70 million Americans can’t really have any reservations about lawfully convicted criminals because, after all, they voted for one so that he could take the highest office in the USA. It is a mystery to me how so-called Christians in particular can reconcile their support for the criminal Trump with their faith. They should hardly be able to stand the smell of Sulphur that surrounds them every day.
Tag: PinellasCounty
Germany and Europe: On a fatal Path
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2024 by Uwe Bahr
On the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz chooses strong words. And he is obviously forgetting the successful policies of his own Social Democratic Party not too long ago.
Not without a small pinch of uncertainty, Scholz told his fellow citizens in all seriousness yesterday: “A return to the policy of deterrence was necessary. Words such as ‘deterrence’ and ‘defense readiness’ are unfamiliar words for some [people] coming from a German Chancellor. However, they stand for an important task: Together with our allies, we must be so strong that no one dares to attack us. This is how we ensure our security. And this is how we defend peace in Europe.”
He is thus contradicting the spirit of all reason and history, from which the Germans in particular should have learned their lessons. For it is not difficult to see that his statements will only lead to an endless spiral of rearmament and further deaths, including the mutual waste of resources affecting generations to come – for the other side will of course respond with the same.
Recent history teaches a different path, which was successful and ultimately led to the – temporary – end of the division of Europe, the Cold War. The West German policy of détente in the 1960s/70s, often to the annoyance of the Americans at the time, led to de-escalation in small steps, although wars were also the order of the day back then. The Soviets subjugated the entire Eastern Bloc, and a Leonid Brezhnev as the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in World War II allied with the USA, was anything but an easy negotiating partner – certainly worse than a Putin in the first decade of our century. But at least the channels of communication between the two power blocs always remained open, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
The certainty has long since solidified that an economically and socially staggering Germany today no longer pursues an independent foreign policy, but has made itself the vassal of interests that cannot be German interests.
Instead of submitting unconditionally, the Europeans, led by France and Germany, should form their own protective alliance, which represents the interests of Europe and not those of the USA. France has nuclear weapons, France and Germany together have more people than Russia, a higher economic power than Russia and a higher military budget than Russia. If a deterrent were needed, the potential for it would be in European hands and not in the hands of the USA, which does not want to grant a fair partnership based on reciprocity.
The reaction of the USA would remain to be seen if they no longer had their hands in the pie everywhere in order to expand their influence and their quest for endless profit.
For the USA is not a protective power, but an aggressive world power that is exclusively pursuing its own expansionist interests. It has proven this fact with its senseless wars, interventions and bombings throughout its history.
Such a country cannot lead a defense alliance.
This has become of Germany
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2024 by Uwe Bahr
After the Second World War, the Germans had sworn off any involvement in war. The world agreed, for we were the evil Nazis.
In 1999, however, active participation in military operations was resumed – the conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl had been voted out of office a year earlier – with the bombing of Serbia at the behest of the USA.
This was followed by 20 years in Afghanistan, where we finally fled the country with the Americans and their military, which proved to be completely helpless. To this day, no German government can explain what the purpose of this mission with German participation was.
In 2015, we supported the bombing Americans in Syria with aerial reconnaissance. As always, Ramstein in Germany is used as a US military base and hub for global drone attacks. This is one of the reasons why Russian nuclear missiles are aimed at our country. Nobody in Germany talks about this – but in the USA they do.
Now we are firmly locked into and integrated into a US proxy war in Ukraine. Tanks with the Iron Cross on their turrets are once again rolling against Russia, where the German invasion in 1941 and following years cost 26 million Russians their lives. There is always talk of 6 million Jews that we have killed. We support Israel with carte blanche, no matter what that country does. That doesn’t apply to Russia – because of the Americans’ claims to power.
What is striking is that every time the Americans have come to the end of their tether with their bombing and their Latin, waves of refugees have set in, of which Germany has always been the largest host country at horrendous cost – now it is no different with Ukraine. On top of this, however, Germany is being admonished by the Americans to spend more on joint defense within NATO. And Germany is complying here, too.
Someone like Trump is simply too stupid to recognize the correlations. However, if an overall account were to be drawn up, then it would be clear who would have to pay whom.
As a consequence, money is lacking elsewhere in Germany. And then we give the Americans another ten billion euros in bribes for the Intel settlement in Magdeburg and buy the dirty fracking gas from them at inflated prices, for which nearly the entire German economy and the average German consumer have to bleed.
No one can be that completely crazy like the German government. It’s simply not possible.
A Missed Penalty Kick
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
A missed penalty kick and an inappropriate smile – already some blinded American “patriots” are gasping for breath. Instead of blue hair and woke policies they should think and name what makes them so proud of their country.
The storming of the Capitol by a mindless, antisocial horde, making the U.S. look like a third world country?
A proud military running from medieval warriors in sandals in Afghanistan – in a country where no U.S. soldier has any business being?
Proud of an inhumane “health care system” that leaves out millions of Americans because insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations have to line their own pockets with billions in profit?
Proud of a country that is considered the richest in the world, but where there are hundreds of thousands of children who are categorized as disadvantaged and do not get three meals a day?
A country where more than two-thirds of all so-called “Christians” voted for a pervert like Trump?
A country where racial discrimination and the discrimination of dissenters are the order of the day?
A country where usury and profit for the benefit of the few count more than the common good?
Proud of a country where children can’t go to school without fear because of an insane gun culture in the most Christian of all countries?
Proud of a country that maintains military bases in more than 100 countries under the pretext of being the world’s policeman for democracy and freedom, only to interfere wherever expansionist US interests are threatened?
But the missed penalty kick of an American soccer player who has led her country to so much success in previous events becomes a troubling factor in a lost person’s damaged psyche for a perceived would-be patriotism. That says it all.
It is voices of ignorance like the one below that are dividing the United States of America, contributing to unrest and creating a dangerous atmosphere:
With Stones Against Russian Tanks
Long before the Berlin Wall was built, the Soviet satellite state of East Germany was doomed to fall
From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr
Seventy years ago, on June 17, 1953, about one million people took to the streets in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, which had been called the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR) since 1949. They demonstrated against the poor supply situation and, above all, against the ordered norm increases for workers without wage compensation. During the uprising, political demands were added: free and democratic elections and the restoration of German unity.
No help came from the West.
While GDR citizens defended themselves against Soviet tanks with stones and sticks, head of state Walter Ulbricht and his communist comrades had to flee to the custody of the Soviet military administration in Berlin-Karlshorst. For a few hours, the GDR, which was not even four years old, was actually already destroyed. The West stood idly by during these days, as it did later during the building of the Berlin Wall, and indeed could not help. For any active interference would have triggered a military confrontation with the Soviet Union including unimaginable consequences.
Thirty-six years later, GDR citizens again took to the streets against the Stalinist system – and in peaceful protests they were successful this time, eliminating the SED regime of injustice and making the reunification of Germany possible in the first place. When the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet tanks stayed in the barracks, while the Western powers, who held the protection of West Berlin, did not dare to intervene openly. As a contemporary witness, I saw myself in disbelieving amazement at this – then, as now. The Soviets at the End of the Cold War had their own difficulties, mainly of economic nature – that’s true, but they were still a nuclear power and could have reacted very differently in the fall of 1989.
Today, there are politicians in Germany who, in their unquestioning allegiance to the U.S., want to certify directly or indirectly to the same former East Germans who brought down the Cold War that they sympathize with today’s Russia and Putin out of “nostalgic attachment” to the former Soviet Union. This is the reason why fewer people in the German East allegedly support the war in Ukraine against Russia than in the West.
How is that possible? Those who actively opposed the totalitarian occupying power back then now all of the sudden feel sympathy for it in the aftermath? There can hardly be a greater contradiction. Or are they perhaps the ones who can see through the mendacious policy of the West because of the experiences they made in two German states? Do they still feel gratitude? Without Gorbachev and his relenting there would probably not have been a German reunification. In Gorbachev’s back, as is often forgotten today, Stalinist die-hards were ready to undo history, as the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991 proves. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were still stationed in the East of the reunited Germany, the last of whom did not leave until 1994.
It is an impertinence beyond compare when people with a lack of expertise assume the right to judge pejoratively those who had the courage to speak out against a Stalinist dictatorship. For this, those attacked are nowadays publicly put in a corner in my home country as unruly citizens. Any opinion other than the official one does not correspond to the spirit of the times. This also shows the hypocrisy when Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and others talk about events like June 17, 1953. Yet it was people like Steinmeier who courted Putin and pushed natural gas supplies from Russia – they just don’t want to talk about it anymore.
When then as now there is talk about the “evil Russians”, most commentators fail to realize that there was also a time in between, which was not long ago. Perhaps the “old GDR people”, people like me, are a bit more sensitized by their life experiences. We probably feel the new injustice in today’s system the most and understand how much the aggression policy of the USA including the eastward expansion of NATO, but especially the interferences in Ukraine, has destroyed Russia’s initially benevolent attitude towards the West.
We know who, after German reunification, failed to reach out to Russia as a partner and instead build it up as a new enemy.
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.
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.
The Wind of Change 