Newsletter, 10/15/25

Biomedical, 4IR

[Image by Anti Empire dot com, via Edward Slavsquat dot Substack dot com]

Biomedical. In what is more of an announcement rather an article, Dr Sam Bailey affirms that she and her husband Mark cleared legal obstacles and are coming to the US to take part in the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Wise Traditions Gathering this weekend in Salt Lake City.

We’re Heading to the USA!

Join Us (In Person or Online) at Wise Traditions 2025. Dr Sam Bailey, 10/15/25.

Next week there will be no scheduled video as Mark and I will be in the United States. However, we are not on holiday and will be giving a number of talks at the Wise Traditions Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah from October 17-20. If you have not already seen it then please watch my recent interview with Sally Fallon Morell of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

If you are attending the conference in person then feel free to introduce yourself to Mark and I, and let us know about what brought you to the event.

For those that are not attending the conference in person there is still the option of signing up for live-streamed talks at this link: (On sale now, 25% off for a limited time: Sale ends October 16, 2025)

Here are the talks that we will be giving:

Friday, October 18,:

7.30-9.30pm (MDT) Dr Samantha Bailey: SECRETS OF A STAGED PANDEMIC [In person - Being live streamed]

Saturday, October 19:

11.00am-12.15pm (MDT) Dr Samantha Bailey: THE TRUTH ABOUT LYME DISEASE {In person - Being live streamed}

6:30–9:30pm (MDT) Dr Mark Bailey: AWARDS BANQUET AND KEYNOTE: VIROLOGY’S FINAL DAYS {In person - Being live streamed}

Sunday, October 20:

10.45am-12pm Dr Mark Bailey: A LOGICAL END TO VIROLOGY,

1:30–2:45pm (MDT) Drs Mark Bailey, Samantha Bailey, Tom Cowan, Andrew Kaufman “Virus Deniers Unite Panel” {In person - Being live streamed}

4IR. The prices of oil futures, i.e. contracts to buy oil in the future, are providing a strong signal of deflationary pressures ahead.

BREAKING: Oil Curve Just Flipped (This Always Ends Badly). Jeff Snider/Eurodollar University, 10/14/25, 20 minutes.

“A big signal we - and the whole market - have been waiting for was triggered. Better still, there is no ambiguity with this one. The oil curve has flipped for the first time in years in what is a very clear downturn signal. They call it a supply glut when there is no mistaking it’s all about demand.”

And, in the matter of UK plans to impose a digital ID upon society, UK Prime Minster Starmer seemed quite intrigued by the system which has been implemented in India. The critical aspect of this piece, however, seems to be pretty much the concerns that private interests might get their hands on lots of data and that certain groups are left out, rather than the state having access to such a wide spectrum of information about every person under its jurisdiction (and more), or that AI is running the system.

‘Your basis to live is checked at each and every step’: India’s ID system divides opinion. Keir Starmer is considering Aadhaar as model for UK, but detractors warn of ‘digital coercion’ and security breaches. Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi, 10/14/25.

It is often difficult for people in India to remember life before Aadhaar. The digital biometric ID, allegedly available for every Indian citizen, was only introduced 15 years ago but its presence in daily life is ubiquitous. Indians now need an Aadhaar number to buy a house, get a job, open a bank account, pay their tax, receive benefits, buy a car, get a sim card, book priority train tickets and admit children into school. Babies can be given Aadhaar numbers almost immediately after they are born. While it is not mandatory, not having Aadhaar de facto means the state does not recognise you exist, digital rights activists say.

For Umesh Patel, 47, a textile business owner in the city of Ahmedabad, Aadhaar has brought nothing but relief. He recalls the old days of bringing reams of paper to every official office, just to prove his ID – and confusion often still reigned. Now he simply flashes his Aadhaar and “everything is streamlined”, he said, describing it as a “marker of how our country is using technology for the benefit of its citizens.”“It’s a robust system that has made life much easier,” said Patel. “It is also good for the security of our country since it reduces the chances of anyone making fake documents...Aadhaar is now part of the Indian identity.”

The scheme has been deemed such a success that it was among those studied by the UK government as it looks to introduce mandatory ID cards for all citizens. Yet digital rights groups, activists and humanitarian groups paint a less rosy picture of Aadhaar and its implications for Indian society.

For some of the poorest and least educated in India – whose lack of literacy, education or documents have left them unable to get an Aadhaar – the scheme has been highly exclusionary and therefore punitive, depriving some of those who need it most from being able to receive welfare or work. And as there is a growing push to have Aadhaar linked to voting rights and proof of citizenship, there are fears it will become a tool to further disenfranchise and demonise the poor.

Apar Gupta, the founder and director of the Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation, said that, for many in India, Aadhaar had turned into a form of “digital coercion, in which each and every time they need to avail a government service, enter a public space or just conduct their lives, there is a constant demand for Aadhaar-based authentication”. Gupta said that since its introduction Aadhaar had “metastasised” and become the basis of an ever-expanding bureaucratic minefield of unique IDs required in order for people to conduct business. “Your very basis to live is checked at each and every step,” he said.

Critics allege that India’s most recent data protection and privacy law, which remains in draft form, is not fit for purpose in protecting the privacy and possible misuse of the highly valuable and sensitive Aadhaar database, which includes biometrics such as photos, face scans, iris scans and fingerprints of more than 1 billion Indians. Over the years, the Indian media have uncovered numerous breaches of Aadhaar data, including an incident in 2018 when it was discovered that the details of 1.1 billion Indians on the Aadhaar database were being sold online for as little as 500 rupees (£5).

“Under this law, which has still yet to be notified, there is no way to know if there has been a reported data breach and no oversight into how Aadhaar data may be bundled with other databases, which could enrich wider tracking and surveillance of citizens,” said Gupta. “There’s a complete lack of transparency.” While Aadhaar was introduced before the prime minister, Narendra Modi, came to power in 2014, his ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) has embraced and expanded the unique digital ID scheme with gusto. As India hosted the G20 summit in 2023, Modi cited Aadhaar as one of the key successes of a “digital India” that had become an “incubator of innovation”. He has claimed that it has saved India more than $22bn in wiping out corruption in welfare schemes.

The government has also pointed to Aadhaar’s vast adoption as a measure of its success and universality. More than 1.42bn Aadhaar numbers have been generated as of last month – almost the exact size of the population of India itself – making it the world’s largest digital identity scheme by a long mile. Before the scheme, more than 400 million Indians lacked any form of official ID and did not have access to a bank account.

Yet, according to Chakradhar Buddha, a senior researcher at LibTech India, an organisation that has been assisting those left behind by India’s digital push, the reality on the ground – particularly in rural and tribal communities – was very different to that being painted by the government in Delhi.

“We have seen those in tribal, hilly or remote areas being unable to get an Aadhaar – and it’s happening on a large scale that goes unacknowledged,” said Buddha. “Partly it’s because they might not have the right documents or their different documents don’t catch completely; partly it’s because the technology keeps changing and creating additional hurdles that punish the most vulnerable. Ultimately, it’s a system that undermines access to essential social security and welfare for those that need it most.”

The government’s insistence that Aadhaar is a watertight identity verification was questioned by Buddha, who said he had seen many examples of officials recording inaccurate names or details, creating greater problems for communities. In one village, where a tribal community did not have birth certificates, they were all given 1 January as their birthday. Tribal names are also regularly spelt wrong on Aadhaar cards as officials are unfamiliar with them.

Buddha warned that using Aadhaar as a universal basis for voting rights would lead to a “mass expulsion of the poorest from the electoral register”, citing a recent example where millions of India’s poorest workers were wrongly deleted from a government system, depriving them of a livelihood, after an Aadhaar verification system was enforced. “These people are already deprived of social equality; now they want to use Aadhaar to strip away their right to political equality and universal franchise,” said Buddha.

Among those who recently came up against the perils of being without an Aadhaar card was Aalam Sheikh, 34, an illiterate labourer, whose bag containing important ID documents and Aadhaar card was stolen on a train. What followed was a Kafkaesque nightmare. Not knowing his Aadhaar number, which he was given a decade ago, he had no way to get a new card. Without it, he was stopped from working his construction job, depriving his family of a vital income, and his son was later forced to withdraw from school.

Months later, Sheikh has still been unable to resolve the problem and get a new card, even after travelling thousands of miles back to his village. Meanwhile, he lives in fear of being declared an illegal citizen without it. “This Aadhaar has become a nightmare for us. Why can’t the government maintain a proper system?” said Sheikh. “Everything in this country works against the poor, and so does this Aadhaar card.”

And, while the Israeli state is stopping aid trucks from coming into Gaza, alleging the Hamas is violating the cease fire by not returning all the bodies of those dead hostages which it has previously stated it had access to, and Hamas continues to impose a thuggish regime upon the population by battling other local thugs (not all of whom are controlled by Israel), Trump proclaims “we” will force Hamas to abide by the agreement and disarm if it doesn’t do so on its own. He means US proxy forces like the IDF and the to-be-created ISF.

Trump says Hamas will be forced to disarm or ‘we will disarm them.’ US president says it should take place in a ‘reasonable period of time’ amid questions over group’s status. Andrew Roth in Washington, 10/14/25.

Donald Trump has said that Hamas will be forced to disarm after questions swirled around the group’s status following the signing of a peace deal meant to bring an end to the war in Gaza. Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said: “If they don’t disarm, we will disarm them and it will happen quickly and perhaps violently...But they will disarm, do you understand me?” he added, saying it should take place in a “reasonable period of time”.

As a Trump-brokered ceasefire comes into effect in Gaza this week, one of the greatest question marks remains the White House’s plans to force Hamas to disarm and leave Gaza if and when the second phase of his 20-point peace deal comes into effect. The US president’s own remarks had suggested the group may continue to play a limited role in Gaza, as revelations surfaced of a direct meeting between White House envoys and Hamas negotiators in the highest-level summit ever held between the two sides.

Earlier this week, he admitted the group would have a “limited role” in maintaining order in the short term, raising questions about how the White House may seek to wrangle a peace deal that attempts to restrain Hamas and Israel from resuming the conflict. Video released on Tuesday by Hamas showed the group’s members executing eight blindfolded, bound and kneeling men whom it called “collaborators and outlaws”. Agence France-Presse, which reported the video, said Hamas was targeting “Palestinian criminal gangs and clans” in Gaza after the signing of a ceasefire between the group and Israel.

Aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters Hamas would continue to have a limited role in enforcing security operations before phase two of the peace deal started, despite the fact his 20-point deal expressly said that the group will disarm and abandon its aim to control the Gaza Strip. “{Hamas} are standing because they do want to stop the problems, and they’ve been open about it, and we gave them approval for a period of time,” Trump said. The rebuilding of Gaza, he said, would be dangerous and difficult, suggesting the US needed to work with forces on the ground to make that possible.

Speaking in Egypt earlier, Trump said phase two of his peace deal had “started, as far as we’re concerned”, but then said some elements would be implemented over time. “Phase two has started,” he said. “The phases are all a little bit mixed in with each other. You’re gonna start cleaning up. You look at Gaza – it needs a lot of cleanup.”

Those remarks followed a meeting last week between senior Hamas leaders and the US’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who provided a personal guarantee that Trump would restrain Israel from resuming the conflict if Hamas signed the peace agreement. The meeting was held on Wednesday between Trump’s envoys and a Hamas delegation headed by Khalil al-Hayya, the militant group’s political leader, who survived an assassination attempt by Israel in Doha last month.

The meeting, which was first reported by the US news website Axios, was the first between the White House and Hamas since the US envoy for hostages, Adam Boehler, met Hamas leaders in Doha in March to try to secure the release of US-Israeli hostage Edan Alexander, as well as the remains of four other Americans held by the group.

During last week’s 45-minute meeting, Witkoff reportedly told Hamas that the hostages were “more of a liability than an asset for you” and it was time to facilitate a hostage exchange. “President Trump’s message is that you will be treated fairly and that he stands behind all 20 points of his peace plan and will make sure they are all implemented,” Witkoff said, according to the Axios source.

The direct meeting was instrumental in securing the deal, the outlet reported, with the spy chiefs of Egypt, Turkey and Qatar speaking privately with Hamas negotiators and then telling Witkoff and Kushner: “Based on the meeting we just had, we have a deal.”

And an update from the Guardian, 14.49 EDT, 10/15/25.

Trump warns Israel could resume fighting ‘as soon as I say the word’ if Hamas don’t uphold deal

Donald Trump has told CNN he would consider allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to resume military action in Gaza if Hamas refuses to uphold its end of the ceasefire deal, saying Israeli forces could return to the streets “as soon as I say the word”. “What’s going on with Hamas - that’ll be straightened out quickly,” the US president said in a telephone call.

Asked what happens if Hamas refuses to disarm, Trump said he’d “think about it”. “Israel will return to those streets as soon as I say the word,” he said. “If Israel could go in and knock the crap of them, they’d do that.” “I had to hold them back,” he said of the IDF and the Netanyahu administration. “I had it out with Bibi.”

And, the president of Israel’s neighbor Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa , is visiting Putin. Long gone are the days when Putin swore eternal allegiance to the alliance he had with Bashar Assad, whose rule was backed by Russian military forces, leading people like blogger Vanessa Beeley to become Putin loyalists who support his every move.

Syria seeks to ‘redefine’ Russia ties, al-Sharaa tells Putin in Moscow. Syria’s interim leader assures the Russian president that his government will honour all past agreements with Moscow. Stephen Quillen and News Agencies, 10/15/25.

Syria’s President Ahmed al-Sharaa has told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that he seeks to “restore and redefine ties” with Moscow, a key ally of ousted longtime Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad. Al-Sharaa made the statement on Wednesday while meeting with Putin in Moscow during his first state visit to the country that has been hosting al-Assad since his exile from Syria 10 months ago. “We are trying to restore and redefine in a new way the nature of these relations so there is independence for Syria, sovereign Syria, and also its territorial unity and integrity and its security stability,” al-Sharaa told Putin in the Kremlin.

The Syrian leader assured that Damascus would honour all past agreements with Moscow. “There are bilateral relations and shared interests that bind us with Russia, and we respect all agreements made with it,” he said. According to Syrian officials cited by the Reuters and AFP news agencies, al-Sharaa, who once headed the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda under the name Abu Mohammed al-Julani, plans to use today’s meeting with Putin to request Moscow hand over al-Assad. But there was no mention of the sensitive diplomatic matter in al-Sharaa’s brief televised remarks at the beginning of the meeting.

Welcoming al-Sharaa, Putin hailed decades of “special relations” between the two countries, in which he claimed Moscow was always guided by Syrian people’s interests, and said his government wanted to expand them. He also praised recent parliamentary elections in Syria – the first since al-Assad’s overthrow – saying the process would strengthen ties between all political forces.“I believe that this is a great success for you, because it leads to the consolidation of society, and despite the fact that Syria is currently going through difficult times, it will nevertheless strengthen ties and cooperation between all political forces in Syria,” said Putin.

Despite having been on opposite sides of the battle lines of Syria’s 13-year civil war that Moscow intervened in, the new rulers in Damascus have taken a pragmatic approach to relations with Moscow, as they have with other foreign powers. For Damascus, maintaining ties with Russia is important for rebuilding the war-shattered country and shoring up international legitimacy for the government.

In a recent interview with US network CBS, al-Sharaa said, “Russia has close and longstanding relations with Syria, which relate to the basic structure of the state and to energy and food, for which Syria depends partly on Russian supplies, as well as some old strategic interests”. Russia, for its part, has retained a presence at its air and naval bases on the Syrian coast, and the Kremlin has voiced hope for negotiating a deal to keep the outposts. Moscow has also reportedly sent oil shipments to Syria.

And, a bit further to the east of SW Asia, there have been some fierce clashes between the military forces of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Note: Qatar, the state/business entity whose media outlet is Al Jazeera, is siding with Afghanistan, as is the Turkiye state/business entity which together with Qatar and perhaps Syria in the near future forms a Muslim Brotherhood alliance. India also backs Afghanistan, while the US (and China) back Pakistan.

Pakistan and Afghanistan announce ceasefire after deadly border clashes. Brief flare-up spanned southeastern Afghanistan’s Spin Boldak district and Pakistan’s Chaman district. Stephen Quillen and News Agencies, 10/15/25.

Pakistan and Afghanistan have agreed to a ceasefire amid deepening hostilities between the former allies after deadly clashes erupted on the border overnight, according to Pakistani and Afghan officials. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that the ceasefire would come into effect at 6pm local time (13:00 GMT) and last for 48 hours. Both countries would make sincere efforts through dialogue to find a solution to the standoff, which was complex yet resolvable, the ministry said in a statement.

The Taliban government’s chief spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, wrote in a social media post that the truce was at the “insistence” of the Pakistani side. His social media post did not mention a 48-hour timeframe. The ceasefire announcement came after renewed fighting killed and wounded dozens in a remote border area spanning southeastern Afghanistan’s Spin Boldak district and Pakistan’s Chaman district overnight on Tuesday. Both sides accused the other of triggering the clashes.

Amid the tensions on the border, at least five people were killed and 35 others were wounded in explosions in Kabul, said an Italian NGO, EMERGENCY, which runs a hospital in the Afghan capital, before the truce with Pakistan entered into effect. “We started receiving ambulances filled with wounded people, and we learned that there had been explosions a few kilometres away from our hospital,” Dejan Panic, EMERGENCY’s country director in Afghanistan, said in a statement. “Forty people have arrived so far, including women and children,” he said, adding that “unfortunately, five people were already dead on arrival.”

Mujahid accused Pakistani forces of initiating the border fighting by firing “light and heavy weapons” at Afghanistan, killing 12 civilians and injuring more than 100. Ali Mohammad Haqmal, a press spokesperson in Spin Boldak district, put the civilian death toll at 15. The AFP news agency quoted a district hospital official as saying 80 women and children are among the wounded. Mujahid claimed Afghan forces returned fire, killing “a large number” of Pakistani soldiers, seizing Pakistani weapons and tanks and destroying Pakistani military installations.

Pakistani authorities blamed the Afghan Taliban for first firing on a Pakistani military post and other areas near the border, causing the clashes that also wounded four of its own civilians. The Reuters news agency quoted unnamed security officials as saying six Pakistani soldiers were killed in the violence, which one official said lasted approximately five hours. Najibullah Khan, a resident of Pakistan’s Chaman district, said the clashes forced some people living near the border to flee. “People are in a very difficult situation. Shells are falling in people’s homes,” he said.

In a statement, Pakistan’s army said its forces had “effectively repulsed” the attack from Afghanistan’s Taliban, killing from 15 to 20 of their members and injuring others. It also said it had repelled separate Afghan Taliban attacks earlier in the night in Kurram District, further north. “The insinuations that the attack was initiated by Pakistan, are outrageous and blatant lies, just like the claims of capturing Pakistani posts or equipment,” said the military statement. “The Armed Forces stand resolute and fully prepared to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Pakistan.”

Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from the Torkham crossing on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, called the latest fighting a “serious escalation” that threatens to “lead to something much bigger”. “The population on both sides are wary of the new round of escalations,” Hyder said.

Although the clashes halted on Sunday after appeals from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, most border crossings between Pakistan and Afghanistan have remained closed. Over the weekend, Kabul said that in retaliation for what it called repeated violations of Afghan territory and airspace, it targeted several Pakistani military posts and killed 58 Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan’s military reported lower figures, saying it lost 23 soldiers and killed more than 200 “Taliban and affiliated terrorists” in retaliatory fire along the frontier. Pakistan accuses Kabul of harbouring fighters with the Taliban-allied Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, which has carried out numerous deadly attacks in Pakistan.

Ending this segment and this edition, a tribute to a fallen “freedom” hero. Riley Waggaman pays homage to his late friend Marko Marjanovic, a blooger and editor at Anti Empire. Marjanovic spared neither US/“collective West” rah rah enthusiasts nor apologists for Putin and the BRICS blog for his withering criticism.

We've lost the Slavic H. L. Mencken

We’ve lost the Slavic H. L. Mencken. Eternal memory to Marko Marjanović, a fearless dispenser of bitter truths. Edward Slavsquat, 10/14/25.

Marko Marjanović, the editor of Anti-Empire dot com who waged a one-man insurgency against soothing falsities, seeking favor from no one and enraging State Department toadies and Kremlin boot-lickers alike, was discovered dead in his apartment in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines, on July 22. He was 40 years old. I’d been trying to make contact with Marko after he stopped communicating in mid-July. Yesterday my worst fears were confirmed while combing the internet for clues to his possible whereabouts.

You may have never heard of Marko Marjanović, but chances are he has, directly or indirectly, disabused you of lazy heuristics and wishful thinking. Without Anti-Empire dot com, there would have been no Edward Slavsquat. The same holds true for countless commentators and writers who went down a rabbit hole that Marko dug, practically alone, by hand.

His tenacious, piercing journalism laid the foundation for a reality-based approach to understanding Russia, one devoid of the word-salad-padded fantasies popularized by so much of “alternative” media. At great personal expense, to the point where he gained pariah-like status, Marko forced his readers to grapple with Russia as she is, not how they would like to imagine her to be. He applied the same standard to everything he wrote about—and he wrote about pretty much everything. Marko accomplished this feat with unmatched wit slathered in Slavic dark humor. He mastered the art of the headline, so much so that his titles became self-standing testaments to our upside-down garbage world. [Several samples of his work follow]

No one and nothing was spared the Anti-Empire treatment. Predictably, Marko’s website caught the eye of our benevolent thought-police. Anti-Empire was shadow-banned by Google in March 2021, and the website’s Facebook page was Zucked a few months later. In August 2022, Marko was kicked off PayPal, depriving him of reader donations. However, these were minor accolades compared to the Turkish government’s impressively petty decision to add Anti-Empire to its list of verboten websites.[Screen shot]

Ever the diplomat, Marko tried to initiate negotiations with Ankara after he was notified by Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority that he had four hours to remove an article that painted Turkish military involvement in Syria in an unflattering light, or face the consequences:[Screen shot]

From a modest background in Slovenia, Marko was essentially self-educated, and through voracious reading obtained an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. He was particularly well-versed in matters pertaining to the Soviet Army and the Second World War. Before starting Anti-Empire, he worked in a factory as a mechanic, and returned to this blue-collar job when he struggled to pay the bills with reader donations.

Taking a few days off from his factory job (he had returned to Slovenia to save up money for another extended stay in the Philippines), in August 2023, Marko traveled to Moravia to visit me. We had a wonderful, wine-soaked time together, which I documented on the blog.[Screen shot, link]

Marko was a self-described anarchist, advocate for pan-Slavic unity, and an unflinching opponent of all forms of imperialism, everywhere. His prickly personality sometimes alienated him from his friends and supporters. I attribute this character defect to the fact that he felt let down when others fell short of the high standards he set for himself when trying to make sense of the Madness:

“Who doesn’t love a good fairy tale? Everyone does. Problem is when you are an adult, and you believe a fairy tale to be actually true. In that case, you need some fairy-tale-slaying. You won’t like it, it will be painful and traumatic, you will resist it, and you may even hate the one doing the slaying, but it is nonetheless for your own good. Not for the good of your comfort, but for the good of you knowing true things.”

Perhaps because of his working-class roots, Marko never allowed his seething hatred for NATO to rob him of his empathy for ordinary, wage-slave Westerners who, like himself, were at the mercy of the Empire:

“The hegemon of our day, the American Empire, is powered by American power and run from Washington. But it is not synonymous with the USA — not with the country, nor with its people, or even its government. Obviously a sales lady in a Milwaukee donut shop or a mechanic in Topeka are in no way the Empire. Their taxes may help fuel the Empire’s war machine but taxes ultimately rest on coercion and are not freely given.

To a lesser extent, even the taxes extracted from a Romania shepherd go toward aiding Empire’s adventures yet it would be absurd to claim he is part of the Empire as opposed to merely living under it. Our Milwaukee sales lady and Topeka mechanic are in fact victims of the Empire, albeit the level of their victimization is infinitely smaller than for example that of a Yemeni child withering away from cholera under a US-Saudi blockade.

Aside from being coerced into paying taxes the pair is spied upon and propagandized to. Moreover, the Empire needlessly amplifies their exposure to the danger of terrorism and forces them to live under the constant background threat of a mushroom cloud.”

It is a testament to his human integrity that even though he dreamed of a NATO-free world, and felt Moscow had every right to intervene in Ukraine to halt the “defensive” alliance’s destructive machinations, Marko ultimately concluded that a Russian military incursion would do more harm than good, killing tens of thousands of his fellow Slavs, while likely exacerbating the problems that such an operation aimed to correct:

“I don’t know how {Russian military intervention} is supposed to fix Putin’s problem of Ukraine being “anti-Russia”. Isn’t a war between the two only going to deepen animosities and provide Ukrainian nationalists with more fodder? Try as they might at least until now it has been very difficult for Ukrainian nationalists to find historical examples of Ukrainians and Russians spilling each other’s blood…..

While rearranging borders in a coloring book is a blast, this isn’t a video game. The Russian military is an artillery-firepower army. It is incredibly lethal. The takeover of Southern and Eastern Ukraine doesn’t happen without tens of thousands of deaths. Mostly Ukrainian. But didn’t Putin just explain that Ukrainians are Russians too? Well, I prefer my Malorussians deluded (and even anti-Russian) over dead…..

Take it from someone who knows a little about fratricidal war: You don’t want one.”

He wrote the above lines in January 2022, at a time when all the big names in “independent” media, who are currently raking in huge sums of money with their cheery forecasts for the appalling tragedy unfolding before our eyes, insisted that Moscow would never attack Ukraine, and that anyone who even hinted otherwise was some sort of CIA-backed agitator. Ironic that so many of them are former US military and intelligence veterans. There’s a lesson here, somewhere?

Marko took so much abuse for correctly predicting the events of February 2022, and where they would likely lead, that he published an open letter to his readers, berating them for refusing to even consider information that inconvenienced their own worldviews.[Screen shot]

He wrote on February 28, 2022, four days after the launch of the SMO:

“It’s hilarious really. There are alt-media brains who were still making definite statements about Russian escalation being impossible as late as the day before the war commenced. Anti-Empire by contrast treated it as a possibility that deserved consideration since December. And tried raising alarm about it being a possibility that wasn’t being taken seriously enough for the past two months.

In my naivete I thought that when I published the case that Russian-initiated escalation is a real possibility people would read it, consider it, and move on. I thought the real danger was that some readers might come to love the idea of such an escalation and start rooting for it to happen. I thought that my role would be to try to remind the reader of the human cost of war, and dampen that enthusiasm a little bit. Instead, my suggestion that [Russia launching a military operation in Ukraine] had to be treated as a real possibility was met with hatred, hysterics, and meltdown. Apparently, the mere idea that Moscow could move to enlarge the war threatened the fragile identities of some.”

In the months that followed, he understandably expressed frustration over how his work continued to be ignored and dismissed, even as “experts” who arrived late to the party began parroting what he had been saying since before the SMO even started.[Screen shot]

I am still searching for answers to the circumstances surrounding Marko’s death. It’s frankly unbearable to even think about. All I can do now, as a friend and admirer, is try to preserve his legacy. This is a time-sensitive endeavor that I need your assistance with.

There are several free-to-use programs to download copies of entire websites (HTTrack, Cyotek WebCopy, among others), but I cannot get any of them to work properly because I am technologically inept. Instead, I’ve started manually downloading each individual article using a browser extension. This will take me a very long time.

If anyone reading this has the know-how to help preserve Marko’s incredible body of work for posterity, please do so as soon as you can, and make the archive accessible for public viewing or download. I don’t know how much longer we have until his domain expires, and the mere thought that Anti-Empire might go offline before a complete record of Marko’s work can be compiled for safekeeping fills me with unbearable despair.[Someone posted in the comments that this archiving process has begun!]

Please, if you are able, do it now, and inform me in the comments section below, or email me directly at riley dot waggaman at gmail dot com.

In the meantime, I have created a new category on the blog, Marko Was Right, where I will republish his underappreciated journalism, much of which was years ahead of its time. Indeed, many of the internet’s most celebrated “independent” journalists are still incapable of coming to terms with observable realities that Marko wrote about three years ago.[Screen shot]

Marko, you will be missed more than you will ever know. Love you, buddy, - Riley

My comment at the page.

This is a HUGE loss for the cause of unvarnished truth. Thanks so much for letting us know, Riley, it was thanks to you that i got to know of Marko and hear/read him.