Eric Zuesse
https://off-guardian.org/2018/
7:34– Carla Del Ponte, UN prosecutor on Syrian war crimes: “The important thing is for peace to prevail, so that civilians can return to their homes, so that refugees return to Syria. I think only Russia can achieve peace in Syria.”
17:15– A Russian soldier says “And all of a sudden, the symphony of the power structures and the Russian people, they joined into one melody. In Spring of 2014 [right after the U.S. coup in Ukraine, Crimea broke away from Ukraine and resumed being a Russian province], we understood that we are one people, this is our president, our forefathers are behind us, this is our history — and all of this combined is our whole.” His eloquent expression of nationhood moved me. Though I am not Russian, nor have even visited there, and feel no particular personal identification to any of its many cultures, Russia under Putin might now be occupying much the same significance in world affairs today that my own country, America, did under FDR, as the moral leader of an emerging new international order. We all live in FDR’s shadow. Future generations could find themselves living in Putin’s. (That’s if the American aristocracy won’t so crave war, so that there soon won’t be any future at all.) The threat in FDR’s time was the German aristocracy; the threat in ours is the American aristocracy. Perhaps Russia, during Putin’s leadership, is up to that challenge, as America was during FDR’s. I hope so.
23:20– Putin: “[In 2012,] They introduced the Magnitsky Act under absolutely imaginary pretexts. … 50 new sanctions, I think. I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that this is 2012 — before any events in Ukraine, before the reunification with Crimea — but sanctions are in full swing! … They have always attempted to ‘contain’ the development of our country — so, I think the answer is simple. It’s just a method against competition. It’s illegitimate, it’s unjust, but that’s how it is. And, of course, it’s an attempt to contain the defense capability of our country.”
27:00- “[In 1991,] we expected that with the end of the Warsaw Pact, NATO would cease to exist too. Or, at least, as we were told at the time, this organization would not expand. We assumed some kind of tectonic changes in international relations to take place, but they did not. It turned out that under the guise of this ideological war, there was also a geopolitical war. For geopolitical interests [’The Great Game’ as aristocracies call it]. Secondly, they thought that they no longer had to consider anyone else in their decisions. [As Obama often expressed this, the United States is “the one indispensable nation”, which means that all others are dispensable.] … They started to support separatism and radicalism in our Caucasus region. They bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 without a resolution from the UNSC [U.N. Security Council]. They just spat on everything — they bombed it, destroyed the country. … If the people of Yugoslavia strove for independence, maybe it’s good. But did you have to do it by that method? … I doubt it. I am assured it should not have been done. … Then Afghanistan. Then Iraq. Then two waves of NATO expansion.”
33:40- “In 1992 or 1993, the then Mayor [of St. Petersburg, Anatoly] Sobchak took me with him to Bonn, where he met with Chancellor Kohl. At some point, Kohl asked all the attendees to leave [but] I was left to translate between the two. … And that was the first time I heard the Chancellor say, ‘I don’t see a future for Europe without Russia.’ For me, as a former KGB officer, it was completely unexpected.” (Putin continued by making clear that he views Russia as being part of Europe, “culturally and spiritually, its science, its defense potential.”)
39:00- The documentary announcer criticizes Merkel’s immigration-policy: “As admitted by German experts, … 4 out of 5 migrants don’t wish to study [to learn German and to learn skills to become productive in the economy]. They want to receive benefits.” If this is true, then perhaps America’s billionaires are aiming to destroy the social-welfare states in Europe, so as to spread America’s sink-or-swim economy, make the public as desperate as possible. Perhaps that’s one reason why Europe’s role is to take in the people who have lost their homes and their life’s savings in the countries that we’ve bombed and that we’ve aided the jihadists to decimate and destroy — that it’s in order to flood Europe with culturally alien ‘third-world’ immigrants, who (with those difficulties) will drain, instead of grow, Europe’s economy.
41:25- Putin: “In some places, liberalism is giving up its positions. … The multicultural model they tried to build in Europe, not only did it not work, but my [European] colleagues who wanted it, today say themselves that it failed.” Q: “Will we lose our national identity?” A: “Us? No. It’s too dear to us. … [Some] Russians convert to Russian Orthodox, other Russians convert to Islam, but, still, together, this is ‘us’ [regardless of religion].”
56:45- Putin, referring to Ukraine’s violations of the Minsk agreements it had signed that established a pathway by which Donbass would democratically re-enter being part of Ukraine: “The law on amnesty is not [even] being signed [by Ukraine]. The law on special status of Donbass [within Ukraine] is not signed. Practically [on Ukraine’s side] nothing is signed. To the contrary, they signed a law on ‘de-occupation’, which doesn’t mention the Minsk agreements at all. They do this to themselves, with their own hands.”
1:07– Putin is presented with Western media characterizations of him as an evil man and “Putin’s War on The West,” and is asked “What’s it like to be the main global villain?” He answers: “I have some very good anchors. Those anchors are the interests of the Russian Federation and its people.”
1:14– Q: “We see the targeted approach to distance our allies from us. They’re working Belarus, Kazakhstan, working Armenia very actively. We see the way they drip poison into their ears. How can we counteract this?” A: “Whoever drips poison anywhere will end up drinking it themselves, at the end of the day. We have a good saying about it: ‘Don’t spit into the well [from which we all drink]’.”
1:27– Putin: “What we have to do in the near future is to ensure that it is technological innovation that is the main driver behind Russia’s development. If we can achieve this — which includes all of its components: digital technology, biology, fundamental sciences — then without a doubt, Russia will preserve the status of a great superpower.”
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On 3 June 2014, I headlined “How and Why the U.S. Has Re-Started the Cold War (The Backstory that Precipitated Ukraine’s Civil War)” and, with a number of graphs, showed the drastic improvement in Russia’s economy under Putin, and in the lifespans and other welfare-indicators of the Russian people, and I explained why the U.S. aristocracy want to get rid of him. But, given that America’s anti-Russian war (which has thus far included Serbia, Iraq, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine, and other Russia-friendly governments, and is now moving on to Russia itself) was established on 24 February 1990, before Putin was even in the picture, there’s no reason for him to take The West’s insults personally. This has been the U.S. Government’s plan even before there was any President Putin.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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