Starters or Main Course

The pandemic was sent to us, by grace of Masters of Covid, in their great mercy, instead of a ‘real’ nuclear war. It was sent in order to dump old government debts and issue new debt; to restart the dollar; to raise the demand for credit, and correspondingly, the interest rate. At the same time it was sent to preserve certain lives and assets from otherwise inevitable destruction. That is what I thought and wrote. However, now I have doubts. Perhaps, the pandemic isn’t an alternative course but is just “for starters”, and the main nuclear course is still to come.

This uncomfortable thought came to me while listening to Joe Biden talking about “soulless killer” Vladimir Putin. Smaller insults have sparked off wars. The “Footless, yellow earth-worm” slur moved Kaa the Rock Python to devour Bandar Log. Luckily, easy-going Putin replied with a smile. He said that in his childhood, kids responded with “I am rubber, you are glue; bounces off me and sticks to you”; he only wished good health for the American president and proposed to debate him online, so that Americans and Russians, as well as the whole world, could form their own opinion. Biden evaded the challenge. It’s not clear he remembered who Putin is. An empty suit with a teleprompter, called him Donald Trump Jr. Biden said Putin meddled in the US elections and he will pay a price for it. Alas, Putin couldn’t influence the US dead, and they swung the elections as they voted for Biden by whole cemeteries. Yes, Biden is a senile dummy that couldn’t even board Air Force One without stumbling thrice the next day, but there is somebody who operates the teleprompter, and that is the problem.

The Russians were visibly furious. When US leaders drop such invective, it’s like pirates passing a ‘black spot’ in Treasure Island. It’s a signal that the foreign leader has to be deposed or killed outright. That’s how they spoke of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi; both were killed and their ‘rogue states’ devastated. It was clearly a show of hostile intentions, not just from Biden but also from the US establishment speaking like ventriloquist through the current White House tenant.

It is bad enough to make a quarrel with Russia, but Biden regime didn’t stop at that. Next day there was a nasty quarrel with China, at the Alaska talks. Secretary of State Blinken began negotiations by accusing China of genocide in Sinkiang, of depriving Hong Kong denizens of their rights, of buying fewer Australian products, and he said that they would negotiate “from a position of strength”.

“The United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be.” This unprovoked attack annoyed the Chinese representative and he replied:

Do you want to speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength? So was this carefully all planned and was it carefully orchestrated with all the preparations in place? Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue? The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The U.S. does not represent the world. It only represents the Government of the United States. I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion, and those countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”

This two-pronged attack on Russia AND on China is not a coincidence. The Biden regime prepares for war. A new Raider Bomber B-21 is in preparation, it is reported:

The strategic stealth bomber will be able to deliver conventional and thermonuclear weapons to enemy targets anywhere and anytime in the world. It will be able to destroy any target, anywhere. The B-21 was conceived to overcome all the deficiencies of the current heavy bomber fleet, which consists of 157 ageing Cold War aircraft. In particular, it will have the range, payload, strike features, and survivability to address every category of potential target—including deeply buried or time-sensitive mobile targets inside China. The basic logic of the design is that if the B-21 is to be an effective deterrent to all forms of aggression, then it must be able to put at risk every asset valued by any adversary, no matter how well concealed or protected such assets may be. The Raider will replace the B-2 bomber, which means it will be wired from day one to carry the B-61 variable-yield nuclear gravity bomb and the Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) nuclear cruise missile. (Facebook does not allow the posting of a link to this article).

There are thousands of new missiles, aircraft, ships and bombs to be produced and deployed by Biden regime – and its allies. The British poodle decided to increase its nuclear weapon arsenal by 40 per cent. It mainly consists of those Trident nuclear warheads that Jeremy Corbyn pledged to eliminate altogether, until he was stopped in his tracks by the antisemitism smear. Perhaps his wish to disarm was the main reason why this gentle man was dumped, and Jews were, as always, ready to provide an excuse. There is no mystery for whom the nukes are prepared: Moscow remains “the most acute threat” to British security, said Boris Johnson. Russia is the enemy No One.

Afghanistan is a great base from which to invade Central Asia and threaten Russia from the south. The country has been occupied by the US for 20 years, and Trump was determined to pull out the troops. Biden has already hinted that the US will renege on its agreement with the Taliban to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was supposed to be completed by May 2021; it will be “tough” for the United States to withdraw forces from Afghanistan in six weeks, he said. Biden has also scrapped Trump’s plan to withdraw forces from Germany, and with good reason. His administration wants Germans to drop the Nord Stream II project, and it is easier to convince a country if you have forty military bases there.

Fighting against Iran never stopped. When the US isn’t doing it her best friend Israel is acting. It has emerged that during the last two years, Israeli frogmen sabotaged 12 Iranian tankers, reported the Wall Street Journal. But it all backfired. On February 16, the entire Mediterranean coast of Israel was covered with sticky black mess.

The blow to Israel was terrible – animals, plants and fish died; for a long time it will be impossible to swim and sunbathe on the oily shores. Only now the sad truth has begun to leak out: ‘the worst pollution of the century’ had been done by Israelis. The first to speak about the source of the pollution was Israeli Minister of the Environment Gila Gamliel. She said the oil was released by the Iranian tanker Emerald carrying a cargo of US-sanctioned oil products to Syria. This is Iranian eco-terrorism, she said. But Gila was quickly gagged – the Israeli military censorship forbade discussion of this topic, except in the most general terms. It appears Gila Gamliel was right – up to a point. The Israeli dissident Richard Silverstein wrote about it:

It was a deliberate attack by Israel on the Iranian vessel. Israel’s naval commando unit, Flotilla 13 covertly attached a mine to the Emerald. The intent was to cause minor damage that would send a message to Iran that its own attacks on Gulf shipping would bring a cost. This Times of London report written by Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeiffer confirms my source. However, the commandos didn’t realize that the Emerald was a rusty old hulk in desperately ill-repair. The Israeli mine, which was supposed to cause minor damage, actually ripped a hole so big that much of the contents of the ship’s hold leaked into the Mediterranean. This is what caused the Israeli environmental disaster: Israel itself.

This incident reminds us that war has unpredictable consequences, especially world wars. Such desire for war is a clear sign of an unhappy nation. The combination of covid and war is even less predictable. The US, and its European allies are frustrated. Joe Biden came to the White House as the man of the Masters of Covid, with a mask on his face; he does not take it off, nor do his senior officials. Texas and South Dakota freed themselves; so did Florida, but the rest of the US is still restricted. Despite millions of vaccine shots, the corona pandemic is still the reason for lockdowns and travel limitations. Brits are not allowed to leave their country. In the US, a woman, Dr Micheline Epstein, delivered her daughter to a school, and she was (oh horror!) bare-faced. The schoolteachers contacted the police; the six-year-old daughter has been taken away from her mother indefinitely, for breach of the mask regime. She is still not allowed to reunite with her daughter, it was reported.

People are all too vulnerable in the Righteous Empire. The enforcers of right attitudes can do with you anything, anything at all. A scientist who kept quiet when he heard the word n<…> being uttered, has lost his job. A man, Robert Hoogland, has been sent to jail for calling his 14-year-old daughter, “daughter”, and publicly referring to her with the pronouns “she” and “her”, while the girl still isn’t allowed yet to buy beer insists she will be a man. Add to that the misery created by lockdowns, and you will understand why thousands of Russian émigrés rush back into Mother Russia.

Since 1980s, Russians considered themselves lucky if they could escape their frosty homeland and move westward. The children of Stalin and Khrushchev, top government figures of Yeltsin days, artists and scientists, moved to Florida or Paris. They were always ready to condemn Putin the brutal dictator. A popular film actor Mr Alexei Serebryakov had left Russia for Canada, angrily slamming the door, condemning the “bloody regime” and Russia’s “mix of strength, arrogance and rudeness”. And suddenly – the wind had changed, and the reverse drift has begun. Serebryakov returned from Canada, though many Russians aren’t welcoming his move back at all. A science journalist Asya Kazantseva returned to Moscow from Tel Aviv and Bristol, UK and wrote:

An unexpected collateral effect of the pandemic is that all the friends who immigrated to Europe a long time ago flocked home to spend the winter here in Moscow, where vaccines are free and available, and there is no lockdown. Social life here is twice as active as it was in peacetime. I will never be lonely again! [A popular Jewish blogger] Alina Farkash recently wrote that in Moscow, you are a beloved child in a large family, while emigration [in her case to Israel] is like being sent to an orphanage. That’s all true. I really hope that I will never go anywhere else, that I will always be here, and that I will firmly remember what an endless happiness it is just to be here.”

Indeed, Russia is not a wonderland; it has many faults and problems. Its oligarchs are too rich, its people are rather poor; taxes are too low; the social gap is greater than in the US or China, as you can read in this text (in Russian). However, Russia is free. You can say and write whatever you wish. There are no lockdowns. Schools operate as usual; distance learning is rare. Churches are open. Theatres, ditto. There are no obligatory masks; where they are obligatory, the Russians still ignore them.

Putin answered Biden at a concert in a Moscow stadium full to capacity. Among 80 thousand attendees, just a few cautious people wore masks. Vaccines are free and available, the excellent old-fashioned Russian vaccines that have no known ill side effects. There is a choice of three Russian vaccines, with the first one, Sputnik V, authorised the world over, and bought in Europe and elsewhere. Anxious people exposed to Western discourse do vaccinate, others feel no pressure to do it. Russia is the most relaxed place re corona you can find now. Even Putin haters, plentiful among Moscow middle classes, have changed their tune. They were calling him a coward who hides in a shelter out of fear of virus; now they say he just pretended, and he knew all the way along that the virus is not all that dangerous, so he is now just a cheat. He can’t win them all.

Still, Russia does not deny the virus. It would be silly, for the Russian vaccines bring in heaps of dollars to the state coffers. The Deputy Director of the State Influenza Institute Dr Daria Danilenko wryly commented: “For the first time in the history of scientific observation, the world faced an epidemic season without influenza”.

The Masters of Covid are too powerful to be challenged openly. This week, they disposed of the Tanzanian President, John Magufuli. A cheeky man, he tested papaya, goat and engine oil for covid using WHO-supplied tests, and they all turned out to be positive. He rejected testing and declared Tanzania free of covid. Then, the London Guardian newspaper (in a section funded by Bill Gates) called for him to be removed.

The US Council on Foreign Relations, FCR, seconded the call, and presto! he is dead. He was the second African ruler who did not succumb to covid obsession, and found his untimely death. The first one was the President of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, who did not allow WHO envoys into his country and refused to lock down and succumb to mass testing. He promptly died of a heart attack, or, according to other sources, from covid, just like Magufuli. The man who took his place immediately invited the WHO into the country and followed their instructions.

President Lukashenko also refused the WHO diktat, and was almost deposed, but he fought back – after all, Belarus is not in Africa. The Swedes, as you know, also gave ground under pressure. Perhaps President Putin acted wisely when he did not contradict the Masters of Covid. They are, apparently, an irresistible force in the current world. They removed Trump, they locked Europe down. Putin would also have been destroyed – and Russians would end in an endless lockdown, like Israel or France.

I cannot answer the question of how the Masters of Covid were able to do it. Neither Schwab, a second-rate professor in Zurich, nor Gates, the owner of a large data company – could have achieved such a result by any known means. Will we ever know who is behind them? Or is that very question to be condemned as a conspiracy theory?

By the way, Magufuli, the late president of Tanzania, was an outstanding personality. A Russian newspaper wrote:

Magufuli looked everywhere to cut unnecessary expenses, and the saved money was used for the construction of roads and for free education (with him, not only primary, but secondary schools became free, as well). He reduced the cabinet from 30 to 19 people, and fired about 150 high-ranking officials as unnecessary or corrupt. An audit revealed that 10,000 salaried civil servants existed on paper only. Magufuli cancelled two deals with China, which had already been signed by his predecessor, President Kikwete: the construction of the country’s first electrified railway and the largest port in East Africa in Bagamoyo. Only a madman could agree to the conditions proposed by the Chinese. Magufuli was indignant. The railway was eventually built by a Turkish company; the Tanzanian authorities still cannot agree on the port with Chinese investors. Magufuli believed that the scale of the pandemic is greatly exaggerated and some forces use it to sabotage the economy, wrote Associated Press. He did not want to introduce quarantine fearing that the level of poverty would rise.

In short, a wonderful person! But he undertook to chop down a tree that was beyond his strength.

The Masters of Covid played on our fear of death. I wonder how they will overcome it while instigating a world war? Perhaps they will do it by trying to make our life so miserable that we will accept mass annihilation, if not gladly, at least placidly.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

This article was first published at The Unz Review.