Tag: UnionCountyFetchYourNews

“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.

“No one answered”

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Why Putin attacked

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

He is still the President of Ukraine, but his hours are probably numbered. It is to be hoped that he and his family will get out of the country in time and unharmed, because he is still young. But Volodymyr Selensky will have his own story to tell about the reliability of the West.

The phrases from Washington to Berlin have proven to be rhetoric of outrage and compassion fading away like the echo in the cave.

His home country has been betrayed and sold by its western “partners”, in the end mercilessly abandoned, in spite of all the full-bodied words towards Kiev. Yet the country had been the plaything of Washington before, as Trump’s envoys sought to enrich themselves at the country’s expense, such as one Rudi Giuliani and his criminal Ukrainian business partners. We remember: American payments for defense purposes were used as leverage for statements by the Ukrainian president about Trump and his alleged blamelessness. This was nothing but a form of state terrorism and blackmail on the part of the USA.

It is significant what Volodymyr Selensky had to say last night on camera: he had addressed the leaders of 27 countries in the past hours to accept Ukraine into NATO immediately. “But everyone is afraid, no one has answered.”

Ukraine in NATO would activate in this hour the immediate alliance case, with which all member states would have to support Ukraine immediately militarily. The conflict would most likely turn into a global conflagration. Conversely, if Ukraine had been in NATO for a long time, Putin would not have attacked it. It was his unbearable nightmare that the country could join the Atlantic Alliance and Russia would be strategically cornered more and more. That is why he attacked.

There is little likelihood that Ukraine will settle down after the war; a human tragedy emerges. Europeans can prepare themselves for a new wave of refugees. All this is happening mainly because the West, in boundless hubris and arrogance over the past two decades, thought it could put Putin in his place and push Russia back.

Cui Bono – to whom is it a benefit?

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How the West provoked the Russian Bear

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

An old Latin phrase goes: “Cui bono?”, which translates roughly as “to whom is it a benefit?” This, it seems, is a conclusion according to which everyone twists his own version of history (or simply omits facts), and as a result only comes to light how much the blusterers like to measure things with double standards: When two do the same thing, it is far from being the same.

The omission of facts has served the West as a justification to blame the other not only since these days. What made U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, not only insult Russia but throw stones in his own glass house during the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague? The quote is worthwhile because it shows how arrogantly, negligently and immoderately the USA and Europe – the occasion was the Russian invasion of Crimea – railed against Russia. Obama said at the time, “Russia is a regional power that threatens some of its immediate neighbors … We [he meant his own country] do not need to invade our neighbors in order to have a strong, cooperative relationship with them.”

Pardon me?

Who else should the U.S. have attacked as neighbors after the way had been “paved” for westward expansion by wiping out indigenous peoples in violation of treaty after treaty to the point that they no longer mattered? And yet, that was not enough. Mexico, a neighbor, had been attacked in violation of the treaty for – among other things – not allowing slavery in Texas, a part of Mexico – and 40 percent of Mexican territory fell into U.S. hands “just like that” at the end of the war. Now there was no neighbor in the west anymore, for the Pacific was difficult to attack.

This is called, according to free American translation, a “strong cooperative relationship with our neighbors”?

Those who then have hardly any neighbors left but want to advance in their expansionist drive for world domination, eventually look elsewhere in the world. Where have the Americans, as the unmatched military power, not invaded to secure their influence by deposing existing governments, unjust or not, and replacing them according to their own good thinking to protect their own interests? Where have they not used their intelligence services to launch or support plots to organize coups and overthrows – all, of course, under the official guise of “democracy and freedom?” The list of affected countries is not short.

Anyone who is not very interested in history, who is not familiar with it, need only look at recent events – the criminal war in Vietnam is not even necessary in the considerations. In Afghanistan, for example – after George W. Bush’s grandiose announcements about fighting terrorism, although it was clear very soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, that the majority of the terrorists not only came from the allied Saudi Arabia but had also been financed from there. A little later, weapons of mass destruction were the alleged reason for attacking Iraq – a lie for a pretense. What has become of it?

What capitalist interests, what dilettante ruthlessness was behind pelting the Russian bear with stones in the decades that followed the end of the Cold War? Doesn’t the West realize how much it is fomenting a nationalist revival in Russia?

To this day, no one seems to notice what a divided country Ukraine is – with one of the highest mortality rates in the world, by the way. Apparently, Russian tanks are already in eastern Ukraine, whose people were denied the use of their native Russian language after Ukrainian independence in 1991. There, in the Donbass, the powerful industrial center of the tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, the Americans with their omnipresent McDonald stores and Coca-Cola will probably have to give up the sails for the time being. One can only hope that the conflict does not spread even further.

But the profit vultures in Stars and Stripes, who already control most of the corporate world, have long been circling elsewhere – in Germany, of all places, whose chancellor according to desire only today decreed the “interim” halt to the Russian gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. A victory for the dealmakers, hagglers and speculators: against the will of a majority of the more environmentally conscious German population, the Americans can now probably sell their dirty, overpriced fracking gas in Europe.

So, it looks as if Germany, the largest donor to the largest European country – Ukraine – will be asked to pay twice in the future, including extreme prices for liquid gas, which probably have to be subsidized. For years, German money has been seeping into dubious channels in Ukraine, for the oligarchs there are selling out their country like the Americans are selling out theirs. This means that the boomerang especially for Germany is already in the air. In the end, the sanctions against Russia might harm the Europeans more than the Russians.

As another truism says: democracy is the rule of money.

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
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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

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.

Trump’s Stalinist Show Trial

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

At his rally in Arizona, a mastermind named Donald Trump spoke of Stalinist show trials in connection with the investigative committee on the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

I was born into a Soviet satellite state where there were such show trials, as a result of which Stalinists and Communists tortured and murdered people. The victims were neither mentally deranged nor anti-social rioters, but freedom fighters who stood up for the fundamental right of the people.

To compare victims of dictatorship and tyranny with the demented American mob of January 6, would be tantamount to disparaging Stalinist victims – if it didn’t come from the mouth of someone like Trump, who, as a con man, is bent on taking others for fools. Figures like Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Ted Cruz strike the same chord.

The fundamental question is: What brainchild are those who elected and support experts like Trump, Cruz, and Taylor-Greene to positions of ultimate responsibility for their country – political charlatans who don’t shy away from fomenting conspiracy theories no matter what societal damage they inflict?

But such a question cannot actually arise. After all, what can be expected in a country where half of the population (!) completely rejects evolution and instead believes that the world and all life was created by a supernatural ghost?

Is What Bernie Sanders is Saying not True?

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Is someone a radical left if he calls a truth by its name – a truth that affects the majority of people in the U.S. at that?

The truth should prevail above personal political and, by the way, religious convictions. Why? For, first, humanity has been misled and abused by both sides – by politics and even more so by religions – more often than seldom. And secondly, because those who in principle give their convictions a higher value than facts and truth degrade themselves to intellectually wretched creatures whose train of thought discharge into baseless assertions. From such a corner emerge the conspiracy theorists, who, by the way, have always existed throughout history.

Without my own experience, I probably wouldn’t believe Bernie Sanders so easily either. In eight years of working for a company called Walmart, I’ve encountered more than enough not to know what he’s talking about. I can justifiably say that I have not experienced such a lack of rights on the part of the workers even under communist rule in the GDR. There – in a command state in which we were all walled in – at least the physical well-being of the workers was still taken care of. In the workplace, physical integrity was a high priority, and no one has ever been burdened with additional financial demands other than the monthly health insurance contribution. Medical care at that time was excellent, even if it was subsidized.

It is an arbitrariness like in a third world country, to which the employees at Walmart and more than likely elsewhere in the country are exposed – without a real possibility to defend themselves. Working time was cut if the profit figures for the store did not match greedy corporate expectations. Consequently, those who were spared from even lesser income now had to run faster to get all the work done. In a hopelessly understaffed department, I contracted a double hernia. All references from my side to a health impairment contracted at Walmart were of no use – the superiors had their instructions according to which they had to proceed.

A case like mine was everyday business, and Walmart had long since taken precautions to shirk its financial responsibility. Workers’ compensation insurance was only on paper, because according to Walmart’s philosophy, I had not sustained the injury while loading hundreds of bags of mulch, garden soil and compost for the customers, not seldom without help, but probably at home growing tomatoes or studying American history books.

Despite health insurance, a not inconsiderable part of the costs for the surgery fell on me. I settled the bill with means not generated in the USA, but in my home country Germany. How many Americans are fortunate enough to be able to similarly compensate for the miserable care their own wealthy country provides them?

After the passing of a young colleague, the lady from Human Resources went from table to table in the Walmart break room asking for donations for his immense hospital bill that the bereaved family was facing. No one sitting there could answer in the negative. People barely able to make ends meet themselves pulled a dollar out of their pockets, some as much as five, while American health insurance companies shoveled billions in profits into their own pockets without lawmakers lifting a finger to stop the criminal profiteering at the public’s expense.

A few weeks later, this HR woman who had helped me get a full-time job in 2014, was also hospitalized and died.

During my tenure at Walmart, I’ve seen colleagues 80 and older dragging themselves to work, forced by medical bills, incurred years ago. People undergoing cancer treatment had visible difficulty to make it through the workday. I saw all this for the first time in my life, and I couldn’t believe I was in the United States of America.

Of course, Bernie Sanders is right. Anyone who denies this has lost all touch with reality and lives in another galaxy. Facts cannot be blurred by closed eyes during prayer, either, but faith and belief can be misleading. Religion can very easily lead astray – especially when those who derive lucrative benefits from it know how to skillfully spread it among people as an ideology. As a consequence, this has a lot to do with how few of my colleagues recognized the injustices that happened to them every day. Most took it in silence. To put it bluntly: they were used to it, they didn’t know any different.

The old man Bernie is also right about the Democratic Party. Because just like the Republicans, Democrats with very view exceptions are also grateful recipients of large donations from the country’s moneyed elite. Their corrupt nature deprives millions of needy Americans of much-needed help in connection with the build back better act once so hopefully announced by Biden. Instead of supporting their president, his own party is embroiled in an internal battle of alignment while more and more Americans are dissatisfied.

Is he really surprised? Joe Biden is an American, he should have known better. After all, not long ago he publicly described himself as a capitalist. It seemed to me as if he wanted to make clear with this very insipid formulation how little he has to do with socialist ambitions. The man knows only too well what a sour taste such a disposition would evoke in most of his compatriots. Therefore, he did not even bother to explain to them what socialism actually is, nor what kind of capitalist he himself impersonates as president of the country.

I don’t think a turn for the better is imminent for most Americans.