Beyond Negative Evidence on COVID Vaccines

Civil Defense Perspectives January 2024 (vol. 39 #1)

The finding of DNA fragments in COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, by standard laboratory methods by professional researchers, has created a great stir. It is actual affirmative evidence of potential danger—but only a first step (tinyurl.com/3af6xf3t).       The scientists, principally Kevin McKernan and Phillip Buckhaults, Ph.D., carefully divulged the limitations of their work, including the small number of vaccine samples and lack of a chain of custody, and emphasized the need for further research.

The reports do not come from the Ivy League or from eminent scientists or from NEJM. Dr. Buckhaults has not yet published his findings, but provided oral testimony before the South Carolina Senate.  McKernan, who has an undergraduate degree in biology, is the founder of Medicinal Genomics, a company that markets test kits and genomics-related services to the cannabis,  hemp, and mushroom industries (tinyurl.com/3ns3ywny). Dr. Buckhaults is a professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of South Carolina.

The work is under attack, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) deny that the “small” quantities of DNA fragments are a problem. The FDA sets a regulatory threshold for residual DNA, and the tested samples reportedly exceeded this. An EMA spokesperson said the agency was not “aware of scientific evidence showing that the…residual DNA that may be present in vaccine batches could integrate into the DNA of vaccinated individuals” (ibid.). And “there isn’t evidence to date that the vaccines cause cancer or have led to an increase in cancer” (ibid.).

Continue reading “Beyond Negative Evidence on COVID Vaccines”

Negative Evidence on COVID Vaccines

Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 38 #6

As of Jan 2, 2024, the lead entry on the website of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) is still “COVID-19 Vaccines.” It states: “COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and free. Everyone 6 months and older can get an updated COVID-19 vaccine.” It adds that “Children aged 6 months–4 years need multiple doses of COVID-19 vaccines to be up to date, including at least 1 dose of updated COVID-19 vaccine.”

Other nations are banning the use of these vaccines in persons under age 30. Social media, especially since Elon Musk bought Twitter, is full of reports of sudden deaths and other catastrophes linked to receipt of these vaccines. Coincidences? Various authorities, of varying credibility, announce detailed theories and “smoking guns” that trend explosively for a time. Click bait for fund-raising campaigns? The theories, such as the hydras, the snake venom, and the self-organizing nanobots, fade away, and the funds disappear. So, what can we conclude about safety?

A series of guest editorials in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (www.jpands.org) considers the negative evidence for many of the possible adverse events.

Continue reading “Negative Evidence on COVID Vaccines”

The New World Alignment

Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 38 #5

During his invasion of Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush popularized the idea of the New World Order. Today, American diplomats frequently invoke the “rules-based international order,” to which all nations are supposed to submit. The underlying assumption seems to be that the rule maker will be the World’s Only Superpower, the center of a unipolar world. The recognized physical capital might be Washington, D.C., but the ruling elite would be globalists, who might be in Davos, Switzerland, or anywhere else.

The key concept of the globalists’ World Economic Forum (WEF) is that “you will own nothing.” As with communism, private property would be abolished, and “the people” or a few megacorporations would own everything and allow you, if you are sufficiently compliant, to use your fair share for the “common good” and the good of the Planet.

Continue reading “The New World Alignment”

The End of Dollar Hegemony

Civil Defense Perspectives March 2023 (vol. 38 #2)

Defeating Russia in Ukraine is “the most important thing in the world right now,” according to U.S. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Tucker Carlson disagrees: maintaining the value of the dollar is far, far more important, though the media and politicians are largely ignoring this issue.

The U.S. dollar has been the currency of the world for 80 years, giving Americans unique privileges of low-cost borrowing. But with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. determined to blow up the Russian economy. The “strong sanctions” were “morally essential” to deter further aggression, politicians said. But since March 2022, it has been apparent that the U.S. has been hurt far more, Carlson stated.

Unlike the U.S., Russia does not have a late-stage finance economy. Oligarchs do not get rich from credit default swaps but from selling things that people actually need, such as coal, gas, wheat, and fertilizer. The largest resource economy on earth can barter if necessary. In contrast, the Biden Administration has depleted the most valuable hard asset the U.S. has, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The sale of 218 million barrels in one year is more than in all previous years combined. And no one knows, Carlson says, how much gold is in Fort Knox.

By converting the dollar, previously an apolitical store of value, into a weapon, the Biden Administration has “done the most destructive thing to America that any president has ever done.” People have learned that if the U.S. government disapproves of what they do, it can seize all their money. If dollars held abroad come home, the massive worsening of inflation will cause poverty and civil unrest, Carlson predicts.

What caused the hyperinflation in Weimar? Carlson says: Germany borrowed too much money, to fund a pointless war. The U.S. has gotten away with this—until now. But instead of ending the war in Ukraine, U.S. rulers are fantasizing about WWII and Winston Churchill  (https://tinyurl.com/4jrxhe4u).

De-dollarization

The destruction of the dollar is occurring at an accelerating rate. Even France is using Chinese currency.

Beijing and Brasilia have signed an agreement on trade in mutual currencies, abandoning the U.S. dollar as an intermediary. China has been Brazil’s largest trading partner for more than a decade, with bilateral trade hitting a record $150 billion last year.

According to Brazil’s Secretary for International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance, 25 countries are already making settlements with China in yuan (https://tinyurl.com/55p39mmt).

An Upside-down Pyramid

A superstructure on a tiny base is bound to collapse eventually. As the U.S. has off-shored its industrial base, its prosperity is based on financial rather than industrial engineering. “It’s as if the whole objective of corporate industry today is to get consumers to run into debt and make money off the interest…rather than to make a profit,” states Michael Hudson. “Even Macy’s used to make more money by getting credit cards for Macy’s customers than they made actually on the store” (https://tinyurl.com/2wecxnmv).

What we  are seeing now, in Hudson’s opinion, is “the unraveling of neoliberal financialization.” He states that for two decades U.S. authorities have “acted like the policeman in the film Casablanca who is shocked to find there is gambling in the casino.” The Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) has resulted in blowing up asset bubbles, in stock, bonds, and real estate—as well as speculative products such as asset-based securities and derivatives. If the banks reported what their assets were really worth, it would be clear that they are broke. The private banking system cannot survive if interest rates go back to normal.

Hudson explains: If private capital takes over a company like Bed Bath & Beyond, it’ll privatize the company, loan it money, take that loan and pay itself a special dividend for management, and leave the company a bankrupt shell. “So you could say that the role of the banking system is to bankrupt corporate industry and to lock in the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. Really it’s suicide” (ibid.).

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) financed extremely speculative investments and the lavish lifestyles and immense wealth agglomeration of the people involved (ibid.).

“The Treasury has been privatized by the banking system,” Hudson argues. “That is sort of the ultimate victory of finance capitalism, but the result is that it’ll destroy industrialization and what used to be industrial capitalism in the United States” (ibid.).

Reindustrializing the U.S. will require replacing the banking system, Hudson states.

Financial Weapon of Self Destruction

Hanging over the whole banking system is the threat of a quadrillion-dollar derivatives tsunami. Pull out one card and the whole house collapses, writes Ellen Brown. SVB held $27.7 billion in derivatives, no small sum, but it is only .05% of the $55,387 billion ($55.387 trillion) held by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. derivatives bank (https://tinyurl.com/2jw3dejb).

The unwinding of this precarious system will probably be unimaginably catastrophic. If a new BRICS currency emerges,  we can, according to The Consciousness of Sheep, “expect roughly a 33 percent devaluation of the western currencies…something which would result in what can only be described as hyper-stagflation, with prices of imports—including essentials like food and fuel—rising beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest westerners, even as that mountain of unrepayable debt comes tumbling down so rapidly that it will render most of what we still consider repayable bad as well” (tinyurl.com/337yt3rm).

Perpetual Motion Machine Is Failing

In the finance economy, the expansion of credit pulls money into risk assets whose valuation grows as demand increases, serving as collateral for more borrowing, setting in motion a feedback loop. But now the globalized West has pawned everything and owns nothing but debt. The Great Reset is our owners’ attempt to take control of the collateral—our lives—in order to retain control in the face of socioeconomic breakdown, through Central Bank Digital Currency, which can cancel any account at will (https://tinyurl.com/2eszcx5p).


Macron Calls for Ditching Dollar

Returning from his visit to China in early April, French president Emmanuel Macron told journalists of his theory of “strategic autonomy” for Europe, presumably led by France, to become a “third superpower.”

In his meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, Macron also argued that “Europe had increased its dependency on the U.S. for weapons and energy and must now focus on boosting European defense industries” and also suggested that “Europe should reduce its dependence on the ‘extraterritoriality of the U.S. dollar,’ a key policy objective of both Moscow and Beijing.”

“Russia, China, Iran and other countries have been hit by U.S. sanctions in recent years that are based on denying access to the dominant dollar-denominated global financial system,” write  Jamil Anderlini and Clea Caulcutt in Politico. “Some in Europe have complained about ‘weaponization’ of the dollar by Washington, which forces European companies to give up business and cut ties with third countries or face crippling secondary sanctions” (https://tinyurl.com/ukhpscxs).

In France, Macron is facing riots as he’s planning to extend the retirement age. One reason France can’t afford to pay social security is that banks needed more money for the bailout (https://tinyurl.com/2fc95ye3). 


Debt and Civilization

In Dante’s Inferno, usurers are in the eighth circle of hell, with blasphemers and sodomites. They crouch with purses around their necks in a steady stream of flakes of fire.

In modern English, “usury” means charging an exorbitant rate of interest, but originally it meant charging any interest at all. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were forbidden to charge “usury,” or interest, on loans to fellow Israelites (Deuteronomy 23:19), but they were permitted to charge interest on loans to foreigners (Deuteronomy 23:20). This seemed to be in the context of not profiting from aiding the needy. Financing risky but possibly profitable ventures or keeping up with inflation (possibly not invented yet) were evidently not considered.

Some ancient kings, as in Babylon, Egypt, Sparta, China, and others, resolved the widespread problem of crushing debt, which  would cause people to lose their land or even their freedom, by declaring debt amnesties. The ancient Israelites removed debt relief  from the realm of a king’s whims and encoded it into their laws, making a Jubilee recur the year after seven cycles of seven years: “Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite” (Deuteronomy 15:2-3). Note: this was not a bail-out of imprudent creditors at the expense of non-debtors.

Greece and Rome and subsequent societies were different in that they did not cancel debts, writes Michael Hudson, an independent Wall Street financial economist who describes himself as an anti-imperial leftist. Rome had a Dark Age, when creditors took over and reduced all the rest of the economy to bondage.  Today, this is called “austerity” or “debt deflation.” Today’s feudal lords are a financial class, not landlords.

Hudson states that the common denominator in all Western financial systems is that debts grow by compound interest. That is, any rate of interest has a doubling time. Debts “sweep up steadily, and the real economy grows much more slowly, so that debts mount up without the economy being able to pay them and there’s a crash” (https://tinyurl.com/tucw5h57).

Rising debt destroys economies when it is not being used to finance new capital investment in means of production. Most Western credit today is created to inflate stock, bond, and real estate prices, not to restore industrial ability. As a result of this debt-without-production approach, the U.S. domestic economy has been overwhelmed by debt owed to its own financial oligarchy, even though it has had a free lunch in running up foreign debt based on  dollar hegemony.

Classical political economy defined a free market as one free from unearned income and related creditor privileges. But by the end of the 19th century the rentier oligarchy sponsored a fiscal and ideological counter-revolution. This rejection of the classical critique of rentier income has been accompanied by re-defining “democracy” to require having a “free market” of the anti-classical oligarchic rentier variety. The result has been to centralize economic planning in Wall Street and other imperial financial centers, writes Hudson. A defining characteristic of Western legal systems for the past 2,000 years has been the oligarchy’s “security of contracts” giving creditors the right to expropriate debtors (ibid.).

The goal of reaching a unipolar Western neoliberal financialism as the “end of history” is being blocked by the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. The war is a catalyst for fracturing the world into competing economic systems. The global South owes enormous dollar debts that they cannot afford to repay. International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank loans are “odious debt”—that does not help the client countries earn the money to repay the debt with interest (tinyurl.com/2je6csa4). What if the Bank of China offered credit on better terms?

Would it mean the end of Western civilization—or just of financial hegemony? How important could it be?

In 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych ditched a long-pending EU affiliation agreement and IMF stabilization plan  in favor of  a more favorable deal with Moscow, which included a $15 billion loan without the IMF’s preconditions and a discount on gas purchases from Russia. The U.S. State Department decided that such a deal could not be allowed and undertook a $5 billion “regime change” (https://tinyurl.com/yekdvehb).


Cheating 20th Century Prophets

“Scipio [the Roman general who defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War] dreaded for you, when he stopped the building of theaters, when he saw how easily you could be corrupted and perverted by prosperity…. He did not think that a city is fortunate when its walls are standing, while its morals are in ruins. 

–St. Augustine, City of God, Bk I. Ch 33

 Reflecting on the ways in which our current political society resembles the decline of Rome (tinyurl.com/6hcjkk8w),  Frank Connor sees signs that people may again be playing the game of “Cheat the Prophet” (https://tinyurl.com/29xu4n66). Humanity has begun to undermine the predictors of perpetual liberal enlightenment. The liberal world values were embodied in the Bretton Woods System, United Nations, European Union, and even NATO. The prophets of this order foresaw perpetual economic prosperity and lasting peace ensured by an integrated international economy. But instead of clear-headed secular enlightenment, we see a hazy popular paganism. Heroes come from Marvel comics, and belief in witchcraft and Satanism is on the rise.

“The fruit of liberalism, however, has been spoiling and increasingly it feels like a new vine is growing.”

The World’s Heartland

Civil Defense Perspectives January 2023 (vol. 38 #1)                        

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 set off a chain reaction that changed the global geopolitical landscape forever, writes Simplicius The Thinker (https://tinyurl.com/euwts8fn). “The USSR represented a balance of powers between global blocs, a multipolarity of sorts, which inherently fostered a deterrence system preventing one bloc or the other from exerting too much influence and bringing too many key geographical areas under one or the other’s control.”

After 1991, the U.S. was the “world’s only superpower.” But geographically, it has a problem. It is one of the “lands of outer or insular crescent.” Eurasia is the World Island and the “center of global power” as described by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard (https://tinyurl.com/3tw4afxn). This was based on the work of Halford Mackinder, the founding father of “geopolitics” and “geostrategy.” Mackinder wrote:

“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

The Heartland contains 50% of the world’s resources. Russia alone has the world’s largest forests for timber, and Lake Baikal holds one-fifth of the entire world’s fresh water supply.

The basic idea of the World Island has evolved and been adapted by such writers as Russia’s Aleksandr Dugin— “colloquially (and erroneously) called ‘Putin’s brain/mysticist,’” according to Simplicius. In his work, Dugin characterizes Russia as the land power of  “Eternal Rome,’” fighting against the Atlanticist sea powers (UK/US) of “Eternal Carthage.”

Destroying Russia, the center of the World Island, as a sovereign power appears to be the objective of globalists.

As part of the USSR, the “Eurasian Balkans” (Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan—the “Stans”) blocked the way into the Heartland. Independent, they became vulnerable and weak. Peripheral to the Stans is the Arab world, which the USSR has frequently supported.

Simplicius outlines what he considers to be U.S. efforts to destabilize the Middle East, as part of the Wolfowitz Doctrine to prevent the emergence of another rival to U.S. power.

In a famous interview, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO forces, General Wesley Clark, spoke of a memo he was given immediately after 9/11 about how the U.S. military would take out “seven countries in five years” (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran). Simplicius notes how those countries align with a direct route straight into that “backdoor” of the “Heartland” zone.

The real purpose of U.S. support of Ukraine appears to be to weaken Russia as much as possible. Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg, former advisor to Mike Pence, said it was “the acme of professionalism” to use Ukraine to fight Russia because that “takes a strategic adversary off the table” without “using any U.S. troops.”  And then “we can focus” on “our primary adversary, which is China” (https://tinyurl.com/5h9e5z6u).

As discussed in Jordan Peterson’s interview of Sen. Mike Lee (tinyurl.com/27djmy46), there is no clear definition of victory in Ukraine, and removing Vladimir Putin is unlikely to lead to a better regime. Might the Russian Federation splinter into pieces, with dispersed nuclear weapons?

While he may have destroyed democracy, some credit Putin with saving Russia in 1999–2004 by stopping the implosion of what was left of the USSR. He reputedly stopped widespread social unrest, converted Chechens from archenemies of Russia to the one of her best allies, and curbed oligarchs. 

Looking at the results of “two decades of America’s violent attempts at gatecrashing the Heartland’s vulnerable rear entrance,” Francis Fukuyama has recanted, Simplicius states. One of the earliest and staunchest supporters of the neoconservative movement, and one of the founding signatories of the Project for the New American Century, he wrote that neoconservatives “believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support” (Simplicius, op. cit.).

Rivals for the Heartland

Putin has said that if NATO (the U.S.) does not prevail in the Ukraine, we are likely to see a “multipolar” world instead of a unipolar one led by the U.S. Russia is moving closer to China, Turkey, Iran, and even Saudi Arabia.

A tripartite Russia-China-Persia axis is not the one U.S. planners focused on. Rather, the Anglo-American foreign policy establishment has been heavily invested in preventing the formation of a new collective security architecture in Europe centered on Russia and Germany rather than the U.S., writes William Schryver. Russo-German reconciliation and economic collaboration had to be prevented at all costs. The U.S. repeatedly opposed and openly threatened the Nord Stream gas pipelines, which were sabotaged in September 2022 (tinyurl.com/2p8uenm4).

Reporter Seymour Hersh concluded that the U.S. was responsible (https://tinyurl.com/4275wbvk). While the White House called Hersh’s report “false and complete fiction,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the result “a tremendous strategic opportunity” to remove Europe’s dependence on Russian energy (https://tinyurl.com/3yrptbwj).

 It also removed the only means by which Russia could negotiate an end to the war (https://tinyurl.com/567vtpjv).

The nearly 90% of the world that does not support the U.S. on Ukraine is working on its own arrangements for trade and security. The organizing economic engine, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is an ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st-century economic infrastructure, from highways and high-speed rail lines to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. The plan is to serve most of the 5 billion people in Eurasia, 30 times more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s interstate highway project helped, with the goal that all of the participating nations will be enriched. This Mackinder-feared Eurasian integration puts the U.S. outside the world’s most dynamic trading bloc. Ukraine may be the turning point, showing the hollowness of U.S. systems (https://tinyurl.com/5n6duf8y).

Anti-European Policy

The original version of the Defense Planning Guidance document was authored by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992.  It speaks of a new world order in which the sole superpower would have only temporary alliances. The UN and even NATO would be increasingly sidelined. The Wolfowitz Doctrine theorizes the need for the U.S. to block the emergence of any potential competitor to U.S. hegemony, especially “advanced industrial nations” such as Germany and Japan—and the European Union.

In 2000, Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski, speaking at  a large Ukrainian-U.S. symposium in Washington, pledged to support independent Ukraine, to provoke Russia to go to war with it, and ultimately to finance the destruction of the resurgent rival of the U.S. These commitments were implemented in the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022.

The rise in energy prices in the EU and its increasing scarcity threaten not only the heating and transportation of individuals, but the survival of all their industries. If this phenomenon continues, the economy of the EU will suddenly collapse, taking its population back at least a century.

Thierry Meyssan predicts that the architects of U.S. policy, followers of Leo Strauss, will “go all the way” to destroy Europe unless European citizens stop them (tinyurl.com/2r9xb9xu).


Europe’s Last Chance

For 70 years, Europe meant “no more war,” write Ulrike Guérot and Hauke Ritz (https://tinyurl.com/4tjzbh8c). The plan envisioned construction of a cooperative, pan-continental peace order, the European House from Lisbon to Vladivostok, backed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. However, it  was never taken seriously. The EU allowed the U.S. to determine Europe’s strategic interests. Today, the U.S. still acts as if the unipolar moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall still persists. Its worldview “disregards classical diplomacy and divides the world in friend and foe, democracy and dictatorship, Good and Evil.” In contrast, Entspannungspolitik envisaged a consensual and economically prosperous relationship with Russia.

“Without Siberian raw materials or the Chinese market, there can be no lasting prosperity for Europe,” the authors state. Europe needs a strategic capacity to act independently from the U.S. “Ultimately, lasting peace in Europe can only be achieved with, not against Russia.”


Call It World War E

The “E” is for Economics, writes Mathew Crawford (https://tinyurl.com/yc7b4ut7). “Economics is ultimately what all the other wars are about, one way or another.” Figuring out who is friend and who is foe is complicated, he states.

“I suspect that the powers in the U.S., along with the corporations that play on a global scale, are doing to Europe what European proto-megacorps once did to Africa, Asia, South America, and elsewhere, which is to enforce total financial subjugation.”

He asks, “Will the European economy be crushed first?”

He wonders whether Putin just announced World War III, “or has it already been going on for years?”

“How hard is this topic to discuss among friends given the emotion of eight different vectors of partisan bias on everything Russia? Is the difficulty associated with discussing Russia really just an erected barrier to discussing World War E? Perhaps that’s the only way to sell the relinquishing of national sovereignty to a corporate-sponsored NGO?”

In summary, Crawford states: “World War E is The Club against everyone else.” We do not know who all is in The Club.

Crawford frequently quotes David Rockefeller: “We are on the edge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”

“The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries,” Rockefeller said.


What’s Up with the Balloons?

After providing a major diversion, “Chinese spy balloons” have vanished from the media, though not from the atmosphere.

Balloons are not new. The Defense Post featured an article about American balloons on Jul 6, 2022 (https://tinyurl.com/j6vbkh6j). The balloons, capable of flying at up to 90,000 feet (27.4 kilometers), would reportedly become a part of a surveillance network for tracking hypersonic weapons.

According to Threat Journal, the U.S. Dept. of Defense’s Covert Long-Dwell Stratospheric Architecture (COLD STAR) program would add inflatables to the Pentagon’s extensive ground-based, airborne, and space-based surveillance network. Tracking a fast-moving object coming from over the horizon requires a high-altitude platform (https://tinyurl.com/4dbdm979). 

China has the world’s most advanced hypersonic wind tunnel facility. It has constructed working glide vehicles that can travel at Mach 10. It has married ultra high-tech tracking devices to low-tech balloons to monitor U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea (https://tinyurl.com/3tpacxk4).

Ret. Gen. Jack Keane argues that China is probing America’s defenses against threats coming from different directions. The  balloons have been mostly in the south, while systems looking for bombers and ICBMs are watching for threats coming over the pole from the north (https://tinyurl.com/mraww58x).

Since March 2021, the U.S. has catalogued 247 reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). In the prior 17 years, there had been 263. Of 366 analyzed reports, 163 were characterized as balloons (Nature 2/23/23).


Rumors of War

Because of the Ukraine conflict, Russian arms manufacturers are switching to a six-day working week. Shifts at defense enterprises may also be extended to 12 hours (https://tinyurl.com/4c78bhmr).

Authorities are equipping shelters in apartment buildings and shopping centers in the Moscow region, which should protect about 15 million residents (https://tinyurl.com/2p8htp3v). 

The World Health Organization (WHO) has updated its critical medicines list for radiological and nuclear emergencies. These include stable iodine to reduce thyroid uptake of radioactive iodine; chelating and decorporating agents (Prussian blue, applied to remove radioactive cesium from the body, and calcium- / zinc-DTPA used to treat internal contamination with transuranium radionuclides); cytokines used for mitigation of damage to the bone marrow in case of acute radiation syndrome; and medicines used to treat vomiting, diarrhea, and infections (https://tinyurl.com/bdh7wjv3).

End of Unipolar Rule?

Civil Defense Perspectives Vol. 36 #6

Russia invaded Crimea on Feb 20, 2014, officially marking the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War. On Mar 16, a referendum was held, in which 95.5% of voters in Crimea voted in favor of joining Russia. The vote was condemned by the EU as “illegal and illegitimate.” UN considered it illegal because the whole of Ukraine did not vote and both options on the ballot would have resulted in a separation from Ukraine.

The pretext for the invasion was to rescue elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in the Maidan coup (tinyurl.com/3d5y72an; tinyurl.com/yvba829t). 

Troubles between the EU, NATO, and Russia were brewing long before. Observers commenting on the current situation recommend a review of the speech Vladimir Putin presented to the Munich Conference on Security Policy in 2007 (https://tinyurl.com/5kmuxj54). Key points included:

“Only two decades ago the world was ideologically and economically divided and it was the huge strategic potential of two superpowers that ensured global security….

Continue reading “End of Unipolar Rule?”

Nuclear War Survival Skills Written for Our Day

Civil Defense Perspectives Vol. 37 #6

The ground will be frozen in Ukraine in mid-December. This means that recently mobilized Russian troops will soon, some say, be able to mount a major offensive.

Does this portend nuclear war? Why this concern about a conventional conflict between two nations, only one of which has nuclear weapons, sparking worldwide nuclear war?

There are two narratives about the war. According to my email feed from Quora, Russians are hopelessly inept and ill-equipped, and sure to suffer a humiliating defeat. According to Alexander Mercouris and the Duran, on Youtube.com and other channels, Gonzalo Lira (tinyurl.com/2p96nzx9), and Will Schryver (tinyurl.com/39jmd5jh), among others, the Ukrainian military is being annihilated, and collapse is prevented only by Western aid.

For Russia, defeat by NATO, especially with Ukraine joining NATO and the EU, is an existential threat that might be seen as justifying resort to nuclear weapons. And a strong, sovereign Russia might be seen as an existential threat to globalists.

Two recent events might be viewed as deliberate provocations. Missiles landed in Poland and killed two farmers. Initially some blamed Russia for attacking a NATO member, but the missiles were Ukrainian and were launched from Ukraine. Did someone hope to draw NATO into the conflict directly (https://tinyurl.com/3uye5zkm)? Some analysts say that NATO could not win a conventional war with Russia (CDP May 2022, https://tinyurl.com/3pjs7cj9).

Two air bases deep within Russia were struck by what are believed to be Soviet-era drones: Ryazan, a few hours’ drive from Moscow, and Engels air base, home to Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. The Tupolev long-range bombers at Engels form a big part of Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal, similar to U.S. B-52s (https://tinyurl.com/mpz6nf9).

Americans have often been told that in a nuclear war there are no winners. But the destruction of the economy, infrastructure, and millions of lives in the “superpowers” might be considered victory by globalists who see the U.S. and possibly Russia as impediments to totalitarian one-world government. They know that all the nukes in the world cannot destroy the planet or turn it into a radioactive wasteland. The idea that “radiation is forever” (by definition, it decays!) and that “there is no safe dose” are myths though widely believed. Nuclear war may be unthinkable to a majority—but not to those who could launch it.

Federal Disaster Response: It’s D.I.Y.

The scientists who researched and tested measures to protect against nuclear weapons effects at the dawn of the atomic age believed that the government would never develop an adequate civil defense program. So, even though they worked for the U.S. Department of Energy, they focused on measures that could be implemented by ordinary Americans. Both the methods themselves and the written instructions were field-tested by lay people.

The actual construction of expedient shelters, under the supervision of Cresson Kearny, was done at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in 1986, and video is available (tinyurl.com/4by72sny). Most Americans would not be able to implement this today, even if they had adequate warning. They don’t live in a place where it would be practical or permissible to dig a hole. They might, however, be able to make a core shelter, as Kearny demonstrated (tinyurl.com/26k4er9b). Or the best available shelter might be a basement or near the center of a building—in many cases adequate to prevent receiving a lethal dose. The key question is when it would be safe to leave.

Our government officials are unable to answer that question.

The Nuclear Was Survival Skills plan (oism.org/nwss) is the default government-supported plan for the vast majority of Americans not included in Continuity of Government operations or wealthy enough to have a huge bunker.

Cresson Kearny’s book Nuclear War Survival Skills, first published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1979, had detailed instructions for making an electroscope radiation monitor, which can be as accurate as instruments costing thousands of dollars, if meticulously made. The plan was for newspapers to print them in a developing crisis. I remember clipping instructions for a crude electroscope from Parade magazine during the Cold War.

Like the rest of government, emergency management has been corrupted. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) used to be called the Office of Civil Defense. By degrees, its mission was changed from protecting the public from the effects of nuclear weapons to protecting the public from Mother Nature and goblins in the closet, states Stephen Jones, special projects director for Physicians for Civil Defense.

Americans need to know that government at all levels lacks the ability to monitor fallout radiation. In the rare casein which  officials have instruments, they do not have personnel trained to use them. “New York’s uncontested PSA of ‘Get Inside, Stay Inside, Stay Tuned’ (https://tinyurl.com/4k6ay65j) shows both the government’s ignorance and the success of enemy propaganda against the American people,” states Jones.

“Emergency Management—federal, state, county, and municipal—are incentivized NOT to prepare for disasters,” Jones explains. “If disaster strikes and there is great loss of life and or property, Emergency Management receives huge grants, massive overtime pay, and great publicity.  If effective disaster plans are in place such that no loss of life and little property damage occurs, no grant money or overtime wages are forthcoming.” Thus, preparedness is your job.  

See November 2022 DDP Newsletter (https://tinyurl.com/yc78ckzn) for more information on radiation monitoring.

NWSS is an invaluable resource for surviving disasters of all types, which have consequences like those after nuclear war. There is information on water purification, sanitation, emergency lighting, affordable food storage, fires and carbon monoxide, ventilation, improvised winter clothing, and minimum pre-crisis preparations. The updated DDP medical kit can be downloaded here: (ddponline.org/pdf-medical-kit-download-page).

Cresson Kearny asked whether people deserved to survive if they couldn’t even be bothered to make a fallout meter.

Once the need becomes obvious, radmonitors.com, http://ki4u.com/, and other sources will be sold out.

Like with past warnings, this crisis might pass without disaster. Don’t panic, but get this insurance while you still can.


How Would a Nuclear War Play Out?

Imagine that you are a general or in charge of the nuclear arsenal in your country. Remember that when World War 2 began we had a submarine fleet of about 300 boats. While they were equipped with state-of-the-art torpedoes they initially had a 70% failure rate of some 1,400 torpedoes fired, and some boats had a 90% failure rate, Stephen Jones points out.

Consider Russia and the U.S. with mostly aging arsenals. Our bomber fleet was largely built in the 1950s and is vulnerable to air defenses. How many of the missiles carrying nukes will actually work? Solid-fueled missiles (like U.S. SLBMs), if there is a crack in the fuel block, could blow up mid-flight. And how many of the warheads will be duds or nearly duds? (See below.)

An all-out nuclear attack on the U.S. would likely start with an electromagnetic pulse (cars stalling, radio broadcasts going silent), followed by small nukes launched from submarines off our coasts. Costal cities would have virtually no warning while cities in our heartland might have five-to-ten minutes warning. One life-saving warning could be loud booms and lights in the distance. What may look like a shooting star in the daylight could be a re-entry vehicle. An intense brilliant light or flash is the last warning, such that if you don’t immediately drop and cover you will be killed or badly injured. 

 A nuclear war would not be over in an hour. Misses and duds mean that millions of people will get a chance to take cover and survive if they know simple things to do. Over the next few days, the enemy may send bombers to mop up.

Note that air-burst nuclear warheads do not produce much fallout. Deposits that look like sand mean you may need to stay inside for as much as two weeks, Jones states; if it looks like ash or dust, a few days are likely enough.

The aftermath might be impossible to survive in a city. People might need to escape by walking. Jones recalls that the North Vietnamese won the war by using bicycles to transport material to the front. If you remove the pedals from a bike and replace the seat with a pole, several hundred pounds can be loaded onto the bike that you walk out with.


Stockpile Stewardship

The U.S has conducted no nuclear testing, even underground, since the early 1990s. The only recent known tests have been by North Korea. Being radioactive, warheads deteriorate. According to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the W78 thermonuclear warhead atop Minuteman ICBMs is nearing the end of its functional lifespan after 37 years in service. The W87-1 program slated to replace it will require all new manufacturing of components, which has not been done since 1992. Its function will be assessed by 3D simulations with supercomputers;  the El Capitan, 50 times faster than the Sierra system now in use, should be ready by 2023 (https://tinyurl.com/bdheyvmt).

The W87-1 modification program will support deployment of the U.S. Air Force’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent by 2030 (https://tinyurl.com/mr44kp7s).

Meanwhile, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are “core elements of our values.” Further evolution is likely: “Currently, the United States government Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) reporting requirements use the gender categories of male and female. We are currently reviewing the way we collect and display data” (https://tinyurl.com/bdf9mv2s).


Put out Fires

Essential immediate post-attack work includes extinguishing fires. People following the “Get Inside, Stay Inside” advice might burn to death. Some cities might be subject to firestorms, Jones warns. Everything is knocked down, smolders for about 20 minutes, and can then burst into flame. 


Evidence and Simulations

John Kerry, U.S. special envoy for climate, warned of “massive emissions consequences” from a Russian war against Ukraine, which he also said would be a distraction from work on climate change. Nevertheless, he added, “I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate” (https://tinyurl.com/e9aux8jk).

Although he was Secretary of State when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, he apparently was less concerned about the consequences of war for Ukrainians. He has faith in computer climate models, despite their dismal record for accuracy, but not in satellite evidence of Russian troop movements, global temperature measurements showing that atmospheric warming is not dangerous, or photographs showing greening of the earth from increased CO2 fertilization (https://tinyurl.com/e9aux8jk).

Kerry told the BBC that he hopes Mr. Putin realizes northern Russia is thawing, “and his infrastructure is at risk, and the people of Russia are at risk” (https://tinyurl.com/3n5dk2rd).


NATO Involvement

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that the Russia-Ukraine war could escalate into a “major” conflict, according to an article just published in Newsweek. Still, he expressed confidence that NATO “will avoid that” due to its increased presence in Eastern Europe, having enhanced the number of troops in several countries including Poland, Estonia, and Hungary “to deter attacks against NATO” (tinyurl.com/27rj9pyv).

From a Russian viewpoint, NATO involvement is massive. “Indian Commissar” who has a Communist flag in his avatar and often posts in Russian, writes: “I really hope, Russian people realize that West (under Satanic control) is NOT satisfied with the collapse/disintegration of the USSR and that they (West) want to finish Hitler’s unfinished business to completely destroy Russia” (https://tinyurl.com/2dxexwxx).

He states that up to 100,000 U.S. special forces and regular military troops are in countries bordering Ukraine. A video by Face the Nation shows a live-fire exercise that is not against a hypothetical, but a real enemy (https://tinyurl.com/2fxz8whf).

Willian Schryver wrote on July 11 that NATO is “playing with fire.” He states that U.S. intelligence operatives and special forces have been deployed in Ukraine throughout the ongoing war and are directly involved in attacking Russian targets. They provide “hands-on” training and likely direct operation of U.S. advanced weaponry, which has resulted in the killing of Russian field commanders, possibly the sinking of the Moskva, and attacks on Russian-sympathizing civilians.

“What the Russians will do in response to this direct U.S. involvement in the war—and when—remains to be seen.” Shooting down unmanned, and then manned ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) assets over the “theater” including the Baltic Sea  is one possibility (tinyurl.com/2p8sm283).

Genetic Warfare

Civil Defense Perspectives vol. 36 #5

From bat soup or lab leak? Much controversy has surrounded this question. But what if SARS-CoV-2 was intentional? A 2015 book, The Unnatural Origins of SARS and Man-Made Genetic Weapons of New Human Viruses, edited by Dezhong Xu and Feng Li, published by the Military Medical Science Press (Beijing), and translated by Volunteers of Miles Guo’s Whistleblower Movement, provides extensive historical and scientific background.

According to the translators’ 2021 foreword,  “This book serves as a framework and protocol to guide the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] to create SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, which is a ‘contemporary genetic bioweapon.’” They also state that another purpose is to “cover up its earlier publication in Nature back in 2013 revealing the true origin of SARS-CoV and…to shift the blame to other countries, like the United States.”

Continue reading “Genetic Warfare”

Kaliningrad: Trigger for WWIII?

Civil Defense Perspectives (vol. 37 #3)

 

British soldiers were being told that they will be sent to Europe for a long ground war, while Joe Biden was reiterating his promise of “no boots on the ground.” Kaliningrad is a potential trigger to Article Five, which obligates NATO members to go to war to defend a member.

Kaliningrad used to be Königsberg in what was formerly East Prussia. It was ceded to the Soviet Union at Potsdam in 1945, and since the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been an exclave of the Russian Federation. Wedged between Poland and Lithuania 200 miles from the Russian border, commerce with Russia is mostly by rail, with free transport guaranteed by treaty.

In recognition of EU sanctions over the Ukrainian war, Lithuania is banning transport of coal, construction materials, metals, and advanced technology crossing its territory. The EU banned flights by 21 Russian-certified airlines in April, so goods can be transported now only by sea. Kaliningrad’s oil pipeline from Russia is also cut off (tinyurl.com/yy633tvp).

Russia complains that the ban on rail travel is illegal by treaty and threatens unspecified “serious” actions in retaliation.

Continue reading “Kaliningrad: Trigger for WWIII?”

The Borderlands

Civil Defense Perspectives (vol. 36 #3)  

In Russian and all Slavic languages, Ukraine literally means “near the end of the territory” (U=near, Kraina=land, territory) and can be translated into as English “frontier lands.”

In the 9th century, Kiev was the capital of Kievan Rus, the ancestral homeland of Russia, whose rulers came from Scandinavia. In 988, its prince Vladimir was baptized in the old Greek colony of Khersonesos on the Crimean coast. His conversion marked the advent of Orthodox Christianity among the Rus and remains a moment of great nationalist symbolism for Russians.

Successive Mongol invasions beginning in the 13th century led the Russians to migrate north. For several centuries Ukrainian territory was a no man’s land on the margins of competing empires, a region of permanent contest and shifting borders   (https://tinyurl.com/bdh98r4t).

The portion east of the Dnieper became Russian in 1686 and the portion west of that river in 1793, according to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ukraine had experienced a brief period of independence in 1918–20, but portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the period between the two World Wars.

Inhabitants of this region named Cossacks (“freemen”) are basically a mixture of Poles/Lithuanians and Russians (with some Mongolian/Tatar blood). Yet this ironically named mixed race was enslaved and horribly abused by Poles, Russians, and Tatars, as portrayed in the classic romanticized novel Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol. After the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian empire the Russian czarist empire abused its half-brothers and half-sisters, and Soviet Russia abused them the most, especially under Stalin. 

Austrian Germans who occupied a small part of Ukraine treated its autochthonous population the best, giving the possibility of Ukrainians/Cossacks aligning with Nazi Germany against Russians and Poles, which happened in the Bandera movement.

Bandera’s fighters committed unspeakable atrocities against Russians, Poles/Lithuanians, and Jews. This was revenge for hundreds years of abuse, but the acts were so atrocious in their animalistic, inhumane cruelty that even the ruthless Nazis were appalled. In the Volhynian slaughter during World War II, Ukrainians killed about 100,000 Poles, Galicians, and Russians in a barbaric and cruel fashion (https://tinyurl.com/ypcpj7yr).

After WWII, Ukraine became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. An 1897 map shows the Donbass and territories east of the Dnieper and along the northern edge of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov as Novorossiya (“New Russia”). They became “Ukrainian” only by writ of two of history’s greatest evil monsters—Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin (https://tinyurl.com/ymcpfh2r).

“Ukraine is the Poland and Czechoslovakia of the present time—-an artificial state loaded with Russians and with no reason for existence in its present form,” writes Richard Maybury. “Poland had disappeared from the maps of Europe in 1795 and had no reason to come back in the fulsome extent provided by the Versailles Treaty except for Wilson’s courting of the Polish vote…. Similarly, the mongrel state of Czechoslovakia with its linguistic, religious and ethnic concoction had no historical basis or reason for existence at all” (ibid.).

  After the fall of the Soviet empire, Ukraine was designated as an independent entity. Arguably, the Gorenvolk concept was more real. This was invented by occupying Nazi forces to try to convince inhabitants of the southern Podhale region that they were not Slavs, but descendants of wandering German tribes—in spite of the fact that from the late 19th century onwards, the region had been romanticized by artists as a cradle of Polishness.

The 2014 Maidan Putsch

Ukraine’s 2010 election showed a stark division between the pro-Russian and the Ukrainian nationalist regions of the country, but there was a tolerable electoral balance. Pro-Russian president Yanukovych won by a margin of 3.6%. The country was going bankrupt, and was making a deal with Moscow in preference to the EU and the extremely harsh conditions of an IMF loan.

To scuttle the deal with Moscow, a “regime change” was engineered, which David Stockman describes as a “$5 billion all-hands Washington undertaking,” with the cooperation of the U.S. State Department, the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), NGOs, and favored Ukrainian oligarchs (tinyurl.com/bdz8z39v). The Maidan putsch, which deposed the duly elected president,  is the subject of a theatrical documentary by Oliver Stone. Ukraine on Fire, quickly censored by YouTube, is available free on rumble (tinyurl.com/nhk57b84). This gives the history of Ukraine since World War I, with focus on how its current state relates to global interests.

Stockman writes that assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland picked the new prime minister and his cabinet; four of 11 were “rabid anti-Russian neo-Nazis.” At the heart of the putsch, he writes, were organizations whose hero is Stepan Bandera, a collaborator with Hitler, who led the liquidation of Poles, Jews, and other minorities as the Wehrmacht headed to Stalingrad.

Before 2014, Ukraine received very little Western aid, but since then has gotten $15 billion, including $3 billion in military aid. The per capita GDP was $4,030 in 2013, $2,125 in 2015, and $3,663 in 2019 (https://tinyurl.com/myvc59x3).

Current president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, an actor who played being president on a TV series, Servant of the People, has reportedly accumulated $1.2 billion in a bank in Costa Rica during his 2.5 years in office (https://tinyurl.com/yk6utxxc).

Ukraine is a money-laundering haven for billionaire global elitists, who are striving to impose the New World Order. What an irony that globalists who intend a worldwide Holodomor should be headquartered in Ukraine! They have demonstrated that they want to destroy agriculture, and in many nations the privatization of waterways is being theorized, for the advantage of multinationals and with the aim of controlling and limiting agriculture activities. The pro-NATO government of Kyiv deprived Crimea of Dnieper River water for 8 years to prevent the irrigation of the fields and starve the people, writes Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (tinyurl.com/bdhw3krj).

Zelenskyy’s performances in drag are consistent with the LGBTQ ideology, part of the “reform” agenda, along with gender equality, abortion, and the “green” economy, needed to gain the support of the World Economic Forum, Viganò writes.


End of the ‘End of History’

In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote the article  “The End of History?” for The National Interest. He argued that a remarkable consensus on the legitimacy of liberal democracy as a system of government had emerged throughout the world, as it conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and communism. He also argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government” (tinyurl.com/yckwyuat).

But history has had its revenge. At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. was the undisputed economic and military hegemon. American elites were busy shifting the country’s industrial base to China. And the idea that the Western security order could be challenged was unthinkable, writes Malcolm Kyeyune.

“That world is now…truly dead. The economic model of deindustrializing the West while industrializing China has proved to be…suicidal. Globalism has broken down…. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine revealed the West to be incapable of deterrence….

“What has also become clear is that ‘wokeness’ isn’t just some ideology that can, or should, be fought in the marketplace of ideas. Every woke campaign amounts to…a demand for added managerial intermediation—…the constant creation of new positions for experts, consultants, and commissars.”

The new class warfare is between Canadian trucker Gord Magill’s “email caste” and people who deliver tangible goods.

“The official left and right have proved themselves intellectually bankrupt” (https://tinyurl.com/ycktcjv9).

There could still be a “unipolar” world—with the endpoint being a global technocracy replacing the U.S. hegemon.


Flashback

In April 2014, Richard Maybury predicted the crisis in Ukraine that would break out in February 2022; his explanation is reprinted in the April-May 2022 issue of Early Warning Report. He credits John Maynard Keynes for brilliant forecasting in his 1919 book Economic Consequences of the Peace—despite Keynes’s disastrous economics. One of the main insights was the importance of always trying to see something from the other person’s point of view. Keynes saw where the Treaty of Versailles would lead: the Allies were just as responsible for World War II as Hitler. Key points from 2014:

·  People in Maybury’s “Chaostan” (much of Africa and Eurasia)  do not forget. To them, 100 years ago was just yesterday. The Crimean crisis dates back to 1783 or earlier.

·  The good-guys-vs.-bad-guys model leads to serious errors.

·  The history of Russia is the history of invasions.

·  Since 1990 NATO has been creeping ever closer, despite its promises not to do so.

·  Only two of the postwar buffer states are left: Belarus and Ukraine; in 2008 NATO declared its intention to induct Ukraine.

·  Russians may tolerate almost any degree of tyranny if they believe it keeps them safe from NATO.

·  Washington has been poking a snake with a sharp stick and then howling when it does what snakes do.

Maybury now warns that if Putin is “taken out,” there will be more Putins. Both sides have nuclear arms, and with “dial-a-yield” weapons, there is no clear line between tactical and strategic. Time for the “power junkies” in NATO to dial it down and stop scaring Russians, he says.


The Ukrainian Military

The neo-Nazi Azov Special Operations Regiment is officially a part of the Ukrainian Army. The battalion has been trained by the U.S. Army for 8 years. In 2015 the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment banning all aid (including weapons and training) to the battalion because of its neo-Nazi past, but it was revoked under pressure from the CIA, writes Archbishop  Viganò. The battalion has been involved in blatant human rights violations and mass killings of Russian-speaking persons in Donbass, states Viganò.

As Lev Golinkin writes in The Nation, post-Maidan Ukraine is the world’s only nation to have a neo-Nazi formation in its armed forces. (https://tinyurl.com/2wrau9k3).

Is NATO in Ukraine even though it is not officially a member? Yavoriv and Zhytomyr are de facto NATO bases, Maybury writes. NATO conducted cyber security training at Zhytomyr in September 2018 and described Ukraine as a “NATO partner.” Yavoriv has been a primary training and logistics center for supplying fighters and weapons.


Solzhenitsyn’s Perspective

Although best known for his exposure of the Soviet Gulag and his staunch anticommunism, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn welcomed Putin’s rise to power in 1999 and praised him for restoring Russia’s national pride. In 2007, Putin visited the ailing Solzhenitsyn at home to award him a state prize for his humanitarian work. In his 1990 essay “Rebuilding Russia,” Solzhenitsyn advocates a “Russian Union” encompassing Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the ethnic Russian parts of Kazakhstan (https://tinyurl.com/utf4s3ba).


The Soros View

“At the beginning of the 1980s, I embarked on what I call my political philanthropy. First, I set up a foundation in my native Hungary, and then I actively participated in the disintegration of the Soviet empire…. I set up a foundation in Russia, and then did the same in each of the successor states. In Ukraine, I established a foundation even before it became an independent country. I also visited China in 1984, where I was the first foreigner allowed to set up a foundation,” writes Soros.

“Approaching the age of 70, Putin feels that if he is going to make his mark on Russian history, it is now or never.”

“In July 2021, Putin published a long essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are really one people, and that the Ukrainians have been misled by neo-Nazi agitators. The first part of his argument is not without some historical justification…. But in the second part, it was Putin who was misled…. Many Ukrainians fought valiantly during the Euromaidan protests in 2014” (https://tinyurl.com/zr7459ur).

In 2015, Russia banned the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations and Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation.

Soros funded the Ukraine Crisis Media Center. In a 2014 interview, Soros described Maidan as “the most important development in this part of the world” in many years and said he was exerting his “utmost efforts” to support Ukraine (tinyurl.com/nhfseszf). Soros’s foundations also were deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution (tinyurl.com/5n9aacyu), protesting the election of Yanukovych, and bringing in a pro-NATO president.