Category: War Crimes

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Computing Uncategorized War Crimes

Global Splintering

What’s going on? Are we seeing a divisive split among global technocrats that cuts into the heart of Western administrations? Only a few months ago, Sir Keir Starmer was the darling of the progressive mainstream media. The BBC salivated over him as he entered 10 Downing Street and laid down the new law of the land targeting far-right thuggery and outdoor smoking, while touring Europe and North America to pledge full alignment with the EU and NATO in the fight against Putin, climate change and the enemies of woke progressivism. However, on the Levantine conflict, Sir Keir had to tread a tricky path between the conflicting demands of Labour activists and the Zionist wing of the Military Industrial Complex, by backtracking on his earlier unconditional support for Israeli military incursions in Gaza. At the Labour Party Conference, Sir Keir showed signs of fatigue by calling both for a ceasefire and the release of the sausages (which rhymes with hostages in southern British English).

All of a sudden, media reports of sleaze and outright corruption within Labour's upper echelons are rife. The same media outlets that ousted Boris Johnson over two and a half years after his electoral success over Party-gate, because he did not comply with absurd covid regulations, are now gunning for Starmer and his cronies over Lord Alli’s lavish donations. To be honest, Lord Alli’s involvement with the new New Labour project was off my radar. My focus was on Sir Keir’s close ties to the Tony Blair Institute, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum and on his earlier actions as Director of Public Prosecutions in England and Wales between 2008 and 2013. He had obviously been groomed as a young global leader who could appeal to a key section of the wider managerial classes while somehow placating the working classes with promises of economic stability and progressive patriotism. The cracks in Labour’s happy family were all too apparent long before the General Election. While the red-tinted party may have regained votes in Scotland from the SNP and from some disaffected Tories in the English shires, it lost votes in many of its former strongholds.

Some alternative media influencers have intimated Sir Keir may have had a gay relationship with Lord Alli. That may have been a scandal 30 years ago, but why should anyone except Sir Keir’s wife care in a society that embraces all expressions of consensual sexuality? To top it all, many of the same pundits have highlighted Lord Alli’s meetings and apparent friendship with Syrian President, Bashar Al Assad, a prime target for US-led regime-change since at least 2010. Things have not always been that way. The Assad family have close links with the UK. Not only did Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, grow up in London, Bashar did postgraduate studies at the city’s Western Eye Hospital in the early 1990s. Later the US and UK courted the new leader when he succeeded his father in 2000 as they attempted to build an alliance of pro-Western Arab leaders in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Alas Assad chose to build stronger ties with Lebanon and Iran to support the Palestinian cause against Israeli repression. That’s when Islamic fundamentalist sects started a six-year long civil war, with the covert support of Western agencies and mercenaries. In 2014 Russia surprised the world by intervening militarily in their first foreign mission since the fall of the Soviet Union to defeat ISIS and its allies and support Assad’s secular government, helping it to recapture most of Syria. The Western media framed Assad as a brutal dictator who gassed his own people with countless claims of war crimes inevitably discovered by Western-funded White Helmets intermingling with rebel Islamic militants. The same self-proclaimed liberal media outlets who would later lie to us about covid, entertained the gullible with their poster child, Bana, whose well-written blog fit the anti-Assad narrative to a T. Yet the BBC had been caught red-handed staging a documentary with crisis actors to implicate Assad in a gas attack. Four years later OPCW inspectors failed to find evidence to blame the Syrian government for the alleged 2017 Douma chemical attack and, unsurprisingly, the Mafia media has gone quiet on the specifics of its blanket accusations ever since, shifting its focus to Vladimir Putin.

Why does all this matter now, you may wonder? Starmer has staked his reputation on ideological conformity, sticking to the dominant fake-progressive narrative, while distancing himself from his more radical policy advisors and Deep State actors. While he could channel his efforts against the spectres of Putin, far-right thugs, smokers and climate change, he could still command the support of most Guardian-reading Labour loyalists and the wider bien-pensant upper-middle classes. Now the US Deep State has pivoted to the Middle East in support of Israel, aiding and abetting an undeniably large scale of death and destruction, Starmer can no longer play the good guy.

Far be it from me to come to Starmer’s defence, but his holier-than-thou demeanour may not be able to stave off the inevitable opposition to direct UK involvement in a war between Israel’s allies and Iran supported logistically by Russia and China. Alliances may shift fast too. GB News talking heads, except for Neil Oliver, and the Reform Party leadership are unashamedly pro-Israel as is the Trump team. The rumours about Keir Starmer’s private life have all the hallmarks of a hatchet job, inspired by the brain behind the Blair project, Peter Mandelson. We may be seeing a split between the one-world-love and Zionist wings of the global techno-cabal. Sir Keir has served his purpose, but there are few charismatic leaders available who will follow the orders of an increasingly unstable and disunited ruling class as the US Empire crumbles?

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Parallel Narratives

In an age of high-tech deceit

On almost the same day as Israeli military forces attacked Lebanon and destroyed the 14th century Great Mosque of Khan Younis in Gaza, a knifeman attacked 14 young revellers, killing at least 3, at a Christian festival, celebrating ethnic diversity, in the West German town of Solingen. Within 24 hours it emerged the perpetrator was a 17-year-old asylum seeker who pledged allegiance to ISIS and sought revenge for the German government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes.

The total civilian death toll since 7th October 2023 now exceeds 40,000 and some estimates show that collateral damage to essential infrastructure may have caused 160,000 more deaths. In a parallel timeline, Hamas fighters broke through Israeli defences and killed 1139 military personnel and civilians and took over 100 hostages. Ever since there have been regular protests across the Western world against Israeli war crimes, with reports of attacks against Jewish communities such as the recent firebombing of a synagogue in the Southern French seaside town of La Grande Motte.

This comes only three weeks after riots following the stabbing of 11 young girls, with 3 fatalities, in Southport. Online rumours, labelled misinformation, circulated that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker, leading some angry local residents to protest outside the nearest mosque. It turns out the perpetrator grew up in Cardiff with Rwandan parents. The official narrative suggests he suffered from a mental illness. Sir Keir Starmer’s administration reacted by clamping down on the alleged far-right with a special focus on social media posts that may incite hatred. It turns out rumours about the Southport killer being a Muslim asylum seeker that spread from the Channel3Now network did not emanate, as initially reported on the BBC and Sky TV, from Russian sources or far-right organisations. The claim actually came from a Pakistani Web developer, Farhan Asi, whose motives may well have been to trigger revenge attacks in the full knowledge that the police would blame anti-Islam protesters. It’s not inconceivable that said operative could have been working for the British secret services, as I doubt normal Pakistanis, many with relatives in the UK, would want to see internecine warfare or more police repression. Western governments are quite happy to play a game of bait and switch between rival ethno-religious groups. The German government has recently arrested the publisher of the right-leaning Compact magazine for publishing official crime statistics as it may incite hatred against new ethnic minorities, while also apprehending leftwing activists, with many from new immigrant communities, for protesting peacefully against Israeli war crimes, under the pretext of antisemitism.

We now have four parallel narratives to explain the breakdown in peaceful coexistence:

  • Extreme right-wingers are spreading misinformation to destabilise society.
  • Radical Islamists want to eradicate infidels and destroy Judeo-Christianity.
  • Israel, along with the Western ruling elites, wants to eradicate Palestinians and subjugate Muslims worldwide.
  • We have an urgent mental health crisis among young males.

All narratives lead us in the same direction, towards a more tightly controlled and militarised society with more advanced surveillance, social engineering and censorship. Of course, the mainstream media is the prime source of fake news and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is much more nuanced than just a straight battle between good and evil and must be viewed in the wider context of the growing concentration of power in Big Tech.

The last narrative may often seem a convenient cover for more sinister motives, but may also empower the state to expand its surveillance grid to every aspect of your private life. We could soon be required to carry a digital health app on our mobile device. Such a device may be as small as wristwatch or even just an embedded microchip. It could contain data not only of genuine medical conditions or vaccines, but also of any mental health conditions and required treatment. Ingestible sensor technology already exists to track your compliance with medication regimes. The spectre of kitchen-knife-wielding maniacs approaching children’s playgrounds could justify the installation of embedded microchip access control (EMAC) systems around all public spaces, either denying access to non-compliant individuals or immediately alerting the police of their presence. While many may welcome such measures to protect children against predators, administrations can abuse such innovations not only to limit medical freedom and privacy, but to track dissidents. Imagine not being allowed to enter your local pub or café because you have not taken your neuroleptic meds to suppress politically incorrect thoughts. This is no longer science fiction.

It hardly matters if some groups fear far-right racists, while others fear Muslim fundamentalists, Zionists, rabid antisemites or psychiatric patients on the loose. Whichever version of reality you choose to believe, more technocracy will be the solution. Once you’re trapped in the digital surveillance grid, your personal worldview is inconsequential to the powers-that-be, a mere character trait that may need medical attention.

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All in the Mind Uncategorized War Crimes

Extreme Centralisers

Gungho Keir Starmer

The rise of progressive Technocrats

Why do we call extreme advocates of centralisation moderates and proponents of greater self-determination extremists?

Have you noticed that political actors posing in the middle ground tend to favour more regime change wars, surveillance, censorship, top-down social engineering and biotechnical tyranny, while opposition to these policies comes from activists labelled far-left or far-right? That’s because the politicians that the mainstream media call moderate serve the interests of large global corporations, while their opponents want to redress the balance of power to compact nation states, local communities or trade unions accountable to their members. The radical left and patriotic right may differ on religion, traditional family values, public ownership and immigration controls, but they both oppose the transfer of more power to the global military, biotech and banking industrial complex. Progressive politicians appeal most to the affluent professional classes, while the lower classes of all ethnic backgrounds are now more likely to rebel against global centralisers. Nowhere is this divide clearer than in France. Macron has lost his earlier appeal as a liberal antifascist who could win over trendy young professionals. Alas Macron’s administration has always sided with the interests of big corporations over those of the French rural and urban working classes. One minute he accuses the patriotic right of xenophobia, the next he supports bombing mainly brown people to assert the hegemony of Western bankers. One minute he champions LGBTQ+ rights in the name of bodily freedom, the next he wants to isolate jab refuseniks. Macron once courted the Muslim vote with his pro-migration stance, but on most social issues French Muslims are closer to Le Pen than either Macron or Mélanchon of the green-left La France Insoumise grouping.

Meanwhile, the British establishment wants to install Sir Keir Starmer as the next Prime Minister. The Labour Left hate him because he supports the Israeli and Ukrainian regimes, wants to keep nuclear weapons, boost military spending and build more prisons. Social conservatives hate him because he favours open-door immigration, tried to stop Brexit, struggles to define a woman, wanted to lock down harder and panders to climate alarmism. On the left Starmer faces challenges from George Galloway’s Workers’ Party and independents like former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn or deselected candidate Faiza Shaheen. On the populist right, the BBC’s favourite Trilateral Commission member may lose votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK grouping and a few other independent candidates like Andrew Bridgen, expelled from the Conservative Party for daring to challenge the safe-and-effective covid jab narrative. Labour may well have scuppered its hopes of winning back hearts and minds among its traditional Northern working-class base. At best Labour can appeal to condescending groupthink on our NHS and mental healthcare with only vague talk of creating new green jobs to replace the country’s shrunken manufacturing base. They’ve certainly invested heavily in social media advertising. One of their Scottish ads on Youtube portrays a nurse preparing an injection for an elderly lady. I doubt this will win over many undecided voters. The ad foreshadows the kind of future Sir Keir’s handlers have in mind for the humble little people, one of complete dependence on the nanny state.

Owing to the dynamics of politics within the first-past-the-post electoral system and a mainstream media that sidelines outsiders, Labour still seem set to win a sweeping majority of seats as the Tory vote collapses and others parties fail to fill void. They may well gain over 200 seats with as little as 30% of the vote in some constituencies. In Scotland the SNP stand to lose the most seats. The only question is: who will be the official opposition? With nothing left to lose many traditional conservative voters may switch to Reform in the English provinces, while in some metropolitan areas with large Muslim communities Labour may lose to anti-war candidates.

Statistically in Western Europe, the richer you are the more likely you are to believe the greatest challenges of our times are climate change, infectious diseases, transphobia and misinformation as defined by official fact-checkers. You only need to listen speeches by the likes of Ursula von der Leyen or Tony Blair himself to understand these narratives come from the very top. The commonfolk on the ground do not want to shut down farms to reduce carbon emissions or eradicate bird flu. They don’t want their children exposed to drag queen story time and gender ideology. They just want children to be children, girls to be girls and boys to be boys. There is nothing hateful or extreme about such attitudes, just as there is nothing immoral about pride in your cultural heritage. Yet in our perverse upside-down world, free speech advocates are called fascists and anyone who doubts the official narrative is smeared as a loony leftie or right-wing conspiracy theorist.

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Power Dynamics War Crimes

Divide et Impera

How the Global Elites are setting us up for endless civil strife.

The current incumbent of 10 Downing Street, Rishi Sunak, addressed the nation on the day after a by-election result that humiliated the establishment parties. Before the Rochdale by-election, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party seemed poised to win a thumping majority at the next general election, largely through apathy as supporters of the conventional alternatives would rather stay at home and only a small minority of traditional small-c conservatives would back the right-wing-labelled Reform Party.

It seems the Tory high command do not want to win the next general election. They care more about prolonging the war over Ukraine, appeasing Israel and promoting new mRNA injections than addressing any of the practical concerns their voters may have.

The infamous Rwanda Plan to stem the tide of undocumented migrants crossing the English Channel was not only designed to fail but would have entrenched the concept of global governance sending NGO-trafficked opportunists from countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Albania to the African country most favoured by the institutions of global technocracy. Unsurprisingly, Tony Blair is a regular visitor. I wonder if a future UK governance team will resurrect the plan to deal with indigenous dissidents or will we end up in Greenland, Antarctica or some godforsaken high-tech re-education camp in the middle of the Australian outback? It’s a globalist solution to a globalist problem. Our technocratic overlords do not care either about settled communities or about migrants, but exploit the fears and anxieties of both groups to consolidate their control of resources and ultimately their power to determine who thrives and who expires. They do not like strong and close-knit communities able to manage fine without help from the Global Mafia.

The era of mass consumerism got us hooked on the products of a complex planet-wide supply chain that relied on infrastructure controlled by a handful of large corporations. The automotive revolution could not have happened without massive economies of scale. You may sell handcrafted trinkets online but you need to import the raw materials, advertise on social media, dispatch your creations efficiently and accept digital payments to stand a chance of earning a living in the cybersphere. We were lured into a false sense of security in a new world of ubiquitous brand names with their deceptive diversity that displaced earlier mosaics of farms, workshops, open-air markets, independent shops, places of worship and theatres that expressed a custom mix of intersecting cultural influences. Before smartphones connected over half of humanity into a single control grid, the world remained a maze of human mysteries with almost infinite variation. Of course, over many centuries of colonial empires we had gradually grown together but more in the fashion of interlocking cultural paradigms than an earth-enveloping universalism that trumps traditional values passed down through generations.

Given recent authoritarian trends across the Western world, casual observers may welcome scenes of large gatherings of wishful-thinking citizens in cities across Germany chanting “Everyone together against fascism” (or “Alle zusammen gegen den Faschismus”). Were they protesting against censorship or the proposed banning of a major political party represented in the Bundestag? Did they want to defend the right to demonstrate against war crimes in the Middle East? Apparently not, the state-funded organisers, posing on the progressive centre-left, wanted to rally upstanding citizens against any alternatives to the UniParty, embodied by the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens. Just as radical leftists welcomed a small decline in support for the much-maligned Alternative für Deutschland, the police shut down an international conference on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, was among many high-profile attendees banned from Germany. Official explanations for such actions would not have been out of place in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). They had to suppress all open criticism of Israeli military operations in Gaza to prevent any resurgence of antisemitism and thus avoid a recurrence of the Holocaust. Objective truth matters little to such apparatchiks. It matters not one jot that many Jews, critical of the Israeli government, were in attendance or that ICJ had concluded that the risk of genocide in Gaza, after over 30,000 civilian deaths, is plausible.

In our upside-down world, the centrists beat the drums of war and the alleged extremists, whether notionally on the left or right, oppose it. While many bankers still support the US/UK/EU/Israel axis, some influential global actors, such as George Soros and his Open Society Foundations, have coopted the Palestinian cause, calling for coordinated international action to force a ceasefire and oust the Netanyahu government. This is the regime-change narrative, the notion that there is some higher authority that can override any national government. Whatever the problem may be, the proposed solutions are always more centralised control. For the WEF, it’s heads we win and tails we let the BRICS alliance win against the old West.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Our Rulers Want War

Last month, the world’s movers and shakers met up in the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Nominally elected politicians posed with billionaire technocrats and functionaries of unaccountable global organisations like the WHO to discuss how to manage the restless plebs. Hot on their agenda, besides climate change, future pandemics and universal digital ID, was the perceived threat of disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. The last neologism is particularly ominous. They are not only concerned with information that may be factually incorrect, but with indisputable facts which, if disseminated, would incriminate them. Information must now not just be manipulated, but actively suppressed for the greater good of the elite’s long-term plans for humanity.

While the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, shared the stage with Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, and, without a hint of irony, welcomed the prospect of rolling out a mass injection campaigns within 100 days of the next pandemic, his colleague, Grant Shapps posing as Secretary of State for Defence, made a high-profile speech to prepare us for war with Eurasia. A week later General Sir Richard Shirreff appears on British TV screens to advocate conscription in the build-up to a military conflict with Russia allegedly to defend freedom and democracy.

How can these professional charlatans, who have both on numerous occasions revealed their ignorance on basic science and geopolitics, claim to represent the hapless citizens of the United Kingdom? Who voted to impose medical martial law and digital IDs or to wage war with Russia, Iran and/or China when our armed forces can barely defend our borders? Did we not vote to take back control? How does bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen solve any of the practical challenges we have at home? Do our political speech writers think we all suffer from collective amnesia? Have we somehow forgotten that the UK not only armed Saudi Arabia to the hilt, but the RAF helped train its pilots as they launched airstrikes over Northern Yemen? Why on earth would Houthi rebels be disrupting shipping in Red Sea as Israel flattens Gaza?

In the same week the Indian multinational, Tata Steel, announced it would close the blast furnaces in Wales, as government and opposition politicians prioritise their Net Zero agenda. Did it occur to anyone that we will need an awful lot of steel and aluminium not only to build new energy infrastructure but to fight all the wars our rulers want to pursue.

The days of US military supremacy are over. What happened to the promises of a joint NATO-Ukrainian victory over the Eastern invaders? How could Russia win if its economy is supposedly a basket case economy and its military budget only a tenth of the USA’s mighty $800 outlay? In reality, the Russian bear is only weak if we measure its power in American greenbacks. In terms of raw materials, it’s the richest country in the world with a manufacturing base now larger than France’s and a highly skilled workforce. Western sanctions have barely affected Russia as it deepens its alliances with China, India, Iran and many resource-rich African countries. What we’re witnessing is much more complex than an eastward shift in the economic centre of gravity or a transition to a multipolar world order dominated by China. Many analysts mistakenly assume the western wing of the Military-Biotech Industrial Complex wants to defeat its eastern wing. American tech giants depend on the East Asian manufacturing base. Where do you think all the servers, laptops and mobile phones we need to power the Fourth Industrial Revolution are made? If they’re not assembled in China itself, chances are they’re made in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea or Vietnam, all within China’s orbit. Re-localising manufacturing to Western Europe requires plentiful cheap energy, which is now in shorter supply. Europe’s industrial powerhouse, Germany, has had to absorb a double whammy, with the destructions of Nordstream II gas pipeline depriving it of cheap Russian gas and its government’s ideological pursuit of Net Zero policies. Germany even decommissioned its last nuclear reactors in May 2023. You need a hell of a lot of wind turbines and solar panels to power a car manufacturing plant. Unsurprisingly major manufacturers are now relocating to regions with lower energy costs. With highly automated production lines, skilled labour is less of an issue these days.

Now it appears the collective West, as some call NATO and its partners, has abandoned Ukraine to refocus its attention on securing trading routes in the Middle East. Yet Colonel Douglas MacGregor not only foresaw a Russian victory over Ukraine, he’s now predicting the humiliation of the Israeli government and its closest allies, leading sooner or later to WW3 with catastrophic consequences for millions of Europeans accustomed to the relative safety that followed the end of WW2. Amidst all turmoil, governments at loggerheads over the Ukrainian or Palestinian questions, are working almost in lockstep to trap their citizens into a digital control grid. The freest countries in the coming decades may well be those with incompetent governments, shoddy infrastructure and non-compliant citizens not dependent on the central banking system and able to fend for themselves without state handouts or NGO intervention. Adversity builds resilience and cosiness builds helplessness. Many Africans may live in ramshackle huts, but they have learned how to cope in the event of power cuts. By contrast most Europeans would be helpless without emergency generators kicking into action within hours of a power outage. When downtown Auckland (New Zealand) experienced a power failure in February 1998, most of the district’s 6000 inhabitants had to find alternative accommodation and city workers either worked from home or from relocated offices. Residents averted catastrophe only because people could easily move to well-provisioned surrounding neighbourhoods and emergency services acted promptly to deploy backup generators and restore full capacity within 40 days. A city the size of London may not be so lucky in the event of a catastrophic power failure resulting from enemy airstrikes.

I doubt Western intelligence agencies believed an outlay of over $200 billion could easily defeat the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine. As Julian Assange observed very astutely about the protracted Western intervention in Afghanistan, the aim was not military victory, but to transfer funds to the military industrial complex in a perpetual war against elusive enemies. Not only has the US Deep State armed and trained many of its official enemies to destabilise rival regimes, as it did with Mujahedeen in Afghanistan back in the 1980s, it needs enemies to justify its existence. “War is a Racket”, wrote Smedley D. Butler in 1935. The global elites need the spectres of Putin and Islamic Jihadists to scare the masses into submission. “If we don’t support Ukraine, defeat Houthi militias in the Red Sea or stand up to Iran, we will lose our cherished freedoms and prosperity”, cry the same neoliberals who oversaw the outsourcing of Western manufacturing to the Far East, the downsizing of the Western working classes and colluded with Big Tech to suppress all dissent to the socially and economically destructive lockdowns and biotechnological coercion of the 2020-23 pseudo-pandemic and are busy rolling out hate speech laws to ban all criticism of transgender ideology and ethnic cleansing.

The Western mainstream media has exploited the curious death of the fringe opposition Russian leader, Alexei Navalny, of a sudden cardiac arrest to beat the drums of war against Russia. Little do they care that Western support for Zelenksy's regime has led to the early deaths of over 400,000 Ukrainians and possibly over 270,000 Russian fatalities. We're being primed for World War Three, which this time may see the planned destruction of the Western World as we knew it.

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All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Shifting Narratives at the Crossroads of Civilisation

Things are about to turn very nasty

Protesters at Liverpool Street Station, London.

If you believe the opinion polls, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is poised to win by a country mile at the next general election. Recent by-election results would confirm this trend albeit with very low turnouts. Yet on the ground there is little enthusiasm for the prime-ministerial candidate that BlackRock’s Larry Fink has publicly endorsed. Meanwhile, parliament has become a sideshow. When Andrew Bridgen MP dared to raise the issue of excess deaths, citing voluminous data from various government agencies of increased mortality among working age adults since the multi-billion pound jab roll-out, only a handful of MPs dared to turn up while the soundproofed public gallery was full and the BBC saw fit to add captions contradicting the MP’s well-researched evidence. Sir Keir has admitted on camera to the BBC’s Emily Maitlis that he much prefers annual WEF gatherings with like-minded global influencers at Davos to parochial shouting matches at Westminster.

Some have accused Sir Keir of sitting on the fence on the key controversies of the day, but nothing could be further from the truth. He merely had to bide his time as Boris waffled over the first two and half years of the corona regime. He offered no opposition to the massive government overspend on covid containment policies. Indeed, under his stewardship Labour wanted to lock down sooner and harder. The lavishly funded Behavioural Insights Team did Labour’s dirty work for them by engendering a climate of helplessness and hyper-dependence on remote authorities, setting the stage for the next phase of the Great Reset. Unsurprisingly, the Labour-run fiefdom of Wales is running the first major trial of Universal Basic Income with funding from a penny-pinching Tory government.

What frightens me most about Keir Starmer is not his devotion to the institutions of technocratic control, but his staunch opposition to intellectual freedom. We heard hardly a whisper of opposition to the Orwellian Online Safety Bill from the Labour front bench and only murmurings of dissent from Corbynite left. If you can censor scientists who disagree with the WHO’s directives, you can censor peace activists who disagree with the Israeli government. If can censor opponents of mass migration because of their alleged racism, you can censor historians who disagree with official fact-checkers. If you rewrite history and send dissident historians to quarantine camps, you can literally get away with mass murder.

In the wake of the war over Gaza, Labour faces an enormous challenge. Large sections of its members and electoral base disagree profoundly with the leadership. Labour needs the block votes of Britain’s growing Muslim community and the wishful-thinking caring classes (teachers, nurses, social workers etc.). While Sir Keir may get away with his slavish parroting of the covid narrative, feelings run high about the mounting death toll in the Levant. Millions of Labour supporters can easily access Aljazeera with 24/7 coverage of Israeli war crimes and now distrust the British MSM more than ever, although for different reasons than social conservatives, libertarians and nationalists. Many have also questioned whether Hamas beheaded babies or whether the IDF’s heavy-handed response could have boosted the high civilian death toll in the horrific October 7th attacks on innocent Israelis. If the British telecommunications regulator, OfCom, attempted to ban Aljazeera in the same way as they silenced dissent over covid or banned RT, hundreds of thousands more would be out on the streets protesting and people will quickly find other means to access alternative news sources. That explains, at least in part, why the BBC has been more balanced on Palestine than it was on the covid regime.

One minute we all have to isolate and stay at least 2-metres apart, the next we all have to huddle into densely populated refugee camps sharing a toilet with hundreds of other people. One minute we ostracise the unvaccinated, the next we welcome undocumented refugees into our homes. One minute we welcome refugees from all over the world, the next we arrest them for protesting against Israeli war crimes.

If you believed the lockdowns were about public health, you might also believe Sir Keir Starmer wants peace in the Middle East. If he did, why would he align himself so closely and visibly with the Tony Blair Institute? As noted elsewhere the Biotech Industrial Complex is an extension of the better understood Military Industrial Complex. Unsurprisingly, both have close links with the Tony Blair Institute, the WEF, the White House and the Israeli government.

Infantile Pro-Palestinians

It is not just the Labour Party that’s split down the middle on Gaza, but the whole international woke movement. All of a sudden, I find myself sympathising with the likes of Greta Thunberg as her pro-Palestinian stance has given her a bad press in some quarters. However, George Soros’ openDemocracy foundation has long championed the Palestinian cause. His organisation has openly funded many pro-migration NGOs and open-borders campaign groups. Global technocrats can play both sides against each other. Tails you lose, and heads you score a pyrrhic victory. The Chinese Communist Party is realigning with the BRICS alliance and has given diplomatic support to the Palestinian side, but they have also recently wined and dined California’s lockdown king, Gavin Newsom. Of the big geopolitical powers only India, traditionally pro-Israeli, seems to be hedging its bets, while many pro-NATO European politicians, like Guy Verhofstadt better known for his rants against Putin and Brexit, are now distancing themselves from the US administration’s resolute opposition to a ceasefire. Why? Because they can feel the winds of global change. If Israel wins the battle of Gaza, it will do so at the expense of a weakened Collective West, morally obliged to accommodate millions more refugees. It would be a lose-lose situation for both Palestinians and ordinary Israelis (i.e. not the 20% with dual citizenship). An alternative outcome could bring Russia, Iran and China into the conflict and enforce a radical two-state solution based on the 1948 borders policed by international peacekeepers with the removal of all US military bases in the region. This scenario would not only humiliate the US/UK alliance with a heavy price in terms of human lives, it would inevitably lead to a mass exodus of Jewish Israelis. We might even see both sequences of events play out in quick succession. European workers will be expected to foot the reconstruction bill, but the Israeli and Arab elites will do just fine as will their friends in the arms and surveillance industries.

Who could benefit most from an intensification of community hostilities in cosmopolitan towns and cities across the Western World? With competing narratives about the causes of the Middle East conflict, I think we need more dialogue and fearless open debate, but alas our WEF-compliant politicians see things in terms of hate speech, which they get to define, and the parallel spectres of antisemitism and Islamophobia. Sir Keir Starmer has succeeded in annoying not only most Labour supporters sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but also many staunch Zionists, by calling for urgent action against, wait for it, Islamophobia a day after making a speech against a ceasefire. In Sir Keir’s world, you may not insult the prophet Mohamed or complain about Pakistani grooming gangs in your neighbourhood, because that would be Islamophobic, but it’s fine to support Israeli airstrikes on refugee camps in Gaza, because otherwise you would deny Israel’s right to exist and that would be antisemitic. All we need is a handful of rogue agitators at a pro-Palestinian rally calling for an armed insurrection against Zionists and the Home Secretary has a pretext to ban all peaceful protests because they may incite violence. If the government can ban comedians for telling jokes about Gays for Palestine being thrown off rooftops, it can also ban protests against Israeli war crimes, lockdowns or gender-bending lessons in primary schools.

Are we being played?

Unlike Rishi Sunak or Sir Keir Starmer, Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf and Scottish Labour Leader, Anas Sarwar, both of Pakistani descent, have called for a ceasefire and, almost in the same breath, urged Scots to welcome Palestinian refugees. Yet only yesterday, both politicians seems perfectly aligned with the global establishment. The Scottish Government has no say in the UK's foreign and migration policies. Meanwhile, GB News and the Daily Mail, the bad boys of the British mainstream media, have a distinct pro-Israeli bias with their regular opinion leaders advocating a ban on Pro-Palestinian protests on Armistice Day (11th November). The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has also indicated that anti-terrorism and anti-hate-speech laws could outlaw any protests glorifying Hamas and, by extension, Hezbollah, which enjoys greater support in the wider Muslim world. This may lead to a standoff between two rival factions, both funded and manipulated by major global players. On the one hand we have the Israel-sympathising pro-American faction, allied with many British patriots, and on other we have a fragile alliance of the internationalist radical left, most Muslims and critically thinking peace activists. In a cruel twist of fate, many critical thinkers are now in the same camp as trendy lefties, while many social conservatives now welcoming a clampdown on freedom of expression in the name of antisemitism and honouring our forebears who helped defeat the Nazis. With organisers planning for as many as a million to attend next week's National March for Palestine in London coinciding with the traditional poppy-festooned Armistice Day memorial services, the stage is set for a showdown with the police. We may then only need a real or false flag terror attack, allegedly to revenge a mounting civilian death toll in Gaza, to justify martial law on the streets of London.

Categories
All in the Mind Power Dynamics War Crimes

Spiked Opposition

Imagine being invited to debate disinformation on the BBC, after three and a half years of non-stop covid lies, and the best example of BBC fake news you can cite is one of the few cases of objective reporting.

The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.

I don’t really like ad feminam or ad hominem attacks. I sympathise instinctively with anyone who has put their head above the parapet and argued eloquently against the madness of covid-themed tyranny. In the end, the debate over covid restrictions boiled down to a battle between technocracy and natural humanity that transcends complex and emotionally charged geopolitical conflicts.

I began writing this blog over a week ago after I saw a clip of Laura Dodsworth discuss misinformation and censorship in the context of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill with BBC veteran Paul Mason. To her credit, Laura argued against the bill, but missed a golden opportunity to expose the BBC’s grotesque bias over covid. I held off publishing this post last week because Laura still comes across as an eminently likeable and honest person. Unlike many noteworthy covid dissidents such as Dr Peter McCullough or Prof Sucharit Bhakdi, Laura does not have a dedicated Wikipedia page. Her own website reveals little information about her past political affiliations and has yet to be subjected to a media smear campaign. Then I caught a glimpse of Baroness Claire Fox pushing almost the same line asking a Pro-Palestinian activist why he did not dissociate himself from extremists chanting ” From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” or waving Hamas flags. This is rich coming from an unrepentant IRA apologist. Then Scottish comedian and free speech advocate, Leo Kearse, toed the same line with his mildly amusing quip about Gays for Palestine not being thrown off buildings in Gaza because they've all razed to the ground. Lo and behold, Leo also has a column on Spiked.

Have you ever wondered why the pseudo-progressive intelligentsia has devoted so many resources to vilify some dissident thinkers, while they give others a free pass? As the former head of Pfizer’s research division specialising in respiratory diseases, Dr Mike Yeadon is certainly well-qualified to contribute to scientific debates over the efficacy of covid restrictions, but Wikipedia dismisses him as a conspiracy theorist who has made unfounded claims about vaccine harms. In trendy metropolitan elite circles, any mention of some outspoken covid critics, such as the late Nobel Laureate, Prof. Luc Montagnier, or investigative journalist Dr Naomi Wolf, is to invite ridicule. Yet some regular pundits on mainstream TV seem to get away with deceptively bold critiques of government policies. This leads us to the curious case of Laura Dodsworth and her association with Spiked Online.

The Spiked sect grew out of the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party, which disbanded in the early 1990s. When I briefly flirted with this grouplet as a naïve and disillusioned student in 1985, they positioned themselves to the left of the larger neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party. While the SWP supported a United Ireland, but condemned all attacks against civilian targets, the RCP gave its unconditional support to the IRA in the struggle against British imperialism. Fast forward 40 years and the Spiked Gang now give their unconditional support to the State of Israel in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the escalation of hostilities in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has already poisoned community relations in many cosmopolitan cities. Whatever the truth about Israeli or Hamas war crimes may be, there is no justification for intimidating other civilians either for their religious affiliation or their stance on this conflict. There is no excuse for vandalising Jewish-owned shops, but who is stoking all this hatred and, more important, who will benefit most from the ensuing culture of fear and intimidation? That’s the common thread between the covid and Middle East crises. The mainstream media suppresses rational discussion over objective truth, while spreading fear of your neighbours by redefining hate speech as anything that runs against the mainstream narrative. Thus, it was hateful to oppose mask mandates as bare human faces may have exposed some vulnerable people to airborne pathogens, but it was not hateful to ridicule and ostracise anyone who refused to take government-injectables. As for British Muslims, they can quickly go from heroes to zeroes in the eyes of the bien-pensant establishment left. One minute they are victims of Islamophobia, racism, foreign wars or the legacy of British imperialism, the next they are reactionary homophobes and/or antisemites.

Now I do not claim to know the whole truth about the tragic explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital that caused hundreds of deaths, but aerial footage shows vast swathes of the densely populated Northern Gaza Strip have been flattened. Both the IDF and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as Hamas itself have denied responsibility. Could a makeshift surface-to-surface missile hit a car park or could it only have been Israel’s more advanced Iron Dome System?

The question is why would the author of a State of Fear and Free Your Mind cite the Al Ahli hospital blast as an example of BBC fake news? Why would she be so certain that the IDF did not fire missiles into Northern Gaza with massive civilian casualties, but yet failed dismally to cite countless outright untruths spouted by BBC talking heads during the covid era? What about the endlessly repeated claims that the mRNA jabs prevent the spread of covid and saved millions of lives, based on wild exaggerations of the numbers who might have died of/with covid, or Devi Sridhar’s infamous claim on children’s TV that the mRNA shots were safe and effective for children, despite the fact that no healthy children had died with covid before 2021 and there has since been a marked rise in children and young adults with myocarditis and a disturbing number of unexplained sudden deaths.

Andrew Bridgen MP had the courage to raise these issues in the House of Commons and has been the target of a concerted smear campaign. Although Ms Dodsworth attended a few anti-lockdown protests and boycotted the 2021 Spectator’s Festival of Ideas over their covid pass policy, she’s steered clear of all scientific questions relating to the jabs that governments wanted to inject into us at all costs. Did Laura ever ask why governments would go to such extreme lengths to impose medical martial law or was it just the woke left latching onto the latest fad?

Future historians may well debate why the BBC suppressed dissident voices much more strictly on the covid fiasco than on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leo Kearse may have a point in claiming that Palestinian Lives Matter, with Greta Thunberg’s full blessing, is the new Black Lives Matter. The only trouble with this analogy is that countless thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza at the mercy of the IDF over the last ten days, while the US and the Israeli air forces bomb neighbouring Syria. On cue, Joe Biden reads a speech calling for another $106 billion to help Ukraine and Israel to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese warships have quietly sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean as President Xi Jinping promises to defend Iran in the event of a US or Israeli attack. World War Three is sadly no laughing matter. We’re not talking about the sad case of a former drug addict, George Floyd or scenes of disaffected urban youngsters looting and burning down retail outlets. We’re talking about an escalation of the Middle East quagmire that could cost millions of lives. I fear many analysts fall into the trap of siding either with the Collective West, aligned with Israel, or with the new Collective East and South, aligned with the Palestinian cause. Neither side will win. The Chinese are still doing big business with the USA. President Xi Jinping was happy to welcome California Governor, Gavin Newsom to Beijing the other day. What we are witnessing is the demise of the American World Order and the rise of a global technocracy. The elites are quite happy to see much of the Middle East go up in flames and then to build their brave new network of smart cities modelled on Doha and Dubai. Affluent Israelis can easily migrate to Ukraine, while poorer Israelis may perish if Iran ever retaliates with Chinese support.

This is not the time to support Israel or Hamas, but to avert World War Three before it’s too late. Alas Spiked talking heads, as edgy as they may appear to the uninitiated, are controlled opposition. That’s why they’re always on the telly.

Categories
Power Dynamics War Crimes

Can we let the War Party win again?

Who benefits from more death and destruction in the Middle East?

Rubble litters a street between smoldering buildings hit by an Israeli airstrike in Jabaliya, Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)

It’s easy to jump on bandwagons in righteous indignation against the latest demons guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. Alas recent history has taught us over and over again that we cannot trust the objectivity and impartiality of the mainstream media to verify the authenticity of some of the most gruesome videos of crimes attributed to either side.

The technocratic coup of early 2020 that saw the roll-out of medical martial law amid a coordinated propaganda campaign gave rise to a new alliance among critical thinkers. We buried our differences over complex geopolitical matters in a battle between the Biotech Mafia and natural humanity. For three short years, the Middle East conflict almost disappeared from our TV screens with blanket wall-to-wall propaganda over novel respiratory viruses, Ukraine and climate change. Many heroes of the fledgling medical truth movement such as Mark Steyn and Robert F Kennedy Jnr. have sided firmly with the Israeli government and given their unconditional support for any military actions it may have to take to defend Israel’s right to exist. I find this stance very disturbing in the light of the recent Ukrainian quagmire for a heavy-handed invasion of Gaza could well backfire, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. In an increasingly unstable world, we should never assume the Collective West will always win. Let us not forget Benjamin Netanyahu used his own people as guinea pigs by enforcing one of the strictest covid regimes.

Sadly, many on the other side of the Palestinian debate fell for the covid psyop hook, line and sinker. As much as I believe Israel has committed many war crimes against the Palestinian people (namely the descendants of the region’s pre-1948 inhabitants), I can’t help but notice the Palestinian liberation movement’s close links with the illiberal forces of Islamic fundamentalism and the neo-Bolshevik left with many still donning facemasks. How can they advocate self-determination for Palestinians if they want to abolish all nation states? How can they support the religious rights of Muslims if they also want to impose gender-bending ideology on young children? Besides, does self-determination mean anything at all if we do not have fundamental freedoms such as bodily autonomy or intellectual freedom? Did Socialist Worker sellers care much about free speech when censorship only affected dissident scientists and gender-critical feminists? Oddly the same BBC that failed to report massive anti-lockdown protests in its main news bulletins and spent countless millions on propaganda against antivaxxers, gave extensive coverage of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London, Glasgow and elsewhere yesterday. Far be it from me to praise the BBC, but its journalists have questioned the morality of collective punishment and interviewed many critics of the Israeli government, much to the chagrin of staunch Zionists. By contrast, on covid we only ever heard one side of the argument with only guarded critiques of lockdowns, but not a whisper of uncontested criticism of the mRNA injections.

On the subject of corporate disinformation, who would butcher innocent babies and senior citizens to defeat an imperialist occupier? In the age of high-definition TV screens bringing selective heart-rending imagery of atrocities into living rooms across the westernised world, it beggars belief that any combatants could not be aware that beheading new-born babies would be a public relations disaster and would inevitably embolden Israel with the full support of its Western allies to crush Hamas and Hezbollah by inflicting collective punishment on all Gaza residents. Two wrongs do not make one right when it comes to targeting civilians. If it’s wrong for Hamas to target revellers at a music festival, it’s equally wrong to bomb densely populated areas of the Gaza strip where collateral damage is unavoidable or to force over a million Gazans to leave their homes within 48 hours despite the lack of infrastructure in neighbouring Egypt.

The claims and counterclaims on both sides of the decades-old conflict over the self-determination and livelihoods of rival ethno-religious groups have exposed the ideological hypocrisy of many mainstream politicians. For once, the progressive alliance of green, social democratic and neoliberal parties that championed global convergence with the phasing out of nation states are divided. How can they advocate open borders and multiculturalism in the West, but also support ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, either to defend Israel’s right to exist or to evict Jewish settlers on land once owned by Palestinians. Alas lasting peace will only come to the Levant when the diverse Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities can reconcile their differences and agree to difficult compromises. Historically, Christian and Jewish communities were spread over a wide area of the Ottoman Empire, which would later become Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine. All this changed with the emergence of Israel as a Jewish state, the protracted Lebanese civil war and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism amid a battle for control over copious oil reserves and decades of Western interventionism. The Middle East is probably the world’s most militarised region. Saudi Arabia alone, spends more than the UK or France on its armed forces. Tiny Qatar has a huge $15 billion defence budget representing 7% of its GDP and Israel spends around $23 billion on defence or 4.5% of its GDP, but can count on generous logistical support from the US. Yet despite its massive military budget and substantial soft power, the world’s leading superpower has suffered a series of embarrassing setbacks in Afghanistan and Syria. Their long occupation of Iraq succeeded only in enriching military contractors like Haliburton, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and McDonnell Douglas, and fomenting Islamic militias like ISIS and Al Qaeda. Over $100 billions of military aid has failed dismally to thwart the Russian occupation of Eastern Ukraine. With Saudi Arabia now selling oil in yuan and rupees and poised to join an expanded BRICS alliance, the petrodollar era is over.

Slowing but surely, we’re inching towards a post-American world. While the Anglo-American cultural legacy will live on in the same way as Latin survived the fall of the Roman Empire, the global Deep State owes no special allegiance to North Americans or Western Europeans. Indeed, Israel itself may have outlived its purpose as an outpost of the US-centred world order that grew out of the ashes of the Second World War.  Benjamin Netanyahu’s government may soon find itself isolated if it overplays its hand in the coming ground offensive against the Gaza insurgency, scuppering any chance of reconciliation and potentially drawing other big players such as Iran and Russia into the fray, with the tacit support of China.

I’d much prefer a more innocent world with a mosaic of diverse self-governing communities living side by side with full mutual respect for each other’s different ways of life. I’d love to believe in a peace-loving democratic Israel besieged by primitive Arab neighbours eager to “drive the Jews into sea”. Alas today’s Levant has been shaped by centuries of rival empires, rapid urbanisation, immense oil wealth and, dare I say, population growth. The latter challenge may be one of the most controversial, especially in the light of the recent covid regime that saw us divided into essential and non-essential workers and reclassified human beings as bio-hazards. Saudi Arabia’s population has grown from 3 million in 1950 to 36 million today with most of its citizens concentrated in a few urban areas surrounded by inhospitable desert. The people count of Israel (without the West Bank and Gaza) has grown from just 1.4 million in 1950 to 9.6 million today. That increases reliance on expensive irrigation systems and energy-intensive desalination plants to tackle water scarcity. While the nomadic herders of North Yemen can cope with rudimentary technology, the 2.3 million residents of the compact Gaza Strip cannot survive long without clean drinking water, electricity and imported resources essential to modern life. A complete blockade of Gaza is effectively a death sentence for those unable to flee or take advantage of emergency supplies.

We live in dangerous times and my voice in the wilderness will ineluctably fall on deaf ears. However, only an immediate cease-fire agreed by the Israeli Government, its Arab neighbours, Iran and Hamas can save us from an all-out war that could kill millions more and potentially go nuclear.

Categories
Power Dynamics War Crimes

Neither Washington nor Moscow, but Natural Humanity

Some readers may recognise the above slogan as a calque on the Socialist Workers’ Party’s old catchline ending in “but international socialism”. It appealed to the anti-establishment radical left who realised the old Soviet Union had failed to deliver the kind of Utopian communalism to which they aspired. How could we oppose American imperialism in Latin America, while turning a blind eye to abuses of basic human rights in countries controlled or occupied by the USSR? To do so, we had to favour a rose-tinted vision of life under Soviet rule while attributing all hardships at home to something we called capitalism. In reality, both systems saw extreme concentrations of power with plenty of regulations to maintain social order. Yet the Western mixed economy model proved better at spreading prosperity and lifting people out of extreme poverty, mainly due to better and more efficient technology.

Thirty-one years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the world appears once again divided between rival camps as the United States of America loses its role as the world’s dominant superpower. As Western governments resort to more authoritarian means of people management, some of us may pin our hopes on Russia, China and India as the new beacons of human progress. I very much doubt the Kremlin would have authorised the military occupation of Ukraine without the covert support of Asia’s two most populous countries.

In all major conflicts since the fall of the Iron Curtain, we have witnessed a familiar pattern of concerted media campaigns that serve not only to manufacture consent for military intervention, but to instil in the public mind the dominant narrative of an enlightened liberal international community battling barbaric despots. The Western media has at different times portrayed Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad as the latest reincarnations of Hitler. To counter this narrative, peace campaigners had to learn the often chequered histories of regional ethno-religious rivalry and imperial meddling. Objective truth in such disputes is seldom a clearcut case of good versus evil. The United States bankrolled the predecessors of Al Qaeda, the Mujahadeen, in the 1980s to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and initially supported Saddam Hussein’s regime in the eight-year Iraq-Iran war. Until recently it seemed plausible to assume the US-centred Deep State has destabilised many resource-rich regions to consolidate their commercial interests. This logic suggests that the Western working classes may have unjustly benefited from the exploitation of other regions. In the eras of Western imperialism and American exceptionalism, large corporations certainly did use some of the proceeds of their exploitation of third world resources to buy off the working classes, but then they opted to outsource most intensive manufacturing to China, Vietnam, Indonesia and other countries with shameful human rights records. Since China has morphed into the world’s industrial powerhouse, it has increasingly relied on the exploitation of raw materials in Africa, South America and Siberia. Only the greenback’s role as the world’s reserve currency and the USA’s strong military ties with Saudi Arabia have prevented China from dominating the global economy. Now Saudi Arabia has agreed to sell its fossil fuels in Yuan and Russia has put the rouble back on the gold standard, cutting favourable deals with India and China.

As soon as Russian forces occupied Eastern Ukraine, Western governments acted fast to censor RT and turn up the level of anti-Russian propaganda with wild accusations of mindless atrocities attributed to Russian forces. However, the Indian, Chinese, Arabic and Iranian media have failed to toe the Western line. This is not a war between a mad dictator, personified by Putin, and the enlightened West. It’s the end of the New American Century and the beginning of the next phase in the Great Reset, something that could not happen without the active participation of the Chinese Communist Party. The Russian army may not be deliberately targeting Ukrainian civilians. The Azov Battalion may well be responsible for many of the crimes the Western media attributes to Putin, but Russia has already lost some 16,000 lives in this war and has no need for more living space. That’s more than 13,000 thousand who died in the 8-year civil war in the Donbas and Luhansk. Just as American military interventionism has failed to benefit US citizens back home, Russian revanchism will bring neither peace nor prosperity for its citizens. The Ukrainian question could have been solved peacefully and democratically.

In many ways, Russian propaganda mirrors Western narratives. RT is certainly a smooth operation providing the semblance of objectivity, but their favourite game is to portray all advocates of national self-determination as Nazis. They may have a point with some elements of the Azov Battalion, but Ukrainian cultural attitudes are broadly in line with their neighbours and their politically incorrect sympathies for defunct regimes a product of Stalinist repression and the Holodomor. Why is Ukrainian nationalism so much more dangerous than Polish or Lithuanian nationalism, both of which had been suppressed by the former Russian Empire? The whole thing looks like a pantomime with narratives tailored to different audiences. Russian and Chinese audiences may believe this is a result of NATO aggression and Russia is liberating Ukraine from Western-backed Nazis. The West claims the Russians are the aggressors behaving like Nazis, while offloading the blame for the impending financial collapse on Putin. This manufactured conflict provides the perfect backdrop for the eclipse of American hegemony with the full blessing of big tech.

I fear the main beneficiary of this futile war will be the kind of Sinocentric globalism that Justin Trudeau admires. If modern Russia has killed thousands in Chechnya and hundreds in Ukraine, China continues to kill thousands of Uighur insurgents with utter impunity. The Western European economy may struggle to cope with higher gas prices as a result of Russian sanctions, but it would grind to a halt without China. Our entire industrial base depends on cheap Chinese imports. The elites will use the new cold war to fast-track the Great Reset with the smart automation of most monotonous jobs, universal basic income dependent on social credit scores and total surveillance of all human habitation zones. Not only has Russia introduced digital health passes, but its main ally, China, has enforced the most extreme lockdown ever in Shanghai with children testing positive for the mild omicron variant removed from their parents.

For more on Russia’s role in the New World Order, I recommend the excellent debate hosted by the Off-Guardian with Ian Davis and Tom Luongo among others.

Categories
Power Dynamics War Crimes

Who Wants War?

Just two weeks ago, Western leaders like Boris Johnson announced that Russia was poised to attack Ukraine. Considering the US still has military bases in many countries surrounding the Russian Federation and over 10 times the military budget, I doubted the Kremlin would risk triggering World War 3 to settle old scores with its Slavic neighbour. It had little to gain materially. Unlike most Western and Central European countries, Russia does not lack either space or resources. Whatever you may think of Vladimir Putin, his strategy has usually been flawless. Territorial disputes make little sense in an interconnected world where large corporations can simply buy influence. This begs the question: Why now?

The former Soviet Republic declared independence over 30 years ago. Most of its territory had been part of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union after an interlude of independence following the short-lived Brest-Litovsk Treaty in 1918-19. Over the centuries parts of its western provinces have at different times been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Much of the south, from Odessa to the Crimea was once under Ottoman Rule before the Russian Empire conquered it in the 17th century. While the word Ukraine itself means borderlands, the Kievan Rus is often considered the birthplace of Russian civilisation as it evolved since the 9th century. In many ways the Ukrainians are more Slavic, and thus closer to the original Russians than modern Russians, who have assimilated with a much more diverse range of peoples as they expanded east. Successive empires have suppressed Ukrainian cultural identity. Before the 20th century, the North West sandwiched between Romania, Poland, Slovakia, Belarus and the Dnieper river was known loosely as Ruthenia. Under the Czars, distinctive Ukrainian culture and language retreated to the rural hinterlands. While the Bolsheviks succeeded in winning back the region in the 1917-23 Russian Civil War, resistance to forced collectivisation among Ukrainian smallholders exacerbated the mass famines of the mid 1930s  known as the Holodomor, with between 3 and 7 million excess deaths. This experience helps explain why many Ukrainian nationalists welcomed the 1941 Nazi occupation and some, notably the notorious Azov Battalion, sympathise with Aryan Nationalism to this day.

The point is Ukraine with its current borders, or at least those recognised before the recent Russian invasion, has only been independent as a single entity for the last three decades and its citizens are riven by conflicting loyalties and cultural identities, with some looking east and others west. Only eight years ago the US, UK and EU-sponsored operatives engineered the Euromaidan colour revolution to overthrow pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Back in 2014, young Ukrainians could be forgiven for looking to the freer and wealthier West rather than the more backward and poorer East. Closer ties with the EU and NATO were marketed as the best way to bring the American dream of an affluent middle class to the former Soviet Republic. Now Western governments are adopting Chinese-style bio-surveillance and clamping down on dissent. We now take it for granted that main media outlets will either ignore or besmirch politically incorrect protesters. The treatment of anti-vaccine-mandate protesters across Europe and North America shows how fast the once liberal West has moved to a totalitarian model that grants citizens time-limited rights based on compliant behaviour just like in the old Soviet Union.  People fled repressive regimes to enjoy greater freedom and prosperity rather than nanny-state security.

What’s really happening?

If we believe the Western media, Putin has not only invaded Ukraine allegedly reaching Kiev (Kyiv) by Saturday 26th February but may well threaten the Baltic States. The Mirror newspaper featured a map of Southern England with the extended fallout zone of a potential Russian nuclear strike on London encompassing over 25 million residents. Yet so far, we only have verified evidence of airstrikes against military targets with collateral damage. That’s the term the Americans used to explain civilian deaths after airstrikes in successive wars since the first Gulf War in 1991. Indeed, despite their withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, the USAF bombed Somalia last week, while Israel and Saudi Arabia continue their raids on Syria and Yemen respectively with US and UK-supplied weaponry. Many scenes of fleeing civilians appear staged with crisis actors and face-painted wounds. Journalists in flak jackets and helmets appear only metres away from local residents going casually about their everyday lives. On Friday we heard a Russian destroyer ship shot dead 13 Ukrainian soldiers defending the tiny Black Sea outpost of Snake Island ( Ostriv Zmiinyi). Russian reports later showed the same soldiers surrendering to Russian naval officers. Over the coming weeks, independent journalists will sort claims and counter-claims about atrocities in Ukraine, but I would not trust either Western or Russian sources. For balance, I’d much rather rely on English-medium Indian sources. India has strong economic ties with Russia, but also maintains friendly relations with the US and EU.

Although the Russian Federation remains the world’s largest country and has the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal, its military budget dwarfs that of the United States. When measured in US dollars, Russia ranks 8th. The United Kingdom, with less than half its population, spends more both in absolute terms and per capita.

Biggest Military Spenders

Countrybillion USD2022 PopUSD per capita
United States750.0334,805,269$2,240.11
China237.01,448,471,400$163.62
Saudi Arabia67.635,844,909$1,885.90
India61.01,406,631,776$43.37
United Kingdom55.168,497,907$804.40
Germany50.083,883,596$596.06
Japan49.0125,584,838$390.17
Russia48.0145,805,947$329.20
South Korea44.051,329,899$857.20
France41.565,584,518$632.77
Italy27.860,262,770$461.31
Brazil27.8215,353,593$129.09

It’s about resources, stupid…

Much of Central and Eastern Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas to heat homes. Italy and Germany import around 50% of their gas from the Eastern Bear. Without expanding nuclear power, governments would have to invest billions of € more in renewables to meet current demand. Energy is about to get a lot dearer. Millions will have little choice but to wear extra layers in winter rather than risk paying exorbitant heating bills. But it gets worse. Russia is also a leading supplier of many minerals and precious metals essential for our high-tech lifestyles. It has half of the world’s diamond reserves, 18% of its coal and iron ore and 14% of gold and is the leading producer of aluminium, arsenic, cement, copper, magnesium metal and compounds such as nitrogen, palladium, silicon and vanadium. If the Europeans and North Americans don’t wish to do business, the Russians have hungry markets in China and India. However, thanks to its undervalued currency and distorted global financial markets heavily dependent on property speculation in a few key metropolises, the Russian economy still seems much smaller than that of the G7 countries. Once the US dollar crashes, bringing the Euro and Pound Sterling down with it, control of natural resources will matter more than electronic bank balances. The Western World’s economy is built on debt and in the last two years of the covid scare, quantitative easing has devalued the main currencies. Russia’s trump card is that is not indebted to foreign banks and can easily survive the collapse of the global banking system, just it survived the Bolshevik Revolution, forced collectivisation, the Nazi invasion and the fall of the Soviet Union. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan or Serbia, Russia has a functioning nuclear deterrent.

Could Putin’s belligerence accelerate the Great Reset?

While the main European and North American governments take a firm stand against Russian aggression, Israel, India, China and, most notably, the World Economic Forum remain much more neutral. Putin is listed on the WEF website as a former Global Young Leader. Only last October, Vladimir Putin delivered a speech declaring his full support for the coming fourth industrial revolution. After some initial scepticism, the Russian government has also rolled out its own version of the bio-security state. Some may mistakenly believe Russia will stand up to the banksters and biotech mafia, but such beasts are now global in nature and as deeply embedded in China and India as they are in the West. The tech giants rely heavily on the Chinese manufacturing base and by 2030 the Chinese economy will have overtaken the USA’s in absolute terms. Of note, at the UN Security Council, China, India and the United Arab Emirates abstained when asked to pass a resolution calling the immediate cessation of Russian military actions against its Slavic neighbour.

The engineered crisis has succeeded in justifying larger military budgets, heightened security, more surveillance of dissident groups and greater censorship of all media outlets either directly connected with the Kremlin or suspected of accepting the Russian narrative. Just as Russian police arrest peace protesters in St Petersburg and Moscow, any Westerners who fail to offer their unconditional support for the Ukrainian resistance and potential Western military actions are now considered traitors. This is a win-win situation for autocrats in Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.

Many suggest that a demilitarised neutral Ukraine, acting as a bridge between Central Europe and the East with full respect for the diverse ethnic backgrounds and loyalties of its citizens, may have averted this showdown. However, I fear neither the West nor the Kremlin wanted peace and prosperity to prevail. The spectre of nuclear Armageddon may be an even more effective means of behavioural modification than the virus scare. With the biosecurity state now firmly in place, Western governments can detain dissidents without trial. Millions will not be drafted to fight in Ukraine as the real war is over economic and ideological control. The global elites need the spectre of never-ending territorial conflicts to justify the next more austere phase of the Great Reset. Meanwhile, it will be business as usual with China.