Although the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was surely one of the most famous events of the twentieth century, its sixtieth anniversary passed a few months ago with relatively little attention, probably overshadowed by the looming defeat of Ukraine in its war with Russia and also the enormous civilian casualties following the sudden outbreak of the Israel/Gaza conflict. But many individuals of an older generation probably remembered that tragic date, and I think that one of them may have been Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.
Born in 1954, Sachs had just turned nine years old a couple of weeks before the events in Dallas threw our entire nation into mourning. In recent months he has frequently emphasized his great admiration for our slain leader, whose speeches and public statements seemed to offer hope for world peace, a possibility soon tragically lost.
I suspect that much like myself, over the decades Sachs had always dismissed and ignored the conspiratorial theories of the JFK assassination that were so popular during the 1960s and 1970s then gradually faded away during the more optimistic 1980s. But my eventual discovery of various other major historical anomalies finally led me to begin exploring the facts of the JFK assassination a dozen years ago. Perhaps a very similar process over the last couple of years has now led Sachs’ thinking to move in the same direction, propelled by his shock at discovering official cover-ups on entirely different issues.
As I wrote in late 2022:
Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.
In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazine has twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.
It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.
Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.
Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, in recent months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told by all our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.
From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.
However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering.
Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. However, the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RT eventually ran a brief item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.
Having publicly broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing the same on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.
Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster
Jeffrey Sachs • Consortium News • July 1, 2022 • 1,300 Words
The West’s Dangerously Simple-Minded Narrative About Russia and China
Jeffrey Sachs • Common Dreams • August 23, 2022 • 1,000 Words
A few months later, a series of massive underwater explosions severely damaged the $30 billion Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines. This constituted the greatest act of industrial terrorism in the history of the world, with potentially crippling long-term impact upon the energy supplies of Germany and other European countries. Although there was enormous circumstantial evidence implicating America in those attacks, and renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later revealed the exact details of the sabotage operation, the entire Western media and political establishment stubbornly pretended to see nothing, instead absurdly accusing Russia of having destroyed its own energy pipelines.
But Sachs refused to support this cover-up and he instead played an important role in breaking the media blockade:
Then a few days later, Bloomberg TV invited Sachs to share his concerns over the Ukraine war. His hosts were flabbergasted when he flatly declared that America had probably destroyed the Russian pipelines, even mentioning that top journalists had privately told him the same thing, although none of those vital facts could ever appear in their own newspapers.
As a consequence of Sachs’ candor, the interview was cut short—with Sachs “yanked off air” in the words of the hostile New York Post—but the entire segment was watched at least a couple of hundred thousand times on Youtube and the short clip of Sachs’ Nord Stream remarks soon went super-viral on Twitter, viewed more than 4 million times in one Tweet and another million times across a couple of others.
Perhaps partly as a consequence, he has been extremely forthright in denouncing the ongoing slaughter and starvation of Gaza’s helpless civilian population, and the remarkable unwillingness of the Biden Administration to force Israel to end its military rampage. As he recently put it, on these matters Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sometimes seems to act as if he were our actual president instead of the confused individual sitting in the Oval Office.
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