It seems that all the hard work done by the population over the past two years has been for nothing (“PM says no to free tests as lab closes”, January 4). The recent change in the attitude of federal, state and territory governments is quite baffling. Leaders now refuse to put in place strategies which might limit the spread of the Omicron virus. They are telling us it’s now up to us get on with it, and we’ll probably all get the virus. They are limiting PCR testing, shortening the quarantine time and encouraging us to get out and about. They tell us to get a rapid antigen test if we show symptoms. However, the availability and the cost of these tests make acquiring them extremely difficult. The Prime Minister is refusing to make the RATs free, even for those on limited income, and this will result in many families being unable to self-test, thus inadvertently spreading the virus. It seems our governments have abdicated their responsibility to govern in the best interests of the community. - Merrie Carling, Nicholls (ACT)

When it comes to submarines, we sign up to some vague plan at the cost of tens of billions. When it comes to showering taxpayer money into Coalition seats as rorts, it’s considered good value. When it comes to large corporations walking away with billions of erroneously claimed JobKeeper dollars, there’s no need to get the handouts back. But now that I would like a few RAT kits, which would be for the wider community’s health more than my own, I’m being lectured on things not being “free”. I have not been able to procure a RAT, but I sure can smell one. - Wendy Varney, Leura

With our health systems falling down around our ears, PCR testing sites failing, businesses unable to open up due to lack of staff and with people unable to access booster shots, PCR tests or rapid tests, we are being thrown on the scrap heap. - Maureen Donlon, Wagga Wagga

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/couldn-t-give-a-rats-pm-cuts-us-loose-as-cases-soar-20220104-p59loe.html

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The pandemic has weaponised the argument that individual responsibility for one’s health is best – free from government edicts. This is pathetic.

 One June afternoon in 2013, the Dalai Lama arrived at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital to participate, with about 400 hospital and research institute staff, in a medical ethics seminar. His sense of humour was soon displayed: when he had had his gall bladder removed not long before, he explained with a chuckle, he opted for ‘medication, not meditation.’

 During the Q&A format, he emphasised the importance of each individual’s responsibility for his or her own health – but one question slowed him. Asked if doctors had a responsibility to treat people who had abused their health through smoking, drinking, and overeating, he paused: “I don’t know. You’ll need to work that out!”  But was His Holiness offering sound advice? 

 During COVID’s war-like progression, generating confusion and error, a new mantra has emerged: that individual responsibility for one’s health is the way forward – free from government edicts. There is a tension between private and public responsibility. The latter is accomplished through public health regulations and changes in societal behaviour mandated, on expert medical advice, by responsible governments. It is not within the portfolio of individual responsibility.

 COVID is like a game of cricket: the government has batted for a modest first innings using public health measures. They have declared. Their responsibility is over.  After drinks in the shade, it’s up to us – the individual responsibility team – to have a go. Regrettably, our team is uneven in ability.  

 The distribution of Australian deaths reported as due to COVID up to July 31 last year by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), is uneven. 

 The ABS compares the number of deaths in five equal groups or quintiles of the population ranked according to their socio-economic status. One hundred and fifty-five deaths occurred among men in the least privileged quintile – compared with 43 among the most privileged. One hundred and fifty-six deaths occurred among the least privileged women – compared with 40 among the most privileged. 

 Studies of vaccination rates by Nicholas Biddle, Ben Edwards, Matthew Gray, and Kate Sollis of the Australian National University show the same strong association with socio-economic status.  

 Before concluding that these gradients are within the power of the individual to modify, we should take account of language differences, income, housing, education, employment, access to medical care and other social factors that differ markedly among the quintiles. They are not under the control of the individual.  Adult health illiteracy in Australia is running at almost 60 per cent and this weakens the ability to make individual health decisions. This cannot be remedied by individual willpower. 

 Further concerns about individual responsibility relate to the treatment of Covid cases. The idea of unvaccinated patients paying for care is problematic.  

 The foundation of Medibank/Medicare was that all of us would contribute according to our incomes.  All would then be equally entitled to financial cover. It would not be risk-rated, where those with higher health risks pay more.  It would be universal. Patients with Covid ­– even the unvaccinated – are as entitled as anyone else to Medicare funding.  (The Dalai Llama could not have been expected to know much about Medicare.)

 But Medicare is not a panacea. John Deeble, one of the architects of Medibank and then Medicare, at a seminar on health equity about 25 years ago, insisted that Medicare was only about funding for care.  Nothing more or less.  It does not guarantee uniform outcomes of care, if does not overcome geographic limitations, and does not assure timeliness of care. It was not designed to resolve the inequalities in health and illness related to social and economic advantage beyond alleviating financial pressures on the sick. 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/its-not-only-us-mr-morrison-government-must-play-part-in-fighting-covid/

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Kiev’s determination to extinguish pro-Russian sentiment in its two far eastern provinces has derailed the Minsk agreement, which offered the best hope for stability in the region.

The UN General Assembly on December 16 passed its annual resolution on “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, with 130 countries voting in favour and only two in opposition.

One of those voting against was Ukraine. The other was the United States. Australia, together with a group of other pro-US nations, abstained. Washington justified its vote with a convoluted argument about protecting freedom of expression. Presumably on that basis it should give up its attempts to ban hate speech.

The UN vote was followed by a torchlight parade through Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, commemorating the birthday of wartime Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, seen as the founder of today’s Ukraine. As head of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera’s group had joined in the wartime Nazi mass killings of Jews, Russians and others.

Today the Banderites and other similar nationalist right-wing groups have become the dominant force in Ukraine. One of their first demands has been the restoration of the Ukrainian language.

I travelled extensively in Ukraine, including Crimea, in the 1960s and in Crimea again in 2016. Russian was the absolute lingua franca. Only in the traditionally anti-Russian, anti-Semitic western regions close to Poland would one hear Ukrainian, then regarded as a poor relation of Russian.

Since then the Banderite right wing has come a long way in its quest for political power. A major success was the 2014 Maidan revolt against the democratically elected pro-Russian government. The Banderites have also done much to ignite a civil war which has left 14,000 dead and divided the nation. Russian speakers were and probably remain the majority. But with the anti-Russians now in control, use of the Ukrainian language is being forcefully imposed.

Pro-Russians with access to Russian aid have been bottled up and fighting for survival in the two far eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which basically is where we are now today.

But it is not where we should be. In 2015 representatives of Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe) and the two pro-Russian separatist provinces met in Minsk and signed what was supposed to be a peace agreement to end the war. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine were there at the same time. They too declared support for the deal, which promised a dialogue on interim self-government for Donetsk and Luhansk and to acknowledge their special status by a resolution of the Ukrainian parliament.

In other words, the two provinces would come to resemble regions such as Quebec in Canada, which remains in Canada but with its own laws and language.

Kiev has managed to circumvent the Minsk agreement and all subsequent attempts at a peace deal by the simple device of saying it was unable to get parliament to grant the constitutional power for the “decentralisation” needed to allow Donetsk and Luhansk to go their separate ways. It did not have that constitutional power for the simple reason that it did not want that power. It wants the Donetsk and Luhansk holdouts to be extinguished.

On this basis, Kiev assumes the right to continue the war against the two separatist provinces, Moscow assumes the right to provide the aid needed for their survival, and the West assumes the right to provide the aid needed to counter “Russian aggression”, even though Moscow has repeatedly stated it wants the two provinces to remain in Ukraine as promised under the Minsk agreement.

Today we hear much about Russian aggression and a rules-based international order. But we hear very little mention of the Minsk agreements that were supposed to provide the order needed to resolve the Ukraine problem.

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/how-ukraines-dominant-right-wing-undermines-the-peace/

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It is outrageous that Australia abstained in the vote against Nazism... This shows how complicit with this plague of political opportunism Australia's ScuMo has been. Really? Are we supporting the NAZIS? Unfortunately we are, but our media and Western governments under the arm twisting of the USA are eager to see Ukraine fall into the clutches of NATO, thus do not want to mention that the government in Ukraine is 90 per cent fascist and NAZI. There should be a revolution in the street of Sydney agains our support of NAZISM — and the only thing one could see is a few protestors against vaccination, crossing the Harbour Bridge around 1 pm today. Vaccination isn't Nazi, though some loonies are prepared to mix them up.

The Ukrainian language channel of US state-run broadcaster RFERL is making a concerted effort to rehabilitate the life and legacy of WWII-era Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, widely held by historians to have been a war criminal.

A video posted by the broadcaster, registered as a "foreign agent" in Russia, earlier this month argued that Ukrainians are deeply divided about whether the wartime leader was a hero or a villain – while leaning heavily in favour of the hero narrative. RFE/RL is part of the US Agency for Global Media, a government controlled organisation, with an annual budget of over $800 billion, which is charter bound to promote the "foreign policy objectives of the United States."

Bandera was the figurehead of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which formed an alliance with Hitler’s Third Reich and played a role in rounding up Jewish people, executing civilians and fighting the advance of the Red Army. Many members of the OUN eventually fought as part of the all-Ukrainian 1st Galician division of the Waffen SS, a locally raised unit under the control of Nazi commanders. The descendants of this virulent nationalist movement continue to hold Bandera aloft as their anti-Russian ideological figurehead. Bandera has been linked with a series of incidents of wartime genocide carried out upon ethnic Poles and Jews in some of the worst crimes Europe has ever witnessed.

Many of its proponents also play leading roles in Ukrainian civil and political life, and have enjoyed support and indulgence from the West. The US does not in itself have an ideological proclivity towards neo-Nazism, at least in the mainstream, but its policies come down to a question of power politics. Washington often pushes its rivals against each other, much like all preceding empires have followed the strategy of divide and conquer, and it has on several occasions had an interest in supporting fascists as leading adversaries of the Soviet Union and Russia.

The current efforts to remake Eastern Europe into an anti-Russian front line are once again incentivising the glorification of war criminals from WWII as the leading lights of Ukrainian statehood.

When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, future US president Harry Truman argued that “if we see that Germany is winning the war we ought to help Russia [sic], and if Russia [sic] is winning, we ought to help Germany and in that way let them kill as many as possible”.

The US allied with the Soviet Union against Germany during the war, although switched thereafter as West Germany became an ally and the Soviet Union became the enemy. The partnership with Germany entailed the embrace of the Himmerod memorandum, which called for ending the “defamation” of the Wehrmacht and the transformation of public opinion. The whitewashing of Wehrmacht as an opponent of Bolshevism was deemed necessary to adapt to the new Cold War realities, which entailed legitimising the creation and partnership with the Bundeswehr as its successor.

Former adversaries became allies. Operation Paperclip, a secret US programme transferred approximately 1,600 German scientists to the US after the war for employment with the US government.

Adolf Heusinger, operations chief within the general staff of the High Command of the Nazi German Army, became the first inspector general of the Bundeswehr in 1957 and then was appointed as chairman of the NATO Military Committee in 1961. Wernher von Braun, a Major in the Nazi SS and a rocket engineer, eventually became the director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre.

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/russia/545499-america-rebrand-ukraine-fascists/

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