“The most important ingredient for state propaganda is historical ignorance.” ~ Glenn Greenwald
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Dear readers and listeners, I cannot tell you how glad I am to finally bring you this essay, the first in a new series of occasional essays on “THE BIG PICTURE”. They take a long time to write, in -between everything else that I do, hence the “occasional” part. I want to give special thanks to former US Airforce personnel Robyn Ruffo for sharing her anthrax vaccine story. The big picture is never complete without a personal story to bring it home to all of us.
On Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial passenger airplanes and carried out suicide attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush announced the War on Terror, saying, “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
NEVER has a presidential promise failed more abysmally than this one. Instead of ridding the world of terrorists, they have multiplied. Just like the “war on drugs”, the “war on terror” has proved too lucrative for the politicians, the drugs/arms dealers, the billionaire’s club to consider ending it.
When it comes to Hamas, leaders in the United States and Israel should take their share of the blame for creating this monster, although of course they never will. For years, the United States and Netanyahu’s government gave billions of dollars in “humanitarian aid” to Hamas, which was then used to amass military supplies and build a network of tunnels beneath Gaza where more than 200 hostages from nations all over the world now languish. Meanwhile, the leaders of Hamas live luxurious lifestyles in Qatar and Turkey, far from the bloodshed of the people they claim to represent. Deals are made in Qatar between men who love war for the power it gives them, just as deals have always been made down through history and I am not sure why anyone is surprised that this is no different.
When I think of our ‘fearless’ leaders, the image of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani always comes to my mind. As the United States abandoned hundreds of its own people when it exited Afghanistan in 2021, Ghani fled the country with four vehicles and a helicopter so stuffed full of cash that a trail of money was left lying on the tarmac.
The United States’ virtuous defense of Ukraine is another hypocritical example of the madness of money and war. By the end of 2022, Washington had spent almost $20 billion on arming Ukraine — nearly double the amount the United States gave in 2021 to 12 other countries combined, including Afghanistan ($4.1 billion), Israel ($3.3 billion) and Egypt ($1.3 billion). As of February 2023, the total amount in aid from western nations had reached a staggering $150 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
The amounts of money kept escalating as Americans were asked to tighten their belts. As of September 2023, the United States has given to Ukraine $113 billion, and no one is sure where that money has gone.
The White House is now asking for almost $106 billion for Israel, Ukraine and the border. The bulk of that money will go to Ukraine while $14.3 billion will go to Israel.
According to The Nation:
This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion…. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined.
…the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy.
No matter what our leaders say to the contrary, their commitment is not to the people, but to the perpetuation of war.
Ukraine has one of the biggest black markets for weapons in the world and it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume it is now the biggest. As with recent conflicts involving the US, such as Afghanistan and Syria, weapons officially sent by the US are diverted when they arrive in Ukraine, eventually making their way into the hands of extremist militias, paramilitary groups, drug traffickers and terrorist organizations like Hamas.
The “war on terror” is a nebulous term that often means assassinating notorious individuals like al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden and Iran’s Qassem Soleimani. In the case of Soleimani, President Donald Trump said that he ordered a precision strike to “terminate” a top Iranian commander who was plotting “imminent and sinister attacks” on Americans, adding that the decision was one of deterrence rather than aggression.
“We took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war,” Trump said in a statement.
Except that four years later, rather than stopping wars, we are facing World War III with one of our main enemies being Iran.
Ever since 9/11, the government has relentlessly made sure that terrorism looms large in our minds. Without the threat of terrorism, most of the recent wars we’ve engaged in would not have been justified. Wars are a way to push totalitarianism and surveillance as a means to keep people “safe”. Wars are a way for unpopular leaders to increase their ratings in the polls, even as they fleece citizens for every last dime, telling them it’s for the cause of freedom.
Many people would be surprised to learn that terrorism is not only a much rarer cause of death than non-communicable or infectious diseases; it is also a rare cause of violent death: more than 4 times as many people die in armed conflicts, and more than ten times as many dies from homicides”.
In America, we have our own type of terrorist—the mass shooter. More than 560 mass shootings have taken place in the United States so far this year, including the one in Lewiston, Maine. The rate of mass shootings in 2023 has consistently outpaced that of past years, with an average of nearly two mass shootings a day.
While in 2021 alone, there were a total of 48,830 firearm deaths— 54% from suicides, another surprising fact—the average number of deaths due to actual terrorist attacks over the last decade was around 24,000 per year.
Below is a chart of what people die from. If you look at the teeny, tiny writing in the lower right-hand corner, 0.05% is from terrorism.
According to Brown University, over the past twenty or so years, the cost of attempting to eradicate terrorism has been $8 trillion while more than 900,000 people have died.
Those deaths include U.S. military members, allied fighters, opposition fighters, civilians, journalists and humanitarian aid workers who were killed as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets or fire. It does not, the researchers noted, include the many indirect deaths the war on terror has caused by way of disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.
The catchphrase, “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is attributed to Winston Churchill. Referring to the financial crisis in 2008, Rahm Emanuel — the incoming White House chief of staff for then-President-elect Barack Obama, said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” and he echoed it again during Covid.
Creating the term, the “war on terror” allowed the government to manufacture crisis after crisis as justification for war.
The anthrax attacks that happened shortly after 9/11 are a distant memory in most American’s minds, but perhaps more than any other event, they played an important role in softening people up to accept totalitarianism as a means to fight against enemies that were, literally, everywhere; in the air we breathed, on the surfaces we touched, and from our best friends who could kill us just by giving us a hug.
Sure, planes crashing into buildings are terrifying. But those were isolated incidents that happened to a limited number of people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The anthrax attacks, on the other hand, proved that terrorists could covertly invade your home with substances that you could not see or smell, but that if you inhaled them or even touched them, could kill you.
Some incidents of when anthrax has been used as a biological weapon:
- The first modern incident of anthrax spores being used as a biological warfare occurred when Nordic rebels, supplied by the German General Staff, used anthrax against the Imperial Russian Army in Finland in 1916.
- Anthrax was first tested as a biological warfare agent by Unit 731 of the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchuria during the 1930s; some of this testing involved intentional infection of prisoners of war, thousands of whom died.
- Anthrax, designated at the time as Agent N, was also investigated by the Allies in the 1940s.
- In 1942, British bioweapons trials severely contaminated Gruinard Island in Scotland with anthrax spores of the Vollum-14578 strain, rendering it uninhabitable.
- Around the same time, five million “cattle cakes” (animal feed pellets impregnated with anthrax spores) were prepared for “Operation Vegetarian“, anti-livestock attacks against Germany to be made by the Royal Air Force. The plan was for anthrax-based biological weapons to be dropped on Germany in 1944. However, the edible cattle cakes and the bomb were not used; the cattle cakes were incinerated in late 1945.
In 1979, at least 66 people died after airborne anthrax bacteria emerged from a military lab in the Soviet Union. “But leading American scientists voiced confidence in the Soviets’ claim that the pathogen had jumped from animals to humans. Only after a full-fledged investigation in the 1990s did one of those scientists confirm that the accident was a lab leak and one of the deadliest ever documented”.
It’s outrageous how the New York Times covered up the truth about Covid, going with the “jumping from animal to human theory”, while saying this about the anthrax leak in Soviet Russia:
It shows how an authoritarian government can successfully shape the narrative of a disease outbreak and how it can take years — and, perhaps, regime change — to get to the truth. As the Soviet Union crumbled, so did its ability to keep secrets…. Soon, Mr. Yeltsin — who himself was part of the cover-up as the top Communist official in the region in 1979 — admitted that the military was to blame.
At a summit meeting with President George Bush in February 1992, Yeltsin came clean, admitting to the elder Bush that “the Sverdlovsk incident was the result of an accident at a Soviet biological warfare installation”.
It’s interesting to note that the elder Bush found out about the anthrax attack in the Soviet Union and then probably told the story to his son who then became president and experienced an anthrax terrorist attack in the United States. Of course, in all of our minds, we can’t help but wonder whether or not it was a set up.
As with Covid, reporting on the anthrax scare of 2001 started with reassurance and no reason to fear, only to keep on escalating. “It’s an isolated incident with no reason to believe it was a terrorist attack” turned into “America strikes back”. “Any attempt to terrorize Americans is going to fail”. “Germ warfare”. “Rare, inhaled form”. By the end of six weeks, the media was saying there was “still no sign that the worst case of bioterrorism in this country is close to being solved”.
With the fear of biological attacks so deeply embedded into Americans’ minds, people easily complied with the draconian restrictions Dr. Fauci imposed on their freedoms. People say they will never do it again. But they will. If another attack comes, you can be sure it will be more terrifying than Covid.
One of Anthony Fauci’s first warnings was that we could get sick or even die just by touching a surface that was contaminated. With this terrifying news, he convinced billions of people all over the world to start performing the first of many rituals, disinfecting everything, even down to the packages our food was wrapped in. People took off their clothes before entering their houses. They slathered their hands in sanitizers, never caring that the chemicals were far more dangerous than the ordinary germs they encountered every day.
Millions of people are still brainwashed. They continue to feel safer wearing masks and using chemicals-laced hand sanitizers than breathing fresh air and developing a healthy immune system. It doesn’t matter how illogical this is, or how detrimental it is to their health. People want an expert telling them what to do and they want to believe the expert without question. This brings comfort in the midst of chaos and fear.
The fact is, the danger of nuclear war or a biological attack is real and there is no protection against it for ordinary citizens, much as the government likes to tell us otherwise. Nor is there a way to keep us safe from what is even more dangerous—the out-of-control evil wrought upon us by the powerful.
We’ve just been through three years of a so-called plague, and we are more in the dark than ever. Experts abound on both sides of the aisle but who is right? Was Covid just a bad flu? A bioweapon? Do viruses even exist? How about the vaccines? Some say they’re vaccines, others say they aren’t. Do they stop people from getting sick or are they killing people? Are mRNA vaccines a plot to get rid of all the useless eaters? Are they turning people into the actual bioweapon? Maybe Covid and the vaccines are both bioweapons? Maybe not? How can we trust anything we’re told by anyone anymore?
Of one thing we can be sure. People are dying in ways that cannot be termed “natural causes”.
Seven days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, anonymous letters laced with deadly anthrax spores began arriving at media companies and congressional offices. Over the ensuing months, five people died from inhaling anthrax and 17 others were infected after exposure.
And then, poof! The danger disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. And we all forgot about it. We moved on. But it was there, in the back of our minds without us even realizing it. The psychological scarring didn’t start with Covid. It’s been going on for a long time and the anthrax attacks were a big part of it.
We might have forgotten and moved on. But millions of military personnel who had been forced to take the anthrax vaccine before any of us had ever even heard of it did not. Many of them went on to suffer horrific side effects as a result of those vaccines.
Between March 1998 and December 2008, nearly 8 million doses of BioThrax were administered to over 2 million U.S. military personnel as part of the program.
Retired Marine Maj. Dale Saran, a former JAG officer, authored the book “United States v. Members of the Armed Forces: The Truth Behind the Department of Defense’s Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program,” published in 2020. He also offered legal advice to attorneys with clients facing punishments for refusals.
Saran’s clients and many others were often top performers, some early in their careers and others nearing retirement. But once they refused the vaccine, their commands sought to punish them.
“The venom with which they went after people … I just find that abhorrent,” Saran said. Those service members “were charged and threatened, people’s lives were destroyed.”
Just like what happened with the Covid vaccines.
So much suffering can be traced back to the war on terror and the bottomless pit of greed that lies at the heart of Washington. If we don’t stand up to our governments and say enough is enough; if we don’t start listening to the voices of those who have suffered for years in silence, how can we virtuously claim we are doing anything to make it better now by screaming about injustices on social media. It is all so cowardly and pointless.
Robyn Ruffo was one of the millions of soldiers who got the anthrax vaccines. When she became ill, no one listened to her. No one was interested. Robyn and I met on Twitter before I was banned a year ago. We reconnected when I was let back on. I wanted to give her a chance to speak, not only for her own sake, but to remind all of us that, as Glenn Greenwald has said, “The most important ingredient for state propaganda is historical ignorance.”
It’s imperative that we do not remain ignorant. Those in power want us so caught up in the emotion of the moment, that we forget how we got here, forget that we are all brothers and sisters fighting the same battle. The powerful want us to turn on one another instead of exposing the truth about them.
Here is Robyn’s story.
To read or listen to Robyn’s story please go to https://khmezek.substack.com/p/the-big-picture-how-anthrax-and-the
Break Free 