The Open Assassination of Fred Hampton

 
Excerpted from Dissenting Views (2010)
 

The idea in writing this piece was to show two things: firstly, that the murder of Fred Hampton was essentially the conspiracy that wasn’t. In other words, the state powers who oversaw his execution were so certain that no one would pursue the Hampton case that they didn’t construct an elaborate conspiracy as against the Kennedys, Dr. King, and so on. They executed him in the open, as it were. Secondly, I wanted to show that this case could be made using the most mainstream sources imaginable, so primarily this article relies on quotes from the New York Times.

Fred Hampton, the dynamic Chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, was by all accounts a tireless worker for his chosen cause. Under his leadership, which began at the age of 18, the Chicago chapter started five breakfast programs, sponsored blood drives, and initiated a medical co-op that tested members of the community for sickle-cell while providing general care.[1] Three years later, he was recognized as a community leader and a brilliant speaker. Unfortunately, he would not live to see his 22nd birthday, having been murdered in his bed by the F.B.I.

Targeted assassination both foreign and domestic, as a methodology, is nothing new for the United States. However, the Fred Hampton case is unique for the incredibly egregious and blatant nature of the murder, the facts of which are not in dispute. It is thus an excellent case study of the F.B.I.’s behavior and motives, the methods used to achieve their goals, and finally their attempts at cover-up. It can also serve as a case study in the way today’s journalists are forced to concoct a controversy in order to maintain an ideologically dualistic paradigm.

The Target

Fred Hampton had proven himself to be an extremely dangerous man. The danger, however, did not lie in any capacity for physical violence – far from it. Instead, what was truly frightening about Hampton, from the point of view of the authorities, was his intelligence, insight, charisma, and emphasis on community action. The image of the gun-toting Panther was one that Hoover’s F.B.I. actively promulgated, as they felt this image would tend to undermine popular (i.e., White) support. Internal documents have shown that Hoover, for example, had authorized agents to design letter campaigns for the express purpose of destroying Jewish support for the Panthers.[2] (Leonard Bernstein, among others, had sympathized with the Panther cause.) Hoover also wrote that the Breakfast Program “-fill[ed] adolescent children with insidious poison.”[3]

In Fred Hampton’s own words, in a speech later titled “You Can Murder a Liberator, but You Can’t Murder Liberation,” he provided evidence of this alleged “poison”:

Our Breakfast for Children program is feeding a lot of children and the people understand [it]. We sayin’ something like this – we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit. You got to have both of them – the two go together. We have a theory about feeding kids free. What’d we do? We put it into practice. That’s how people learn.[4]

This is terrifying behavior, from the standpoint of Hoover and his minions. A group that is actively feeding and educating children, outside the state-sponsored system, is a movement that can sponsor a revolution. Hampton continues:

The Black Panther Party is about the complete revolution. We not gonna go out there and do half a thing...All they got to do is come to 2350 West Madison any day of the week and anybody up there’ll let them know, let the motherfuckers know: Yes, we subversive with the bullshit we are confronted with today. Just as subversive as anybody can be subversive. And we think them motherfuckers is the criminals. They are the ones always hiding. We the ones in front.[5]

Like the title of his speech, this comment would prove to be prophetic. Some of the ones in hiding were F.B.I. infiltrators in the Panther organization, and one of these double agents would aid his murder.

The Assassination

On the evening of December 4, 1969, Hampton had gone to bed in his flat in Chicago. Mark Clark, the Panther Chairman in Peoria, was also at the house, along with several women. According to the officers, they had obtained a warrant to search the premises for illegal weapons due to an informant’s tip. Sergeant Daniel Groth of the Chicago Police Department told reporters that he had knocked on the door and announced that the police were requesting entry. He stated that this occurred numerous times with no action, but then shots were fired from the home and police had no choice but to return fire. “There must have been six or seven of them firing,” Sergeant Groth said. “The firing must have gone on for 10 or 12 minutes. If 200 shots were exchanged, that was nothing.”[6]

(Note: Daniel Groth is quite a notorious figure even beyond the Hampton case. He also happens to be the man who arrested Thomas Arthur Vallee in Chicago. Vallee was a Lee Harvey Oswald lookalike who played a key role in the Chicago Plot, one of the other plots against John Kennedy before he was murdered in Dallas. Groth coincidentally has been rumored to have been a CIA plant. See Edwin Black’s brilliant “The Chicago Plot.” End of aside.)[7]

The basic story, then, is the following:

  • An informant gave police information that Hampton was storing illegal weapons.
  • The officers announced themselves, and only returned fire after being fired upon.
  • The officers attempted to stop the shoot-out, but could not because the people inside insisted on continuing the crossfire.

The story eventually unraveled, although it would take years for the full details to arrive, complete with F.B.I. internal documents. However, early on it was apparent that the government’s position was to stonewall. Despite their efforts, a special grand jury was convened to study the matter in May of 1970. Jerris Leonard, who was the Assistant Attorney General of the State of Illinois at the time, met with the special commission and actually tried to stop them from conducting the investigation.[8] It didn’t work, and their investigation came to the conclusion that the “...police there had grossly exaggerated Black Panthers’ resistance.”[9] This would turn out to be an understatement. Over the course of the next several years, civil suits filed by the mothers of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark would reveal some startling facts about the incident. In addition, another panel, this time led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, would conclude in 1972 that “neither the Federal Government nor the state sought to establish the truth” in the Hampton and Clark slaying.

The panel found that: “contrary to its stated objectives,” the officers had “conceived and planned [the raid] as a search and destroy mission aimed at the leaders of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther party.” The police had fired the first shot and continued to blast away, ignoring the lack resistance and the hiding occupants, who “cried out for the police to stop.” The report further stated that Hampton “could not be roused, owing to a possibly lethal concentration” of secobarbital in his system.[10] The police had arranged for Hampton to be drugged by their “inside man” in the operation, William O’Neil. He was the chief of security for the Panthers and Hampton’s personal bodyguard, meaning he was in an ideal position to deliver the drug. “Statements by survivors indicate that Mr. Hampton, who was slain in his bed, did not awaken during the raid.”[11]

Even by conservative estimates, almost 100 bullets were fired and Hampton never awoke – indeed, he was shot in the head while he slept. In addition to making sure Hampton would be unconscious, police knew the exact layout of the building. FBI agent Roy Mitchell testified that information on the layout had been provided by the same William O’Neil. Before the raid, F.B.I. agents handed out maps to the police officers, which were marked to show exactly where Hampton would be sleeping.[12]

The Panthers had maintained from the beginning that there had been no shootout, but in fact what had taken place was a simple massacre. The special Federal grand jury had concluded that police fired “between 82 and 99 shots.” They also concluded that one shot had been fired in return – possibly. The Times article in which this information appears goes on to note that “the inquiry raised the possibility that the police had been ‘falsifying’ their report, but the jury returned no indictments.”[13]

Raised the possibility? How could it be otherwise, given the facts?

William O’Neil received a $300 bonus for his work in assisting the murder of Fred Hampton,[14] part of $17,000 that he received from 1969 to 1970.[15]

COINTELPRO

Later, many of the COINTELPRO programs that targeted the Panthers, Martin Luther King, and others would be exposed. These operations focused on destroying specific individuals that J. Edgar Hoover feared would emerge as new “black messiahs,” in his words. There were also specific attempts to insert discord in the black movement, aiding for example the split between Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. “...F.B.I. documents also disclosed an attempt by the agency to create discord between the Panthers and the Black P. Stone Rangers in February 1969 by sending an anonymous letter to Jeff Fort, leader of the Rangers, suggesting the Panthers were planning a ‘hit’ against him. [Then-head of the F.B.I.’s Chicago field office Marlin] Johnson insisted the word ‘hit’ did not mean a murder contract. He testified that he had defined it as something nonviolent in nature.”[16]

This ludicrous statement, like the ‘possible’ misstatements by police years earlier, went uncommented-on by the Times. However, the reporter who wrote this story did go on to quote from further documents that also proved that all of the weapons at Hampton’s flat “had been legally purchased.”[17]

Going back to the key points we isolated for the government’s version:

  • The informant did indeed provide information to the F.B.I., but it had nothing to do with illegal weapons. The weapons had been legally purchased. Instead, the information concerned the specific location of the sleeping, drugged Fred Hampton prior to the raid.
  • The officers fired some 90 shots (there are other estimates that say more) into the residence and may have been fired upon once.
  • There was no ‘continuing crossfire’ and therefore the police lied about wanting to stop the shooting. Hampton himself had been shot numerous times, including twice in the head from point-blank range, which is an execution.

As I noted at the beginning of this essay, the assassination of Fred Hampton is one of the most blatant committed by the federal government in all their sordid and far-ranging history.

The facts are stunning, easily discovered, and yet still ‘controversial.’ For example, when a proposal to name a street in Chicago Fred Hampton Way was announced, the Times characterized Hampton as “a frightening, dangerous radical”[18] The same article states the following, without batting an eye:

Much of what happened before dawn on Dec. 4, 1969, when police officers raided the apartment building at 2337 W. Monroe Street, is still fiercely debated here.

The raid, ordered by State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, who said then that the 14 police officers were searching for illegal weapons, ended with the deaths of Mr. Hampton and Mark Clark, another party leader.

The police said a shootout had led to the deaths, but survivors in the apartment said the police had fired nearly all of the more than 80 shots. The police, meanwhile, listed numerous guns they said they found inside.

The police officers were cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the raid, but survivors and family members ultimately received a $1.85 million settlement from a civil rights case against the government entities involved.[19]

Note the point of view. This is complete nonsense. The facts are not “fiercely debated” by anyone who can read. The writer says that “survivors...said the police fired nearly all...” the shots, making it seem like there could be disagreement about this. Even the description “nearly all” fails to do justice to the matter. As we’ve seen, it was more than 90 shots, and a grand jury investigation led by Ramsey Clark, one of the most highly respected figures in the country, proved that police fired all but one of them. Then the reporter inserts an irrelevant note that “police listed numerous guns” while failing to report that the guns were legal. And that final note that the cops were “cleared of criminal wrongdoing” although the family eventually received almost two million dollars. This is remarked without follow-up, because any follow-up would get into details that would reflect poorly on the Chicago Police Department and the Bureau.

Monica Davey’s article is a perfect example of what “objectivity” has become in our time. In order to be “objective,” Davey has to cast doubt, and draw opposing sides into controversial claims, regardless of evidence.

There are not equal and opposing sides in the Fred Hampton scenario, and the pretense that there are ignores historical reality. Taken across the spectrum, that notion plays into the hands of the powerful and against the people, for whom Hampton spent his energy trying to help. Like so many before him, however, he placed himself in opposition to wealth and power and earned himself an execution courtesy of Uncle Sam.

Notes

  1. Huey P. Newton, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America. Harlem River Press: London, 1996, pg. 72. [↩]

  2. “F.B.I. Files Reveal Moves Against Black Panthers.” C. Gerald Fraser, The New York Times: 19 October 1980. [↩]

  3. Ibid. [↩]

  4. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panthers Speak, Da Capo Press: MA, 2002, pg. 139. [↩]

  5. Ibid, pg. 140. [↩]

  6. “Police in Chicago Slay 2 Panthers.” John Kifner, The New York Times: 5 December 1969 [↩]

  7. Edwin Black, “The Chicago Plot,” The Chicago Independent, 1975 November. [↩]

  8. “U.S. Aide Asked Panel Not to Study Panther Deaths.” John Kifner, The New York Times, 23 May 1970. [↩]

  9. “U.S. Jury Assails Police in Chicago on Panther Raid.” Fred P. Graham, The New York Times, 16 May 1970. [↩]

  10. “Report Assails Inquiry on Slaying of Black Panthers.” Thomas A. Johnson, The New York Times, 17 March 1972. [↩]

  11. “F.B.I., Before Raid, Gave Police Plan of Chicago Panther’s Flat.” John Kifner, The New York Times, 25 May 1974. [↩]

  12. Ibid. [↩]

  13. “F.B.I. Files Say Informer Got Data for Panther Raid.” John Kifner, The New York Times, 7 May 1976. [↩]

  14. Ibid. [↩]

  15. Newton, War Against the Panthers, pg. 73. [↩]

  16. “Ex-Head of Chicago F.B.I. Office Says Agency Sought to Discredit Panthers.” Seth S. King. The New York Times, 22 February 1976. [↩]

  17. Ibid. [↩]

  18. “Chicago Divided Over Proposal to Honor Slain Black Panther.” Monica Davey, The New York Times, 5 March 2006. [↩]

  19. Ibid. [↩]

by Dave Ratcliffe

Steven Newcomb:
Confronting the System of Christian Domination

Artwork by Russell Brutsché, Flute by Kerri Lake [1, 2], Jan 2019
Steve Newcomb
Indigenous Law Institute Co-Founder

We cannot as Indigenous Peoples or Original Nations and Peoples, we cannot be on the ship coming toward our own ancestors in the way that history is taught. We have to understand ourselves as being on the shore looking out at that ship as it’s coming in. And we have to be standing next to our ancestors, so to speak, but with the hindsight that we have all these centuries later to try to come to terms with really, truly what has happened to our nations and peoples.

Typically what scholars do is they take the word Christian and they replace it with the word European, and then they say that the Doctrine of Discovery is the first Europeans to locate non-European lands and claiming a right of a dominion or a right to take over those lands.

My way of characterizing it is to say that it is the first Christian people to locate the lands of heathens and infidels, or what they would title heathens and infidels, and claiming the right of ultimate Dominion to be in themselves such as we see in the Johnson versus McIntosh ruling.

I began to understand that this conflict between the colonizers, from what was called Christendom and our Original Nations and Peoples, is a conflict based upon a religious perspective that they held but an imperial religious perspective of the Christian Empire, Christiani Imperii in Latin. Then that information began to inform and influence the development of what they call US federal indian law which is simply an idea system premised on a claim of a right of domination. And that’s what they’ve been using against our Nation’s and People’s ever since they got over here.

The international working definition of the word, indigenous, means dominated peoples. In other words it’s the original people of a given place that are existing there, and a secondary population comes in and through conquest, settlement, and other means, establishes dominance over them. So that dominance is considered to be a given, and there’s nothing in the definition that suggests that one day that dominance or that system of domination will be removed. It’s just supposed to be there forever.

And so indigenous rights are the rights of indigenous peoples, the rights of dominated peoples, is the rights that are accorded to them under that system of domination. When they said, Abolish Apartheid, they said Abolish Apartheid, they didn’t say give give them rights under apartheid. They didn’t try to expand the scope of the rights under that apartheid system, they wanted to get rid of that whole system.

Now you have ecological systems and collapse, the die-off of all the insects, you have the Sixth Extinction that’s happening, you have Fukushima, all the radiation from that. You can go on and list a whole litany of all the different symptoms and effects and consequences of domination and dehumanization. But most people don’t name it that. And then now these people are living in the wreckage of that psychological dysfunction and these other people that caused that act blameless. They bear no responsibility.

So how do we get rid of the domination system that afflicts the planet at this time? It has been afflicting it for so many centuries, thousands of years. That’s the real challenge.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Ending the Domination System
REVOKE The PAPAL BULLS

On 30 March 2022, the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education, and the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, issued a “Joint Statement” on the “Doctrine of Discovery.” The Vatican stopped short of a revocation of the 4 May 1493 papal bull, issuing instead a “repudiation of the doctrine of discovery.”

On 3 May 2023, “In response to the Papul Bulls issued 530 years ago  (3 and 4 May 1493)”, Shawnee/Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb published “Revoke the Papal Bulls – A View-from-the-Shore Analysis of the Vatican’s 30 March 2023 Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery”. The opening establishes the framework of this critique:

The context begins with the free existence of our Native nations and peoples, extending back to the beginning of our time through our oral histories and traditions, contrasted with the system of domination that was carried by ship across the ocean and imposed on everyone and everything. From that starting point we end up with a non-Christian view-from-the-shore with our Ancestors looking out at the invading ships sailing from Western Christendom, and a view-from-the-ship perspective, with the colonizers moving toward our Ancestors with the intention of establishing the Christian empire’s system of domination where it did not yet exist. Below we discuss the recent Vatican Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery with a view-from-the-shore perspective, while realizing that the Vatican officials wrote their statement with a view-from-the-ship (church) perspective.

Steven Newcomb has been researching and decoding the doctrine of Christian Discovery since the 1980s. Together with Birgil Kills Straight, a ceremonial leader of the Oglala Lakota Nation, the Indigenous Law Institute was founded in 1992 to begin a global campaign to revoke the 4 May 1493 papal bull, Inter Caetera, which Pope Alexander VI issued shortly after Columbus returned to Western Christendom from the Bahamas. Concerning the Origins of the Doctrine of Discovery, Newcomb wrote in 1992:

To understand the connection between Christendom's principle of discovery and the laws of the United States, we need to begin by examining a papal document issued forty years before Columbus' historic voyage. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued to King Alfonso V of Portugal the bull Romanus Pontifex, declaring war against all non-Christians throughout the world, and specifically sanctioning and promoting the conquest, colonization, and exploitation of non-Christian nations and their territories.

Under various theological and legal doctrines formulated during and after the Crusades, non-Christians were considered enemies of the Catholic faith and, as such, less than human. Accordingly, in the bull of 1452, Pope Nicholas directed King Alfonso to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ,” to “put them into perpetual slavery,” and “to take all their possessions and property.” [Davenport: 20-26] Acting on this papal privilege, Portugal continued to traffic in African slaves, and expanded its royal dominions by making “discoveries” along the western coast of Africa, claiming those lands as Portuguese territory.

Thus, when Columbus sailed west across the Sea of Darkness in 1492 - with the express understanding that he was authorized to “take possession” of any lands he “discovered” that were “not under the dominion of any Christian rulers” - he and the Spanish sovereigns of Aragon and Castile were following an already well-established tradition of “discovery” and conquest. [Thacher:96] Indeed, after Columbus returned to Europe, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal document, the bull Inter Cetera of May 3, 1493, “granting” to Spain - at the request of Ferdinand and Isabella - the right to conquer the lands which Columbus had already found, as well as any lands which Spain might “discover” in the future.

In the Inter Cetera document, Pope Alexander stated his desire that the “discovered” people be “subjugated and brought to the faith itself.” [Davenport:61] By this means, said the pope, the “Christian Empire” would be propagated. [Thacher:127] When Portugal protested this concession to Spain, Pope Alexander stipulated in a subsequent bull - issued May 4, 1493 - that Spain must not attempt to establish its dominion over lands which had already “come into the possession of any Christian lords.” [Davenport:68] Then, to placate the two rival monarchs, the pope drew a line of demarcation between the two poles, giving Spain rights of conquest and dominion over one side of the globe, and Portugal over the other.

During this quincentennial of Columbus' journey to the Americas, it is important to recognize that the grim acts of genocide and conquest committed by Columbus and his men against the peaceful Native people of the Caribbean were sanctioned by the abovementioned documents of the Catholic Church. Indeed, these papal documents were frequently used by Christian European conquerors in the Americas to justify an incredibly brutal system of colonization - which dehumanized the indigenous people by regarding their territories as being “inhabited only by brute animals.” [Story:135-6]

The lesson to be learned is that the papal bulls of 1452 and 1493 are but two clear examples of how the “Christian Powers,” or “different States of Christendom,” viewed indigenous peoples as “the lawful spoil and prey of their civilized conquerors.” [Wheaton:219-20] In fact, the Christian “Law of Nations” asserted that Christian nations had a divine right, based on the Bible, to claim absolute title to and ultimate authority over any newly “discovered” Non-Christian inhabitants and their lands. Over the next several centuries, these beliefs gave rise to the Doctrine of Discovery used by Spain, Portugal, England, France, and Holland - all Christian nations.

Fast-forward 31 years to May 2023 and consider Newcomb’s in-depth critical analysis of the Vatican’s 30 March Joint Statement that “repudiates” the “Doctrine of Discovery”. This Joint Statement of the Vatican fails to address humanity’s dire need for these destructive papal bulls to finally be revoked as a beginning to end the domination system they have produced. The Contents of A View-from-the-Shore Analysis provides the historical background of The Empire Domination Model of Christianity and how Christian Discovery is the foundation of the United States:

The Conclusion distills the reach and foundational influence of 15th century papal documents into the 21st century:

Today Indigenous nations and peoples live with the psychological and other forms of wreckage brought about by the fifteenth century Vatican documents issued by various popes. How many nations and peoples are no longer existing as a result of those documents? How many languages, evolved over thousands and thousands of years by the ancestors of original nations and peoples, are no longer existing as result of those destructive documents? How many acres and hectares of land of the original (Indigenous) nations and peoples are now under the claim of a right of domination as a result of those papal bulls? The number of potential questions regarding all the torment and abuse and suffering caused by the legacy of those documents is staggering.

The Vatican March 30, 2023 statement on the Doctrine of Discovery heightens awareness of the roots of the patterns of domination found in the Vatican papal bulls that were adopted into United States law in the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, two hundred years ago this year. Evidence of those religious domination patterns is found in the distinction made in the Johnson ruling by Chief Justice John Marshall between “Christian people” and “natives, who were heathens,” and in his claim of United States “ultimate dominion” [domination]” over “heathen” Native nations and their lands. The U.S. Supreme Court has made the 15th century claims of a right of domination foundational to U.S. federal anti-Indian law and policy, and the claim of the “plenary power” of Congress over “Indians.” The claim of a right of domination must be abandoned and ended if there is to be any rightful relationship between the descendants of the colonizers and Indigenous nations and peoples today.

The patterns of domination that were unleashed on the planet by means of the Vatican documents have had devastating consequences that have been manifested in, for example, the theft and kidnapping of our children from the their loved ones and families, as well as murdered and missing Indigenous women, the expropriation of our lands and waters, the destruction of our original free existence by robbing us of our liberty and forcing us under a system of domination, the poisoning of our land, water, air, and our bloodstreams with toxic chemicals, the attempt to intentionally kill our languages (i.e., Linguicide), intentionally teaching the abuse of women and children, the destruction and desecration of our Sacred and Significant Places, to name just some of the ways in which the Holy See’s papal bulls of the fifteenth century have destructively impacted and continue to destructively impact our original nations and peoples.

How much land of our original nations does the Vatican currently hold as “property” throughout the Western Hemisphere? Every acre [or hectare] of land in the Western hemisphere that is in the possession of the Vatican and the Catholic Church is a result of the papal decrees of the fifteenth century that we are talking about here. If the Vatican is sincere, let’s talk about its land holdings, how they got hold of all that land of Indigenous nations and peoples, and how they are going to abandon their claim of a right of domination over those areas.

We at the ILI, in solidarity with Original Nations and Peoples, will continue to call upon the Holy See to not simply “renounce” the “doctrine” inherent in the papal bulls, but to abandon the papal bulls themselves by revoking them. We do this as part of our effort to publicize and challenge the patterns of domination globally and to challenge the patterns of domination expressed in the Johnson v. McIntosh ruling and in other legal decisions that are based on Johnson into the 21st century.

In a 2021 interview, Newcomb summed up how patterns of Christian domination were used by the colonial powers of Europe to justify claiming title to the lands of Africa and the Western Hemisphere as well as sovereignty over all Original Free and Independent Peoples living in those lands and throughout the globe since time immemorial.

When I think about the Vatican papal bulls, the papal documents that were issued by various Popes in the 15th century, and I think about the language that I examined in those documents and the patterns that are revealed by that language, it reminds me of claims of a right of domination in all kinds of eras across history, throughout history, throughout time. What I mean by that is if we go back and think about the language in the 1452 papal document Dum Diversas as a starting point, and think about the pattern of thought and behavior that’s revealed in the language that states: “invade, capture, vanquish, and subdue”, “reduce [their persons] to perpetual slavery” and “take away all their possessions and property”, [there is] this idea that they have the right to convert the land. In other words, to take the lands of Original Nations and Peoples, or what most folks know as Indigenous Nations and Peoples and all of the lands and territories, and take those from them and convert them into the property of those claiming a right to come in on top of them.

So if we dispense what the word Christian—Christian is a cover word—but it’s very clear that that is part of what was understood as the Christian Empire back then, at least that’s what they termed it. The [Inter Caetera] papal bull of May 4th, 1493, issued by Pope Alexander VI after Columbus made his voyage to the Caribbean or Bahamas and back to Europe, that particular document refers to the Christian Empire, Christiani imperii. When we think about these patterns of domination, empire, invade, capture, vanquish, subdue, as I already said, and look at how those kinds of patterns play out today and the behavior of the state governments of the world and the state systems of the planet, there is always at the base or foundation of every state system that I know of the claim that everyone and everything within the boundaries of the state territory is subject to that claimed authority on the part of the state.


Tour Group in the Capitol Rotunda, Washington, D.C., June 2021


Landing of Columbus, John Vanderlyn (1775-1852)

Christopher Columbus is depicted landing in the West Indies, on an island that the natives called Guanahani and he named San Salvador, on October 12, 1492. He raises the royal banner, claiming the land for his Spanish patrons, and stands bareheaded, with his hat at his feet, in honor of the sacredness of the event. The captains of the Niña and Pinta follow, carrying the banner of Ferdinand and Isabella. The crew displays a range of emotions, some searching for gold in the sand. Natives watch from behind a tree.
John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) had studied with Gilbert Stuart and was the first American painter to be trained in Paris, where he worked on this canvas for ten years with the help of assistants.

The difference for Original Nations and Peoples, those of our nations and peoples that were existing here prior to the invasion by Western Christendom of this continent and this hemisphere and other parts of the world, is that our ancestors were living a free and independent existence and had been living that kind of an existence for thousands and thousand of years, and had been evolving their languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions over that very lengthy period of time. All kinds of developments and primarily with the idea, based on our origin stories and traditions and teachings, that we were supposed to have a sacred or beneficial relationship with other life forms forever. That’s the kind of contrast to that invade, capture, vanquish, subdue mentality, the contrast between those two orientations toward reality.

The massive Landing of Columbus painting is “One of four scenes of early exploration in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.” Vanderlyn was commissioned by Congress in June 1836 to paint this work; it was installed in early 1847 where it hangs to this day, celebrating “claiming the land for his Spanish patrons ... with his hat at his feet, in honor of the sacredness of the event.... The crew displays a range of emotions, some searching for gold in the sand.” The inclusion of this painting speaks worlds about the true origins of the claimed right of title to the land and sovereignty over Original Free and Independent Peoples who pre-date the creation of the U.S. Constitution from time immemorial.

In a 15 Dec 2021 presentation made On the Doctrine of Christian Domination at the 3rd Annual Oceti Sakowin Titunwan Lakota Oyate Treaty Conference, Newcomb focuses on how language frames the conception and awareness of our shared reality through the power of metaphor.  As he states at 4:00, “The words that we use create and maintain the reality that we experience.” He goes on (beginning at 20:53) to explain how the word “government” in Latin is “dominationes”:

“Government” also means “Domination”. This is revealed in one of the vatican papal bulls. There's a sentence that says, “We trust in Him”—capital H on him “from whom empires and dominations and all good things proceed”. Actually in English, it says, “from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed.” When you go to the Latin and look at the Latin word for governments, its “dominationes” meaning dominations. So I often just use that Latin word instead of the English.

But this is important because the system of domination—if we understand that a state is a system of domination as revealed by Max Weber and many others, then any time that the state or a state is being referred to, a system of domination is being referred to, and so it's the domination called South Dakota or North Dakota or California or whatever because it's a state of domination. But they don't want to call it that. That reveals the true nature of the game so they put another metaphor on there and then they take your own name—they take the Dakota name and even appropriate that. Like in Hawaii, they take the name Hawaii, which belongs to the Kanaka Maoli People, and they steal that and put that on their state of domination and call the state of domination Hawaii.

There are those minds that are highly intelligent that know how to orchestrate all of these meanings and that's what we've been up against all of this time.

Steven Newcomb’s view-from-the-shore perspective is invaluable, providing as it does, the critical understanding of the history and legacy of the domination system that must end if the human project is to successfully evolve into our post-industrial-mind epoch.

by Dave Ratcliffe

State Censorship & Gagged Thought - Once Unthinkable, Now Run-Of-The-Mill

This is a copy as of 26 April 2023 of  Appendix XIII in History Will Not Absolve Us - Be Liberated From The United States of Denial.  Always reference the above link to see the current source list.

APPENDIX XIII

State Censorship & Gagged Thought
Once Unthinkable, Now Run-Of-The-Mill

See analysis from October 2021 concerning the actual definition of “disinformation”. Censorship through collusion between the federal government and big tech is the gravest assault—a “HATE CRIME” if you will—mounted against the US Constitution in this corporate empire state’s history. The selected list below only scratches the surface of the supreme danger posed by the complete corporate state extinguishment of the free exchange of ideas.

The concerted suppression of any perspective and analysis contrary to the official narrative is the actual source of increasing danger. Censorship is the ultimate tool to smother and extinguish the free exchange of ideas and from this the freedom to think. Robert Heinlein captured the essential power exercised by censorship in his 1949 novel, Revolt in 2010. The story revolved around efforts to overthrow a 100-year theocratic totalitarian United States of America:

I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Propaganda wants no argument. It’s not like oratory in ancient Greece where one speaker would follow another, they would disagree publicly, and the people would listen and make up their own minds. That’s not how propaganda works. Propaganda wants to monopolize all the space around it. It wants to monopolize every mind within its reach. It wants no contradiction. Those who dissent, those who disagree are either censored or vilified or both and that’s one sign of the fact that we’re living in the shadow of a totalitarian roll out, the likes of which the world has never known because this is global.

 
 
We’re suing Facebook at the moment. We’re suing Facebook for censoring us. But Facebook has a right to censor people. Facebook is a private company. If they don’t like what you say they can throw you off. But in our case, what we argue is that the government instructed them to the censor us. Adam Schiff, who’s the head of the Intelligence Committee, told them to censor all vaccine misinformation. And Facebook has said that it is coordinating its censorship with CDC and with WHO, and with the US State Department.

 

In our country, private companies can censor you, but the government is not allowed to censor you. What our argument in our court case against Facebook says is you are acting as a government surrogate. So you are censoring us because the government told you to censor us and because they don’t like our political speech. That’s a violation of the First Amendment. That’s one of the approaches we’re bringing but we have many, many, many lawsuits right now.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Corona Committee, The Great Recall - Intl 17 Feb 2021

by Dave Ratcliffe

Deaths from C19 Vaccines

This is a copy as of 7 April 2023 of  Appendix I in History Will Not Absolve Us - Be Liberated From The United States of Denial.  Always reference the above link to see the current source list.

APPENDIX I

Deaths from C19 Vaccines

As of 7 April 2023, the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has logged 2,458,057 COVID Vaccine Adverse Event Reports. Established in 1990, VAERS is a voluntary reporting system that has been estimated to account for only 1% of vaccine injuries (see page 6 of the Lazarus Report). For 7 April 2023, the system recorded 35,096 COVID Vaccine Reported Deaths.

Given that a small percentage of genuine vaccine injuries—including death—are recorded in VAERS, the actual lethality of these injections begs a number of beyond-hideous questions. Why is there no reporting on this? Why is this not page-1 banner headlines on every newspaper and news program every day? Why has the FDA continued to approve more and more shots, especially for healthy younger and middle-aged adults and children? Why has Covid Czar Ashish Jha continued to say these injections are safe and effective?

A breakdown of the VAERS data is listed in the OpenVAERS Project, allowing browsing and searching of reports without needing to compose advanced searches:

 

As of 25 February 2023, the WHO-sponsored European Union Drug Regulating Authorities adverse reaction website, EudraVigilance (European database of suspected adverse drug reaction reports) reported 5,315,063 injuries including 50,663 deaths and 2,335,820 serious injuries following injections of five experimental COVID-19 shots:

“Reaction Group” fatalities chart

“The European Medicines Agency publishes these data so that its stakeholders, including the general public, can access information that European regulatory authorities use to review the safety of a medicine or active substance. Transparency is a key guiding principle of the Agency.”

AUDIT EVERY DEATH CERTIFICATE

In October 2020, COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Retrospective was published in the journal Public Health Policy Initiative by the Institute for Pure and Applied Knowledge.

In March of 2021, the COVID research team took the liberty of collecting, organizing, and publishing hundreds of references in this wide-ranging, peer-reviewed magnum opus, COVID-19: Restoring Public Trust During A Health Crisis. The peer-reviewed scientific literature and clinical evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that asymptomatic transmission is a failed theory, PCR testing is fatally flawed, evidence-based treatments exist, projection models have been massively inaccurate, clinical trials for the experimental biologics have not demonstrated safety or effectiveness, and that the greatest freedoms under assault are compassion, love, and moral courage in medicine.

In June of 2021, the Santa Clara County California public health department performed a partial audit of death certificate records where COVID was listed as the cause of death and found that the data was hyper-inflated by 22%.

In July of 2021, the Alameda County California public health department performed a partial audit of death certificate records where COVID was listed as the cause of death and found that the data was hyper-inflated by 25%.

Partial audits of death certificates entail removing obvious reporting inaccuracies such as car accidents, physical accidents, etc. being counted as COVID caused deaths.

Full audits of death certificates, which my research team has been calling for since October of 2020, entail a review of full medical records, including any autopsy results, so the cause of death can be definitively confirmed.

Santa Clara County and Alameda County California are large population centers and prove our point that the changes adopted by the CDC in violation of federal law led to inaccurate data that significantly hyper-inflated case, hospitalization, and death counts. To make matters worse, these inaccuracies were rewarded with a higher Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement and no consequences as yet for the massive errors that have compromised all published COVID data.

 

 

The image above displays 5 columns of COVID data published through February 6, 2022.

Looking left to right, column one displays that COVID death count published by the CDC. This is the total number of deaths published using the March 24th, 2020 COVID Alert No. 2.

The 2nd column displays a projected value assuming that soft audits of all death certificates would be similar to what occurred in Santa Clara & Alameda Counties and produce a 25% reduction in death counts.

The middle column displays the projected maximum reduction in death counts if a full audit of all records was based upon the 2003 death certificate reporting handbooks published by the CDC and still in use for all causes of death except COVID. It is important to note that the CDC states as of February 6, 2022 that, “For over 5% of these deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.” This statement has remained unchanged since at least July 2021.

The 4th column is the total number of deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) as of February 4, 2022.

The 5th column is the estimated number of actual deaths based upon the case filing filed by attorney Tom Renz in the US District Court of Alabama on July 19, 2021, which asserts under penalty of perjury that data being reported to VAERS is significantly under reported by a factor of 5 at the very minimum.

Collectively, this graphic contends that a full audit of all COVID death certificates could reveal that more people have died in connection with the experimental COVID inoculations than due to complications from the SARS-CoV-2 infection had federal laws not been violated, hyper-inflating COVID data published by the CDC.

 
A ‘Cover-Up of Evidence of Mass Murder’:
The CDC Appears to Be Removing VAERS Records
The Vigilant Fox, Daily Clout, 21 Dec 2022
“It’s not an accident they would do this.”
Something strange is going on with the VAERS system. Reports that were present three months ago are now inexplicably missing. And fewer than 4% of adverse events recorded in V-Safe have made their way to VAERS. This is the CDC’s database; Dr. Rochelle Walensky is in charge of it. And the agency’s failure to properly manage VAERS is suppressing the already-alarming safety signal of the Covid-19 shots.

Above are the lower-limit reports of injuries and deaths. Concerning the upper limit estimate of deaths caused by the C19 “Vaccines”:
Experts estimate 20 million are already dead due to COVID Vaccination & over 2 billion injured, The Exposé, 1 Oct 2022
as described by Dr. Roger Hodkinson here: 20 Million Dead from the Jab, 2.2 Billion Injuries – Analyst Estimates.
Complete film is here: Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson with Dr. Roger Hodkinson; Fertility, Cancer, Flight Safety and SADS, 5 Oct 2022

Until Proven Otherwise - Two Cardiologists Expose Big Pharma, Justus R. Hope, Repurposed Drugs: Powers & Possibilities, 19 Dec 2022
“Until Proven Otherwise” Two World Renowned Cardiologists independently reach the same medical conclusions. US American Peter McCullough, MD, MPH, and British Aseem Malhotra, MD state that their medical opinion is that the sudden deaths, especially in young people, are caused by the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, until proven otherwise. Nov 2022
In order of appearance:

by Dave Ratcliffe

C19 Vaccine Deaths: Analysis & Reports

This is a copy as of 25 April 2023 of  Appendix IV in History Will Not Absolve Us - Be Liberated From The United States of Denial.  Always reference the above link to see the current source list.

APPENDIX IV

C19 Vaccine Deaths: Analysis & Reports
The law is literary
Here is a beautiful court ruling during a national emergency.
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943):

“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever increasing severity....[t]hose who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only unanimity of the graveyard.”

In our current national and worldwide “emergency,” the suppression of dissent in the face of compulsory shots and medical protocols, and the suppression of a variety of treatments for Covid19 has killed millions.

—Warner Mendenhall, 25 Sep 2022

Presented here is a partial list of correlation between US Emergency Use Authorization experimental injections and death from August 2021 to ongoing.

See the complete set of articles comprising The Chloroquine Wars in Appendix 7.

by Dave Ratcliffe

C19 Vaccine Injuries: Analysis & Reports

This is a copy as of 15 April 2023 of  Appendix V in History Will Not Absolve Us - Be Liberated From The United States of Denial.  Always reference the above link to see the current source list.

APPENDIX V

C19 Vaccine Injuries: Analysis & Reports

Presented here is a partial list of correlation between US Emergency Use Authorization experimental injections and medical injury from March 2022 to ongoing.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Do No Harm

Sasha Latypova is a Soviet expat. A brief background describes her experience as an ex-pharma/biotech professional with 25 years experience in clinical trials, clinical technologies, and regulatory approvals. She owned/managed several contract research organizations, worked for 60+ pharma companies worldwide, and interacted with FDA as part of a scientific industry consortium on improving cardiac safety assessments in clinical trials. In her own words: “I am a retired pharmaceutical R&D executive. I worked in pharma clinical trials and ran several clinical research organizations working for 60+ pharmas worldwide. My clients included Pfizer, J&J, AstraZeneca and many other large and smaller companies. I also worked with the FDA and helped my clients prepare regulatory data submissions. I have an MBA degree from Dartmouth. Regarding bioweapons, all of this is based on me reading publicly available information - there are numerous DOD and academic studies, reports, and textbooks on this topic available online.”

In Oct 2022, Latypova observed in C-19 Injections, Regulatory and Manufacturing Fraud [PDF of slides presented]:

The intentional part—it’s fully intentional. But they ask me is it depopulation or genocide? I can’t get into the head of a criminal. Nobody can. So, the purpose of why they’re doing this, I don’t know. But I know for sure it’s intentional. That’s what the data shows and that’s what their behavior shows and all the documents. Of course all these government officials in CDC and FDA and NIH, they all know. They all know how many people have died. They have great data to follow it. They’ve known it since day one. They followed thousands of deaths and they’re under no confusion about this. So the fact that they continue is just intentional.

The injurious and lethal consequences of the experimental injections are treated as unthinkable by unelected public health officials.
In The Canaries in the Human DNA Mine, Julian Gillespie (LLB, BJuris, 8 Mar 2023) identifies and analyzes the criminal intent of changing human DNA

Abstract:
Decades of sophisticated and detailed legislation created to safeguard Humanity from exposure to Genetically Modified Organisms, was ignored or legislated away in an instant when SARS-CoV-2 arrived. This was done with intention, and not for the good of Humanity. The LNP-modRNA ‘vaccines’ always fulfilled the legal definitions for being categorised as Genetically Modified Organisms. Pfizer, Moderna, and regulators all knew this. The claims by Pfizer and Moderna repeated by regulators and complicit politicians that modRNAs do not enter the cell nucleus, and reverse transcribe into the Human Genome, were lies, made knowingly. Over four decades of scientific knowledge that started with a Nobel Prize only pointed to modRNAs integrating into the Human Genome. The WHO and regulatory experts everywhere did not want to inform the global population about these facts.

David Hughes analyzes What is in the so-called COVID-19 “Vaccines”? Part 1: Evidence of a Global Crime Against Humanity (International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research 3 Sep 2022):

Abstract
Between July 2021 and August 2022, evidence of undisclosed ingredients in the COVID-19 “vaccines” was published by at least 26 researchers/research teams in 16 different countries across five continents using spectroscopic and microscopic analysis. Despite operating largely independently of one another, their findings are remarkably similar and highlight the clear and present danger that the world’s population has been lied to regarding the contents of the COVID-19 “vaccines”. This raises grave questions about the true purpose of the dangerous experimental injections that have so far been shot into 5.33 billion people (over two thirds of the human race), including children, apparently without their informed consent regarding the contents. Surprise findings include sharp-edged geometric structures, fibrous or tube-like structures, crystalline formations, “microbubbles”, and possible self-assembling nanotechnology. The blood of people who have received one or more COVID-19 “vaccines” appears, in case after case, to contain foreign bodies and to be seriously degraded, with red blood cells typically in Rouleaux formation. Taken together, these 26 studies make a powerful case for the full force of scientific investigation to be brought to bear on the COVID-19 “vaccine” contents. If the findings of these 26 studies are confirmed, then the political implications are nothing short of revolutionary: a global crime against humanity has been committed, in which every government, every regulator, every establishment media organization, and all the professions have been complicit.

Daniel Santiago is a pharmacist in Orlando, Florida.  Here he summarizes A Partial Answer to the Question Posed by David A. Hughes, PhD, in the Article: “What is in the so-called COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’? Part 1: Evidence of a Global Crime Against Humanity” (International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research 3 Sep 2022):

Abstract
In this comment, originally thought of as a “Letter to the Editor”, I want to address the opening question posed by David A. Hughes in the immediately preceding entry in this journal: “What is in the so-called COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’?” The views from under the microscope, ordinary light or electron scanning, all show undisclosed foreign objects that seem to activate themselves and aggregate into complexes that disrupt blood flow in all organ systems. With the spectral analysis using electron microscopy it is possible to determine the specific elements and relative quantities of the elements in those foreign entities. In this comment, I want to focus on the absence of certain elements that are universally present in the proteins of naturally occurring life forms from humans right down to bacteria and even the proteins formed from viruses. What is missing from the spectral analyses of the foreign elements in the main COVID-19 vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna for certain, and probably also missing from the other experimental products being widely distributed that are known to contain foreign aggregates of strange materials similar to those found in the Moderna and Pfizer injections, are the elements nitrogen and phosphorous. This is revealing because all natural DNA, RNA, and their protein products contain those missing elements. Nitrogen for protein synthesis and phosphorus for DNA, RNA, and energy transfer. Therefore, their absence from the foreign structures seen under many different microscopes in all of the COVID-19 so-called “vaccines” that have been examined, and also found in blood samples of persons injected with the Moderna and Pfizer concoctions, proves that these intentionally manufactured self-assembling components, built mainly from carbon-based materials used in computing and super-conductors, are connected with the avant-guard evolutionary theory and experimentation with what is known as XNA, Xeno (Greek for “foreign”), Nucleic Acid. Most of the relevant information is behind significant paywalls in esoteric journals specializing in this peculiar branch of highly theoretical and experimental chemistry. To leap to the bottom-line of my urgent comment on the Hughes’ paper, the edgy modified mRNA with N1-methylpseudouridine (Ψ) replacing the naturally occurring RNA nucleotide uridine (U) at least 728 times in each one of the 30 billion mRNA molecules in each of the Pfizer injections is an exmplary XNA. In this comment I want to explain why the inclusion of such an XNA may be the clue that leads to the unraveling of the already devastating and potentially exterminating impact of the ongoing COVID-19 experiment on the human race.

Dr. Roger Hodkinson is a general practitioner and a medical specialist in pathology, a national pathology board examiner, and laboratory accreditation inspector. A graduate of Cambridge University and a Fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP) and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (FRCPC), he began voicing his concerns about our upside-down world in 2020. In the following 25 Aug 2022 recording, Why Is No One Talking About Sudden Dead Doctor Syndrome?, he speaks with Laura-Lynn Tyler Thompson (segment begins at 44:17 and runs to 1:23:56; mp3: 39:39). The following excerpts focus on the very future promulgation of the human species in terms of fertility and infertility in both women and men.

This has to stop, not just for children, but for the entire population. It’s the most catastrophic intervention in medical history. It’s at that scale of enormity.... As a pathologist with a very full, extensive career, I have opened up hundreds of uteruses that have come from the operating room. The gynecologists take it out. They don’t open it up. We do as pathologists in order to look at the pathology, to take sections and look at them microscopically.
I can tell you that the endometrium is the lushest, most fragile tissue in the entire human body. You can put your finger in it, just like you can put your finger in the brain. It’s extremely delicate and it’s meant to be so as a nurturing environment for the develop—the fertilized ovum that comes down the fallopian tube and implants into the endometrium. The blood vessels in the endometrium are exquisitely fragile. Witness, how easy it is to make them bleed; a woman’s menstrual period every month.
Those vessels are all lined by a receptor for the spike protein. The receptor is called the ACE2 receptor. So it should come as no surprise to hear of all these menstrual abnormalities that are happening after vaccination. Because the spike protein being massively overproduced in some women, hones in on many blood vessels, including the blood vessels in the lining of the uterus causing them to thrombose or bleed. Hence the reason for the menstrual abnormalities post vaccination, so called.

But that’s merely the backdrop. That fertilized ovum that’s traveling down, hoping to be received by welcoming, lush endometrium, suddenly finds itself landing in a space that’s been devastated. Not at all welcoming. And so the likelihood of that ovum implanting and having a successful pregnancy is much lower. And that’s one of the principle reasons I think why we are seeing a decline in fertility for women.
The other reason is that the spike protein—the antibodies directed against the spike protein—which is the intended consequence of this clot shot, those antibodies against the spike protein happen to cross-react to a particular protein in the placenta called syncytin. And that attack against the developing placenta would be another reason for the developing fetus not to survive.
But the story gets much, much more serious than that. Just a digression for a minute. Before getting into the developing female fetus. Spermatozoa counts have been dropping internationally for decades for reasons that are unclear. But we do know that superimposed upon that, there’s an additional 15% reduction in the concentration of spermatozoa following injection with the clot shot.... So that compounds the problem of course of infertility because that’s only the count by the way. It doesn’t reflect the actual viability and metabolism of an individual spermmatozoon. It’s simply the crude count. There may well be other functional abnormalities that are not being studied.
Anyway, to get to the big point, the big point is this: we know from the freedom of information requested for the Japanese as a result of the Pfizer [Biodistribution Report] submission there. That was done by Dr. Byram Bridle out of Guelph. We do know that that study that was presented to the Japanese and released very reluctantly by Pfizer, showed that nanoparticles without the mRNA inside them, just the naked particles, when injected into rats, those particles honed on the rat ovaries to a very significant degree. The third highest concentration in the rat was in the rat ovaries.
Now, baby girls are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have in their entire life. They don’t make any more when they’re born. It’s about a million or so. And so each one of those ova is incredibly precious. So there could be an inflammatory attack going on against the ovary of a developing female fetus because we also know that nanoparticles of that size are well known to pass through what we call the placental barrier, the thing that keeps the baby safe from all kinds of noxious things. So these nanoparticles from the clot shot that are known to be inflammatory and known to concentrate in rat ovaries—by the way, not studied in humans, conveniently—despite knowing that those nanoparticles known to be inflammatory are getting through the placenta and could be, again, not studied, could be attacking the ovary of the developing female fetus. Translation: this may not be simply an effect on fertility. It could be causing infertility only manifest 20 years later when that little girl becomes of reproductive age. This is the scale. This is the scale of stuff that is still not studied, things with gigantic consequences. The only saving grace is that it seems, at least in the states, that parents are smartening up and are choosing not to get their children vaccinated.

 

Two observable facts have helped some people see through the fog of this war, and continue to help more people see through it all the time:

  1. FDA and other governments’ drug regulatory agencies have not withdrawn authorizations or approvals of the drugs, devices and protocols yet, despite millions of injuries and deaths experienced by recipients of the products during the initial deployment phase (January to November 2020, including the fraudulent clinical trials for the injections) and since the general deployment of the injections that began in December 2020. If the products were intended for medicinal, healing or protective purposes, and were subject to regulation governing research and development, production and use of medical drugs and devices, FDA and its counterparts in other countries would have stopped the programs as soon as the injuries and deaths became apparent. Instead, they have refused to even answer the question: “What is the stopping condition?”
  2. Independent third-party verification of vial contents is prohibited under the terms of the DOD-mediated contracts between purchasing governments and manufacturing corporations. In typical drug regulation frameworks, according to Sasha Latypova, independent researchers can and do purchase products from manufacturers to verify that contents match labels and corroborate or disprove claims about safety and efficacy.
— Katherine Watt, Stopping conditions. 45-page version of the core US statutory history and legal implications. Bailiwick News, 22 Nov 2022

by Dave Ratcliffe

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW GLOBAL - Is History Repeating Itself?
2023 5-part Documentary

Complete annotated transcripts of this 5-part documentary—see TABLE OF CONTENTS—were produced to increase visibility and access to the wealth of wisdom and critical analysis presented herein:

Episode 1. Here We Go Again On Steroids, 30 Jan 2023
Episode 2. Anyone Who Wants To Start A War Has To Lie, 31 Jan 2023
Episode 3. Breaking The Veil Of The Real Conspirators, 1 Feb 2023
Episode 4. This Time Around We’re All Jews, 2 Feb 2023
Episode 5. Never Give In – Never Give Up, 3 Feb 2023

Director Vera Sharav describes her perspective on this:

During these de-stabilizing three years, I have come to believe, like many other Holocaust survivors, that our survival was for a purpose. Our fear is that we may be the last witnesses who remember how:

  • A highly educated society and its exemplary academic, scientific, and cultural institutions were perverted;
  • Moral norms and legal safeguards were discarded;
  • The fabric of society was torn apart as segments of the population were disqualified;
  • Decent people became agents of industrialized mass murder.

The survivors and family members in this documentary share their knowledge, and their painful memories of the unprecedented industrial-scale human catastrophe. We believe that the purpose of our survival is not only to remember; but to warn others about how fear and propaganda condition people to follow repressive – even murderous – government dictates.

  • We know how the suspension of personal freedom, the suspension of civil rights, and the silencing of dissent, devolve into genocide.

Current invocations of “depopulation solutions” are chilling and foreboding.

  • Depopulation is invoked to solve supposed problems such as: “limited resources” and “global warming” and “climate change”;
  • An unprecedented mandatory vaccination campaign subjected hundreds of millions of people to an experimental, genetically manipulated injectable product;
  • The product’s safety and efficacy were untested;
  • Its ingredients are top secret;
  • And its promoters referred to this vaccine as the “Final Solution” to the pandemic.

I interpret these ominous verbal references as veiled codes for another planned human catastrophe. That realization propelled me to embark on a project I had never engaged in before – a documentary with the intention to open people’s minds to the current, ominous, genocidal “solutions” that a band of global oligarchs have set in motion. Another important objective of the documentary was to expose the false narrative that has (for decades) obscured the active participation of multinational corporations, global financiers, and family dynasties – who facilitated and profiteered from the genocidal Nazi regime and its slave labor force.

 

Never Again is Now Global is the only documentary dealing with the Holocaust directed by a Holocaust survivor. In addition to survivors, our documentary brings together testimonies of children and grandchildren of survivors and victims; German descendants of victims as well as a grandson of Nazi scientists. The participants who expressed their alarm about the current nefarious global operation include doctors, scientists, a Rabbi, and African American freedom fighters.

 

Uwe Alschner is a historian who gave testimony in the 5th Episode, Never Give In—Never Give Up:

This documentary was produced to facilitate a discussion within the general public about similarities between events leading up to the Holocaust and the present events all around the world in what was called “the Covid-Pandemic”. As is laid out in the Report of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, presented on September 27, 1979: “A survivor sees himself or herself as a messenger and guardian of secrets entrusted to them. A survivor feels he or she may be the last to remember, the last to warn....”
This documentary is intended to serve as a warning to Humanity: Never Again Is Now Global. We encourage you to watch and share this important documentary. However as a disclaimer at the start of the film points out, the documentary “contains true life images of atrocities then and now. Viewer discretion is advised.
 

Demonstrating how the past is prologue to today, Attorney Warren Mendenhall points up “a beautiful court ruling during a national emergency... In our current national and worldwide ‘emergency,’ the suppression of dissent in the face of compulsory shots and medical protocols, and the suppression of a variety of treatments for Covid19 has killed millions.” From Sep 2022, The law is literary:

“Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever increasing severity....[t]hose who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only unanimity of the graveyard.”

The toll of deaths[I][II][III] and Injuries from the experimental injections is staggering and, for too many, “unbelievable”. Attorney Todd Callender describes some of the “unbelieveable” dynamic of what IS occurring in hospitals:

... why do I say the hospitals are murdering people? Because I’m involved in trying to get people out of them. As part of my analysis, in trying to help people escape the ICU intensive care, I’ve stumbled on a variety of things that are really quite interesting from a legal perspective. And that is that in 2008, the US Government merged Public Health with Law Enforcement, with the Judiciary and with Corrections. All four of them are now under one roof.... My client went in with an aneurysm. The client was nonetheless treated in the exact same format I’m telling you about: with the Midazolam, with the Remdesivir. They put him in the Covid ward. They never had Covid. But what they did, instead, was they they doped him up on morphine and fentanyl and a variety of a cocktail of drugs. I called the hospital’s lawyer and said, Listen, we want to move him to other care. And the hospital’s lawyer told me, No, your client is going to die in our hospital. This was his words.... Open Secrets, Mar 2022

In Episode 5, Scott Schara gives testimony of how his daughter Grace was murdered in the hospital. In his second segment, Scott explains the horror that has seared his soul:

You have this white coat phenomenon. Grace died because I trusted the white coat and I don’t want anybody to fall trap to that. And the bigger picture is, the elites believe: “We’ve got to control the population because the planet can’t sustain itself.”[15a][15b] So they invent COVID, and then they use it as a cover, as Step One to implement this massive agenda.[16] It’s all out there. But I mean, people don’t want to believe this. And I didn’t either. I mean, you think “it can’t be this bad”. But it is that bad.[17]
I mean, I am just the dad who is learning this in real time and I’m awake now and once you’re awake, you can’t stop sharing this. This has become my life. It’s all consuming because you just want to—of course, you just want to help other people.[18a][18b]
Jessica called me after one of the interviews and she said, Dad, Grace is looking down from you and saying: “Way to go Earthly Dad.” The numbers are staggering. The government has paid out the hospitals already as in the form of COVID treatment bonuses, including the death bonuses, four trillion.[19a] This is in the United States.[19b] Four trillion dollars has already been paid out to implement this agenda.[19c] We’re the only country with over a million deaths attributable to COVID.[19d] We’re the only country where Remdesivir is the recommended treatment.[19e] The only one.
The single most important thing that shocked me is how corrupt our government is. They are so corrupt. There’s not one thing that they say that you can trust. It’s just mind blowing to me. It is like zombies walking around. “We need a 16th booster? let’s go. I can hardly wait to get my next booster.” I mean, are you kidding me? Their neighbor dies. The person’s been perfectly healthy, their neighbor dies. Don’t you connect the—don’t you even think? Well, he just got the jab two weeks ago. “Well, that has nothing to do with his death.” I mean, my gosh, this stuff is, it’s just happening right in front of you, but you cannot—you refuse to connect the dots.[IXa][IXb][IXc][IXd][IXd]
That is also part of the banality of evil. They’ve trained critical thinking out of the school system. But if you don’t cut off the head of the cobra, it keeps coming back. But what’s the head of the Cobra? It isn’t these individuals carrying out the work. It isn’t that they shouldn’t have consequences and be accountable. I’m not against that at all. But eugenics never died. Until that stops, and that’s in the heart of men. So until the hearts are changed, this cannot be stopped. History is always doomed to repeat itself because we don’t deal with the head of the cobra, which is the heart, which is the heart of man. Our research is: this is a worldwide holocaust.

Scott Schara is doing everything he can to help others wake up. He continues developing Our Amazing Grace and in February 2023 began the video channel, Deprogramming With Graces Dad. Recent interviews of note include:

 

by Dave Ratcliffe

Forest of the Fallen

Forest of the Fallen
https://theforestofthefallen.com/

Forest of the Fallen is a silent display.

Set up and then left to work its intention on all who are open to witness and interact with it; It is not a protest, it is not a database. It is solely a platform where we share only cv19 injection deaths and injuries that I have personally found, only where stories have been publicly shared and published on multiple sources. Some have been personally shared to me, but the majority are not.

The Forest has no need for any marketing, advertising or spruiking! It propagates alone and speaks for itself entirely.

As an initiative, I intend for us to work in unity, together to help spread the most important message to all. We must gently alert all we can, that this information is being censored. We are not offering medical advice.

The Forest displays the public domain stories of cv19 “vaccinated” people. As they are all vaccinated, it is literally, actually a completely vaccinated display, and should NEVER be referred to as an ‘anti-vax’ display.

 

Forest of the Fallen spreading across Australia.
Please share this video and the website for those who would like to display in their area, Meryl Dorey, Informed Choice, 23 Apr 2023

by Dave Ratcliffe

Katherine Watt: Orientation for new readers

This excerpt is the beginning of Orientation for new readers. Text and video links.

Katherine Watt on Baliwick News:

There is a lot of material here at Bailiwick.

If you’re new, here’s some orientation.

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a paralegal and writer.

I do legal research and writing to support civil and criminal cases brought in American courts, and to educate and mobilize more people to exert social and political pressure on federal and state legislators, prosecutors and judges, to terminate the interlocking control-and-cull campaigns operated under a fraudulent national emergency framework; hold accountable the US Government officials who pseudo-authorize, actually-fund, and run the programs; and set up relief programs for injured victims and survivors of the dead.

I post sacred art with my writing because I’m Catholic, the art is beautiful, the saints are inspiring, and without the faith that my father passed down to me, I could not do this work.

If you’re a new reader and want to read a few posts to get mostly caught up, please start with these:

Sasha Latypova, writing at Due Diligence and Art, Substack

Patrick Delaney, writing at LifeSite News

DailyExpose:

Legal history in other formats:

If you want to go back and follow the legal research trail from January 2022, all of my work is compiled by month in footnoted PDFs and those are available at Bailiwick’s Wordpress backup site. (Scroll down past the Affidavit of Noncompliance and Selected Essays to 2022 Bailiwick News.)

by Dave Ratcliffe

Katherine Watt: LEGAL HISTORY - AMERICAN DOMESTIC BIOTERRORISM PROGRAM

Katherine Watt on Baliwick News:

I’m not a lawyer. I’m a paralegal and writer.

I do legal research and writing to support civil and criminal cases brought in American courts, and to educate and mobilize more people to exert social and political pressure on federal and state legislators, prosecutors and judges, to terminate the interlocking control-and-cull campaigns operated under a fraudulent national emergency framework; hold accountable the US Government officials who pseudo-authorize, actually-fund, and run the programs; and set up relief programs for injured victims and survivors of the dead.

Written/compiled by Katherine Watt, this timeline was published on 19 Dec 2022: Biomedical security state and state-run bioterrorism programs: six American statutory frameworks. 14-page summary: nine pages of text with five pages of endnotes. (14-page PDF). It begins with:

LEGAL HISTORY - AMERICAN DOMESTIC BIOTERRORISM PROGRAM
Enabling statutes, regulations, executive orders, guidance documents and budget allocations.

 

At least six Congressionally-authorized statutory frameworks and related budget appropriations, reinforced through Presidential Executive Orders and related executive branch declarations,[1] and implemented through hundreds of regulatory amendments,[2] mostly promulgated through the Federal Register since 1969, authorized and funded a coordinated US Government attack (actors), on the American people (targets), using toxic biological and chemical material (bioagents/biochemical weapons) distributed across state borders labelled as "Covid-19 vaccines."[3]

These biochemical weapons have been fraudulently marketed by the US Government and pharmaceutical weapons manufacturers including Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson and their manufacturing subcontractors as "safe and effective vaccines," following the transfer of the US Government's Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, formerly housed in the Department of Defense (DOD), to the Public Health Emergency (PHE) Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) Medical Countermeasures (MCM) program.­

The American chemical and biological warfare program is now housed in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and jointly operated by DOD, HHS, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, most other federal agencies and their subordinate departments, divisions, offices, authorities, enterprises, committees, advisory boards and employees.

Six of the enabling statutes, in chronological order of Congressional enactment:

1 1983-present, relevant Presidential Executive Orders, proclamations and related acts, partial list: Executive Order 12452, 1983 (expanded list of communicable diseases subjecting citizens to forcible apprehension and detention under HHS Secretary quarantine authority); EO 13139, 1999 (forced experimental, unapproved 'vaccines' on armed forces without informed consent); Proclamation 7463, 2001 (Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks, renewed annually since); EO 13295, 2003 (added symptomatic SARS to quarantinable communicable diseases); EO 13375, 2005 (added symptomatic influenza to quarantinable communicable diseases; National Security Presidential Directive 51, 2007; EO 13527, 2009 (Establishing Federal Capability for the Timely Provision of Medical Countermeasures Following a Biological Attack); EO 13601, 2012 (National Defense Resources Preparedness); EO 13674, 2014 (added asymptomatic, suspected SARS to quarantinable communicable diseases); EO 13747, 2016 (Advancing the Global Health Security Agenda to Achieve a World Safe and Secure from Infectious Disease Threats); EO 13887, 2019 (Modernizing Influenza Vaccines in the United States to Promote National Security and Public Health; directed rapid-deployment mRNA/DNA/LNP/nanotech drugs and devices); Proclamation 9994, 2020 (Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Novel Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Outbreak, renewed annually since); EO 13909, 2020 (Prioritizing and Allocating Health and Medical Resources to Respond to the Spread of COVID-19): EO 13910, 2020 (Preventing Hoarding of Health and Medical Resources To Respond to the Spread of COVID-19); EO 13911, 2020 (Delegating Additional Authority Under the Defense Production Act With Respect to Health and Medical Resources To Respond to the Spread of COVID-19); EO 14047, 2021 (added measles to the list of quarantinable communicable diseases); EO 14081, 2022 (Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy.)

2 1981-present, relevant HHS Proposed Rules, Final Rules, Notices, and Guidance for Industry, partial list: HHS-Food and Drug Administration Final Rule Protections for Human Subjects; Prisoners Used as Subjects in Research (1981); HHS-FDA Final Rule Protection of Human Subjects; Informed Consent (1981); HHS Interim Final Rule: Informed Consent for Human Drugs and Biologics; Determination that Informed Consent is Not Feasible (1990); 1991 Common Rule (1991); HHS-FDA Guidance for Human Somatic Cell Therapy and Gene Therapy (1998); HHS Interim Final Rule - Human Drugs and Biologics; Determination That Informed Consent Is NOT Feasible or Is Contrary to the Best Interests of Recipients; Revocation of 1990 Interim Final Rule; Establishment of New Interim Final Rule (1999); HHS-FDA Draft Guidance Re: Emergency Use Authorization of Medical Products (2005); HHS-FDA Interim Final Rule, Medical Devices; Exception From General Requirements for Informed Consent (2006) HHS-FDA Guidance: Gene Therapy Clinical Trials - Observing Subjects for Delayed Adverse Effects (2006); HHS-FDA Guidance - Emergency Use Authorization of Medical Products (2007); HHS Interim Final Rule - FDA Exceptions or Alternatives to Labeling Requirements for Products Held by the Strategic National Stockpile. (2007); HHS-FDA Final Rule: Medical Devices; Exception From General Requirements for Informed Consent (2011); HHS-FDA Guidance: Potency Tests for Cellular and Gene Therapy Products (2011); HHS-FDA Preclinical Assessment of Investigational Cellular and Gene Therapy Products (2013); HHS-FDA Guidance: Decisions for Investigational Device Exemption Clinical Investigations (2014); HHS-FDA Considerations for the Design of Early-Phase Clinical Trials of Cellular and Gene Therapy Products (2015); HHS-FDA Guidance: Design and Analysis of Shedding Studies for Virus or Bacteria-Based Gene Therapy and Oncolytic Products (2015); HHS Final Rule - HHS Clinical Trials Registration and Results (2016); HHS Workshop Summary - The Nation's Medical Countermeasure Stockpile: Opportunities to Improve the Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Sustainability of the CDC Strategic National Stockpile (2016); HHS-FDA Guidance: Emergency Use Authorization of Medical Products and Related Authorities (2017); HHS Final Rule - Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (2017); HHS Final Rule - Control of Communicable Diseases (2017); HHS-FDA Guidance: IRB Waiver or Alteration of Informed Consent for Clinical Investigations Involving No More Than Minimal Risk to Human Subjects (2017); HHS-FDA Guidance: Use of Real-World Evidence to Support Regulatory Decision-Making for Medical Devices (2017); HHS Final Rule - Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects: Six Month Delay of the General Compliance Date of Revisions While Allowing the Use of Three Burden-Reducing Provisions During the Delay Period (2018); HHS-FDA Guidance: Development and Licensure of Vaccines to Prevent COVID-19 (2020); HHS-FDA Guidance: Emergency Use Authorization for Vaccines to Prevent COVID-19 (2020); HHS-FDA Guidance: Real-World Data - Assessing Electronic Health Records and Medical Claims Data To Support Regulatory Decision-Making for Drug and Biological Products (2021); HHS-FDA Guidance: Real-World Data - Assessing Registries to Support Regulatory Decision-Making for Drug and Biological Products (2021); HHS Interim Final Rule - Possession, Use, and Transfer of Select Agents and Toxins–Addition of SARS-CoV/SARS-CoV-2 Chimeric Viruses Resulting From Any Deliberate Manipulation of SARS-CoV-2 To Incorporate Nucleic Acids Coding for SARS-CoV Virulence Factors to the HHS List of Select Agents and Toxins (2021); HHS Final Rule - National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program: Adding the Category of Vaccines Recommended for Pregnant Women to the Vaccine Injury Table (2022); HHS-FDA Proposed Rules: Protection of Human Subjects and Institutional Review Boards (2022)

32018: "Agent or bioagent is used broadly to refer to any product created using biological components that may be intended to cause harm. In the context of synthetic biology, an agent could be a pathogen, a toxin, or even a biological component, such as a genetic construct or a biochemical pathway, that may be developed with the intent to harm a human target; Actor is used to refer to individuals or groups who may seek to effect an attack; Target is typically used to refer to the human beings harmed (or intended to be harmed) in an attack. In the context of manipulation of biological components, target may be used to refer to the intended outcomes of those manipulations." Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology, National Academy of Sciences (2018).

This summary—referenced in Orientation for new readers, text and video links—is one in a list of five documents covering U.S. Legal History of leading up to today.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Katherine Watt: Construction of the kill box: legal history

This excerpt is the beginning of Construction of the kill box: legal history.

Katherine Watt on Baliwick News.

In December 2022, I drafted an executive summary version of the legal history of the biomedical police state kill box system for Senator Ron Johnson, at his request.

At that time, Sen. Johnson’s stated goal was to send a letter enquiring about military control and lethal intent of the Covid-19 program, to President Biden, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

A small team assembled a package including a list of questions and document requests to shed more light on the program through which genetic cell poisons are falsely presented to and injected into the world’s people as medicinal products.

We put together supporting exhibits, summarizing facts already found by Brook Jackson and Sasha Latypova (cGMP and DoD/BARDA reports).

My contribution to the project was a legal history memo with footnotes, which I also posted here at Bailiwick:

After several weeks reviewing the material with his staff, Johnson decided not to engage further in the process of exposing and stopping the killing program; removing the killers from the government offices they occupy; building criminal prosecution cases against the killers; and bringing them to justice.

The legal memo remains the most concise version of the legal story that I’ve written to date.

I updated it a few days ago after receiving a request from a military litigant seeking supporting affidavits.

In December 2022 and January 2023 versions, I used softening language to try to make the horrifying information somewhat easier for new readers to emotionally process.

Softening words and phrases have been removed from the May 2023 version.

The brutal global mass murder program is fully intentional.

Widespread fear, confusion, despair, sickening and death are not, as many would prefer to believe, “unintended consequences.”

The killing program includes religious, psychological, behavioral, biochemical, social, economic, political, financial, monetary and military elements.

The program hides behind lies about the source and purpose of human life and procreative potential; population-carrying capacity; resource use; climate; scientific and technological aptitude; human disease; and human health.

The lies are promulgated by governments, transnational organizations, mass media and State schools.

The program’s effective implementation is readily observable through lived human experience over the last 60 years.

 

READ COMPLETE POST

by Dave Ratcliffe

The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity

In Praise of Liberty and Mutual Aid:
A short review of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021)

 

By Peter d’Errico, © December 2021, source: academia.edu

The Dawn of Everything, a “new history of humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow, an anthropology and archaeology research team, joins a burgeoning global awareness that life on Earth is in social and ecological crisis and that the crisis is tied to the system of industrial state corporate society. The book’s contribution is to help us understand why we are having a difficult time figuring a way out of the mess. The reason, they say, is that our thinking is trapped by belief in the story that modern corporate state society is the end state of human evolution, the inevitable result of “progress” from “barbarism” to “civilization.” The obstacle to thinking of alternatives to the current organization of society is a belief that there is no alternative to this organization.

This belief dominates received opinion. Francis Fukuyama, in the heady days of US self-congratulation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said we are at the “end of history.” Recently, even as ecological data confirmed that the current social system is problematic, Jared Diamond persists in promoting the view that it is “unrealistic,” because of “biogeographical” factors, to expect to live without “kings, presidents, and bureaucrats” except in “some tiny band or tribe.” He insists on this limiting view even though the event he presumes caused the dilemma, the so-called “agricultural revolution,” is “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” If we believe received wisdom, we can only conclude there is no way out of a world out of balance.

Speaking of Fukuyama and Diamond, Graeber and Wengrow say, “The truly remarkable thing is that, despite the self-assured tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence.... There is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian—or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies.” Notions of a “necessary” human evolution from small-scale egalitarian to large-scale hierarchical societies “are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or...laws of history.”

The Dawn of Everything is a riposte to received wisdom. But The Dawn is not a polemic. It is a detailed survey of scientific data about ancient human civilizations from archaeological and anthropological investigations that have only recently become possible (archaeobotany, DNA analysis, “statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials,” etc.). The conclusions they draw from this data are directed against all stories of irreversible historical inevitability, those derived from Rousseau’s notion of an original human egalitarianism ruined by the “agricultural revolution” and those tied to Hobbes’s proposition of an original “nasty, brutish” humanity rescued by “sovereign government.” The Dawn rejects both versions on the grounds that they “simply aren’t true; have dire political implications; [and] make the past needlessly dull.”

These three analytical categories shape the authors’ overall approach and tone of the book: First, occupying the greatest portion of the book, is the scientific data; second are discussions of political implications of various readings of history; third are speculations aimed to enliven our “sense of human possibility.” The authors suggest that our “future now hinges on our capacity to create something different” and they ask a question to motivate readers through the nearly 700 pages of text: “What if, instead of...[repeating the conventional story], we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

✦

The book’s opening salvo is, “Most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway.” The authors then declare their intention to go where most people don’t go, to take up “the sort of grand dialogue about human history that was once quite common.” In fact, as the authors quickly make clear, lots of people do talk about human history, “from industrial psychologists to revolutionary theorists...[to] popular writers.” The problem, they say, is that the talk generally shares the same “foundational story...the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history [that]...has almost nothing to do with the facts.” They embark on the task of backing up their assertion by exposing the ethnographic and historical assumptions incorporated into the dominant story of human evolution to state-of-the-art scientific work. The result, they promise, will not simply be a catalog of new data, but “a conceptual shift” in thinking about the “notion of social evolution,” a shift “retracing...the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development...hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on.”

Ursula Le Guin [“Books Aren’t Just Commodities” (National Book Awards Speech, 2014)] also reminded us of human possibility and the power of conceptual shifts to motivate historical change: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

✦

I approached The Dawn of Everything with a view to bolster my own work studying Indigenous peoples’ legal issues, a field I’ve been working for more than 50 years. From that perspective, rooted in scholarly study and personal experience, I long ago realized the falsity of the Anglo-European proclamation of civilizational superiority. I wasn’t looking for “proof” that Indigenous peoples of the past built sophisticated societies and grappled with complicated social problems. I understood that Indigenous perspectives about human society today offer valuable alternatives to the political economy of industrial extraction and “wealth production.” I knew Rousseau’s “noble savage” and Hobbes’s “brute” were efforts to bracket and come to terms with evidence of alternative modes of human existence from the “New World.” I had already done what Graeber and Wengrow decide to do: “To move away from European thinkers like Rousseau entirely and instead consider perspectives that derive from those indigenous thinkers who ultimately inspired them.”

The authors’ core thesis is that the story of a “necessary” human evolution from “barbaric tribes” to “civilized states” was produced by European writers to rationalize the great differences between their societies and the societies “discovered” in the “New World.” The Dawn refers to this process as Europeans responding to the “Indigenous critique,” ideas put forward by Indigenous people criticizing European Christian civilization. The most significant reports of the Indigenous critique were provided by Jesuits and other missionaries in the Northeast Woodlands region: That Native peoples are very generous with one another, that there’s no one who goes hungry within their communities unless everyone is hungry, that there are no beggars within their communities and no jails. The reports also noted that Indigenous chiefs only have authority in as far as they’re eloquent, and that no one will do anything when ordered to do so unless they find it agreeable. Scandalized missionaries reported that Indigenous women had full control over their bodies; colonial authorities noted that women often took part in Indigenous governance.

Public figures in Europe directly encountered the Indigenous critique from Natives visiting Paris, London, and other cities, who saw beggars in the streets and attributed this to a lack of charity on the part of the Europeans, condemning them for it. The contrasts between European hierarchy and domination, selfishness and greed, and the way of life of Indigenous peoples had a profound impact in Western thinking and was one of the major streams of thought flowing into the Enlightenment.

In a nutshell, The Dawn of Everything says the theory of human evolution from “barbarism to civilization” was developed specifically to defend European feudal societies against the overall Indigenous critique. Europeans were shaken by the unmistakable openness and fluidity of Northeast Woodlands Indigenous societies and the paradoxical (to Europeans) combination of Indigenous insistence on individual autonomy with an equally strong insistence on group solidarity. The central theme of the European arguments was that individual autonomy and self-determined group cohesion were viable only among “primitive” peoples and had to be abandoned as humans “evolved.” Followers of Rousseau and Hobbes alike argued that “advanced civilization” was “necessary” in human “development” and that the life of “tribes” was doomed by this necessary “progress.”

The Dawn notes that Europeans did not perceive such dangerous ideas from the Aztec and Inca, whose urban civilizations and empires rivaled Europe. Neither did they bother to figure out how their theory of “human progress” could explain such “advanced” Indigenous societies. The only explanation they needed to combat such peoples was the “heathen and infidel” argument that, with religious notes, also composed a hierarchical scale putting European Christendom at the top.

The eventual outgrowth of European defense against the Indigenous critique produced a combination of “human evolution” and the doctrine of a “right of Christian discovery,” a combination adopted into US law in 1823 by the Supreme Court decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Justice Joseph Story [Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833)] characterized that decision as “...the title of the Indians was not treated as a right of propriety and dominion; but as a mere right of occupancy. As infidels, heathen, and savages, they were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to absolute, sovereign and independent nations.... The territory, over which they wandered, and which they used for their temporary and fugitive purposes, was, in respect to Christians, deemed, as if it were inhabited only by brute animals.”[Chapter XVI. General Review of the Colonies, p.102] (Not surprisingly, “Christian discovery” originated as a Portuguese “right” to the African slave trade in 1452.)

That doctrine and the “evolution” story remain dominant at the legal foundation of contemporary US claims of inevitable supremacy. Recent examples include City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation (2005), where Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “Under the ‘doctrine of discovery,’...fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.”... [she denied Oneida land ownership]; and McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), where Justice Neil Gorsuch said Congress has “authority to breach its own promises and treaties” with Native nations, based on “Christian discovery” precedents [he said Congress had not done this yet with the Creek Nation, but “remains free to...[do so] at any time”].

Indigenous critique also persists in the 21st century, including: Idle No More (founded 2012)—Led by women, with a call for “refounded nation-to-nation relations...a movement for Indigenous rights and the protection of land, water, and sky”; Independent Lakota Nation Declaration on Lakota Nationhood and the Dakota Access Pipeline Conflict (2016)—“We do not recognize United States or state permits to gather, pray, or otherwise demonstrate our cultural, social, and political institutions on our own aboriginal lands”; Yakama Nation amicus in Washington State v. Cougar Den (2018)—“The Court should expressly repudiate the doctrine [of Christian discovery] and instead rely on the Yakama Treaty”; Manoomin, et.al., v. Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, et.al. (Case No. GC21-0428 in White Earth Tribal Court, 2021)—“an action for declaratory and injunctive relief to declare Manoomin, or wild rice, within all the Chippewa ceded territories is protected and possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”

In short, the 16th century dynamic cited at the core of The Dawn remains active in the 21st century, providing global humanity with the same opportunity and challenge that faced Christian European colonial powers: to shape human societies harmoniously and sustainably.

✦

Even as apparently “simple” Indigenous societies befuddled and disturbed European intellectuals, they attracted on-the-ground colonists. James Axtell [The Invasion within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985)] summarizes what colonists said about their experiences living among Native peoples: “They found Indian life to express a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity...[as well as] social equality, mobility, adventure...the most perfect freedom,...ease of living, the absence of...corroding solicitudes....”

The record of contacts between colonial invaders and Native peoples illustrates what Axtell and The Dawn say: The Puritans, for example, were embarrassed by the fact so many of their kind fled to the “Indians,” while so few Natives wanted to adopt the Puritan world. Sebastian Junger [Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (2016)], like Graeber and Wengrow, quotes Benjamin Franklin bemoaning that white captives “liberated from the Indians” and returned to “stay among the English...take the first good opportunity of escaping again" to their Native communities. On the other hand, Franklin said, “When an Indian child has been brought up among us...if he goes to see his relations...there is no persuading him ever to return.” Junger recounted that when Colonel Henri Bouquet, a Swiss mercenary under British General Jeffrey Amherst, attacked Odawa Chief Pontiac’s forces (after delivering smallpox-infected blankets to Fort Pitt [see d’Errico, “Amherst and Smallpox” (2001, 2020)]) and demanded return of white captives, Native families had to bind those people and forcibly bring them in. Many later escaped and returned to their Native communities.

Junger, echoing Axtell, says colonials gravitated to the "intensely communal nature" of Indian life: Not only the "rough frontiersmen," as he puts it, but also "the sons and daughters of Europe" were drawn to the natural sociability of Indian life, even as against "the material benefits of Western civilization." He quotes French immigrant writer Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur, saying, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European. There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.”

Graeber and Wengrow launch their book against this background: “Revisiting [the encounters of Indigenous peoples and Europeans]...has startling implications for how we make sense of the past today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.” They suggest that “The ultimate question of human history...is not our equal access to material resources..., much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.” Contemporary diatribes against “tribal politics” in the US have forgotten this long-existing perspective that “tribal” life is more humane than state civilization.

✦

European efforts to counter the Indigenous critique and neutralize its threat, combining the “human evolution” story and religious theory, ultimately merged into a field of “natural law,” a domain of thought explicitly triggered by debates about the moral and legal implications of European Christianity’s “discovery” of the “New World.” The core debate focused on the question: What “rights” do humans have even if they exist in a “state of nature” ignorant of “revealed religion”? The answer, generally, was that they have some rights, but that these are inferior to the rights of civilized (read, European Christian) humans.

The argument in Dawn only touches on the development of “international law” from these natural law origins. That history is told by Carl Schmitt [The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950; trans. 2003)] and will be helpful to recap here: Schmitt says,

The traditional Eurocentric order of international law...arose from a legendary and unforeseen discovery of a new world.... The Age of Discovery, when the earth first was encompassed and measured by the global consciousness of European peoples...resulted in ...a Eurocentric international law: the jus publicum Europaeum.... Its nomos was determined by the following divisions. The soil of non-Christian, heathen peoples was Christian missionary territory; it could be allocated by papal order to a Christian prince for a Christian mission....European international law considered Christian nations to be the creators and representatives of an order applicable to the whole earth. The term ‘European’ meant the normal status that set the standard for the non-European part of the earth. Civilization was synonymous with European civilization.... The first question in international law was whether the lands of non-Christian, non-European peoples...were at such a low stage of civilization that they could become objects of organization by peoples at a higher stage.

Schmitt has this to say when he focuses specifically on the claim of “a right of Christian discovery”:

The meaning of the legal title ‘discovery’ lay in an appeal to the historically higher position of the discoverer vis-à-vis the discovered. This position differed with respect to American Indians, and other non-Christian peoples, such as Arabs, Turks, and Jews.... From the standpoint of the discovered, discovery as such was never legal. Neither Columbus nor any other discoverer appeared with an entry visa issued by the discovered princes.

In the same vein that Graeber and Wengrow decry the absence of questioning of all this, Schmitt says, “Jurists...have in view...only the system of a specific state legality. They are content to reject as ‘unjuridical’ the question of what processes established this order.”

✦

We might expect that The Dawn’s thesis will be rejected by many commentators. After all, contemporary edifices of power, whether in academia, media, corporations, or statehouses, is dependent on public belief in the inevitability of the edifice; more, a fear that the absence of the edifice would mean a loss of “quality of life.” Nevertheless, a quick rejection is not viable. Proper evaluation of the thesis requires engagement with nearly 700 pages of information from the most recent scientific work related to human history. I will point readers to the book itself for that task and close my review with a comment about anarchy, which some may assume must be the underlying philosophy of The Dawn, especially because Graeber was known as an anarchist.

The dominant story of “human evolution,” to which mass society and professional commentators seem equally wed, has no room for anarchism. Liberty and mutual aid are either gone forever or limited to their bureaucratic manifestations in the “welfare state.” Anything else is said to be wishful thinking, hopelessly naïve, even “anarchy.”

If it be anarchism to challenge the received (and celebrated) story of inevitable statist domination of human life, so be it. On the other hand, anarchism is not the same as anarchy. Specifically, anarchism is “a political theory advocating the abolition of hierarchical government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion”; anarchy is “a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority or other controlling systems.” Anarchism not only comprehends social order but celebrates such order that arises from and is compatible with liberty and mutual aid. One need not be a Marxist to embrace these values; Friedrich Hayek did also. To explore the significance of that coincidence requires more than I can do here.

Suffice it to say, quoting Carl Schmitt again,

Anarchy is not the worst scenario. Anarchy and law are not mutually exclusive. The right of resistance and self-defense can be good law, whereas a series of statutes shattering every notion of resistance and self-defense, or a system of norms and sanctions suppressing anyone who proposes resistance and self-defense can presage a dreadful nihilistic destruction of all law.

I have long been fond of a remark by Professor Grant Gilmore [The Ages of American Law (1977)], who, to my loss, left Yale Law School as I was entering, and I close with it:

Law reflects, but in no sense determines the moral worth of a society.... The better the society, the less law there will be. In Heaven, there will be no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.... The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell, there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.

by Dave Ratcliffe

Nuclear Weapons Detonation: HIGH-ALTITUDE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (HEMP)

Source: Steven Starr's Nuclear Famine

from the beginning of: https://nuclearfamine.org/connect/

HIGH-ALTITUDE ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE (HEMP)

A nuclear weapon detonated in the upper atmosphere will produce a High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). While no blast, fires, or ionizing radiation will be felt on Earth, a single HEMP will instantly create intense electromagnetic fields that will blanket tens or hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Earth’s surface. These fields will induce highly destructive transient electric voltages and currents into any electrically conductive material located in the affected regions, including overhead power transmission lines, telecom lines, and cables. Any unshielded modern electronic equipment, containing solid state circuitry connected to these lines, will be damaged or destroyed.

READ 121 page analysis: High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP): A Mortal Threat to the U.S. National Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants, 18 April 2023

15 page Executive Summary: High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP): A Mortal Threat to the U.S. National Power Grid and U.S. Nuclear Power Plants

Bullet point summary of High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP):

— A single high-altitude nuclear detonation will create a massive Electromagnetic Pulse that will bring down most or all of the US national electric grid (and that goes for any national electric grid that has not been shielded from an Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP)

— In a few billionths of a second, the E1 component of HEMP can induce peak voltages of 2 million volts into long overhead medium-voltage power lines and telecom line, which can create a current of 5000 amps in these lines

— The extreme voltages and currents created by the E1 component of HEMP will damage/disable/destroy any unshielded solid-state electronics found in all modern electronic devices, especially those connected to the grid. The affected area will cover many tens of thousands of square miles

— All critical national infrastructure relies on modern electronic devices to operate; most or all of the critical infrastructure in this affected area will cease to function, including ground, sea, rail, and air transportation systems, fuel and food distribution systems, water and sanitation systems, telecommunication systems, financial systems, and emergency services and governmental services

— E1 will also destroy tens of millions of insulators found on power distribution lines. The loss of a single insulator can stop power distribution

— The E3 component from a single HEMP will cover most of the continental US; it will damage or destroy most or all of the Large Power Transformers in the US national electric grid (which are required for the distribution of 60% to 70% of all electric power in the U.S.)

— Current lead times for Large Power Transformers are 18 to 24 months (overseas suppliers); Large Power Transformers require custom design, very specialized manufacture, they each weigh between 100 and 400 tons and are very difficult to ship, transport, and install. It would likely take more than a year to replace them; most of the US would be without electric power for a year or longer

— After the grid comes down, nuclear power plants will execute emergency shutdowns, but because the E1 component will disable their on-site power sources (Emergency Diesel Generators and Battery Banks), there will be no electric power available to run the active Emergency Core Cooling Systems (ECCS)

— Also, the active ECCS systems contain many motor-driven pumps, motor-operated valves, pressure and temperature sensors, and SCADA control units that will be disabled by E1, so even if power was available, they would not operate

— After emergency shutdown, the decay heat in the core of a nuclear reactor still creates 7% of the heat present when the nuclear reactor is operating at full power. In a large commercial nuclear reactor, hundreds of millions of megawatts of heat would still remain in the reactor core

— A failure of the active Emergency Core Cooling Systems to operate will cause the core to melt down in as little as 30 minutes

–Spent fuel pools, which are adjacent to each nuclear reactor, each contain at least 3 to 5 times more radiation than does the reactor core; without a cooling system that constantly cools the pools, the water in the pools will boil off and allow the spent fuel rods to release massive amounts of radioactive materials that can leave an area the size of an entire state uninhabitable for centuries.

— Dozens of nuclear US power plants could be within the area where E1 is greater than 12,500 volts/meter, and they will simultaneously melt down.

— As many as 50 nuclear power plants could melt down in France as a result of a single HEMP

— Shielding and technical fixes exist that can be used to protect the national electric grid and critical national infrastructure – including nuclear power plants – from HEMP/EMP  

— All efforts to mandate funding to protect the grid and critical infrastructure from HEMP/EMP have been blocked by electric and nuclear utilities

by Dave Ratcliffe