Tag: UnionCountyGOP

1999: When NATO bombed Yugoslavia

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The similarity of the Russian strategy in Ukraine is striking

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, especially smart and USA-hawkish German politicians have repeatedly attracted attention with their omniscient remarks that for the first time since Hitler there is war again in Europe. From a historical point of view, this is not true: For in the spring of 1999 – some may still remember – NATO, led by the USA, bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia outside the alliance and without a UN mandate. That, too, was war.

Yugoslavia 1999: Burning Belgrade after NATO Bombing

The way of warfare at that time reminds of the current Russian strategy in Ukraine, with the difference that almost 24 years ago nobody talked about a “turn of times” as in Germany and nobody else had the idea to impose sanctions against participating, war-leading NATO countries in view of the crimes against international law. If there was an outcry of indignation, it was nowhere near as loud as it is today – in the media and elsewhere.

Although the operation, which took place between March 24 and June 10, 1999, was code-named “Allied Forces,” the main actor – I would never have guessed – was the United States. The Americans dropped a total of 28,000 bombs on parts of Serbia and Montenegro, with the death of an estimated 500 uninvolved civilians, including children and women, and “accidentally” also bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three people were killed there, all of them Chinese citizens.

The humanitarian justification for the bombings remains controversial to this day, to say the least. Nevertheless, it is always possible to invent reasons to start a war – see George W. Bush. In any case, as air strikes on Yugoslavia proved unexpectedly ineffective, the Americans suddenly had grave misgivings about allowing ground troops to advance.

So, they did exactly the same thing in Yugoslavia that Putin is doing in Ukraine today: the war henceforth focused on civilian infrastructure, targeting power plants, coal-fired power plants, waterworks, rail links, bridges and government facilities. We remember, the US President at that time was Bill Clinton.

Unlike today with regard to Ukraine, hardly any voices of indignation were heard in the West at the time, while rather timid tones came from former pacifists everywhere, such as the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who successfully refused military service in his younger years, but today, in an astonishing change of heart, seems to know his way around any tank model. Like the self-proclaimed “peace politicians” from the Greens, part of the current left-liberal traffic light coalition in Germany, Scholz calls for sending more and more weapons to Ukraine – until Russia is defeated.

A nuclear power like Russia, which has launched a brutal war against Ukraine in violation of international law, is difficult to defeat militarily. Vladimir Putin, provoked to the core by the West, is likely to fight to the end and may not recoil to pull the nuclear card as a last option. Meanwhile, US-controlled corporations are making gigantic profits from the production of war materials and the sale of their dirty fracking natural gas, which hardly anyone overseas wanted before, at a price today that is not only dragging the economy in Europe into the abyss, but from which millions of private households in particular are suffering, not least in Germany.

This is far from the end of the line: The new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives could demand a higher cost-sharing by Europeans in the war in Ukraine, which could drag on for who knows how long. It looks like anything but a good new year for Europe.

German President Prepares His Country for Rough Times

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

If Germany’s leaders decide to have their president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, give a completely unscheduled speech to the nation today to get people in the mood for “hard times for the years to come,” it’s a sure sign of how far Germany is still slipping into calamity – and beyond the coming winter.

Almost every sentence he said could be refuted – it is a disgrace how the population is made a fool of. Just one example from his speech:

“We are just leaving the era of fossil industrialization …. We are entering an age increasingly without coal, oil and gas.”

Increasingly without?

The facts paint a different picture:

Coal, a fossil fuel: At the instigation of the Green Minister of Economics, Habeck, the Saarland is currently bringing completely outdated, environmentally harmful coal-fired power plants back to the grid.

Liquefied natural gas, a fossil fuel: LNG terminals are under construction in Wilhelmshaven, Brunsbuettel, Stade and Lubmin to land the dirty fracking gas from the USA. Allegedly, the Americans earn 100 million euros with each arriving ship, paid for by the German consumer.

Oil, a fossil fuel: Chancellor Scholz was recently in Saudi Arabia (a begging US-President Biden was there before him) to ask the Saudis for higher oil production. Here, a brutal war of aggression in Yemen and human rights suddenly no longer play a role, unlike regarding Russia. The German double standards are deplorable. The Saudis, however, have so far given Biden and Scholz the middle finger: they have cut production because this allows them to obtain a higher price for oil.

Steinmeier had not even finished his speech when the news came: The inflation rate in Germany has risen to 10.4 percent.

This is not the result of the war in Ukraine, but of the insane sanctions of the West against Russia.

During the Cold War, oil and natural gas flowed steadily from the Soviet Union to the former Federal Republic and the GDR, despite all international crises, wars and ideological antagonisms. In comparison, today it looks as if the West is virtually conjuring up the discord with Russia and does not miss any opportunity to fuel it further, because this corresponds to the American doctrine of weakening Russia.

Any diplomacy to end the war has been rejected – as already proven by the rapprochement of both belligerents in March under Turkish mediation. In the subsequent negotiations in Istanbul, Kiev had agreed to abandon its aspirations to join NATO and settle for neutral status. Then, without any credible, concrete indication of reasons, the Ukrainian negotiators rejected everything at that time. They had been called off from Washington by Mr. Biden and his minions.

At that point, the Americans had long signaled that they would support Ukraine with whatever it needed against Russia. This is how proxy wars are fought.

God’s Whoremongers

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

“Rather a poor sinner be than a shameless hypocrite.”

They play the Good Samaritan by asking their misguided cult members to do charity in order to create an appearance in public that is a lie from top to bottom. The Baptist sect, once founded by slaveholders who maintained that God and the Bible allowed them to own slaves. Today, they leave everything up to their great designer, but they need guns. Currently, like many other churches, deeply involved in sexual abuse. An institution of fraud and mass dumbing down.

Source: New York Times

Criminal organizations like these should have been banned long ago. Any decent person would be ashamed to associate with such a debauched club. However, it is unbridled business and profiteering as usual in America: a bunch of charlatans shamelessly line their pockets by enriching themselves on the naiveté of their brainwashed adherents. A modern-time gangster gang of populists, corrupters, fornicators, rapists, cover-up specialists and tax dodgers in the name of their creator, as it can hardly be worse.

And these criminals tell others that they are all sinners from birth because they have inherited the sins of Adam and Eve, and Jesus frees them from these sins – of course only if they follow his word. What mindless nonsense, it doesn’t get any more stupid.

Be careful which institution you send your children to. “Let the little children come to me” is not necessarily a demand that attentive people with sense should comply with.

Not from Nowhere

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Joe Biden refutes himself

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The American mendacity cannot be greater: President Joe Biden refutes himself during his visit to the Saudis and with what he had said during the election campaign about the murder of the journalist Kashoggi. In the end, however, it is nothing other than the usual policy towards criminal regimes: business comes first. Idealism is the worst enemy of the mendacious.

It doesn’t matter whether human rights are trampled underfoot in the country in question or not. After all, the world gendarme USA itself is anything but a role model, and the much-vaunted democracy is more equivalent to a dictatorship of the moneyed elite, which is not regulated by the state and can therefore do as it pleases at the expense of the masses. The majority of the people let themselves be ripped off and plundered in ignorance, brainwashed by the corporate media and the churches, which all profit from the public misleading in the name of usury.

Long forgotten is the trade with Nazi Germany until well into the Second World War, after the persecution of Jews in Germany had long become internationally known – George W. Bush’s grandfather is only one example of this. At that time, there was also widespread anti-Semitism in the U.S., which only abated with the founding of Israel, at least officially. Since then, the situation has been reversed for American politics, for the specters they called have long since taken over the helm in the “freest country in the world.” As Democratic Senator William Fullbright already stated in 1973: “Israel controls the Senate.”

Today, the U.S. is demanding tough sanctions against Russia from its allies, while no other country is ruining itself more than Germany.

In turn, only the Americans benefit from this: Their country becomes more attractive for industrial settlements, because no one invests in Europe anymore in view of the high energy prices. At the same time, the American weaponry is running at full speed as long as the war in Ukraine rages – the corporations are making billions in profits and so is the caste of politicians in Washington, who are legally bribed by them. Future tax generations will have to pay for this.

The American elite doesn’t give a damn about their country, whether it’s Trump or Biden, Republicans or the majority of Democrats. The supplication to the Saudis is all about oil. While the world teeters on the edge of the abyss in the manmade climate crisis, Biden continues to heat up the fossil fuel business in firm loyalty to his clientele. When the situation is appropriate, he again feigns a commitment to climate protection. In reality, this tactic is called “greenwashing.”

Thus, the image of the ugly American was created throughout the world. It does not come from nowhere.

Germany Reels under Sanctions

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The claim that Germany and other European countries have made themselves too dependent on a political adversary like Russia with their energy policy is highly simplified and therefore simply nonsensical. The Americans in particular should be careful with such accusations, for they have never cared about ideological sensitivities when it came to enforcing their intentions in all parts of the world by any means as soon as tangible American profit interests were at stake. American wars of aggression grew out of this substance.

Of course, the initial West German rapprochement with Russia after Germany’s barbaric war against the Soviet Union also had its own interests in mind. Six decades ago, the Adenauer government gave away pipelines to the Soviet Union in exchange for cheap oil and natural gas later. That is how it had all begun. The emerging economic power of the Federal Republic of Germany, the German economic miracle after World War II, would very likely not have existed without the energy agreements with the former Soviets. The demand was huge. For 60 years, the Soviet Union and later Russia proved to be reliable trading partners, despite all international crises and ideological antagonisms.

The economic partnership between Soviets and Germans survived the Berlin crises of the late 1950s/early 1960s, including the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Eastern Bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the dramatic events in Poland in 1981, and finally the fall of the Berlin Wall, including the demise of East Germany, and even the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself in 1991 – to name only the most important events.

During the entire period, there were no other energy sources equal in price and quantity to Russian natural gas that Germany and Europe could have turned to. True – the reproach that can be levelled at the Germans today is that they looked too long and too hesitantly for alternatives instead of relying on Russia alone. Instead of becoming more independent from only one source, the country took the path of convenience, counting on “change through trade” to heal up the terrible history between Germans and Russians. Peter Altmaier, CDU politician and last Minister of Economics in the Merkel government, recently stated: “Nobody was prepared at the time to pay billions in costs for more safeguards. Not us politicians, not the executives and not the taxpayers.”

This worked for a long time without any problems. Then came the war in Ukraine and the demand of alliance partners, especially the USA, to engage against Russia. Nonsensical sanctions, from which only Americans and Russians benefit, are now seriously reeling Germany economically: For it suffers more from the war with natural gas than others, having allowed itself to be dragged towards an economic hara-kiri. On the other hand, due to the increased prices caused by the sanctions, Putin can sell his gas and oil advantageously elsewhere, while the price for natural gas in the USA is currently nine times lower compared to Europe, making the country more attractive as an industrial location for companies from all over the world. In the U.S., where the simple man of the street counts for little, the deal makers, their lobbyists, and the politicians they pay know how to win a dirty poker game.

The war in Ukraine is a crime, without question – but the sanctions do not end it. For the time being, it looks like the sanctions war is hurting Germany more than Russia. Germany’s most important gas importer Uniper had to apply for state aid today because there is no longer enough natural gas flowing from Russia. How the situation will develop when scheduled maintenance on Nord Stream 1 begins on July 11 and is to be completed after ten days is still unclear. By the end of the year at the latest, millions of private households will be faced with final bills for energy consumed, which many will probably not be able to pay on their own. And of all things, the federal government in Berlin with Green participation is thinking about reactivating decommissioned, environmentally harmful coal-fired power plants.

Germany is bound to the alliance, but it cannot jeopardize its economic foundations with a nonsensical sanctions war with Russia. There is also a responsibility to its own people. This is why it should open Nord Stream 2 – that is my opinion. As a result, the Americans would not voluntarily withdraw militarily from Europe, because they are never going to give up their imperialistic world domination.

Marx and Lenin

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Does Mrs. Noem know what she is talking about?

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem actually said the following sentence yesterday during the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Houston: “Let me tell you the truth about the enemies of the Second Amendment. They are schooled in the ways of Marx and Lenin.”

Soviet propaganda banner with the heads of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx (from left). We were fed up with such images in GDR times, because they hung in every classroom. I can’t believe that I have to come back to these pictures now, in the supposedly freest country in the world, of all places. At least no harm happened to us in school during our childhood, not once in the whole country – and that in the midst of a socialist dictatorship.

What pathetic nonsense.

“In the ways of Marx and Lenin” I was trained against my will in 1987/88 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the Kalashnikov, the most widely used sub-machine gun in the world at the time – and I did not like that at all. Even that “schooling” did not change my attitude towards guns.

In the GDR, where I lived for 29 years, military education was a compulsory subject in schools, as well as military camps – by the way, also for girls -, where the young people were trained on weapons. This also included hand grenades.

Notice something? Marxists, Leninists, Communists, Socialists, were sinister propagandists in line with Mrs. Noem and the NRA in their opinion about guns. Both sides for different, but in both cases self-serving purposes. Both are characterized by efforts to sell their propaganda with all sorts of history distorting arguments to disguise their true intentions. Politicians in the U.S. for reasons of votes and donations from the gun industry, no matter how many children have to die in their own country due to gun violence. Communists and socialists believed that guns were desperately needed to succeed in the “revolutionary struggle against the class enemy.” I am not sure anymore which is worse.

So, I don’t know where the lady from South Dakota gets her wisdom from. But she doesn’t care about historical facts – because she knows how well any nonsense goes down propagandistically with the majority of her countrymen as soon as terms like “Socialism” or “Marxism” come into play. My special friend Ron DeSantis from Florida uses far-fetched allusions to German history, including odd remarks about the Cold War, with such regularity that you can’t help but laugh at them. But with a majority of Americans, that kind of thing resonates.

The radical, naive and inflammatory speeches of the Trumps, DeSantis’, Cruz’ are easy to see through, especially for those who are informed about the historical background. I understand more and more why the political right, together with the churches in the fairway, wants to teach children in schools only what they think is right. For there is nothing more dangerous for the goals of propagandists than an enlightened humanity.

German State Secretary: Refugees across the Atlantic as well

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Visiting a shelter for Ukrainian refugees today in Hannover, Lower Saxony, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) said every country in Europe must take in refugees. She added: “We must also bring people across the Atlantic.” Given the dramatic situation in Germany and the economic capability of the countries on the American continent, she could only have meant Canada and the USA.

The German Foreign Minister’s demand is more than justified. The refugees from Ukraine are clearly an overall responsibility of the West due to its misguided policies towards Russia in the 1990’s. In concrete terms, this means that all NATO countries should be required to accept refugees from Ukraine, as the Alliance as a whole has been moving its external border closer and closer to Russia since 1999, thereby unnecessarily provoking the country. Of course, this does not entitle Russia to the war in which it is now bogged down. But the disintegrating Soviet Union should have been treated more carefully by the West, instead of pushing it into the corner of a possibly Asian peripheral power via the American Wolfowitz Doctrine.

Germany’s Secretary of State Annalena Baerbock (Alliance 90/The Greens).

In the meantime, it has almost been forgotten that in 1990 there were even brief considerations of admitting the Soviet Union to NATO.

At that time, there were many opportunities to integrate Russia into European security structures based on reciprocity. These opportunities have been punitively squandered. A prudent policy by the West would have made this bonding possible under the acceptance not to impose Western-style democracy on Russia. Anyone who was able to observe the political upheavals in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980’s from close quarters knows that this is true.

Now the European Union expects ten million refugees from Ukraine – that would be a quarter of the country’s entire population. This represents an enormous social burden and at the same time an opportunity for the entire West, including the U.S., to show its true Christian commitment.

A Human Disaster

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

In 2015, Germany mastered the refugee crisis with flying colors – it is remarkable how a million people were integrated into what was already Europe’s most populous country. But now I am anything but optimistic. Special trains from Warsaw carrying Ukrainian refugees reach the German capital Berlin almost at hourly intervals. 10,000 people arrive here alone every day.

The solidarity of the local population still holds.

At Berlin’s main train station, numerous signs in Russian and Ukrainian warn young women in particular not to accept overnight offers from private individuals. Most refugees are women and children. If they do not register upon arrival, every trace is lost. The police patrol everywhere.

On the tarmac of Berlin-Tegel Airport, which was shut down in November 2020 and where my wife and I had landed just three years ago, an arrival center was opened where refugees are registered, cared for and then transported on to other federal states in Germany. The City of Leipzig has already signaled that it has reached its intake capacity.

The German government now assumes that one million refugees from Ukraine will end up in Germany, almost 300,000 of whom are already in the country. But this figure is vague, because no one knows how long the war will last. And it can hardly be assumed that most of the refugees want to return to their destroyed country.

By comparison, the U.S. is about 27 times larger than Germany, but it has barely four times as many inhabitants.

This is the largest movement of refugees in Europe since 1944/45, when 14 million people from the former German eastern territories were fleeing the approaching Soviet army at the end of World War II. One of them was my father from East Prussia.

Only China can make Putin see Reason

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Putin will never succeed in bringing all of Ukraine under his control. I am sure that is not his intention either. Contrary to Western assumptions, the man is not a lunatic, far from it – he knows how to play his cards. He is a Machiavellian. Therefore, he also knows what could exceed the forces of his country.

If anyone at all can mediate in this conflict, it is not the Americans, and certainly not the Europeans. Europeans no longer play any role at all in the big decisions. China – to the detriment of the USA – has the decisive key role to play. If Putin listens to anyone at all, it is Chinese leader Xi Jinping. For the same reason, all channels of communication with Putin must be kept open if the war in Ukraine is to be ended as quickly as possible. As things stand, there will be no other way.

Even then, Putin is unlikely to back down from his demands: Recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, the same for the Donbass, but above all: a guarantee by the West of Ukraine’s neutrality. If peace is wanted – and this peace must come – then this is the price that the West will have to pay for its reckless policy of hubris toward Russia.

The only other possibility would be to bring Russia to its knees militarily or, in the end, even economically. Neither seems very realistic, as Biden’s “no” vote on fighter jets from Poland for Ukraine underscores. It would provoke Russia even more with devastating consequences for the whole of Europe. Here, the West is already showing signs of giving in. And the more the West fights Russia with sanctions, the more it brings the majority of patriotic Russians to Putin’s side.

Even the pictures of protests in Moscow do not change that. For more than a generation, the majority of Russians have wondered what the country actually fought for and won in World War II – only to lose so much again afterwards under its own concession. One has to put oneself in this position of Russian patriots – of a country which was, after all, allied with the USA in the last Great War. All this is directly related to the war in Ukraine.

The other victorious nation, the United States, after the destruction of Hitler’s Germany and with far fewer casualties than the Soviet Union, did not shrink a square inch, did not lose power, although it too has since instigated unjust wars in other parts of the world.

“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.