Terrorism has largely dropped off the radar. Instead, climate change, the pandemic, war in Ukraine, and the global financial crisis dominate headlines. The kind of terrorism that our self-imposed rulers want us to think is terrorism is when groups attack civilians for ideological, political, or financial purposes. When we hear “terrorist,” we tend to think of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and white supremacists like Brenton Tarrant. But the biggest terrorists are nation-states.
STATES AS TERRORISTS
There is a simple principle: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely; to quote a clichéd but true statement. Nation-states are the most powerful institutions that have ever existed. They are run by a relatively small elite consisting of financiers, secret agents, militaries, and political frontpeople. They force complicated communities, municipalities, regions, and even countries into monolithic, homogenous systems and brainwash their populations with nationalism. They erect arbitrary and artificial borders to maintain that phony homogeneity. They indoctrinate their populations from the cradle to the grave with schooling and propaganda. Laws and law enforcement are imposed in case the conditioning doesn’t fully work.
The public are terrorised by their local authorities into paying taxes, lest they go to prison: even though the quality of their local services progressively declines, and local debts are often owed by councils to foreign corporations and serviced by the captive taxpayer.1 Federal authorities terrorise with the threat of imprisonment for not paying national taxes that buy governments weapons to blow children to bits in foreign countries. Private tyrannies that monopolise energy supplies and water threaten to take non-payers to court or even break into homes and seize property (bailiffs) for failing to pay utility bills. These are the actions of gangsters who demand “protection money” from shop owners, or else they come and set fire to the store.
Modern society is little more than the subjugation of the populace by thugs in suits who attend top schools and universities; thugs whose ancestors succeeded in brutalising their opponents into submission so that they could be king, lord, etc. When people try to alert the public as to what is taking place, they are removed or murdered in the name of national security. Their convenient deaths are labelled accident, ill-health, or suicide by the propaganda machine that denigrates as conspiracy theorists those who dare to challenge the conventional narrative. Made to look silly, people internalise the lies and come to hate the truth-tellers, deriding them as fringe lunatics. As Bertrand Russell once wrote in The Impact of Science on Society, successful mind control is convincing the public that snow is black.
SILENCING DISSENTERS
Examples include Gough Whitlam, who in the 1970s was dismissed as Australian PM by the Governor General, supposedly over a House and Senate gridlock. The more realistic reason was that Whitlam was threatening not to renew the license for Pine Gap, the American spy base that listens in on communications across Asia.2
The state also murders dissidents. In 2003, a British Ministry of Defence contractor, Dr David Kelly, was accused of being the sole source for a BBC journalist, who said that the source confirmed that the Tony Blair government knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction – the lie on which the invasion was predicated. The more likely scenario is that a very high-level member of government inside Blair’s cabinet had been speaking to the media and that Kelly was blackmailed into being a “fall-guy” so that the government member could enjoy protection.3 (Kelly had likely been having an affair with an American spy.) To protect the source, or shut Kelly up, or send a warning to other would-be whistleblowers, Kelly was murdered and his death ruled suicide.
Michael Hastings – suicide, accident or state murder?
In the US, a young hot-shot journalist who drove around in a Mercedes, Michael Hastings, had hit upon a major story for Rolling Stone about US military and intelligence activities in Afghanistan. Hastings emailed friends saying that he had uncovered something big and needed “to go off the radar for a bit.”4 His car was seen speeding down a residential street very early one morning in 2013 before hitting a tree and bursting into flames, as luxury cars tend to do on impact. Not. Rumours abound that Hastings had uncovered top-level links to heroin smuggling or child trafficking, but we’ll never know. WikiLeaks later released information that the CIA has the capacity to remotely hack the computer chips in cars,5 leading many to suspect that Hastings was murdered using this method.
PUBLIC AS GUINEA PIGS
There’s also a long history of governments testing biological and chemical weapons on the public. In the 1950s and early ‘60s, the British used South Australia’s Maralinga to conduct nuclear tests. The environmental reports claimed that the areas were terra nullius, no one’s land, and that the only inhabitants were rabbits. But different Aboriginal communities lived there. Some, like Yami Lester, went blind as a result of the tests.6
In more recent years, the evidence has tipped in favour of SARS-CoV-2 being a human-engineered virus by EcoHealth Alliance scientists working under US government grants at a lab in Wuhan, China.7 Having killed millions of people with a likely-human-made virus, governments of the world used violence to enforce draconian lockdowns instead of dealing with the pandemic in a logical and humane way.8
In many countries, governments terrorised their populations with the threat of joblessness, which means homelessness and inability to buy food and pay bills. They demanded that their publics take an experimental “vaccine,” which has been linked by federal reporting systems to excess mortality and does not work like a normal vaccine: it doesn’t prevent transmission or infection; i.e., it’s not a vaccine.
But we should always spare more than a thought for the poor people abroad. The terrorisation of domestic populations is small compared to the “shock and awe” bombing of states’ foreign policies.
With US-British weapons and organisation, the Saudi elites have murdered tens of thousands of Yemenis and tortured millions of babies, toddlers, and children, as well as their desperate mothers, by starving them; many to death.9 Having created the Taliban indirectly in the 1980s and then empowering them briefly in the ‘90s,10 the US withdrew from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation in such a way that has enabled the regime to return back to where it left off.
In Iraq, the US and Britain shell-shocked the entire nation and surreptitiously fomented a civil war11 to blame Iraqis, not themselves, for the massive death toll. When monsters in the form of ISIS emerged from this monstrous situation, the US and Britain bombed Iraq again, killing tens of thousands more people.
Never lose sight of the fact that the nation-state, regardless of who controls it, is the biggest terrorist of all.
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, 37thPresident 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?
Klaus Schwab & Ian Fleming’s Blofeld
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 21st century. How else can one fathom what’s really going on?
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]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
Footnote
1. Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance de Haven-Smith, University of Texas Press, 2014.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, the hashtag #PfizerLiedPeopleDied immediately trended as people posted about the lies and corruption of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The hashtag previously appeared before Musk took ownership but had been quickly removed thanks to mass censorship, often at the direction of Pfizer.
Pfizer was exercising its powerful influence over social media, mass media, academia, governments, and global public health, despite a record of fraud, corruption, and lies that began long before its quest to vaccinate every man, woman, and child on earth with its experimental gene therapy.
Now they were poised to do just that, with complete legal immunity to any lawsuits from vaccine injuries and death, thanks to a clause that Pfizer execs included in contracts with governments before releasing their ‘vaccine’.
History of Fraud & Corruption
The lies and cover-ups surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic brought to life a host of independent citizen journalists to fight the power. One of these journalists has made a significant impact through the highly popular Substack blog Kanekoa News. In early 2023, Kanekoa News published “Pfizer Has a Long History of Fraud, Corruption and Using Children as Human Guinea Pigs.” Pfizer’s partial list of offences includes (the following is quoted directly from Kanekoa News):
In 1992, Pfizer agreed to pay between $165 million and $215 million to settle lawsuits arising from the fracturing of its Bjork-Shiley Convexo-Concave heart valve, which at the time had resulted in nearly 300 deaths, and by 2012 had resulted in 663 deaths.
In 1994, Pfizer agreed to pay $10.75 million to settle US Justice Department claims that the company lied to get federal approval for a mechanical heart valve that had fractured, killing hundreds of patients worldwide.
In 1996, Pfizer administered an experimental drug during a clinical trial on 200 children in Nigeria but never told the parents that their children were the subjects of an experiment. Eleven children died, and many others suffered side effects such as brain damage and organ failure. Pfizer did not obtain consent or inform the patients that they were the subjects of an experiment, not the recipients of an approved drug.
In 2002, Pfizer agreed to pay $49 million to settle allegations that the drug company defrauded the US federal government and 40 states by charging too much for its cholesterol treatment Lipitor. Lipitor had sales of $6.45 billion in 2001.
In 2004, Pfizer agreed to plead guilty to two felonies and paid $430 million in penalties to settle charges that it fraudulently promoted the drug Neurontin for unapproved uses. Pfizer’s tactics included planting company operatives in the audience at medical education events and bribing doctors with luxury trips.
In 2008, the New York Times published an article entitled “Experts Conclude Pfizer Manipulated Studies.” Pfizer delayed the publication of negative studies, spun negative data to place it in a more positive light and controlled the flow of clinical research data to promote its epilepsy drug Neurontin. In 2004, the company paid $430 million to settle US federal criminal and civil claims that one of its subsidiaries had promoted the drug for unapproved uses.
In 2009, Pfizer was fined $2.3 billion, then the largest healthcare fraud settlement and largest criminal fine ever imposed in the US. Pfizer pled guilty to misbranding the painkiller Bextra with “the intent to defraud or mislead,” promoting the drug to treat acute pain at dosages the FDA had previously deemed dangerously high. The government alleged that Pfizer paid kickbacks to compliant doctors and promoted three other drugs illegally: the antipsychotic Geodon, an antibiotic Zyvox, and the antiepileptic drug Lyrica.
In 2009, Pfizer paid $750 million to settle 35,000 claims that its drug, Rezulin, was responsible for 63 deaths and dozens of liver failures. Rezulin’s withdrawal from the US market on March 21, 2000, followed negotiations between the drug’s manufacturer and the FDA.
In 2010, Pfizer was ordered to pay $142.1 million in damages for violating US federal anti-racketeering law by its fraudulent sale and marketing of Neurontin for uses not approved by the FDA. The jury found that Pfizer’s marketing of Neurontin violated both the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and California’s Unfair Competition Law.
In 2010, the New York Times published an article entitled “Pfizer Gives Details on Payments to Doctors.” Pfizer admitted that it paid about $20 million to 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals for consulting and speaking on its behalf in the last six months of 2009. Pfizer also paid $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centres and other research groups for clinical trials in the same period.
In 2010, Blue Cross Blue Shield filed a lawsuit against Pfizer, accusing the pharmaceutical giant of illegally bribing 5,000 doctors with lavish Caribbean vacations, golf games, massages and other recreational activities to convince doctors to use Bextra for off-label use.
In 2010, leaked cables between Pfizer and US officials in Nigeria showed that Pfizer had hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general to blackmail him to drop legal action over the controversial 1996 Trovan trial involving children with meningitis.
In 2012, the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Pfizer Inc. with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act when its subsidiaries bribed doctors and other health care professionals employed by foreign governments in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia and Serbia to win business.
In 2012, Pfizer paid $1.2 billion to settle claims by nearly 10,000 women that its hormone replacement therapy drug, Prempro, caused breast cancer. The Prempro settlements came after six years of trials. Several plaintiffs were awarded tens of millions of dollars, including punitive damages for the drug maker’s actions in withholding information about the risk of breast cancer from Prempro.
In 2013, Pfizer agreed to pay $55 million to settle criminal charges of failing to warn patients and doctors about the risks of kidney disease, kidney injury, kidney failure and acute interstitial nephritis caused by its proton pump inhibitor, Protonix.
In 2014, Pfizer paid $35 million to settle a lawsuit accusing its subsidiary of promoting the kidney transplant drug Rapamune for unapproved uses, including bribing doctors to prescribe it to patients.
In 2016, Pfizer was fined a record £84.2 million for overcharging the UK National Health Service for its anti-epilepsy drug, Phenytoin, by 2,600% (from £2.83 to £67.50 a capsule), increasing the cost to UK taxpayers from £2 million in 2012 to about £50 million in 2013.
Moving onto COVID
The corruption and fraud continued with Pfizer’s ongoing campaign to hide the truth about its ineffective, dangerous, even deadly COVID-19 injections. As a result, the general public is still in the dark thanks to Pfizer’s unprecedented influence over mainstream media narratives and the ‘science’.
Pfizer, which has long captured US Congress with its lobbying efforts and injected billions into mainstream media to exercise influence, also done everything in its power to suppress and censor doctors and medical professionals who dared speak out about its mRNA product.
Fortunately, we have the recent revelations of the Twitter Files that exposed the extent to which Big Pharma lobbied Big Tech. The manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines, including Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna, heavily lobbied Twitter and other social media platforms to set moderation rules that would flag purported COVID-19-related ‘misinformation’.
Reporting on the Twitter Files, investigative journalist Lee Fang for The Intercept said, “The Pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to shape content around vaccine policy.” Fang cited as an example BIO – Biotechnology Innovation Organisation – the lobbying group of Pfizer and Moderna, which “fully funded a special content moderation campaign designed by a contractor called Public Good Projects (PGP), which worked with Twitter to set content moderation rules around COVID ‘misinformation’.”
PGP has direct links to the US Centers for Disease Contorl (CDC), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the US Department of Health and Human Services and has partnered with the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation, in turn, partnered with many non-profit organisations to fund behavioural psychology research intended to “nudge” more people to get the COVID shots.
Fang noted that lobbying efforts on the part of COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers against the production of low-cost generic equivalents afforded those companies massive revenues, as they “saw the crisis as an opportunity for unprecedented profit.”
The Twitter Files also expose the actions of Pfizer board member Dr Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner, to suppress debate. Independent journalist Alex Berenson, writing in his Unreported Truths Substack, revealed that Gottlieb hired the same Twitter lobbyist the Biden White House had worked with to shut down posts by former acting FDA commissioner Dr Brett Giroir.
“It’s now clear #COVID19 natural immunity is superior to #vaccine immunity, by ALOT. There’s no science justification for #vax proof if a person had prior infection,” claimed Giroir’s tweet. After pressure from Gottlieb to Twitter lobbyist Todd O’Boyle, Giroir’s tweet was later labelled “misleading,” and the ability to like or share it was disabled, with the message: “Learn why health officials suggest a vaccine for most people.” Why would Gottlieb do this? Maybe because the mRNA vaccine had become a cash cow to the tune of $81 billion and Gottlieb was paid $365,000 as a Pfizer board member in one year alone.
The FDA has been in bed with Pfizer and Big Pharma for years, with nine of the last 10 FDA commissioners having gone on to work for pharmaceutical companies. It’s the classic “revolving door” of high-level employees from public-sector jobs moving into private sector jobs – a recipe for corruption.
The one hold-out who did not join the pharma ranks, David Kessler, explained to Quartz: “[The American people] believe that the FDA is making their decisions in their interest and no one else’s.” Kessler expressed concern about politicisation at the FDA, which he views as a threat to “its ability to base decisions on independent, scientific analysis.”
So those hired to protect the public are in bed with industry.
Safe & Effective
It is shocking also to learn that the member of an allegedly independent “data monitoring committee” charged with ensuring the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 product was once a paid consultant and advisor to Pfizer!
Dr Kathryn Edwards’ conflicts of interest were revealed by Del Bigtree, the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN). In an interview with ICAN lead attorney Aaron Siri, details were revealed in court transcripts showing multiple instances where Edwards was coached while her testimony was in progress to downplay her prior involvement with vaccine manufacturers.
Despite the clear proof otherwise, Edwards, a world-renowned vaccinologist, denies a conflict of interest. Her case highlights the many associations and affiliations between researchers, medical scientists, and the industries they are ‘independently’ monitoring and evaluating. You cannot assess the safety of a Pfizer product while being paid by Pfizer.
Siri participated in the now-famous lawsuit to have the FDA release hundreds of thousands of Pfizer’s documents related to the licensing of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 product. Pfizer had pressured the FDA to hold off the release for 75 years, but the lawsuit forced their hand. As thousands of pages hit the public stage, it became apparent that the vaccines were not only ineffective at stopping COVID transmission but exhibited deadly side effects, including myocarditis, and are now being linked to infertility and miscarriages etc. But Pfizer and the ‘health’ authorities kept promoting them as “safe and effective,” even pushing regular boosters.
We already know about the thousands of emerging cases of post-vaccination myocarditis, mostly in teenage or young males, but now reports are coming in about the Pfizer shots adversely affecting the elderly!
An RT news story, “CDC Must Investigate Deadly Vaccine Side Effects,” reported that the US House Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers has called upon the Centers for Disease Control to “rapidly investigate a potential link between Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and strokes among elderly people. The CDC acknowledged the risk yet continues to recommend that everyone over six months of age receive booster shots.”
Alternative news media has been covering the explosion of cases of young and healthy athletes dropping dead on the playing field. The deaths, and those of celebrities and citizens alike, including children, are called “coincidental” or “sudden death syndrome,” but now more doctors and researchers are speaking out.
Excess Deaths
When Dr Michael Yeadon, a former VP at Pfizer, retired and began speaking out about the propaganda surrounding COVID-19, including the “lie” of deadly new variants and the potential dangers of the vaccines, he was censored, banned, and ridiculed.
Yeadon continued to speak out about the mass vaccine campaigns, “injecting some superfluous genetic sequence for which there is absolutely no need or justification.” His “conspiracy theories,” as the media called them, and his concerns that mass vaccination was a pathway for depopulation are now front and centre after new government data showed mortality rates skyrocketed in 2022.
A news report in The Exposé on 23 January 2023, “Vaccine Genocide: Pfizer lied and 20 Million people died in just a handful of Countries according to Secret Government Reports,” claimed the following: “Secret reports from the Governments of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and most of Europe have raised alarm bells as they confirm that approximately 20 million deaths have been recorded resulting in 2 million excess deaths since Pfizer lied to enable the mass roll-out of the COVID-19 injections. Sadly, further reports quietly published by the UK Government also confirm that mortality rates are lowest among the unvaccinated in every single age group. Therefore, this strongly suggests that Pfizer’s lies have caused millions to die, and the COVID-19 injections are the largest contributing factor to the millions of excess deaths seen across the ‘Five Eyes’ and most of Europe.”
Australia alone suffered 11,068 excess deaths in 2021 and then 22,730 excess deaths by week 38 of 2022, in stark contrast to 2020, when only 1,306 excess deaths were recorded at the height of the COVID pandemic and prior to the rollout of the injections. “This means Australia suffered a shocking 1,640% increase in excess deaths in just 39 weeks throughout 2022 compared to 53 weeks throughout 2020.”
Are people just guinea pigs in this relentless pursuit of profits to feed the insatiable Big Pharma beast?
As if it couldn’t get any worse for Pfizer, in January 2023, Project Veritas – a media watchdog group – published undercover footage of a Pfizer executive discussing experiments the company is running on COVID-19 and their vaccine’s effect on women’s reproductive health.
The video, which went viral on social media and was totally ignored by mainstream media, recorded Pfizer Director of Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning, Jordan Tristan Walker, claiming that Pfizer is exploring a way to “mutate” COVID via “Directed Evolution,” similar to gain-of-function that involves “a mutation that confers new or enhanced activity on a protein” and can make COVID more potent. Walker, who was being secretly filmed and thought he was on a date at a restaurant, even acknowledges that “people would not like this information if it went public.”
Screenshots from the Project Veritas sting that netted a senior Pfizer employee into making damaging admissions.
“One of the things we [Pfizer] are exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves so we could create – preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine – no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f**king viruses,” Walker said. “Don’t tell anyone. Promise you won’t tell anyone. The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put the virus in monkeys, and we successively cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them.”
As the fake date progressed, Walker revealed: “You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere. It’s bullshit.”
Not only was Walker admitting that Pfizer was toying with the idea of attempting something similar to gain-of-function, which is supposed to be illegal, but that the virus itself was not of natural origin.
In the video, Walker also lists reasons why Pfizer’s COVID jab could potentially cause issues with women’s menstrual cycles and even insinuates that the company doesn’t know the long-term effects of the vaccine.
“There is something irregular about their menstrual cycles. We will have to investigate that down the line, because that is a little concerning. Because, if you think about the science, it shouldn’t be interacting with the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonadal axis – the hormones that regulate their menstrual cycles and things like that.”
A second video showed Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and his journalists confronting Walker, who attempted to destroy an iPad containing the recordings and called the police. When O’Keefe tried to grab back the iPad, Walker smashed it to the ground. The Project Veritas team left the restaurant before the police arrived.
Pfizer quickly released a statement denying they were conducting directed evolution research regarding vaccine development, but they did not deny Walker’s statements nor that Walker worked for them. While mass media ignored this shocking story, Mr Walker and all his former employment associations with Pfizer were promptly scrubbed from all company listings and the entire internet – however, Project Veritas and other researchers had already captured proof of his employment and work history.
Pfizer has on its website, “We’re in relentless pursuit of medicines and vaccines that will benefit patients around the world.”
In late January, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla announced that profits were way down for their mRNA COVID vaccine product. In an earnings release to Wall Street, Bourla stated, “Our focus is always on what is next. As we turn to 2023, we expect to once again set records, with potentially the largest number of new product and indication launches that we’ve ever had in such a short period of time.”
In just the first three months of 2021, Pfizer made $3.5 billion from its mRNA product. Pfizer went on to make a staggering $36.8 billion in 2021. It predicts revenue of $29 billion in 2022, despite recently admitting that the vaccine does not stop transmission nor stop people from getting sick.
In her Substack blog, the writer Karen Hunt says Pfizer’s massive success with COVID-19 has put CEO Albert Bourla under pressure to “come up with the next blockbuster drug. And we will all be expected to take it.”
“There’s a plethora of illness out there. Which ones are most likely to turn the biggest profit is the question,” notes Hunt. “In the past twelve months, Pfizer launched 16 new products. On its website, Pfizer describes itself as a ‘pipeline’ of potential breakthroughs in the making.”
Pfizer is not going away soon, and we can expect it to pound out more propaganda as it pushes a whole array of new vaccines for every possible ailment.
Will we keep going along with this and take the new shots? “Some of us will refuse,” writes Hunt, “But how many of us can say that at some point in our lives we have not fallen under the spell of a drug company and the promises they gave us?”
It’s high time that spell was broken.
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 197.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
The late Australian geopolitical analyst James O’Neill wrote this article for New Dawn 155, published in 2016. As you will read, James accurately analysed and foretold the events that are unfolding today.
In 1904 Sir Halford Mackinder gave a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in London in which he set out a blueprint for change in the world’s geopolitical footprint. The centrepiece of Mackinder’s vision was the great land mass he called Euro-Asia, now better known as Eurasia.
The heartland of this great landmass, a “world island,” was an area stretching in Mackinder’s vision from the Persian Gulf to the Yangtze River. We would now see it as from Vladivostok to the Baltic. Who rules the heartland, Mackinder argued, rules the World Island. Who rules the World Island “rules the world.”
In Mackinder’s vision the less consequential hemispheres outside this controlling land mass included the United States and Australia. It might be argued that Mackinder underestimated the rise to dominance of the US in the hundred years following his address, but that dominance may be seen, in the broader sweep of history, as an aberration.
American power, so dominant in the latter half of the twentieth century, is fading, being replaced by the re-emergence of Eurasia as the centre of economic, financial and geopolitical power. The self-styled “exceptional nation” (the US) has a fundamental problem with accepting the reality of that shift.
One says re-emergence because the domination of the Western nations’ maritime, colonial and military power existed for a relatively brief period from the mid-16th to the latter 20th century.
American foreign policy post-World War II has sought to maintain control of the world’s resources by building a comprehensive system of military bases that now number between 800 and 1,000, depending on definition, around the world. When viewed on a world map, the European, Asian and Pacific network of bases may be seen as effectively an encirclement of the Eurasian landmass, especially aimed at “containing” any expansion of Chinese and Russian influence.
The military bases have been supplemented by a number of military alliances, of which the better-known ones are NATO, SEATO and ANZUS. Their common denominators are American control and the serving of American interests. Australians like to think of ANZUS as the bulwark of their defence network, but the treaty only requires the parties to “consult” in the event of an attack upon them. It is one of Australia’s more dangerous delusions.
Asymmetrical Warfare
More important than the military alliances, which are publicly portrayed as defensive in character, is the huge effort and resources devoted to asymmetrical warfare. This takes many forms. One form is the use of quasi-governmental organisations such as the US National Endowment for Democracy to finance and organise opposition groups with the aim of “regime change” to ensure a government in the target country that is amenable to American imperial interests. It is known that more than 70 countries since World War II have been subject to that kind of attention.
Another form this asymmetrical warfare takes is the staging of false flag attacks that can be blamed on (generally) left wing groups, thereby ensuring the retention of power of conservative pro-American governments. Operation Gladio is the best documented of this type of subversion.
A third favoured technique is the use of extremist proxy groups, of which the current incarnation is radical Islamists. That is not a new phenomenon, however, as its origins can be traced back at least to Operation Cyclone. That particular operation began in Pakistan in the 1980s where Muslim radicals (including the later infamous Osama bin Laden) were trained by the Americans to infiltrate and disrupt non-compliant governments.
An obvious target was the leftist nationalist government of Afghanistan, but in fact the intended targets for infiltration, subversion, sabotage, assassinations and general mayhem included Iran, the then Soviet republics to the north of Afghanistan, and the Muslim Chinese region of Xinjiang.
The CIA was the source of many of these policies. Finance for the operations, which had to be shielded from US congressional scrutiny, came largely from control of the production, distribution and sale of illegal narcotics.
As Peter Dale Scott, Alfred McCoy and others have documented, CIA control of the world’s narcotics trade can be traced to the South East Asia Golden Triangle, for which the American War in Vietnam provided so many lucrative opportunities, to Afghanistan’s heroin. The latter provided 93% of the world’s supply. The Taliban government had virtually eliminated that industry during their period in power in the 1990s. It was no coincidence that following the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the US and its allies including Australia, one of the earliest major changes was a reinstatement of the heroin industry. Bagram air base north of Kabul became the major departure point for heroin distribution. Camp Bond Steel in Kosovo, the largest American base in Europe, but almost completely absent from the pages of the Western press, functions inter alia as a major transit point for heroin into Europe.
Colombian cocaine performs a similar function for the American market. Daniel Hopsicker has brilliantly exposed the interconnections between Colombian cocaine, the CIA and American politicians at the highest levels of government.
The final component of this strategy was for the US Navy to control the world’s great maritime “choke points.” These are the narrow sea-lanes through which the great preponderance of the world’s maritime trade must pass.
There are seven such great choke points. In each of these there is either direct US control (e.g. the Panama Canal); a significant American military presence that either controls the choke point (Persian Gulf, Straits of Malacca, Straits of Hormuz); or has a significant military presence (air, sea and land based) in close proximity. The US 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean (Suez Canal) and the 7th Fleet in Bahrain supplement land bases also in close proximity.
Such unipolar dominance and actual or implied military threats is clearly intolerable to the other great powers of Eurasia – Russia and China. The pressure to respond has become increasingly acute in recent years as the US, through its NATO arm, has steadily moved further East in direct contradiction to assurances given to Russia at the end of the Cold War. The American organised coup d’état in Ukraine clearly crossed a red line as far as the Russians are concerned.
One Belt, One Road
The response of China and Russia to these endless provocations has taken many forms, which either individually or collectively, amount to a quiet revolution that is fundamentally reshaping the post World War II geopolitical structure. This revolution is being achieved without a single coup, invasion, acts of subversion or assassination of an unfriendly leader. Much less are there threats or sanctions. The revolution is predicated upon what Chinese President Xi Jinping likes to refer to as a “win-win” policy.
Xi first presented his vision of a One Belt, One Road policy in a speech to the Indonesian parliament in October 2013. Chinese attempts to reform existing financial and trade institutions were repeatedly stalled or rebuffed. US foreign policies, of the type noted above, showed no inclination to change. If China was not to be eventually trapped by the tightening US noose, a bold new initiative was required.
Since then, events regarding the New Silk Roads, as the policy is known in the West, have moved with dizzying speed. Scarcely a week passes without major new announcements, and any listing would rapidly become obsolete. The framework for Xi’s initiative was already in place as discussed below. The interested reader can readily ascertain details of the land and maritime routes that are incorporated in the plan.
Chinese President Xi Jinping
The main focus here is to put the New Silk Roads into their geopolitical context, and then to examine the implications for the changing world order and the challenges it poses for countries such as Australia.
Chronologically, the first development was the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in 1996. There are currently six member nations: China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
There are a further six states with “observer status”: Afghanistan, Belarus, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan. India and Pakistan have been granted membership and will formally become full members in 2016.
Iran’s accession to full status has been hampered by Western inspired sanctions. The ostensible reason for the sanctions was Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” All 16 US intelligence agencies have on two occasions concluded there was no such program.
That did not stop the customary belligerence from Israel, an actual nuclear-armed state, that the Western press carefully avoids acknowledging. Neither did it lessen the sanctions regime imposed by the West [Editor’s note: In January 2016, the West lifted sanctions against Iran following the implementation of a deal negotiated in 2015. In 2018, under President Trump, the US reneged on the deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran]. The real reason for the sanctions had more to do with placating Israel and Saudi Arabia and the lingering dislike for Iran by the Americans for having the temerity to overthrow the US backed dictator. The Shah had been imposed on Iran following the CIA-MI6 organised coup against the secular Mosaddegh government in 1953. The coup was on behalf of the Anglo-American Oil Company (now BP) whose assets had been nationalised by the Iranian government.
As with so much of the politics of south-west Asia, an understanding of geopolitics is only ascertainable when one appreciates the central role of oil and gas resources, and the insatiable desire of the West to control those resources for their own benefit.
The execrable Saudi regime is only tolerated by the West because it is the world’s largest source of oil. Its importance to the West was reinforced by the then secret agreement entered into in 1973 between the Saudis and the Americans that all oil sales were to be denominated in US dollars.
This latter fact has been a principal reason why the US dollar has been able to defy economic logic and maintain its position, until very recently, as the world’s sole reserve currency.
The decisions by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qadhafi in Libya to accept payment for oil and gas in other than US dollars was undoubtedly a major factor in the illegal regime change imposed on their countries in 2003 and 2011 respectively. That both countries have among the world’s largest known reserves of oil and gas was also a significant factor. The blowback from those two disastrous interventions reverberates today.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) were the next major geopolitical grouping. Preliminary discussions began in 2006, although the first formal summit was not until 2009. South Africa joined in 2010.
China, India and Russia are the common basis of membership of both the SCO and BRICS. Between them they account for approximately 40% of the world’s population. China, India and Russia are all major components, geographically as well as in population terms, of Mackinder’s World Island. Brazil is by far the largest nation of South America, and South Africa was until 2015 the richest African nation. Both South America and Africa are key elements of China’s diversification in the supply of its raw materials.
BRICS Bank & AIIB
An important but little reported upon event, in the Western press at least, is the formation of the BRICS Bank, and the decision by its members to trade in their own currencies rather than through the medium of the US dollar. This is a significant move in a wider series of moves to fundamentally alter the dollar based financial system that has dominated world trade in the post World War II era.
The third major Eurasian development was the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), the formal establishment treaty for which was signed in May 2014 with the customs union coming into force from 1 January 2015. Its members are Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kirghizstan and Russia. Again, the overlap with membership of the SCO is readily apparent.
Some observers have derided this development as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to recreate the old Soviet bloc. This is typical of the ideologically driven comment that passes for analysis where Russia is concerned. The Russian leadership had for some years tried to interest the European Union in a grand free trade area from “Lisbon to Vladivostok.” It was only when these efforts were repeatedly rebuffed that the EEU was born.
There have already been formal links established between the EEU and the SCO covering a wide range of areas of co-operation. Again, one of the most significant developments is that the trade relations between the member countries of the two groupings are denominated in other than US dollars.
The fourth development in this context of enormous significance is the establishment of the China led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). It was formed in 2014 and 57 countries have already signed up, including Australia, Germany, France, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
The conspicuous absentees from the founding nations are Japan and the United States. The European nations, Australia and New Zealand signed up in the face of significant American pressure not to do so. This was a rare example of those countries acting in their own national interests, as opposed to American interests.
One of the functions of the AIIB will be to fund the huge infrastructure projects that are a central element of Chinese President Xi’s vision for an alternative world order to one that is run by and on behalf of the Americans.
To nobody’s surprise the Americans have not quietly acquiesced in this fundamental realignment from a unipolar to a multipolar world. Their response has taken a number of forms, two of which may be briefly noted here.
The American Response
The first is a series of military and political moves designed to exert pressure on Russia and China in particular. In Russia’s case that has included the almost unparalleled demonisation of Russia in general and President Putin in particular.
The coup in Ukraine noted above was followed in quick succession by Crimea rejoining Russia, and the shooting down over eastern Ukraine of Malaysian Flight MH17. Despite Crimea’s long history as an important part of Russia, and that the decision by Crimea to leave Ukraine and apply to join the Russian Federation followed an overwhelming popular vote for that course, it is consistently portrayed in the Western media as an example of “Russian aggression,” an “annexation” and a demonstration of Mr Putin’s alleged imperialistic ambitions.
Despite very strong evidence that the shoot down of MH17 was carried out by Ukrainian forces, the Western media portrayed it as “Putin’s missile.” All evidence to the contrary, as with the recent Dutch Safety Board Report into the crash, is simply ignored or misrepresented. Appendix T of the Report, for example, said that the missile was fired from an area contested by both the separatists and Ukrainian forces. The Report also said there was no evidence separatists had possession of BUK missiles or the technical capacity to fire them.
Notwithstanding this clear evidence, [then]-Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop claimed that separatists from a separatist controlled area had fired the missile. This blatant misrepresentation was simply reported by the media without correction or comment.
The American led sanctions against Russia for its alleged transgressions in Ukraine have hurt the European nations more than it has hurt Russia. A direct consequence of these ill-conceived policies has been the acceleration of co-operation and mutual assistance by Russia and China. Throughout 2014 and 2015 these two countries have signed a plethora of agreements in trade, defence, and infrastructure development that are worth significantly more than two trillion dollars.
In the Asia-Pacific region the American response has been to step up its so-called pivot to Asia. In reality, this is no more than a continuation of long standing American interference in the region. The devastation wrought on Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam from the 1950s to the 1970s is only one such example.
The current policy is clearly to engage in a series of provocations against China in the South China Sea. When one looks at a map of American bases in near proximity to China, and the concentration of naval, air and land forces at those bases, just who is being belligerent is immediately obvious.
One of the most important features of the New Silk Roads policy being developed at a rapid pace by China and its allied countries in BRICS, the EEU and the SCO, is that the vast energy and mineral resources of Russia, Mongolia and others in these groupings, are capable of meeting all of China’s needs without recourse to Australian resources. China also has the option of sourcing its energy and mineral needs from its rapidly expanding links in Africa and Latin America.
When China is contemplating further large scale purchases of iron ore, copper, bauxite etc., is it more likely to turn to its land based neighbours and other friendly nations in Africa and Latin America, or will it continue to buy from an Australia that persists in its slavish adherence to US foreign policy imperatives? The answer to that question is something that should be giving Australian policy makers serious concern.
The New Silk Roads therefore is a great deal more than just the world’s largest infrastructure project. It is much more than the linking, through multiple high speed rail links over 12,000 kilometres of the Eurasian landmass from Vladivostok to Berlin.
As important and frankly exciting as these huge infrastructure projects are, the longer-term significance lies in the development of a wholly different financial structure. The major instruments of Western economic hegemony, the IMF and the World Bank, the interbank credit system and many more, have proved incapable of reform. A range of financial institutions is progressively replacing them in arrangements created by the SCO, BRICS and EEU.
Perhaps most significantly of all, countries trading in their own currencies, or through Special Drawing Rights that now include the Yuan, are steadily replacing the US dollar. The scramble by traditional financial centres such as London and Frankfurt to be part of this financial revolution is a very clear indicator they at least recognise the emerging geopolitical reality.
The overriding geopolitical question is whether so-called Western nations such as Australia recognise these changing realities and adapt accordingly, or whether they remain mired in the old Anglo-American world and its increasingly irrelevant certainties. Making the right choices dictates whether the future is one of prosperity as an active and vital component of Mackinder’s World Island, or as one of the losers in a nuclear showdown that existing Western policies almost certainly foreshadow.
[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 155.[/alert]
[alert type=”success” dismiss=”no”]If you appreciate this article, please consider subscribing to help maintain this website.[/alert]
The following was one of the final pieces written by the late Australian geopolitical analyst James O’Neill. For several years, James had been writing on these matters for New Dawn. Today we are witnessing the beginning of the new multipolar world.
The annual meeting of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (STIEF) was held in June 2022. As usual, it received very little coverage in the Western mainstream media, which prefers to ignore developments in Russia or, if it mentions them at all, denigrate the importance of what is happening.
The theme of the 2022 meeting was appropriately ‘New Opportunities in a New World’. Representatives of 115 countries and regions attended. Absent were representatives of Western countries.
This year’s conference was notable on several grounds. It featured a groundbreaking speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin (of which more below), but perhaps even more importantly, it foreshadowed major changes in geopolitics and the world economic system.
The war in Ukraine has undoubtedly triggered many of the responses observed in Saint Petersburg, but they have been in the making for some time. Developments such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have instigated new relations between countries that mark a significant transition away from the system created and dominated by the Western powers of Europe, North America and Australasia over the past 300 years. That era is rapidly drawing to a close. However, it won’t be a peaceful transition and things will likely get a lot more fractious before the new world order is established.
The BRI has several smaller groupings, each important and contributing to the fundamental realignment of the world’s nations. But, again, these developments scarcely rate a mention in the Western media, long transformed by its own sense of importance and used to dealing with the developing world in other than an exploitative way.
This has included the use of force by the Western powers to sustain what it perceives as its right to dominate the world and force recalcitrant countries to comply with its image of how the world should be run.
Western interventions are almost invariably based on lies. One only needs to recall the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by United States-led forces based on allegations that Afghanistan was sheltering Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the “9/11” attacks in the United States in Sept 2001, and in the case of Iraq that they possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bin Laden died from natural causes in December 2001. His obituary was even reported in the New York Times. However, his death did not result in the Americans and their allies withdrawing from Afghanistan with apologies.
There was a similar complete absence of apology and withdrawal when the American allegations about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction also proved to be a complete lie. Now, 20 years later, the Americans still occupy Iraq and show no inclination to leave that country, much less apologise and pay compensation. They are joined by their Australian colleagues who similarly refused a 2001 demand by the Iraqi government to vacate their country.
Even the fake arrest and death of “bin Laden” in May 2011 did not result in the Americans and their friends withdrawing from Afghanistan. On the contrary, they stayed a further decade before staging an ignominious retreat.
This prolonged occupation of the country gave rise to several theories about the real reasons for the invasion and occupation. Thwarting the development of Afghanistan was one reason. Others included control of the world’s opium trade, a long-standing American preoccupation where Afghanistan was responsible for more than 80% of the world’s opium supplies. Preventing Afghanistan from joining the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative was also a motivation. Unfortunately, none of these real motives for the invasion and prolonged occupation of Afghanistan were ever given much coverage in the Western media.
BRICS & Putin’s Speech
The Saint Petersburg forum was also crucial in connecting to other developments helping transform the world economy. The first of these is the emergence of what some have called the “new G8,” which combines four of the BRICS nations (Brazil, China, India and Russia – but excluding South Africa) with four other emerging nations: Iran, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey. The BRICS heads of state recently participated via video link in the 14th BRICS Summit held in China.
The combined gross domestic product of these eight nations exceeds the GDP of the original eight (as it was when Russia belonged.) The inclusion of Turkey in the grouping is perhaps the only surprise, given that country’s membership of NATO, but it marks the increasingly independent stance taken by Turkey in managing its affairs.
Putin highlighted these developments in his speech at the Saint Petersburg meeting. It is worth noting some of the highlights of the speech that the official news outlet of the Kremlin noted was “extremely important.” Putin said that new centres of power had emerged and that the old unipolar world order was not coming back. Its colonial “way of thinking” had proven a failure.
Putin noted that the United States had declared itself the victor of the Cold War and subsequently saw itself as the leader of the world in which its views were paramount. Putin rejected United States unilateralism. He referred to the “truly revolutionary, tectonic changes in geopolitics, in the global economy, and the technological sphere, and in the entire system of international relations.” Those changes were, he said, “fundamental, pivotal and inexorable.”
Over the past two years, Putin noted, the money supply in the United States has grown by 38%. In the past, similar rises took decades but now it grew by 38% or $5.9 trillion in two years. The European Union money supply also dramatically increased over the same period. It grew by about 20% or €2.5 trillion.
While at the end of 2020, imports of goods to the United States amounted to about $250 billion a month, now it has grown to about $350 billion a month. They printed and distributed money and used it, Putin alleged, to wipe out goods from third-world markets.
The Western world tried to undermine and even crash the Russian economy with its sanctions. The reverse has been the case with the cost of living in Europe being driven up. The European Union has lost its political sovereignty and instead of damaging Russia it damaged its own population and economy. The direct cost of the sanctions imposed on Russia will cost the European economies over $400 billion in one year.
The West says high energy prices are “Putin’s price hike,” which is a profoundly ignorant attempt at misdirection. Putin labelled this a “stupidity, designed for people who could neither read nor write.” The Russian leader assessed that the Western establishment’s disconnection from the people “will inevitably lead to a surge in populism and extremist and radical movements, major socioeconomic changes, degradation and a change of elites in the short term.”
Troubles with the food supply did not arise over recent months but can be traced back several years. The West caused those problems, Putin argued, in what he described as the “short-sighted actions of those who are accustomed to solving their problems at the expense of others.” Trade flows have been disrupted and distorted by printing money and what he described as a “predatory colonial policy.”
On Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Putin described it as a forced consequence of the genocidal policies pursued by the Kiev regime, whose “neo-Nazis have received the full protection of the West.” It is difficult to argue against that analysis. The Kiev regime did nothing to implement the provisions of the Minsk accord of 2015, and their total lack of action in this regard, apart from the inevitable breaking away of the two Donbass republics and Crimea, led directly to the war that has now broken out.
The Ukrainian government has just banned two more political parties, bringing the total number of banned parties to nine. This is an open power grab by the Ukrainian president and his government, removing any opposition to their rule. This power grab and the cancellation of the legitimate existence of opposition parties receives no attention in the Western media. Instead, the Ukrainian president appears to be the darling of the West, with a willingness to overlook his manifest flaws and anti-democratic tendencies and policies to an astonishing degree.
Ukraine’s president still indulges in the fantasy of Crimea being returned to Kiev’s control, a fantasy shared with Western nations who disregard entirely the history of how Crimea became part of Ukraine in 1954 and, more recently, the overwhelming vote of its population to reunite with Russia. This is an event the Western media persistently misreports as Russia’s “annexation” of Crimea.
The President of China, Xi Jinping, delivered an address by video at the Saint Petersburg conference. Xi’s message was clearly directed to the whole of the global South. He evoked what he called “true multilateralism” in which the emerging economies of the world – not coincidentally making up the bulk of the nations in China’s Belt and Road Initiative – had to have “a say in global economic management.”
The world, said Xi, is now entering a new period of turbulence and transformation amid the ongoing radical changes and the coronavirus pandemic. The growing divide between the South and the North and weakening cooperation in the area of development could plunge the erratically reviving global economy into a deep recession. Xi quoted in his speech what he described as ancient Chinese words of wisdom, where a clever man sees a seed of crisis in every opportunity and an opportunity in every crisis.
Constructing an Alternative World Order
A good example of the emerging nature of key economic groupings is the focus on the increasingly important relationship between members of the Eurasian Economic Union (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia) and membership of the ASEAN Group of nations (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam).
These two groups of largely developing nations are uniting in a common interest of closer international agreement. Countries that have been outside the Western-centred economic structure are combining to promote a genuine system of international cooperation.
Russia and Iran are accelerating the construction of a new International North-South Transport Corridor from Mumbai to the Baltic through Iran, the Caspian Sea, South, and Central Russia. Launched in 2002, the route is a shorter and cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal route.
This is marked, among other things, by a rejection of the United States and the so-called “rules-based international order” which in practice means following the rules devised by, and for the benefit of, the United States. The development of a new order was one of the themes developed by Putin in his speech. This theme is finding favour not only in the international groupings noted above but is symbolised by developments on the ground like the International North-South Transport Corridor linking Russia with the Persian Gulf via the Caspian Sea and Iran. Russia has started using this new route to ship goods, bypassing the Mediterranean Sea/Suez Canal route.
During STIEF’s ‘Russia – Africa’ Business Dialogue, the Russian academician and Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) Minister for Integration and Macro-Economics, Sergei Glazyev, pointed out that the time has come to go beyond shifting payments to national currencies. He advocates creating a unified exchange space in the EEU for price formation in national currencies rather than relying on currency exchange rates based on the US dollar.
The liberal, “rules-based” order is under challenge, both from a recognition induced by economic crisis and war, and the unfair advantage it offers Western powers. An alternative economic order is now takingshape. For example, at the recent 23-24 June BRICS+ summit, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), is “exploring the possibility of creating an international reserve currency based on the basket of BRICS currencies.” Eurasian Economic Union official, Sergei Glazyev (above), is the leading proponent for an independent international monetary and financial system based on sovereign equality of all nations.
Glazyev argued for a completely different attitude to partnership and cooperation. In the hybrid war that the Western world is currently waging against the whole of humanity, he emphasised common interests with African countries. He says we are on the same front line, and to survive this war we need to strengthen economic ties, especially if a common exchange base was created to unite the Eurasian, Asian and African continents. Glazyev invited listeners to develop cooperation in creating this new monetory, financial, trade and economic architecture.
Mikhail Myasnikovich, chairman of the board of the EEU’s Eurasian Economic Commission, told the forum that it was urgent the EEU discuss the development of not only trade and payments in national currencies but construction of an independent monetary system.
These new organisations represent a major break from the old Western-dominated arrangements. They are the way of the future for countries like Australia, which has largely ignored the realities of its geography and will face considerable challenges as it is forced to turn away from the United States to ensure its economic survival.
The Belt and Road Initiative, the largest of these emerging developments, represents an existential threat to the United States’ view of the world. One can expect the United States to take steps, which it is already doing, to combat this challenge to their previous supremacy. The pressure put on Germany to cancel the Nord Stream 2 project is one example of the United States fighting the emergence of a new system that challenges its previous dominance.
As the Russia affairs expert Gilbert Doctorow (www.gilbertdoctorow.com) recently noted, Putin “argued the case that the present grave challenges to the global economic, financial and political systems have their source in wrong-headed policies in the collective West.” In Putin’s view, he wrote, “the West has not absorbed the lessons handed down in elementary school and are now trying, in the global Information War, to put the blame” for their inflation on Putin.
The emergence of new multinational arrangements and multiple new trade routes approve a more powerful force than the old United States-dominated system. This is not to suggest the transition will be easy. The United States can be expected to fight hard and dirty to try and retain its previous dominance. To invoke a Chinese curse: we live in interesting times. The trick will be to maintain the changes without a war. That may prove the greatest challenge.
It is clear from the meeting in Saint Petersburg and the BRICS summit in China that the world is undergoing epochal changes to the European system that has dominated the past 300 years. It will not be a change without challenges. It is the chance to recreate the world’s economic and social system in a new way. The challenge should be welcomed.
