The science of modern propaganda arguably got its start over a century ago during World War I when a young Edward Bernays was recruited to help sell the conflict to a reluctant American populace, after which he took what he’d learned on that front and folded it into a lifetime of work on the study of mass-scale psychological manipulation. That was when propaganda, as we know it today, came into being, with the scientific method applied to the task of refining techniques for manipulating large-scale human behavior using modern media distribution. Those methods have been in research and development this entire time, and have advanced at least as much as our other instruments of warfare have advanced since World War I. But that wasn’t the beginning of mass-scale psychological manipulation by the powerful. That has been going on since the dawn of civilization.
Dr. Robert Malone, an outspoken critic of the COVID-19 vaccines, discussed his new book “Lies My Government Told Me” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in a recent episode of “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”
According to Malone, U.S. Americans for the last three years have been subjected to “military-grade information warfare — capability and technology that was designed for our opponents for military warfare outside of the U.S. — that has been turned on American citizens.”
Malone told Kennedy, I know “that’s a lot of words, some strong words, but I think that’s really what we have here.”
Kennedy and Malone discussed the “psychological operations” employed by the U.S. government during the COVID-19 pandemic and earlier in U.S. history that relies on fear and propaganda messaging as tools of social control.
Malone said the information warfare regarding the U.S. government’s response to COVID-19 appears to have been largely deployed through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
“What’s been deployed has been basically the technology and capabilities that were designed to respond to terrorism, but they’ve been deployed against the likes of you, me and Dr. McCullough and so many others,” Malone said.
In his book, Malone explains how during the COVID-19 pandemic DHS “defined misinformation, disinformation and malinformation as a form of domestic terrorism.”
“They made this odd kind of logic jump where they spoke about basically the January 6th events and domestic violence,” Malone said, “and then they linked that to vaccines and vaccine hesitancy and stated in alert that they anticipated there would be domestic violence associated with protests against the masks and the vaccine mandates — and that that should be responded to as terrorism.”
“I strongly suspect that they had intelligence and reacted to the trucker protest as it was developing as another domestic terrorism act.”
“So in 1976, President Carter’s CIA director, said, ‘We are not going to infiltrate the U.S. press anymore’ and they acknowledged that it was illegal,” Kennedy told Malone.
“But the following year, Carl Bernstein did an article for Rolling Stone in which he said there’s at least 400 of these reporters still out there [that are on the CIA’s list] … [and] in 2014, President Obama made it legal once again for the CIA to propagandize Americans,” Kennedy added.
Malone responded by saying in his book he discusses how Obama has been a “major voice” championing the logic that the protection of democracy requires censorship. “And Mr. Biden, no surprise, seems to also be a strong advocate for this position,” Malone said.
Both Kennedy and Malone said they found Desmet’s theory to be a relatively accurate analysis of human psychology and behavior.
According to Kennedy, the CIA has a long history of “working on this” by exploring questions such as, “How do you get large groups of people to behave? How do you get social groups — societies — to do what you want, to accept authoritarian control?”
Malone said he considered Twitter to be a “military-grade weapon that is designed and powered with some of the capabilities for crowd control, for crowd management, for crowd motivation, for crowd direction.”
At the end of the interview, Malone told Kennedy that one of the things he found most troubling during the COVID-19 pandemic was the “substitution of hope for science” that was “reinforced through this weaponized propaganda.”
Malone said:
“We were basically trained to accept an unlicensed, unsafe, non-effective medical product based on no science — on hope — and trained into us through this well-developed system of propaganda, censorship, information control and everything else.
“What it means for the future is grim unless folks pay attention.”
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
WARNING: Graphic footage: Fox News host Tucker Carlson rips the sexual exploitation of children and the media for ignoring Balenciaga child ‘bondage’ ad controversy on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’
This Evil is Old
Testimony of Anneke Lucas, survivor of the Belgian pedophile network “Children were mainly used for sex, but there were a number of aristocrats who were part of this club who also enjoyed killing children” pic.twitter.com/lOQXXeykct
Facebook’s parent company Meta has acknowledged the discovery of several clusters of fake accounts and pages believed to be linked to individuals “associated with the US military,” according to the company’s latest adversarial threat report published this week.
“Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their identities and coordination, our investigation found links to individuals associated with the US military,” the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.
The influence campaign was discovered earlier this year and in total Meta removed 39 Facebook and 26 Instagram accounts, as well as 16 pages and two groups, all for violating the company’s policy against “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
The social media giant admitted that the large-scale operation ran beyond those several dozen accounts and across many other internet platforms, including Twitter, YouTube and Telegram – as well as major Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. It seemingly attempted to downplay the discovery by insisting that the “majority of this operation’s posts had little to no engagement from authentic communities” and highlighting similar “deceptive campaigns” by China and Russia.
Meta’s acknowledgement substantiates a bombshell investigation by the Washington Post that revealed the Pentagon was forced to launch a “sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare,” after a variety of social media accounts, which its operatives used to target foreign audiences in elaborate psychological warfare efforts, were exposed.
The takedown of the influence network was initially highlighted by researchers at Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, which back in August published a report about online networks allegedly pushing “pro-Western,” anti-Russia and other politicized narratives.
While the original study did not pin blame for the fake accounts on any particular actors, two officials later told the Post that US CENTCOM – the combatant command which oversees forces in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia – “is among those whose activities are facing scrutiny” for its influence operations.
At the time, CENTCOM refused to comment on whether any of the suspicious accounts were created by its personnel or contractors, but one official claimed such behavior would “absolutely be a violation of doctrine and training practices.”
Well, he is not the brightest light bulb in the political pack. Imagine believing that Iran would execute 14,000 civilians for protesting. This is the bonehead who seized the bank accounts of Canadians that were protesting against his unscientific mandates one year ago.
Western politicians, pundits and celebrities circulating the false claim that Iran sentenced 15,000 protesters to death is a good example of the way fact checking and journalistic responsibility go out the window when it’s a claim about a government the US empire wants to remove.
Trudeau got played by the CIA so bad that he had to delete this tweet. Lol. Condolences to everyone else who believed this CIA disinformation nonsense. pic.twitter.com/4MzPR0HhEk
More concerned with MANUFACTURING FAKE NEWS than in reporting it. The Propaganda arms of the Empire of LIES are rapidly being revealing themselves as the cowards, liars and charlatans that they are.
Moscow’s UN envoy compared the barrage of ‘fake news’ about the Ukraine conflict to city shelling
He went on to compare Western media coverage with actual Ukrainian bombings of civilian infrastructure. “Just as Western weapons are now targeting cities in the Donbass and the liberated territories, Western propaganda is firing ‘information shells’ at its own citizens,” he claimed.
Amid the Ukraine conflict, Western countries are waging an information war not only against Russia but also the entire international community, Vassily Nebenzia, the nation’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, said on Tuesday.
Speaking at a presentation at the UN of the RT documentary ‘Journalists Under Fire,’ the top diplomat noted that Russia had found itself under massive media pressure after it launched its military operation in Ukraine in late February.
Nebenzia noted that Western coverage of the conflict is typified by “a huge number of ‘fakes’ about the activities of the [Russian] military, as well as about the goals, objectives and motives” of its campaign in Ukraine.
“It’s no secret that the West has launched a real information war against us, which affects not only the residents of Russia and Ukraine but also people around the world,” he reiterated.
He went on to compare Western media coverage with actual Ukrainian bombings of civilian infrastructure. “Just as Western weapons are now targeting cities in the Donbass and the liberated territories, Western propaganda is firing ‘information shells’ at its own citizens,” he claimed.
According to Nebenzia, the media onslaught is harmful to ordinary people, who “are losing touch with reality, become distressed and confused” when being overwhelmed with an endless barrage of falsehoods. They also lose the ability to think critically, he claimed.
After Russia launched its military operation against Ukraine, Western countries unleashed an unprecedented crackdown on Russian media abroad, with the European Union banning RT and Sputnik channels. Moscow has repeatedly criticized the move, with Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claiming that it has shown the world the true worth of so-called Western values.
Great, just what we need, another way for the US to control us all. This is real people, this is happening.
Hey so it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the "cognitive infrastructure" of the population.
Should be as a shock to no one I have to say the phrase “cognitive infrastructure” is a great rhetorical attempted workaround to the 1st Amendment. Refer to the minds of the people as “infrastructure” then point to how they are tasked with “defending infrastructure”… brilliant
US intelligence has been doing same via paper publications since the 50’s and 60’s, Henry Luce had a close working relationship with Allen Dulles the longest serving CIA Director. Not condemning nor condoning, simply stating a historical fact, I’m a fan of recent history.
That’s why we often say that the US govt is full of projections. Whenever they accuse another country of doing something it’s because they’re doing it.
The thread goes on and on but you get the gist.
Some calming music for your mind as you absorb the significance of this chicanery.
Doesn't it strike anyone as strange that the "leader" of this "freedom" movement in Iran is a US government employee and bosom buddy of the neocons? But hey, sure, it's totally legit… https://t.co/oPF7lf9Bvxpic.twitter.com/VPGFgaJDSU
Covert Hybrid WW3: Hegemony vs. Multipolarity – a chronicle of the ongoing battle for the freedom of humanity, against those who seek its total enslavement. Introduction: The Shadow Wars of the 21st Century are being conducted in the terrestrial, aerial, maritime, subterranean, and extraterrestrial battlespace, which involve the maximum use of economic, political, kinetic, psychological, chemical, biological, cyberspace, and electromagnetic warfare.
The Western Deep State is seeking a full spectrum dominance; the Eastern Alliance is waging a full spectrum countermeasure. Who will win in the war between hegemony and multipolarity?
People who never took the vaccine are precisely the sort of people I want to surround myself with. They resisted a military-grade psy-op. They stood their ground. They refused to let the "experts" do their thinking for them. These are the people I trust and respect.
— David Morgan 🏴 #StayFree (@david_r_morgan) September 4, 2022
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and the Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex, and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to alternative news media.
Published: April 7, 2022
In a bombshell NBC scoop published Wednesday, the authors of the report alleged that US spy agencies used deliberate and selective intelligence leaks to mainstream news outlets to mount an information warfare campaign against Russia during the latter’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine, despite being aware the intelligence wasn’t credible.
The US intelligence assessment that Russia was preparing to use chemical weapons in the Ukraine War, which was widely reported in the corporate media and confirmed by President Biden himself, was an unsubstantiated claim leaked to the press as a tit-for-tat response to the damning Russian allegation that Ukraine was pursuing an active biological weapons program, in collaboration with Washington, in scores of bio-labs discovered by Russian forces in Ukraine in early days of the military campaign.
The crux of the NBC report, however, isn’t what’s being disclosed but rather what’s still being withheld by the US intelligence community that the mainstream news outlets are not at liberty to report on.
Despite being aware of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s major unilateral concession to Kyiv, halting the Russian offensive north of the capital and focusing on liberating Russian-majority Donbas in east Ukraine, practically spelling an end to Russia’s month-long offensive in Ukraine, US security officials are still deceptively asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” that signals a “significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine,” one that US officials believe could be a “protracted and bloody fight.”
Regarding the malicious disinformation campaign mounted by Western media on behalf of NATO powers, the report notes: “The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world, said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.”
It has become clear now the “40-mile-long Trojan Horse” of battle tanks, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery that descended from Belarus in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route to the capital was simply a power projection gambit astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s military strategists in order to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine where real battles for territory were actually fought and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.
But US security agencies insidiously kept feeding false information of the impending fall of the Ukrainian capital to the mainstream media throughout Russia’s month-long military campaign in Ukraine. Only two conclusions could be drawn from this scaremongering tactic: either it was a massive intelligence failure and Western security agencies weren’t aware the “40-mile-long Trojan Horse” approaching the capital was a ruse, or the NATO’s spy agencies had credible intelligence since the beginning of Russia’s military campaign that real battles for territory would be fought in Donbas in east Ukraine and the feigned assault on the capital was simply a diversionary tactic but they exaggerated the threat in order to vilify Russia’s calculated military offensive in Ukraine, and win the war of narratives that “how the war is perceived across the world.”
Except in the early days of the military campaign when Russian airstrikes and long-range artillery shelling targeted military infrastructure in the outskirts of Kyiv to degrade the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces, the capital did not witness much action during the month-long offensive. Otherwise, with the tremendous firepower at its disposal, the world’s second most powerful military force had the demonstrable capability to reduce the whole city down to the ashes.
By mid-March, after the “40-mile-long” column of armored vehicles that created panic in the rank and file of Ukraine’s security forces and their international backers and that didn’t move an inch further after reaching the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war, it became obvious even to the lay observers of the Ukraine War that it was evidently a diversionary tactic.
But Western security agencies and the corporate media kept propagating the myth that the purported assault on the Ukrainian capital was stalled by alleged “fierce Ukrainian resistance,” and if it were up to Russian forces, they would “ransack the capital Kyiv” and “overrun the whole territory” of the embattled country.
Even a week after the unilateral Russian peace initiative on March 25, scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating the Russian-majority Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, the Western intelligence community and the mainstream media kept warning the gullible audience Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv “wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment” and that Russian forces had withdrawn back into Belarus and Russia simply to “regroup, refit and resupply.”
Last week, US officials told reporters they had intelligence suggesting “Putin was being misled” by his own advisers, who were “afraid to tell him the truth.” “The degree to which Putin is isolated or relying on flawed information can’t be verified,” Paul Pillar, a retired career US intelligence officer, confided to NBC. “There’s no way you can prove or disprove that stuff,” he said.
Two US officials said the intelligence about whether “Putin’s inner circle was lying to him wasn’t conclusive” — based more on “analysis than hard evidence.” Multiple US officials acknowledged that the US had used “information as a weapon” even when “confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high.” Sometimes it had used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the US was just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.”
While attempting to play mind games with Putin, the US intelligence community must’ve overlooked “an inconsequential detail” that before venturing into politics, Putin himself led the Cold War’s premier Russian intelligence agency, the KGB, for many years, and the puerile psyops orchestrated by the CIA and NSA were nothing more than child’s play for the seasoned Russian strongman.
Based on declassified intelligence, The New York Times reported last week: “The Russian military’s stumbles have eroded trust between Mr. Putin and his Ministry of Defense. While Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu had been considered one of the few advisers Mr. Putin confided in, the prosecution of the war in Ukraine has damaged the relationship. Mr. Putin has put two top intelligence officials under house arrest for providing poor intelligence ahead of the invasion, something that may have further contributed to the climate of fear.”
Other American officials, as reported in the mainstream media, had said that “Putin’s rigid isolation during the pandemic” and willingness to publicly “rebuke advisers who did not share his views” had created a degree of wariness, or even fear, in senior ranks of the Russian military. Officials believe that Putin had been getting “incomplete or overly optimistic reports” about the progress of Russian forces, “creating mistrust with his military advisers.”
The corporate media’s psychological warfare campaign, in collaboration with Western intelligence community, after the successful culmination of Russia’s month-long military offensive in Ukraine must have upset the Russian leader to the extent that instead of summarily sacking and court-martialing the military’s top brass, he has decided to celebrate May 9 as the Victory Day by announcing to organize a Russian Armed Forces parade in Moscow, and is reportedly considering rewarding battlefield commanders who valiantly fought in the Russo-Ukraine War with promotion in ranks and pecuniary benefits.
All the media hype in order to misguide gullible audiences following the stellar Russian victory in the Ukraine War aside, the fact remains it’s old wine in new bottles. The intelligence wasn’t declassified last week, it was declassified a month ago, but nobody paid much attention to the asinine assertion of an alleged rift between Putin and the Russian military leadership.
The Politico reported as early as March 8, in an article titled “Putin is angry,” that the US intelligence heads warned before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the panel’s annual hearing on worldwide threats that Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was not going as planned and it could “double down” in Ukraine.
“Although it still remains unclear whether Russia will pursue a maximalist plan to capture all or most of Ukraine, Director National Intelligence Avril Haines said, such an effort would run up against what the U.S. intelligence community assesses is likely to be a persistent and significant insurgency by Ukrainian forces.”
Clearly, DNI Avril Haines spilled the secret before the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the US intelligence was in the dark whether the Russian forces would overrun the whole of Ukraine, or the Russian blitz north of the capital was only a diversionary tactic meant for tying up Ukrainian forces in the north, while Russia concentrated its efforts in liberating Donbas in the east.
Echoing the “recently declassified intelligence” disclosed by NYT the preposterous claim that Putin’s rigid self-isolation during the COVID pandemic allegedly created a rift between him and Russia’s military leadership, the Politico report from a month ago presciently endorsed the inane intelligence assessment:
“William Burns, the CIA director, portrayed for lawmakers an isolated and indignant Russian president who is determined to dominate and control Ukraine to shape its orientation. Putin has been ‘stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. That personal conviction matters more than ever,’ Burns said.
“Burns also described how Putin had created a system within the Kremlin in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower — and sparser still because of the Covid-19 pandemic. In that hierarchy, Burns said, ‘it’s proven not career-enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.’”
The most notable success of the US information warfare campaign based on misleading declassified intelligence to media outlets, as claimed by the NBC report, may have been delaying the invasion itself by weeks or months, which officials believe they did with accurate predictions that Russia intended to attack, based on definitive intelligence. By the time Russia moved its troops in, “the West presented a unified front.”
“A former U.S. official said administration officials believe the strategy delayed Putin’s invasion from the first week of January to after the Olympics and that the delay bought the U.S. valuable time to get allies on the same page in terms of the level of the Russian threat and how to respond.”
Contradicting the NBC claim, however, The Intercept reported on March 11, citing “credible intelligence sources,” that despite staging a massive military buildup along Russia’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, “Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack on February 24,” senior current and former US intelligence officials told the Intercept. “It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the US intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade,” the senior official added.
Last April, US intelligence first detected that “the Russian military was beginning to move large numbers of troops and equipment to the Ukrainian border.” Most of the Russian soldiers deployed to the border at that time were later “moved back to their bases,” but US intelligence determined that “some of the troops and materiel remained near the border.”
In June 2021, against the backdrop of rising tensions over Ukraine, Biden and Putin met at a summit in Geneva. The summer troop withdrawal brought a brief period of calm, but “the crisis began to build again in October and November,” when US intelligence watched as Russia once again “moved large numbers of troops back to its border with Ukraine.”
Extending the hand of friendship, Russia significantly drawdown its forces along the western border before the summit last June. Instead of returning the favor, however, the conceited leadership of supposedly the world’s sole surviving superpower turned down the hand of friendship and haughtily refused to concede reasonable security guarantees demanded by Russia at the summit that would certainly have averted the likelihood of the war.
After perusing such contradictory reports, citing “credible intelligence estimates,” it appears the US intelligence community has developed a novel espionage technique of playing both ends against the middle. The world’s leading US spy agencies seem to have this uncanny ability of predicting with absolute certainty that an event is as likely to happen as it is likely that it may not happen. And since the media watchdog has been tamed to the point where it dares not question the authority, therefore security agencies would get the credit whether or not they performed their duties diligently.
“I wonder about Trump’s antagonism towards China. Is he emphasizing it for the wrong reasons?
See below from Pepe Escobar. In the past, Escobar has been on-point as to US geopolitical conflicts. Could this be the darkest side of the story? Could we have started a biological attack on China’s economy and it backfired? I’d rather believe not, but past research at Fort Detrick, Maryland, now recently shut down, has done the world a lot of harm, going back to our Swine Flu fever attack on Cuba under Nixon. We wiped out the entire pig population of an island we’re still aggressively sanctioning, as we are Iran and Venezuela. Now China? Is the US losing its cool?”
The fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak puts Beijing and Washington on a collision course, writes Pepe Escobar.
Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yiat the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus.
Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronavirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack.
The terminology of President Xi Jinping is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched.
Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code.
China’s President Xi Jinping visits Wuhan community, meets residents and frontline workers, March 10, 2020. (YouTube)
When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signaling that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 U.S. military.
He directly quoted U.S. CDC Director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by Coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the U.S., replied that “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the U.S. today.”
Zhao’s explosive conclusion is that COVID-19 was already in effect in the U.S. before being identified in Wuhan – due to the by now fully documented inability of the U.S. to test and verify differences compared with the flu.
Adding all that to the fact that coronavirus genome variations in Iran and Italy were sequenced and it was revealed they do not belong to the variety that infected Wuhan, Chinese media are now openly asking questions and drawing a connection with the shutting down in August last year of the “unsafe” military bioweapon lab at Fort Detrick, the Military Games, and the Wuhan epidemic. Some of these questions had been asked– with no response – inside the U.S. itself.
Extra questions linger about the opaque Event 201 in New York on October 18, 2019: a rehearsal for a worldwide pandemic caused by a deadly virus – which happened to be coronavirus. This magnificent coincidence happened one month before the outbreak in Wuhan.
Event 201 was sponsored by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum (WEF), the CIA, Bloomberg, John Hopkins Foundation and the UN. The World Military Games opened in Wuhan on the exact same day.
Irrespective of its origin, which is still not conclusively established, as much as Trump tweets about the “Chinese virus,” COVID-19 already poses immensely serious questions about biopolitics (where’s Foucault when we need him?) and bio-terror.
The working hypothesis of coronavirus as a very powerful but not Armageddon-provoking bio-weapon unveils it as a perfect vehicle for widespread social control — on a global scale.
Staff monitoring passengers’ body temperature in Wuhan railway station during the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. (China News Service, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Cuba Rises as Biotech Power
Just as a fully masked Xi visiting the Wuhan frontline last week was a graphic demonstration to the whole planet that China, with immense sacrifice, is winning the “people‘s war” against COVID-19, Russia, in a Sun Tzu move on Riyadh whose end result was a much cheaper barrel of oil, helped for all practical purposes to kick-start the inevitable recovery of the Chinese economy. This is how a strategic partnership works.
The chessboard is changing at breakneck speed. Once Beijing identified coronavirus as a bio-weapon attack the “people’s war” was launched with the full force of the state.Methodically. On a “whatever it takes” basis. Now we are entering a new stage, which will be used by Beijing to substantially recalibrate the interaction with the West, and under very different frameworks when it comes to the U.S. and the EU.
Soft power is paramount. Beijing sent an Air China flight to Italy carrying 2,300 big boxes full of masks bearing the script, “We are waves from the same sea, leaves from the same tree, flowers from the same garden.” China also sent a hefty humanitarian package to Iran, significantly aboard eight flights from Mahan Air — an airline under illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic could not have been more explicit: “The only country that can help us is China. By now, you all understood that European solidarity does not exist. That was a fairy tale on paper.”
Under harsh sanctions and demonized since forever, Cuba is still able to perform breakthroughs – even on biotechnology. The anti-viral Heberon – or Interferon Alpha 2b – a therapeutic, not a vaccine, has been used with great success in the treatment of coronavirus. A joint venture in China is producing an inhalable version, and at least 15 nations are already interested in importing the therapeutic.
Now compare all of the above with the Trump administration offering $1 billion to poach German scientists working at biotech firm Curevac, based in Thuringia, on an experimental vaccine against COVID-19, to have it as a vaccine “only for the United States.”
Social Engineering Psy-Op?
Sandro Mezzadra, co-author with Brett Neilson of the seminal “The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism,” is already trying to conceptualize where we stand now in terms of fighting COVID-19.
We are facing a choice between a Malthusian strand – inspired by social Darwinism – “led by the Johnson-Trump-Bolsonaro axis” and, on the other side, a strand pointing to the “requalification of public health as a fundamental tool,” exemplified by China, South Korea and Italy. There are key lessons to be learned from South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
The stark option, Mezzadra notes, is between a “natural population selection,” with thousands of dead, and “defending society” by employing “variable degrees of authoritarianism and social control.” It’s easy to imagine who stands to benefit from this social re-engineering, a 21st century remix of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.”
Amid so much doom and gloom, count on Italy to offer us Tiepolo-style shades of light. Italy chose the Wuhan option, with immensely serious consequences for its already fragile economy. Quarantined Italians remarkably reacted by singing on their balconies: a true act of metaphysical revolt.
St. Corona by the Master of the Palazzo Venezia Madonna in the National Gallery of Denmark.(Wikimedia Commons)
Not to mention the poetic justice of the actual St. Corona (“crown” in Latin) being buried in the city of Anzu since the 9th century. St. Corona was a Christian killed under Marcus Aurelius in 165 AD, and has been for centuries one of the patron saints of pandemics.
Not even trillions of dollars raining from the sky by an act of divine Fed mercy were able to cure Covid-19. G-7 “leaders” had to resort to a videoconference to realize how clueless they are – even as China’s fight against coronavirus gave the West a head start of several weeks.
Shanghai-based Dr. Zhang Wenhong,one of China’s top infectious disease experts, whose analyses have been spot on so far, now says China has emerged from the darkest days in the “people’s war” against Covid-19. But he does not think this will be over by summer. Now extrapolate what he’s saying to the Western world.
It’s not even spring yet, and we already know it takes a virus to mercilessly shatter the Goddess of the Market. Last Friday, Goldman Sachs told no fewer than 1,500 corporations that there was no systemic risk. That was false.
New York banking sources told me the truth: systemic risk became way more severe in 2020 than in 1979, 1987 or 2008 because of the hugely heightened danger that the $1.5 quadrillion derivative market would collapse.
As the sources put it, history had never before seen anything like the Fed’s intervention via its little understood elimination of commercial bank reserve requirements, unleashing a potential unlimited expansion of credit to prevent a derivative implosion stemming from a total commodity and stock market collapse of all stocks around the world.
Those bankers thought it would work, but as we know by now all the sound and fury signified nothing. The ghost of a derivative implosion – in this case not caused by the previous possibility, the shutting down of the Strait of Hormuz – remains.
We are still barely starting to understand the consequences of Covid-19 for the future of neoliberal turbo-capitalism. What’s certain is that the whole global economy has been hit by an insidious, literally invisible circuit breaker. This may be just a “coincidence.” Or this may be, as some are boldly arguing, part of a possible, massive psy-op creating the perfect geopolitlcal and social engineering environment for full-spectrum dominance.
Additionally, along the hard slog down the road, with immense, inbuilt human and economic sacrifice, with or without a reboot of the world-system, a more pressing question remains: will imperial elites still choose to keep waging full-spectrum-dominance hybrid war against China?
Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.
In a move that surprised exactly zero people, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has wasted no time scrambling to blame Iran for damage done to two sea vessels in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, citing exactly zero evidence.
“This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication,” Pompeo told the press in a statement.
“The United States will defend its forces, interests, and stand with our partners and allies to safeguard global commerce and regional stability. And we call upon all nations threatened by Iran’s provocative acts to join us in that endeavor,” Pompeo concluded before hastily shambling off, taking exactly zero questions.
Here are seven reasons to be extremely skeptical of everything Pompeo said:
1. Pompeo is a known liar, especially when it comes to Iran.
Pompeo has a well-established history of circulating blatant lies about Iran and the behavior of the Iranian government, and he recently told an audience at Texas A&M University that when he was leading the CIA, “We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses.”
2. The US empire is known to use lies and false flags to start wars.
The US-centralized power alliance has an extensive and well-documented history of advancing preexisting military agendas using lies, false flags and psyops to make targeted governments appear to be the aggressors. This is such a well-established pattern that “Gulf of Tonkin” briefly trended on Twitter after the Gulf of Oman incident. Any number of government agencies could have been involved from any number of the nations in this alliance, including the US, the UK, the KSA, the UAE, or Israel.
3. John Bolton has openly endorsed lying to advance military agendas.
I wrote an article about this last month because the Trump administration had already begun rapidly escalating against Iran in ways that happen to align perfectly with the longtime agendas of Trump’s psychopathic Iran hawk National Security Advisor. At that time people were so aware of the possibility that Bolton might involve himself in staging yet another Middle Eastern war based on lies that The Onionwas already spoofing it.
On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.
“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.
“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.
“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?”
“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.
4. Using false flags to start a war with Iran is already an established idea in the DC swamp.
Back in 2012 at a forum for the Washington Institute Of Near East Policy think tank, the group’s Director of Research Patrick Clawson openly talked about the possibility of using a false flag to provoke a war with Iran, citing the various ways the US has done exactly that with its previous wars.
“I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran,” Clawson began.
“Which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming, that the traditional way that America gets to war is what would be best for US interests,” Clawson added. “Some people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into the war… you may recall we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think that Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War One; you may recall we had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to get us into Vietnam; you may recall we had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn’t go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded. And may I point out that Mr. Lincoln did not feel that he could call out the Army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians said would cause an attack.”
“So if, in fact, the Iranians aren’t going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war,” Clawson continued. “One can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I mentioned that explosion on August 17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down. Some day, one of them might not come up. Who would know why? [Smattering of sociopathic laughter from the crowd.] We can do a variety of things, if we wish to increase the pressure (I’m not advocating that) but I’m just suggesting that this is not an either/or proposition — just sanctions have to succeed or other things. We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier at that.”
5. The US State Department has already been running psyops to manipulate the public Iran narrative.
Outrage on Capitol Hill over completely unacceptable US-funded scheme to shape Iran debate. The @IranDisinfo troll campaign targeted American citizens critical of Trump’s Iran policy and accused them of being loyal to Tehran regime.
State Department officials admitted to Congressional staff at a closed-door meeting on Monday that a $1.5 million troll farm had gone “beyond the scope of its mandate” by aggressively smearing American critics of the Trump administration’s Iran policy as propagandists for the Iranian government, according to a new report from The Independent. That “mandate” had reportedly consisted of “countering propaganda from Iran”, also known as conducting anti-Iran propaganda.
“Critics in Washington have gone further, saying that the programme resembled the type of troll farms used by autocratic regimes abroad,” says The Independent.
“One woman behind the harassment campaign, a longtime Iranian-American activist, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the State Department over the years to promote ‘freedom of expression and free access to information,’” the report reads.
6. The Gulf of Oman narrative makes no sense.
Here we go again. US Empire creating a pretext to go to war with Iran. It makes no sense that Iran would provoke a war with US Empire while Iran tries to salvage the nuclear deal with Europe. This situation looks manufactured as hell. The pro-war US media can’t wait to sell this.
One of the ships damaged in the attacks was Japanese-owned, and the other was bound for Japan. This happened just as Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran attempting to negotiate a de-escalation between the US and Iran with Trump’s blessing , and just after Iran had released a prisoner accused of conducting espionage for the US in what many took to be a gesture of good faith.
Iran has been conducting itself with remarkable restraint in the face of relentless sanctions and provocations from the US and its allies; it wouldn’t make much sense for it to suddenly abandon that restraint with attacks on sea vessels, then rescue their crew, then deny perpetrating the attacks, during a time of diplomatic exchanges and while trying to preserve the nuclear deal with Europe. If Tehran did perpetrate the attacks in order to send a strong message to the Americans, it would have been a very mixed message sent in a very weird way with very odd timing.
7. Even if Iran did perpetrate the attack, Pompeo would still be lying.
Pompeo’s statement uses the words “unprovoked” twice and “Iran’s provocative acts” once, explicitly claiming that the US empire was just minding its own business leaving Iran alone when it was attacked out of the blue by a violent aggressor. Sometimes the things put out by the US State Department feel like they’re conducting experiments on us, just to test the limits of our stupidity.
As noted in this article by Moon of Alabama and this discussion on the Ron Paul Liberty Report, the US has been provoking Iran with extremely aggressive and steadily tightening sanctions, which means that even if Tehran is behind the attacks, it would not be the aggressor and the attacks would most certainly not have been “unprovoked”. Economic sanctions are an act of war; if China were to do to America’s economy what America is doing to Iran’s, the US would be in a hot war with China immediately. It could technically be possible that Iran is pushing back on US aggressions and provocations, albeit in a strange and neoconservatively convenient fashion.
Either way, we have seen exactly zero evidence supporting Pompeo’s claims, so anyone you see hastening to blame Iran for the Gulf of Oman incident is either a war whore or a slobbering moron, or both. Knowing what we know about the US-centralized empire and its pre-existing regime change agenda against Iran, there is no reason to believe Pompeo and many reasons not to.
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“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat, as stated a month ago by 
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