Timely Lessons About Tyranny from the Father of the U$ Constitution

by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / June 14th, 2024

It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.

— James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,  1785

James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of Americans.

How right he was.

Although Madison initially felt that the inclusion of a bill of rights in the originally ratified Constitution was unnecessary to its success, Thomas Jefferson persuaded him that “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, & what no just government should refuse, or rest on inferences.”

The Bill of Rights drafted by Madison—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—was a document so revolutionary at the time that it would come to be viewed as the epitome of American liberty. The rights of the people reflected in those ten amendments encapsulated much of Madison’s views about government, the corrupting influence of power, and the need for safeguards against tyranny.

Madison’s writings speak volumes to the present constitutional crisis in the country.

Read them and weep.

“The accumulation of all powers, Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 47 (30 January 1788) Federalist (Dawson)/46 Full text at Wikisource

“The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 49 (2 February 1788)

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (6 February 1788)

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” — James Madison, Speech, Constitutional Convention (29 June 1787), from Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. I [1] (1911), p. 465

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” — James Madison, Letter to Thomas Jefferson (17 October 1788), as quoted in James Madison: The Writings, 1787-1790 Vol. 5 (1904)]

“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” — James Madison to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822, Writings 9:103-p-9

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”— James Madison, Speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention on Control of the Military, June 16, 1788 in: History of the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, vol. 1, p. 130 (H.B. Grigsby ed. 1890).

In the years since the founders laid their lives on the line to pursue the dream of individual freedom and self-government, big government has grown bigger and the rights of the citizenry have grown smaller.

However, there are certain principles—principles that every American should know—which undergird the American system of government and form the basis of our freedoms.

The following seven principles are a good starting point for understanding what free government is really all about.

First, the maxim that power corrupts is an absolute truth. Realizing this, those who drafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights held one principle sacrosanct: a distrust of all who hold governmental power. As such, those who drafted our founding documents would see today’s government as an out-of-control, unmanageable beast.

The second principle is that governments primarily exist to secure rights, an idea that is central to constitutionalism. The purpose of constitutionalism is to limit governmental power and ensure that the government performs its basic function: to preserve and protect our rights, especially our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and our civil liberties. Unfortunately, the government today has discarded this principle and now sees itself as our master, not our servant.

The third principle revolves around the belief that no one is above the law, not even those who make the law. This is termed rule of law. Richard Nixon’s statement, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal,” would have been an anathema to the Framers of the Constitution.

Fourth, separation of powers ensures that no single authority is entrusted with all the powers of government. The fact that the president today has dictatorial powers would have been considered an offense to every principle for which the Framers took their revolutionary stand.

Fifth, a system of checks and balances, essential if a constitutional government is to succeed, strengthens the separation of powers and prevents legislative despotism. The Framers did not anticipate the emergence of presidential powers or the inordinate influence of corporate powers on governmental decision-making. Indeed, as recent academic studies now indicate, we are ruled by a monied oligarchy that serves itself and not “we the people.”

Sixth, representation allows the people to have a voice in government by sending elected representatives to do their bidding while avoiding the need of each and every citizen to vote on every issue considered by government.

Finally, federalism is yet another constitutional device to limit the power of government by dividing power and, thus, preventing tyranny. In America, the levels of government generally break down into federal, state and local branches (which further divide into counties and towns or cities). Because local and particular interests differ from place to place, such interests are better handled at a more intimate level by local governments, not a bureaucratic national government.

These seven vital principles have been largely forgotten in recent years, obscured by the haze of a centralized government, a citizenry that no longer thinks analytically, and schools that don’t adequately teach our young people about their history and their rights.

Yet here’s the rub: while Americans wander about in their brainwashed states, their “government of the people, by the people and for the people” has largely been taken away from them.

The answer, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries: get un-brainwashed.

Learn your rights.

Stand up for the founding principles.

Make your voice and your vote count for more than just political posturing.

Never cease to vociferously protest the erosion of your freedoms at the local and national level.

Most of all, do these things today.

If we wait until the votes have all been counted or hang our hopes on our particular candidate to win and fix what’s wrong with the country, “we the people” will continue to lose.

John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and author, is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. He wrote the book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015). He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Read other articles by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

 

This Day in Anarchist History: The Vinegar Revolt

by subMedia / June 15th, 2024

On June 13th 2013in anarchist history, we remember The Vinegar Revolt, a series of protests turned into riots across the lands occupied by Brazil.

On June 13th 2013 ongoing demonstrations over a transit fair hike In São Paulo, Brazil erupted into a national uprising after police cracked down hard, arresting 60 people for simply possessing vinegar to protect themselves against the use of teargas.

Soon the demonstrations spread to many other cities and became one of the first documented use of the Black Bloc tactic in the country.

The violent and disruptive tactics of The Vinegar Revolt highlighted the wide gulf between the radical and institutional left and has even led to progressives conflating anarchists with the far-right.

 

Unbecoming American: Judgement at Normandy

by T.P. Wilkinson / June 15th, 2024

Those who learned or vaguely remember what they were taught in school in those deliberately boring hours devoted to the subject called “history” may be forgiven for their confusion at the progressive transformation of core myths from the mid-20^th century. Among those are the bundle of fabrications that constitute the history of the “good war”. The 20th century can be called the American Century not only because of US aspirations to global dominion after 1945 but because it was the US propaganda ministry — in privatized USA aka known as “Hollywood”—which has successfully written the history of the two world wars and propagated it like the Bible, also in foreign parts. During the recent commemorations of the June 1944 “Normandy landings”, executed by an amphibious force comprising mainly members of the Anglo-American armed forces, the constellation of honoured guests was instructive in ways that no textbook could be.

Decades of make-believe have persuaded those susceptible to Western mass media that the Second World War, a designation these hostilities acquired after the capitulations of 1945, was fought by the Anglo-American Empire, the Allies, for democracy and freedom against fascism in Germany and Italy (and as an afterthought in Japan). It has also persuaded millions that this war, in which the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP regime in Germany and the older government of British agent Benito Mussolini’s Partido Nazionale Fascista (the origin of the generic term) were subdued, was ultimately won by the heroic efforts of the largest amphibious assault action in history, the so-called Normandy landings. Never mind for the moment that since the 1960s the purpose of the war has been utterly redefined as the defence of some segment of European Jewry.

To illustrate how this propaganda has expanded with each year further from the events themselves, there were posters hanging in Porto this year advertising an exhibition to commemorate military action in which Portugal was in no way involved. (How the regime of the Bourbon-Anjou pretender, successors to the Caudillo de Espana por la gracio de Dios and usurper of republican government in Madrid, remember 1944 may be worth comment, too. Veterans of the 250th “Azul” division were most unlikely in attendance.) The head of the Portuguese government of that day, Dr Antonio Salazar Oliveira, carefully avoided any overt participation in the international aggression. Instead he exported grain to feed the Wehrmacht instead of his own compatriots and under pressure of his liege lords in London, leased airfields and harbours in the Azores to the Americans. Perhaps Dr Salazar also understood that the Atlantic Charter also protected him from the ultimate enemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Each year since the demise of the Soviet Union the government of the Russian Federation, for some twenty years led by President Vladimir Putin, has politely requested, then objected that the commemoration reflect the facts of the 1944 and not the political preferences of those in attendance. If the Normandy commemoration serves to recall the efforts of the forces invading France to defeat the German NSDAP regime, then the French government itself could not claim honours there any more than the representatives of Germany who soon became regular guests. After all half of France was willingly occupied by Germany while the other half, governed from Vichy collaborated. In other words, if taken at their word, the celebrants before the altars on Omaha Beach, could insist that Paris be treated just like Russia would have Kiev treated today. If the war was against fascism in Europe, as the propagandists in the West have proclaimed for decades, then Germany and France both constituted fascist states whose leaders at such a mass must – at the least—repeat acts of contrition, if not ritual surrender. That at least would be consistent with the anniversary memorials. It would be consistent with the “living history” model of historical re-enactment so beloved in Anglo-American “Disney-culture”. In fact, in a generous interpretation of the Second World War it was a great battle against truculent fascism. Obsequious fascists like those in Madrid or Lisbon were conspicuously spared. Then in 1949 both were lovingly absorbed into NATO, a precedent that should not be overlooked.

Instead not only is France celebrated as an Anglo-American ally—which it was not during that great war (assuming for the purposes of argument the official rationale)—but the ostensible main enemy, evil Germany has been elevated to the status of ally as if it had waged war against itself. In fact, that would conform to the perverse logic by which Koreans invaded Korea in 1950 and Vietnamese invaded Vietnam, while Chinese are poised today to invade China. Already the absurdity and patent insincerity of the commemoration becomes evident. With further interpretative generosity, the Normandy exhibition is a demonstration by its producers that the thousands who died there constitute multiple Christ figures whose “sacrifice” vicariously saved the fascists of France and Germany from damnation. Given the fanaticism with which Latin hypocrisy is practiced in the West, both in and out of church, there are no doubt Faithful to adhere to such a construction. After all the Latin Church has innumerable monuments to its “martyrs” who died fighting communism.

No Red Army units crossed the Manche to wade onto the coast of cows and Calvados. Confining the celebrations to the memory of battles actually fought by those who actually bore arms there (and their descendants) could legitimately be limited to British and American imperial forces and perhaps the few exile French allowed along for the ride. However the Normandy prostrations, especially after 1989, became a stage for historical revisionism. The Russian Federation rightly objects to this deliberate distortion of the war record and its mass medial – hysterical propagation.

This year the Russian government complained that after years of ignoring the primary role of the Soviet Union and Red Army in defeating the NSDAP regime, the western allies added insult to injury by receiving the tee shirt-clad Führer in Kiev, whose party and regime openly celebrate Nazi paramilitary and regular armed forces as national heroes. The harbinger of this affront was the ovation given to a Ukrainian Waffen SS veteran in the Canadian House of Commons last year. He was honoured in the House as a courageous legacy fighter against Russia.

Joseph Stalin insisted that the French (de Gaulle’s French and by implication the French Communists who constituted the bulk of the Résistance) share in acceptance of the capitulation in Karlshorst (Berlin) in May 1945. (Only enormous diplomatic pressure prevented Dwight Eisenhower’s anti-communist armies from accepting a separate surrender by the German High Command a few months earlier.) Then the Soviet Union sincerely or pragmatically lent its Western allies the benefit of a doubt, presuming perhaps that there was still enough of a Left in the West to keep Britain and the US within civilized boundaries.  Since 1989, despite the havoc wreaked upon the dissolving Soviet Union by Western powers, the Russian government has diplomatically avoided stating the obvious in the real revision. Politely speaking the Western “allies” could be accused of foreign policy narcissism as rabid as the narcissism of their popular culture. Having fed on decades of their own mythology they suffer political obesity and hence are incapable of seeing that their story of the Second World War is sociopathic vanity. Hollywood has so permeated their consciousness that they genuinely believe they won the war. The late Ronald Reagan, B-grade film actor that he was, once actually claimed in an interview to have been among US troops that liberated concentration camps in Poland. Aside from the fact that he had never served in combat, the arch anti-communist neither knew nor cared that the Red Army and not the US Army liberated the camps in Poland. His errors (like those of his successors) were dismissed like so many other senile remarks from American gerontocrats, without a wall on which to stand.

Far more plausible and consistent is another explanation. It is also far more obvious and less tortuous to recognize. Namely after 80 years, the Anglo-American Empire has openly repudiated its own mythology. Finally after nearly a century, the West is admitting that the Second World War was the war of the London-New York- Rome – Tokyo – Paris Axis against the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. The true allies were the Soviet Union and the nascent People’s Republic. At Normandy this year the successors to Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis—properly the Anti-Comintern Pact powers—and the children of the collaborators in industrial-strength mass murder from the Rhine to the Dnieper join those high commissioners of banks and hedge funds who have sponsored them since 1917 in the comprehensive war against communism and any other form of national and popular development at odds with the British, American and French Empires—and the caste who own them all.

As they celebrated on the beaches their invasion of France—a last ditch effort to stop the Red Army from reaching the Rhine—they prepare for the next great war against Russia and China, against humanity itself.FacebookTwitter

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Dr T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..

In Our Make-believe Politics, the Strings Pulled by the Super-rich are all too Visible

Biden wanders offstage or walks like a geriatric robot. Yet we are meant to believe he’s carefully navigating us through the nuclear tripwires of the West’s serial wars

by Jonathan Cook / June 15th, 2024

We live in a world of make-believe politics, a world where strings pulled in the interests of the super-rich are ever more visible. And yet we are expected to pretend we cannot see those strings. More astonishing still, many people really do seem blind to the puppet show.

1. The “leader of the free world”, President Joe Biden, can barely maintain his attention for more than a few minutes without straying off topic, or wandering offstage. When he has to walk before the cameras, he does so like he is auditioning for the role of a geriatric robot. His whole body is gripped with the concentration he needs to walk in a straight line.

And yet we are supposed to believe he is carefully working the levers of the western empire, making critically difficult calculations to keep the West free and prosperous, while keeping in check its enemies – Russia, China, Iran – without provoking a nuclear war. Is he really capable of doing all that when he struggles to put one foot in front of the other?

2. Part of that tricky diplomatic balancing act Biden is supposedly conducting, along with other western leaders, relates to Israel’s military operation in Gaza. The West’s “diplomacy” – backed by weapons transfers – has resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children; the gradual starvation of 2.3 million Palestinians over many months; and the destruction of 70 per cent of the enclave’s housing stock and almost all of its major infrastructure and institutions, including schools, universities and hospitals.

And yet we are supposed to believe that Biden has no leverage over Israel, even though Israel is entirely dependent on the United States for the weapons it is using to destroy Gaza.

We are supposed to believe Israel is acting solely in “self-defence”, even when most of the people being killed are unarmed civilians; and that it is “eliminating” Hamas, even though Hamas doesn’t appear to have been weakened, and even though Israel’s starvation policies will take their toll on the young, elderly and vulnerable long before they kill a single Hamas fighter.

We are supposed to believe that Israel has a plan for the “day after” in Gaza that won’t look anything like the outcome these policies appear designed to achieve: making Gaza uninhabitable so that the Palestinian population is forced to leave.

And on top of all this, we are supposed to believe that, in ruling that a “plausible” case has been made that Israel is committing genocide, the judges of the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, have shown they do not understand the legal definition of the crime of genocide. Or possibly that they are driven by antisemitism.

3. Meanwhile, the same western leaders arming Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including more than 15,000 children, have been shipping hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of armaments to Ukraine to assist its armed forces. Ukraine must be helped, we are told, because it is the victim of an aggressive neighbouring power, Russia, determined on expansion and land theft.

And yet we are supposed to ignore the two decades of western military expansion eastwards, via Nato, that has finally coming knocking, in Ukraine, on Russia’s door – and the fact that the West’s best experts on Russia warned throughout that time that we were playing with fire in doing so and that Ukraine would prove a red line for Moscow.

We are supposed to make no comparison between Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and Israel’s aggression against the Palestinians. In the latter case, Israel is supposedly the victim, even though it has been violently occupying its Palestinian neighbours’ territory for three-quarters of a century while, in flagrant violation of international law, building Jewish settlements on the territory meant to form the basis of a Palestinian state.

We are supposed to believe that the Palestinians of Gaza have no right to defend themselves comparable to Ukraine’s right – no right to defend against decades of Israeli belligerence, whether the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948 and 1967, the apartheid system imposed on the remnant Palestinian population afterwards, the 17-year blockade of Gaza that denied its inhabitants the essentials of life, or the “plausible genocide” the West is now arming and providing diplomatic cover for.

In fact, if the Palestinians do try to defend themselves, the West not only refuses to help them, as it has Ukraine, but considers them terrorists – even the children, it seems.

4. Julian Assange, the journalist and publisher who did most to expose the inner workings of western establishments, and their criminal schemes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, has been behind bars for five years in Belmarsh high-security prison. Before that, he spent seven years arbitrarily detained – according to United Nations legal experts – in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, forced to seek asylum there from political persecution. In an interminable legal process, the US seeks his extradition so he can be locked away in near-isolation for up to 175 years.

And yet we are supposed to believe that his 12 years of effective detention – having been found guilty of no crime – is entirely unrelated to the fact that, in publishing secret cables, Assange revealed that, behind closed doors, the West and its leaders sound and act like gangsters and psychopaths, especially about foreign affairs, not like the stewards of a benign global order they claim to be overseeing.

The leaked documents Assange published show western leaders ready to destroy whole societies to further western resource domination and their own enrichment – and eager to wield the most outrageous lies to achieve their goals. They have no interest in upholding the supposedly cherished value of freedom of the press, except when that freedom is being weaponised against their enemies.

We are supposed to believe that western leaders genuinely want journalists to act as a watchdog, a restraint, on their power even when they are hounding to death the very journalist who created a whistleblowers’ platform, Wikileaks, to do precisely that. (Assange has already suffered a stroke from the more than a decade-long strain of fighting for his freedom.)

We are supposed to believe that the West will give Assange a fair trial, when the very states colluding in his incarceration – and in the CIA’s case, planned assassination – are the ones he exposed for engaging in war crimes and state terrorism. We are supposed to believe that they are pursuing a legal process, not persecution, in redefining as the crime of “espionage” his efforts to bring transparency and accountability to international affairs.

5. The media claim to represent the interests of western publics in all their diversity, and to act as a true window on the world.

We are supposed believe that this same media is free and pluralistic, even when it is owned by the super-rich as well as western states that were long ago hollowed out to serve the super-rich.

We are supposed to believe that a media completely dependent for its survival on revenues from big corporate advertisers can bring us news and analysis without fear or favour. We are supposed to believe that a media whose primary role is selling audiences to corporate advertisers can question whether, in doing so, it is playing a beneficial or harmful role.

We are supposed to believe that a media plugged firmly into the capitalist financial system that brought the global economy to its knees in 2008, and has been hurtling us towards ecological catastrophe, is in a position to evaluate and critique that capitalist model dispassionately, that media outlets could somehow turn on the billionaires who own them, or could forego the income from the billionaire-owned corporations that prop up the media’s finances through advertising.

 

We are supposed to believe that the media can objectively assess the merits of going to war. That is, wars waged serially by the West – from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, from Ukraine to Gaza – when media corporations are embedded in corporate conglomerations whose other big interests include arms manufacturing and fossil-fuel extraction.

We are supposed to believe that the media uncritically promotes endless growth for reasons of economic necessity and common sense, even though the contradictions are glaring: that the forever growth model is impossible to sustain on a finite planet where resources are running out.

6. In western political systems, unlike those of its enemies, there is supposedly a meaningful democratic choice between candidates representing opposing worldviews and values.

We are supposed to believe in a western political model of openness, pluralism and accountability even when in the US and UK the public are offered an electoral scrap between two candidates and parties that, to stand a chance of winning, need to win favour with the corporate media representing the interests of its billionaire owners, need to keep happy billionaire donors who fund their campaigns, and need to win over Big Business by demonstrating their unwavering commitment to a model of endless growth that is completely unsustainable.

We are supposed to believe that these leaders serve the voting public – offering a choice between right and left, between capital and labour – when, in truth, the public is only ever presented with a choice between two parties prostrated before Big Money, when the parties’ policy programmes are nothing more than competitions in who can best appease the wealth-elite.

We are supposed to believe that the “democratic” West represents the epitome of political health, even though it repeatedly dredges up the very worst people imaginable to lead it.

In the US, the “choice” imposed on the electorate is between one candidate (Biden) who should be in pottering around his garden, or maybe preparing for his final, difficult years in a care home, and a competitor (Donald Trump) whose relentless search for adoration and self-enrichment should never have been indulged beyond hosting a TV reality show.

In the UK, the “choice” is no better: between a candidate (Rishi Sunak) richer than the British king and equally cosseted and a competitor (Sir Keir Starmer) who is so ideologically hollow that his public record is an exercise in decades of shape-shifting.

All, let us note, are fully signed up to the continuing genocide in Gaza, all are unmoved by many months of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian children, all are only too ready to defame as antisemites anyone who shows an ounce of the principle and humanity they all too obviously lack.

The super-rich may be just out of view, but the strings they pull are all too visible. Time to cut ourselves loose.Facebook

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Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

ICYMI

Reuters Reveals Secret U.S. Government Anti-China Operation to Increase Covid-19 Deaths in East Asia and Pacific

by Eric Zuesse / June 16th, 2024

On June 14, Reuters headlined: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic: The U.S. military launched a clandestine program amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.”

A June 15 Google-search of the headline “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic” produced virtually no publication of that Reuters news-report anywhere within the U.S. empire — U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, etc. The news-report was not published, for example, in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Guardian, Telegraph, and Daily Mail, nor CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, PBS, Deutsche Welle, etc. That headline did briefly run on the websites of USA Today and Fox News, but never the news-report itself on that given site, and the link to the story no longer works at either USA Today or Fox News. There had been a link to that headlined story, but that news-report had not been published on either site. The only mainstream site in the U.S. empire that posted not only the headline but that also at their site the actual news-report, was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, on June 15. A Google-search of that headline four hours later on June 15 showed no better results. So, this extraordinarily important news-report remains as being news even the day after Reuters had published it on their news-feed. Suppression of a major news-story from a U.S. empire news-agency such as Reuters is highly extraordinary.

That suppressed news-report — which should immediately have been splashed everywhere, because it was among the biggest news-stories anywhere on June 14 — opened:

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

This post, identified by Reuters, matched the messaging, timeframe and design of the U.S. military’s anti-vax propaganda campaign in the Philippines, former and current military officials say. Social media platform X also identified the account as fake and removed it.

TRANSLATION FROM TAGALOG

#ChinaIsTheVirus

Do you want that? COVID came from China and vaccines came from China

(Beneath the message is a picture of then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte saying: “China! Prioritize us first please. I’ll give you more islands, POGO and black sand.” POGO refers to Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators, online gambling companies that boomed during Duterte’s administration. Black sand refers to a type of mining.)

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

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Podcast: Pentagon’s anti-vax campaign

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

The military program started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency, Reuters found – even after alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation. The Biden White House issued an edict in spring 2021 banning the anti-vax effort, which also disparaged vaccines produced by other rivals, and the Pentagon initiated an internal review, Reuters found.

“I don’t think it’s defensible. I’m extremely dismayed, disappointed and disillusioned to hear that the U.S. government would do that.”

Daniel Lucey, infectious disease specialist at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine.

The news-report also said:

Then-Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte pleaded with citizens to get the COVID vaccine. “You choose, vaccine or I will have you jailed,” a masked Duterte said in this televised address in June 2021.

When he addressed the vaccination issue, the Philippines had among the worst inoculation rates in Southeast Asia. Only 2.1 million of its 114 million citizens were fully vaccinated – far short of the government’s target of 70 million. By the time Duterte spoke, COVID cases exceeded 1.3 million, and almost 24,000 Filipinos had died from the virus. The difficulty in vaccinating the population contributed to the worst death rate in the region.

COVID-19 deaths in the Philippines

The pandemic hit the Philippines especially hard, and by November 2021, COVID had claimed the lives of 48,361 people there. …

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” …

In 2019, before COVID surfaced in full force, then-Secretary of Defense Mark Esper signed a secret order that later paved the way for the launch of the U.S. military propaganda campaign. The order elevated the Pentagon’s competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the State Department when conducting psyops against those adversaries. The Pentagon spending bill passed by Congress that year also explicitly authorized the military to conduct clandestine influence operations against other countries, even “outside of areas of active hostilities.”

Esper, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. A State Department spokesperson referred questions to the Pentagon.

The statement — “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.” — means that the U.S. Government was placing a higher priority upon “dragging China through the mud” than on keeping covid-19 deaths down in the Assia-Pacific region. Especially in the Phillipines, which under Duarte’s Presidency was neutralist in the conflict between the U.S. Government and the Chinese Government, adding to the death-rate there was not a practical concern for the U.S. Government. In other words: the U.S. Government treats neutralist nations as-if they’re instead among its enemy-nations, to such an extent that even civilian deaths there that are caused by the U.S. Government, are of no practical (much less of ethical) concern. This operation by the U.S. Government was expected to increase deaths in that region (because the U.S. Government believed that vaccinations would reduce covid-19 deaths in its own and allied territories), but they were not concerned about that. They were interested only in “how we could drag China through the mud.” The possibily that deaths would increase deaths in and around Asia as a result of what they were doing, was of no concern to them. The extent to which the post-1945 U.S. Government is significantly different than was Hitler’s Government in Germany, is therefore an appropriate matter for public debate, though it’s not being debated anywhere in today’s U.S. empire. The major importance of this news-report from Reuters is that it importantly contributes to that debate; and, now, the further fact of its virtually complete black-out within the U.S. empire, displays the extent to which the U.S. empire will not tolerate the existence of any such public debate. Perhaps this fact is even more important than that extraordinary report from Reuters itself was.

A reasonable conclusion from all of this is that America’s Government treats neutral countries as-if they are enemy countries. An associated aspect of this fact is that starting on June 11th the U.S. Government increased its secondary sanctions against Russia — the sanctions against businesses that trade with Russia — so as to punish them for that and thereby to limit such firms’ choices as to which countries they will be allowed by the U.S. Government to have commerce with. Secondary sanctions present non-U.S. targets (neutral countries and firms) with a choice: do business with the United States or with the sanctioned target, but not both. This is erecting a new “iron curtain,” of a specifically economic type, between the American empire — “The West” — and “The East.”

The U.S. Government is, in effect, betting that to force neutrals to choose between “The West” and “the East,” “The West” will expand, instead of reduce, its empire. Whether, or the extent to which, the reverse might happen, was so much as even considered by “The West,” is not, as-of yet, publicly known.

However, specifically as regards what was the topic in that Reuters news-report: to be concerned not at all about how the death-rates in the east-Asian region would be affected, but ONLY about “how we could drag China through the mud,” was — given the fact that the U.S. Government thought that to increase the vaccination-rates in that region would reduce the death-rates there — for the U.S. Government to intend to increase covid-19 deaths in the East-Asia & Pacific region. It was their intent, regardless of whether, or the extent to which, it was the result of what the U.S. Government did there.Facebook

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Eric Zuesse is an investigative historian. His new book, America's Empire of Evil: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. Read other articles by Eric.

70 YEARS OF SCI-FI-TEK

Tokamak Energy to use digital twin with ST40 fusion machine

13 June 2024

UK-based Tokamak Energy says that the digital twin computer software means it will be able to maximise the impact of each experiment without needing to test multiple scenarios in the physical machine.

(Image: Tokamak Energy/Linkedin)

Last year the ST40 fusion device achieved a 100 million degrees Celsius fusion plasma - the highest temperature recorded in a privately-owned spherical tokamak.

The digital twin computer software programme, named SOPHIA, was developed in-house and trialled last year to help with the development of "high-performance diverted plasma scenarios in its high field spherical tokamak". The plan is to fully integrate it into ST40 plasma operations for 2024. The company says it can run multiple simulations at once and "predicted results have been proven to mirror actual experiments, ensuring ST40 tests do not breach machine limits and cause plasma disruptions".

Tokamak Energy’s Chief Engineer, Mike Porton, said: "Successful experiments tested virtually by SOPHIA will go forward to ST40 for real, producing measurable, publishable, verifiable, physical results to accelerate our research and development productivity. It is a huge breakthrough in cutting timelines on Tokamak Energy’s mission to validate power plant designs and deliver commercial fusion in the 2030s."

Background

Tokamak Energy was spun out of the UK's Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) in 2009. It announced in February last year it is to build a prototype spherical tokamak, the ST80-HTS, at the UKAEA's Culham Campus, near Oxford, England, by 2026 "to demonstrate the full potential of high temperature superconducting magnets" and to inform the design of its fusion pilot plant, ST-E1, which is slated to demonstrate the capability to deliver electricity - producing up to 200 MW of net electrical power - in the early 2030s. That would then be followed by the roll-out of 500 MW commercial fusion plants "in the mid-2030s".

Last week, Tokamak Energy signed an agreement with the US Department of Energy as part of its USD46 million "bold decadal vision for delivering commercial fusion". It joins other companies who will team up with national laboratories and universities to address technical and commercialisation milestones for the design of a fusion pilot plant.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News