• Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today.

    His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir.

    The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious.

    “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists.

    Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy”

    Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium.

    “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad.

    He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad.

    He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility.

    By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours.

    And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.”

    The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy.

    Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”.

    The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.”

    Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.”

    On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”.

    Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews.

    At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance.

    The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed.

    And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army.

    The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group.

    When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.”

    “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.”

    For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father.

    “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”.

    His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.”

    He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.”

    And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view.

    His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.”

    Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.”


    https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
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  • Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today.

    His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir.

    The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious.

    “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists.

    Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy”

    Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium.

    “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad.

    He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad.

    He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility.

    By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours.

    And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.”

    The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy.

    Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”.

    The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.”

    Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.”

    On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”.

    Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews.

    At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance.

    The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed.

    And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army.

    The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group.

    When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.”

    “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.”

    For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father.

    “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”.

    His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.”

    He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.”

    And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view.

    His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.”

    Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.”


    https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’ This beautiful, inspiring, elegiac book is the story of the author’s journey – a journey from Baghdad to Israel in 1950, aged five, and from Israel to England. But Avi Schlaim’s journey was at different levels. It was geographical and it was cultural. It also became a political journey to his own position today. His personal experiences illustrate a bigger story of the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in 1950 following the creation of Israel in 1948. His story and his words speak more eloquently than any reviewer can, and so for the most part, I quote directly from his memoir. The book is “a glimpse into the lost and rich world of the Iraqi-Jewish community”. Perhaps, coming from what he describes as a prosperous, privileged family, he may see the past through rose-tinted glasses. But his memories are precious. “We belonged to a branch of the global Jewish community that is now almost extinct. We were Arab-Jews. We lived in Baghdad and were well integrated into Iraqi society. We spoke Arabic at home, our social customs were Arab, our lifestyle was Arab, our cuisine was exquisitely Middle Eastern and my parents’ music was an attractive blend of Arabic and Jewish…We in the Jewish community had much more in common, linguistically and culturally, with our Iraqi compatriots than with our European co-religionists. Of all the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, the one in Mesopotamia was the most integrated into local society, the most Arabised in its culture and the most prosperous… When the British created the Kingdom of Iraq…the Jews were the backbone of the Iraqi economy” Jewish lineage in Mesopotamia stretched as far back as Babylonian times, pre-dating the rise of Islam by a millenium. “Their influence was evident in every branch of Iraqi culture, from literature and music to journalism and banking. Banks – with the exception of government owned banks – and all the big markets remained closed on the Sabbath and the other Jewish holy days.” By the 1880s there were 55 synagogues in Baghdad. He describes how in Iraq there was a long tradition of religious tolerance and harmony. “The Jews were neither newcomers nor aliens in Iraq. They were certainly not intruders”. By the time of the First World War, Jews constituted one third of the population of Baghdad. He contrasts Europe and the Middle East. “Unlike Europe the Middle East did not have a ‘Jewish Question’. “Iraq’s Jews did not live in ghettos, nor did they experience the violent repression, persecution and genocide that marred European history. There were of course exceptions, notably the infamous pogrom against Jews in June 1941, for which the actions of British imperialism must take substantial responsibility. By 1941, antisemitism in Baghdad was on the increase but was more a foreign import than a home grown product. There was a violent pogrom against the Jewish community named the farhud. The Jews were seen as friends of the British. 179 Jews were murdered and several hundred injured. It was completely unexpected and unprecedented. There had been no other attack against the Jews for centuries. Avi gives many examples of Muslims assisting their Jewish neighbours. And yet he writes: “The overall picture, however, was one of religious tolerance, cosmopolitanism, peaceful co-existence and fruitful interaction.” The critical moment was the creation of Israel. “As a result of the Arab defeat, there was a backlash against the Jews throughout the Arab world. “What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly perceived as a sinister fifth column”, with Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists identifying the Jews in their countries with the hated Zionist enemy. Palestinians “were the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half their number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. But there was another category of victims, less well known and much less talked about: the Jews of the Arab lands”. The sub-title of the book refers to ‘Arab-Jews’. “The hyphen is significant. Critics of the term Arab-Jew see it as… conflating two separate identities. As I see it, the hyphen unites: an Arab can also be a Jew and a Jew can also be an Arab…We are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews… The story of my family in Iraq -and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and co-operation.” Yet the Zionists portray the Jews as the victims of endemic Arab persecution and this is used to justify the atrocious treatment of the Palestinians. Thus the narrative of the ‘Jewish Nakba’ to create a ‘false symmetry between the fate of two communities. This narrative is not history; it is the propaganda of the victors.” On 29th November 1947 the General Assembly of the United Nations voted for the partition of mandate Palestine into two states: one Arab, one Jewish. The General Council of the Iraqi Jewish community sent a telegram to the UN opposing the partition resolution and the creation of a Jewish state. “Like my family, the majority of Iraqi Jews saw themselves as Iraqi first and Jewish second; they feared that the creation of a Jewish state would undermine their position in Iraq… The distinction between Jews and Zionists, so crucial to interfaith harmony in the Arab world, was rapidly breaking down”. Iraq’s participation in the war for Palestine fuelled tensions between Muslims and Jews. Iraqi Jews were widely suspected of being secret supporters of Israel. With the defeat of Palestine a wave of hostility towards Israel and the Jews living in their midst swept through the Arab world. Demonstrators marched through the streets of Baghdad shouting “Death to the Jews.” And the government needing a scapegoat did not simply respond to public anger but actively whipped up public hysteria and suspicion against the Jews. At this point official persecution against the Jews began. In July 1948 a law was passed making Zionism a criminal offence punishable by death or a minimum sentence of seven years in prison. Jews were fired from government jobs and from the railways, post office and telegraph department, Jewish merchants were denied import and export licences, restrictions placed on Jewish banks to trade in foreign currency, young Jews were barred from admission to colleges of education and the entire community was put under surveillance. The number of Jewish immigrants leaving Iraq to the end of 1953 numbered almost 125,000 out of a total of 135,000. The Jewish presence going back well over 2,000 years was destroyed. And yet for all this the mass exodus did not occur till 1950/1951 in what was known as the ‘Big Aliyah”. The majority of Iraqi Jews did not want to leave Iraq and had no affinity with Zionism. Most who emigrated to Israel did so only after a wave of five bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad. It has long been argued that the bombings were instigated by Israel and the Zionists to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews to Israel, needed as they were to do many of the menial jobs and to boost numbers in the army. The author makes a forensic examination of the evidence – based on examination of documents and on interviews – and concluded that three out of the five bombings were carried out by the Zionist underground in Baghdad, a fourth – the bombing of the Mas’uda Shemtob synagogue, which was the only one that resulted in fatalities – was the result of Zionist bribery and there was one carried out by a far right wing, anti-Jewish Iraqi nationalist group. When the Iraqi Jews arrived in Israel, their experience fell short of the Zionist myth. At the airport in Israel, many were sprayed with DDT pesticides “to disinfect them as if they were animals.” They were then taken to squalid and unsanitary transit camps. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by policemen. The immigration and settlement authorities had no understanding of their customs and culture. “They thought of them as backward and primitive and expected them to take their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy and be grateful for whatever they were given… The lens through which the new immigrants were viewed was the same colonialist lens through which the Ashkenazi establishment viewed the Palestinians.” “We were Jews from an Arab country that was still officially at war with Israel. European Jews.. looked down on us as socially and culturally inferior. They despised the Arabic language…I was an Iraqi boy in a land of Europeans.” For his grandmothers, Iraq was the beloved homeland while Israel was the place of exile. “Migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah or ascent. For us the move from Iraq to Israel was decidedly a Yeridah, a descent down the economic and social ladder. Not only did we lose our property and possessions; we also our lost our strong sense of identity as proud Iraqi Jews as we were relegated to the margins of Israeli society.” The experience was to break his father. “The unstated aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our Arab-Jewish identity… A systematic process was at work to delegitimise our heritage and erase our cultural roots” It was a clash of cultures. The Mizrahim were earmarked to be the proletariat – the fodder to support the country’s industrial and agricultural development. As one author put it, “We left Iraq as Jews and arrived in Israel as Iraqis.” They were clearly, to borrow from current jargon, “the wrong kind of Israeli”. His journey was a political one too. His message and his warnings are unequivocally universalist. “The Holocaust stands out as an archetype of a crime against humanity. For me as a Jew and an Israeli therefore the Holocaust teaches us to resist the dehumanising of any people, including the Palestinian ‘victims of victims’, because dehumanising a people can easily result, as it did in Europe in the 1940s, in crimes against humanity.” He had previously argued that it was only after the 1967 war that Israel became a colonial power, oppressing the Palestinians in the occupied territories. However, “a deeper analysis… led me to the conclusion that Israel had been created by a settler-colonial movement. The years 1948 and 1967 were merely milestones in the relentless systematic takeover of the whole of Palestine… Since Zionism was an avowedly settler-colonial movement from the outset, the building of civilian settlements on occupied land was only a new stage in the long march… The most crucial turning point was not the war of 1967 but the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.” And more: “the two-state solution is dead or, to be more accurate, it was never born… The outcome I have come to favour is one democratic state… with equal rights for all its citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion.” He is absolutely right in my view. His family’s story “serves as a corrective to the Zionist narrative which views Arabs and Jews as congenitally incapable of dwelling together in peace and doomed to permanent conflict and discord… My experience as a young boy and that of the whole Jewish community in Iraq, suggests there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about Arab-Jewish antagonism… Remembering the past can help us to envisage a better future… Arab-Jewish co-existence is not something that my family imagined in our minds; we experienced it, we touched it.” Optimistic? Yes, perhaps over-optimistic. But towards the end of this masterpiece, Avi Schlaim justifies his message. “Recalling the era of cosmopolitanism and co-existence that some Jews, like my family, enjoyed in Arab countries before 1948 offers a glimmer of hope… It’s the best model we have for a better future.” https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/avi-shlaim-three-worlds-memoirs-of-an-arab-jew/
    WWW.JEWISHVOICEFORLABOUR.ORG.UK
    Avi Shlaim: ‘Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab – Jew’
    Graham Bash reviews this groundbreaking personal and political memoir by Avi Shlaim in which he laments the lost world of…
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  • Sodium fluoride is toxic.
    It should not be added to drinking water.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13059969/Millions-fluoride-added-tap-water-biggest-expansion-controversial-scheme-1980s.html
    Sodium fluoride is toxic. It should not be added to drinking water. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13059969/Millions-fluoride-added-tap-water-biggest-expansion-controversial-scheme-1980s.html
    WWW.DAILYMAIL.CO.UK
    Millions to get fluoride added to tap water in expansion of scheme
    Revealed as part of the Government's long-awaited dental recovery plan the fluoride expansion will see an initial 1.6million people having the mineral added to their drinking supply.
    Like
    1
    0 Comments 1 Shares 906 Views
  • What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG?
    Vigilant NewsFebruary 2, 2024
    By Brian Cates

    The last 9 months have been an exceedingly strange journey for me.

    While I had already figured out the FDA food pyramid was garbage and had watched in real-time as all the federal “medical” “health” “science” agencies played a direct role in suppressing accurate information on COVID-19 and C-19 origins, treatments, vaccines, etc., it took me the better of part of 3 years to begin critically and logically examining what these self-same propagandists disguised as ‘experts’ have been telling all of us about food and what supposedly comprises a healthy diet.


    I’d struggled with my weight since I was a young man of 24. I am soon turning 60.

    I’d spent the past few years talking about losing weight and the all the issues I was dealing with from lugging around over 100+ pounds of useless bodyfat.

    But I was still eating 4-5 times a day, at least two of those meals being sizable. And though I cut down on the sweets and was eating what I was told were ‘healthy whole grains’, the weight not only refused to go down, it kept going up.

    I would go through the same cycle several times from when I was around 26 to last year: Start working out religiously, while eating what I was told was mostly ‘healthy’ food. I’d add some muscle, my weight would drop maybe 20 pounds or so…and then after 3-4 months, hit the wall. No changes, and despite working out, the weight crept back up. Quit working out, gain all the weight back, a year goes by…then start the cycle again.

    34 years or so I ran on this hamster wheel.

    When this picture was taken, I’d just started writing for The Epoch Times in mid-2018. I was 350 pounds or so. Hadn’t weighed myself in a while. I was too scared to look anyway.

    Image
    I had just gone through the cycle again early last year.

    Working out, eating the “healthy food” chock full of carbs, various forms of sugars and toxic seed oils & chemicals, etc., etc. Then in May, I quit again.

    In late June, my stepmom visited me in my new house in Florida while I was on an RV tour around the US, and when she saw how I was living and eating, she read me the riot act. She kicked me in the ass and got me not only moving again, but that visit was also the catalyst I needed to go back and re-examine 35+ years of failure and why trying the same thing over and over again wasn’t working.

    For years, people like me were told this was a willpower/laziness thing. You’re fat and you can’t lose the weight because you don’t eat right/work out hard enough or long enough, etc.

    So I was mentally beaten down after exhausting myself on this hamster’s wheel as I was headed into decade #4 with the wrong programming in my head.

    Overweight Man Tired after Training, with Hand on Forehead Against ...
    But here’s the thing.

    As a journalist, I’d just spent the last 3 1/2 years extensively and exhaustively covering how federal and state and county ‘health’ ‘medical’ and ‘science’ ‘experts’ had just engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to hide and censor true and accurate information from the American public.

    Not to mention also covering the amount of gaslighting we were all being hit with following the blatant theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump.

    So at this time, in late June/early July of last year, I started my re-examination of around 35 years of failure with an intriguing thought:

    **COULD IT BE** that the very same ‘health’ ‘medical’ & ‘science’ experts who’d just exposed and outed themselves as Big Pharma propagandists and business partners lying to us about COVID & many of the drugs involved in the treatment/prevention of infection…were also wrong or deliberately misleading us about….food?

    Image
    Could it possibly be….
    One of the first things I realized, when I began examining what the federal ‘health’ ‘medical’ ‘science’ agencies tout as a ‘healthy’ diet, is that when they last changed the food pyramid in the early 1990’s, the rates of both obesity and diabetes exploded in this country as people began following this ‘expert’ advice.

    As you can see from the graphs below, an already alarming rising trend suddenly shot dramatically upward in the early 1990s.

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    How bad has the obesity/diabetes/insulin resistance crisis gotten in the US?

    It is now so bad they’ve coined a bullshit term – ‘prediabetes’ – to try to mask the deadly seriousness of the crisis. If you are diagnosed as ‘prediabetic,’ you ARE diabetic; it’s just that your insulin resistance hasn’t progressed to such an extent that they’ll officially call it ‘diabetes.’

    Image
    Or as actor Wilford Brimley would say:

    Wilford Brimley Has Diabeetus - Misc - quickmeme
    Insulin resistance leads directly to a massive amount of chronic health issues of which diabetes is only one.


    By giving Americans the ‘expert’ advice that they needed to start chugging down ‘6-11 servings’ every day of ‘healthy whole grains’ and cook their food with seed oils while counseling them to also **reduce** the amount of meat and animal fats they were eating, Americans began ingesting way more carbohydrates and PUFA’s [that’s ‘polyunsaturated fatty acids, for those of you in Rio Linda…] every day than they’d been eating before.


    And yet I recall for the past 30 years or so watching the popular culture health reporters scratch their heads and wondering what could possibly be causing the massive explosion of obesity and chronic illnesses, as well as the dropping testosterone and estrogen levels they were observing.


    So the fact that the federal ‘health’ agencies caused much of the country to make a dramatic wrong turn that exacerbated the rising trends of obesity and chronic illness with their drastically wrong official ‘food pyramid’ in the early 1990s, caused me to wonder:

    If they were giving the American public such rotten, terrible, horrible, no-good ‘expert’ instructions on what they should be eating every day, **what else** have they been telling us that is utter bullshit?

    And the very first thing I stumbled over in this regard was the history of SEED OILS and how medical scientists doing animal experiments back in the 1890s/early 1900s quickly established that seed oils were toxic and harmful to growing and developing animals.

    By the end of July last year, I was sharing the alarming stuff I was finding in my research with my readers on my Substack:

    Image
    You have to fully grasp this. They **knew** from animal experiments on rats and cows and horses and birds **exactly** what SEED OILS did to growing and developing animals.

    Many of these experiments were carried out from the late 1880s through the 1910s. Experiment results were published in books, such as this one from scientist E.V. McCollum in 1918.



    There was no mystery here. The results were established and easily observable.

    And yet…what ended up happening over the next 100 years?

    Government ‘health’ experts working hand-in-glove with Big Food corporations convinced most Americans to stop cooking their food with butter, lard, and tallow, and instead use the new ‘Crisco’ and other highly processed seed oils and margarine. Because they claimed these new processed products were ‘healthier’.

    And because Americans back then were very trusting people who didn’t know their government was controlled by hidden corporations and interests out to make massive profits while not caring about their health, they followed this ‘expert’ advice from authority figures they were taught to trust.

    From the 1920s through today, Big Food, working in conjunction with Big Government, began creating many new highly processed foods that contained large amounts of these seed oils and myriad toxic chemicals and food additives. Our American culture is now flooded with highly processed fake ‘food’ that didn’t exist even 100 years ago. And they are inventing new kinds of fake food every year.

    Image
    If they knew what seed oils would do to human beings who began eating them early in life, and ate them throughout their physical development and into adulthood – and evidence seems to suggest they did – then the only possible reason for them to do that would be to arrest the development of children, cause chronic illnesses throughout life, and ensure a premature death.

    What I saw through my research was **deeply disturbing to me**.

    Image
    This can’t be just about profit motive, the fact they’d make a lot of MONEY creating new addictive processed sugar-and-carb-and-seed oil-filled foods. They had to also have seen the very real and OBVIOUS HARM they would be doing to their fellow citizens by introducing these heavily toxic and health-destroy products into the American food supply.

    Not when you realize the wealthy elite who run everything in this fallen world behind the scenes are constantly wringing their hands and brainstorming about how to ‘fix’ the world’s overpopulation problem, think even the concept of human rights is a big funny hilarious joke, and that human rights don’t exist, just like God doesn’t exist.

    They’ve always sat around at their big, important conferences in places like Davos and talked about culling the human herd like they’re ranchers planning for the next cattle drive. It’s just that they’re starting to get embarrassed that the cows are now spying on them in the barn and figuring out what they’re talking about, their plans for the rest of us.

    What more clever way could be devised than convincing people to simply EAT themselves into chronic illnesses that will guide them expeditiously into an early grave?

    The rise in life expectancy rates over the past 100 years is not because people are HEALTHIER overall.

    Image
    Far from it.

    The rates rose because of medical advancements in keeping chronically ill people alive longer.

    Were people not being tricked and misled into fattening themselves with constant insulin resistance and filling their bodies with toxins, most people would very likely be living into their upper 90s by now. Instead, life expectancy is dropping because the amount of toxic and unhealthy food Americans are eating is going up.

    This cannot be overstated. With the medical/health/scientific advancements in knowledge and technology over the past 120 years, the only way this was allowed to happen and to become so widespread at this point millions of people are dying from easily preventable chronic illnesses is that…

    …and I know some of you will struggle to accept this….

    …the real owners of the world out there **wanted** this to happen. They demanded it.

    There’s no way they don’t know. So if they know…and nothing’s been done to stop it? It’s not just about money. There’s what looks like an exceedingly nefarious agenda at work here.

    Image
    Sometimes in my more paranoid moments, I wonder if….

    Nah. Couldn’t be….

    Could it?

    Image
    Tastes like chicken!
    https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W-JhfjGtlp8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
    So the first two things I discovered in my new research starting in the middle of last year:

    1. The food pyramid was a massive ‘mistake’…or was it?

    2. Seed Oils are toxic and harm human development and shorten the human lifespan Yet they were allowed to proliferate into the American food supply by accident…or was it really an ‘accident’?

    Next, I discovered that the conventional ‘expert’ findings about animal fat were wrong.

    For decades I’d been endlessly told and had read that too much dietary animal fat caused health/heart issues. Cut down dramatically on the red meat, the eggs, the butter, replace the fat with ‘healthy’ food…

    And yet what do you actually **FIND** when you examine the medical research?

    You find when people dramatically reduced their animal fat intake they still got FATTER and more CHRONICALLY ILL. After all, one of the biggest reasons for creating a ‘new and improved!’ food pyramid back in the early 1990s was to convince people to CUT the amount of meat and animal fat they were eating and replace them with ‘healthy’ carbs.

    For people who were supposedly becoming more ‘healthy’ by following the new food pyramid’s ‘expert’ advice, Americans seemed to be getting fatter, heavier, and more unhealthy.

    It’s been noticed for some time now that people in America in the 1940s and 1950s sure do look pretty darn healthy, even though we were constantly being told by our modern ‘health experts’ that those poor folks were eating WAY too much animal fats and red meat and eggs and [gasp!] butter.

    I mean…there’s just NO WAY that Americans back then eating all that bad stuff were healthier than US today, right?

    🤔

    Why, that very idea would be absurd! They didn’t know any better! They didn’t have our advantages!

    Image
    Image
    Image
    Hey…maybe it’s time for us to stop, go back and look, and rethink this all out again…

    Because SOMETHING clearly isn’t working.

    We’re **supposed to be** far healthier than those poor fools back in the 1940s and 1950s…but we’re NOT.

    Why is that?

    If you commit yourself to finding the truth and facing it unflinchingly, no matter where it leads…you can find it.

    The brutal truth is…people here in America have been misled. Just about EVERYTHING the ‘health’ and ‘diet’ ‘experts’ have been telling them all their lives is….SURPRISE!…wrong.

    It’s not your fault. It is THEIR fault. They either didn’t know what they were talking about when they were teaching you how to eat, or they had a hidden agenda.

    Either way…NOT YOUR FAULT.

    Image
    Image
    Image
    Its not that you lack willpower. Or that you’re lazy. Or that you don’t work out enough.

    Its that what the ‘experts’ taught you about how to eat a proper diet wasn’t true. You were not getting accurate information.

    You were steered towards unhealthy seed oil/sugar/carb-filled processed foods because authority figures you trusted gave you terrible advice.

    You were given bad information by government and medical authority figures on 7 dietary subjects:

    1. Cholesterol levels

    2. Salt/mineral levels

    3. Protein levels

    4. Animal Fats

    5. Fiber

    6. Seed oils

    7. Meal frequency

    My research has led me to conclude that we need to go BACK to how our ancestors ate. A mostly meat diet where we do not eat large meals of highly processed fake foods several times a day with snacks in between.

    We’re not designed to put food into our stomachs 3-6 times a day, constantly spiking our insulin levels and hormonal system, developing lifelong insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome-related chronic illnesses and diseases.

    Especially not the kind of food we’re surrounded by in our popular culture, the highly over-processed stuff that didn’t exist 100 years ago that are now chock-full of toxic seed oils, sugars, and chemicals.

    Sure, people back in the 1940s and 1950s were eating 3 squares a day, but look at **what** they were eating compared to what we are surrounded by now. Until around 120 years ago, most people lived on farms, and even if they didn’t, most of the food they ate came almost directly from a farm.

    Have you heard stories about people who travel to Europe and visit places like France and Italy where they eat all the bread and pasta, drink all the wine they want, etc. and don’t get fat? Know why that is?

    Because it’s ILLEGAL over there in many European countries to add in the toxic chemical crap they put into US processed food on this side of the pond. Look at the following links for just a HINT of how bad this issue is. Why are European governments taking better care of their people’s health than our supposedly superior US government?

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-food-additives-banned-europe-making-americans-sick-expert-says/
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bread-additives-chemicals-us-toxic-america
    https://foodrevolution.org/blog/banned-ingredients-in-other-countries/
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/23/titanium-dioxide-banned-chemicals-carcinogen-eu-us
    Image
    So, when I began changing my diet again in 2023, I switched to a [O]ne [M]eal [A] [D]ay program [OMAD] where I ate only once time in every 24-hour period.

    I adopted a 4-hour ‘feeding window’ from 4 pm to 8 pm.

    I also cut out most of the processed foods I had been eating – including the Weight Watcher’s stuff. I increased the amount of meat I ate from around 1/3rd of my diet to 2/3rds.

    From late June through early September, I went from 345 pounds [my stepmom made me get on the scale with her watching. I expected to see around 320. Ulp!] down to 320.

    And then I got stuck. The weight stopped coming off and I fluctuated between 317 and 320 for around a month and a half.


    Then my ‘little sister from another Mister,’ investigative journalist and head editor of Uncover DC, Tracy Beanz, shared some pictures and testimony about her husband William, who had lost over 160 pounds on a Carnivore Diet in one year. He not only lost a massive amount of unhealthy body fat, but he also had several chronic health issues evaporate.

    Image
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    So….in early November, I decided to cut out the bread and the potatoes and the ‘healthy’ cereal I was still eating and stay only with raw milk and unpasteurized cheese for my carbs, and the rest of my diet was Amish-farm raised beef, bison, chicken, turkey, and fish with large brown eggs.

    The weight started coming again…slowly. I went from 320 down to my current weight of 295. I’ve gone down to 293, but 295 is what I saw the last 2 times I weighed myself.

    So. I learned a lot in the last 8 months. I wanted to share some of what I learned in this thread.

    I am not telling or advising anyone to do what I’m doing. I’m providing information and asking for people to check this out for themselves and make up their own minds.

    A key part of The Great Awakening is, I am convinced, teaching people how to get healthy and stay that way. And if people have been getting wrong and perhaps even deliberate disinformation from ‘health experts,’ the more people realize that and start reassessing what they’ve been told over the past few decades?

    THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING.



    https://vigilantnews.com/post/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling-you-about-food-is-wrong/


    https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling.html
    What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG? Vigilant NewsFebruary 2, 2024 By Brian Cates The last 9 months have been an exceedingly strange journey for me. While I had already figured out the FDA food pyramid was garbage and had watched in real-time as all the federal “medical” “health” “science” agencies played a direct role in suppressing accurate information on COVID-19 and C-19 origins, treatments, vaccines, etc., it took me the better of part of 3 years to begin critically and logically examining what these self-same propagandists disguised as ‘experts’ have been telling all of us about food and what supposedly comprises a healthy diet. I’d struggled with my weight since I was a young man of 24. I am soon turning 60. I’d spent the past few years talking about losing weight and the all the issues I was dealing with from lugging around over 100+ pounds of useless bodyfat. But I was still eating 4-5 times a day, at least two of those meals being sizable. And though I cut down on the sweets and was eating what I was told were ‘healthy whole grains’, the weight not only refused to go down, it kept going up. I would go through the same cycle several times from when I was around 26 to last year: Start working out religiously, while eating what I was told was mostly ‘healthy’ food. I’d add some muscle, my weight would drop maybe 20 pounds or so…and then after 3-4 months, hit the wall. No changes, and despite working out, the weight crept back up. Quit working out, gain all the weight back, a year goes by…then start the cycle again. 34 years or so I ran on this hamster wheel. When this picture was taken, I’d just started writing for The Epoch Times in mid-2018. I was 350 pounds or so. Hadn’t weighed myself in a while. I was too scared to look anyway. Image I had just gone through the cycle again early last year. Working out, eating the “healthy food” chock full of carbs, various forms of sugars and toxic seed oils & chemicals, etc., etc. Then in May, I quit again. In late June, my stepmom visited me in my new house in Florida while I was on an RV tour around the US, and when she saw how I was living and eating, she read me the riot act. She kicked me in the ass and got me not only moving again, but that visit was also the catalyst I needed to go back and re-examine 35+ years of failure and why trying the same thing over and over again wasn’t working. For years, people like me were told this was a willpower/laziness thing. You’re fat and you can’t lose the weight because you don’t eat right/work out hard enough or long enough, etc. So I was mentally beaten down after exhausting myself on this hamster’s wheel as I was headed into decade #4 with the wrong programming in my head. Overweight Man Tired after Training, with Hand on Forehead Against ... But here’s the thing. As a journalist, I’d just spent the last 3 1/2 years extensively and exhaustively covering how federal and state and county ‘health’ ‘medical’ and ‘science’ ‘experts’ had just engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to hide and censor true and accurate information from the American public. Not to mention also covering the amount of gaslighting we were all being hit with following the blatant theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump. So at this time, in late June/early July of last year, I started my re-examination of around 35 years of failure with an intriguing thought: **COULD IT BE** that the very same ‘health’ ‘medical’ & ‘science’ experts who’d just exposed and outed themselves as Big Pharma propagandists and business partners lying to us about COVID & many of the drugs involved in the treatment/prevention of infection…were also wrong or deliberately misleading us about….food? Image Could it possibly be…. One of the first things I realized, when I began examining what the federal ‘health’ ‘medical’ ‘science’ agencies tout as a ‘healthy’ diet, is that when they last changed the food pyramid in the early 1990’s, the rates of both obesity and diabetes exploded in this country as people began following this ‘expert’ advice. As you can see from the graphs below, an already alarming rising trend suddenly shot dramatically upward in the early 1990s. Image Image How bad has the obesity/diabetes/insulin resistance crisis gotten in the US? It is now so bad they’ve coined a bullshit term – ‘prediabetes’ – to try to mask the deadly seriousness of the crisis. If you are diagnosed as ‘prediabetic,’ you ARE diabetic; it’s just that your insulin resistance hasn’t progressed to such an extent that they’ll officially call it ‘diabetes.’ Image Or as actor Wilford Brimley would say: Wilford Brimley Has Diabeetus - Misc - quickmeme Insulin resistance leads directly to a massive amount of chronic health issues of which diabetes is only one. By giving Americans the ‘expert’ advice that they needed to start chugging down ‘6-11 servings’ every day of ‘healthy whole grains’ and cook their food with seed oils while counseling them to also **reduce** the amount of meat and animal fats they were eating, Americans began ingesting way more carbohydrates and PUFA’s [that’s ‘polyunsaturated fatty acids, for those of you in Rio Linda…] every day than they’d been eating before. And yet I recall for the past 30 years or so watching the popular culture health reporters scratch their heads and wondering what could possibly be causing the massive explosion of obesity and chronic illnesses, as well as the dropping testosterone and estrogen levels they were observing. So the fact that the federal ‘health’ agencies caused much of the country to make a dramatic wrong turn that exacerbated the rising trends of obesity and chronic illness with their drastically wrong official ‘food pyramid’ in the early 1990s, caused me to wonder: If they were giving the American public such rotten, terrible, horrible, no-good ‘expert’ instructions on what they should be eating every day, **what else** have they been telling us that is utter bullshit? And the very first thing I stumbled over in this regard was the history of SEED OILS and how medical scientists doing animal experiments back in the 1890s/early 1900s quickly established that seed oils were toxic and harmful to growing and developing animals. By the end of July last year, I was sharing the alarming stuff I was finding in my research with my readers on my Substack: Image You have to fully grasp this. They **knew** from animal experiments on rats and cows and horses and birds **exactly** what SEED OILS did to growing and developing animals. Many of these experiments were carried out from the late 1880s through the 1910s. Experiment results were published in books, such as this one from scientist E.V. McCollum in 1918. There was no mystery here. The results were established and easily observable. And yet…what ended up happening over the next 100 years? Government ‘health’ experts working hand-in-glove with Big Food corporations convinced most Americans to stop cooking their food with butter, lard, and tallow, and instead use the new ‘Crisco’ and other highly processed seed oils and margarine. Because they claimed these new processed products were ‘healthier’. And because Americans back then were very trusting people who didn’t know their government was controlled by hidden corporations and interests out to make massive profits while not caring about their health, they followed this ‘expert’ advice from authority figures they were taught to trust. From the 1920s through today, Big Food, working in conjunction with Big Government, began creating many new highly processed foods that contained large amounts of these seed oils and myriad toxic chemicals and food additives. Our American culture is now flooded with highly processed fake ‘food’ that didn’t exist even 100 years ago. And they are inventing new kinds of fake food every year. Image If they knew what seed oils would do to human beings who began eating them early in life, and ate them throughout their physical development and into adulthood – and evidence seems to suggest they did – then the only possible reason for them to do that would be to arrest the development of children, cause chronic illnesses throughout life, and ensure a premature death. What I saw through my research was **deeply disturbing to me**. Image This can’t be just about profit motive, the fact they’d make a lot of MONEY creating new addictive processed sugar-and-carb-and-seed oil-filled foods. They had to also have seen the very real and OBVIOUS HARM they would be doing to their fellow citizens by introducing these heavily toxic and health-destroy products into the American food supply. Not when you realize the wealthy elite who run everything in this fallen world behind the scenes are constantly wringing their hands and brainstorming about how to ‘fix’ the world’s overpopulation problem, think even the concept of human rights is a big funny hilarious joke, and that human rights don’t exist, just like God doesn’t exist. They’ve always sat around at their big, important conferences in places like Davos and talked about culling the human herd like they’re ranchers planning for the next cattle drive. It’s just that they’re starting to get embarrassed that the cows are now spying on them in the barn and figuring out what they’re talking about, their plans for the rest of us. What more clever way could be devised than convincing people to simply EAT themselves into chronic illnesses that will guide them expeditiously into an early grave? The rise in life expectancy rates over the past 100 years is not because people are HEALTHIER overall. Image Far from it. The rates rose because of medical advancements in keeping chronically ill people alive longer. Were people not being tricked and misled into fattening themselves with constant insulin resistance and filling their bodies with toxins, most people would very likely be living into their upper 90s by now. Instead, life expectancy is dropping because the amount of toxic and unhealthy food Americans are eating is going up. This cannot be overstated. With the medical/health/scientific advancements in knowledge and technology over the past 120 years, the only way this was allowed to happen and to become so widespread at this point millions of people are dying from easily preventable chronic illnesses is that… …and I know some of you will struggle to accept this…. …the real owners of the world out there **wanted** this to happen. They demanded it. There’s no way they don’t know. So if they know…and nothing’s been done to stop it? It’s not just about money. There’s what looks like an exceedingly nefarious agenda at work here. Image Sometimes in my more paranoid moments, I wonder if…. Nah. Couldn’t be…. Could it? Image Tastes like chicken! https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W-JhfjGtlp8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0 So the first two things I discovered in my new research starting in the middle of last year: 1. The food pyramid was a massive ‘mistake’…or was it? 2. Seed Oils are toxic and harm human development and shorten the human lifespan Yet they were allowed to proliferate into the American food supply by accident…or was it really an ‘accident’? Next, I discovered that the conventional ‘expert’ findings about animal fat were wrong. For decades I’d been endlessly told and had read that too much dietary animal fat caused health/heart issues. Cut down dramatically on the red meat, the eggs, the butter, replace the fat with ‘healthy’ food… And yet what do you actually **FIND** when you examine the medical research? You find when people dramatically reduced their animal fat intake they still got FATTER and more CHRONICALLY ILL. After all, one of the biggest reasons for creating a ‘new and improved!’ food pyramid back in the early 1990s was to convince people to CUT the amount of meat and animal fat they were eating and replace them with ‘healthy’ carbs. For people who were supposedly becoming more ‘healthy’ by following the new food pyramid’s ‘expert’ advice, Americans seemed to be getting fatter, heavier, and more unhealthy. It’s been noticed for some time now that people in America in the 1940s and 1950s sure do look pretty darn healthy, even though we were constantly being told by our modern ‘health experts’ that those poor folks were eating WAY too much animal fats and red meat and eggs and [gasp!] butter. I mean…there’s just NO WAY that Americans back then eating all that bad stuff were healthier than US today, right? 🤔 Why, that very idea would be absurd! They didn’t know any better! They didn’t have our advantages! Image Image Image Hey…maybe it’s time for us to stop, go back and look, and rethink this all out again… Because SOMETHING clearly isn’t working. We’re **supposed to be** far healthier than those poor fools back in the 1940s and 1950s…but we’re NOT. Why is that? If you commit yourself to finding the truth and facing it unflinchingly, no matter where it leads…you can find it. The brutal truth is…people here in America have been misled. Just about EVERYTHING the ‘health’ and ‘diet’ ‘experts’ have been telling them all their lives is….SURPRISE!…wrong. It’s not your fault. It is THEIR fault. They either didn’t know what they were talking about when they were teaching you how to eat, or they had a hidden agenda. Either way…NOT YOUR FAULT. Image Image Image Its not that you lack willpower. Or that you’re lazy. Or that you don’t work out enough. Its that what the ‘experts’ taught you about how to eat a proper diet wasn’t true. You were not getting accurate information. You were steered towards unhealthy seed oil/sugar/carb-filled processed foods because authority figures you trusted gave you terrible advice. You were given bad information by government and medical authority figures on 7 dietary subjects: 1. Cholesterol levels 2. Salt/mineral levels 3. Protein levels 4. Animal Fats 5. Fiber 6. Seed oils 7. Meal frequency My research has led me to conclude that we need to go BACK to how our ancestors ate. A mostly meat diet where we do not eat large meals of highly processed fake foods several times a day with snacks in between. We’re not designed to put food into our stomachs 3-6 times a day, constantly spiking our insulin levels and hormonal system, developing lifelong insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome-related chronic illnesses and diseases. Especially not the kind of food we’re surrounded by in our popular culture, the highly over-processed stuff that didn’t exist 100 years ago that are now chock-full of toxic seed oils, sugars, and chemicals. Sure, people back in the 1940s and 1950s were eating 3 squares a day, but look at **what** they were eating compared to what we are surrounded by now. Until around 120 years ago, most people lived on farms, and even if they didn’t, most of the food they ate came almost directly from a farm. Have you heard stories about people who travel to Europe and visit places like France and Italy where they eat all the bread and pasta, drink all the wine they want, etc. and don’t get fat? Know why that is? Because it’s ILLEGAL over there in many European countries to add in the toxic chemical crap they put into US processed food on this side of the pond. Look at the following links for just a HINT of how bad this issue is. Why are European governments taking better care of their people’s health than our supposedly superior US government? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-food-additives-banned-europe-making-americans-sick-expert-says/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/28/bread-additives-chemicals-us-toxic-america https://foodrevolution.org/blog/banned-ingredients-in-other-countries/ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/23/titanium-dioxide-banned-chemicals-carcinogen-eu-us Image So, when I began changing my diet again in 2023, I switched to a [O]ne [M]eal [A] [D]ay program [OMAD] where I ate only once time in every 24-hour period. I adopted a 4-hour ‘feeding window’ from 4 pm to 8 pm. I also cut out most of the processed foods I had been eating – including the Weight Watcher’s stuff. I increased the amount of meat I ate from around 1/3rd of my diet to 2/3rds. From late June through early September, I went from 345 pounds [my stepmom made me get on the scale with her watching. I expected to see around 320. Ulp!] down to 320. And then I got stuck. The weight stopped coming off and I fluctuated between 317 and 320 for around a month and a half. Then my ‘little sister from another Mister,’ investigative journalist and head editor of Uncover DC, Tracy Beanz, shared some pictures and testimony about her husband William, who had lost over 160 pounds on a Carnivore Diet in one year. He not only lost a massive amount of unhealthy body fat, but he also had several chronic health issues evaporate. Image Image So….in early November, I decided to cut out the bread and the potatoes and the ‘healthy’ cereal I was still eating and stay only with raw milk and unpasteurized cheese for my carbs, and the rest of my diet was Amish-farm raised beef, bison, chicken, turkey, and fish with large brown eggs. The weight started coming again…slowly. I went from 320 down to my current weight of 295. I’ve gone down to 293, but 295 is what I saw the last 2 times I weighed myself. So. I learned a lot in the last 8 months. I wanted to share some of what I learned in this thread. I am not telling or advising anyone to do what I’m doing. I’m providing information and asking for people to check this out for themselves and make up their own minds. A key part of The Great Awakening is, I am convinced, teaching people how to get healthy and stay that way. And if people have been getting wrong and perhaps even deliberate disinformation from ‘health experts,’ the more people realize that and start reassessing what they’ve been told over the past few decades? THAT’S A BEAUTIFUL THING. https://vigilantnews.com/post/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling-you-about-food-is-wrong/ https://donshafi911.blogspot.com/2024/02/what-if-everything-theyve-been-telling.html
    VIGILANTNEWS.COM
    What If Everything They’ve Been Telling You About Food Is… WRONG?
    Have our trusted health authority figures led us astray? And if so... what can we do about it?
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  • Former Chief of General Staff: Israel Lost the War in Gaza
    Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorJanuary 19, 2024
    VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

    $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
    Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

    Former Chief of General Staff of the Israeli army, Dan Halutz, said that Israel lost the war in Gaza, stressing that the only victory to be achieved is the overthrow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.



    “One has to take into account that back in the 80s, while an imposed ward had been unleashed by the west and their Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms (18 countries) through Saddam against Iran, Hafez Al Assad offered an infallible help to the Iranians including the I-R-C-G . The Iranian ballistic program actually started there as the father of the Iranian Ballistic Program was then detached to Damascus. This itself would be sn interesting topic. The cultural and historic bindings between western asian countries cannot be understood by the vast majority of westerners.”


    https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/former-chief-of-general-staff-israel-lost-the-war-in-gaza/
    Former Chief of General Staff: Israel Lost the War in Gaza Jonas E. Alexis, Senior EditorJanuary 19, 2024 VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel $ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State. Former Chief of General Staff of the Israeli army, Dan Halutz, said that Israel lost the war in Gaza, stressing that the only victory to be achieved is the overthrow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “One has to take into account that back in the 80s, while an imposed ward had been unleashed by the west and their Persian Gulf Sheikhdoms (18 countries) through Saddam against Iran, Hafez Al Assad offered an infallible help to the Iranians including the I-R-C-G . The Iranian ballistic program actually started there as the father of the Iranian Ballistic Program was then detached to Damascus. This itself would be sn interesting topic. The cultural and historic bindings between western asian countries cannot be understood by the vast majority of westerners.” https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/01/former-chief-of-general-staff-israel-lost-the-war-in-gaza/
    WWW.VTFOREIGNPOLICY.COM
    Former Chief of General Staff: Israel Lost the War in Gaza
    The only victory to be achieved is the overthrow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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  • #Kevin_Mitnick
    Kevin Mitnick is a former computer hacker turned cybersecurity consultant and author. Born on August 6, 1963, Mitnick gained notoriety in the 1980s and 1990s for his hacking activities. He was involved in a series of high-profile cyber intrusions into various computer systems, including those of major corporations and government agencies.

    Mitnick's hacking exploits included gaining unauthorized access to computer networks, stealing proprietary software, and intercepting sensitive communications. His actions led to him being pursued by law enforcement, including the FBI. In 1995, he was arrested and charged with multiple counts of computer and wire fraud.

    After serving five years in prison, including eight months in solitary confinement, Mitnick was released in 2000. Following his release, he shifted his focus to a legal career in the field of computer security. He became a respected cybersecurity consultant, helping companies identify and address vulnerabilities in their systems.

    Mitnick has also authored several books, sharing his experiences and insights into computer security. Some of his notable books include "The Art of Deception" and "The Art of Intrusion," which explore social engineering and various hacking techniques.

    As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2022, Mitnick continues to be active in the cybersecurity industry, providing training and consulting services to organizations worldwide. Please note that developments in his life or career beyond that date are not known to me.
    #Kevin_Mitnick Kevin Mitnick is a former computer hacker turned cybersecurity consultant and author. Born on August 6, 1963, Mitnick gained notoriety in the 1980s and 1990s for his hacking activities. He was involved in a series of high-profile cyber intrusions into various computer systems, including those of major corporations and government agencies. Mitnick's hacking exploits included gaining unauthorized access to computer networks, stealing proprietary software, and intercepting sensitive communications. His actions led to him being pursued by law enforcement, including the FBI. In 1995, he was arrested and charged with multiple counts of computer and wire fraud. After serving five years in prison, including eight months in solitary confinement, Mitnick was released in 2000. Following his release, he shifted his focus to a legal career in the field of computer security. He became a respected cybersecurity consultant, helping companies identify and address vulnerabilities in their systems. Mitnick has also authored several books, sharing his experiences and insights into computer security. Some of his notable books include "The Art of Deception" and "The Art of Intrusion," which explore social engineering and various hacking techniques. As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2022, Mitnick continues to be active in the cybersecurity industry, providing training and consulting services to organizations worldwide. Please note that developments in his life or career beyond that date are not known to me.
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  • Were the Hamas Attacks in Israel a False Flag?
    activistpost (78)


    By Scott Lazarowitz

    The October 7th Hamas attack on Israelis has been referred to as "Israel's 9/11," which gives us good reason to believe that it was probably another false flag psy-op.

    Some people really do believe it was a false flag, i.e., that the Israeli regime allegedly knew that it was being planned and let it happen.

    As Paul Craig Roberts notes, how could Israel's Mossad intelligence agency not know this was being planned? Don't Israeli intelligence and military have the most sophisticated and comprehensive monitoring and surveillance of the Israeli sheeple and of Palestinians and of Hamas?

    The planning allegedly was going on for 2 years. Really?

    And there were warnings from other countries or intelligence agencies, including Egypt who had warned the Israelis of a terrorist attack being planned, warnings ignored.

    In any event, the official narrative of "surprise" attack is just not believable. A possible motive for a false flag op as reported by Jonathan Cook is a planned expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai which is controlled by Egypt, an ethnic cleansing plan allegedly under way since at least 2007, according to Cook.

    Many people dismiss such allegations as "conspiracy theory." But would it really be that surprising that government-employed losers would intentionally allow a terrorist attack to occur, and for the sake of implementing a plan of ethnic cleansing of an entire population whose presence is inconvenient?

    After all, government bureaucracies generally attract psychopaths. The worst of the worst, as F.A. Hayek had noted.

    And now we are learning that there is a high probability that many of the Israelis killed on October 7th were killed by the Israeli military (IDF) itself, possibly as high as 80% of the Israeli deaths, according to Scott Ritter. And Ron Unz described the IDF as possibly "trigger-happy Apache pilots". It has also been difficult for Israeli authorities to distinguish between many killed Israeli and Palestinian bodies.

    But there is some history that is important here. The fact that Israel contributed to the creation of the Hamas organization is quite relevant to the allegation of false flag ops.

    Justin Raimondo noted that the Israelis promoted the organization that later became Hamas for the purposes of discouraging Palestinians from supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat as well as to cause blowback.

    In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a “humanitarian” organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas – but not before it was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political support.

    Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate with Israel – and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO: the Israelis allowed Yassin’s group to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.

    ...

    This “blowback” principle applies to Hamas not only insofar as Israel was involved in funding and encouraging Mujama, but also, after the consolidation of Hamas as an armed group, due to Israeli military policy. The much-touted “withdrawal,” which amounts to Israel giving up Gaza while strengthening its hand elsewhere in the occupied territories, has been grist for the radical Islamist mill, as has the Wall of Separation and the attempt to quash the vote in East Jerusalem. Israel’s relentless offensive against its perceived enemies – first Fatah, now Hamas and Islamic Jihad – has created a backlash and solidified support for fundamentalist extremist factions in the Palestinian community.

    And see this and this.

    Besides the Israeli regime helping to foster an Islamic extremist terrorist group, Hamas, Al-Qaeda was also partially trained and funded by CIA.

    See "MI6 'halted bid to arrest bin Laden'" on the Guardian and "Mainstream Media Finally Reports on U.S. Funding of Terror" on The New American for info.

    Those examples of government-employed buffoonery have been a decades-long part of Western governments' history of exploiting the more primitive Islamic cultures toward the end of Western regimes' foreign policy goal of "creating monsters to destroy" to justify the expansion of the national security (sic) state and all its tax-funded largess.

    Another example, in 2017 Islamic State or ISIS claimed responsibility for the London stabbing attack that killed 8 and injured 48 people. According to British historian Mark Curtis, author of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, one of the 3 attackers had allegedly been "trained by U.K. and U.S. ‘liaison’ officers,” as part of a "covert" op in Libya, as other terrorists get trained to fight in Syria against the regimes the U.S. and U.K governments don't like. Western regimes train would-be terrorists, who then go on to commit acts of ... terrorism. And on and on.

    So Western government bureaucrats, especially in the U.S. and U.K., have a history of radicalizing Muslims. As I wrote in this 2017 blog post,

    In this article, Curtis states that the Manchester bombing was blowback from “overt and covert actions of British governments.” And Nafeez Ahmed in this article says that the “terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.”

    You see, this government bureaucrat-type of idiocy, attempting to manipulate and control hostile factions in society, seems to result in blowback.

    Do bureaucrats never learn from their past mistakes? Or do "intelligence" and "national security" bureaucrats just like blowback?

    Why would bureaucrats like blowback? Because of the bureaucrats' extravagant government budgets at taxpayer expense. As I have maintained especially in this article, the involuntary, confiscatory income tax is the biggest enabler of government criminality ever. Removing the involuntary income tax is an "existential threat" to said government "security" apparatchiks.

    Other examples of murderous Western government actions that have resulted in catastrophic blowback include President George H.W. Bush's 1991 starting a whole new war of aggression against Iraq, even though Iraq was not a threat to the U.S.

    In 1991 the U.S. military bombed and destroyed Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers and then imposed sanctions on the Iraqis, which prevented the Iraqis from rebuilding, which forced the Iraqi civilian population to have to use untreated water, which led to skyrocketing disease and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by the mid-1990s, and then hundreds of thousands more by the year 2000.

    The September 11th attacks in 2001 were clearly blowback from the decade of violence, bombings and murders by U.S. military in Iraq and the U.S. government's other invasions, occupations and support of repressive regimes leading up to that time.

    So, my question is, was the George H.W. Bush regime starting a whole new war in the Middle east in 1991 intentionally to cause the blowback of a 9/11 nature? Are bureaucrats that insane?

    What do you think is going to happen when you bomb and destroy people's water supply and sewage treatment centers? (Which the Israelis are doing to Gaza right now, by the way.)

    Another example of that insane motive could be that after 9/11, and after the younger President George W. Bush followed in his father's warmongering footsteps by starting another war of aggression in Iraq as well as a war in Afghanistan, during the mid-2000s the Bush administration helped Iraq and Afghanistan concoct new Constitutions.

    Not a Constitution promoting freedom and individual rights, mind you. Nope. The new Iraq Constitution, still in place, declared Iraq to be an Islamic state under repressive Sharia Law. Why would the Bush administration agree to this?

    The new Afghanistan Constitution was the same, although since 2021 Afghanistan now has no Constitution and an even more repressive society. Thanks, George W. Bush.

    Prior to the 1990s, the U.S. government armed Iraq and helped Saddam Hussein gas Iranians during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War. (If only the rulers had listened to George Washington!)

    Even further back, there were the hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. American "conservatives," foreign interventionists and neocons are still angry at Iran for taking Americans hostage in 1979 at the time of the Iranian Revolution, which itself was blowback for the CIA's supporting the Shah of Iran's repressive SAVAK police state and torture, which followed CIA's 1953 "Operation Ajax" coup in Iran (that was partly in the name of expropriating Iran's oil for the British).

    The U.S.-backed SAVAK police state kept Iranians in fear of their own government, much like what many Americans fear now thanks to the gestapo-like tactics of the Obama/Biden DOJ and FBI in Amerika.

    So, did U.S. government bureaucrats, CIA and Pentagon, intend to cause the radicalization of Islam believers in Iran during the 1950s, '60s and '70s?

    Iranians living in such repressive conditions in society as imposed by the American CIA-supported SAVAK had to have been a major contributor to the radicalizing of Iranians' Islamic religion, from the 1950s coup leading up to the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.

    Since 1979 the Iranian opposition to the repressive Islamic regime, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK), during the earlier years following the 1979 Revolution had been involved in terrorist acts of assassinations and bombings, and was listed as an official terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

    That is worth noting here, because U.S. government bureaucrats and their hangers-on had been caught giving paid speeches on behalf of the Iranian MeK, while the MeK was on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations.

    Meanwhile, other people mainly non-involved Muslims had been imprisoned for the crime of providing "material support for terrorism," as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in 2012.

    But some of the American statist lackeys who were supposedly "providing material support" for the officially designated terrorist organization MeK included, according to Greenwald, "Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh -- and Fran Townsend," a bunch of neocons, interventionist apparatchiks and "national security" swamp creatures.

    And get this. In his subsequent article on the red-faced U.S. government's 2012 de-listing of the MeK as an official terrorist organization, Greenwald notes,

    What makes this effort all the more extraordinary are the reports that MEK has actually intensified its terrorist and other military activities over the last couple of years. In February, NBC News reported, citing US officials, that "deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by [MEK]" as it is "financed, trained and armed by Israel's secret service". While the MEK denies involvement, the Iranian government has echoed these US officials in insisting that the group was responsible for those assassinations. NBC also cited "unconfirmed reports in the Israeli press and elsewhere that Israel and the MEK were involved in a Nov. 12 explosion that destroyed the Iranian missile research and development site at Bin Kaneh, 30 miles outside Tehran".

    In April, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reported that the US itself has for years provided extensive training to MEK operatives, on US soil (in other words, the US government provided exactly the "material support" for a designated terror group which the law criminalizes).

    In other words, your tax dollars at work, folks.

    More info on the U.S. and Iranian MeK here.

    And if the October 7th Hamas attack really was an intentional false flag from the blowback of Israel's "open air imprisonment" of Gazans for 15 years, it could also have been allowed as an excuse for the government to expand even further the police state, the surveillance state cracking down even more on speech and on "disinformation," and on people who question the government's official narratives or who criticize the regime. And I mean in the U.S. not just Israel.

    Throughout the history of the West, the U.S., Israel, and other governments, false flag acts of violence have been planned and committed in order to blame the violence on others or effect in some desired central planning outcome.

    Washington's Blog, which apparently no longer exists, had this very detailed list (Wayback Machine link) of the many false flag ops admitted to by governments and militaries. For instance,

    The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the pseudo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings...

    Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed)...

    The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister...

    The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change...

    The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

    As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security”...[Washington's Blog further expands on this item with several more links.]

    As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings...



    A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddafi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter...

    The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

    Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction...

    Washington's Blog included many more false flag ops by many countries' governments on the long list there.

    Israeli rulers allegedly seeking to expel the Arabs from their Jewish State is a possible motive for a false flag op. And possible motive by the Western central-planning regimes in keeping Gaza, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic-based cultures "oppressed," poor, primitive and repressive, and their populations angered and enraged at Western governments' manipulations and false flag ops, in my view, might be so that the U.S. and the West would continue to dominate economically and culturally, as well as for the greedy parasites in those governments to expropriate the oil and natural resources of those lands.

    And to justify the continuation of the greedy Western government bureaucrats' extravagant tax-funded budgets and high-off-the-hog largess, of course.

    Image: Anthony Freda Art

    Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.

    Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Follow us on SoMee, Telegram, HIVE, Minds, MeWe, Twitter - X, Gab, and What Really Happened.

    Provide, Protect and Profit from what's coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today.


    https://hive.blog/war/@activistpost/were-the-hamas-attacks-in-israel-a-false-flag
    Were the Hamas Attacks in Israel a False Flag? activistpost (78) By Scott Lazarowitz The October 7th Hamas attack on Israelis has been referred to as "Israel's 9/11," which gives us good reason to believe that it was probably another false flag psy-op. Some people really do believe it was a false flag, i.e., that the Israeli regime allegedly knew that it was being planned and let it happen. As Paul Craig Roberts notes, how could Israel's Mossad intelligence agency not know this was being planned? Don't Israeli intelligence and military have the most sophisticated and comprehensive monitoring and surveillance of the Israeli sheeple and of Palestinians and of Hamas? The planning allegedly was going on for 2 years. Really? And there were warnings from other countries or intelligence agencies, including Egypt who had warned the Israelis of a terrorist attack being planned, warnings ignored. In any event, the official narrative of "surprise" attack is just not believable. A possible motive for a false flag op as reported by Jonathan Cook is a planned expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai which is controlled by Egypt, an ethnic cleansing plan allegedly under way since at least 2007, according to Cook. Many people dismiss such allegations as "conspiracy theory." But would it really be that surprising that government-employed losers would intentionally allow a terrorist attack to occur, and for the sake of implementing a plan of ethnic cleansing of an entire population whose presence is inconvenient? After all, government bureaucracies generally attract psychopaths. The worst of the worst, as F.A. Hayek had noted. And now we are learning that there is a high probability that many of the Israelis killed on October 7th were killed by the Israeli military (IDF) itself, possibly as high as 80% of the Israeli deaths, according to Scott Ritter. And Ron Unz described the IDF as possibly "trigger-happy Apache pilots". It has also been difficult for Israeli authorities to distinguish between many killed Israeli and Palestinian bodies. But there is some history that is important here. The fact that Israel contributed to the creation of the Hamas organization is quite relevant to the allegation of false flag ops. Justin Raimondo noted that the Israelis promoted the organization that later became Hamas for the purposes of discouraging Palestinians from supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat as well as to cause blowback. In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a “humanitarian” organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas – but not before it was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political support. Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate with Israel – and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO: the Israelis allowed Yassin’s group to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat. ... This “blowback” principle applies to Hamas not only insofar as Israel was involved in funding and encouraging Mujama, but also, after the consolidation of Hamas as an armed group, due to Israeli military policy. The much-touted “withdrawal,” which amounts to Israel giving up Gaza while strengthening its hand elsewhere in the occupied territories, has been grist for the radical Islamist mill, as has the Wall of Separation and the attempt to quash the vote in East Jerusalem. Israel’s relentless offensive against its perceived enemies – first Fatah, now Hamas and Islamic Jihad – has created a backlash and solidified support for fundamentalist extremist factions in the Palestinian community. And see this and this. Besides the Israeli regime helping to foster an Islamic extremist terrorist group, Hamas, Al-Qaeda was also partially trained and funded by CIA. See "MI6 'halted bid to arrest bin Laden'" on the Guardian and "Mainstream Media Finally Reports on U.S. Funding of Terror" on The New American for info. Those examples of government-employed buffoonery have been a decades-long part of Western governments' history of exploiting the more primitive Islamic cultures toward the end of Western regimes' foreign policy goal of "creating monsters to destroy" to justify the expansion of the national security (sic) state and all its tax-funded largess. Another example, in 2017 Islamic State or ISIS claimed responsibility for the London stabbing attack that killed 8 and injured 48 people. According to British historian Mark Curtis, author of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, one of the 3 attackers had allegedly been "trained by U.K. and U.S. ‘liaison’ officers,” as part of a "covert" op in Libya, as other terrorists get trained to fight in Syria against the regimes the U.S. and U.K governments don't like. Western regimes train would-be terrorists, who then go on to commit acts of ... terrorism. And on and on. So Western government bureaucrats, especially in the U.S. and U.K., have a history of radicalizing Muslims. As I wrote in this 2017 blog post, In this article, Curtis states that the Manchester bombing was blowback from “overt and covert actions of British governments.” And Nafeez Ahmed in this article says that the “terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.” You see, this government bureaucrat-type of idiocy, attempting to manipulate and control hostile factions in society, seems to result in blowback. Do bureaucrats never learn from their past mistakes? Or do "intelligence" and "national security" bureaucrats just like blowback? Why would bureaucrats like blowback? Because of the bureaucrats' extravagant government budgets at taxpayer expense. As I have maintained especially in this article, the involuntary, confiscatory income tax is the biggest enabler of government criminality ever. Removing the involuntary income tax is an "existential threat" to said government "security" apparatchiks. Other examples of murderous Western government actions that have resulted in catastrophic blowback include President George H.W. Bush's 1991 starting a whole new war of aggression against Iraq, even though Iraq was not a threat to the U.S. In 1991 the U.S. military bombed and destroyed Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers and then imposed sanctions on the Iraqis, which prevented the Iraqis from rebuilding, which forced the Iraqi civilian population to have to use untreated water, which led to skyrocketing disease and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by the mid-1990s, and then hundreds of thousands more by the year 2000. The September 11th attacks in 2001 were clearly blowback from the decade of violence, bombings and murders by U.S. military in Iraq and the U.S. government's other invasions, occupations and support of repressive regimes leading up to that time. So, my question is, was the George H.W. Bush regime starting a whole new war in the Middle east in 1991 intentionally to cause the blowback of a 9/11 nature? Are bureaucrats that insane? What do you think is going to happen when you bomb and destroy people's water supply and sewage treatment centers? (Which the Israelis are doing to Gaza right now, by the way.) Another example of that insane motive could be that after 9/11, and after the younger President George W. Bush followed in his father's warmongering footsteps by starting another war of aggression in Iraq as well as a war in Afghanistan, during the mid-2000s the Bush administration helped Iraq and Afghanistan concoct new Constitutions. Not a Constitution promoting freedom and individual rights, mind you. Nope. The new Iraq Constitution, still in place, declared Iraq to be an Islamic state under repressive Sharia Law. Why would the Bush administration agree to this? The new Afghanistan Constitution was the same, although since 2021 Afghanistan now has no Constitution and an even more repressive society. Thanks, George W. Bush. Prior to the 1990s, the U.S. government armed Iraq and helped Saddam Hussein gas Iranians during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War. (If only the rulers had listened to George Washington!) Even further back, there were the hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. American "conservatives," foreign interventionists and neocons are still angry at Iran for taking Americans hostage in 1979 at the time of the Iranian Revolution, which itself was blowback for the CIA's supporting the Shah of Iran's repressive SAVAK police state and torture, which followed CIA's 1953 "Operation Ajax" coup in Iran (that was partly in the name of expropriating Iran's oil for the British). The U.S.-backed SAVAK police state kept Iranians in fear of their own government, much like what many Americans fear now thanks to the gestapo-like tactics of the Obama/Biden DOJ and FBI in Amerika. So, did U.S. government bureaucrats, CIA and Pentagon, intend to cause the radicalization of Islam believers in Iran during the 1950s, '60s and '70s? Iranians living in such repressive conditions in society as imposed by the American CIA-supported SAVAK had to have been a major contributor to the radicalizing of Iranians' Islamic religion, from the 1950s coup leading up to the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution. Since 1979 the Iranian opposition to the repressive Islamic regime, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK), during the earlier years following the 1979 Revolution had been involved in terrorist acts of assassinations and bombings, and was listed as an official terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. That is worth noting here, because U.S. government bureaucrats and their hangers-on had been caught giving paid speeches on behalf of the Iranian MeK, while the MeK was on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, other people mainly non-involved Muslims had been imprisoned for the crime of providing "material support for terrorism," as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in 2012. But some of the American statist lackeys who were supposedly "providing material support" for the officially designated terrorist organization MeK included, according to Greenwald, "Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh -- and Fran Townsend," a bunch of neocons, interventionist apparatchiks and "national security" swamp creatures. And get this. In his subsequent article on the red-faced U.S. government's 2012 de-listing of the MeK as an official terrorist organization, Greenwald notes, What makes this effort all the more extraordinary are the reports that MEK has actually intensified its terrorist and other military activities over the last couple of years. In February, NBC News reported, citing US officials, that "deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by [MEK]" as it is "financed, trained and armed by Israel's secret service". While the MEK denies involvement, the Iranian government has echoed these US officials in insisting that the group was responsible for those assassinations. NBC also cited "unconfirmed reports in the Israeli press and elsewhere that Israel and the MEK were involved in a Nov. 12 explosion that destroyed the Iranian missile research and development site at Bin Kaneh, 30 miles outside Tehran". In April, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reported that the US itself has for years provided extensive training to MEK operatives, on US soil (in other words, the US government provided exactly the "material support" for a designated terror group which the law criminalizes). In other words, your tax dollars at work, folks. More info on the U.S. and Iranian MeK here. And if the October 7th Hamas attack really was an intentional false flag from the blowback of Israel's "open air imprisonment" of Gazans for 15 years, it could also have been allowed as an excuse for the government to expand even further the police state, the surveillance state cracking down even more on speech and on "disinformation," and on people who question the government's official narratives or who criticize the regime. And I mean in the U.S. not just Israel. Throughout the history of the West, the U.S., Israel, and other governments, false flag acts of violence have been planned and committed in order to blame the violence on others or effect in some desired central planning outcome. Washington's Blog, which apparently no longer exists, had this very detailed list (Wayback Machine link) of the many false flag ops admitted to by governments and militaries. For instance, The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the pseudo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings... Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed)... The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister... The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change... The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security”...[Washington's Blog further expands on this item with several more links.] As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings... A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddafi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter... The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war. Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction... Washington's Blog included many more false flag ops by many countries' governments on the long list there. Israeli rulers allegedly seeking to expel the Arabs from their Jewish State is a possible motive for a false flag op. And possible motive by the Western central-planning regimes in keeping Gaza, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic-based cultures "oppressed," poor, primitive and repressive, and their populations angered and enraged at Western governments' manipulations and false flag ops, in my view, might be so that the U.S. and the West would continue to dominate economically and culturally, as well as for the greedy parasites in those governments to expropriate the oil and natural resources of those lands. And to justify the continuation of the greedy Western government bureaucrats' extravagant tax-funded budgets and high-off-the-hog largess, of course. Image: Anthony Freda Art Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog. Subscribe to Activist Post for truth, peace, and freedom news. Follow us on SoMee, Telegram, HIVE, Minds, MeWe, Twitter - X, Gab, and What Really Happened. Provide, Protect and Profit from what's coming! Get a free issue of Counter Markets today. https://hive.blog/war/@activistpost/were-the-hamas-attacks-in-israel-a-false-flag
    HIVE.BLOG
    Were the Hamas Attacks in Israel a False Flag? — Hive
    The attack on Israelis has been called "Israel's 9/11," which gives us good reason to believe it was probably another false flag psy-op. by activistpost
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  • GOD'S FAVOR

    https://ispringmedia.blogspot.com/2023/11/gods-favor.html
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    GOD'S FAVOR https://ispringmedia.blogspot.com/2023/11/gods-favor.html #10inchbbc #1619project #11pmisthenew3am #1620project #1776commission #18yohornyslut2018 #1960s #1970s #1980smovies #1975lindalewis #1a #1happyhotwife #1980s #1minuteprayer #1muniteprayer #1sexyhotgf #1sexyhotwife #1sexywife #1stdegree #1weekholidays #2000mules #2000mulesdocumentary #2000mulesmovie #2000mulesthemovie #2017_bombing #2020_riots #2020to2024electioninterference #2021war #1funcouple #1minute
    ISPRINGMEDIA.BLOGSPOT.COM
    God’s favor
    Start your day with a biblical perspective you can carry with you no matter what lies ahead. Receive practical application for life.
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  • Al Shefa is the main hospital in besieged Gaza! The Zionist terrorists have no mercy!

    #IsraelWarCrimes

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/8/why-is-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-at-the-heart-of-israels-war

    Why is Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital at the heart of Israel’s war?
    It’s Gaza’s largest hospital, sheltering and treating thousands of Palestinians even as Israel attacks it.

    Lorraine Mallinder
    An injured Palestinian boy is carried from the ground following an Israeli airstrike outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City
    For Palestinians in Gaza, it’s the “house of healing”. For Israel, it’s Hamas’s main command centre.

    Al-Shifa, the biggest hospital in the enclave, is now at breaking point, battling to treat thousands of patients as it comes under direct attack from the Israeli military.

    Last week, the Israeli army bombed an ambulance outside the hospital, part of a convoy that was meant to carry patients from Gaza City to the Rafah border crossing, so they could be treated in Egypt. Fifteen people were killed in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which had coordinated the journey with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza.

    Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the attack, which killed people inside and around the ambulance, should be investigated as a possible war crime.



    On Monday, it was reported that Israeli forces had again targeted the hospital, this time hitting a solar panel system that provided electricity to its main departments. With barely any fuel left in its tanks to keep its one generator running, it’s now only a matter of time before the hospital is forced to switch off vital equipment like ventilators and dialysis machines, leaving patients to die.

    Here’s what you need to know about al-Shifa and why is it being targeted:

    What is al-Shifa?

    Dar al-Shifa, literally translated as “house of healing”, is the largest and most extensive medical complex in the strip, comprising three specialised facilities: surgical, internal medicine, and obstetrics and gynaecology.

    Sign up for Al Jazeera

    Week in the Middle East


    Located in the northern Remal neighbourhood, close to the port, the site originally housed British Army barracks. It became a hospital in 1946, undergoing successive expansions under Egyptian rule and during the Israeli occupation in the 1980s.

    The hospital has become a lifeline for people seeking urgent medical intervention. Like all hospitals in the besieged strip – bar the Jordanian field hospital, which received an airdrop of medical aid at midnight on Sunday – it has been denied urgently needed supplies of medicine and fuel.

    It has the capacity to treat 700 patients, but right now doctors are treating approximately 5,000, according to a recent report by Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF. Thousands of people who have lost their homes are living in the hospital corridors and in the courtyard.

    INTERACTIVE_GAZA_al-Shifa_NOV8_2023-1699442409

    Already overwhelmed, the hospital has been flooded with bodies and wounded patients since last week’s bombing of the Abu Assi school, run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Casualties mounted on Sunday, following one of the heaviest nights of bombardment seen so far, which saw the Israeli military hit 450 targets in the north – including the nearby Shati refugee camp.

    Dr Marwan Abusada, the hospital’s head of surgery, said that al-Shifa can offer 210 beds on normal days. Currently, 800 patients are waiting to be admitted, he said in a statement relayed to Al Jazeera by NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

    The hospital is also low on personnel. Israeli air attacks have killed 150 medical staff in the strip.

    What are conditions like right now?

    “At all levels, we are dealing with a health disaster,” said Dr Abusada.

    MSF, which supplied al-Shifa with the medicines and equipment that it still has in its stock, has reported that surgeons at the hospital are operating on patients without painkillers. Short on beds, surgeons have amputated limbs as patients lie on the floor.

    With nowhere to keep patients in the unhygienic conditions, patients who have undergone surgical procedures run a high risk of infection. “We have a type of worm, called white flies, covering the wounds after the surgery. They appear after one day,” said Dr Abusada.

    Running on empty, the hospital is barely able to deliver needs, conserving its electricity supply for its emergency unit, intensive care and operating rooms. “We are trying hard to continue delivering services to the patients who need kidney dialysis, urgent catheterisation and … incubators, but we are delivering the bare minimum,” said the doctor.

    On Monday, an Al Jazeera report depicted scenes of chaos outside and inside the hospital, with bloodied patients lining the corridors. Having just pronounced a man dead, surgeon Sara Al Saqqa spoke of living, sleeping and waking at the hospital, working as many as 72 consecutive hours.

    “Every day, we say today was the worst ever, then the next day is worse,” she said, adding later that there aren’t enough freezers to keep the corpses.

    At the weekend, the hospital was forced to transfer its maternity ward to the private Al Helou International Hospital in Gaza City. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women are caught up in the conflict, according to the United Nations Population Fund in Palestine. Premature births and miscarriages are on the rise, owing to the fear and panic caused by bombardment.

    In northern Gaza, where the hospital is located, the main sources of water – a desalination plant and the pipeline from Israel – have been shut down since the start of the war. At present, the hospital only receives salty groundwater, unsuitable for drinking and hygiene. According to the UN, only 5 percent of Gaza’s water needs are being met.

    A Palestinian man mourns
    A Palestinian man mourns as civil defense teams and residents conduct a search and rescue operation for Palestinians stuck under the debris of a demolished building following Israeli airstrikes hit al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on October 24, 2023. [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images]
    Why is it under attack?

    Al-Shifa is a prime target for Israeli forces, which claim the hospital is located above the headquarters of Hamas, the armed group that has governed Gaza since 2007.

    Last month, the Israeli military released a video that used a combination of satellite imagery and animated graphics to claim that it had intelligence-based proof of Hamas’s purported use of the hospital below ground, with tunnels, facilities and meeting rooms. Hamas has rejected those claims, which it said is sheltering more than 40,000 displaced people.

    It’s not the first time that links have been drawn between Hamas and al-Shifa. Following Israel’s 2014 ground offensive in Gaza, Amnesty International accused Hamas of committing “spine-chilling” atrocities against political rivals in abandoned areas of the hospital to extract confessions of collaboration. In an earlier report, the rights group had also accused Israel of war crimes during its incursion, which killed more than 2100 people.

    Back then, too, the hospital had come under attack. Israel and Hamas traded blame for an explosion at the hospital that reportedly killed at least 10 children. Hamas blamed the blast on an Israeli drone attack, while Israel claimed it had been caused by a failed Palestinian rocket. The episode had shades of a similarly disputed, but much deadlier explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital last month.

    In the current conflict, Israel has accused Hamas of storing fuel for its own operations, preventing more supplies from entering in the limited number of humanitarian convoys crossing into the strip. With no power, 16 out of the 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have stopped working.

    Smoke rises following Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7
    Smoke rises following Israeli attacks, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7, 2023 [Mohammed Al-Masri/Reuters]
    What next for al-Shifa?

    As Israeli forces close in, the outlook is bleak for al-Shifa. At the time of writing, Israeli troops had severed northern Gaza from the rest of the enclave and were engaging Hamas fighters in the heart of Gaza City.

    Israel has insisted that it wants to rout Hamas, destroy the alleged headquarters below the hospital and hunt down the group’s fighters. It has also said it wants to assume control of the strip’s security for the foreseeable future.
    Al Shefa is the main hospital in besieged Gaza! The Zionist terrorists have no mercy! #IsraelWarCrimes https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/8/why-is-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-at-the-heart-of-israels-war Why is Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital at the heart of Israel’s war? It’s Gaza’s largest hospital, sheltering and treating thousands of Palestinians even as Israel attacks it. Lorraine Mallinder An injured Palestinian boy is carried from the ground following an Israeli airstrike outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City For Palestinians in Gaza, it’s the “house of healing”. For Israel, it’s Hamas’s main command centre. Al-Shifa, the biggest hospital in the enclave, is now at breaking point, battling to treat thousands of patients as it comes under direct attack from the Israeli military. Last week, the Israeli army bombed an ambulance outside the hospital, part of a convoy that was meant to carry patients from Gaza City to the Rafah border crossing, so they could be treated in Egypt. Fifteen people were killed in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which had coordinated the journey with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza. Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the attack, which killed people inside and around the ambulance, should be investigated as a possible war crime. On Monday, it was reported that Israeli forces had again targeted the hospital, this time hitting a solar panel system that provided electricity to its main departments. With barely any fuel left in its tanks to keep its one generator running, it’s now only a matter of time before the hospital is forced to switch off vital equipment like ventilators and dialysis machines, leaving patients to die. Here’s what you need to know about al-Shifa and why is it being targeted: What is al-Shifa? Dar al-Shifa, literally translated as “house of healing”, is the largest and most extensive medical complex in the strip, comprising three specialised facilities: surgical, internal medicine, and obstetrics and gynaecology. Sign up for Al Jazeera Week in the Middle East Located in the northern Remal neighbourhood, close to the port, the site originally housed British Army barracks. It became a hospital in 1946, undergoing successive expansions under Egyptian rule and during the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. The hospital has become a lifeline for people seeking urgent medical intervention. Like all hospitals in the besieged strip – bar the Jordanian field hospital, which received an airdrop of medical aid at midnight on Sunday – it has been denied urgently needed supplies of medicine and fuel. It has the capacity to treat 700 patients, but right now doctors are treating approximately 5,000, according to a recent report by Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF. Thousands of people who have lost their homes are living in the hospital corridors and in the courtyard. INTERACTIVE_GAZA_al-Shifa_NOV8_2023-1699442409 Already overwhelmed, the hospital has been flooded with bodies and wounded patients since last week’s bombing of the Abu Assi school, run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Casualties mounted on Sunday, following one of the heaviest nights of bombardment seen so far, which saw the Israeli military hit 450 targets in the north – including the nearby Shati refugee camp. Dr Marwan Abusada, the hospital’s head of surgery, said that al-Shifa can offer 210 beds on normal days. Currently, 800 patients are waiting to be admitted, he said in a statement relayed to Al Jazeera by NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). The hospital is also low on personnel. Israeli air attacks have killed 150 medical staff in the strip. What are conditions like right now? “At all levels, we are dealing with a health disaster,” said Dr Abusada. MSF, which supplied al-Shifa with the medicines and equipment that it still has in its stock, has reported that surgeons at the hospital are operating on patients without painkillers. Short on beds, surgeons have amputated limbs as patients lie on the floor. With nowhere to keep patients in the unhygienic conditions, patients who have undergone surgical procedures run a high risk of infection. “We have a type of worm, called white flies, covering the wounds after the surgery. They appear after one day,” said Dr Abusada. Running on empty, the hospital is barely able to deliver needs, conserving its electricity supply for its emergency unit, intensive care and operating rooms. “We are trying hard to continue delivering services to the patients who need kidney dialysis, urgent catheterisation and … incubators, but we are delivering the bare minimum,” said the doctor. On Monday, an Al Jazeera report depicted scenes of chaos outside and inside the hospital, with bloodied patients lining the corridors. Having just pronounced a man dead, surgeon Sara Al Saqqa spoke of living, sleeping and waking at the hospital, working as many as 72 consecutive hours. “Every day, we say today was the worst ever, then the next day is worse,” she said, adding later that there aren’t enough freezers to keep the corpses. At the weekend, the hospital was forced to transfer its maternity ward to the private Al Helou International Hospital in Gaza City. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women are caught up in the conflict, according to the United Nations Population Fund in Palestine. Premature births and miscarriages are on the rise, owing to the fear and panic caused by bombardment. In northern Gaza, where the hospital is located, the main sources of water – a desalination plant and the pipeline from Israel – have been shut down since the start of the war. At present, the hospital only receives salty groundwater, unsuitable for drinking and hygiene. According to the UN, only 5 percent of Gaza’s water needs are being met. A Palestinian man mourns A Palestinian man mourns as civil defense teams and residents conduct a search and rescue operation for Palestinians stuck under the debris of a demolished building following Israeli airstrikes hit al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on October 24, 2023. [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images] Why is it under attack? Al-Shifa is a prime target for Israeli forces, which claim the hospital is located above the headquarters of Hamas, the armed group that has governed Gaza since 2007. Last month, the Israeli military released a video that used a combination of satellite imagery and animated graphics to claim that it had intelligence-based proof of Hamas’s purported use of the hospital below ground, with tunnels, facilities and meeting rooms. Hamas has rejected those claims, which it said is sheltering more than 40,000 displaced people. It’s not the first time that links have been drawn between Hamas and al-Shifa. Following Israel’s 2014 ground offensive in Gaza, Amnesty International accused Hamas of committing “spine-chilling” atrocities against political rivals in abandoned areas of the hospital to extract confessions of collaboration. In an earlier report, the rights group had also accused Israel of war crimes during its incursion, which killed more than 2100 people. Back then, too, the hospital had come under attack. Israel and Hamas traded blame for an explosion at the hospital that reportedly killed at least 10 children. Hamas blamed the blast on an Israeli drone attack, while Israel claimed it had been caused by a failed Palestinian rocket. The episode had shades of a similarly disputed, but much deadlier explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital last month. In the current conflict, Israel has accused Hamas of storing fuel for its own operations, preventing more supplies from entering in the limited number of humanitarian convoys crossing into the strip. With no power, 16 out of the 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have stopped working. Smoke rises following Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7 Smoke rises following Israeli attacks, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7, 2023 [Mohammed Al-Masri/Reuters] What next for al-Shifa? As Israeli forces close in, the outlook is bleak for al-Shifa. At the time of writing, Israeli troops had severed northern Gaza from the rest of the enclave and were engaging Hamas fighters in the heart of Gaza City. Israel has insisted that it wants to rout Hamas, destroy the alleged headquarters below the hospital and hunt down the group’s fighters. It has also said it wants to assume control of the strip’s security for the foreseeable future.
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  • The Age of Megathreats
    Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
    op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
    NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

    Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

    Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

    Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

    Goodbye to All That

    Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

    There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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    Digital subscribers enjoy access to every PS commentary, including those by Nouriel Roubini, plus our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content, including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More.

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    With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

    Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

    Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

    There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

    Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

    But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

    Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

    Hard Choices, Hard Landings

    The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

    While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

    What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

    History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

    Sticky Stagflation

    In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

    Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

    This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

    Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

    Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

    On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

    The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

    Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

    The Worst of All Possible Economies

    When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

    Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

    While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

    The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

    Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

    With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

    How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

    For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

    The Moment of Truth

    In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

    And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

    How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

    In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

    Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

    Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.
    The Age of Megathreats Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022 op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be. Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.” Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies. Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries. Goodbye to All That Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII. There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb. Subscribe to PS Digital now to read all the latest insights from Nouriel Roubini. Digital subscribers enjoy access to every PS commentary, including those by Nouriel Roubini, plus our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content, including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More. For a limited time, save $15 with the code ROUBINI15. Subscribe Now With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea. Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any. Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy. There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia. Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.” But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate. Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind. Hard Choices, Hard Landings The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks. While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession). What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant). History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies. Sticky Stagflation In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral. Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction. This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth. Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc. Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade. On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable. The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods. Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise. The Worst of All Possible Economies When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing. Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis. While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent. The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture. Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate. With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates. How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates. For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage. The Moment of Truth In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one). And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters. How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust. In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix. Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse. Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.
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  • The Age of Megathreats
    Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
    op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
    NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

    Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

    Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

    Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

    Goodbye to All That

    Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

    There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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    With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

    Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

    Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

    There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

    Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

    But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

    Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

    Hard Choices, Hard Landings

    The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

    While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

    What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

    History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

    Sticky Stagflation

    In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

    Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

    This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

    Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

    Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

    On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

    The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

    Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

    The Worst of All Possible Economies

    When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

    Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

    While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

    The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

    Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

    With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

    How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

    For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

    The Moment of Truth

    In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

    And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

    How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

    In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

    Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

    Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.
    The Age of Megathreats Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022 op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be. Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.” Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies. Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries. Goodbye to All That Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII. There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb. Subscribe to PS Digital now to read all the latest insights from Nouriel Roubini. Digital subscribers enjoy access to every PS commentary, including those by Nouriel Roubini, plus our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content, including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More. For a limited time, save $15 with the code ROUBINI15. Subscribe Now With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea. Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any. Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy. There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia. Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.” But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate. Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind. Hard Choices, Hard Landings The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks. While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession). What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant). History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies. Sticky Stagflation In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral. Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction. This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth. Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc. Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade. On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable. The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods. Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise. The Worst of All Possible Economies When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing. Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis. While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent. The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture. Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate. With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates. How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates. For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage. The Moment of Truth In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one). And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters. How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust. In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix. Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse. Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.
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  • The US Army War College’s recent journal includes a disturbing essay, which states that “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”
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    WWW.ACTIVISTPOST.COM
    The US Military Is Laying the Groundwork to Reinstitute the Draft - Activist Post
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