Category Archives: Ukraine

Why I am now a Christian

Atheism can't equip us for civilisational war

Article by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on UnHerd.com.

Quotes:

Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.

But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

[. . .]

To me, this freedom of conscience and speech is perhaps the greatest benefit of Western civilisation. It does not come naturally to man. It is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible. Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.

[. . .]

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilisational. We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilisation that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

That is why I no longer consider myself a Muslim apostate, but a lapsed atheist. Of course, I still have a great deal to learn about Christianity. I discover a little more at church each Sunday. But I have recognised, in my own long journey through a wilderness of fear and self-doubt, that there is a better way to manage the challenges of existence than either Islam or unbelief had to offer.

A Year of Lying About Nord Stream

Seymour Hersh writes about his research on this topic.

Excerpt (conclusion):

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.

NATO Chief Openly Admits Russia Invaded Ukraine Because Of NATO Expansion

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

During a speech at the EU Parliament’s foreign affairs committee on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clearly and repeatedly acknowledged that Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine because of fears of NATO expansionism.

His comments, initially flagged by journalist Thomas Fazi, read as follows:

The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

Stoltenberg made these remarks as part of a general gloat about the fact that Putin invaded Ukraine to prevent NATO expansion and yet the invasion has resulted in Sweden and Finland applying to join the alliance, saying it “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he’s getting the exact opposite.”

Stoltenberg’s remarks would probably have been classified as Russian propaganda by plutocrat-funded “disinformation experts” and imperial “fact checkers” if it had been said online by someone like you or me, but because it came from the head of NATO as part of a screed against the Russian president it’s been allowed to pass through without objection.

In reality Stoltenberg is just stating a well-established fact: contrary to the official western narrative, Putin invaded Ukraine not because he is evil and hates freedom but because no great power ever allows foreign military threats to amass on its borders  —  including the United States. That’s why so many western analysts and officials spent years warning that NATO’s actions were going to provoke a war, and yet when war broke out we were slammed with a tsunami of mass media propaganda repeating over and over and over again that this was an “unprovoked invasion”.

Continue reading here.

Silencing the Lambs. How Propaganda Works

Article by John Pilger, from 6 September 2022.

From the conclusion:

When will real journalists stand up? An inspirational samizdat  already exists on the internet: Consortium News, founded by the great reporter Robert Parry, Max Blumenthal’s  Grayzone, Mint Press News, Media Lens, Declassified UK, Alborada, Electronic Intifada, WSWS, ZNet, ICH, Counter Punch, Independent Australia, the work of Chris Hedges, Patrick Lawrence, Jonathan Cook, Diana Johnstone, Caitlin Johnstone and others who will forgive me for not mentioning them here.

And when will writers stand up, as they did against the rise of fascism in the 1930s? When will film-makers stand up, as they did against the Cold War in the 1940s? When will satirists stand up, as they did a generation ago?

Having soaked for 82 years in a deep bath of righteousness that is the official version of the last world war, isn’t it time those who are meant to keep the record straight declared their independence and decoded the propaganda? The urgency is greater than ever.

Why is the West so Weak (and Russia so Strong)?

The role of human capital and western education

Article by Gaius Baltar.

I suggest that the cause of this unfolding disaster is a serious structural problem in the West – which Russia seems to have largely avoided. This structural problem is a necessary condition for the current western system and has been purposely created to bring it about and maintain it. This problem is the subject of this article – as well as the “mechanism” behind it. This is unfortunately a long article, but the subject matter demands it.

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

>>>>>>

Update (24/06/2023): I heard a day or so ago that Youtube has taken the video down. Indeed it has been. No problem, see it here instead.

<<<<<<

Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

The Covid Deception: The Dire Consequences of the Lack of Accountability

Only accountability can rescue freedom from tyranny.

Paul Craig Roberts summarises the current situation.

Excerpts (my emphases):

Reiner Fuellmich, who has been investigating together with thousands of attorneys and scientists assembled in the German Corona Investigative Committee the toxicity of the vaccine, has collected enormous evidence that the vaccine is toxic.  The puzzle has been why some suffered death or injury and others did not.  The answer is the inconsistency of the vaccine batches.  Experts, such as former Pfizer vice president and chief science officer Dr. Michael Yeadon and former head of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Dr. Wolfgang Wodran, have concluded that “criminal acts are being committed” and that “a big crime is so obvious.”

You can read the report here, I encourage you to do so.  I am now going to turn to its implications.

We know for a fact that the “Covid pandemic” was a fear-driven orchestration, and that no aspect of the treatment protocol was effective or made any sense.  The masks do not protect. The lockdowns did more harm than good. Human rights were violated by coerced mandated involuntary vaccinations with a substance untested and put into use under an emergency authorization that required that there were no known treatments or cures.

The emergency use requirement meant that known cures successfully used in other countries, such as Brazil and India, had to be denied and prohibited from use in the US and other parts of the Western world.  US public health authorities and the presstitutes lied through their teeth that Ivermectin and HCQ were dangerous and unapproved drugs.  Ivermectin was said to be a horse medicine dangerous to humans.  In actual fact both drugs had long been approved for human use and had many decades of use and perfect safety records.  Ivermectin is routinely taken as a preventative of river blindness in those parts of Africa where the parasite is prevalent, and HCQ has long been used as a preventative of malaria.

[…]

Remember also that hospitals were incentivized to maximize Covid deaths as they were paid some $39,000 for each Covid death.  Consequently, nearly all deaths were reported as Covid deaths, even motorcycle accidents, thus maximizing the reported Covid death rate and driving people to vaccination.  

Remember, the PCR test used to diagnose Covid was said by the test’s inventor to be incapable of diagnosing Covid.  The PCR test produced up to 97% false positives, thus immensely exaggerating the pandemic.

Remember too, that the original explanation for Covid was infected bat meat sold in a Chinese market.  We now know for a fact that Covid was an engineered virus and that the “gain-of-function” aspect, which made if contagious, was financed by NIH at the University of North Carolina and when criticism arose due to concerns it violated the Biowarfare Convention, the funding was moved to Wuhan in China.  Remember also, that initially DARPA was involved in the manufacture of the virus.

The new story is that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, but more alert people believe the Covid virus was intentionally released.

There are many independent scientists with no Big Pharma conflicts of interest who regard the “vaccine” as not only more deadly than Covid but also as a bioweapon.  Clearly, the fact now revealed that 5% of the doses account for the adverse effects implies motive and intention.  This must be investigated by independent scientists and organizations.  It is difficult to expect Congress, as dependent as its members are on Big Pharma campaign funds, and the regulatory public health agencies, FDA, NIH, CDC, agencies that are revolving door Big Pharma marketing agents, to honestly investigate the “Covid pandemic” and the toxic batches of the vaccine.

If there is no investigation and no accountability, you can expect worse orchestrated pandemics in the near future.  There are indications that the US has been experimenting with weaponizing ebola, and within the past two years I reported that vials of deadly smallpox had twice been discovered lying about on counters instead of being under lock and key.

[…]

Bioweapon research is Satanic and contrary to the Biowarfare Convention. That the US continues this illegal research is a danger to every American and to the entire world.  Moreover, it shows a reckless unconcern on the part of the US government and its scientists for law and life.  

Government agencies that operate secretly outside the law can lie forever to Congress and can invoke “national security,” a holy cow for Congress, and escape accountability.  We are currently watching the FBI and DOJ continue their protection of Joe and Hunter Biden while pursuing President Trump with false charges.  

Nuclear war is a real possibility.  The neoconservatives’ hostility toward all countries capable of serving as constraints on US unilateralism, together with the Kremlin’s endless tolerance of provocations, are leading to nuclear war.

We face equal risk of extermination from the US government’s weaponization of deadly viruses.  This work continues unobstructed and justified with every kind of false argument.  “Our enemies are doing it, so we must also in order to protect ourself.”  Or as Fauci, Gates, and others claim, we have to make deadly viruses in order to study them so we can be able to preempt them with vaccines.

These arguments are false.  Moreover, the consequences for humanity and all life of nuclear war and bioweapons are so horrific that it makes the pursuit of peace the ultimate of all goals.  But Washington is pursuing hegemony, which is a guarantee of war.

The danger of our situation cannot be exaggerated.  Only accountability for the orchestrated Covid pandemic can re-establish human life as more important than Big Pharma’s profits and rescue freedom from tyranny.

Beware Perfidious Albion as Britain Takes Lead Role in War Provocation

Perhaps more dangerous than a dying imperial power is a dying imperial side-kick flunky

Writes Finian Cunningham:

For the most part of the past century, the failed British empire was assigned the junior role as the butler to service the needs of the American empire. This special relationship involved London giving political and diplomatic cover for its American boss, as well as military services when required for one dirty war or another.

It is axiomatic that a dying empire is a dangerous beast, liable to lash out to salvage its waning power. The American empire has reached its death throes moment. But perhaps more dangerous than a dying imperial power is a dying imperial side-kick flunky.

Today, Britain is a broken-down impoverished de-industrialized wasteland whose shocking numbers of poor are like an army of living dead. It has long ago lost former colonies to parasite off. But there is one former colony – the United States – that might just be stupid enough to allow Perfidious Albion to manipulate a catastrophic war.

The tensions over the NATO proxy war in Ukraine with Russia are a powder-keg situation. And the British dirty-tricks brigade are the past masters that merit being closely watched.

Read the whole piece here.

Is the collective West nearing the end of a cycle?

Or are we still in mid-cycle? And could it be an epochal point of inflection?

Writes Alastair Crooke:

The levelling project being essentially nihilistic becomes captured by the destructive side of the revolution – its authors so absorbed with dismantling structures that they do not attend to the need to think policies through, before launching into them. The latter are not adept at doing politics: at making politics ‘work’.

(Interenstingly, this applies not only to foreign policy, such as Ukraine and Taiwan, but also to Covid and climate change policies.)

Thus, discontent at the welling string of western foreign policy flops grows. Crises multiply, both in number and across different societal dimensions. Perhaps, we are closening to a point of beginning to move through the cycle – toward disillusionment, retrenchment, and stabilization; the prerequisite step to catharsis and ultimate renewal. Yet, it would be a mistake to underestimate the longevity and tenacity of the western revolutionary impulse.

“The revolution does not operate as an explicit political movement. It operates laterally through the bureaucracy and it filters its revolutionary language through the language of the therapeutic, the language of the pedagogical, or the language of the corporate HR department”, Professor Furedi writes. “And then, it establishes power anti-democratically, bypassing the democratic structure: using this manipulative and soft language – to continue the revolution from within the institutions.”