Putin just called the bluff of the War Hawks who are trying to prop up their collapsing unipolar order. By recognizing the independence of the “breakaway republics” of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, he is offering to protect them from the escalating shelling and shooting coming from the Ukraine side of the Line of Contact. He said no matter what Russia did, the West would respond with sanctions, because their goal is not peace, but the destruction of Russia’s economy, to force a regime change there, which he will not allow. The alternative is to organize a new security architecture — is anyone in the West listening?
Blinken’s difficulty with truthful dialogue was again on display yesterday, in an interview with ABC-News, and in a speech before the U.N. Security Council (UNSC). At the UNSC, he presented lie after lie, asserting that Russia will invade Ukraine, Russia has violated the Minsk Agreement, is preparing a false flag event in the Donbas as an excuse to invade, etc., etc. Expect more of the same today from him and NATO spokesmen at the annual Munich Security Conference. To hear the full, actual truth, be sure to register for the online Schiller Institute Conference on Saturday: https://schillerinstitute.nationbuilder.com/100_seconds_to_midnight_02192022
This interview with Alexander Rahr was done on February 17, at a time of continuing escalation of tensions between the U.S.-NATO forces and Russia, ostensibly over Ukraine. Rahr is an historian, a business consultant and an active proponent of German-Russian friendship, who writes frequently on this subject and is often featured in interviews. In this interview, he presents what is generally censored in the western media, answering: What is really behind the crisis in Ukraine? What are Putin’s goals? Can war be avoided? In the second section, he takes up the question of diplomacy, emphasizing the importance of a French-German role in countering the insistence of the proponents of 19th and 20th century British geopolitics, who argue that east and west cannot work together. He discusses the potential for collaboration in energy and technology, including space exploration, and how this can form the basis of a security architecture stretching from the Atlantic to Vladivostok, which could include the United States. The interview was conducted by Harley Schlanger of the {Executive Intelligence Review}.
The Schiller Institute conference of Feb. 19 intervened in the midst of a continuing war drive to make two vital points. 1.) The war danger is driven by the ongoing systemic collapse of the authority of the Unipolar world, led by the economic collapse; 2.) The solution is a shift to a multi-polar world built upon a new security architecture, which recognizes the right to sovereignty of all nations, and promotes mutually beneficial economic policies, centered on making scientific and technological progress available to all. The efforts by war hawks in the Trans-Atlantic to provoke a Russian invasion of Ukraine will serve as an excuse to impose sanctions designed to destroy Russia’s economy, as various western spokesmen have confirmed — and to divert attention away from the failed economic, social and cultural policies harming all nations, produced by the Unipolarists!
Here is a link to Schiller conference.
Also, watch my interview with Alexander Rahr HERE
Speaking to reporters yesterday, President Biden seemed to be facing reality. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which his intelligence team had predicted for February 16, did not happen. While not acknowledging the error, he said he will address the security concerns raised by President Putin, and engage in continuing dialogue. But one of the major factors behind the war drive — the collapse of the Trans-Atlantic economic/financial system continues, with investment guru Jeremy Grantham saying he believes we are at “the beginning of the burst.” The Schiller Institute will address the interconnection between economic collapse and the war drive this Saturday, Feb. 19 at 10 AM EST — register for the online conference here: https://schillerinstitute.nationbuilder.com/100_seconds_to_midnight_02192022
Today is the day we were told by U.S. and NATO intelligence officials that Russia would invade Ukraine. This narrative was built on an escalating cascade of lies, designed to scare you into silent submission to the cabal of liars who created the narrative. Every day, more voices are speaking out against the narrative. Today we report comments from former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Matlock, and former French Foreign Minister Dumas, debunking the Trans-Atlantic war hawk drumbeat. But a word of warning — the war threat has not ended, as the danger exists of a provocation by NATO-backed and trained crazies in Kiev, which could trigger a Russian response.
Matlock’s statement is available HERE.
Over the weekend, the chicken hawks in the U.S. State Department and intelligence were out in force, beating the drums for war, insisting that Russia may invade Ukraine by this Wednesday. Why are they doing this? Former presidential candidate and military veteran Tulsi Gabbard asked why won’t the Biden administration guarantee that we will not allow NATO membership for Ukraine: “Is it because the war mongers actually want Russia to invade?” More to the point, it is that they fear the Anglo-American unipolar world order, absurdly called by Blinken the Rules-Based Order, has lost any semblance of legitimacy after two decades of regime change wars, followed by imposing murderous sanctions on those who reject giving up sovereignty to the imperial looters, and is an advanced state of collapse.
Paris, Feb. 12, 2022 (EIRNS) – In an op-ed published by the French “souverainist” weekly Marianne, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, argue in favor of a French exit from the integrated command of NATO. The German economist Peter Dittus is the former secretary general of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), while the Frenchmen Hannoun its deputy director general.
Their arguments are the substance of their new book called “OTANexit: Urgence Absolue”, published on Jan. 16.
“Since November 2021,” they say, “the French, like other peoples of the West, have been subjected to an unprecedented mental conditioning conducted by the United States and Nato on the theme of the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine”, which may go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003.”
This is a lie, they say. “The only war that NATO seems to be winning is the one of information. We show in our book this striking German propaganda map in the weekly Bild of December 4, 2021, giving an imaginary detailed plan of the “imminent Russian invasion”. The role of propaganda is terrifying, because of the charge of hatred generated by the lies on both sides. On the NATO side, the aggressive and bellicose discourse of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is irresistibly reminiscent of the famous Orwellian inversion: ‘peace is war’”. (…) “France’s current alignment with NATO, through its participation in the integrated military command under American leadership, is a strategic dead end for a country with a universal vocation like France. Today, this country has a historic role to play in stopping the march towards war in Europe initiated by the sleepwalkers of NATO. France’s exit from NATO, which will mark the end of the alignment of France’s foreign security policy with the United States, will have an immense impact on the world.”
“It will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world and the rapid demise of the obsolete NATO framework. France will then rediscover its universal vocation, contributing to the global balance for peace, and playing, thanks to its rediscovered impartiality, a role of synthesis within the P5, the concert of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France), a P5 whose composition must be maintained and whose role as regulator of world peace must be enhanced.”
Full text of Marianne op-ed:
“Faced with the Ukrainian crisis, France’s NATO exit is an absolute emergency”
The following op-ed was published by the French “souverainist” weekly Marianne, Peter Dittus and Hervé Hannoun, who argue in favor of a French exit from the integrated command of NATO. The German economist Peter Dittus is the former secretary general of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), while the Frenchmen Hannoun its former deputy director general. Text:
“Breaking with the policy of non-alignment followed by de Gaulle, Giscard and Mitterrand for 43 years, France once again became a member of the integrated military command of NATO in 2009, without the French people having been consulted by referendum. The current Ukrainian crisis reveals the serious perils to which France is exposed by being attached to a defensive collective security organization under the command of the United States that has become expansionist.
“Since November 2021, the French, like other peoples of the West, have been subjected to an unprecedented brainwashing (“mise en condition”) conducted by the United States and Nato on the theme of the “imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine”, which may go down in history as an episode of disinformation along the lines of the fabricated intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003.
“What is the reality? Millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the two self-proclaimed Donbass people’s republics live under sporadic firing and shelling by the Ukrainian army against separatist forces. The concentration of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders is obviously aimed at dissuading Kiev from attempting to regain direct control of the enclaves of Donetsk and Lugansk by force. NATO’s successful disinformation on Ukraine has consisted in presenting Putin’s moral obligation to defend these Russian-speaking populations – which Ukraine wants to progressively deprive of the right to speak their language – as a prelude to the total annexation of Ukraine by Russia.
The myth of an “imminent Russian invasion
“NATO manages to pass off a concentration of Russian troops ready to come to the rescue of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the Donbass as an “imminent Russian invasion” of the whole of Ukraine, including Odessa, Kharkiv and Kiev. A crazy invasion that in reality Russia completely rules out… unless it is pushed into it by a possible prior Ukrainian attack on the Donbass.
“The only war that NATO seems to be winning is the one of information. We show in our book this striking German propaganda map in the weekly Bild of December 4, 2021, giving an imaginary detailed plan of the “imminent Russian invasion”. The role of propaganda is terrifying, because of the charge of hatred generated by the lies on both sides. On the NATO side, the aggressive and bellicose discourse of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg is irresistibly reminiscent of the famous Orwellian inversion: “peace is war”.
And if France had the solution?
Paris must avoid the military spiral into which the United States and NATO want to drag it. In the coming weeks, it must not allow itself to be involved in a war in Eastern Europe that is not its own. France has already agreed to deploy hundreds of men in a NATO battle group in Estonia. On January 1, it took the lead in the NATO Rapid Response Force, which includes at least 7,700 French soldiers. President Macron has just announced the possible dispatch of a thousand French troops to Romania under the NATO banner on the “eastern flank”, in the Black Sea region. The military escalation is dangerous. For the security of the French people, it is necessary to exclude committing the French army under the banner of Nato in a war in Ukraine or Belarus.
“On the other hand, France has a diplomatic weapon to resolve the serious crisis between NATO and Russia. The detonator of this crisis was the stubbornness of Jens Stoltenberg and the Americans to pursue since 2018 a creeping process of accession of Ukraine to NATO, called “open door policy”, seen by Russia as a threat to its security. To put an end to the current confrontation, President Macron should simply declare solemnly in the name of France that his country will oppose any request from Ukraine to join NATO.
“As decisions on membership of the Alliance require unanimity, France can exercise a veto. In doing so, the president would be in line with the commitments he made during his 2017 presidential campaign not to support NATO’s expansion to Ukraine. It would be an elegant way out of the crisis. Alas, the French president, during his visit to Moscow and then to Kiev on February 7 and 8, 2022, did not consider this simple solution because French diplomacy did not oppose in the NATO bodies the crazy “open door policy” to the membership of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO. On the other hand, France supports NATO and the G7 in their demand for the return of Crimea to Ukraine, knowing full well that this cannot be done without a war, possibly nuclear.
American subordination
“At the time of the 1992 referendum on the European Union treaty, no one could have imagined that this great project of Mitterrand and Kohl for peace would be deviated from, from 1998 onwards, by the American geopolitical project to take de facto control of the European common defense and security policy. This was due to the simultaneous enlargement of the European Union and NATO to ten Eastern European countries between 1991 and 2007, and also to President Sarkozy’s decision, with far-reaching consequences, to abandon in 2008 the Gaullist strategic position of refusing to participate in NATO’s integrated military command.
“From the moment that 21 of the 27 EU countries, including France, became full members of NATO, the initial spirit of Maastricht was betrayed, because “Europe for peace” was inevitably going to be thwarted by the interference of the United States, with its own geopolitical objectives, in the common European defense and security policy. In reality, there can be no independent French or European defense within the current framework of participation in the integrated military command of NATO by France and 21 other European Union states. The concept of “European strategic autonomy” within Nato is an illusion, given the control of the United States over this Alliance. The European Union seeks to hide this fundamental flaw behind a vague concept: the “strategic compass”.
The fundamental incompatibility between the US-controlled NATO and an independent French or European defense does not prevent our leaders from defending the thesis of complementarity between the EU and NATO in terms of defense, as summarized on December 11, 2021 by the French Minister of Foreign Affairs: “We are keen for the EU and NATO to complement and reinforce each other in order to contribute to strengthening security and defense in Europe. This is the meaning of the strategic compass that will be adopted during the French Presidency of the EU Council.
Defense: the impasse of “at the same time”
The EU’s “strategic compass” is above all an effort to provide a conceptual framework for the false idea that “European strategic autonomy” in relation to the United States is compatible with the Nato membership of the vast majority of EU member states. This complementarity between NATO and the EU, the “at the same time” applied to defense, is an illusion. The fussy logic of national independence has given way to the vague and misleading concept of strategic autonomy and the search for interdependence and interoperability with our “allies”.
“Beyond the immediate crisis surrounding Ukraine, the presidential elections of April 10 and 24 must allow for a decision on the question of NATO. All those who refuse NATO’s march towards the war that is brewing on the eastern borders of the European Union have a unique opportunity, with the presidential election of 2022, to send a simple and clear message of peace to the leaders of our country, in one word: Otanexit. It is a question of ensuring that a candidate for peace is elected president, who is committed to putting an end to France’s alignment with NATO.
“One can think that the outgoing president will want to avoid a debate in the presidential campaign on the question of our military alliances in NATO: alliance with the adventurism of the Anglo-Saxons, whose arrogance was revealed by the Australian submarine affair, unnatural alliance with Islamist Turkey, alliance with Polish nationalism, and tomorrow perhaps, alliance with a Germany that could use NATO as a springboard for its remilitarization, or even alliance with Kosovo against Serbia This list alone allows us to measure the risks of a collective security system comprising 30 heterogeneous nations, and dominated by one of them.
An unconstitutional “defense union”
“On January 7, 2022, at a joint press conference with President Macron in Paris, the President of the European Commission allowed herself a federalist statement that exceeded her prerogatives: “We agree that we need a real defense union. In the presence of President Macron, she spoke of adding a “defense union” to the Economic and Monetary Union in the future, without taking into account the fact that this statement is contrary to the French Constitution, which is based on national independence, national sovereignty and national defense. It is necessary to oppose the stealthy European federalism that is currently being practiced, which cannot replace a federalism that is democratically accepted – or rejected – by referendum, according to the procedure followed in 1992 by François Mitterrand for the transfer of monetary sovereignty provided for in the Maastricht Treaty. The French people must reject the concept of defense union under the banner of NATO that Ursula von der Leyen wants to impose on them.
“France’s current alignment with NATO, through its participation in the integrated military command under American leadership, is a strategic dead end for a country with a universal vocation like France. Today, this country has a historic role to play in stopping the march towards war in Europe initiated by the sleepwalkers of NATO. France’s exit from NATO, which will mark the end of the alignment of France’s foreign security policy with the United States, will have an immense impact on the world.
“It will signal Europe’s independence from American exceptionalism, the renewal of multilateralism, the emergence of a multipolar world and the rapid demise of the obsolete NATO framework. France will then rediscover its universal vocation, contributing to the global balance for peace, and playing, thanks to its rediscovered impartiality, a role of synthesis within the P5, the concert of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France), a P5 whose composition must be maintained and whose role as regulator of world peace must be enhanced.”
Taliban Delegation in Geneva Discusses Humanitarian Needs
Feb. 11 (EIRNS)–Beginning Feb. 7 and extending through today, a large Taliban delegation has been meeting behind closed doors in Geneva in sessions convened by the humanitarian organization Geneva Call, to discuss the country’s dire humanitarian crisis with representatives of non-governmental organizations, foreign diplomats, Swiss government officials, Doctors Without Borders and other institutions. In the course of this week’s private meetings, Afghan Health Minister, Qalander Ebad, met with World Health Organization (WHO) Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with whom he discussed the Afghan health system’s enormous needs, especially Covid-19 (Omicron) test kits, vaccines, expanding the healthcare workforce, etc. Tedros issued a call to the international community to “continue the dialogue to support the people of Afghanistan, so that we improve the health and wellbeing of all Afghan people.” Today, Al Jazeera reports, the Taliban were scheduled to meet with Swiss and other European officials, and representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
According to the Associated Press, the meetings were kept private, in order to build conditions for more aid to the country. That meant exacting some commitment from the Taliban on issues of human rights–women and girls–education, etc. No one from the Taliban delegation was made available to the press. According to Raphael Naegeli, head of the Asia-Pacific division of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Taliban delegation’s presence in Geneva in no way suggested recognition of its government; but stressed it was important to continue to engage with the Islamic Emirate and to impress on them the need to provide certain guarantees and show the international community they are a serious and trustworthy government..
As a result of this week’s discussions, Geneva Call tweeted this afternoon that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan had in fact adopted a humanitarian declaration, making commitments in five areas: humanitarian aid, healthcare, education, explosives (left in the country after years of war) and environmental and cultural protection. Geneva Call stated that the Taliban commitment “represents a step towards enhanced protection of civilians in Afghanistan, acknowledging that needs are dire and that increased support and collaboration is needed to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan population.”
The pathetic attempt by UK Foreign Minister Truss to imitate her model, Margaret Thatcher, in her confrontation with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, fell flat, as she came off looking like an ill-prepared buffoon. At the same time, the French and Germans saw in a Normandy Four meeting in Berlin, that the Russians are right, that it is Ukraine — NOT Russia — that is blocking the fulfillment of the Minsk Accords. And the EU’s version of a Green Build Back Better plan was hit by a blow from Senegal’s President, who said Africans are more concerned about having electricity than in meeting the COP 26 agreement’s demands on hydrocarbons.
