I don’t agree with Bernie
Author: gdrthinktank
The Forgetful Mr. Biden
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
U.S. President Joe Biden called the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Russian President Putin “justified” and termed it “a strong signal.” However, it is the U.S. that does not recognize this criminal court, for good reasons. For otherwise, quite a few of their own politicians would have been internationally indicted for crimes in the past, possibly even Biden himself for his involvement in the Iraq war – and not only that.
As a reminder:
In 2001, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden supported President Bush’s decision to attack and invade Afghanistan, a mission which ended in disaster under the current President’s leadership.
In 2002, he pushed for a bipartisan resolution authorizing President Bush to attack and invade Iraq. Five years later, Biden approved a plan to divide Iraq into three regions – one Kurdish, one Sunni, and one Shiite – that was consistent with U.S. strategy.
Between 2009 and 2017, Biden participated in the planning and execution of the wars against Libya and Syria and the coup in Ukraine. The current U.S. President played a direct role leading to the mass protests on the Maidan in Kiev and ultimately to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was legally elected to office.
Facts no longer matter today.
The shamelessness and mendacity of the West along with its corporate media is unprecedented.
Wall Street Criminals
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
Deregulation of financial markets serves the top one percent, not the common people. It lays the foundation and sets the course for future crises that put the safety and health of hundreds of millions of people at risk. This is the reality of the so-called “free market,” where there is little or no regulation, and where lobbyists in the service of big business corrupt the legislature to ensure that laws are passed according to their ideas and wishes. It no longer has anything to do with real democracy to the good of society.
What more proof and evidence do clear thinking people need to grasp the truth? It cannot be true that people voted for Trump, who in 2017 not only gave a trillion (i.e., $1,000,000,000,000) in tax breaks to corporations and the top one percent of the wealthiest people instead of “cleaning up the swamp” as he promised before the election – rather, he did the opposite: he appointed mostly billionaires to his cabinet.
Who do you think these billionaires would serve? The interests of the working class, which is the majority of the American people?
The mass of people simply do not learn, but are deceived. How is such a thing possible? Only 15 years after the last bank crash, there are still speculators in the financial institutions who gamble away people’s savings – and not only that: Contrary to all the protestations of politicians like Biden now, they not only go unpunished, but are also rescued as under Obama in 2008/09) with taxpayer funds. In plain terms, those who caused the problem in their criminal greed are being bailed out at the behest of the government.
But no one bails out the working-class families who are losing their jobs, are threatened with eviction, and don’t know how to put food on the table.
Against such a legalized Wall Street criminality no election helps anymore. Only mass movements that revolt against injustice can help.
Please watch and listen to the following: Bernie Sanders talking in 2018 about the financial crash of 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQE9r5K2oNA
Bernie Sander’s Socialism
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
I am ahead of Bernie Sanders in only one thing, if not two, but I do not really know. I actually lived in a socialism, unlike probably him; I was born there and grew up in it, for nearly three decades. Like most folks back then, I despised it.
However, this was more than likely a different socialism than Sanders is striving for. It was a dictatorial, for especially outwardly inhuman socialism in the former GDR, today widely known as “East Germany.” The Cold War circumstances played a big role. In the fall of 1989, hundreds of thousands of protesting people were able to get rid of this socialism, while Soviet party leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not send tanks to crush the revolutionary movement. I was 29 years old at that time and, as today, just a sand corn in the process.
Without our rejection of the socialist form of government, the upheaval leading to German reunification, which took place peacefully in 1990, would not have been possible. The discontent did not come out of nowhere; it had been building up among the people for years.
The second thing that distinguishes me from Bernie Sanders – I don’t know exactly – may be the fact that I spent eight years in the U.S. working with ordinary people at a lower level, so to speak. Here, too, I can base my opinion on personal experience.
After immigrating to the United States for family reasons and going through a period of acclimation – including working for an insurance company in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, and attending college in Clearwater – I was eventually employed by Pinellas County government, wrongly concluding that all the social benefits I could enjoy there were part of the general standard in the United States, a country I still believed at the time to be the freest country in the world. For ten years, so to speak, I walked around with half-closed eyes, seeing only what concerned myself. Actually, a not unusual human trait.
Then my wife and I moved to beautiful Blairsville, Georgia, where we still live today, now retired, aided by circumstances that originated not in the United States of America but in my home country. It was here in North Georgia that I first encountered the social issue in my life, through an employer famously named “Walmart.” Never in my life would I have thought such a thing possible; the way the American upper class treats Americans. My whole way of thinking has changed since then.
I am not a friend of socialism. For nothing in the world would I like to live again in a socialism as I had to get to know it from the GDR. But in the USA, there is also a dictatorship – that of big money, which takes away people’s rights or restricts them, such as health insurance or workers’ rights; for example, the right to organize unions.
I was born in the dictatorship of socialism and will most likely die in a dictatorship of big money. Neither dictatorship leaves much for members of the working class, as I have seen with my own eyes. In the GDR, Socialism locked up its own people behind an impenetrable western border. Anyone who did not agree with the political system had to fear repression.
Those who, through no fault of their own, live under financial constraints in a rich country like the U.S. simply because they needed surgery or are not academics are not living free lives. Fundamental rights such as the right to freedom of expression or freedom of religion do not change this. You do not feel free if you have to worry about health care or food, the rent for your apartment or the mortgage for your house. In the USA, 60 percent live from paycheck to paycheck, and I was one of them for eight years in Blairsville, Georgia.
I am a proponent of a social order in which the capitalist economy is controlled by the legislature through regulations and laws to protect the working majority, rather than allowing corporations a free hand in return for billions in campaign contributions – to the detriment of the many and the benefit of the few at the top. A human system that was once called a “Social Market Economy” at the time I left my home country in 1998.
Be clear about it – in Germany, too, a once comparatively exemplary system is disappearing with each passing day.
If I am not mistaken, Social Market Economy is the kind of “socialism” Bernie Sanders is striving for. I don’t care what he calls it. I don’t care what he calls it. All I know is that he’s right, because he stands up for the human side of society.
A Narrative of Good and Evil
The Media as Court Reporters for Their Governments
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
There is such a nice saying in German: “When two do the same thing, it is far from being the same.”
More than any other country in recent history since World War II, the United States under the leadership of presidents from both parties has instigated wars on more than questionable grounds, interfered, supplied weapons, bombed, killed, actively contributed to the overthrow of disagreeable governments around the world, and, not least, planned, paid and directed the political upheaval in Ukraine in 2014. Each time, it was not about democracy and freedom or humanity, but about maintaining U.S. supremacy in the world and the acquisition of sales markets. Millions of U.S. citizens do not want to believe this; instead, they pay homage to a fabricated patriotism and believe in things that can neither be rationally explained nor proven.
It is the result of what their own country’s media successfully drums into them on a daily basis. Partial truths serve to distract from the truth about one’s own country, which should not even arise in the consciousness of the population. Only what is useful for the purposes of the leading class should be present in the minds of the people.
This is the result of paid journalism – again, as with politics, big money is behind it, because the corporations don’t want the majority of people to realize the facts that have led to the polarization within the US. The social division is deliberate, because nothing is more dangerous to the corporations than a united people who would have the idea of truly exercising power in the sense of “WE THE PEOPLE.” At the same time, media outlets like CNN or Fox News not only engage in politics on behalf of their clientele – they also earn billions from it. It doesn’t bother them to mislead the people through and through.
The sanctions against Russia and Russia’s war against Ukraine have ensured that this no longer applies only to the USA. People are only presented with stories agreeable to Western politics, and the back story is often deliberately completely omitted. The public should not even think about who the profiteers of wars are, while people pay with their lives.
Each time, as today, American defense corporations made billions and wrote their own laws and regulations along the way, which were rubber-stamped by members of Congress because the corporations gave them huge grants for their election campaigns. The Biden administration has not the slightest interest in ending the war in Ukraine through negotiations and therefore let the near Istanbul agreement of last year fail. The fact that the war is causing the U.S. national deficit to take on ever more astronomical forms is of no concern to the politicians, because the taxpayer has to fix the problem that has been put on the back burner.
Now the Biden administration accuses China of trying to supply Russia with weapons.
The West risks new tensions with China over, among other things, spy balloons that Pentagon military strategists apparently could not say with certainty might have been sent into the sky by amateur groups from their own country.
The only reason why large parts of the population of Western countries agree with current policies toward Ukraine is the fact that people are exposed to widespread war propaganda, which makes them draw irrational conclusions and, in any case, hardly allows any different opinion, if one does not want to be put in the corner of the malicious.
Instead, everyone who shares non-governmental opinions about Ukraine is on the side of the Russians – no other option is allowed to the dissenters. This is the state of democracy in the self-proclaimed “value-regulated society” of the West.
The Staircase Joke of Germany’s “Growing Influence”
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
Today on CNN:
Targeted misrepresentation about my home country in many U.S. media, not just CNN, and also in Germany itself: The truth of the tank issue is rather that the Biden administration, at least in its official presentation, has also changed course, primarily to help Polish demands for the delivery of German Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to gain acceptance.
It is downright absurd to speak of “growing German influence” in this context, and the authors of such articles know this very well. The deliberate intention is not to let the USA appear as a profit-hungry, all-determining power on the globe, at least not all the time. Anyone who disagrees should take a look at the US defense budget figures – a budget that does not deserve the name. They are more than double the military spending of China and Russia combined to ensure American military presence and superiority in all parts of the world. A so-called “defense” budget looks different.
A clear-thinking person must ask why a supposedly peace-loving country has to spend so much money on the military, moreover for the strategic orientation to dominate others – with military presence even in the remotest corners of the earth. Russia maintains 20 military bases outside its own country, the U.S. nearly a thousand worldwide. What for?
The whole world had seen and heard who set the pace when US-President Joe Biden gave the answer in the press conference nearly a year ago about how the USA would prevent Nord Stream 1 and 2. A grinning German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stood by and had nothing to say in response to the open threat against German infrastructure. Since then, no “transatlantic power dynamic” has changed, because the U.S. doesn’t let anyone tell it anything when it comes to their interests. NATO is essentially them, and the others are mere vassals and performing agents.
From the beginning, the Americans intended to cut off Russian energy supplies to Germany in order to sell their dirty fracked gas to Europe at higher prices while weakening Russian-German relations. There are corresponding documents, including public ones, which prove this, up to the written threat to “destroy the ferry port of Sassnitz” on the Baltic coast, where the last pipelines for the completion of Nord Stream 2 were stored.
The U.S. is the only country to benefit from the end of Russian energy supplies to Europe and especially Germany. In this context, the statement by political scientist George Friedman, after which it has been the goal of U.S. policy for a hundred years to prevent Russian raw materials from coming together with German technology, is highly interesting.
The big losers today are first and foremost the people of Germany, who are now suffering the greatest loss of prosperity since the end of World War II after their own government willingly subjugated itself to the repressive policies of the United States in the form of the imposed sanctions against Russia.
For those still capable of recognizing the facts of our times, it should be a ridiculous staircase joke to speak of a shift in the “transatlantic dynamic.” The reality is a cold power politics of the Biden administration against Europe and in particular against Germany. Most people there are not foolish enough not to notice this.
The Fuehrer would be Thrilled
German Tanks against Russia
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
Poland, of all countries, today submitted a request to the German government to supply Ukraine with German Leopard 2 tanks from its own inventory. This requires the approval of the country of manufacture. However, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki already signaled yesterday that he would deliver the German tanks without Berlin’s consent if necessary.
The German government is still hesitating – but the question is how long it will continue on this course.
This development is astonishing and rather reminiscent of extortionist methods, to say the least. After all, it has always been Poland that has not grown tired of reminding Germans of their Nazi past over the last decades. The unanimous view was that Germany should stay out of military interventions once and for all. This viewpoint has changed dramatically virtually overnight.
So now German tanks are to drive forward again. It opens all doors to the next political abuse: If something goes wrong and the conflict in Ukraine escalates further, the Germans and their weapons could be held responsible. Because we know: Mankind forgets quickly.
You would think that people should learn lessons from history – instead, not only ordinary people, but also the vast majority of politicians judge from the moment. Hand to mouth. This attitude is disastrous, because in this way mistakes from the past are repeated.
In the old German peace party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), of all parties – which once rejected Hitler’s Enabling Act – a majority opinion has now emerged according to which Germany is a leading power and its army (the Bundeswehr) should consequently be upgraded to the strongest military force in Europe. Those who criticize this new German adventurism get, among other things (for example, to be called a “Putin-understander”), the answer that new challenges require a new political orientation.
All this is happening because the largest country on earth, Russia, is to be brought to its knees via corrupt oligarch capitalism in Ukraine, after the West has permanently managed over the past two decades not only to ignore Russian security interests, but to challenge the country unnecessarily.
As the former U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan rightly said about U.S. policy immediately after the collapse of the old Soviet Union: “The West is squandering the opportunity to turn a former enemy into a partner.”
Now they only talk about German tanks against Russia. The Fuehrer would slap his thigh with enthusiasm.
Germany on the Nose Ring
The White House calls the shots
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
German tanks for Ukraine.
As a German and believing to be halfway familiar with the history of my country, I can’t trust my own eyes when I read something like the following. Discovered today on CNN:
In supposedly free countries like the USA or Germany, do media still exist that are not addicted to unconditional warmongering – media that do not have in mind to almost uncritically pass on the views of their respective governments to a bleary-eyed population?
Are there any historically literate scribblers or even politicians, called “Western officials”, who still use facts from history to assess today’s situation, even if they only refer to a quotation? How is Ukraine supposed to achieve lasting peace if old mistakes are repeated during the war, possibly also after the war, and the country – which is actually to be feared – continues to be used by the West as a protective shield against Russia?
Didn’t German tanks kill Ukrainians 80 years ago as well? Such an argument to justify German arms deliveries to Ukraine today is not only cynical, but in its naively simplified form it also bears no causal relation to history as it actually happened. Because in reality, by far more ordinary Ukrainians have suffered from a criminal collaboration of German Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists than from German tanks.
Of course, from the point of view of those who think they have to use weapons to resolve a conflict that cannot be judged in black and white, it is inevitable to resort to such naive platitudes.
The author of the nonsense at CNN obviously has no knowledge of the fact that when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Ukraine, large parts of the Ukrainian population received the German soldiers as liberators from Stalinism – a mistake for which they were later to pay bitterly. I had former soldiers of the German Wehrmacht in my own relatives who reported about it. It is part of a narrative about a cruel war that brought us (by that I mean: we Germans) too late to the realization: “Whoever picks up a gun again, let his hand fall off.” Unfortunately, the quote does not stem from me, but from Franz-Josef Strauss, an arch-conservative Bavarian politician who himself fought as an officer on the Eastern Front during World War II.
The historical knowledge about the collaboration of Ukrainian extremists with Hitler is linked to an astonishing development, according to which there were and are political forces in Ukraine, which not only strived for a plausible independence of their country, but also wanted to ethnically cleanse it. Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ideologist and national movement leader of the 20th century, with his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) played into the hands of the Holocaust with active assistance. Under their “cooperation” the German occupiers killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. Tens of thousands of Poles who escaped with their lives were expelled from their ancestral homeland.
All this suited the OUN because its goal was to transform Ukraine into an ethnically homogeneous country. It was clear to the organization that this could only be achieved by means of mass killings. The West, with all its peace-preaching politicians, no longer wants to know anything about all this.
What does that have to do with today?
Some. For to this day, Bandera is revered as a national hero in western-oriented parts of the Ukrainian population. Not only are there several monuments to Bandera in Ukraine, erected after the breakaway from the Soviet Union, but a main street in Kiev was renamed after him in 2016 – much to the dismay of the Russians living in eastern Ukraine, and also, by the way, of Israel.
It is not only the memory of Bandera that is glorified today in large parts of the non-Russian speaking population. The notorious Azov regiment, which today plays a large part in Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia, is infested with Nazi ideology; until recently it was seen with symbols closely associated with the German Waffen SS.
So, when Vladimir Putin blathers about wanting to purge Ukraine of “fascist elements,” the West does not have history on its side at all. The problem is that peace cannot be achieved with such attitudes on either side.
And by the way, even German tanks cannot solve problems that have their multi-layered origins in social spheres. Politicians and media should stop poisoning people’s minds with irresponsible war polemics.
One more remark: A country like the U.S., which for sole interest demonstrably carries out one military aggression and intervention after another or has them carried out by third parties, cannot hold the leadership of a pretended defense alliance like NATO. Europe should take care of itself instead of submitting to American market interests. The idea is realistic if the will to implement it were there – but it is not.
Defense, protection from Russia? France, unlike Germany, is a nuclear power, and together the two countries have a higher military budget than the largest country in the world – Russia.
But none of this seems to play a role in the deliberations of those responsible in my home country. Germany is in a politically neglected state and lets itself be led by the Biden administration on the nose ring through world history. It does not seem to occur to any of those playing with fire today how much the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with Russia endangers Europe in particular. The Americans always wage their wars far enough away from their own country and withdraw as soon as things get dicey, or they run away altogether with their glorious military – see Afghanistan – and are then no longer directly affected for the time being.
Ukraine, however, is barely a two-hour flight from Germany.
When the West was still negotiating
Energy agreements with other despotic regimes now replace Russia
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
When it is claimed on current occasions – in my home country even more vehemently than elsewhere – that Germany has made itself too dependent on Russian natural gas for decades, then these claims do not stand up to historical evidence. All the more so when this is compared to other countries, and here again in particular to the USA.
For about 100 years, America has been obtaining most of its primary source of raw materials – crude oil – from other parts of the world, namely from countries that can be described as politically unstable at the very least and where human rights violations are a daily occurrence. Even wars against international law do not keep the USA and other NATO countries from maintaining friendly economic relations with despotic regimes, such as Saudi Arabia, which has been waging a criminal war in Yemen for years with the support of the Americans.
In contrast to Ukraine, there is no international outcry here, although according to estimates, far more than 100,000 people have died in Yemen so far as a result of the effects of the war. And just last summer, the European Union reached an agreement with Azerbaijani despot Ilham Aliyev, under which the country would double its natural gas supplies to Europe by 2027. The double standard is not only shocking, but shameful.
Doesn’t all this entail the risk of dependency on regimes that are anything but democratic and where it is at least uncertain how they will develop?
But there is an essential difference: Germany, as a country poor in raw materials, must solve its current energy problems diplomatically, while the Americans resort to their intelligence services when things do not go the way of U.S. interests. If it is not enough to establish puppet governments according to their wishes, they then march in with the most highly armed military in the world to ensure “democracy and freedom” appropriate to their own ideas and interests – see Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of American interventions around the world is long – no less than 251 times since 1991, the USA created its own facts using force.
It is a mistake, which can have disastrous effects, to always look at things only from one’s own point of view. The American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are on par with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not wanting to admit to this and supporting one, aggressive side while condemning the other is a classic example of double standards. Such an approach certainly does not contribute to an objective assessment of events. But this is the intention of those who set the tone and mislead their own people, for they naturally want to conceal the true motives.
Those who today in all seriousness allege that Germany over the cause of decades had become too dependent on Russia in the energy question are at the same time ignoring a policy of balance and détente that proved successful at the end of the 1960s and especially in the 1970s. It is therefore worthwhile, in the sense of forming a realistic opinion, not to spare the effort of following the chronology of events, at least in broad outline. Nazi Germany’s war in the Soviet Union had cost up to 27 million lives there. In view of the war trauma, it was especially important in the postwar years to conclude economic agreements as part of the reactivation of relations between the two countries in order to create an initial basis for mutual understanding. This purpose was served not least by the natural gas and oil contracts with the then Soviet Union. Both German states profited from this, whereby it is remarkable at what far more favorable conditions an ideological opponent sold its raw materials to Germany and Europe for over 60 years than the great ally USA does today.
It is hard to deny that contrary to all the prophecies of doom at the time – even from me, who was still very young at the time – this policy of dialogue led to a softening of hardened fronts in the middle of the Cold War. And this aspect was not the only important factor: for without this policy of détente, German reunification would hardly have been possible. This is historical evidence of how peaceful negotiations to establish a basis of trust while respecting mutual security interests in the former Soviet-subjugated Eastern Bloc countries ultimately led to freedom and democracy. It was not war and more and more weapons that eventually led to peaceful coexistence, but the will to talk to each other.
In other words, negotiations have been held with the opponent instead of refusing to negotiate.
If you look around today, you are bound to notice the frightening extent to which almost all Western politicians ignore these virtues. The nice Mr. Biden is the highest representative of a supposedly democratic leading power, but he does not want to negotiate with Russia, even for the hope of preventing further senseless victims in Ukraine, as well as a possible horror scenario with nuclear weapons. One has to imagine that. Instead of firmly objecting to its great friend in Washington, the whole of Europe has submitted to the sanctions imposed by the Americans on Russia, simply because the Americans think of nothing else but their own interests.
The damage is being borne by Europeans, while the U.S. and the internationalized corporations it controls are the only ones profiting from the war in Ukraine.
For the First Time since Hitler
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
As long as I have been in this world, we Germans have been told time and again by our own governments – both in the dictatorial GDR and in the later, reunified Germany – war is not a means of politics and that, because of our history, we should stay out of everything that has to do with militarism.
Those who can think of nothing better than to respond to violence with counter-violence are setting in motion a spiral that ends in nothing other than the death of countless innocent people. How many more examples of this kind have to be added to history before mankind learns something from them? Especially Christian people or those who fancy themselves as such should know this better than someone like me.
Now, sooner or later, the German government will actually deliver “Leopard” tanks to Ukraine; tanks that will then shoot at Russian soldiers with the Iron Cross on their turrets for the first time since Adolf Hitler. Every normal person in Germany should know how wrong this is, especially since Ukraine is so torn apart that even after the war with Russia it is very unlikely to achieve a progressive democracy for the country as a whole.
Ukraine has never been an ethnically unified, nation-state entity. Corrupt politicians have squandered all opportunities to do so since the country’s secession from the Soviet Union in 1991, and instead have gradually bartered away sovereignty to Western economic interests and to NATO, which has had its fingers in the pie from the beginning. It is to be feared that corruption and abuse of authority will not end even after a cease-fire with Russia and instead the country will apply for all kinds of aid from the European Union – aid which in turn will only benefit the corrupt politicians on the scene, but not the simple, suffering people.
Europe, and Germany in general, will bear a responsibility in the coming decades which the Germans in particular, as the (still) strongest economic power in Europe, will not be able to escape. I believe this is deliberate – not only on the part of the USA for reasons of its own economic and military world domination, but also on the part of countries such as Poland, where leading politicians still want to take belated revenge because of the German Reich.
The Wind of Change 