I – Introduction – Merkel to continue leadership that has thus far been a colossal failure in numerous instances
Tomorrow Angela Merkel is expected to be elected in the Bundestag to a fourth term as Germany’s federal chancellor, a position she has continuously held for over a dozen years. Below is an analysis of the current political situation in Germany, which has been dominated by the ongoing migration crisis. This report contains details about specific events during the past few years, especially in 2015, which led to a crisis condition. Sufficient background information plus thirty links are contained for the reader to understand important developments in a proper context. The impact of certain flawed elements of German society, its media organizations, the political party landscape, the judicial structure, and popular sentiment, which, through their interactions, contribute to an ongoing erosion of community and increasing strife, are highlighted with specific examples. Some of the facts included here are being presented for the first time in English, though most people in Germany have also been completely unaware of them. The report is subdivided into 18 different sections to delineate various interrelated themes and facilitate legibility.
Often a contemporary joke, not unlike a political cartoon drawing, succinctly encapsulates poignant realities and may elicit mirth. Have you heard the latest one, about a particular type of dog encountering a rare bird?
Question: What type of creature do you get when you cross-breed a poodle on a leash with a parrot in a birdcage?
Answer: A German Supporter of Merkel, even if only implicitly. (Cumulatively, that’s a majority of adult Germans).
On Sunday, March 4, 2018, it was announced that a majority of nearly two thirds of the voting members of Germany’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), gave permission for its party leaders to proceed with a coalition agreement they had negotiated a few weeks ago with party representatives of the Christian Democratic Union (SDU), headed by Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), headed by Horst Seehoferfor more for than ten years until his resignation earlier today, after which he moves to Berlin to take on the position of Minister of the Interior. This means that Germany will finally form a majority government nearly half a year after federal elections were held last September. These three parties had already constituted the previous coalition government for four years, though with a more substantial majority of seats than is the case now. Based on the parameters of the new coalition agreement, which party leaders of CDU and CSU have already ratified without a popular vote of its registered party members, one thing is certain: Societal destabilization – triggered in the summer of 2015 by a historically unprecedented influx of illegal migration to Germany upon Merkel’s open-ended invitation, which has not been rescinded so that it continues at a rate of a few hundred newcomers on a daily basis – will be significantly exacerbated.
The previous Merkel coalition government has been a colossal failure, not only regarding the all-important migration crisis but also in its dealing with the euro currency crisis, the lingering European banking crisis, the Greek bankruptcy crisis, the governmental spying scandal, the Ukrainian government coup, the diesel emission fraud scandal, a breakdown in diplomatic and commercial relations with Russia, the supply and preparedness scandal in the German military, increasing impoverishment of many among the older generation (Altersarmut) receiving meager pensions, critical urban housing shortages brought on by a combination of negligent planning, speculative foreign investment in urban real estate, and demand by migrants from eastern Europe and beyond, who have chosen to live in high density population centers, which have resulted in skyrocketing property and rental prices. No matter what the critical issues have been, actual solutions were not provided; the specific situations remain unresolved, they were either made worse or deferred. For instance, to highlight that general affluence is purely a myth, it was recently announced by a European statistical agency that the acute risk of becoming poor due to unemployment was over 70% in Germany, significantly higher than in any of the 28 countries of the EU. Though Germany’s labor agency claims a low unemployment rate, such figures are artificial, as they are known to be in the US too. It is remarkable that Merkel still remains sufficiently popular with a substantial portion of the population so that rival politicians have not dared to oust her from office, even though it must be evident by now that she actually dislikes her country – and its flag – to such an extent that she is allowing the gradual deterioration of social cohesion to progress, yet the population appears to oblivious. Like sheep or cattle, millions of people are eagerly or just blindly following her into the abyss.
II – Forced immigration and social stratification are unfair to citizens because they induce alienation and conflict
For many centuries societies built fortified walls around their settlements to keep out unwanted invaders. Even today dwellers build fences or walls, with gates, around their homes, and it is a common feature of entrance doors to come with locks. Social progress brought on the concept of the nation state, which was based on basic commonalities and affinities of the people they represented, same language, related ethnicities or a common heritage such as religious beliefs. Until recently external borders in European countries had border crossings or checkpoints, as continues to be the case in most countries in the world. Maintaining open borders was subjected to negotiated treaties and agreements among countries with a similar social structure and political values, premised on external borders continuing to be subject to rigid controls. This system worked rather well until 2015, in which year the system broke down, through malicious subterfuge and ultimately, the egregious and illegal decision by Merkel, as will be explained below, with the complicity of party colleagues and the media. Millions of foreign people (with different ethnicities, different languages, different customs, different religions, from economically underdeveloped societies) have been resettled, purportedly temporarily, but in reality with the repeatedly professed intent to somehow permanently “integrate” them into the indigenous population. From many decades of social experiments already conducted elsewhere, it should be understood what the consequences of such a large-scale resettlement effort will likely be.
It must be noted that this new German “experiment”, which is preordained to fail calamitously – as have previous German social experiments last century that were attempted under some flavor of “Humanism”, as described by Yuval Noah Harari – is in clear violation of the preamble and spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949:
The parties to this treaty… are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.
This acknowledges the very basic right of a society or country to maintain and preserve such cultural commonalities. Contrary to what the treaty stipulates, the common heritage and civilization of the German people, who are being invaded, is not being safeguarded at all but being intentionally destroyed over time through the demographic effects that will ensue. Though such basic societal aspects have been instinctively understood for centuries, it has been established beyond dispute by Robert D. Putnam, a social researcher at Harvard University, that mixing newcomers into a society results in mutual distrust. A sense of social cohesion gets replaced by increasing stratification, conflict, societal corrosion. This must certainly be evident to anyone who has ever visited such cities as New York, London, and Paris, among the larger centers where such phenomena are constantly on display. The migration processes leading to these phenomena came about by enacting certain laws that allowed such migration to occur.
What forces or impulses led to the drafting, introducing, and lobbying for such legislation is equally well documented but is rarely discussed in the popular media, if at all. Triggered by their paranoia, Jewish elites living in the galut, sought to become more visibly inconspicuous in their respective environments. They were concerned about their safety from collective historical experiences of expulsion, of which there had been many. Rarely reflecting honestly exactly what about their conduct or behavior might have prompted such animosities, they reflexively blamed their host population, which limited the remedies they would consider. By altering the ethnic and racial make-up of modern western societies in North America and Western Europe, their fear factor is decreased because they can more easily blend in with the indigenous population with whom they share more similarities, genetically and culturally, than, say, migrants who have come from sub-Saharan Africa or East Asiatic regions. With regard to the US situation in Europe, this has been very well documented by psychology researcher Kevin MacDonald (Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review). With regard to the situation in Sweden, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who had moved from Wisconsin to Israel to Stockholm, has been rather candid about acknowledging this too, in videos that went viral a few years ago. With regard to the situation in Germany, Jewish leaders have played a significant role too, most explicitly in May 2015, through psychological coercion (guilt-tripping), as is documented farther below in Section IX.
III – A combination of lacking freedom of speech and tight media control effectively enhances social conformity
The legislative period prior to last September’s parliamentary election had been a disaster for the common people in Germany, though the powerful television and print media, who shape the cognitive framework of the majority of the population, have been very successful in covering up this fact, through distorted reporting, lies of omission, and other tricks that generate a result that is known under the generic term “fake news”. In Germany critical intellectuals refer to them as the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). The degree of uniformity they display when reporting on the critical issues concerning the country has been even tighter in Germany than what has been in evidence by the US media in its nearly universal support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election season and thereafter. The German media, which lack the healthy and thriving alternative Internet media landscape evident in the US, tend to be even more ideologically driven than the US corporate media. Unlike in the US, German journalists do not make a pretense of being unbiased, for they see it as their duty to project a selective and slanted interpretation of actual events or developments (Deutungshoheit) and incidentally also function as a type of thought police (Gedankenpolizei) by vilifying those whose views might stray too far from permitted opinion. In Germany, as nearly everywhere else, freedom to publicly express any opinion is not constitutionally guaranteed, as is the case in the US. Under the fuzzy pretext of cherishing human “dignity” as a paramount value, certain paragraphs in the German penal code forbid anybody to publicly insult or disparage others too strongly (Beleidigung), which in the US might be an actionable civil matter under libel and slander laws. Criminalizing such kinds of opinion fosters superficial politeness, lest some influencial individual, whose feelings were allegedly hurt, files a criminal complaint to investigate the matter. An incidental effect is that powerful crooks and liars are less likely to be strongly criticized. In the absence of freedoms of speech that Americans take for granted, the level of social conformity and acquiescence, to whatever standards of thought the media set, increases. The higher one’s social standing, correlating strongly with educational level, the farther down one could fall upon stepping out of line with an unpopular opinion, due to an effect known as public shaming, that can be achieved through negative media reinforcement. This leads to the paradoxical situation, witnessed in US towns with top universities, namely that very well educated people often publicly project themselves as ignoramuses by professing opinions on social issues that they ought to know are contrived. Such attitudes are a reflection of the cognitive dissonance they develop as a consequence of political correctness overload, as they learn what they dare not mention openly. In Germany and Sweden the traditional media have been very effective in maintaining this behavioral control mechanism while incrementally yet constantly narrowing the scope of opinions that will avoid possible ostracism.
IV – Manipulating public perceptions by obfuscating basic facts and lying with false and misleading terminology
As was revealed late 2014 in a book by a former journalist, turned to whistleblower, Udo Ulfkotte, formerly employed by Germany’s preferred newspaper read by top level decision makers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, prominent and influential journalists in Germany are “bought” (Gekaufte Journalisten) to serve special interest groups and also collaborate with the CIA, which tells them what to write. Though this admission is hardly shocking, given the power of the press, it is nonetheless helpful for prior presumptions to have been confirmed by a person, who was part of this practice, to then come clean and publicly apologize for his own involvement before his death, last year. A concrete example from the German media’s methods of “perception management” – the contemporary term for what used to be referred to as “thought control” or “mind control” or simply “brainwashing” – has been the persistent use of the word Flüchtlinge (i.e. refugees, more precisely “those who are fleeing”) when referring to the assortment of migrants who have arrived overland in Bavaria by way of Austria and other countries farther south before that, either from Africa or the Middle East. According to Germany’s own basic law, as well as international treaties and agreements, by the time the migrants arrive at Germany’s border they have relinquished any possible refugee status that may have obtained elsewhere, based on strict criteria. Therefore, they have no legal right whatsoever to apply for – much less receive – asylum in Germany. An orderly procedure to deal with their presence would involve refusing them entry or immediately deporting them if they had already crossed the border. Repeatedly using this particular word and its derivations in that manner, for instance “refugee crisis” (Migrationskrise), is simply a bold lie and a tacit insult at least to Austria, because the implication, if the word were used correctly, would have to be that these migrants had all incurred individual political persecution by the Austrian government, from which jurisdiction they were compelled to taking flight, as it were. Yet both Austria and Sweden had actually taken in a higher percentage of alien migrants, relative to their respective populations, than has Germany. Using this term also entails a degree of arrogance because it tacitly suggests some moral superiority or high-minded benevolence on the part of Germany for providing refuge to those economic migrants who have come so far. On a psychological level, this makes those people who are perpetually burdened by self-hatred and unearned guilt, to feel a little better. In practice, this misleading term has also been used by the media to even pertain to those migrants whose asylum requests were rejected, and whose continued residency is simply “tolerated” (geduldet) by the local governments instead of being deported.
V – Falsely invoking “humanitarian” reasons as a pretense for a historically unprecedented and criminal decision
As Europeans have witnessed, the established legal premises and procedures for dealing with a mass influx into Germany, by migrants who are not members of the European Union (EU), had been unilaterally abandoned by Merkel in early September 2015, with no prior consultations with members of her own government. This unilateral action constituted a major crime. It was done under a false guise simply by invoking the magic word “humanitarian”, a useful lie that somehow causes people’s brains to lock up, causing any rational or critical thinking to be automatically aborted by the population. Practice has shown that it is possible to trick a people into accepting the most reprehensible acts, including waging war and killing hundreds of thousands of people, so long as these crimes are summarily packaged as somehow being humanitarian. The assertion “We had to destroy the village [Ben Tre] to save it” from the era of the Vietnam war is an example of such a purportedly humanitarian gesture, as was the US bombing campaign against Serbia a few decades thereafter. However, Merkel did not just accept a few trains filled with migrants coming from Hungary through Vienna as a special exception, she subsequently went on to publicly invite any and all migrants to come to Germany and receive an enthusiastic public welcome (Willkommenskultur). They were primarily young males, of whom many had previously been ‘Islamist’ mercenaries driven out by the Syrian troops. This was likely the most ominous and stupid decision yet made this century, which has led to a completely novel situation, unprecedented in human history. As will be explained in detail below in Section IX, there is plenty of evidence that this was definitely not an ad hoc response to an unforeseen emergency situation, as the media have deceptively portrayed it to have been, but the consequence of an orchestrated destabilization campaign, one of the various modes of asymmetric warfare, planned months ahead of time, which not only high officials but even the general public had been warned about, months before, as being imminent unless appropriate counter-measures would be adopted. Though even the alternative media have neglected to do so, due to a lack of information, it is possible, within a contextual chronology of events in the first half of 2015, to trace back the origin of Merkel’s commitment to break the laws on a grand scale – also to have the Bavarian minister to go along with it – and thereby permanently alter the future demographics of the population within Germany, possibly even in other countries. Her determination to betray her country and its population was triggered by listening to a fateful speech given in early May 2015 north of Munich, at a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US troops.
VI – The symbiosis between the authoritarian and elite “leftist” Green Party and Merkel’s shifting policy positions
Nowadays a substantial proportion of German journalists sympathize with the Green Party, which during its inception a few decades ago primarily promoted their desired legalization of pederasty (for which they have apologized only decades later) and the banning of nuclear power generation plants, which is in the process of being implemented. They were very supportive of so-called “humanitarian bombings” in the Balkans, solar and wind power, and more recently, taking cues from the Obama regime, have been obsessed with advocating or promoting divisive cultural Marxist issues (gender identity, homosexual marriage, ethnic multiculturalism through unchecked mass migration, political correctness, global warming alarmism, open borders, self-hatred, abolishing national sovereignty, opposing free speech, and fighting vocally against “the right”). The Green Party is most popular among school teachers and petty bureaucrats, who enjoy special privileges in German society, students and people who got university degrees in sociology, psychology, journalism, political science, and pedagogy. Given the fact that they are German, those seven political parties that were elected to the Bundestag last September have an authoritarian bent, but the Green Party is the most authoritarian of them all, which is not surprising since their roots lie in the doctrinaire “New Left” movement that derived from the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Their leading functionaries are the most eager to dictate what the behavior of everybody else ought to be, yet are most zealous in filing criminal complaints because they felt personally insulted by some criticism or crude remark. Most memorable is their proposal, a few years ago, to force cafeterias to serve veggie burgers at least once a week because eating beef consumed more resources. Since they do not object to economic neo-liberalism, they have become an important pillar of contemporary “One World” Globalism of open borders. Accordingly, their support among those who might consider themselves “working class” laborers in the industrial and service sectors is miniscule.
As one might expect, a party with such a dubious pedigree as the Green Party is characterized by hypocrisy and internal contradictions. For instance, while its leadership professes to be strongly “anti-fascist”, representatives have no problems with Germany maintaining close relations with such quintessentially fascist regimes that are currently in power in Israel, Ukraine, Turkey, and China. Though the word “Green” refers to environmentalism, the consequences of their advocacy has harmed the environment. The Green Party strongholds are primarily in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which is headed by a Green Party member. The mayors of the university towns of Tübingen and Freiburg are from the Green Party. Only in two of nearly three hundred voting districts did the Green Party exceed a vote of 20% – in Freiburg, with their strongest showing at 21.2%, and in one of the central districts in Berlin. The mayor of the capital city, Stuttgart, is also from the Green Party. Stuttgart happens to be a bastion of the automotive industry. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes cars, Porsche, manufacturer of sporty vehicles, both have their headquarters, respective museums, and some manufacturing facilities in Stuttgart, as does Bosch, the largest automotive supplier. In part due to its topography, Stuttgart residents continue to suffer some of Germany’s worst air pollution. In their zeal to limit carbon dioxide emissions, as if they were toxic, the Green Party has wound up promoting diesel vehicles simply because they are slightly more efficient than gasoline engines, while ignoring the far more serious health effects of carbon particulate matter and harmful nitrogen oxides coming from diesel combustion, as if people were not already aware of this fact from the serious incidences of smog experienced in Tokyo and Los Angeles forty years ago. Suddenly, however, anyone who drives a diesel car is a sucker (one third of registered cars in Germany have diesel motors), since a few days ago Germany’s top administrative court ruled that city administrators are permitted to ban diesel cars due to their obligation to curtail excessive air pollution, at least two thirds of which is caused by diesel vehicles. Thirdly, in a most incredible exercise in self-deception, self-righteous adherents of the German Green Party tout the coexistence of radical feminism with misogynist practices of men from Asian and African societies because “it’s part of their culture”. Though such antithetical concepts are not subject to debate, some people are beginning to wonder, resulting in a loss of support for this party, which used to have a much stronger following a decade ago. Since the professed desire by politicians for unspecified cultural integration is a delusion, the only way to synthesize such opposing concepts is to support the creation of parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften), essentially ghettos, or “no-go” zones where police do not venture into. From a class analysis perspective, elitists do not regard such a development as a problem because they have the resources to live in more affluent enclaves and send their children to private schools, while the less financially endowed sectors of society are left to deal with reduced employment and housing opportunities, high crime, and other manifestations of social ferment.
In the federal election last September (with over 76% participation rate) the Green Party received less than nine percent of the total vote. That was less than those who voted for the Left Party (proponents of the traditional economic Marxism; their legacy comes from the near-totalitarian East German society, though they now also support unconstrained mass migration) as well as those who voted for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which appeals mainly to managers, bankers, physicians, entrepreneurs, attorneys, affluent and wealthy individuals. It would be fair to say that the majority of tax dodgers and evaders have a strong political affinity toward the FDP. Generally, this party is the least authoritarian of the seven parties.
What is important to understand is that during the course of more than a dozen years as Germany’s chancellor, Merkel has continuously drifted toward adopting positions that have been traditionally dear to the Green Party. Thereby, she has effectively become the Green Party’s “secret” leader, or top ally. So as not to be eclipsed by her shifting, the Green party has advocated more extremist and self-destructive positions. These views were not necessarily shared by the vast majority of the population but passively tolerated. In principle, most Green Party voters can be considered to be Merkel supporters because they take pride in her having gravitated toward their side. If they had been too far apart the Green Party would not have been willing to engage in lengthy coalition talks after the election to form a coalition government under Merkel’s leadership. The same could be said of the FDP, which joined with the Green Party to engage in these negotiations, which ultimately failed. Those who voted for the FDP did so in the hopes of influencing certain liberal economic policies and were comfortable in having some of these accents being implemented under a Merkel leadership.
VI – The new leader of the Free Democratic Party missed a rare opportunity to oust Merkel on election night
A few hours after the September election results became evident, the SPD announced that they would not join another coalition under Merkel. At that point the relatively new leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, could have easily announced that, almost likewise, while the FDP was not opposed to joining a coalition with her party, he would only entertain this prospect under a different personal leadership, that is, not with Merkel. Such a firm statement would have surely led to Merkel’s inevitable resignation, arising from internal pressure. Four years earlier the FDP had missed the 5% threshold to remain in the Bundestag and had re-emerged that evening with over 10% of votes. Had Lindner not been so cautious (some might say spineless), Merkel could have been ousted from her domineering role on election night because the only realistic alternative would have forced her into a minority government, which is not uncommon in Nordic and western European countries. Such a constellation requires hard work – true leadership – by patching together temporary coalitions, depending what the specific issues happen to be. However, Merkel is apparently too lazy, clumsy, and vain to pursue such an endeavor. Moreover, she is too obsessed with wanting to maintain full control and has ruled out leading a minority government.
VII – Social Democratic Party leaders obsessed with preferring Israeli interests to those concerns of its core voters
As Merkel’s junior partner in the past government, the SPD received only slightly more than one fifth of the popular vote last September. Due to this collapse in popularity, compared to their standing only a decade ago, the leader until a few weeks ago, Martin Schulz, said on election night that the reason for not intending to enter into another coalition with Merkel’s Union parties (one, CSU, representing Bavaria, the other, CDU, everywhere else) was a need to re-group and regain a distinct profile, which could better be cultivated in the opposition. Yet, just as Merkel was completely detached from reality after more than a decade as chancellor, beholden to Globalists, media elites, and corporate executives, so also was Martin Schulz, a top-level EU commissar from Brussels, and former alcoholic, who may have never awakened from what appeared to be a perpetual utopian delirium. If an outsider might think that Merkel was completely nuts, this guy seemed to be a certified lunatic. For a person wanting to become the next German chancellor, his particular hobby-horse issues were rather peculiar and definitely contrary to the interests of the party’s core clientele:
– Abolishing nation states and their associated sovereignty within the EU; consequently Germany would merely be yet another region among many others with a centralized (Soviet totalitarian style) Europe;
– After negotiation agreements for a coalition of Green Party and FDP with Merkel had broken down, he expropriated an ongoing Green Party obsession, namely to permit endless chain migration from the MENA region, specifically those related to migrants whose asylum requests had been rejected in Germany and had received temporary (subsidiary) protection but were technically subject to forced repatriation in the very near future. Some politicians associated with Merkel’s alliance parties were already demanding these deportations occur without any further delay yet Schulz and his colleagues demanded that these individuals, subject to deportation, should be allowed instead to bring their family members to Germany too, and so on, which would mean they would all be allowed to remain in Germany forever.
Interestingly, for weeks earlier this year the German media regularly reported that reaching an agreement on the issue of allowing family members of these migrants subject to deportation to join them in Germany, thus completely nullifying the prospect of implementing these repatriations back to their home countries, was a contentious issue and appeared to be the major stumbling block toward achieving a comprehensive agreement, yet never were the SPD functionaries ever called upon to provide a cogent rationale for insisting so staunchly on such a counterproductive demand that was clearly not in the interest of the German people, since, as was shown earlier in this report, enticing and accommodating even more people from foreign cultures, who will likely never assimilate, is not only an unnecessary drain on the budget and a strain on public infrastructure, especially housing, it results in higher crime rates and distrust between newcomers and the indigenous population. Social cohesion, such as it exists, is replaced by increasing stratification, conflict and corrosion. Obviously this conspicuous failure by the media to elicit an explanation by the SPD – and the Green Party before that – to justify their stance was because the true reason would have been a huge embarrassment, another taboo theme that dare not be publicly explained. The best that these supporters of unrestrained migration could deliver was an unconvincing cliché reference to this being the moral or “Christian” thing to do, as if though these cynical politicians were suddenly pretending to be virtuous and benevolent spokespersons for the Catholic and Protestant religious establishments, both of which have become so mentally corrupted that they now indulge in and propagate a most pernicious form of pathological altruism.
Their rationale for enhancing societal destabilization is not rooted in any religious epiphany but derives from the fact that the SPD has jumped onto the bandwagon to please Israeli and Jewish interests, specifically merging or synthesizing the long term goals of the Israeli Oded Yinon Plan, published in 1982, to enable Zionist expansion by destroying its Arab neighbor countries, the desired implementation of which served as the inspiration for the attacks on the World Trade towers to provoke US led wars on Israel’s behalf, with the intended realization of an expanded Coudenhove-Kalergi “Plan” – or vision – published in 1925, according to which the indigenous European populations would universally intermarry with Black Africans and transform themselves over time to a new type of mixed race, to be ruled over by a spiritual nobility of Jews. By destroying Syria and causing a depopulation of its inhabitants, Israel could eventually take over more of this territory with only slight resistance at an opportune moment, while at the same time resettling much of the population in Europe would cause its desired destabilization and weakening, ultimately destroying its culture. While it is understandable that supporting such a fantastical endeavor must sound wonderful to Zionist Jews, the eagerness with which European leaders would want to actively facilitate such a development is quite appalling, an indicator of a treasonous or mentally deranged frame of mind.
VIII –Merkel concedes to adopt even more extremist positions on migration to maintain power in a new coalition
The result of the negotiations on allowing family members of those individuals subject to deportation from Germany to join them and resettle in Germany, presumptively in perpetuity, was a rather fuzzy formulation with numerous contingencies and loopholes, so that all parties then claimed their own public stance had prevailed while the other side had conceded. In reality, the SPD had prevailed on this issue, so the door will soon be open to additional mass migration, along with generous financing for it, though it is impossible to foresee just how significant it will turn out to be in the longer term. This concession by Merkel, with the CDU giving up the finance ministry to the SPD, while the SPD gives up the economics ministry to the CDU, was characterized by a political cartoon on the cover of Germany’s largest newsweekly magazine as a big sellout – a huge exaggeration that was surely intended to sway the vote by the SPD party to endorse the coalition deal. With regard to a second dispute during the negotiations, very dear to a majority of the population, namely modifying the medical insurance scheme in such a manner that the dual track structure (the privileged few, affluent people and public bureaucrats, get preferred treatment while everybody else gets regular treatment) would eventually be abolished and transformed to a more equitable construct, the SPD simply caved in; they accepted that a commission would be formed to study the issue – everyone familiar with government knows what that means. The message is clear: Health insurance issues, of concern to the general public, are subsidiary to debased elites of a party preceded by the adjective “Social” in a quest to placate Israel, while parties whose names are preceded by the adjective “Christian” endorse an accelerated tendency for the society to become more Islamic. Applied Orwellian terminology has been on full display. In reality, of course, not just Merkel but the German political leadership despises the common population, even if they are of the same ethnicity. In general, to put it abstractly, the government would prefer its people to die as soon as possible upon having served their usefulness as laborers and consumers, to avoid paying them pensions from public funds upon their retirement. This attitude explains why the German government raised the retirement age to 67 a few years ago and why in Europe only Germany, along with Bulgaria, still permits billboard advertising for cigarettes, which tend to target young women, who still have a higher statistical life expectancy. It is surely just a matter of time until the pharmaceutical opium epidemic will also hit Germany, so that various people may be compelled to prematurely end their misery pursuant to maintaining their dignity. A few days after the agreement was reached and subjected to SPD party member votes, Schulz resigned his position after he came under criticism. He now has no functionary role in the SPD.
IX – A chronology of key milestones that led to the mass invasion of migrants and Islamic jihadists into Europe
In order to contradict the common misconception that the unpleasant invasion of Germany through mass migration came as a sudden surprise and could not possibly have been anticipated in the scope that occurred, so that authorities would have been unprepared to avert it in any case, a few informative milestones preceding this ominous development are presented below, with attendant commentary or analysis:
In October 2010 a widely discussed book, by an SPD member and high official of the German Federal Bank, Thilo Sarazin, with the provocative title “Germany Abolishes Itself” (Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab), led to him being reviled by the media and forced to resign his position. He predicted and warned about the emerging problems of migration and development of parallel societies from foreign cultures and their detrimental effects on social cohesion. Heavily footnoted and rationally argued, his thesis was hard to contradict, so instead of engaging with the issues raised, the media vilified him personally as a “racist”, misrepresented his assertions, or constructed straw-man allegations that were easy to refute.
In October 2014 public concern about creeping societal transformation in Germany due to “Islamic” radicalization, of larger segments of the migrant population and their descendents, a reality already in evidence in such European cities as London, Birmingham, Paris, Marseille, Brussels, and Malmö, among others, led to weekly Monday evening protest marches through Dresden, by a patriotic group under the name PEGIDA, to express their dissatisfaction about such an ominous trend also taking hold in Germany. Without addressing their published points of concern, the thousands of marchers were summarily denounced by the media as “Nazis” or “xenophobes” or “radical right-wingers”.
In early January 2015, just a few days after a shooting attack in the offices of a Charlie Hebdo publication in Paris, a Bavarian offshoot of PEGIDA announced plans to demonstrate in Munich. In response, the city government and local media demanded a huge public turnout for a counter-demonstration. This constituted a spectacular 180° reversal, a true display of extreme hypocrisy, according to the double standard principle of Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: Just a few days before top politicians from all over, including Merkel, had congregated to march in a staged parade in Paris (“We are Charlie”) to express solidarity for the right of a publication to criticize Islam – including depicting the mythical prophet Mohammad as a cartoon character – yet a planned march in Munich, in which people also wished to express dissatisfaction with creeping Islamic tendencies in the Occident, not unlike Charlie Hebdo had projected, was characterized as evil. Other German cities, including Cologne, also saw mass demonstrations that month, counteracting the feared popular acclaim of an emerging PEGIDA movement by supporting what they were against. Professing the desire to welcome any and all refugees from anywhere came more as a reactionary response to the PEGIDA challenge, which the German media had vilified as Neo-Nazi, than as an expression of wanting to be invaded by migrants, but expressing a derivative sentiment by being against a group that was against something (anti-anti) was hardly a compelling inspiration to motivate people to march out in the cold weather. Some of the huge and professionally done banners being carried should have made it obvious to onlookers that some group with deep pockets was operating behind the scenes to pay for this. By this time “Refugees Welcome” signs displayed by protesters were becoming ubiquitous. Images of these types of demonstrations were later leveraged or amplified by spreading them on the Internet. Credulous individuals were made to feel they had a duty to recite these slogans to prove they were “tolerant”, while impoverished individuals around the world who saw such images may have easily gotten the impression they would be loved if they migrated over to Germany. It is unclear how many people were actually paid by non-governmental organizations to show up. In any case, Germans tend to be extremely easy to manipulate into being politically correct simply by guilt-tripping and using a few trigger words. For many years a most infantile and therefore very effective slogan, “Fight Against the Right” (Kampf gegen Rechts), had been cultivated, initially by the SPD led government to target narrow groups, before Merkel rose to power, but expanded in scope thereafter, so all that was necessary to incite the population against some group was merely for the media or some politician to assert (no evidence needed) that this or that organization met this loose criterion of being “Right”. As was demonstrated more than sixty years ago by the famous conformity experiments by Solomon Asch, there is a tendency by a large segment of any society to knowingly contort their publicly expressed opinion to conform to some imagined norm. However, this phenomenon of submissive conformity is much more strongly in evidence amid Germans than in other European societies, though perhaps not quite as much as in some East Asian cultures. This serious behavioral weakness was basically a major factor that contributed to the strong support that Adolf Hitler enjoyed in the 1930s, and it appears that Germans have not learned enough from history. The social conditioning is being deployed by propagandists to have the German public reflexively repeating nonsensical slogans or lies, like a parrot, against their own interest. Of course, the specific ideological content being promoted now is different from what was prevalent eighty years ago, but this is secondary. What matters most is whatever sentiment is being established and reinforced as the standard for others to conform to. Though it may be a conjectural proposition, it seems very plausible that the Green Party “leftist” who blindly parrots the media cues today, if transformed back through time into a propaganda setting that prevailed eight decades ago, would have analogously wanted to conform to what was popular back then.
In mid February 2015 British and Italian media reported that the terror militia organization ISIS (organized and operated by Israel; financed and ideologically trained by Saudi Arabia to embrace Wahhabism, a puritanical flavor of Sunni Islam; and supplied with offensive weaponry by the US), which was operating mainly within Syria and Libya, would be sending half a million migrants to Europe as part of a psychological warfare effort to create chaos and would embed its own fighters, who would pose as migrants. From the Daily Mail:
“… letters from jihadists show plans to hide terrorists among refugees”
In early March 2015, an explicit threat was made by the Greek defense and foreign ministries in the wake of ongoing disputes between the Greek government versus the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (the Troika). However, this Troika constellation was a fancy way of providing cover to publicly conceal the heart of the conflict, which was between the Greek government and Deutsche Bank, which had speculated on Greek bond price developments and was on the verge of losing significant money, possibly leading to bankruptcy, if Greece would be unable to make good on their debt. Due to options bets by other banks, additional financial institutions would also be adversely impacted. Greece was put under painful austerity supervision to make binding commitments in return for being lent more money, which they in turn would pay back to Deutsche Bank for the Greek bonds they held. Throughout this dispute the German finance minister in particular was regarded to have behaved very arrogantly toward Greece. From the Telegraph:
“Greece will unleash a ‘wave of millions of economic migrants’ and jihadists on Europe unless the eurozone backs down on austerity demands, the country’s defence and foreign ministers have threatened.”
The most convenient way for migrants to pass into central Europe was through Greece, past Salonika, then farther to the north toward Macedonia. It appears that Germany didn’t take the threat so seriously. It is obvious that government ministers making threats of this nature must at least have already known that they were in a position to follow through, which implies a degree of prior cooperation with non-governmental organizations and Turkey to facilitate such a “wave of millions of economic migrants”. In other words, the basic organizational structure to follow through was already in place by then. With regard to the mention of “jihadists” joining in with the migrants, this term may sound abstract but one must have surely been aware of what type of people were being referred to. Mainly mercenaries, their occupation as rag-tag fighters entailed such activities as riding around the back of Japanese pickup trucks and indiscriminately spraying high caliber ammunition from belts through the smoking hot barrels of heavy machine guns mounted to them on tripods, operating shoulder-held missile launchers aimed at tanks, feeding mortars or grenade launchers whose explosives landed inside villages, shooting assault rifles with high capacity banana clips in urban combat scenarios, occasionally singing religious songs of jihad, engaging in the massacres of sickly village elders, learning how to make improvised bombs at a “workshop” in the desert, gang raping teenage girls and young women, stealing archeological artifacts and selling them to middlemen, occasionally decapitating their conquered enemies with a sharpened blade, stacking their heads atop a wall for public display to show off how tough they are and send the message “don’t mess with us”. As these murderous jihadists were being dislodged from their occupational positions by the Syrian army attempting to slowly regain territorial control, they could either fight to their deaths or drop their weapons and make a getaway to some other region far away, mingle with other members of a displaced population, likely they would be unwelcome in Turkey where they might be found out, maybe trim their beards and get a haircut, head out farther away for new adventures, toward central Europe to re-group with comrades already living there; rumor had it that Sweden and Germany were being overly generous – “refugees welcome” and all that, no questions asked – free housing with running water.
On a rainy weekend in early May 2015 the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, born in Haifa during the 1950s, gave a prepared speech at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich to commemorate its liberation by US forces 70 years earlier, just a few days before Germany’s surrender. In attendance were chancellor Merkel and Bavarian minister Seehofer sitting next to each other. His speech featured vituperative comments against the PEGIDA movement, along with the usual well-known complaints one would imagine at such an event, including references to their standard atrocity narrative. One of the key passages was the following, in which He doth commanded:
“Germany has foisted so much disaster upon the world. It stands so deeply indebted to so many countries – we are the last country that can afford to reject refugees and those who are persecuted!”
This particular passage was subsequently amplified by the newspaper Die Welt, as follows: “Germany Must Not be Allowed to Reject Any Refugees”. The event was significant inasmuch as Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp and because Merkel had previously not attended such a commemoration elsewhere that year. There was virtually no coverage in the US media, and the aforementioned cryptic command pertaining to the orchestrated deluge of migrants, including jihadists, was not cited by any of the two English language publications that reported on the event through the Internet. In writing about the ceremony, The Times of Israel cited the following assertion made by Merkel later that day in her weekly podcast message:
“We Germans have a particular responsibility here to handle what we [sic] perpetrated in the period of National Socialism attentively, sensitively and also knowledgeably”.
If the translation is correct, then Merkel has apparently accepted the dubious concept of collective and inherited guilt that may be transferred to subsequent generations of Germans and imposes an unearned burden upon them. The faulty logic seems to be: Because a few of Germany’s ancestors ran concentration camps more than seven decades ago, that now obliges Germany’s current generation to now accept and pamper militant jihadists and impoverished migrants, as well as their eventual descendents, for life. Such a proposition is irrational and unacceptable and should be firmly rejected rather than embracing it. This date was surely one of the most significant milestones in the ongoing mass migration crisis. The causality between Schuster’s commands that day and Merkel and Seehofer’s utter disregard for the law from September 2015 onward right until this day, is beyond question because Merkel herself had cited the rationale of Germany’s past as a justifications for not controlling the country’s border crossings and repeatedly refusing to set an upper limit on the number of migrants that Germany would be willing to take in annually. It is for this stubborn stance that her fiercest critics have characterized her as a traitor of the people (Volksverräter). By contrast, Seeohofer repeatedly postured publicly about the need to set a limit, thereby consenting to ignoring the laws, but it soon became apparent that he was just puffing hot air (Dampfplauderer). For this his Bavarian CSU party lost much support in the election, and as a consequence he will not be heading the party in this year’s regional election in Bavaria. Instead, he will be the minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Merkel’s new coalition government.
Early June 2015, a month after Merkel seems to have made a private commitment to never automatically reject any migrants coming to Germany, contrary to what the law stipulates, she hosted the G7 Summit in southern Bavaria at the base of the Alps. Like an obedient poodle, Merkel is eager to please her nominal Globalist masters, in this case Obama, who in reality was himself just a puppet figurehead. As a reward for her obsequiousness she got countless puff pieces in the media that stroked her ego. The media put her on a pedestal and crafted a light personality cult, so how could she ever even think about disappointing their increasing expectations? Though Merkel has no children, the German media have referred to her as “Mommy” (Mutti) to concoct the impression that she cared so much about the German people, which is contradictory to reality. She had invited numerous leaders of African countries to also make an appearance at the summit conference the next day. (Might they have been encouraged to empty their jails and send the freed prisoners north, to board flimsy boats to Europe and then be accepted by Germany?) A few days later the annual Bilderberg meeting took place only a few miles away in Tyrol, near Innsbruck, where the migrant issue was one of numerous agenda items. The impending “Operation Deluge”, as one might call it, must certainly have been a topic of private conversation by insiders, according to their Chatham House rules.
By early September 2015 the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Irvine, California, had registered – and was operating – a German language web site in India. The web site specialized in providing encouragement and organizational tips on how to smuggle migrants into Germany inside the personal vehicles of Germans coming back from vacations, particularly from Italy. A professionally produced video on their web site presented such illegal activities as morally heroic. Another video featured a Black African in the back seat of a car, asserting that all borders should be open (one world) and that anybody had a human right to go anywhere they wanted. On September 2, 2015 a little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose parents were trying to get to Canada, was found drowned and washed ashore at a Turkish beach. Photos of his lifeless body appeared on the front pages of nearly all major newspapers because this mishap provided them a perfect opportunity to sentimentalize the developing migration crisis while detracting from the fact that it was being actively orchestrated by various organizations behind the scenes. Normally publishing such pictures of corpses would be considered in bad taste and therefore newspapers would refrain from publishing them. The fact that nearly every newspaper published some version of him, shot from all angles by the same Turkish photographer, including even one of his face visible with open eye, cannot be a mere coincidence and points toward prior coordination. The media exploited this mishap in order to soften up the public into viewing the entire migration phenomenon in an emotional manner. By focusing on the dead toddler they were able to detract from the mass exodus of murderous jihadists escaping toward Europe from their eroding military positions before the Syrian army closed in on them. A couple of days later, on September 4, a group of migrants had set out from the Budapest train station to walk toward Austria on the highway because train traffic between Budapest and Vienna had been discontinued. The migrants could have sought refugee status in Hungary or in other countries along the way before that but were determined to reach Germany instead because international organizations working behind the scenes had steered them in that direction. Operating on a Friday night in the immediate emotional wake of the images of Alan Kurdi, Merkel arranged to have numerous trains filled with migrants to come to Munich directly from Hungary through Vienna. From September 5 onward, the deluge was unstoppable. A detailed chronology of what happened during those two days is available at Zeit Online:
The Night Germany Lost Control – “What happened on September 4, 2015? What intentions, failures and misunderstandings led to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Germany?”
Though the hordes of migrants – at least four fifth of which were young men traveling alone – began arriving at Munich’s main train station on Saturday morning, even though the public could not possibly have known or anticipated just 12 hours earlier that Merkel would be illegally arranging a mass transfer of many thousands of migrants in the middle of the night, there “just happened to be” a huge “spontaneous” welcoming crowd of do-gooders already in place, with banners and stuffed animals available for the few children – which the photographers and cameramen focused on, to convey a selectively distorted impression to the public. The sentiment being conveyed was something to the effect of: “Hey look, we’re such wonderful people”. (In Munich over 17% voted for the Green Party last September to make it the city’s second strongest party.) Anybody who would want to deny that this whole episode in Munich was not a meticulously orchestrated ambush operation must surely be a hard-core coincidence theorist! It would have been interesting to know which organization was primarily involved in the welcoming ceremony and how much per hour these mysterious do-gooders (mobs on demand) were getting paid, but local media know not to report on such details in case they bothered to inquire. Those working at the top level of this sophisticated transfer operation from Syria to Munich must have been amused by Merkel’s subservient compliance. Hundreds of Covert Islamic Jihadist Escapees Receive Enthusiastic Welcome at Munich Train Station might have been an appropriate headline to present.
X – Speculation about a possible Nobel Peace Prize award to create the perception that Merkel acted honorably
One must wonder whether the planners had promised to use their influence to propose Merkel for getting the Nobel Peace Prize just a month later. In any case, in following up after the floodgates had already been open for a few weeks, the media in Germany and elsewhere reinforced the notion that her fateful decision had been the bold and correct thing to do by suggesting that she was the favorite to win this prize. Only hours before the official award announcement, the Telegraph wrote:
Speculation is mounting that Angela Merkel will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her handling of the European refugee crisis and the war in Ukraine…
The German Chancellor has emerged as the firm favourite for the 2015 peace prize, the winner of which will be announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday.
Mrs Merkel was the favourite in late betting on Thursday night…
Over the years the Norwegian Nobel Committee had come under criticism and ridicule for having made dubious choices by having conferred this prestigious award to assorted war criminals. In an attempt to recover from their reputation it would have been folly to announce that yet another public criminal would be publicly honored.
XI – Efforts by other European countries to curtail steady migration flow as Merkel prolongs her open invitation
Many of the jihadists continued onward toward Copenhagen, from where they took a train across the water to Malmö in Sweden. Early January 2016 Swedish authorities were compelled to implement border controls for traffic coming from Denmark for the first time in over sixty years to stem the migration flow. Since Merkel had been publicly encouraging anyone in need to come to Germany, which in turn created new waves of migration, including from poor regions in the Balkans, it was up to other leaders to finally take the initiative to curtail this flow. On February 24, 2016 the Austrian foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, now chancellor, arranged a high-level conference in Vienna. He invited 18 leaders, including interior and foreign ministers, from six countries: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The purpose was to coordinate border management between these countries. Explicitly not invited were Merkel or representatives from Greece, clearly a diplomatic snub to the two countries most responsible for having encouraged this mess. Merkel expressed disappointment that the migration flow would be curtailed.
XII – Extreme displays of arrogance by Merkel and EU Commissars trying to force other countries to accept migrants
The height of German arrogance nowadays, coming from Merkel and president of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, began soon thereafter, when they and other top EU bureaucrats repeatedly demanded that countries in Eastern Europe be required to take in substantial numbers of these migrants, which she had invited in and accepted illegally, even though neither the migrants wanted to resettle in these countries nor did these countries want to accept them. Media constantly and deceptively use the word “integrate”, as if though it were possible for these mainly Islamic migrants to ever be fully integrated into these respective Slavic societies, or, for that matter also Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Merkel says these countries need to take in “their fair share” and “show solidarity”, which really means they are now being coerced to be complicit in her illegal activity and sheer stupidity. The leaders of these European continue to refuse this outrageous demand. The Austrian chancellor, Kurz, took their side in December 2017, shortly after he took office. The matter has been deferred for a few more months. In July 2018 Austria will have the European rotating presidency until the end of the year, so Kurz will host numerous high-level European conferences. If Merkel and Juncker continue their arrogant stance to force illegal migration onto all the other countries too through a redistribution scheme, future conflict will be assured. Not only will Merkel then likely be reviled all over Europe, as she already is in Greece and Russia, by extension Germans in general may be strongly disliked too when they go abroad.
XIII – Emerging signs of public animosity to Merkel now countered by Antifa goons on her behalf in Hamburg
In a few days Merkel is expected to be reelected to become the chancellor for a fourth four-year term. Any leader heading a state after so many years in office has basically lost contact with the public. Merkel may enjoy ongoing popularity among most Germans, but many strongly dislike her. During the election campaign last year she was frequently jeered loudly at public squares where she appeared and called a traitor. Only a few days prior to the election, during the Oktoberfest, she was jeered so loudly at Munich’s main square that her speech could no longer be heard, despite heavy amplification through loudspeakers. Some demonstrators had even brought along plastic horns, vuvuzelas, used to make noise during soccer matches in South Africa, Brazil, and Iberia. Videos with audio of this public square rejection of Merkel went viral. Some leaders whose terms are not constitutionally limited may convince themselves of their own indispensability and usually do not know when to quit or ignore warning signals, as appears to be the case with Merkel, who has received numerous polite but explicit hints in the European media during the past six months, that her time is up. History has repeatedly shown the possible consequences of such stubbornness. Leaders wound up being ousted through parliamentary intrigue to force their resignation, perhaps they were sent into exile, but sometimes this process of removal occurred violently. In contemporary times, mobs of common people no longer oust their rulers by force but instead provide the collective message of popular resentment. While such messages have already been expressed, they do not represent the majority mood, yet the dynamics of political trends are hard to predict. Long suppressed sentiments tend to erupt suddenly, without warning, like some surprise volcanic eruptions or urban riots. There will then be a tendency for such expressions to be suppressed, in hopes of counteracting the likelihood of spreading.
An interesting example of how public resentment can spread almost like wildfire was demonstrated a few weeks ago in Hamburg. In late January Uta Ogilvies, a Mom who was fed up with Merkel during the ongoing coalition negotiations at the time, walked in the center of Hamburg one evening alone, holding a simple sign saying “Merkel Must Go” (Merkel muss weg). This is the stationary equivalent of a group of demonstrators parading and chanting “hay-hay, hoe-hoe, whatever it is has got to go”. Exactly one week later there were about sixty demonstrators who had come out to support her. One week after that the number had doubled to 120, she claims. Then the hooded Antifa affiliated agitators started to show up. They found out where she lives, and somebody threw paint through her window at home into her kid’s room. Last week, Hamburg’s newspaper reported 350 demonstrators showing up to protest against Merkel, with roughly a thousand counter-demonstrators. Understanding that the event is potentially volatile, the police have been showing up in force too, including with armored water cannons. Counter-demonstrators have been able to mobilizing in the usual way, by crying “wolf”, claiming that opponents of Merkel are “right-wingers” or worse. Yesterday a city official attempted to intimidate those wanting to demonstrate against Merkel by asserting that they should be aware of their commonality with right wing extremists. These developments underscore that Merkel is no longer considered as “conservative” but has become the new darling of the “left”. More importantly, it shows that Merkel now has lumpen thugs of black clad street fighters who will reliably come out to counter those who would openly support her resignation. Hitler had his notorious Brown-Shirts (Braunhemden), derived from Mussolini’s Black-Shirts, and now Merkel has her Antifa Black-Hoods. Nobody can predict with any certainty how rapidly or severely future conflict will escalate. The still localized phenomenon of hooded goon squads could spread from Hamburg to other cities.
XIV – New waves of mass migration by organized transfers of Africans on ships directly to Hamburg easily possible
Other things could be happening in Hamburg this year too. Some experts have warned that there are millions of migrants in Africa, but only a small portion of them, almost exclusively young males, manage to arrive in Italy, either a few dozen by inflatable raft or a few hundred at a time by wooden boat, yet it is not difficult to imagine a new scenario, especially in light of Italian general elections on March 4, 2018, the results of which makes it more likely that the Italian navy will no longer graciously accept these African migrants and will send them back instead of processing them in Italy and then distributing them. Of the more than a hundred cruise liners owned or operated by one or the other Israeli mogul, at some point an overhaul or refurbishing is necessary at the dry dock. Hamburg and other shipyards in northern Germany have dry docks. In the summer of 1980 Fidel Castro opened his jails and freed all he prisoners, who took boats to southern Florida. Officials in some African countries would be glad to release their violent male prisoners if a Big Sugar Daddy would guarantee their transfer out of the country. Packed tightly, a big multi-level cruise liner could transport between ten to twenty thousand people, they could be filled up and embark from such places as Lagos, Monrovia, and Dakar. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, the ships have quietly arrived in the port of Hamburg, and thousands of young African males have arrived on land and are hungry, truly a humanitarian crisis, some will surely need medical care. They all apply for asylum because they have been unfairly “persecuted”, they will claim. Having arrived by ship from Africa, they cannot be sent back, as would have to be the case if they had come to Bavaria from Austria and Merkel decided to follow the law. Hamburgers are so open and welcoming; they are used to seeing African sailors roaming about town. Roughly half of Hamburgers voted either for the Green Party or the SPD or the Left Party; all of these parties want not just more migrants, but the newly arrived young African men must then also be allowed to bring their entire families and clans, ad infinitum, and if citizens should object then Merkel’s Black-Hoods will mobilize to show up. That such a scenario has not yet occurred is not so much because nobody would dare to make it happen, but more likely because simply threatening to do so – words like blackmail or extortion come to mind – can achieve other benefits to those who have the connections to organize such an operation.
XV – None of Germany’s seven Bundestag parties offer the winning mix of positions on economic and social issues
Of the seven political parties represented in Germany’s current parliament (Bundestag), all but two of them have either accepted or embraced continued mass migration into Germany of impoverished individuals. The FDP would like to see selective migration of qualified people with useful skills according to the Canadian model. Only Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new party, rejects migration from outside Europe due to issues of cultural incompatibility. US President Donald Trump recently reflected this position when he reportedly complained that so many immigrants are coming from “shithole” countries instead of from advanced countries like Norway. After many decades of social engineering and economic policy experiments, it has been empirically proven that maintaining a viable and affluent social state for the benefit of public well-being is incompatible with mass immigration, though so many people whose perspective is ideologically driven are in denial about this. Furthermore, the economic neo-liberalism flavor of capitalism being pursued today (Chicago School, Milton Friedman) ever since it was initially adopted under Margaret Thatcher, then implemented in numerous other countries, results in high levels of wealth inequality, which is also a destabilizing force in the long run. With rampant speculation in an expanded financial sector at the expense of taxpayers after bailouts and decreasing disposable income of an increasingly greater part of the population, due to low wages or higher unemployment in conjunction with inflated rental and real estate prices, declining economic wellbeing for the broad public becomes inevitable. Though the Left Party rejects the adverse excesses of economic neo-liberalism and advocates the type of social market capitalism that was successful in Germany under Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, but also in Scandinavia, yet was abandoned by the SPD under Chancellor Schroeder, on the other hand the Left Party completely neutralizes and discredits itself by embracing open borders and unlimited migration because the former policy cannot work if you also entertain the latter. Only one prominent and increasingly popular politician from the Left Party, who regularly appears on the political talk show circuit, seems to have understood this. For having strayed from the self-contradictory Left Party position, Sahra Wagenknecht, was punished at a Left Party Congress in 2016 by receiving a creamy pie shoved in her face by a fellow “leftist”, yet an attempt to dethrone her from leadership ranks has failed.
Additionally, an important prerequisite for democracy to work well is for the population to be both well educated and well informed, in an environment that respects free speech that allows a variety of opinions and ideas, so they are encouraged to participate in the process and make well-informed decisions when voting, as opposed to having their perceptions and perspectives manipulated by carefully crafted lies. Most importantly, the legal framework must be sophisticated to enhance fairness and discourage as well as punish corruption. However, none of the parties in Germany even state these basic ideals as worthwhile to pursue and attain. Any party exclusively pursuing such goals has the potential to achieve an absolute majority because a society based on such basic premises is one that most citizens would want to be a part of. Since the AfD is still new and ridiculed in the press as an opportunistic one-trick pony capitalizing on public resentment of Merkel’s open border policy, it has not yet developed a full spectrum of policy advocacy, so it could attain the first-mover advantage by embracing sensible positions because it would not entail back-tracking or having to reverse themselves, as other parties would have to do. At least theoretically, they could become Germany’s strongest party in four years, as they already are in Saxony.
XVI – Numerous significant flaws in Germany’s antiquated and corrupted judicial system impede basic fairness
To highlight one key element of a well functioning society, cited above, that is not so well known about, even within Germany, namely its judicial system, it needs to pointed out that important criteria by which to evaluate such a system are how well it is structured with regard to its laws and its procedural rules, as well as how accessible it is for the general public, as opposed to just affluent individuals and corporations. The German system fails on all these aspects. It should be understood and acknowledged that it is extremely flawed – primitive and inherently (structurally) corrupt, a complete sham. It lacks the most elementary elements that are taken for granted in the US legal system. Its inadequacies prevent the functioning of reliable justice and a fair society. For instance, to be specific by citing at least ten structural peculiarities: This antiquated and byzantine system has numerous different court venues (Criminal, Administrative, Labor, Family, Commerce, Social, Youth, Agriculture, etc.) with differing procedural regulation, judicial proceedings are not recorded, there is no jury, class action suits are not permitted, appellate levels require representation by attorneys, whose mandatory fees are strictly regulated, pro bono public representation is uncommon, contingency fees are a novelty and uncommon, court fees are excessive and a severe impediment to seeking redress, requests for waivers of fees and legal representation when bringing a complaint in civil cases are subject to a much higher standard (hard evidence of favorable outcome, to be decided by – and routinely rejected – by the same judge who would then take the case) than they are elsewhere in Europe (showing that a suit is neither malicious nor frivolous), and especially incomprehensible, a first level appellate judge may decree that his or her decision may not be subject to a higher level appeal, and any attempt at circumventing such a stipulation is practically impossible; if a dispute is not considered potentially relevant or instructive for a wide domain of other people that could be potentially affected but simply too specific or individual, then accepting an appeal can be ignored. These flaws make it very easy for judges to deviate from other norms that should be followed, without taking accountability for failing to follow guidelines. Basic rules of deductive logical reasoning need not be followed because truth or evidence are deemed subjective, exculpatory evidence can be ignored if the judges decide not to take note of it in the record. Even the basic constitutional guarantee, to have relevant arguments heard and addressed, is routinely ignored if a judge did not deem it relevant.
Though these numerous flaws are known among practicing attorneys, who themselves are often frustrated by the corrupt system they have chosen to operate in, they have an interest in allowing things to remain as they are. Since public calls for comprehensive judicial reform of this system come not even from the academic realm, it is fair to conclude that this must be another of various German taboos, such as advocating for free speech. Within this wider judicial milieu of judges, attorneys, and law professors there exists a conspiracy of silence to not rock the boat, for which, if they had a conscience, they ought to be ashamed of for doing nothing and thus perpetuating a very flawed system. In order to make the point, that if even in a very high profile case, subject to coverage by international reporters, a panel of judges fails to provide justice and conducts a show trial instead, transparent foe all to see, one can safely assume that such a corrupt practice is completely routine in such cases that enjoy no public scrutiny at all, highlighting a specific instance from the John Demjanjuk trial, that took place in Munich over the course of a few years, is very instructive.
XVII – The Demjanjuk show trial and its shameful perversion of justice proves needs for reforms that remain taboo
John Demjanjuk has been falsely accused in a show trial in Israel for allegedly having been “Ivan the Terible” at the Treblinka concentration camp and was sentenced to death in 1988, but this verdict was overturned five years later after new evidence cast reasonable doubt on his culpability. This did not deter zealous prosecutors with an axe to grind, so in the summer of 2009 he was deported from Cleveland to Munich to stand trial for allegedly having been accessory to murder in Sobibor on nearly 28 thousand counts. These charges were based on testimony of dubious credibility and purported evidence, an ID card that was deemed to have most likely been forged. Demjanjuk had denied having been a guard in Sobibor and his presence there was never proved. Essentially, the court required proof of a negative proposition, which is a logical impossibility unless one can prove an alternative proposition that is mutually exclusive of the first. This is the principle of being guilty as charged by default unless and until one can prove innocence, a violation of basic principles in US jurisprudence. Aside from that, alone the charge that he was present at Sobibor automatically entailed the presumption, without any need for this to be proved, that he was an accessory to so many murders. Cited in Wikipedia:
An 11 August 2010, Esquire magazine article written and researched by Scott Raab questioned the whole idea of Demjanjuk’s trial, crime, and punishment, pointing out many of the absurdities of this particular case, stating specifically “Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you’ll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene.
Leaving aside the question of whether Demjanjuk had been in Sobibor or not and assuming for the sake of argument that he had been there, though in this case he would have been a prisoner too, though functioning involuntarily as a guard with a weapon, the prosecution basically reasoned that it was incumbent on him to flee. On March 16, 2010 the court heard expert testimony from Dieter Pohl, an expert at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, Institute for Contemporary History, as was widely reported at the time in the international media covering the trial, including from Cleveland, Demjanjuks’ former home. A particular finding presented orally in court by Pohl was essentially of an exculpatory nature:
Pohl said that some Trawniki men did successfully escape, but conceded that if they had fled with their weapons and were recaptured, they faced certain execution.
As Pohl had asserted this, the defense attorney submitted a motion to the court to have that particular passage by Pohl be submitted into the record. It was close to lunchtime so the chief judge said that the court would adjourn and announce the decision after the recess. After the recess the full court denied the motion to take official note of that evidence, so it was not included in the record. Thus, anybody following the proceedings knew what the court itself refused to acknowledge.
More than a year later Demjanjuk was sentenced anyway. His appeal was pending when he died. From Wikipedia:
Christiaan F. Rüter, Professor of Law and expert on NS trials in Germany, who researched the subject at the University of Amsterdam for 40 years, expressed reservations against the commencement of proceedings stating that to him “it is a complete mystery, how anyone who knows the German jurisdiction up to now, would be able to assume that Demjanjuk could be sentenced based on the given evidence.
It was understood by everyone that the facts and evidence were irrelevant to the court. So much for the concept of “human dignity” if authorities determine that somebody does not deserve it for reasons of political expediency. This set an important precedent and sent the signal to judges that they will surely get away with perversion of justice (Rechsbeugung), which is technically a criminal offense in Germany, though a judge will virtually never gets indicted for it, much less prosecuted and convicted. Nobody who was initially hoping to enjoy some kind of hateful revenge could have been placated by the verdict since it was evident that the proceedings were a complete farce. From Wikipedia:
Yoram Sheftel, the lawyer who represented Demjanjuk during the Israel trial in the 1980s, criticized the German court for conducting a show trial. “There was a shameful farce here”, he said. “Certainly the German court did not believe its own ruling.” “Nothing has changed since then”, he said. “Even during the trial in Germany, there was not one person who testified that Demjanjuk was Ivan from Sobibor, by virtue that he was seen there, and as such the conviction is a farce.”
Months ago one of the high profile leaders of the AfD party was accused of having asserted in an e-mail to somebody that the German legal system was corrupt, which she subsequently denied she had written, though she did not deny the system was corrupt. When looking at the slick web site of the AfD, it is apparent that the party takes absolutely no position on the need to reform Germany’s legal system. The issue remains outside the bounds of legitimate criticism or discussion.
XVIII – Summary – Germany has not yet matured to engender trust; Merkel’s legacy will incur infamy and shame
It should be evident from the serious shortcomings within its society, alluded to above, that, as a whole, Germany has not matured sufficiently for its neighboring countries to feel comfortable if it were no longer under supervision through its ongoing de facto occupation. Its leadership has failed to live up to the ambitious desire to become a model nation, and a majority of its citizens have been led astray. It is up to Germans themselves to continue on their self-destructive path or otherwise attain the sophistication that engenders lasting trust and respect from peers and adversaries alike. Surely, once the younger generations recognize the long-term societal damage that will have been caused by and blamed on Merkel’s decisions and policies – the adverse effects from which they may themselves be suffering and coping with – then they may covertly be ashamed for the rest of their lives because the disaster unfolded while they could have actively insinuated themselves to challenge these policies rather than being indifferent or passively acquiescent. In recognizing this situation and taking a pivotal turn away from the current course, before it is too late, Germans may still avert future disaster if they change course under a new leadership.
Making nonsense of Fukuyama’s premature triumphalist screed, it is commonplace now to note that the United States corporate elites and their European and Pacific country counterparts are increasingly losing power and influence around the world. Equally common is the observation that these Western elites and the politicians who front for them have acted over the last twenty years to reassert their control in their respective areas of neocolonial influence. The European Union powers have done so in Eastern Europe and Africa, most obviously but not only, in Ukraine, Libya, Ivory Coast, Mali and the Central African Republic. Likewise, the United States has acted to reassert its influence in Latin America and the Caribbean, effectively declaring war on Venezuela, maintaining its economic and psychological warfare against Cuba and intervening elsewhere with varying degrees of openness.
Before they died, among the main Western media bogeymen were Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Muammar al Gaddhafi. Now Vladimir Putin and Bashar al Assad have been joined by Xi Jinping and Nicolas Maduro. Along with these and other world leaders, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega has also constantly been the object of endlessly repetitive Western media hate campaigns. This longstanding, plain-as-day media strategy, regularly and blatantly prepares mass opinion to facilitate Western government aggression against the latest target government. No one following these processes with any attention will have failed to notice the leading role played by non governmental organizations in the Western elites’ offensive against resistance to them by political leaders and movements around the world.
In almost every case of recent Western provoked interventions, from Venezuela in 2002, through Haiti in 2004, Bolivia in 2008, Honduras in 2009, Ecuador in 2010, Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria in 2011, Ukraine in 2014, Western media have used deliberately misleading and downright deceitful reports from Western NGOs to support their own false misreporting of events. In Nicaragua’s case, the usual untrustworthy NGO suspects like Amnesty International, Transparency International and Global Witness constantly publish misleading reports and statements attacking or undermining President Daniel Ortega and his government. In general, their reporting is grossly biased and disproportionate given the regional context of incomparably horrific events and deplorable conditions elsewhere in Latin America, but, as often as not, it is also downright untrue.
In a recent example, Global Witness stated that Nicaragua’s proposed interoceanic canal “wasn’t preceded by any environmental impact reports, nor any consultation with local people”. Both those assertions are completely untrue. But this Big Lie repetition is the modus operandi of the Western elites who fund outfits like Global Witness, Amnesty International, and other influential NGOs like International Crisis Group and Transparency Intenational. For example, Amnesty International claims “We are independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion”. But it bears constant repetition that many of Amnesty International’s board and most of its senior staff responsible for the organization’s reports are deeply ideologically committed with links to corporate dominated NGO’s like Purpose, Open Society Institute, Human Rights Watch, and many others.
Also worth repeating is that Global Witness in 2016 received millions of dollars from the George Soros Open Society Foundation, Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network, the Ford Foundation and NATO governments. The boards and advisory boards of these NGOs are all made up overwhelmingly of people from the Western elite neocolonial non governmental sector. Many have a strong corporate business background as well. All move easily from one highly paid Western NGO job to the next, serving NATO country foreign policy goals. Cory Morningstar has exposed the pro-NATO global political agenda of organizations like US based Avaaz and Purpose, noting “the key purpose of the non-profit industrial complex is and has always been to protect this very system it purports to oppose”.
Back in 2017 it was already a truism to note that Western NGOS “operate as the soft, extramural arm of NATO country governments’ foreign policy psychological warfare offensives, targeting liberal and progressive audiences to ensure their acquiescence in overseas aggression and intimidation against governments and movements targeted by NATO. To that end, they deceitfully exploit liberal and progressive susceptibilities in relation to environmental, humanitarian and human rights issues.” What is now becoming even more clear in the current context is that these Western NGOs and their media accomplices are confident enough to publish downright lies because reporting the facts no longer matters. Western public discourse has become so debased, incoherent and fragmentary that the truth is almost completely irrelevant. All that matters is the power to impose a version of events no matter how false and untruthful it may be.
This sinister media reality is intimately related to the politicization of legal and administrative processes in the national life of countries across Latin America. The spurious legal processes against Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva in Brazil, against Milagro Sala and Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, against Jorge Glas and, no doubt very soon, Rafael Correa in Ecuador are all based on the same faithless virtual association and complete disregard for factual evidence as Western media and NGO propaganda reports attacking Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua. It is imperative to overcome the ridiculous liberal presupposition that the region’s elites, with the advantage of designing and controlling their countries’ legal systems and communications media for over 200 years, are somehow going to respect high falutin’ avowals about “separation of powers”.
Note: this article borrows from previous articles here and here.
Israel is in the process of plunging America into a war with Iran that could destroy what’s left of the Middle East and ignite a third world war, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned in Washington approximately a week ago.
Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who now teaches at Washington-area universities, didn’t hold back in his critique of where the status quo is leading the United States via its client state, Israel.
At the annual Israel lobby conference at the National Press Club, sponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Wilkerson explained that Israel is headed toward “a massive confrontation with the various powers arrayed against it, a confrontation that will suck America in and perhaps terminate the experiment that is Israel and do irreparable damage to the empire that America has become.”
One of the principal antagonists begging for a war with Iran that Wilkerson identified was none other than Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Russian-born Defense Minister. Wilkerson stated:
Lieberman will speak in April in New York City at the annual conference of the Jerusalem Post. The title is, ‘The New War with Iran.’ It is clear that he’s [at] the forefront of promoting this war.
And nowhere does my concern about such a war focus more acutely at the moment than Syria. As [the] president of France Emmanuel Macron described it recently, ‘The current rhetoric of the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel is pushing the region toward conflict with Iran.’”
Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incessant denigrations of Iran, including claiming the greatest danger facing the Jewish state is the Islamic republic — a country he accuses of fanning the flames of anti-Semitism — Wilkerson blew these accusations out of the park using simple logic. He said:
This antisemitism bit, of course, as we’ve heard today, is almost always a weapon of choice for Israeli politicians under stress hurled, in this case, at the country whose Jewish population — by the way, the largest in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel — lives in Iran in reasonable peace.”
He continued:
And don’t forget that these words were uttered by the man who, as we’ve heard today, is doing everything he can to expel dark-skinned African refugees largely from Eritrea and Sudan from Israel, where most have come as legitimate refugees.”
Wilkerson highlighted the hypocrisy of Netanyahu and his cohorts in more ways than one. For example, Wilkerson referred to Netanyahu’s grandiose speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he directly challenged Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif while holding remnants of a drone allegedly downed over Israeli airspace. Israel claimed the drone was Iranian-manufactured. Wilkerson noted that in response, Iran found itself being rescued by Lebanon’s Defense Minister, who said he had an Israeli drone over his head virtually 24 hours a day.
Further, the mainstream media and the governments that benefit from their narratives pay close to zero attention to the fact that Israel routinely violates Lebanese airspace with its sophisticated aircraft. Rather, Iran is constantly painted as the major threat and violator of international law.
“Of late of course,” Wilkerson continued, “Tel Aviv is increasingly using Iran’s presence in Syria, its support for Bashar al-Assad, and its alleged drive– and I love this one, and my military comrades love it, too– for a Shia corridor from Tehran to Aden, as the hoary beast that must not be at any cost, including of course America’s treasure and lives, as his probable cause and existential prompt for action.”
But why is there a danger that the U.S. will be dragged into this war, and why does Israel need America’s help? As Wilkerson explains:
I believe the answer is fairly clear once you push aside the cobwebs that surround it. The legitimacy of great power is what I call it. And that is precisely what Netanyahu and Lieberman desire.
“It’s also what Riyadh desires, especially with the new boy king Mohammed bin Salman, now an erstwhile ally of Israel.
“In short, the IDF could defend Israel but it could not attack Iran. Not successfully, anyway. And were it to do so, it would be damned internationally and thus isolated even more than it already is today, perhaps devastatingly so.”
Last year, a top Israeli general tasked with writing his country’s defense policy admitted that Israel cannot take on Iran’s military alone if the day should come that the regional powers face off in a direct military confrontation, saying they would need to rely on the U.S. for assistance
According to a Politico report, during the Obama years, Israel drew up a military strike option but never really used it. Deep down, Israel knew its effectiveness lied in its ability to pressure the U.S. government into taking further action of its own lest it be dragged into a catastrophic war with Iran that it may or may not be prepared to fight. From the Politico report:
They [the Israelis] ordered the Israel Defense Forces and the intelligence arms to prepare for a huge operation: an all-out air attack in the heart of Iran. Some $2 billion was spent on preparations for the attack and for what the Israelis believed would take place the day after – a counterattack either by Iranian warplanes and missiles or by its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The latter could use either the 50,000 missiles it had stockpiled (by 2018, Israeli intelligence estimated the number had increased to 100,000), or it could activate its terror cells abroad, with the assistance of Iranian intelligence, to strike at Israeli or Jewish targets. This is what it did in 1992 and 1994 when it responded to Israeli attacks in Lebanon by blowing up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the Jewish community center AMIA in that city, with a massive number of casualties in both attacks.”
The strike plan never took place, of course, but according to Politico, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to use it to put pressure on the U.S. government to achieve its anti-Iranian objectives. Every day, the likelihood that a war might erupt between Israel and Iran, in turn involving the United States, which has sworn to come to Israel’s defense if attacked by Iran, continues to inch that much closer to reality.
Watch | Is the US Ramping Up Its Military Presence in Syria and Planning to Attack Iran for Israel?
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national security advisor during the Reagan administration. Wilkerson is an outspoken critic of the current US foreign policy.
Darius Shahtahmasebi is a practicing attorney with an interest in human rights, international law, and journalism. He is a graduate of the University of Otago, where he obtained degrees in Law and Japanese. Follow him on Twitter at @TVsLeaking.
Vladimir Putin interviewed by NBC anchor Megyn Kelly. The interview was recorded in the Kremlin on March 1, 2018, and in Kaliningrad on March 2, 2018. NBC showed an edited version only. The following transcript is courtesy of the Kremlin office of the President of Russia.
Transcript:
Part 1. The Kremlin, Moscow, March 1, 2018
Megyn Kelly:So, thank you very much for doing this, Mr President. I thought that we’d start with some of the news you made today at your State of the Nation Address, then we will move into some facts about you in preparation for our long piece that we are putting together, and then tomorrow when we will have a longer time together, we will talk about more substantive issues together, if that is ok with you.
Vladimir Putin: Fine.
Megyn Kelly:You announced today that Russia has developed new nuclear-capable weapons systems, including an intercontinental ballistic missile that you say renders defence systems useless. Several analysts in the West have said this is a declaration of a new Cold War. Are we in a new arms race right now?
Vladimir Putin: In my opinion, the people you have mentioned are not analysts. What they do is propaganda. Why? Because everything I spoke about today was done not on our initiative, it is a response to the US ballistic missile defence programme and Washington’s unilateral withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.
If we speak of the arms race, it began at that very moment, when the United States pulled out of the ABM Treaty. We wanted to prevent this. We called on our American partners to work together on these programmes.
Firstly, we asked them not to withdraw from the treaty, not to destroy it. But the US pulled out. It was not us who did this but the US.
Yet we again suggested we work together even after this. I told my colleague then, “Imagine what would happen if Russia and the US joined forces in the crucial area of strategic security. The world would change for a long period to come, and the level of global security would rise to an all-time high.” The reply was, “This is very interesting.” But they ultimately rejected all our proposals.
Then I said, “You understand that we will have to improve our offensive arms systems to maintain a balance and to have the ability to overcome your BMD systems.” They replied that they were not developing the BMD systems to counter us, that we were free to do as we pleased, and that they would not view our actions as spearheaded against the US.
Megyn Kelly:That happened right after 9/11, three months after 9/11.
Vladimir Putin: No, it was after the US withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, and the conversations I mentioned were in 2003–2004.
Megyn Kelly:At the time that happened, I believe you were quoted as saying that you thought it was a mistake on the part of the United States, but not a threat. Do you perceive the United States as a threat today?
Vladimir Putin: We have always said that developing the missile defence system creates a threat to us. We have always said that. Our American partners would not publicly admit it, claiming that the system was spearheaded mainly against Iran. But eventually, in conversations and during talks they admitted that, of course, the system will destroy our nuclear deterrence potential.
Imagine the situation. What was the point of signing the treaty back in 1972? The United States and the Soviet Union had only two regions that they defended from missile attacks: one in the United States and one in the Soviet Union. That created a threat for a potential aggressor who would be struck in response. In 2002, the United States said, “We do not need this anymore. We will create anything we want, globally, all over the world.”
Megyn Kelly: Again, it was in the wake of 9/11, just to make it clear. 9/11 happened on September 11, 2001, and the United States was reassessing its security posture in the world for good reason, wouldn’t you admit?
Vladimir Putin: No, not for good reason.This is complete nonsense. Because the missile defence system protects from the kind of ballistic missiles that no terrorists have in their arsenal. This is an explanation for the housewives watching your programme. But if these housewives can hear what I am saying, if you show it to them and they hear me, they will understand that 9/11 and the missile defence system are completely unrelated. To defend themselves from terrorist attacks, the major powers must join their efforts against the terrorists rather than create threats for each other.
Megyn Kelly:About the weapon that you announced today, the ICBM, have you actually tested it and it works? Because some analysts are suggesting that you have tested it, and it failed. And that is why you only showed animations of it today, and have not yet produced any actual videos.
Vladimir Putin: I spoke about several systems today. Which one are you referring to, the heavy-duty intercontinental ballistic missile?
Megyn Kelly:Yes, the one that you claimed renders defence systems useless.
Vladimir Putin: All the systems I mentioned today easily overcome missile defence. Each one of them. This is the point of all these developments.
Megyn Kelly:But you have tested it?
Vladimir Putin: Yes, of course.
Megyn Kelly:And it worked?
Vladimir Putin: It did, very well.
Some of these systems require additional work. Some of them are already deployed. Some are in serial production.
Getting back to the beginning of our conversation, there is a missile defence system deployed in Alaska. The distance between Russia’s Chukotka and Alaska is only 60 kilometres.
Two systems are being deployed in Eastern Europe. One is already in place in Romania. Construction of another one is almost finished in Poland. There is also the navy. US ships are based very close to Russian shores both in the south and the north.
Imagine if we placed our missile systems along the US-Mexico or the US-Canada border in their territories on both sides and brought our ships in from both sides. What would you say? Would you take action? Meanwhile we would respond that you are escalating the arms race? Ridiculous, isn’t it? This is exactly what is happening.
Megyn Kelly:Just to come back. Are you saying that we are in a new arms race?
Vladimir Putin: I want to say that the United States, when it withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002, forced us to begin developing new weapon systems. We told our partners about it, and they said, “Do whatever you like.” Fine, that is what we did – so enjoy.
Megyn Kelly:You disclosed that Russia was developing an intercontinental ballistic missile that was powered by nukes that could render defence systems useless?
Vladimir Putin: Of course not. I did not know at the time how we could respond, to be honest. So it seems that our partners believed we would have nothing to respond with. Our economy was is dire straits, as well as the defence sector and the army. Therefore, I do not think anobody could have thought that in such a short period of time we would be able to make such a gigantic leap in the development of strategic weapons. I think the CIA must have told the US President that we would not do anything in response. While the Pentagon said something like, “And we will develop a powerful cutting-edge global anti-missile system.” So they did.
But I will answer your question directly. I can tell you what we told our American partners, what I said personally at the time.
Megyn Kelly:Just to clarify, do you mean George W. Bush?
Vladimir Putin: Who was President in 2002, 2003 and 2004?
Megyn Kelly:But did this happen continuously or just during that timeframe?
Vladimir Putin: Actually, we kept going on about it for 15 years. I said, almost literally, that we would not develop a system of anti-missile defence the way you are doing. Firstly, because it is too expensive, and we do not have the resources. And secondly, we do not know yet how it would work: you do not know, and we certainly do not either.
But, to preserve the strategic balance so that you would not be able to zero out our nuclear deterrence forces, we will develop strike systems that will be able to break your anti-missile systems.
We said this plainly and openly, without any aggression, I just told stated we would do. Nothing personal.
And the response was, “We are not doing this against you, but you do whatever you want and we will presume that it is not directed against us, not against the United States.”
Megyn Kelly:Let us talk about present day and going forward, because what you said today was that you would use these weapons if Russia or her allies come under attack. And the question is whether you meant any attack or only a nuclear attack on Russia or its allies?
Vladimir Putin: I heard you.
I would also like to say that in 2004 – I mentioned this today –I said at a news conference that we will be developing weapons and even mentioned a concrete missile system, Avangard as we call it.
It is called Avangard now, but then I simply spoke of how it would work. I openly said how it would work. We hoped that this would be heard and the US would discuss it with us and discuss cooperation. But no, it was as if they had not heard us. Strategic offensive arms reduction and an antimissile defence system are different things.
Megyn Kelly:So, you didn’t feel like you needed to disclose.
Vladimir Putin: We will be reducing the number of delivery vehicles and warheads under the New START Treaty. This means that the numbers will be reduced on both sides, but at the same time, one party, the United States, will be developing antimissile systems.
This will ultimately lead to a situation where all our nuclear missiles, Russia’s entire missile potential will be reduced to zero. This is why we have always linked this. This is how it was in the Soviet-American times; these are natural things, everyone understands this.
Megyn Kelly:But is it your contention that the 4,000 nukes that Russia now has cannot penetrate the existing military defence system?
Vladimir Putin: They can. Today they can. But you are developing your antimissile systems. Antimissiles’ range is increasing, and so is their accuracy. These weapons are being upgraded. This is why we need to respond to this appropriately, so that we are able to penetrate the system not only today but also tomorrow, when you acquire new weapons.
Megyn Kelly:That is why it would be a big deal if you really did have a nuclear-powered ICBM, which people are questioning, whether you have a usable one right now. When you said earlier that you have some that had tested positively and were excellent, you said others had not. So, for the record, right now, do you have a workable ICBM that is powered by nukes that you have tested successfully?
Vladimir Putin: Look, I did not say that the testing of some of these systems had been unsuccessful. All the tests were successful. It is just that each of these weapon systems is at a different stage of readiness. One is already on alert duty in line units. Another is in the same status. The work is proceeding on schedule with regard to some systems. We have no doubt that they will be in service, just as we had no doubt in 2004 that we would make a missile with the so-called cruise glide re-entry vehicle.
You have been referring all the time to intercontinental ballistic missiles, new missiles…
Megyn Kelly: You keep mentioning ICBMs.
Vladimir Putin: No. I am saying that we are developing just one brand of new heavy missile, which will replace a missile that we call Voyevoda, and you have dubbed it Satan. We will replace it with a new and more powerful missile. Here it is: a ballistic missile. All the other missiles are not ballistic.
Therein lies the entire meaning of this, because any antimissile defence system operates against ballistic missiles. But we have created a set of new strategic weapons that do not follow ballistic trajectories and the antimissile defence systems are powerless against them. This means that the US taxpayers’ money has been wasted.
Megyn Kelly:But again, you say that you are going to use these weapons, these nuclear-powered weapons if Russia or its allies come under attack. Any attack or only a nuclear one?
Vladimir Putin: There are two reasons why we would respond with our nuclear deterrence forces: a nuclear attack on the Russian Federation or a conventional attack on the Russian Federation, given that it jeopardises the state’s existence.
Megyn Kelly:That is consistent with the existing Russian doctrine on the use of nuclear weapons.
Vladimir Putin: Exactly, there are two possible reasons for a nuclear retaliation.
Megyn Kelly:Are you interested in new talks to extend the new strategic arms control treaty?
Vladimir Putin: The START-3 Treaty will expire soon. We are ready to continue this dialogue. What do we consider important? We agree to a reduction or to retaining current terms, to a reduction in delivery vehicles and warheads. However, today, when we are acquiring weapons that can easily breach all anti-ballistic missile systems, we no longer consider the reduction of ballistic missiles and warheads to be highly critical.
Megyn Kelly:So will these weapons be part of those discussions?
Vladimir Putin: In the context that the number of delivery vehicles and the number of warheads they can or will carry should, of course, be included in the grand total. And we will show you from a distance what this will look like.
Our military experts know how to conduct these inspections. In this sense, there are fine-tuned mechanisms and a sufficiently high level of trust. Generally, military experts are working together professionally. Politicians talk a lot, but military experts know what they are doing.
Megyn Kelly:You are a politician
Vladimir Putin: I am also an officer, and I am the Commander-in-Chief. I also served as a military intelligence officer for 17 years.
Megyn Kelly: Are you proud of that fact? Do you like the fact that you were in the KGB? Do you like people to know that?
Vladimir Putin: I do not see it from an emotional perspective. This gave me a lot of experience in the most diverse fields. I found it useful when I moved on to the civilian sector. Of course, this positive experience helped me in this sense.
Megyn Kelly:How so? How did it help?
Vladimir Putin: You know, after I left the intelligence service, I worked as Assistant Rector at St Petersburg University. I worked with people, established contacts, motivated people to act and brought them together. This is very important in the academic environment. Later, I was Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg. I assumed even greater and broader responsibility. I dealt with St Petersburg’s international ties, and that is a metropolis with a population of five million people. While working in this capacity in St Petersburg, I first met Henry Kissinger. Of course, all this helped me in my work at that time, and my additional experience later helped me in my work in Moscow.
Megyn Kelly:Do you think it gives you an advantage over your adversaries and your allies?
Vladimir Putin: It is hard for me to say. I have no other experience. The only thing I know is that my partners, including heads of state and government, are exceptional and outstanding people. They have gone through stringent selection and elimination procedures. There are no chance people at this level. And each of them has his or her own advantages.
Megyn Kelly:What about that? You have been in power for a long time here in Russia, poised to go into another term as president. You have had four American presidents come and go during that time. I am wondering if you had a favourite, if there was one you liked more than the others?
Vladimir Putin: I am sorry, but this is not a very tactful question. Each of my partners is good in their own right. In all, we had good relations with practically all of them. With Bill Clinton, though he was leaving office, we were able to work together for several months. Then with presidents Bush, Obama, and with the current President too, but to a lesser extent, of course. All of them have something to respect them for. At the same time, we can argue and disagree with each other, and it happens often, we have diverging views on many issues, even on key ones, but we nevertheless managed to maintain normal, human relations. If it were not for that, it would have been not only harder, but much worse for everyone.
Megyn Kelly:How important do you think it is to project strength as a President?
Vladimir Putin: It is important not to project strength, but to show it. It is also important how we understand power. It does not mean banging the table with a fist or yelling. I think power has several dimensions.
Firstly, one should be confident that he is doing the right thing. Secondly, he must be ready to go all the way to achieve the goals.
Megyn Kelly:I wonder this because one of the images that we see of you in the United States is without the shirt on a horse. What is that about?
Vladimir Putin: Well, I have breaks. There are your Russian colleagues, there is the internet. But we do not do this on purpose. They take the photos they like. I have lots of photos of me in the office, working with documents, but nobody is interested in them.
Megyn Kelly: (Laughs.) You are saying they like the shirtless photos?
Vladimir Putin: You know, I have seen “photos” of me riding a bear. I have not ridden a bear yet, but there are such photos already.
Megyn Kelly:Now what about you personally? Your elections are coming up in two weeks. You are 65 years old now. Most people would be slowing down a little in their lives. Do you see that for yourself at all in the future?
Vladimir Putin: First, there are many politicians around the world who are older than I am and who are still working active.
Megyn Kelly:Including in my country.
Vladimir Putin: Not only in the United States, in other countries, too. There are many such people, in Europe and everywhere in the world. But if a person assumes the highest offices, he must work as if he is doing it for the first and last day of his life.
There is the Constitution. I have never violated it and have never changed it. Of course, if voters give me the opportunity to serve another term, I will do it to the best of my ability
Megyn Kelly:Last question for tonight, it is late. Forgive me; this may be a long one. What do you see as your greatest accomplishment as president and what do you see as your biggest mistake? And what did you learn from it?
Vladimir Putin: You know, these would be very close.
Our biggest achievement is that our economy has changed radically. It has almost doubled in scale. The number of people living below the poverty line has decreased by half.
At the same time, the number of people living below the poverty line remains large, and we must work on that. We must remove the gap between people with very high and very low incomes. In this context, we have many achievements and many unresolved issues.
Back in the early 2000s, our population shrank by nearly a million people a year. Can you imagine the scale of the disaster? Almost 900,000 people. We have reversed this trend. We have even achieved a natural population increase. We have very low infant mortality, and we have reduced maternal mortality to almost zero. We have prepared and are implementing a large-scale programme of supporting mothers and children. Our life expectancy is growing at a high rate.
Much has changed in our economy. But we have not achieved our main economic goal: we have not yet changed the economic structure as we need to. We have not yet reached the required growth of labour efficiency. But we know how to do it, and I am confident that we will do it. The thing is that we had no opportunity to do this before, because until recently we did not have the macroeconomic conditions for taking specific measures in these areas.
At the beginning of our path, inflation was about 30 percent, but now it is 2.2 percent. Our gold and currency reserves are growing, and we have achieved macroeconomic stability. This offers us an opportunity to take the next step towards enhancing labour efficiency, attracting investment, including private funds, and changing the structure of our economy.
I am talking in large blocks. There are also more specific areas, such as modern technology and artificial intelligence, digitalisation, biology, medicine, genome research, and so on.
Megyn Kelly:Much more on the economy and how Russia is doing – tomorrow, and on your re-election. Thank you so much for your time. You have had a long day. I look forward to meeting up with you in Kaliningrad.
Vladimir Putin: Thank you.
Part 2, Kaliningrad, March 2, 2018
Megyn Kelly:Mr President, good to see you again.
Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon.
Megyn Kelly: So, we are here in Kaliningrad. Why is that? This is a port that, I am told, could not be more threatening to NATO, to Europe. It is a Russian military base. It is a Russian military port. It is home to some of your nukes. Are you trying to send a message?
Vladimir Putin: Why Kaliningrad? Because I regularly visit Russian regions. This is one of these regions. This time, I came here to attend a conference of the regional media, which they decided to hold here. It was not my decision but theirs, your colleagues from the Russian regional media. I have an agreement with them that I attend such meetings once a year and meet with them, and that is why I am here today. It does not have anything to do with any external signals; it is our domestic affair.
Megyn Kelly:Understood. So, the last time we met in June, I asked you about the conclusion of our American intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in our presidential election. You told me that there was nothing specific in these reports, that if there is anything specific, you said, then there will be something to discuss. You told me, as they used to say in the KGB: addresses, houses, names. Since then, 13 Russians and three Russian-owned companies have been indicted by a special prosecutor named Robert Mueller in the United States for interfering in our election. The IRA agency, Yevgeny Prigozhin and others running a cyber warfare operation out of an office at 55 Savushkina Street, St Petersburg, Russia. Addresses, houses, names. So, can we have that discussion now?
Vladimir Putin: Of course. We not only can but I think we must discuss this issue if it keeps bothering you. But if you think that the question has been asked, I am ready to answer it.
Megyn Kelly:Why would you allow an attack like this on the United States?
Vladimir Putin: What makes you think that the Russian authorities and I gave our permission to anyone to do anything? You just named some people; I have heard about some of them, some of them I do not know, but they are just individuals, they do not represent the Russian government. Even if we suppose, though I am not 100 percent certain, that they did something during the US presidential election campaign (I simply do not know anything about it), it has nothing to do with the position of the Russian government. Nothing has changed since we spoke last time in St Petersburg. There are some names, so what? It could just as well be some Americans who while living here, interfered in your own political processes. It has not changed anything.
Megyn Kelly:But it was not Americans. It was Russians. And it was hundreds of people, a monthly budget of 2.5 billion dollars, all designed to attack the United States in a cyber warfare campaign. You are up for re-election right now. Should the Russians be concerned that you had no idea this was going on in your own home country, in your own hometown?
Vladimir Putin: You know, the world is very large and diverse. We have rather complicated relations between the United States and the Russian Federation. And some of our people have their own opinion on these relations and react accordingly at the level of the Russian Government and at the level of the Russian President. There has never been any interference in the internal political processes in the United States.
You have named some individuals and said that they are Russian. So what? Maybe, although they are Russian, they work for some American company. Maybe one of them worked for one of the candidates. I have no idea about this, these are not my problems. Do you know that, for example, after the presidential election in the US, some Ukrainian officials sent messages congratulating Hillary Clinton, even though Trump had won? Listen, what do we have to do with this?
Now, in my opinion, Mr Manafort, that is his name, he was initially accused of having something to do with Russia’s interference in the presidential election in the United States. It turned out that just the opposite was true: in fact, he had connections to Ukraine. And he had some issues with Ukraine. What do we have to do with this?
You know, we have no desire to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. But if you are interested in talking about this, I would like to widen the scope of our discussion.
Megyn Kelly:I want to go through it. I do want to go through it. If we can do it step by step that would be more clear for the viewers who are following us. Let me ask you this: you say the Russian Federation did not order it. Do you condone these activities?
Vladimir Putin: We do not condone or order. But I say that there are internal political processes in the United States itself and there are people who wanted to achieve some result. They could have used some tools in other countries: such technologies exist. They could have sent relevant information from France, from Germany, from Asia, from Russia. What do we have to do with this?
Megyn Kelly:But it was not the Russians.
Vladimir Putin: Well, all right, Russians, but they were not state officials. Well, Russians, and so what? The are 146 million Russian people, so what?
Megyn Kelly:What have you done to satisfy yourself with that fact?
Vladimir Putin: What fact?
Megyn Kelly:What have you done to satisfy yourself that it was not Russians? You suggest maybe it was Americans, maybe it was the French. What have you done to satisfy yourself that the 13 Russian nationals who have just been indicted, those three Russian companies, including, as you pointed out, some of your close friends, were not behind this? This has caused an international incident.
Vladimir Putin: I know that they do not represent the Russian state or the Russian government. And I have no idea what they did and what they were guided by. Even if they did something, then our American colleagues should not just say something in interviews with the media but give us specific data, with proof. We are ready to consider it and talk about it. But you know what I would like to say…
Megyn Kelly:That would be great. Will you extradite them to the United States?
Vladimir Putin: Never. Just like the United States, Russia does not extradite its citizens anywhere. Have you ever extradited any of your citizens? This is my first point.
Second, I do not believe anything illegal was committed.
And, third, we have repeatedly suggested that the United States and Russia establish relations in this area and sign a corresponding interstate treaty on extraditing criminals. The United States has evaded this proposal and does not want to sign it with Russia. What are you hoping for? That we will extradite people to you whereas you will not? This is not a proper way to go about international affairs.
There is more to it. Please listen to me and take to your viewers and listeners what I am about to say. We are holding discussions with our American friends and partners, people who represent the government by the way, and when they claim that some Russians interfered in the US elections, we tell them (we did so fairly recently at a very high level): ”But you are constantly interfering in our political life.“ Would you believe it, they are not even denying it.
Do you know what they told us last time? They said, ”Yes, we do interfere, but we are entitled to do so, because we are spreading democracy, and you are not, and so you cannot do it.“ Do you think this is a civilised and modern approach to international affairs?
Yesterday, you and I talked about nuclear weapons, and that once the United States and the Soviet Union realised that they were moving towards possible mutual destruction, they agreed on rules of conduct in the security sphere given the availability of weapons of mass destruction. Let us now agree on how to behave in cyberspace, which never used to have such a big role and scope.
Megyn Kelly:Okay, so let me ask you: you have stated explicitly you believe that America interfered in Russian elections, right?
Vladimir Putin: We made a proposal to the United States, our partners back during President Obama’s watch: let us agree on how we build our relations, develop common rules acceptable for all, and adhere to them in cyberspace.
The first reaction of the Obama Administration was negative, but then, at the very end of his presidential term, they told us: ”Yes, it is interesting, let us talk about it.“ But again, everything disappeared and vanished in some swamp. Well, let us agree on this, we are all for it.
Megyn Kelly:Okay, so let me ask you: you have stated explicitly you believe that America interfered in Russian elections, right?
Vladimir Putin: The US does this all the time.
Megyn Kelly:But Russia did not interfere in America’s election?
Vladimir Putin: No, and there are no plans in Russia to do so. It is impossible. It is impossible for us.
Megyn Kelly:Why not? Why wouldn’t you?
Vladimir Putin: First, we have principles whereby we do not allow others to interfere in our domestic affairs and do not poke our noses into other people’s business. This is a principle we have. This is the first point I wanted to make.
My second point is that we do not have a comparable number of tools.
Megyn Kelly:Come on. Come on.
Vladimir Putin: No, we simply cannot do that.
Megyn Kelly:You told me just yesterday, because we were amping our missile defence systems, we have to respond in kind with increased nuclear technology. Now you want me to believe that we attacked your Russian elections and you say, we are going to take that road.
Vladimir Putin: This is not a matter of missiles. This is a completely different area.
In addition, we lack the necessary instruments.
Megyn Kelly:Cyber warfare.
Vladimir Putin: This is a completely different area of activity. It has nothing to do with cyber warfare. Russia does not have the kind of tools the US has. We do not have global media outlets comparable to CNN. You think we do? We have Russia Today, and nothing else. This is the only Russian media outlet, and even then, it was designated…
Megyn Kelly:Is that cyber tools?
Vladimir Putin: You keep interrupting me, this is impolite.
Megyn Kelly:Forgive me, sir.
Vladimir Putin: We have one media outlet, Russia Today, and even it was designated as a foreign agent so that it is unable to do its work properly. It is the only media outlet of this kind, while the US has a whole range of outlets, and immense possibilities online. The internet is yours. The United States control all the internet governance tools, all located on US territory. Do you think that a comparison can be made in any way? This is simply impossible. Let us come together and agree on the rules of conduct in cyber space. But it is the US who refuses to do so.
Megyn Kelly:David and Goliath. The Mueller indictment is very specific about what the Russians were doing. There is a specific email, a damning email that is cited therein by a female Russian who appears to have been caught red-handed. She says as follows, “We had a slight crisis here at work. The FBI busted our activity. Not a joke. So I got preoccupied with covering tracks together with the colleagues. I created all these pictures and posts and the Americans believe that it was written by their people.” And now you want to sit here and say you do not have the tools to do it? That we have the market cyber interference? This is just not true.
Vladimir Putin: I do not even understand what you are talking about. You see, this is just nonsense. The US Congress analysed the information from Russian sources that appeared online. The information coming from media outlets like Russia Today was also analysed and turned out to be one hundredth of a percent of the overall information flow in the United States, just one hundredth of a percent. Do you think that this fraction had any impact on the election? This is just nonsense, don’t you see? This is the same old business when the people who lost refuse to admit it. You see, I have commented on this on a number of occasions. It has yet to be seen what the US policy toward Russia will be like under the current administration. Many things remain unclear, since we have not yet been able to start working or to establish normal contacts.
However, it is absolutely clear that the current US President adopted a specific stance in terms of domestic policy, and decided to reach out to the people who were ready to support his campaign promises. This is what led to his victory, not any kind of outside interference. To claim otherwise makes no sense. Will anyone believe that Russia, a country located thousands of kilometres away, could use two or three Russians, as you have said, and whom I do not know, to meddle in the elections and influence their outcome? Don’t you think that it sounds ridiculous?
Megyn Kelly:Now you are talking about causation. But I am still on whether you did it. And it is not true that you do not know the individuals who were accused of conducting this. One of your good friends is actually accused of helping conduct this. His name is Yevgeny Prigozhin. Do you know him?
Vladimir Putin: I know this man, but he is not a friend of mine. This is just twisting the facts. There is such a businessman; he works in the restaurant business or something. But he is not a state official; we have nothing to do with him.
Megyn Kelly:After you heard about him being indicted, did you pick up the phone and call him?
Vladimir Putin: Certainly not. I have plenty of other things to worry about.
Megyn Kelly:He is your friend. He has been indicted.
Vladimir Putin: Did you hear what I just said? He is not my friend. I know him, but he is not a friend of mine. Was I not clear? There are many people like that. There are 146 million people in Russia. That is less than in the US, but it is still a lot.
Megyn Kelly:He is a prominent businessman.
Vladimir Putin: A prominent businessman? So what? There are many prominent people in Russia. He is not a state official, he does not work for the government; he is an individual, a businessman.
Megyn Kelly:Some people say his real job is to do your dirty work.
Vladimir Putin: Who are those people? And what dirty work? I do not do any dirty work. Everything I do is in plain view. This is your prerogative; some people in your country enjoy doing dirty work. You think we do the same. That is not true.
Megyn Kelly:It is a) the fact that you know him, you admit that. He is a prominent Russian businessman. And he is specifically accused of running this operation; b) this is the same man who has been accused of sending Russian mercenaries into Syria and they attacked a compound held by American back militia. This guy gets around.
Vladimir Putin: You know, this man could have a wide range of interests, including, for example, an interest in the Syrian fuel and energy complex. But we do not support him in any way. We do not get in his way but we do not support him either. It is his own personal initiative.
Megyn Kelly:You did not know about it?
Vladimir Putin: Well, I know that there are several companies, several Russian companies there, maybe his among others, but this has nothing to do with our policy in Syria. If he does anything there, he does not coordinate it with us; he probably coordinates it with the Syrian authorities or the Syrian businesses he works with. We do not interfere in this. Does your government interfere in every step your businesses take, especially small businesses? It is essentially a medium-sized business. So, does your president interfere in the affairs of every medium-sized US business? That is just nonsense, isn’t it?
Megyn Kelly:If the 13 Russian nationals plus three Russian companies did in fact interfere in our elections, is that okay with you?
Vladimir Putin: I do not care. I do not care at all because they do not represent the government.
Megyn Kelly:You do not care?
Vladimir Putin: Not at all. They do not represent state interests. If you are worried about anything, state it officially, send us documents proving it and explain what exactly those people are accused of. We will see if they have violated Russian laws…
Megyn Kelly:I did that.
Vladimir Putin: No, this is not true. If they violated Russian law, we will prosecute them. If they did not, there is nothing to prosecute them for in Russia. But after all, you must understand that people in Russia do not live under US law but under Russian law. This is how it is. If you want to reach an agreement with us, let us negotiate, choose the subject, make an agreement and sign it. But you refuse to do this. I am telling you for the third time: we have proposed working together on cyberspace issues. But the US refuses to work like this and instead throws 13 Russians to the media. Maybe they are not even Russians, but Ukrainians, Tatars or Jews, but with Russian citizenship, which should also be checked: maybe they have dual citizenship or a Green Card; maybe, the US paid them for this. How can you know that? I do not know either.
Megyn Kelly:I will give you one piece of evidence. Andrei Krutskikh is an advisor to the Kremlin when it comes to cyber issues. In his speech to an information security forum in February 2016, he reportedly said, quote, “I am warning you. We are on the verge of having something in the information arena which will allow us to talk to the Americans as equals.” What do you think he meant? Because it certainly sounds like a threat right before an election hack.
Vladimir Putin: Sometimes I think you are joking.
Megyn Kelly:No, I am deadly serious.
Vladimir Putin: A man says something about how he sees our contacts and our work with our foreign partners, the US in this case, in a certain area. I have no idea what he said. Ask him what he meant. Do you think I control everything?
Megyn Kelly:He is an advisor to the Kremlin on cyber.
Vladimir Putin: So what? There are 2,000 people working in the administration; do you think I control everyone? Peskov is sitting in front of me, he is my press secretary and he sometimes says things that I see on television and think, what is he talking about? Who told him to say this?
I have no idea what he said. Ask him. Do you really think I can comment on everything administration or government personnel say? I have my own work to do.
Megyn Kelly: I think when it comes to our two countries you know exactly what is going on. And this is Russia’s problem now. It is. The heads of the US intelligence agencies just testified to Congress that Russia, Russia poses the greatest threat in the world to the American security, greater than ISIS. You cannot get the sanctions lifted. The relationship between our two countries is nearly non-existent right now. Did not this interference, whether you knew or you did not know about it, backfire against Russia?
Vladimir Putin: Listen, you are exaggerating. I do not know about someone saying something and I am not going to comment on it, and neither do I follow what is going on at your Congress.
I am more interested in what is going on at the State Duma, if they have approved a bill on a healthcare or utilities issue; if they delay certain discussions or not. Is a special interest lobbying against a nature conservation, or forestry, or environmental law? This is what I am interested in. You should follow what they are discussing in Congress; I have enough on my plate without that.
Megyn Kelly: You know that the sanctions have not been lifted. You know that the relationship between our two countries is at not an all-time low but is getting there. And this is in part the reason. And so, Russian interference in the American elections is important.
Vladimir Putin: Listen, sanctions have nothing to do with the myth of some Russian interference in the US election. Sanctions are about something else entirely: the desire to halt Russia’s progress, to contain Russia. This policy of containing Russia has been pursued for decades, on and off. Now it is back. It is a misguided policy, which not only affects Russian-US relations but also US businesses because it frees up space for their competitors on our market.
You and I were at the St Petersburg Economic Forum. The largest business delegation was from the US. People want to work with us, but they are not allowed to; they are contained in order to contain Russia. They have been contained and contained so that our defence industry cannot develop, among other things. We discussed this yesterday. Did they manage to achieve anything? No, they did not: they have never managed to contain Russia and never will. It is simply, you know, an attempt with tools that…
Megyn Kelly:Can we contain Russia in cyber warfare?
Vladimir Putin: I think it is impossible to contain Russia anywhere. You need to understand this. Listen, you cannot even contain North Korea. What are you talking about? Why would you do that? Why do we have to contain, attack or cast suspicion on each other? We are offering cooperation.
Megyn Kelly:That is my question to you. That is my question to you. Why, why would you interfere in our election time and time again? And why would not you, for that matter? Let me put it to you that way. You have spent a day, every time I have seen you, in St Petersburg, in Moscow and now here in Kaliningrad, telling me that America has interfered in Russia’s electoral process and that Russia has a robust cyber warfare arsenal. And yet you want us to believe that you did not deploy it. Do you understand how implausible that seems, sir?
Vladimir Putin: That does not seem implausible to me at all, because we do not have such a goal, to interfere. We do not see what we have to gain by interfering. There is no such goal. Let us suppose this was our goal. Why, just for the sake of it? What is the goal?
Megyn Kelly:Creating chaos. That is the goal.
Vladimir Putin: Listen to me. Not long ago President Trump said something absolutely correct. He said that if Russia’s goal was to sow chaos, it has succeeded. But it is not the result of Russian interference, but your political system, the internal struggle, the disorder and division. Russia has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Get your own affairs in order first. And the way the question is framed, as I mentioned – that you can interfere anywhere because you bring democracy, but we cannot – is what causes conflicts. You have to show your partners respect, and they will respect you.
Megyn Kelly:You once said, Mr President, that you believed the interference in our election was done by some patriotic Russians. An answer like that, you understand, will lead people to ask, are you the patriotic Russian?
Vladimir Putin: I am the President of the Russian Federation. It is my constitutional duty to address a host of issues concerning the protection of Russia’s interests. When I spoke of patriotic people, I meant that you can imagine that, in the face of a deteriorating Russian-US relationship, people – and people use cyberspace – will express their points of view, their opinions, including on this global network. Of course, they are free to do so. How can we really prohibit it? But we cannot control it and, most importantly, we are not directing it. Please note that this is not the position of the Russian state.
Megyn Kelly:You cannot? The Russian intelligence services cannot find out who is doing this, bring it to your attention? You are unable to stop it?
Vladimir Putin: Perhaps if we looked into it carefully we would find those people, if they exist. But we have no such goal. We propose holding official talks and you refuse. So what do you want? For us to open investigations just because Congress said so? Let us sit down, sign an agreement on working in cyberspace and comply with it. How do you want to do it? There is no other way of conducting international affairs.
Megyn Kelly:So you have no goal to stop it. So what does that mean for our elections in 2018 and 2020? We can expect more of the same?
Vladimir Putin: I did not say that stopping it is not a goal. I said we had…
Megyn Kelly:You just said that.
Vladimir Putin: No, I did not. I said we do not interfere in our people’ private lives and cannot stop them from expressing their opinion, including on the internet. But I also said that Russia’s official position is that we do not interfere in the political processes of other countries as a state. That is the most important part. I want it to be recorded in our conversation today, for people in the US to understand this.
Megyn Kelly:And forgive me, but I am trying to get to one level below that, whether you have the goal of stopping your own citizens from behaving in this manner, which has undermined relationships between our two countries?
Vladimir Putin: I want to say that we will stand in the way of everything that violates Russian law or our international agreements. For the third or fourth time, I will say that we are ready to sign a corresponding agreement with the United States. You still refuse. Let us sit down at the negotiating table, identify what we consider important, sign the document and comply with it with proper verification.
Megyn Kelly:You are the President, sir. Respectfully, I still did not hear an answer about whether you want to crack down on the Russians who committed those crimes. It sounds like the answer is no. If I am wrong, please correct me. I understand you want a negotiation with the United States directly. But internally, you could put a stop to this if you had the desire.
Vladimir Putin: I want you to listen to me. We will counter anything that violates current Russian law. If the actions of our citizens – no matter what they are and whom they target – violate current Russian laws, we will respond. If they do not violate Russian law, we cannot respond.
Megyn Kelly:With this?
Vladimir Putin: With anything. If no Russian law has been broken, no one can be held accountable.
Megyn Kelly:Will this violate Russian law?
Vladimir Putin: I must look at what they have done. Give us the materials. Nobody has given us anything.
Megyn Kelly:You know this. Hacking into the Democratic National Committee, hacking into John Podesta’s email, creating interference in our election by creating bots that spread false information on Twitter, on Facebook. Spreading this information when it comes to Black Lives Matter, when it comes to the shooting we just had in Parkland, Florida, when it comes to our presidential election. Spreading fake news in order to alter the course of the presidential race. That is what I am talking about.
Vladimir Putin: With all due respect for you personally and for the body of the people’s representatives, the US Congress – and we treat all these people with respect – I want you to really understand this. Do you have people with training in law? Of course, you do. One hundred percent. Highly educated people. We cannot even launch an investigation without cause. Our conversation today or an inquiry in the US Congress is not sufficient cause. Give us at least an official inquiry with a statement of facts, send us an official paper. After all, a conversation on air cannot be grounds for an investigation.
Megyn Kelly:The intelligence agencies in the United States, now a special prosecutor with a criminal indictment – that is not enough for you to look into it?
Vladimir Putin: Absolutely not. If you do not have legal training, I can assure you that an inquiry is required for this.
Megyn Kelly:I do.
Vladimir Putin: Then you should understand that a corresponding official inquiry should be sent to the Prosecutor-General’s Office of the Russian Federation. That said, we do not even have a treaty on how to proceed. But send us something in writing at least.
Megyn Kelly:Vladimir Putin could not order an investigation into whether this was done in a way that undermines its relations with a major partner, the United States of America?
Vladimir Putin: Give us something in writing, an official inquiry. We will look at it.
Megyn Kelly: You said that the last time and now I am back with an indictment.
Vladimir Putin: There is nothing in writing. Send an inquiry to the Prosecutor-General’s Office. It is necessary to go through official channels rather than with the help of the media and harsh words in the US Congress, levelling accusations against us that are totally unsubstantiated. Give us something in writing.
Megyn Kelly:Let me ask you this: you were President back in 2001 when the FBI arrested one of its own, Robert Hanssen, for spying for the Russian Federation. In retaliation, President George W. Bush kicked 50 illegit Russian spies out of the United States, and the Kremlin did the same, throwing 50 Americans out of the US Embassy in Moscow immediately. This is a tradition that goes back for decades. December 2016: after our intelligence agencies agreed that Russians interfered in our election President Obama expelled dozens of Russians and seized two Russian-owned properties. And yet, you did nothing, you did nothing in response. Why not?
Vladimir Putin: We believed and I still believe that there were no grounds for this whatsoever. This is the first point.
Secondly, this was done in clear violation of international law and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The totally groundless seizure of our property constitutes a flagrant violation of international law. We were strongly hoping for a response from the new Administration. But since none is forthcoming – and I have already said this and the Foreign Minister repeated this – we will turn to the appropriate courts of the United States to protect our interests.
Megyn Kelly:Let me ask you about President Trump. Any time he says anything about you it is supremely deferential. Never a harsh word for you. Although if you look at the ways he speaks about members of his own party, even members of his own staff, never mind of the other political leaders, he frequently personally insults them. Why do you think he is so nice to you?
Vladimir Putin: This is not about being nice to me personally, in my view. I think he is an experienced person, a businessman with very extensive experience and he understands that if you need to partner with someone, you must treat your future or current partner with respect, otherwise nothing will come of it. I think this is a purely pragmatic approach. This is my first point.
Second, even though this is his first term as President, he is a quick study, and he understands perfectly well that trading accusations or insults at our level is a road to nowhere. It would just mean depriving our countries of their last chance for dialogue, simply the last chance. This would be extremely unfortunate.
You may have noticed that I, for my part, show respect to him and all my other colleagues, not only in the United States, but also Europe and Asia.
Megyn Kelly:You may, but the truth is our President has referred to the leader of North Korea as “little rocket man.” So he is not quite as diplomatic depending on who he is talking about. I am sure you saw that, yes?
Vladimir Putin: Yes, I did. You are aware of our position on that account. We urge everyone to show restraint.
Megyn Kelly:So what do you think of President Trump?
Vladimir Putin: The question is not entirely appropriate, because President Trump’s work should be assessed by his constituents, the American people. There is one thing I would like to say: like it or not – we may dislike certain things as well – he does his best to keep the election promises that he made to the American people. So, he is consistent in this sense. I think that, in fact, this is the only proper way to show respect for the people who voted for him.
Megyn Kelly:He has praised your leadership. Is he an effective leader?
Vladimir Putin: Well, again, this is up to the American people to decide. He has strong leadership qualities, of course, because he takes responsibility when he makes decisions. To reiterate, whether some people like his decisions or not, he still goes ahead and does it. This, of course, is a sign of leadership qualities.
Megyn Kelly:Do you ever read his tweets?
Vladimir Putin: No, I do not.
Megyn Kelly:Do you ever tweet?
Vladimir Putin: No.
Megyn Kelly:Why not?
Vladimir Putin: I have other means of expressing my point of view or making decisions. Well, Donald is a more modern person.
Megyn Kelly:Would you say he is more colourful than you are?
Vladimir Putin: Maybe.
Megyn Kelly:Let me ask you one question going back to the election interference issue. There are two theories on you at least. One is that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State you felt that she interfered with the elections here in 2011 and 2012, inciting protests here, including against you and it made you angry. Two is when the Panama Papers were leaked showing a massive money trail that led to you and some of your associates that that was the last drop for you. Do either of those things make you angry?
Vladimir Putin: This is complete nonsense. Speaking about Hillary, I know her personally, and we generally always maintained a good dialogue every time we met. I cannot understand why at some stage… Her advisers probably suggested that she focus part of her election campaign on criticising developments in Russia. Well, it was their choice. I never took it personally. It was just their policy.
As for all those files, this is complete nonsense. They mention some of my friends. So what? As you know, this has had no effect whatsoever. This is nothing but nonsense and media chatter. I have forgotten all about it. I do not remember what it was all about. Actually, nothing of this kind can make me angry. I am guided by pragmatic considerations, not emotions.
Megyn Kelly:Since you mention it, a friend of yours was mentioned in those Panama Papers. Let me ask you about him. Sergei Roldugin. Legend has it that this guy introduced you to your ex-wife, that he is the godfather to one of your daughters. He is a cellist by trade, right?
Vladimir Putin: Yes, I know him very well. He is a friend and a wonderful musician. He has devoted his life to art and music. By the way, many artists here are also involved in business one way or another. Apart from me, Sergey also has other ties in the country, including business people who have involved him in this work. He has made his money legally. He has not made hundreds of billions [of dollars]. Everything he earned he has spent on the purchase of musical instruments abroad, which he has brought to Russia. He uses some of these instruments personally, for example the cello. He plays the cello.
Megyn Kelly:A $12 million Stradivarius.
Vladimir Putin: Yes, something like that. But it is a unique instrument.
Megyn Kelly:That is a lot of money.
Vladimir Putin: Yes, it is. He must be eccentric, but then, all artists are eccentric. To spend all this money on musical instruments. I think he bought two cellos and two violins. He plays one himself and has given the others to other musicians, who are playing them. He has brought all these instruments to Russia.
Megyn Kelly:According to the Panama Papers, this mass of series of leaked documents about offshore bank accounts, he has got assets, this cellist, of at least a $100 million, including a one-eighth stake in Russia’s biggest TV ad agency, a $6 million yacht, a stake in a truck manufacturer, a 3-percent interest in a Russian bank. He must be one heck of a musician.
Vladimir Putin: Well, I know nothing about his business, but I do know that he has only enough money to buy these musical instruments. All the rest is on paper. He does not have anything else apart from what he has bought. Maybe he does have something else, but you should ask him about it. I do not control his life.
Megyn Kelly:But the question is how a cellist makes that much money? People ask it because many people believe that is really your money.
Vladimir Putin: Listen, just look at many Russian art figures, and probably there are people like this in your country as well. After all, there are art personalities in the US, including Hollywood celebrities who either run restaurants or own some stock. Aren’t there many people like this in the US entertainment industry and art world? I am sure that there are many people of this kind, and more than in Russia. In Russia, there are also quite a few art figures who do business apart from their creative work. In fact, there are many such people, and he is just one of them. So what? The question is not whether he runs a business or not or whether he made a profit or not. The question is whether there were any violations. As far as I know, he did not commit any violations.
Megyn Kelly:That is right. There is no issue with making money. I am an American, we are capitalists. The question is whether that is really your money.
Vladimir Putin: This is not my money, that is for sure. I do not even know how much Mr Roldugin has, as I have already said. As far as I know, he has not committed any violations in his business and creative undertakings, he did not violate any Russian law or norm.
Megyn Kelly:Speaking of money, back in the 1980s and 1990s, in the wake of multiple bankruptcies, the Trump Organisation found it hard to secure loans in the United States and looked elsewhere. Mr Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., said that ten years ago and I quote, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Were you aware of the degree of Russian money flowing into properties?
Vladimir Putin: This is all nonsense. There were no investments in Trump properties in Russia, as far as I know. I do not even know if there were any serious plans for making these investments.
Megyn Kelly:Come on.
Vladimir Putin: Look, you keep thinking that the whole world revolves around you. That is not the way it is.
Megyn Kelly:It is not about me. It is about what Donald Trump Jr. says.
Vladimir Putin: Do you think we know everything what Donald Trump’s son has said? You see, this is not the way things are. Donald came here to Russia when he was not even nominated. I did not even know that he had been to Russia. I learned about it only afterwards, when I was told that as it turned out he had been to Russia. By the same token, I ignore what his son said on this occasion. Did Donald Trump’s son infringe on any rules or laws? If so, charge him. If he did not, why do you keep picking on every word?
Megyn Kelly:Years ago, before Donald Trump ran for president, he said he knew you and he spoke with you a lot. Is that true?
Vladimir Putin: No, I had never met him. You mean before he became President and before he decided to run for President, right?
Megyn Kelly:Before he ran.
Vladimir Putin: No, we had not met. We never talked to each other, neither by phone or otherwise.
Megyn Kelly:You are poised to be re-elected for your fourth term as president here in Russia, right?
Vladimir Putin: We will see what the Russian voters decide.
Megyn Kelly:How does somebody like Vladimir Putin, who is as popular as you are here in Russia, feel any threat from Navalny? I realise he has got in legal trouble, but could you pardon this guy and let him mount a meaningful challenge to you?
Vladimir Putin: As for the question about whom I could work together with and whom I would not want to work together with, I can tell you in all honesty that I would like to and am ready to work with people who want Russia to become a stronger, more effective, competitive and self-reliant country. But to achieve that, the people we are talking about should have a clear plan of action designed to promote national development in today’s environment. There are people like that, including …
Megyn Kelly:But Navalny is such as man and has a fair amount of popularity here in Russia.
Vladimir Putin: Any person can be pardoned if he deserves it.
Megyn Kelly:Why don’t you?
Vladimir Putin: If he deserves it. There are no exceptions for anyone. No exceptions. But we are not talking about pardon now; we are talking about certain political forces. They do not have a development programme for the country. What do they have that is positive and what I like? That they expose problems, and this is actually good, this is the right thing to do, and it needs to be done. But this is not enough for the country’s progressive development, simply not enough. Because focusing on problems is not enough; moreover, it is even dangerous, because it can lead to destruction, while we need creation.
Megyn Kelly:Our political analysts tell me you are exactly right about your chances in the upcoming election, that you have no meaningful opponents so you will likely win. What is next after that? The Chinese President just abolished term limits. Is that something you would ever do?
Vladimir Putin: I do not think that I should talk about my political plans with you now at this meeting, in this conversation, in this interview for American television. But I think I told you yesterday, I never changed the Constitution or adjusted it to my needs, and I do not have any such plans today.
As for China, before criticising decisions in a country like China, you need to think and recall that there are 1.5 billion people living there and, after thinking about it, you need to come to the conclusion that we all are interested in China being a stable and prosperous state. How it should be done best, it is probably up to the Chinese people and the Chinese leadership.
Megyn Kelly:Can you leave power? Because some of the experts that we have spoken to have said it would be near impossible for you because someone in your position would likely either be thrown in jail by your adversaries or worse. They say it is actually sad that you will have to stay in power in order to stay well.
Vladimir Putin: What your so-called experts say is their wishful thinking. I have heard a lot of nonsense like this. Why do you think that I will necessarily be succeeded by people ready to destroy everything I have done in recent years? Maybe, on the contrary, a government will come to power determined to strengthen Russia, to create a future for it, to build a platform for development for the new generations. Why have you suddenly decided that some destroyers would arrive and wipe out whatever they can? Maybe there are people who would like this, including in the United States. But I do not think they are right, because the United States, I think, should be more interested in the other option – in Russia being a stable, prosperous and developing country, I mean if you really can look at least 25–50 years ahead.
Megyn Kelly:Have you groomed a successor? Is there anyone in mind?
Vladimir Putin: I have been thinking about this since 2000. Thinking is not a crime, but in the end, the choice will still be up to the Russian people. Whether I like or hate someone, other candidates will run for president and eventually the citizens of the Russian Federation will make the final decision.
Megyn Kelly:Let me ask you a bit about Syria. Do you believe the chemical weapon attacks in Syria are fake news?
Vladimir Putin: Of course.
Firstly, the Syrian Government destroyed its chemical weapons long ago.
Secondly, we know about the militants’ plans to simulate chemical attacks by the Syrian army.
And thirdly, all the attempts that have been made repeatedly in the recent past, and all the accusations were used to consolidate the efforts against Assad. We are aware of these goings-on, and they are not interesting. One wants to say, “Boring.”
Megyn Kelly:The bodies of dead children thanks to sarin gas attacks? That is boring?
Vladimir Putin: Are you sure that these deaths are the result of chemical attacks by the Syrian Government? I, on the contrary, blame this on the criminals and radicals, on the terrorists who are staging these crimes in order to lay the blame on President Assad.
Megyn Kelly:That is not what the United Nations has concluded. They autopsied the bodies of the dead children. Your Foreign Minister suggested it was all made up. Do you believe that?
Vladimir Putin: Of course. I am absolutely sure that it was. Because there was no serious investigation.
Megyn Kelly:There were no dead bodies?
Vladimir Putin: Maybe there were dead bodies, which is to be expected in a war. Look how they liberated Mosul: it was razed to the ground. Look how they liberated Raqqa: the dead have not yet been removed from the ruins or buried. Do you want to talk about this?
Megyn Kelly:That is what we call whataboutism. That is you pointing to somebody else’s bad behaviour to justify your wrong or that of your ally. We are talking about Assad and dead children thanks to sarin gas. Sarin gas. And you are telling an international audience it never happened?
Vladimir Putin: Look here, to be sure that this was indeed how it happened, a thorough investigation must be conducted and evidence must be gathered at the site. Nothing of this has been done. Let us do this.
Megyn Kelly:Let us do it. They wanted to investigate the helicopters and the UN wanted to go and check the helicopters that were on site. And Russia said no. Russia said no. Why?
Vladimir Putin: There was nothing of the kind. Russia did not say “No.” Russia is for a full-scale investigation. If you do not know this, I am telling you this now. It is not true that we are against an objective investigation. That is a lie. It is a lie just as the vial with the white substance that allegedly proved that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which the CIA gave to the US Secretary of State. He later apologised, but the damage had been done, the country had been ruined. This is yet another piece of fake news, which has no substance behind it. An investigation should be conducted to gather the substance. We are in favour of such an investigation.
Megyn Kelly:Since the beginning of the year, there have been at least four chlorine-based chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Our Secretary of State Tillerson just said that Russia bears the responsibility for this given your earlier promises to reign in chemical weapons attacks in Syria. Your response?
Vladimir Putin: I will tell you that a) we have nothing to do with this, and that we demand a full-scale investigation.
As for crimes, go back to Raqqa and at least bury the dead bodies, which are still lying amid the ruins after the air strikes at residential neighbourhoods there. And investigate these attacks. This will give you something to do.
Megyn Kelly:One of the questions that our audiences have is how do we walk this back? How do we get to the place where these two great nations are less adversaries and something closer to allies, which we clearly are not right now. Do you agree we are not?
Vladimir Putin: Unfortunately, we are not. But we were not the ones who made the US our adversary. It was the US, the US Congress, who called Russia its adversary. Why did you do that? Did Russia impose sanctions on the United States? No, it was the US that imposed sanctions on us.
Megyn Kelly:You know why.
Vladimir Putin: No, I do not. Can I ask you a different question? Why did you encourage the government coup in Ukraine? Why did you do that? The US directly acknowledged spending billions of dollars to this end. This was openly acknowledged by US officials. Why do they support government coups and armed fighting in other countries? Why has the US deployed missile systems along our borders?
Listen, Russia and the US should sit down and talk it over in order to get things straight. I have the impression that this is what the current President wants, but he is prevented from doing it by some forces. But we are ready to discuss any matter, be it missile-related issues, cyberspace or counterterrorism efforts. We are ready to do it any moment. But the US should also be ready. The time will come when the political elite in the US will be pushed by public opinion to move in this direction. We will be ready the instant our partners are ready.
Megyn Kelly:Before I leave you, what do you hope your legacy will be?
Vladimir Putin:I strongly believe that my legacy would be to create a powerful development momentum for Russia, and make the country a resilient and balanced democracy that is able to benefit from the latest advances of the technology revolution. We will keep up our efforts to improve our political system and the judiciary. And I am certain that all this, taken together, would strengthen the unity of the Russian Federation and the unity of our people, and enable us to move forward with confidence for years to come.
Megyn Kelly:Mr President, thank you very much for having us here.
Events in the US since President Trump agreed to South Korean President Moon’s proposal that he meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un show (1) the extent to which the US elite including large sections of the US government’s bureaucracy are willing President Trump to lose despite the huge damage this threatens the US; and (2) how President Trump’s foreign policy instincts are often superior to those of the foreign policy veterans or “adults” which whom he has become surrounded.
Firstly, it is now clear that President Trump’s decision to agree to President Moon’s proposal for a summit meeting with Kim Jong-un was his own.
Apparently when he was told of the proposal by the South Korean delegation which came to brief him about the talks the South Koreans had just had with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, he immediately and enthusiastically agreed to it without first consulting any of his advisers.
Moreover it seems his excitement was so great that he even let slip news of the big announcement which was coming at the Gridiron Dinner.
It seems that none of the key officials of the government – Secretary of State Tillerson (currently on a tour of Africa), Defense Secretary Mattis or National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster – were consulted.
Not only were key officials of the US government not consulted, but there is no secret about their concern and displeasure, whilst the US media is now united with expressions of concern that by agreeing to meet with Kim Jong-un President Trump has walked into some kind of trap. In his typical earthy way President Trump has even tweeted about it
In the first hours after hearing that North Korea’s leader wanted to meet with me to talk denuclearization and that missile launches will end, the press was startled & amazed. They couldn’t believe it. But by the following morning the news became FAKE. They said so what, who cares!
Not surprisingly, there are already attempts to hedge the summit meeting with preconditions, with White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders already talking about unspecified ‘concrete steps’ North Korea must take place before the summit meeting can happen at all
The president will not have the meeting without seeing concrete steps and concrete actions take place by North Korea, so the president will actually be getting something
It is also being said – apparently in all seriousness – that President Trump’s agreement to meet with Kim Jong-un reverses a previously unknown US policy not to meet with North Korea’s leaders lest this might lend them ‘legitimacy’.
Apparently Kim Jong-un’s father Kim Jong-il had repeatedly sought a summit meeting with the US President, only for his requests to be spurned by the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
All I would say about that is that I have never heard of such a policy before, but that if such a policy does exist then it is wrong, has visibly failed, and should be immediately reversed.
Suffice to say that when Kim Jong-il apparently first requested a summit meeting with US President Bill Clinton in the 1990s North Korea did not have nuclear weapons or intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Now it has both.
In other words refusing to meet with North Korea’s leaders has not denied them ‘legitimacy’; it has merely made them pursue their strategic weapons programme more aggressively, resulting in the opposite outcome to the one intended.
If President Trump has indeed reversed a policy of not meeting with North Korea’s leaders, then he should be commended – not criticised – for reversing a policy which has utterly and completely failed.
In any event this criticism ignores the fact that this latest proposal for a summit did not originate with the North Koreans. It clearly comes from the South Koreans whose President Moon Jae-in is looking to President Trump for political cover so that he can press ahead with his dialogue with the North.
Refusing the proposal for a summit would deal a major political blow to President Moon Jae-in, quite possibly inclining him to cut the US further out of the steps he is taking to pursue dialogue with the North, which cannot be in the US’s interests.
US critics of the Trump-Kim summit need to understand that the US is not the only player in this game and that it is a mistake to see this is as a one-to-one confrontation between North Korea and the US.
Not only are the South Koreans taking an active and independent role in the diplomacy, but President Trump himself has just got a call from a very powerful player with a big stake in the game who will have made it very clear that he wants the summit to go ahead.
That player was no less a person than Chinese President Xi Jinping, who took time off from a key meeting of China’s National People’s Congress to telephone President Trump in order to make clear China’s wish that the Trump-Kim summit takes place and that progress towards a comprehensive settlement of the Korean conflict takes place.
Speaking by telephone, Xi told Trump that he appreciates the US president’s desire to resolve the Korean Peninsula issue politically, hoping that the United States and the DPRK will start dialogue as soon as possible and strive for positive results.
Xi added that he hopes all parties concerned will show goodwill and avoid doing anything which might affect or interfere with the improving situation on the peninsula, calling on them to maintain the positive momentum on the Korean Peninsula issue.
Xi also told Trump that China and the United States should focus on cooperation, control differences, promote win-win economic cooperation, and push for new advancement of bilateral relations in the new year.
Regarding the situation on the Korean Peninsula, Trump said the nuclear issue has shown positive development recently, adding that a high-level meeting between the United States and the DPRK meets the interests of all parties, hoping for an eventually peaceful solution to the nuclear issue.
It has been proved that President Xi is right to insist on a dialogue between the United States and the DPRK, Trump said, adding that the US side highly appreciates and values China’s significant role in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue, and is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China over the issue, Trump said.
Xi pointed out that China remains persistent in denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, maintaining peace and stability on the peninsula, and resolving the nuclear issue through talks.
At present, the positive changes in the situation on the Korean Peninsula are conducive to putting the denuclearization process back on the right track of settlement through dialogue, which is also in line with the direction set by UN Security Council resolutions concerning the DPRK, Xi said.
“I believe that as long as all parties adhere to the general direction of political and diplomatic settlement, we will surely push forward the Korean Peninsula issue in the direction that the international community has been looking forward to,” Xi said. (bold italics added)
It is unusual for Xinhua to quote words Xi Jinping actually used in a telephone call with another world leader, yet this is what it has just done in relation to the conversation Xi Jinping and Donald Trump have just had with each other. Moreover the words which Xinhua has quoted make clear China’s concern that the dialogue be continued.
On any objective assessment the storm of anger and criticism that the news of the Trump-Kim summit has provoked is baffling.
The critics have no alternative to offer other than the same policy of endless confrontation that has failed so dismally up to now.
As for the summit itself, what exactly is it that they fear? President Trump is hardly in a position to give the whole US position away. No one is expecting a comprehensive settlement of the whole conflict emerging from a single summit, and it is absurd to talk as if that is what might happen. Months and probably years of hard negotiating lie ahead.
However if a negotiation is going to succeed the parties must at some point meet, and that is all the South Koreans and the North Koreans are proposing, and all that President Trump has agreed to.
Personally I cannot escape the feeling that the true cause of the alarm of at least some of the critics of the proposed Trump-Kim summit is that they do not want President Trump – who they have spent years ridiculing as an infantile narcissist – to prove them wrong by achieving a major diplomatic success. President Trump’s tweet which I have quoted above shows that he thinks the same.
However there is almost certainly a more sinister agenda at work as well.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that some people in the US do not want to see the confrontation with North Korea end, not just because they balk at the idea of the US making concessions and because the Korean conflict is for the US’s military industries highly lucrative but because they fear that an end to the Korean conflict might undermine the US’s position in the north east Pacific and might result in South Korea going its own way.
Some of the criticisms which have been made of the President Trump’s agreement to attend the Trump-Kim summit look suspiciously like the start of a campaign by these people to abort prospects for a Korean settlement.
Given the entrenched positions these people hold in the US government and in the US media, there is no guarantee they will fail, and no guarantee that in the face of the obstacles they are putting before it the Trump-Kim summit will take place.
It is to be earnestly hoped that President Trump this time sticks to his decision and presses ahead with the summit. As I have said previously, a great opportunity to make the deal of his life stands before him. In his own interests and in the interests of the US he should not spurn it but seize it.
For the popular US cable news network MSNBC, the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world is apparently not worth much attention—even as the US government has played a key role in creating and maintaining that unparalleled crisis.
An analysis by FAIR has found that the leading liberal cable network did not run a single segment devoted specifically to Yemen in the second half of 2017.
And in these latter roughly six months of the year, MSNBC ran nearly 5,000 percent more segments that mentioned Russia than segments that mentioned Yemen.
Moreover, in all of 2017, MSNBC only aired one broadcast on the US-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemeni civilians. And it never mentioned the impoverished nation’s colossal cholera epidemic, which infected more than 1 million Yemenis in the largest outbreak in recorded history.
All of this is despite the fact that the US government has played a leading role in the 33-month war that has devastated Yemen, selling many billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, refueling Saudi warplanes as they relentlessly bomb civilian areas and providing intelligence and military assistance to the Saudi air force.
With little corporate media coverage from MSNBC or elsewhere, the US—under both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump—has staunchly supported Saudi Arabia as it imposes a suffocating blockade on Yemen, diplomatically shielding the draconian Gulf dictatorship from any form of punishment as it has plunged millions of Yemeni civilians into mass hunger and pushed the poorest country in the Middle East onto the brink of famine.
1 Mention of Saudi Airstrikes; No Mention of Cholera
A favorite theme of MSNBC coverage
FAIR conducted a thorough analysis of MSNBC‘s broadcasts archived on the Nexis news database. (The figures in this report are derived from Nexis.)
In 2017, MSNBC ran 1,385 broadcasts that mentioned “Russia,” “Russian” or “Russians.” Yet only 82 broadcasts used the words “Yemen,” “Yemeni” or “Yemenis” in the entire year.
Moreover, the majority of the 82 MSNBC broadcasts that mentioned Yemen did so only once and in passing, often simply as one nation in a longer list of nations targeted by President Trump’s travel ban.
Of these 82 broadcasts in 2017, there was only a single MSNBC news segment devoted specifically to the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen.
On July 2, the network ran a segment on Ari Melber’s The Point (7/2/17) entitled “Saudi arms deal could worsen Yemen crisis.” The three-minute broadcast covered many of the important points about US support for the catastrophic Saudi war in Yemen.
Yet this informative segment stood alone in the entire year. A search of the Nexis database and the Yemen tag on MSNBC‘s website shows that, in the approximately six months after this July 2 broadcast, the network did not devote another segment specifically to the war in Yemen.
A search of MSNBC broadcasts also shows that, while the network would sometimes within the same broadcast mention both Yemen and airstrikes, it did not—aside from Ari Melber’s lone segment—acknowledge the existence of US/Saudi coalition airstrikes on Yemen.
MSNBC only notices airstrikes in Yemen when aimed at Al Qaeda
The closest the network otherwise came was in a March 31, 2017 segment on the Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell, in which Joy Reid said, “And as the New York Times reports, the United States launched more attacks in Yemen this month than during all of last year.” But Reid was referencing a New York Times report (3/29/17) on US airstrikes on Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (which numbered in the dozens), not US/Saudi coalition airstrikes on Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen (which numbered in the thousands).
While ignoring the US/Saudi coalition airstrikes and the thousands of civilians they killed, however, MSNBC did report on Houthi attacks on Saudi warships of the coast of Yemen. In his show MTP Daily (2/1/17), Chuck Todd favorably covered the anti-Iran posturing of Trump and National Security advisor Michael Flynn. He misleadingly spoke of the Houthis as Iranian proxies and gave former US diplomat Nicholas Burns a platform to claim, “Iran is a violent troublemaker in the Middle East.” On February 1 and 2, Chris Hayes also reported on the Houthi attack.
MSNBC was eager to highlight attacks by US official enemies, yet the tens of thousands of air sorties Saudi Arabia has launched in Yemen—with weapons, fuel and intelligence from the US and UK—were made almost entirely invisible by the network.
Years of US/Saudi coalition bombing and blockade of Yemen likewise decimated the poor country’s health system, plunging it into a cholera epidemic that has killed thousands of people and broken all previous records. MSNBC did not once acknowledge this catastrophe either, according to a search on Nexis and MSNBC‘s website. Cholera was only mentioned on MSBNC in 2017 in the context of Haiti, not Yemen.
Only Interested When Americans Die
While MSNBC did not bother to mention Yemen’s cholera epidemic, it did express lots of interest in a disastrous Navy SEAL raid President Donald Trump approved in the country, which left an American dead. Particularly early in the year, the network devoted substantial coverage to the January 29 raid, which killed dozens of Yemeni civilians and one US soldier.
A search of the Nexis database shows that MSNBC mentioned the Trump-approved US raid in Yemen in 36 distinct segments in 2017. All of the network’s major shows produced segments that focused on the raid: MTP Daily on January 31 and March 1; All In on February 2, February 8 and March 1; For the Record on February 6; The Last Word on February 6, 8 and 27; Hardball on March 1; and the Rachel Maddow Show on February 2, February 3, February 23 and March 6.
But after this raid left the news cycle, so too did Yemen. A search of Nexis and the Yemen tag on the MSNBC website shows that, excluding Ari Melber’s lone July segment, the latest segment MSNBC devoted specifically to Yemen in 2017 was the Rachel Maddow Show‘s March 6 report on the SEAL raid.
The message conveyed is clear: to the leading liberal US cable news network, Yemen is relevant when it is Americans who die—not when thousands of Yemenis are killed, bombed daily by Saudi Arabia, with US weapons, fuel and intelligence; not when millions of Yemenis are on the verge of starving to death while the US/Saudi coalition uses hunger as a weapon.
The conclusion that only Americans’ lives are newsworthy is confirmed by the fact that Trump launched another disastrous raid in Yemen on May 23, in which several Yemeni civilians were once again killed. But American soldiers did not die in this raid, so MSNBC had no interest. The network did not devote coverage to this second botched Yemen raid.
Constant Attention to Russia
According to a Nexis search of the network’s broadcasts from January 1 to July 2, 2017, “Yemen,” “Yemeni” or “Yemenis” were mentioned in 68 MSNBC segments—nearly all of which were related to the SEAL raid or the list of countries targeted by Trump’s Muslim ban.
In the approximately six months from July 3 through the end of December, the words “Yemen,” “Yemeni” or “Yemenis” were only uttered in 14 segments. In most of these segments, Yemen was mentioned just once in passing.
Thousands of MSNBC segments last year mentioned Russia
In this same 181-day period in which MSNBC had no segments devoted specifically to Yemen, the terms “Russia,” “Russian” or “Russians” were mentioned in a staggering 693 broadcasts.
This is to say, in the latter half of 2017, MSNBC aired 49.5 times more—or 4,950 percent more—segments that spoke of Russia than segments that spoke of Yemen.
In fact, in the four days from December 26 to December 29 alone, MSNBC said “Russia,” “Russian” or “Russians” nearly 400 times in 23 separate broadcasts, on all of the network’s major shows, including Hardball, All In, Rachel Maddow, The Last Word, Meet the Press Daily and The Beat.
The day after Christmas featured an onslaught of Russia coverage. On December 26, the words “Russia,” “Russian” or “Russians” were uttered a staggering 156 times in the broadcasts from 5 pm EST to 11 pm. The following is the breakdown of the number of mentions of Russia:
33 times on MTP Daily at 5 pm
6 times on The Beat at 6 pm
30 times on Hardball at 7 pm
38 times on All In at 8 pm
40 times Rachel Maddow at 9 pm
9 times on The Last Word (with Ari Melber filling in for O’Donnell) at 10 pm
On this one day, MSNBC mentioned Russia almost twice as many times in six hours of coverage than it mentioned Yemen in all of 2017.
Passing References
While MSNBC did not have a segment devoted specifically to the war in Yemen other than Ari Melber’s lone July broadcast, the country was sporadically mentioned in passing.
Chris Hayes briefly acknowledged Yemen a few times, although he did not devote a segment to it. In the May 23 broadcast of All In, the host did point out, “We have been arming and supporting the Saudis as they pursue a proxy war in Yemen against Shia rebels, the Houthis.” Aside from the fact that the supposed Saudi/Iran proxy war in Yemen to which Hayes apparently alludes is a misleading talking point that has been fueled by the US government and intelligence agencies and obediently echoed by corporate media (FAIR.org, 7/25/17), Hayes still did not recognize the US/Saudi coalition airstrikes that have killed thousands of civilians.
In a June 29 interview on All In, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour additionally spoke out on behalf of “Yemeni refugees who are victims of a proxy war that we’re funding.” Hayes added, “Who are starving to death, because we’re essentially funding the Saudis to hold them under siege.” This was the rare moment in which MSBNC acknowledged the Saudi blockade of Yemen—but, again, no mention was made of the US-backed Saudi airstrikes that have killed thousands of Yemenis.
On July 5, Chris Hayes spoke using extreme euphemisms, stating, “Since taking office, the president has been swayed to take Saudi Arabia’s side in its dispute with Yemen.” Looking beyond the fact that “dispute” is an outrageous understatement for a brutal war that has led to the deaths of tens of thousands, Hayes failed to point out that former president Barack Obama, like Trump, staunchly supported Saudi Arabia as it bombed and besieged Yemen.
Rachel Maddow also again briefly mentioned the botched January US raid in Yemen in her broadcasts on April 7 and 24. So too did Hayes on October 16.
On MTP Daily on December 6, Chuck Todd similarly spoke of Yemen in passing, observing:
It is interesting, Tom, that the president seems to have these Gulf State allies. He is giving them basically carte blanche a little bit on what they’re doing in Yemen, is sort of looking the other way.
But that is it. Aside from Ari Melber’s one-off July segment, in 2017 MSNBC had no other coverage of the US-backed war that has created the largest humanitarian catastrophe in the world.
What is striking is that MSNBC is clearly extremely critical of Donald Trump, yet it has passed on one of the best opportunities to condemn his policies. Instead of covering some of Trump’s worst, most violent actions—his acts of war that have left many thousands of civilians dead—MSNBC has ignored Trump’s Yemeni victims.
Perhaps this is because it was a Democratic president—Barack Obama, a favorite of MSNBC—who first oversaw the war in Yemen for nearly two years before Trump entered office. But MSNBC‘s right-wing rival, Fox News, has shown again and again that it has no problem attacking Democrats for doing what Republicans did before them.
You can send a message to Rachel Maddow at Rachel@msnbc.com (or via Twitter: @Maddow). Chris Hayes can be reached via Twitter: @ChrisLHayes. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
London was not a coincidental choice of Saudi Arabia’s new Crown Prince for his first official visit to the Western world. The UK has been deeply involved in the brutal war the Saudis are waging on Yemen.
When it began three years ago this month, the then-foreign minister Philip Hammond explained that Britain’s policy was to support the war “in every practical way short of engaging in combat.”
He has been true to his word. Since then, not only has Britain licenced over £6 billion ($8.3 billion) worth of military equipment, but has supplied no less than 166 personnel to assist the Saudi arms forces, including several officers deployed in the air-force control room, advising on targeting. Britain provides training to Saudi air-force pilots and battlefield skills to Saudi infantry – including, it was recently revealed, training specifically tailored to Yemeni terrain. On the diplomatic front, the UK has repeatedly used its position on the UN Security Council to block UN investigations into war crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition, much to the disgust of many of its European partners. In sum, Yemen is being destroyed by British-made missiles, dropped from British planes, by British-trained pilots.
As the eminent international lawyer Philippe Sands QC told a UK parliament select committee, – as the UK government continues to do – “that the United Kingdom is not involved” in the Yemen war. This involvement is not limited to mere support, however, what is becoming increasingly clear is that Britain is playing a leading role in the war’s strategic direction.
In late 2016, the “Yemen Quartet” was set up – a ministerial-level grouping of the four main powers responsible for the war – the UK, the US, the KSA, and the UAE. Their meetings have been sporadic, but over the past four months, they have become much more frequent, usually at Britain’s behest. But what is particularly noteworthy is that every single major strategic shift in the war’s execution in recent months has coincided with a meeting of the Quartet called by Boris Johnson. Clearly, the Foreign Office mandarins responsible for planning the Yemen war have been working overtime.
On November 29, Theresa May was in Riyadh, meeting with King Salman. At the same time, Johnson was hosting a meeting of the Quartet, attended by the foreign ministers of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, along with the US under-secretary of state. That very day, the forces of former president Ali Abdullah Saleh turned on their erstwhile allies in the Houthi-led Ansar Allah movement in what was heralded as the most significant shift in the war to date.
A few days later, on December 2, Saleh announced his formal defection to the Saudis, a move immediately followed by the launching of a new offensive aimed at the Houthi-held port city of Hodeidah under the auspices of a newly created military alliance between the UAE and the Saudis. Saleh’s defection was supposed to tip the balance against the Houthis, but his assassination two days later left his forces in disarray, allowing the Houthis to more firmly secure the areas under their control.
Nevertheless, the move had clearly been well coordinated with the powers waging war on Yemen, with intense Saudi airstrikes immediately launched in support of Saleh’s move against the Houthis. Meanwhile, the Saudis wanted to know that the offensive on Hodeidah – which had been vigorously opposed by aid agencies as likely to create a famine, and had even been blocked by President Obama when suggested the previous year – had the blessing of their Anglo-American sponsors.
The simultaneous meetings in London and Riyadh were precisely such a demonstration of that support. Less than two weeks after this meeting, and just four days into the new Red Sea offensive, Boris Johnson was in Abu Dhabi, discussing the Yemen war with the most powerful figures in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, their Crown Princes Mohammad bin Salman and Mohammad bin Zayed, followed by another meeting of the Quartet.
On January 23, the Quartet met again, this time in Paris, and again at the instigation of Boris Johnson. This came hot on the heels of the UN’s humanitarian response plan published three days earlier, which explained that the war had driven a further one million people to brink of famine since last year (leaving a total of eight million facing extreme malnutrition), and pushed another 3.5 million to dependence on aid, reaching a total of over 22 million – three-quarters of the population.
Clearly a PR offensive was going to be necessary. The groundwork had already been laid by the Saudi’s “Yemen Comprehensive Humanitarian Operations” plan, announced to the media the day before the Quartet meeting by a British PR company made up of former employees of the disgraced Bell Pottinger. The plan, which proposes to tighten up the blockade of Houthi-controlled ports – a blockade which is already helping to starve 130 children to death every day – essentially dresses up new war crimes as nothing more than heartfelt philanthropy.
Just three weeks later, on February 15, Johnson called another meeting of the Quartet – attended for the first time by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. This meeting occurred as coalition forces had been making slow but steady progress through Hodeidah province and were poised to take their battle to Hodeidah city itself. Once again, such a devastating move for the Yemeni population meant all four powers sought reassurance that the planned slaughter had the blessing of all the others at the highest governmental level.
The following day, the UK put forward a motion to the Security Council praising Saudi Arabia and the UAE for their humanitarian efforts in Yemen, and on February 20, the Emirati press announced that the push on Hodeidah city would begin within days, to be led by Saleh’s nephew. The four protagonists were united in their plans to intensify the strangulation of the Yemeni people.
The reasons for this deep British determination to wage war on Yemen go back over a century, when Britain decided to help the Saudi family secure their rule of the peninsula in the knowledge that their sectarianism and lack of popular legitimacy would make them forever dependent on outside colonial support. The one potential thorn in the side to this plan has always been Yemen, whose population outnumber those of every other country on the peninsula put together, and whose historic civilization appears to give the Sauds an inferiority complex.
The British have always understood that an independent Yemen is the greatest threat to Western domination of the Arab peninsula, and have consistently sought to smash the possibility every time it rears its head. This week’s meeting shows that even the obliteration of the entire country is deemed acceptable in pursuit of this goal.
Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and ‘austerity’. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.
Speech of Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on February 16th, 2018, during the commemoration of Hezbollah’s martyred leaders (Sheikh Ragheb Harb, Sayyed Abbas Musawi, Hajj Imad Mughniyeh)
Transcript:
[…] In Palestine, the US blockade against the Palestinian people continues. (US) funding of UNRWA is blocked, the aid granted to the Palestinian Authority, which has various social, financial, everyday life responsibilities, etc., gets cut, Palestinian Resistance movements and their leaders are placed on the list of terrorist organizations, new sanctions are taken by the US Congress against Palestinian movements, and still more pressure, but what continues to give hope, and we must underline it and support it strongly, is that the Palestinians unanimously reject the decision of Trump (regarding Al-Quds/Jerusalem) and the Palestinians unanimously (reject) the submission to the so-called “Deal of the century”(sponsored by Trump). Such are their public positions.
And in recent weeks, the Palestinian people have proposed (Resistance) examples. I’ll just give 3 names.
The martyr, son of a martyr, Ahmad Jarrar. It is a particularly prominent and worthy model that not only the Palestinian people but the whole (Islamic) Community should follow. One single young, (Resistance) cadre, facing the Israeli army, its arrogance and its security services, this fighter was (heroically) martyred.
Second, a young woman. The media present her as a child, but she is 17 years old, she is a young woman. The woman Ahed Tamimi, with her bold and courageous stand, she and her family (and the martyr Ahmad of course), the logic (of Resistance) of her father, we heard him in the media. This woman slapping Israeli soldiers and facing them, and facing the Court with her parents who encouraged her to continue to stay strong, to be brave and persevering.
Thirdly, Omar al-Abd, who was sentenced yesterday to four life prison sentences, and the prohibition of including him in any (future) exchange of prisoners, how did he welcome the four life imprisonment sentences? With a smile. And it angered (the Israeli Defense Minister) Lieberman. I noticed in particular the anger of Lieberman. Think of it: he gets condemned to 4 life sentences, they refuse to ever negotiate his release, and he welcomes it with a smile. This is the Palestinian people.
Why do we always talk hopefully of the future and horizon of this conflict? Because we place our hopes in such people. These three (Resistant figures) are the children of their communities, they are not isolated but are just like all Palestinians. […]
Last Sunday’s Oscar Awards were interrupted by an incongruous propaganda exercise featuring a Native American actor and Vietnam vet, featuring a montage of clips from Hollywood war movies.
The actor, Wes Studi, said that he “fought for freedom” in Vietnam. But anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of that war, including for instance the millions of viewers who watched Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary, knows that it was the Vietnamese who were fighting for freedom – while Studi and his comrades were fighting, killing and dying, often bravely and for misguided reasons, to deny the people of Vietnam that freedom.
Studi introduced the Hollywood movies he was showcasing, including “American Sniper,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty,” with the words, “Let’s take a moment to pay tribute to these powerful films that shine a great spotlight on those who have fought for freedom around the world.”
To pretend to a worldwide TV audience in 2018 that the U.S. war machine is “fighting for freedom” in the countries it attacks or invades was an absurdity that could only add insult to injury for millions of survivors of U.S. coups, invasions, bombing campaigns and hostile military occupations all over the world.
Wes Studi’s role in this Orwellian presentation made it even more incongruous, as his own Cherokee people are themselves survivors of American ethnic cleansing and forced displacement on the Trail of Tears from North Carolina, where they had lived for hundreds or maybe thousands of years, to Oklahoma where Studi was born.
Unlike the delegates at the 2016 Democratic National Convention who broke out in chants of “no more war” at displays of militarism, the great and the good of Hollywood seemed nonplussed by this strange interlude. Few of them applauded it, but none protested either.
From Dunkirk to Iraq and Syria
Perhaps the aging white men who still run the “Academy” were driven to this exhibition of militarism by the fact that two of the films nominated for Oscars were war movies. But they were both films about the U.K. in the early years of the Second World War – stories of British people resisting German aggression, not of Americans committing it.
Like most cinematic paeans to the U.K.’s “finest hour,” both these films are rooted in Winston Churchill’s own account of the Second World War and his role in it. Churchill was roundly sent packing by British voters in 1945, before the war was even over, as British troops and their families instead voted for the “land fit for heroes” promised by the Labour Party, a land where the rich would share the sacrifices of the poor, in peace as in war, with a National Health Service and social justice for all.
Churchill reportedly consoled his cabinet at its final meeting, telling them, “Never fear, gentlemen, history will be kind to us – for I shall write it.” And so he did, cementing his own place in history and drowning out more critical accounts of the U.K.’s role in the war by serious historians like A.J.P. Taylor in the U.K. and D.F. Fleming in the U.S.
If the Military Industrial Complex and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are trying to connect these Churchillian epics with America’s current wars, they should be careful what they wish for. Many people around the world need little prompting to identify the German Stukas and Heinkels bombing Dunkirk and London with the U.S. and allied F-16s bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and the British troops huddled on the beach at Dunkirk with the destitute refugees stumbling ashore on Lesbos and Lampedusa.
Externalizing the Violence of War
In the past 16 years, the U.S. has invaded, occupied and dropped 200,000 bombs and missiles on seven countries, but it has lost only 6,939 American troops killed and 50,000 wounded in these wars. To put this in the context of U.S. military history, 58,000 U.S. troops were killed in Vietnam, 54,000 in Korea, 405,000 in the Second World War and 116,000 in the First World War.
But low U.S. casualties do not mean that our current wars are less violent than previous wars. Our post-2001 wars have probably killed between 2 and 5 million people. The use of massive aerial and artillery bombardment has reduced cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Sirte, Kobane, Mosul and Raqqa to rubble, and our wars have plunged entire societies into endless violence and chaos.
But by bombing and firing from a distance with very powerful weapons, the U.S. has wreaked all this slaughter and destruction at an extraordinary low rate of U.S. casualties. The U.S.’s technological war-making has not reduced the violence and horror of war, but it has “externalized” it, at least temporarily.
But do these low casualty rates represent a kind of “new normal” that the U.S. can replicate whenever it attacks or invades other countries? Can it keep waging war around the world and remain so uniquely immune from the horrors it unleashes on others?
Or are the low U.S. casualty rates in these wars against relatively weak military forces and lightly armed resistance fighters giving Americans a false picture of war, one that is enthusiastically embellished by Hollywood and the corporate media?
Even when the U.S. was losing 900-1,000 troops killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan each year from 2004 to 2007, there was much more public debate and vocal opposition to war than there is now, but those were still historically very low casualty rates.
U.S. military leaders are more realistic than their civilian counterparts. General Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has told Congress that the U.S. plan for war on North Korea is for a ground invasion of Korea, effectively a Second Korean War. The Pentagon must have an estimate of the number of U.S. troops who are likely to be killed and wounded under its plan, and Americans should insist that it makes that estimate public before U.S. leaders decide to launch such a war.
The other country that the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia keep threatening to attack or invade is Iran. President Obama admitted from the outset that Iran was the ultimate strategic target of the CIA’s proxy war in Syria.
Israeli and Saudi leaders openly threaten war on Iran, but expect the U.S. to fight Iran on their behalf. American politicians play along with this dangerous game, which could get thousands of their constituents killed. This would flip the traditional U.S. doctrine of proxy war on its head, effectively turning the U.S. military into a proxy force fighting for the ill-defined interests of Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Iran is nearly 4 times the size of Iraq, with more than double its population. It has a 500,000 strong military and its decades of independence and isolation from the West have forced it to develop its own weapons industry, supplemented by some advanced Russian and Chinese weapons.
In an article about the prospect of a U.S. war on Iran, U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen dismissed American politicians’ fears of Iran as “alarmism” and called his boss, Defense Secretary Mattis, “obsessed” with Iran. Sjursen believes that the “fiercely nationalistic” Iranians would mount a determined and effective resistance to foreign occupation, and concludes, “Make no mistake, U.S.military occupation of the Islamic Republic would make the occupation of Iraq, for once, actually look like the ‘cakewalk’ it was billed to be.”
Is This America’s “Phony War”?
Invading North Korea or Iran could make the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan look in hindsight like the German invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland must have looked to German troops on the Eastern front a few years later. Only 18,000 German troops were killed in the invasion of Czechoslovakia and 16,000 in the invasion of Poland. But the larger war that they led to killed 7 million Germans and wounded 7 million more.
After the deprivations of the First World War reduced Germany to a state of near starvation and drove the German Navy to mutiny, Adolf Hitler was determined, like America’s leaders today, to maintain an illusion of peace and prosperity on the home front. The newly conquered people of the thousand-year Reich could suffer, but not Germans in the homeland.
Hitler succeeded in maintaining the standard of living in Germany at about its pre-war level for the first two years of the war, and even began cutting military spending in 1940 to boost the civilian economy. Germany only embraced a total war economy when its previously all-conquering forces hit a brick wall of resistance in the Soviet Union. Could Americans be living through a similar “phony war”, one miscalculation away from a similar shock at the brutal reality of the wars we have unleashed on the world?
How would the American public react if far greater numbers of Americans were killed in Korea or Iran – or Venezuela? Or even in Syria if the U.S. and its allies follow through on their plan to illegally occupy Syria east of the Euphrates?
And where are our political leaders and jingoistic media leading us with their ever-escalating anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda? How far will they take their nuclear brinksmanship? Would American politicians even know before it was too late if they crossed a point of no return in their dismantling of Cold War nuclear treaties and escalating tensions with Russia and China?
Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war was a response to the public reaction to what were in fact historically low U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. But Obama waged war on the quiet, not war on the cheap. Under cover of his dovish image, he successfully minimized the public reaction to his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his proxy wars in Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen, his global expansion of special operations and drone strikes and a massive bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria.
How many Americans know that the bombing campaign Obama launched in Iraq and Syria in 2014 has been the heaviest U.S. bombing campaign anywhere in the world since Vietnam? Over 105,000 bombs and missiles, as well as indiscriminate U.S., French and Iraqi rockets and artillery, have blasted thousands of homes in Mosul, Raqqa, Fallujah, Ramadi and dozens of smaller towns and villages. As well as killing thousands of Islamic State fighters, they have probably killed at least 100,000 civilians, a systematic war crime that has passed almost without comment in the Western media.
“… And It Is Late”
How will the American public react if Trump launches new wars against North Korea or Iran, and the U.S. casualty rate returns to a more historically “normal” level – maybe 10,000 Americans killed each year, as during the peak years of the American War in Vietnam, or even 100,000 per year, as in U.S. combat in the Second World War? Or what if one of our many wars finally escalates into a nuclear war, with a higher U.S. casualty rate than any previous war in our history?
In his classic 1994 book, Century of War, the late Gabriel Kolko presciently explained,
“Those who argue that war and preparation for it is not necessary to capitalism’s existence or prosperity miss the point entirely: it simply has not functioned in any other way in the past and there is nothing in the present to warrant the assumption that the coming decades will be any different…”
Kolko concluded,
“But there are no easy solutions to the problems of irresponsible, deluded leaders and the classes they represent, or the hesitation of people to reverse the world’s folly before they are themselves subjected to its grievous consequences. So much remains to be done – and it is late.”
America’s deluded leaders know nothing of diplomacy beyond bullying and brinksmanship. As they brainwash themselves and the public with the illusion of war without casualties, they will keep killing, destroying and risking our future until we stop them – or until they stop us and everything else.
The critical question today is whether the American public can muster the political will to pull our country back from the brink of an even greater military disaster than the ones we have already unleashed on millions of our neighbors.
Despite all the smoke and mirrors, most Americans seem to see where the stenographers of corporate capitalism are taking us. A recent Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans see media as “critical” or “very important” to democracy, only 28% see the corporatist mainstream news media (MSM) as actually supporting democracy. They’re right on both counts of course. The quality of a democracy is only as good as the information people have to make informed judgements about public policy and politicians.
Even as the mainstream news media continue to lose street cred, they persist in a rumor-saturated full court press against the “Trump-Putin presidency,” which only further exposes their lack of professionalism and increasing vulgarity. MSM management and their boardroom bosses have long understood that as long as they spice up their “nothing burger” news, ratings and advertising rates will keep them in business and please their commercial and government clients. Tabloid journalism, which can describe most American mainstream media these days, even when wrapped up as “all the news that’s fit to print,” is in constant search of sensation, scandal, gossip, and profit – and only occasionally in public-oriented investigative integrity.
What else does the citizenry have to say? A mere 18% have “a lot” of trust in the MSM, while 74% see them as “biased” (Pew Research, July 2016). A study by the Harvard-Harris polling organization in May 2017 confirmed this, finding that 65 percent of Americans consider the so-called “free press” biased, obsessed with scandal, and full of “fake news” and therefore cannot be trusted. Among the concurring are a majority of both Democrats (53%) and Independents (60%) as well as 80% of Republicans. Amongst the “informed public,” trust in American institutions in general, that is, the government, business, NGOs, and the MSM, is going through the worst crisis in recorded history, according to the marketing firm Edelman in 2018. The US is the lowest rated of the 28 countries surveyed by the firm on this measure. This is not consistent with the image of a serious “democracy.”
On the MSM coverage of national politics, Americans are equally skeptical. A June 2017 Rasmussen survey of likely American voters indicated that 50% think most reporters are prejudiced against the president, and only 4% believe most reporters are biased in Trump’s favor. Although this is weighted by the 76% of Republicans who support this view, the study also found that 51% of independent voters and even 24% of Democrats also agree. Aided by the billions of dollars of free, almost all negative, publicity the MSM provided, with apparent reverse effect during the presidential campaign, Trump’s standing is also supported by the 47 million American shock troops that faithfully follow him on Twitter.
On January 27, 2018, the Washington Post editorial board issued this statement: “A foreign power interfered in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. law enforcement is trying to get to the bottom of that story. Congress should be doing everything possible to make sure the investigation can take place.” Obviously referring to Russia, the Post’s declaration, as the late investigative journalist Robert Parry and many other independent and respected writers have pointed out, was and remains without a shred of evidence. It’s WMD time all over again, only this time the propaganda is being trumpeted mainly by the Democrats. It would better serve the cause of democracy to investigate the Post for its covert coalition and collusion with the deep state and the Clinton (right) wing of the Democratic Party. The Post and the rest of their pack have constructed a wicked Russia foil in order to undermine Moscow’s presumed ally Trump and boost bigger Pentagon budgets. It’s an extremely dangerous game that is headed toward military confrontation and massive annihilation by the yahoos in government and the liberal media.
But it’s not a new game, because despite their “free press” claims, American major news media have long been instruments of state propaganda. In the 1970s, Carl Bernstein exposed the fact that the overseas branches of US MSM had long served as eyes and ears of the CIA’s “Operation Mockingbird,” and it’s very likely than many amongst their ranks remain agency assets. Back then, Philip Graham, publisher of the Post, ran the agency’s media industry operations, a fact not mentioned in the currently showing eponymous film. During the GW Bush presidency, the Pentagon recruited over 75 military generals to spread propaganda in the mass media, fed in camera by leaders at the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department, and the White House. Their responsibilities included their employment as “objective” foreign policy and war analysts for major network and cable news channels, many of them concurrently receiving pay by military contracting firms. The Pentagon referred to the on-air military propagandists as “surrogates” and “message force multipliers.”
The Russians are Coming
In February 2018, former CIA director John Brennan, the man who fed the Russian “hacking” story to the House Intelligence Committee, became a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC in what has become standard revolving door practice between government and the corporate world. Brennan was a well-known advocate for the CIA’s rendition and torture program, spying on its critics, and its use of drone bombings and assassinations in the Middle East. And he certainly knows something about hacking, as he was forced to admit, after first lying about it, that his CIA hacked the computers of Senate staffers who were investigating the agency’s role in torturing prisoners. A man the MSM apparently regard as having impeccable credentials for truth telling.
If the Russia “hacking” story has no legs, the more interesting piece of news is the organized efforts of the Democrats and some Republicans to bring down Trump and turn over the White House to theocrat Mike Pence. Mainstream pundits and reporters are churning out unsubstantiated speculations about Russia and Trump by the hour. A number of Democrats, military brass, and mercenary journalist (and former country club caddy) Thomas Friedman have characterized alleged Russian intervention as a new “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11,” thereby building a case for war and for treason against the president. There’s no downside to making even the most absurd claims about Russia and Trump, no penalty for fabrications, misrepresentations, or getting facts wrong. If they were honest, their ledes might read: “This fictional news report is loosely based on a true story.” Or: “Any resemblance in this story to real people and events is merely coincidental.”
There’s room in the inferno for the Democrats’ deep state allies. Starting in mid-2015, Peter Strzok, the FBI’s H. Clinton personal email scandal investigator before taking the lead in the probe of Russian election interference, sent emails to his lover, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, which clearly revealed that both of them were actively working for the Clinton campaign to undermine Trump in any way possible. The pair also exchanged references to a “secret society” that was operating within the Department of Justice and the FBI to block a Trump victory. Until their exposure, Strzok had been Robert Mueller’s right hand man on the Trump-Russia investigation.
Meanwhile, two years later, the hunt for the smoking Kalashnikov continues. The best the MSM have come up with is that a St. Petersburg outfit called Internet Research Agency (IRA) placed $100,000 in ads on Facebook (compared to the $81 million Facebook ad spending by the Trump and Clinton campaigns), some of the Russian ads actually directed against Trump. As Jeffrey St. Clair pointed out in the pages of CounterPunch, in the key states where Clinton lost the election, the traditional Democrat strongholds of Michigan ($832 spent on token IRA buy ads), Pennsylvania ($300), and Wisconsin ($1,979), all but $54 of this amount was spent before the party primaries even started.
Facebook’s vice president for advertising Rob Goldman said that in fact most of the total Russian ad buys occurred after the presidential election. “We shared that fact,” he tweeted, “but very few [news] outlets have covered it because it doesn’t align with the main media narrative” about Trump’s election victory. Winning the election for Trump was simply not the Russian objective, Goldman says. Alex Stamos, Facebook chief security officer, concurred. The ads, he said, were more about sowing discord, with messages about guns, immigrants, and racial strife, than on pushing a particular candidate. Think about all the blockbuster American (and British) movies that portray Russians as sinister, violent, and criminal. For starters, remember über-teutonic Ivan Drago, Sgt. Yushin, the many sadistic “Russian” mafia nogoodniks, along with the Cold War-for-children cartoon characters, Boris Badanov and Natasha Fatale? Among the many Russophobic films and TV shows over the decades: The Americans, Air Force One, The Peacemaker, The Saint, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Red Heat, the James Bond flicks, and the 2018 Oscar for documentaries, Icarus. Soviet and Russia-era films, not well tutored in ethnic caricatures, have no comparable stereotypical American counterparts.
There are a few signs of life in mainstream journalism. New York Times correspondent Scott Shane was one of the few journalists who happened to notice that the US intelligence agency (the CIA, NSA, and FBI) report of January 6, 2017 on Russian “hacking” actually offered no evidence. “Instead,” he said, “the message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’” It took the mainstream media 6 months before they acknowledged that the Obama administration claim that 17 intelligence agencies backed the hacking claim was false, the real number was only 3, and even the NSA had only “moderate confidence” in the finding. Last January, the NSA made a significant alteration in its mission statement: it removed the words “honesty” and the pledge to be truthful from its list of priorities.
Even if there were genuine evidence that Russian officials had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager John Podesta emails, as originally claimed by the intelligence agencies, one should put this in context of the long history of the CIA’s efforts to overthrow many democratically elected leaders who had the temerity to stand up to the superpower. These would include Allende, Arbenz, Mossadeq, Lumumba, Chavez, Goulart, Ortega, and others. The list of US interventions in foreign elections just since 1948 (Italy) is voluminous. Do the mainstream media suffer amnesia about Victoria Nuland and John McCain’s presence in the Maidan, egging on the coup against Yanukovych or her infamous leaked phone call to the US ambassador in Kiev in which she dictated the ousted president’s successors? And is it reasonable to expect Russia to be passive about a hostile NATO putting troops along its borders and reacting to efforts to install an anti-Russian regime next door in the Ukraine? In this recent historical context, US accusations of Russian political interference smack of complete hypocrisy.
A study by Carnegie Mellon professor Dov Levin found that between 1946 and 2000 alone, the US intervened in foreign elections 81 times, which does not include its invasions, blockades, sanctions, assassination attempts, and other regime change initiatives. “The U.S. is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries,” he wrote. In 1996, the US intervened in the Russian election to prevent the Communist Party from returning to power. Have the MSM also forgotten the lies the government and the CIA told about Saddam Hussein’s WMD and connections to terrorist movements? Or that, thanks to Edward Snowden’s exposés, we know that Obama’s NSA bugged the phones of 35 foreign political leaders?
If the MSM are still confused, perhaps they should listen to former CIA director James Woolsey. Interviewed by Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Woolsey was asked directly whether the US ever interfered with other countries’ elections. He initially said, “probably, but it was for the good of the system in order to avoid the communists from taking over.” Ingraham followed up with the question, “We don’t do that now?” To this Woolsey responded, “nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, nyum, only for a very good cause,” a rather frank admission that merely amused Ingraham, who failed to follow up with this obvious statement of US double standards. After leaving the CIA, Woolsey became chairman of Freedom House, a right-wing government-supported private NGO that putatively supports human rights causes and has been active in regime change operations around the world – far more actively than merely doing Facebook postings.
William Binney, formerly with NSA as a high-level intelligence operative, subsequently becoming a whistleblower on the agency’s illegal surveillance operations, called the alleged Russian attacks on the DNC “a charade.” Speaking to Daniel Bernstein at Consortium News, Binney said that had any bulk transmissions come from across the Atlantic, the NSA would have known about it, as they tap every communication from abroad. The data from “Guccifer 2.0,” was a download “not a transfer across the Web,” which “won’t manage such high speed.” The intelligence agencies “have been playing games with us. There is no factual evidence to back up any charge of hacking here.” It was likely no more than a USB transfer, he said.
Is there any hope for the mainstream media to change? It would take a revolution to get the MSM to become more democratic. A Harvard Shorenstein Center report found that media coverage of the 2016 US party conventions contained almost no discussion of policy issues and instead concentrated on polling data, scandals, campaign tactics, and Trump and Russia bashing. Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, spoke for the media establishment: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS …. The money’s rolling in …. It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald.”
As Walter Cronkite would say, “And that’s the way it is.”
In January 2017 the Anti-Defamation League and Israel’s Reut Institute co-published a strategy paper that analyzed the movement for Palestinian rights and detailed diverse strategies to defeat it. The paper said that despite a “robust coordinated global effort” on behalf of Israel, increasing numbers of people were supporting Palestinian rights. Read this detailed document:
Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Liberty Report and RonPaulInstitute.org joins us today to discuss the State Department’s “Global Engagement Center,” an online troll farm dedicated to countering “foreign disinformation” on the web…with their own disinformation. We talk about the origins of the center and how it connects to the grander neocon-created #Russiagate disinfo campaign.
After a year and a half of seeking but not finding SARS-2 in any wildlife anywhere (apart from domesticated or zoo animals that appear to have caught it from humans) is it time to say, yes, it didn’t just escape from a lab. It was created, built, assembled in a lab. Or many labs
Coronavirus scientists have been constructing new viruses out of bits and pieces of other viruses for a long time.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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In January 2017 the Anti-Defamation League and Israel’s Reut Institute co-published a strategy paper that analyzed the movement for Palestinian rights and detailed diverse strategies to defeat it. The paper said that despite a “robust coordinated global effort” on behalf of Israel, increasing numbers of people were supporting Palestinian rights. Read this detailed document:
Aletho News
Aletho News 
