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10 Maritime Folktales with a Real-Life Twist

17 July 2026 at 08:00

For thousands of years, the sea has inspired both awe and terror. Imagine spending months aboard a creaking wooden ship, blown off course, surviving on spoiled food, and staring into endless darkness with no way to call for help. In those conditions, every strange light on the horizon, every unexplained sound beneath the waves, and […]

The post 10 Maritime Folktales with a Real-Life Twist appeared first on Listverse.

US SENATE VOTES TO INDICT FAUCI, Trump agrees (2 Videos). The Virologist: “They want me BEHIND BARS”. Why Prosecuting him for SARS-COV-2 Manmade and Lethal Covid Vaccines may be Off Limits

6 August 2026 at 16:49

The cover image shows Dr. Fauci showing Trump the 2020 COVID studies during Operation Warp Speed ​​to fund the Moderna vaccine.

by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Gospa News founder and director

UPDATE ON AUGUST, 7, 2026

VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

Trump suggests Fauci should be prosecuted. But he only faces a few months in prison

U.S. President ​Donald Trump on Thursday suggested that Dr. ‌Anthony Fauci should be prosecuted, hours after Republican Senator Rand Paul said that he would ask the Justice ​Department to do so after US Senate panel voted the contempt of Congress.

When asked if the Justice Department should prosecute Fauci, Trump ‌told ⁠reporters that former aides Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon had faced similar action “over something that essentially was never prosecuted before, and there are ​sort of telltale ​signs ⁠of similarity.”

The Republican president added: “When you see that happen, you sort of ​say maybe he should (be prosecuted). What ​he did ⁠is far more serious than a lot of crimes, frankly.”

The criminal offense of contempt of Congress is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not more than $100,000 nor less than $100 and imprisonment in a common jail for not less than one month nor more than twelve months.

Therefore, even if the preemptive pardon Biden received, which protects the virologist from any conviction, is not deemed valid, he would only risk a few months in prison.

A ridiculous punishment when compared to the fact that the American virologist, a White House consultant also during the first Trump administration, was accused of having contributed to the laboratory construction of SARS-Cov-2 and of having induced the Biden administration to impose mandatory vaccination on many professional categories despite the vaccines being experimental and potentially lethal, as demonstrated by multiple scientific studies even before they were released on the market.

FAUCI & CDC KNEW THAT COVID VACCINES COULD TRIGGER MISCARRIAGE (5 videos). As Denounced by Gospa News in 2021 on 3,573 Cases of Fetal Death among Vaccinated Women

US Senate panel votes to hold former official Fauci in contempt of Congress

A United States Senate panel has voted to hold former health official Anthony Fauci, a key figure in the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in contempt of Congress.

The move on Thursday came after Fauci last week invoked the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which includes the right to remain silent, during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The 8-5 vote fell along party lines.

Fauci, the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), charged that the Republican-led hearing was designed to entrap him. He had previously been pre-emptively pardoned by former President Joe Biden after a politically divisive government response to the pandemic, which included school closures and vaccine promotion.

VIDEO – Dr. Fauci’s Contempt of Congress referral is being Reviewed by DOJ already

Fauci blames the committee chairman, Sen. Rand Paul: “He wants me behind bars”

In his opening statements last week, Fauci accused the committee chairman, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, of having an “unhinged obsession” with him, arguing he had previously cooperated in several congressional hearings and investigations following the pandemic.

“The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something – anything – that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words – quote – ‘behind bars’,”Fauci said.

After the vote on Thursday, the panel could refer Fauci to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution.

Speaking before the vote, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said there was “virtually no chance that a court would actually approve any contempt because [Fauci] had a well-founded fear of self-incrimination, which entitled him to invoke the Fifth Amendment”.

Rand, meanwhile, argued that Fauci’s decision to deliver an opening statement decrying the hearing before invoking his Fifth Amendment right during questioning, showed he was “trying to have it both ways”.

Democrats and critics have charged that last week’s hearing, which comes six years after the pandemic spread across the US, was a purely political exercise that shed no new light on the issue.


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ARTICLE POSTED ON AUGUST, 1, 2026

Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment refusing to anwer alla questions on Covid-19 before the US Senate

The investigation into Covid-19, from the origins of SARS-CoV-2, built in laboratories in China and the US, to experimental vaccines comparable to innovative and dangerous gene therapies, concludes in three sentences.

Anyone who expected to see a Western-style battle before the United States Congress between former White House virologist Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul was certainly disappointed.

Those of us who knew full well that Fauci has enough biological weapons secrets to arrest hundreds of Pentagon officials feared he would get away with it by invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to answer any questions to avoid the risk of perjury.

Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked at least 111 questions today during a contentious congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19 and his role in leading the government’s response to the pandemic. And at least 111 times (details in The Defender article among the sources), Fauci said the same thing:

“On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

But the key phrase that foreshadowed this attitude had already emerged from the famous “Diaries” of the former Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases…

Perhaps the only truly important one in a diary of private notes that contradicts his policy on the Covid emergency, as his emails, which ended up in the two investigations of the Senate and the House of Representatives, had already done.

The notable passages document his initially amicable relationship with President Trump—who called him “the smartest person in the world” and said “We are counting on you.”

And in light of the statements of the POTUS, who has returned to lead the star-spangled nation, it seems we can still count on it…

WUHAN-GATES – 89. “FAUCI & US INTELLIGENCE Hid SARS-Cov-2 BIO-WEAPON LAB-MADE”. CIA Whistleblower before Senate (VIDEO). He Tells the same that Gospa News wrote

This testimony was particularly anticipated after a CIA whistleblower confirmed both Fauci’s role in SARS virus experiments in China and his attempts to hide the artificial origin of the Covid pandemic virus, supported by the same counterintelligence agency.

Sen. Rand Paulwarned former government health official Fauci that there would be “repercussions”

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky warned former government health official and COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci that there would be “repercussions” for his refusal to answer questions during a Senate hearing on Wednesday. Paul proceeded to ask questions of Fauci anyway, who then repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment (details in The Western Journal article among the sources),

The senator responded, “The chairman has denied your assertion of privilege and directed you to answer [the questions]. You nonetheless refused and stand on privilege despite the existence of the pardon.”

“The committee will have to consider after this hearing what appropriate action should be taken against you for the failure to testify after being directed to do so. It’s against the law to obstruct an investigation of Congress. There will be repercussions,”Paul said.

WUHAN-GATES – 87. “HOW CIA COVERED UP COVID LAB-ORIGIN” (2 videos). US Senator confirms the MILLENNIUM CONSPIRACY Exposed in 86 Gospa News Investigations on SARS-CoV-2

“Then Chairman Paul put a contempt resolution on next week’s Senate calendar” The Substack Duty to Dissent detailed (among the sources).

But a few hours before the important hearing, US President Donald Trump intervened. In one of his many posts on Truth, where he practices the administration of a democratic country without having to verify that it is within the law, he effectively “protected” the former White House health and Covid-19 emergency adviser from the media spotlight.

Trump blames Fauci of “Crazy Ideas,” not Bioterrorism: to protect Warp Speed ​​on Moderna vaccine

He called him a “crazy man” and not the bioterrorist many believe him to be, given that he is among the prime suspects for having created a SARS-CoV-2 in various experiments funded by the Pentagon’s DARPA in the US, China, Ukraine, and the UK...

He is also accused of having sworn on the efficacy and safety of experimental mRNA vaccines that turned out not to be so.

John Bolton, Anthony Fauci and Donald Trump during a visit in a NIAID Laboratory among other during the Operation Warp Speed. Featured on the right Barney Graham, former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center (VRS)

But precisely because Trump doesn’t want to admit that he funded a project to test dangerous gene therapies on hundreds of millions of American citizens, with high risks of adverse reactions such as myocarditis, strokes, and turbo-cancer, he has effectively issued an unwritten “pardon” that will protect Facui from the risk of prison or even a possible federal trial.

«Many more people died of Covid under the Biden Administration than under the Trump Administration. “Operation Warp Speed” was a SPECTACULAR SUCCESS, in fact, many say, one of the most successful things ever done by an American President. I overrode Fauci on this. His ideas were CRAZY!» Trump posted.

«Also, I said from the beginning that the Virus came from the Wuhan Laboratory in China. Fauci strongly disagreed, always trying to protect China. I Inherited Fauci, who was there since the 1980’s, but with each passing day, relied less and less on him. He made too many bad calls, like on MASKS. Remember at the beginning he was an anti-masker. He then switched to a super-masker» the US president added on Truth.

WHITE HOUSE “LAB LEAK” Report on COVID-19 ORIGINS. A simple Abstract over Misinformations unveiled by Trump to Unmask the Biden-Fauci Censorships on SARS-Cov-2 Manmade

«In any event I didn’t let him shut the Country down, although he wanted to. I went the Federalist way, and let the governors decide. The Republican governors did a much better job than the Dumocrats. Fauci was largely taken out of play, and then along came Sleepy Joe Biden, who made Fauci a “King!” I called Biden to tell him Fauci was no good, either didn’t have a clue, or was dishonest. The call was well received, but sadly, not acted on. Biden went on to give Fauci vast destructive power. The rest is history! President DJT»

The ODNI-Gabbard Dossier on Fauci, Wuhan and SARS-Cov-2 Manmade

These words reveal a distancing from the state virologist, clearly highlighted in the dossier that Tulsi Gabbard, the outgoing director of the ODNI, declassified as the last act of her tenure as head of the US Intelligence Community.

Bombshell! ODNI (Gabbard Video) ACCUSES FAUCI of Pandemic’s SARS-COV-2 MANMADE with China. New Declassified Files by US IC

This dossier highlights the well-known and notorious research activities on the Gain-of-Function-enhanced SARS virus in the laboratories of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it contains perhaps less damning documents than those published by Gospa News on the Pentagon’s secret activity in the construction of recombinant chimeric viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, whose lethality derives primarily from the insertion of the HIV-AIDS pathogen plasmid.

Trump’s words of heavy moral censure, faced with the gravity of a laboratory-prepared pandemic and a holocaust caused by COVID-19 mRNA vaccines that can cause cancer (as Moderna knew well before releasing them), feel like a small slap in the face.

WUHAN-GATES – 82. SYNTHETIC VIRUSES: BIOWEAPONS Hidden by PENTAGON. Exclusive US AIR FORCE Secret Paper confirms Dangerous Tests by JASON Group on SARS-Cov2

Too Many Secrets behind Moderna Vaccine funded by Trump

“The rest is history” conclude Trump… Why bring to trial the human archive of American bioterrorism, which since the anthrax emergency in 2001 has hidden behind the alibi of national biodefense?

Why make Americans wonder why Ralph Baric, Fauci’s operational arm at the University of North Carolina, published a study in 2017 on “The Recipe for Building a Laboratory-Based COVID”during the Trump administration, and in 2018, DARPA, together with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, funded top-secret experiments on the SARS virus at the UK’s Pirbright Institute?

WUHAN-GATES – 81. EXCLUSIVE & EXPLOSIVE STUDY! The “Recipe” to Build a Covid in Laboratory published by Fauci’s collaborator prof. Baric on 2017. Where was Trump?

Why should Americans risk knowing that Trump’s own aides, or even Trump himself, knew full well about those dangerous experiments, just as the White House knew—or should have known—that Operation Warp Speed ​​funded Moderna’s vaccine, developed with the help of DARPA, Fauci, and Baric, but curiously patented nine months before the emergence of Covid-19 in China.

But we must not forget that during its multiple research activities on vaccines, Big Pharma Moderna of Cambridge (Massachusetts), financed by the Bill Gates foundation, developed in 2016 an artificial human gene that turned out to have a genomic makeup practically identical to that of SARS-Cov-2.

WUHAN-GATES – 79. mRNA KILLER VACCINES Ready Before COVID PANDEMIC. Exclusive DARPA Paper proves Plot among Pentagon, Gates & Moderna

“The rest is history” sentenced Trump…

“Rest in Peace” doctor Fauci, now you can secretely work in the Italian National Anti-Pandemic Center through one of your best close collaborator of NIAID: Barney Graham, former deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center (VRS) inside the ational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (in the previous pics above beside Trump),

His hidden employer, however, always has the same three-letter name: CIA aka Central Intelligence Agency.

Stay tuned and subscribe Gospa newsletter because in the next days we will publish an investigation on the Genesis of Fauci Bioterrorism… 

PS I’ve added below the article by John Leake, published on Peter McCuollough’s Substack, “Focal Points,” which confirms my analysis in every detail in his post titled “Why Prosecuting Fauci is Off Limits”

by Fabio Giuseppe Carlo Carisio – Gospa News founder and director


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Why Prosecuting Fauci is Off Limits

Discovery and prosecution of the former NIAID director would expose the entire rotten edifice of the US government. The liabilities would be astronomical.

by John Leake – originally published on his Substack Focal Points

All the links to previous Gospa News article have been added in the aftermath

Octavian (later the Emperor Augustus) was offended when Mark Antony cheated on his sister (Octavia the Younger) with Cleopatra. However, he also knew that the embarrassing affair that became the talk of the town in Rome served his ultimate design to get rid of Mark Antony.

Had Antony shown real contrition, left Cleopatra, and returned to Rome to patch things up with Octavia, it would have derailed Octavian’s plan to seize unrivaled power.

PENTAGON’s BIOLABS in UKRAINE, COVID-19 BioWeapon & MOSSAD-EPSTEIN Ring (video). IntelDrops by US Military Whistleblower on Gabbard-ODNI Dossier

A close study of history teaches us that whenever the populace is treated to the spectacle of a powerful man being pilloried and lampooned, it is almost certainly a distraction from the true, behind-the-scenes exercise or preservation of power.

I’m pretty sure that everyone in Washington understands that prosecuting Anthony Fauci—and the official discovery it would entail—would be the end of the US government because the liabilities would be incalculably astronomical.

Fauci’s NIAID was the lynchpin of the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex that perpetrated a massive crime against all of humanity.—literally ALL of the earth’s inhabitants. As I noted in my poster yesterday (President Biden’s Preemptive Pardon of Fauci) the following is clearly evident from the enormous paper trail.

  • Knew that Daszak, Baric, et al. were conducting GoF research with their colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (a Chinese biosecurity lab connected with the Chinese military).
  • Knew that Baric et al. were creating SARS coronavirus variants capable of infecting and causing pathogenesis in humans.
  • Knew that the NIH continued to fund (and therefore to endorse) the research of Baric et al. even after the federal pause on GoF in October 2014.
  • Knew that Moderna patented the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site in 2016.
  • Knew that his own NIAID began collaborating with Moderna in 2016 to develop an mRNA vaccine against coronaviruses.

WUHAN-GATES – 56. Deep Investigation on “Moderna’s Artificial human gene like SARS-Cov-2”. Huge Plot EU, China, US Darpa & Fauci

NIAID Collaboration with Moderna

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center and the biotechnology company Moderna had collaborated for four years on mRNA vaccines for other emerging infectious diseases.

WUHAN-GATES – 84. PROOFS of SARS-Cov-2 SYNTHETIC VIRUS: 7 Laboratory-Acquired Infections on 2020 by NEW Research Strains in a US BSL-3 Lab

In other words, Anthony Fauci was a leading conspirator in perpetrating this crime, fraudulently concealing it, suppressing early treatment for it, and promoting the dangerous, experimental mRNA vaccine that NIAID (of which he was the director) developed with Moderna.

The trouble for the sewer known as the US government is that EVERY stinking agency—HHS, DoD, DARPA, BARDA, CIA, FBI—all of them understood the obvious reality of what was going on.

As for the parcel of imbecilic and venal elected representatives in Congress and the White House—stupidity and cowardice aren’t a persuasive defense.

Senators Paul and Johnson are perfect gentlemen, acting in good faith, but I suspect they too know that if this horror show is officially revealed in the discovery phase of a criminal trial against Anthony Fauci, it would be the end of the entire rotten edifice of the US government. The liabilities with respect to all of humanity would be too astronomical.

Fauci also understands that he is, in the language of the Sicilian and Neapolitan mafia, “intoccabile”—untouchable.

FULL ARTICLE CONTINUES HERE ON FOCAL POINTS

John Leake – originally published on his Substack Focal Points


MAIN SOURCES

GOSPA NEWS – DOSSIER WUHAN-GATES – SARSCov2 by Biolab

THE DEFENDER

THE WESTERN JOURNAL

Substack DUTY TO DISSENT

TRUTH


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CLICK TO READ MORE IN ITALIAN VERSION WITH MACHINE TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH AVAILABLE CLICKING ON THE FLAG UP LEFT

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THE SYRIAN WHITE HELMETS INVADE VENEZUELA. To Assist Final Western Regime-Change? (VIDEO) Kit Klarenberg Investigation

Kit Klarenberg Investigation: “Are the White Helmets in Venezuela to assist regime change?”

by Kit Klarenberg – originally published on Al Mayadeen TV

All links to previopus Gospa News post or video have been added in the aftermath

On June 27th, a plane ferrying a “specialized” team of “highly trained search and rescue specialists” flew into Venezuela from Damascus.

The VIOLENCE of RING of FIRE. 93 Earthquakes in a Week: Natural Wild Weather & Geoengineering Nightmares inside HARP, US Pentagon partner

Dispatched at putative Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa’s direct order, the 15-strong group is assisting disaster efforts launched by Caracas in response to devastating twin earthquakes. Among them are members of the notorious White Helmets. A bogus humanitarian group constructed by MI6, they played a central role in Britain’s protracted coup of Bashar Assad.

Are the White Helmets similarly in Venezuela to assist regime change?

State news agency Sana enthusiastically promoted the White Helmets’ arrival, celebrating “Syria’s first overseas humanitarian search-and-rescue deployment in modern history.” The expedition reportedly represents a “significant step” in the country’s “evolving humanitarian role” globally, underscoring “its growing capacity to contribute to international disaster response efforts.” The deployment is explicitly intended to “position” Damascus “as a contributor to international humanitarian operations,” capable of dispatching “search-and-rescue expertise” overseas to support “other nations in times of crisis.”

Sana highlighted the “exceptional field experience” of the White Helmets sent to Caracas, who reportedly acquired “advanced expertise in dealing with complex rubble and the extraction of trapped survivors” throughout the West’s dirty war against the now “deposed regime” of Assad.

This “accumulated experience” has reportedly “enabled Syrian rescue specialists to participate in international emergency response missions,” with Venezuela being their debut. While Damascus provides “experienced rescue personnel,” key dirty war sponsor Qatar supplies “heavy machinery and specialized equipment required for field operations.”

“Al Nusra (Al Qaeda) Terrorists Funded by Qatar”. Scotland Yard Investigates. Syrian Refugees’ and American Reporter’s Lawsuits against Doha’s banks

The White Helmets will “work in close coordination” with international rescue units in shattered Caracas for up to 10 days, “with the possibility of extending the mission depending on operational requirements and developments on the ground.”

An “operational requirement” of the rescuers may be assisting in the construction of quasi-state structures in Venezuela, ala Syria, ensuring Western powers have the requisite people, organisations and structures in place locally to take over when the embattled interim government of Delcy Rodríguez finally collapses.

The FIDEL CASTRO’s DISTURBING “PROPHECY” on VENEZUELA EARTHQUAKE triggered with HAARP Dangerous US Military Tests

White Helmets played a major propaganda role in the dirty conflict against Assad.

As CNN has reported, “Rodríguez’s Venezuela is in such dire straits she can’t afford to reject aid from either friends or foes.” The White Helmets are a self-evident menace. The group was founded in 2014 by ARK, a shadowy British intelligence cutout founded by MI6 veteran Alistair Harris. Over the subsequent decade, operating in areas controlled by foreign-backed extremists, the White Helmets played a major propaganda role in the dirty conflict against Assad.

Even more insidiously, the group and other ARK-created quasi-state structures shored up the dominance of Jabhat al-Nusra, which subsequently rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, before violently taking power in Damascus in December 2024.

“Soros” French Judges want to Arrest Assad for Douma Chemical Attack despite it was White Helmets False-Flag

By providing state-like rescue services in HTS-occupied areas, the extremist faction’s credibility as a governance actor with local Syrians was significantly enhanced, to the extent HTS became “synonymous with opposition to Assad.” Leaked documents show British intelligence well-knew these activities assisted HTS’ “growing influence”, in the years leading up to Assad’s ouster.

Since then, the White Helmets have become Syria’s emergency services under al-Sharaa’s illegitimate rule.

“The NEW SYRIA of TERRORIST CALIPHATE”. Exclusive Analysis on HTS Leader Al Jolani by Former Italian INTERPOL Officer in Jordan

Meanwhile, fellow ARK construct the Free Syrian Police, with which the White Helmets worked hand-in-glove, has been anointed the country’s national police force.

Separate leaks show this was Britain’s plan all along, with Damascus’ post-war “recovery” providing a beachhead for local MI6 assets to “[expand] into newly liberated territory” before all-out regime change. Responding to Venezuela’s cataclysmic earthquakes likewise represents a golden opportunity to finish the West’s long-running war on Chavismo.

“ARMED GROUPS” in Caracas for CIA and Trump Civil War. Venezuelan Govt Condemns U.S. Travel Warning as “Politically Motivated Fabrication”

‘Extremist Groups’

Leaked British documents trace the White Helmets’ inception to a secret program launched July 2013. Once constructed, the so-called Syrian Civil Defence enabled “direct and public linkages between donor funding and support to the Syrian opposition,” while “[enhancing] the legitimacy of local governance actors.” The group had strong links to, and worked in intimate conjunction with, Western-backed extremist groups, and foreign-created anti-Assad civil society and media operations. The White Helmets were a perfect conduit for opaquely funnelling aid and financial assistance to opposition-occupied territory.

Accordingly, the White Helmets were at the forefront of constructing parallel state structures, in advance of the day Assad was finally ousted. A leaked file refers to how in April 2015, ARK mobilised its networks of Syrian opposition actors of every stripe, including the White Helmets, to gather information at the British government’s request on “the situation in Idlib city following its liberation.” This included insights on “humanitarian conditions and service provision, as well as the evolving governance and security space.”

SYRIA’s PRESIDENT ASSAD EXILED IN MOSCOW. Russian FM: “US-UK Using Terrorism for Geopolitical goals Unacceptable”

With British, Japanese and US funding, and in close coordination with the Qatari-created Syrian National Coalition, ARK sought “to galvanise international attention on the issue of protection of civilians,” while “mobilising social media, the international press, global advocacy partners and private entrepreneurs” to promote the White Helmets. In 2014, ARK produced a documentary about the White Helmets, Digging for Life, which racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and elevated the group to international stardom.

In leaked files, ARK boasts about the “impact” such propaganda had within and without Syria. One film the intelligence cutout produced “on the indefatigable spirit of a struggling female protestor” prompted “the eruption of anti-regime protests” in Idlib in 2013 – “protestors chanted her name.” The same ARK staffer behind Digging for Life also produced a “documentary profile” of the Free Syrian Police. Like the White Helmets, the FSP was much-venerated by the Western media, and promoted by British intelligence via “posters, booklets and broadcast products.”

The Grim NATO’S JIHADs. How Atlantic Intelligence “14 Eyes” uses ISLAMIC TERRORISTS: from Italy to Libya, Ukraine and Syria

As with the White Helmets too, the reality of the FSP was considerably darker than what emerged in major news outlets – at least initially. From 2012 onwards, the force operated in close tandem with violent militant factions, and courts punishing residents of opposition-occupied territory under obscenely strict interpretations of Sharia Law. However, a March 2017 BBC profile of the FSP repeatedly stressed the force “does not co-operate with extremist groups,” while refusing to “carry weapons in order to administer law and order in the country.”

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Nine months later, the FSP’s intimate relationships with multiple ultra-violent militant sects, including HTS’s forerunner Jabhat al-Nusra, were publicly revealed. This extended to assisting in the execution of women who disobeyed al-Nusra’s theocratic codes. These disclosures led to the suspension of British funding for the FSP, but this was reinstated within mere weeks as the force’s sinister alliance with extremist elements was “already known” to the Foreign Office. Indeed, the FSP’s entire purpose was assisting HTS and affiliated armed cliques in unseating Assad.

FULL INVESTIGATION CONTINUES HERE ON AL MAYADEEN TV

Kit Klarenberg – originally published on Al Mayadeen TV


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Vital Update (7 Videos) – Biblical OPHANIM Theory (A. Paulina Luna) on UFO X-FILES Declassified by Pentagon. WHO ARE ALIENS? ET, Angels or Devils? Orthodox Priests View

In the cover image the US congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, an original image of an UFO inside the Pentagon-released video and a depiction of an Ophanim

by Carlo Domenico Cristofori

VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

UPDATE ON JULY, 11, 2026

Another alleged UFO like Ophanim-Angels in the new Batch of Pentagon Declassified Documents

The Pentagon showed videos of “UFOs” — they were published in a new batch of declassified documents.

The first shows a six-pointed star that was seen in the Indo-Pacific region in 2025. Judging by the footage, she was moving smoothly.

This is very similar to a previous UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) posted below that supported the “Ophanim theory” which clamis that these apparitions of aliens are a kind of epiphanies of biblical angels (read details below in this investigation)

In the second footage in the above video we can see a strange “transformer” with a height of 3.6 to 4.5 meters was filmed over the Atlantic Ocean in 2020. The footage shows a figure with a powerful jetpack.


ARTICLE POSTED  ON MAY, 25, 2026

The Pentagon has released the first batch of UFO materials promised by Trump

The US Department of War has launched a dedicated portal that makes previously classified US government documents, photographs, and videos, as well as eyewitness accounts of unidentified anomalous phenomena, publicly available.

This is the first major wave of declassification under the presidential PURSUE program.

As is known, Trump previously personally ordered a campaign to declassify such materials as much as possible. The publication of classified documents is expected to continue on a regular basis. The portal notes that the published materials represent “unresolved cases whose nature the US government is not yet in a position to definitively determine. “

A total of 162 documents have already been published, as the video below…

«The Pentagon clarified that this data does not confirm the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization, and that people “will be able to draw their own conclusions” regarding the recorded anomalous phenomena» Maxim Svetlyshev wrote on TopWar and News-Pravda

Among other things, the website published, for example, the operator’s testimony. drone, which in September 2023 reported spotting an unidentified object in the sky emitting a very bright light, and other similar materials. According to Congressman Tim Burchett, the UFO materials already released by the Pentagon represent only a small portion of the overall data set—the most “astonishing part” is yet to come.

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Biblical Angel in UFO Files? Video of ‘8-Pointed Star inspires “Ophanim’ Theories” by Ana Paulina Luna

A newly declassified Pentagon UFO video is fueling massive online speculation after appearing to show a mysterious “eight-pointed star” object floating across the sky.

The infrared footage, captured by US Central Command personnel in 2013, was released as part of the Trump administration’s major UFO disclosure push through the WAR.GOV database.

Shortly after the footage went public, Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna posted a cryptic image of “OPHANIM,” referencing angelic beings described in ancient religious texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

During a House Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) asked UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) whistleblowers if a video showing an “orb” purportedly being struck by a hellfire missile scare them.

Biblical Ophanim Theory: from Ezekiel to Contemporary Interpretation on UFO

The bizarre connection has sparked intense debate online over whether the object could represent advanced technology, extraterrestrial life, or something even stranger (here and below AI info support).

Ezekiel Vision (Raphael – Oil on panel 1517-1518, Pitti Palace – Florence – Italy) on Merkaba aka Chariot mysticism

Ophanim (Hebrew for “wheels”) are celestial beings in Judeo-Christian theology described in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezekiel 1:15-21) as “wheels within wheels” covered in eyes, symbolizing God’s omnipresence, vigilance, and divine mobility.

They are part of the highest angelic hierarchy, often identified as the “Thrones” or “many-eyed ones,” functioning as guardians of the divine throne.

They appear in the Old Testament as shiny, beryl-like wheels that move in any direction without turning, synchronized with cherubim.

The Angels of Thrones depicted with Eye inside the Wheels

The numerous eyes represent omniscience and constant alertness, while their wheel-like form suggests active, moving governance of the universe by God.

They are commonly ranked as the third highest order of angels, specifically associated with the “Thrones”.

In the context of “Biblically Accurate Angels,” they are frequently depicted in popular media and art as complex, non-humanoid entities, contrasting heavily with human-like angelic depictions.

Engraved illustration of the “chariot vision” of the Biblical book of Ezekiel, chapter 1, made by Matthaeus (Matthäus) Merian (1593-1650), for his “Icones Biblicae” (a.k.a. “Iconum Biblicarum”).

Recently, some theories have linked the description of the Ophanim (and their depiction in the Dead Sea Scrolls) to accounts of UFOs or advanced, alien technology, due to their strange, glowing, and mobile nature.

Metropolitan Hilarion: “Aliens live in different realms and occasionally appear to humans as angels”

«According to Metropolitan Hilarion, aliens live in different realms and occasionally appear to humans as angels; it is useless to look for them on other worlds. The Russian Church previously rejected the idea of extraterrestrial civilizations» Mataeo Smith wrote on Express.US.

“If civilizations really existed on other planets, our Holy Scripture, the Bible, would definitely say something about that. If it doesn’t say anything about it, we assume that they don’t exist,” the Moscow Patriarchate Metropolitan Hilarion’s external church relations department stated.

He cited Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, a book written by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, a well-known theologian of the Russian Church Abroad, to further his argument. Testimonies of persons who have seen aliens and UFOs are included in the book; the author compares these accounts to demon appearances, which “exist in abundance in hagiographic literature.”

“He proves in his book that people who have allegedly seen aliens really saw demons, whose existence many people now refuse to believe in,” Metropolitan Hilarion said.

The church believes in angels and demons “not because this is stated somewhere, but because it is confirmed by the centuries-old experience of church people,” he said.

Aliens in a painting from the Serbian Orthodox Church from 1350. [Visoki Decani, Kosovo]

Are Aliens Actually the Devilish Fallen Angels? A VIDEO Explaining Why It’s Very Likely…

We’ve been saying this for years these aren’t extraterrestrial beings from another planet, but created beings that are of this realm.

It’s the most scientific approach to understand these as demons and angels.

Vance recently proposed that it made sense to him that we are talking about angels and demons, not aliens from another planet.

Other guy recounts a government researcher who got pushback from higher-ups. Brass understood these not as aliens, but demons.

This may be the real disclosure but… read much more below!

The Physicist and Astronomer who explained that angels are entities that have existed for all of eternity as God’s messenger

«Some researchers claim that the Bible provides unmistakable proof that they have been present on our planet since the beginning of time. Scientists have been searching the universe for extraterrestrial life for decades» Mataeo Smith pointed out on Express.US.

Dr. Hugh Ross, a physicist and astronomer, presented a compelling argument in 2023 that angels are entities that have existed for all of eternity as God’s messengers and that they function similarly to other entities that are not limited to our “space-time dimensions.”

EUCHARIST AND PENTECOST: Supernatural Gifts of the LAST SUPPER and EASTER. The Revelations of the Gospels of the Apostles John and Matthew

Ross wrote in Salvo magazine, “According to the Bible, these creatures differ from humans in that they are not constrained by either the known laws of physics or the known space-time dimensions. Rather, they exist in a realm distinct from the universe, yet have been granted power to enter the human realm for brief episodes — either in physical or nonphysical form.“

According to the Bible, angels are God’s messengers and, if you will, ground troops who conduct God’s work. There are three categories: Seraphim, Cherubim, and “Living Creatures.”

Carlo Domenico Cristofori


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EXPRESS.US – Aliens are actually angels coming to visit from other dimension, says church


ITALIAN BRIDGE COLLAPSE (3 videos), 43 KILLED in 2018, Now 32 Condemned to 200 YEARS in JAIL. Highway CEO already in Prison for another Disaster

by Gospa News Editorial Staff

VERSIONE IN ITALIANO

Just under eight years after the collapse of the Morandi Bridge, the motorway viaduct that collapsed on August 14, 2018, at 11:36 a.m., killing 43 people, one of the most important and impressive trials ever held in Italian courts has concluded.

A trial involving 57 people began on July 7, 2022, for a total of 284 hearings.

According to Deputy Prosecutors Walter Cotugno and Marco Airoldi, the then and former managers and technicians of Autostrade, Spea (the subsidiary responsible for surveillance and maintenance), the Ministry of Transport, and the Authority for Transport are responsible for that disaster. According to the prosecutor, for years, savings were made on motorway safety and maintenance to ensure greater dividends for shareholders.

The charges, of varying degrees, include multiple manslaughter, vehicular homicide, intentional collapse, failure to perform official duties, undermining transportation safety, forgery, and intentional failure to provide safety devices in the workplace.

For these charges, nearly 400 years in prison and an acquittal were requested. A total of 32 sentences were handed down over nearly 200 years for the collapse of the Morandi Bridge.

Former ASPI CEO Giovanni Castellucci was sentenced to 12 years for the collapse of the Morandi Bridge.

Former ASPI CEO Giovanni Castellucci was sentenced to 12 years for the collapse of the Morandi Bridge.

The former heads of ASPI and Spea were also sentenced. Eleven years for Michele Donferri Mitelli (former ASPI CEO), the prosecutor had requested 15 years and six months. Paolo Berti (former ASPI CEO), a sentence of 5 years and six months, was requested for 12 years and six months. Finally, a sentence of 5 years and six months for Antonino Galatà (former Spea CEO), for whom the prosecutor had requested 7 years.

Mauro Coletta, former director of motorway concession oversight at the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, was sentenced to five years in prison. The prosecution had requested a ten-year sentence.

“We sought the culprit, but not the guilt. Castellucci was convicted without guilt. His only crime is that of being innocent,” commented lawyer Giovanni Paolo, who is defending the former CEO of ASPI after his conviction. “We will continue to fight for his innocence,” the lawyer concluded, “and we are confident that the appeal will correct what we believe to be a mistake.”

The HIGHWAY’s KILLER IN JAIL. The BENETTON’s Manager Sentenced and under Trial for Morandi Bridge Massacre too

The public prosecution had requested 18 years and 6 months in prison for the former CEO of Aspi, Giovanni Castellucci, who had already been imprisoned for months for another motorway disaster, that of the Acqualonga viaduct in Avellino where he was sentenced to 6 years definitively by the Supreme Court and had turned himself in April 2025.


MORE DETAILS HERE IN THE ITALIAN VERSION AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH

You can read in English thanks to machine translation available clicking on the flags up left


Six Italian Highway’s Managers arrested for Attempt on Transport Safety and Fraud


 

The new samizdat

18 May 2026 at 16:02

While much of the media industry focused on the churn of headlines, we became increasingly interested in the undercurrents beneath them: the hidden systems, infrastructures and ideologies shaping events across borders and over time.

Again and again, our reporting led us back to the same realization: for a long time, the struggle over information was understood primarily as a question of censorship or access. Who controls information? Who gets to publish? Who gets silenced?

Those questions still matter. But they no longer fully describe the world we live in.

Today, the struggle over information is about who builds the systems through which reality is organized, distributed and trusted. From state propaganda to algorithmic feeds, from platform monopolies to AI-generated noise, the battle is not over facts. It is over the infrastructures that determine which narratives spread, which voices are amplified and which communities remain connected.

Over the past year, these questions led to a collaboration between Coda and The Continent, the pan-African newspaper founded in Johannesburg by Simon Allison and Sipho Kings. Although our reporting emerges from very different histories and geographies, we found ourselves arriving at remarkably similar conclusions about power, fragmentation and the future of journalism in an age of informational instability.

This two-chapter essay is the beginning of that collaboration, and marks the start of a new project called The Atlas. Pilot edition is available here — please feel free to share with friends, family and colleagues, preferably in its entirety.

In Chapter One, I return to the world of my Soviet childhood: propaganda, samizdat and the search for trustworthy signals through noise.

In Chapter Two, The Continent co-founder Simon Allison presents the Parable of Sinn Sisamouth: the story of how some of the greatest songs ever written were nearly lost, and then found, and then lost again. 

Taken together, these essays ask what journalism becomes in a world where information is no longer organized primarily to inform, but to capture attention, manufacture reaction and shape perception at planetary scale.

The Atlas grows out of that question.

Chapter One: Through the Static

Whenever I am asked why I decided to become a journalist, an image from my childhood pops into my head. It’s dusk. I am 10, sitting in the kitchen with my mom. She is glued to a shortwave radio. Outside, the Soviet Union is on the cusp of collapse. Georgia, where we are, is on the brink of civil war. We didn’t use the term back then, but fake news was all we got through official channels. Real news — coming from the West — felt like a lifeline. I was in awe of the crackling radio that held my mother’s full attention. I wanted to become that voice.

Illustration: Anna Jibladze.

Years later, I got my dream job at the BBC and spent much of my adult life moving between wars, uprisings and authoritarian states. Again and again, I found myself in places where truth was contested terrain: Baghdad, Damascus, Donetsk, Sana’a. But over time I realized something fundamental had changed. Modern authoritarianism no longer relied primarily on suppressing information. It had discovered something more effective.

Information could simply be drowned out by static.

That realization became stark for me in eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014. I arrived in a field of bright yellow sunflowers where the bodies from Flight MH17 still lay scattered across the ground. A Russian missile had blown the passenger plane out of the sky, killing all 298 people on board. Yet almost immediately, the Kremlin flooded the information space with competing explanations. It was a Ukrainian fighter jet. A failed assassination attempt on Putin. The plane had been filled with corpses before takeoff. Each theory contradicted the next, but that hardly mattered. The point was not to persuade, it was to exhaust. It was to create so much noise that truth itself began to feel unstable.

Over the following years, I watched versions of the same logic spread far beyond Russia. Social platforms transformed public conversation into a permanent stream of outrage, performance and distraction, collapsing vastly different kinds of information into the same endless feed. War footage, propaganda, conspiracy theories, journalism and gossip all began competing inside systems designed not to inform people but to capture and hold attention.

Noise became the new censorship.

And increasingly, I found myself thinking about the world of my childhood again. Not because history was repeating itself neatly, but because the emotional landscape felt strangely familiar: confusion, exhaustion, distrust, the constant sense that reality itself was becoming slippery. Back then, people searched desperately for clear signals through the static of Soviet propaganda. Today, we are drowning in a different kind of static, but the instinct, the search for clarity feels remarkably similar.

In the Soviet Union, people developed ways of navigating that confusion. Among my strongest memories from that time is the sound of my parents’ typewriter late at night. Friends would pass around copies of banned Soviet literature and my parents would sit at the kitchen table all night, retyping them page by page so they could be shared again. It was my first encounter with samizdat, although I didn’t know the word then.

Looking back now, what strikes me is that samizdat was never simply about forbidden texts. It was about building trusted alternative systems of circulation when official systems had lost credibility.

At Coda, we have spent years building journalism against the logic of noise. We slowed stories down. We followed themes instead of headlines. We built a reporting system designed to connect events across borders and over time, helping readers see patterns instead of fragments. But as our globally distributed newsroom adapted to an increasingly fractured information landscape, it became clear that journalism alone was not enough. Distribution shapes understanding as much as reporting does.

Around the same time, in Johannesburg, Simon Allison, Sipho Kings and their team were building something that challenged many of the assumptions dominating digital media. The Continent, their pan-African newspaper, spreads largely through direct sharing networks: passed from reader to reader rather than pushed by algorithms.

Illustration: Wynona Mutisi.

Different histories had brought us to remarkably similar questions. What does journalism look like when trust is collapsing, attention is fragmented and the systems that carry information have themselves become instruments of power?

Out of that convergence came The Atlas: a new publication that brings together Coda’s methodology of following systems across borders and over time with The Continent’s radically distributed model for reaching readers beyond algorithmic feeds.

The Atlas is built on a shared conviction: as fragmentation, distrust and informational overload spread across the world, some of the clearest ways through will come from places that have already spent decades navigating propaganda, instability and contested reality. Places once treated as peripheral are becoming essential to understanding the defining question of this age: how can meaning survive systems designed to overwhelm it.

Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images.

Chapter Two: The second silencing of Sinn Sisamouth

Imagine if your favourite song disappeared, forever. 

Almost every album I have ever loved was recommended to me by my friend An-Rui. A few months ago, he sent me a track by the undisputed King of Khmer Music, the Golden Voice, the Cambodian Elvis himself – Sinn Sisamouth.

I had never heard of him.

I didn’t respond at first, so he nudged me. That night, after the kids were asleep, I put on my headphones, sat in the garden and immediately lost myself in Cambodia’s psychedelic rock scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. I don’t know enough about music to explain exactly what I fell in love with, but within weeks I was, according to Spotify, among the top one percent of Sinn Sisamouth listeners worldwide.

An-Rui had added a note to his recommendation. “the songs are happy but since i know what his fate was and i don’t understand the words, it sounds incredibly sad to me”.

The story goes something like this: A small-town boy with an extraordinary voice moves to the big city, and conquers all before him. He writes hundreds of songs, bridging Khmer musical traditions with new western influences: jazz, rock & roll, bossa nova, blues, the Beatles, and, of course, Elvis Presley. He toured the country. He toured the world. He made music with an actual King, Norodom Sihanouk, and became Cambodia’s most beloved rockstar.

Then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power. In the course of committing a genocide, the communist regime disappeared Sinn Sisamouth, and banned his music. He has never been seen, or heard from, again.

But his music never died. It lived on brittle records, hidden for generations under floorboards. It lived on scratchy cassettes, passed hand to hand among the diaspora.

It was only decades later that his music was digitised and remastered, and made available on streaming platforms to the likes of me.

When I listen to Sinn Sisamouth, I can’t help but think about how easily we could have lost his masterpieces entirely. And I wonder what else might have been lost that we have not been able to recover.

And then it happened again.

There’s a particular track that I like to play in my car, where I can turn the bass up as high as it goes. I was driving one afternoon and looked for it on Spotify. It was gone, even though the rest of the album was there. 

I looked again on my laptop at home. Nothing. Gone from Spotify. Gone from Apple Music. Gone from YouTube. Like it had never been there in the first place. I started to wonder if I had gone crazy, and maybe imagined the song entirely. And then I started to panic: What if I never heard it again?

Eventually, I found a bootleg YouTube version, using a different transliteration of the Khmer title – Kanlang Pnheu Pran, instead of Konlong Phner Bran. Before I tracked that down, I had to wade through dozens of AI-generated Sinn Sisamouth ‘cover versions’, all uploaded to YouTube within the last few months. If I had never heard it before, I would never have been able to tell which was the original.

It’s not unusual for songs to disappear from the Internet, especially when the music is from non-English-speaking countries. I’ve had similar experiences with the music of Sharhabil Ahmed, the Sudanese jazz legend, and Ethiopia’s Tilahun “The Voice” Gessesse.

In fact, it’s not unusual for other kinds of information to disappear from the internet; to be edited after the fact; or to be simply lost among all the digital noise. Digital information is incredibly precarious, and becoming more so by the day. AI slop is taking over social media platforms. Algorithms determine what information we can and can’t see, shaping our cultural and political preferences. And powerful interests are becoming increasingly bold when it comes to brazenly manipulating information in their favour – or, of even greater concern, restricting the flow of information across borders.

Amazon changes the contents of books on people’s Kindles without telling anyone. News websites quietly alter critical stories, post-publication, to remove evidence of wrongdoing (my favourite example: the Financial Express published a story critical of India’s richest family; only to replace it with a glorified press release a few days later. They neglected to amend the URL, however, which contains the original headline). Governments shut down internet access on a whim, or legislate which apps and websites are available to specific populations.

For journalism, this is an existential threat. Our job is not just to hold power to account – it is also to write the first draft of history. But if we can’t preserve that first draft, or distribute it effectively, then what, exactly, is the point?

The Continent and Coda Story are working together to try something different. We want to publish news about the world, produced and verified by humans, that cannot be edited after the fact; and to distribute it in a way that dramatically decreases our reliance on unaccountable algorithms or search engine optimisation. The Atlas — pilot edition available here — is our answer to the precarity of information online. It’s a work in progress.

Stay tuned: if we’re going to succeed, we’ll need your help. And if we do succeed, the secret of our success will be those very same transnational networks that kept the music of Sinn Sisamouth alive. Communities of like-minded people, of friends and families will always find a way to stay connected, no matter how vast the distances between them, or how great the obstacles. So what does a global newspaper look like if we design it with exactly these communities in mind?

As soon as I found that bootleg on YouTube, I ripped an MP3 copy and sent it to An-Rui on Signal. “KEEP THIS SAFE,” I told him. I don’t know what happened to the song on Spotify, or if it is ever coming back. But I can’t take the risk of never hearing that bassline again. And here it is, in case you want to hear it too.

The post The new samizdat appeared first on Coda Story.

The afterlife of empire

12 May 2026 at 12:54

On May 3, an unusual procession moved through Washington DC. Several hundred people walked beneath the monuments of the American capital carrying portraits of Red Army soldiers. Children waved Soviet flags. A live orchestra played wartime songs at the World War II memorial. The Russian embassy had filed the permit; the DC Metropolitan Police provided an escort. Russian state media celebrated the event as proof that, with the return of Donald Trump, historical truth too had returned to America.

One organizer told Russian state television: “We love, respect Russia, honor the memory of our heroes.”

Similar marches took place in Paris, Amsterdam and Busan. In Berlin, authorities announced that Soviet flags, Russian symbols and military songs would once again be banned near Soviet war memorials during May 8 and 9 commemorations.

But in Moscow, Victory Day itself appeared haunted by fear.

For decades, May 9 has been Russia’s most sacred annual political ritual, binding victory, patriotism and state power into a single language. But this year, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was reduced to announcing that the Immortal Regiment march in Moscow would continue only “in electronic format.”

The run up to this year’s Victory Day became the most anxious Moscow has experienced in recent memory. The Kremlin canceled the traditional procession in the Russian capital, moving it online. Military equipment was removed from the parade. Mobile internet access across Moscow was intermittently shut down in the days leading up to May 9. Spectator numbers in St. Petersburg were reportedly slashed from thousands to just a few hundred. The Victory Parade in Kaliningrad was canceled entirely. Russian media outlets published extraordinary reports about Vladimir Putin retreating deeper into protected bunkers amid fears of Ukrainian drone strikes and assassination attempts.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry even warned foreign governments to evacuate diplomats from Kyiv before May 9, threatening massive retaliation if Ukraine targeted the celebrations with drones.

And then came another extraordinary twist. Volodymyr Zelensky publicly “allowed” the parade to proceed. In a deliberately tongue-in-cheek decree issued after negotiations around a temporary ceasefire, the Ukrainian president formally excluded Red Square from Ukraine’s operational strike plans for the duration of the celebrations, even listing the exact geographic coordinates of the square itself.

Watching it all unfold, I kept wondering whether empires collapse more easily than the systems of feeling they create. The Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago, but the architecture built around victory, sacrifice and historical grievance survived it, stretching across borders, diasporas and rival political projects. What began as Soviet myth-making about liberation has evolved into a transnational political language through which governments, activists, diasporas and rival ideological movements compete over legitimacy, victimhood and belonging.

Over the years, at Coda, in our Rewriting History current, we have tracked how the remembrance of World War II became central to Putin’s machinery of legitimacy and repression. Soon after he came to power, Russian public culture became saturated with stories of the Great Patriotic War. Watching Russian state television often felt as if the war had ended yesterday. New films, schoolbooks, drama series, speeches, parades and television specials turned victory into the emotional foundation of Putin’s Russia. Scholars of Russian memory politics have described how, under Putin, collective memory of the war became a tool for claiming legitimacy, discrediting opposition and presenting the Russian state as the eternal defender against fascism.

 It resonated because it tapped into genuine emotion passed on for generations. It was never just propaganda. It rested on something real: the scale of Soviet loss and the private grief carried by millions of families.

The Immortal Regiment began in 2012 in the Siberian city of Tomsk as a local act of remembrance. Ordinary people walked through the streets carrying photographs of relatives who died in the war. By 2015, Putin was leading the Moscow procession himself, while state-backed organizations coordinated chapters in dozens of countries. But in Putin’s Russia, where victory had already become the central organizing myth of the state, the boundary between private mourning and political mythology dissolved.

The speed of that transformation still feels important to me. It says something about the way modern political systems absorb private emotion and fold it back into the language of the state.

The Kremlin framed these Victory Day rituals as a defense against what it called Western attempts to “rewrite history” by minimizing the Soviet role in defeating fascism or equating Stalinism with Nazism. Ukraine and many Eastern Europeans came to see the marches instead as vehicles for imperial nostalgia and wartime propaganda. 

But the argument, it seems, is no longer only about what happened in the past. It is about who gets to turn memory and grief into political legitimacy in the present.

This year Germany found itself in the extraordinary position of having to ban Soviet flags and military songs near Soviet memorials, effectively regulating the symbolic language of antifascism itself. Historian Timothy Snyder once warned that “if fascists take over the mantle of antifascism, the memory of the Holocaust will itself be altered.” That is precisely the moral and historical dilemma Berlin has now forced into the open. What happens when the symbols of genuine antifascist sacrifice become inseparable from the imagery of an ongoing war? When the flags carried by the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz are also flown at embassy-organized rallies while Russian bombs fall on Kharkiv? 

At Coda, we explored some of these tensions years ago, in our documentary “What To Do With Stalin,” which examined the strange afterlife of Stalin’s image across the former Soviet world. While filming in Georgia, we encountered arguments that now feel strikingly familiar: whether remembering Stalin represented patriotism or denial, historical pride or historical amnesia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdfTH6rfe7E

Even then, it was obvious these battles were never really about the past.

Putin himself acknowledged as much during this year’s Victory Day speech, describing the war in Ukraine as a “just” continuation of the struggle against fascism and accusing the West of fueling confrontation with Russia “to this day.” Hours later, he suggested the war might finally be over. “I think that the matter is coming to an end,” he told reporters.

Victory Day 2026 may ultimately be remembered not for the military parade itself, but for revealing how unstable that memory system has become. Moscow performed triumph while fearing attack. Berlin restricted Soviet symbols in the name of democratic security. Washington hosted embassy-linked Soviet commemorations beneath American monuments.

I was ten years old when the Soviet Union collapsed. For those of us who grew up inside it, the end of the empire felt at once chaotic and exhilarating. Borders opened, old certainties disappeared and ideology lost its grip almost overnight. I still feel fortunate that, as a child, I witnessed an empire built on terror and repression collapse into history.

In the decades that followed, we watched Russia slowly turn the symbols and emotional reflexes of the Soviet system into instruments of political power once again. Victory Day became one of the most potent of these instruments: a ritual that fused together grief, patriotism, historical trauma and state legitimacy into a single, powerful sentiment.

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Alexander Darchiev, praised what he described as the Trump administration’s dramatically changed attitude toward Victory Day commemorations. The holiday, he said, now played “an unequivocally positive role” in Russia-US relations. He pointed specifically to the marches held in the center of Washington, DC.

But the more I think about this year’s Victory Day, the less it feels like a story about Russia alone. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many of us assumed its emotional architecture would disappear with it. Instead, parts of it were patiently cultivated and repurposed for a new era by the men in charge of Putin’s Russia.  

The emotional logic that once underpinned the Soviet system no longer belongs only to Russia and the shattered geography of its former empire. Grievances, historical trauma and rituals of belonging now shape political life all around the world. Digital networks and algorithmic systems did not create these emotional impulses, but they amplified them at a scale the Soviet state could only dream of. Perhaps that is the true afterlife of an empire: not the survival of its borders or ideology, but of the emotional systems it builds to organize fear, belonging and historical destiny.

Additional research by Masho Lomashvili and Irina Matchavariani

The post The afterlife of empire appeared first on Coda Story.

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