Friday Night Roundup: Covid, Geopolitics

Today we have three Covid related stories that are all interesting for what they say about the public consciousness. Let’s start with the liberal Vox, which is very worried. They want to know:

Why are so few people getting the latest Covid-19 vaccine?

There are two reasons. One is that people have figured out that Covid isn’t a big deal—not for most people, and so most people aren’t getting shot up. Makes sense, even if Vox is unhappy about this—for reasons you’d need to be a liberal to understand. The other reason they identify is more intriguing. In a way it builds off the first one, in the sense that people are abstaining because they think they were conned the first time around. Now, being an abstainer is becoming an identity thing:

“It’s become part of somebody’s identity that they’re not somebody who gets Covid shots in particular,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, a senior fellow at KFF and editor-at-large for Public Health at KFF Health News. “That may spill over to vaccines, but it starts with Covid.”

There are worrying signs of a more general resurgence in vaccine skepticism: 3 percent of US schoolchildren reported a vaccine exemption for the coming school year, the highest share on record according to the CDC. Ten states have an exemption rate above 5 percent; only two did three years ago.

Wait a minute. If that’s the highest share on record, how can that be a resurgence? Something’s up, here.

But while that uptick is worrying, it is clear, as Gounder noted, that Covid is a special case for Americans. … Flu vaccinations this year are on track with last year’s pace, according to the CDC.

…. So why do so many seem so immune to the public health community’s plea that they get a Covid-19 shot at the same time [as the flu]?

What that sounds like is something like: Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Which falls right in line with the decline in respect for “science” that surveys are showing. There’s an attitude here. This isn’t just laziness. And the uptick in more general vax skepticism reflects that, too.

Next:

The Army Is Begging Unvaccinated Soldiers To Return

Authored by Igor Chudov via Igor-Chudov.com,

Oh, how much the times have changed!

The United States Army is now begging COVID unvaccinated soldiers, who underwent involuntary discharge for their refusal to take the vaccine, to return to service and also permits them to correct their military records!

This article is pretty much what you’d expect, and we’ve all read about this. Screw around with people with the ability and gumption to think for themselves and you lose exactly the kind of people you should want to keep. So, with the armed forces falling drastically short on their recruiting goals, what makes them think they can sucker these folks into rejoining?

Lastly, Jeffrey Tucker takes note:

The COVID Caper Gradually Unravels

This long article goes step by step through the whole con, to show how we’re slowly but surely getting the big picture. It really was planned in advance. And the big reveal, with documentation, is that censorship and lockdowns went hand in hand. And so he concludes: It was a coup.

In other words, it all happened at once. From what we can see, the turning point was March 13, 2020. That was the date of the coup. It was never announced. It just happened. The lockdowns and public panic were the dry ice deployed by magicians to hide their tricks.

President Trump was mostly not in charge of anything after that date, which is why he was so anxious to change the subject as the summer months of 2020 approached. At that point, he couldn't restrain the immense bureaucracy that had taken charge of the country.

How the rest of the disaster fits in, we still need to know. There's so much more to discover. But this one bit of information—that censorship and lockdowns went together—is highly suggestive of an integrated plan.

After all, if you were plotting a coup, with some of the world’s smartest and most powerful people, would you not plan it out in great detail? Indeed you would.

There's so much more to learn about this disaster, or scandal, for the ages.

Lots to ponder. And it seems from the injection resistance that people are forming, however inchoately, the general idea of what went down. For most people it’s not a 2+2 thing at this point, but that’s the direction things are headed. The country will never be the same.

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On to geopolitics. I picked up this one listening to John Mearsheimer. It turns out that an Israeli historian and authority on the Holocaust and genocide in general wrote an op-ed for the NYT a week or so ago. His name is Omer Bartov, and he’s a very big name in the field. Here’s a link to his article:

What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide

Yes, he’s talking about the war on Gaza. He begins by formulating a question:

Israeli military operations have created an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. But are Israel’s actions — as the nation’s opponents argue — verging on ethnic cleansing or, most explosively, genocide?

He draws a legal distinction. To show that genocide is occurring, he says, there are two elements: intent to destroy a population, as well as actions that put that intent into action. He distinguishes genocide from ethnic cleansing, but adds that, in practice, the two often go hand in hand—one can lead to the other:

Genocide as a legal concept differs from ethnic cleansing in that the latter, which has not been recognized as its own crime under international law, aims to remove a population from a territory, often violently, whereas genocide aims at destroying that population wherever it is. In reality, any of these situations — and especially ethnic cleansing — may escalate into genocide, as happened in the Holocaust, which began with an intention to remove the Jews from German-controlled territories and transformed into the intention of their physical extermination

He then cites language of high Israeli officials—references to Palestinians as “Amalek” who must be destroyed, dehumanizing characterizations of Palestinians as “human animals”, calls by generals to create a “severe humanitarian crisis.” While Israeli actions thus far may not rise to the level of genocide, this language, he argues, demonstrates a genocidal intent:

Taken together, these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent.

There’s much, much more—Bartov presents a very detailed argument. However, I’ll quote his concluding plea to Israel:

None of this happened in a vacuum. Over the past several months I have agonized greatly over the unfolding of events in Israel. … the racist rhetoric of members of the government, its anti-democratic efforts and the growing violence by settlers, seemingly supported by the I.D.F., against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

What we had warned about — that it would be impossible to ignore the occupation and oppression of millions for 56 years, and the siege of Gaza for 16 years, without consequences — exploded in our faces on Oct. 7. ... We wrote that the only way to put an end to these cycles of violence is to seek a political compromise with the Palestinians and end the occupation.

It is time for leaders and senior scholars of institutions dedicated to researching and commemorating the Holocaust to publicly warn against the rage- and vengeance-filled rhetoric that dehumanizes the population of Gaza and calls for its extinction. It is time to speak out against the escalating violence on the West Bank, perpetrated by Israeli settlers and I.D.F. troops, which now appears to also be sliding toward ethnic cleansing under the cover of war in Gaza; several Palestinian villages have reportedly self-evacuated under threats from settlers.

…

If we truly believe that the Holocaust taught us a lesson about the need — or really, the duty — to preserve our own humanity and dignity by protecting those of others, this is the time to stand up and raise our voices, before Israel’s leadership plunges it and its neighbors into the abyss.

There is still time to stop Israel from letting its actions become a genocide. We cannot wait a moment longer.

And on to a related matter.

Israel’s Other War: Ethnic Cleansing in the South Caucasus

While Gaza is very much in the news, the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from land that they have occupied continuously for literally thousands of years has gone largely unremarked in the West—although we have remarked upon it here. The author of this article suggests that one reason it has received so little attention in the West could be … Note that Professor Bartov would take issue with the conflation of ethnic cleansing and genocide in this article:

Less known, however, is the role the Israeli government has played in another genocide that took place in West Asia only a month and a half ago. This genocide, little noted in the Western press, involved the ancient Christian community of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, known within Armenia as the Republic of Artsakh, that was ethnically cleansed by the Ilham Aliyev, the Shia dictator of Azerbaijan, in late September and early October. The muted response to Azerbaijan’s crime might plausibly be chalked up to the strength of its well-funded and influential lobby in Washington which profits off of the oil and gas revenue generated by SOCAR, the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic. SOCAR has links to the Podesta Group (co-founder John Podesta currently serves as a senior adviser to President Biden), lobbying powerhouse BGR Government Affairs, LLC, as well as numerous think tanks and academics associated with, among others, The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and the American Foreign Policy Council.

Yet another reason for the subdued response by Washington is the well documented ‘special relationship’ between the 51st US state, Israel, and Azerbaijan. …

The relationship between the two countries began to deepen around 15 years ago when Azerbaijan, flush with revenue from its oil and gas deposits in the Caspian basin, began looking to purchase advanced weapons systems.

…

The AP reports that it is estimated that Israel has supplied Azerbaijan with “nearly 70% of its arsenal between 2016 and 2020.” And just this week it was reported that Azerbaijan inked a $1.2 billion dollar deal with Israel Aerospace Industries to purchase the Barak MX air defense system, described as “a modular air defense system… designed to address missile and aircraft threats.”

The question then arises: Why is Israel, which claims to be under a near constant threat of missile attacks from the south in Gaza and potentially from the north by Hezbollah, doing this?

…

The real reason has to do with Iran.

According to Poghosyan, Azerbaijan has agreed “to allow Israel to use their territory for anti-Iranian activities. And we are speaking about covert activities, foreign intelligence… Azerbaijan gave the green light to Israeli special services, especially its foreign intelligence service, to do whatever they want in Azerbaijan. …”