently there had been waning public trust in traditional elites such as politicians, journalists and economists. But that trend has been reversed by a new source of authority – the medical establishment. Because today’s mantra is “follow the science”, anyone who demurs from or questions that science – even when the dissenters are other scientists – can be cast out as a heretic. The political logic of this is rarely discussed, even though it is profoundly dangerous.

    Political certainty

    Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one’s irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

    But medicine – the grey area between the science and art of human health – is not governed by laws in the way gravity is. That should be obvious the moment we consider the infinitely varied ways Covid has affected us as individuals.The complex interplay between mind and body means reactions to the virus, and the drugs to treat it, are all but impossible to predict with any certainty. Which is why there are 90-year-olds who have comfortably shaken off the virus and youths who have been felled by it.

    But a politics of “follow the science” implies that issues relating to the virus and how we respond to it – or how we weigh the social and economic consequences of those responses – are purely scientific. That leaves no room for debate, for disagreement. And authoritarianism is always lurking behind the façade of political certainty.

    Public coffers raided

    In a world where politicians, journalists and medical elites are largely insulated from the concerns of ordinary people – precisely the world we live in – protest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly test their political and “scientific” priorities against our social and economic priorities.

    That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You don’t have to agree with what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be allowed to say it – and not just in their living rooms, and not months or years hence, if and when the pandemic is declared over.

    The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisis –most especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.

    Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

    Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

    Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science – or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the “responsible” public as they seek to cling to power.

    And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic – and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it – for as long as possible.

    Selective freedoms

    Quite how mercurial are the current arguments for and against protest was highlighted by widespread anger at the crushing by the Metropolitan Police this month of a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard in London. A Met police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

    In the spirit of the times, there has been much wider public sympathy for a vigil for a murder victim than there has been for more overtly political demonstrations like those against the Police and Crime Bill. But if health threats are really the measure of whether large public gatherings are allowed – if we “follow the science” – then neither is justified.

    That is not a conclusion any of us should be comfortable with. It is not for governments to select which types of protests they are willing to confer rights on, even during a pandemic. We either uphold the right of people to congregate when they feel an urgent need to protest – whether it be against the erosion of basic freedoms, or in favour of greater safety for vulnerable communities, or against political corruption and incompetence that costs lives – or we do not.

    We either support the right of every group to hold our leaders to account or we do not. Selective freedoms, inconsistent freedoms, are freedom on licence from those in power. They are no freedom at all.

    Fight for survival

    What the UK’s Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the pandemic, which protests constitute a “nuisance” and which do not.

    The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minority – the hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need of protest.

    That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is lost.

    It is unlikely that the aim of the Police and Crime Bill is to keep us permanently locked down – as some fear. It has another, longer-term goal. It is being advanced in recognition by our elites that we are hurtling towards an environmental dead-end for which they have no solutions, given their addiction to easy profits and their own power.

    Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups like Extinction Rebellion – just like the suffragettes before them – believe the majority can only be woken from their induced slumber if they are disturbed by noise, if their lives are disrupted.

    This sane minority is treading the vanishingly thin line between alienating the majority and averting oblivion for our species. As the stakes grow higher, as awareness of imminent catastrophe intensifies, those wishing to make a nuisance of themselves, to be noisy, will grow.

    What we decide now determines how that struggle plays out: whether we get to take control of our future and the fight for our survival, or whether we are forced to stay mute as the disaster unfolds.

    So pray for the “anti-lockdown” protesters whether you support their cause or not – for they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Children are the world’s most valuable resource, and its best hope for the future.
    — John F. Kennedy (“Re: United States Committee for UNICEF, July 25, 1963.”) •

    What President Kennedy said over half a century ago, is more valid today than ever. This world needs a generation that can lead us out of the mess of dystopian values that was created predominantly by a western civilization of greed. The covid crisis, man-made, served the destruction of the world economy, as well as the ensuing World Economic Forum (WEF) designed “Great Reset”. If not stopped by our youth and coming generation, Covid cum Great Reset is about to give civilization the final blow.

    However, the dark forces of the Global Cabal, the Deep State, has plunged humanity, all 193 UN member states at once, into a global catastrophe of epic proportions. To break that globalist spell and to get out of the disaster still unfolding, the world needs thinking people, courageous people, informed and awakened people; people who are not afraid to swim against the stream, to stem the ever-increasing flow of misinformation and government and media lies. It takes educated people. It takes people who dare to resist.

    We are experiencing today just the contrary. The minute global elite that has taken a covid-stranglehold on the world’s 7.8 billion people, is doing everything to keep our children, the generations that are supposed to lead the world and humanity into a bright future, uneducated, scared, socially unfit to communicate, to take initiatives, to lead. Today’s youth is depressed by this constant fear propaganda, by the authorities (sic) rules of confinement, not being able to see their friends, to play with them, communicate with them, to do the healthiest social activities there are – exchanging ideas with peers, acquaintances and friends.

    One might think, there is a purpose behind it all. Could it be that this minute diabolical Globalist Cabal, those who are behind “The Great Reset”, co-authored by the WEF’s founder and CEO since the NGO’s creation in 1971, Klaus Schwab, could it be that these people have a plan, namely, to leave the world to a generation of uneducated, fear-indoctrinated people, who are used to and have been trained to follow orders, obey authorities and believe their very leaders’ (sic) lies and fall for their manipulations?

    It doesn’t take rocket science to believe that this could, indeed, be part of the Cabal’s demonic plan: breaking our society apart. Leaving behind no natural and new leaders to shape the world according to the real needs of the people, of our children not the imposed “needs” of an egocentric dictatorial cabal.

    *****

    In a new book (in German), “Generation Mask – Corona: Fear and Challenge” (Generation Maske – Corona: Angst und Herausforderung), the immunologist and toxicologist Professor Stefan W. Hockertz illustrates the plight of our children in this artificially induced age of corona. He asks in particular the question: what does this pandemic – better called plandemic – do with our children and adolescents?

    They are being flooded by autocratic measures they do not understand, like being forced to cover their faces by wearing masks in school, it’s like a forced-hiding of their identity from their friends and peers; being obliged to follow strict rules of social distancing – don’t get close to your friend, for the protection of your health, you need a distance to your friend, you can no longer freely communicate, and even if you could, due to the covered face, you could not read your friend’s facial expressions – which is key to any useful conversation, between kids as well as adults.

    Our kids in the west are being fear-induced and permanently indoctrinated by radio, TV-broadcasts, by permanently having to listen to “case” figures, infections, hospitalizations and death rates. Never mind, that most of these figures are false or distorted, made even more meaningless by absurdly obsessive testing-testing-testing.

    To crown it all off – newspapers and magazines depict pictures of coffins, not one or two, but hundreds, mass graves. They are utterly disturbing for adults, let alone for children. Fear is being weaponized and replaced by more fear, followed by depression, the perspective of no future,  and often and ever more frequently ending in suicide. Children’s, adolescents’ suicides are skyrocketing.

    Children who are the least vulnerable to the covid disease are forced into mass-testing, entire communities, by order of the mayor or the governor,  all the way to kindergarten. Testing with hurtful nasal swaps, as often as once or twice a month, and if positive – high percentages of these PCR tests, so far, the only covid test method available in the west – are false positives.

    The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) test is a technique used to “amplify” small segments of DNA. If over-amplified, the test results become positive, false positives. Maybe there is a purpose for over-amplifying – increasing the “case figures”, justifying more repression. If one kid tests positive in one of the periodic school tests, the entire class is ordered into quarantine, schooling from home, via computer, Skype, Zoom.

    That’s in the wealthy west. What about in the Global South, where not everybody can afford the necessary electronic equipment for “home-schooling”?  There will simply be no schooling, no learning, no interchange with classmates. No education.

    Testing is traumatic, especially for young children. It is hurtful and scares a kid on several levels, physically – a swap-stick deep into the upper nose, into the sinus cavities, is hurtful and can be even traumatic for children; and psychologically, what if I’m positive? “All my school mates and teachers have to stay home because of me”; or “I could infect my parents and frail grand-parents”. Guilt is everywhere. Guilt is like fear. It makes people pliable, manipulable – takes all initiative and enthusiasm for life away.

    For many kids this continuous repression makes them aggressive, frustrated and eventually so depressed, that many see no way out as they see no future in their lives. They are crying from despair, crying from fear, crying from isolation, crying for not being able to congregate with their friends, classmates and peers, and crying for seeing no way out.

    What is being done to our children is inhuman. The unilateral, viciously applied repressive measures of confinement, not being able to physically go to school and mix and exchange with friends is destructive. It may leave a deep dent in the social and psychological fabric and subsequent behavior of this future post-covid generation.

    No doubt, with a few exceptions, most of the 193 UN member countries applying the same oppressive rules, are aware of what they are doing. They know what and why they are doing what they are doing. They are complicity and in one way or another corrupted and perhaps coerced to adhere to the dictate from “above” or else, if they don’t follow the ruling narrative. Yet, with a minimum of integrity of our leaders, this would not be happening.

    First, they destroy the world’s economy in proportions never seen in recent history, then they destroy our future generations so there are no flag-bearers of a new generation into a bright future, once we, our children’s parents, have disappeared out. Our children are being primed as slaves for a minute diabolical elite to become trans-humans for the “Great Reset”.

    *****

    In his book, Dr. Stefan Hockhertz articulates these concerns and worries of the children, for parents, teachers and authorities to understand them. With the objective of stemming against this catastrophically oppressive trend, Dr. Hockhertz also uses the book to uncover lies and manipulations of governments and the media. He corrects false information and outright lies, but also invites to a dialogue for bringing about more objectivity and less dictatorial rules. After all, this is not a deadly pandemic, but has developed into a plandemic – where clearly a set of different, societally harmful objectives is being played out and relentlessly pursued.

    As an immunologist and toxicologist, Dr. Hockhertz also corrects the highly propagated alleged over-fatality and informs about the dangers of the “vaccines”, especially the RNA-based inoculations. He warns against these vaccines – which, in fact, are no vaccines, but rather gene-therapy injections. They have not been sufficiently researched and tested to be considered safe. To the contrary, primary inoculation results are disastrous in terms of serious side effects and death rates. And this only after less than six months into a worldwide vaccination campaign.

    See also Dr. J. Bart Classen’s January 18, 2021 peer-reviewed Research Paper COVID-19 RNA Based Vaccines and the Risk of Prion Disease”, written for the SCIVISION Publication “Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ISSN 2639-9458).

    The paper points to the potential medium- to long-term disabling neurological effects, especially degenerative diseases, that may be linked to RNA-based inoculations. This would be disastrous for children. Entire generations could be wiped out, so to speak.

    We must not allow this to happen. We must listen to our children’s grief. We must clear the path for a bright future for our children, for our successor generation and for the future of humanity.

    • First published by the New Eastern Outlook – NEO

    • “Re: United States Committee for UNICEF July 25, 1963.” Papers of John F. Kennedy. Presidential Papers. White House Central Files. Chronological File. Series 1. President’s Outgoing Executive Correspondence, Box 11, Folder: “July 1963: 16-31,” JFKL.

    Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • UK health minister Matt Hancock has warned the government’s timeline for unlocking coronavirus restrictions could be slowed as ministers remain “vigilant” against infection rates. What began in March 2020 as a three-week lockdown to ‘save the NHS’ has turned into a year-long clampdown on fundamental liberties with the spectre of freedom through vaccination (‘COVID status certificates’) and the eventual roll out of all-encompassing digital IDs on the horizon.

    In the meantime, children’s education, small independent businesses, livelihoods and lives have been wrecked all in the name of a coronavirus whose impact has been overstated – certainly if we take time to deconstruct the media narrative of 120,000 ‘COVID-19 deaths’ in the UK to see how that figure has been arrived at.

    For example, the vast majority of the deceased had on average almost two serious life-threatening co-morbidities and ‘COVID deaths’ are defined as someone who had a positive COVID test result within 28 days of death, regardless of subsequent cause of death.

    Moreover, in the UK, the average age of a ‘COVID death’ is 82.4, in a country where life expectancy is 81.

    Fear rather than science has been key to UK government strategy. Using lockdowns to control the virus has little if any scientific basis. On the other hand, there is much evidence that shows lockdowns destroy lives. Little wonder then that behavioural strategists are included as part of the top committee (SAGE) advising ministers. And little wonder, therefore, that the public overestimates the threat of COVID-19.

    What has disturbed many commentators, such as former Chief Justice Lord Sumption, is that the media, politicians and ordinary people have rolled over and accepted the erosion of fundamental civil liberties – and by implication, the tyranny of lockdown, based on a corruption of science and the type of medical hubris that Ivan Illich alluded to many decades ago.

    These are liberties that ordinary people fought and struggled (and often died) for down the ages.

    What is just as disturbing is that prominent commentators on the ‘left’ have supported the restrictions, often calling for tighter controls. Other voices on the left have been conspicuous by their silence. These figures have wholeheartedly bought into the official COVID-19 narrative – the people who are usually first in line to criticise and challenge anything a Conservative administration does.

    The aim here is not to regurgitate what has already been stated in the many articles that have appeared over the last year about the current crisis of capitalism or the ‘great reset’. The aim of this article is intended as a brief reminder.

    There is a tradition of struggle in Britain which many people appear to have abandoned – the very people who would be expected to carry on that proud tradition.

    People’s struggle

    Arthur Leslie Morton’s A People’s History of England is a classic text. Morton (1903-1987) takes us back to when humans first inhabited England and then on a forward journey that ends on the eve of the Second World War. His book shows that countless millions have inhabited the place we call England, from ancient hunter-gatherer tribes and the ‘Beaker People’, to the Vikings, Normans and those of the industrial age.

    If you are familiar with the words of the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan, they may well resonate when reading Morton’s book. Sagan stated that generals, kings, rulers and politicians have spilled rivers of blood just to become temporary masters of some or other part of the planet and that endless cruelties have been visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the globe upon inhabitants in another corner.

    However, in all of this cruelty and bloodshed, Morton accounts for the plight of the ordinary person, both in England and abroad, who has borne the brunt of war, famine, exploitation and the political machinations of tyrants and unscrupulous leaders, whether Roman, medieval monarch, feudal baron or modern-day capitalist.

    He describes the rise of feudalism and its decline, the agrarian revolution, the English Revolution, the rape of Ireland, colonial expansion and the Industrial Revolution.

    As this land grew to be the pre-eminent world power, ordinary people struggled to find a voice within these shifting tectonic plates of history. Nevertheless, they succeeded.

    Morton discusses the development of the working class movement and subsequent struggles: he notes the impact of the Peasants’ Revolt, Peterloo, trade unionism and many other inspiring events that litter the historical landscape of England.

    The conclusion to be drawn is that most change that has benefited ordinary people has resulted from the actions of ordinary folk themselves. Such benefits have never been handed out freely by the rich and powerful. This is true for women’s rights and political freedoms, as much as it is for workers’ rights or any other number of gains.

    This is worth bearing in mind as Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock et al decide whether to ‘give back’ to the public their liberties. History shows that once the powerful seize more power, they do not cede it unless forced to.

    If Morton shows us anything, it is that, when conscious of their collective interests, ordinary folk acting together can and do make a difference.

    Whether we look at Klaus Schwab’s ‘great reset’ and what it entails, the struggle of Indian farmers against Facebook, Google, Amazon and Cargill (etc) or Bill Gates and his plan to vaccinate the planet, geoengineer the climate or roll out his and his tech-giant cronies’ warped vision for a one-world fake-food agriculture, it is becoming increasingly clear that the rich and powerful are mounting an ultimate power grab.

    Based on their warped techno-utopian vision of the future, they want to exert total control of farming, food, nature, personal identities, information, the climate, our bodies – just about everything that will shape the rest of this century and beyond.

    They want to ‘build back better’ by ensuring they own everything and you own nothing. Lockdowns have been a convenient tool for helping to kick-start their ‘new normal’.

    A L Morton’s book can teach us much about resisting tyranny – but only if we listen.

    An abridged version of A People’s History of England (edited by Giles Wynne)  can be accessed here.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • It was a fittingly poor conclusion to a tournament that risked being cancelled, run to ground, or even rendered stillborn.  The tennis world number one, Novak Djokovic, had captured his eighteenth grand slam against would be usurper Daniil Medvedev, whose winning streak of twenty matches was conclusively blotted.  The victory was achieved before a crowd filled with vocal Serbian supporters, flags fluttering, a number sporting the šubara, a rather odd thing to wear given the warm temperature (symbolism will resist climate) and the šajkača cap with insignia associated with the Chetnik irregulars who fought in the Second World War under the monarchist banner.

    With sport, history, and battle motifs entangled, supporters awaited, impatiently, for their hero to take the cup.  The necessary formalities had to be settled.  Tennis Australia president Jayne Hrdlicka gave an unremarkable speech, and felt it necessary to mention the difficulties that had come with staging the tournament.  “It’s been a time of heartfelt challenge.  It’s been a time of deep loss and extraordinary sacrifice for everyone.”  But there was some reason to cheer. “With vaccinations on the way, rolling out in many countries around the world, it’s now a time for optimism and hope for the future.”

    Boos, hissing and jeering followed.  These were also repeated when thanks was offered to the Victorian government.  Having endured a 112-day hard lockdown with strict limits on movement last year, and a snap five day lockdown that also ate into the tournament schedule, many of the spectators were weary and disgruntled.  Hrdlicka was diplomatic.  “You are a very opinionated group of people.”

    Novak’s own reaction was one of ginger caution, tiptoeing through a potential minefield.  The AO, he concluded in his speech, was a tournament of various feelings coloured by the quarantine experience of players, their training facilities (or lack of), and the mental adjustments of playing to empty stands.  “There are a lot of mixed feelings about what happened in the last month or so, with tennis players coming to Australia.”

    He had to concede, despite initial reservations, that the report card of the organisers merited a high grade.  “But I think when we draw the line in the end it was a successful tournament for organisers … it wasn’t easy, it was very challenging on many different levels, but they should be proud.”

    As a cipher of sentiment among tennis players, and a nationalist symbol for his country, Djokovic’s words and actions receive extra magnification.  Good intentions can be misconstrued; heartfelt notions are mocked for their cock-eyed naiveté.  Supporters await cues on what sort of conduct to emulate: What changes to his diet will be made, and which foods will he endorse or condemn?  His politics is scrutinised, his world view deconstructed and interpreted.

    With 72 players being placed in hard quarantine on arriving in Australia prior to the tournament, Djokovic was derided for listing six demands made by players to make conditions less stringent.  These included reduced periods of isolation, improved food and the movement of players to private housing with appropriate tennis courts.  “Djokovic,” tweeted the reliably temperamental Nick Kyrgios, ranked 47 in the world, “is a tool.”  The brats had spoken, and the Serbian player took the fall.

    The case with vaccines was particularly salient.  Djokovic’s reported opposition to vaccinations has become something of a millstone.  In a nightmarish year which saw his efforts to keep the pulse of tennis going during a pandemic with the Adria tour in the Balkans, Djokovic became a figure to be admired and reviled in the coronavirus wars.  The tennis event held in Serbia and Croatia in June saw Djokovic, other players and staff, contract COVID-19.  Social distancing measures were ignored.  As a consequence, the tournament was abandoned.  As he explained in the aftermath of the disaster, the tournament had been organised “with the right intentions.”  There were “steps that could have been done differently, but am I going to be then forever blamed for doing a mistake?”

    As for vaccines, Djokovic attempted to shuffle his position for the New York Times in August last year.  His opposition to jabs had been “taken out of context a little bit”.  The issue he had was with “someone forcing me to put something in my body.  That I don’t want.  For me that’s unacceptable.” Djokovic professed to not being “against vaccination of any kind, because who am I to speak about vaccines when there are people that have been in the field of medicine and saving lives around the world?”

    The reaction from the tennis punditry and press corps to the irate spectators proved savage. Stuart Fraser of The Times was impressed by the successful conclusion of the Australian Open.  “But between players giving tournament director Craig Tiley ‘significant abuse’ and spectators booing the mention of vaccines at the trophy ceremony, it really has brought out some morons.”  George Bellshaw of Metro called it “bonkers” while Ben Rothenberg of the New York Times kept his reaction raw: “It was a weird-ass five weeks in Australia, tennis.”

    The Daily Mail Australia thought it could offer a deeper insight.  “Rowdy Australian fans were not booing the coronavirus vaccine rollout, but were instead protesting Melbourne’s three lockdowns.”  The Mail can never be accused of being anthropologically sharp and did not disappoint with its observation that the “boos” were “few” and “were eventually drowned out by cheers and applause.”  Federal Senator Matt Canavan thought it traditional that Australians at sporting tournaments “boo politicians”.  It only took a few for others to “join in and that is mob behaviour”.  Those in the crowd were “just having a bit of fun.”  So much for the profound analysis.

    At stake here is a more complex picture for Australian authorities at both the state and federal level.  Ill-tempered views and suspicions about vaccination exist, though these are impossible to measure with certainty.  Within the patchwork multi-ethnic country, sceptics and rumours circulate, questioning government intentions and competence.  Protests against the impending vaccine rollout have taken place.  A greater challenge than hosting a successful international tennis tournament awaits.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Our mace shaped COVID-19 enemy and its mutations merrily popping up around the United States, ironically has opened up new possibilities for inching beyond the grimy confines of industrial capitalism to new modes of work, learning and being that were initially promised by technocrats at the dawn of the Internet/World Wide Web. Indeed, the Pandemic of 2020-21 (Pandemic) revealed that remote education and work was feasible easing; for example, the pollution that filled the air with the exhaust from automobiles, buses, aircraft and idle factories.

    Further, telemedicine was catapulted from mere novelty to reality as the medical community realized that simple follow-up appointments did not require brick and mortar (B&M) office visits. Corporations like Amazon saved billions, according to CNBC, on travel expenses by halting the practice of needlessly sending employees to conferences and trade shows that could just as easily be conducted online. Families were forced to spend time together maybe getting to know one another better.  Businesses that survived during the Pandemic were forced to make hybrid arrangements for employees so they could care for their children while staying physically distanced from the workplace. Americans had time to think in isolation and perhaps, for a moment, they became bored with all the technological gadgets and networks that blur, rather than educate.

    Was it really all that bad? Can’t the nation wean itself off of industrial capitalism? Do we have to go back?

    Yes, no doubt, suffering was real. Millions went unemployed and the destruction wrought by the Pandemic was revealed in the numbers filing for unemployment claims, food assistance, rent/mortgage and student loan forbearance. Homelessness increased. Surplus labor skyrocketed. Indeed, according to the human resources consultancy Adeccogroup.com, the top five jobs set for the post-Pandemic chopping block are in higher education, sales, administration and office support, construction, air travel and the hospitality industry. What now?

    Never Forget

    It was in this that the Pandemic exposed the sheer ruthlessness of American industrial capitalist governance and its homicidal policies. Even as 500,000 Americans died from complications of COVID-19, Americans would watch as the US government—through its elected representatives, simply told the people to go pound sand. Watching the mostly wealthy entrenched ideologues in the US Congress bicker, or vacation, while COVID-19 was causing America to eat itself has to stand as one of the more sickening events in American history. Indeed, stock prices soared at many points during the Pandemic even as a modern day plague ravaged the land.

    No one should ever forget it.

    The Pandemic caused American government to buckle on its knees. It was a horrific structural failure and the wreckage is there for all Americans, and the world, to see. It is there in the COVID-19 KIA body counts, a flimsy healthcare system ravaged by privatization, logistical impasses in transporting vaccines and, in the midst of it all, the US Congress—while in session affirming the electoral vote count for president Joe Biden—was overrun by an ignorant mob. And now those at the apex of industrial capitalism, here in the United States, and those at the bottom of it, want to move back to the standard industrial model that has left a path of death, suffering and waste in its wake. “Build Back Better,” US president Joe Biden says. Back to what?

    Yes, our deadly friend COVID-19 showed that Americans are made of the stuff of ignorance, fear, complaint and irresponsibility. The Pandemic caused Americans not to adapt and put on a brave face, but rather exposed the flimsy myth of America as exceptional. Oh, first responders and frontline medical workers have great courage, of course, and so do many US soldiers that experience combat, but those individuals are small in number in a nation of 335 million people.

    It is strange that the Pandemic pushed the Internet/WWW to be used for what it was initially meant for: research, learning, work, and video/voice communication in a time of isolation. It was a far better use of the medium as opposed to  24 hours news casts, Tik-Tok videos and perpetual head-down positions required by the handhelds; all accompanied, of course, by loud, tractor-pull mutilated language or techno pop. With 100 places to turn for electronic stimulation— and the fear of missing a call, video or text—it’s no wonder attention spans for the young and old have become so irreparably damaged that recalling sentence number one at the end of a four sentence paragraph is a challenge of the highest order.

    Lobotomy Please, Not Reality

    But perhaps there is a ghost in the machine type of logic to it all. The network connected American has come to forget in the evening what was purchased in the morning. It is certainly good for business. History is what happens in the future, not the past. The past needs to be wiped away so the future can appear. The unintended use of the Internet/WWW and communications technologies/gadgets, have caused in-depth, critical thinking to be wiped away in the United States. The Pandemic has shown that Americans do not want to slow down or spend time apart from their handheld which is, of course, connected to the Internet/WWW.

    With the Internet—the cables, links, routers, switches and other machinery upon which content (voice, images, video, text, software) travels the World Wide Web, Americans became easily blinded into thinking that they were living out some novel, fantastical existence in a technologically sophisticated, forward thinking society. It was all cosmetic gloss, a techno-veil, one which we all donned because we really believed that by doing so we were moving in some direction to a sort of new American Nirvana.

    It is tempting to refer to the artsy-tech movie The Matrix and the scene where Morpheus shows Neo that the world he thought he knew has been destroyed. “Welcome to the world of the real,” Morpheus says as Neo looks on and goes into shock, vomiting.

    But the world of 2021 is no special effects movie.

    Americans are eager to get back to the way things were, in their world of the real. To get back on the road to commute to work/school; that is, increase pollution, vehicle accidents. To be relieved of parenting, that is, using schools/teachers as a babysitting service and prisons for prepubescent adolescents and/or maturing teenagers. Why does the United States want to rush back into the B&M model? Consider building construction, or, better still, phrase it as building empty, wasteful spaces. Elementary and high school buildings remain largely empty during a 24/7, 12 month cycle (after hours they remain largely vacant). The sports fields, running tracks and basketball courts that accompany each structure are only partially used. The same can be said for sky-scraping office buildings that, over the same 24/7 hour, 12 month cycles, remain empty. Meanwhile, taxpayer funded sports stadiums are never fully used. It is reminiscent of cathedrals and mosques built at great expense on the backs of the poor that become tourist attractions more than places of worship. Or think about military bases, factories and housing projects abandoned, rotting away. These are the wasteful byproducts of industrial capitalism still existing and perpetually constructed in what is wistfully called “The Information Age.”

    The Human Condition has hardly changed at all.

    Warehouses for the Young

    The Pandemic showed that the Internet—those land, seafloor and space-based communications networks, combined with the content and software of the World Wide Web (WWW), could be effectively used to teach students online, at home, and in virtual classrooms. As it is, America warehouses K-20 students; separating, or rather protecting them, from the messy society adults have created. Students are taught — what exactly? How to master a college entrance exam? To memorize Algebraic equations they will forget in a year?

    The Pandemic of 2020-21, showed just how archaic B&M education is. Let’s face it, isn’t distance learning/work the way the United States was supposed to evolve even minus COVID-19?

    Prognosticators claimed the greatest technological powerhouse on the planet was going to push ahead building pipelines to carry and host vast stores of knowledge content via the Internet and WWW for learning. No more bulky, out of date textbooks. Students, parents, teachers and local-state-federal government officials (in that order) would work together to develop an educational plan based on the student’s primary interests which would likely be demonstrated by 12th grade, perhaps, with second and third interests in the pipeline if the student’s subject matter area changed.

    Course tracks would be customized by downloading, largely free, content from the WWW. The teacher would become more like a tutor and the student would have many of them with perhaps a learning coordinator/advocate constantly tweaking the course menu. Since performance data on students in K-12 in the USA is tracked anyway; for example—including absent/sick days, suspensions and legal problems— career path/trend analyses based on grades and other statistics could be implemented to assist the student in selecting a field of study-employment.

    Chained to the Bicycle Rack

    “It’s nice to know things. I like to know things. You like to know things,” said Professor David Perkins of Harvard University in the 2015 issue of Harvard Ed Magazine. “But there are issues of balance, particularly in the digital age. The information in textbooks is not necessarily what you need or would like to have at your fingertips…Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack…It sits solidly in the minds of parents: I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it? The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out…the life worthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty, it seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

    It is often necessary to visit the past for a solution to the present. Consider the following from 1971. It is excerpted from Between Two Ages: The Technetronic Era, by Zbigniew Brzeziński.

    The following would be a good start for Americans to set about changing their views of learning, working and being.

    In America higher education is carried on within a relatively self-­contained organizational and even social framework, making for a protracted period of semi­-isolation from problems of social reality. As a result, both organizationally and in terms of content, a divorce between education and social existence has tended to develop…extending education on an intermittent basis throughout the lifetime of the citizen, society would go a long way toward meeting this problem. The duration of the self­-contained and relatively isolated phase of initial education could then be shortened. Taking into account the earlier physical and sexual maturation of young people today, it could be more generally pursued within a work ­study framework, and it should be supplemented by periodic additional training throughout most of one’s active life.

    A good case can be made for ending initial education—more of which could be obtained in the home through electronic devices, somewhere around the age of eighteen. This formal initial period could be followed by two years of service in a socially desirable cause; then by direct involvement in some professional activity and by advanced, systematic training within that area; and finally by regular periods of one and eventually even  two years of broadening, integrative study at the beginning of every decade of one’s life, somewhere up to the age of sixty. For example, medical or legal training could begin after only two years of college, thus both shortening the time needed to complete the training and probably also increasing the number attracted into these professions. Regular and formally required retraining—as well as broadening—could ensue at regular intervals throughout most of one’s professional career.

    By now you are wondering: So what is my solution? I don’t have an adequate response to that question, but I do know that national and transnational cultural education has to be connected to any answer or plan that sets America—and the world, for that matter, on a path to a post-industrial capitalist society. The country isn’t even close to it now. The Pandemic has shown that. It just does not seem likely that returning to the industrial capitalist, B&M norm—or the model of governance as it is run by officials now in power—will move the country any closer to change. The wars go on, weapons are more lethal and will soon be operated by AI programs, racism still exists, ignorance is bliss, corporations are people, pollution continues, wasted spaces are good for business, and education is awash in a mishmash of learning methodologies, software applications and a war between parents, teachers and administrators.

    Perhaps—like the US military as it seeks to stand down to contemplate the problem of extremism in its ranks—American civil society needs to stand down for some period of time to reassess learning, work and being.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • by John R. Hall / February 15th, 2021

    As the doctor approached with his scalpel and began performing ritual genital mutilation, I complained as loudly as an eight pound body is able, but my cries fell upon deaf and unsympathetic ears.  Then They destroyed my first line of defense against disease-causing toxins by ripping out my tonsils and adenoids, and once again no one heeded my screams of agony.  Then a white-coated monster called a dentist drilled away my new strong teeth, replacing vast enameled swaths with a lead-like substance.  Then other white coats brought out the needles, and the “jab”, all too often followed by bouts of fever and vomiting, became routine.  Behind my sobs of pain was a growing suspicion that there was an agenda to wreck my health or kill me.

    But those were also times of prosperity and hope.  The second war to end all wars was history, and my parents bought a new house in Phoenix, Arizona.  Three bedrooms, two baths, and a family room…all wrapped up in a package painted with lead-based colors, insulated with asbestos, and financed by a loan from a bank with money created out of thin air, to be repaid with interest over the next 30 years.  So while They sprayed the surrounding citrus, grape, and cotton fields with DDT, stunted my intellect with regimented memorization of useless verbiage in a prison camp called “school”, and added fluoride to the water supply, I managed to grow to a size approximating that of an adult.

    It was 1960 when, at the age of eleven I became a financially semi-independent paperboy.  When the next jab was scheduled, I balked, then refused further vaccines.  Schooling (an activity designed for fish) became evermore unbearable, and I became some semblance of what humans were meant to be:  fearless, free, strong, and joyous.  A rebellious danger to society in the making.  A decade or so later, after three tortuous semesters of college, I quit showing up.  This triggered a 1A Selective Service classification, a draft notice, a refusal of induction, a federal felony charge, and “just punishment” for my unreasonable hesitancy to become a murderous slave to those who claim authority.

    60 years later or one year ago, with the lion’s share of my life behind me, it was beginning to look like the slide into the Homeplate of eternity might be made with confidence and ease.  I’d known love many times, fathered a beautiful daughter, then embraced a grandson.  My senses had beheld a great deal of the splendor of the world.  I’d resisted the insane antics of the ruling class, understood their agenda of endless wars, had immediately seen through the 9-11 fraud, and attempted to vaporize them in words without mercy.  I was at peace and without regrets.  Then came the scam to end all scams.  The scam which would completely sedate the huddled masses, rendering them and all progeny impotent and servile for the foreseeable future.  The perfect scam, complete with an invisible and imaginary enemy.  An enemy which was presented with precise timing and perfectly coordinated worldwide orchestration by the suits and ties, media whores, and white coats who announced loudly, clearly, and oh so often that there was only one road to salvation.  There was only one way forward They said.  Take the vaccine or die They said.  Mask up, don’t gather, sing, shake hands, kiss, make love, or talk.  Stay indoors, close your businesses, obey!  Oh crap, this can’t be good said my little voice.  Homeplate will have to wait a while.  There’s a job to be done.  No grandson of mine will grow up in the brave new world of Covid-1984.

    There is a conspiracy which is much more than a theory.  A vast and evil conspiracy to decimate the world population and enslave those who remain.  They Live.  Whether or not “They” are alien lizards or actual psychopathic humans is a conversation somewhat irrelevant at this juncture.  “They” must be stopped, and sooner rather than later.  Sand in the hourglass of freedom is on the move.  “They” have had many names throughout history, and it seems that “They” have been around for a very long time.  Their names have grown in number over the years, but their disdain for the common folks remains.  To them, we are mere resources to be harvested, and with their new military grade 5G radio frequencies combined with technological breakthroughs have rendered the common folks superfluous and expendable.  But we do make excellent lab animals.  Listen!…

    They control worldwide:  land, water, governments, money creation, healthcare, schools, food, energy, transportation, information, armies and police departments.

    They thought nothing of precipitating the great wars of the twentieth century, didn’t blink an eye when their experimental vaccines caused a pandemic that snuffed as many as one hundred million lives with what was strangely called The Spanish Flu.  They celebrated all of the assassinations of the 60’s, frolicked in the power of atomic bombs, enjoyed a sense of fulfillment on 9-11-2001, and are now finding perhaps ultimate satisfaction in the apparent complete success of The Covid-1984 Plandemic.

    They are destroying your world so they can “Build back better.”  U.N. Agenda 21 for sustainable development is real.  Event 201 foretold the Covid-1984 Plandemic only months before the big reveal.  The Great Reset is resetting.  The Fourth Industrial Revolution (the digital revolution) is here now.  You are a resource at best; a hindrance and liability more likely.

    They plan to usher you into human settlements where you will be linked to a population control grid and fed a diet of augmented reality and bioengineered food-like substances to keep you mooing contentedly.  Physical money will disappear.  Your cellphone will betray you.  Your flat screen will create your reality.  Your neighbor will police you, as you rat on him.

    They transformed healthcare a century ago with needle-administered nouveau snake-oil “vaccines” and oil-based “treatments” designed to exacerbate vaccine damage, thereby creating a need for new treatments which are usually equally toxic…and so on.  They said Pasteur (germ theory) was truth and Bechamp (terrain theory) was quackery.  They used their allopathic model to sicken the world population at an ever-increasing rate, and in 1986 received complete immunity from damages caused by vaccines.  They successfully shut down all contrary conversation and said that the science was fixed.  That should have been a clue.

    They don’t want you to be healthy.  Healthy people don’t take their vaccines or treatments, don’t attend their schools designed to create obedience, mediocrity and uniformity, don’t eat their toxic, genetically modified and patented Frankenfoods, and don’t swallow the swill dished out by their dinosaur media.  They despise humans who exercise in the sunlight and eat organic foods, and hate folks who love, laugh, play, mock them, and disobey.  They need to be stopped once and for all, and if you don’t have that figured out by now, may the gods have mercy.  At least you’re not alone.  Those who pretend to sleep are many, and nearly impossible to awaken.

    They shudder in fear when their official narrative is questioned, and fiercely censor all opposition.  They are the state merged in the throes of passion with private corporations.  They are fascists in every sense of the word, and must be stopped before their mass-culling of the herd goes any further.  The vaccine scam has already killed or damaged unknown millions of hapless victims.  They are the Democrats and Republicans at the top of the dung heaps.  They are the old families; the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Carnegies, and Fords.  They are the newbie technocratic clans; the Gates’, Zuckerbergs, and Bezos’.  They are Facebook, Google, Amazon, and The New York Times.  They are the enemies of mankind and the destroyers of freedom, and they have created a case of worldwide Stockholm Syndrome. They orchestrated and financed the revolutions which resulted in the rise of the U.S.S.R. and the C.C.P. as models for the U.S.A., which is being retooled to become just another big totalitarian state as we speak.

    If you know all of this, and are participating in their plan, then their success is assured.  If you are wearing a muzzle and speaking Mumblish, if you are eschewing hugs and handshakes, if you are practicing social distancing, and if you are jumping through all these ridiculous hoops fully aware that the Covid-1984 Plandemic is a fraud and a lie…then you are worse than the masses of hapless, hypnotized victims of Operation Mockingbird, which must comprise 95% of the U.S. population.  They know not what they do, and must be shown the way…if there still is a way.  All we can do at this point is lead by example.  Burn masks, hug your friends, exchange saliva with those most dear, and learn the power of NO!  Freedom isn’t quite dead yet, although its demise has been widely reported.  Hope is the best of things said Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, but it must be backed up by action.  Hasta la victoria siempre!

    John R. Hall, having finally realized that no human being in possession of normal perception has a snowball’s chance in hell of changing the course of earth’s ongoing trophic avalanche, now studies sorcery with the naguals don Juan Matus and don Carlos Castaneda in the second attention. If you’re patient, you might just catch him at his new email address, but if his assemblage point happens to be displaced, it could take a while. That address is: drachman2358@outlook.com Read other articles by John R..

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Image: Anadolu Agency

    Mandatory masks continue to be the standard operating procedure for many counties, regions, districts, states and nations worldwide, as the COVID cult agenda progresses. In many places, while COVID vaccines are not yet mandatory, authorities are rushing to prepare to make them so, by setting up schemes like immunity passports, vaccine certificates and mandatory tracking databases which log who has taken the shot and who has not. Meanwhile, inherent sovereign human rights are being limited to those who acquiesce to tkae the shot. The insanity and absurdity of the COVID cult is all the more apparent when you realize that its mandatory or quasi-mandatory rules stand in contradiction to a very important set of principles decided upon in 1947. I refer to the Nuremburg Code, the set of 10 points that arose from the infamous Nuremburg Trials conducted in the aftermath of World War II. I am not passing judgement on how impartial those trials were, because I know they were mainly run by the US and the Allies (as the victors), who for obvious reasons did not press charges against American generals such as Eisenhower (who later became US President) for his POW camps inside of Germany and carpet-bombing of Dresden. Nonetheless, the trials produced the Nuremburg Code which enshrined the principle of informed consent – a principle which, in the advent of the COVID scamdemic, is now highly relevant and is continually being put to the test. This article will look briefly at each of the 10 points in the light of COVID restrictions and rules.

    The 10 Points of the Code

    This website gives a brief history of how the 10 points of the Nuremburg Code came into existence. Interestingly, although the code is an international ethical landmark, it is apparently still not enshrined in American or German national law. We must assume those governments via their secret agencies like the CIA wanted to keep the door open to conduct medical experimentation (such as bioweapon programs like weaponized ticks) upon their citizenry without technically breaking the law:

    On August 19, 1947, the judges of the American military tribunal in the case of the USA vs. Karl Brandt et. al. delivered their verdict. Before announcing the guilt or innocence of each defendant, they confronted the difficult question of medical experimentation on human beings. Several German doctors had argued in their own defense that their experiments differed little from previous American or German ones. Furthermore they showed that no international law or informal statement differentiated between legal and illegal human experimentation. This argument worried Drs. Andrew Ivy and Leo Alexander, American doctors who had worked with the prosecution during the trial. On April 17, 1947, Dr. Alexander submitted a memorandum to the United States Counsel for War Crimes which outlined six points defining legitimate research. The verdict of August 19 reiterated almost all of these points in a section entitled “Permissible Medical Experiments” and revised the original six points into ten. Subsequently, the ten points became known as the “Nuremberg Code.” Although the code addressed the defense arguments in general, remarkably none of the specific findings against Brandt and his codefendants mentioned the code. Thus the legal force of the document was not well established. The uncertain use of the code continued in the half century following the trial when it informed numerous international ethics statements but failed to find a place in either the American or German national law codes. Nevertheless, it remains a landmark document on medical ethics and one of the most lasting products of the “Doctors Trial.”

    Nuremburg Code #1: Voluntary Consent is Essential

    The first point of the Code is:

    The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

    This point has already been broken many times over just with the introduction of mandatory masks alone. In the US, for example, masks are defined in several places as “medical devices” according to the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). The first piece of evidence is on the FDA’s website itself at this page that discusses masks and is nested under the category Medical Devices as follows:

    Home / Medical Devices / Products and Medical Procedures / General Hospital Devices and Supplies / Personal Protective Equipment for Infection Control / N95 Respirators, Surgical Masks, and Face Masks


    The second piece of evidence is in the law: the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) which is US federal law enacted by Congress. It and other federal laws establish the legal framework within which FDA operates. The FD&C Act can be found in the United States Code (USC), which contains all general and permanent US laws, beginning at 21 USC 301. You can read it here. Look under Chapter II Definitions (pg.3) and scroll down to Section 201(h):

    (h) The term “device” (except when used in paragraph (n) of this section and in sections 301(i), 403(f), 502(c), and 602(c)) means an instrument, apparatus, implement, machine, contrivance, implant, in vitro reagent, or other similar or related article, including any component, part, or accessory, which is — (1) recognized in the official National Formulary, or the United States Pharmacopeia, or any supplement to them, (2) intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions, or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, in man or other animals, or (3) intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals, and which does not achieve its primary intended purposes through chemical action within or on the body of man or other animals and which is not dependent upon being metabolized for the achievement of its primary intended purposes.

    Under this section, a mask meets the criteria required for being designated as a medical device, since it meets point (2), being an apparatus which is intended to prevent disease.

    Did any politician ask the people of the world whether they wanted to wear masks and volunteer themselves to wear medical devices? No. There has been no voluntary or informed consent.

    Nuremburg Code #2: Yield Fruitful Results Unprocurable By Other Means

    The second point of the Code is:

    The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

    We have to face reality that COVID measures such as mandatory masks or vaccines are a giant medical experiment. Many people have been suffering the ill effects of under-oxygenation due to prolonged mask wearing. The untested vaccines constitute the biggest worldwide experiment in human history, having been rushed to market in under 12 months when vaccines usually take 7-20 years to develop. As covered in previous articles, these so-called vaccines (actually mRNA devices) were not designed to stop transmission, elicit a direct immune response (as traditional vaccines do) nor to stop moderate to severe symptoms, so their risk-to- benefit ratio is massively high. Cloth masks made of bandannas and rags are utterly “random and unnecessary in nature.” Meanwhile, there are many other ways to produce “fruitful results” for society without this experimentation: educating people about the principles of natural health, boosting the immune system naturally and even supplementing with vitamin D (research has shown a connection between those acquiring COVID and vitamin D deficiency).

    Nuremburg Code #3: Base Experiments on Results of Animal Experimentation and Natural History of Disease

    The third point of the Code is:

    The experiment should be so designed and based on the results of animal experimentation and a knowledge of the natural history of the disease or other problem under study that the anticipated results will justify the performance of the experiment.

    This point has also been broken. Big Pharma companies skipped animal trials in their rush to get their “vaccines” to market.

    Nuremburg Code #4: Avoid All Unnecessary Suffering and Injury

    The fourth point of the Code is:

    The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

    None of the masks and “vaccines” (which indisputably cause suffering, injury, and death) are necessary for many reasons:

    1. the COVID case and death count has been wildly inflated from the beginning;
    1. COVID is a repackaging scheme which reclassifies existing diseases to create the appearance of a new deadly disease and pandemic when there is none. See the work of people such as Dr. Genevieve Briand;
    1. the alleged novel virus SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified and proven 100% to exist.

    Nuremburg Code #5: No Experiment to be Conducted if There’s Reason to Think Injury or Death Will Occur

    The fifth point of the Code is:

    No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.

    Is there an a priori reason to believe disabling injury or death will occur from the COVID not-vaccines? Given the past history of vacine injury, yes there is. Around 2 weeks ago on January 29th 2021, the CDC reported over 11,000 adverse reactions to the COVID vaccine, including 501 deaths and 10,748 other injuries, some of which were indeed disabling injuries. If you are not fainthearted, see these video clips and compilations (here, here, here and here) which show the possible horrible side effects of the vax.

    Nuremburg Code #6: Risk Should Never Exceed the Benefit

    The sixth point of the Code is:

    The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.

    From Big Pharma’s point of view, the risk doesn’t exceed the benefit. They are shielded from legal liability thanks to the 1986 NCVIA and other preparatory laws like the 2005 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act which paved the way for Big Pharma legal immunity. There’s no risk, and the profits are astronomical. For the average individual, on the other hand, the situation is exactly the reverse; there’s no benefit to taking a non-vaccine which doesn’t protect you from severe symptoms and which doesn’t stop transmission, but which could lead to serious and debilitating effects like paralysis and death.

    Nuremburg Code #7: Preparation Must Be Made Against Even Remote Possibility of Injury, Disability or Death

    The seventh point of the Code is:

    Proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.

    No preparations have been made! The COVID vaccines are a giant worldwide human experiment, and every single participant is the equivalent of a human hamster or guinea pig. If you die, bad luck! Big Pharma will be sure to roll out their legal and PR departments and immediately question the connection bewteen their vax and your death. They will never, ever admit a connection, and even if they did, there are no legal consequences for them. There is no recourse.

    Nuremburg Code #8: Experiment Must Be Conducted by Scientifically Qualified Persons

    The eighth point of the Code is:

    The experiment should be conducted only by scientifically qualified persons. The highest degree of skill and care should be required through all stages of the experiment of those who conduct or engage in the experiment.

    Doctors such as Dr. Stefan Lanka and Dr. Tom Cowan who challenge the mainstream narrative of virology – namely that contagious viruses exist and can infect you – would most certainly dispute that career bureaucrats like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Big Pharma scientists are truly qualified, but even if you accept that they are, the scientists that make the vaccines are not the ones administering them. It’s the regular nurses and doctors who are doing that. How many of them truly know what the non-vaccine is, what it does, the complete list of its ingredients and the full list of its long-term side effects? No one knows the latter, precisely because this is a giant experiment.

    By creating unlawful mask mandates, politicians are playing doctor, putting themselves in the position of being medical experts by dictating health directives and medical interventions to the entire population. The people have not given consent for politicians, who are medically untrained, to act as their personal physicians.

    Nuremburg Code #9: Anyone Must Have the Freedom to Bring the Experiment to an End At Any Time

    The ninth point of the Code is:

    During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

    Do you have the right to bring the insane COVID cult medical experimentation to an end? Of course you don’t! People are being discriminated against for not wearing masks by being deprived of their rights to freely travel, trade and work. People are being threatened with fines and prison for not wearing masks. People’s rights are being violated when they exercise their right to make thier own medical decisions by refusing the vax. There is no freedom for the COVID subject who is being experimented upon.

    Nuremburg Code #10: The Scientist Must Bring the Experiment to an End At Any Time if There’s Probable Cause of it Resulting in Injury or Death

    The tenth point of the Code is:

    During the course of the experiment the scientist in charge must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.

    This point includes the phrase “probable cause” which is probably well-known to many people, especially Americans, since it is enshrined in the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution that protects people against searches and seizures unless the police have a warrant based on probable cause that that person has a committed a crime. Probable cause is legally considered to be a higher standard than “reasonable belief” or “reasonable suspicion” which is the wording used in other jurisdictions. Regardless, do you think any Big Pharma company has EVER voluntarily halted their vaccine rollout because of their “superior skill and careful judgment” that they might be harming people? No way! The profits are too great, and their line of defense is that some people may be injured or killed by the vaccines, but it’s all for the “greater good” of protecting society. As Martin Luther King said, “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

    Conclusion

    Society is regressing right now. We are giving up hard-fought rights and freedoms out of fear. Collectively, we are forgetting that we have already long ago established fundamental human rights such as bodily autonomy, medical sovereignty and informed, voluntary consent. The Nuremburg Code is a stark reminder that we have been through all this before, and got through it to crystallize the lessons learned. We must remember Who We Are and stop this insane COVID medical experimentation – before it’s too late.

    Makia Freeman is the editor of The Freedom Articles, a long-time truth researcher and a promoter of freedom. He provides insightful, non-partisan, unique and cutting-edge analysis on who’s running the world, how they’re doing it and what the deeper agenda is – as well as solutions for restoring peace and freedom to the world. Read other articles by Makia.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Contingent on World Bank aid to be given to poorer countries in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns, agrifood conglomerates will aim to further expand their influence. These firms have been integral to the consolidation of a global food regime that has emerged in recent decades based on chemical- and proprietary-input-dependent agriculture which incurs massive externalised social, environmental and health costs.

    Reliance on commodity monocropping for global markets, long supply chains and dependency on external inputs for cultivation make the food system vulnerable to shocks, whether resulting from public health scares, oil price spikes (the global food system is fossil-fuel dependent) or conflict and war. An increasing number of countries are recognising the need to respond by becoming more food self-sufficient, preferably by securing control over their own food and reducing supply chain lengths.

    The various coronavirus lockdowns have disrupted many transport and production activities, exposing the weaknesses of the food system. If the current situation tells us anything, it is that structural solutions are needed to transform food production, not further strengthen the status quo.

    Agroecology

    During the Disappearing World Forum in 2013, author Arundhati Roy was asked by an audience member, what is the alternative to the mainstream development narrative?

    She responded by saying:

    You can ask the question of alternatives in two ways. One way is a genuine way and the other is a sort of aggressive way. And the genuine way would take into account that today we are where we are because there has been a series of decisions taken about everything; whether it’s about hybrid seeds, whether it’s about big dams. Whatever it’s about, every time there’s a decision that has been taken, there’s always been an alternative… There was an alternative to every way you chose to develop. When you have a system that’s been created with a layer – with thousands of decisions – and you want me now to tell you an alternative in one sentence, it isn’t possible.

    In a world where the ‘good life’ is associated with GDP growth, endless consumption and increasing urbanisation, there is a price to be paid in terms of environmental destruction, devastating resource conflicts, population displacements, a destructive arrogance that sees humans apart from and above nature and the degradation of our most fundamental need – food and our ability to produce it.

    The solution cannot be expressed in one sentence, but a vital – perhaps central – component of ‘the alternative’ involves prioritising an agrarian-centric development paradigm based on a wide-ranging shift to agroecology. The agroecological paradigm is not just about growing food; it involves reimagining our relationship with nature and with each other and the type of actions and activities that give meaning to life.

    In 2014, UN special rapporteur Olivier De Schutter’s report concluded that by applying agroecological principles to democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and poverty challenges. He argued that agroecological approaches could tackle food needs in critical regions and could double food production in 10 years.

    The 2009 IAASTD peer-reviewed report, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommended agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. And the recent UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.

    Agroecology is based on traditional knowledge and modern agricultural research, utilising elements of contemporary ecology, soil biology and the biological control of pests. This system employs sound ecological management by using on-farm solutions to manage pests and disease without the use of agrochemicals and corporate seeds. It outperforms the prevailing industrial food system in terms of diversity of food output, nutrition per acre, soil health, water table stability and climate resilience.

    Academic Raj Patel outlines some of the basic practices of agroecology by saying that nitrogen-fixing beans are grown instead of using inorganic fertilizer, flowers are used to attract beneficial insects to manage pests and weeds are crowded out with more intensive planting. The result is a sophisticated polyculture: many crops are produced simultaneously, instead of just one.

    Much has been written about agroecology, its successes and the challenges it faces, not least in the 2017 book Fertile Ground: Scaling agroecology from the ground up, published by Food First. Agroecology can offer concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems. It challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics of a neoliberalism that drives a failing system of industrial agriculture.

    By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work in both richer and poorer countries, it can address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out offshored jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal, globalised capitalism that has hollowed out the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India.

    Agroecology is based on food sovereignty, which encompasses the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food and the right of people to define their own food and agriculture systems. ‘Culturally appropriate’ is a nod to the foods people have traditionally produced and eaten as well as the associated socially embedded practices which underpin community and a sense of communality. But it goes beyond that.

    Modern food system

    People have a deep microbiological connection to soils, food processing practices and fermentation processes which affect the gut microbiome – up to six pounds of bacteria, viruses and microbes akin to human soil. And as with actual soil, the microbiome can become degraded according to what we ingest (or fail to ingest). Many nerve endings from major organs are located in the gut and the microbiome effectively nourishes them. There is ongoing research taking place into how the microbiome is disrupted by the modern globalised food production/processing system and the chemical bombardment it is subjected to.

    Capitalism colonises (and degrades) all aspects of life but is colonising the very essence of our being – even on a physiological level. With their agrochemicals and food additives, powerful companies are attacking this ‘soil’ and with it the human body. As soon as agri-food corporations undermined the capacity for eating locally grown, traditionally processed food, cultivated in healthy soils and began imposing long-line supply chains and food subjected to chemical-laden cultivation and processing activities, we not only lost our cultural connections to food production and the seasons, but we also lost our deep-rooted microbiological connection with our localities. Corporate chemicals and seeds and global food chains dominated by the likes of Monsanto (now Bayer), Nestle and Cargill took over.

    Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, neurotransmitters in the gut affect our moods and thinking. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression and Parkinson’s Disease. In addition, increasing levels of obesity are associated with low bacterial richness in the gut. Indeed, it has been noted that tribes not exposed to the modern food system have richer microbiomes.

    To ensure genuine food security and good health, humanity must transition to a notion of food sovereignty based on optimal self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and local ownership and stewardship of common resources – land, water, soil, seeds, etc.

    However, what we are seeing is a trend towards genetically engineered and biosynthetic lab-based food controlled by corporations. The billionaire class who are pushing this agenda think they can own nature and all humans and can control both. As part of an economic, cultural and social ‘great reset’, they seek to impose their cold dystopian vision that wants to eradicate thousands of years of culture, tradition and farming practices virtually overnight.

    Consider that many of the ancient rituals and celebrations of our forebears were built around stories and myths that helped them come to terms with some of the most basic issues of existence, from death to rebirth and fertility. These culturally embedded beliefs and practices served to sanctify their practical relationship with nature and its role in sustaining human life.

    As agriculture became key to human survival, the planting and harvesting of crops and other seasonal activities associated with food production were central to these customs. Freyfaxi marks the beginning of the harvest in Norse paganism, for example, while Lammas or Lughnasadh is the celebration of the first harvest/grain harvest in Paganism.

    Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal and people had a necessary and immediate relationship with the sun, seeds, animals, wind, fire, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life. In addition to our physiological connection, our cultural and social relationships with agrarian production and associated deities had a sound practical base.

    We need look no further than India to appreciate the important relationship between culture, agriculture and ecology, not least the vital importance of the monsoon and seasonal planting and harvesting. Rural-based beliefs and rituals steeped in nature persist, even among urban Indians. These are bound to traditional knowledge systems where livelihoods, the seasons, food, cooking, processing, seed exchange, healthcare and the passing on of knowledge are all inter-related and form the essence of cultural diversity within India itself.

    Although the industrial age resulted in a diminution of the connection between food and the natural environment as people moved to cities, traditional ‘food cultures’ – the practices, attitudes and beliefs surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of food – still thrive and highlight our ongoing connection to agriculture and nature.

    If we go back to the 1950s, it is interesting to note Union Carbide’s corporate narrative based on a series of images that depicted the company as a ‘hand of god’ coming out of the sky to ‘solve’ some of the issues facing humanity. One of the most famous images is of the hand pouring the firm’s agrochemicals on Indian soils as if traditional farming practices were somehow ‘backward’.

    Despite well-publicised claims to the contrary, this chemical-driven approach did not lead to higher food production according to the paper “New Histories of the Green Revolution” written by Prof Glenn Stone. However, it has had long-term devastating ecological, social and economic consequences as we saw in Vandana Shiva’s book The Violence of the Green Revolution and Bhaskar Save’s now famous and highly insightful open letter to Indian officials.

    In the book Food and Cultural Studies’ (Bob Ashley et al), we see how, some years ago, a Coca Cola TV ad campaign sold its product to an audience which associated modernity with a sugary drink and depicted ancient Aboriginal beliefs as harmful, ignorant and outdated. Coke and not rain became the giver of life to the parched. This type of ideology forms part of a wider strategy to discredit traditional cultures and portray them as being deficient and in need of assistance from ‘god-like’ corporations.

    Post-COVID plunder

    What we are seeing in 2020, is an acceleration of such processes. In terms of food and agriculture, traditional farming in places like India will be under increasing pressure from the big-tech giants and agribusiness to open up to lab-grown food, GMOs, genetically engineered soil microbes, data harvesting tools and drones and other ‘disruptive’ technologies.

    This vision includes farmerless farms being manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce commodity crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be processed and constituted into something resembling food. What will happen to the farmers?

    Post-COVID, the World Bank talks about helping countries get back on track in return for structural reforms. Are tens of millions of smallholder farmers to be enticed from their land in return for individual debt relief and universal basic income? The displacement of these farmers and the subsequent destruction of rural communities and their cultures was something the Gates Foundation once called for and cynically termed “land mobility”.

    Cut through the euphemisms and it is clear that Bill Gates – and the other incredibly rich individuals behind the great reset with their ‘white saviour’ mindset – is an old-fashioned colonialist who supports the time-honoured dispossessive strategies of imperialism, whether this involves mining, appropriating and commodifying farmer knowledge, accelerating the transfer of research and seeds to corporations or facilitating intellectual property piracy and seed monopolies created through IP laws and seed regulations.

    In India – still an agrarian-based society – will the land of these already (prior to COVID) heavily indebted farmers then be handed over to the tech giants, the financial institutions and global agribusiness to churn out their high-tech industrial sludge?

    With the link completely severed between food production, nature and culturally embedded beliefs that give meaning and expression to life, we will be left with the individual, isolated human who exists on lab-based food, who is reliant on income from the state and who is stripped of satisfying productive endeavour and genuine self-fulfilment.

    Technocratic meddling has already destroyed or undermined cultural diversity, meaningful social connections and agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security, as outlined, for example, in the 2017 article “Food Security and Traditional Knowledge in India” in the Journal of South Asian Studies.

    Such a pity that prominent commentators like George Monbiot, who writes for the UK’s Guardian newspaper, seems fully on board with this ‘great reset’. In his 2020 article ‘Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’, he sees farmerless farms and ‘fake’ food produced in giant industrial factories from microbes as a good thing.

    But Vandana Shiva says:

    The notion that high-tech ‘farm free’ lab food will save the planet is simply a continuation of the same mechanistic mindset which has brought us to where we are today – the idea that we are separate from and outside of nature… it is the basis of industrial agriculture which has destroyed the planet, farmers livelihoods and our health.

    She adds:

    Turning ‘water into food’ is an echo from the times of the second world war, when it was claimed that fossil-fuel-based chemical fertilisers would produce ‘Bread from Air’. Instead we have dead zones in the ocean, greenhouse gases – including nitrous oxide which is 300 times more damaging to the environment than CO2 – and desertified soils and land. We are part of nature, not separate from and outside of nature. Food is what connects us to the earth, its diverse beings, including the forests around us — through the trillions of microorganisms that are in our gut microbiome and which keep our bodies healthy, both inside and out.

    As an environmentalist, Monbiot supports lab-based food because he only sees a distorted method of industrial farming; he is blind to agroecological methods which do not have the disastrous environmental consequences of chemical-dependent industrial agriculture. Monbiot’s ‘solution’ is to replace one model of corporate controlled farming with another, thereby robbing us of our connection to the land, to each other and making us wholly dependent on profiteering, unscrupulous interests that have no time for concepts like food democracy or food sovereignty.

    Moreover, certain lab-engineered ‘food’ will require biomatter in the form of commodity crops. This in itself raises issues related to the colonisation of land in faraway countries and the implications for food security there. We may look no further to see the adverse health, social and environmental impacts of pesticide-dependent GMO seed monocropping in Argentina as it produces soy for the global market, not least for animal feed in Europe.

    Instead of pandering to the needs of corporations, prominent commentators would do better by getting behind initiatives like the anti-imperialist Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology, produced by Nyeleni in 2015. It argues for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on genuine agroecological food production. It adds that agroecology requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

    It would mean that what ends up in our food and how it is grown is determined by the public good and not powerful private interests driven by patents, control and commercial gain and the compulsion to subjugate farmers, consumers and entire regions to their global supply chains and questionable products (whether unhealthy food or proprietary pesticides and seeds). For consumers, the public good includes more diverse diets leading to better nutrition and enhanced immunity when faced with any future pandemic.

    Across the world, decentralised and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) food supply chains that can cope with future shocks are now needed more than ever. But there are major obstacles given the power of agrifood concerns whose business models are based on industrial farming and global chains with all the devastating consequences this entails.

    Following the devastation caused by coronavirus-related lockdowns, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet – on the condition that further neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.

    He says that countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong:

    For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.

    For agriculture, this means the further opening of markets to benefit the richer nations. What journalists like George Monbiot fail to acknowledge is that emerging technology in agriculture (AI drones, gene-edited crops, synthetic food, etc) is first and foremost an instrument of corporate power. Indeed, agriculture has for a long time been central to US foreign policy to boost the bottom line of its agribusiness interests and their control over the global food chain.

    In the words of economics professor Michael Hudson:

    It is by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

    It is naïve to suggest that in the brave new world of farmerless farms and lab-based food, things would be different. In the face of economic crisis and stagnation at home, exacerbated by COVID lockdowns and restrictions, whether through new technologies or older Green Revolution methods, Western agricapital will seek to further entrench its position across the globe.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • If you want to deprive citizens of freedom of movement, freedom of assembly and the right to family life, there should be written reasons. They ask the department why they can hardly find such anywhere since the intervention was introduced in March. It is a mystery that hardly any Norwegian journalists have thought of asking this question. { } …that should be every journalist’s first instinct when the government shuts down the country.
    — Øyvind Håbrekke (Candidate for Krk in Trondelog, Norway)

    I. Decrees the expulsion of Jews from the colony. { }
    XXXII. The runaway slave, who shall continue to be so for one month from the day of his being denounced to the officers of justice, shall have his ears cut off, and shall be branded with the flower de luce on the shoulder: and on a second offence of the same nature, persisted in during one month from the day of his being denounced, he shall be hamstrung, and be marked with the flower de luce on the other shoulder. On the third offence, he shall suffer death.
    — Louisiana Code Noir, 1724-1803

    Any person who wilfully enters or uses any public premises or public vehicle or any portion thereof or any counter, bench, seat or other amenity or contrivance which has in terms of sub-section (1) been set apart or reserved for the exclusive use of persons belonging to a particular race or class, being a race or class to which he does not belong, shall be guilty of an offence and liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding fifty pounds or to imprisonment for a period not exceeding three months, or to both such fine and such imprisonment.
    — Reservation of Separate Amenities Act. Parliament of South Africa, 1953

    And by doing so, these devices are constantly reinvented as masks: as apparatuses of categorical transformation aimed at allowing humanity to persist at the brink of the end of the world as this is embodied by the spectre of the “next pandemic.” Portrayed as the last barrier between us and the killer virus to come, “plague masks” ultimately transform us into a species inhabiting the anteroom of its own extinction.
    — Christos Lynteris (Plague Masks- ‘Medical Anthropology,Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness Volume 37, 2018 – Issue 6’)

    One of the most important aspects of aesthetics, of the study of art at all, is that it teaches the viewer or reader how to see and experience more deeply, with more sensitivity, and this in turn (among other things) leads to the ability to recognize the fraudulent. In other words you come to recognize propaganda. It is almost the cultivating of a sub-clinical intuitive skill, a sense when a narrative or an image seem counterfeit.

    Along with this comes the ability to, at least partly, resist marketing campaigns and advertisers’ manipulations. I have always felt the reading of the classics serve as a teflon shield for adverstising.

    Art and culture have more profound gifts than just a finely tuned ‘bullshit meter’. But given the events of this last week, and of the entire year, as well, the loss of cultural education keeps coming back to me. The least enrolled post-grad program at U.S. universities is the study of the classics. History is very low, too, for any era. Business management is the most popular. I often have thought that the loss of such studies today has had a genuinely deleterious effect. Certainly most big search engines, if you google post-graduate programs in the classics, will return a variety of links about how such a degree has nearly zero economic reward attached.

    This is now about a year into the pandemic and there have still been no debates, no public round-tables and no referendums. Nothing. Just decrees by the government. I honestly have given up trying to make sense of statistics, really. But a couple of things have not changed; the fatality rate if you catch Covid-19 is under 1% (and yes, case fatality is different than infectious mortality and that in turn is different from mortality rate). And depending on how it is being counted, it is often a good deal less than that. And yet the entire planet has been subjected to severe restrictions on travel, and coerced to follow pseudo scientific behaviour like mask wearing and social distancing. Today in many places there is what amounts to martial law. Police or national guard patrol the streets after dark. Many countries have banned public events, closed restaurants and nightclubs, and limited any public gatherings. Many schools remain closed or only partially open.

    The economic consequences of these non-debated government policies have been catastrophic. In the U.S. something like 60 million jobs have been lost, many never to return. A hundred and fifty thousand restaurants have gone bankrupt. Only one in three museums will ever reopen. In San Francisco they decided NOT to count the numbers of new homeless. No reason was given but one can guess. The homeless situation in the U.S., in big cities in particular, was critical even before the pandemic. Now the numbers are unprecedented. Not even during the ‘Great Depression’ was there anything like the current level of those without basic shelter. Food insecurity is at a crisis level. Feeding America, the largest hunger relief organization in the US, estimates over 50 million people go hungry every night including something close to twenty million children.

    Since mid-March 2020, numerous surveys have documented unprecedented levels of food insecurity that eclipse anything seen in recent decades in the United States, including during the Great Recession. Over the past five years, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates of food insecurity in the United States have hovered around 11% to 12%.

    As of March and April 2020, national estimates of food insecurity more than tripled to 38%.3 In a national survey we fielded in March 2020 among adults with incomes less than 250% of the 2020 federal poverty level (based on thresholds from the US Census), 44% of all households were food insecure including 48% of Black households, 52% of Hispanic households, and 54% of households with children.
    — American Public Heath Association (Dec 2020)

    And yet, Congress just passed another defense budget increase. According to Defense News“the final version of the 2020 defense appropriations bill, part of a broad $1.4 trillion spending deal to finalize federal spending for 2020 and avert a government shutdown. The defense bill would provide $738 billion.”

    Almost one in three households suffers hunger, regularly. Almost half of black and hispanic households. Households with children are most vulnerable to the government policies. So half of the kids in the U.S. have inadequate nutrition. Half will suffer long term developmental problems, almost guaranteed.

    So, given that there are countless medical professionals around the world who question the effectiveness of Covid policy by government, who question the World Health Organization and CDC, one would think there would be a heated and exhaustive discussion about how to proceed. Once it was clear that this was not a particularly fatal virus, there should have been wide and far-reaching debate. But there was none. And who are the authorities who dictate these policies? This also remains unclear. The head of the WHO is Dr.Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. But the face of the pandemic is Anthony Fauci. Now his role is also a bit unclear. Fauci is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). He has held that position since 1984. It is unclear why he is the official advisor to presidents.

    But, the point is that Bill Gates controls forty percent of the WHO. So, take Norway, where I live. Who advises the PM? Or advises her health minister? And it’s worth noting that the health minister is Bent Høie, from the ruling party, a conservative business friendly party. Here is the wiki entry on Mr Høie…“Høie was born in Randaberg. He studied law at University of Bergen in 1991 and also attended the Norwegian School of Hotel Management from 1991-93.” Well, I guess Hotel management is as good a background as any to make life and death decisions about pandemics. One assumes WHO and/or the CDC send advisors to talk to the Minister of Health. But I am only guessing.

    My point is that the decision-making process is utterly opaque. Nobody seems to have a clear idea from where, exactly, the policy of lockdown (the quarantining of healthy people is far as I can tell utterly new) originated, or where the marketing and obvious fear mongering came from. For there has been a clear marketing apparatus in play, with all the mask adverts, the social distancing, etc. And worth mentioning is that the eco outcry about plastic straws, a genuine issue, really, suddenly receded and now in the hysteria of mask wearing the environment has had to absorb 9 billion single use cloth and plastic masks.

    The entire global economy is teetering on collapse. And this was intentional. This is because of governmental actions, not because of a virus. Of course, western economies has been teetering since 2008, if not before. And I’m not an economist, but this is the point where one must look at “The Great Reset”. Most of you have heard of it, it’s been on the cover of TIME magazine and that photo of Klaus Schwab and his Vulcan unitard suit has cropped up across all social media platforms. The short version (for a long and exhaustive and insightful version see Cory Morningstar here) is that Schwab and his friends at the World Economic Forum have this idea, clothed in perfect green attire, to “reset” the economies of the West (or of the world). The word ‘reset’ is interesting. Who came up with that I wonder? It feels very computer-ish and futuristic, and optimistic!. And while much is made of certain aspects (natural capital, social capital, a new deal for nature, social impact bonds, etc) the reality is that the capitalist system, in the hands of the richest at any given moment, or we can say the ruling class, drive corrections to the market. This helps consolidate wealth at the top, or transfer more to the top. And that is what this is, with the difference being that the plan is more about the destruction of markets, the destruction of competition, and the hyper monopolization of nearly everything. It entails a good deal of AI fantasy, but it also means a digitalization of currency (so no grey economy, no borrowing from friends, no under the table work) and a massive increase in surveillance and tracking. All of this is helped by the lockdown policies, the so called Reset would likely be still born if not for the reaction to Covid.

    Allow me to insert here a European Commission statement regarding Covid-19.

    Now the new head of the European Commission is Ursula von der Leyen. Remember that much of the Reset is driven by the ruling elite of Europe and North America. And these people share common values and goals. Here is a brief biographical sketch on Ms von der Leyen…

    Von der Leyen’s father’s grandparents were the cotton merchant Carl Albrecht (1875–1952) and Mary Ladson Robertson (1883–1960), an American who belonged to a plantation owning family of the southern aristocracy from Charleston, South Carolina. Her American ancestors played a significant role in the British colonization of the Americas, and she descends from many of the first English settlers of Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Barbados, and from numerous colonial-era governors. Among her ancestors were Carolina governors John Yeamans, James Moore, Robert Gibbes, Thomas Smith and Joseph Blake, Pennsylvania deputy governor Samuel Carpenter, and the American revolutionary and lieutenant governor of South Carolina James Ladson.The Ladson family were large plantation owners and her ancestor James H. Ladson owned over 200 slaves by the time slavery in the United States was abolished; her relatives and ancestors were among the wealthiest in British North America in the 18th century, and she descends from one of the largest British slave traders of the era, Joseph Wragg.

    I will return to why this has relevance. But I will only say here that all of the faces fronting for the Green New Deal, and the Reset, are wealthy, from lineages of extreme wealth and position. Today’s theme is ‘class’.

    I can tell you only what I think Schwab and his colleagues want from this project. Let’s look at what is not going to return to normal after the lockdown. Commercial airlines are going bust, and those that are still alive have drastically cut routes and have limited their service. The days of cheap flights to warm beaches is gone, I suspect, for good. Vacations will be limited and travel limited (well, unless you are very rich like Gates and Schwab and Ms von der Leyen and Prince Charles and Jeff Bezos et al). There are now sixty million people out of work in the U.S. The inevitability of the Universal Basic Income is pretty clear. The question is how much does one mean by *basic*? Here I think one might do a quick history overview of apartheid South Africa, of the sugar plantations of the 18th century in the Caribbean, or well, the Nazi work camp system. The new capitalism that is imagined (and look, feel free to call it post capitalism, or woke feudalism or whateverthefuckever you want) has more in common with the aforementioned systems of servitude and slavery than it does to anything else. It is class struggle, as Marx emphasized. Jobs won’t be coming back. There will be a gigantic surplus population.

    And already one sees the gradually coalescing of a new caste system. People deemed ‘important’ are allowed to go places and few questions are asked if they violate social distancing or mask wearing. The new social apartheid which began as a pseudo scientific method for disease control has now in the brief span of a year, become a defacto class segregation. The rich are exempt. There was one article in the New York Post (August 15th) ..

    Meanwhile, billionaire David Geffen has been hanging on his yacht, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson are cruising Greece in another yacht after receiving “honorary” citizenship, Facebook overlord Mark Zuckerberg has been trolling the waters off Hawaii in a $12,000 surfboard, Jeff Bezos and his lady friend have been (multiple) house-hunting, buying up millions of dollars in property in Los Angeles to build a compound while traveling via private jet to several cities around the country, former Mayor Bloomberg splashed out $45 million on a Colorado compound (joining a host of other billionaires buying in that state as well as Montana and Wyoming); and others are spending millions to buy citizenship in “safe” countries like New Zealand.

    That compound remark is worth noting. For this is the future for much of America. Gated compounds for the aristos and the dirty squalid infected world for the proles. And look, gated communities with private security have been in existence for forty years. Only now the separation has deeper implications. Of course, football can continue in both the US and UK, though basketball has been more strictly limited (the perception is, of course, that basketball is an urban game and in a league over 70% black). It is amazing how these strictly enforced behavioural rules are relaxed for the amusements of the court. The rich can pretty much do whatever they want. Literally none of the rules apply to them. There is a middle tier of affluent, those deemed necessary, for the moment anyway, who get to move around more easily. For the millions now without income the restrictions will be quite acute.

    So, back to the ‘Reset’ for a moment. I keep returning to the slave economies of times past because this is increasingly what capitalism has been trending toward. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean used slave labour. Imported from Africa. They sold that raw product in markets of the metropole to world markets. But on the plantation only master and slave relations existed. And this is, in one sense, what is being normalized today. Slave relations. And like the gulf Monarchies, who use *guest* workers (slaves, literally) Americans are close already to being guest workers in their own country. And like the Apartheid laws in South Africa, certain castes (replacing race in this case) cannot go to the private beach of Mark Zukerberg. Or these days, often, any beach at all. And it’s worth noting that the old 19th century industrialist tycoons eventually become huge philanthropists. Carnegie, Mellon, Peabody, Rockefeller even. They endowed education, built libraries and hospitals. Today’s tycoons create deceptive Green projects that are really just more wealth amassing schemes to displace indigenous people, steal land and property, and help sell and normalize the police state.

    Students throughout California are now stuck at home in hot, crowded rooms that occasionally fill with wildfire smoke. 19% of these students are English language learners and almost 13% of them have disabilities. Every day on Zoom they fall more and more behind both academically and socially. In Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district, students are receiving 90-170 minutes of daily live instruction (depending on their age), after which they are expected to do independent work. Compared to the traditional six- or seven-hour school day, online education is laughably inadequate. In real time, teachers and families are watching important developmental windows close for vulnerable children. Meanwhile the California Democratic Party and its affiliates tout virtual schooling as a solution for mitigating COVID-19 transmission.
    — Alex Gutentag (The Bellows)

    Gutentag also notes that the California governor sends his kids to a private school with in-person learning. Caste.

    Not to mention that many children in the U.S. now live in highly stressed homes. Over forty million people are at risk of eviction because of unpaid back rent. None of these homes can afford adequate food. They certainly cannot afford health care. What happens when a child gets sick in today’s America? I suspect for hundreds of thousands they will. at best, get inconsistent attention from volunteer medical workers — unless there is a lockdown in effect. Then they get nothing.

    But as I say, this brutal reorganization of the economy bears no small similarity to a slave economy — but it is being sold to the public by pretending it is this new technology driven ‘Reset’. (Own nothing and be happy). What exactly does the government plan to do with those sixty million unemployed Americans? What does the UK plan? or Germany or France? Or anywhere? The stimulus package went mostly to big corporations. And media and state propaganda continue to provide endless distractions (see assault on the Capital, and anything to do with Trump).

    There is a clear belief in and emphasis on technology in all this. On AI and robotics and transhumanism (sic). And this belief in AI to solve almost everything is reaching levels of delusion that many people, even critics of the Reset, seem to ignore.

    So how is it that people have so passively surrendered their rights? The answer is complex. First, the idea of cooperation and grass roots organizing have been relentlessly disparaged in media for decades. When unions were effectively destroyed under Reagan, along with them went the last vestiges of collectivity. Hollywood has always made films about individual triumph, almost never about revolutionary organizing. I think a large number of people today, even those skeptical, suffer from a kind of inertia. And this too has been built into the system. And it may well be an aspect of screen habituation.

    But before that, people are afraid. The unseen enemy, the invisible virus, the plague, an enemy that brings fevers and suffering, sickness and death. But that is only a part of the problem.

    The Reset is presenting a future of total control for the ruling class. Why would anyone support this madness? Well, first, because they are being sold on the idea that it’s green, and that THEY, themselves, will be in control. Sort of. And second, they have limited options. In a way the long shadow of the Reagan years is evident here. The destruction of unions coupled to the loss of real public education has allowed for the rootless lonely and isolated ‘individual’ of contemporary America. And the utter absence of a real leftist party. But it’s true for much of Europe, too. Here in Norway the wearing of masks is prevalent in ‘high risk’ red zones. And one still can’t drive across the border to Sweden. I see enormous stress indicators in children. Even in my children. And they are young. Nobody feels happy. Isolation does not promote happiness.

    Still, how likely is it that this Reset works? I think this is a somewhat ignored question. And I think I need to ask ‘for whom does it work’? There has been enormous amounts of great stuff written about Schwab and the WEF. To digress a moment (though it’s not really a digression, but only appears to be) there is a basic problem with AI, deep learning, and natural language. And while it is about language, it applies to other fields as well. This is the frame problem. And the frame problem is entwined with the problem of time. The frame problem (see a quick summation here) is about relevance, and that the outlier issues, while statistically rare, are actually what distinguishes smart people from not smart people. Machine learning, AI, can do a lot of things, but to over applaud its achievements without admitting the profound limitations, is going to lead to some catastrophic mistakes and, no doubt, human tragedies.

    And then there is this.

    AI works great in labs, with toys and controlled environments, but a lot less well in the real world.

    So far the solution for the new AI cheerleaders is to make the real world like a lab. In one sense, Singapore, with extensive use of AI, via a very authoritarian state apparatus, has already done this. China is a more complex discussion, and wanting to avoid any idea of an ‘Oriental plot’, I’m just going to take a Mulligan. The ruling class anywhere is exempted in all such examples. The majority of humans will be treated as rats in a lab test. Not even rats, but toys. In other words, highly, if not totally, expendable. The problem with the Reset, and with all of the green new deal projects, are that they operate in a computer model based world that is rather significantly divorced from real life, and certainly, intentionally, disregards class (and caste). There are also new ideas like ‘human capital bonds’. It sounds complex but this is just a more draconian loan arrangement where if you default, for example, while going to medical school, even if you graduate you wont be allowed to practice. Everything in this new economy gives people less power and less autonomy.

    The issues with all AI and with the advanced technology praised by the Reset is philosophical more than scientific. Part of the problem is that the real world is enormously complex. Like weather prediction, anything more than six or seven days out is all but impossible. There are too many unknown factors and variables. This truth can be extrapolated to just about any real world problem. But for all the growing skepticism about AI, the proponents (who know these problems) continue to propagandize the benefits and the infinite possibilities of an AI dominated future. The most absurd are the transhumanists. Given how little is actually known about consciousness, and considering that all AI is just math, it seems almost infantile to think we are going to learn better with implants, or work more efficiently. Alongside that is this issue of prediction. Perhaps this was built into the Enlightenment, but what Adorno and Horkheimer came to call ‘instrumental thinking’ is now embraced unquestioningly by the new peddlers of AI.

    Back to the philosophical issue. Wittgenstein famously said “If a lion could speak, we would not understand it.” Language is part of a shared horizon of the world (as Steven Gambardella put it). Computers can simulate thought, but only up to a point. (See Chinese Box experiment).

    The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages.
    — Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus)

    AI is the Alchemy of the 21st century. The new Reset, driven by the high net worth figures from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or the Royal Houses of Europe, is a fantasy. But a fantasy that is part of a long class struggle. And at a certain point it doesn’t matter, not totally, if AI works. If errors occur in computation, or in facial recognition, or in food allotments to the projected new slave class, the billionaires on their yachts wont mind.

    If the implant in my brain crashes during a scheduled update, that’s just one less servant to feed. And there is also a clear de-population agenda at work in all this. Certainly David Attenborough and Baroness Goodall are big on getting rid of the indigenous people in Africa.  Nearly all of the pro Reset leadership believe in depopulation. Prince Charles is another who prefers he keep his privilege. It is not an accident that an Ursula von der Leyen is running point for the EU now. A descendent of the biggest slave trader in Europe at one time. It speaks to exactly why a Hugo Chavez, for example, so offended these people. Or an Evo Morales. Remember it was not so long ago that the U.S. worked to control and neutralize African independence movements. While Cuba and the U.S.S.R. helped to support those movements. Dick Cheney until the 90s called Mandela a terrorist.

    This intentional demolition of capitalism as we have come to know it is designed to enclose populations via surveillance, digital tagging, health passports, and no doubt much more. Again, if the digital tag doesn’t work, so what? I happen to think much of this ruling class dream is doomed to fail on the technical level. The problem is that it quite possibly will work on a political and control level.

    Depopulation is rebranded eugenics, and nothing else. The royals of Europe have always longed for a return to what, for them, was colonial grandeur. The fantasy future is nostalgia for the ruling class. The dream can be traced back to what the Empire has always done. They destroy anything democratic and/or socialist. They support any dictator at any time because they believe they deserve more and more of what is better. Let them eat cake. They have crushed independence and autonomy for all of the 20th century and now into the 21st. The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the assassination of Lumumba, Vietnam, Indonesia and Suharto, El Salvador (U.S. support for Roberto D’Aubuisson, a fervent admirer of Hitler), or Nicaragua, or Chile, the former Yugoslavia. One could go on and on and on. The U.S. support for Papa Doc in Haiti, for Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Nowhere, at any time, has the Imperialist and colonial loving ruling class EVER supported democracy or equality. Never, nowhere, not once.

    The problem is about perception. Take one of the biggest NGOs in the entire New Deal for Nature *Conservation International*. These people work with the WWF, with Club of Rome, and We Mean Business. These are very wealthy business ventures. Now Conservation International also finances the Greta Thunberg films. And here is their board of directors, from their web page:

    Perception. But Northrup Grummon… and Riverstone Holdings. The first is a major player in the defense industry, the industry that just got a trillion dollars, give or take, from the U.S. Government. The second is a private equity firm focused on leveraged buy outs. Arnhold LLC is an investment management company. Banco BTG Pactual S/A is an investment management company and consultant to corporate trading. You get the idea. These are the people who have helped further inequality, aided environmental destruction, and helped plunder the assets of countless countries. The cynicism is jaw dropping, but many people just see Greta, see green new deal and assume this NGO is an innocent well intentioned and ‘woke’ eco venture.

    WHY would anyone think that suddenly these people are out to save the planet? Well, *they* might think they ARE saving the planet, but not for you and me. For themselves.

    John Steppling is an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theatre, and PEN-West winner for playwrighting. He’s had plays produced in LA, NYC, SF, Louisville, and at universities across the US, as well in Warsaw, Lodz, Paris, London and Krakow. He has taught screenwriting and curated the cinematheque for five years at the Polish National Film School in Lodz, Poland. Plays include The Shaper, Dream Coast, Standard of the Breed, The Thrill, Wheel of Fortune, Dogmouth, and Phantom Luck, which won the 2010 LA Award for best play. Film credits include 52 Pick-up (directed by John Frankenheimer, 1985) and Animal Factory (directed by Steve Buscemi, 1999). A collection of his plays was published in 1999 by Sun & Moon Press as Sea of Cortez and Other Plays. He lives with wife Gunnhild Skrodal Steppling; they divide their time between Norway and the high desert of southern California. He is artistic director of the theatre collective Gunfighter Nation. Read other articles by John.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Before the January 4 ruling of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in the extradition case of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher will continue to endure the ordeal of cold prison facilities while being menaced by a COVID-19 outbreak.  From November 18, Assange, along with inmates in House Block 1 at Belmarsh prison in south-east London, were placed in lockdown conditions.  The measure was imposed after three COVID-19 cases were discovered.

    The response was even more draconian than usual.  Exercise was halted; showers prohibited.  Meals were to be provided directly to the prisoner’s cell.  Prison officials described the approach as a safety precaution.  “We’ve introduced further safety measures following a number of positive cases,” stated a Prison Service spokesperson.

    Assange’s time at Belmarsh is emblematic of a broadly grotesque approach which has been legitimised by the national security establishment.  The pandemic has presented another opportunity to knock him off, if only by less obvious means.  The refusal of Judge Baraitser to grant him bail, enabling him to prepare his case in conditions of guarded, if relative safety, typifies this approach.  “Every day that passes is a serious risk to Julian,” explains his partner, Stella Moris.  “Belmarsh is an extremely dangerous environment where murders and suicides are commonplace.”

    Belmarsh already presented itself as a risk to one’s mental bearings prior to the heralding of the novel coronavirus.  But galloping COVID-19 infections through Britain’s penal system have added another, potentially lethal consideration.  On November 24, Moris revealed that some 54 people in Assange’s house block had been infected with COVID-19.  These included inmates and prison staff.  “If my son dies from COVID-19,” concluded a distressed Christine Assange, “it will be murder.”

    The increasing number of COVID-19 cases in Belmarsh has angered the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer.  On December 7, ten years from the day of Assange’s first arrest, he spoke of concerns that 65 out of approximately 160 inmates had tested positive.  “The British authorities initially detained Mr. Assange on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Sweden in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct that have since been formally dropped due to lack of evidence.” He was currently being “detained for exclusively preventive purposes, to ensure his presence during the ongoing US extradition trial, a proceeding which may well last several years.”

    The picture for the rapporteur is unmistakable, ominous and unspeakable.  The prolonged suffering of the Australian national, who already nurses pre-existing health conditions, amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.  Imprisoning Assange was needlessly brutal.  “Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone, so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”  Melzer suggested immediate decongestion measures for “all inmates whose imprisonment is not absolutely necessary” especially those, “such as Mr Assange, who suffers from a pre-existing respiratory health condition.”

    Free speech advocates are also stoking the fire of interest ahead of Baraitser’s judgment.  In Salon, Roger Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, penned a heartfelt piece wondering what had happened to the fourth estate.  “Where is the honest reporting that we all so desperately need, and upon which the very survival of democracy depends?”  Never one to beat about the bush, Waters suggested that it was “languishing in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.”  To extradite Assange would “set the dangerous precedent that journalists can be prosecuted merely for working with inside sources, or for publishing information the government deems harmful.”  The better alternative: to dismiss the charges against Assange “and cancel the extradition proceedings in the kangaroo court in London.”

    In the meantime, a vigorous campaign is being advanced from the barricades of Twitter to encourage President Donald Trump to pardon Assange.  Moris stole the lead with her appeal on Thanksgiving.  Pictures of sons Max and Gabriel were posted to tingle the commander-in-chief’s tear ducts.  “I beg you, please bring him home for Christmas.”

    Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has added her name to the Free Assange campaign, directing her pointed wishes to the White House.  “Since you’re giving pardons to people,” she declared, “please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality in the deep state.”

    Pamela Anderson’s approach was somewhat different and, it should be said, raunchily attuned to her audience.  She made no qualms donning a bikini in trying to get the president’s attention.  “Bring Julian Assange Home Australia,” went her carried sign, tweeted with a message to Trump to pardon him.  Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Intercept, proved more conventional, niggling Trump about matters of posterity.  “By far the most important blow Trump could strike against the abuse of power by CIA, FBI & the Deep State – as well as to impose transparency on them to prevent future abuses – is a pardon of @Snowden & Julian Assange, punished by those corrupt factions for exposing their abuses.”  Alan Rusbridger, formerly editor of The Guardian, agrees.

    While often coupled with Assange in the pardoning stakes, Edward Snowden has been clear about his wish to see the publisher freed.  “Mr. President, if you grant only one act of clemency during your time in office, please: free Julian Assange.  You alone can save his life.”  As well meant as this is, Trump’s treasury of pardons is bound to be stocked by other options, not least for himself.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Newspeak, Trumpism and conspiracy theories

    News Junkie Post has a policy of zero tolerance for conspiracy theories. With a story as big and global as the COVID-19 pandemic, alternative narratives from conspiracy theorists were bound to happen. Like most news outlets, big or small, News Junkie Post‘s main focus in 2020 was the pandemic. Our Co-Editor-in-Chief, Haitian born microbiologist Dr. Dady Chery, superbly focused on and explained the science; our Indian Editor Imtiaz Akhtar gave us a heart felt testimony from Calcutta under lockdown. For my part, I handled the sociological, political and economical implications of a grossly mismanaged global crisis. As opposed to many, we covered the pandemic in a clinical and analytical way, without falling into the macabre body counts or the assumption that vaccines would be perfect silver bullets. We tried, with humility, to keep our eyes on the unpredictable shifts of a constantly moving target.

    In the Trump era, soon to fade away in our rear view mirror, catering to border line conspiracy theory narratives has become rampant. This phenomenon has deeply impacted people’s perception of reality, not only in the United States, but worldwide. Dismissal of information, valid or not, as fake news is commonplace. This notion has become so insidious that it has even entered, ad verbatim in English, France’s news outlets lexicons. Needless to say, and in accordance with Orwell newspeak, depending on the location or ideological orientation, the fake news for some are the real news for others.

    In our Orwellian kaleidoscope, figments of the imagination’s fictional mirages claim to be anchored in reality. In brief, the soon to be defunct Trump era has taught us that reality is a lot stranger than fiction; that propagandists of all stripes can be duly amplified to the dubious status of global influencers; and the scattered thought processes they promote through social media are a lot more contagious that the nastiest Influenza.

    In the surreal context of the US election aftermath circus, the startup network NewsMax has become Trumpism’s Newspeak vehicle of choice: a Trump propaganda echo chamber where Trump’s die hard supporters, independently of any rationality or moral decency, are told exactly what they want to hear, and therefore are given talking points and ammunition to fuel their simmering anger even more. Needless to say, this crescendo in the realm of the imaginary from their leader, where the elections were rigged and stolen, put into jeopardy the legitimacy of the entire US electoral process. It will be extremely tricky to ensure that the baseless grievances of Trump-hypnotized followers do, in time, heal rather than become festering maggot-infested open social wounds. In a time when the dark forces of the imaginary tromp rationality, the upcoming Biden-Harris administration faces this as its hardest challenge.

    Conspiracy theories such as “the 2020 elections were stolen from Trump by the US Deep State in cahoots with a globalist elite cabal” are a paranoid version of a narrative that contains factual elements. Like any mythology, religion, of course, included, some of the far-fetched assumptions are anchored in the cultural reality of a group’s collective psyche. For example, the toxic notions of purity of blood and Aryan master race were the foundations of the Nazi dogma. In the religious realm, the same can be said of the concept of being the chosen people, invented by the Jewish faith. In both cases, we are dealing with mythologies based on exclusion: the racist and elitist notion that a specific group of humans are above all others, as if humanity has an explicit pecking order, not based on personal merit but linked to almost tribal origins.

    In most conspiracy theories, the imaginary is perceived, almost through some sort of epiphany, as a hard unquestionable truth. Once rationality has ceased to be sociologically and psychologically relevant to enough members of a group, then propaganda, disinformation or religious fundamentalism can convince them that magical thinking is reality. Therefore, the Earth can be flat, a circle can be square, and the love of Jesus can be the best shield against COVID-19. Deep in the QAnon paranoia, a Chinese plague was created by the globalist elite, which is composed of blood sucking elderly pedophiles who might secretly be communists, to depopulate the planet, enslave everyone, and last but not least, make sure the proud patriot crusader against this new world order, Donald Trump, loses his reelection bid.


    A Trumpism myth, which curiously has some international appeal, is that Donald Trump was the champion of sovereign nations fighting against an evil globalist world order. But, as matter of fact, this is completely fabricated, as Trump is, and always was, entirely at the service of global corporate imperialism. Donald Trump attempted to run the United States not as a nationalist, like he claimed in his empty slogans with US citizens’ interests in mind, but as the CEO of America Empire Inc., a subdivision of capitalism global empire. Trumpism, and other brands of populism/neo-fascism are, in essence, disingenuous as they mislead their supporters into believing they are anti-globalist. How could they be when such politicians are, in reality, the obedient servants of mega-corporate interests?

    COVID-19: bonanza for disaster capitalism

    Capitalism, either using the bogus cover of populism or the pseudo humanitarian narrative of neoliberalism of someone like President Macron in France, always operates the same way. The beast is ruthless and has no mercy for the people it exploits, breaks and ultimately destroys. Capitalism‘s gargantuan appetite feeds on people’s miseries. For its engine to stay lubricated and fueled, it needs a colossal amount of human sacrifices. The COVID-19 crisis is no exception. If wars always end up translating into a financial boom, the same can be said about natural disasters like a nice little global pandemic. When you are morally depraved enough to put profit over people, your mindset is always: how could I and my investors make huge benefits from this crisis?

    For COVID, the financial bonanza that has driven world wide stock markets to record highs, while the real economy experiences a depression, has the following factors. Firstly, huge injections of cash were made using a mechanism known as quantitative easing, a euphemism for printing money. This practice, to mitigate an initial crash of the markets, was applied world wide, but considerably more in the US and the EU. Secondly, because of various lockdown measures established in almost all countries since March 2020, there has been a huge boost for online one-stop shopping providers such as Amazon, as well as corporations such as Zoom that facilitate teleconference work. Thirdly, and this is the most important one as it is becoming Wall Street’s Holy Grail, we have, of course, the vaccines!

    Who knows if the vaccine candidates in question will be efficient or have any side effects, but Wall Street and all the financial markets could care less. Moderna might not be a pandemic panacea, but one thing is obvious: it is the new El Dorado! How can you possibly go wrong with a stock that traded at around $20 in January and now trades at more than $130! Now, this is the shot in the arm that global capitalism has longed for. While millions starve, the vaccine boon is a great Christmas bonus for Wall Street!

    While capitalist junkies are getting their fix, and the likes of Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos are becoming trillionaires, millions of ordinary people have died and are dying, millions more have lost their jobs, millions of small businesses worldwide are in dire straights. Countless people all over the world, included in the rich nations, rely on food banks to eat. The obscenity of it all is in our faces, defiantly staring at us. In brief, the COVID-19 crisis has been used by global capitalism and its political surrogates as a giant wealth-concentration machine. One of the stupid empty slogans of the pandemic was “We’re all in this together.” With the unbearable mismanagement of COVID from the get go, what an insult to people’s basic intelligence. No. There is no “together” at all in all this, but just a dog-eat-dog social construct.

    COVID and social inequality fatigue: dissent against police states?

    As more people are becoming aware, at least intuitively, that their governments have failed them or are trying to impose on them drastic measures such as lock-downs, curfews and other arbitrary behavioral rules that have varied throughout the pandemic, a general sense of fear, a collective depression triggered by anxiety and isolation seems to be turning into anger for many. Fear and anger are powerful primal emotions. Unlike fear, which paralyzes, properly channeled anger can be a positive force. Especially collective anger towards incompetent governments that are either not making decisions at all, like Trump did in the US, or are dictating authoritarian measures, like Macron in France, which seem to be based on medical science, but are, in fact, a form of political navigation in a stormy sea, without a compass.

    To add insult to injury, Macron thought it was a good idea to give a little more muscle to his repressive tool kit by passing an extremely police friendly law in France called Loi de Securite Globale. Fortunately, dissent and protest in France are not dead yet, and 10 days after the infamous police-state friendly law was passed, 500,000 people took to the streets despite the pandemic rules curtailing freedom of movements and assembly.

    The COVID-19 crisis will give many governments an opportunity to push some authoritarian policing strategies. After about 20 years under the cover of supposed terrorist threats, the police have become meaner and more omnipresent in most countries’ social landscapes. As most countries ruling classes largely use their police forces as a tool of repression against their own citizens, police brutalities have blossomed almost universally. In fact, the Robocops of global corporate imperialism wear pretty much the same gear and adopt the same brutal techniques. Police forces are in the advance process to become the Praetorian Guard of the global capitalist empire and its billionaire ruling class as well as political surrogates.

    This must be stopped at any cost, the Loi de Securite Globale is a prime example. If the world citizenry do not forcefully and diligently oppose it, hybrid police states could be maintained in place for the much bigger challenges humanity will face once the climate crisis builds its unstoppable momentum. Only a global movement can tackle the enormity of the task at hand, collectively make a stand “by any means necessary,” to quote Malcom X, and get from governments drastic systemic changes, to avoid humanity’s looming collapse.

    Photographs two, three, five, seven and eight by Gilbert Mercier; photograph six from the archives of Backbone Campaign; photograph nine by Daily Chalkupy; and photograph eleven by Johnny Silvercloud.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • On Saturday 21 November 2020 Russia celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg Trials which started on 20 November 1945 and lasted almost a year, until 1 October 1946. The Tribunal was given the task of trying and judging 24 of the most atrocious political and military leaders of the Third Reich.

    For this unique celebration – so we shall never forget – Russian leaders and people of the Arts and History organized a Special Performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” at Moscow’s Helikon Opera Theatre. Daniel Hawkins, from RT, introduced this extraordinary event, as a journey through history, a journey through life and death, when some of – at that time – most genocidal people in history had to answer for their crimes.

    This opera event was prepared for more than a year and was first performed in January 2020 for the Holocaust victims and the victims of the Nazi concentration camps in Leningrad. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an International Military Tribunal. They resulted in 12 death sentences.

    The idea of the “Requiem” performance is “not just to appeal to emotions, but to reason. Because if we fail to learn from history, the tragedy could be repeated.”

    This is precisely what Sergei Novikov, head of the (Russian) presidential directorate for social projects, intimidated. He says, “Despite of what we have seen happening 75 years ago – we do not seem to have learned a lesson. Today we seem to go down the same road, which is frightening.”

    The musical performance interplays with theatrical realism – so memories are awake and moving – better than a museum. The educational impact of this celebration of remembrance is extremely important especially for the young people, who do not remember these events, but with this first-class performance, they may learn a crucial lesson,  a lesson hardly talked about in history books and even less so in the west.

    If we compare what has happened then – 75 years ago – actually the anti-Jewish demonstration in Berlin, known as Kristallnacht, on 9 and 10 November 1938, effectively the beginning of WWII, and look at today’s extremism in Europe, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium, we know that we are not far from a tyranny we knew as “Nationalsozialismus”, a political Nazi-concept of the late 1930s and up to mid-1940s, that today can best be compared with extreme neoliberalism and merciless oppression of peoples’ rights by police and military.

    In fact, we may be steps ahead of what Hitler and his crime and war cabinet had done, but again, today, like then, we are blind to it. There may be a time when we can no longer move, when we are in constant lockdown, masked with dismembered faces, so to speak, kept away from each other under the pretext of social distancing so that we cannot communicate with each other, all for reasons of public health, for the “good intentions” of our governments to protect us from an evil virus – the corona virus.

    Today, this oppression is the result of a long-term plan by a small elite to implement The Great Reset (Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020).

    *****

    There is, of course, a good reason, why Moscow wants the world to remember what WWII meant and how eventually Nazi-Germany was defeated – yes, largely if not solely by enormous sacrifices of the Soviet Union. Some 25 to 30 million USSR soldiers and Soviet citizens had left their lives for salvaging Europe – and possibly the world – from an all invading fascism.

    The United States, nominally an ally of the Soviet Union, had clandestinely funded the Third Reich’s war against the Soviet Union. One of the key purposes for the US getting “involved” in WWII, other than defeating the British Empire, was to defeat their arch-enemy, communist Soviet Union. The Rockefellers funded Hitler’s war machine by providing them with hydrocarbons, with petrol, the energy that drove the war.

    On the other hand, the Federal Reserve (FED), via the Bank for International Settlement (BIS) – the pyramid tower still omni-present in Basle, Switzerland, near the German border – transferred gigantic monetary resources to the Reichsbank (at that time Hitler’s equivalent of a German Central Bank)

    Verdi’s Requiem Performance in Moscow on 21 November is important to go back in history and open the “memory books” in front of our eyes. It is even more important, as we see the trend of fascism taking over the entire European continent and possibly also the United States.

    Europe basically ignores the importance of the 75th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials which still, as of this date, provides precedents for international war crimes – except, these precedents are miserably ignored.  If not, we would have multiple repeats of Nuremberg in our days and age with European and US leaders (sic) in “retirement’ but still with power. Our dystopian western world is beset by war criminals even to the point where they blackmail judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, not to touch their – the European and US – war crimes, or else…

    That’s where we have arrived.

    Since we are going back to the times when WWII and Nuremberg happened, we should take the opportunity to also look at the Big Picture, one that may be at the root of this new wave of fascism invading Europe. It is, in essence, a health dictatorship; it has become a Health Martial Law. Many countries have ratified, quietly, or rammed it through Parliament without the public at large noticing – a law allowing them switching from everyday life to an emergency situation; i.e., (health) Martial Law.

    The Big Picture, though, is a diabolical plan of eugenics. Yes, it’s a term nobody wants to use, but it must be said, because it’s one of the fundamental principles that lies in all that is planned, the 2010 Rockefeller Report and the extremely important WHO Report “A World at Risk” – Annual Report on Global Preparedness for Health Emergencies, by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board – GPMB (September 2019).

    Key members of this Monitoring Board include the World Bank, IMF, CDC and many more influential players, who have been concocting the “Preparedness” for a new epidemic since at least 2016, when the World Bank set up a special “Health Emergency Fund” to face the “next pandemic”.

    Also, part of the SARS-Cov-2 preparedness and planned outbreak, was Event 201 (18 October 2019, NYC, sponsored by Gates, the WEF, and the Johns Hopkins School for Medicine (Rockefeller created and funded), which simulated the outbreak of a SARS-Cov-2 virus which curiously happened a few weeks later. The “outbreak” was actually officially announced on the dot of the beginning of the Decade 2020.

    The Big Picture scheme also includes as an aftermath to covid, The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab, WEF, July 2020), a plan to implement the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enslavement of the remaining population. The Rockefellers and Bill Gates, Kissinger and many more  have nurtured the idea of massively reducing the world population for at least the last 70 years.

    Ever since the Rockefellers espoused the concept of the “Bilderberger Society” (a parallel organization to the WEF (World Economic Forum), with overlapping and an ever-moving memberships) their one and only continuous “project” was a selective population reduction. And they actually never made it a secret. See Bill Gates TedTalk in February 2010 – just about the time when the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued, the one that has us now in “lockstep” following all the rules and regulations, issued by WHO and supported by the entire UN system .

    Why then was the eugenics agenda never seriously picked up by the mainstream, by the public at large? – Possibly, because nobody can even imagine people so evil – or allow me to call them non-humans – to actually want to make this reality. But these non-humanoids do exist. How they infiltrated themselves into human society is a mystery.

    By the way, have you ever seen Bill Gates – with his obnoxious grin – wearing a mask? Or the Rockefellers, Kissingers, et al?  How come they are always spared from this deadly virus, SARS-Cov-2?  How come they get very old, but appear to be always in good health? What kind of life elixir are they using?

    Back to the Eugenists. To implement such a massive plan on a worldwide scale, one needs a uniform approach to world health. In 1948, just a couple of years after the Nuremberg trials started, where war criminals like the Rockefellers should also have been indicted for supplying the enemy (German Nazis) with energy to drive their (anti-Soviet) war machine – back then, in 1948, Rockefeller created WHO, the World Health Organization.

    The philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation (RF) has marked the field of health like no other organization. The oil magnate, John D. Rockefeller “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” Hence, the RF created and provided the original funding to set up WHO in 1948. On 7 April 1948, WHO inherited the mandate and resources of its predecessor, the Health Organization, which had been an agency of the League of Nations. Twenty-six (out of then 58) UN members ratified WHO as a UN agency under the UN Constitution.

    Once you have “Global Health” under one roof, the WHO, funded primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the pharmaceutical industries (predominantly GAVI – Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization – also created by Bill Gates in 2000) and you also have the predominant donor, Bill Gates, an obsessed vaxxer (and eugenist) without any medical training, choose WHO’s Director General – Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a buddy of Gates and former Board Member of GAVI – it is relatively easy to make the foundation of WHO’s health policies based on vaccination.

    That’s what we see today. As we have heard from Gates’ TedTalk (2010 see above), vaccination seems to lend itself perfectly to reduce the world population. It has the further advantage, that if anything goes “wrong” – no vaccine company can be held responsible, let alone being sued. For example, if people get seriously ill or die from the vaccinations – which would not be a surprise, after the Covid-19 are planned to be administered in warp speed – the vaccine pharmaceuticals cannot be sued.

    In fact, vaccine companies do not bear any liability risk. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) of 1986 (42 U.S.C. §§ 300aa-1 to 300aa-34), was signed into law by US President Ronald Reagan on November 14, 1986. NCVIA’s purpose was to eliminate the potential financial liability of vaccine manufacturers due to vaccine injury, since lawsuits led many manufacturers to stop producing the vaccines, a lame argument, but that shows once more the lobbying power the pharma industry commands.

    That’s where we stand today. Any sinister vaccination agenda, no matter how hurtful to the public, is home free. Today we are at this crucial point of massive forced vaccination. Many governments; i.e., UK’s Boris Johnson and Australia’s Scott Morrison, have already advanced the idea of a vaccination-pass. Without it you are banned from flying and from just about every public event. That’s promising.

    And one might ask what does that have to with public health?  What is the real agenda behind it?

    Again, returning to the Nuremberg Trials, aren’t we in the midst of a world tyranny to which all 193 UN member countries subscribed, or were coerced into – a tyranny that has already been genocidal, in as much as it destroyed the world economy, creating countless bankruptcies, unemployment – untold poverty and misery and death, and now a potentially genocidal massive vaccination campaign, the effects of it might be death in the medium to long term, but “untraceable”, or too late by the time the cause is discovered.

    A world tyranny inflicted by all 193 UN member countries – whatever their motivation – all these governments and the heads of WHO and the entire UN system belongs before a new Nuremburg-type Tribunal – where the same legal principal would be applied as 75 years ago in 1945.

    Who says this will not happen? We can make it happen. We, the People, are the 99.99%.  They are only 0.01 %. We have the power to resist – and we will prevail.

    Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Read other articles by Peter.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.