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Olaf Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto in ‘Foreign Affairs’ magazine

By Gilbert Doctorow | December 21, 2022

When I first read through Olaf Scholz’s comprehensive foreign policy essay “The Global Zeitenwende” recently published in Foreign Affairs magazine, it brought to mind another sensational manifesto from an international leader in the news published by this very same authoritative journal. That was an essay ‘written’ by then Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko for the late spring 2007 issue.

There are several things these two essays have in common aside from centrality of Ukraine and of Russian malevolence in their thinking about the world. Publication of the Tymoshenko article gave rise to accusations of plagiarism against her for lifting some well known phrases from the writings of Henry Kissinger without attribution. In the case of Scholz, there is a more subtle kind of ‘plagiarism,’ in that he, like Tymoshenko, is clearly not the sole author of the text published over his name. I will go into these matters in some detail below.

Another common feature is the extraordinary way in which these essays were crafted so as to slot into the susceptibilities and preferences of the American foreign policy establishment. The authors seem to have checked every possible box whether or not it was directly relevant to their overriding argument or to the nations they represent.

A third commonality is apt timing of the publication.  In the case of Tymoshenko, her fierce denunciation of Russia in which she deployed every calumny invented by the American Neo-Conservatives came just a few months after Vladimir Putin delivered his now famous speech on Russian claims against the US-led West at the Munich Security Conference. The sheer temerity of the Russian leader whose speech was witnessed by Senator John McCain and other American political worthies seated in the front rows left the U.S. Administration of George W. Bush infuriated and confounded over how to respond. As soon as they found their footing and their voice, they initiated what has ever since been a vast Information War directed against Russia.

Tymoshenko’s article in Foreign Affairs was the first cannon shot in this war of words. The publishers were most obliging, because such service to the State Department in disseminating a document they had to know was fake was the price they willingly paid to receive privileged access to high government officials on a regular basis and thereby provide value to their subscriber base at home and abroad numbering in the hundreds of thousands that makes FA the most widely read journal of its kind.

By giving pride of place to Scholz’s foreign policy manifesto today, when the will and strength of European solidarity with the USA over the war in Ukraine is top of mind and is being questioned by some in the mainstream media, FA continues this line of service to the powers that be.

******

I dealt with the peculiarities of the Tymoshenko manifesto in an essay dated 10 November 2009 that I published on my blog and then republished as a chapter (29) in my 2010 book Stepping Out of Line. In that piece, I used close textual analysis to show that many turns of speech and lines of thinking were utterly inconsistent with supposed authorship by a native Ukrainian of her generation while they were second nature to American political commentators.

In this same essay, I emphasized that the kind of misrepresentation practiced in the publication of Tymoshenko’s text by FA was not a one-off development in America’s war of words on Russia. I pointed to an Open Letter to the Administration of President Barack Obama published in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on 16 July 2009 that was signed by Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other well known thinkers and former statesmen who were behind the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination in the late 1980s. This appeal to the American President to ensure greater U.S. attention be given to the security of their region had a number of explicitly Russophobe points, including the insistence that Russia’s policy towards their countries was revisionist and threatening. Russia was said to be using overt and covert economic warfare in pursuit of its aims.

The context for the Open Letter was Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow a couple of weeks earlier to pursue the ‘reset’ of relations and achieve a rapprochement on several issues of strategic importance to the United States. Mainstream media, including The New York Times, carried the Open Letter.

The American public took it to be a cri de coeur of freedom fighters. In reality it was concocted by a team of ghost writers under the supervision of the German Marshal Fund and its boss Ron Asmus. This later came out in an expose written by Jacob Heilbrunn for the journal The National Interest.

For all of the above reasons, my first thoughts about possible American authorship of the Scholz manifesto had to be tested. However, the verdict of two German-speaking experts who examined the texts at my request was that German, not English was the source language and that the points made here were in line with what Scholz has said in speeches he has delivered around Germany in the past few weeks. And yet, I insist, that in its particulars the manifesto was made to appeal to the American readership of FA.

******

Olaf Scholz is notable for his cunning. In short order, as the days of the Merkel chancellorship faded, he leveraged his prominence as a regional politician (mayor of Hamburg) into national standing. And when the Social Democrats emerged from the last elections as the leading party, though one still without a majority in the Bundestag, he succeeded in putting together a governing coalition relying on The Greens. This fox of a man surely recognized The Greens as politically primitive and so, malleable to his purposes, whereas forging yet another Grand Coalition with the CDU/CSU, who would be peers in terms of experience in federal cabinets, would have limited his power. Indeed, the outcome has been a federal government in which the highly visible posts of Economic Affairs (Robert Habeck) and Foreign Affairs (Annalena Baerbock) were filled with utterly inexperienced and incompetent high-ranking Greens politicians whose missteps and foolish statements in public space have diminished the Greens’ weight in a government that the Chancellor dominates.

However, cunning is not the same thing as intellectuality. The author(s) of the manifesto published in Foreign Affairs magazine show a mastery of the skills required to write effective propaganda that you acquire in a political science milieu not in an administration responsible for governing one city on a day to day basis, as was the milieu of Herr Scholz for decades before he rose to the chancellorship.

Am I being unfair or pedantic in calling Scholz a plagiarist when he put his name to a paper written by a team under his direction possibly with inputs from overseas friends in the USA? Isn’t that what political leaders do regularly when they stand on the dais and read speeches that were written by their professional speech writers?

Yes, but speeches are not the same thing as contributions to a journal that is published by political scientists with academic credentials for political scientists with academic credentials.

This is plagiarism in a form that is all too widespread in German political culture. Over the past couple of decades there were a number of scandals involving high politicians there whose doctoral theses were exposed as ghost written or plagiarized in the formal sense of the word. This directly results from the high respect that Germans as a society give to the Herr Doktor moniker. Political aspirants with burning ambition are all too tempted to go for broke.

Had he wished to be more honest with his own people and with the world, Scholz could have said his manifesto was co-authored with one or more experts so that everyone could better judge where this thinking was coming from and challenges to the thinking would be less politicized. Joe Biden did as much when he published his own manifesto in 2017-2018 on “standing up to the Russians” in FA with Michael Carpenter presented as co-author.

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Now let us look at the content of the manifesto which is firstly a very carefully trimmed narrative of what over the past thirty years has brought us to the present turning point in the road, or “Global Zeitenwende,” and secondly, a road map to the future, which the author(s) say, in the subtitle to the manifesto, will enable us “to avoid a New Cold War.”

In their hands, the narrative of European and world history over the past thirty years is the story of Russian revanchism that exists in a vacuum, without context of provocations and escalations from the USA, the EU and other actors, and propelled by the animus of one man, Vladimir Putin.

The key message about Russian culpability for everything comes in a couple of paragraphs. The original sin was Putin’s evaluation of the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century.” From that the authors fast forward to Putin’s “aggressive speech” at the February 2007 Munich Security Conference, “deriding the rules-based international order as a mere tool of American dominance.” This was followed in short order by the war Russia launched against Georgia in 2008. And from there we are off to the races:

In 2014, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea and sent its forces into parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, in direct violation of international law and Moscow’s own treaty commitments. The years that followed saw the Kremlin undercut arms control treaties and expand its military capabilities, poison and murder Russian dissidents, crack down on civil society, and carry out a brutal military intervention in support of the Assad regime in Syria. Step by step, Putin’s Russia chose a path that took it further from Europe and further from a cooperative, peaceful order.

This imperial ambition imputed to the Russians culminated in the unprovoked and utterly illegal invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 to which Europe, and in particular Germany must respond by breaking entirely with past efforts at accommodation with Russia. Instead Germany must rearm and become the leading defender of Europe.

The authors walk a thin line between claiming European leadership for Germany and lauding the Americans for saving Europe presently from the Russian assault. They are giving the Americans exactly what Washington has been demanding for more than a decade: the commitment to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP.  The text even finds space to go into specific procurement items coming up, such as the “dual purpose” (meaning nuclear enabled) American F-35 warplane. Such details obviously are calculated to bring holiday cheer to the Washington establishment.

It is interesting that the manifesto speaks about avoiding a New Cold War when it is patently obvious that we are in the midst of exactly that and should count ourselves lucky that it has not yet escalated to a hot war that quickly becomes nuclear war. We may assume from the text that Scholz is holding out division into hostile blocs as the defining moment for a Cold War. And while formal declaration of anti-NATO alliances has not and may never emerge, the present reality is precisely the formation before our eyes of the Global South in confrontation with the Collective West. The Russia-Iran-China axis is there for all to see even if it is not a formally constituted military bloc. Moreover, a key constituent element of the Cold War, namely an ideological dimension, has in the past several years taken definitive shape in the notion of free democratic nations versus authoritarian nations. As for declaring a Cold War, what is there more to wait for?

Scholz’s manifesto completely distorts history to the point where it even overlooks the finding by the EU, following an investigation by then French President Sarkozy, that the Georgian War was caused by the military assault by Tbilisi on Ossetia, not by some unprovoked Russian attack on the Georgians. More importantly, it is totally blind to where his thinking would and may yet lead Germany and the world.

First, within Europe, his claim that Germany will be the leader of European defense and have the strongest military on the Continent goes directly in the face of a similar ambition of the Poles, the front-line state in the confrontation with Russia that will be receiving the greatest assistance of Washington, because the Poles, unlike the Germans, are putting their bodies on the line in the fight with the Russians over Ukraine.

The German leader’s hopes to become Washington’s closest ally by unquestioningly signing on to the American propaganda line also runs up against the ambitions of the French. It is no accident that the manifesto was issued so as to compete for attention with the visit of Emanuel Macron to Washington, in the knowledge that Macron was bringing to the overlords Europe’s complaints over unfair trading practices embedded in the latest Congressional legislation.

The biggest problem with Scholz’s road map at this Zeitenwende is that it is blind, as is Washington, to where the armed conflict on Ukrainian territory is taking us all. Ukrainian military victory is simply unattainable and sooner or later Kiev will fold. Scholz’s manifesto makes it plain that what lies ahead is what all sides are now calling a ‘long war.’

Yes, Germany will greatly expand its military spending and make amends for the pitiful forces of the present day Bundeswehr. However, the Russians will not go back to their bear caves and hibernate when the fighting stops in Ukraine. Indeed, what I now see is that progressively, over the past 300 days of warfare, Russian society has moved from consumerism and consolidated around patriotism. The ‘fifth column’ Liberals have now mostly left the country and moved to where their assets have long been kept in the West. Russian industry, under state direction, has risen to the challenge of supplying the army with equipment and munitions that are being expended at the highest daily rate since WWII. This trend will only accelerate going forward, as the Russian economy reorganizes on a war footing. Moreover, and most importantly, the small professional army that Russia built up from the start of Putin’s tenure in the presidency has been replaced conceptually by plans to develop an army scaled to offset the whole of European conventional forces. This means, as we have heard repeatedly from the host of the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk show, a standing army of three million men and women. And, against that coming force, Mr. Scholz’s Bundeswehr will be as pitiful in the future as it is today when facing Russia. Meanwhile, hopes for an even partial return to normality in relations between East and West on this Continent will be in vain, to the great loss of all sides.

© Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

December 22, 2022 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Leave a comment

Former Austrian vice-chancellor launches peace platform

Free West Media | December 20, 2022

The launch of a remarkable peace initiative has been reported from Austria. The initiator of the “Platform for Peace and Neutrality” is the former FPÖ boss Heinz-Christian Strache. On Monday, a highly acclaimed panel discussion took place in Vienna.

Guests included FPÖ veteran Andreas Mölzer, the former Liberal National Councilor Peter Fichtenbauer, AfD member of parliament Christina Baum, former Baden-Württemberg AfD member of parliament Heinrich Fiechtner and non-aligned Efgani Dönmez.

The motive for the event and the founding of his platform was that there were “no loud and audible peace initiatives,” explained Strache, who moderated the discussion. Russia is not being invited to the negotiating table, he added, blaming Western nations for not taking the initiative.

Former MEP Mölzer stated: “Nothing positive is being brought to the table from the European side at the moment.”

The panellists also agreed that Russia was being portrayed too negatively in the Western media. However, the causes of the war are much more complex, stated Mölzer. He added: “Not everyone who is critical [of the war], is a Putin supporter.”

For the AfD member of parliament Christina Baum, who had already spoken out in the Bundestag against Sweden and Finland joining NATO, Russia or Kremlin chief Putin was not responsible for the war in Ukraine. “The aggressor is the one who forces his opponent to take up arms,” ​​she quoted Frederick the Great as saying. Even before the war, she thought, “I hope Putin won’t lose his nerve,” because he was “permanently provoked”.

The former Greens and ÖVP member Dönmez, a representative from the camp of the mainstream parties also participated in the round of talks.

Dönmez pleaded for restraint and understanding towards Russia: “We are presented with a narrative, a story that we have to accept without thinking. As a mediator, I say: I would also like to understand Mr. Putin.” This also applies in the case of the Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and the Turkish President Erdogan. Instead, the West is deliberately escalating tensions.

The war is a proxy war of the great powers, said Dönmez. The EU only acts as a “vassal state” of the USA. Putin did them a favor with the war: the EU has now moved closer to the USA and has distanced itself from Russia, while the EU should actually pursue an independent peace policy, explained Dönmez.

Asked by moderator Strache whether Ukraine was the epitome of “Western values”, ex-AfD member of parliament Heinrich Fiechtner replied: “Unfortunately yes, it is – in all its corrupt amalgamation.”

The roundtable convened in Vienna also agreed that Austria’s neutrality should be upheld, which has been increasingly undermined since the beginning of the war. “I think joining NATO is the last thing the Austrians want,” Strache said. AfD MP Baum agreed and expressed the opinion that “it is very important that Austria remains neutral”. She wished the same for Germany, but chances are slim that Atlanticist politicians will abandon their course.

New enemies

While a year ago the unvaccinated and those who refused to wear masks were marginalized in society, today friends of Russia or critics of the war are the new enemy to be denunciated and discriminated against.

The deputy leader of the Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag Andrea Lindholz (CSU) has demanded a “reporting office” and a “nationwide situation report” on alleged Russian disinformation.

“The danger of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Germany must not be underestimated,” Lindholz is quoted as saying. “Especially now that everything is getting more expensive, there is a risk that people will become more receptive to pro-Russian fake news,” the CSU politician told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland.

Of course, it is particularly insidious when more and more alleged “fake news” turn out to be true as is currently being experienced with the Corona pandemic.

December 20, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

The Other Lab in Wuhan: The German-Chinese “Laboratory for Virus Research”

By Robert Kogon | Brownstone Institute | December 19, 2022

The “lab-leak” theory is enjoying a strong revival at the moment, thanks in part to Elon Musk having obliquely endorsed it in a Tweet while clearly point the finger at Anthony Fauci: “As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people.”

This despite the fact that an article in Science appeared to have already put the theory to rest over a year ago by showing that the initial cluster of Covid-19 cases in Wuhan was located on the opposite (left) bank of the Yangtze River from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is commonly supposed to be the pandemic’s epicenter according to the “lab-leak” theory.

But unbeknownst to most observers, there was in fact another infectious diseases lab in Wuhan, the German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity, and it is located on the same side of the river in the cluster.

The below map from the Science article makes the distance of the cluster from the two campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology clear – although the article itself coyly refrains from referring to the Institute.

Instead, the article shows that even if many of the earliest known cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan did not have any “epidemiologic link” to the famous Huanan wet market, the great majority of them were clustered in the vicinity of the market. This suggests – as per the quasi-official account – that the epidemic started in the market by way of animal-to-human (zoonotic) transmission and then spread to the surrounding area via “community transmission.”

Ergo, the “lab-leak” theory is dead.

Except that there is also an infectious diseases lab in the area of the cluster: the aforementioned German-Chinese Joint Laboratory of Infection and Immunity at Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College. The laboratory is a joint project of Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College and the University Hospital of Essen in Germany. Prof. Ulf Dittmar, chair of the virology department in Essen, has also referred to the joint laboratory as the “Essen-Wuhan Laboratory for Virus Research.”

(See interview here [in German]. It should be noted that in the cited interview, conducted in January 2020, Dittmar downplays the dangerousness of the novel Coronavirus and warns against “hysterical” reactions.)

Helpfully, the map from the Science article also indicates the locations of the Chinese host institutions of the joint laboratory: the Union and Tongji hospitals. Per the legend, they are indicated by crosses 5 and 6: right next to the home location of what the article identifies as “cluster 1,” an elderly husband and wife who represent “the earliest known case cluster and the only cluster admitted by 26 December. They had no known connection to Huanan Market.” (Red dots on the map indicate cases with a known connection to the market; blue dots those that have no known connection.) The Tongji Hospital is the closest to “cluster 1.”

Astonishingly, in early September 2019, only three months before the allegedly initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel paid a visit to none other than…Tongji Hospital in Wuhan. The hospital is also known as the German-Chinese Friendship Hospital.

A photo of Chancellor Merkel being welcomed by nurses at the hospital reception can be seen here. The accompanying article in the German newspaper Die Süddeutsche Zeitung notes another highly intriguing fact: the Essen University Hospital is not the only German teaching hospital with which Tongji has a “close partnership.”

It also has a partnership with the Charité Hospital in Berlin of Germany’s “state virologist” Christian Drosten! Drosten is the chair of the virology department at the Charité.

Now, it was none other than Christian Drosten who in mid-January 2020 – just a couple of weeks after the initial outbreak of Covid-19 just a stone’s throw from Tongji Hospital – devised the notoriously oversensitive PCR test that would become the “gold standard” for detecting the virus. Since Drosten’s PCR would also and especially be used to test people with no symptoms of the illness, it thus paved the way for the outbreak to obtain pandemic status.

Before the PCR test was adopted by the WHO, Drosten’s paper on it would be rushed through the peer-review process of the EU-funded journal Eurosurveillance in record time: going from submission to acceptance in anywhere from three-and-a-half hours to 27-and-a-half hours per the calculations of Simon Goddek.

According to accompanying tweets and Gettr posts in German, a photo that circulated on the two platforms earlier this year is supposed to show Drosten at a Tongji Medical College (or perhaps joint Tongji-Charité?) event. “What a coincidence,” some of the posts note ironically. (Here, for instance.) Many of the posts link a Charité webpage. But the link does not contain or no longer contains any such photo. It merely leads to generic information on a Charité-Tongji exchange program, thus leaving the source of the photo unclear.

Christian Drosten at Tongji Medical College event?

A Google search result from the Tongji website (see below) tantalizingly notes that a “Sino-German Disaster Medicine Institute, Charité University in Germay [sic.] and Tongji Hospital was officially opened in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, China.” But the indexed Tongji news article is not available nor is it cached, and the URL is not archived by the Wayback Machine either. Could this be the event at which Drosten is pictured? Perhaps Drosten could clarify.

In any case, thanks to a FOIA request, we know that Drosten participated in February 2020 email exchanges with Anthony Fauci and other international scientists about the possibility of a lab leak and that he was in fact, in contrast to other participants, particularly irritated about the hypothesis. Several of the others – including, n.b., Anthony Fauci – are clearly willing to entertain the possibility of a lab leak, and Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust even says that he is split 50:50 between lab leak and natural origin and that Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney is even 60:40 lab leak.

The doubts and open-mindedness of the other participants elicits an obviously pissy response from Drosten. “Can someone help me with one question,” he asks, “didn’t we congregate to challenge a certain theory, and if we could, drop it? …Are we working on debunking our own conspiracy theory?”

As the journalist Milosz Matuschek has pointed out in an article for the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, the FOIA release could prove to be a problem for Christian Drosten. For in a sworn statement to a German court, Drosten has insisted that he

had no interest in steering the suspicion about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a certain direction. In particular, I had and I have no personal interest in ruling out the so-called laboratory thesis as origin of the virus. If there were indications for the correctness of the laboratory thesis, I would vigorously defend it in the scientific and public discussion.

Prosecute/Drosten?

Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, a translator, and researcher working in Europe. Follow him at Twitter here. He writes at edv1694.substack.com.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Policy Implications Of The Energy Storage Conundrum

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 13, 2022

It occurs to me that before moving on from my obsession with energy storage and and its manifest limitations, I should address the policy implications of this situation. I apologize if these implications may seem terribly obvious to regular readers, or for that matter to people who have just thought about these issues for, say, five minutes. Unfortunately, our powers-that-be don’t seem to have those five minutes to figure out the obvious, so we’ll just have to bash them over the head with it.

Here are the three most obvious policy implications that nobody in power seems to have figured out:

(1) More and more wind turbines and solar panels are essentially useless because they can never fully supply an electrical grid or provide energy security without full dispatchable backup.

Here in the U.S. the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022 provides some hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and tax credits to build more wind turbines and solar panels. Simultaneously, the Biden Administration, directed by a series of Executive Orders from the President, proceeds with an all-of-government effort to suppress the dispatchable backup known as fossil fuels. Does somebody think this can actually work? It can’t.

And then there’s the December 6 press release from the UN’s International Energy Agency, touting how renewable energy sources (wind and solar) are being “turbocharged” to provide countries with “energy security.” The headline is: “Renewable power’s growth is being turbocharged as countries seek to strengthen energy security.” Excerpt:

The global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years. . . . “Renewables were already expanding quickly, but the global energy crisis has kicked them into an extraordinary new phase of even faster growth as countries seek to capitalise on their energy security benefits. The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the previous 20 years,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

Completely ridiculous. Wind and solar power provide the opposite of energy security. Back in the real world, just a few days after the IEA issued that nonsense, on December 11 the UK got a taste of the kind of “energy security” provided by wind and solar power, when a cold snap at the darkest part of the year came along with a prolonged period of calm in the winds — a typical winter occurrence. From the Guardian, December 11:

Live data from the National Grid’s Electricity System Operator showed that wind power was providing just 3% of Great Britain’s electricity generation on Sunday [December 11]. Gas-fired power stations provided 59%, while nuclear power and electricity imports both accounted for about 15%.

And what was the inevitable consequence of the wind conking out just when it was needed most?

UK power prices have hit record levels as an icy cold snap and a fall in supplies of electricity generated by wind power have combined to push up wholesale costs. The day-ahead price for power for delivery on Monday reached a record £675 a megawatt-hour on the Epex Spot SE exchange. The price for power at 5-6pm, typically around the time of peak power demand each day, passed an all-time high of £2,586 a megawatt-hour.

2,586 pounds/MWh would be equivalent to about $3 per kWh (wholesale), compared to a typical U.S. price for electricity of around 12-15 cents per kWh retail. Congratulations to the UK on achieving this level of “energy security.”

(2) The so-called “all of the above” energy strategy is equally disastrous.

In the U.S., Republicans sensibly looking to blunt the disastrous energy policies of the Democrats and the Biden Administration have somehow come up with something they call the “all of the above” strategy is their proposed alternative. For example, here is the webpage of the Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources, led by one Bruce Westerman of Arkansas. Excerpt:

Republicans support an all-of the-above energy approach that includes development of alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal and biomass, along with clean coal and American-made oil and natural gas. A comprehensive plan will help protect the environment and improve our economic and natural security.

No, no, no and no. Because of the impracticability and cost of energy storage, building more and more wind and solar facilities cannot lead to any reduction, let alone elimination, of the fossil fuel infrastructure. You will inevitably end up with two fully redundant energy systems, both of which must be paid for even though each supplies only about half of the power to the grid. Thus at the minimum you have doubled the cost of electricity to consumers. But the worst case is far worse than that, where the government suppresses the fossil fuel backup (as in the UK). In that case, when the fossil fuel backup has been reduced but is suddenly needed, the consumer may have to pay 10 or 20 or 30 or more times a reasonable price for electricity. All due entirely to government folly. Can the U.S. Republicans avoid the disastrous blind alley into which the UK Tories have driven their country? That remains to be seen.

(3) A carbon tax is a terrible idea.

Over at the GWPF (where I am the President of the American Friends affiliate), they are in the process of sponsoring a back-and-forth debate on the subject of carbon taxes as a way to address the issue of climate change. Professor Peter Hartley of Rice University has taken the side of advocating for a carbon tax. William Happer of Princeton and energy analyst Bruce Everett have taken the negative.

The gist of the Happer/Everett piece is that CO2 is not a pollutant and poses no danger to humanity, and therefore a tax designed to suppress it is unjustified. I agree with that argument. But an equally valid and independent line of reasoning is that, because of impracticability of energy storage and the consequent futility of trying to make wind and solar generation work without fossil fuels, a carbon tax can only serve to drive up the price of energy to consumers without meaningfully changing the use of carbon fuels.

As much as all three of these policy prescriptions are manifestly terrible and destructive ideas, they seem to reign supreme today, with virtually no push back anywhere. Maybe a few bouts of $3/kWh electricity this winter in the UK and Germany might start to wake people up.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Soaring energy prices cost EU $1 trillion – Bloomberg

RT | December 18, 2022

EU member states have spent roughly a trillion dollars (€940 billion) in the face of the bloc’s worst energy crisis in decades, Bloomberg is reporting on Sunday, citing calculations based on market data.

Soaring energy prices have sent its economies plunging into recession as most member states opted to stop importing gas from Russia, facing the necessity to turn to more expensive supplies.

The agency highlighted that the total estimated losses marks just the beginning of a full-scale crisis, as a period of high prices for energy could last years, while aid is already becoming unaffordable.

The security of energy supply is expected to remain an issue beyond next winter after the filled gas storage facilities across the region are emptied. The nations of the EU will have to refill their gas reserves for the next cold season with no deliveries from Russia, which also heats up competition for tankers.

Even with more import terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) coming online, the crisis will reportedly loosen its grip only in 2026, when additional production capacity from the US or Qatar becomes available. At the same time, prices should remain high to attract LNG away from other buyers from energy-hungry Asian buyers.

A state of emergency could linger for years, according to Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, as quoted by Bloomberg.

“Once you add everything up –bailouts, subsidies– it is a ridiculously large amount of money,” Martin Devenish, a director at consultancy S-RM, told the agency. “It’s going to be a lot harder for governments to manage this crisis next year.”

A rush to fill storage during summer, despite all-time high prices, has softened the supply squeeze so far. However, freezing weather is expected to give the region’s energy system the real test this winter.

Last month, Germany’s energy regulator, the Federal Network Agency, warned that German households and small businesses have failed their first gas-saving tests. The regulator noted that a reduction in consumption of at least 20% was required to avoid a gas shortage in the coming months.

December 18, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Germany’s Gas Reserves “Emptying At Record Speed” As Country Struggles To Keep Warm, Lights On

By P Gosselin | No Tricks Zone | December 16, 2022

Germany’s gas reserves are emptying at record speed: 1% per day as the current wind/solar energy lull means more gas gets burned for electricity, heating.

Pleiteticker.de reports how Germany’s natural gas reserves “are emptying at record speed” because wind and solar power have been on the scarce side over the past few weeks. This means gas turbines have had to jump in to pick up the slack in electricity production – not one the German government had hoped as it wrestles with the heightening energy crisis.

“Germany is converting gas into electricity in record quantities,” pleiteticker.de reports. “Thanks to high pressure system ‘Erika’, the current December is colder than it has been for years. […] In recent days, gas storage facilities have therefore been emptying much faster than before. From December 12 onwards, more than one percent was withdrawn from gas storage facilities in Germany every day.”

“Last week, almost one third of all electricity was generated from natural gas. These are record figures,” writes pleiteticker.de.

If the cold persists through the winter, gas reserves threaten to become extremely tight before spring arrives.

But instead of blaming the energy woes on failed government policies, federal network agency head Klaus Müller criticizes the situation on the consumers, and worries “the gas storage may not last the whole winter.”

“A national gas shortage in winter can be avoided if, firstly, the savings target of at least 20 percent continues to be achieved,” the Federal Network Agency says. Here the government’s solution clearly is that citizens should accept freezing even more when it’s bitterly cold out.

Over 800 million euros paid for unproduced energy in 2021

The problem with wind power is that either too much or too little is produced, due to the weather. As mentioned above. the past weeks have seen little wind power being produced, and so gas turbines had to be fired up to keep the grid supplied.

But when it’s too windy, something needs to be done to keep the grid from being overloaded: wind turbines have to be shut down. That’s costing Germans 807 million euros this year because the excess electricity that could have been fed into the grid by the wind parks legally has to be compensated.

Pleiteticker here writes: “For the amount of electricity that the operators could have fed into the grid, they still receive compensation from the grid operators according to the statutory tariffs. And this sum is higher than ever this year: 807 million euros. Record value. For electricity that never existed.”

And the problem is getting bigger, according to the Federal Ministry of Economics.

“At the time of the worst energy crisis Germany has seen in a long time, when companies and consumers are hammered by energy prices like rarely before, Germany is paying money for energy that also doesn’t get produced,” comments pleiteticker.de.

So far Germany’s response to the energy crisis is plans to build many more turbines, with talks of even tripling its current installed  capacity, which of course would only triple  grid volatility, thus making it far more unstable than it already is and so create an even much bigger mess.

December 16, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Committee of German Parliament Approves $10Bln Purchase of F-35 Jets From US

Samizdat – 14.12.2022

The Budget Committee of the German parliament approved the contract with the United States on the purchase of F-35 fighter jets worth 10 billion euros ($10.6 billion), a British news agency reported on Wednesday, citing sources in the committee.

According to the news agency, the committee green-lighted the purchase using money from a 100 billion euro ($106 billion) special defense fund established by the German government shorty after the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in February.

First eight fighter jets are expected to be delivered by the US to Germany in 2026, the report said, adding that the new planes could replace old Tornado jets.

In July, Washington also approved a possible $8.4 billion sale of 35 F-35 jets to Germany including missiles and equipment.

December 14, 2022 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

In Germany, putative vaccine-induced causes of sudden death tripled after vaccine rollout

By Meryl Nass | December 13, 2022

What the graph below shows is that there are 6 codes on death certificates that correspond to “sudden deaths”—unexpected events that happened acutely and resulted in rapid demise.

Use of these codes jumped roughly 2-3 times from their 5 year average (even including the year of severe COVID (2020) in the five year average) in 2021, when the COVID vaccines began rolling out. The data are consistent for all 5 quarters in 2021-2022 for which data are available. The vaccines are killing us. Not COVID. Simply look at the data or the press conference (in German) where they were discussed..

Below is what the wonderful Jane Orient had to say:

Dec 13, 2022

COVID-19: Do you have enough life insurance?

If you have dependents, you need to protect them in case you die suddenly. Life insurance is the method used by most. Sudden, unexpected death of a breadwinner is not new, but the constant stream of hazards in the news should focus your attention.

Many scare stories turn out to be hype—especially those based on computer modeling (and serving an agenda). But the graph below shows actual occurrences. Sudden Adult Death Syndrome is real.

The source is the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV), which insures 72 million lives. Remember that if actuaries, in contrast to public health authorities, make a mistake, they and the companies they work for face consequences—including bankruptcy.

Just after the rollout of COVID-19 injections, there was a sharp, unprecedented spike in unexpected deaths, a 1,000% increase. The KBV denies a causal relationship to vaccination. The cause for the deaths is unknown, but it is not COVID-19. Authorities have not yet done appropriate studies to investigate a possible vaccine connection. Mainstream media did not attend a press event where data analyst Tom Lausen presented the figures, which he calls a “risk signal.”

From CDC data, equity investment advisor Edward Dowd calculates that Millennials, age 25 to 40, experienced an 84% excess mortality in the fall of 2021, coinciding with vaccine mandates and boosters—a Vietnam War-size event.

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions, number 1 should be providing as best you can for your family’s future, and carefully examining the risks you might be taking.

Jane Orient, M.D., Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, jane@aapsonline.org

December 13, 2022 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Washington wants Europe’s total Dependence on the US

By Salman Rafi Sheikh – New Eastern Outlook – 12.12.2022

In March 2022, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported that “Europe is the new hotspot” of global arms import. While this development is attributed to the ongoing military conflict between Russia and Ukraine (US/EU/NATO), what’s equally, or even more, important to understand is how most of this European purchase is coming from the US and how the latter has turned the conflict into a money-making machine. The US is responsible for the so-called ‘energy crisis’ in Europe and, by selling expensive US gas to Europe, is making a lot of money. Of course, the US told the Europeans that doing so was necessary to reduce their critical dependence on Moscow. The Europeans, in their bid to ‘punish’ Russia, decided to increase their dependence on the US. This is now turning into an ugly issue, as European powers, as reports in the western mainstream media show, are now directly accusing the US of profiteering from war.

This criticism is based not just on the fact that Europe is buying expensive US gas and the latter is profiting from it. In fact, it is based upon the fact that Europe is now too dependent on the US to prevent its economic collapse. If Europe’s dependency on the US continues to increase, it will only come at the cost of its strategic autonomy.

Secondly, this is not just about gas. If gas is linked to economy, Europe’s increasing military purchase from the US is directly linked to its defence and security, or at least this is how it is being projected. This dependence in the defence field is most easily evident from the German purchase of F-35 fighter jets from the US. While the US is going to make a whole lot of money out of this multi-billion dollar deal, strings attached to this deal show how this deal is a direct reinforcement of European dependency on the US.

Martin Kroell, the President of the Federal Association of the German Aerospace Industry (BDLI), was quoted to have said that Germany, even after purchasing these jets, would not have the rights to maintain and repair these jets in Germany. They will be maintained “in other European countries in the network of the US Armed Forces, or by the US companies Lockheed … this creates a dangerous dependency.”

Let’s not forget that this sale happened, first and foremost, when the US started putting pressure in early 2021, when the Russia-Ukraine conflict began, on European nations to increase their defence capacity. But, using the pressure of this conflict, the US authorities managed to make a deal that did not give much leeway to the German authorities to really protect their interests. As another report confirms, the Germans made an ‘error’ in not demanding the involvement of their own “arms industry in the maintenance, repair, and support of these expensive aircraft.”

This is not Germany alone. Finland, for instance, is another country entering the phase of dangerous dependency on the US. It has already decided to buy 64 Block 4 F-35s for US$9.4 billion. Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Finland has upped its weapon purchase, with, unsurprisingly, most of this purchase coming from the US.

While the conflict in Ukraine has led to many deals worth billions of USD, there is a growing fear in the continent that the US is now trying to start a new crisis with China. Such a conflict would create additional problems for Europe.

But the rhetoric being produced – and effectively used – by the US for Europe is to reduce dependence on China. Europe of course is concerned about this form of geopolitics. As Charles Michael, President of the European Council who recently met Xi, said in a tweet: “The EU promotes its interests and values in the world. With China, engaging openly on all aspects of our relationship is the only way forward.”

China, too, understands that Europe is far from being in agreement with the US over a joint China policy. Therefore, Xi was candid enough to tell the EU last week that the bloc should keep up its investment in China, adding that China and the EU must jointly “oppose de-coupling.”

But while the EU is fighting the US over forcing a policy on the EU vis-à-vis the China question and the economic consequences it could have for Europe in the long term, the US continues to make policies that directly impact the EU economy. The latest irritant is certainly the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which gives tax breaks for components used in electric cars provided they are made in (North) America.

While the EU-based companies could set up factories in the US, this would effectively mean that these companies will add to the US economy more than the EU’s economy. In other words, the EU’s capital will be used to add to the US capital at the expense of the EU’s own economic health.

This pattern is similar to the way the EU capital is being used via expensive gas sales and weapon systems to help the US economy. This is precisely how the conflict in Ukraine has turned out to be a major source of profit for the US state.

What can the EU do? The Europeans are unlikely to be able to break out of this dependency relationship without first developing an independent global outlook. Imagine the economic scenario in the EU if, instead of supporting the US bid to expand NATO, it had taken an independent line. The EU did not take that line. Now, the EU accuses the US of its energy crisis. The question is: can it translate this anger into a concrete policy?

December 12, 2022 Posted by | Economics | , , , | Leave a comment

What did the biggest anti-terror raid in German history uncover?

Free West Media | December 10, 2022

Some 36 hours after the largest raid in the history of Germany, there are increasing indications that the investigators apparently did not find the expected arsenal of weapons. The Attorney General has offered no explanation.

The massive raid continues to make waves, especially after more than 3 000 police officers searched more than 150 properties across Germany on Wednesday. At least 27 people were arrested and another 25 are being investigated. They are said to have planned an extensive armed coup.

But what have the investigators actually found in this unprecedented large-scale operation?

According to the Federal Criminal Police Office, weapons were found in 50 of the 150 locations searched. That sounds like an operation with a high risk potential, but conveys very little. In the past, baseball bats, Swiss army knives and brass knuckles were also considered “weapons” in comparable large-scale operations.

It is still not clear if the authorities have found machine guns, grenades or actual firearms. It would presumably take more than a handful of kitchen knives to launch a so-called planned military coup.

Attorney General is unusually unresponsive

Berlin weekly Junge Freiheit therefore sent the Federal Public Prosecutor a comprehensive catalog of questions about what items had been confiscated, how many firearms were among them and which of them were illegal. In view of the extent of the raid and the importance that Nancy Faeser’s (SPD) interior ministry has attached to it, it can be ruled out that the authorities do not know this already.

However, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office refuses to respond to the JF request: A spokesman asked “for your understanding that we are currently not commenting on the evidence found during the search measures – which have not yet been completed”.

It is apparently completely unclear why questions are raised in this regard or when the public will be informed. As a reminder, Faeser spoke of an “abyss of terrorist threat” from the rightwing.

These are strong words in a country where the RAF swept through Germany in the 1970s and where an Islamist with a truck killed twelve people and injured dozens more while driving into pedestrians at a Berlin Christmas market in 2016. It would be in Faeser’s interest to back up her peculiar comments with facts as soon as possible.

Service weapons found

According to German daily Welt, so far “a firearm”, stun guns, prepper supplies and thousands of euros in cash have been found. That sounds like a rather meager yield, especially since “thousands of euros” distributed over 150 houses searched certainly is no indication of the formation of a terrorist group. Notably, the Ministry of the Interior, in view of the risk of power cuts, has itself called for cash to be kept at home at all times.

The same applies to the supposed “prepper supplies”. The government has recommended that citizens prepare themselves extensively for emergencies due to risks associated with German support for the war in Ukraine.

It is therefore not clear where crisis prevention ends and supposed “prepping” starts. Since some of the suspects are said to have gun ownership cards, the discovery of stun guns is not surprising in the least. As a reminder, no parliament can be stormed with the latter.

The representatives of the Interior Committee in the Bundestag were said to have been informed a little more extensively on Friday. According to media reports, two rifles, a pistol and swords, stun guns and flare guns were confiscated. Even service weapons from accused police officers were taken. It is not yet known whether there were gun permits for the various weapons.

More and more media outlets have doubts

Meanwhile, doubts are growing in the media as to whether the historical raid was really appropriate. The editor-in-chief of Cicero, Alexander Marguier, wrote on Wednesday: “Today I spoke to a number of colleagues from other media – including those media that were at the forefront of the exuberant coverage of the treasonous plan. In unison (and of course only in confidence) it was said: It all seems completely exaggerated to us, but when the competition reacts so dramatically, we can’t take a tepid approach.”

The reporter Anna Schneider spoke on Twitter of an “extremely peculiar hysteria and staging of this spectacle”.

The former head of the parliamentary office of the Bild newspaper, Ralf Schuler, wrote on the social network that he could only hope that those responsible for the “giant raid” would also provide evidence of the alleged coup attempt.

The fact that numerous media had apparently been informed about the raids for some time can be considered proven in view of the fact that they arrived with camera teams on site at the same moment as the police task forces.

‘Organized media support’

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) commented: “The historical large-scale operation and the accompanying media reporting raise questions.”

The author noted: “In political Berlin it has been heard for days that there is ‘a big thing in the bush’. Some media obviously knew about the impending raids and arrests, because many editorial offices published extensive reports on the breaking news, which was actually quite new, almost at the same time – as if after an embargo.”

She considered the “organized media support of the operations” to be fundamentally problematic. “It indicates that the matter wasn’t that dangerous after all. In the latter case, the impression could arise that this is primarily – or also – a political public relations exercise.”

A ‘show’

The domestic policy spokeswoman for the Left Party in the Bundestag, Martina Renner, criticized the handling of the Interior Ministry with the raid by 3000 police officers. The so-called “anti-terror operation” against 25 suspects around the 71-year-old Heinrich XIII living in Frankfurt am Main, Prince Reuss shouldn’t be a “show”, said the politician, who has been in the Bundestag since 2013.

December 10, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | | Leave a comment

UNTRUSTWORTHY

By Helmholtz Smith | Son Of The New American Revolution | December 8, 2022

Russian has a rather complicated adjective недоговороспособны (nedogovorosposobny) for which there isn’t any good English equivalent. Literally it means something like “not together in speaking to find a way”; the clumsy English word used is not-agreement-capable. The meaning is “you can’t make an agreement with them and, even if you could, they’d break it”.

The Minsk agreements were negotiated between Kiev and the breakaway regions of Lugansk and Donetsk with two variants in 2014 and 2015. In essence they agreed to a ceasefire and the start of negotiations on some form of autonomy for Lugansk and Donetsk inside the borders of Ukraine. The second version had big involvement by France (President Hollande) and Germany (Chancellor Angela Merkel) – they were its guarantors. Russia’s role was to force Lugansk and Donetsk to the table (they would have preferred independence or joining Russia.) The agreements never took effect.

Kiev never pretended to try and then-President Poroshenko has recently admitted that Kiev only saw it as a mechanism to buy time and Donetsk and Lugansk could “hole up in basements“. Western consumers/dupes of their media would only have heard of it in the context of “In Ukraine, we have maintained an effort under Ambassador Kurt Volker to provide the means by which Russia can live up to its commitments under the Minsk Agreements.” More lies – Russia had no commitments in the agreement, the obligations were entirely on the part of Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk. Russia delivered the latter two to the signing table and France and Germany were supposed to deliver the first. Had the agreements been lived up to – had France and Germany pressured Ukraine – Kievans would be cooking their meals in lighted rooms after a hot shower and sleeping in their own beds. Thousands of people would be alive and healthy today.

Putin recently told a group of soldiers’ mothers “In hindsight, we are all smart, of course, but we believed that we would manage to come to terms, and Lugansk and Donetsk would be able to reunify with Ukraine somehow under the agreements – the Minsk agreements… We were sincerely moving towards this.”

What did we just learn the other day from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel?

And the 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time. She also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today. The Ukraine of 2014/15 is not the Ukraine of today. As you saw in the battle for Debaltseve (railway town in Donbass, Donetsk Oblast, ed.) in early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.

[Sie hat diese Zeit hat auch genutzt, um stärker zu werden, wie man heute sieht. Die Ukraine von 2014/15 ist nicht die Ukraine von heute. Wie man am Kampf um Debalzewe (Eisenbahnerstadt im Donbass, Oblast Donezk, d. Red.) Anfang 2015 gesehen hat, hätte Putin sie damals leicht überrennen können. Und ich bezweifle sehr, dass die Nato-Staaten damals so viel hätten tun können wie heute, um der Ukraine zu helfen.]

Compare that with what she said at the time – “We are here to implement the Minsk deal, not to call it into question“.

So, Poroshenko was right – it was just a delaying tactic, NATO and Kiev never had any intention of negotiating an arrangement in which Lugansk and Donetsk, inside Ukraine, would enjoy a degree of autonomy and Germany, at least, never intended to push Kiev.

Putin was lied to and fooled.

I have three questions.

  1. Why would anybody in Russia ever bother negotiating with these people ever again about anything?
  2. Why would anybody in the rest of the world – China, India, Iran, the Middle East, Africa, South America – ever bother negotiating with these people ever again about anything?
  3. What possessed her to admit this now? An upwelling of conscience? Arrogance – we’re Number One and always will be and we don’t give a damn what you think? You’d think after the catastrophe that is hitting Ukraine and Europe because she (and others) ignored diplomacy and negotiation that she’d keep her mouth shut. (Korybko speculates on her motives.)

 

Недоговороспособны – even when you think you’ve made an agreement, they’re just trying to fool you.

December 9, 2022 Posted by | Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Another Reichstag fire?

Free West Media | December 8, 2022

Drawing parallels between the latest operetta staged in Germany and Trump’s alleged capture of the Capitol in the United States quite clearly indicate who is behind the story of the “seizure of the Bundestag”.

In both these cases, these “conspiracies” were used to attack the opposition and political opponents. A “coup d’etat”, which was being prepared by far-right retirees was allegedly prevented. The conspirators hoped to return the constitutional order to the configuration of the Second Reich. To do this, it was planned to storm the Reichstag and the Bundestag, arrest deputies, create conditions for an uprising by cutting off electricity and overthrow the federal government by seizing power in the country. The conspirators had already appointed new ministers in their “shadow” cabinet.

One is of course also reminded of the very convenient arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin, on Monday 27 February 1933, precisely four weeks after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Hitler attributed the fire to Communist agitators and used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President Paul von Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree suspending civil liberties, and pursue a timely “ruthless confrontation” with his adversaries.

In the days following the incident, major newspapers in the US and London were immediately sceptical of the good fortune of the Nazis in finding a communist scapegoat.

An old and trusted way of getting rid of opposition

The emergence of political opposition has regularly been prevented by secret service methods. As soon as people gather in a room or on the street to form an alternative to the ruling political forces, they are joined by paid agents whose task is to discredit or even ban the enterprise. In fact, paid agents often inspire the crime.

At the centre of the current conspiracy are Heinrich XIII Prince Reuss zu Köstritz, who owns the hunting lodge Waidmannsheil near Bad Lobenstein in Thuringia, and former AfD member of the Bundestag and judge at the Berlin Regional Court Birgit Malsack-Winkemann.

According to the responsible public prosecutor’s office, the two are leading heads of a Germany-wide network that planned an armed coup. On 7 December 2022, the Bild newspaper summed up the big blow of the valiant state organs against the right-wing threat:

“Since the early hours of the morning, officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and special units such as the GSG 9 and several SEK have been taking nationwide action against the so-called Reichsbürger scene. Under the code name Soko ‘Schatten’, some 3 000 forces are searching 137 properties belonging to 52 suspects. There are said to have been 25 arrests.”

Prince Heinrich works as a private financial consultant. He has repeatedly reminded his audiences that modern Germany is not a sovereign state and is under the control of the United States and the United Kingdom.

The princely house ruled the lands in Thuringia from the 12th century and the very name of the dynasty means “Russian”. The ancestor of the younger line of the dynasty was Henry I at the end of the 13th century, who married the granddaughter of Prince Daniel Romanovich.

Targeting the AfD

Among those arrested are several AfD members. If the secret services manages to frame the party sufficiently and the whole terror construct is not promptly exposed as absurd and collapses, nothing should now stand in the way of the AfD’s inclusion in the federal and state “reports on the protection of the constitution”.

In the digital age, the mere planning of an armed coup is easy to stage without risk of injury. There will certainly be a few old hunting rifles lying around in the prince’s castle, which should be enough to prove that he was “armed”. In small chat groups, by gathering a little rant here and a few swear words and curses there – a nefarious plan could be easily conjured up. It’s enough for searches, arrests and certainly a few convictions.

The last political party that could be “proven” to have had plans for a coup in Germany was the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which was banned by the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1952. Its chairman, Dr. Fritz Dorls, was an undercover agent of the Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution or secret service).

In order to ensure a smooth ban procedure, Dorls commissioned a secret service colleague to legally represent the party before the Federal Constitutional Court: Agent and lawyer Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer saw to it that the judicial farce ran smoothly.

Apparently, then as now, none of the responsible actors are remotely concerned about the rule of law.

Anyone who challenges the political class by successfully participating in elections is labelled an enemy of the constitution and targeted by the secret services. Yes, as we are witnessing these days, even voting has become quite dangerous.

Current events prove that Germany has not moved an inch in terms of democracy and the rule of law since the secret service banned the SRP in 1952. The irony is that the realisation of democracy in Germany thus remains a revolutionary challenge: an act of resistance that is not possible with, but only against the established ruling clique.

December 8, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

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