Thomas Fazi

I’ve got a new article up at UnHerd, where I take a critical look at the increasingly popular concepts of permacrisis, polycrisis and the such.

In my latest column for UnHerd I look at the recent media firestorm surrounding Elon Musk — this time concerning the role of his Starlink satellite system in Ukraine. According to his detractors, Musk thwarted a Ukrainian attempt to use SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet system — which has been providing communications services to Ukraine since the start of the war — to launch a major sneak attack in September 2022 on the Russian fleet based in Crimea. Is this true? But more importantly, how did a private entrepreneur end up playing such a big role in the Ukraine war? Is Musk really as innocent as he claims? Or do his ties to the US military-industrial and national security complex reveal a darker side? Click here to have all your questions answered.

I’ve got two new pieces out. In my first article, for UnHerd, I unpick the announcement made by the Open Society Foundations (OSF), Soros’ powerful philanthropic organisation (now run by his son Alex), that it will be largely withdrawing from Europe. Why is the OSF moving out of the EU? What’s the future of the OSF? What is the organisation’s legacy? And, most importantly, why do we allow billionaires like Soros to use their (or in Soros Jr’s case, their dad’s) wealth and influence to shape the politics of entire nations? 

In my second article of the week, published on the 50th anniversary of the bloody coup in Chile, which occurred on September 11, 1973, I review the US deep state’s crucial role in those events — and their continued relevance to the present. Some of the points I cover in the article: how Kissinger and Nixon made the decision to overthrow Allende just a few days after his election; how the CIA almost immediately put in motion a covert operation to destabilise and overthrow Allende, which involved identifying, recruiting, and supporting military officers willing to back a coup; how, even before Allende took office, the CIA oversaw a plot (which result in the general’s murder) to kidnap Gen. René Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean armed forces, because he opposed military interference in the election; and how the US supported for years Pinochet’s regime, which went on to murder or “disappear” thousands of political opponents. As I conclude: “This history has special relevance today, as governments throughout the Global South begin to mount new challenges to the US-led global order”.

I’ve got a new article up at UnHerd about the latest BRICS summit, and why it signalled the greatest shift in the global balance of power since World War II — away from the West and towards a post-Western international order already comprising half of the world’s population. I hope you enjoy it.

I’ve got a new piece up at UnHerd about the unprecedented wave of violence and gang warfare currently engulfing Haiti. In the article I explain that the current situation can only be understood in the context of more than a century of disastrous neocolonial interventions — mostly by the US, and more recently by the UN.

Hi everyone, I’ve got two new pieces fresh out of the oven. For Compact, I’ve written about about the way in which the Ukraine war — or more precisely the West’s response to the latter — is causing Europe to deindustrialise at frightening speed, and how there is ample evidence that, from America’s perspective, this was the intended outcome all along.

Meanwhile, for UnHerd, I’ve written the ultimate explainer about what’s happening in Niger and in the wider Sahel region — and how the ongoing crisis can’t be understood without taking into a accounting a crucial factor: monetary imperialism. These countries are all former French colonies which still use a currency — the CFA franc — largely controlled by their former colonial ruler.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has had massive global economic repercussions — but the worst may be yet to come. I’ve written for UnHerd about the unraveling of two agreements put in place at the start of the Ukraine war to limit the global economic fallout from the conflict: the Black Sea Grain Initiative, whereby Russia allowed Ukraine to continue exporting grain via the Black Sea (which is under its control), and a deal that allowed Russian gas to continue flowing to Europe via Ukraine. The former has just been suspended, and the latter could soon be terminated. The Black Sea Grain Initiative, in particular, was an incredible achievement: for two countries engaged in a brutal war against each other, against the background of a global proxy war between the West and Russia, reaching an agreement of this kind was a big, if rare, victory for international diplomacy.

But with no end to the war in sight, and all sides engaged in increasingly brazen military brinkmanship, is anyone really surprised that a deal that hinged entirely on Russia’s goodwill has come undone? Meanwhile, Ukraine’s energy minister said that Kyiv is unlikely to renew the gas transit deal when Ukraine’s supply contract with Gazprom expires in 2024. In practice, this would mean the closure of one of the last arteries still carrying Russian gas to Europe, a move which would severely weaken many energy-dependent EU countries. For a continent already struggling with creeping deindustrialisation, the consequences could be devastating. Read the article here.

I’ve written for UnHerd about the right-populist wave sweeping over Europe. Liberal politicians and pundits are understandably freaking out. Conservatives, on the other hand, can barely contain their excitement. But — “anti-wokeness” aside — what alternative do these parties offer? As it turns out, on a number of issues, they are peculiarly aligned with the mainstream. In terms of economic policy, for example, almost all of them are wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy embedded in the EU: with few exceptions, their economic agendas revolve around pro-austerity, pro-deregulation, anti-worker and anti-welfare policies. Even more worryingly, as much as these parties love to rail against the “Brussels bureaucrats” and the “globalist elites”, they have virtually all ditched any mention of leaving the EU and/or the euro from their programmes (to the extent that they ever made that claim). Nowadays, right-populists are all euro-reformists who speak of “changing the EU” from within. Meanwhile, on perhaps the most important issue concerning Europe’s future — the war in Ukraine and the bloc’s geopolitical positioning — the parties are deeply divided. Read the rest of the article here.

I also wrote a shorter piece about the New York Times finally admitting what we’ve been saying for a very long time: that Covid deaths were massively overcounted as a result of absurd statistical methods — i.e., classifying as a Covid death any deceased, for whatever reason, who had recently tested positive. As Ngozi Ezike, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) Director, put it in April 2020: “Technically, even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had Covid at the same time, it’s still listed as a Covid death. So, everyone who’s listed as a Covid death doesn’t mean that was the cause of death, but they had Covid at the time of death”. It would later emerge, in one American county, that “clear alternate causes” of death could include anything from injury and poisoning to motorcycle accidents and gunshot wounds. Read the rest of the article here.

These days the news is filled with stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” heat waves sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe (and especially Italy). Rome — my hometown — has been redubbed the “infernal city”. I appreciate the global concern for us poor Romans but I can assure everyone that we’re actually doing okay. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by famine, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change. Such sensationalism is revealing of the climate hysteria that has gripped the West — and the way in which it is seriously hindering our ability to devise rational solutions. It is also completely distorting our perception of the world, and pushing us to make increasingly irrational — and ultimately very dangerous, if not deadly — choices for poor and marginalised people everywhere, in the developing world as well as in rich countries. Read the rest of the article here.

To mark the two-day NATO summit in Vilnius, which ends today, I wrote for UnHerd a myth-busting piece about the true nature NATO. The latter presents itself as a purely “defensive alliance… working for peace, security and freedom”. The reality, however, is quite different. Aside from the fact that its most powerful member and de facto leader, the US, has bombed more countries than any other nation, NATO itself has a rather violent track record. In 1999, NATO began its 78-day illegal bombing campaign of Yugoslavia, the first act of aggression against a sovereign state committed in Europe since the Second World War. Many civilian targets were hit, including 48 hospitals, 70 schools, 18 kindergartens and 35 churches. Overall, hundreds of civilians were killed, including 81 children. Since then, NATO has been involved in several other conflicts, most notably Afghanistan (following an illegal US-led invasion and bombing campaign) and Libya. None had anything to do with defending its members from external aggression; in all these cases, NATO was quite clearly the aggressor. It’s also far from clear how exactly NATO is providing “security” to Europe. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that NATO played a crucial role in unravelling Europe’s security architecture and creating the conditions for the war in Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World, by aggressively expanding eastward, systematically ignoring Russia’s warnings over the years. Read the rest of the article here.