1984 vs Brave New World – How Freedom Dies

1984 vs Brave New World – How Freedom Dies

February 19, 2024

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”  

George Orwell, 1984

George Orwell’s writings have experienced a spike in popularity over the past several decades and for a good reason – modern societies are becoming ever more like the dystopia Orwell depicted in his novel 1984. Whether it be mass surveillance, the incessant use of propaganda, perpetual war, the manipulation of language, or the cult of personality surrounding political leaders, many consider Orwell’s novel to be prescient. While the West remains freer than the dystopian society of 1984, the trend of more and more power being concentrated in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats does not bode well for those who favour a free society. Orwell believed that the totalitarianism he portrayed in his novel was a distinct possibility for the West and at times he went as far as to suggest that it may in fact be inevitable. Or as he wrote: 

“Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships.”   

George Orwell, Complete Works – Volume XII

In this video we will look at the cause of Orwell’s pessimism, focusing on two trends that increase the risk of a totalitarian future – the movement toward collectivism and the rise of hedonism. We then contrast Orwell’s views with those of another author of dystopian fiction – Aldous Huxley. 

Collectivism is a doctrine, central to several ideologies, in which the goals of a certain collective, such as a state, a nation, a socio-economic class, an ethnic group, or a society, are given precedence over the goals of individuals. Socialism, communism, nationalism, and fascism are all collectivist ideologies. Orwell believed that a pre-condition for the rise of totalitarianism was the widespread adoption of a collectivist mentality, and all the totalitarian nations of the 20^th century were organized based on some form of collectivist ideology – in the Soviet Union and China it was communism, in Germany and in Italy, fascism.  

Orwell’s view of the connection between totalitarianism and collectivism has proved puzzling as Orwell was a staunch leftist, a critic of capitalism, and a socialist. How could someone who favoured socialism, a collectivist ideology, at the same time write a dystopian novel which portrays a collectivist society in such a horrific manner? To understand his position, it must first be realized that Orwell did not consider capitalism to be a viable system, or as he explains: 

“It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption.”  

George Orwell, Complete Works – Volume XII

Capitalism was such an inadequate system in Orwell’s mind, that like many other leftists of his day, he believed it was on its deathbed and would soon be replaced by some form of collectivism. He saw this as inevitable. The issue for Orwell was what type of collectivism would take its place.  

“The real question…is whether capitalism, now obviously doomed, is to give way to oligarchy [totalitarianism] or to true democracy [democratic socialism]”.  

George Orwell, Complete Works – Volume XVIII

Following the death of capitalism Orwell hoped that democratic socialism would rise in the West. Democratic socialists, like Orwell, advocated for a centrally planned economy, nationalization of all major industry, and a radical decrease in wealth inequality. They were also strong supporters of civil liberties such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, which they hoped could be maintained in a society which would largely deprive people of their economic freedoms. 

The problem, however, which Orwell and other socialists had to grapple with, were the lack of examples, past or present, of any country successfully adopting democratic socialism. Furthermore, when a government rids a populace of its economic freedom, the destruction of civil liberties tends to follow. For a centrally planned economy is rife with corruption, waste, and mismanagement and so for a government to maintain power as it parasitically saps wealth and resources from a populace it must limit their ability to speak out and protest. To make matters worse, all the states that had turned to collectivism in the first half of the 20^th century, such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, adopted what Orwell called oligarchical collectivism, not democratic socialism. 

Oligarchical collectivism is a totalitarian system in which an elite few, under the guise of a collectivist ideology, centralize power using force and deception. Once in power these oligarchs take away not only the economic freedoms of their citizens, a move which socialists like Orwell favoured, but also their civil liberties. Orwell was concerned that following the death of capitalism the possibility existed that the entire Western world would succumb to oligarchical collectivism. One of the main reasons for this fear was his recognition that hedonism was on the rise in the West, and a hedonistic populace, according to Orwell, is a populace ripe for the taking by totalitarians.  

Hedonism is an ethical position which maintains that life’s ultimate goal should be the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain and discomfort. In an increasingly urban and consumerist West, Orwell believed that many people were structuring their lives in a hedonistic manner. A hedonistic lifestyle, according to Orwell, weakens people, it makes them feeble and incapable of mounting any resistance against those who desire to rule over a society with force. Or as David Ramsay Steele writes: 

“Orwell thinks that any group which gives itself over to hedonism must ultimately become easy meat for fanatical ideological enemies, which are more self-sacrificing, more dedicated, and more remorseless. The real enemy is not the lover of pleasure but the fanatic who is against pleasure, and the former is conceived as defenceless in face of the latter.”

David Ramsay Steele, Orwell Your Orwell

The West, since Orwell’s death in 1950, has become more hedonistic, and most people have been indoctrinated to accept collectivism in one form or another, but this has not led the permanent entrenchment of oligarchical collectivism. Rather, Aldous Huxley, the author of another famous 20^th century dystopian novel, Brave New World, may have had a better grasp of the way Western societies would become enslaved in the late-20^th and early-21^st centuries.  

Huxley, like Orwell, was an anti-hedonist, but his aversion to hedonism differed from Orwell’s. Huxley’s main concern was that hedonism could be used as an effective tool to oppress a society because people will willingly forgo freedom so long as their appetite for pleasure and consumption is fulfilled. If a society is structured so that people can devote much of their time to pursuing pleasures, gratifying material wants, and even drugging themselves to escape from reality, then persuasion and conditioning, rather than coercive force, will be sufficient to exert extreme control over a society. Under such conditions most people won’t even notice the chains of servitude that slowly tighten around them, or as Huxley wrote: 

“In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature…are deliberately used…for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation.” 

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, contrasts the differing fears of Orwell and Huxley: 

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one…Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture…In 1984 people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.” (Neil Postman) 

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The West, it seems, finds itself in a situation analogous to what Huxley feared. We live in a society that is drowning in distractions. Most people spend more time staring at screens than interacting with people in the flesh and blood, and popping prescriptions pills, or self-medicating with alcohol or illicit drugs, has become the normal mode for coping with any form of distress. Most people still believe the West is free and the overt physical coercion that Orwell thought would be required to enslave a society has so far proven unnecessary. Through endless distractions, diversions, and the easy availability of pleasurable and distracting experiences, many embrace their lack of freedom and worship the society which has made their hedonistic lifestyle possible.  

“The world’s stable now,’ says the Controller in Huxley’s Brave New World. ‘People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.”  

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Before dismissing Orwell’s fears completely, however, it must be noted that Orwell was familiar with Huxley’s position, and he did not deny that the hedonistic society Huxley feared was a possibility. But he saw it as a temporary stage creating the ideal conditions for a more brutal regime to seize control and impose its will on a society composed of weak and apathetic men and women. Whether Orwell will be proven correct remains to be seen, but as was revealed in the first few years of this decade, if a societal crisis emerges, most people will accept the more brutal form of totalitarianism that Orwell feared. So perhaps all that is missing to throw us permanently into the dystopian world depicted in 1984 is one more major social crisis.  

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Source

https://academyofideas.com/2024/02/1984-vs-brave-new-world-how-freedom-dies/

‘We Need to Ask These Questions’: Experts Accuse Government, Pharma of Covering Up Vaccine Risks

‘We Need to Ask These Questions’: Experts Accuse Government, Pharma of Covering Up Vaccine Risks

Medical experts, political figures, journalists and whistleblowers today accused public health agencies and the mainstream media of censoring and covering up information relating to COVID-19 vaccine injuries and adverse events during a U.S. Senate roundtable discussion hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson

Editor’s note: This is the first of several articles about today’s roundtable discussion, “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

Medical experts, political figures, journalists and whistleblowers today accused public health agencies and the mainstream media of censoring and covering up information relating to COVID-19 vaccine injuries and adverse events during a U.S. Senate roundtable discussion.

Sen. Ron Johnson hosted the discussion — “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” — which his office said was intended to “expose the truth about how the COVID cartel — federal health agencies, Big Pharma, legacy media, and Big Tech — engaged in censorship and coverups.”

“It was heartening to hear these courageous experts willing to risk careers and reputations in order to tell the truth despite tremendous pressure to look the other way,” said Laura Bono, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) vice president.

Bono, who attended the roundtable, added:

“We can’t ensure that the global devastation caused by the COVID crisis will never occur again unless we are able to analyze what happened and speak about it freely. We are immensely grateful to Senator Johnson for presenting this crucial discussion to the American public.”

The discussion focused on six topics: COVID-19 vaccine issues, the history of vaccine injury cover-ups, the corruption of medical research and federal public health agencies, media censorship and propaganda, the COVID-19 response in other countries and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) proposed “pandemic agreement.”

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD chief scientific officer, told The Defender he was “riveted listening to the panelists during the entire four-hour session.”

“Being here among these heroes was such an encouragement,” he said. “Sen. Johnson was an extremely gracious host and a true hero himself.”

Hooker, co-author with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of “Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak,” participated in the roundtable, highlighting the health risks posed by vaccines and the lack of adequate testing by federal health agencies.

HHS never submitted required vaccine safety report to Congress

In his testimony, Hooker said, “The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has never tested the cumulative effect of the vaccine schedule on childhood health outcomes.”

He referenced several scientific studies to support his testimony.

“Vaccinated children were at least twice as likely to be diagnosed with developmental delays, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders. The likelihood of an asthma diagnosis among the vaccinated group was four-and-a-half times higher than the unvaccinated group,” he said.

Hooker said unvaccinated children have shown “incidence rates between 4-20 times lower” than vaccinated children for autoimmune, neurodevelopmental and other disorders.

He also referred to the sharp rise in myocarditis diagnoses following COVID-19 vaccination.

“Myocarditis is a serious disorder and 76% of all cases following COVID-19 vaccination, as reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS], required emergency care and/or hospitalization,” he said. Yet, the “CDC significantly downplays myocarditis as a side effect of the vaccine.”

Further highlighting government inaction in studying and responding to vaccine injuries, Hooker said:

“The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act requires that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report to Congress on the state of vaccine safety in the U.S. every two years.”

Yet HHS has “never submitted a vaccine safety report to Congress,” he said.

Big Pharma ‘controls the levers of power,’ suppresses unprofitable treatments

Edward Dowd, a former BlackRock executive who has extensively studied the increase in excess deaths during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, also participated in the roundtable.

Dowd, author of “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,” said that government and WHO statements claiming the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective” have “been proven false.”

“It has become clear that the U.S. government, along with the health regulators, do not desire an honest accounting of … policies that were imposed mostly under federal mandates,” he said, noting that this has resulted in high human costs.

Dowd told the panel:

“The total excess deaths since the rollout of the vaccine in the U.S. is approximately 1.1 million for 2021, 2022 and 2023. We estimate the economic cost of productive working age people dying at $15.6 billion [and] estimate 28.4 million individuals are chronically absent, resulting in an estimated economic cost of $135 billion since 2021.”

Jessica Rose, Ph.D., an immunologist and biochemist, told The Defender in advance that her testimony would focus on an “Analysis of the VAERS pharmacovigilance database in the context of the COVID-19 injectable products,” which “has revealed strong emergent safety signals — from myocarditis to death — that are not being acknowledged by the owners of the data.”

“This goes against standard operating procedures and begs the question: Why?” she said.

Rose also referred to recent revelations, later confirmed by Canadian public health authorities, about the contamination of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

“Is there a risk associated with DNA insertion in the context of the modified mRNA shots? Yes,” she said.

Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, discussed the suppression of potentially effective treatments by public health agencies.

“We are only now beginning to understand that many long-established drugs may have other uses that we don’t even know about, effectively treating diseases we never imagined using them against,” he said. “So why on earth aren’t we systematically testing them for potential new uses?”

Kory told the panel:

“The ugly truth is it’s not profitable. Big Pharma makes money on complicated new drugs, and it controls the levers of power. Nearly half of FDA’s [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] budget is bankrolled by the drug industry, and its tentacles are deep in academia, medicine and other regulatory agencies like the NIH [National Institutes of Health].”

He cited ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as examples of treatments that were suppressed during the pandemic despite evidence they were effective.

Johnson: Those who ask questions ‘vilified,’ ‘ridiculed’

In an interview with The Gateway Pundit Sunday, Johnson discussed adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccines, the discovery by embalmers of “strange white fibrous clots” in bodies of the deceased since the vaccine rollout began in late 2020 and efforts to suppress ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-19 treatments.

Referring to the clotting phenomenon, Johnson said, “What’s unfortunate is the medical establishment in general, and certainly, our federal health agencies, are discouraging autopsies. So, the only evidence we’re getting of this is from embalmers that are having a difficult time getting embalming fluid into [the] cadavers.”

Johnson suggested that Big Pharma and government health agencies promoted mRNA vaccines because of a profit motive.

He said:

“They’ve had this mRNA platform. It never succeeded in animals, but they knew how profitable a platform it could be. They’ve already found out how profitable vaccines are because there’s no worry of liability. You just get those things on the childhood vaccine schedule, and you just start printing money.

“Nobody can question the efficacy. Nobody can question the safety of them. So, vaccines are highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies, so they’re going to push them. And of course, they’ve got their individuals in government that push them right along with them.

“Again, our health agencies have been completely captured by Big Pharma.”

Johnson also questioned the addition of an increasing number of vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule in the U.S.

“With the number [of vaccines] we administer to children now, gee, what could go wrong?” he said. “Every time you inject a child with a vaccine, you’re messing with their immune system. Is that why autoimmune diseases are up?”

“We need to ask these questions,” Johnson said. “My problem is we’re just not even able to ask questions, and those who ask questions, those who put forward evidence are immediately ostracized, criticized, vilified, ridiculed — and that’s not science.”

Johnson also implied that some of his congressional colleagues have sustained injuries related to the COVID-19 vaccines but are not speaking out.

“My guess is they understand how people that do question this stuff are ridiculed and vilified. And they just don’t want to put up with the hassle,” he said.

Johnson also spoke out against pharmaceutical company advertising, suggesting it should be subject to a government ban.

“Pass a law,” he said. “We are one of the very few countries that allow that.”

Johnson said that while he is “a free-market guy” who usually “would not be on the side of imposing that kind of government restriction on business,” he said that having seen how Big Pharma “spends the billions and how they use that to capture the narrative and destroy anybody who questions the narrative,” he believes “that’s got to stop.”

Participants at the roundtable included:

• Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
• Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD senior director of science and research.
• Del Bigtree, CEO of the Informed Consent Action Network.
• Psychologist and author Mattias Desmet, Ph.D.
• Edward Dowd, author of “‘Cause Unknown’: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022.”
• Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center and co-author of the 1985 book “DPT: A Shot in the Dark.
• Dr. Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.
• Journalist Lara Logan, formerly of CBS News.
• Dr. Robert Malone, pioneer and expert in mRNA and DNA vaccines and therapies.
• Kevin McKernan, chief scientific officer and founder of Medicinal Genomics.
• Journalist Rodney Palmer, formerly of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
• Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., professor emeritus and senior research scientist in epidemiology (chronic diseases) at the Yale School of Public Health.
• International elected officials, including Rob Roos, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands.
• Immunologist and biochemist Jessica Rose, Ph.D.
• Biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein, Ph.D.

Several of the participants — and Sen. Johnson — previously spoke at this past weekend’s International Crisis Summit in Washington, D.C., which Malone organized. Rep. Greene recently spoke in support of vaccine injury victims at a U.S. House of Representatives vaccine safety hearing.

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV's "Good Morning CHD."

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Source

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/ron-johnson-roundtable-government-pharma-cover-up-vaccine-risks/

The Heroic Julian Assange

The Heroic Julian Assange

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

February 26, 2024

Julian Assange may soon be extradited to the United States, where he will face prosecution that could end in his imprisonment for life. He is in fact a hero, who should be honored rather than punished. American foreign policy is based on the pursuit of global hegemony and to achieve this goal, our “leaders” engage in torture and murder. Assange brought these crimes to public attention through his publication of the “WikiLeaks” documents he got from Bradley Manning. Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.

Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:

“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.Julian Assange In His ... Assange, Julian Best Price: $9.00 Buy New $12.83 (as of 02:30 UTC - Details)

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages, reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes — including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and 10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S. imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York Times — will be criminalized.” See here.

It’s important that we understand in detail what was in the WikiLeaks documents. In an article published in March, 2020, the 10^th anniversary of their publication, Arjun Walla gives us some of the highlights:

“Last month marked the 10th anniversary of WikiLeaks’ publication of the Collateral Murder video. The video shows how two Apache helicopters murdered 11 Iraqi people including two Reuters journalists. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.  This is one of the publications Julian Assange is being indicted for espionage. He faces 175 years in a US jail if extradited from the UK.  WikiLeaks obtained the video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. They analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material and spoke to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work

After the video was released, one of the soldiers involved in the incident, Ethan McCord, said the following:

“If you feel threatened in any way, you’re able to engage that person. Many soldiers felt threatened just by the fact that you were looking at them, so they fired their weapons on anybody that was looking at them because they (I) felt threatened. We were told if we were to fire on anybody, and if it were to be investigated, that ‘officers will take care of you.’ ”

“We were told by our battalion commander to kill every m***** f****** on the street.  Many soldiers would not do that, we decided we were going to shoot into the rooftops of buildings because, if you didn’t fire, the NCOs in your platoon would make your life hell.”

“This happens on a daily basis, destroying vans full of children, the destruction of the Iraqi people happens on a daily basis.” See here.

The WikiLeaks documents also showed how the US military and the CIA manipulate the banking and financial system. Arjun Walia is again on top of this:

“I recently came across an article published on MintPress News. It was written by Whitney Webb, who is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

In her article, she references a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” that was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks. The U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.”

The rest of her article is posted below:

The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”

WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.

The manual also touts the “state manipulation of tax and interest rates” along with other “legal and bureaucratic measures” to “open, modify or close financial flows” and further states that the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) – which oversees U.S. sanctions on other nations, like Venezuela — “has a long history of conducting economic warfare valuable to any ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] UW [Unconventional Warfare] campaign.”

This section of the manual goes on to note that these financial weapons can be used by the U.S. military to create “financial incentives or disincentives to persuade adversaries, allies and surrogates to modify their behavior at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels” and that such unconventional warfare campaigns are highly coordinated with the State Department and the Intelligence Community in determining “which elements of the human terrain in UWOA [Unconventional Warfare Operations Area] are most susceptible to financial engagement.”

The role of these “independent” international financial institutions as extensions of U.S. imperial power is elaborated elsewhere in the manual and several of these institutions are described in detail in an appendix to the manual titled “The Financial Instrument of National Power.” Notably, the World Bank and the IMF are listed as both Financial Instruments and Diplomatic Instruments of U.S. National Power as well as integral parts of what the manual calls the “current global governance system.”

Furthermore, the manual states that the U.S. military “understand[s] that properly integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be a component of UW,” meaning that these weapons are a regular feature of unconventional warfare campaigns waged by the United States.” See here.

I mentioned that the US seeks global hegemony, and its closest ally in this futile and deadly quest is Britain. The WikiLeaks document showed how close their on-going collaboration really is, as Mark Curtis reveals:

“Whitehall’s special relationship with Riyadh is exposed in an extraordinary cable from 2013 highlighting how Britain conducted secret vote-trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council. Britain initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support.

The Wikileaks releases also shed details on Whitehall’s fawning relationship with Washington. A 2008cable, for example, shows then shadow foreign secretary William Hague telling the U.S. embassy that the British “want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it.”

A cable the following year shows the lengths to which Whitehall goes to defend the special relationship from public scrutiny. Just as the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War was beginning in 2009, Whitehall promised Washington that it had “put measures in place to protect your interests”.

It is not known what this protection amounted to, but no U.S. officials were called to give evidence to Chilcot in public. The inquiry was also refused permission to publish letters between former U.S. President George W. Bush and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair written in the run-up to the war.

Also in 2009, then Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised the prospect of reducing the number of British nuclear-armed Trident submarines from four to three, a policy opposed in Washington. However, Julian Miller, an official in the UK’s Cabinet Office, privately assured U.S. officials that his government “would consult with the U.S. regarding future developments concerning the Trident deterrent to assure there would be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and UK.” The idea that British decision-making on Trident is truly independent of the U.S. is undermined by this cable.The Trial of Julian As... Melzer, Nils Best Price: $7.50 Buy New $19.64 (as of 02:30 UTC - Details)

The Wikileaks cables are rife with examples of British government duplicity of the kind I’ve extensively come across in my own research on UK declassified files. In advance of the British-NATO bombing campaign in Libya in March 2011, for example, the British government pretended that its aim was to prevent Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s attacks on civilians and not to overthrow him.

However, Wikileaks files released in 2016 as part of its Hillary Clinton archive show William Burns, then the U.S. deputy secretary of state, having talked with now Foreign Secretary Hague about a “post-Qaddafi” Libya. This was more than three weeks before military operations began. The intention was clearly to overthrow Gaddafi, and the UN resolution about protecting civilians was simply window dressing.

Another case of British duplicity concerns Diego Garcia, the largest island in the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean, which is now a major U.S. base for intervention in the Middle East. The UK has long fought to prevent Chagos islanders from returning to their homeland after forcibly removing them in the 1960s.

A secret 2009 cable shows that a particular ruse concocted by Whitehall to promote this was the establishment of a “marine reserve” around the islands. A senior Foreign Office official told the US that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.”

A week before the “marine reserve” proposal was made to the U.S. in May 2009, then UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also conniving with the U.S., apparently to deceive the public. A cable reveals Miliband helping the U.S. to sidestep a ban on cluster bombs and keep the weapons at U.S. bases on UK soil, despite Britain signing the international treaty banning the weapons the previous year.

Miliband approved a loophole created by diplomats to allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on UK soil and was part of discussions on how the loophole would help avert a debate in Parliament that could have “complicated or muddied” the issue. Critically, the same cable also revealed that the U.S. was storing cluster munitions on ships based at Diego Garcia.” See here.

The CIA was so angered by Wikileaks that its director, Mike Pompeo, plotted to kill him. Philip Giraldi gives us the inside story:

“In an April 2017 speech, Donald Trump’s new CIA Director Mike Pompeo said “WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service and has encouraged its followers to find jobs at the CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is: a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.” It was a declaration of war. The label “non-state hostile intelligence service” is a legal designation which more-or-less opened the door to non-conventional responses to eliminate the threat. CIA Stations where WikiLeaks associates were known to be present were directed to increase surveillance on them and also attempt to interdict any communications they might seek to have with Assange himself in the embassy. A staff of analysts referred to as the “WikiLeaks Team” worked full time to target the organization and its leaders.

At the top level of the Agency debate over more extreme options prevailed, though there were legitimate concerns about the legality of what was being contemplated. In late 2017, in the midst of the debate over possible kidnapping and/or assassination, the Agency picked up alarming though unsubstantiated reports that Russian intelligence operatives were preparing plans to help Assange escape from the United Kingdom and fly him to Moscow.

CIA responded by preparing to foil Assange’s possible Russian-assisted departure to include potential gun battles with Moscow’s spies on the streets of London or crashing a car into any Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange to seize him. One scenario even included either blocking the runway or shooting out the tires of any Russian plane believed to be carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. Pompeo himself reportedly favored what is referred to as a “rendition,” which would consist of breaking into the Ecuadorian Embassy, kidnapping Assange, and flying him clandestinely to the U.S. for trial. Others in the national security team favored killing Assange rather than going through the complexity of kidnapping and removing him.” See here.

Fortunately, the plot failed. But now it looks like Assange will be shipped to the US, where this ill man, who suffered a stroke in a British jail, faces a dire fate. Let’s do everything we can to prevent this and to honor this true American hero.

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Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. [send him mail], former editorial assistant to Ludwig von Mises and congressional chief of staff to Ron Paul, is founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, executor for the estate of Murray N. Rothbard, and editor of LewRockwell.com. He is the author of Against the State and Against the Left. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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Source

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2024/02/lew-rockwell/the-heroic-julian-assange/

The Wuhan Cover-Up by RFK, Jr.: Review and Analysis

By Debbie Lerman   February 16, 2024   Government, History, Vaccines   13 minute read

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The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (Skyhorse Publishing, December 3, 2023) is a crucial book for understanding how the Covid catastrophe happened. 

I would even go so far as to argue that RFK, Jr.’s new book is the most important Covid chronicle to date, although it ends at the beginning of 2020, before most of us were even aware that a “novel coronavirus” was circulating among us. 

The book explains the CAUSES of the global disaster, which all happened before March 2020. Everything after that are the downstream EFFECTS of what The Wuhan Cover-Up exposes.

Here’s how RFK, Jr. summarizes those effects:

Everyone has now seen that pandemics are another way for the military, intelligence, and public health services to expand their budgets and their power. In 2020, public health, defense, and intelligence agencies weaponized a [Covid-19] pandemic, resulting in unprecedented profits to Big Pharma and the dramatic expansion of the security/surveillance state, including a systemic abandonment of constitutional rights—effectively a coup d’état against liberal democracy globally.

(Kindle edition, p. 385)

Putting Covid in the Biowarfare Context

Interestingly, in the publicity blurb on the book and in interviews about it, RFK, Jr. focuses on “the etiology of the gain-of-function research” and everything that led up to a virus being engineered in a US-funded lab in Wuhan by a group of Chinese and Western scientists.

At the core of this story is RFK, Jr.’s desire to warn readers about the dangers of gain-of-function research, which he shows in the book to be irrefutably a biowarfare – not a public health – endeavor.

But in the process of constructing the argument and supplying the proof for his dire warning, and for his assertion that this type of research should be stopped immediately and forever, RFK, Jr. provides what I find to be an even more compelling story.

The story in the Wuhan Cover-Up that interests me is the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex – the global behemoth comprising military/intelligence alliances, Big Pharma, Big Tech, academic and medical institutions, and NGOs – that both created the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 and ran the global response to it.

In this article, I will highlight key parts of The Wuhan Cover-Up that pertain to this storyline – which I believe are downplayed in its publicity materials and are one of the main reasons it has been practically banned from polite society: The book has been so heavily censored that I cannot find a single actual review on Google. Newsweek reported that independent bookstores do not want to carry it. 

A lot of the censorship has to do with mainstream animosity toward RFK, Jr’s presidential campaign. But the explosive content of the book, as reviewed in this article, is also likely a factor.

Top-Level Summary of the Rise of the Biowarfare Industrial Complex, as Told by RFK, Jr.

• The biowarfare industry started to grow after WWII, when Western intelligence agencies imported Japanese and German scientists to help develop weapons against Communist enemies. This was, in fact, the first task of the newly formed CIA.

• After 9/11, funding for bioweapons research exploded, and so did the power and reach of the military and intelligence agencies in charge of such research. The research, presented to the public as “pandemic preparedness and response (PPR),” encompassed mostly attempts to engineer deadly pathogens and simultaneously to create countermeasures to them, predominantly vaccines. 

• So much money was pouring into PPR/bioweapons research that the public health agencies and academic institutions involved in government research all became dependent on it – or, perhaps more accurately, addicted to the money and power this type of research bestowed. Multinational public-private partnerships and “non-governmental organizations” (e.g., The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Wellcome Trust) were created to fund and promote the need for such research.

• In the fall of 2019 an engineered pathogen from one of the bioweapons labs in China found its way into the population. All the military, intelligence, and public health officials from China, the US, UK, and other countries, with their pharma and academic partners, conspired to cover up the lab leak, while simultaneously preparing to unleash their countermeasures on the world.

How the Nature of Biowarfare Research Has Not Changed

As RFK, Jr. tells it, the history of today’s biowarfare industry starts after WWII, when German and Japanese scientists were secretly repatriated to assist the intelligence community and military in developing chemical and biological weapons programs. 

It is no coincidence, he argues, that many sinister features of those earlier programs carried forward to the present. These features include:

• tight alliances with the pharmaceutical industry and the media; 
• the complicity of academia and medical schools; 
• the co-opting of journals; 
• intense secrecy; 
• pervasive experimentation on human subjects; 
• liberal use of the word “volunteers;”
• open-air testing on large unwilling populations; 
• ethical elasticity; 
• the normalization of lies; 
• the use of microbiology to alter and weaponize bugs; 
• the use of vaccine development as a mask for bioweapons research; 
• the corruption of the entire medical establishment 

(p. 48)

Even just this list is enough to explain what happened with Covid: Take all these ingredients, add billions of dollars and multinational public-private partnerships involving top research institutions and thousands of scientists, and how could you not get a global disaster? 

Deep CIA-Biowarfare Ties

The Wuhan Cover-Up spends a lot of time documenting the correspondence between the rise of the CIA and the emergence of the modern biowarfare program. 

 RFK, Jr. writes:

…it’s worth reviewing the agency’s seventy-five-year preoccupation with bioweapons, pandemics, and vaccines. Bioweapons development was the CIA’s first love, and has remained its relentless passion. The CIA’s natal obsession with bioweapons pitted the agency against all the idealistic underpinnings of both American democracy and the healing arts of medicine. 

(p. 46)

An important related point emphasized in the book is that bioweapons research is not an obscure, niche industry. Rather, according to The Wuhan Cover-Up, it is a top national defense concern, driving the national security agenda:

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military and intelligence apparatus erected the biosecurity agenda as the new spear tip of American foreign policy. These agencies deftly replaced the fear of the Soviet monolith and creeping communism with a fear of infectious disease, which they have successfully stoked to justify vast expansions in power…

(p. 44)

Shockingly Broad Participation by Academics and Scientists

Because the biosecurity agenda – which focuses on biochemical and medical research – is so central to foreign policy and national security, it controls large swaths of research funding. Thus, as RFK, Jr. documents, it has come to encompass many top academic institutions and thousands of doctors and scientists:

Among the most alarming side effects of the federal preoccupation with bioweapons has been the systematic diversion of vast resources and armies of academic and government scientists away from public health and healing. 

(p. 46)

Today, some thirteen thousand death scientists labor on bioweapons technology on behalf of US military, intelligence, and public health agencies in some four hundred government and university bioweapons labs. 

(p. 83)

Moral Bankruptcy

When faced with Covid “conspiracy theories” – such as those put forth in The Wuhan Cover-Up – people often argue that so many doctors and scientists could not possibly have knowingly agreed to civilization-killing ideas like lockdowns and injections of unsafe medical products into billions of people. They must have believed they were actually saving humanity, right?

Wrong, according to RFK, Jr.:

History has shown again and again the bioweapons agenda’s awesome power to transform compassionate, brilliant, idealistic doctors into monsters. 

(p. 47)

They have, as a class, demonstrated thoroughly warped judgment and a reliable penchant for dishonesty and terrible ideas. 

(p. 87)

Bioweapons Research = Vaccine Research

Another crucial idea bearing on our understanding of the Covid response is that vaccine research is a primary concern for the biowarfare-industrial complex, although it is publicly presented as a public health endeavor.

The book quotes Professor Frances Boyle, author of the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, with this explanation:

You can’t use a bioweapon against your enemy without having in your possession an antidote with which to shield your own team from blowback. For this reason, bioweapons and vaccines are always developed in tandem with each other.

(p. 121)

Moreover, because vaccine research funding goes to both biodefense and public health agencies, they have become inextricably linked:

The military and public health agencies work in close coordination to develop vaccines for military applications, sharing information and working side by side in labs. Vaccine research often serves as a cover or rationale for illegal bioweapons development.

(p. 129)

From an Obsession of US National Security to a Tool of Globalism

As RFK, Jr. writes, after 9/11, Islamic terrorism became the focus of US national defense. After the anthrax attacks, the focus of antiterrorist activities coalesced around the need to predict, prevent, and create countermeasures to biological terrorism. 

This more reliable and terrifying enemy would soon replace the war against Islamic terror—justifying a “forever war” against germs. “Biosecurity,” a.k.a. Pandemic Preparedness and Response (PPR), provided a rationale for US presence in every developing nation.

(p. 149)

And, as further explained by RFK, Jr., the focus on bioterrorism, which first served the American imperialist impulse, then became incorporated into the program of globalism:

The emerging medical/military-industrial complex would soon be citing biosecurity as a pretext for centralized control, coordinated response among nations, a sprawling construction project for new US bioweapons laboratories, the archiving of every germ with weapons potential under the pretext of pandemic protection, the control of the media, the imposition of censorship, the erection of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure ostensibly needed to “track and trace” infections, universal digital IDs, digital currencies to reduce disease spread, and the ceding of power by national governments to the WHO—in short, globalism. 

(p. 149)

China Becomes a Dominant Biowarfare Research Player

Concurrently, China’s leaders were working on a mission to make China a world leader in science, research, and innovation. According to The Wuhan Cover-Up, the Chinese have been using the West’s march toward globalism to infiltrate “Western academia, businesses, media, cultural groups, and government agencies that speak the language of cooperation, globalism, and public health.” (p. 257)

As part of their infiltration process, the Chinese lavished funding on Western research institutions and scientific publishing houses. And because biomedical/biowarfare research was so central to Western governments and research institutions, the Chinese were able to eventually dominate that space as well.

Thus, the book explains, China was able to “co-opt US academic institutions and US public health agencies into performing backdoor bioweapons research for the Chinese military.” (p. 274)

Why Would the US Do Bioweapons Research in/for China?

This is, perhaps, the most oft-raised question in response to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered bioweapon from a lab funded by the Chinese military, the US, and other Western governments.

As RFK, Jr. explains, with the Chinese as major funders of Western institutions, journals and projects related to biomedical research, this strange collaboration was not just unsurprising, but in fact, inevitable:

The Chinese campaign to co-opt leading scientists and the river of Chinese funding to researchers at US and British medical research universities and to the leading scientific journals had, by then, bought China powerful friends across the Western scientific establishment. 

(p. 280)

Furthermore, the interests of China intersect with the interests of major global corporations and NGOs that comprise the biowarfare-industrial-complex – many of which enriched themselves considerably through the Covid response. As RFK, Jr. writes:

There is a natural intersection of interests between Western business titans and a former communist government [the Chinese Communist Party] that has made itself the global model for seamlessly merging corporate with government power, and promoting business growth by suppressing democracy, labor, and human rights. 

(p. 572)

For its part, the US intelligence community has all kinds of reasons – all ultimately geared toward increasing its own power and influence – to engage in sensitive scientific research projects with the Chinese:

The deliberate transfer of our superior bioweapons knowledge to the Chinese—a potential enemy—makes little sense to citizens who think in terms of conventional rivalries between nations. Espionage was clearly among the complex motivations for the US intelligence community supporting Chinese bioweapons research in China. Knowing what the Chinese are up to is the mission of the US intelligence community. But quietly sharing cutting-edge technologies may also serve institutional self-interest. After all, the intelligence community expands its power by reporting the enemy’s expanding capabilities; more frightening capabilities abroad justify increased budgets and increased power at home. 

(p. 388)

Bioweapons expert Dr. Francis Boyle is quoted stating that:

Opportunities to expand institutional power and corporate profits always seem to trump patriotism and duty within the CIA’s bioweapons teams. Patriotism is a polite fiction among the bioweapons set.

(p. 383)

RFK, Jr. adds that the public health agencies, which are heavily involved in, and funded by, biowarfare research, share the CIA’s self-interested non-patriotism:

NIH and NIAID operate under the same perverse incentives that drive destructive conduct across the whole bioweapons field.

(p. 383)

A Convergence of Personal, Political, Financial and Global Interests

In the final chapters of The Wuhan Cover-Up, RFK, Jr. focuses on several key figures in the biowarfare-industrial-complex, including Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust (now at the WHO), Anthony Fauci of the NIH, and Bill Gates. 

RFK, Jr. uses these figures to show how the Covid pandemic emerged from the toxic stew of ethically compromised biowarfare research standards; military, intelligence, public health, and academic institutions/organizations dependent on biowarfare funding; the involvement of China and global interests in the booming business of “pandemic preparedness and response;” and, of course, the endless pursuit of political power and personal enrichment.

Here’s a great summary of how they all came together, through personal and institutional greed and power-mongering, to unleash the Covid catastrophe on the world:

The evidence suggests that instead of relentlessly protecting public health, Farrar exploited the pandemic to promote the venal financial agendas of his WEF [World Economic Forum] patrons, to transform Western democracies into surveillance states, to expand his personal power and paycheck, and to pander to high-level Chinese officials. Achieving these objectives required Farrar to hide [Covid’s] laboratory origins, a project in which he enlisted a cadre of his medical cartel cronies—those who, thanks to years of funding by Fauci, Farrar, and Gates, now occupy the highest echelons of virology in academia, the regulatory agencies, and pharmaceutical companies. 

(p. 539)

If for nothing else, I would recommend adding The Wuhan Cover-Up to your library as an invaluable resource on leading figures, organizations, and power brokers involved in the biowarfare-industrial-complex.

Conclusions and Comments

It was especially gratifying to me to read The Wuhan Cover-Up (all 600 pages of it), because it validated my own research, showing that the pandemic response was led by the national security/intelligence arms of government, not public health agencies. 

In fact, after reading the first few chapters – the ones that go into the history of chemical and biological warfare and the rise of the biowarfare-industrial-complex – I paradoxically felt an enormous sense of relief. 

Finally, we have a detailed account that shows – beyond what I would consider a reasonable doubt – that the entire Covid catastrophe was caused, and led, by a multinational military-intelligence-academic-pharma-tech-NGO cabal.

RFK, Jr.’s conclusion is that we should look to a future “in which the bio-elites are held responsible for their actions, people regain their rights, and the Constitution is restored to its intended preeminence.”

But how do we do that? 

I am afraid, based on the information in his own book, and the fact that RFK, Jr. himself is being censored and banned so extensively from the public square, that the solution to the problems he exposes is much more difficult and complex than just “holding the bio-elites responsible” which will somehow lead to people regaining their rights.

What we need to do is to shut down, or extract ourselves from, the global biowarfare-industrial-complex that is able to convince (or coerce?) our governments into declaring states of emergency over supposed pandemic threats, and then curtail civil rights and impose massive surveillance, censorship, and propaganda that would not be permitted in non-emergency situations. Not to mention garnering enormous wealth while forcing the world’s population to accept novel, untested, and potentially lethal medical “countermeasures.”

The Wuhan Cover-Up does a better job than any other book or article I have read at exposing the trends, forces, and institutions that brought us the Covid catastrophe – with hundreds of pages of notes and references. What’s frightening is that the enormity of the problem is beyond the scope of the book, not just to solve, but even to fully acknowledge.

Republished from the author’s Substack

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Author

• Debbie Lerman, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, has a degree in English from Harvard. She is a retired science writer and a practicing artist in Philadelphia, PA.

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-wuhan-cover-up-by-rfk-jr-review-and-analysis/