Towards a Greater Middle Eastern War & Defeat in Ukraine
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, interviewed by Professor Glenn Diesen
Video at Odyssee
Glenn Diesen | September 24, 2024
I spoke with Colonel Douglas Macgregor about the deteriorating situation in the Middle East and Ukraine. Colonel Macgregor was a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defence under President Trump, he has written several books on military strategy, and is the CEO of Our Country Our Choice which seeks among other things to challenge the bipartisan support for the militarisation of US foreign policy
The war in Gaza has now spread into Lebanon and can seemingly no longer be contained, which threatens to pull in other actors in the region such as Iran. However, leaders in the region are already facing angry populations for failing to take a more hardline position against Israel and the US. Yemen is already striking ships passing through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, while attacks have also increased on US occupation troops in Syria and Iraq. The US and Israel continue to play good cop / bad cop in which the US provides the weapons and intelligence for the onslaught, while simultaneously complaining they are not able to impose a ceasefire. Israel is in deep trouble as its military exhausts itself and there are no desirable paths to peace, which is why pulling the US into a wider war appears to be the sole solution.
In Ukraine, the situation is also deteriorating quickly as the army suffers from a shortage of manpower, armoured vehicles, ammunition, air defences, aircrafts, and a multitude of other areas. Furthermore, Ukraine’s electric grids are severely damaged, the economy falters, the public grows more unhappy with the aggressive “recruitment” of new soldiers, while political divisions are yet again emerging in Kiev. In the West, there are fewer and fewer weapons to be sent and the US is seemingly reluctant to become directly involved in deep strikes within Russian territory as it will trigger a NATO-Russia war with the possibility of a nuclear exchange. War fatigue is growing throughout the West, with the exception of the UK which remains gung-ho for more war. When the US sabotaged the Minsk agreement and the Istanbul peace agreement, the objective was to use Ukrainians as a proxy to bleed and exhaust Russia to knock it out from the ranks of great powers, and thereafter shift focus to breaking China and thus restoring US global primacy. Instead, we are seeing a Russian victory, a pending unmitigated disaster in the Middle East, while the global majority is constructing a post-American world with BRICS.
We have crossed the point of no return in terms of reaching a peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. The world is heading towards major wars – and the US is approaching this dangerous situation with empty slogans rather than a strategy.
Russia set to gain access to Atlantic port – media
RT | September 24, 2024
Russia is poised to gain access to a naval port in the Atlantic Ocean through a bilateral military cooperation agreement with the island nation of Sao Tome and Principe, located off the west coast of Africa.
A bill on the issue has been approved by a Russian government commission on legislative activity, RTVI reported on Monday, citing a source familiar with the discussions.
The draft treaty will be put to a vote in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. The first deputy chairman of the Duma’s Committee on International Affairs, Alexey Chepa, explained that ratifying the pact will allow Russian ships to be stationed in the Gulf of Guinea.
“Today, a large number of ports where our ships could come in for refueling are closed. Therefore, opportunities to find friendly ports significantly facilitate the activities of our fleet,” Chepa told RTVI.
Under the agreement between Russia and the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, which was initially signed in St. Petersburg in April, the two sides will exchange information and experience in the field of military education, and cooperate in providing engineering support for troops, combating piracy and terrorism, and providing military logistical support.
Cooperation is also expected to include joint exercises and other activities between the two countries’ armed forces.
The draft document says the agreement will last for an indefinite period, and that the adoption of the treaty will not require additional funds from the federal budget.
Leaked documents reveal US intel cutout’s Iranian counter-revolution plans
By Kit Klarenberg and Max Blumenthal · The Grayzone · September 19, 2024
Leaks expose a secret effort by retired National Endowment for Democracy leader Carl Gershman to consolidate war-hungry neoconservative control over Iran’s opposition, while channeling US government funds into his own pet regime change initiatives.
Leaked documents and emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal a seemingly covert effort by American regime change operatives to impose radical leadership on the remnants of Iran’s protest movement against the mandatory hijab, in order to topple the government of Iran.
The initiative was spearheaded by Carl Gershman, the longtime director of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-funded non-profit which advances regime change operations across the globe. Originally conceived by the Reagan administration’s CIA, the NED has meddled in elections and sponsored coup leaders from Nicaragua to Venezuela to Hong Kong, and beyond.
The leaks reveal how Gershman privately plotted to channel US State Department resources into the construction of an “Iran Freedom Coalition” composed of pro-Western Iranian activists and US neoconservative operatives who clamor for an American military assault on Iran.
While aiming to “mobilize international support” for the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, “and to do what is possible to aid [their] struggle,” the Freedom Coalition represents a clear attempt to impose an exiled leadership over the grassroots Iranian opposition which is directed and sponsored by the most belligerent elements in Washington.
Attempts by The Grayzone to reach several members of the Coalition for comment were unsuccessful. We were therefore unable to determine if those listed by Gershman had explicitly committed to participating, or had been named by the NED veteran as prospective leaders.
Regardless of the listed members’ level of participation, the composition of Gershman’s proposed Iran Freedom Coalition demonstrates how Iran’s self-proclaimed pro-democracy movement has become a plaything for the Bomb Iran lobby. Among those handpicked by Gershman to lead the initiative was William Kristol, the neocon impresario who has led a decades-long lobbying campaign for a US military invasion of Iran. Also selected was Joshua Muravchik, a flamboyant supporter of Israel’s Likud Party who insists that “war with Iran is probably our best option”
The Freedom Coalition’s Iranian members consist heavily of US government-sponsored cultural figures and staffers at interventionist Western think tanks like the Tony Blair Institute. While these figures are quoted in Western media as the leaders of Iran’s “freedom” struggle, their involvement in US government-backed campaigns like the one conceived by Gershman reveals them as little more than Persian front people for Washington warmongers.
Protests erupted in Iranian cities in September 2022 after the death of a young Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini, who was briefly taken into police custody in Tehran after violating moral codes mandating that women wear a hijab. The movement attracted the zealous support of Western governments, celebrities and feminist NGOs, which cheered it on even after it fizzled out in the streets.
As Gershman’s leaked proposal illustrates, these elements quickly hijacked the protests, inserting US government-sponsored exiles as the movement’s international face and voice, thus ensuring that their ultimate effect would be a deepening of US sanctions on average Iranians.
In an investigation published this August, The Grayzone revealed that after retiring from his longtime post as leader of the NED in 2021, Gershman became locked in a vicious power struggle with his younger, more socially progressive successors. The Iran leaks we have obtained show how even in retirement, Gershman has attempted a bureaucratic end-around, marshaling his connections in US foreign policy networks to channel government resources into his own pet regime change projects.
Seeking a cut of “illegitimate” $55 million State Dept fund
When Gershman sought to kickstart his latest Iran regime change plot, he reached out to a longtime ally who recorded a three-minute-long “retirement tribute” honoring his tenure at the NED. It was Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Republican powerbroker of the South Florida-based Cuban American lobby. As Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Department of State in the House Committee on Foreign Relations, Diaz Balart had substantial influence over the pursestrings of US foreign operations.
On August 27 2023, Gershman fired off an email to Díaz-Balart and the lawmaker’s “legislative assistant,” Austin Morley, stating that one of his “retirement initiatives” was “to work with Freedom House to create a coalition of working groups.” Calling it the Iran Freedom Coalition (IFC), Gershman claimed the Coalition was already “established.” However, no trace of its existence can be found online.
Gershman explained to Díaz-Balart that his “Iranian friends were taken aback” by the guidelines of the State Department’s 2023 Iran Democracy Fund, which earmarked $55 million for proposals to “strengthen civil society engagement in electoral processes.” According to Gershman, because the Women, Life, Freedom movement driving national protests “doesn’t recognize the legitimacy of the regime that will be managing those ‘electoral processes,” some of the money should be funneled to a more hardline initiative.
The Coalition was to consist “of a dozen solidarity working groups representing…women, civil society and human rights groups, parliamentarians, trade unionists, and physicians that help the injured and traumatized protesters.” Bizarrely, though the protests had been extinguished in Iran, Gershman pitched his IFC to “support…the mass uprising” in Iran, as if it were contemporary.
He suggested Díaz-Balart use his influence within Congress to “direct…maybe 10%” of the $55 million annual budget for the State Department’s controversial Iran Democracy Fund to his own NED.
“The funds could be managed by the NED,” Gershman wrote, “that has a small Iran grants program already and is in very close touch with groups in the US and elsewhere that are trying very discreetly to aid the resistance movement. In effect, this would enable NED to expand what it’s already doing. Taking such an initiative at this time would be an important act of solidarity.”
US-backed interventionists marketed as Iranian “freedom” leaders
Initially led and organized by Iranian citizens, the Women, Life, Freedom Movement quickly became a cause celebre for notorious, high-profile anti-Islamic Republic exiles. They included Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran’s eldest son and pretender to the country’s now non-existent throne, and Masih Alinejad, a prominent veteran of Western-funded propaganda efforts targeting Tehran, who has reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars from the US government for her anti-Iran agitation – which includes calls for Israeli attacks on the country of her birth. In a September 2022 New Yorker interview, she claimed to be “leading this movement.” Alinejad has also called for Israel to assassinate Iranian leaders.
The Women, Life, Freedom movement’s co-optation by Western interventionists was so flagrant, activists on the ground in Iran complained their efforts had been “hijacked” by foreign forces. Protests in Tehran tapered off after a few weeks, and were forgotten inside Iran.
Yet, Pahlavi and Alinejad continued to hype the movement, earning an invite to the February 2023 Munich Security Conference, where they were presented as prospective leaders of a future “democratic” Iran. Three months later, the US government-funded NGO Freedom House presented the defunct Women, Life, Freedom movement with its annual Freedom Award.
With the introduction of his Iran Freedom Coalition, Gershman aimed to consolidate control of any future protests in the hands of the most belligerent elements in Washington, who advocate crushing sanctions, assassinations of Iranian leaders, and US airstrikes, while claiming concern for the human rights of average Iranians.
Gershman seeks US funds for defunct protest movement
Attached to Gershman’s email to Díaz-Balart was a document setting out his vision for the Iran Freedom Coalition. Touting the defunct Movement as somehow continuing to “represent momentous challenges to the Iranian theocracy and its clerics,” the file called for a “new approach to dealing with Iran.” This was considered particularly urgent in light of the coming termination of the Iran nuclear deal, and what he believed was the Islamic Republic’s “burgeoning military assistance to Russia”:
“The confluence of these factors urgently requires… a focus on building international support for the Iran protest movement and holding the regime accountable for human rights abuses and other violations of international law, as well as thwarting the regime’s ability to sustain its repressive practices and finance its malign activities inside the country and regionally… Through actions outside Iran, the Coalition will also help connect, strengthen, and mobilize constituencies within Iran, namely women, youth, trade unions, civil society, and others.”
The IFC would thus seek to “[shape] international political discourse” on Iran, “[helping] support national discussions about power and democracy.” This work might include “[coordinating] boycotts or divestment campaigns to bring economic pressure to bear” on Tehran, “denying them resources to sustain their repressive activities.” In turn, the Coalition would “bring increased visibility to the efforts of Iranians and empower them to advance change.”
Gershman wrote that Freedom House was committed to “[nurturing] the formation” of IFC, “a coalition of like-minded and influential groups and individuals working on Iran.” It would seek to “inform public opinion in the US and abroad” about “Iran’s freedom struggle,” while focusing “public and diplomatic pressure…on isolating the regime and stopping the flow of funds to the regime.”
A rogue’s gallery of regime change operatives
Gershman’s proposal also provided an accompanying list of “individuals involved or to be involved” in the IFC. Those assembled as the leaders of the longtime NED leader’s coalition represent a veritable rogue’s gallery of neoconservative chickenhawks, pro-war think tankers, and Western-backed Iranian regime change activists.
A full proposed membership list appears at the end of this article.
Mahnaz Afkhami – Afkhami was Minister of Women’s Affairs under the Shah from 1976 to 1978, at a time when the Shah’s brutal Savak security forces were disappearing, torturing and killing thousands of protesters.
William “Bill” Kristol – Kristol is perhaps the leading neoconservative demagogue in Washington, and known for his extensive history of lobbying for war with Iran. In 2010, he declared that Washington’s calamitous, bloody “interventions” in Muslim countries, of which he was invariably a top cheerleader, should be considered “liberations,” and not invasions at all.
Joshua Muravchik – One of the most virulent advocates for a US war on Iran, Muravchik declared “WE MUST bomb Iran” in a 2006 LA Times editorial. Again in 2015, Muravchik declared in a Washington Post editorial, “War with Iran is probably our only answer.” A neoconservative admirer of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party, Muravchik has insisted with his usual knack for subtlety, “Israel keeps saving the world” by carrying out assassinations inside Iran.
Leopoldo Lopez – The de facto leader of Venezuela’s putschist, US and EU government-sponsored opposition, Lopez participated in a failed military coup to remove the democratically elected President Hugo Chavez in 2002, then assisted the Trump administration’s plot to oust President Nicolas Maduro which appointed a phony president, Juan Guaido, to steal Venezuela’s foreign assets, and initiated another failed military coup. Lopez is the aristocratic son of a right-wing Spanish legislator, Leopoldo Lopez Sr., and currently resides in Spain.
Kasra Aarabi and Saeid Golkar – Aarabi and Golkar both work at the Tony Blair Institute, the think tank and influence peddling operation of the pro-war former British Prime Minister. The outfit is known to have received £9 million for advising the government of Saudi Arabia. In November 2022, the Blair Institute published an extraordinary report on the Women, Life, Freedom Movement, excitedly cheering how “removal of the hijab became a symbol of regime change” in Iran. The report made a number of frenzied claims, including that the overwhelming majority of the Islamic Republic’s population are secularists, if not atheists, wholeheartedly supporting their government’s overthrow.
It went on to boast that the Blair Institute had “developed on-the-ground intelligence in Iran through a network of contacts on the streets,” which it has exploited to forecast” protest trends in Iran for the past five years, including the ongoing nationwide uprising.” While the Institute’s claim is unsubstantiated, it raises questions about whether the former UK PM’s outfit played a clandestine role in instigating the Women, Life, Freedom Movement protests.
Roya Hakakian – An Iranian-Jewish author and darling of the Israel lobby, Hakakian has denigrated protests against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza as proof that “Iran [has] arrive[d] on US campuses,” and fervently defended Israel as a robust democracy striving for peace.
Maziar Bahari – A Canadian-Iranian journalist, Bahari was the subject of Jon Stewart’s 2014 film, Rosewater, about his detention in Iran’s Evin prison. Today, Bahari serves alongside former State Department and USAID officials, and Western interventionist NGO leaders, as director of the board of Journalism For Change. As the independent outlet Noir reported, Journalism For Change receives at least 95% of its budget from the US State Department, which also funds IranWire, an anti-Tehran partner outlet that publishes Bahari’s articles.
Mariam Memarsadeghi – A self-proclaimed “Iran democracy activist” who features both the Ukrainian and Israeli flags on her Twitter/X bio, Memarsadeghi directs the Israel lobby-adjacent Cyrus Forum, which is dedicated to promoting regime change in Iran.
Despite her own flamboyant advocacy for toppling Iran’s government, Memarsadeghi conceded that Reza Pahlavi’s own campaign to dismantle the Islamic Republic floundered because “his most visible associates” were deranged far-right ultranationalists who alienated average Iranians. “[Spending] most of their time peddling distrust and attacking other opposition leaders on social media,” they also “publicly [called] for retributive violence, summary executions, the purging of leftists, vilification of human rights defenders, and antagonism towards free media outlets.”
In her criticism of Pahlavi, Memarsadeghi could have also been describing the neocon-controlled Iran Freedom Coalition to which she apparently lent her name and reputation.
Measles “Outbreak” In Maine Was Vaccine-Induced All Along
Informed Consent Action Network | September 24, 2024
ICAN’s attorneys obtained documents related to the widely reported May 2023 “outbreak” of measles in Maine. As it turns out, test results from the CDC confirmed that the measles case was “consistent with vaccine strain,” meaning there was no “outbreak” and, instead, it was the vaccine that caused the child’s rash.
On May 5, 2023, the Maine CDC reported that a child had “tested positive” for measles. News outlets immediately began fearmongering, hinting that the “outbreak” was due to low vaccination rates:
- “Measles can be serious for anyone…” (Maine CDC Facebook Page)
- “In severe cases, measles can cause pneumonia, brain swelling and death.” (Bangor Daily News )
- “The CDC says roughly one to three of every 1,000 children infected with measles die.” (USA Today ) Note: the death rate is actually more like 1 in 500,000.
- “Measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000… But vaccination rates in the US have dropped in recent years, sparking new outbreaks.” (CNN)
- “Anyone who is not immunized or does not know their measles immunization status should get vaccinated.” (Maine CDC Press Release)
The Maine CDC reported that even though the child had received a dose of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, it was “considering the child to be infectious out of an abundance of caution.” In the meantime, the Maine CDC indicated it had sent a specimen to CDC headquarters to determine the specific strain of measles; however, it did not mention how the child would have been exposed to the wild strain of measles, such as international travel, nor did it share how recently the child may have received the vaccine.
According to a WHO report, about 2% of those who receive the measles vaccine develop a rash, called VARI (vaccine-associated rash illness). In fact, one study recommends assuming the rash is vaccine-caused and that “testing should only be considered if exposure to the wild-type (not vaccine-strain) virus is strongly suspected.”
So, it is unclear why the Maine CDC raised the alarm and then took so long to confirm the specific strain. The child was diagnosed on May 3, but it took the Maine CDC five days to ship the sample to the CDC. It then took the CDC seven days to report the results and for the Maine CDC to announce the child was not infectious.
ICAN, through its attorneys, requested relevant records and received them. Incredibly, they reveal that the positive measles test was “[c]onsistent with vaccine strain,” which is apparently an “acceptable” form of measles because, as the Maine CDC announced, the strain that the child tested positive for was not considered “an infectious strain of the virus,” despite causing traditional symptoms of the disease. Decidedly absent from Maine’s announcement was the fact that the child got measles as a result of the vaccine. Maine and the CDC simply hid this fact from the public.
Maine’s actions make sense, however, when considering that it may have just been following a CDC marketing presentation which states that the perfect “recipe” for creating demand for vaccines “requires creating concern, anxiety, and worry” by, for example, having medical experts and public health authorities “state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes)” and show “[v]isible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g., pictures of children, families of those affected coming forward) and people getting vaccinated (the first to motivate, the latter to reinforce)” — all things we saw implemented during this “outbreak.”
Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq. lays out the details here.
ICAN will continue to follow-up on reported outbreaks across the country. In the meantime, catch up on some of ICAN’s additional work on vaccine policy:
Democrat Senators Urge Platforms To Share Plans for Addressing “Disinformation” (Even Inside Encrypted Apps)
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 24, 2024
US Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley have joined those currently publicly pressuring companies behind social media platforms and encrypted messages – they have identified 11 of the most widely used ones – to make sure they “combat election disinformation.”
Specifically, four Democrats (the letter was also signed by Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren) want to know what these companies’ censorship plans are: the senators phrase it as the need to discover what measures will be taken to “de-amplify” (and that includes removal) content and accounts seen as spreading the said type of disinformation.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
How will the tech companies know this is happening on their platforms? They will, the senators write if that content or accounts violate their policies. (That is, those same vague and restrictive policies that have been used and abused over the years.)
As far as Wyden and Merkley and others are concerned, it doesn’t matter if this content they consider to be election disinformation is AI-generated or not.
On the encrypted chat apps front, they want the companies operating them to “explain whether they have a reporting system for their users to flag unwanted election disinformation and what enforcement measures are in place.”
To cover all this the way the senators see fit, the companies and their platforms – Meta, Google (YouTube), TikTok, X, Reddit, Snapchat, Amazon (Twitch), Discord, Signal, Telegram, and Apple (Messages) – are urged to “increase resources” needed to fight what the US lawmakers describe in terms presented as a national-level crisis.
They warn that disinformation that is allegedly now more present than ever could suppress voter participation, but also “sow doubt in US democracy and incite political violence.”
The many times repeated references are made in the senators’ letter about alleged foreign disinformation campaigns during the 2020 and 2022 elections in the US, and a note is made that this “disinformation” would at that time remain online longer if it was in Spanish.
Essentially, what Wyden and Merkley now want from the tech giants – but also companies like Signal, that bill themselves as the ultimate privacy-friendly choice – is a report, to keep them on the straight and narrow, at least the way that is perceived by four Democrat senators at the height of a presidential campaign.
“Share information about the size and capacity of their 2024 US elections safety resourcing – including personnel and technologies – broken down by language,” is the opening demand aimed at social platforms.
Mystery of Andrew Bridgen’s vanishing votes
By Sally Beck | TCW Defending Freedom | September 23, 2024
After 14 years as MP for North West Leicestershire, former Conservative Andrew Bridgen lost his seat in spectacular fashion at the general election in July with an implausible 95 per cent decrease in votes. This made no sense as he enjoyed more than 95 per cent recognition on the doorstep, an endorsement from US politician Robert F Kennedy Jr, and a positive response from his constituents, many of whom had received justice because of his interventions.
A popular MP, fighting David-and-Goliath causes considered taboo by the government but essential by the electorate, he had become a thorn in the Conservative government’s side, and he was expelled in April 2023. Facing ferocious opposition from his own party, he exposed the Horizon Post Office scandal, fought for recognition for the covid vaccine injured and bereaved, and highlighted the iniquity for those facing compulsory house purchases to make way for the HS2 rail link. He was forced to sell his family home to HS2 and personally lost £500,000.
Bridgen was first elected in 2010, in what was then a Labour stronghold considered ‘unwinnable’ by David Cameron, overturning a Labour majority of 4,477 to win with a majority of 7,511, 45 per cent of the vote. In the 2015 and 2017 general elections, he kept his seat and increased his margins to 11,373 (49 per cent) and then 13,286 (54 per cent). In 2019, his majority increased again to 20,400, 63 per cent of the vote, with 33,811 voters.
To drop from 63 per cent of the vote to 3.2 per cent with just 1,568 votes seems implausible. Bridgen said: ‘After the election people were coming up to me, and still are, saying, “I voted for you, my whole family voted for you. What happened?”’
Compare Bridgen’s 2024 result with that of former Labour MP George Galloway, now leader of the Workers Party of Britain. In 2003, Galloway left Labour to become independent and in March 2024 won a landslide by-election in Rochdale with 12,335 votes, almost 6,000 more than any other candidate. He lost the general election four months later to Labour’s Paul Waugh, by just 1,539 votes – Waugh 13,047 and Galloway 11,508, a 15 per cent decrease.
Bridgen’s competitors were virtually unknown in the area too, although Conservative candidate Craig Smith (who came second) does live locally. Both have a tiny social media presence compared with his own. Labour’s Amanda Hack, who won the seat, has just 840 followers on Facebook, Craig Smith who came second, fares marginally better with 2,200 followers, but nothing in comparison with Bridgen who currently has 28,000 Facebook followers. His rival MPs’ X presence is just as pitiful; just 2,431 follow Hack, a measly 1,366 follow Smith while 261,900 follow Bridgen.
So what happened? Bridgen thinks that the vote could have been tampered with, a suggestion strenuously denied by North West Leicestershire District Council (NWLDC) which has responsibility for collecting and counting the votes, and has highlighted what he sees as anomalies. A council spokesman said: ‘With the exception of the exit poll being cancelled, the allegations being made have no factual basis and are based on inaccurate assumptions.’
The contentious issues for Bridgen surround the exit poll, the opening of the ballot boxes and new electoral services staff. Is there any evidence to support him or are the inconsistencies coincidence or misinterpretation?
The market research company Ipsos-MORI conduct exit polls on behalf of the BBC, Sky Television and ITV. Just two weeks before the election, they cancelled the North West Leicestershire exit poll with no explanation, removing any chance to check voters’ candidate preference.
Political scientist John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, curates the information for Ipsos-MORI and confirmed that North West Leicestershire (and Rochdale for that matter) had no exit poll. He said: ‘The only exit poll was an exercise conducted at 134 locations across the UK and designed to estimate the outcome across the country in seats.’ There are 650 seats in the UK.
NWLDC also admitted the poll was cancelled and their spokesman said: ‘We were only informed at the very last minute.’
Bridgen questioned the time it took to count the vote. The ballot boxes took around 25 minutes to reach Whitwick and Coalville Leisure Centre, a central location in the constituency, where the ballot papers were counted.
Polling stations closed at 10pm and Allison Thomas, CEO of the council and returning officer for the constituency, said they would not begin the count until 2am – a four-hour time lag. ‘There was no explanation,’ Bridgen said. ‘The election officers were unnaturally nervous too. You’d have thought they were the ones standing for election. None of it stacked up. I’ve been through around 20 elections locally and I’ve never seen anything like that.’
Bridgen’s manager David Baggett confirmed: ‘The ballot boxes were slow to come in. They were still validating the ballot papers when the final count was called in Newcastle.’
Validation means election staff check the number of ballots received against voter roll lists that are checked at each polling station.
NWLDC appointed Ms Thomas as CEO in August 2022. In April 2023, after he had been expelled from the Conservative Party, Bridgen said: ‘I was informed that the whole of the election services department had resigned en masse, on a Friday, and they’d been replaced by a new team. That was amazing because I can’t remember anybody leaving since I became the candidate in 2006. There were three people in the department, they weren’t relatives, so I can’t understand why they all left on the same day. I think that’s very, very unusual.
‘I spoke to Allison Thomas to ask what was going on. And her answer was that it was the right time for them to move on, whatever that means. Before the election I wanted to have a meeting with the new team. I was very uncomfortable about it. It took a long time to get a meeting.’
The council have denied that the whole team left but admitted Bridgen and Baggett met election services staff before the general election. Their spokesman said that two staff retired in 2022, no staff left or retired in 2023 or 2024, and two original staff remained: Democratic Services Manager Clare Hammond and Electoral Services Officer Chris Colvin. Both met Bridgen and Baggett.
Bridgen was concerned that electoral services staff were on their own in Stenson House, a council building in Coalville, while all other departments had been relocated to other buildings. Part of the council’s offices were due to be demolished, hence the mass exodus.
Bridgen said: ‘We had the meeting four weeks before the election in the old premises. Clare Hammond joined, saying “I thought you’d like to see a familiar face.” It turned out that the whole of the council had decamped, leaving electoral services in that big old building on their own. There was no oversight of them, so no one knew what they were doing.’
The council said: ‘This is not the case. Our entire staff moved to new administration offices in April 2023. For the purposes of administering and managing all elections, the elections team book rooms at Stenson House. This is to enable all members of the team to work in the same office, and to allow the team the space they need to receive postal votes, organise ballot boxes and other work that requires space. This work takes place at Stenson House for every election and has done for many years.’
Bridgen was always popular with his constituents, and his 2024 election address has had 24,231 views on YouTube.
‘Michael and Susan Rudkin from Ibstock were my constituents,’ Bridgen said. ‘Michael was chairman of the National Federation of Subpostmasters. He appeared in ITV’s drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office about the Horizon scandal, and witnessed Fujitsu’s engineers altering sub-postmasters’ accounts remotely at their HQ. The day after he visited Fujitsu, his wife was accused of stealing £44,000 from the post office and wrongly convicted. I helped get that conviction overturned.’
By contrast many in the Conservative Party hated him, and the government refused 20 requests to debate excess deaths after the UK saw a 9 per cent increase in 2022, a year after the covid vaccine rollout.
Bridgen also challenged the World Health Organization’s power grab, continued to highlight the government’s gross ineptitude and handling of the covid pandemic, and they finally kicked him out after Matt Hancock accused him of anti-Semitism, clearly twisting his words. Discussing the horrendous rise in post covid vaccination heart issues, Bridgen tweeted: ‘As one consultant cardiologist said to me, this is the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.’
On alleged vote rigging he said: ‘If there was any skulduggery relating to the vote, it would have had to have been before the ballot boxes got to the leisure centre. I have no idea who would have been behind it. I tell constituents who ask that I’m trying to get to the bottom of it but without a whistleblower, I’m not sure I ever will.’
If anyone has any information about the vote, please email: [email protected]
Thirst for money enriches oligarchs, but bankrupts Europe
By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 24, 2024
There are many reasons why Europe wants to prolong the war in Ukraine. Irrational liberal ideology and commitment to the project of a unipolar global order are undoubtedly the most important reasons. However, business and private profit cannot be ignored. According to many recent reports, there has been a huge increase in the profits of military-industrial companies in a number of Western countries, which explains the thirst for war of the pro-Ukrainian oligarchies.
One of the most notorious cases of this war profiteering is taking place in Germany. The military giant Rheinmettall is seeing its profits growing amid a wave of systematic support for the Kiev regime. By continuously and incessantly sending weapons, the German company has managed to escape a serious financial crisis and now has a chance to once again rank among the world’s leading defense companies.
Rheinmettal’s business was in a bad way. The company was on the verge of abandoning the military sector to focus on civilian production, since most of its profits were coming from the production of automobile parts. However, Germany’s participation in military assistance programs led the corporation to revitalize its production of weapons and ammunition, once again becoming a global giant in the sector.
Armored vehicles, tanks, ammunition, artillery pieces and air defense systems are some of the products in Rheinmettal’s current industrial catalog. After making adventures into industrial base projects on the Polish-Ukrainian border, the company is now working on opening a new factory in Saxony, where it expects to produce more than one hundred thousand artillery shells per year.
Obviously, the German state is interested in these profits. Recently, an action plan by the German government was announced to use part of the profits of Rheinmettal for reindustrialization projects – which seem more necessary now than ever, since Germany has been the country most affected by the anti-Russian madness. It only remains to be seen how this reindustrialization will be possible without Russian gas and cheap energy.
In short, Germany believes it is profiting from the war. But this calculation is wrong – as well as dangerous and irresponsible. The profits do not go to the German people, but to a small number of defense oligarchs who employ an absolute minority of German society. Furthermore, the real economic revival is minimal, since the constant demand for weapons requires a systematic production routine that hinders any research project in technological innovation. In other words, Rheinmetall – as well as the entire Western military-industrial complex – is doomed to continually produce the same type of equipment according to its current samples, without any relevant innovation.
Industry without innovation has little chance of long-term success. Western weapons, which have already proven to be largely unsuitable for the Ukrainian battlefield, are likely to become increasingly obsolete, and there will be no capacity for technological renewal, since, thanks to anti-Russian sanctions, the precarious European society is reaching a pre-industrial stage of development.
And, still on the subject of sanctions, it is important to emphasize that increased spending on the military industry could be a ticking time bomb for a country without reliable sources of cheap energy. After the blockade of Russian gas, Germany has been experiencing a period of profound energy instability, depending on unusual alternative sources to meet its needs – such as burning wood or buying American gas at exorbitant prices. This scenario is completely inconsistent with a situation of economic development and stability.
Germany will discover an old lesson in economics: the private profits of the oligarchies do not reflect a real situation of economic development and social well-being. Without solving the problems generated by sanctions – which obstruct technological innovation – and without relieving the pressure on the systematic production of weapons, not even constant demand will be able to save Germany and the whole of Europe from a deep crisis.
Despite the profits, aid to Ukraine remains an obstacle to European economic progress, pleasing only transnational oligarchies.
Time for NATO to Retire?
Learning all the Wrong Lessons from Europe’s Bloc-Politics?
By Glenn Diesen | September 24, 2024
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently gave his farewell speech. The speech was intended to be a tribute to NATO and himself, instead it revealed why the outdated military bloc should retire.[1] The speech exposed an ideological and simplistic mindset in which conflicts occur because there are bad guys in the world, and security depends on the good guys arming themselves to the teeth and confronting the bad guys. Immersed with ideology to justify a hegemonic world order, there was zero recognition of the security competition in the international system. Our weapons are good, the weapons of our adversaries are bad. Dividing the world into good and evil is dangerous as war becomes the only path to peace, or as Stoltenberg argues about the Ukraine War: “weapons are the way to peace”.
How is security measured by NATO? Stoltenberg boasted that “we have strengthened our defences”, without assessing if this has resulted in heightened security. Stoltenberg celebrated that NATO went from “having zero to tens of thousands of combat-ready NATO soldiers on our Eastern flank”, without a word about how Russia will respond to NATO militarising its borders. Expansionism was presented as an objective of its own as “Montenegro, North Macedonia, Finland and Sweden joined our Alliance. And Ukraine is closer to NATO than ever before”. Given that NATO expansionism triggered the war in Ukraine, how will the end of neutrality in Europe impact peace? The failed ambition towards the end of the Cold War was to transition away from confrontational bloc politics, zero-sum politics, and Cold War mentality. Yet, the advancement of a military bloc is now seemingly the sole measurement of success for NATO.
Peacetime alliances
The modern world order is based on a balance of power in which alliances are useful to the extent they balance the hegemonic ambitions of an expansionist power. After the Cold War, NATO itself became an instrument of expansionism and hegemony. NATO preserved US dominance in Europe and the military bloc had to search for a new purpose to justify its own existence. NATO transitioned from a status-quo power to a revisionist power as its continued relevance relied on expansionism and military interventionism. The buzz phrase of the 1990s was that NATO had to go “out of area or out of business”. Today, NATO is an organisation that justifies its existence by the need to counter the security challenges caused by its own existence.
Peacetime alliances are problematic as they rely on external adversaries to preserve internal solidarity, which creates incentives for radicalising the “us” versus “them” mentality. NATO struggled with a lack of purpose when peace broke out in the 1990s, although Stoltenberg could now celebrate the renewed purpose and unity of NATO as war had returned to Europe. Peacetime alliances also create entanglements as military alliances replace a state’s right to make war with a duty to make war.[2] Military alliances also encourage smaller states to maintain their historical grievances and embolden aggressive behaviour. For example, the former Prime Minister of Estonia, a country of 1.3 million people, feels comfortable calling for breaking up the Russian Federation into many smaller states as the US stands behind it. Instead of encouraging reconciliation, peacetime military alliances embrace the people who pursue historical justice and vengeance. Whenever a NATO member state considers to return to diplomacy or recognise the security concerns of the adversary, the demand for “alliance solidarity” is used to prevent peace from breaking out.
The lesson from history is that security competition is mitigated with inclusive security arrangements that pursue security with other member states, as opposed to an exclusive alliance that pursues security against a non-member. After Russia’s victory over Napoleon, Europe’s first collective security institution was established, the Concert of Europe (1815-1914), in which the defeated state France was invited to have a seat at the table. This lesson was not followed after the First World War as peace was deemed to rely on perpetuating the weakness of Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, which laid the foundations for the Second World War. However, after the Second World War, both Germany and France were brought into the same club to pursue security with each other rather than against each other.
The decision to abandon the agreements to form a pan-European security architecture after the Cold War functioned as a second Treaty of Versailles in which peace in Europe would rely on perpetuating the weakness of Russia. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defence, William Perry, recognised that NATO expansion was a betrayal of the post-Cold War peace, but his colleagues did not care as Russia was weak and kept getting weaker. George Kennan, the architect of the US containment policy against the Soviet Union, criticised the decision to expand NATO as a reversal back to confrontational bloc politics: “Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom”.[3] In an interview with the New York Times, George Kennan outlined the folly and predicted the consequences of expansion:
“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves… Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong”.[4]
The success of NATO is also measured by the ability to expand the bloc politics of Europe to the wider world. Stoltenberg applauded NATO for the “deepened relations with countries in the Indo Pacific”, which is evidently intended to contain and confront China. Bloc politics was equated to freedom as Stoltenberg argued NATO “must not make the same mistake with China” as “freedom is more important than free trade”. NATO’s lesson from Europe is seemingly not that zero-sum bloc politics was advanced at the expense of an inclusive European security architecture, rather it was that the West allowed itself to have any dependence on Russia at all. Is it possible that expanding militarised dividing lines closer to Russian borders was not a good recipe for security?
An Alternative Farewell Speech?
An alternative farewell speech should have been held by the former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating. Last year, Keating commented on the goal to make NATO go global. In Keating’s words: “NATO’s continued existence after and at the end of the Cold War has already denied peaceful unity in broader Europe”.[5] Keating was thus fiercely opposed to expanding the model of European bloc politics and Cold War mentality to Asia as “Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States”. Regarding the man of the hour, Jens Stoltenberg, Keating opined:
“Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen… Stoltenberg conducts himself as an American agent more than he performs as a leader and spokesperson for European security.”
[1] NATO – Opinion: Transcript – German Marshall Fund event, Reflections on a Challenging Decade: A Farewell Conversation with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, 19-Sep.-2024
[2] J.H. Herz, ‘Power politics and world organization’, The American Political Science Review, vol.36, no.6, 1942, p.1046-7.
[3] G.F., Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, The New York Times, 5 February 1997.
[4] T.L. Friedman, ‘Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X.’, The New York Times, 2 May 1998.
[5] P. Keating. ‘NATO’s provocative lurch eastward and the ‘supreme fool’ Jens Stoltenberg’, China Daily, 10 July 2023.
European Union morphs into NATO’s financial war machine
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 24, 2024
Two key posts – in foreign and defense policy – reveal the militarist and anti-Russia direction of the European Union.
Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission – which works as the executive branch of the European Union – announced her new team of commissioners for the next five years.
Taking over as foreign affairs minister for the 27-nation bloc is Kaja Kallas who is a staunch Russophobe and vigorous supporter of Ukraine. Kallas has called for more EU and NATO military funding for Ukraine to “defeat Russia” and the break up of the Russian Federation.
The former Estonian prime minister has led the movement to destroy Soviet Red Army monuments across the Baltic states. (This is while her investor husband continues to profit from doing business with Russia.)
Working closely alongside Kallas will be another rabid Russophobe, the former Lithuanian prime minister Andrius Kubilius, who is taking up a newly created EU post as defense commissioner. The creation of that post is an alarming sign of how the EU bloc has transitioned from a trade and political union to a military organization.
But what’s even more alarming is the assigning of such an anti-Russia hawk as Kubilius to oversee military policy.
At a time when relations between the EU and Russia have become so fraught with tensions, the European bloc is giving politicians from hostile Baltic states a driving seat to push relations even further towards conflict.
Indeed, the first announcement Kubilius made as the prospective new defense commissioner was that the European Union would likely be at war with Russia in the next six to eight years. That assessment is shared by Kaja Kallas.
Kubilius said the sole focus during his tenure is ramping up military spending by the EU nations to boost NATO and aid Ukraine. He said that he will be working closely with foreign policy chief Kallas to tap funds.
What this means is that the European Union is moving towards making it mandatory for national budgets to allocate more to military procurement. That’s a breakthrough for all the worst reasons.
Kubilius is reportedly aiming for a budget of €500 billion over the next five years to be spent on the military by the EU.
That increase would represent about half of the projected EU total budget.
His comments indicate the purpose of the massive redirection of finances – to boost NATO. Kubilius noted that “the European Union has instruments to get larger financing, which NATO doesn’t.”
That implies that under his formulation and compulsory directives from Brussels, the EU will make it mandatory for member states to spend more on the military.
NATO and the EU have overlapping membership with 23 members of the EU’s 27 also being part of the U.S.-led military alliance. Non-NATO members are Austria, Cyprus, Malta, and Ireland.
NATO states are expected to spend a minimum of 2 percent of their GDP on military. That amounts to about $380 billion for European members of NATO in 2024. That is a huge increase compared with what was spent by these members only a few years ago. But what the NATO planners want is more and more going forward. The problem is locking that expenditure in.
The trouble for NATO planners is the 2 percent figure is not mandatory. It is subject to national policy. While most members of NATO are hitting that target currently, there is no guarantee it will continue. Changes in national governments might result in spending slipping back to former levels of 1-1.5 percent of GDP as was the case before the proxy war in Ukraine blew up in 2022.
What the NATO hawks in the EU desire most is to lock in military spending year-on-year. NATO does not have the legal means to enforce such a commitment as mandatory on its members. But the EU can do it through its supranational powers as served by centralized directives from Brussels.
The Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have upped their military spending to nearly 3 percent of GDP when Kallas and Kubilius were in office.
Moreover, Kubilius has previously proposed that all EU members devote an extraordinary, additional 0.25 percent of their GDP to make mandatory military donations to Ukraine to “ensure victory over Russia”, amounting to €100 billion a year.
This is an astounding transformation of the European Union. The organization has its roots in the 1950s as a loose trade federation of Western European nations – principally France and the Federal Republic of Germany – which proclaimed that lessons of the Second World War had been learned and would never be repeated because of commitments to good neighborliness and commercial partnership. In its earlier incarnations, the European bloc sought out friendly relations with the Soviet Union, primarily with energy trade being a cornerstone of cooperation.
Since the supposed end of the Cold War in 1991, the EU has expanded in line with the expansion of NATO. Its powers have become evermore centralized and usurping national policy. A striking feature of both NATO and the EU is the hardening of Russophobic policy that has come with the leveraging of anti-Russia Baltic states. Historically, these states were virulent collaborators with Nazi Germany in its genocidal war against the Soviet Union. The Baltic states still harbor fascists who venerate the Third Reich. Hence, the destruction of Soviet-era war monuments and the rehabilitation of public displays commemorating Nazi collaborators.
NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia is the continuation of Western imperialist designs on subjugating Russian territory that was previously pursued by Nazi Germany.
The European Union has subverted its earlier ideals of pacifism and cooperation to become part of NATO’s war machine. Crucially, what the EU brings to the war machine is legalized enforced funding, even for nations that are not part of NATO.
Added to that is the EU is being directed by people who drool about war with Russia: Von der Leyen, the former German defense minister and descendant of Nazi ideologues, is aided and abetted by Kaja Kallas and Andrius Kubilius who cannot think of Russia without fantasizing about its “defeat”.
The Nazi specter is resurrected in NATO and its EU financial wing.
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The Case for Dismantling the Rules-Based International Order
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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