I have broken a two week self-imposed silence, partly over personal disgust at the global situation which we ourselves tolerate, and the absolute war against humanity posed by the current (and past) rogue US leadership. A war which has now been exposed by none other than a team of investigators at Lancet Global Health (as if we didn’t already instinctively know), the story now revealed and lucidly further explained on Lena Petrova’s Global Affairs in Context website (links below).
Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis – a pdf publication of Lancet Global Health – First publiched in August 2025 and since corrected.
Silent Killers: 38 Million Dead, and the West Still Calls Sanctions a “Peaceful” Policy – Lena Petrova – World Affairs in Context – Oct 2, 2025
Back in the early 1960’s, the world, my world – I was just finishing my formal education at the time – was brought to a state of alarm and high tension with the threat of Nuclear War for the first time in our history, over what became known as ‘The Cuba Crisis’.
The world has lived, ever since those years, under the same continuing threat of annihilation (although held at bay by global treaties which have now – this month, February 2026, completely expired because of US refusal to renew them), and today a new ‘Cuba Crisis’ is rearing its head. This time spearheaded by the shyster Trump’s US Foreign Policy though, truth be told, it wouldn’t matter which particular shyster was in control in that disgusting excuse for a nation. Always ‘rogue’, by nature since its inception. Never changing. Relentlessly pursuing it hateful course of global destruction through domination.
That must end. And in pursuit of such a goal I offer the final sections of Lena Petrova’s piece, as a worthwhile quote and a plea for global sense to prevail, and preventive measures to be taken to ensure that actually happens this time.
A quote from – Silent Killers: 38 Million Dead, and the West Still Calls Sanctions a “Peaceful” Policy – Lena Petrova
Economic Warfare by Design
To dismiss this as an unintended consequence is to ignore history and the very nature of U.S. foreign policy. The intent has been spelled out in declassified documents. A U.S. State Department memo from 1960 described how to weaken Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution. The plan, written in cold bureaucratic language, was to “bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.”
Hunger as a weapon. Desperation as a strategy. Death as leverage. This was not an accident—it was policy.
Sanctions are not diplomacy. They are brutal economic warfare.
How the West Enforces Control
The reason the U.S. and EU can wield sanctions so effectively is simple: control. They control the arteries of the global economy—the U.S. dollar, the Euro, and the international payment system SWIFT. They dominate critical technologies, from cloud networks to satellites.
When Washington or Brussels decides a country has stepped out of line, it can be cut off from these systems in an instant. No trade, no banking, no technology. An entire society can be hurled into crisis at the stroke of a pen.
It is economic power disguised as policy. And the disguise has worked—until now.
Nevertheless, cracks are showing. Russia’s experience since 2022 demonstrates that, with difficulty, countries can build alternatives. Moscow has developed parallel systems to replace Western finance and trade channels. China has taken it even further, creating its own international payment network (CIPS) and the BeiDou satellite system as rivals to SWIFT and GPS.
Beyond these major powers, the Global South is experimenting with new forms of resistance. Regional trade in local currencies, shared technology development, and new cooperative institutions are emerging. For the first time in decades, there is a sense that dependence on the West may not be permanent.
It is the slow birth of an alternative order.
In the end, this is not a debate about economics. It is about sovereignty, dignity, and life itself.
We must ask: what kind of world are we willing to accept? A world where half a million people die every year from sanctions, where hunger and disease are deployed as weapons? Or a world where nations are free to pursue their own paths without fear of economic strangulation?
The data from The Lancet leaves no room for denial. The numbers are in. The human cost is clear.
Now comes the question of morality—whether we continue to tolerate economic warfare masked as diplomacy, or whether we begin to imagine something better.
A world not of coercion, but of cooperation. Not of domination, but of dignity.
The silent war of sanctions has killed millions. The silence must end.
Not Something Else 
Leave a comment