Author: Patrick Henningsen

From New Dawn 189 (Nov-Dec 2021)

It’s an unthinkable scenario, one which no one in their right mind would want. And yet, we sit on the precipice of the unthinkable: a war with China.

The bellicose rhetoric became more noticeable during the Trump presidency and has since elevated to another level after the Covid crisis. The US and its allies have been steadily building up military capabilities for years in preparation for a major confrontation in the Pacific.

One gets the distinct feeling that China is being groomed for “Axis of Evil” membership, right alongside North Korea and Iran. With ever-increasing frequency, western media dutifully portray Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a ruthless and cunning autocrat. Aside from familiar accusations of ‘Chinese bullying’ in the South China Sea, there is also western charges of ‘genocide’ against the Muslim Uyghur population in China’s Xinjiang Province. 

More recently, Western politicians and media blame a “reckless” Chinese Communist Party for unleashing the Covid-19 pandemic on the world. The latter charge may seem hyperbolic, but it’s been most effective in sharply increasing Western hostility towards China.

There is a real fear all this fighting talk will eventually reach a crescendo that sets the two opposing powers on a collision course that could radically transform the global system for the next century and beyond.

It’s no surprise that China would like to see the US out of Asia, but at what cost?

Similarly, in its desire to maintain global hegemony, the United States aims to knock China’s economy and global influence down a peg or two. Would they wage a world war to do it?

At the very least, this has initiated new international arms and cyber warfare races. Will it escalate into an intense hot conflict or a new cold war with lower intensity operations and proxy wars stretching out over decades? 

Can this apparent drift towards conflict be averted, or will history repeat itself as superpowers from different hemispheres with two different political and economic visions are drawn into a world war?

Thucydides Trap

Unlike previous US target nations, China is a permanent UN Security Council member and set to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy and all the global influence that comes with it.

Yet, more than ever, there is a pervading sense that a confrontation between the incumbent western superpower and the emerging power in the east is becoming unavoidable.

This geopolitical phenomenon has been referred to as “The Thucydides Trap,” a term popularised by American political scientist Graham Allison that describes an apparent tendency towards war when one emerging power threatens to displace an existing great power as a regional or international hegemon.

In Ancient Greece, Thucydides was an Athenian historian and military general who believed that the underlying cause of the Peloponnesian Wars was a fait accompli. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” he explained.

In other words, opposing superpowers invariably find themselves in competition with one another, either in trade or over ideological and cultural supremacy, creating an unavoidable spiral towards confrontation.

This concept implies there are inescapable psychological realities of human dynamics in a world of competing nations. Realist scholar Ken Waltz, the author of Man, The State and War (published in 1959), posited that behind the facade of diplomacy and international relations exists a Hobbesian “state of nature” that is always in a perpetual state of anarchy.

Waltz’s theoretical work is credited with helping form the “bipolar” world order paradigm that dominated intellectual and academic thinking in the West through the Cold War era (1948-1991) and beyond. The bipolar world order was succeeded by a unipolar world order led by the United States and its allies following the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite network of countries.

Speaking to the question of the foundational motivation behind the Thucydides Trap, Waltz wrote: “States in the world are like individuals in the state of nature. They are neither perfectly good nor are they controlled by law.”

“Each state pursues its own interests, however defined, in ways it judges best. Force is a means of achieving the external ends of states because there exists no consistent, reliable process of reconciling the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise among similar units in a condition of anarchy.”

“With many sovereign states, with no system of law enforceable among them, with each state judging its grievances and ambitions according to the dictates of its own reason or desire – conflict, sometimes leading to war, is bound to occur.”

As for judging the outcome of any conflict between great powers, Waltz did not hide his cynicism to the point of ambivalence, as he famously remarked:

“Asking who won a given war, someone has said, is like asking who won the San Francisco earthquake. That in war there is no victory but only varying degrees of defeat is a proposition that has gained increasing acceptance in the twentieth century.”

Waltz’s harsh realist worldview never sat well with liberal internationalists and true believers in the United Nation’s global governance system who believe that world peace can one day be achieved through cooperation among nations and interdependency. In many ways, these are two irreconcilable worldviews.

Still, in the absence of that Kantian vision of an international utopia, Waltz does speak to some fundamental truths: why people and nations do what they do, and insights to help us better understand history that may save nations from sliding into undesirable wars.

2025: A Limited Window of Opportunity

A 2016 RAND Corporation document commissioned by the US Army, “War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable,”¹ outlines likely scenarios with war planners stressing there is a limited window of opportunity to confront China, beginning close in 2025. 

After that, they argue China will achieve an irreversible level of global dominance and capability. They state:

“We postulate that a war would be regional and conventional. It would be waged mainly by ships on and beneath the sea, by aircraft and missiles of many sorts, and in space (against satellites) and cyberspace (against computer systems). We assume that fighting would start and remain in East Asia, where potential Sino-US flashpoints and nearly all Chinese forces are located.”

The recently announced UK-Australia-US (AUKUS) defence pact was designed to do just this. Using Australian bases to increase their nuclear submarine capabilities, the US and UK can submerge for more extended periods to threaten the Chinese Navy and ultimately disrupt Chinese shipping lanes and international trade through the Southeast Asian and Pacific region.

As for the nuclear question, geopolitical analyst Brian Berletic explained this polarity in Thucydidean terms in a recent interview: “It’s concerning because these are two nuclear-armed countries… While it’s unprecedented for the US to start an armed conflict directly with a peer, or near-peer competitor, it is also unprecedented that China is now in a position to pass the West.”²

The RAND analysis states that even if nuclear weapons were not used, China would resort to other ways of attacking the United States proper, mainly through space and cyberspace, meaning the public or commercial use of both domains would be severely curtailed during a protracted period of hostilities. However, the US is prepared to deploy smaller lower-yield tactical or ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons. With a sizeable arsenal already, this would still be a step below high-yield nukes, which both sides would be reluctant to deploy. In such a scenario, whoever struck first would have the upper hand and significant leverage for setting a higher risk threshold than their opponent. Unlike the US, China would want to avoid using any nuclear weapons near its shores. 

For the globalists, all this might be a worthwhile sacrifice to make, especially if by the end of a long and costly war a global outcry emerges – clamouring for a One World Government as the final solution to keeping the peace and curing all of our planetary woes.

Target: Belt and Road

The US plan to contain China is nothing new. You can go back to a State Department document from 1965 entitled “189. Draft Memorandum From Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson”:

“The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China. China – like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30’s, and like the USSR in 1947 – looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organise all of Asia against us.”³

More than anything else, China’s New Silk Road project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative, worries the Anglo-American world order. Through their ambitious project, China is attempting to develop a vast network of interconnected land and sea transport trade routes to facilitate its future growth.

Western plans like AUKUS are meant to thwart Belt and Road shipping lanes, while other destabilisation operations would be carried out at crucial land access points like Pakistan’s Gwadar port in Balochistan, as well as covert operations in Afghanistan, disruptions in the Persian Gulf, and instability in Africa’s Sahel region, to name just a few. 

Interestingly, McNamara’s old memo foreshadowed many of these disruptive operations: 

There are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realising that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.

Myanmar is also a key node in the Belt and Road map with a pipeline transporting fuel from the Bay of Bengal to the Chinese mainland. Operationally speaking, the US views any location that could potentially supply China with resources as a place of interest.

Australia: Deep Port One

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, Great Britain was disparagingly referred to as Air Strip One, presumably for functioning as Oceania’s (likely representing a US-led Anglo-American hemispheric order) “unsinkable aircraft carrier” parked on the European fringe.

Similarly, the AUKUS defence pact formalises Australia’s position as an Anglo-American outpost to project power across the Indo-Pacific. Henceforth, Australia becomes Deep Port One, a platform to launch future naval and submarine operations against the People’s Republic of China. This would see an expansion of military operations in Australia’s Northern Territory with ports located around Darwin and possible plans to develop a new facility in Exmouth Gulf in Western Australia.

Former Australian PM Paul Keating vehemently opposed the pact, telling off [the then] PM Scott Morrison, warning in a public statement that it “will amount to a lock-in of Australian military equipment and thereby forces, with those of the US with only one objective: the ability to act collectively in any military engagement by the US against China.”⁴

The fact that this also makes Australia a bona fide target in an armed conflagration between two nuclear powers is of little concern to the United States, who are set to bill Australia a cool $66 billion for building its new group of nuclear-powered submarines – hardware which will no doubt be managed and staffed by US personnel. 

It should be noted this scenario of Australia obtaining nuclear-powered submarines – which is now coming under heavy scrutiny as to its practicability – could be a disinformation ploy to cover up the real strategy.

A report in The Times on 21 September, ‘Britain’s nuclear submarines to use Australia as base for Indo-Pacific presence’, indicates what might be in the works.

“Senior [UK[ government sources said that the AUKUS pact could lead to the Royal Navy’s 1.4 billion pound Astute-class attack submarines undergoing deep maintenance in the region so that they can stay deployed for longer rather than returning to the Faslane naval base in Scotland.”

The Times quoted James Peddell, a former defence technology attache in Washington with experience in submarine technology, who said that a base in Australia could “bring the power of a submarine right up to the doorstep of China… You can bring it in closer, in a stealthy way. You can do intelligence and surveillance, you can project power… and give protection [to surface warships].”

Britain would get to use facilities in Australia to house its nuclear-powered submarines. London is hailing the deal as a victory for its new ‘Global Britain’ brand, but it’s just the latest instalment of Perfidious Albion having another go at the Great Game. If history is any guide, it’s sure to leave a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake. 

It’s no secret Australia has always been regarded by Washington and London as a convenient Asia-Pacific backwater colony for its Five Eyes network and global military-industrial complex, most notably its NSA signals intelligence and satellite surveillance base located at Pine Gap, along with joint military bases around the country’s coastal map. This provides the Atlanticist power bloc with a valuable foothold at the gateway to both Southeast Asia and the South Pacific – so the chances they ever release Australia from their political grip is slim to none. Due to its strategic importance, Washington and London always wield influence and power behind the scenes of Australian politics and will orchestrate regime change when the people elect a potentially unfriendly government in Canberra, such as the case of the joint CIA-MI6-ASIO operation in 1975 to remove Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Award-winning journalist John Pilger recalled, “Australia briefly became an independent state during the Whitlam years.” Since that coup, Washington has determined the whip-line in Canberra.

This controlling influence continued into the Hawke years, confirmed after the declassified release of secret US embassy cables in 2021. A paper by Federation University’s Cameron Coventry on the cables said the Americans valued Hawke because he “helped protect [US] defence installations, provided information about union disputes and warned officials that installations could be targeted.”

Covering the period 1973 to 1979, the cables revealed that Hawke worked intimately with US officials, notably Ambassador Marshall Green, on every key aspect of trade union and Labor policy. Their other preoccupation was how to muzzle rising opposition to the US alliance as a result of the Vietnam War and to protect highly strategic American military-intelligence bases in Australia.

It’s also worth noting that should the US and Britain wish to drag Australia into a war with China, the electorate will have no say in the matter. Nor would there be any debate in Parliament. To declare war, the Prime Minister only needs to notify the Minister of Defence of his plans. Democracy at work.

Taiwan

If a full-blown conflict between the US and China is initiated, the trigger will be over the island of Taiwan, located off the coast of the Chinese mainland.

Along with US allies Japan and South Korea, Taiwan would make the ideal tripartite partner to countering Chinese power in the Pacific. Such an alliance has been discussed but remains a remote fantasy under Beijing’s enormous shadow.

China maintains that Taiwan is rightfully part of the mainland under its “One China” doctrine. Officially named the “Republic of China” with a population of 24 million, Taiwan is a diplomatic conundrum, no longer recognised as an official entity by the United Nations, but receives substantial political, trade and military support from the US, which uses it as the key chess piece on its geopolitical board in the Asia Pacific region.

Many experts believe that by 2025 China plans to seize control over Taiwan, a move that would effectively signal the end of Washington’s predominance in the Pacific and maybe the world. At that point, there would be little the US could do to stem the tide of Beijing. 

When America first pledged its support to Taiwan, China was not today’s emerging global superpower. So, has Washington written a cheque which it can no longer cash?

Historian Niall Ferguson writes: “As a student of history, to quote Kissinger, I see a very dangerous situation. The US commitment to Taiwan has grown verbally stronger even as it has become militarily weaker.”⁵

“Perhaps Taiwan will turn out to be to the American empire what Suez was to the British Empire in 1956: the moment when the imperial lion is exposed as a paper tiger.”

Has the US placed Taiwan in the firing line to realise and protect its own global ambitions? Either way, this part of the puzzle remains complicated but extremely important. 

ASEAN is with China

The residents of Southeast Asia, also known as the ASEAN bloc, are not keen on the prospect of a US-led war on China.

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, interviewed by The Australian Financial Review, commented on the new AUKUS deal: “This agreement indicates you openly regard China as a possible enemy and that, if it comes to the crunch, you might even go to war. Just imagine what war would do to Southeast Asia.”⁶

Dr Mohamad’s sentiments are likely shared by the rest of the ASEAN neighbourhood – all major trading partners with China and most enjoying cordial relations with Beijing given their very long history of managing China.

As far as Washington and London are concerned, if war is on the cards, then a lack of enthusiasm from ASEAN is a mere inconvenience to be managed. 

The Anglo-American tag team would likely fall back on its tried and true methods of creating subservient client states by first sowing chaos and instability, preparing the way for the usual Soros-style colour revolutions, followed by regime change operations. This seems to be the case in Myanmar, with US-backed militants active on the ground and the usual human rights outcry from the media and Western NGOs condemning the government. 

With China’s current socio-economic and political trajectory, at best the US and its allies can only hope to play a ‘spoiler’ and disruptor role in the region. Berletic agrees, explaining: “It’s incredibly insecure, it’s paranoid, and it’s pressed for time… It’s a world order trying to project confidence but everything they’re doing is done out of paranoia and done out of fear of being surpassed by China, and they’re inflicting damage on themselves in the process.”

Perhaps America now realises one of the great paradoxes of hegemony. Its biggest advantage during its rise to global dominance in the 20th century was that, unlike its allies, it was prepared to sacrifice a significant amount of blood and treasure to achieve national or corporatist interests, accruing the spoils and kudos of empire required to sustain its dominance over the last 80 years. 

This strength became its most significant liability. The current public and political appetite for costly endless wars and interventions is now wearing thinner than at any point since its brief isolationist era in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. In reality, that political doomsday clock began counting down after the Vietnam War and went further into the red when America invaded and occupied Iraq.

Certainly, the Western public’s appetite for war is not what it was, and in the information age, Western governments are also having a much more difficult time controlling the narrative. In the age of the internet, blogs, and social media, governments can no longer rely on the controlled legacy press to serve up the usual narrow, unchallenged version of events.

Maybe the narrative writers at the new Ministry of Truth can fit up China to fill the role of the new Soviet Union, as per Orwell’s classic line: “The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.” 

Hybrid Warfare: A Constant State of War

In his speech to the 2019 Land Warfare Conference, hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Chief of the General Staff of the British Armed forces, General Mark Carleton Smith, unveiled NATO’s new approach to “securing competitive advantage” in an Anglo-American led New World Order.

The General lamented how the rules of warfare are changing and need updating or risk being relegated to a position of outdated “dominant irrelevance” on the global stage.

“The geometry of the battlespace is changing, to the detriment of our conventional military advantage,” he said, referring to “that hybrid space that exists between those two increasingly redundant states, binary concepts, peace and war – artificial and binary characterisations of a strategic context that no longer exists today.”⁷

In other words, there is no longer such a thing as peacetime or wartime. Instead, reality is redefined as a permanent state of alertness and threat against an amorphous foe known as “the enemy.” This new undefined and constantly evolving hybrid warfare spectrum eerily echoes the constant conflict characterised by Orwell in 1984 as “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” 

Presumably, these state actor enemies would be Russia and China, with others to be named later. 

In their Integrated Operating Concept document, the UK Ministry of Defence further refined its new tactic as “offensive” in nature, rather than traditional defensive and assisting roles. 

The new language of war feigns imperial bluster and seems laced with paranoia and doublespeak, protruding through militaristic rhetoric. On these new enemies of the realm, it claims:

“Their strategy of ‘political warfare’ is designed to undermine cohesion, to erode economic, political and social resilience, and to challenge our strategic position in key regions of the world. Their goal is to win without fighting: to achieve their objectives by breaking our willpower, using attacks below the threshold that would prompt a warfighting response. These attacks on our way of life, from assertive authoritarian rivals and extremist ideologies, are remarkably difficult to defeat without undermining the very freedoms we want to protect. We are exposed through our openness.”⁸

They essentially admit how they’ve lost the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ both at home and abroad. Rather than pause and take a moment for self-reflection on why this happened, the military mindset instead reflexively blames ‘the enemy’ for confusing the unsuspecting electorate in the ‘free’ ‘democratic’ West. You can’t help but notice fascist impulses, yearning to break the tedium of democracy while lamenting how “we” in the West are “exposed through our openness.” 

One of the solutions rolled out in response to this new omnipresent “challenge” is to treat free speech, expression, and independent journalism as a threat to their supposed political ‘consensus’ across the Western bloc. 

The persecution of Julian Assange and targeting of WikiLeaks can be viewed as the top end of their plan to control the global information commons, but the broader imperative includes everyone – right down to bloggers and individual social media users. Of chief concern is information shared by the general public, questions they are posing to their governments, and independent analysis and opinion that threatens the legacy media monopoly over opinion-forming in the West.

To combat supposed ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’, the UK government launched a gaggle of new cyber warfare units like the notorious 77^th Brigade and other cyber regiments like the 13th Signal Regiment. Recently, the UK government announced £5 billion to build a new digital warfare centre for “offensive cyber operations.”⁹ You can’t help but view all this as preparation for a new globalised war.

The authoritarian language is subtle but chilling nonetheless: “The old distinction between foreign and domestic defence is increasingly irrelevant. When ‘fake news’ appears to originate not abroad but at home, it gains credibility and reach, stoking confusion, disagreement, division and doubt in our societies. This has been particularly evident with the significant uptick in disinformation and misinformation during the coronavirus crisis.”¹⁰

You can translate “doubt in our societies” to mean targeting everyday dissenting speech or investigative journalism that exposes government and institutional corruption. The state and its military arm are attempting to bracket normal domestic opposition and debate in a democratic society as something in league with ‘malign foreign influences’, an approach not unlike that of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels when his political party moved to gain control over press and information in 1930s Germany.

Under the direction of the state, the military is turning its sights on its own population as they attempt to repurpose the heavily politicised ‘fake news’ trope as a pretext to deploy information warfare resources in a domestic theatre and internationally.

More importantly, note how the response to Covid sought to constantly remind the public that we are on a ‘war footing’ in the battle against the virus. Military assets were routinely deployed in public spaces across NATO countries to help with Covid testing, vaccinations, and delivering fuel. In New York, the military backfilled vacancies caused by thousands of medical staff fired for refusing to take the experimental Covid jab. 

This is a gradual militarisation of society – during peacetime. Through the construction of a ‘global pandemic’ state of emergency, governments have already established a ‘state of war,’ and so transitioning to an actual hot, warm, or cold war will be seamless; the economic shock has already occurred, expectations of comfort lowered, supply chain severed, travel restricted, borders shut, and rights and freedoms suspended at home, including criminalisation of public gatherings and political protests. Undoubtedly, this would diminish the natural opposition governments expect to encounter when war is declared and things suddenly come to a grinding halt.

The Integrated Operating Concept document continues: “‘Home’ is no longer a secure sanctuary whence we may choose to launch interventions unhindered. ‘Away’ is no longer a regional horizon but a global one, involving space and the electromagnetic spectrum. Similarly, the ‘front’ no longer lies in some distant theatre of operations, but is within the port, airfield, or barracks.” 

In true Orwellian fashion, the state’s biggest fear is not some foreign military power but mere information, even at the barracks level, with military brass and civil servants worried that their personnel might be corrupted by something they’ve seen or read online. This is not the rhetoric of a ‘free and open society’ but rather that of highly paranoid totalitarian regimes.

Lurking in the UK National Security Capability Review (2015) are concerns about “the erosion of the rules-based international order, making it harder to build consensus and tackle global threats.”¹¹

Their radical new national security pretext will be backed up by legislation. The government hurriedly implemented its new UK Online Public Safety Bill,¹² supposedly designed to protect people from ‘online harms’ like abuse and hate speech by deputising social media firms with new authority to remove ‘harmful’ or ‘illegal’ content. Buried inside the legislation is a move to designate official state narratives as “democratically protected” speech, which means anything challenging official narratives will be removed from parts of the internet they control. How quickly they arrive at this totalitarian determination depends on the ‘emergency’ of the moment, but we already see government directing Big Tech to remove political posts or anything critical of the government or ruling party as they did during and after the 2020 US Presidential Election to protect “public confidence in our election integrity.” At the time, US Democrats and the corporate media painted this as a national security issue.

Invariably, this wide legislative net will further expand to deal with extreme ‘right-wing and leftwing speech’, dangerous ‘conspiracy theories,’ ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘medical misinformation’ – all of which is already being judiciously scrubbed from YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter. The list of potential ‘harmful’ speech is virtually endless.

The danger cannot be overstated as this type of legislation not only formalises state-corporate censorship but gives carte blanche to unfettered official corruption by shutting down public or journalistic opposition. This is classic fascism. 

This ‘threat’ is also used to justify offensive cyber operations to bolster the ‘consensus’ across the NATO bloc. The consensus can be translated as the propaganda de jour propped-up by the government-media complex. Anything threatening is a national security threat. This is precisely what was established at the 2018 G7 Summit in Canada when then-UK PM Theresa May announced the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism, an agreement between member states to streamline public messaging on any issue that might have national security implications. Think the manufactured narratives on the Skripal Novichok attack in the UK, the Douma chemical attack in Syria, or ‘Russian interference’ in western elections. And notice how there was no deviation in the positions of G7 governments on these stories.

This same level of political and informational continuity would become paramount in a time of war and signal the end of sovereign independence for those individual countries. It is pure power politics, complete with entangling alliances and an inability to think and act independently. These were some of the perilous conditions leading to the catastrophic First World War. 

The West: Trending Away From Democracy

There is a new and disturbing school of thought creeping into Western discourse. That is, if the West is to defeat or overcome China’s dominance, it needs to become more like China. Since the onset of the Covid crisis and the push to implement draconian new systems like Vaccine Passports, it’s clear that Western governments are embarking on a path towards authoritarian technocracy.

Interestingly, the RAND Corporation’s wargaming exercise troubleshoots antiwar and pro-peace influences in the West, characterising it as a threat to the war effort, or at least something to be overcome or neutralised to prosecute a more successful war. Without explicitly stating it, the tone suggests that war planners view inconvenient features of democratic society as a potential hindrance to realising strategic goals. It’s almost as if they’re saying, ‘If only we could be more like China’, including all necessary domestic systems of social control firmly in place to run a long and unimpeded campaign, at home and abroad.

From a Western wargaming point of view, the current disparity between Chinese ‘totalitarianism’ and Western ‘democracy’ or constitutional republican forms of government gives China a distinct advantage in the ability to control its own population.

The question is finally on the table: how might the West address this issue and still maintain its moral and political high ground as the global standard-bearer for democratic values in their “rules-based international order”?

The signs are indeed worrying as we see a rapid transition by western governments away from democracy and towards establishing rigid totalitarian systems at home. No doubt the ‘global pandemic’ accelerated this transition – the evidence is all around us now.

Heeding the Warning Signs

Just as the Roman legions eventually lost the will to fight and would no longer give their blood for the glory of Rome, so too are America’s warriors approaching that twilight ebb of imperial lineage. Now money and security take precedence over flag and country. As with Rome, the wars fought on the outer rim became increasingly cumbersome and expensive.

Historically, the issue of money has been at the core of sustaining global military dominance. In a long war with China, one of the US-led coalition’s comparative advantages is that the business of war is a much more profitable racket than for China and Russia – as long as the fiat magic money tree is kept fed and watered. Which financial engine will hold up to allow government to maintain an arms race while keeping populations content at home?

Historians typically focus on military status as a metric for an empire in decline rather than the country’s internal societal failings as a prognostic for sovereign decay. For the NATO bloc, and the West in general, the signs are clear: a near exponential growth in the size of government in the last 50 years, a failing and overinflated fiat money system, an increasingly opaque and bloated surveillance state, a more militarised society, an intelligence agency leviathan and entrenched deep state, an increased deference to globalist institutions and governance, the fetishism of identity politics and culture wars, a sinking education system, an incredible wealth gap, the capture of government by industry lobbyists, a corrupt Fourth Estate, and the rise of Silicon Valley’s privatised censorship farms that are subverting and eliminating free speech. Additionally, America is more divided politically now than at any time since the Civil War era, and a divided house cannot stand, let alone fight and win a world war.

Western nations are currently locked into an unforgiving ‘Green’ Great Reset globalist overhaul of their economy and society. It’s a scientific dictatorship by any other name and never voted on or debated in the vaunted parliamentary halls of democracy.

Lastly, should a military showdown occur, China has a home-field advantage which means that while the US and its allies could make life extremely difficult for an extended period on the Chinese mainland, the West will not be able to prosecute a war halfway across the globe forever. With its size, human resources, infrastructure, and food production capacity (near 90% food self-sufficient), China can withstand long-term trade disruptions and the diversion of resources. Moreover, if the West attacks China, this will galvanise domestic support behind the government of Xi Jinping, boosting resilience to China’s defensive posture throughout a protracted conflict. Another important factor is the Anglo-Americans would be waging war on the other side of the globe. This is a fundamental lesson the US coalition should have learned from Afghanistan and the decade-long dirty war against Syria. But have they? 

What if the US cannot prevail by conventional means and resorted to unconventional methods to bring its opponent to heel, as they did with Japan during the waning moments of WWII? If conflict commences, there will be those in the US who demand the nuclear option, and like with WWII, the longer the war, the louder the calls from ‘humanitarian’ war hawks to “just drop the bomb and bring this war to an end.” One can only hope that the threat of nuclear retaliation by multiple countries and the grave human and environmental toll to ensue would be enough of a deterrent to Oppenheimer’s “destroyer of worlds.”

As the ascendant power of the moment, China appears to have a slight advantage should a confrontation arise, at least for the time being. But that could change if the US succeeds in fomenting domestic unrest and instability within China’s borders.

For all the reasons cited above, and not lack of military prowess or exotic weaponry, we can expect to see the gradual devouring of America and its allies, and one day, western civilisation too. History also tells us this will likely be a long, painful, drawn-out process, sometimes lasting centuries. 

Time will tell, but we would be naïve not to heed the many glaring warning signs at this turning point in history.

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Footnotes

1. War with China: Thinking the Unthinkable, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1100/RR1140/RAND_RR1140.pdf

2. Sunday Wire, Episode 390, https://21stcenturywire.com/2021/10/03/episode-390-major-realignments-with-dr-mark-changizi-and-brian-berletic/

3. Draft Memorandum From Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v03/d189

4. Why the US-led ‘Aukus’ security pact leaves Australia exposed, Greg Barns, www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3148983/why-us-led-aukus-security-pact-leaves-australia-exposed

5. A Taiwan Crisis May Mark the End of the American Empire, www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-21/niall-ferguson-a-taiwan-crisis-may-end-the-american-empire

6. ‘You have escalated the threat’: Mahathir blasts Australia on subs, www.afr.com/world/asia/mahathir-aukus-makes-armed-conflict-with-china-more-likely-20210921-p58ti7

7. 2019 Land Warfare Conference, www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoazo5C5My8

8. Integrated Operating Concept (2021), https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1014659/Integrated_Operating_Concept_2025.pdf

9. UK to build £5bn digital warfare centre to mount ‘offensive’ cyber attacks, www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/ben-wallace-cheltenham-boris-johnson-government-lancashire-b958504.html

10. Integrated Operating Concept (2021)

11. 2015 National Security Capability Review, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/705347/6.4391_CO_National-Security-Review_web.pdf

12. Online Safety Bill ‘catastrophic for free speech’, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57569336

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 192 (May-June 2022)

The following article by Patrick Henningsen – written only months after Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine on 24 February 2022 – explains the background dynamics of this war. The facts outlined here – that were suppressed in the West but well known to informed observers – are only now emerging in mainstream media as Western backers of Ukraine begin to face reality.

There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
– Niccolo Machiavelli

They say timing is everything. Had this war happened two years earlier, or one year later, the outcome would have been vastly different.

As for the great Atlanticist power bloc, this isn’t a war they’ve been willing to fight, not in the traditional military sense anyway.

As the mortars and bombs continue to fall and efforts to kickstart negotiations are ongoing, a sustainable path to peace seems unlikely to emerge in Ukraine.

While Russia seems intent on seeing through its “Special Military Operation,” the US and its allies will have to decide what they want and exactly how long they plan to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian.

The western chorus of nations contends that by waging their ‘war of choice’ against its neighbour Ukraine, the Russian Federation and its President Vladimir Putin have fallen foul of the vaunted Rules-Based International Order. By doing so, they have effectively left the international community.

However, on closer examination of the evidence and historical context surrounding this highly contentious geopolitical event, it becomes clear that it was the “international community” which left Russia – leaving it with no choice but to pursue its national security interests on its own accord.

As it stands, Russia, Ukraine, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) alliance are now at war, with each party firmly in the belief that they are fighting an existential conflict – not over any particular political or territorial dispute but for their future existence, or in the case of NATO, its relevance as a regional hegemonic entity.

No one saw this coming, or did they?

How Did We Get Here?

It’s no secret that over past decades numerous foreign policy experts warned that NATO’s continued eastward expansion, coupled with the US and UK’s increasingly strident rhetoric and aggressive policies directed against Russia would end up fomenting war in Ukraine.

Chief among those were luminaries like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Kennan, the architect of America’s policy of Soviet containment during the Cold War, was adamant that unchecked NATO expansion would eventually lead to war with Russia. Kissinger agreed, and thought that Ukraine should not be dominated by either NATO or Russia but rather act as a neutral bridge between east and west.

Also raising the alarm was one of America’s leading international relations scholars, Professor John Mearsheimer, who succinctly drove this same point home in public interviews and lectures,¹ but even his cogent and considered realist arguments garnered little interest within Washington’s foreign policy clique.

The US, UK, and western Europe were fully engaged on this path following the February 2014 Maidan coup d’etat in Ukraine, especially after Russia’s supposed ‘annexation’ (as the West refer to it, while Russians will regard it as a reunification) of Crimea, an act that triggered some of the harshest economic sanctions seen yet prosecuted by the US and European Union against Russia.

And just like that, The Great Game was truly in play again.

Undoubtedly, one of the material consequences of the 2014 US-backed coup in Kyiv was Ukraine losing the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian Federation in February/March of that year. Two main factors made this transfer a fait accompli. Firstly, with a predominantly Russian population, Crimeans viewed the unconstitutional toppling of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv as an illegitimate seizure of the government and feared ethnically-motivated retribution against Russians and Russian-speaking citizens at the hands of western-backed  radical Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power.

This policy of disenfranchisement and lustration (where a new regime bars any opponents to its legitimacy from participating in the political process) had already reared its ugly head in other primarily Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, in the eastern region of Donbass, where protests against Kyiv’s illegal coup regime broke out in Donetsk and Luhansk. They were suddenly treated as insurrectionists for not recognising the new putsch government in Kyiv, which effectively suspended the parliamentary representation of the Donbass parties, and even deployed the military to quell the growing political opposition.

Knowing they may meet a similar fate, Crimea’s local councils held a regional referendum on leaving Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation. The result was overwhelming, with roughly 95% favouring secession. The process was made that much easier by the fact that Crimea is home to one of Russia’s largest military installations housing some 20,000 personnel located on the southern-most tip of Crimea, in the port city of Sevastopol. Since the time of Catherine the Great it has been the historic home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia had been leasing the base from the Ukrainian state.

It should be noted that none of this would have gone smoothly had the overwhelming majority of Crimea not supported the new mandate. That, and the fact that Crimea had previously belonged to Russia up until 1954 when then Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave the peninsula to the Soviet republic of Ukraine – a purely political move designed to curry favour with Ukraine at the time – explains why this changing of the guard was virtually seamless.

This brings us to the second reason Crimea reunited with Russia. From a national security standpoint, Moscow could not risk the fate of its main naval port to the machinations of an unstable, US-backed radical nationalist junta in Kyiv. From Russia’s point of view, if Ukraine joined the EU, or worse, was folded into the NATO alliance, it would only be a matter of time before Moscow’s cherished warm water port was jeopardised, and with that closing Russia’s access to the Mediterranean Sea.

If Ukraine joined NATO and then tried to take back Crimea by force, Russia would be compelled to retaliate, triggering NATO Article 5, opening the door for all-out war between NATO and Russia. For Russia, that risk was simply unacceptable. From a statecraft point of view, these series of events can be viewed as totally logical, and not the impulsive machinations of an unstable despot in Moscow.

Russia’s canny but ultimately necessary geopolitical move incensed the West to no end. From this point on, Washington and London have ben determined to find new ways to isolate Russia, beginning with the work of discrediting and isolating them internationally, and aiming to somehow retake the Donbass and Crimea, while edging ever closer to achieving regime change in Moscow. That’s the general plan, and war planners in Washington and Brussels are sticking to it.

A War Like No Other

For all practical purposes, World War III has already begun. It is a war being fought on multiple levels, and the conflagration over Ukraine may only be the start.

For its part, the West has declared full-blown economic war against Russia including a total embargo on trade and commerce, and the banning and restriction of Russian communications, media, culture, and even participation in international sports. Who would have imagined that a leading global power could be cancelled, at least in western spheres of influence in the “International Community” as it common refers to itself, the moralising confederation comprised mainly of North America, UK, the European Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The rest of the world, including China, India, Africa, the Middle East, and large portions of South America including Brazil, have taken a much more neutral stance in relation to Russia.

But in order to really understand what is happening, we must consider how we arrived at this point in history, and maybe speculate where events are likely to take us once the dust finally settles on this phase of the conflict.

How We Got Here

The narrative in popular western mainstream media discourse is that this war came out of nowhere – an impulsive act of hubris by an unstable ‘mad man’ and dictator, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who simply decided one day to invade Ukraine to realise his ambition of reconstituting the former Soviet empire. That’s a favourite fallback position for most American and British politicians and pundits. If only it were true.

In reality, we are seeing the logical conclusion of a series of events and provocations coming from NATO and Ukraine itself. Ever since their open invitation to Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, the West has steadily supplied weapons, military ‘advisors’, and other technical and intelligence support to those former Soviet republics. Could Russia afford to wait for US-made medium-range missiles to arrive in those countries?

For those and other reasons, Russia’s military intervention did not surprise foreign policy heavyweights like Kissinger or Mearsheimer. Even Ukrainian president Vodolymyr Zelenskyy’s political advisor, Oleksiy Arestovich, predicted this clash would unfold during a 2019 interview.²

If that’s not convincing enough, read the RAND Corporation’s 2019 strategic report, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,”³ which describes chapter and verse how Washington’s primary goal has been to undermine Russia by repeating what it considers as past successes against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Only this time, rather than ‘hedge for peace’ by simultaneously engaging in productive bilateral relations or outpacing the enemy in arms and technology, the report opines that NATO should focus on enacting a dizzying range of anti-Russia measures in what it calls hybrid war. This includes leveraging NATO members against Russia, engaging in political and economic warfare, and active measures across all information warfare fronts. Whereas communism vs capitalism was the defining dialectic that shaped strategy and tactics during the old Cold War, new quasi-ideological fault lines should be reframed, like ‘dictatorship vs democracy,’ and the fomenting of divisions on religious and ethno-nationalist lines. Beyond this, we have the military theatres. For war planners at RAND, these are ranked according to perceived risks, benefits, and “likelihood of success.”

The RAND report also suggests capitalising on what the West perceives as Russia’s “deep-seated” anxieties about provocations from the West and advises that this vulnerability must be exploited to get Russia to react. And react it did.

When Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, it was the culmination of a long series of events that had effectively forced Russia into a national security quandary that would be difficult to avoid without making serious compromises. It could ultimately degrade its current position as a global power in the short term but, more importantly, pose a severe risk to its territorial integrity in the long term.

Operation Z: Putin Springs the Trap?

To present a thorough analysis of this historic impasse taking place over Ukraine, we need to first cast the scene back a few centuries, followed by a detailed depiction of both World Wars, and give a brief analysis of the formation and dissolution of the Soviet Union, including a granular look at the post-Soviet development of its respective satellite states. In New Dawn 191 (Mar-Apr), I covered some of the historical rivalries between the British and Russian empires in my article, ‘The Great Game 2.0: What’s Behind the Ukraine Crisis’.

For this analysis, we’ll move the timeline forward to February 2014, to the infamous Maidan uprising, known locally as the “Revolution of Dignity” in Kyiv. While the mainstream media likes to portray this colour revolution as a grassroots uprising ‘embodying the spirit of western democracy’ with young Ukrainians expressing their EU aspirations, the hard reality was that this was a violent coup d’etat, leading to the ouster of a democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych. The evidence now reveals that he was replaced by a succession of hand-picked US political puppets installed to do the bidding of regime change practitioners in Washington.

This was exposed in detail during a leaked phone call between then US Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador Geoffrey R. Pyatt in Kyiv. The degree to which they were micromanaging their new incoming regime was astonishing. The full sequence of events is well-documented in director Igor Lopatonok’s 2016 film, Ukraine on Fire, featuring Oliver Stone.

It turns out that this hostile takeover of Ukrainian politics was in the works for a very long time. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the 2014 Maidan coup was how the US and its allies harnessed the power of Ukraine’s radical far-right nationalist cells to enforce a political line on the streets of towns and cities across the country.

Many refer to movements like Right Sector (Pravyy Sektor) and their respective paramilitary and ‘volunteer corps’ militant factions as Neo Nazi. However, they are much more than that. By any reasonable measure, these are not ‘neo’, but rather, bona fide Nazis – adherents to the Nazi ideology, descendants in the political (and in some cases, genealogical) lineage of Hitler’s western Ukrainian brigades, and inspired by controversial figures like Stepan Bandera, who to this day, is still idolised by radical nationalists in Ukraine. Bandera was leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists in the 1930s and 1940s, which fought alongside the Waffen SS during Nazi Germany’s scorched earth march towards Stalingrad. It is a matter of historical record that Banderites engaged in pogroms and atrocities against Jews, as part of the broader Holocaust, as well as slaughtering Poles. History also reveals that Washington and the CIA groomed Banderite cells in western Ukraine after WWII through programs like Operation Aerodynamic.⁴

Following the Maidan coup, Washington installed interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, followed by billionaire oligarch, President Petro Poroshenko, who marshalled these same radical nationalist forces and began integrating them into the Ukrainian military structure. Extremist militias like the Aidar and Azov Battalions were deputised to help Kyiv prosecute a brutal civil war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region – to put down the rebellion against the post-coup government which the rebel opposition in Donetsk and Luhansk regarded as an unconstitutional regime.

After his election, Poroshenko mounted an “anti-terror operation” in the eastern regions – bringing the full force of Ukraine’s military against its own people. A bloody eight-year-long civil war ensued that was systematically whitewashed from Western mainstream media and politics. Burying this inconvenient truth was essential for the United States, British and their NATO partners to condition the western public to see no evil in a newly-minted ‘democratic’ Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Russia was incensed, only it could not intervene militarily in Ukraine to protect ethnic Russians without provoking a major international incident. So instead, it provided diplomatic, economic aid, no doubt some special military support and technical training, likely comprising of some arms, hardware, intelligence and communications support. For its part, Moscow also offered invaluable international media coverage of the conflict through Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik.

In order to de-escalate the situation, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, France and Germany drafted the Minsk Accords, or “Minsk I & II,” in 2014 and 2015 respectively. This initially helped reduce fighting which had already taken thousands of lives and displaced many hundreds of thousands from the region. It’s important to note here that Minsk Process was codified by UN Security Council Resolution 2202, unanimously endorsing the “Package of measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements.” But unfortunately, in the years that followed, successive US-backed governments in Kyiv systematically undermined the agreement and rather than de-escalate the fighting in Donbass, increased the military build-up, culminating in a massive uptick in troop and equipment deployments to the region under President Zelenskyy.

Ironically (or not), Zelenskyy ran for office in 2019 on the promise of uniting the country and ‘bringing peace’ to Donbass, neither of which happened. Instead, the violence and proliferation of far-right militias in Donbass increased dramatically. It was clear this is what Ukrainians wanted, which was a far cry from what eventually unfolded. To make matters worse, Zelenskyy threw gasoline on the fire by constantly courting NATO membership when he (and his western handlers) knew full well that this was an absolute red line for Russia. Zelenskyy could have defused tensions earlier by disavowing NATO aspirations and declaring Ukraine a neutral state. The coup de grace came in February 2022 after Zelenskyy remarked at the Munich Security Conference that he would like his country to acquire nuclear weapons. At that point few can argue that Russia lacked sufficient reason to make its bold move in order to secure its own vital national security interests.

It is not at all surprising that most western pundits are largely aloof to this progression of events, and that Russia’s concerted moves are as much political as they are military. The great strategist Carl von Clausewitz said it best in his seminal text, One War: “War is simply the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means.”

In the spring of 2021, Moscow would increase its frequency of military drills and manoeuvrers, amassing more military forces along its border with Ukraine. In December of that year, Washington and its allies began raising the alarm that Russia was planning to invade Ukraine. Moscow issued an urgent letter to the Washington demanding that its security concerned be addressed immediately to avoid further escalation, but its overtures were largely brushed aside and ignored by the US State Department. For the next three months, western alarm bells dominated media coverage, all the while Russia was denying any intention to move its forces into Ukraine.

Then on 21 February something extraordinary happened. Vladimir Putin sprung the trap.

After eight long years of bloodshed and failed peace negotiations, the Russian president took to the airwaves to announce Moscow’s formal recognition of the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. For a legal perspective, this immediately qualified them for official Russian military protection, including the establishment of humanitarian corridors which were quickly opened. After more than seven years of stalled diplomacy, Moscow finally chose to abandon the already dead Minsk agreement and directly deal with the situation in Donbass – and the threat posed by a US-controlled and NATO-occupied Ukraine to its national homeland security.

On 24 February, Putin took to the airwaves again to deliver an hour-long lecture on the geographical, cultural, political, and geopolitical history of Ukraine and its interconnected relationship to Russia. Western pundits were left puzzled. Why was Putin delivering this masterclass in Soviet history and articulating concepts underpinning Russia’s national security doctrine?

Those questions were soon answered when Moscow announced its military intervention code-named “Z,” effectively invading Ukraine from four different directions, with these goals: to secure the Donbass, followed by “demilitarisation,” and “denazification” of Ukraine.

Within 72 hours, the Russian armed forces had begun their “Special Military Operation” (SMO).

For the West, decrying Russia’s surprise invasion of Ukraine means they’ve suddenly discovered the concept of international law and are pointing to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, and how the international community must condemn this egregious violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. While this may be true with respect to the letter of the law in this instance, such international treaties have never hindered the United States and its allies in the recent past – not in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Yugoslavia, nor in Vietnam, to name but a few. The same could be said for Turkey’s incursions and occupations in Cyprus and northern Syria, and especially Israel’s 75 year-long incursion, illegal occupation and systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinian population.

Following Russia’s SMO, the West enacted an unprecedented reflexive, collective response – a program of full-spectrum dominance – which includes overlapping strategies of hybrid warfare, the results of which have invariably altered the current world order.

Hybrid Warfare & Full-Spectrum Dominance

Governments and military structures are engaged in hybrid warfare. If you’re living in the West, they don’t tell you that you are immersed in a theatre of constant conflict is a 360-degree hippodrome of mass media information warfare with active measures and countermeasures. Even seemingly innocent bystanders – the general public – are viewed by governments and military strategists as active participants in the broader war theatre.

This has always been the case throughout history, articulated as propaganda and soft power, with citizens in whatever country on whatever side find themselves in a war for the age-old ‘battle for hearts and minds’. The process of public engagement also requires an incendiary ingredient to drive it, whereby the state conditions the people to both fear and hate the enemy de jour. Without that sense of personal and collective threat, or at the very least, in the Orwellian sense, that “two minutes of hate,” members of the public will not feel civically and emotionally invested in the process.

Additionally, an emerging new compliment to the military theatre is cyber warfare, now touted by western planners as a key domain to build up offensive and defensive capabilities. Klaus Schwab in Davos is gaming out this digital conflagration with the World Economic Forum’s “Cyber Polygon” tabletop simulations.

As much as the mainstream media spinners try to frame it, this Russia vs ‘The West’ conflict is not the proverbial ‘black hat vs white hat’ square-off. On the contrary, it is incredibly complex with many overlapping layers of history, culture, ethnic strife, and political and geopolitical forces which push and pull various actors, both in the theatre of war and on its periphery.

It’s crucial to understand that this is a proxy war pitting a US-UK-led NATO against Russia using Ukraine as the proxy, or cudgel, to poke the Russian bear. This was done numerous times during the Cold War, and it should be of no surprise history again repeats itself here. As it cannot engage in a direct military fashion, NATO is applying the Syrian model – trafficking an unlimited number of lethal arms, supplies and military advisors into Ukraine, with the express goal stated in the RAND document of wearing down and’ overextending’ Russia. Western planners openly boast about creating “another Afghanistan” for Russia.

Economic Warfare

Part of this hybrid warfare was the “mother of all sanctions,” an all-out economic war waged by the West against Russia to destroy their economy, hoping it provokes the Russian population to rise up and overthrow their leader. This is an attempt to cancel what is arguably the world’s top commodities producer – exporting a large share of the world’s gas, oil, wheat, fertiliser, minerals and key components for the highly globalised nuclear power, and space exploration industries.

The move to ban and restrict the Western bloc from purchasing Russian natural gas, oil, food and fertiliser has come even though Europe overly relies on these Russian supplies to heat their homes and provide power, minerals and product to run their industries, and put food on their tables. This highly self-destructive collective economic suicide pact is already backfiring spectacularly in the West, triggering tumults in already shaky natural gas and oil markets, and causing food shortages, supply chain disruptions, and a lack of available and affordable supplies of grains, sunflower oil, fertiliser and other essential staples.

Some western farmers cannot plant in the spring due to either a lack of supplies or the fact that the fertiliser price is too high, making farming unprofitable. A hike in fuel prices has triggered record-levels of inflation across the board in the West, spelling a lower standard of living for the working and middle classes right across the western world.

In another significant development, in late March the US sanctioned Russia’s Central Bank and seized some $300 billion of Russia’s foreign currency assets to bring on financial armageddon in Russia. President Putin turned the tables by announcing that Russia would no longer accept dollars and euros for its gas and oil, and payment would need to be made in Roubles. With the stroke of a pen, Putin made the Russian Rouble a type of reserve currency, and there was an immediate effect on the US dollar’s near-global monopoly as the pre-eminent world reserve currency. To make this move stick, Putin pegged the Rouble to gold, effectively making the Rouble a gold-backed currency. Russia’s currency was further bolstered by the fact it’s backed by a basket of essential commodities like oil, gas, and wheat. Interestingly, this very same move propelled the US economy after the Second World War following the Bretton Woods Agreement.

Time will tell how well this pans out for the Russian economy, but early signs are western economies are suffering most in sanctions blowback – the sort of damage that might eventually lead to political consequences in elections.

The only people in the West who seem pleased with these ruptures are the green lobby and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset parishioners, both dreaming to leverage this artificial crisis to advance their ‘sustainable’ agendas and press home the argument that fossil fuels are now too expensive and a liability to global stability (because they supposedly pad the pockets of the Russian war machine).

Will it work or will it all end in tears? You might ask the Central Bankers who have certainly used this crisis to accelerate their roll-out of a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), completely in line with the Great Reset’s digital global fiat and cashless society, with its digital ID wallets, to be tied to your social and carbon credits. Many believe, and rightfully so, that this looks very much like the final implementation stage of the globalist plan to enslave the planet. It’s becoming harder to argue with that conspiracy theory.

Are we seeing a new bipolar or even multipolar world order taking shape – with Russia and China leading Eurasia in one direction while Klaus and the West head towards their technocratic digital ‘utopia’? If this unfolds, we may see a bifurcated world economy and digital media, on polar ends of a bifurcated world order, with different rules, values, and practices in different hemispheres.

Negotiating into a New World

As we go to press, Ukraine’s actor-cum-statesman, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was still being paraded (via Zoom) in front of US Congress, the British, Canadian, and Australian parliaments, and the Council of Europe in Brussels, with western leaders enthusiastically chanting the nationalist mantra Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine!)

This issue has become a global cause célèbre in the West, with Ukrainian flags flying over municipal buildings, businesses, and lapel pins, and with school children and churches doing bake sales, airline hostesses passing the hat around on long-haul flights, and other endless online fundraisers – all raising money for the Ukrainian cause as everyone joins in the biggest geopolitical virtue-signalling campaign in modern history.

However, none of this will change the facts on the ground.

What we know of the ongoing conflict resolution talks between Russia and Ukraine is that there is a stalling for time which is likely being directed behind the scenes by the US State Department. In reference to the previously-cited RAND report and US/UK/NATO strategy, stretched-out negotiations allow for the unrestricted flow of weapons over the Polish border into western Ukraine. But the longer Kyiv drags this on, the more territory Zelenskyy’s Ukraine stands to lose. The territory presently held by Russian forces is beginning to resemble historic “Novorossiya,” which is also the proposed confederation of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic. This would create a land bridge stretching from Moldova, over to Crimea, across to Mariupol, and up to Kharkov. The remainder of the current Ukrainian state would have lost access to the Black Sea.

Another potential outcome is providing the West and its media establishment with a face-saving ‘out’ – something like how the invasion has gone so poorly for Russia and wore them down so much that in the end they were forced to negotiate a settlement due to the brave Zelenskyy-led resistance. Remember, the western PR machine can spin anything into a win, no matter how bad things have really gone.

One of the most extraordinary parts of this story is the revelation that just days before the Russian invasion, Zelenskyy was offered a peace deal by German chancellor Olaf Scholz while attending the Munich Security Conference – but the Ukrainian president turned it down.⁶ The peace deal was “that Ukraine should renounce its NATO aspirations and declare neutrality as part of a wider European security deal between the West and Russia” and that “the pact would be signed by Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden, who would jointly guarantee Ukraine’s security.” It’s reported that Zelenskyy rejected the offer, saying, “Putin couldn’t be trusted to uphold such an agreement and that most Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.”

Was Zelenskyy in a position to dial-down tensions and nullify one of Russia’s main reasons for the invasion? But through a combination of incompetence and pressure from anti-Russia US hawks, did he make one of the most careless and fatal mistakes in history?

This rapid sequence of events has exposed the intellectual, ethical, and moral bankruptcy of western neoliberal chauvinism, and its postmodern civilisational narcissism. That phase of unipolar dominance may be coming to an end.

It is a time of great turbulence, but it is also a time of great revelations. In just a few short months, this war is already reshaping the global order, and before long it may not be the same world order the master planners had envisioned.

Don’t look now, but these are those interesting times you always dreamed about.

The great awakening continues…

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 192.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. John Mearsheimer: Is the West Responsible for the Ukraine Crisis?, https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/03/02/john-mearsheimer-is-the-west-responsible-for-the-ukraine-crisis/

2. Former Ukrainian presidential advisor perfectly predicted Russian invasion in 2019, www.intellinews.com/former-ukrainian-presidential-advisor-perfectly-predicted-russian-invasion-in-2019-238183/

3. RAND Corp. Overextending and Unbalancing Russia, www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

4. Operation Aerodynamic, https://cryptome.org/2016/01/cia-ua-aerodynamic.pdf

5. Pentagon-Ukraine Bio Labs: The Hunter Biden Connection, https://21stcenturywire.com/2022/03/23/pentagons-ukraine-bio-labs-the-hunter-biden-connection/

6. Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in Ukraine – and How the West Mishandled It, www.wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 197 (Mar-Apr 2023)

Once reviled and publicly excoriated, now vindicated. Who knew the proverbial tin foil would suddenly be upgraded to a state-of-art cultural mainframe and keeper of advanced knowledge.

In truth, the great unravelling has been unfolding for years, but it’s during the era of COVID that we’ve witnessed successive feverish waves of revelatory epiphanies, one after another, and before we knew it, the conspiracy theorists had been proven right.

Long regarded as a disparate and marginalised section of the populace, the tin foil hat community have finally reached the promised land – a veritable oasis of welcome respite from mainstream persecution.

But it comes at a cost: the red pill revelations are still deeply disconcerting, not least of all because of the stark realisation that we’re in the throes of a full-blown global fascist power grab – a lurid connivance hatched during the so-called ‘global pandemic’ and population-wide roll-out of the experimental mRNA gene-jab.

While the general public is slow to come to grips with the gravity of this new reality, the foils know the scale of the global tumult. To be sure, the implications are nothing shy of biblical, with the modest consolation being that alternative and independent voices have now been afforded a credible platform for exposing the perennial lies of governments and shadow state cabals, such as the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group and the transnational pharmaceutical industrial complex.

The plethora of once-maligned but now validated conspiracies have effectively defanged the establishment epithet typically used to ridicule, defame and marginalise anyone accused of being a ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theorist – as if positing an alternative opinion or speculating outside the depressingly narrow constraints of the Overton Window de jour… was somehow dangerous.

Perhaps the late American gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson said it best: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

That hour is now upon us. Only the truly open-minded are equipped to navigate the maelstrom of baseness. This might be the golden age of conspiracies.

The disparaging label “conspiracy theorist” has been weaponised by authorities and mainstream media for decades. It turns out the term was utilised by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to ward off any challenge to the official story of what really happened on that fateful day on 22 November 1963at Dealey Plaza.

Ever since the Warren Commission concluded on 24 September 1964that an unlikely lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, assassinated President John F. Kennedy, authorities have used the term “conspiracy theory” to attack and discredit anyone proffering an alternative view of who might be responsible for that awful murder. In fact, the CIA practically invented the term – a shrewd but highly adept move by the American Deep State and detailed in Lance DeHaven-Smith’s excellent book Conspiracy Theory in America.¹ Even back in the 60s, mainstream sceptics believed there was enough credible evidence to make the case that rogue elements in the CIA, FBI, and Secret Service, together with factions of the mafia and organised crime, had conspired to kill JFK. Then, one by one, dissenting voices were systematically slapped down with the newly-minted and powerful pejorative – that’s a conspiracy theory.

The lid blew off this ageing can of worms after Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the unsayable on US national television in December 2022. He announced that a credible government source, familiar with the trove of classified documents scheduled to be handed over to the National Archives, had confirmed to Carlson that the unredacted files contain evidence that the CIA was directly involved in JFK’s assassination.

Regarding the motivation for the execution, take your pick: the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy’s hesitation in escalating the Vietnam War, or the controversy surrounding the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the State of Israel. It’s hard to pin it down to a single reason, but Carlson’s public admission is profoundly significant and maybe the first time in US history that a leading mainstream media outlet has dared such a bold reveal in front of millions of primetime viewers.

Interestingly, Carlson also exposed how Donald Trump’s former CIA Director and US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, was involved in blocking the release of this information. This is especially interesting, as Pompeo, the consummate Deep State actor, is preparing his candidacy for the 2024 Republican nomination for US President. At the very least, Pompeo will be auditioned for a Vice Presidential role, seemingly following in the footsteps of Dick Cheney and Joe Biden as Deep State operatives running clandestine affairs from Number One Observatory Circle in north-western Washington, D.C.

Tucker’s revelations didn’t end there. Early in the new year, he dropped a corresponding addendum to the JFK bombshell when he explained what many researchers suspected for decades – that the Watergate scandal which took down the reign of Richard M. Nixon, 37^th President of the United States (1969–1974), was a coup d’état hiding in plain sight; a well-crafted distraction, courtesy of the intelligence community, designed to deflect from revelations that threatened to destabilise the Deep State.

Among other tradecraft secrets, this likely included the truth about the assassination of JFK, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and perhaps even Martin Luther King. All above Nixon’s ‘pay grade’ and security clearance. Tucker even fingered legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward as an intelligence plant who helped orchestrate the deception.

More telling was that Tucker’s highly controversial comments went practically unchallenged by the mainstream media and its various gatekeepers, who never seem to miss an opportunity to shoot down anyone challenging the sacred cows of prescribed 20th-century history. In other words: that massive domino fell right before our eyes, but only a relative few seem to have understood its significance, for now.

Was this merely a glitch in the matrix, or is it more consequential than that? If the JFK and Watergate narratives collapse, what does that mean for the Establishment’s ability to control and moderate consensus reality? Are we, at last, witnessing the great unravelling happening in real-time? If these key dominos fall, what next? 9/11? 7/7?

Such a loss of faith on the part of the public could threaten the entire infrastructure of control. That is no exaggeration, either. It’s akin to Christian scholars rewriting the holy gospel. Our whole edifice of modern governance and authority is built on these paradigmatic narratives, cascading through time to form the lattice of future hierarchies. To tamper with the modern scriptures would be as disruptive to the control grid as a time traveller being hurled into the past (or catapulting into the future) and interfering with the delicate fabric of reality, only to trigger a paradox somewhere else along the space-time continuum.

Bond-like Plots & Epic Denials

Are we ready for a great awakening, having now been acclimated to outrageous Bond-level plots involving plans for world domination by real-life Blofeld antagonists?

Consider the World Economic Forum’s doppelganger for Ian Fleming’s Blofeld character from his James Bond novels: Klaus Schwab. His Great Reset masterplan for global digital enslavement and the A.I.-driven fourth industrial Brave New World aggressively pushed by the billionaire luminaries in Davos.

Schwab and Western governments blatantly attempted to use a contrived ‘global pandemic’ crisis and the vaccine roll-out to fast-track their program of digital enslavement. Schwab laid out his conspiracy in his COVID-19: The Great Reset manifesto in July 2020. What followed was every G7 leader taking to their respective pulpits adorned with identical backdrops emblazoned with the ominous globalist strapline and mantra, “Build Back Better.”

Truly remarkable and more than enough to send any self-respecting tin foil hatter fleeing to the hills with their bug-out bag, or at least into psychological paralysis.

Running concurrently with this Great Reset theme has been a massive media push to demonise meat and accelerate a new ‘zero carbon’ future to ‘save’ the planet from man-made global warming. Suddenly we have a global push to promote fake meat and celebrities promoting insects as a delectable protein replacement. Meanwhile, we see one report after another of food production and distribution facilities catching fire or being taken offline due to ‘random’ incidents. And quietly stewing in the background with the grin of a Cheshire cat is one of the planet’s wealthiest oligarchs buying up every available acre of farmland in North America and just happens to have cornered the market in ‘sustainable’ synthetic meat production.

If only the movie ended there. When it comes to nefarious Hollywood plots, how about a Malthusian tale of an evil elite cabal claiming to save humanity from a deadly virus, only to mislead the world’s population into injecting an untested genetic substance that ended up injuring and killing millions before plunging humanity into a global fertility crisis? How’s that for a wild conspiracy theory? It’s almost too horrific even to contemplate. The only part missing is Drax and his secret breakaway master race colony waiting out the calamity in upper Earth orbit. But, space colonies aside, the first part is pretty close to what’s already transpired since the COVID-19 drama began in early 2020 and a near-matching script to the 2004 dystopian thriller Children of Men.

It’s right there in front of our eyes, but how many people can see it? With much of the world languishing in a mental swamp of cognitive dissonance, it’s worth asking if the peculiar dot-connecting analytical dexterity of a full-blown ‘conspiracy theorist’ is now a prerequisite for survival in the 21^st century. How else can one fathom what’s really going on?

Last Orders: Armageddon

As you advance down the gestalt of dystopian storylines, you will eventually arrive at World War III and the total annihilation of the human race following a thermal nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. It is the mother of all conspiracy theories, and the final chapter in any doomsday story, including the Book of Revelations, depending on how you read it.

Western society was practically marinated in this Armageddon story during the Cold War era. The well-worn plot line has been the subject of so many novels and films that we’ve almost been desensitised to it. In the modern context, its only true saving grace seemed to be the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which neutralised any Machiavellian motivation one side might have in believing they could gain the upper hand when wargaming a first-strike scenario. Cooler, rational heads would prevail, we were told. That was then, and this is now.

When scanning the playing field in 2023, it’s not easy to find those cooler heads anymore, at least not on the western side of this Orwellian Iron Curtain – especially amid a chorus of war hawks opining for an endless proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Instead of seasoned diplomatic talk of de-escalation and negotiated ceasefires, we hear even more unhinged rhetoric, with cock-sure Western political leaders and mainstream media experts all doubling and tripling down on their stated pledge – to defeat Russia in Ukraine, destroy the Russian economy and oust Vladimir Putin from power in Moscow.

Subsequently, veiled and indirect threats of nuclear strikes have been going back and forth for the last year, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in high office willing to step up and calm the situation. Instead, we get more puffed chests and festooning following the recent sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines. While it’s glaringly evident that the United States and its NATO allies carried out the attack on the joint German-Russian energy infrastructure project, disingenuous politicos and media mavens play coy, pretending the rest of the world is as ignorant and aloof to the clear and present danger as they unfortunately are. Suddenly, oil and gas pipelines are fair game, and Russia’s national security interests are dismissed out of hand as the crazed ravings of an ‘autocratic Russian regime’. That’s international relations through the current Western lens – a dire situation indeed.

The outlook is so worrying that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set their Doomsday Clock to “90 seconds to midnight,” the closest it’s ever been to nuclear war in the organisation’s near 80-year history.

One can’t help but wonder how much of the Western animus towards Russia and enthusiasm for war is a direct result of years of priming the public with the official “Russiagate” conspiracy theory, which we now know turned out to be a wholly fabricated hoax. To this day, many Americans, British and Europeans falsely believe that Russia meddled or ‘interfered’ in their elections or that Donald Trump was put into office through some clandestine Russian military intelligence operation. Sure, it might have been total fantasy fiction, but enough people believe it, and that’s what matters.

The release of the Twitter Files further blew the lid off the cover-ups. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, these files are going viral as new instalments show how Big Tech and the US government conspired to suppress, censor, and shadow-ban. Anyone on social media who went against the official disinformation storylines promulgated by the Establishment was tracked, censored, and ultimately de-platformed (banned from using Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) by government agencies working hand-in-hand with Big Tech firms and third-sector intelligence cut-out operations like Hamilton68, Newsguard, and ‘fact-checking’ soft censorships cartels like the Trusted News Initiative and First Draft Coalition, to name just a few.

It’s ironic that with all the endless blathering about “extremist speech” and “dangerous disinformation” or “harmful conspiracy talk” online, the really dangerous conspiracy theories – the ones that threaten the safety and welfare of populations – are not found in the bowels of 4Chan or Reddit, nor on QAnon forums, or any alternative media websites, and certainly not in magazines such as this one. No, the real threat to life on Earth is the deceptive conspiracy theories and fake news pushed by governments and the corporate mainstream media. That’s right – the same crazed official narrative conspiracies mindlessly repeated by what they call ‘normal’ folk.

Something to think about when the missiles start flying.

Although, I sincerely hope that never happens.

Stay vigilant, and be sure to keep a fresh roll of foil in the kitchen drawer :-).

Long may the foils reign.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 197.[/alert]

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Footnote

1. Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance de Haven-Smith, University of Texas Press, 2014.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 194 (Sept-Oct 2022)

It’s hard to know where to start. So much has been done. So many have suffered. Not because of a virus but due to hasty, reckless, and irrational decisions made by elected leaders and their bevy of experts.

For much of 2022, the world received some respite from the madness we came to know as the “New Normal.”

This nightmare started in January 2020 as the world watched inexplicable scenes of fear and panic coming out of Wuhan, China – the supposed epicentre of what would soon be known as the “global pandemic.”

The Chinese response was swift as they unleashed ruthless quarantine measures and ordered residents to stay home and not leave until the government said otherwise. The population was effectively placed under house arrest, suspected of carrying or transmitting a microscopic viral particle. Henceforth, this practice would be known as lockdown – a term describing the confining of prisoners to their cells.

This tool of social control was copied by hysterical public officials in Italy and then Spain, and before long, most countries instituted versions of Chinese-style lockdowns. Anything to “stop the spread.” Some countries went further and closed their borders for fear someone might inadvertently bring in the viral particle and trigger a new “wave.” As crazy as that might sound, it was the received orthodoxy at that time.

Of course, none of this corresponded with scientific evidence and certainly not common sense. It was hysterical groupthink on steroids. A fit of collective madness, decorated with virtue-signalling motifs.

Locking the population in their homes. Paying businesses to stay shut and paying employees to stay home and work online or not work at all.

Hospitals not treating patients. Employers firing anyone who wouldn’t submit to the corporate needlecraft.

Suddenly ‘public health’ became the new raison d’etre. Overnight, previously bland public officials transformed into flamboyant dictators, intoxicated by newfound powers and backed up by confidence trick game masters like Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates, all of whom seemed to revel in their newfound spotlight. 

In the haze of fear-induced ‘mass formation’ psychosis, the population was mesmerised by daily hours-long press conference updates on the pandemic’s progress, starring government health bureaucrats and their politician overlords, entranced by the power on offer.

While doing endless victory laps, politicians have been reticent to admit the catastrophic effect on national economies and the broader global economy. In the United States, the government took the liberty of printing over 4.5 trillion dollars out of thin air to pay for this epic folly. At the time, they assured the populace it was necessary – doled out in direct lumpsum ‘stimulus’ payments to nearly every citizen, along with billion-dollar blank cheques for schools to pay for a failed ‘online education’ experiment. In addition, untold billions were wasted on Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) and a conveyor belt of masks, gowns, rubber gloves, and reams of infantile COVID signage. Also, hundreds of billions for completely useless ‘contact tracing’ systems doubling as human tracking apps. 

And we can’t forget two of the main profit centres in this global heist: the myriad of non-diagnostic COVID tests and, of course, the so-called vaccines. Most of these expenditures are still running today.

Whatever country you’re in, chances are your government attempted to implement these same policies and got the same damage to the national economy and the state of freedom.

It is almost impossible to calculate the actual economic and societal toll of the COVID response. One peer-reviewed study¹ in the Journal of American Medicine estimated the cumulative financial costs of the pandemic at more than $16 trillion, approximately 90% of the annual gross domestic product of the US. Consequently, the wealth and inequality gap increased by orders of magnitude in the last 18 months. The ten richest men in the world doubled their fortunes during the government COVID splurge while the incomes of 99 per cent of humanity fell.

They said it was all for a noble cause – embodied in great Schwabian mantras born from the loins of Davos: The New Normal, Build Back Better, and The Great Reset.

In hindsight, this may have been the biggest psychological operation (psyops) ever – designed to re-engineer society and the human race to advance a series of planned future outcomes.

Literally everything was cancelled. Even democracy. Freedom of assembly suddenly became a luxury we could ill afford in the face of such an awe-inspiring viral particle. 

But while their plans were cunning and comprehensive in scale and scope, the globalist establishment did not calculate how their draconian global coup d’etat wouldbring together dissidents from all strata of society, political persuasions, and religions – every walk of life. And their numbers are growing by the day, a bittersweet for the elite class because it’s in direct proportion to the constantly climbing number of injuries and untimely deaths associated with the experimental injections. 

Low Ebb for Humanity

Perhaps the lowest ebb for humanity in this saga has been the vilification and persecution of the unvaccinated over the past two years.

Early on, it became apparent that so-called ‘freedom-loving’ Western governments were emulating China’s authoritarian Zero-COVID societal shutdown. Countries like Italy, Israel, Spain, Canada, and New Zealand went all-out to flex their totalitarian bona fides. But the standard bearer was Australia, a nation transformed into a Zero-COVID nightmare. Autocrat State premiers and chief ministers formed the equivalent of COVID Stasi enforcement divisions, even usingthe military to police strict lockdowns and coerce the entire population into taking experimental injections. Melbourne, the capital of the state of Victoria and Australia’s second-largest city, endured six lockdowns to become the most locked-down city in the world. People defying lockdowns or daring to walk in public without a mask – in parks or on the beach – were hunted down by the police, to be fined or worse.

Technocrats barely batted an eyelid after summarily destroying the livelihoods of thousands of people, especially small businesses, and ruining real public health on a scale never seen in modern times. 

In the UK, Boris Johnson’s government deployed the most cynical con imaginable, invoking a faux Blitz spirit by imploring a hapless public to go outside and bang pots and pans together at sundown because they needed to “stay home” to “save” the National Health Service (NHS). During the so-called pandemic, the NHS stopped running as a national health service and became a ‘COVID only’ service – and then a ‘vaccine only’ service. With record waiting lists, and millions discouraged from seeking basic care, the NHS rapidly resembles a zombie institution in line to be absorbed by some international consortium. 

Many people were gaslit by public health mavens and media charlatans to believe that if they did not comply with the bevy of ineffective and baseless pandemic mitigation measures – they were putting people’s lives at risk. The level of fearmongering and hysteria reached a point where some fanatics in government and media went so far as to label noncompliant sceptics and anti-vaxxers as “killers.” 

Cognitive scientist Dr Mark Changizi put it succinctly: “If your position implies that healthy people breathing in the same room are doing you violence, you have lost. Thanks for playing.”² 

For those who believe in the virology orthodoxy, the ageing octogenarian US President Joe Biden is an interesting ‘case’. In late July and early August, Joe supposedly was infected by COVID twice in quick succession – catching it again three days after being cleared – which essentially is a case study on the futility of mass masking, contact tracing, social distancing, and vaccination. The President boasted he was double jabbed and double boosted, with a total of four injections, but he still got COVID, twice in a row. 

It needs to be remembered and restated that millions of people were coerced into taking the jab on the insinuation it would protect them from COVID and make us “safe” again. That was the mantra constantly pushed by authorities, including Biden, who shamed the ‘vaccine hesitant’ by falsely stating at a July 2021 meeting, “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations,” and “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalised, you’re not going to be in the ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.” 

It is vitally important we don’t forget what government apparatchiks put us all through these past two and half years. The fact of the matter is that pandemic measures did little to “stop the spread” and had no positive impact on public health. The crisis merchants will claim that every extreme measure somehow saved lives. There are enough corrupt people in politics and media with a vested interest in this to ensure no one will be allowed to refute it publicly. 

Their fanciful claims can be debunked if we look at the control countries in this global experiment like Sweden, which initially opted out of the lockdowns and showed no noticeable difference in mortality or even ‘cases’. 

The only tangible benefit was for those who conveniently cashed in on the crisis.

Despite the hysteria and propaganda, you can point to the fact there was no significant rise in all-cause mortality in 2020. However, many lockdown deaths – drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide – increased in 2020. In 2021, we saw a significant increase in all-cause mortality, in excess of 20 per cent.³ Bear in mind the mass vaccination roll-out started in December 2020. 

The Drugs Don’t Work

Never before in human history has a rapacious industry and its government functionaries threatened the public on a scale such as this. Their efforts have been aided by a corrupt government-media complex and vaccine NGO complex spearheaded by oligarch Bill Gates, along with billionaire gatekeepers Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and other Big Tech lords who coordinated censorship campaigns across social media to block scepticism and criticism of the vaccine roll-out. Many were de-platformed and silenced, and that continues even today. Doctors who dared question the official science were threatened with deregistration.

With each passing week, new studies and reports emerge about the safety and effectiveness of COVID jabs. Soon it might become impossible for mainstream media to continue to ignore the numerous vaccine injury cases. For example, the British Medical Journal has highlighted how Pfizer’s own data revealed an excess of mRNA vaccine harms, specifically myocarditis and pericarditis, for those aged 12-25 years.⁴ Why people in this age group were targeted with the experimental jab is somewhat mysterious and concerning, considering this age group has little to no risk of dying from the virus. 

It was back in December 2020 when the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) emergency authorised the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 jabs, claiming “the benefits outweighed the harms.” That claim is now under attack by medicos brave enough to emerge from the climate of fear and censorship.

A group of international researchers re-analysed the original trial data upon which that claim was made to conclude that the “vaccines” are associated with an “increased risk of serious adverse events” that surpass the “risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalisation” relative to the placebo group.⁵

According to former medical scientist and Australian investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi, PhD:

“The Fraiman analysis has revealed that the FDA and the CDC underplayed the harms of the mRNA vaccines in Dec 2020. By authorising and recommending a population-wide vaccination campaign, authorities neglected to focus on protecting the elderly, and exposed many younger people to unnecessary harm. As the pandemic progresses, and new variants emerge, the benefits of the mRNA vaccines will continue to diminish, while the harms are likely to compound.”

We need to recall the string of drug failures by the pharmaceutical industry and the corrupt, bought-and-paid-for US FDA. Over the decades, the shareholders of these pharmaceutical firms netted untold billions. 

Daniel Berger is an attorney who won millions in settlements for investors and consumers hurt by the likes of Exxon and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. Their exploitation pales compared to what America’s prescription drug manufacturers have done to promote mass addiction of legal chemical substances.

“I used to think that there was nothing more reprehensible than what the tobacco industry did in suppressing what it knew about the adverse effects of an addictive and dangerous product,” said Berger. “But I was wrong. The drug makers are worse than Big Tobacco.”⁶

The War on Fertility

Perhaps the most shocking episode in this global debacle is the wanton state and corporate recklessness of the ‘vaccine’ roll-out. When industry whistleblowers and journalists began asking questions about the possible effects of the experimental mRNA injections on human fertility, they were either ignored or immediately met with derision and condemnation. 

The first COVID shots rolled out in late 2020, and it did not take long before qualified doctors, scientists and pharmaceutical professionals began warning the public of possible reproductive effects. On 1 December 2020, Pfizer’s former head of respiratory research, Dr Michael Yeadon, and the lung specialist and former head of Germany’s public health department, Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, petitioned the European Medicine Agency – which is responsible for EU-wide drug approval – calling for the immediate suspension of all SARS-CoV-2 vaccine trials, in particular the BioNTech/Pfizer study.⁷

The most alarming part of their complaint was the potential effects on pregnant women. They explained that while the vaccines are meant to produce antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2, these same spike proteins also contain syncytin-homologous proteins, an essential building block in the formation of the human placenta. They implored that “it must be absolutely ruled out that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could trigger an immune reaction against syncytin-1, as otherwise infertility of indefinite duration could result in vaccinated women.”

According to a recent analysis by Dr Joseph Mercola, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) was alerted to the high potential for adverse effects on fertility by Janci Chunn Lindsay, PhD, director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services LLC, which submitted a public comment back in April 2021. Disturbingly, what Dr Lindsey had predicted seems to be happening. She provided credible evidence suggesting that the COVID mRNA gene therapy jab may cross-react with syncytin and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that impair reproductive outcomes. Considering the large percentage of the population coerced into taking the experimental shots, the ramifications are beyond comprehension. “We could potentially be sterilising an entire generation,” warned Dr Lindsey.⁸

Other reported risks included significant menstrual irregularities, vaginal haemorrhaging, and miscarriage for women who received the injections. According to vaccine injury databases like America’s VAERS system, the EU’s EudraVigilance and the UK’s Yellow Card system, such conditions were already numbering in the thousands at the time of her report – a safety signal which should not have been ignored. Only it was, and still is.

Even those who previously offered unconditional support for the jabs must be concerned about some new studies emerging in recent months. For example, a recent study by Washington University found that COVID-19 vaccines affected an astonishing 42 per cent of women’s menstrual cycles. Of course, the women who reported these impacts after being jabbed were roundly condemned as delusional or pushing an anti-vaccine agenda.

In a surreal state of affairs, at the same time both Australia and Canada had granted “emergency use authorisation” (EUA) of the Moderna COVID jab on young children aged six months to five years of age, the German Federal Ministry of Health tweeted that 1 in 5,000 people had suffered serious adverse reactions following COVID injections. 

Eugenics: An Elite Love Affair

Since the mid-20^th century, elite interests have been hard at work funding and developing “anti-fertility vaccines” designed to be implemented on a mass scale. This is not the stuff of conspiracy theories – one only has to read a 1968 Rockefeller Foundation report in which foundation-funded scientists and public health experts boasted about the cacophony of possibilities:

“…several types of drugs are known to diminish male fertility, but those that have been tested have serious problems of toxicity. Very little work is in progress on immunological methods, such as vaccines, to reduce fertility, and much more research is required if a solution is to be found here.”⁹

According to the Rockefeller Foundation, the possibility of using vaccines to reduce male fertility was something that “needed to be investigated further” because oral birth control pills and intrauterine devices (IUD) would not yield the desired outcome due to problems with mass-scale distribution:

“We are faced with the danger that within a few years these two ‘modern’ methods, for which such high hopes have been held, will in fact turn out to be impracticable on a mass scale.”

They sought to encourage institutions “by making research funds available, as well as by other means, established and beginning investigators to turn their attention to aspects of research in reproductive biology that have implications for human fertility and its control…. Encouraging more biology and biochemistry students to elect careers in reproductive biology and human fertility control, through support of research and teaching programs in departments of zoology, biology, and biochemistry.”

Why the obsession with population control, you might ask? The answer: eugenics. Like many ruling elites, the Rockefeller dynasty regarded themselves as stewards of the planet and took it upon themselves to bear the burden of regulating the planet’s resources and its population.

“There are an estimated five million women among America’s poverty and near-poverty groups who need birth control service… The unchecked fertility of the indigent does much to perpetuate poverty, undereducation, and underemployment, not only in urban slums, but also in depressed rural areas.”

The eugenics theme is explicit throughout the globalist pedigree. Bear in mind these are the very same institutions that funded the development and distribution of vaccine ‘health solutions’ throughout the world over the last 60 years. Other examples and incidents in recent history prove this is a central objective of the elites’ social engineering in the 20^th century. So who’s to say the eugenics baton hasn’t been passed to a fresh pair of legs?

In the 21^st century, elite stewardship on such matters seems to have been handed down to people like billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a tireless advocate and financier for global vaccine roll-out. At the beginning of the so-called ‘global pandemic’, Gates did the rounds on every imaginable media outlet, calling for eight billion people, the entire global population, to be injected with the new experimental COVID ‘vaccine’.

It should be noted that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has deep ties with the Rockefeller group,¹⁰ including the funding of vaccinations and programs that can be construed as ‘anti-fertility’. Bill Gates and David Rockefeller were the leading members of a billionaire’s club that met secretly to discuss how to strengthen measures for population control, particularly in the developing world, through the guise of “philanthropy.” Other notable members include Ted Turner, George Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Bloomberg.¹¹

Bye Bye Build Back Better

All the above was done in the name of keeping us safe.

The great Ben Franklin once remarked, “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Now that their pandemic complex is complete, invoking another pandemic will be much easier.

No government has ever relinquished power without the threat of force, and no citizenry has ever received a bill of rights without having to fight for it first.

In the end, this generation will come to grips with a certain truism that our forefathers knew all too well: the battle for liberty is a fight spanning generations, a multi-generational fight, and it is incumbent on all of us to do our absolute best, and then pass on the baton of liberty to our progeny, and theirs too. 

Above all, do not let them do it again.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 194.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. The COVID-19 Pandemic and the $16 Trillion Virus, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771764

2. https://twitter.com/MarkChangizi/status/1549875975676108801

3. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2790491

4. Pfizer’s own data point towards an excess of mRNA vaccine harms, https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1635/rr

5. https://maryannedemasi.com/publications/f/the-serious-adverse-events-of-mrna-covid-19-vaccine-trials

6. “Worse Than Big Tobacco”: How Big Pharma Fuels the Opioid Epidemic, www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/worse-than-big-tobacco-how-big-pharma-fuels-the-opioid-epidemic

7. Urgent Safety Warning: Health Experts Petition to Stop All COVID-19 Human Vaccine Trials, https://21stcenturywire.com/2020/12/09/urgent-safety-warning-health-experts-petition-to-stop-all-covid-19-human-vaccine-trials/

8. Covid vaccine fertility issues, https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2022/07/25/covid-vaccine-fertility-issues.aspx

9. The Rockefeller Foundation President’s Five-Year Review Annual Report 1968, page 72, https://web.archive.org/web/20120606152422/http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/uploads/files/1496d619-017d-4b13-8a64-fce8ed4f785d-1968.pdf

10. www.globalresearch.ca/vaccinate-the-world-gates-rockefeller-seek-global-population-reduction

11. https://rense.com/general87/immu.htm

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 167 (Mar-Apr 2018)

Editor’s Note: As with many New Dawn featured articles, this 2018 piece by journalist Patrick Henningsen was extremely prescient, particularly following the recent revelations exposing the Russiagate hoax, and how Washington was preparing its geopolitical chess pieces for subsequent events in Ukraine. The 2023 Twitter Files also confirm that US Democrats and media organisations knowingly propagated the ‘Russiagate theory’ hoax and spread a false narrative about “Russian bots” and trolls amplifying pro-Trump messaging.

Make no mistake about it: the US Deep State and its Atlanticist partners are waging a new Cold War against Russia, but will it go hot? It’s still difficult to say how far this sabre rattling will go, but one thing is certain: Washington’s stroganoff is definitely overcooked.

When WikiLeaks published leaked Democratic National Committee emails in July 2016, it didn’t take long for Washington and its media oracles to trade-in their ultimate cash-cow ‘threat’ de jour, ISIL, in favour of a newly inflated Russian Bear.

Right out of the gates, the media went big, clamouring for something to be done about Russia “hacking” the 2016 US presidential election. When no evidence materialised, the narrative mysteriously morphed into “Russian collusion,” before being lowered to “Russian meddling,” and then finally, 18 months after the story began, it’s been further downgraded to mere “Russian influence.” As weak as the case continues to be, the reality is that political operatives have staked everything on their official Russian conspiracy theory and are dutifully ploughing ahead regardless.

One of the Deep State’s key partners in propping-up their narrative are the Silicon Valley tech firms. In January, Republican lawmakers began pressuring the House Intelligence Committee to release an explosive memo written by chairman Devin Nunes. The memo contains damning evidence about a fraudulent surveillance warrant ordered by Barack Obama’s FBI and Department of Justice, in order to spy on members of Donald Trump’s campaign and transition teams.

Before the memo’s release, the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo began trending on Twitter. It didn’t take long before the Deep State spin machine claimed it had evidence that the top-trending hashtag was being propelled through cyberspace by “Russian influence-linked accounts.” Unhinged Democrats, led by Congressman Adam Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein, went even further and drafted a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey demanding the Silicon Valley giants “conduct an in-depth forensic examination” of their latest anti-Russian conspiracy theory.¹

According to their overwrought line of thinking, anyone who retweeted or ‘liked’ any Twitter post which was either sympathetic to Russia or supported Trump had in fact taken part in the Kremlin’s secret “active measures” operation to influence the vulnerable minds of Americans. Twitter was so concerned that it sent an email out to hundreds of thousands of users who might have been ‘touched’ by the Kremlin, informing them of their original sin.

California tech firms found no evidence of Russian meddling on social media over the last year, nor were there any attempts to sponsor ‘interference’ either.² Still, desperate congressional conspiracy theorists like Adam Schiff want to pressure Silicon Valley firms to rummage through their data logs in the hopes of magically finding some evidence.

As it turned out, the source of the hysterical reports was a Deep State cut-out organisation, a new online initiative promoted by the US-German Marshall Fund called “Hamilton 68,”³fronted by former military and FBI operative Clint Watts. He is an associate of the antediluvian cold warrior Deep State think tank Foreign Policy Research Institute.⁴

Watts’ cut-out front is not dissimilar to another earlier online Deep State Russiaphobia project called “PropOrNot”⁵ which was promoted by the Washington Post and listed some 200 mostly North America alternative media websites including the Ron Paul Institute, Global Research, Truth Out, Paul Craig Roberts and many others. The shadowy site claimed these websites were all part of an intricate nefarious network of Kremlin agents.

Both of these Deep State vilification initiatives claim to be part of ‘counter-propaganda’, but you can’t counter something which isn’t there in the first place.

In the Crosshairs of the Deep State

During the primary phase of the US presidential election, Donald Trump was essentially up against 15 Republican war hawks (except for Rand Paul). He adopted a more pacifist-reformist approach in order to separate himself from the field – and it worked. Trump ran the table and cruised into the Republican Party nomination, ready to do battle with arch-globalist and Deep State favourite Hillary Clinton.

His rhetoric on the campaign trail was promising. The soon-to-be 45^th President of the United States spoke boldly about reaching out to Russian President Vladimir Putin and normalising relations with Russia, stressing the need for the two nations to cooperate on a number of pressing issues, not least of all the War on Terror and the fight to defeat ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

Trump was popular with Americans feeling the fatigue of war, and also with disillusioned Obama supporters who believed in his ‘hope and change’ slogan, only to be saddled with seven wars from the Nobel Peace Prize president. Trump’s desire for détente with Russia angered both the Republican and Democratic establishments, federal agency operatives, and of course the mainstream media who have been ginning-up a new Cold War since the US-backed coup d’état in the Ukraine in 2014.

Then, while the Trump transition team was waiting in the wings after defeating Clinton in a stunning upset, the outgoing Commander-in-Chief, Barack Obama, made a series of cutting moves that would undermine any chance of Trump starting his term on a positive footing with Moscow. First, Obama signed an extension on US sanctions against Russia as well as adding a number of new measures.⁶  But what came next can only be described as an act of diplomatic warfare when Obama ordered even more new sanctions along with the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and the closing of Russian diplomatic properties in Maryland and New York, which Obama claimed were being used for intelligence-related purposes.⁷

“There has to be a cost and a consequence for what Russia has done,” said one of the mainstream media’s typically unnamed ‘senior administration officials’ at the time. “It is in an extraordinary step for them to interfere in the democratic process here in the United States of America. There needs to be a price for that.”

Russian was understandably irate and warned this was Cold War déjà vu being initiated by the White House. Obama did not stop there. To keep things on ice between Washington and Moscow, he then deployed 300 US Marines to Norway, supposedly to reinforce Norway’s 122 mile-long border with Russia near the Arctic Circle.⁸ It was the first US deployment in Norway since World War II. Finally, right before Trump’s inauguration, Obama ordered the deployment of some 3,000 US soldiers into Poland to “reassure NATO allies who were concerned about ‘a more aggressive Russia’.”⁹

The neophyte Trump tried playing it cool, even complimenting Vladimir Putin for not responding in a mindless tit-for-tat. Regardless, it was clear Trump had already been sandboxed before his term got started.

To add insult to injury, while all this was unfolding, Obama appears to have also dispatched his top Deep State agent, former national security adviser Susan Rice, to oversee the spying of the Trump transition team, allegedly under the guise of surveilling “foreign officials,” in what became known as the great ‘Unmasking Scandal’.¹⁰

From this point on, it became very clear what the Deep State wanted – it had no intention of allowing any US president to pursue good relations with Russia. Before the 2016 election, it was difficult to conceptualise this shadowy thing called the ‘Deep State’. It had previously been spoken of by a few great scholars such as Peter Dale Scott¹¹ and Mike Lofgren.¹² Some call it a ‘state within a state’, while others refer to it as a hidden hierarchical network of corruption that facilitates all number of criminal enterprises globally. From hostile corporate takeovers of countries and the unleashing of jackals like the ones described by John Perkins¹³ in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, to proxy ‘regime change’ terrorist militias, to the CIA and its global drugs and weapons trafficking syndicates, and the banks and financial institutions who launder their illicit proceeds, some of which are used to fund other covert and ‘black ops.’

At the very top of this pyramid of international organised crime is what US president Dwight D. Eisenhower¹⁴ famously dubbed the “Military Industrial Complex.” These are the criminal interests represented by Trump’s own party opponents like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and of course John McCain. Certainly the same could be said about Hillary Clinton, a key operative in the Deep State machine since her husband’s days as Arkansas governor.¹⁵

After Trump took office it wasn’t long before he was surrounded by Deep State loyalists, all tasked with making sure the new President stayed on course with the wider agenda. This is their strategy of geopolitical tension on multiple fronts, designed to keep Washington and its allies on a permanent war footing, leading to the most important outcome of this equation – the triggering of increased military and ‘defence’ spending, not only in the US but in Europe too. Positioning Russia as Washington’s number one existential threat is the keystone of this strategy.

One year on, we can now see exactly how Russiagate greased the tracks for at least one controversial arms transaction: an initial US deal to send $50 million worth of lethal Javelin anti-tank missiles to the Ukraine.¹⁶ As arms shipments go, this is a small one amounting to a mere drop in the bucket compared to what the US trafficked to terrorists in Syria since 2012, but it does demonstrate how US politics can effectively trigger the mechanism on a deal that was simply not possible one year ago. You can expect more arms shipments, all fuelled by sustained fear-mongering and the spinning of evermore colourful fables about how Russia’s ‘little green men’ invaded and are occupying the Ukraine.¹⁷

No doubt, this overall strategy of tension is what Trump’s vaunted ‘Generals’ were aiming at when pushing him to engage in more theatrical sabre rattling with Kim Jung-Un in North Korea. The strategy paid off as Congress enthusiastically inked his pen for a new $700 billion defence budget in December 2017 – a near 20 percent increase from the previous year’s already bloated Pentagon money pit. Interestingly, the $56 billion hike was almost as much as the entire Russian annual defence budget.

The business doesn’t end there either. In Brussels, a concerted and relentless campaign of hysterical Russiaphobia in Europe has helped pave the way for a historic new European ‘collective defence’ agreement. 23 European Union countries signed the new Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), a historic move that officially lays the framework for European military integration, or an EU Army. This includes a centralised defence budget for military hardware, facilities, and research & development. At the heart of this new EU defence force will be the usual suspects – transatlantic military juggernauts like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamic, BAE Systems and many others. EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, described the signing of PESCO as a “historic moment in European defence.”¹⁸ By 2025, you could see a collective EU defence budget that rivals the US, as the world’s number two military spender ahead of China and Russia. Eventually, this will move NATO to an adjunct role in the job of policing the European hemisphere. You can almost hear Eisenhower rolling in his grave.

In addition to this, there is already talk of increasing the US defence budget to $1 trillion over the next two years.¹⁹ Frugal-minded Americans would be shocked to realise that when you audit America’s entire National Security Budget, it already totals $1.1 trillion.²⁰

All of this, we’re told, is to counter the great Russian menace. How odd then, that in 2017 the Russian Federal Treasury announced its nation’s annual defence budget was being cut by 25.5 percent down to $65.4 billion²¹ – the most drastic cut in the country’s defence spending since the early 1990s. If the West is to be believed and Vladimir Putin really is “the next Hitler,” then his war chest is looking a bit scant. Good luck with the world domination Vlad.

As for the West, the peoples’ challenge still remains: how to dislodge the Deep State and re-take control of their governments?

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 167.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. “Top Dems call on Twitter, Facebook to investigate Russian bot campaign,” http://thehill.com/policy/technology/370265-top-dems-call-on-twitter-and-facebook-to-investigate-russian-bot-campaign

2. “Tech companies say they didn’t see Russian social media infiltration in 2017 elections,” www.politico.com/story/2018/01/25/russian-social-media-elections-312491

3. “Hamilton 68: A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation on Twitter,” http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/blog/2017/08/02/hamilton-68-new-tool-track-russian-disinformation-twitter

4. “Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East,” www.fpri.org/contributor/clint-watts/

5. “Washington Post’s ‘Fake News’ Guilt,” https://consortiumnews.com/2016/11/27/washington-posts-fake-news-guilt/

6. “U.S. extends sanctions against Russia ahead of Trump inauguration,” www.rbth.com/international/2016/12/21/us-extends-sanctions-against-russia-ahead-of-trump-inauguration_665023

7. “Obama expels 35 Russian diplomats in retaliation for US election hacking,” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/29/barack-obama-sanctions-russia-election-hack

8. “The Plan to Deploy U.S. Troops to Norway,” www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/norway/2016-11-09/plan-deploy-us-troops-norway

9. “US tanks and troops in Poland a threat, Russia says,” www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38592448

10. “Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel,” www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-20/what-we-still-don-t-know-about-obama-era-unmasking

11. “The ‘Deep State’ behind U.S. democracy,” www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html

12. “What is The Deep State?,” http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/09/02/what-is-the-deep-state/

13. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins

14. “Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961),” https://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/farewell_address.html

15. “Clintons, Contras and Cocaine,” www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/11/clintons-contras-and-cocaine/

16. “Why Trump’s Decision to Send Javelin Anti-Tank Missiles to Ukraine Could Escalate Tensions with Russia,” http://fortune.com/2017/12/23/trump-approves-javelin-missiles-ukraine/

17. “How, Why, and When Russia Will Deploy Little Green Men,” www.fpri.org/article/2016/03/how-why-and-when-russia-will-deploy-little-green-men-and-why-the-us-cannot/

18. “EU Paves the way for Defense Union,” www.dw.com/en/pesco-eu-paves-way-to-defense-union/a-41360236

19. “President Trump Is Likely To Boost U.S. Military Spending By $500 Billion To $1 Trillion,” www.forbes.com/sites/charlestiefer/2016/11/09/president-trump-is-likely-to-boost-u-s-military-spending-by-500-billion-to-1-trillion/

20. “US National Security Budget at $1.1 trillion,” www.pogo.org/straus/issues/defense-budget/2017/americas-1-1-trillion-national-security-budget.html

21. “Russia Cuts Military Budget,” www.defenseworld.net/news/18745/Russia_Cuts_Military_Budget_By_25__To_US_65_Billion

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