Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has finally picked on someone his own size: Finland. His officials have virtually accused the Finns of genocide of Soviet civilians in “concentration camps,” allegedly complete with gas chambers, during the Second World War. It is charged that some 8,000 died, including children.

This horror story comes complete with a state-subsidized “camp” museum to be set up in the village of Sopohan (Suopohja), where there are no records of any juvenile detention facility, and a movie for Russian kids, “Vesuri,” which milks this bogus tale. In fact, the museum, which was endowed with a presidential grant, pretends to be an old concentration camp. Actually, it is a movable movie set left behind after filming the propaganda piece.

There is more than meets the eye here. In addition to a neo-Stalinist narrative of eternal Russian victimhood aimed at Western audiences, the master of the Kremlin has his own captive people in mind. His is, in fact, a typical, comprehensive Bolshevik propaganda maneuver that has never gone out of style in Russia.

The last Soviet manifestation of this tackle occurred in the late 1980s. During his policy of “openness” (glasnost) and “restructuring” (perestroika) General Secretary of the Communist party Mikhail Gorbachev resolved to admit the Soviet Union’s responsibility for the slaughter of some 22,000 Poles, mostly captured Allied POWs, a sordidly genocidal affair known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. Among other things, the Soviet leader hoped to pacify Poland with this admission and to thwart Lithuania’s bid for independence in a quid pro quo with the Vatican. Gorbachev pledged to own up to Katyn, if Pope John Paul II restrained Catholic Lithuanians from proclaiming sovereignty.

In any event, always a dialectician, Gorbachev immediately worked out a propaganda fallback position for the Katyn affair. He claimed that 100,000 Bolshevik POWs were allegedly killed by the Poles in 1920. True, perhaps some 20,000 Red Army men did die in Polish captivity, along with their Polish guards, because the “Spanish Flu” epidemic killed them. There was a global pandemic, and they fell victim to it, along with about 50 million other human beings globally. The “Spanish Flu” was the deadliest killer ever, felling more people than perished in the First World War.

Putin has decided to copy the former General Secretary’s playbook. The current master of the Kremlin has deployed the narrative against Poland quite a few times, while also denying that Katyn ever happened. Now Russia’s president has turned his ire on the Fins.

In December 1939, unprovoked, the Soviet Union attacked Finland. The latter put up stiff resistance and sued for a ceasefire only in March 1940. Peace came at a forbidding price. Stalin demanded a chunk of their national territory, Karelia in particular. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the Finnish government ordered its troops to recover the area.

The Nazis admonished the Finns to join them in their anti-Communist war of extermination, which included the Holocaust. Yet, the Finnish declined. They simply wanted the restoration of the status quo ante. They did not share the Third Reich’s insane ideology. There were even Jewish soldiers in Finland’s armies fighting against the Soviets.

After reclaiming Karelia, Helsinki’s troops took some prisoners; they also encountered Russian-speaking colonists who were dispatched by Moscow to help Sovietize Finland’s territories. Thus, the Finnish authorities set up POW and internment camps for enemy aliens and everyone suspected of aiding and abetting Stalin. The conditions in the camps were rather mild by Soviet and Nazi standards but there was some suffering indeed because of general destitution and hardship at the time. Some internees died. Moscow claims the victim count was in the thousands and their deaths were deliberate. In other words, they were allegedly mass murdered.

However, to make the Finnish legitimate effort to secure their country into a genocidal project is neither factual nor convincing. In fact, it is rich coming from an heir to, and beneficiary of, Stalin’s mass murder. At best, this a morally relativistic effort to claim that Finland was “just like” the Soviet Union – murderous. At worst, it is a brazen attempt to equate the Finns to Nazi Germans. In the West, it is the best way to de-legitimize any polity. In particular, because of their acute awareness of the Holocaust the Americans tend to be very prickly about such charges and associations.

There is another angle to this deception operation. In Russia it is primarily about domestic politics. The nature of the post-Soviet “counterintelligence state,” as John Dziak has dubbed it, is to maintain itself in power by ferreting out all real and imagined enemies. One of them is Yuri Dmitriev, an amateur historian and an affiliate of Russia’s prime human rights organization Memorial. Dmitriev’s focus is the Great Terror, as Robert Conquest memorably dubbed it, particularly in Karelia, where the scholar happens to live. He devoted an enormous amount of time to discover its horrific secrets.

At least from 1936 through 1940, Stalin’s secret police in Karelia murdered tens of thousands of people, Soviet citizens, who remain buried in anonymous graves. Dmitriev discovered a few of the graves and described the slaughter. That was too much for the Kremlin. The historian-cum-human rights activist was arrested on charges of child pornography. He maintained a medical folder on his computer for his chronically ill adopted daughter, which included several naked pictures of her, documenting her affliction. Dmitriev was arrested and exonerated, but now he has been rearrested again and awaits a re-trail.

Human rights organizations in and out of Russia are outraged. Moscow has counterattacked. Nothing detracts the attention of the free world and Russia’s own citizens than a bogus story of Finnish death camps for children. Please take a careful note, because this is standard modus operandi of the Kremlin spin masters. Fake news galore.

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is Professor of History at the Institute of World Politics, a graduate school of statecraft in Washington D.C.; expert on East-Central Europe’s Three Seas region; author, among others, of “Intermarium: The Land Between The Baltic and Black Seas.” Read Marek Jan Chodakiewicz’s Reports – More Here.

Source: https://www.newsmax.com/marekjanchodakiewicz/putin-finland-world-war-ii/2020/06/22/id/973461/

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It’s been a little over a decade since the world experienced its last pandemic, the 2009 H1N1 swine flu. Between the spring of 2009 and the spring of 2010, the virus-infected as many as 1.4 billion people across the globe and killed between 151,700 and 575,400 people, according to the Centers for Disease Protection and Control. Now, the world is in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2.

Having been through a pandemic in recent history, it seems reasonable to expect that government agencies in the U.S. would be prepared for the next one. But there are some key differences between the 2009 swine flu and COVID-19, and the response to each of them.

“The 2009 H1N1 pandemic should have been a warning sign,” said Steffanie Strathdee, the Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences at the University of California San Diego’s Department of Medicine. “It didn’t end up being a pandemic that killed millions of people as we feared it would, but it should have been a wake-up call. By all serious estimates, COVID-19 is going to be a major killer.”

Strathdee is also the author of “The Perfect Predator” (Hachette Books, 2019), a memoir of her personal experience fighting a deadly microbial pathogen, a superbug called Acinetobacter baumannii, and witnessing her husband almost die from it. Her husband fully recovered but is at high risk of developing serious complications if the COVID-19 pandemic reaches him.

How are the illnesses different?

The 2009 flu pandemic was the second H1N1 pandemic the world had seen — the first being the 1918 Spanish flu, still the most deadly pandemic in history. The 2009 pandemic was caused by a new strain of H1N1 that originated in Mexico in the spring of 2009 before spreading to the rest of the world. By June of that year, there were enough cases that the World Health Organization declared the swine flu outbreak a pandemic.

In the U.S., between April 2009 and April 2010, the CDC estimates there were 60.8 million cases of swine flu, with over 274,000 hospitalizations and nearly 12,500 deaths — that’s a mortality rate of about 0.02%.

Related: Path of a pandemic: Map shows how H1N1 swine flu spread

The mortality rate for the novel coronavirus is much higher so far, around 2% (although the number will likely change as more people are tested). That may not sound like a big difference, “but when extrapolated, can mean millions more deaths,” Strathdee said.

The 2009 flu pandemic primarily affected children and young adults, and 80% of the deaths were in people younger than 65, the CDC reported. That was unusual, considering that most strains of flu viruses, including those that cause seasonal flu, cause the highest percentage of deaths in people ages 65 and older. But in the case of the swine flu, older people seemed to have already built up enough immunity to the group of viruses that H1N1 belongs to, so weren’t affected as much.

There is typically some herd immunity to seasonal flu, Strathdee said. This means that so many people are immune to the infection, because of vaccines or because their immune system has already fought the infection, that the few people who aren’t immune are somewhat protected. There might be some groups of people who have immunity to the 2019-CoV-2 virus, too, but that’s an area that’s still being researched. So far, COVID-19 is most deadly for people over 60 who have underlying health conditions.

Another difference is that flu viruses are spread in respiratory droplets and airborne particles, while 2019-CoV-2 is primarily spread through respiratory droplets, and in some instances may be shed in feces, Strathdee said. “We don’t yet know how important the oral-fecal route of infection is, but it’s another reason to wash your hands regularly with soap and water,” she said.

The symptoms of the swine flu were similar to those caused by other flu viruses, primarily: fever, cough, headache, body aches, sore throat, chills, fatigue, and runny nose. Those symptoms show up between one and four days after contracting the virus.

Doctors are still determining the full breadth of symptoms of COVID-19. So far, the clearest signs of the disease appear to be fever, dry cough and shortness of breath, according to the CDC. Other symptoms, including headache, sore throat, abdominal pain, and diarrhea, have been reported, but are less common. And just like the flu, COVID-19 can cause respiratory issues that lead to serious problems, such as pneumonia.

But some people with COVID-19 have mild symptoms, or they may not experience symptoms at all, according to the CDC. The virus appears to have an incubation period of between four and 14 days, which means an individual could be carrying (and spreading) the virus for up to two weeks before experiencing any illness.

The H1N1 flu was also less contagious than the novel coronavirus. The basic reproduction number, also called the R-nought value, is the expected number of individuals who can catch the virus from a single infected person. For the 2009 H1N1 virus, the mean R-nought value was 1.46, according to a review published in the journal BMC Infectious Diseases. For the novel coronavirus, the R-nought value is estimated to be between 2 and 2.5, at the moment.

How has the response been different?

There have been a few differences in the way the U.S. responded to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic compared with the nation’s response to COVID-19 pandemic.

“A major difference in response is that we were better prepared for a pandemic (at least in the U.S.) years ago,” Strathdee said.

At the beginning of both pandemics, the genetic sequences of the virus were released to the public with remarkable speed, so that countries could create diagnostic tests as soon as possible. On April 24, 2009, just nine days after initial detection of H1N1, the CDC uploaded genetic sequences of the virus to a public database and had already begun development of a vaccine. Similarly, on Jan. 12, 2020, five days after the novel coronavirus was isolated, Chinese scientists published the virus’ genetic sequence.

The first case of COVID-19 in the U.S was identified on Jan. 20, and the country’s Department of Health and Human Services declared COVID-19 a public health emergency 11 days later, on Jan. 31. Similarly, the U.S. declared the swine flu a public health emergency 11 days after the first confirmed U.S. case in 2009.

But that’s about where the similarities stop. Things haven’t happened quite as fast or as smoothly with COVID-19 as they did with H1N1.

Within four weeks of detecting H1N1 in 2009, the CDC had begun releasing health supplies from their stockpile that could prevent and treat influenza, and most states in the U.S. had labs capable of diagnosing H1N1 without verification by a CDC test.

But diagnostic testing ran into significant hiccups when it came to COVID-19. On Feb. 5, the CDC began sending diagnostic kits for 2019-CoV-2 to about 100 public-health laboratories across the country. Most of the labs received faulty kits, which caused a major delay in combating the virus. Testing had to continue exclusively at the CDC headquarters until the agency could develop and send out replacement kits. This meant that COVID-19 continued to spread, undetected for weeks.

The FDA commissioner announced on Feb. 29 that the agency would allow labs across the country to begin testing for the novel coronavirus with their own lab-developed tests without prior approval, as long as the labs took basic steps to validate the tests and submitted an “emergency use authorization” (EUA) application within 15 days of the notice.

Related: Confusion and chaos surround coronavirus testing in the US

By March 10, seven weeks after the first confirmed case in the U.S., the CDC announced that 79 state and local health labs in the United States could test people for COVID-19. But some of those labs are already running out of supplies to run the tests.

“Another difference is that this is the first pandemic in the era of social media,” Strathdee said. The wealth of misinformation about the disease has spread faster than the virus, she said, as has blame for the virus. “We need to stop thinking like this. We need to unite against the virus.”

However, the plus side of living in this advanced technological age is the speed at which research and vaccine development can occur. A potential treatment and the first trial of a candidate vaccine are already underway, which is amazing and encouraging, Strathdee said. “It will take time for a vaccine and treatments to be studied and scaled up,” she said. “So in the meantime, we all need to do our part and stay home.”

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Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 25, 2020 to reflect a correction. The U.S. declared the swine flu a public health emergency 11 days after the first confirmed U.S. case in 2009, not two days. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-pandemic-vs-swine-flu.html

The post How does the COVID-19 pandemic compare to the last pandemic? first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

First the good news.  NASA predicts the large asteroid they’ve been watching will miss the earth.

On the other hand, the locust plague in East Africa is being described in Biblical terms.   Billions of locusts have swarmed crops in Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and observers are worried that it is spreading to neighboring countries.  This is the worst locust outbreak since the 1950s, so it’s not as if this phenomenon is unique in all of history.  But the headlines are full of panic.  This time last year stories were being written about skies that were blackened by enormous swarms of locusts in Saudi Arabia, even in Mecca.  Still, there are concerns that the locusts may continue to multiply into a full-blown plague.  Aerial spraying may be the only solution, and that raises concerns about soil contamination.  But never fear, the UN is on the case. (sarcasm)

In other apocalyptic news, the coronavirus is not under control.  Desperate measures are underway in China, things that could never happen in any nation not under fascistic communist control.  There are reports of people being dragged from their homes and interned in camps where they’re sure to contract the disease whether they had it in the first place or not.

One headline reported that eight planes had been “locked down” at Heathrow Airport in London.  In fact, one flight was held for twenty-five minutes while health officials arrived to determine whether one passenger, isolated in the back of the plane, actually had contracted the virus.  The other seven flights (described in the headline as “locked down”) simply had to wait.  We don’t know how big the coronavirus will become.  The headlines would lead us to believe that the world is facing an imminent pandemic.  A Harvard Health professor is warning that “if this becomes a pandemic,” up to seventy percent of the world’s population will become infected.

Yes, and if the global warming projections had panned out, we’d all be dead by now.

A “Bible scholar,” quoted on one of the world’s preeminent Internet blogs is saying that the outbreak of the locust plague, combined with the continued spread of the coronavirus satisfies prophecies of end-time events and that the Second Coming is imminent.  And then I saw his picture.

These events might well serve as warnings as to what to expect.  But regardless of what the “Bible scholar” says, the scenario we see today is not complete.  There is no “king of the south” at present, or for that matter a “king of the North.”  There is no ten-nation or ten king power in the heart of Europe controlling the activities of individuals all over the civilized world, “that no man might buy or sell” without the Mark of the Beast.

There have been events in history (like the Spanish flu in the early 1900s) that killed tens of millions but didn’t portend the end of the age.   We know that fortunes are being made with dire predictions, just as they’ve been made with the “global warming” nonsense.  In Jesus’ prophecy of end-time circumstances in Matthew 24, He says, “See that you be not troubled, for the end is not yet.”

The media is making merchandise of us all.  Their record of deception, particularly in recent years is undeniable.  They’ve kept us on the edge of our seats for three years, pumping out manufactured bunk around the clock.  It’s reached the point where you can barely believe anything you read, and everything has to be verified by multiple sources before you react.  We’re not going to cry “wolf” every time the media sets out to create a panic.  If we did, we wouldn’t have any more credibility than they do.

So regardless of the suddenly famous “Bible scholar” or the Harvard Health professor’s dire predictions, we intend to rest on the Sabbath tomorrow and give thanks for our many blessings and the fabulous creation that God has given us to enjoy.

Mark

P.S. Mr. Terry Gooch is at home and recovering from surgery. We’d appreciate continued prayers on his behalf.

Source: http://www.intercontinentalcog.org/fridayupdates.php

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – 14 February 2020 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.