By mere coincidence – or perhaps by a divine sense of humor – the character most concerned with viruses and germs was an Italian man whose name began with the letter F.
The third installation presents a scenario most analogous to today’s world. In it we find a global conspiracy largely led by academics and scientists, who are hell-bent (literally) on ushering in a world that is overtly sanitary and free of any intellectual or biological germs.
The term “Orwellian” has been rightly applied over the past “two weeks to slow the spread.” In many ways, we have seen the sort of society that George Orwell warned against come into existence.
Double speak, the re-writing of history, and increasing surveillance by the proverbial “Party” have become commonplace. It seems every day there is another reason to say that such and such is Orwellian, or that this or that even is straight out of 1984.
The current madness emanating from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the form of a so-called pandemic treaty seems very Orwellian indeed – though we should note that the sort of ideas coming from the WHO are commonplace to all tyrants in our age of health tyranny. Fauci, Schwab, Tedros, and Tam are all cut from the same sulphuric cloth.
Attorney Thomas Renz recently gave an interview to the Gateway Pundit, wherein he outlined the potential consequences of what could happen if the WHO gets its way.
Carte blanche for the WHO – a pseudo-governmental organization – to operate in sovereign nations without needing permission, globalist collaboration by elites from all over, and a scientistic materialist worldview obsessed with viruses will no doubt have commentators saying, “Orwell was right!”
But, it was not in fact Orwell – or Huxley with his Brave New World, for that matter – who predicted how the ideals of a medical tyranny would infiltrate into normal life. To find the real prophet who described how a health-dictatorship would take root in society, we need to look to C.S. Lewis.
We see this happening with Ukraine. As it becomes clear that this story will not end well for Ukraine or the Europeans, the players are looking for a new quest. Joe Biden’s heroic management of the economy through the Putin-Trump inflation spiral looks like a fun new expansion pack. Maybe they play the China as dangerous dragon add-on that came with the Covid edition. Maybe someone is about to release something entirely different and inject it into the media echo system.
There is an argument that we live in a novel political environment in which the mass media is the political authority. They get on an issue and the political and corporate classes respond to it. We saw this with the George Floyd story that was orchestrated by the big media operations. On the other hand, political actors will seed the media with fake stories hoping they will put it into their megaphones. The Russian collusion hoax cooked up by team Clinton is an example.
A couple of weeks back, Tucker Carlson observed that most Republicans wake up in the morning and go to the New York Times. They and their staff read the thing over breakfast, because it is their guide throughout the day. This is true of mainstream conservatives as well. What passes for the Right in America is entirely controlled by the Left, which is controlled by the media. Old school liberals sound like Trump people when they complain about how the media runs their party.
There is a lot of truth to the media-ocracy claim. The backers of the Ukraine fiasco have been feeding the media nonsense tales about Ukraine. They handed them Ukraine lapel pins they had made up for the occasion. Note no one in the media looked into who supplied everyone on television with those pins. Instead, it was a unified media voice, a wall of sound, selling the Ukraine story. Washington and the political class in Europe were swept up in this unfolding disaster.
The thing is though, the Russia hoax makes clear that the media does not have a coordinated center. The details of the hoax have been supplied in the court case against Clinton crony Michael Sussman. He relied upon confidence men like Franklin Foer, who exist to inject false narratives into the media echo system. Once these fake stories get loose, they rocket around the system, repeated by the sociopaths who are attracted to life in the media echo system.
Further proof of the passive nature of the media system is the war in Ukraine, a place few in the media can find on a map. There are three observable trends in the coverage of the war thus far. One is there are few Western reporters trying to cover the war on the ground in Ukraine. They went over for the photo-ops when it started but made sure to stay in Kiev. They quickly went back to their countries and left the reporting to contractors and interested think tanks.
That is the other thing about the media response to the war. The work-at-home war correspondents now do their reporting from press releases issued by outfits like the Institute for the Study of War. Alternatively, they rely on Ukrainians on the payroll of the American of British intelligence services. In both cases, a five minute search on-line would reveal these sources to be entirely fake. Instead, they just pass on the information without bothering to question any of it.
The lack of original reporting and reliance on single sources with narrow agendas has resulted in a uniform opinion in the media. Even the so-called conservative media, which took off their American flag pins and put on the Ukraine pin, repeated the same stories from the same sources as if it was holy writ. What the Ukraine story reveals is the media echo system operates like a murmuration of starlings, rushing through the news cycle in response to external stimulus.
This reality will lead some to assume this system is controlled by a tiny cabal of deep state actors in a hollowed out volcano. In reality, the people trying to inject their special brand of poison into the system are often tangled in the system. The Covid panic is the perfect example. It was people hoping for media recognition who kept injecting ridiculous claims into the system. These were not deep state players, but often just ordinary people hoping for fifteen minutes of fame.
The “frontline workers” posting their made up tales of woe on social media is the perfect example of how small players can move the media swarm. Hoping for attention, nurses and doctors started positing on social media stories that made them look like selfless heroes trying to save Covid victims. This psychosis, and it was a form of psychosis, was picked up by the media and amplified. These fake stories became fact, which spawned new fake stories made up by media members.
The Covid hoax, and it is fair to call it a hoax at this point, was not the result of clever scheming like the Russian collusion hoax. Instead, it was something like a stampede over a cliff. Unlike the animals in the herd, the people in this media stampede could question the rush over the cliff, but like the animals in the herd, they feared being trampled more than they feared the end result. As a result, fantasy became holy writ and Covid turned into a bizarre mass media religion.
In a way, the berserk obsession with disinformation and misinformation is not entirely motivated by malice toward the general public. The people running the New York Times and Washington Post still cling to the old myths about the media. They think they should be the cynics not falling for their hoaxes. They sort of get the problem, but they lack the proper perspective from their position inside the swarm to see that it is the nature of the swarm, what makes it possible, that is the problem.
Behind all the frenzied virtue-signaling and ritualistic condemnations, it is hard not to discern loads of malice; and it is directed mostly by white people against other white people.
Last week, according toUSA News, “the Senate failed to pass a bill to create domestic terrorism offices within federal law enforcement agencies in the wake of mass shootings at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school.” This bill, which went down to defeat after a 47-47 deadlock in the Senate, was long overdue according to the prevailing media narrative. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) insisted that for the sake of our moral health we need to call “domestic terrorism” by its correct name. This evil is now “feeding off the poison of conspiracy theories like the White replacement theory.”
Now we get to the heart of the matter. The stalled bill was not about such mundane matters as arranging for more surveillance checks on prospective gun owners. Whatever one may think of such proposals, they at least bear some relationship to the mass shootings that recently took place. This latest Democratic initiative, by contrast, is intended to unmask “white supremacists,” who according to Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, represent the greatest terrorist threat in our systemically racist country. Senate Republicans countered by pointing out that the executive is already equipped with the authority to investigate terrorist threats. Are we dealing with something here which existing arrangements don’t address? Why otherwise would we need a special agency to resist domestic terrorism, and one that would exist specifically “to combat White supremacist and neo-Nazi membership in uniformed services and federal law enforcement”?
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) responded fittingly to this political stunt, by describing it as “the Democratic plan to brand and insult our police and soldiers as White supremacists and neo-Nazis.” Not coincidentally the stunt Paul criticized came one day after Joe Biden signed an executive order placing the police under special scrutiny to detect white racism. The law will also curtail the use of force and scale back military equipment to police during a time of surging violent crime. Such moves seem designed to appease a particular constituency while writing off the rest of the country. Blacks who think whites, and especially white police, are out to get them and those who share the mentality of the ADL, SPLC, and the faculties of Ivy League universities, have become the only voting bloc that Biden and his party seem to care about. In fact, they care enough about this constituency to appeal to its pathological fixation.
In this group’s already widely diffused vision, the United States is perpetually in the grip of neo-Nazis and white supremacists, who plan to eliminate nonwhites and to fill the country with racially pure Aryans. Antiwhite racists are no problem for Biden’s constituency because BLM, Antifa, and other such terrorist organizations either don’t exist or are acting in self-defense against a white supremacist threat. Similar accusations are now issuing from the ruling class in other Western countries. For example, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser refuses even to recognize the criminality of Muslim migrants in German cities and attributes their misdeeds to a “right-wing extremist danger.” There is no substantive difference between the German “struggle against the Right” generously supported by all “democratic” (read woke, antifascist) German parties and the race politics pursued by Biden in the United States.
During a 2018 presentation at the annual World Economic Forum meeting, titled, Will the Future Be Human? Harari said he sees a future where info-tech and bio-tech merge, allowing the hacking of humans.
Harari claims the algorithms will know humans better than they know themselves.
The WEF philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, says “humans are [good] for nothing and elites need to surveil them digitally.
Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is a former member of the UN Advisory Board on Sustainable Development. He is also the leader of “The Great Reset”, and sees himself as the dictator of the new world order.
The WEF meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, and includes CEOs, cultural and political leaders, billionaires, and other globalists of renown.
They discuss gender equality, climate change, and the reworking of capitalism into a more feudalistic economic system they call stakeholder capitalism.
The WEF website states, “The non-profit organization’s aim is to engage the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.”
Transitioning Capitalism Into Socialism
The “Great Reset” is a term coined in a 2011 book by economist Richard Florida and enthusiastically embraced by Schwab in the context of the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.
They plan to determine “the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of the global commons.” They plan to transform the social, economic, and political structure of the world’s “operating systems” – capitalism, the free market, and democracy.
“Stakeholder capitalism” – with the private sector tightly controlled by the government – will replace capitalism. The free market is considered unfair and skewed to the advantage of an exploitive business class. Democracy is regarded as an inefficient political arrangement. It fails since it relies on the incapacity of the common man to know what’s best for him.
Dictators are arrogant.
The WEF philosopher, Yuval Noah Harari, says “humans are [good] for nothing and elites need to surveil them digitally.
During a 2018 presentation at the annual World Economic Forum meeting, titled, Will the Future Be Human? Harari said he sees a future where info-tech and bio-tech merge, allowing the hacking of humans.
Harari claims the algorithms will know humans better than they know themselves.
When you start to connect the dots, they lead right back to the American police state and the war-drenched, violence-imbued, profit-driven military industrial complex, both of which continue to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.
With alarming regularity, the nation is being subjected to a heartbreaking spate of violence that terrorizes the populace, fractures communities, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.
Mass shootings have taken place in schools, on college campuses, movie theaters, nightclubs, grocery stores, concert venues, bars, workplaces, churches, on military bases, and in government offices. In almost every instance, the shooters were dressed in military-style gear and armed with military-style weapons.
Take the latest shooting that took place in Uvalde, Texas, when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, wearing body armor and carrying a rifle, walked into Robb Elementary School and opened fire, leaving at least 19 children and two teachers dead.
This Uvalde shooting took place ten days after another 18-year-old man, heavily armed and wearing tactical gear (including a tactical helmet and plated armor), opened fire in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y, killing 10 people.
Yet surely there’s more to these shootings than just easy access to weapons and mental illness.
Ask yourself: Why do these mass shootings keep happening? Who are these shooters modelling themselves after? Where are they finding the inspiration for their weaponry and tactics? Whose stance and techniques are they mirroring?
With Russia’s war in Ukraine now in its fourth month, mainstream media consumers have been treated to seemingly endless headlines and analysis of Russia’s extensive military losses. At the same time Ukrainian forces have tended to be lionized and their battlefield prowess romanticized, with essentially zero public information so far being given which details up-to-date Ukrainian force casualties, set-backs, and equipment losses.
But for the first time The Washington Post is out with a surprisingly dire and negative assessment of how US-backed and equipped Ukrainian forces are actually fairing. Gone is the rosy idealizing lens through which each and every encounter with the Russians is typically portrayed. WaPo correspondent and author of the new report Sudarsan Raghavan underscores of the true situation that “Ukrainian leaders project an image of military invulnerability against Russia. But commanders offer a more realistic portrait of the war, where outgunned volunteers describe being abandoned by their military brass and facing certain death at the front.”
As many careful and less idealistic observers suspected the whole time, a steady stream of both wartime propaganda and one-sided social media feeds where it seems the only tanks being blown up are Russian ones has served to present a very skewed portrayal of the battlefield to the Western public. While it’s perhaps easier to get sucked into this pro-Ukraine bias based on the innumerable so-called open source intelligence self-anointed ‘experts’ on Twitter, this is less so if one wades into Telegram, where a flood of uncensored videos from both sides gives a truer picture, as the fresh report seems to also suggest.
The Washington Post report belatedly admits the avalanche of propaganda based in a pro-Kiev, pro-West narrative from the outset: “Videos of assaults on Russian tanks or positions are posted daily on social media. Artists are creating patriotic posters, billboards and T-shirts. The postal service even released stamps commemorating the sinking of a Russian warship in the Black Sea.”
The report then pivots to the reality of an undertrained, poorly commanded and equipped, rag-tag force of mostly volunteers in the East who find themselves increasingly surrounded by the numerically superior Russian military which has penetrated almost the entire Donbas region. “Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries or losses of military equipment. But after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries and desertions,” the report reads as it follows one particular battalion.
The report’s sources speak out despite threat of being court-martialed amid a heavily controlled information flow:
“War breaks people down,” said Serhiy Haidai, head of the regional war administration in Luhansk province, acknowledging many volunteers were not properly trained because Ukrainian authorities did not expect Russia to invade. But he maintained that all soldiers are taken care of: “They have enough medical supplies and food. The only thing is there are people that aren’t ready to fight.”
The report references a video widely circulating online this week wherein a group the size of a platoon declares they simply can’t fight for lack of weaponry, ammunition, food and proper command support:
“We are being sent to certain death,” said a volunteer, reading from a prepared script, adding that a similar video was filmed by members of the 115th Brigade 1st Battalion. “We are not alone like this, we are many.”
Ukraine’s military rebutted the volunteers’ claims in their own video posted online, saying the “deserters” had everything they needed to fight: “They thought they came for a vacation,” one service member said. “That’s why they left their positions.”
In the wake of the video, the Ukrainian troops featured are being accused of ‘desertion’:
Additional videos have surfaced that are similar: units complain even of being left to fight in already impossible conditions with WWI and WWII-era rifles, which can do little up against Russia’s far superior firepower.
In 1976, Dr. Halstead Holman, the youngest professor to be named chairman of Stanford University’s Department of Medicine at the age of 35, wrote,
“the medical establishment is not primarily engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge into medical practice; rather in significant part it is engaged in special interest advocacy, pursuing and preserving social power.”
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In 1976, Dr. Halstead Holman, the youngest professor to be named chairman of Stanford University’s Department of Medicine at the age of 35, wrote,
“the medical establishment is not primarily engaged in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge into medical practice; rather in significant part it is engaged in special interest advocacy, pursuing and preserving social power.”
Holman called for a paradigm shift in medical laboratory research that would be innovative, support intellectual freedom, and have the courage to tackle the many challenges and shortcomings clinical medical practice faced.
The greatest obstacle Holman confronted within the medical community was what he called “excellence deception,” which he defined as an “ideological justification” that rejects criticism and insulates itself from alternative medical theories and opinions.
Consequently Holman was calling out the hubris that pervaded the higher echelons of the medical establishment.
A decade later, Dr. Robert Petersdorf, an internationally renowned expert in infectious disease, also worried over the direction modern medicine was headed. In 1989, Petersdorf stated, “We can no longer tolerate dishonesty, cheating, fraud and conflict of interest that have invaded science and medicine.” Looking back over the past three decades, Holman’s and Petersdorf’s warnings may have just as well been feathers floating down a cliff. The paradigm shift never occurred. The medical profession has instead become increasingly corporatized, dogmatic, and oppressive.
Corruption is a high-stakes game played by the pharmaceutical complex, without which we might actually have a functioning healthcare system that improves public health. Whether it be concealing or fudging prior knowledge about drugs’ adverse effects to maximize profits, publishing junk clinical trials, buying off legislators, or engaging in devious retaliatory efforts to pressure and silence critics, these are only the costs of doing business that keep drug companies’ and Wall Street’s coffers overflowing. And this corporate culture of deception has the full approval of governments’ health ministries and the World Health Organization. Today our lives are at the mercy of a powerful cartel of medical bureaucrats in white physician coats intent on protecting a corporate-based inquisition to stifle dissent.
If anyone doubts that the Inquisition was only a dark anomaly in western history when the Church and superstitions reigned, and that our “enlightened” civilization would never fall back again into such tyranny or repeat the horrors of witch trials, you have not been paying attention. Monty Python got it correct, the Inquisition’s “chief weapon is surprise and fear… fear and surprise… and ruthless efficiency.” During the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, fear, not science base on viable consensus, ruled over the population as a means to police compliance.
For years, Noam Chomsky has been pointing out the censorship that emerges when propaganda is united with a control over the media. Today’s media is no longer distinguishable from the CDC, the FDA and Silicon Valley’s technological masters of cancel culture and virtue signaling. The architecture of scientific materialism’s Inquisition has grown steadily. Tuomas Tahko, a professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Helsinki, warns that the rise of a “Scientific Inquisition” is an effort to “convert us all to naturalism [scientific materialism or Scientism] and to denounce the false gods of intuition, a priori reasoning and thought experiments.”
When modern medicine’s greatest threat becomes “intellectual freedom,” even the freedom to carry out thought experiments outside the parameters of the dominant scientific tradition is heretical. The frontline physicians who found strong evidence for cheap off-patent drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as effective treatments against SARS-2 infections acted upon their intuitive suspicions and prescribed these drugs. They were proven correct; yet, despite having saved countless lives, who would have otherwise died in intensive care units due to the medical bureaucracy’s faith in the unfounded and barbaric medical advice from Anthony Fauci and the CDC, these physicians were vilified and viciously attacked in the media. “The philosophies of one age,” wrote the father of modern medicine William Osler, “have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday have become the wisdom of tomorrow.” For the hardcore followers of modern scientism, particularly those in the medical and biological sciences, a human being is nothing more than an animate machine controlled by a computer in the skull that will break and ultimately cease to function.
This is not an exaggeration. One of sicentism’s most popular voices, Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, would have us believe:
“What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it’s all smoke, mirrors and rapidly firing neurons… But it goes even further: If our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which in turn are made up of even smaller robots.”
Or even a brilliant genius such as Stephen Hawking who describes the existence of the human race as “just chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies.” Hawking also believed the brain was simply a computer that could survive outside the body and replicated in artificial intelligence to reach immortality. He also believed a computer virus was an actual life form.
Dennett’s and Hawking’s scientism, as well as many others in our educational institutions, are in line with the long term goals of the World Economic Forum for humanity’s dystopian future. In our modern civilization where human life has lost all existential meaning and therefore it has forfeited its social moral compass, Klaus Schwab asks the appropriate questions: “Where do we draw the line between human and machine? What does it mean to be human?” The fact that we are even asking these questions indicates how far modern humanity has been torn away from itself. The potential consequences of this catastrophic self-inflicted dementia permeating scientism are literally terrifying.
Since Scientism embraces an extremely limited, and a rather demented view of reality, which discards much of human experience such as intuition and creative flights of the imagination as subjective nonsense, there is no room for “thought experiments” in modern reductionist science. Hence, no investigation or research is warranted nor should be funded that explores outside the conventional box. To even consider that biomolecular health and disease may be understood from certain principles of quantum theory is anathema; yet, for quantum physicist Prof. Marc Henry at the University of Strasbourg, understanding the particle-signal quanta of cellular biology is exactly what medicine needs to start learning.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought America’s foreign policy interventions under the limelight once again. Ryan McMaken argues that the US administration’s claim that countries should not have the right to a sphere of influence, implicitly addressing Russia, is hypocritical. The US opposes a sphere of influence for Russia and other regional powers, while at the same time has steadily expanded its own global outreach. Among other, one can judge how true this is by looking at the amount of US military spending and size of its foreign military interventions.
The USA not only spends a disproportionately high amount of money on military relative to the rest of the world, but has also continued doing so when the Cold War was over and it could have set in motion a virtuous cycle of international disarmament. The USA has also multiplied its foreign military actions and engaged in controversial and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, harming both international peace and the global economy. From this point of view, Lew Rockwell’s scathing criticism of the US military interventions in Iraq and global hegemonic ambitions in general, appears still relevant after almost twenty-five years.
US Military Spending in Perspective
The US spends about 11 percent of its federal budget on defense, which is the third largest item after Social Security and Health, and costs almost twice as much as education. The US defense budget was $754 billion for the financial year 2022, before President Biden increased it by another $29 billion following the war in Ukraine.
However, this is not the full picture, because other federal spending is also closely tied to defense. The budgets of Department of Veterans Affairs ($113 billion), Homeland Security ($55 billion), the State Department ($64 billion), and the FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice ($10 billion) add another $242 billion to the base budget of the Department of Defense (DoD). By adding it all up, defense spending is set to exceed $1 trillion in 2022—i.e., 14 percent of the federal budget and 4 percent of gross domestic product.1
The US defense budget represents not only a significant burden on the domestic economy, but looks completely disproportionate relative to other countries’ military outlays. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) the US military spending is greater than those of the next ten largest military expenditures combined. At around $800 billion in 2021, the US military budget was almost three times higher than China’s ($293 billion) and twelve times larger than Russia’s ($66 billion).
Except for China’s military budget which has increased about ten times over the last two decades, albeit from a very low level, the steady increase in the US military spending has widened the gap with the rest of the World (graph 1). Together with its allies in Western Europe, the US spent on military three times more than Russia and China combined in 2021. As the annual spending differential between the US and other countries took place over many years, it means that the United States’ overall military supremacy in terms of stock and quality of military equipment is undisputable.
The key question is why the USA has not decreased dramatically its military spending when the Cold War was over and the main threat to its security disappeared. In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union’s military spending was very high at about $220 billion and almost in the same ballpark with the $300 billion spent by the US. However, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and its economy collapsed in the early 1990s, Russia’s military spending shrunk to a puny $10 billion on average during that decade. Yet, despite being a nuclear superpower, the US kept its military spending at the Cold War level of around $300 billion and later increased it exponentially during the War on Terror.
Endless Foreign Military Interventions Post–Cold War
The surge in US military spending over the last two decades mirrors a dramatic increase in the number of US military interventions. Monica Duffy Toft shows that US military interventions—i.e., the deployment of US armed forces to other countries—intensified over time, in particular after the Cold War.
In a recent editorial, I discussed a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on May 1, 2022, by Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).
The proposed AUMF, if passed, would allow President Biden to deploy American forces to restore “the territorial integrity of Ukraine” in the event that Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
Thankfully, as Antiwar.com news editor Dave DeCamp writes, Kinzinger’s AUMF has failed to gain traction. This may seem like a bright spot in an otherwise apocalyptically bad news cycle, but not to worry! Antiwar.com Opinion Editor Kyle Anzalone noted in his recent interview of me, Kinzinger’s proposed AUMF will likely sit on the House Floor until the necessary political capital appears.
It probably will when Russia (or anyone really) uses the above-described weapons.
Although Kinzinger’s proposed AUMF asserts the moral high ground by threatening war against Russia, it can claim none. The United States itself has deployed all three types of weapons against its enemies—in the recent past, if not sooner.
As for nuclear weapons—the United States is the only country in world history to have used nuclear weapons against an enemy during wartime. Their use is even more abhorrent considering Hiroshima and Nagasaki held no strategic military value and the ordinance overwhelmingly killed civilians.
As if obliterating two major Japanese cities wasn’t enough, the Manhattan Project’s test detonations in the New Mexico desert exposed nearby farmers and their families to dangerous levels of radiation. Although the family members did not exhibit external symptoms, much of their livestock died.
In tune with their character, between 1945 and 1947 Manhattan Project scientists purposely injected 30 Americans with plutonium just to see what would happen. These injections were administered without the subjects’ knowledge or consent.
As for biological warfare, the United States’ military has tested biological weapons against its own citizens on several occasions.
In 1949, the Army Chemical Corps secretly released a harmless bacteria into the Pentagon’s air conditioning system to see how it spread through the building.
In April of 1950 and September of 1950, the Army Chemical Corps sprayed the coasts of Norfolk, Virginia and San Francisco, California, respectively, with two types of bacteria.
The types of bacteria that were released, Bacillus globigii and Serratia marcesens were believed to be harmless at the time. However,
Bacillus globigii is now [considered] to be a pathogen, causes food poisoning, and can hurt anyone with a weak immune system. As for Serratia marcesens, 11 people were admitted to a hospital with serious bacterial infections after the San Francisco test. One of them–Edward Nevin–died three weeks later.
In a previous editorial, I wrote about how the U.S. Army Chemical Corps sprayed several cities in the United States and Canada with zinc cadmium sulfide. At the time, zinc cadmium sulfide was considered to be harmless, but a large class of victims brought a federal lawsuit claiming the exposure caused myriad ailments. The lawsuit was dismissed, in part because the U.S. Government cannot be sued without its consent.
In the 1980s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided Iraq with pathogens, which were ostensibly used against Iran in the Iraq-Iran War. In fact, the United States supported both sides of the war.
In September 2002, West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd entered the CDC’s own documents into the Congressional Record during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The documents showed that
the CDC and a biological sample company, American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene…Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including West Nile virus.
A few years later, the United States invaded Iraq under the pretext of destroying the above weapons. In the largest battle of said invasion, the Second Battle of Fallujah, the United States used white phosphorous against insurgents.
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White phosphorous is a chemical compound that burns intensely when exposed to oxygen. When it contacts the human body, it burns to the bone, causing horrific injuries.
Although the legality of using white phosphorous against combatants is debatable, and beyond the scope of this piece, the use of white phosphorus against civilians is a war crime.
There is evidence that the United States’ use of white phosphorous in Fallujah harmed civilians. It is also confirmed that the United States used white phosphorous in Iraq and Syria in its ostensible fight against the Islamic State. Human Rights Watch could not confirm several allegations that the white phosphorous harmed civilians, but it noted that the allegations exist and are supported by at least some evidence.
U.S. partners Israel and Turkey have been accused of using white phosphorous. Israel admitted it.
One of the most grievous and well-documented cases of the United States’ use of chemical weapons occurred during the Vietnam War.
While working on solutions to its counterinsurgency problem in Vietnam, the Pentagon, through ARPA, created a defoliant that gained international notoriety under the name “Agent Orange.”
Agent Orange was supposed to combat the Vietcong insurgency by denying it “protective cover from the jungle canopy.” Its second purpose was to starve the enemy “by poisoning their primary food crop, a jungle root called manioc.” Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Security Advisor Walt Rostow called the defoliant program “a type of chemical warfare.”
By the end of the war, the United States had sprayed 19 million gallons of Agent Orange on Vietnam’s jungles. “A 2012 congressional report determined that over the course of the war, between 2.1 million and 4.8 million Vietnamese were directly exposed[.]”
In addition to destroying its natural resources, Agent Orange caused abhorrent health defects in the Vietnamese population.
Ninety-eight refugees who had been exposed to chemical sprays in South Vietnam were interviewed in Hanoi. Most reported effects on eyes and skin and gastrointestinal upsets. Ninety-two percent suffered fatigue, prolonged or indefinite in 17 percent of cases. Reports of abortions and monstrous births in sprayed humans and animals and of substantial numbers of deaths among fish, fowl, and pigs were also given.
A 2006 meta-analysis found a very high correlation between exposure to Agent Orange and birth defects:
Results In total, 22 studies including 13 Vietnamese and nine non-Vietnamese studies were identified. The summary relative risk (RR) of birth defects associated with exposure to Agent Orange was 1.95 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.59–2.39], with substantial heterogeneity across studies. Vietnamese studies showed a higher summary RR (RR = 3.00; 95% CI 2.19–4.12) than non-Vietnamese studies (RR = 1.29; 95% CI 1.04–1.59). Sub-group analyses found that the magnitude of association tended to increase with greater degrees of exposure to Agent Orange, rated on intensity and duration of exposure and dioxin concentrations measured in affected populations. Conclusion Parental exposure to Agent Orange appears to be associated with an increased risk of birth defects.
The United States constantly grandstands about enforcing the “international rules-based order,” but what does that order stand for? If its own conduct is the measure, then the United States should have no quarrel with Russia for using chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.
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Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick.macfarlane@libertyweekly.net
