I’m still on August hiatus, but here’s a two-hour lecture on the history of mass media to tide you over until September! This is Lesson One of my three lesson Mass Media: A History online course. Buy the complete course for audio and video downloads, a hyperlinked transcript of each lesson and a study guide with questions and reading recommendations. Enjoy!
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By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 15, 2024
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has announced that Canada’s Supreme Court refused his appeal against undergoing social media re-education (“remedial”) training.
The case stems from the demand of the Ontario College of Psychologists (which licenses practicing clinical psychologists) for Peterson to be subjected to media training. The ruling now means he is to pay court costs to the organization seeking to impose this measure on him.
According to Peterson, the demand was spurred by his negative stance regarding what’s known as “gender-affirming care,” the doomsday climate change narrative (that he spoke about on Joe Rogan’s podcast), and criticism of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In a video posted on YouTube, Peterson said the court’s “terrible decision” not to consider his appeal was yet another “blow to free speech” in his country – and could well result in the revoking of his license to practice, while the ultimate goal of the social media re-education would be to get “something approximating a public apology” for his opinions and for expressing them.
Peterson previously mentioned his criticism of social service workers and police “threatening to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protestors” as another reason for the Ontario College of Psychologists wanting to get him “reeducated” – though he did not speak about this in the YouTube video.
In a post on X, Peterson said that the Supreme Court ruling amounted to admitting that “mid-level bureaucrats who rule the professional colleges and regulatory boards” have more power than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In another post, he criticized Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government which he said was “overseeing the commissars” standing in the way of conservatives’ free expression, including “perhaps” Ford himself.
Peterson is also critical of the way Canada’s CBC covers the case (including his remarks on the Rogan podcast), referring to the broadcaster as “paid lackeys.”
But Peterson has received support from other corners, including Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, who said they were willing to work with him “to see if he wants to take the case international” – which he seems to be open to.
And Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre lambasted the decision as an attempt to impose forced political reeducation, noting that this came after “another government bureaucracy threatened to ban a Canadian from practicing his profession because he expressed political opinions the state doesn’t like.”
The devastating effects on empathy, love, intimacy & sex
By Dr. Roger McFillin | Radically Genuine | August 15, 2024
In our relentless pursuit to transcend the human suffering, we’ve stumbled into a dangerous oversimplification: an improved mental state reflects the absence or decrease in negative emotional states. This reductionist view has not only cheapened our understanding of the human emotional spectrum but has also paved the way for a troubling linguistic shift.
The word “sad” has all but vanished from our lexicon, replaced by the catch-all term “depression” – a linguistic sleight of hand that medicalizes every shade of human sorrow, from loneliness to anxiety, from fear to disappointment. This semantic broadening has opened the floodgates for indiscriminate prescribing of “antidepressant” drugs, extending far beyond their original purpose to treat clinical depression.
Today, these powerful drugs are doled out for an alarming array of off-label conditions: gastrointestinal issues, fibromyalgia, grief, chronic pain, and eating disorders, to name but a few. This prescription epidemic is built not on scientific evidence, but on a dangerous myth – the allure of a quick fix for life’s complexities. The medical profession and mental health communities, seemingly hypnotized by the promise of “antidepressant” effects, have unwittingly become complicit in a grand experiment on human neurochemistry.
At the heart of this phenomenon lies a disturbing paradox: the very mechanism that gives these drugs their “antidepressant” label – emotional blunting – is causing more harm than good. By dampening our ability to feel, these “medications” offer a Faustian bargain: potential short-term relief from suffering at the cost of our full range of human experiences.
For those battling severe clinical depression, the trade-off of emotional blunting might seem a necessary evil. Yet paradoxically, these individuals often struggle most acutely with the very emptiness that antidepressants can exacerbate. More alarmingly, the vast majority caught up in the widening net of antidepressant prescriptions aren’t facing such severe depressive episodes. For them, the potential for permanent emotional deadening was never a consideration, let alone a risk they knowingly accepted.
Emotional Blunting is Not Mental Healthcare
In our misguided quest to eradicate pain, we’ve stumbled upon a chemical lobotomy that threatens the very essence of what makes us human. Emotional blunting, the insidious “side effect of antidepressants”, doesn’t just dull our sorrows – it extinguishes the vibrant flames of joy, love, and connection that give life its meaning.
Imagine a world painted in shades of gray, where the highs of ecstasy and the lows of despair are replaced by a monotonous, tepid middle ground. This is the reality for countless individuals trapped in the purgatory of SSRI-induced emotional blunting. They walk through life as spectators, unable to fully participate in the rich tapestry of human experience.
The medical establishment, in its haste to silence the symptoms, has forgotten a fundamental truth: pain, in all its forms, is not just an inconvenience to be eliminated. It’s a vital signal, a call to action, a catalyst for growth and change. By indiscriminately muting this signal, we’re not just treating depression – we’re risking the very essence of what makes us human.
But the consequences of this chemical flattening extend far beyond personal discomfort. Recent research has unveiled a chilling truth: SSRIs decrease affective empathy, our ability to emotionally resonate with others’ experiences. Neuroimaging reveals a reduction in activity across three crucial brain regions associated with empathy for pain. In our attempt to shield ourselves from suffering, we’ve created a generation of emotional zombies, incapable of truly connecting with the joys and sorrows of those around them.
Consider the implications for love and attachment – the very foundations of human society. How can one form deep, meaningful bonds when the heart’s strings have been chemically severed? The butterflies of new love, the warmth of familial affection, the bittersweet ache of nostalgia – all reduced to mere concepts, intellectually understood but never truly felt. In this emotional wasteland, how can we expect individuals to develop a robust sense of gender and sexual identity, both of which are intimately tied to our capacity for emotional and physical intimacy?
The cruel irony is that in our desperate bid to numb pain, we’ve numbed everything that makes life worth living. Joy becomes a faded memory, a concept understood but no longer experienced. The exhilaration of achievement, the quiet satisfaction of a beautiful sunset, the overwhelming surge of love for a newborn child – all diluted into pale imitations of their former glory.
This emotional castration strikes at the very heart of the human spirit. Our ability to feel deeply – to be moved by music, stirred by art, inspired by acts of kindness – is what separates us from machines. It’s the wellspring of creativity, the driving force behind innovation, the fuel for compassion and altruism. By chemically muting these essential aspects of our humanity, we risk creating a society of hollow individuals, going through the motions of life without ever truly living.
The consequences ripple out far beyond the individual. A populace incapable of deep emotional resonance is a populace ripe for manipulation, apathy, and moral decay. How can we expect people to fight injustice, to stand up for the oppressed, to sacrifice for the greater good, when they can no longer feel the burning indignation or overwhelming compassion that drives such actions?
In our shortsighted attempt to eliminate suffering, we’ve stumbled upon a cure far worse than the disease. The price of emotional blunting is nothing less than our humanity itself. As we continue down this perilous path, we must ask ourselves: in our quest for painlessness, are we willing to sacrifice everything that makes us human? What impact does this emotional blunting have on sexual desire and intimacy?
Post SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD)
Imagine a world where the very essence of your being – your capacity for intimacy, pleasure, and connection – is suddenly and inexplicably stripped away. This isn’t the plot of a dystopian novel; it’s the harsh reality for countless individuals suffering with Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD), a hidden epidemic born from our society’s pill-popping approach to mental health.
A vibrant libido isn’t just about carnal pleasure; it’s the body’s barometer of vitality, a complex symphony of physical, hormonal, and psychological factors humming in harmony. But for those struck by PSSD, this life-affirming melody is replaced by a deafening silence.
PSSD is the pharmaceutical industry’s dirty little secret, a Pandora’s box of sexual side effects that persist long after the last antidepressant pill is swallowed. We’re talking about a cruel trifecta of desire destroyed, genitals numbed, and an inability to orgasm.
The numbers are staggering – up to 73% of patients dancing with these serotonin-enhancing devils report one or more of these bedroom-killing effects. That’s not a side effect; that’s a full-blown assault on human sexuality.
But here’s where it gets truly Kafkaesque: PSSD doesn’t play by the rules. It doesn’t fade away when you kick the meds to the curb. No, it sets up shop in your nervous system, potentially rewiring your sexual circuitry for years – or even indefinitely. Imagine trying to rebuild your life post-depression, only to find that your capacity for one of life’s most fundamental joys has been carpet-bombed into oblivion.
The medical community, in its infinite wisdom, largely turns a blind eye to this sexual holocaust. PSSD sufferers are left adrift in a sea of misdiagnoses and dismissals, their anguish compounded by the very professionals sworn to help them.
As for the root cause of this sexual sabotage? The jury’s still out. Some point to a chemical lobotomy of the brain’s pleasure centers, others to a genetic vandalism that silences the body’s sexual whispers. But while the white coats scratch their heads, real people are left struggling with shattered relationships, crippled self-esteem, and a quality of life that’s been gutted like a fish.
We stand at a critical juncture in mental health care, facing a silent epidemic that threatens the very essence of human experience. Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction (PSSD) is not just a side effect – it’s a life sentence of emotional and sexual numbness that demands immediate recognition and action.
To the medical community, pharmaceutical industry, and mental health advocates: I implore you to acknowledge PSSD as a real and devastating condition. To researchers and funding bodies: We desperately need your support to unravel the mechanisms behind PSSD and develop effective treatments. Donations could be the lifeline that restores hope to countless sufferers.
But recognition and research are not enough. We must revolutionize the informed consent process for antidepressant prescription. To every potential patient, we pose this grave question:
Would you willingly sacrifice your ability to feel emotions deeply, to experience sexual desire, and to forge intimate connections, all for the possibility of short-term relief?
This is not a hypothetical – it’s the reality faced by PSSD sufferers worldwide. We demand transparency about these risks before a single pill is prescribed. The human cost of our current approach is too high, the potential for lifelong suffering too great. It’s time to prioritize true informed consent and explore alternative treatments that don’t gamble with the core of our humanity. The stakes couldn’t be higher – it’s not just about saving lives, but preserving what makes those lives worth living.
I encourage everyone to visit the PSSD Network to learn more about this debilitating condition.
Parents Should Not Expect a Long-Term Benefit
By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse™ | August 12, 2024
In 1991, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) first recommended that all infants in the United States receive the hepatitis B vaccine at birth or within 1–2 months of age. The goal was to prevent maternal transmission of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) and reduce the incidence of infections in babies. Many healthy mothers without hepatitis B or risk factors such as IV drug abuse with normal infants ask what is the benefit in their babies?
The CDC recommends that children receive three doses of the hepatitis B vaccine as part of their routine childhood vaccine schedule:
What happens later in life when young people go into the medical field and are potentially exposed to hepatitis B in sick patients? Posuwan et al evaluated a prospective cohort of young people (mean age 18 years) going into medicine and evaluated their antibody titers as a proxy of enduring immunity to hepatitis B.
The investigators were disappointed to find that only 6.9% had long-lasting immunity to hepatitis B, and thus underwent booster doses upon entering medical school. It is unclear when immunity is lost in this cohort. The results are important for parents to understand that the hepatitis B shots given at birth are only applicable if the mother has hepatitis B or serious risks for carrying it including active IV drug abuse. Otherwise the vaccine schedule for this illness has little value at that age.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 15, 2024
Stock prices for mpox vaccine maker Bavarian Nordic surged after the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday declared mpox a global public health emergency.
The company’s share prices jumped 17% in early trading in Copenhagen today, Forbes reported, after climbing 12% yesterday when the WHO made its announcement. In the U.S., shares were up 33% this morning.
The WHO cited recent outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and neighboring nations in its declaration.
In the first known infection of its kind outside Africa, Sweden today confirmed a case of the highly contagious strain of mpox, according to NBC News. The WHO’s European regional office in Copenhagen said it was discussing with Sweden how best to manage the newly detected case, according to Medical Xpress.
This is the second time in two years the WHO has declared mpox a “public health emergency of international concern” PHEIC — pronounced “fake” — which is its highest form of an alert.
The announcement follows a declaration Tuesday by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention that mpox is a continent-wide public health emergency.
Last week, the WHO triggered the process to grant Emergency Use Listing to two mpox vaccines, although it didn’t name which ones it would list. The agency also invited manufacturers of mpox vaccines to submit an “expression of interest” for Emergency Use Listing.
The DRC, where the outbreak is concentrated and most severe, has approved two vaccines — Japan’s LC16 and Bavarian Nordic’s Jynneos, which is also marketed as Imvamune and Imvanex.
Bavarian Nordic is one of the few companies in the world with an already-approved mpox vaccine that is also available in large quantities. Other contenders, such as Emergent BioSolutions’ ACAM2000 have been available under special investigational protocols. Others, like Tonix Pharmaceuticals, have experimental shots that are in earlier stages of development.
LC16 is a smallpox vaccine licensed in 1980 in Japan and approved in July 2022 for mpox. It isn’t commercially available, but there are large supplies in Japan’s national stockpile, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reported. Like Jynneos, it is a third-generation mpox vaccine that uses attenuated virus strains.
Jynneos and ACAM2000 can cause myocarditis, pericarditis and other serious side effects at high rates, Dr. Meryl Nass told The Defender last week, as the labels for both drugs indicate.
The Japanese LC16 vaccine also has been linked to encephalitis, Nass reported on her Substack today.
“The WHO is using the monkeypox outbreak in Africa to fast-track, under emergency use, two monkeypox vaccines,” Dr. Kat Lindley, a senior fellow at FLCCC Family Medicine and president of the Global Health Project told The Defender.
“We need to use discernment and evaluate risks and benefits before recommending any experimental new product to a vulnerable population,” she said.
The African CDC in a LinkedIn post said it needed 10 million doses to control the outbreak and called for global support for its vaccination efforts.
Bavarian Nordic’s CEO Paul Chaplin told Bloomberg the company can provide 10 million doses of its vaccine to African countries over the next year and a half.
In an interview Wednesday — before today’s stock price surge — Chaplin said, “We have inventory and we have the capabilities. What we’re missing are the orders.”
In May 2022, the WHO announced it would phase out the name “monkeypox” and rename the disease “mpox” to avoid the stigma generated by associating the disease with monkeys.
WHO process for issuing PHEIC declarations ‘non-transparent and contradictory’
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in his press announcement that the agency decided to declare a PHEIC because:
“The detection and rapid spread of a new clade of mpox in eastern DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], its detection in neighboring countries that had not previously reported mpox, and the potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying.”
The WHO declaration signals a public health risk requiring an international coordinated response. It can lead to WHO member countries and private investors pouring substantial resources into countries with outbreaks to facilitate sharing of vaccines, treatments and testing.
The declaration also grants the WHO authority to issue travel warnings or restrictions, to review and critique the validity of public health measures by member countries and to help persuade people that they ought to follow public health recommendations.
This is the eighth public health emergency the WHO has declared since 2007, when it substantially revised its International Health Regulations (IHR). Critics have called the process for designating such an emergency “non-transparent and contradictory.”
In July 2022, the WHO declared mpox a global emergency after reporting the disease had spread to more than 70 countries, mostly affecting gay and bisexual men. At the time, Tedros made the declaration unilaterally, in direct contradiction to independent review panel advice.
At that time, the Jynneos vaccine was licensed in the U.S. and ACAM2000 was “made available for use against mpox in the current outbreak [2022] under an Expanded Access Investigational New Drug (EA-IND) protocol.” Jynneos received emergency use authorization in the U.S. for children under 18 considered to be at high risk.
Although in the U.S. monkeypox has appeared to be a mild illness, several lucrative government contracts in 2022 paid the vaccine makers hundreds of millions to stockpile the vaccines.
The 2022 outbreak reportedly affected nearly 100,000 people, primarily gay and bisexual men, in 116 countries and about 200 people died.
Despite media hype and hundreds of millions of dollars spent to stockpile mpox vaccines in the U.S., the designation was quietly withdrawn in May 2023, “given the sustained decline in cases.”
On Aug. 8, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority renewed its contract with Bavarian Nordic, committing $156.8 million to manufacture and store Jynneos doses to partly replenish the inventory used to manufacture vaccines in response to the mpox outbreak in 2022.
Critics suggest ‘common sense mitigation measures’
Mpox was first detected in humans in 1970 in the DRC, according to the WHO, and is considered endemic to countries in central and west Africa, with the number of cases rising and falling periodically.
The disease causes flu-like symptoms and pus-filled lesions. It is usually mild but can be serious, particularly in people with weakened immune systems, Reuters reported.
In its announcement Wednesday, the WHO said the DRC is experiencing a severe outbreak of mpox, with 15,600 cases and 537 deaths. It said the current outbreak is caused by a virus strain, or “clade” — clade 1b — that is more severe than clade 2, which was responsible for the global outbreak in 2022.
It “appears to be spreading mainly through sexual networks,” and it has been detected in neighboring countries of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda, with 100 “laboratory-confirmed cases of clade 1b” in total in those countries.
Lindley said health officials are most likely using PCR tests, which were shown during the COVID-19 pandemic to generate false positive results.
“We really have no idea,” she said, if the alleged deaths are “complications of people who have depressed immune systems and are dying of other things.”
“Why would we start mass vaccination with a new product for which we know nothing about the safety profile when common sense mitigation measures can work?” she asked. “If it is sexually transmitted, use a condom or abstain from sex. If it can be transmitted through secretions, wash your hands and don’t touch people with clinical presentation.”
Nass expressed similar skepticism on her Substack:
“If this generally mild viral illness is killing people, what is the cause of death? Does it only cause death in severely immune suppressed patients? Are babies dying due to dehydration? Do we need to treat babies with fluids rather than give them a vaccine that was never tested in babies? Lots of unanswered questions.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
By W.M. Peterson | Truth Blitzkrieg | August 5, 2024
Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul once asserted, “There’s no history to show that Iranians are aggressive people. When is the last time they invaded a country? Over 200 years ago!”
As with many other important matters, Congressman Paul was absolutely correct; Iran has never been a warmongering state, unlike adversarial belligerents Israel and the USA.
Despite deep state meddling in the Persian nation’s affairs (e.g., the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and the 2020 murder of Major General Qasem Soleimani), Iran has never posed the slightest threat to America. Why, then, are we being maneuvered into war when there is absolutely no national interest at stake?
It’s somewhat of a rhetorical question, I admit, since by now most people who aren’t cognitively impaired understand that Israel is trying like hell to steer America’s military into the Middle East to shed more blood on its behalf. The recent provocations towards Iran are but the latest installments in an ongoing saga we’ve witnessed play out repeatedly since 2001.
Americans should know by now what to expect. After having been led by the nose into 20 years of costly wars primarily for the enrichment and comfort of Jewish intruders squatting in the Holy Land, you’d think we might have learned a thing or two about international Zionist statecraft. It’s not as if their methods of fomenting a climate of war have changed. It’s not as if we weren’t told what to expect.
In fact we were told, by none other than former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Wesley Clark.
During a 2007 interview on Amy Goodman’s political talk show Democracy Now, General Clark spoke about a detailed war agenda that was revealed to him by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he visited the Pentagon just ten days after 9/11:
“One of the generals called me in. He said, ‘Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second… We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.’ This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, ‘We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?’ He said, ‘I don’t know…I guess they don’t know what else to do.’ So I said, ‘Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?’ He said, ‘No, no…there’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq…I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.’ And he said, ‘I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
A few weeks later, Clark returned to the Pentagon and met with the same man, recalling:
“I said, ‘Are we still going to war with Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Oh, it’s worse than that.’ He reached over his desk. He picked up a piece of paper and he said, ‘I just got this down from upstairs’ — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — ‘today.’ And he said, ‘This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’ I said, ‘Is it classified?’ He said, ‘Yes sir.’ I said, ‘Well don’t show it to me.’ And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, ‘You remember that?’ He said, ‘Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you.’”
General Clark was having these conversations at a time when the Pentagon was entirely under the thumb of Zionist Jews who had been plotting and preparing for a global war on terror for many years prior to 2001. The battle plan disclosed to Clark is not of American provenance; it is an Israeli war stratagem smuggled into our foreign policy by duplicitous foreign agents. You’ll notice that almost every country named by the general has been ‘dealt with’ militarily in one form or another in the years following 9/11, Iran being the lone exception. That status is likely to change real soon as Israel continues to escalate tensions in the region. AIPAC control over U.S. politicians ensures there won’t be so much as a whimper of protest from the ‘American Colossus’ in response to Zionist saber-rattling and increased provocations. And, rest assured, America will defend Israel to the death when the situation in the Middle East reaches critical mass. American citizens, and especially ‘conservatives,’ need to understand how they’re being emotionally manipulated into supporting yet another war that is entirely at variance with our interests and could only spell doom for our already beleaguered nation.
Netanyahu’s War on Terror
On July 24th, Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu swaggered into the U.S. Capitol to address a joint session of Congress and to cultivate material and emotional support for his upcoming war with Iran. During the course of his nagging hour-long harangue, the Israeli prime minister received 58 standing ovations from submissive stooges on both sides of the aisle, proving once more that Pat Buchanan’s description of Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory” is as true today as it was 30 years ago.
The AIPAC-funded adulation shown this Hebrew war criminal was a sickening sight to behold. Former US Marine and United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter summed it up nicely:
“Israel has bragged about buying the US Congress. And this is the result, where a war criminal—a man who has been accused of genocide, who has arrest warrants being prepared for him by the International Court of Justice, a man who heads a State that has been defined legally as an “apartheid state,” carrying out an illegal and unjust occupation and, again, genocide of the Palestinian people—has demanded an audience to the Congress that he has bought and paid for. That’s what’s happening here. We must see it in that perspective. This isn’t an honor being given to Netanyahu by the US Congress. This is the US Congress obeying the commands of the man who leads the nation that owns the US Congress.”
In one of his most memorable lines of the day, Netanyahu affirmed with a straight face, “there is no place for political violence in democracies!” (He made the comment while referring to the recent shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania.) Within one week, however, Israel had assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran; Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut; and Al Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul in Gaza. The recent killing spree occurred only three months after IDF jets bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria killing 16 people, including seven diplomats. “There is no place for political violence in democracies!” quoth the mass-murdering psychopathic Jew, who once attended a two-day anniversary celebration commemorating the Irgun’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel.
Bibi the Butcher, that distinguished darling of America’s political class, has spent his entire adult life promoting Israel’s War on Terror.
In 1979, he and his father Benzion partnered with Irgun terrorist-turned-prime minister Menachem Begin to organize the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, a three-day event intended to “launch an international propaganda offensive to promote and exploit the issue of international terrorism,” as Philip Paull explains in his 1982 book, International Terrorism: The Propaganda War. The event was held at the Yonatan Institute, named after Netanyahu’s deceased older brother, and its purpose was to bring Western political leaders together to discuss international terrorism and the possibility of manipulating America’s military into the Middle East to wage a war on terror. The elder Netanyahu (born Mileikowsky) said in his opening address, “This conference was called to serve as a beginning of a new process — the purpose of rallying democracies of the world to a struggle against terrorism and the dangers it represents.” (George H.W. Bush spoke on the last day of the event.)
From that point on, the Western media dutifully disseminated the propaganda of the Jerusalem Conference and Benjamin Netanyahu would produce a number of books, articles and speeches throughout the 1980s and 90s promoting the doctrine of a global War on Terror. As Philip Paull wrote in 1982, “This ‘anti-terrorist’ propaganda campaign was and is being conducted in a style reminiscent of war-time ‘psychological warfare’ by journalists serving as conduits and spreaders of misinformation originating in Jerusalem.”<
Forecasting War
Netanyahu’s plan to haul America’s military into the Middle East to wage war on Israel’s enemies became a reality after September 11, 2001, a day he claimed was “very good” for Israel. (Source: New York Times, Sept. 12, 2001)
Many Americans still believe the War on Terror was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks. The fact is, however, the War on Terror was conceived many years before 2001, and the atrocities perpetrated in New York City and Washington D.C. were merely the excuse to make the war agenda operational.
In February 1982, the World Zionist Organization published ‘The Yinon Plan: A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.’ The document was published in Hebrew but was later translated into English by the eminent professor Israel Shahak of Hebrew University. It was written by military strategist Oded Yinon and detailed a plan to break up large Arab nations like Iraq and Syria and transform them into tiny ethnic statelets that would be incapable of defending themselves against Israel’s superior military might. Yinon wrote:
“The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas… is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target.”
Yinon’s vision for Iraq came to fruition following the illegal American invasion, launched on the Jewish revenge holiday Purim, in 2003. Almost immediately, America’s conquering forces disbanded Iraq’s military and the entire country soon descended into civil war between competing factions of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Prior to the invasion, Iraq had been a significant impediment to Israeli domination of the Middle East, which is why the Jews in control of America’s foreign policy selected it for annihilation. And, as an added bonus, there were the financial spoils of war to acquire as well. Oded Yinon: “Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand…is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria.”
What Yinon described in 1982 is the Eretz Yisrael (Greater Israel) project that Americans have been fighting and dying for since 2001. America’s military is not fighting terrorism; it is reorganizing the Middle East to conform with Israel’s whims and Iran is the crown jewel. This war agenda has already bankrupted America morally and financially and has destroyed the erstwhile superpower’s standing on the world stage. As noted Middle East expert Linda S. Heard wrote in an article for Counterpunch (April 25, 2006), “Oded Yinon’s 1982 ‘Zionist Plan for the Middle East’ is in large part taking shape. Is this pure coincidence? Was Yinon a gifted psychic? Perhaps! Alternately, we in the West are victims of a long-held agenda not of our making and without doubt not in our interest.”
A Clean Break and PNAC
An updated version of The Yinon Plan was drafted for Netanyahu in 1996 during his first year as Israel’s prime minister. Titled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,’ the document was assembled for Netanyahu by neocon hawks Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. It specifically called for the removal from power of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria and recommended military confrontations with both countries as well as with Lebanon and Iran. One year later, Perle, Feith and Wurmser would all join the newly-founded Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and continue their strategizing for Netanyahu’s War on Terror.
PNAC was an elite neoconservative think-tank founded in 1997 by influential Zionists William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The majority of the group’s membership was comprised of fanatical Jews with deep ties to the state of Israel, many of whom came to power just prior to 9/11 within the administration of George W. Bush. These include: Dov Zakheim, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, David Frum, Robert Zoellick, David Wurmser, and the convicted felon Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby.
The overarching philosophy of PNAC was based on the ideology of Jewish intellectual Leo Strauss. Like many of today’s neoconservatives, Strauss was an ex-Trotskyite who promoted Machiavellian tactics and the use of lies as necessary political tools while a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Significantly, he was also a dedicated Zionist and a follower of the terrorist Ze’ev Jabotinsky. On the surface these ideological alignments appear to be contradictory, unless some understanding of the overwhelming Jewish role in both Zionism and Communism can be apprehended. Both were pioneered by the same man, Moses Hess, and both are Jewish revolutionary movements whose sole aim is to do whatever is best for Jewish interests even if it means employing seemingly opposing methods. Far-right Zionism (Jewish nationalism) and far-left Communism (Jewish internationalism) are two sides of the same shekel working in tandem as a lethal pincer for global hegemony. Attempting to explain these amorphous tendencies, Jewish historian and political theorist Murray Rothbard once noted that neoconservatives “moved from cafeteria Trotskyites to apologists for the US warfare state without missing a beat.”
In September 2000, PNAC published a 90-page document titled ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century.’ The document, co-authored by Rabbi Dov Zakheim, called for America to initiate a series of regime change wars in the Middle East and North Africa with an emphasis on Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and Iran. The authors of the report emphasized the importance for America to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” but acknowledged that “the process of change is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.” One year to the month of the document’s publication America got what George W. Bush referred to at the time as ‘our Pearl Harbor.’
Conclusion
And so America teeters once again on the brink of war due to our fatal attraction to the Zionist state. The man who claims “there is no place for political violence in democracies” presides over a country that has made political assassinations its stock-and-trade and is undoubtedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks which activated its long-held War on Terror scheme. Speaking to an audience at Bar Ilan University in 2008, the war criminal recipient of 58 standing ovations from the US Congress reiterated his belief that the 9/11 attacks were in fact good for Israel: “We are benefitting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq.” (Source: Ha’aretz, April 16, 2008)
*Nota bene: Netanyahu listed three things, not one, but to the mind of an architect of the War on Terror, all three blend seamlessly together.*
The Israeli prime minister and his minions have nothing but contempt for America. That won’t change regardless of how many standing ovations he receives from a goyische congress or how many US dollars flow into his over-stuffed war chest. In 2001, he was filmed having a conversation with Israeli settlers about ways in which he intended to undermine the US-led Oslo Peace Accords that had been signed in 1993 and 1995. During one such conversation, he crowed: “I know what America is… America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won’t get in the way.” He goes on to boast about his ability to manipulate the US in the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian peace process, saying, according to the Washington Post (July 16, 2010), “They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo Accords]… I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”
Benjamin Netanyahu ladies and gentleman. A man whose military has killed upwards of over 186,000 Palestinians this year alone and has bombed hospitals, schools, churches, aid convoys and refugee camps; a man who sanctions the anal rape of prisoners; a man American politicians hail as a conquering hero; a man millions of evangelical ‘Christians’ believe we should sacrifice more of our children’s blood for.
Palestinian Information Center – August 15, 2024
RAMALLAH – The testimony of a Palestinian detainee revealed that Israeli occupation forces (IOF) used him and another prisoner as human shields for 40 days in Gaza.
The Palestinian Prisoner Affairs Authority and the Palestinian Prisoner Society said in a joint statement on Thursday that the IOF forced the Palestinian detainee to wear a military uniform, placed a camera on him, and accompanied him with a drone.
The Authority and the Society confirmed that if the prisoner refused to be used as a human shield, he would be subjected to brutal beatings, deprived of food and basic needs, in addition to being shot and prevented from receiving medical treatment.
The joint statement presented the testimony of the 21-year-old Gaza youth “M.D.,” who was used by the IOF as a human shield for more than 40 days, along with another detainee who was with him.
The same source said that the Palestinian young man, who was working at the Kerm Abu Salem crossing, was subjected to acts of torture, deliberate humiliation and assault, starvation, terrorism and threats, after he and a group of citizens were arrested by the IOF soldiers last June and detained between the Palestinian-Egyptian borders and Rafah.
According to the testimony of the Gaza youth, the IOF used him as a human shield on a daily basis, through several methods, such as placing him at the front of IOF military vehicles, with his hands and feet tied, and forcing him to wear the Israeli military uniform and attaching a camera to his body.
According to the horrifying testimony of the young man, if he refused to go along with the IOF orders, he was subjected to beatings, and added that a drone was used to guide him during his movements. During his detention, the young man confirmed that the IOF soldiers did not provide him with enough food, deprived him of using the bathroom or taking a shower, and this continued throughout his detention period, until he was shot in the chest on the 6th of August, and he remained without treatment for about half an hour.
The Palestinian young man found himself the next day in the Israeli Soroka hospital, where he stayed for 3 days, until he was released on the 9th of August through the Kerm Abu Salem crossing, and he was then transported by ambulance to the Nasser Medical Hospital. The tests showed that the injury caused him a fracture in his chest and another injury in his lung, and he still needs urgent treatment.
For their part, the two bodies concerned with the affairs of Palestinian prisoners considered that the young man from Gaza was exposed to a complex and horrific war crime, starting from his arrest and using him as a human shield throughout this period, and torturing and humiliating him, and then injuring him, and releasing him from the hospital without completing his treatment.
The two bodies once again called on the international human rights institutions to regain their necessary and required role in the face of the ongoing genocide war and the systematic crimes committed by Israel against prisoners and detainees, and to assume their necessary responsibilities, and stressed the need to overcome the horrific state of impotence that surrounds their role, and to go beyond this role that is limited only to monitoring crimes and violations and issuing positions and statements, to a level that leads to holding Israel and its supporters accountable.
International humanitarian law and the 1949 Geneva Convention prohibit armies from using civilians as human shields, and the International Criminal Court considers this a war crime.
Israel has been continuously waging its devastating war on the Gaza Strip for more than 10 months, which has so far resulted in more than 40,000 martyrs and more than 92,000 injuries, mostly women and children, in addition to massive destruction of vital facilities, residential buildings, and an exacerbating famine in the besieged Strip.
Israel continues its war despite two resolutions from the UN Security Council to stop it immediately, and orders from the International Court of Justice to end the invasion of Rafah and take measures to prevent genocide and improve the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Al Mayadeen | August 15, 2024
The Israeli occupation’s anticipation of Hezbollah and Iranian response to Israeli assassinations carried out in late July has pushed the regime into “economic chaos”, Israeli media outlets reported.
The economic affairs commentator for Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 underlined that the past two weeks have “exhausted” the Israeli market. Several economic events were canceled in Israeli-occupied territories, while others were reduced due to the state of anxiety experienced among settlers.
Economic activities have also been affected by the operational measures issued by Israeli authorities, in preparation for retaliatory strikes by Hezbollah and Iran.
The Israeli commentator highlighted the significant losses that affected the Israeli tourism sector, largely linked to international flight cancellations to Israeli-occupied airports. An increasing number of Israeli settlers have been stranded in other countries due to the wide-scale cancelation of flights. The possibilities of responses launched by the Axis of Resistance have also impacted hotels and other hospitality and tourism businesses in the northern Israeli-occupied territories, which may be directly affected by future strikes.
The commentator warned that these challenging conditions and operational measures, which are also impacting the medical and energy sectors, could persist well into September.
If the wait continues into next month, the Israeli educational sector will also be severely affected by operational measures, forcing institutions to “maneuver within combat scenarios.”
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 15.08.2024
Ukraine’s ill-fated Kursk terror attack could be part of the US Democratic establishment’s effort to prop up their candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election, according to Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel.
Despite the US State Department and Pentagon denying any involvement in the Kiev regime’s Kursk aggression, it has all the earmarks of US-NATO management and planning, according to Major General Apti Alaudinov, deputy head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Military-Political Directorate and Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
“At this stage, nothing likely happens in Ukraine and vis-a-vis Russia unless approved in advance by someone in the US,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik. “Relevant questions include: exactly who approved these offensive operations and what debate, if any, occurred in Congress before these raids happened?”
Ortel called the Kursk attack a “wag the dog 2.0” operation, saying that it “seems a reprise” of then-US President Bill Clinton’s assault on one of Sudan’s biggest pharmaceutical factories in Khartoum in 1998. The US attack based on faulty intelligence was presented as retaliation to Al-Qaeda bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
However, some analysts noted at the time that the US bombing came as investigations into Clinton’s lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky intensified. Dubbing the case a “wag the dog” situation, they suggested that Clinton urgently authorized the strike as a distraction, with the backing of many Democratic lawmakers including then-Senator Joe Biden.
The Kursk aggression appears to be as dubious in terms of military planning and strategic value as the senseless bombing of the Al Shifa factory. US Congressman Paul Gosar called Ukraine’s border incursion “suicidal” in an interview with Sputnik, while retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski wondered whether Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had a hand in the Kursk aggression planning.
Earlier, on August 8, CNN quoted Ukrainian officials as saying that the Kursk attack was aimed at demoralizing Russian forces and diverting them away from other parts of the front. However, as of August 12, the Ukrainian military told the New York Times and Financial Times (FT) that the Russian Armed Forces’ advance in Donbass, including near strategically important Chasov Yar and Torestk, is continuing unabated.
To complicate matters further for Kiev, at least six Ukrainian brigades that previously fought near Kharkov, Sumy, Chasov Yar and Toretsk were redirected to participate in the Kursk aggression, according to FT. The newspaper cited Ukrainian soldiers’ worries about leaving positions in Donbass to take part in the Kursk gamble.
On August 15, Russia’s Tsentr Battlegroup destroyed a Ukrainian military stronghold in the Avdeyyevka direction in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). On August 12, the Russian military liberated the settlement of Lisichnoye; earlier, Timofeyevka and Veseloye were retaken from the enemy. Russia liberated a total of 19 settlements of the DPR in July, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Harris and Walz’s ‘Illusionary’ Campaign Doomed to be Busted
One might ask why the US Democratic establishment would need any “prop-up” of their presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, given that the two are currently enjoying a surge in the polls.
According to Ortel, the surge appears to be short-lived and most likely artificial and made-up by the US corporate press, especially given that Harris’ poll numbers as Biden’s veep had been disastrous. For instance, the Wall Street analyst referred to a recent survey published by the Hill that claimed that more voters trust Harris than Donald Trump on the economy as completely detached from reality.
“The corporate-owned press, including Fox, has lost all credibility which explains their financial losses and the rise of Twitter spaces, Tucker Carlson and alternative truth-tellers that thrive,” Ortel said. “Traditional actors are resolved to sell fiction as fact to promote a singularly unaccomplished airhead to lead America out of the messes she helped create.”
Indeed, US conservative commentators and pundits have recently thrown Harris’ poll numbers, campaign performance and unwillingness to make one-on-one interviews into question.
“[The media] are so in the tank for Harris that they are defending her decision not to talk to them,” remarked US investigative journalist and author Michael Shellenberg on X on August 14. Earlier, the journalist drew attention to the fact that, for some strange reason, Harris has not put a policy agenda on her website.
Former White House Political Director Matt Schlapp tweeted that there is nothing short of a “push by the national media and Democratic National Committee (DNC) to legitimize Kamala Harris,” adding that she is not giving interviews to evade criticism over her vice presidency.
Similarly, Fox News host Sean Hannity recently called Harris “an illusion, built on a mountain of lies” on X.
Rogan O’Handley, a former entertainment lawyer, claimed on X on August 7 that the Harris campaign was caught offering Instagram influencers money to post personal stories about how the Biden-Harris administration helped them.
Axios reported on August 13 that it found that Harris’ campaign was editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads to “make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side.” The news outlet noted that while such activity is in line with the Google rules, the tech giant admitted there was a “glitch” that removed a disclaimer “sponsored” near the news headlines touting Harris.
US conservative journalist Kyle Becker also alleged on X that pollsters are “oversampling” Democrats for no reason “except deceiving the voters.” Becker believes that the reports that Harris is leading her Republican competitor in key battleground states are made up to justify her future win. “It is all designed to try to keep Harris within the margin of cheating,” tweeted Becker. In 2020, Biden won the presidential election after outperforming Trump by a razor-thin margin in crucial swing states. Many Republicans believe voting procedures were rigged there.
According to Ortel, the Harris-Walz campaign “honeymoon” may end as abruptly as it started.
“The true mud-slinging will start after Labor Day [September 2] and continue thereafter. No one yet has vetted Harris or Walz and I suspect their reputations will be gutted, fairly, well before November 5, 2024. Moreover, neither are effective, battle-hardened debaters, campaigners or leaders,” Ortel said.
Looming Crises Won’t Allow Harris-Walz to Fool Voters
While the Harris-Walz campaign needs good news, be it record-high poll numbers, Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, or their proxy Zelensky claiming victories, the problem is that the “looming crises and worsening economic prospects” won’t let “conflicted grifters” in the US establishment fool American voters again, according to Ortel.
As Ukrainian forces continue to lose ground on the battlefield, the Biden administration is still struggling to reach a ceasefire agreement amid Israel’s war in Gaza, fuelling discontent with the Democratic Party among Palestine supporters. According to the New York Post, an August 14 rally supporting Vice President Harris in the New York City descended into chaos after pro-Palestinian protesters infiltrated the gathering and later started to clash with the police.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg experts warn the US economy is expected to slow down under the Biden-Harris administration, casting an additional shadow on the Harris-Walz campaign.
Commenting on the Democratic administration’s chaotic domestic and foreign policies, Ortel noted:
“The period 1991 to present stands already as a rare epoch during which too many leaders combined arrogance and ignorance into a toxic cocktail, gulling voters with effective lies into bullied serfs, grateful for gruel as the donor class and their paid stooges seemingly prospered,” the pundit said. “‘What could have been’ from 1991 forward unburdened by Harris, Walz and other incompetent, conflicted has-beens is truly a marvel to contemplate! Let’s see whether the American election is free and fair and let’s see who actually wins.”
By Dmitri Kovalevich | Al Mayadeen | August 15, 2024
Every day, across the country, police are reporting arson attacks against Ukrainian military vehicles. Military personnel in the rear are increasingly wary of leaving their vehicles on the streets overnight, instead parking them near police stations. But even this does not always help.
Those detained by police for these attacks have mostly been teenagers between 12 and 18 years of age, according to governor Oleh Sinegubov of Kharkiv Oblast (province), writing in early August.
Shoot the youth who are attacking military vehicles?
As a result of such attacks increasing in number, Oleh Romanov, commander of an anti-tank unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), has declared he has given permission to shoot on sight those who set fire to military vehicles in the rear. “In coordination with higher command, using military immunity, I give verbal permission to my fighters to shoot those things on the spot. Such traitors must be eliminated on the spot, considering wartime conditions.” His unit is the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, formerly a unit of the neo-Nazi ‘Azov Battalion’ now fully integrated as an autonomous unit of the regular army.
So the commander of what is today a regular Ukraine military unit is openly claiming that he has issued orders to shoot without trial civilian youths should they be caught in the act of damaging military equipment… or be only accused of doing so.
Ukrainian authorities are not denying that many of the attacks against military equipment are carried out by teenagers, nor do they deny that orders to shoot perpetrators are being issued and are bypassing the formal, decision-making of the country’s government and armed forces general staff. Such orders are also bypassing the Ukraine constitution, which since the year 2000 (at the insistence of the European Union at the time) has prohibited the death penalty.
All of this highlights once again that the ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi formations embedded within the AFU are accustomed to acting without regard for the law and at their own discretion, arguing that without their actions, the military front and the entire Ukrainian state machine could well crumble.
At the same time, the Ukrainian telegram channel Rubicon believes that the order issued by the commander of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade to “shoot on the spot” arsonists or others engaged in damaging military equipment could only be authorized from above (for example, from the presidential office), aiming to intimidate not only potential arsonists but anyone contemplating civil disobedience against the Ukraine government’s war policies.
Fear of military conscription only deepening
Ukrainian authorities traditionally blame Russia for any antiwar protests that may take place in Ukraine, but the fact that the vehicles of military enlistment officers were the first to be burned many months ago suggests more of a spontaneous protest against conscription than anything being covertly organized.
The Ukrainian Telegram channel Kartel comments on the recent trends, writing, “Arson attacks against the vehicles of employees of [military enlistment officers in Ukraine], that is, the vehicles of those who are hunting down men of the age of military service, are now being recorded all over the country. And the public does not consider the people behind these incidents as playing along with Moscow; the arsons have actually become a symbol of protest against forced conscription, corruption, and all the other injustices committed by authorities.”
Protests against conscription have manifested themselves in the form of arson attacks on military vehicles, physical assaults on individual Ukrainian soldiers in the rear, and spontaneous rallies against conscription officers at work. In early August, the town of Kovel near the Polish border in western Ukraine exploded. Crowds turned out for a rally demanding the release of three forcibly conscripted locals. The crowd stormed the military enlistment office and the protest continued through the night until residents secured the release of the three detainees.
The next day, authorities accused the protesters of “working for Russia” and launched criminal prosecutions. Ukrainian MP Yevhen Shevchenko wrote in Telegram on August 3 that the events in Kovel showed that “the party of peace is growing in the form of people voting against the war with their feet”. He continued, “How are the blind philosophers in Ukraine coping with this? Will they continue to brag about the fact there is no such thing in Ukraine as a formal party of peace?”
The Telegram channel Rubicon notes that riots against military enlistment officers are not a rare or unique phenomenon in Ukraine. There have been mass rallies protesting the continued war against Russia in Zaporozhye city and region; in Carpathia region (western Ukraine), where road blockades of burning tires have been erected by Roma people; and in Odessa city several months ago, where a mass brawl took place between ambulance crews and military enlistment officers when one of the crew was seized and threatened with forced conscription. But what happened in Kovel differs significantly from everything that has happened before. There, it was a mass confrontation and brawl against military and government authorities that unfolded in which men who would ‘normally’ be quietly hiding at home to avoid being forcibly conscripted took part.
The conscription crisis is a sign of a failing war
According to the writers at ‘Rubicon’, the government in Kiev cannot change its current conscription regime. Volunteering for the army has run out, all-but ending as early as 2022. Meanwhile, financial motivations to gain recruits, as are widely available in Russia, are very expensive and unrealistic for a depopulated Ukraine with a moribund economy, notwithstanding the funds that the U.S. government has allocated to boost recruitment.
Nevertheless, the large Western governments continue to demand intensified conscription by the Ukraine government, which means more capture and kidnapping by military conscription officers without the slightest heed or attention to human rights. Ukrainian MP Fyodor Venislavskyy wrote on Telegram on August 6 that Ukraine’s Western ‘partners’ are also raising periodically the proposal that Ukraine lower its official age of military service (conscription). He writes, “They believe that the age range of 18-25 is the most optimal and effective age of military service for citizens when physical and psychological qualities needed to be able to fight are at their prime.”
Currently, the age of military registration in Ukraine is 18, while the youngest age for military service is 26.
Ukrainian politicians and analysts typically offer ‘regrets’ to the Ukrainian population for the demands by Western governments for more military recruitment, at the same time saying that Ukraine’s Western allies have the right to pronounce on such a domestic matter because they are the ones providing the funds and equipment to wage war against Russia.
More war dead in order to improve negotiating position
Western analysts and politicians are unrelentingly pushing Ukraine further into battle, using the argument that Kiev needs more combat in order to improve its future negotiating position. This argument was used in 2022 and again in 2023. Today, it is the equivalent of flogging an exhausted and worn-out horse. It also shows a complete misunderstanding of the aims of the political and military leadership in Russia.
Western capitalists measure everything against themselves. They imagine future negotiations between Russia and Ukraine as resembling one company up against its business competitor, each side seeking to strengthen its respective position. But for the Russian leadership, nothing changes should the AFU occupy a Russian town or two or should it withdraw from there to the relative safety of the border of Poland.
The list of demands and conditions by Russia for an end to the war (including an end to the dream by NATO and Kiev for a rump, NATO-member Ukraine) will remain unchanged no matter what happens. This rigidity and unchanging of military goals is the key to Russian stability and to the slow and steady military advances it is making.
This is being continually reinforced by the deep wellspring of historic memory of the Russian people. They recall only too well the harsh, social and economic disaster of the post-Soviet years of the 1990s, when promises by the West to Russia of eventual integration into the Western world’s economy had the ear of the Russian governments of the day while many Russian people themselves held such hopes. The 25 years since then, and in particular the past ten years, have shown to the Russian people that their country does not need economic ties to the Western economy to survive and even prosper. Indeed, Russia is doing quite well today having lost much of its trade and investment ties to the West.
Flight of youth from Ukraine, and mass desertions from the armed forces
Expecting a lowering of the conscription age, young people in Ukraine are fleeing the country daily by the dozens and hundreds. Some are dying while making perilous crossings across the rough river border in western Ukraine. Oleksiy Arestovich, a former adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, wrote in early August in the online Eurasia Daily that ‘official’ estimates of the flow of men of conscription age trying to escape from Ukraine are being underestimated by 30 times.
“If I tell you how many people are trying to escape from Ukraine every day, you would gasp. The State Border Service admits 100 or so people trying to leave each day, while a Rada deputy has recently admitted 200. But the real figure is approximately 30 times higher… Imagine, each day, the equivalent numbers of five military brigades are seeking to escape from Ukraine. Many try to cross the Tisa (Tisza) River [which borders Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia in places] each day by whatever means possible.”
According to recent estimates by the National Bank of Ukraine, a further 700,000 people will leave Ukraine in 2024-2025. The Bank expects a gradual return of Ukrainians to their homeland only from 2026 and only if, by then, the security situation improves, new housing is built, and the overall economic situation improves.
Mass desertion is no less of a problem than is conscription for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Germany’s Deutsche Welle state broadcaster reported on August 2 that desertion from the Ukrainian army in 2024 has reached an alarming scale. Every 14th serviceman has quit his unit arbitrarily, the publication reports. Overall, since the beginning of 2022, the prosecutor’s office has counted 63,200 criminal proceedings for desertion.
Poliltnavigator news website reports on August 5 that according to retired SBU (secret police) colonel Oleg Starikov, more and more soldiers are deserting. “I have a comrade who is now deputy commander of a battalion of paratroopers. He is not a professional soldier; he was conscripted and rose to the rank of lieutenant. I asked him about the personnel situation he faces, and he replied that the soldiers serving under him, quite simply, ‘do not want to serve, they do not wish to fight’.”
” ‘So what are they doing out there?’, I asked. ‘They dig trenches and build fortifications’, he replied. ‘But that is logistical support,’ I replied, ‘who is doing the actual fighting?’, I asked again. ‘They do not want to fight’, came the reply.”
A mercenary role for the future Ukraine?
Although the Armed Forces of Ukraine are constantly short of men and Ukrainian troops have been slowly retreating along the front lines all year, Ukrainian authorities and security services are finding in countries other than Ukraine new recruits, weapons, and other means to fight for the interests of the West. Ukraine has no special interests in these other countries, but the U.S., UK, Germany, and France do.
In August, two African countries, Mali and Niger, severed diplomatic relations with Ukraine. Both accuse Kiev of supporting radical terrorist groups [linked to Al Qaeda] that have been fighting the governments of these two countries since they began to distance themselves economically and militarily from the West last year.
The Mali government reacted to statements by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (GUR) which praised an alleged involvement by Kiev in an attack against Mali government forces last month near the border with Algeria. “The actions taken by the Ukrainian authorities violate the sovereignty of Mali, go beyond the scope of foreign interference, which is already condemnable in itself. They constitute clear aggression against Mali and clear support for international terrorism,” the Malian government charged.
In Senegal, Ukraine’s interference in Mali’s affairs also caused outrage. The Ukrainian ambassador was summoned to that country’s foreign ministry to hear its condemnation.
On July 31, the Kyiv Post reported that Ukrainian forces made a strike on Russian and Syrian forces at the Kuweires Air Force base in Syria. As well, in the spring of 2024, there were published reports of Ukraine’s involvement in the fighting in Sudan. As reported by the Wall Street Journal in March, Ukraine has participated in combat in Sudan because “the West has been reluctant to get directly involved”.
Thus does the Kiev regime try to sell itself to the West as resembling an effective, private military company that will fight against anti-imperialist movements around the world whenever and wherever the Western governments do not dare to introduce their own troops. Rubicon Telegram channel reports on August 6, “We can only state this curious precedent in international relations when an entire state begins to position itself as a large, highly specialized, private military company (PMC).
In the early days of August, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced its support for a draft law ‘On International Defense Companies’ which, in essence, would legalize the operations of PMCs (mercenary companies) on the territory of Ukraine. One author of the bill, MP Serhiy Grivko, proposes to send Ukrainian soldiers to serve in other global hot spots, saying that many will not wish to surrender their weapons and return to peaceful life.
“Following the demobilization of a large number of personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, there is a risk of a wide range of negative consequences,” the bill says. The ‘negative consequences’ for Ukraine in this case is the presence of a large number of foreigners with weapons in hand on Ukrainian soil, the reactions should payments to PMCs (which the Ukrainian budget cannot afford) ever be reduced, and the beginning of anticipated “destructive political processes in the country”.
Simply put, Ukrainians are to become expendable human material spending their entire lives fighting wars and working to pay off international loans, all for the sake of preserving the hegemony of Western imperialism.
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 15.08.2024
Media outlets such as the WSJ recently started to peddle a narrative that the Nord Stream pipeline destruction in 2022 was allegedly orchestrated by a group of high-ranking Ukrainian officers led by Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.
Despite Western media efforts to implicate Ukraine, the United States still looks like the “main beneficiary and customer of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline,” says German political analyst and independent journalist Dr. Gregor Spitzen.
“This has been clear from the very beginning, both in terms of the basic Roman law principle of ‘Cui bono?’ [who benefits?] and the statements by President Joe Biden and Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland that the US would not allow the pipeline to go into operation,” he tells Sputnik.
Efforts by German politicians and media to draw the attention away from the US by “throwing new and implausible versions into the information field,” while understandable – “if the US is found guilty of an act of state terrorism on the object of German property, the whole architecture of European security will collapse” – are still no less outrageous, Dr. Spitzen remarks.
“Germany’s attempts to pin the blame on Ukrainian saboteurs who acted without a clear mandate from their government, while at the same time taking President Zelensky out of harm’s way, looks legally flawless, but completely implausible,” Dr. Spitzen elaborates. “It can be predicted that the specific Ukrainians accused of sabotage will never be found. Either they will be found to have died of natural causes under suspicious circumstances, or they will have committed suicide.”
“This would be the best solution to the Nord Stream sabotage case. The pipeline is destroyed, US guilt is not proven, German politicians’ reputations are saved, Ukrainian political leaders are exonerated, and the specific perpetrators, who acted on their own initiative, are dead or missing,” he adds.
Former CIA operations officer Philip Giraldi also branded media efforts to pin the blame on Ukraine as a “cover story,” arguing that Kiev simply lacked the resources to carry out the Nord Stream bombing.
“The US did and had even stated its intention in advance to destroy the pipeline if Russia were to invade Ukraine. And there is also the involvement of Norway which is not plausible if it were a Ukrainian operation,” he said.
Both Spitzen and Giraldi suggested that the fact that the story about Ukraine’s alleged role in the Nord Stream bombing surfaced simultaneously in the US and German media hints at the likelihood of a coordinated effort to craft “an acceptable narrative regarding what took place,” as Giraldi put it.
“It suggests to me that they are coordinating some new approach in dealing with Ukraine and Zelensky though I am not sure what that might be,” Giraldi added.
RT | August 15, 2024
Kiev had nothing to do with the explosions on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, Mikhail Podoliak, a top adviser to Ukrainian leader, Vladimir Zelensky, has said.
Podoliak made the statement to Reuters on Thursday in response to a report by the Wall Street Journal, claiming that Zelensky authorized the September 2022 attack which ruptured the key energy infrastructure built to deliver Russian gas to Germany and the rest of Europe.
According to the US outlet’s sources, which included officers allegedly involved in the operation, Zelensky initially approved the attack on Nord Stream. He later tried to call it off under pressure from the CIA, but then Ukrainian commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny told him it could not be done as the sabotage group had already been dispatched and there was no way to contact it.
“Such an act can only be carried out with extensive technical and financial resources… and who possessed all this at the time of the bombing? Only Russia,” Podoliak told the agency.
Russia has ridiculed claims that it would destroy its own pipelines, which provided it with steady revenue. Top officials in Moscow, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, have previously pointed the finger at Washington, arguing that it stood to gain the most from the disruption of Russian gas supplies to the EU.
“Ukraine has nothing to do with the Nord Stream explosions,” Podolyak insisted, adding that Kiev did not gain any strategic or tactical advantage from the sabotage.
The report by the WSJ claimed that “a handful of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen” came up with the idea of blowing up the pipelines during a drinking party in May 2022, a few months after the outbreak of the conflict between Moscow and Kiev. The plotters believed that it would reduce Russia’s energy profits and make the EU less dependent on Moscow, it said.
Zaluzhny, who is now Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, told the outlet that claims of his – or Kiev’s – involvement in the destruction of Nord Stream were a “mere provocation.” A senior official in the Security Service of Ukraine, the SBU, also denied the report, insisting that Zelensky in particular “did not approve the implementation of any such actions on the territory of third countries and did not issue relevant orders.”
The WSJ said its reporting is partially corroborated by the findings of the German police investigation into the Nord Stream explosions. The German Federal Public Prosecutor issued a first arrest warrant in connection with the sabotage this week, according to local reports. The suspect is believed to be a Ukrainian citizen identified as ‘Vladimir Z’.
The newspaper suggested that the police investigation could “upend” relations between Kiev and Berlin, which has been Ukraine’s biggest backer in the EU amid the conflict with Russia.
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By Professor Glenn Diesen | December 23, 2024
The so-called “rules-based international order” aims to facilitate a hegemonic world, which entails displacing international law. While international law is based on equal sovereignty for all states, the rules-based international order upholds hegemony on the principle of sovereign inequality.
The rules-based international order is commonly presented as international law plus international human rights law, which appears benign and progressive. However, this entails introducing contradictory principles and rules. The consequence is a system devoid of uniform rules, in which “might makes right”. International human rights law introduces a set of rules to elevate the rights of the individual, yet human-centric security often contradicts state-centric security as the foundation of international law.
The US as the hegemonic state can then choose between human-centric security and state-centric security, while adversaries must abide strictly by state-centric security due to their alleged lack of liberal democratic credentials. For example, state-centric security as the foundation of international law insists on the territorial integrity of states, while human-centric security allows for secession under the principle of self-determination. The US will thus insist on territorial integrity in allied countries such as Ukraine, Georgia or Spain, while supporting self-determination within adversarial states such as Serbia, China, Russia and Syria. The US can interfere in the domestic affairs of adversaries to promote liberal democratic values, yet the US adversaries do not have the right to interfere in the domestic affairs of the US. To facilitate a hegemonic international order, there cannot be equal sovereignty for all states. … continue
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