Amid a storm of protest from the US and its allies, and a ban on Russian journalists from travelling to New York, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov chaired Monday’s session of the UN Security Council.
The meeting was dedicated to “effective multilateralism,” as Moscow continues to emphasise to emphasise its intentions to help change the world order. In his opening remarks, LAVROV outlined the nature of the current conflict, which he said was really between the UN Charter and the “rules-based order” of the collective West.
Lavrov also noted that the US had effectively denied visas to his accredited media pool, a move to which Moscow has vowed to respond to in such a way as “to make Americans remember that things should not be done in such a fashion.”
Crisis of the world order
The UN-centric system is going through a deep crisis caused by some members’ desire to replace international law with their “rules-based order,” Lavrov insisted. Such “rules” are invented ad hoc and applied to stop independent development. They are enforced through means ranging from military force to embargoes, financial sanctions, the confiscation of property, “destruction of critical infrastructure” – likely a reference to the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines – and “manipulation of universally agreed norms and procedures.” The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been paralyzed, market mechanisms have collapsed, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been turned into “an instrument for achieving the objectives of the US and its allies.”
Globalization and its enemies
“In a desperate attempt to assert its dominance by punishing the disobedient, the US has moved to destroy globalization, which for many years it extolled as the greatest good of all mankind,” said the Russian foreign minister. Now the US and its allies blacklist anyone who dissents from their “golden billion” and tell the rest of the world, “those who are not with us are against us.”
Yet the “Western minority” has no right to speak for the entire world, Lavrov said. Its “rules-based order” amounts to a rejection of sovereign equality, the key principle of the UN Charter, as evidenced by EU commissioner Josep Borrell’s infamous statement about the European “garden” and the “jungle” outside it.
Gross violations of the UN Charter
In addition to the string of US military “adventures” from Yugoslavia and Iraq to Libya, the worst violation of the UN Charter was its meddling in the affairs of post-Soviet states, Lavrov said. As examples, he brought up the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan and the 2014 coup in Kiev. When the UN sought to stop the ensuing war by endorsing the Minsk Agreements, they were “trampled by Kiev and its Western masters, who recently cynically and even proudly admitted that they never intended to fulfill them, but only wanted to buy time to pump Ukraine with weapons against Russia,” the Russian foreign minister added.
What the Ukraine conflict is about
Today “it is clear to everyone” that the Ukraine conflict isn’t about Ukraine at all, but “about how international relations will be built: through crafting a stable consensus based on a balance of interests, or through aggressive and explosive promotion of hegemony,” Lavrov said. Russia has “honestly said what we are fighting for” in Ukraine, he added. The goals of its military operation are to eliminate the threat to its security posed by NATO, and protect the people whose rights recognized by international conventions have been systematically violated, by a regime that seeks to “expel and exterminate” them.
How to save the UN
The West has made a “brazen attempt to subjugate” the UN by taking over its secretariats and other international institutions, Lavrov told the Security Council. Washington and its allies have abandoned diplomacy and demanded a battlefield showdown within the halls of the UN, created to prevent the horrors of war. Genuine multilateralism “requires the UN to adapt to objective trends” of emerging multipolarity in international relations, the Russian foreign minister argued. The Security Council should be reformed to increase the representation of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as the current “exorbitant overrepresentation” of the West “undermines the principle of multilateralism.”
Spying on your enemies is one thing, but when it’s directed at supposed friends who can blame them for being annoyed?
Guterres’ lack of surprise that he is spied on by the US is understandable, given the country’s history of espionage targeting the UN and its senior officials. The organization’s founding charter is the product of such activity.
Several files that Teixeira shared with other members of a private Discord chat, an action that may land him in a US supermax prison for the rest of his life, show Washington is keeping a very close eye on all Guterres’ sensitive private communications. One accuses him of “accommodating Russia to preserve [the] grain deal.” According to “FISA-derived signal intelligence,” Guterres is “taking steps to accommodate Russia in an effort to protect the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI).”
Among the classified documents allegedly leaked by US Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, as part of a huge trove, is one exposing how the US is spying intently on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and is deeply unhappy that he is engaging with Moscow.
What do we learn from this leak?
Several files that Teixeira shared with other members of a private Discord chat, an action that may land him in a US supermax prison for the rest of his life, show Washington is keeping a very close eye on all Guterres’ sensitive private communications. One accuses him of “accommodating Russia to preserve [the] grain deal.” According to “FISA-derived signal intelligence,” Guterres is “taking steps to accommodate Russia in an effort to protect the Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI).”
“[Guterres] considers [BSGI] a pivotal UN success and key to addressing global food insecurity, and his actions are undermining broader efforts to hold Moscow accountable for its actions in Ukraine. In early February, he urged Russian Foreign Minister [Sergey] Lavrov in a letter to renew the BSGI before its term expires on 18 March and Guterres emphasized his efforts to improve Russia’s ability to export, even if that involves sanctioned Russian entities or individuals.”
The document is likely to have been written in late February or early March before Russia and Ukraine agreed to extend the grain deal. To broker it, the UN said it would facilitate the export of Russian fertilizer and grain, which was blocked by Western sanctions despite exemptions for agricultural goods. Since the resumption, several governments have rejected grain flowing from Ukraine due to its poor quality.
Numerous other leaked documents contain accounts of Guterres’ private conversations with aides on diplomatic matters and meetings, along with accompanying commentary from US intelligence officials. Some suggest his relationship with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is far from cordial. One document referring to his trips to Iraq and Qatar in early March notes he was “not happy” about the prospect of travelling on to Kiev days after returning from Doha, despite the Ukrainian government’s request.
It’s uncertain why Guterres was resistant to visiting Kiev, but the trip went ahead and included a private meeting with Zelensky and a joint press conference on March 8. The UN secretary-general regretted going. Another document records a conversation between Guterres and his personal spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, in which he was “really pissed off” about an unexpected public ceremony in honor of International Women’s Day during the visit.
The document indicates aides later discussed how Zelensky had sprung the event, which included the presentation of medals to uniformed soldiers, on Guterres without warning or his consent, and later posted misleading photographs and videos that implied he was congratulating Ukrainian military personnel alongside the president. It is recorded in the file that the UN secretary-general “emphasized that he made a point of not smiling the entire time” in later conversations with aides.
“[Guterres] is not surprised by the fact that people are spying on him and listening in on his private conversations,” Dujarric has commented on the leaks. “What is surprising is the malfeasance or incompetence that allows for such private conversations to be distorted and become public,” the spokesman added.
Guterres’ lack of surprise that he is spied on by the US is understandable, given the country’s history of espionage targeting the UN and its senior officials. The organization’s founding charter is the product of such activity.
The US sought to manipulate the form and content of the UN by conducting espionage operations against the charter’s signatories, intercepting coded cable traffic to and from other members. This granted the US intimate advance knowledge of the negotiation positions of all 49 countries. Academic Stephen Schlesinger says the US was able to “write the UN Charter mostly according to its own blueprint” through this operation.
The US has since been repeatedly caught spying on the UN. In 2003, as the Security Council prepared to vote on the Iraq War, the NSA conducted a “dirty tricks” campaign against delegations in New York to win votes in favor of intervention. This included interception of the home and office telephones and emails delegates.
A memo from the NSA’s chief spoke of stepping up intelligence gathering operations “particularly directed at…UN Security Council Members” minus the US and UK, to gain up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush administration officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.
Then, in 2010, it was revealed that Washington was running a secret intelligence operation targeting the leadership of the UN, including then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and permanent Security Council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK. A classified directive was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name the previous year, demanding forensic technical details about communications systems used by UN officials, including passwords, personal encryption keys, and even detailed biometric information and credit card numbers.
They aren’t going to stop until they impose their twisted values on the entire planet. If you have not heard of “The 8 March Principles” yet, you can find the entire document right here. It is essentially a blueprint for synchronizing all global laws regarding sexuality, gender and reproductive rights. UNAIDS is one of the organizations that was involved in drafting this document, and on their official website they claim that many global laws that prohibit certain types of sexual behavior “not only violate human rights, but the fundamental principles of criminal law themselves”. Alarmingly, among the laws that are being targeted by the globalists are laws that ban adults from having sex with children.
It turns out that they have been working on “The 8 March Principles” for quite a long time.
In fact, UNAIDS says that it took “over five years” to finalize this new document…
The principles are the outcome of a 2018 workshop organized by UNAIDS and OHCHR along with the ICJ to discuss the role of jurists in addressing the harmful human rights impact of criminal laws. The meeting resulted in a call for a set of jurists’ principles to assist the courts, legislatures, advocates and prosecutors to address the detrimental human rights impact of such laws.
The principles, developed over five years, are based on feedback and reviews from a range of experts and stakeholders. They were finalized in 2022. Initially, the principles focused on the impact of criminal laws proscribing sexual and reproductive health and rights, consensual sexual activity, gender identity, gender expression, HIV non-disclosure, exposure and transmission, drug use and the possession of drugs for personal use. Later, based on the inputs of civil society and other stakeholders, criminalization linked to homelessness and poverty were also included.
Most of the material in “The 8 March Principles” is not a surprise. Everyone knows that the UN wants to promote abortion, the gay agenda and the transgender agenda.
But what floored me is that they are also seeking to weaken laws that prohibit adults from having sex with children. The following is an excerpt that comes directly out of “The 8 March Principles”…
With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner. Enforcement may not be linked to the sex/gender of participants or age of consent to marriage.
Moreover, sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them. Pursuant to their evolving capacities and progressive autonomy, persons under 18 years of age should participate in decisions affecting them, with due regard to their age, maturity and best interests, and with specific attention to non-discrimination guarantees.
If they believe that children under the age of 18 can meaningfully consent to sex, where do they think the cutoff should be?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donates millions annually to a nongovernmental organization which claims that children are born sexual and should learn about “commercial sex work” under 10 years of age.
The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) – a separate entity from the U.S. nonprofit – wields significant influence on global sex education. The NGO comprises 120 independent organizations in over 146 countries and has received – including its European network – over $80M from Gates. Other significant donors included the World Health Organization.
Go back and read that last paragraph again.
This extremely powerful organization is operating in at least 146 different countries.
And according to Fox News, it teaches children that “commercial sex work” is a completely legitimate occupation…
“Sexual activity may be part of different types of relationships, including dating, marriage or commercial sex work, among others,” IPPF said about children under 10 should be taught, which was first flagged by Nicole Solas of the Independent Women’s Forum.
Children under 10 should be taught that “Sexuality is a part of you from the moment you are born. Your sexuality develops and changes throughout your life.”
These people are sick.
And it shouldn’t shock any of us that many of the individuals that work for such organizations end up being predators themselves.
The former marketing director of a Planned Parenthood in Connecticut committed suicide days after police raided his New Haven apartment on April 6 as part of a child pornography investigation, The Middletown Press reported.
Tim Yergeau, 35, who previously worked as director of strategic communications for the Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, died by suicide last Tuesday, according to officials. Both Yergeau’s neighbor and the state Office of the Chief State Medical Examiner confirmed his death, the report states.
Of course, it isn’t just people on the left that are into such things.
Recently, “conservative” author Dennis Prager defended the use of pornography by saying that “men want variety”…
Dennis Prager, a conservative author and talk radio host, is trending on social media for sharing what many see as an overly simplistic and undeniably problematic view of pornography.
“Men want variety,” Prager said during a recent round-table discussion hosted by The Daily Wire’s Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and author. Pornography, he went on to say, is “not awful,” so long as it’s used as a “substitute for adultery.”
This is how far we have fallen.
Now even leaders that are considered to be “ultra-conservative” are openly promoting pornography.
A civilized society would be seeking to protect women and children, but in our society there is a voracious appetite for exploiting and abusing them.
Throughout history, every society that has embraced extremely loose sexual behavior has eventually fallen.
Now the globalists are determined to push their extremely twisted sexual agenda on the whole world, and that will inevitably have very serious consequences.
The United States has reportedly been spying on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, according to fresh revelations in classified intelligence documents that ended up on the internet.
Thursday, 13 April 2023
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres speaks at a press conference in Mogadishu on April 11, 2023. (Photo by AFP)
The United States has reportedly been spying on UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, according to fresh revelations in classified intelligence documents that ended up on the internet.
The documents, which appear to have come at least in part from the Pentagon and are marked as highly classified, began circulating widely on Russian social media channels last week.
The files that contain candid observations from Guterres about the war in Ukraine suggest that Washington has closely been monitoring the top UN official.
One leaked document focuses on the Black Sea grain deal, brokered by the UN and Turkey in July following fears of a global food crisis.
The UN chief, according to the assessment, was so keen to preserve the deal that he was willing to accommodate Russia’s interests.
“Guterres emphasized his efforts to improve Russia’s ability to export,” one document said, “even if that involves sanctioned Russian entities or individuals.”
His actions, according to the file, were “undermining broader efforts to hold Moscow accountable for its actions in Ukraine,” the files show.
Another document from February contains a frank conversation between Guterres and his deputy, Amina Mohamed in which the UN chief expressed “dismay” at a call by the EU Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, for Europe to produce more weapons and ammunition due to the war in Ukraine.
Other documents include analysis from US intelligence agencies about Russia and several other countries, all based on information gleaned from classified sources.
The US and its EU allies are now struggling to understand how dozens of top-secret intelligence documents had been exposed.
The moment in which the UN exposed itself again and refused to pass a resolution for the investigation of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks pic.twitter.com/JPNMZ5qxEo
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Monday in a speech delivered before the 193-member UN General Assembly that the world is headed toward a “wider war” in Ukraine due to the ever-increasing risk of escalation.
“The prospects for peace keep diminishing,” Guterres said. “The chances of further escalation and bloodshed keep growing.” He then sounded the alarm that “I fear the world is not sleepwalking into a wider war. I fear it is doing so with its eyes wide open.”
His starkly negative outlook for the crisis comes as Ukraine is warning that the Kremlin’s largest offensive since the opening weeks of the war is looming, according to The New York Times, which further wrote:
The Ukrainian General Staff, which is responsible for military strategy, said in its daily battlefield update that the Russians fired on some two dozen towns and villages around Bakhmut, the ruined city that has become the focal point of Moscow’s campaign to seize all of the eastern area known as Donbas.
By many recent accounts the changes of Ukrainian forces holding on the Bakbmut look bleaker by the day, as Russian troops are busy encircling the strategic city in Donetsk.
Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said Monday that the battle for the east is rapidly “heating up” as the Russian side throws “new units into the battle and eradicating our towns and villages.”
Last month Ukrainian leaders began warning their Western backers that Putin has ordered hundreds of thousands more troops to muster along the border for a major new offensive; but such a potential escalation has failed to materialize thus far.
Also of note is something President Zelensky said in an interview with Fox News days ago…
While discussing the broader war, the Ukrainian leader said“If Ukraine falls, it would be the start of World War 3” – given that this would trigger major Western powers jumping in to back Kyiv directly in a bigger collective effort to defeat Russia.
Videos showing Russian soldiers apparently executed by Ukrainian forces appear genuine, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk stated on Friday. He called on Kiev to fully investigate what Moscow has described as an outright execution.
The footage, consisting of two clips stitched into one video, surfaced on social media last week. It shows a dozen unarmed Russian servicemen surrendering to Ukrainian troops and lying down on the ground, a separate man apparently opening fire on the Ukrainians, and the first dozen soldiers lying dead in pools of blood.
“Our Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has conducted a preliminary analysis indicating that these disturbing videos are highly likely to be authentic in what they show,” Turk said in a press release. “The analysis…underlines the need for independent and detailed forensic investigations to help establish exactly what happened.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense described the footage as evidence of “the deliberate and methodical murder” of the soldiers, with the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council calling the incident a “demonstrative and audacious crime.”
Kiev has promised to investigate the incident, but Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanishina claimed last week that it is “very unlikely” that the clips show a deliberate execution, and Ukraine’s Prosecutor General accused the Russian soldiers, who were unarmed, of “imitating a surrender” in order to ambush their captors.
Turk acknowledged that Ukraine has opened an investigation, and called on Kiev to make sure that the probe “is seen to be independent, impartial, thorough, transparent, prompt and effective.”
The UN commissioner also called on both sides “to issue clear instructions to their forces that there should be no retaliation, no reprisals, against those they take as prisoners of war,” and reminded both militaries that the “summary execution” of prisoners constitutes a war crime.
“Order your troops to treat those who surrender and those they detain humanely,” he told commanders.
In addition to executing the captured Russians, Ukrainian commanders have murdered their own men for refusing to follow orders, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday. Putin declared that Russia is “dealing with a neo-Nazi regime” in Ukraine, which operates in “a completely different moral atmosphere.”
Annually, each year, since 2005, the U.S. Government has been one of only from 1 to 3 Governments to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against an annual statement by the General Assembly against racism and other forms of bigotry — an annual Resolution condemning it, and expressing a commitment to doing everything possible to reduce bigoted acts. For the first time ever, on November 4th, America was joined not only by one or two voting against it, but 55 nations, and almost all gave as reasons that Russia was for it and has invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is the only country that has almost always been joining America in opposing such resolutions; and many countries now vote against the resolution because Ukraine always does, and thus vote in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia — condemn the resolution because Russia supports it.
This year’s Resolution particularly offended America and its allies because “Nazism” is mentioned and condemned specifically in it.
No specific nation is ever mentioned in such resolutions.
The U.N. makes its documents and voting records as difficult as possible for the public to find, but, after many hours I have been able to find the following records regarding the 4 November 2022 resolution and vote.
The Resolution was completed in the draft on 29 September 2022, and here it is (though the U.N. tends to change URLs in order to make documents unfindable, and also this and many other documents at the U.N. are designed so as not to be copyable into web archiving services; so, this document might soon become unfindable: see this.)
I made the first copy of it at the main web archive, and that archived image is very different, not the document itself. This is typical for the U.N. But, anyway, if you can see it, then at least you will be able to know the Resolution’s text.
The U.N. likewise makes its voting records as difficult as possible for journalists to be able to report the specific votes of specific nations — the U.N. provides photo-images (such as in this case) of the nation-by-nation vote so that journalists will need to type everything out character-by-character instead of do copy-pastes, and journalists on rapid deadlines won’t typically retype an entire document. I have done it in this case, and here that is:
Since Austria backs the EU’s statement on this, here is that statement from the EU.
The U.S. Government seems to be having remarkable success making even nazism fashionable among its allies.
This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s 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. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is by edgarwinkler / Pixabay
The original source of this article is Global Research
Why do we have a United Nations if it is absolutely useless?
And now that the Nazis are out of Brazil Lula will most likely join the good side next year.
The question remains: Why is the US on Cuba’s soil? It is not their country. Cuba should take over Florida as a trade. Right…
For the 30th consecutive year, 185 countries at the UNGA have voted to end the illegal U.S. blockade of 🇨🇺, while just 2 countries voted to maintain it.
The countries supporting the blockade were, you guessed it, 🇺🇸 and 🇮🇱. Only 2 countries abstained from voting: 🇧🇷 and 🇺🇦. pic.twitter.com/irPMnVR6Bp
Oh good, obviously Israel will listen to reason and abandon its doomsday weaponry. For sure.
The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly, 152 to 5, to tell the Israeli apartheid regime to get rid of its nuclear weapons, which are illegal under international law https://t.co/YCQsbXWFZp
In his speech to the UN General Assembly, the Colombian president highlighted the necessity of ending the war on drugs and saving the environment
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs, as a symptom of their capitalist greed. He accused
“You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing the jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison [the rainforest] is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.”
This is Petro’s first trip to the United States since he was inaugurated in August. He was received on Sunday night September 18 by hundreds of supporters in Queens, NY who manifested their support for his administration’s commitment to working for peace and ensuring the wellbeing of the Colombian people.
Below is a full transcription of his speech on September 20, 2022 to the United Nations General Assembly.
I come from one of the three most beautiful countries on Earth.
There is an explosion of life there. Thousands of multicolored species in the seas, in the skies, in the lands…I come from the land of yellow butterflies and magic. There in the mountains and valleys of all greens, not only do the abundant waters flow down but also the torrents of blood. I come from a land of bloody beauty.
My country is not only beautiful, but it is also violent.
How can beauty be conjugated with death, how can the biodiversity of life erupt with the dances of death and horror? Who is guilty of breaking the enchantment with terror? Who or what is responsible for drowning life in the routine decisions of wealth and interest? Who is leading us to destruction as a nation and as a people?
My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon jungle, the ChocóWar jungle, the waters, the Andes mountain ranges, and the oceans. There, in those forests, planetary oxygen is emanated and atmospheric CO2 is absorbed. One of these CO2 absorbing plants, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on earth. At any cost, its destruction is sought: it is an Amazonian plant, the coca plant, sacred plant of the Incas. [It is in] a paradoxical crossroads.
The jungle that tries to save us, is at the same time, destroyed. To destroy the coca plant, they spray poisons, glyphosate in mass that runs through the waters, they arrest its growers and imprison them. For destroying or possessing the coca leaf, one million Latin Americans are killed and two million Afro-Americans are imprisoned in North America. Destroy the plant that kills, they shout from the North, but the plant is but one more of the millions that perish when they unleash the fire on the jungle. Destroying the jungle, the Amazon, has become the slogan followed by States and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptizing the rainforest as one of the great climatic pillars is unimportant.
For the world’s power relations, the jungle and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that plagues them. The power relations are plagued by the addiction to money, to perpetuate themselves, to oil, to cocaine and to the hardest drugs to be able to anesthetize themselves more. Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse to save the rainforest. The jungle is burning, gentlemen, while you make war and play with it. The rainforest, the climatic pillar of the world, disappears with all its life.
The great sponge that absorbs planetary CO2 evaporates. The savior forest is seen in my country as the enemy to be defeated, as the weed to be extinguished.
Coca and the peasants who grow it, because they have nothing else to grow, are demonized. You are only interested in my country to spray poisons on our jungles, to take our men to jail and put our women in exclusion. You are not interested in the education of the child, but in killing its jungle and extracting coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless, they prefer to throw more poisons into the atmosphere.
We serve them only to fill the emptiness and loneliness of their own society that leads them to live in the midst of drug bubbles. We hide from them the problems that they refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the jungle, on its plants, on its people. While they let the forests burn, while hypocrites chase the plants with poisons to hide the disasters of their own society, they ask us for more and more coal, more and more oil, to calm the other addiction: that of consumption, of power, of money.
What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal, or oil? The dictates of power have ordered that cocaine is the poison and must be pursued, even if it only causes minimal deaths by overdose, and even more by the mixtures necessitated by clandestinity, but coal and oil must be protected, even if their use could extinguish all of humanity.
These are the things of world power, things of injustice, and things of irrationality, because world power has become irrational. They see in the exuberance of the jungle, in its vitality, the lustful, the sinful; the guilty origin of the sadness of their societies, imbued with the unlimited compulsion to have and to consume. How to hide the loneliness of the heart, its dryness in the midst of societies without affection, competitive to the point of imprisoning the soul in solitude, if not by blaming the plant, the man who cultivates it, the libertarian secrets of the jungle.
According to the irrational power of the world, it is not the fault of the market that cuts back on existence, it is the fault of the jungle and those who inhabit it. The bank accounts have become unlimited, the money saved by the most powerful on the earth will not even be able to be spent in the time of the centuries. The sadness of existence produced by this artificial call to competition is filled with noise and drugs. The addiction to money and to having has another face: the addiction to drugs in people who lose the competition, in the losers of the artificial race in which they have transformed humanity.
The disease of loneliness will not be cured with glyphosate [sprayed] on the forests. It is not the rainforest that is to blame.
The culprit is their society educated in endless consumption, in the stupid confusion between consumption and happiness that allows the pockets of power to fill with money. The culprit of drug addiction is not the jungle, it is the irrationality of your world power. Try to give some reason to your power. Turn on the lights of the century again. The war on drugs has lasted 40 years, if we do not correct the course and it continues for another 40 years, the United States will see 2,800,000 young people die of overdose from fentanyl, which is not produced in Latin America. It will see millions of Afro-Americans imprisoned in its private jails.
The Afro-prisoner will become a business of prison companies, a million more Latin Americans will die murdered, our waters and our green fields will be filled with blood, and the dream of democracy will die in my America as well as in Anglo-Saxon America. Democracy will die where it was born, in the great western European Athens. By hiding the truth, they will see the jungle and democracies die. The war on drugs has failed.
The fight against the climate crisis has failed. There has been an increase in deadly consumption, from soft drugs to harder ones, genocide has taken place in my continent, and in my country, millions of people have been condemned to prison, and to hide their own social guilt they have blamed the rainforest and its plants. They have filled speeches and policies with nonsense. I demand from here, from my wounded Latin America, to put an end to the irrational war on drugs. To reduce drug consumption we do not need wars, for this, we need all of us to build a better society: a more caring society, more affectionate, where the intensity of life saves us from addictions and new slavery. Do you want less drugs? Think of less profit and more love. Think about a rational exercise of power.
Do not touch with your poisons the beauty of my homeland, help us without hypocrisy to save the Amazon Rainforest to save the life of humanity on the planet. You gathered the scientists, and they spoke with reason. With mathematics and climatological models, they said that the end of the human species was near, that its time is no longer of millennia, not even of centuries. Science set the alarm bells ringing and we stopped listening to it.
The war served as an excuse for not taking the necessary measures. When action was most needed, when speeches were no longer useful, when it was indispensable to deposit money in funds to save humanity, when it was necessary to move away from coal and oil as soon as possible, they invented war after war after war. They invaded Ukraine, but also Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
They invaded in the name of oil and gas. They discovered in the 21st century the worst of their addictions: addiction to money and oil. Wars have served as an excuse not to act against the climate crisis. Wars have shown them how dependent they are on what will kill the human species.
If you observe that the peoples are filling up with hunger and thirst and migrating by the millions towards the north, towards where the water is; then you enclose them, build walls, deploy machine guns, shoot at them. You expel them as if they were not human beings, you reproduce five times the mentality of those who politically created the gas chambers and the concentration camps, you reproduce on a planetary scale 1933.
The great triumph of the attack on reason. Do you not see that the solution to the great exodus unleashed on your countries is to return to water filling the rivers and the fields full of nutrients? The climate disaster fills us with viruses that swarm over us, but you do business with medicines and turn vaccines into commodities. You propose that the market will save us from what the market itself has created. The Frankenstein of humanity lies in letting the market and greed act without planning, surrendering the brain and reason. Kneeling human rationality to greed.
What is the use of war if what we need is to save the human species? What is the use of NATO and empires, if what is coming is the end of intelligence? The climate disaster will kill hundreds of millions of people and listen well, it is not produced by the planet, it is produced by capital.
The cause of the climate disaster is capital. The logic of coming together only to consume more and more, produce more and more, and for some to earn more and more produces the climate disaster. They applied the logic of extended accumulation to the energy engines of coal and oil and unleashed the hurricane: the ever deeper and deadlier chemical change of the atmosphere. Now in a parallel world, the expanded accumulation of capital is an expanded accumulation of death.
From the lands of jungle and beauty. There where they decided to make an Amazon rainforest plant an enemy, extradite and imprison its growers, I invite you to stop the war and to stop the climate disaster. Here, in this Amazon Rainforest, there is a failure of humanity.
Behind the bonfires that burn it, behind its poisoning, there is an integral, civilizational failure of humanity. Behind the addiction to cocaine and drugs, behind the addiction to oil and coal, there is the real addiction of this phase of human history: the addiction to irrational power, profit, and money. This is the enormous deadly machinery that can extinguish humanity.
I propose to you as president of one of the most beautiful countries on earth, and one of the most bloodied and violated, to end the war on drugs and allow our people to live in peace. I call on all of Latin America for this purpose. I summon the voice of Latin America to unite to defeat the irrational that martyrs our bodies. I call upon you to save the Amazon Rainforest integrally with the resources that can be allocated worldwide to life.
If you do not have the capacity to finance the fund for the revitalization of the forests, if it weighs more to allocate money to weapons than to life, then reduce the foreign debt to free our own budgetary spaces and with them, carry out the task of saving humanity and life on the planet. We can do it if you don’t want to. Just exchange debt for life, for nature. I propose, and I call upon Latin America to do so, to dialogue in order to end the war. Do not pressure us to align ourselves in the fields of war.
It is time for PEACE.
Let the Slavic peoples talk to each other, let the peoples of the world talk to each other. War is only a trap that brings the end of time closer in the great orgy of irrationality.
From Latin America, we call on Ukraine and Russia to make peace. Only in peace can we save life in this land of ours. There is no total peace without social, economic, and environmental justice. We are also at war with the planet. Without peace with the planet, there will be no peace among nations. Without social justice, there is no social peace.
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Featured image: Gustavo Petro addressed the UN General Assembly on September 20, 2022. Photo: UN
“Fifty million people in 45 countries [are] knocking on famine’s door,” he told the outlet. “If we don’t reach these people, you will have famine, starvation, destabilization of nations unlike anything we saw in 2007-2008 and 2011, and you will have mass migration.”
A growing hunger crisis risks “famine, starvation” and the “destabilization of nations,” the head of the World Food Program warned
Around 50 million people are now on the brink of famine, while even greater numbers face other forms of food insecurity, according to UN food chief David Beasley.
He warned of global “chaos” and unrest if nations fail to resolve major shortages in fuel, grain, fertilizer, and other essential goods in food production.
Speaking to the Associated Press for an interview on Thursday, Beasley urged donor countries and private philanthropists to take action to prevent a catastrophic hunger crisis amid ongoing shortages, stating there would be “chaos all over the world” otherwise.
“Fifty million people in 45 countries [are] knocking on famine’s door,” he told the outlet. “If we don’t reach these people, you will have famine, starvation, destabilization of nations unlike anything we saw in 2007-2008 and 2011, and you will have mass migration.”
If we don’t get on top of this quickly – and I don’t mean next year, I mean this year – you will have a food availability problem in 2023. And that’s going to be hell.
While the World Food Program director said a total of around 80 million people faced some level of food insecurity when he took the job in 2017, that figure has since ballooned to 345 million thanks to a series of causes – what Beasley called “a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm.” Among other factors, he cited the lingering economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdown measures, as well as significant supply chain issues caused by the conflict still raging in Ukraine and retaliatory sanctions imposed by the West.
Grain shipments from both Ukraine and Russia, which typically export enough goods to feed hundreds of millions of people, have fallen sharply amid the fighting, as have fertilizer exports from Russia, the world’s second-largest producer behind China. Economic sanctions and outright embargoes on Russian products have also exacerbated the issue, though some countries, including the United States, have made exceptions to compensate for shortages.
Beasley went on to explain that the world produces enough food for the global population of some 7.7 billion but said farmers can only achieve the proper yields using fertilizer, which has struggled to reach world markets. Without it, he predicted “havoc” around the globe, particularly in Asia, where he said, “rice production is at a critical state right now.”
The official called on Gulf nations, in particular, to “step up” contributions to the food program, noting that some countries have reaped major financial gains due to soaring oil prices.
“We’re not talking about asking for a trillion dollars here. We’re just talking about asking for a few days’ worth of your profits to stabilize the world,” he said, adding “Even if you don’t give it to me, even if you don’t give it to the World Food Program, get in the game… People are suffering and dying around the world. When a child dies every five seconds from hunger – shame on us.”
It gets worse. The largely ineffectual EU Parliament now wants to stop the construction of the 1,445 km-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, invoking hazy human rights violations, environmental threats, and “advising” member countries to simply drop out of the project.
YALI is the soft, Instagrammed face of AFRICOM. The US has participated in the overthrow of several African governments over the past two decades, with troops trained under secrecy-obsessed AFRICOM. There has been no serious Pentagon audit on the weaponizing of AFRICOM’s local “partners.” For all we know – as in Syria and Libya – the US military could be arming even more terrorists.
In a rational environment, the 77th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) would discuss alleviating the trials and tribulations of the Global South, especially Africa.
That won’t be the case. Like a deer caught in the geopolitical headlights, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued platitudes about a gloomy “winter of global discontent,” even as the proverbial imperial doomsayers criticized the UN’s “crisis of faith” and blasted the “unprovoked war” started by Russia.
Of course, the slow-motion genocide of Donbass russophone residents for eight years would never be recognized as a provocation.
Guterres spoke of Afghanistan, “where the economy is in ruins and human rights are being trampled” – but he did not dare to offer context. In Libya, “divisions continue to jeopardize the country” – once again, no context. Not to mention Iraq, where “ongoing tensions threaten ongoing stability.”
Africa has 54 nations as UN members. Any truly representative UNGA meeting should place Africa’s problems at the forefront. Once again, that’s not the case. So it is left to African leaders to offer that much-needed context outside of the UN building in New York.
As the only African member of the G20, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa recently urged the US not to “punish” the whole continent by forcing nations to demonize or sanction Russia. Washington’s introduction of legislation dubbed the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, he says, “will harm Africa and marginalize the continent.”
South Africa is a BRICS member – a concept that is anathema in the Beltway – and embraces a policy of non-alignment among world powers. An emerging 21st-century version of the 1960s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is strengthening across the Global South – and especially Africa – much to the revulsion of the US and its minions.
Back at the UNGA, Guterres invoked the global fertilizer crisis – again, with no context. Russian diplomacy has repeatedly stressed that Moscow is ready to export 30 million tons of grain and over 20 million tons of fertilizer by the end of 2022. What is left unsaid in the west, is that only the importation of fertilizers to the EU is “allowed,” while transit to Africa is not.
Guterres said he was trying to persuade EU leaders to lift sanctions on Russian fertilizer exports, which directly affect cargo payments and shipping insurance. Russia’s Uralchem, for instance, even offered to supply fertilizers to Africa for free.
Yet from the point of view of the US and its EU vassals, the only thing that matters is to counter Russia and China in Africa. Senegal’s President Macky Sall has remarked how this policy is leaving “a bitter taste.”
‘We forbid you to build your pipeline’
It gets worse. The largely ineffectual EU Parliament now wants to stop the construction of the 1,445 km-long East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) from Uganda to Tanzania, invoking hazy human rights violations, environmental threats, and “advising” member countries to simply drop out of the project.
Uganda is counting on more than 6 billion barrels of oil to sustain an employment boom and finally move the nation to middle-income status. It was up to Ugandan Parliament Deputy Speaker Thomas Tayebwa to offer much-needed context:
“It is imprudent to say that Uganda’s oil projects will exacerbate climate change, yet it is a fact that the EU block with only 10 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 25 percent of global emissions, and Africa with 20 percent of the world’s population is responsible for 3 percent of emissions. The EU and other western countries are historically responsible for climate change. Who then should stop or slow down the development of natural resources? Certainly not Africa or Uganda.”
The EU Parliament, moreover, is a staunch puppet of the biofuel lobby. It has refused to amend a law that would have stopped the use of food crops for fuel production, actually contributing to what the UN Food Program has described as “a global emergency of unprecedented magnitude.” No less than 350 million people are on the brink of starvation across Africa.
Instead, the G7’s notion of “helping” Africa is crystallized in the US-led Build Back Better World (B3W) – Washington’s anaemic attempt to counter Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – which focuses on “climate, health, and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality,” according to the White House. Practical issues of infrastructure and sustainable development, which are at the heart of China’s plan, are simply ignored by the B3W.
Initially, a few “promising” projects were identified by a traveling US delegation in Senegal and Ghana. Senegalese diplomatic sources have since confirmed that these projects have nothing whatsoever to do with building infrastructure.
B3W, predictably, fizzled out. After all, the US-led project was little more than a public relations gimmick to undermine the Chinese, with negligible effect on narrowing the $40-plus trillion worth of infrastructure needed to be built across the Global South by 2035.
Have YALI, will travel
Imperial initiatives in Africa – apart from the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which amounts to raw militarization of the continent – brings us to the curious case of YALI (Young African Leaders Initiative), widely touted in the Washington-New York axis as “the most innovative” policy of the Obama years.
Launched in 2010, YALI was framed as “empowering the new generation of Africa leadership” – a euphemism for educating (or brainwashing) them the American way. The mechanism is simple: investing in and bringing hundreds of young African potential leaders to US universities for a short, six-week “training” on “business, civil leadership, entrepreneurship, and public management.” Then, four days in Washington to meet “leaders in the administration,” and a photo op with Obama.
The project was coordinated by US embassies in Africa, and targeted young men and women from sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 nations – including those under US sanctions, like Sudan, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe – proficient in English, with a “commitment” to return to Africa. Roughly 80 percent during the initial years had never been to the US, and more than 50 percent grew up outside of big cities.
Then, in a speech in 2013 in South Africa, Obama announced the establishment of the Washington Fellowship, later renamed the Mandela-Washington Fellowship (MWF).
That’s still ongoing. In 2022, MWF should be granted to 700 “outstanding young leaders from sub-Saharan Africa,” who follow “Leadership Institutes” at nearly 40 US universities, before their short stint in Washington. After which, they are ready for “long-term engagement between the United States and Africa.”
And all that for literally peanuts, as MWF was enthusiastically billed by the Democrat establishment as cost-efficient: $24,000 per fellow, paid by participant US universities as well as Coca-Cola, IBM, MasterCard Foundation, Microsoft, Intel, McKinsey, GE, and Procter & Gamble.
And that didn’t stop with MWF. USAID went a step further, and invested over $38 million – plus $10 million from the MasterCard Foundation – to set up four Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs) in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Senegal. These were training, long distance, and in-class, at least 3,500 ‘future leaders’ a year.
It’s no wonder the Brookings Institution was drooling over so much “cost-efficiency” when it comes to investing “in Africa’s future” and for the US to “stay competitive” in Africa. YALI certainly looks prettier than AFRICOM.
A few success stories though don’t seem to rival the steady stream of African footballers making a splash in Europe – and then reinvesting most of their profits back home. The Trump years did see a reduction of YALI’s funding – from $19 million in 2017 to roughly $5 million.
So many leaders to ‘train’
Predictably, the Joe Biden White House YALI-ed all over again with a vengeance. Take this US press attache in Nigeria neatly outlining the current emphasis on “media and information literacy,” badly needed to tackle the “spreading of disinformation” including “in the months leading up to the national presidential election.”
So the US, under YALI, “trained 1,000 young Nigerians to recognize the signs of online and media misinformation and disinformation.” And now the follow-up is “Train the Trainer” workshops, “teaching 40 journalists, content creators, and activists (half of whom will be women) from Yobe, Borno, Adamawa, Zamfara, and Katsina how to identify, investigate, and report misinformation.” Facebook, being ordered by the FBI to censor “inconvenient,” potentially election-altering facts is not part of the curriculum.
YALI is the soft, Instagrammed face of AFRICOM. The US has participated in the overthrow of several African governments over the past two decades, with troops trained under secrecy-obsessed AFRICOM. There has been no serious Pentagon audit on the weaponizing of AFRICOM’s local “partners.” For all we know – as in Syria and Libya – the US military could be arming even more terrorists.
And predictably, it’s all bipartisan. Rabid neo-con and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, in December 2018, at the Heritage Foundation, made it crystal clear: the US in Africa has nothing to do with supporting democracy and sustainable development. It’s all about countering Russia and China.
When it learned that Beijing was considering building a naval base in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, the Biden White House sent power envoys to the capital Malabo to convince the government to cease and desist. To no avail.
In contrast, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was received like a superstar in his recent extensive tour of Africa, where it’s widely perceived that global food prices and the fertilizer drama are a direct consequence of western sanctions on Russia. Uganda leader Yoweri Museveni went straight to the point when he said, “How can we be against somebody who has never harmed us?”
On 13-15 December, the White House plans a major US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington to discuss mostly food security and climate change – alongside the perennial lectures on democracy and human rights. Most leaders won’t be exactly impressed with this new showing of “the United States’ enduring commitment to Africa.” Well, there’s always YALI. So many young leaders to indoctrinate, so little time.
Moscow has suggested that Kiev’s plan was to capture the nuclear plant and then use the staff of the UN nuclear watchdog as “human shields” to maintain control over it.
Russia has been insisting on international inspectors coming to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant as it accused Ukraine of repeatedly shelling the facility in recent weeks and of risking a disaster that could affect many countries in Europe.
The assault was attempted despite the presence of IAEA inspectors at the facility, Russian defense ministry says
Russian servicemen on the territory of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. Konstantin Mihalchevskiy
Russia’s defense ministry has confirmed that Ukraine has made yet another attempt to take over the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant late on Friday, revealing some details of Kiev’s operation, which failed.
Over 40 motor boats, divided into two groups and carrying over 250 Ukrainian special operations troops and foreign mercenaries, tried to land on the coast of the Kakhovka reservoir not far from Energodar, host city of the nuclear power plant, a ministry statement said on Saturday.
The attackers were quickly spotted and struck by Russia’s Su-30 jets and Ka-52 attack helicopters. Those strikes sunk some 20 boats, while the rest turned around and retreated. The remaining Ukrainian troops were than targeted by the Russian artillery as they tried getting ashore in the Ukrainian-controlled territory, the ministry said.
According to Moscow, the failed attack on the nuclear power plant saw 47 Ukrainian service personnel killed, including ten foreign mercenaries, with at least 20 others wounded.
Kiev’s special forces attempted to storm the facility despite the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) being there, the defense ministry stressed.
Ukraine attempted a similar attack ahead of the arrival of the IAEA team at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant on Thursday. It was also repelled by Russian troops, with the Ukrainian assault force suffering heavy losses.
Moscow has suggested that Kiev’s plan was to capture the nuclear plant and then use the staff of the UN nuclear watchdog as “human shields” to maintain control over it.
Russia has been insisting on international inspectors coming to the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant as it accused Ukraine of repeatedly shelling the facility in recent weeks and of risking a disaster that could affect many countries in Europe.
Ukraine claims that the Russian forces who have been in control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant since March have turned it into a military base and that they’re striking the station themselves in order to pin the blame on Kiev.
IAEA chef Rafael Grossi, who headed the team of inspectors at the facility, has confirmed that the physical integrity of the plant “has been violated several times,” but added that it was impossible to determine if the damage was deliberate or accidental.
On December 16th, 2021, 130 nations passed a UN resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Two nations voted against it. USA and the Ukraine 🇺🇦. They want to continue to glorify Nazi. pic.twitter.com/jWEuQAR6kY
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 
