Amnesty International Report - June 2018: Undeniable USA mass war crime in Raqqa - Syria

The Amnesty International report of June 5, 2018,

Syria: “War of annihilation”: Devastating toll on civilians, Raqqa – Syria

5 June 2018, Index number: MDE 24/8367/2018 

https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/MDE2483672018ENGLISH.PDF

presents undeniable evidence of USA criminal disregard for civilian life, on a mass scale, in a populated city, and calls for official investigations leading to war crimes prosecutions.

The Report is an administrative description of USA evil deeds, performed under a cover of media silence and war propaganda at home.

The disregard for human life and urban installations on such a scale, under questionable pretext, while illegally attacking a sovereign nation, is as criminal as war crimes get.

The USA has no legitimacy in its proxy war for regime change in Syria.


Here are excerpts from the June 2018 70-page Amnesty International Report:

Amnesty International researchers travelled to Raqqa in February 2018 and spent two weeks visiting 42 locations of strikes and interviewing 112 witnesses and survivors. The organisation analysed satellite imagery and reviewed other publicly available material. This report documents the experiences of four families whose cases are emblematic of wider patterns.

The cases provide prima facie evidence that several Coalition attacks which killed and injured civilians violated international humanitarian law. ... Coalition forces did not take adequate account of civilians present in the city and failed to take the precautions necessary to minimise harm to civilians and civilian objects. ...

To date, the Coalition has not explained why it continued to launch strikes which killed so many civilians while a deal granting IS fighters impunity and safe passage out of the city was being considered and negotiated. Many survivors of Coalition strikes interviewed by Amnesty International asked why Coalition forces needed to destroy an entire city and kill so many civilians with bombardments supposedly targeting IS fighters – only to then allow IS fighters to leave the city unharmed. ...

In all the cases detailed in this report, Coalition forces launched air strikes on buildings full of civilians using wide-area effect munitions, which could be expected to destroy the buildings. In all four cases, the civilians killed and injured in the attacks, including many women and children, had been staying in the buildings for long periods prior to the strikes. Had Coalition forces conducted rigorous surveillance prior to the strikes, they would have been aware of their presence. Amnesty International found no information indicating that IS fighters were present in the buildings when they were hit and survivors and witnesses to these strikes were not aware of IS fighters in the vicinity of the houses at the time of the strikes. Even had IS fighters been present, it would not have justified the targeting of these civilian dwellings with munitions expected to cause such extensive destruction.

The Coalition has so far refused to even acknowledge the scale of harm caused to civilians by the military campaign. At the height of the Raqqa battle, in September 2017, outgoing Coalition commander, Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, wrote that “…there has never been a more precise air campaign in the history of armed conflict”. However, this precise air campaign killed hundreds of civilians. At the same time, US Marines’ activities described by Army Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell (senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), suggests that the Coalition operation was far from precise: “In five months they fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets… They fired more rounds in five months in Raqqa, Syria, than any other Marine artillery battalion, or any Marine or Army battalion, since the Vietnam War.”

Given that standard artillery shells fired from an M777 howitzer have an average margin of error of over 100m, launching so many of these shells into a city where civilians were trapped in every neighbourhood posed an unacceptable risk to civilians. Yet despite incontrovertible evidence of civilian casualties and wholesale destruction in Raqqa, and the high level of civilian casualties, the Coalition narrative remains unchanged.

The international Coalition [allegedly] to defeat IS in Iraq and Syria was formed in 2014. Named “Operation Inherent Resolve”, it sought to present itself as an international Coalition with broad-based support from nations and institutions around the world. But the military action it took in Raqqa against IS was an overwhelmingly US military affair. Under the command of a US General, US forces fired 100% of the artillery into Raqqa and carried out over 90% of the air strikes. British and French forces were the only other Coalition members to strike Raqqa from the air. ...

Eight months after military operation ended, most of the city’s residents remain displaced and those who have returned are living in dire conditions among the mountains of rubble and the stench of dead bodies trapped beneath, facing the threat of mines/improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and unexploded ordnance. Virtually every resident of Raqqa who spoke to Amnesty International asked why those who could spend so much for a costly military campaign to destroy the city cannot provide the relief so desperately needed in its aftermath, including the heavy-lifting equipment needed to clear the rubble and recover the bodies and clear the IEDs.

My comment in square brackets.

NOTE: This Amnesty International Report follows massive 2017 criticism of the organization's nasty propaganda work regarding Syria, when it was widely dubbed "Shamnesty International": LINK TO LINKS. Maybe it understands now that true human rights defenders are well informed?

RACISM AND ISRAEL AND YEMEN

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

RACISM. The Western middle-class ethos has been infected by a disproportionate taboo-like hyper-aversion to attitudinal and opinion racism.

This is a socially engineered and recent pathology that is not checked by humour and satire. People are now routinely prosecuted and jailed for victimless "hate speech" that is inferred to signal blasphemous beliefs and attitudes.

One consequence of the said pathology is that, as a result of the obsession with thought racism, it is difficult to discerned physical racism operationally enabled by states.

The more thought racism is an obscene crime, the less difference there is with racism actuated as state-run predation, genocide or war, which are the Western state’s main expenditures.

You can't get Canadians upset about the on-going mass genocidal war in Yemen. On the contrary, average liberal Canadians in-effect agree to sell the Saudis weapons to help advance the massacre and cheer on the sanctions and blockade. But if a baker refuses to make a cake for a gay wedding all hell breaks loose.

The public is content to accept state-run physical racism if it is masked by vigorous demonstrations of concern for attitudinal and opinion racism.

For example, Canadian aboriginals can continue to be poisoned on toxic holding reserves and continue to have their land rights violates if "we" give them "respect" and "value" their traditional knowledge and languages, and suitably freak out at social media examples of overt personal expression racism or related interpersonal incidents.

Similarly, as a result of the said pathology, a charge of anti-Semitism is a powerful censoring bludgeon to silence objections to Israel's violent and genocidal 70-year containment and eradication campaign.

The defenders of the “Words that Wound” industry of manufactured outrage and criminalization against attitudinal and opinion racism make a steep slippery slope argument [a]. They argue that individual expression is the tail that wags the state-sponsored racism dog. I argue the opposite, that free expression checks state violence and abuse, and produces meaningful and robust cultural development. Instead, we have silenced the comics, militarized the media, and jailed the “hate speakers” that are the most triggering catalysts for intellectual and moral development.

Instead of discerning thought and expression racism of individuals in our own society from physical-violence racism of our state, the pathology is so advanced that we are reduced to pointing out inconsistencies or bias in outrage.

For example, Ivan Kalmar, anthropology professor, University of Toronto, argues that both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are appalling and that “both are fed by the Israel/Palestine conflict” [1]. In this way, the powerful state of Israel’s violent and genocidal containment and eradication of the native population is not an egregious long-term mass violation of the Geneva Conventions regulating military occupation but rather is simply part of a “conflict” that produces “appalling” individual racist attitudes and demonstrations in both a priori legitimate sides; because after all, it is those racist demonstrations at home that concern us.

Steven Salaita, on the other hand, has brilliantly exposed the narrative (“hasbara” or spin) pushed by Israel to be fundamental state-sponsored racism, underpinned by true conviction of race superiority [2]. But he has not done it in a way that expressly challenges the “Words that Wound” pathology, as he did in the “legitimizing anti-Semitism” tweet that made him famous.


Endnotes

[a] “Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chapter 5 in: The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menard, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226520049; which is a critique of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, by legal scholars Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw, Westview Press, 1993.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editors/2018/05/31/your-letters-muslim-anti-semitism-and-jewish-islamophobia-are-based-in-geopolitics.html

[2] http://mondoweiss.net/2018/06/defending-israel-actually/


Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is a social theorist and the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism.

Message from The Man

Dissidents: If you are too threatening, actually threatening and not protected, then you will be murdered. If you are too popular, then you will be character assassinated. If you confine yourself to properly "academic" expression and the pretext to fire you is too costly or risky, then you will not be censored. Only your web venues will be very very very s..l..o..o..o..w.

Jordan Peterson and the Threat of Working-class Intellectual and Attitudinal Liberation

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

[This article was first published at Dissident Voice: LINK.]


SUMMARY: Why the industry of glib and vehement mainstream character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson? My examination of Peterson’s “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back” suggests that it is a seminal work anchored in a prestigious body of scientific research that should form the theoretical basis of social science in the coming years. Peterson is simply presenting this nascent scientific paradigm of the primacy of dominance hierarchy directly to the people, without an institutional filter, and using it in a cognitive therapy approach to solve the self-image catastrophe that white males in particular are experiencing. There is no valid basis for the attacks against Peterson, which are motivated by establishment machinations.


I’m a world-class scientist. I’m a physicist with an h-index of 36 (i10-index 81). I was a university professor at 29 and a full and tenured professor at 40. I’ve made discoveries in physics and some of my most cited papers are in soil and environmental science. I’m not clever in navigating society’s dominance hierarchy but I am intellectually honest and I am damn smart when it comes to understanding concepts and recognizing new phenomena.

Only those of my enemies who are professional liars (lawyers) have ever dared to call me stupid: “Mr. Rancourt is an intelligent man Your Honour”, but not repeatedly.

That is why I have been surprised to observe the deluge of strident voices, opinion leaders of our time, who use the establishment’s highest media venues to launch character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson based on… nothing.

Peterson is a fascinating media and social phenomenon worth investigating. I looked at his outstanding research record on Google Scholar and read several of his most cited and recent scientific papers. I watched several of his debates against said opinion leaders and several of his pedagogical presentations.

The scientific papers are exemplary, with correct applications of sophisticated statistical, significance and factor analysis tools. I often find sloppy and incorrect applications to be the norm in the medical field,¹ for example, but not here.

In the presentations, I find clear and intelligent statements on the questions related to his many areas of expertise, and ya, some exaggerations and incorrect statements in areas where his gaze has not been objective, it appears.

For example, I don’t understand how an authentic intellectual could read the landmark works of Karl Marx and the critiques of the said work by the great anarchist theorist Kropotkin and not be thoroughly impressed by the genius of Marx, and the elements of his theory that are seminal and fundamental even if incorrectly extrapolated by Marx. I conclude that Jordan has not actually read this stuff or he is being irrational in his evaluation, for whatever reasons related to his personal history.

In my evaluation, however, Peterson’s occasional stupid summaries are entirely a result of his boldness to put ideas out there, on the fly, in his broad and continuous interactions with the world; and they remove nothing from the depth and rigour of his other written and spoken words. Even Einstein wrote naïve and silly things without the prerequisite background study: “Why Socialism?”, 1949.

Next, I decided to get myself a copy of his record-breaking best seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I’m a slow reader, and I read all the notes and most of the articles themselves that are cited. I have now finished up to the end of: “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back”.
I thought: “Holy crap. This guy is doing something unprecedented. He is taking a nascent scientific paradigm and bringing it directly to the people, with no institutional intermediaries. Brilliant.”
I’ll explain what Peterson is doing and its significance but before I do…

I next went back to the products of the character-assassination professionals to see what the service intellectuals had said about “Rule 1”, and I looked for “Rule 1” summaries and explanations on line.
I was shocked to find the degree to which the said service intellectuals had done their job. What a distasteful spectacle. Such vile dishonesty. Only an assigned mission and attempts at opinion mobbing could produce such trash, which actually hurts the brain unless your purpose is mindless subservience to establishment spin.

What is the “nascent scientific paradigm”, which threatens key tenets of the current social engineering complex if it is not sufficiently buried? Let me be blunt. In the last decade or more, biochemists, biologists, animal behaviourists and psychologists have established proof of what some astute observers have been saying for centuries: Dominance hierarchy rules, across the animal kingdom and over evolutionary time. It is rooted in a primordial physiology and metabolic biochemistry.

The metabolism of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin, and the associated evolutionary biology, is the first synthesis of the new tectonic plates theory of social science, whether social scientists are aware of it yet or not. Period.

The metabolic biochemistry of dominance locks us in. No socialism theory that presumes altruistic cooperation as its organizing principle can ever work. Non-hierarchical anarchism and its libertarian cousin are useful conceptual end-points that can never be sustainably achieved. The best we can do is to have a responsive and optimally (evolutionarily) beneficial dominance hierarchy that is actively prevented from exercising pathological excess.²

Jordan is spelling this out (p. 14-15):

This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected-and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence. We (the sovereign we, the we that has been around since the beginning of life) have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. [Footnote 17: “Serotonin and dominance”, by Ziomkiewicz-Wichary, 2016] It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious and weak. If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of fight that life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies. And it is not only the behavioural and experiential similarities that are striking. Much of the basic neurochemistry is the same.

Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in the lobster. Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency—as anything whatsoever may happen, at any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely something good). Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan—among humans, just as among crustaceans. Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps are held constant. The importance of this can hardly be overstated.

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society …

What the ignorant hit men against Peterson have failed to recognize is that Peterson has summarized the greatest scientific advances of the last few decades, which have immediate relevance to human anthropological consciousness—not to mention representing a direct threat to the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry.²

Peterson is doing this as part of a state-of-the-art cognitive therapy guide or companion.
How can his glib critics be oblivious to this? Simple: Their place and the place of their bosses within the dominance hierarchy are threatened.

Jordan goes on (p. 23-24) to explain the fundamental roles of anger and of fighting back, both as necessary elements of personal liberation and as the fundamental agent to prevent societal spiralling into totalitarianism. His summary on this point is brilliant, and is as seminal as Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology in the geopolitical field.

The same point is also the main thrust of my 2013 book³ and was made in my 2011 blog extract from the book:

There is no denying the first reality about humans. We are social beings, first and foremost regarding the forces that determine our lives. Our societies are hierarchical and, when not constrained by geography or balancing natural forces, spontaneously grow in size towards more hierarchy and fascism.

A recent antidote against the runaway excesses of Western monarchical and religious hierarchies has been the development of an ethos of individual freedom, spawned in the Enlightenment and anchored in mid-layer economic independence from the top hierarchical predators. …⁴

Peterson is not waiting for the social and medical sciences to catch up to the paradigm elucidation that has recently occurred among dominance-hierarchy pioneers. He is taking those discoveries as his world view and as the foundation for his advice to the youth.

The dominance-hierarchy view of nature is powerful and compelling, now supported by a few decades of hard science. It is a predictive model with unlimited capacity to organize our perception of the world. It is a dangerous truth, as is any truth about ourselves, which is not dominance-hierarchy-given but which instead is anchored in objective reality.

In the words of Harold Pinter:

[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
– Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

Peterson is having an impact because his important words are true and because oppressive false words have gone too far.

Goodiness is helpful in stabilizing the domestic dominance hierarchy, but goodiness has been co-opted and used to excess by one side of the establishment forces, the so-called “Left”. In a classic positive feedback loop—not unlike Jordan’s explanation of alcoholism—goodiness (political correctness) has achieved pathological levels and its totalitarianism is spraying dead bodies all over the landscape.

Regular white males are very publicly being told to “check their privilege” (that is, to shut the fuck up), to cower and to apologize and make amends for a historical accumulation of “toxic masculinity”. Privileged (professional class) non-white and non-male service intellectuals are recruited into a deceitful industry of supposedly fixing society by engineering language and by mounting witch hunts against perceived attitudinal blasphemy.

Dominance hierarchy theory tells us that this is a recipe for backlash. Self-image catastrophe is the dominant determinant of ill-health and is accompanied by violent outbursts or self-destruction.⁵
Jordan Peterson is furiously working to prevent and alleviate a violent race and gender civil war, waged by competing hierarchical exploiters, and guided by a disgusting array of careerist social managers.

Jordan Peterson is also fighting for reason and objectivity and against ideological madness.
I mean, come on:

[T]he idea that there is no binary male/female sex divide in humans is simply a vast overstatement of the fact that many other things also occur in the genital and metabolic physiology of a minority of individuals. …

That environmental factors—including culture and the violence or authoritativeness of the local social dominance hierarchy—affect both natural reproduction and the said set of sex-differentiating physiological attributes does [not] invalidate the sex binary in human society.⁶

Jodan’s Rule-1 explanation about gender roles (pp. 15-16) is anchored in science. His Footnote 18 is “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom”, which has:

Combining Bateman’s principles with Darwin’s conception of eager males and discriminating females, the Darwin-Bateman paradigm is now the most commonly invoked concept to explain conventional sex roles (…). Specifically, it provides the conceptual framework to understand two central manifestations of conventional sex roles—female-biased parental care and male-biased sexual dimorphism.⁷

What is next? Are we going to pretend that sexual dimorphism is not real? Or postulate that virtually all animal behavioural studies are cultural fantasies imagined by the field observers? Are we going to throw out evolutionary biology and all of Darwin’s ideas as “male science”? Why not discount Einstein’s theories as “Jew science” while we are at it?

Look, white males are assholes, fine. But the “Words that Wound” industry service intellectuals are going too far.⁸ Establishment “science” can be lethal, as is literally the case with medicine,¹ but that does not negate what we actually know about cell biology and metabolic reactions. Likewise, fundamental empirical discoveries about dominance and sex are not negated because Freud was off and psychiatry is a horror. You cannot simply extrapolate cherry picked scientific reports of anomalies into broad self-serving ideological conclusions.

These are the things that Jordan Peterson is responsibly questioning. Thank god.

1. “Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis”, by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, December 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129. [↩] [↩]
2. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017. [↩] [↩]
3. Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism, by Denis Rancourt, Stairway Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9859942-8-0. [↩]
4. “Individual freedom versus collective oppression as the determinative conflict in a hierarchical society”, by Denis Rancourt, Activist Teacher, August 16, 2011. [↩]
5. “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014. [↩]
6. “Respecting ‘Rules of War’ in Societal Battles: Science, Sex and Hate Speech”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, November 8, 2016. [↩]
7. “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom”, by Janicke et al., Science Advances, 12 Feb 2016: Vol. 2, no. 2, e1500983 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500983 [↩]
8. “Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chapter 5 in: The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menard, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226520049; which is a critique of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, by legal scholars Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw, Westview Press, 1993. [↩]

Kim and Moon KOREA

Why renewed peace now, after decades?

Here is my tentative answer:

1. USA global hegemony is visibly eroding. Nations have less and less incentive to be oppressed servants of USA domination. The new multi-polar world (with an emerging Eurasia, etc.) has many more advantages than servitude to USA human and natural resource extraction, including stability, security and peace.
2. Kim has the needed background of safety, thanks to his now hydrogen bomb and intercontinental missile capabilities.
3. Distributed media technology (social media, etc.) makes it impossible for the USA to create a flawless web of war propaganda. Populations are more and more informed about reality, rather than simply manipulated. (That is why there is a top-down "fake news" frenzy.)
4. Trump, with all his flaws and qualities, is the man of the hour in the USA: the common-sense player that wants to maneuver and manage hegemonic-come-down (America First) rather than try to impose hegemony with ever more violent wars.
5. Russia and China have developed massive advanced military defence capabilities, and technologies that can be exported to their allies. They could survive a USA first-strike attempt and therefore cannot be intimidated. They can choose their battles, such as in Syria. Russia has decided to frustrate the USA model of nation destruction (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...) Next even Gaza and Yemen and Africa... will be healed.

I think the USA propaganda that is unfolding corroborates my analysis:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/26/world/korea-summit-kang-kyung-wha-amanpour-intl/

The USA needs an out without losing face and Moon is happy to help in that regard. The USA makes the world go round. Right?

Denis Rancourt, PhD

Check out this related commentary:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

Canadian Societal Depravity is Anchored in Medical Care

Where good will provides cover for predatory population enslavement

by Denis Rancourt, PhD

This article was first published on Dissident Voice (LINK).


A society of socially engineered individuals who cannot identify their own anthropological dissonance is a depraved society.

Its depravity is further established by its managers who do not experience profound discomfort in the face of the state’s domestic and foreign perpetual mass crimes.

Here, I explore the role of so-called health care in maintaining Canadian societal depravity. Canada is a satellite state of the USA, which defines itself as a jurisdiction with public medical services.

The truth is Canadian “health care” has become a system in-effect designed to keep Canadians stupid and sick. This design serves the global-elite bosses, the political class, the medical profession and the Big Pharma predators, in what is a symbiotic mesh of enslavement. So Canada defines itself by one of its main systems of social control.

I’m driven to write this by a few recent events that point to a downward spiral.

First, in 2017 the Ontario government announced its new publicly funded “pharmacare” program for people 24 years old or younger, which includes virtually every patented “behavioural enhancement” drug. This was done in a total absence of scientific impact studies and in a total absence of independent studies of hierarchical needs and drug efficacy.

Then, last month, in a further cynical move to buy votes in time for the June 2018 election, the Ontario government expanded its “pharmacare” program to seniors, the most over-mediated segment of our drugged society.¹

On top of it all, I had the displeasure of reading the leading Left health-care guru’s 2017 book Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin.²

Martin’s book is superbly researched, authoritative and beautifully written. It is an essential current resource for medical care activists and managers. But it plays right into the hands of the said mesh of enslavement by recruiting Left organizers and people of good will to believe that fixing is possible — if guided by research, brave implementations and a moral desire for a fair society.

Such fixing by gradual change from within is not possible with the hydra that we are contemplating. Yet, Martin states:

In the anatomy of a system for change, clinicians are the feet that do the walking. They can also be the feet that drag. […] Making change is always about the art of the possible. Sometimes it would be great to pass a piece of legislation requiring hospitals or doctors to do something, but it just isn’t feasible. At other times it would be better to engage physicians and inspire them to drive change locally, but sometimes they’re frankly unwilling or unable to do so.

You get the drift. It’s on and on like that.

Martin’s “six big ideas” are too many: (1) return of the patient-physician relationship, (2) too much prescribing of drugs too expensive, (3) get physicians to voluntarilly “do less”, to stop harming patients and to reduce costs, (4) do more with less, (5) eliminate poverty to improve health and reduce overall government expenditures, and (6) be smart about actuating change.

A realistic campaign would have just one idea: The medical-establishment-led so-called health care system does far more harm than good and is a system of exploitation and enslavement that must be dismantled. With one application note: The reform will have to be grassroots and culturally anchored or it will easily be hijacked.

Contrary to Martin’s thesis, death by medicine is not some manageable feature that can be remedied by better procedures and more responsible practice. Rather, it is systemic and would require accountability and publicly documented enforced penalties, which exist on paper but are in reality foreign to the profession.³

In my 2015 critical review of the scientific literature, I summarized the problem of fatal medical “errors” this way:

In the words of Dr. Barbara Starfield, and many others, it is therefore incontrovertible that establishment medicine is the third leading cause of death in industrialized countries, after deaths from heart disease and cancer, which in turn are causes that medicine can do very little about. The next and fourth leading cause of death is cerebrovascular disease and its rate is far below that from medical-induced (iatrogenic) deaths, such that “medical manslaughter” is not about to give up its rank of third leading cause.

In concrete terms, I calculated that this means that between 6% and 8% of advanced Western state citizens die from medicine rather than any other cause, including both medical-error deaths and non-error medical deaths.⁴

In the West, medicine causes more deaths that all wars, violent crimes, car accidents… you name it. It is routinely referred to as an epidemic in the scientific literature, yet it is not on the radar of media-driven public policy concerns. The media is too busy telling us about the supposed dangers of self-administered cannabis.

You are at more risk walking into your doctor’s office or into a community clinic than from virtually every other thing you will ever do.

You have been hoodwinked. To achieve this, it is necessary to continuously engineer and maintain a cultural veil that makes one fundamental biological truth impenetrable: almost always the body heals itself, and does a remarkably good job of it if dominance power does not interfere. The human body has been doing this for more than a million years; and this self-healing capacity has sustained the most successful species of large mammals on the planet, despite the opportunism of witch doctors and fortune tellers.

The only exceptions are the inevitability of old age and accidents that are fatal in the absence of crisis intervention. Medical crisis intervention means: Stop the bleeding and repair vital organs that will not repair themselves in time to prevent death or permanent disability, without causing death by the intervention itself. Modern heart attack interventions and repairs following massive lacerations are examples.

Virtually everything else involves simply securing an environment that optimizes healing by ensuring security, alleviating stress and removing causal factors. Admittedly, these are difficult healing goals in a dominance hierarchy of lobotomized and exploited individuals being milked for service charges and drug dependence by a “health care” system.

The said biological truth has been replaced with a constellation of lies: That industry-recommended “medication” and interventions are required and beneficial; That pain plays no useful role and should be artificially suppressed; That drugs accelerate healing without diminishing the body’s ability to heal itself; That disconnected doctors know best; That technological tests and physical measurements are substitutes for self-knowledge; That it’s better to consult rather than try to be one’s own doctor; and so on.

In 1974, Ivan Illich put it this way and things have only gotten much worst since:

Within the last decade medical professional practice has become a major threat to health. Depression, infection, disability, dysfunction, and other specific iatrogenic diseases now cause more suffering than all accidents from traffic or industry. Beyond this, medical practice sponsors sickness by the reinforcement of a morbid society which not only industrially preserves its defectives but breeds the therapist’s client in a cybernetic way. Finally, the so-called health-professions have an indirect sickening power – a structurally health-denying effect. I want to focus on this last syndrome, which I designate as medical Nemesis. By transforming pain, illness, and death from a personal challenge into a technical problem, medical practice expropriates the potential of people to deal with their human condition in an autonomous way and becomes the source of a new kind of un-health.⁵

“The medical establishment has become a major threat to health” was true is 1976 and that threat has only dug itself in and widened.⁶ However, more is scientifically known now about the mechanistic cause of ill-health of the individual animal then was known in the 1970s.⁴,⁷,⁸  Therefore, then and now, in addition to hiding the truth about healing, the fundamental truth about the cause of ill-health must also be hidden from the individual and buried as deeply as possible.

Even at her most progressive, Martin in-effect plays this role admirably well. She points to the large area of health research known as “social determinants of health”. The researchers in this field avoid treating the harmful nature of establishment medicine itself and, instead, focus on the societal factors that statistically correlate with ill-health.

They find that the dominant factor that correlates to ill-health and mortality is poverty, and that this correlation is significantly modulated by a co-factor that is the magnitude of the income gap between rich and poor in the society. Martin concludes, therefore, that governments should eliminate poverty to improve public health and to reduce overall government expenditures.

Martin’s economic structural solution amounts to what doctors do best: Divert resources and attention towards suppressing the symptoms rather that addressing the cause, even though she firmly believes that she is addressing a cause. Eliminating poverty by systemic change is an honourable and just cause in itself and it should not be anchored in any ancillary goal, especially not one that relies on the medical profession for its accomplishment.

Of course, extreme poverty causing fatal nutritional and environmental deficiencies causes death. That is not controversial. However, all such extreme poverty has been structurally eliminated in Canada and the killer now is the subjective stress and self-image devaluation caused by the inherent violence of society’s dominance hierarchy, including the violence from the medical enterprise itself.⁴,⁷,⁸  This is true to different degrees in all social classes, from professional workers to aboriginal reserve residents to urban homeless people.

Martin in no way is contributing to a solution. Rather, she is vying for partisan influence for good-will managers and enlightened professionals. However, the problem is deeper than anything addressed by establishment forces, including the progressive ones.

Both private (USA) and public (Canada) medical systems are networks of oppression and enslavement run by collaborating corporate, government and professional bodies whose members derive disproportionate and immoral benefits. Arguing which is best is akin to arguing about whether to vote Democrat or Republican, prior to the somewhat democratizing anomaly of Trump that was enabled by the technological opportunity of a temporarily free social media.

At its heart, individuals have been infantilized and reduced to following directives under paternalistic umbrellas. On the contrary, knowledge and individual responsibility must be distributed and accompanied by individual influence and power. The structures that have neutralized us in every sphere and the forces that keep us depressed are the factors that make us sick and keep us dependent.
The way forward is to fight for fundamental rights that ensure a measure of influence and power, starting with the most fundamental rights of free expression and free association.

Furthermore, those with institutional power must be accountable, rather than shielded. The professional associations, colleges and councils that shield lawyers, doctors and judges must be defeated and made to answer to their victims.

“Whistleblower protection” cannot mean tenuous protection for the few individuals who expose egregious abuses. It must mean broad effective protections for all employees who wish to disclose and complain about government and corporate employers and procedures. It must mean actual transparency by distributed impetus.

“Freedom of the press” cannot mean shielding government and corporate media from accountability and protecting journalist shills who serve interested publishers. It must mean distributed power to individuals to publish in social media without imposed constraints, with effective protection against establishment hijacking of technological venues.

Actual education is a collective and self-organized societal process, not a method to train and indoctrinate. Optimal freedom gives enlightened and healthy individuals. Excessive domination gives the opposite. This principle is increasingly painfully obvious.⁹

Everything else is a surreal argument about whether the organized oppression is fair or unfair.

1. News Release: Making Prescription Drugs Free for People 65 and Over – Expanding OHIP+ Will Make Prescription Drugs Free for Nearly One in Two Ontarians, March 20, 2018, Office of the Premier.
2. Better Now – Six Big Ideas To Improve Health Care for All Canadians by Dr. Danielle Martin, Penguin Random House, 2017, pp. 298.
3. “Psychiatrist Louis Morissette Should Be Barred From Practice” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, April 5, 2018.
4. “Cancer Arises from Stress-induced Breakdown of Tissue Homeostasis – Part 1: Context of Cancer Research” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, December 4, 2015.
5. “Medical Nemesis” by Ivan Illich, The Lancet, vol. 303, no. 7863, May 11, 1974, pp. 918-921, at p. 918.
6. Limits to medicine: medical nemesis—the expropriation of health by Ivan Illich, London: Marion Boyars, 1976, pp. 294.
7. “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health” by Robert M. Sapolsky, Science, vol. 308, no. 5722, April 29, 2005, pp. 648-652, DOI:10.1126/science.1106477.
8. “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014.
9. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017.

Professional Ethics: Psychiatrist Louis Morissette Should Be Barred From Practice

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

This article was first published on Dissident Voice (LINK).

The Quebec medical tribunal will decide if psychiatrist-for-hire Louis Morissette was allowed to provide a hatchet job based on hearsay.

The review committee of the medical tribunal of Quebec will decide within 90 days whether or not anyone anywhere, such as a political party or institution or individual in any province or state, can hire a Quebec expert psychiatrist to render a medical opinion about an opponent without interviewing or even informing the individual.

The said medical opinion could be made without any medical record or clinical evaluation or verification of information, and then used publicly or otherwise for political or institutional purposes.
This happened to me, with devastating consequences.

I only found out by chance, years later, thanks to an investigation into my 2008 dismissal from the University of Ottawa, which is still in litigation.¹,²,³

I filed a complaint to the medical tribunal as soon as I could. I have publicly posted the entire complaint, the intake investigator’s conclusions, and my appeal of the said conclusions.⁴

This is what occurred, in the most neutral terms I can muster.

Dr. Louis Morissette, a psychiatrist licenced by the province of Quebec, agreed to conduct a secret medical evaluation of an individual who was critical of his employer.  The psychiatrist evidently agreed to the employer’s request that he work without informing the individual.  The psychiatrist never contacted the individual, never tried to contact him, and never even claimed that he tried to contact him.

The psychiatrist did not use any medical records whatsoever. Instead, he relied entirely on false intimate personal information provided by the employer, which he never attempted to verify, and on media reports selected by the employer.

On this basis alone, the psychiatrist wrongly labelled me a dangerous person, causing me to be exiled from my community, following his definitive recommendations to that effect.  Years later, when I found out that the psychiatrist had medically evaluated me, he refused to give me a copy of his report.
Morissette has a long documented record of evidence-based alleged and proven violations that the Collège des médecins du Québec has ignored.

These include the following that I added to my complaint, with the evidence:

• judicially proven lying while giving expert testimony in court;
• giving expert opinion in a criminal proceeding without consulting the relevant scientific research literature;
• an appellate court finding of his reprehensible behaviour;
• giving an in-court expert opinion of the harmlessness of mass-murderer Karla Homolka based on 3½ hours of interview;
• being in conflict of interest while recommending release of double-child-murderer Guy Turcotte;
• destroying his appraisal-session interview notes immediately and prior to termination of criminal legal proceedings and engaging in such disallowed practice since 1983;
• requesting double payment for the same service by claiming the same accused person both as patient and legal client;
• performing such a large amount of opinion-for-hire contracting for clients as to affect his professional independence, put him in conflict of interest, and influence the quality of his practice; and,
• exercising his profession in a jurisdiction in which he is not a certified practitioner.

After eight months, the medical tribunal’s intake analyst, Dr. Michel Jarry, summarily dismissed my entire complaint, writing that there is no cause to bother the disciplinary committee since I am not a “patient” of Morissette. This remarkable result was handed down despite the many and repeated unambiguous violations by Morissette of the statutory rules of professional ethics.

I filed an appeal on April 2, 2018, and the review committee has 90 days to make its decision about whether this sort of thing is allowed.

It must not be allowed. Otherwise, we are no better than any totalitarian regime that mines rumours and false accusations to legitimize state actions, and psychiatrists are no better than opportunists-for-hire in such a system.

It is also of note that the vice-president-governance of the University of Ottawa who coordinated the collection of hearsay about my intimate personal information, for use by the hired psychiatrist to render his secret “psychiatric opinion”, was Nathalie Des Rosiers.

Des Rosiers subsequently became Director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) for a time and is now an elected member (MPP) of the Ontario parliament and a minister in the government.

The university did not inform me of its actions, and vigorously opposed my access to the psychiatric report until the final hour of an appeal in litigation for access in 2017.⁵

1. “Academic Freedom? How Nasty Can a University Be?” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, February 17, 2018.
2. “Denis Rancourt’s letter to president Jacques Frémont, University of Ottawa”, with three attached supporting letters from Hazel Gashoka, Jean-Marie Vianney, and Cynthia McKinney, January 8, 2018.
3. “Did University of Ottawa Persecute a Professor on Its Faculty? A Petition in Support of Denis Rancourt”, March 2018.
4. “Book Of Complaint Against Psychiatrist Louis Morissette With Appeal To CdR CMQ”, by Denis Rancourt, April 2, 2018.
5. “Book: All arguments of parties and intervener in Dr. Denis Rancourt’s constitutional challenge of Section 65(6)3 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, at judicial review, in the Divisional Court for Ontario, Court File No.: 17-DC-2279”, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, March 2018.