Ian Fantom — July 31, 2020

Whatever one’s views on Coronavirus are, it seems that the vast majority of people are agreed on one thing: Things aren’t making sense. When politicians keep asserting that what they are doing is based on Science, but when asked where the scientific evidence is reply “That’s confidential”, you know they are not speaking the truth, because if science is not subject to scrutiny it is not science.

When public relations people tell us things that don’t make sense, we instinctively try to see through the hype, and want to know who the real decision-makers are and what they are up to. Yet in politics people assume that the government is in charge, despite the fact that all Cabinet ministers seem to spend all their time presenting their narratives to the public – often pretending they do make sense – and have no time left for actually running the country. They can’t answer questions on detail because they themselves don’t know what’s going on until they receive their next briefings. The result is a lurch towards madness.

The Coronavirus issue has been a subject of intense discussion amongst members of the Keep Talking email discussion group, and this has brought together much information. This has helped me in writing my reports, and it has helped Nick Kollerstrom, who has now written a book titled ‘The Great British Coronavirus Hoax: A Sceptic’s View’. This book was banned by Amazon, then after he appealed it was unbanned. He says this was the third book of his banned by Amazon, the others being ‘Breaking the Spell: the Holocaust Myth and Reality’ and ‘Who did 9/11? A View from Across the Pond’. He is now turning the tables on Amazon, saying, “Don’t buy from Amazon”. As an alternative he is suggesting Abe Books or searching in Find Book Prices.

Madness everywhere

‘Madness Everywhere’ is the title of a video produced by author Dr Vernon Coleman, a medic who used to work for the BBC, until he got a bit too inquisitive about the real world and so was abandoned by the BBC. Since then he has written about a hundred books.

Twenty years ago such a video would have been interpreted as satirical comedy, but nowadays it’s difficult to tell the difference between comedy and reality. I think that’s why comedy has to be laced with swearwords – or rather, with the only swearword in English that hasn’t already lost its potency by overuse, but soon will do. Perhaps if Vernon Coleman had put in such profanities YouTube wouldn’t have removed his video, but they did, and replaced it with the words “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s community guidelines”. I suppose nowadays we are all expected to be members of one ‘community’, intolerant of any difficult people who dare to follow the fundamental principles of science even when they go against the Powers That Be. Vernon Coleman’s video was also taken down by Vimeo. It was then posted on Bitchute, a video channel set up specifically to provide a platform for such difficult people. In that uploading it was given the title ‘Dr. Vernon Coleman: Your Government Wants You Dead – BANNED from YouTube’ There you can watch it yourself to see how dangerous it is to the ‘community’ of big business and their bankers.

In that video he was talking about the compulsory vaccinations programmes that appear now to be becoming a reality. He wasn’t saying anything more outrageous than you’ll read in my newsletters. He is critical of the World Health Organisation, and that seems to touch a raw nerve. As a qualified medical practitioner he is obviously dangerous to the Powers That Be. I think he was just describing the situation as it was: Madness.

One of our Keep Talking people wrote to me saying that she had been stranded in Perth, Australia, since mid-March. “No one knows anything! But everyone I speak to is perplexed, confused and frustrated … Perth has been great, life has remained almost normal, even many hairdressers stayed open through lockdown. No one is wearing a mask, maybe the occasional person, but rare. No one worries about social distancing and I have seen friends throughout lockdown. Now large numbers can gather even up to 30,000 outdoors. So I dread returning, but have things to sort out”, she wrote. I think everyone is confused here in England, too, …

Mid-sentence, I was interrupted by a letter to a local newspaper by my Newbury friend and campaigner Barrie Singleton, who wrote: “A ‘plan’ for Covid 19. A ‘plan’ for Brexit. But no plan for massive unemployment in a country already severely stressed. Proof, if proof were needed, that politics isn’t governance. Is this the moment when voters will realise (too late) that our political system is a fraud?”. I personally think that they do have a “plan for massive unemployment” – and that massive unemployment is the plan – but, yes, we are being governed from elsewhere. Recently I chatted to two guys on small local building sites, and they know perfectly well that it’s all about control, and that the collapse of the Twin Towers onto their own footprints as a result of aircraft hitting them side-on was a fairy tale.

In All Communities

You can’t be a medical practitioner in the UK and speak out about the lack of science in the the Pandemic without putting your career at risk. I signed a petition to the General Medical Council (GMC) to revoke the twelve-month suspension on Mr Muhammad Iqbal Adil, consultant surgeon, UK, in relation to Covid-19, who pointed out that the Covid-19 virus had not been isolated. I commented: “Although I’m not medically qualified I am scientifically qualified (MSc Physics), and the government claims on COVID-19 are simply not based on Science”.

I heard on the BBC news that because obese people are more susceptible to Covid-19 the Prime Minister has announced that the government will be supplying £50 bicycle repair vouchers on a first-come-first serve basis, and that GP surgeries will provide access to bicycles. The big debate at the moment in the UK is the government’s requirement for people travelling from the Canary Islands to go into self-imposed quarantine for two weeks after returning, on the grounds that there is a high incidence of Coronavirus in parts of Northern Spain, such as Barcelona, despite the fact that the Canaries are twice as far from Barcelona as Barcelona is from London, and the government’s advice not to travel to Spain applies only to the mainland.

It seems you can’t be a professional footballer either, if you step out of line by criticising the Rothschilds. Footballer Tom Pope was asked, “please predict the #WWIII result you king”, to which he replied “We invade Iran then Cuba then North Korea then the Rothchilds are crowned champions of every bank on the planet ������������������the end ������������������”. For that he was suspended by the Football Association for antisemitism on the grounds that others who had criticised the Rothschilds had been antisemitic, though the footballer claimed he didn’t know the Rothschilds were Jewish. I don’t know that they are Jewish either; I know that they say they are Jewish, and that they have exploited Jews in the Zionist’s military take-over of Palestine, as described by the founding father of Israel, Theodor Herzl, but I have seen no evidence that they are Jewish, and I doubt that they adhere to any religion. On the other hand, the Bush-Blair version of 9/11 was that it was funded by a rich Middle Eastern Semite named Osama bin Laden, but they are not accused of antisemitism. That’s completely mad. It means that the Rothschild banking family are beyond criticism in England, on a par with Her Majesty.

Israel is now beyond criticism in the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, who vowed to “tear out the poison” of Labour anti-semitism on the day he was elected party leader. On the same day he wrote to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, described by Stuart Littlewood in Redress Online in April 2020 as “the very people who spent three years vilifying the party to ensure its electoral defeat in December”. Keir Starmer told them that he had adopted the Board of Deputies’ Ten Pledges on Tackling Antisemitism and now want to work with them to make sure that they are delivered as soon as possible. The most controversial of these is the redefinition of ‘antisemitism’, which makes it easier for them to vilify those who criticise Israel or Zionism. In fact, all five leadership candidates had embraced the ‘Ten Pledges’ that “dictate how they must think, speak and act”, as Stuart Littlewood put it. These candidates included Corbyn supporter Rebecca Long-Bailey, whom Keir Starmer expelled from his Shadow Cabinet for forwarding a tweet saying that the neck lock that had been used by the police on George Floyd had been one of the techniques acquired by US police from their training in Israel. “Shafted by the Friends of Israel: One by one the icons fall”, announced The Word Newspaper on its front page. I see on page two of that issue an article by their religious correspondent an article that begins: “Something is very wrong with the Labour Party when twenty-five Jewish members are currently suspended, accused of antisemitism; the situation borders on the ridiculous”.

The Word was set up by some people in Manchester who “realised that to achieve a Labour Government that delivers a left wing agenda we needed a balanced media”. They describe in their ‘About’ page how they themselves have been sabotaged. In 2014 I gave Jeremy Corbyn my research reports into the Esperanto association. He was particularly interested, because at one time he was the Secretary of the Esperanto Parliamentary Group, and I had been the main motor behind its foundation in 1972. I meant it also as a warning on what could happen in the Labour Party, and indeed it did happen. Now the Labour Party dissidents are well ahead of the Esperanto dissidents.

Masking the Science?

There’s enormous controversy over whether face masks will prevent the spread of COVID-19 viruses. The UK government states on its website: “Tight-fitting respirators (such as disposable FFP3 masks and reusable half masks) rely on having a good seal with the wearer’s face. A face fit test should be carried out to ensure the respiratory protective equipment (RPE) can protect the wearer”. How many members of the public will remove facial hair before fitting a mask, I wonder. The man on the video is of course talking about surgical masks, which are going to be much more efficient than those worn by ordinary members of the public. So will the wearing of face masks by the public make a significant difference to the spread of COVID-19?

One argument is that the viruses are tiny compared with the holes in the mask, and would sail through them easily. On the other hand, they say that a face mask will restrict the circulation of fresh air, and so result in the build-up of carbon dioxide and a reduction in the oxygen level of the air breathed in. I’m not sure how they can know the size of a COVID-19 virus if they have never succeeded in isolating such a virus or proving its existence, but the claim is that it varies from about 60 to 140 nanometers in diameter. However, carbon dioxide molecules are a less than a thousandth of that in diameter, so presumably masks do have some effect. I found ananalysis by Smart Air, which describes itself as “a social enterprise dedicated to helping people protect themselves from the harms of air pollution through education and cost-effective purifiers” – in particular, with reference to China. It is headed ‘Can Masks Capture Coronavirus Particles?’, and they answer the sceptics’ case by quoting from a 2009 study by Edinbugh University. This wasn’t about COVID-19, or even about viruses, but about the ability of various masks to stop air pollution particles. They found that a cotton handkerchief would block 28% of such particles, as distinct to a surgical mask, which would block 80% of the particles. I read the Edinburgh University paper, which was actually about health effects rather than mask efficiencies. They presented a preliminary table of penetrations of various masks, and decided to use a 3M Dust Respirator 8812 for their subsequent work. This is an industrial respirator, which is more effective as a filter than a surgical mask, and neither of these would be likely to be used by the public. I should have thought that the cotton handkerchief would be the nearest to what the public would wear, except that the masks would likely not be well fitted. But in the Edinburgh study I saw no analysis by particle size in this part of the report.

The Smart Air report then referred to a study, which found that the mask tested would stop over 90% of the viruses present. This was a study from 2006, headed ‘Do N95 respirators provide 95% protection level against airborne viruses, and how adequate are surgical masks?’. The abstract concludes: “Some surgical masks may let a significant fraction of airborne viruses penetrate through their filters, providing very low protection against aerosolized infectious agents in the size range of 10 to 80 nm.” It should be noted, they add, that the surgical masks are primarily designed to protect the environment from the wearer, whereas the respirators are supposed to protect the wearer from the environment”. Again, neither of these masks would be likely to be used by the public. In short, it looks as if the sorts of masks that the public are likely to wear may have some effect in capturing viruses, but that their real benefit would be in highly polluted cities, such as Wuhan and Milan, in avoiding health problems due to airborne particulates rather than viruses.

Amongst the other studies by Smart Air are ‘The Riskiest Place to Catch COVID-19 is Right in Front of You’ (in which they show that virtually all the transmission is indoors – though I’m nor sure how a well-ventilated shop would compare with a sitting room), ‘Air quality, Coronavirus COVID-19 Lockdown Slashes PM2.5 in India’s 6 Biggest Cities’ (in which they show that during lockdown particulate air pollution dropped dramatically in India’s cities), ‘Are Polypropylene Bags Effective as DIY Face Masks for COVID-19?’ (in which they found that home-made masks made of non-woven polypropylene bags can be as effective at filtering viruses as commercially produced ones), and ‘Half of Chinese N95 Masks Tested Fail to Meet Standards Air Pollution’. So how many of the UK masks meet quality standards, and how much more effective are they than cloth handkerchiefs and the social norms of not coughing or sneezing at people? And if the transmission outside is very low, then what case is there for demanding that people wear masks in public places anyway? And if people do wear face masks, what do they do with them afterwards, and does that spread any viruses?

The same logic could be applied to the spread of greenhouse gases from cattle, in that they could reduce the spread of the greenhouse gases by surrounding the field with a hawthorn hedge. No doubt that would act as a wind break, which would reduce the amount of gases reaching the next field when the cattle break wind, but in the atmosphere as a whole it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Yet politicians are interested only in the immediate. This shows how a little bit of science in the hands of politicians is a dangerous thing. All science needs to be made available for public scrutiny.

It should have been quite simple to resolve the issue. The result of tests available to the government at the time it gave the advice to wear face masks should have been published for each face mask. If there was no data, then there was no case. But then if the face masks do stop 28% of the viruses, what effect will that have on the probability of spreading the virus? Suppose you get caught out in the rain, and take shelter under a net that catches 28% of the raindrops; what is the probability that you will get wet?

The morning after I had written those words, the BBC announced that the wearing of face masks in shops in the UK would be made compulsory from 24 July. The previous day ministers were saying contradictory things, so it appears that this is merely an edict coming from Boris Johnson – or via Boris Johnson. No doubt we will shortly be able to read informed discussion on the legality of this move from the UK Constitutional Law Association. The police are not going to be happy policing this. A representative of the Police Federation told BBC Radio 4 that it was absurd. Then there’s a question of whether they will be able to enforce the law in private property. There are bound to be widespread rebellions amongst the public, and not just from seasoned campaigners. Will shop owners have to call the police for this to work? I can foresee boycotts of shops that do. This is not policing by consent. The situation in France is even more absurd; face masks are compulsory, but burqas are banned. I asked a French friend about that, and he replied: “Yes! That’s what I’ve been thinking for months! What will the police do? ! They have to stop people from going in public places covering up their faces ! And at the same time stop them from NOT covering up their faces !”. A niqab in the UK would cost just a few pounds online. It would also serve as protection against the face recognition system in place in Kings Cross, London.

There is general confusion over what is allowed and what is not allowed, and over what is a legal requirement and what is compulsory by law. On 13 July the House of Commons Library issued a Briefing report ‘Coronavirus: Business re-opening’. This will be useful for businesses considering reopening. The report states, “It is important to note that the government guidance, whether from the UK Government or devolved administrations, is not law”. Yet the very next day some business owners would have to rethink their plans in the light of the unexpected announcement about compulsory wearing of face masks by their customers. It now appears that that was enforced as a ‘statutory instrument’ to be ratified later by Parliament.

Just Testing

I’ve just received an email from Brass Checks TV, saying, “Keeping track of all the frauds Fauci & Friends are coordinating, is literally a full time job”. That’s my problem, too. Brass Checks have been collecting material on this, and just watching all their videos is a big job. The web page they link to in their email contains three videos, the shortest of which is an interview with Kary Mullis, who invented the PCR method of detecting tiny microbes, including viruses, and was awarded a Nobel Prize for that. The PCR method is the one being used for the COVID-19 tests. He states:

The number of cases reported went up epidemically – you know, exponentially – because the number of tests that was done went up exponentially. How many doctors knew about HIV in 1983? Two. How many knew about it in 1985? Say 500. How many knew about it in 1986? 40 000. So, that’s where the curve came from. How much money did we make off of HIV this year? And they could have plotted that, and it would have looked the same. You know. And they could have said there’s an epidemic because we’re making more and more money. That made it a plague, and the CDC needed one, the CDC hadn’t had a good plague since polio. Their funding was probably going to be cut back if they didn’t come up with one. The guy that was the head of the CDC in fact wrote memos that have been obtained you know that they described this as hot stuff. You know, those guys have got an agenda, which is not what we would like them to have, meaning that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way.

Unfortunately, Kary Mullis died in 2019, and so we can only guess what he would have been saying about COVID-19. I came across a Reuters Fact Check page on a supposed quote from Kary Cullis, saying “PCR tests cannot detect free infectious viruses at all”. They say, “However, the quote is actually from an article written by John Lauritsen in December 1996 about HIV and AIDS, not COVID-19”, so I followed that up. He stated:

Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Science for inventing the PCR, is thoroughly convinced that HIV is not the cause of “AIDS”. With regard to the viral load tests, which attempt to use PCR for counting viruses, Mullis has stated: “Quantitative PCR is an oxymoron.” PCR is intended to identify substances qualitatively, but by its very nature is unsuited for estimating numbers. Although there is a common misimpression that the viral load tests actually count the number of viruses in the blood, these tests cannot detect free, infectious viruses at all; they can only detect proteins that are believed, in some cases wrongly, to be unique to HIV. The tests can detect genetic sequences of viruses, but not viruses themselves.

In other words, he stated: “What PCR does is to select a genetic sequence and then amplify it enormously. … In short, the viral load tests are a scam”. It seems that COVID-19 is a repeat of this scam. My understanding is that the PCR tests do not even claim to be testing for the COVID-19 virus, but for antibodies which arise due to the virus. But how do we know that these fragments of RNA are actually antibodies to a virus that no-one has yet managed to isolate or even prove exists?

John Lauritsen is a writer and investigative journalist. In this case he was working with molecular biologist Peter Duesberg. In 1990 he published a book ‘Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story’, which is expensive in all the bookstores I found who stock it, but has been made available free of charge by the author as a PDF. It contains a Foreword by Peter Duesberg, in which he explains:

The DNA chain terminator ATZ was designed over twenty years ago for the treatment of leukemia. Its antileukemic mechanism of action is to kill growing lymphocites by termination of DNA synthesis. However, since AZT failed to prolong the lives of leukemic animals it was not accepted for cancer chemotherapy. In 1987 it was approved to treat symptomatic and asymptomatic carriers of HIV to cure and prevent AIDS, based on the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS. … The virus-AIDS hypothesis has not stopped the spread of AIDS, and it is about to create 50,000 new ones – the number of people currently being treated with AZT.

A friend of mine once told me it wasn’t the cancer that was killing him, but the medication. He had been told by the cancer specialist, “My job is to make sure you die of something else”. I get the double meaning.

Questioning Virus Theory

Things weren’t making much sense to my colleague Kevin Boyle, either. He’s a physics teacher, and he produced a video titled ‘PROVE IT!! … Or There Is No Science’. He points out that the PCR tests themselves have not been tested, when it would have been easy to have carried out such tests. After some elaboration on that he continues: “So, is there a virus, a real virus? Well, the identification of a virus in the body, for any viral illness, including COVID-19, has not been achieved. … No-one’s purified a virus out of human tissue. That just has never happened. That’s why they need a PCR test, because they can’t find a virus. What kind of science is that?”. Then he moves on to a third question, a question of contagion:

The issue of ‘Is this illness contagious in the person-to-person sense?’ has not been tested. Science has not tested this assumption that we’re meant to accept. In 1918-1919 with the Spanish flu it was tested. People saw that this was an incredibly fast-spreading disease – it looked like very contagious, it moved faster that humans could travel. It was a puzzle to everybody, and when it was tested, by infecting healthy people with the blood and sputum … they didn’t get sick. So the only tests that we can find that have been done for the contagion of influenza demonstrated that it was not contagious on a person-to-person basis, which caused many people at the time, including Rudolf Steiner – a raving genius – to declare that the illness had been caused by all the radio antennae that were going up at the time across the world; it was an electromagnetic illness.

After elaborating more on this point he hammers home his point that science is not science if it is not proved, and issues his challenge to the scientists. As a teacher he understands the need to hammer the point home much better than I do; he uses 500 words to do so. I’m still coming to terms with the fact that it is nowadays necessary to explain to people in excruciating detail very simple principles of science that I had assumed fifty years ago that absolutely no-one would have any difficulty with. It is necessary, for instance, to explain very carefully one point that few people understand, namely that when a scientist undertakes research he doesn’t know in advance what the outcome will be. It may be something completely unexpected, like, in my case, finding that the treasurer had been hiding funds. Even if the outcome is in agreement with something that Donald Trump has said, that doesn’t make the researcher a Fascist. Not many people know that.

The question of whether viruses exist is a puzzling one. How else can we explain the eradication of smallpox, for instance? Yet it transpires that the virus theory of Louis Pasteur wasn’t the only theory around at that time. Pasteur’s rival Antoine Béchamp had a theory, too, which is described in a book published in 2011, titled ‘Béchamp or Pasteur?: A Lost Chapter in the History of Biology’. The question of whether electromagnetic waves cause illness is also a topical issue because of the apparent links between the installation of 5G and outbreaks of Coronavirus. Kevin Boyle is trying to find out more about the roll-out of 5G, but is having difficulty finding that out. It seems that such information is confidential. A key book, ‘The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life’, by mathematician Arthur Firstenberg, was published in March 2020. This is now on my desk waiting to be read. In the meantime I have followed some of a talk titled ‘The Genocidal Nature of Non-Ionising Radiation’ by microwave weaponry expert Barrie Trower, who “diligently exposes the plethora of peer-reviewed empirical studies, which prove that all wireless technology causes non-ionising radiation sickness, which often results in flu-like symptoms and sometimes in death”. He refers to documents available at ‘5G Awareness’. He makes it clear that the issue is not so much in the power of these microwaves, or even in their frequencies, but in the pulse rates in their protocols. He says he has thousands of papers on this. I think the next step should be to make them all available by scanning them in, a massive job, but one which undoubtedly could be funded by crowd funding, considering the following that he now has.

Who is WHO?

The World Health Organisation is constantly referred to in the mass media, as the source of recommendations and decisions over Covid-19. But who is WHO? In February 2018 a film ‘trustWHO’ was released in German cinemas nationwide. It was a report on the influence of privatised industry on the World Health Organisation, and is now available in several languages (French, Spanish, German, Japanese and English). A synopsis states:

This personal investigation tells the story of how the WHO has been infiltrated and influenced by industry, and how the member States misuse the UN-organization for their own national economic interests. Whether dealing with the tobacco scandal, swine flu or Fukushima – the WHO plays a daunting role. It lacks funding, power and transparency. And its decisions end up helping the pharmaceutical companies and the nuclear energy industry more than the victims. The WHO was created as a guardian of world health, but it has become the plaything of individual interests. Lilian Franck shows a frightening portrayal of our present society, in which governmental politics is becoming obsolete.

The film is distributed by Journeyman Pictures, who provide a trailer, in which the film director states: “What I have found out is shocking, and far exceeds my initial suspicions”. A UN Special Advisor, David Nabarro states: “What is worrying is that a small group of companies have attempted to subvert the process by which WHO is run”. A journalist, Robert Parsons, states: “It was discovered in the tobacco documents that they had placed moles at WHO; they had people in there who would alert the tobacco industry to every move that WHO was planning”. Walter Wodarg is a former delegate to the European Council, who has previously spoken out over the Covid-19 issue, and he states: “There is no investigating commission, like in Parliament. The WHO can operate in a very clandestine fashion”.

The film producers, OvalMedia, later posted the film on Vimeo, and Vimeo then removed it. They explain this in a YouTube video, under which one Nic Bonforce comments: “Thank you very much. Prof. Dr. Wodarg seems to be Enemy No 1 here in Germany, because he’s fighting for the truth. That’s very very sad”. They give links to the film online in English, German and French. A full transcript is available on the Journeyman Pictures website, which should be useful for translators.

Agenda 2030

The reported subversion of democratic procedures in WHO is compatible with widespread subversions in all sorts of organisations at all levels, which I was first finding following my research into the Esperanto movement. Those responsible for the good governance of WHO are the The World Health Assembly, which is made up of representatives of the member states. That means that the governments are supposed to determine policy, and therefore have responsibility to ensure that the organisation is not taken over by vested interests. Since WHO is a specialised agency of the United Nations, one cannot escape the fact that those responsible for letting this happen must include those controlling the United Nations, and that means the nation states which are members of the UN. The UN Charter makes it clear that the purpose of the UN is to encourage the peaceful solution to international conflicts. I see in it nothing to do with health and prosperity, but even so, I see in the header of their web pages: “United Nations: Peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet”. It seems that they have changed their agenda since their foundation in 1945.

So we have to ask why the governments of the world are allowing WHO to be corrupted, and whether the same logic applies to the United Nations itself. Are governments complicit with big business in the UN and its specialised agencies? Or are they being blackmailed? Or are they going along with ridiculous resolutions because they don’t want to be seen as anything other than good members of the ‘international community’? Who is controlling our governments? We need now to look at the agenda of the United Nations.

The first thing that caught my eye on the home page of the United Nations website was that that day (20 July) was World Chess Day. The announcement states: “While the coronavirus outbreak has forced most gaming and sports activities to scale down, chess has demonstrated remarkable resilience and a strong convening power during the pandemic. Recognizing important opportunities offered by chess in strengthening education, realizing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, and fostering inclusion, tolerance, mutual understanding and respect, the General Assembly proclaimed 20 July World Chess Day”. Really? I didn’t realise when I’ve been playing chess in the evenings that I was making such a grand contribution to world peace. I clicked on the link, which took me to the General Assembly’s resolution of 2019 under agenda items ‘Sport for development and peace: building a peaceful and better world through sport and the Olympic ideal’ and ‘Culture of peace’. The preamble is heavy, but it eventually comes to the point, in “Acknowledging the important opportunities offered by chess in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. On another page, headed ‘Chess for Recovering Better’, I am informed: “Chess, being a mind game, encourages deep logical thinking which enhances responsible action. Thus, promoting the playing of chess and linking this with issues of sex and sexuality could be a creative and strategic way of taking up the HIV/AIDS challenge”. Would the present international tensions be solved by the General Assembly taking part in chess tournaments in order to bring some logical thinking to deal with this madness?

Such trivialisation is a common feature of organisations great and small whose objective is being marginalised by vested interests. It diverts attention to small issues, thus hiding some hidden agenda.

The UN’s resolution on Agenda 2030 is nearly as grand as the one on chess, but much longer. It is to be found on the UN’s ‘Sustainable Development Goals Knowledge Platform’, and is called ‘Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. The Preamble begins: “This Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity. It also seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom”. So the purpose for which the UN was set up has now been downgraded to an aside – though I don’t pretend to know what ‘in greater freedom’ means. They continue: “We recognise that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest global challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development”. Really? I thought the greatest challenge was the incessant wars, social unrest, commercial exploitation and debt that brought about such conditions. “All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan”, they continue, “We are resolved to free the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want to heal and secure our planet. We are determined to take the bold and transformative steps which are urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path”. Fine, so why don’t they just do it? “As we embark on this collective journey, we pledge that no one will be left behind”, they say, but how are they going to enforce that if one state lags behind? Are they going to apply sanctions, or launch a military invasion? Their section headed ‘Means of Implementation’ doesn’t explicitly mention such possibilities, but it does state (para 39): “The scale and ambition of the new Agenda requires a revitalized Global Partnership to ensure its implementation”. That Partnership would bring together various actors, including the ‘private sector’. They continue (para 41): “We recognize that each country has primary responsibility for its own economic and social development”. So now the role of the member states has been made subservient to the Global Partnership. “The new Agenda deals with the means required for implementation of the Goals and targets. We recognize that these will include the mobilization of financial resources …”. So the mobilisation of financial resources will be used in the implementation, and presumably the enforcement, of the Agenda. They continue (para 44): “We acknowledge the importance for international financial institutions to support, in line with their mandates, the policy space of each country, in particular developing countries. We recommit to broadening and strengthening the voice and participation of developing countries – … – in international economic decision-making, norm-setting and global economic governance”. So the Global Partnership is to be in league with ‘international financial institutions’ in ‘global economic governance’. In other words, the big bank loan sharks, who have been financing wars, thrusting whole nations into debt, have taken over the creation of the money supply in many countries, and have been primarily responsible for austerity in the West and poverty in former colonies, are re-forming as a ‘Global Partnership’, which is to become the core of a world government. That’s what the ‘New World Order’ is all about.

A list of the ‘sustainable development goals’ is given in paragraph 59. Basically, it’s about everything we would want in a Utopian society: ending poverty, hunger, ensuring healthy living, achieving gender equality, water management and sanitation, sustainable economic growth, full employment, decent work for all, building resilient infrastructure, promoting sustainable industrialisation, fostering innovation, reducing inequality, promoting various environmental issues, and promoting peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development. The latter comes from Goal 16, which is the only mention of the original purpose of the UN. Tell me, if those promises were put forward by government ministers in your own country, would you believe them? There’s just one catch: they need additional powers in order to fulfil their promises (or not), and this is expressed in Goal 17 as “Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development”.