The Deadline Report – Ben Vidgen Investigates

Broadcast: Sunday 1.00pm and Friday 7.00pmLanguage: English

Category: Ethics, News and Politics – FRESH FM

Investigative journalist, bestselling author, award winning broadcaster Ben Vidgen, presents a 30-minute show offering quality alternative media backed by quality documented information on the issues not hitting the headlines, but that should be. A double shot of reality, always educational if never pretty.

The Deadline Report airs on Sundays at 1:00pm and replays Friday nights at 7.00pm

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Health Sports & Well Being

KNOW THEY ENEMY KNOW THY TRIGGERS We’re living in age of trauma make sure you know the signs of PTSD that the beginning in finding a cure against anxiety.

Beating inflammation often the ambulance at the top of the hills when it comes to arthritis and degenerative diseases and the battle ground starts with your diet.

This Really Needs Its Own T-Shirt.  you can say this without naming the country and everyone knows which nation being discussed. “They believed the arrest was a result of a misunderstanding with police, in a country where you really don’t want to have misunderstandings with police”. Top New Zealand rower arrested in **** following post-regatta incident – RNZ.

THE LIGHT SIDE

WILD WORLD WEATHER WITH WAL WINDY WURGANDY.

Asteroid not hitting earth.this week.Meteroisc predicted to be headed for Earth has changed course for the moon.Cheese prices expected to rise

AMERIKIA Adreno CilPrisencolinensinainciusol’ by Adriano Celentano was released in 1972. The nonsense lyrics to “Prisencolinensinainciusol” was written after the singer
argued that American culture had so come to dominate western think they believed he could write anything and as long as it sound American it would be accepted. Despite having no actual meaning, the song rose to number one on the charts in Italy, Germany, France and Belgium that year

CASHLESS IS COMING

Australian customer’s visited a branch in South Melbourne seeking to withdraw a large sum of cash, but was informed it was a “cashless” branch. Despite booking an appointment she was told on arriving she would have to go a “specialist hub”, which is different to your traditional bank branch.

MORE COFF FROM (NEOLIBERAL) GOFF “Sad that Rich has passed away. I worked with Rich Armitage and Colin Powell when they were Deputy Secretary and Secretary of State, and I was Foreign Minister for NZ. They were personally both decent people and a contrast to today’s US Administration. We stayed in touch. Rich contacted me a couple of days before he died after I questioned the Trump Administration’s appeasement of Putin, comments which he agreed with.” Notwithstanding the role Armitage played in the Regan government (with whom Trump was friendly) complete with Nazi death squads in South America Armitage represented one of the Hawks behind the Project for A New American Century which ultimately led to the illegal; US invasion of Iraq led by Powell and Tony Blair (Ardern’s boss), lies concerning Anthrax and 911 and the collapse of perestroika and a new and dangerous second cold war.

SAYS IT ALL

Helen Clark Foundation just advertised a night with Helen Clark who Tabled the TPPA,Tim Grosvenor (Candy Club Tim) sold the lie of the TPPA and Phil Goff (Jacinda Ardern’s mentor) signed off on it after Labour swore to walk away from the TPPA what a bunch of globalist assholes

THE FULL HISTORY OF THE UKARAINE CONFLICT FROM THE ROLE PLAYED BY PNAC & THATCHER TO THE CURRENT DAY.

Special Economic Zones

We update our investigation into the coming of Special Economic Zones to the Pacific at a time when multinationals are looking to introduce SEZ whose breath-taking draconian powers Kevin Hague the former head of the Forest and Bird warn us of shortly before his passing back in 2016. It’s the story of how army undermines democracy and spends billions on arms, allegeldy to counter China, as hilariously it gives away the family silver ware to companies directly serving China economic warfare plan so that Bejing and its mates at Black Rock can destroy the West all currency all without firring a s hot’s

May 28, 2025, National Parliament of Samoa passed the Special Economic Zones Bill 2024 today without any amendments. The bill now becomes an act of parliament to regulate and establish special economic zones across the country to promote investment, job creation, and economic growth. The bill, introduced by the Minister for Commerce, Industry, Labour, and Immigration and Member of Parliament for Northeast Guadalcanal, Hon. Jamie Vokia, is promoted to attract investment, create jobs, and stimulate economic growth throughout the country. 

Minister Vokia highlighted the bill’s importance in laying a legislative foundation to support economic transformation and “investor confidence”. Despite concerns, the bill was passed without amendments and will soon be passed by the Governor General.

MAY 27 2025 Ontario Canada: The Ford government of Ontario Canada is working on amendments to a bill that Indigenous leaders have warned will reignite the “Idle No More” movement in Ontario if it is passed. Bill 5, the Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, would give cabinet the power to designate an area a “special economic zone,” and then exempt selected proponents and projects from requirements under any provincial law or regulation, including bylaws of municipalities and local boards, that would otherwise apply in that zone. The bill also proposes to speed up approvals for mining projects through a “one-window” approach, ends an environmental assessment for a controversial dump expansion in Dresden, Ont., replaces the province’s Endangered Species Act with legislation that environmental groups argue offers far weaker protections, and empowers cabinet to exempt projects from archeological assessment requirements — which Indigenous leaders have warned puts sacred sites at risk. 

Indigenous leaders, environmental groups and citizens in Ontario Canada (who previously were successful in delaying the TPPA in 2017, due to its unconstitutional nature) have been mobilizing against the bill, holding protests and sending hundreds of written submissions to the committee studying the bill in opposition to it. Bill 5 gives cabinet the power to designate an area a “special economic zone,” and then exempt selected proponents and projects from requirements under any provincial law or regulation, including bylaws of municipalities and local boards, that would otherwise apply in that zone.

Feb 25 2025 New Zealand First minister Shane Jones admits the Crown cannot afford to reopen or build a new oil refinery, with a report showing it would cost up to $7.3 billion. But the Resources, Regional Development and Associate Energy Minister is instead pushing for a special economic zone around the former Marsden Point refinery in Northland, to enable alternative fuel manufacturing like biofuel. The New Zealand Government is considering creating a special economic zone at Marsden Point, a site described by Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones as an “attractive option for overseas investors”.

2023 Silent Coup is published exposing the violent tactics of Oceana Gold in PNG and Latin America the book is also critcla of SEZ noting the authors investigate special economic zones (SEZs) designed to tackle poverty in specific regions. However, this has resulted in corporations benefiting from preferential conditions and weak labour rights, as the book explores in the case of China (pp.116-23). This in turn has led to the creation of ‘corporate armies’ employed on behalf of corporations to intimidate local opposition, such as in the case of Honduras (pp.185-8).

Feb 2021 The Otago Regional councils representing both regions and the Otago Regional Council have developed a draft proposal for central government under the Regional Deals framework. It included plans for a public mass-transit gondola in Queenstown, private-public health services, a special economic zone and a visitor levy.

2018: Special Economic Zones are listed on the Buller Council Agenda for May 2018 and subject to a feasibility report. The area is increasingly attracting the attention of the likes of Ocean Gold (partnered with Siren Gold Australia) a Toronto listed company whose top 25 investors include Vanguard, Black Rock and Van Eck three New York. Companies with exceptionally close relations with China (an irony considering National recoent posturing on why it needs billion dollar choppers as 85,000 folk wait for surgery) who are currently behind the rapid rise of gold as China and Russia  have being offloading American currency in exchange for precious commodities as they seeks to weaponize critical minerals and devalue American and NATO based currencies. 

2016/17: MBIE (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) briefing paper shows the development of SEZ’s. The documents show Special Economic Zones would have the power to take over conservation land and private land, provide tax breaks (and reduced royalty for the government) for favored developers, and override overseas investment and immigration controls designed to prevent scab labor.

2017: Press release The New Zealand Initiative has welcomed news that Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are still under consideration by the Economic Development Minister Simon Bridges. We also note that government documents released under the Official Information Act show that Ministers Bill English and Steven Joyce were supportive of the proposal.

2017: Operation Kouru & Southern katipo 2015: war games involving US marine and sophisticated survey and surveillance drones is based on a fictitious scenario set in a Pacific region called Becara. The Becaran government “proposes a new economic vision” for the region, some Becarans object and form a resistance movement to oppose it…. Becara is deemed to be on the brink of collapse and the UN is given a mandate for international intervention. New Zealand troops have been deployed to lead a multinational force tasked with restoring “order.” The exercise led the late Kevin Hague, former head of Fish and Bird, to discover national plans for SEZ in New Zealand’s national parks. He describes the “draconian powers” of the SEZ as “breathtaking”.

2010 New Zealand Initiative begins talking of Special Economic Zones. And who exactly is the New Zealand Initiative?? The New Zealand arm of the Atlas Network who according to Chat GP “The Atlas Network is an international far right think tank whose extreme policy platform seeks to attack public servants, push for radical privatization, dismantle regulation protecting workers and the environment and champions Landlords over renters.” The New Zealand Initiative director includes Stephen Jenning, a former New Zealand Rogernomics treasury official of the 1980s whose 1990’s Renaissance Bank Moscow was accused of bankrolling Vladmir Putin’s rise to power. Jennings current operations in mineral rich Africa are aimed at Western Russian and Chinese oligarchs.

SOURCES:

Claire Provost and Matt Kennard, Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy (Bloomsbury 20023), 296pp.
Shane Jones wants Marsden Point economic zone, admits Govt can’t afford oil refinery Northern Advocate Denise Piper 27 May 2025

First Nations leaders warn of confrontation over Ontario’s ‘special economic zones’ in omnibus bill Jeff Gray The Globe & Mail May 22 2025.* ( Drawn from in addition to other current media sources).

Govt accused of trying to bypass laws to speed up mining plans 12 July 2017 RNZ.

Journal of the Anti-Bases Campaign November 2017 Ready Reactionary CounterInsurgency by Dennis Small.

Economic Zone’ idea gets local government backing RNZ 13 July 2017 Asian Development Bank Institute.

Appropriate Economic Space for Transnational Infrastructural Projects: Gateways, Multimodal Corridors, and Special Economic Zones ADB Institute 2010.

AGENDA: Meeting of Buller District Council Wednesday 30 May 2018 page 196A Special Economic Zone status for the west coast provides an opportunity for the west coast to become a “Duty Free Port” (P225).

Atlas Network gets first ever mention in New Zealand Parliament

About the author: Ben Vidgen is a former army reservist who holds a degree in politics and history where he specialized in counter insurgency and social unrest and constitutional law. Ben lives in Golden Bay on the back of the National Park and Sams Creek where Ocean Gold are seeking to mine nearly 800,000 ounces next to an area protected by a conservation order. He has published two books including the New Zealand best sellers State Secrets 1 & 2 (which include his critique on the role mining companies have played in social unrest in the pacific from 1973) and won awards for his community radio shows.

The Aotearoa Extinct Owls Club
& The DARPA Grasshoppers. The Dead ANZAC Scientist Club.

As Judith Collin and Nation advertise a visit from the USS Warship Blue Bridge following last month visit by a Chinese ‘spy’ fleet they are less vocal about their approval to let a Chinese biolab become established in Nelson. Meanwhile a second Entomologist from Auck Uni Science has died in a homicide case as the University of Auckland (controlled by Peter ‘I Like US Military dollars’ Gluckman) is increasingly undertaking work with potential military implications. I’m starting to get a little curious.

In one of those we will probably never know but regardless didn’t we just learn a lot about US defense dollars in NZ academia I went and took a closer look at bugs wars. Aside from NZ past connection with insect biowarfare when Iraq accuses New Zealander Ian Broughton, formerly of the NZSAS, who supervises demining in the northeastern province of Suleimaniya, of putting “locust eggs, a fatal insect for harvests, in the Khanaqin region” close to the Iraq-Iran border northeast of Baghdad. The foreign ministry said the New Zealander had “in April buried cases containing locust eggs, fatal to cultivation. Residents in the region unearthed the cases and saw they contained locust eggs. Similar accusation has since surfaced in Mozambique Mosquitos and Locust as plague on food loom large in our global futures.

This comes on top of the death of Rodney Marks Antarctic Space Warfare Scientist on NZ turf death and 8 other Crop and Food Research based at Lincoln, Christchurch heading a biotechnology institute that leads the country’s research on genetically modified organisms. The list includes Dr Rodney Turnstall of Otago University the same year plus Ansi Nazar who was studying Agribusiness management at Lincoln University who was killed during the Chrostchurch. Its believed a further two victim were indirectly linked to her work at Lincoln. And it comes on top of another crash involving infectious disease quarantine specialist Dr David Banks (this list of dead New Zealand Australian scientist) near Cape York. With the exception of Marks the dead where all linked to agriculture entomology and vector transfer of disease into crops. Which comes on top of a Rabbit Calici Virus outbreak where the over site committee of dead scientist Dr Robert Shope dr Colonel Donald Burke all worked for the US Chemical weapons facility at Fort Detrick’s. The death of Banks and the Lincoln 7 is significant as a source within the Prime Minister Office specifically suggest to me in 2005 that these events warranted further investigation due to the classified nature of their work.

Will be doing a follow report on these and other NZ dead scientist shortly.

The Moonlight Diaries Nukey Night Mares in Newark NJ May 10th Happy Mothers Day.

The Hens are on the porch going nuclear as they angrily demanding their breakfast. They can wait.

It’s Mother’s Day I must not forget to phone Rowan. When she has gone I’ll be basically an orphan. To be honest I don’t really care about my other family members other than these days I don’t really get to have an excuse to talk about mum and our joint adventures. So no chance to activate that part of memory and that makes me a bit sad. It all starts to feel like a dream something that never really happened or you can’t quite really clearly.

The 2000 tens has been a decade of test and tribulation and I’m getting a bit over it if I’m being honest but if I’m being really honest I’m glad mums not here she wouldn’t have understood it or fitted in will with this she of packaging and candy floss.

I have the pot on for Coffee, and I will get up once it boils and not before. I didn’t sleep well last night my Tinnitus is kicking up a storm. Which in my case usually means a storm on the way. A fan tail pops his head in the door the third time this week. Hi mum thanks for checking in I didn’t sleep well as a result I killed another Reacher book and spent an hour or so down a rabbit hole as unusually I got great indoor net reception, another sign of unusual atmospherics.

No real surprise with my fast food diet of instant fear porn and pinged eardrums induced anxiety that I end up dreaming of sentient Zombies. Nearly living creatures who arise as a result of a combination of disease and AI gone rogue. It all gets released by extreme climate changes that result in a series of unfortunate circumstances fiscally driven that result in condition FUBAR. Even the breath of my dream time Netflix monster movie is infectious and the Zomborgs track humans via the signature of our electronic technology which we have all become dysfunctional and slavishly dependent on.

The dream consists of this hoard of ravenously ruthless intelligent fiends tracking down and trapping all my friends and family in a huge fortified 1930s styled millionaire mansion, located in Newark New Jersey. The kind of Adams Family look alike probably owned by some scion or dynasty that now has a street named after it on Manhattan Island. Their ancestors industrial sized fortune turns out to have side effects that only probably killed a few hundred thousand before everyone decided putting that in your water ways wasn’t probably such a good idea. Today they sit on the board of the Corporation who probably still are poisoning our water food and air.

Im not sure if that building really exists or comes from my imagination. But it’s a real location not far from the Hell Angels New Jersey walled up gang pad. Which is near a series of car lots and some kind of overpass and river lush in autumn fall leaves and drains stuffed with plastic takeaways food wrappers. A park close by it has a moment of a general on a horse with one hoof off the ground that commemorates some kind civil war victory.

The statue celebrating violence as a means of conflict resolution probably linked to the fact Newark was where the Union army was headquartered. Today it remains listed as the in the top fifty locations to be nuked in nuclear war. In part due to its continued role as land air transport hub for North East seaboard but it also were nukes heading to Europe get stockpiled along with about 13 other primary military installation based there. I doubt few of its locals are aware of any of this.

It’s one of those statues that you see all around America. Knock off versions of the grand pre 17 century European monuments you might find in ancient University cities covered in extensive Latin inscriptions filled with elaborate esoteric details and knowledge. These look smaller as if they were made of cheap cement parris and made with a factory cast mold. They lack the luxury and charm of pre Civil War gold mining era and look like government issued propaganda versus the artistic style of say a West Coast Son of the Golden Dawn or Garibaldi commemorative piece of art. Though the goals of imperialism propaganda remain the same in all cases.

In my dream tension builds as we are too slow to work out our tech is what’s drawing the creatures in ever increasing numbers to our safehold. For some reason the building and surrounding neighborhood during my dream gets increasingly derelict and desolate as a result of the siege, a raging weather event, plus the general chaos created by the combined events. In the dream everything is raining incessantly and it’s so cold our breath is continually vaporised. The unloving unliving breath is a putrid green steam the same colour of Manhattan’s famous landmarks the Napoleon gifted Statue of Liberty. Everything in my dream is flooding, dripping, leaking, washing away much of our hastily put up ineffective defence. Our fortress is rapidly turning into a tomb of our own making.

One by one my companions are grabbed and dragged off screaming for help I can’t deliver. And then they are infected with the flesh eating nanotech that is the source of the outbreak. Whereupon they then turn on the remaining survivors and use their former knowledge to further undermine the rapidly deteriorating soaked gothic fortress inadequate protections. An unquenchable never ending hunger that vampirically consumes all. It’s only goal is to eat. Though its host loose none of their surface intellect. They simply become predatory and one tracked obsessed, like junkies needing their meat fix.

In the end a handful of us make a desperate hopeless dash for freedom. Except it’s not so much as we are running away. Rather we calculatedly hered up a huge steaming muddy mountain that ends in a dead end with an ocean littered with spikey rocks either side that offers no way out. There is no escape, no way out, no cavalry arriving to save the day. And the rain gets even more chaotic and the scheming zombies numbers become overwhelming. And then I simply change the channel and drift off to a proper sleep. I didn’t wake until the Rooster added their vote to the hen din. The sun is shining bright.

Most of the dream as I race to record it dissolves quickly. It’s like watching sinking sugar cubes, as on waking I quickly forget most of it. But I do recall vividly a decaying and bite ridden Quentin Tarantino complaining ” I don’t mind being a cannibal but why does human meat always have to smell so bad” before sighing and taking a hearty bite out of someone’s arm. Which I thought was pretty funny at the time. I recall laughing aloud in my sleep at the thought of a Tarantino cameo in my head. Humans we are a weird lot.

My hour on the net is mostly to blame for my nightmare saga. Trying for distraction from the tinnitus I ended down a rabbit hole after reading how ICE, who using Newark as a holding centre for detained immigrants has just detained Newark New Jersey Mayor a democrat for Trespassing.

That story alone blew my head in all sorts of directions. I wonder what Lady Liberty thinks. I for one hate partisan politics in municipal politics which is a relatively new goblin here in New Zealand. The practice is to grab some Kool kid or D celebrity and groom them at a local level for party politics down the rob. It seeks to fake grass roots politics by buying it. It’s not looking for leaders it’s looking for influencers and digital indoctrination. IT wants to raise IT’s own army of undead unthinking Zomborgs.

My own experience was watching assholes who really didn’t give a shit about anything beyond fame, suddenly parroting the party agenda. Now they run for the local office backed by big boy party dollars. They promote issues they couldn’t really give a dam about as they look the other way as property developer and council tender contract services do whatever the bureaucracy wants to them do. Which is namely creating potholes for road cones to guard in the road at peak trading times and not clean the storm drains.

In the left case they kept their mouth shut as Dunedin spent 150 years of gold mining investments building a football stadium on a swamp. Then they got rewarded with backing for a run at local politics where they talked unicorns and climate change as the drains remain blocked up to make sure the TV view matched the hyperbole they were selling.

And the city water began getting dangerously high lead reading and my mum and sister ended up with Alzheimer’s. Which I’m sure has nothing to do with the highest lead reading being in the property next door. Just as I’m sure its got nothing to do with the high rates of leukaemia and neurological disorder Dunedin coastline and lowlands are riddled with. And even if I’m wrong I’m sure it will get picked up by the city’s new hospital. Oh yeah we’re not actually getting that fully built or fully staffed now the government blown the budget on war toys and cyber spies. Which to be fair what the last lot did as well.

On the right it’s the same Schick. Except nothing happens locally and the candidate on their well funded platform blame Unicorns and Climate Change fear scammers as they too do sweet F all to help clean the drains and check the source of water pollution.

I have no idea of Newark’s municipal politics . Hell perhaps he is a good mayor. Having wandered around Newark I know it is full of grand buildings and once must have been a grand place post WW2. And it’s clear a lot of Newark problems turned up before Trump was a Republican president and the Democrat Mayor had likewise been elected. These days like any American city it’s not looking too great. And with the exception of Richmond Virginia Greyhound bus depot Newark subway has the filthiest most vandalised toilet I ever experienced in the USA. They both would fit perfectly into my Zomborg night sleep cinema. Newark’s downtown subways are not a place to loiter. Inside (toilet aside) it’s okay but outside its ocean of mental health trauma victims as folk obviously in need are not being treated and fentanyl abuse and mad desperate poverty is an epidemic.

The question I ask myself, when I recall streets where garbage piles up and every second house is a bombsite and its neighbor a deadlocked bars on the window fortress, is who’s to blame? Trump’s Republican mate in the 1990s primed the future property market with dubious speculation and toxic debt. Mortgages collapsed squatters’ drugs and rubbish moved into once proud suburban streets.

Or was it the Clintons and Obama’s as they bailed out those lending Institutes. And the federal borrowing of the corporate beneficiary continued. Sure it resulted in a place at the table for the middle class diversity vote but at the expense of working class needs and the future of future middle class generations..staying at home scrolling the social media feeds for an American dream that no longer exists.

My Rabbit hole mulled this over along with the spate of misfortune I experienced as my subconscious tucked away notes for my own organic AI movie maker and sleep time cinema.

Newark also features in the drone mass panic of early 2O25, which came and went as Newark Airport experienced multiple multiple outages centred at its airport and communication hubs. Events occurring at the same time a similar phenomenon rocked NATO countries and a Black hawk crash at Regan Airport involving a white house aid who was conducting classified if nuclear war comes to get the VIPs to their bunker exercises.

The exercises follow a series of threats to the Northeast seaboard including an alleged probe by Russian fighter bomber, a so-called terror group key caught before they targeted a Baltimore nuclear plant and the bridge which leaves NY via Baltimore being taken out by a ship that loses steering inexplicably too bad if you need mass evacuation. An equally dodgy story about dirty nuke smuggling just doesn’t add up.

The aforementioned drone would be seen over Newark New Jersey and UK bases storing Nukes or linked to nuclear sites. A 2024 Dec reports of missing radioactive materials from New Jersey as during the drone threat Army Vet got 15 million hits when the drone specialist dropped the bombshell “there were over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing. We don’t know where they are.”

He believes one of them in the USA. Authorities and the Fact Checkers deny this but there is no denying authorities are spending up large on nuclear detection choppers and nuke sniffing tech like they have never before. No money for hospitals honey but we do get gold for guns. Your welcome happy mother’s day.

A quick check shows yes in the 1990s there queries over a 100 tactical nukes missing. Russia assured the West and the IAEC their nukes were accounted for. But Russia and the ICAE admitted the count for Georgia Ukraine is not so clear. I recall Post UKraine DC Talk Ukraine President Zelensky in frustration at Trump saying words to the effect of “soon Americans will know terror on their soil like we have”.

Nukes are back on the shopping list. Nukes make up 99 percent of global weapons sales. I bet the firms who made millions in the last Cold War racket are pleased to be back in bussiness.

America Australia New Zealand UK and all the other western governments have a left wing and a right wing and where ever you go it’s the same story a ferocious war over Unicorns as hospitals don’t get built, trash piles up and we spend ever increasingly amounts on guns and billionaire bunkers. Oh and spying on society at large via our social media addiction.

Who’s the real monster lords and who’s the dancing rotten puppets. “I don’t mind being a cannibal but why does human meat have to smell so bad”

CRISIS GLOBAL WAR — The 90 Left wing Comic that the left forgot about -Book Review

“Greenhouse floods, identity cards, electronic tagging, video surveillance. You never know what the techno-pervs are going to dream up next“.

Written in 1995 So says a member of Freeaid’s so-called peace force—a group of troubled, forcibly conscripted teenagers operating in South America—in Pat Mills and Carlos Ezquerra’s Third World War 1988 Comic series Crisis Science fiction told us that in 2020 we’d have time travel and giant robots, so it’s a shock encountering a comic like this, originally serialized over thirty years ago, that isn’t just prescient, but exactly right. With its images of “forever wars” benefitting global corporations and sub-tropical forests burning to provide land for future Happy Meals, Third World War was a scalding prediction of late-stage capitalism. The future’s arrived.Published between 1988 and 1991 in Crisis magazine, a spin-off of 2000 AD, Third World War is set in the then-future of, a-ha, 2000 AD.

Among its accuracies is its depiction of young people at the dawn of the new century; its main character, Eve, wasn’t called a Millennial then, but she is one now. A politically conscious, black teenage girl growing up in the shadow of white, western paternalism, Eve is deemed “unemployable” by the country’s youth selection board and forced to join Freeaid. (As an example of the thin vein of dark humor that runs through the book, Eve knows she’s doomed when she tells the board that she’s studying art, English, and sociology.) “I’d always thought things would get better by 2000 A.D.” Eve confesses. “I hadn’t realized they’re getting worse. That it was so late…later than you think…”

Eve and the rest of her Free Aid team—consisting of a punk, an eco-pagan, an evangelical, and worst of all, a volunteer—are sent to win over the hearts and minds of the South Americans who are being forcibly displaced and culturally annihilated for the sake of western corporations. One such corporation is Multifoods, a fast-food empire represented by its impish, ghoulish mascot, Mickey the Multifoods Dragon.

A glance at the cover of this new Treasury of British Comics release of Third World War shows us a blood-red Eve ripping apart a Mickey plush toy, her Multifoods Global Village t-shirt fixed with a slash of a pen—Multifoods Global Pillage. Like the rest of her generation, Eve distrusts soulless mascots, empty slogans, and the back-breaking, environment-destroying corporations behind them. Self-expression is one of the few weapons Eve has in a world that wants to bulldoze free-thinkers like her and replace them with pasty white faces in army fatigues. Like the P that transforms “village” into “pillage,” words of protest are scrawled all over the book, on every available surface: walls, planes, bodies.

This is a distinct part of Third World War’s visual identity; Mills and Ezquerra (along with artists Angela Kinkaid and D’Israeli) synthesize the art and text—incorporating everything from Chumbawamba song lyrics to Lorraine Schneider posters into the pages.

Third World War is an eye-opening book, as it shows death squads, mass graves, and other atrocities that are the bitter, pesticide-poisoned fruit of western imperialism, and dares the reader to look away. It’s an immensely heavy read, but its strength is that it never feels like a lecture; Mills and Ezquerra say what they need to through their characters instead of to them. Eve is a fallible, human lead, but she possesses a durable integrity and keeps a diary that is a document to everything that happens to her—the truth, not propaganda spewed from the mouth of a cartoon dragon.