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https://www.globalresearch.ca/john-pilger-coming-war-speak-up-now/5817726
By John Pilger
***
In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on ‘the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists’ to discuss the ‘rapid crumbling of capitalism’ and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.
Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.
The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and ‘all of us under the shadow of violent great power’.
Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: ‘The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.’
Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:
On 7 March, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on ‘the looming threat’ of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.
No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A ‘panel of experts’ presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the west’s war industry.
‘Beijing could strike within three years,’ they warned. ‘We are not ready.’ Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough. ‘Australia’s holiday from history is over’: whatever that might mean.
There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway ‘lucky’ country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained ‘experts’. What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.
The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ‘national security reporters’ I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.
‘How did it come to this?’ Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. ‘Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?’
The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans ‘foreign interference’ by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?
Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of ‘identity’. American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for ‘advice’. Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Johnson or a Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Zelensky.
No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about ‘crumbling capitalism’ and the lethal provocations of ‘our’ leaders. The most infamous of these, Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.
At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias‘ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.
Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations, 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.
This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.
Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.
The Issue is Not Trump. It is Us.
In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.
Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s ‘assets’ in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.
The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the ‘important issue of academic freedom of expression’ and found ‘Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech’. Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.
A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that ‘for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life’.
No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, ‘the last to raise his voice’, wrote Eagleton.
Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as ‘the movement’, had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.
On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: ‘There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.’
At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the ‘political action and truth-telling’ of the 1960s had failed and only ‘culture and introspection’ would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.
Within a few years, the cult of ‘me-ism’ had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.
As for ‘the movement’, its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.
When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new ‘threats’ on ‘America’s frontier’ (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In the years since, America has gone to war with the world.
According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s ‘war on terror’ was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.
This figure does not include the dead of US-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, ‘could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.’
‘At least’ one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or five per cent of the population.
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, ‘What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?’
He replied. ‘If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.’
I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein‘s ‘threat’, and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been ‘duped’, spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.
Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.
Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its ‘allies’ and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?
Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945: ‘Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.’
One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.
‘I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,’ said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as ‘special operations’ as no other president had done since the first Cold War.
According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.
Every Tuesday – reported the New York Times – he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the ‘terrorist target’.
A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. ‘Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,’ he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’
In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi was planning ‘genocide’ against his own people.
‘We knew…,’ he said, ‘that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.’
This was a lie. The only ‘threat’ was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.
Destroying Gaddafi’s ‘threat’ and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the US, Britain and France, Nato launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that ‘most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten’.
When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: ‘We came, we saw, he died!’
On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the Nato attack on Libya which it described as an ‘array of lies’ — including the Benghazi massacre story.
- The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the US extended secret ‘special forces’ operations to 138 countries, or 70 per cent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.
Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the US African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s ‘soldier to soldier’ doctrine embeds US officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.
It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s ‘historic mission’, warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of ‘a capitalism rampant though camouflaged’.
In the year Nato invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the ‘pivot to Asia’. Almost two-thirds of US naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to ‘confront the threat from China’, in the words of his Defence Secretary.
There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a ‘noose’.
At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any US administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to ‘help rid the world of nuclear weapons’.
Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.
I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the twentieth century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about ‘our’ propaganda.
All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like ‘dominoes’.
Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: three million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.
If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.
*
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John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute includes his 1979 film, “Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia,” among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th century.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Consult the archive of John Pilger’s Global Research articles (2004-2023) Some of his previous contributions to Consortium News can be found here.
Featured image is from FAIR
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © John Pilger, Global Research, 2023
https://www.globalresearch.ca/turkey-syria-earthquake-act-terror/5807763
By Peter Koenig
Global Research, April 15, 2023
***
Author’s Update
The conclusion of “No Evidence So Far” in the title referred to the strong suspicion that this horrendous quake was the result of an ENMOD engineered disaster. (Environmental Modification Techniques). Up to this day it killed more than 48,000 people, injured more than half a million, and still tens of thousands are missing.
Will there ever be justice?
Will the presumed perpetrators be brought to trial?
The “no evidence” statement is wearing thinner and thinner, especially, when listening to Serdar Hussein, the Head of the Turkish Space Agency talking on Russian TV.
He uses hyperbolic emblematic speech when talking about the hard titanium alloy material being launched to the Earth. It refers to using the titanium alloy rods to send these deadly, super-power beams of energy to earth, deep into the ground to cause the earthquake:
Transcript (Translation)
The head of the Turkish Space Agency, Serdar Hussein Yildirim, on weapons capable of causing earthquakes:
You know those power poles on the streets. They are similar to these pillars, about 8-10 meters high. Metal rods.
There is nothing inside the rod, no explosives, nothing, but it’s a metal rod made of a hard titanium alloy material.
They put them in a satellite. A certain amount of. And then they aim and launch them to Earth. It’s like a stick with a sharp point. For example, God forbid, it falls somewhere, we will not name the disaster scenario now, but as soon as it falls to the ground, it penetrates up to 5 km deep into the earth.
This happens very quickly and creates an earthquake of magnitude 7-8.
As a result of the impact, everything that is there will be destroyed. Look, there are no weapons here, no explosives, no bombs, nothing like that. Simple sticks [rods]. But there is such a force that comes from outer space, and you have no chance to see it, stop it, or defend yourself.”
Serdar Hussein’s statement remains to be verified.
Peter Koenig, February 22, 2023
According to Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “More than 13 million people have been affected by the devastating earthquake in Turkey.” (quoted by Tass, February 7, 2023)
“The earthquake has caused colossal damage. It was the biggest-ever calamity not only in our country’s history but in the history of the entire world,” Erdogan was quoted telling local television channels.
“We are living through the most painful days in our history. Two powerful earthquakes, with the epicenters in Pazarcik and Elbistan in Kahramanmaras, [close to the city of Gaziantep] have caused large-scale damage in ten provinces. Around 13.5 million [out of 85 million Turkish population] of our citizens have been affected on these territories,” he said.
Early Monday morning at around 4 AM on February 6, 2023, a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked southeast Turkey and Syria. According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake’s epicenter hit an area about 30 km from Gaziantep (2.1 million population), a major city and provincial capital 100 km from the Syrian border. The quake was centered about 18 km deep.
It was followed by a strong 6.7 magnitude aftershock about 10 minutes later. Read more here. See also NY Post drone video below of some of the devastated areas.
The death toll from the earthquake so far exceeds 5,400, and some 32,000 people were injured. This is only after day two when most of the destruction and rubble has not yet been searched for survivors or bodies.
The earthquake also hit northern Syria, leaving so far at least 1,200 deaths and thousands injured. (See 2 google maps to the left).
By comparison, the 1960 Chile earthquake hitting the Santiago area was one of the most devastating tremors in recent history, killing some 1,700 people, plus the ensuing tsunami with a death toll of between 2000 and 2,500, and tens of thousands of injured.
A Gigantic Act of Terror?
If President Erdogan is right, that this is one of the world’s largest calamities ever – and it looks very much like he is right – wars notwithstanding, is this an act of terror?
What has Turkey done to elicit such a devastating reaction – by whom?
The US of A? NATO, which as far as command goes is also Washington and the Pentagon?
A few recent initiatives by Turkey – a key member and heavy-weight of NATO for her strategic geographic location between east and west – may have provoked the wrath of her NATO allies.
Not necessarily in order of priority:
1. Turkey has entered an alliance with Russia – which for a NATO-member is like “sleeping with the enemy”. (Michel Chossudovsky) See this and this. Such a partnership with a NATO enemy is indeed an absolute no-go for the West.
2. Under this alliance, Turkey has decided to buy theRussian S-400 Air Defense system, instead of the US Patriot system, as it would behoove for a NATO member, especially one as crucial as is Turkey. Patriot (standing for Phased Array Tracking Radar for Intercept on Target) is a surface-to-air missile and anti-ballistic system. It is NATO’s air defense system. Instead, Turkey’s decision for the more sophisticated, more precise and effective Russian S-400 is a strong backbone for her alliance with Russia.
3. President Erdogan brokered in 2017 a US$ 2.5 billion deal with President Putin for the S-400. First deliveries of the S-400 missile batteries arrived in 2019.
4. The S-400 system is said to pose a risk to the NATO alliance as well as the F-35, America’s most expensive weapons platform. Turkey was severely sanctioned at the time by President Trump, notably by a foreign-manipulated currency devaluation of the Turkish Lira – which had a devastating impact on Turkey’s economy. It is unusual, almost unheard of, for Washington to “punish” a NATO member for misbehavior.
5. US warship USS Nitze barred from entering the Black Sea through the Turkish controlled Bosporus. According to USNI News, the US warship USS Nitze, a US destroyer, was spotted in early February 2023, operating near the Black Sea. It is said to be the closest a US warship has come to Russia since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine began.
6. On February 3rd, the Nitze was seen at the lower edge of the Bosphorus Strait, en route to a port call in Turkey. The last US warship to pass through the strait was the USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51), which left the Black Sea on December 15, 2021. See Google map below, followed by video on the USS Nitze
7. In February 2022, Turkey closed the Bosphorus passage from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea for all vessels which do not have a national port within the Black Sea. This means, US war ships are not allowed to cross from the Med-Sea through the Bosporus into the Black Sea, from where Russia may be vulnerable for cruise missiles form US destroyers, for example the USS Nitze. In the meantime, Nitze has scheduled a port call at Gölcük Naval Base, in the Sea of Marmara (see Google map above).
8. Turkey, a key NATO country, between East and West, with the crucial Bosphorus as the dividing line, is closing a critical strategic passage to her NATO ally – NATO commander – protecting Russia, the US enemy – may not be seen with joy by Washington.
9. Turkish – Syrian rapprochement, is certainly not what Washington wants. It is the latest development in regional surprises, as reported by Arab Center Washington DC – see this.
10. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s interest in a rapprochement with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the latest chapter in his delicate domestic and regional balancing act, and it has his friends and enemies alike, especially the US, scrambling for how this development might impact them. The rapprochement, if it succeeds, would further complicate the domestic and regional dynamics in northern Syria without securing any clear advantage for Erdogan beyond, perhaps, in the upcoming Turkish elections.
11. Remember the Russian Involvement in Syria – when the US was chased out of Syria? At the request of President Bashar al-Assad – Russian military, mostly air force interference from September 2015 until the end of 2017, was largely responsible for Washington’s significant withdrawal, albeit not complete, from Syria. In 2017, when “mission accomplished”, Russian combat troops were withdrawn, but Russia keeps a nominal military police presence in Northern Syria.
12. Turkey’s Bombshell – a few days ago, rejecting Sweden as NATO member, may have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. For a new country to become a NATO member, ALL NATO nations must approve the new candidate.
13. Sweden says they cannot meet some of the Turkish conditions. Among them are Turkey’s accusations that Sweden is supporting members of the Kurdish Working Party – the PKK, archenemies of Erdogan’s.
14. According to a Turkish Crisis Group, some 30,000 to 40,000 people are estimated to have died in fighting between the PKK and Turkish government, since 1984.
15. Maybe there were also some Russian interests at stake in Turkey’s rejection of Sweden as a NATO member. Although peace has prevailed between Sweden and Russia, since 1809, the two countries never achieved a close relationship, unlike the situation with other neighbors. This is particularly the case with the current Swedish Government.
Turkish General Elections on 14 May 2023.
If the timing of the earthquake was part of a plan, it would fit perfectly into the coming General Elections on 14 May 2023. President Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AK Party), are currently not doing well in popularity polls.
Depending on his dealing with the consequences of the earthquake, he and his Party may gain or lose in approval ratings. Usually, „natural“ disasters do not bode well for the governments in place, regardless of whether they bear any responsibility.
In any case, new elections bring new “opportunities”. In the meantime, it is clear to most analysts, that no elections are truly “democratic” – that there is literally no election in the world in which the decisive vote – the decisive influence – is not exerted by the Anglosaxon western empire.
Replacing Erdogan with a US stooge, might bring Turkey back as the desired all obedient NATO country, no alliance with Russia, no more “sleeping with the enemy”.
Is it a coincidence that just a few days after Turkey rejected Sweden’s candidacy for NATO membership, a massive, deadly and all-destructive earthquake hits Turkey, with serious ramification for Syria, and even impacting on Cyprus and Lebanon.
Was The Earthquake the Consequence of A Terror Attack? No Evidence
Artificial earthquakes have been prompted before. For example, the 12 January 2010 earthquake off Port-au-Prince, capital city of Haiti, is suspected having been prompted by underwater / underground explosions, in order to bring huge oil reserves lodged largely around the shores of the Caribbean Sea, closer to the surface to be easier accessible and exploitable. William Engdahl’s “Strategic denial of oil in Haiti?” points clearly in this direction.
F. William Engdahl says Geo-physics suggest there could be massive oil and mineral deposits in and off-shore Haiti. See this 9-min video from 30 January 2010.
The US Air Force’s Weather Warfare
Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, “offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary”:
‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.”
Study Commissioned by the US Air Force: Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025, August 1996
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP)
The US Air Force’s “Weather Warfare” is related to The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) which was developed in the early 1990s.
A scientific report (HAL Id: hal-01082992) regarding HAARP (2011, 2014) explains that high-power ELF radiation generated by modulated HF heating of the ionosphere could cause Earthquakes, Cyclones and localized heating. The paper by Fran De Aquino Maranhao summarized the scientific findings as follows:
“HAARP is currently [2014], [the project was closed in Gakona, Alaska and transferred in 2014] the most important facility used to generate extremely low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic radiation in the ionosphere. In order to produce this ELF radiation, the HAARP transmitter radiates a strong beam of high frequency (HF) waves modulated at ELF.
This HF heating modulates the electrons’ temperature in the D region ionosphere and leads to modulated conductivity and a time-varying current which then radiates at the modulation frequency. Recently, the HAARP HF transmitter operated with 3.6GW of effective radiated power modulated at frequency of 2.5Hz. It is shown that high-power ELF radiation generated by HF ionospheric heaters, such as the current HAARP heater, can cause Earthquakes, Cyclones and strong localized heating.”
The patents used to develop the HAARP program are owned by Raytheon through its E-Systems subsidiary.
It should be noted that with the closing down of The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) program in Gakona, Alaska in 2014 for another location, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been actively involved in ENMOD research, most of which is classified. See this
At the time of writing, there is suspicion, but no concrete evidence that the Turkey-Syria Earthquake was an Act of Terror, triggered by Environmental Modification Techniques.
The above statements remain to be fully ascertained.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Featured image: The earthquake destroyed buildings in the town of Jandaris, near Afrin, Syria.Credit: Rami al-Sayed/AFP/Getty
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Peter Koenig, Global Research, 2023
The nation officially hit its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in January
https://www.rt.com/business/575636-us-debt-default-warning/
May 2, 2023
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US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned on Monday that the federal government could run short of cash to pay its bills as soon as next month without a debt limit increase.
“After reviewing recent federal tax receipts, our best estimate is that we will be unable to continue to satisfy all of the government’s obligations by early June, and potentially as early as June 1, if Congress does not raise or suspend the debt limit before that time,” Yellen wrote in a letter to House and Senate leaders.
She urged congressional leaders “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting as soon as possible.”
“We have learned from past debt limit impasses that waiting until the last minute to suspend or increase the debt limit can cause serious harm to business and consumer confidence, raise short-term borrowing costs for taxpayers, and negatively impact the credit rating of the United States,” Yellen wrote.
“If Congress fails to increase the debt limit, it would cause severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position, and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests,” she cautioned.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) also updated its forecast on Monday, warning there was a “significantly greater risk that the Treasury will run out of funds in early June” because of weaker-than-expected tax collections. The CBO had originally projected that a default could happen between July and September.
READ MORE: US debt default a matter of time – Musk
The warnings come after a months-long standstill in talks on the matter between the White House and Republicans in Congress.
Yellen has been voicing alarm since January, when the United States hit its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling. At the time she notified Congress that the Treasury had begun resorting to “extraordinary measures” to avoid a federal government default.
On Monday, President Joe Biden called all four congressional leaders and invited them to a May 9 meeting on the issue.
https://www.rt.com/business/575634-imf-georgieva-us-dollar-shift/
2 May, 2023
Kristalina Georgieva says there are no viable alternatives for a global reserve currency
Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, on May 1, 2023. © AFP / Patrick T. Fallon
The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said the US dollar is gradually losing its status as the world’s main reserve currency.
Speaking on Monday, Kristalina Georgieva noted that there is no viable alternative among global currencies to replace the greenback in the near future.
“There has been gradual shift away from the dollar, it was 70% of reserves, now it is slightly under 60%,” Georgieva stated at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California.
According to the IMF chief, the euro can be viewed as the biggest competitor to the dollar, while the British pound, the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan “play a very modest role.”
She stressed that the leading factor for trust in the currency of this or that country is the strength of its economy and the depth of its capital markets.
READ MORE: India and China to drive half of world’s economic growth – IMF
“And if you are thinking of an alternative in a world in which we may migrate to central bank digital currencies massively… and there I don’t see an alternative, I don’t see it coming anytime soon,” Georgieva said.
Georgieva highlighted the major shocks of the past few years – the Covid pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the spike in interest rates after years of loose monetary policy – calling them “a series of unthinkable events.”
She explained that the rapid transition from low to high interest rates has exposed vulnerabilities in the financial sector, and that the high exposure of the US banking sector to the crisis has come as a surprise to IMF analysts.