Tag: PinellasCountyVoters

We threw Chestnuts at Soviet Military Vehicles

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Germany intends to deliver GDR Strela anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine

Germany intends these days … to deliver 2,700 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from former NVA stocks to Ukraine. For the record, the NVA (Nationale Volksarmee) was the National People’s Army of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known in the U.S. – and not entirely historically accurate – as the former communist East Germany. Like the same state, this army has ceased to exist since 1990.

Germany delivers 2,700 surface-to-air missiles from GDR stock to Ukraine

The military utensil (the official term is 9K32-Strela-2, but there is absolutely no military expert talking in me) is ironically of Soviet design and now to be used in Ukraine against Russian invading forces. It has been in service since 1968, and there has hardly been a conflict hotspot during and since the Cold War in which this weapon has not been deployed. Among others, the Viet Cong also used it against the Americans in the Vietnam War.

Around the same time – we were eight or nine years old – a school friend and I, crouched behind a cemetery wall, threw chestnuts at passing Soviet military vehicles. When one of these vehicles stopped and we heard a loud Russian voice, we almost wet our pants and ran away.

We had actually been told in school to always wave to the Soviet convoys whenever we saw them on the road – because according to official propaganda, they were considered “our liberators from fascism.” But that didn’t really catch on. At the same time, my father was a great admirer of the American Apollo space flights. There I was confronted with the other extreme early in life: For it was Hitler’s former scientists who decisively helped the Americans win the race to the moon during the Cold War. My father’s influence was unconsciously reflected in my thinking, which could not follow the communist propaganda. I feel with almost similar mixed feelings about the portrayals in most news broadcasts today. All this together is probably the material for a whole book.

According to the official GDR account of that time, the Soviets were our friends, but in large parts of the population it was not seen that way. The GDR, a state about two-thirds the size of Florida, was frontline Warsaw Pact territory and therefore fully occupied by Soviet troops. They were omnipresent in the daily street scene, although strangely we hardly came into contact with them.

The chestnuts of 1969 against Soviet military have of course achieved nothing, and yet they were – in a figurative sense – probably trendsetting. For in the fall of 1989, peaceful protests in the Eastern Bloc, not chestnuts and certainly not tanks, led to the end of the Cold War. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of “glasnost and perestroika”, which means “openness, transparency and reformation”, led to the peaceful withdrawal of the Soviets from Middle and Eastern Europe. When two weapons-staring systems faced each other, things could have gone very differently, despite the supposed weakness of one of the opponents (we see it today with Russia). But in the decades to come, the West has struck at the outstretched hand of the Russians several times and without careful consideration. Without necessity, one did not understand how to turn a previous enemy into a partner.

And now there is a war in Europe, of which no one can say how the conflict would be resolved even after a ceasefire – from the point of view of both sides, the West as well as Russia, by the way. But the beginning of the 1990s proved how peace and security can be achieved: through dialogue, by approaching each other – in no case with more and more weapons.

One would think that the so-called Christianity of the Occident should understand and support Gorbachev’s option better than anyone else, but unfortunately, in the history of the world, the opposite has usually been the case.

Therefore, a Christian who advocates weapons remains for me a very strange Christian, because he permanently disregards his own principles instead of leaving everything to his dear God.

“Fuck The EU”

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Do we remember the following? https://www.theguardian.com/…/eu-us-diplomat-victoria…

This is not meant to justify Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine – on the contrary. But it may be recalled how Washington and also the European Union tried to manipulate the opposition they preferred in Ukraine after Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian president, came to office in 2010 in a recognized election.

Western interference came to light when a bugged telephone conversation between U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Ross Pyatt, was leaked in 2014 on the internet.

By “Fuck the EU,” Mrs. Nuland was referring to the European Union’s reluctance to support the stricter U.S. intent to “arrange” a pro-Western course for Ukraine by manipulating Ukrainian opposition against Russia and for its (the West’s) own interests.

At that time, then U.S. President Barack Obama had repeatedly assured the world public that the U.S. would not interfere in the internal affairs of Ukraine. This was a lie that came to light openly through the phone call.

It has long been confirmed that the 2013/14 protests on the Maidan in Kiev, the perseverance of the masses in freezing cold in tent cities, was a subversion financed by the United States and the European Union.

The West is partly to blame for the fate of Ukraine, because for years it has ostensibly pursued only its own interests and not the interests of the people of Ukraine. The compassion of ordinary people today, who want to help, is real – the “compassion” of the West is hypocritical.

As always, it is the people who have to suffer. This is what we are now witnessing in Ukraine, and the accompanying hypocritical chatter of the Europeans at the expense of the suffering population in Ukraine is hard to bear. The West should be ashamed of itself.

The Note that James Baker no longer knows

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The West is not innocent of the War in Ukraine

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III responded to my question about NATO’s eastward expansion. Mr. Baker was present in a leading position when, in 1990, the negotiations with the Soviets on the reunification of my homeland primarily concerned the question of the future of the transatlantic alliance.

The answer of the statesman to a directly affected person like me is extremely polite, but also just as politically codified. I assume that the chief negotiator at the time can no longer openly refer to the actual result of 1990 in view of the current explosive nature of the unchecked eastward expansion of NATO.

He then does not address my core question in an unambiguous form but refers mainly to the issue of Germany’s future NATO membership, which was very relevant at the time. The possibility of excluding the area acceding to the Federal Republic of Germany – i.e., the GDR – from future NATO membership was also briefly discussed, but finally discarded. With reference to my main question, Mr. Baker writes to me that “nobody at that time was considering the possibility of expanding NATO to other countries.” But in another passage, it says: During the early stage of the negotiations he (Baker) had raised the possibility towards Gorbachev that the USA COULD agree to a non-extension of NATO to the East, if the Soviet Union agreed to a German reunification. However, this had only been a “what if” consideration, which was withdrawn a short time later.

His initial remark apparently refers to February 9, 1990, when he settled the NATO issue with Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev in Moscow, which resulted the following day in the Soviet “yes” to an economic and monetary union vis-à-vis East Germany – which, as is well known, led to German reunification that same year. But Mr. Baker did not mention to me a note he wrote specifically about the promise to the Soviets not to expand NATO beyond the German Oder-Neisse line.

Instead, the end of the letter from his office states that the information is for the recipient’s personal use only and is to be kept confidential. Therefore, I cannot publish them in their entirety, but only use parts of their content analogously.

As chance would have it, on the morning of February 26, 2022, I came across an interview with the former German Minister of State in the Foreign Office and former First Mayor of Hamburg, Klaus von Dohnanyi. The interview with him had been broadcast by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (Central German Broadcasting), a public broadcaster for the federal states of Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt (my home state). I followed von Dohnanyi’s statements live on the Internet.

Von Dohnanyi cited a written memo from the U.S. Secretary of State referring to NATO, without which German unification would not have been possible because the Soviets would otherwise have refused to give their consent. The German politician said in a statement: “Baker’s reference in that note implies Germany can join NATO as a whole, but beyond that there is no expansion.” And further: “The context is completely indisputable – anyone who denies this does not know the files.”

So, we have two statements here. One diplomat doesn’t really get to the topic, avoids it politely and very clever – the other diplomat quotes the file situation.

I personally have not seen this note, but it hardly makes sense why the Soviets de facto gave up everything they had gained in World War II without at least securing their own borders and demanding corresponding assurances from the West. This seems highly unlikely – regardless of the fact that in 1990 no one could have accurately foreseen the breakup of the Soviet Union and with it the emergence of independent former Soviet republics like Ukraine that would now pursue their own security interests.

In addition, there are statements in audio and visual documents from politicians active at the time who, by their own admission, did not intend NATO to expand eastward – see my article “The West’s Falsification of History.”

Let’s conclude with one of the most respected and brilliant diplomats the U.S. has ever had: George F. Kennan, the architect of US post-World War II strategy of containment of the Soviet Union. When secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 1999 formally welcomed Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) at the Harry S. Truman presidential library in Independence, Missouri, Kennan called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold war area”, causing damage “beyond repair” to efforts to transform Russia from an enemy into a partner.

My implication is the following: Putin is inexcusable, because every war is a crime, no matter who starts it. But how the West presents itself these days is not only frightening, but shameful.

The West bears a historically verifiable share of the guilt for the war in Ukraine.

Kiev before the Fall?

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Game is over in Ukraine for the Giuliani’s, the Trump’s, and the Biden Juniors

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Once again: Cui Bono, for whose benefit? Putin, too, can talk all he wants. The real reason for the invasion of Ukraine was the not unjustified fear that sooner or later NATO would also present itself there. After all, Ukraine’s goal, declared in its own constitution, was to join the NATO alliance. From the Russian point of view, it is understandable that Putin would not allow that – conversely, the Americans would not have done it differently if they had felt threatened in front of their own door (see the Cuban missile crisis in 1962). Perhaps with the difference that their army would have bogged down in such a situation as usual, with helicopters evacuating their own people from roofs.

After all the grandiose assurances, after all the support for Ukraine against Russia, it now looks like Americans and Europeans are dropping the country like a hot potato, while, as in any war, the civilian population suffers the most.

Already there are first reports that Kiev could soon fall. The city is considered the mother of the Russian state system, which originated a thousand years ago. Scandinavian traders formed the Kievan Rus there together with Slavic tribes as early as the eighth century.

One only needs to follow the development since 1990. Germany could have cultivated the friendly atmosphere that prevailed toward the then Soviet Union, even in the course of the many changes. We got our reunification only because the Soviets allowed it and did not send tanks in the GDR in 1989 as they did in 1953 – a previously unimaginable situation.

Already Bismarck, anything but a socialist, had warned 140 years ago not to mess with Russia. But the Atlantic alliance compulsion of our days has degenerated the initially good German relationship with Russia into a willing allegiance to the Atlantic alliance. In another scenario of history, we would not see the things that we have to see today with regard to Ukraine.

It looks like the game is over in Ukraine for the Giuliani’s, the Trump’s, and the Biden juniors (remember?). Wherever there is quick money to be made, they have their fingers in the dirt. They and their ilk have made a run for it and will try elsewhere.

The Historical Falsification of the West

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US-Secretary of State James Baker: “Not one inch eastward.”

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Many people do not remember what happened in the recent past, but politicians in high positions of responsibility would actually be obliged to do so. This should be self-evident for a very banal reason: For yesterday’s events become the guide of action for today.

Thirty-two years may be a long time in a person’s life – in the history of the world they are only the blink of an eye. As someone who followed the events at that time very closely and was affected by them – after all, those were the basic conditions for the reunification of my country – I can understand Vladimir Putin today. The entire West – mainly Germany under the benevolent protection of the USA – have deceived and lied to the Russians and rejected Putin’s outstretched hand several times during his first term as Russian president.

Contrary to all international promises and assurances, NATO’s external border has steadily moved closer to Russia, starting in 1999 with the inclusion of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. There was absolutely no need nine years before to exploit the goodwill of the disintegrating Soviet Union in such obscurity. This is not an opinion, but an indisputable, historical fact.

For a short time in 1990, there was even discussion of admitting the Soviet Union itself into NATO. And one should also remember: At the end of a speech in the German Bundestag on September 25, 2001, there was a standing ovation for the German-speaking Vladimir Putin. All forgotten already.

Only a few days ago, the re-elected German Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, had nothing better to do than to warn Putin of “harsh consequences” in connection with Ukraine. Of course, there should be no more war in Europe, but Russia feels humiliated and threatened. What would be the reaction of the USA if Putin stationed soldiers and missiles in Venezuela? It should be allowed to ask this question.

The link below shows the two foreign ministers of the United States and Germany at the time, James Baker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, with English subtitles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qbj9E_WhM4
May be an image of 7 people and text

Faith under Threat

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

At least sometimes a few Americans stand up against nonsense, and there is much hope when young people do this. The following story is set in West Virginia in the 21st century – please follow the link at the bottom.

Instead of accepting the silly claptrap, a number of American school children decided to kick the old church fart’s butt after being exposed to the following:

“Students who attended were asked to raise their arms in prayer and give their lives to Jesus so that they can find purpose and salvation. The speakers said that those who did not follow the Bible would go to hell when they died, students told the Associated Press.”

Faith and salvation under the threat of punishment – this is how the church and its demagogues have always operated since the early Middle Ages. The Church is, in its history, the most insane and criminal institution ever invented by mankind to make the mainstream compliant.

Their instruction manual for a magical ideology is called the Bible, a work of art largely dating from the first century, when ordinary people could neither read nor write, were exposed to all kinds of superstitions, knew no medical care, gnawed on bones, had to walk around in rags, and barely lived past the age of 40. It was the time from which also Halloween originates. Compared to the nonsense from the Bible, the old witch’s cookbook from the fairy tales of my childhood read comparatively harmless.

What does it have to do with freedom when wicked parsons are allowed to tell kids in their school what they have to believe? This is even worse and more stupid than the propaganda I experienced in the alleged socialism of the GDR. But this is also part of the pointed “program” of mass dumbing down in the “land of the free.” It is a routinely occurrence – in this case it came out into the public eye because someone had the courage to stand up to it.

If there is any hope for this country, it lies with the young people.

Christian revival at West Virginia public high school prompts more than 100 students to walk out – The Washington Post

The German Chancellor’s Balancing Act

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The new German chancellor Olaf Scholz could not signal his agreement with U.S. policy toward Russia fast enough in Washington yesterday. And yet he knows how careful he must be.

The Americans, always profit-oriented, want to sell their highly polluting fracking gas to Germany as well. Yet even if it worked that way against expected protests from the massive Green Deal movement overseas, it would not meet the demand in Germany, as natural gas from Russia can. But it’s not about Nord Stream 2 alone.

My home country, as always, is in a moral dilemma when it comes to Russia. In both countries – a fact not very well known in America – the last Great War has not been forgotten. 25 million people were lost by the Soviets because of the Nazi invasion in World War II. Almost every Russian family was affected. No other country has had to pay a higher blood toll.

It is true: Stalin was hardly better than Hitler, but he was suddenly in league with the Americans two years after the alliance with the German dictator had ended. Those who believe that this no longer plays a role in the consciousness of Russians and Germans today are very much mistaken. World War II is the reason why Germany cannot supply weapons to Ukraine – although German war atrocities in Ukraine were particularly brutal there in 1941/42.

The Germans, even in subsequent generations like mine, have accepted the guilt. This is not self-evident in world history. Until today, the Americans have not officially apologized for the war crimes committed in Vietnam.

Of course, Putin is not a flawless democrat, but the Americans, in their neoliberalism, also have their difficulties in asserting democracy in their country. And they all – the U.S. as well as the European Union – should remember how badly the disintegrating Soviet Union was mishandled in 1991 and after. As in a boxing match in which the opponent is already down, the Americans struck again below the belt in form of the secret Wolfowitz-Memorandum, casting “Russia as the gravest potential threat to U.S. vital interests [before it had even done anything] … The Pentagon had decided the United States would never permit any nation … to rise again even to the status of regional superpower” (Source: Patrick J. Buchanan: A Republic, not an Empire, pages 7-9).

The memorandum proves the West’s aggressive strategy against Russia: pushing NATO forward to its borders in open breach of previous agreements – the same agreements, by the way, that enabled the Germans to reunify in 1990. I was there, I lived it and experienced it.

One can declare someone the main enemy before even knowing whether the opponent is an enemy at all. This is exactly what happened with Russia after the end of the Cold War. The truth of the history is long forgotten today. Just one hundred years ago, the current confrontations over Ukraine would have led to a full-scale military conflict. Who still cares about that? Of course, Putin also has skeletons in the closet – but from the point of view of the West, he alone is the villain. It is as simple as that.

For they do not know what they are talking about

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Too many Americans obviously don’t know much about the history of their own country. Many have no knowledge, for example, that the social measures proposed by a certain Bernie Sanders are very similar to the measures implemented by one of the most famous U.S. presidents, FDR; measures that have brought millions of Americans out of the misery of the Great Depression. Nobody in America therefore seriously thought of calling Roosevelt a socialist. And it’s worth noting that to this day, schoolchildren in the U.S. every morning recite a pledge written in 1892 by an avowed socialist, Francis Bellamy.

As a contemporary witness who had to live in a socialist form of society, my assessment of the USA is that the term “socialism” in this country is continuously misused by the political right for ideological purposes as well as propaganda of the most primitive kind. In truth, the opposite of socialism has been taking place in the U.S. for a long time, at least since the days of Ronald Reagan: It is the greedy seed of neoliberalism that is dividing and destroying the country.

The recurring warning of an alleged, American socialism serves the political right as a bogeyman to protect their real clientele, the super-rich corporations and their billions in donations to the very same politicians. Among the profiteers, by the way, are also large parts of the Democratic Party, which 40 years ago would have been identified as moderate Republicans.

It is a sad fact that the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has turned its back on the working class and is shamefully abandoning it even in the time of Joe Biden.

The Next Church Stink Comes to Light

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The next church stink comes to light in Germany: After the former Pope Benedict XVI has been caught in a lie, today more than a hundred employees of the Catholic Church have come out publicly as homosexuals – knowing full well that they could lose their jobs. They demand an end to discrimination by the church.

They now receive support from the Bishop of Aachen, Helmut Dieser. In a news program on the public television station ARD, Dieser said today that the church’s view on the subject of homosexuality no longer reflects the times.

In response to a reporter’s inquiry as to whether this means that against today’s background the interpretation of the Bible is wrong, the bishop replied: “If one interprets it in such a way that fundamental statements are made there about the phenomenon homosexuality, which are on the level of today’s natural science, then yes.”

He is right, the bishop. And if one would get the idea to subject the Bible in its entire content to a scientific examination, then it would turn out that the complete work of art consists of fraudulent nonsense and superstition, because nothing of what is written there stands the test of science.

The Crimes of the Churches

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To this day they propagate the existence of the devil

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

File:Karte Erzbistum Muenchen-Freising.png - Wikimedia Commons
Map of Germany: The Archdiocese of Munich-Freising is shown in highlighted color.

The New York Times reported today: “Pope Benedict XVI was faulted in a report over his handling of sexual abuse cases when he was an archbishop in Munich. A newly released report by a law firm said the former pope failed to discipline priests in at least four cases of sexual abuse accusations in Germany.”

The main German news program “Tagesschau,” a public service medium, reported today: “497 victims, 235 perpetrators and a balance of horror: The expert report on abuse in the Archdiocese of Munich heavily incriminates high-ranking church officials – including Pope Emeritus Benedict and Cardinal Marx.”

To understand the full extent of the crimes committed by the catholic church in Germany alone, one must know that the Archdiocese of Munich-Freising covers only a small part of Germany (see graphic on left).

In their two-thousand-year history, the Christian churches have almost consistently held the greatest power that has ever existed. To this day – as they have “reinvented” themselves again and again under varying names – they are mainly responsible for the greatest crimes against humanity ever committed. This is a historically established fact.

Any political party and organization with such a criminal background would have been banned long ago – just as Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party was banned after the war.

How the churches survive their inhuman crimes is shown by only a small example from the American South. Most of today’s churchgoers probably don’t know anything about it – and those who do know, don’t want to admit it:

In the United States of America, the Southern Baptist Convention had been founded as a church of slaveholders in 1845. The slaves were told not to worry, because they would have it better in a second life.

Today, the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the USA.

To the present day, the demagogues of these churches have been spreading the nonsense of the existence of a devil as an instrument of intimidation and as the cause of the unsuccessfulness of their god in improving this world. In the history of the world, religion has never been anything but a special form of superstition and has always been used as such by the authorities to keep their subjects in line. Religion is the most dangerous kind of superstition.

“God is a hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the burden of proof rests on the theist.” Quote: Percy Bysshe Shelley