Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #628 It’s Not Easy Being Green: Nazi infiltration and Co-option of the Green Party

Record­ed March 9, 2008
MP3: 30-Minute Seg­ment
REALAUDIO NB: This RealAu­dio stream con­tains both FTR #627 and FTR #628 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broad­cast.

“Green” pol­i­tics has become an impor­tant part of the polit­i­cal scene, assum­ing a piv­otal posi­tion in the pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ty. This broad­cast high­lights Nazi and fas­cist infil­tra­tion and co-option of the Green Par­ty and green pol­i­tics in gen­er­al. Unknown to many in the Green move­ment is the fact that the Nazi par­ty under Hitler [NSDAP] had a “green wing,” that advo­cat­ed poli­cies not unlike those of the con­tem­po­rary green move­ment. The Nazi greens, how­ev­er, incor­po­rat­ed a chau­vin­is­tic “blood and soil” mys­ti­cism that saw eco­log­i­cal con­scious­ness as a philo­soph­i­cal basis for war and geno­cide. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the the­o­ries and advo­cates of the “Green wing” of the NSDAP, the pro­gram high­lights the doc­trine of Walther Darre, one of the most impor­tant the­o­reti­cians and politi­cians of the Nazi party’s green wing and a man who enjoyed the sup­port of Hitler deputy Rudolph Hess. The green wing of the Nazi par­ty estab­lished a precedent—the Ger­man branch of the Green Par­ty has, to an extent, reca­pit­u­lat­ed the green wing of the NSDAP. Note that the Green Par­ty as a whole reject­ed attempts by “neo-Nazis” to infil­trate and turn the par­ty. Nonethe­less, the green dal­liance with fas­cism has con­tin­ued. Polit­i­cal argu­ments that are, in their fun­da­men­tal, fas­cist con­tin­ue to prove seduc­tive to unwary green advo­cates. The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the mur­der of Petra Kel­ly, leader of the Ger­man Greens, at the hands of her long­time com­pan­ion, a for­mer Ger­man gen­er­al who fought with the Nazis in World War II.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Dis­cus­sion of Kel­ly mur­der­er Gert Bastian’s post­war involve­ment in fas­cist pol­i­tics; the key role in the for­ma­tion of the Green Par­ty played by August Haussleiter—a vet­er­an of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch; Haussleiter’s post­war involve­ment with the world­wide SS under­ground.

1. Begin­ning with dis­cus­sion of the the­o­ries and advo­cates of the “green wing” of the NSDAP—the Nazi par­ty under Hitler—the pro­gram high­lights the doc­trine of Walther Darre, one of the most impor­tant the­o­reti­cians and politi­cians of the Nazi party’s green wing. Eco­fas­cism high­lights how the Nazi party’s green wing con­sti­tut­ed an impor­tant part of the philo­soph­i­cal ratio­nal­iza­tion for geno­cide. This same philo­soph­i­cal out­look has proved appealing—to an extent—to ele­ments of the con­tem­po­rary pro-ecol­o­gy milieu. As will be seen at greater length in FTR#629, green phi­los­o­phy has afford­ed con­tem­po­rary fas­cist and Nazi ele­ments an oppor­tu­ni­ty to infil­trate, seduce and co-opt green ele­ments to a fas­cist con­struct. “ . . . No aspect of the Nazi project can be prop­er­ly under­stood with­out exam­in­ing its impli­ca­tion in the holo­caust. Here, too, eco­log­i­cal argu­ments played a cru­cial­ly malev­o­lent role. Not only did the ‘green wing’ refur­bish the san­guine anti-Semi­tism of tra­di­tion­al reac­tionary ecol­o­gy; it cat­alyzed a whole new out­burst of lurid racist fan­tasies of organ­ic invi­o­la­bil­i­ty and polit­i­cal revenge. The con­flu­ence of anti-human­ist dog­ma with a fetishiza­tion of nat­ur­al ‘puri­ty’ pro­vid­ed not mere­ly a ratio­nale but an incen­tive for the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes. Its insid­i­ous appeal unleashed mur­der­ous ener­gies pre­vi­ous­ly untapped. Final­ly, the dis­place­ment of any social analy­sis of envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion in favor of mys­ti­cal ecol­o­gy served as an inte­gral com­po­nent in the prepa­ra­tion of the final solu­tion: ‘To explain the destruc­tion of the coun­try­side and envi­ron­men­tal dam­age, with­out ques­tion­ing the Ger­man peo­ple’s bond to nature, could only be done by not ana­lyz­ing envi­ron­men­tal dam­age in a soci­etal con­text and by refus­ing to under­stand them as an expres­sion of con­flict­ing social inter­ests. Had this been done, it would have led to crit­i­cism of Nation­al Social­ism itself since that was not immune to such forces. One solu­tion was to asso­ciate such envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems with the destruc­tive influ­ence of oth­er races. Nation­al Social­ism could then be seen to strive for the elim­i­na­tion of oth­er races in order to allow the Ger­man peo­ple’s innate under­stand­ing and feel­ing of nature to assert itself, hence secur­ing a har­mon­ic life close to nature for the future.’ This is the true lega­cy of eco­fas­cism in pow­er: ‘geno­cide devel­oped into a neces­si­ty under the cloak of envi­ron­ment pro­tec­tion.’. .”
(Eco­fas­cism: Lessons from the Ger­man Expe­ri­ence; by Janet Biehl and Peter Stau­den­maier; AK Press [SC] 1995; Copy­right 1995 by Janet Biehl and Peter Stau­den­maier; ISBN 1–873176-73–2; pp. 17–20.)

2. More about the philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion of green wing of the NSDAP: “ . . . To make this dis­may­ing and dis­com­fort­ing analy­sis more palat­able, it is tempt­ing to draw pre­cise­ly the wrong con­clu­sion — name­ly, that even the most rep­re­hen­si­ble polit­i­cal under­tak­ings some­times pro­duce laud­able results. But the real les­son here is just the oppo­site: Even the most laud­able of caus­es can be per­vert­ed and instru­men­tal­ized in the ser­vice of crim­i­nal sav­agery. The ‘green wing’ of the NSDAP was not a group of inno­cents, con­fused and manip­u­lat­ed ide­al­ists, or reform­ers from with­in; they were con­scious pro­mot­ers and execu­tors of a vile pro­gram explic­it­ly ded­i­cat­ed to inhu­man racist vio­lence, mas­sive polit­i­cal repres­sion and world­wide mil­i­tary dom­i­na­tion. Their ‘eco­log­i­cal’ involve­ments, far from off­set­ting these fun­da­men­tal com­mit­ments, deep­ened and rad­i­cal­ized them. In the end, their con­fig­u­ra­tion of envi­ron­men­tal pol­i­tics was direct­ly and sub­stan­tial­ly respon­si­ble for orga­nized mass mur­der. No aspect of the Nazi project can be prop­er­ly under­stood with­out exam­in­ing its impli­ca­tion in the holo­caust. Here, too, eco­log­i­cal argu­ments played a cru­cial­ly malev­o­lent role. Not only did the ‘green wing’ refur­bish the san­guine anti-Semi­tism of tra­di­tion­al reac­tionary ecol­o­gy; it cat­alyzed a whole new out­burst of lurid racist fan­tasies of organ­ic invi­o­la­bil­i­ty and polit­i­cal revenge. The con­flu­ence of anti-human­ist dog­ma with a fetishiza­tion of nat­ur­al ‘puri­ty’ pro­vid­ed not mere­ly a ratio­nale but an incen­tive for the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes. Its insid­i­ous appeal unleashed mur­der­ous ener­gies pre­vi­ous­ly untapped. . . .”
(Ibid.; pp. 24–25.)

3. The green wing of the Nazi par­ty estab­lished a precedent—the Ger­man branch of the Green Par­ty has, to an extent, reca­pit­u­lat­ed the green wing of the NSDAP. Note that the Green Par­ty as a whole reject­ed attempts by “neo-Nazis” to infil­trate and turn the par­ty. Nonethe­less, the green dal­liance with fas­cism has con­tin­ued. Polit­i­cal argu­ments that are, in their fun­da­men­tal, fas­cist con­tin­ue to prove seduc­tive to unwary green advo­cates. Note how eco­fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy con­cides with “volks­grup­pen­rechte” or “going native” as Mr. Emory calls it. (This is dis­cussed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR#627.) “ . . . As in France, such notions were com­pat­i­ble with the hatred of refugees, asy­lum seek­ers, and eth­nic minori­ties. But this ani­mos­i­ty was obscured some­what by the Ger­man New Right’s strong endorse­ment of nation­al lib­er­a­tion move­ments and ‘rev­o­lu­tion­ary strug­gles’ around the world, rang­ing from the Basques in Spain and the IRA in North­ern Ire­land to the peo­ples of the East­ern EU , the Ukraine, the Afghan mujahideen, and the San­din­istas of Nicaragua. In short, any mor­tal ene­my of a super­pow­er was deemed a de fac­to ally by var­i­ous inchoate New Right for­ma­tions that sprang up in West Ger­many dur­ing the ear­ly 1980s. This peri­od also saw the emer­gence of the Greens, left-of-cen­ter peace-and-ecol­o­gy par­ty, as a mass-based oppo­si­tion move­ment in West Ger­many. Gal­va­nized by NATO’s deci­sion to sta­tion a new gen­er­a­tion of medi­um-range nuclear mis­siles in Europe, the Greens adopt­ed a neu­tral­ist stance toward the East-West con­flict. Their attempts to forge a third way beyond cap­i­tal­ism and Com­mu­nism bore cer­tain sim­i­lar­i­ties to themes stressed by New Right intel­lec­tu­als and neo-Nazi mil­i­tants, who tried to out­flank their left-wing con­tem­po­raries by enun­ci­at­ing rad­i­cal posi­tions on ecol­o­gy, nuclear weapons, U.S. Impe­ri­al­ism, and ‘nation­al lib­er­a­tion.’ Some right-wing extrem­ists went so far as to call for ‘rev­o­lu­tion from below’ in Ger­many mod­eled after Third World inde­pen­dence strug­gles. They often employed left­ist-sound­ing rhetoric that appealed to the Greens’ sup­port­ers, who also obsessed over ques­tions of per­son­al and col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty. Many Greens were recep­tive to argu­ments that Ger­man uni­fi­ca­tion was an indis­pens­able pre­con­di­tion to a durable peace in Europe. Such mat­ters were debat­ed in New Right pub­li­ca­tions that inter­spersed arti­cles by left-wing authors and neo-fascis­tic ‘nation­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.’ . . .”
(The Beast Reawak­ens; Mar­tin A. Lee; Lit­tle Brown [HC]; Copy­right 1997 by Mar­tin A. Lee; ISBN 0–316-51959–6; pp. 216–217.)

4. Note that a vet­er­an of the NSDAP and Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was a sem­i­nal mem­ber of the Ger­man Green Par­ty. August Haus­sleit­er was also active in post­war Ger­man fas­cist pol­i­tics. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for our pur­pos­es is Haussleiter’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Bruderschaft—a pro-SS con­tin­gent among Ger­man offi­cers in the fledg­ling Bundeswehr—the army of the “new” Fed­er­al Repub­lic of Ger­many. Ernst Remer was an SS offi­cer who became a major leader of the post­war SS under­ground the ODESSA. “ . . . The first orga­ni­za­tion to call itself ‘the Greens in 1977 was led by August Haus­sleit­er, a bull­necked, red-faced vet­er­an of Hitler’s beer hail putsch, who had a long his­to­ry of involve­ment in extreme right-wing caus­es after World War II. Dur­ing the 1950s, August Haus­sleit­er’s Deutsche Gemein­schaft (Ger­man Com­mu­ni­ty) col­lab­o­rat­ed with the neo-Nazi Brud­er­schaft, which count­ed Otto Sko­rzeny among its key per­son­nel. Short­ly after the Social­ist Reich Par­ty was banned by the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment, Haus­sleit­er engaged in secret talks with Ernst Remer’s col­leagues in an effort to pre­serve the polit­i­cal punch or the SRP faith­ful. The SRP-linked attor­ney Rudolf Aschenauer was an exec­u­tive board mem­ber of the DeutscheGe­mein­schaft. By the late 1960s, how­ev­er, Haus­sleit­er had swung toward the Left in an effort to attract stu­dent rad­i­cals. His group, Action Com­mu­ni­ty of Inde­pen­dent Ger­mans, began to focus on ecol­o­gy and anti­nu­clear issues. Haus­sleit­er sub­se­quent­ly became a father fig­ure for the fledg­ling Greens, whose ini­tial sup­port­ers includ­ed dis­si­dent con­ser­v­a­tives as well as left-wing activists. In 1980, he was elect­ed chair­man of the Greens, but Haus­sleit­er was forced to step down after a months because or his check­ered past. . . .”
(Ibid.; p. 217.)

5a. The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at the 1992 mur­der of Petra Kelly—the leader of the Ger­man Green Par­ty. She was osten­si­bly killed by her “sig­nif­i­cant oth­er” Gert Bas­t­ian, whose corpse was also [alleged­ly] found at the crime scene. Note that Bas­t­ian was, accord­ing to some sources, a mem­ber of the Brud­er­schaft, as was August Haus­sleit­er. Bas­t­ian fought with the Nazis in World War II, and con­tin­ued to work with the Ger­man far right in the post­war peri­od. Mr. Emory notes that, accord­ing to some sources, the Ger­man police nev­er released the actu­al files on the mur­der. Mr. Emory also notes that Kelly’s mur­der took place as the Ger­man Greens were meta­mor­phos­ing from an ele­ment for peace and détente into a philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal ratio­nal­iza­tion for war. The promi­nence of the Greens on the Ger­man polit­i­cal land­scape was a major rea­son why the Sovi­ets and Mikhail Gor­bachev gave the go-ahead for the re-uni­fi­ca­tion of Ger­many. After Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion, the Green Par­ty became a force for war, as they began active­ly sup­port­ing the pol­i­cy of “volks­grup­pen­rechte” or “going native,” with regard to the for­mer Yugoslavia. (This is dis­cussed at greater length in FTR#627.) “ . . . He had an odd his­to­ry. In World War II, he fought for the Nazis, failed in pri­vate busi­ness after the war, and went back into the mil­i­tary in 1956. He was a mem­ber of CSU — the far-right par­ty — until 1963, when he began a long polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion that by the 1980s land­ed him with the Greens. He lat­er resigned, protest­ing that they were being too soft on com­mu­nists by just focus­ing on U.S. mis­siles. . . .”
(“Who Killed Petra Kel­ly” by Mark Herts­gaard; Moth­er Jones; January/February/1993.)

5b. Again, Gert Bas­t­ian was appar­ent­ly part of the Brud­er­schaft, along with Haus­sleit­er.

. . . .After the war, Haus­sleit­er con­tin­ued his effots by join­ing the “Brud­er­schaft” or “broth­er­hood,” of for­mer SS active with­in the Ger­man mil­i­tary and polit­i­cal worlds. His col­leagues in this net­work includ­ed Gert Bas­t­ian, Otto Sko­rzeny (the res­cuer of Mus­soli­ni) and Otto Ernst Remer (the turn­coat respon­si­ble for crush­ing the Ger­man offi­cers’ July 1044 plot to over­throw Hitler.) . . .

Mer­chants of Despair: Rad­i­cal Envi­ron­men­tal­ists, Crim­i­nal Pseu­do-Sci­en­tists, and the Fatal Cult of Anti­hu­man­ism (Google eBook) by Robert Zubrin, p. 196.

6. Two video pro­duc­tions are being gen­er­at­ed by a cou­ple of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers. One is a DVD of a three-lec­ture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Rela­tion­ship Between Fas­cism and Reli­gion.” In addi­tion, there will soon be a doc­u­men­tary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fas­cist.” For more about this project, vis­it TheAntiFascist.com.

Discussion

26 comments for “FTR #628 It’s Not Easy Being Green: Nazi infiltration and Co-option of the Green Party”

  1. [...] Green move­ment and fas­cism prop­er­ly or nazism, pro­vid­ed by anti-fas­cist researcher Dave Emory click here, by authors Janet Biehl and Peter Stau­den­maier, click here or by Peter Stau­den­maier alone, [...]

    Posted by Update on Green Fascism at the National Post: The tar sands agenda and other subjects | lys-dor.com | June 19, 2011, 3:15 pm
  2. [...] FTR #628 It’s Not Easy Being Green: Nazi infil­tra­tion and Co-option of the Green Par­ty [...]

    Posted by Ezra Levant – Indoctrinating children in the labs of the proto-fascist Green Movement | Lys-d'Or | May 10, 2012, 11:35 am
  3. Here’s an arti­cle that high­lights why it’s going become increas­ing­ly impor­tant for envi­ron­men­tal­ists to become famil­iar with his­to­ry of eco-fas­cism so such none­sense is nev­er repeat­ed and so envi­ron­men­tal move­ments don’t get infil­trat­ed and sub­se­quent­ly dis­cred­it­ed by far-right oper­a­tives. With around half of the world’s pop­u­lace liv­ing with­in 200 kilo­me­ters of a coast­line, ris­ing sea lev­els could be caus­ing social upheaval — exact­ly the kind of sce­nario that could give rise to mis­di­rect­ed forms of envi­ron­men­tal­ism — for a long long time:

    NYTimes
    Tem­per­a­ture Ris­ing
    How High Could the Tide Go?

    By JUSTIN GILLIS
    Pub­lished: Jan­u­ary 21, 2013

    BREDASDORP, South Africa — A scruffy crew of sci­en­tists bar­reled down a dirt road, their two-car car­a­van kick­ing up dust. After search­ing all day for ancient beach­es miles inland from the mod­ern shore­line, they were about to give up.

    Sud­den­ly, the lead car screeched to a halt. Paul J. Hearty, a geol­o­gist from North Car­oli­na, leapt out and seized a white object on the side of the road: a fos­silized seashell. He beamed. In min­utes, the team had col­lect­ed dozens more.

    Using satel­lite gear, they deter­mined they were sev­en miles inland and 64 feet above South Africa’s mod­ern coast­line.

    For the leader of the team, Mau­reen E. Ray­mo of Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, the find was an impor­tant clue as she tries to deter­mine just how high the oceans might rise in a warmer world.

    The ques­tion has tak­en on new urgency in the after­math of Hur­ri­cane Sandy, which caused coastal flood­ing that sci­en­tists say was almost cer­tain­ly wors­ened by the mod­est rise of sea lev­el over the past cen­tu­ry. That kind of storm tide, the experts say, could become rou­tine along Amer­i­can coast­lines by late in this cen­tu­ry if the ocean ris­es as fast as they expect.

    In pre­vi­ous research, sci­en­tists have deter­mined that when the earth warms by only a cou­ple of degrees Fahren­heit, enough polar ice melts, over time, to raise the glob­al sea lev­el by about 25 to 30 feet. But in the com­ing cen­tu­ry, the earth is expect­ed to warm more than that, per­haps four or five degrees, because of human emis­sions of green­house gas­es.

    Experts say the emis­sions that may make a huge increase of sea lev­el inevitable are expect­ed to occur in just the next few decades. They fear that because the world’s coasts are so dense­ly set­tled, the ris­ing oceans will lead to a human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis last­ing many hun­dreds of years.

    Sci­en­tists say it has been dif­fi­cult to get peo­ple to under­stand or focus on the impor­tance, for future gen­er­a­tions, of today’s deci­sions about green­house gas­es. Their evi­dence that the gas­es rep­re­sent a prob­lem is based not just on com­put­er­ized fore­casts of the future, as is com­mon­ly believed, but on what they describe as a grow­ing body of evi­dence about what occurred in the past.

    ...

    Cal­cu­la­tions by Cli­mate Cen­tral, a research group, sug­gest that once the ocean has risen five feet, storm tides com­pa­ra­ble to those of Hur­ri­cane Sandy could occur about every 15 years in New York City.

    Sci­en­tists say that in the 22nd cen­tu­ry, the prob­lem would prob­a­bly become far worse, and the rise would then con­tin­ue for many cen­turies, per­haps thou­sands of years. Recent research sug­gests the like­ly rise could be 12 feet by the year 2300, inun­dat­ing coastal regions around the world.

    If the rise is slow­er than expect­ed, soci­ety may have time to adjust, or to devel­op new tech­nol­o­gy to solve the prob­lem of green­house emis­sions. But many sci­en­tists are plagued by a nag­ging fear that the oppo­site will occur — that their cal­cu­la­tions will turn out to have been too con­ser­v­a­tive, and social sta­bil­i­ty will even­tu­al­ly be threat­ened by a rapid rise of the sea.

    “At every point, as our knowl­edge increas­es,” Dr. Ray­mo said, “we’ve always dis­cov­ered that the cli­mate sys­tem is more sen­si­tive than we thought it could be, not less.”

    We’re almost guar­an­tee­ing that future gen­er­a­tions will be fac­ing forced real aus­ter­i­ty via envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion with all of the hor­rif­ic choic­es that come with such a sce­nario. So let’s hope present and future envi­ron­men­tal­ists are aware of the risk of fas­cist infil­tra­tion as the envi­ron­ment becomes and more and more impor­tant top­ic to the pub­lic at large. The Ger­man Greens, for instance, sur­prised the Ger­man polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment with big gains in the Low­er Sax­ony elec­tions this week and as the cli­mate con­tin­ues to change we should expect that trend to apply to Green par­ties around the globe. Poi­son­ing those par­ties’ futures with fas­cist infil­tra­tors is an obvi­ous strat­e­gy so they had bet­ter be on guard...for a long long time.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 25, 2013, 2:12 pm
  4. http://www.vexnews.com/2013/06/the-hate-boat-greensparty-wanted-to-go-solidarity-sailing-with-nazi-holocaust-denier/

    THE HATE BOAT: Greenspar­ty want­ed to go “sol­i­dar­i­ty” sail­ing with Nazi holo­caust denier
    By VEXNEWS ⋅ June 20, 2013

    green­z­nazis­The noto­ri­ous New South Wales branch of the Greenspar­ty has once again embroiled the par­ty in scan­dal, fol­low­ing rev­e­la­tions in The Aus­tralian that it has forged close ties with the nation’s most infa­mous Holo­caust denier and Nazi, Fredrick Töben.

    They even invit­ed him to sail in sol­i­dar­i­ty to raise funds for Gaza, in protest at Israel’s attempts to stop the flow of weapons and equip­ment used by ter­ror­ists there against Israeli civil­ians and ene­mies of the Hamas-led regime there. The non-sharia booze cruise for Gaza wasn’t cheap:

    $75 reg­u­lar | $100 sol­i­dar­i­ty (inclu­sive of food and fine com­pa­ny)

    Emails between an unnamed Greenspar­ty staffer who we can reveal is Mark Ribol­di, an elec­torate offi­cer to David Shoe­bridge MLC, show a close degree of inter­ac­tion between the sup­pos­ed­ly left-wing MP’s state elec­torate office and the noto­ri­ous anti-Semi­te from Ade­laide. A Google search, the gen­er­al noto­ri­ety of Töben includ­ing a lot of press last year relat­ing to an anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion case against him, mean their denial that they were aware of his views and activ­i­ties strains creduli­ty. As you’ll see, Töben wasn’t shy about writ­ing about “Jew­ish pres­sure” in cor­re­spon­dence with the Greenspar­ty. And of course, Töben could very well be a Greenspar­ty vot­er giv­en the well-estab­lished envi­ron­men­tal­ist tra­di­tion in Nazi ide­ol­o­gy.

    Young-Greens-Israel-poll-webThe rev­e­la­tions come after a Greenspar­ty asked its sup­port­ers and mem­bers “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” an agen­da item per­haps lift­ed from a Ku Klux Klan con­fer­ence.

    The Australian’s Chris­t­ian Kerr, who has been under­stand­ably agi­tat­ing for rede­ploy­ment from Can­ber­ra to Mel­bourne, has done well to shine light on a very sin­is­ter email exchange show­ing the Greenspar­ty and Nazis show com­mon cause when it comes to hat­ing the Jew­ish state, Israel. The Aus­tralian reveals:

    Mr Shoebridge’s office emailed Dr Toben a link to his speech on March 25.

    “Many, many thanks, Mark – and all the very best to David – and I do hope there will not be a bend­ing to Jew­ish pres­sure after this coura­geous stance!” Dr Toben said in a return email the same day.

    “Def­i­nite­ly not,” came a response from Mr Shoebridge’s office two days lat­er.

    Usu­al­ly Israel haters are care­ful to refer to “Zion­ists” rather than direct­ly refer­ring to Jews. Mark Ribol­di was not dis­turbed by the plain-speak­ing about the Jews. Quite rem­i­nis­cent of that oth­er anti-Semi­te, one-time Chris­t­ian Kerr boss turned foe Stephen Mayne, who once told an ABC radio audi­ence he’d sub­mit­ted to what he claimed was omnipo­tent Jew­ish pow­er by just fol­low­ing the edi­to­r­i­al line of the Jew­ish News on Israel when he ran Crikey.

    The publication’s car­ni­val of Israel-hat­ing writ­ers at the time mustn’t have got Mayne’s memo. As ever with Mayne, now a car­pet­bag­ging local coun­cil­lor in league with dodgy devel­op­ers’ mate Dare­bin may­or Tim Lau­rence, it was a fib. Mayne told a lot of fibs back then, Crikey insid­ers say, espe­cial­ly those co-founders he reput­ed­ly defraud­ed in their part­ner­ship when it came to divvy up the spoils from the sale to Eric Beech­er. What­ev­er one might say about Kerr – and we’ve said plen­ty – he is sound on Israel and trou­bled by anti-Semi­tism.

    The Greenspar­ty-Nazi alliance exposed by Chris­t­ian Kerr today is about as con­fronting and wor­ry­ing as any­thing else we’ve ever seen from the Greens. Their pre-occu­pa­tion with Israel, their insis­tence on the Jew­ish state being some kind of vil­lain while remain­ing silent about the Mid­dle East’s real human rights abusers like the Saud­is and Syr­i­ans, can now be seen in its prop­er con­text.

    A Google search of the Greensparty’s intend­ed guest Fredrick Töben is a hor­ror show. He is undoubt­ed­ly Australia’s most promi­nent and infa­mous Holo­caust denier, salut­ed with the Third Reich salute by his fans dur­ing his mul­ti­ple crim­i­nal tri­als. He has pro­duced lengthy texts and videos mak­ing his case that among oth­er things: 1) the Holo­caust didn’t hap­pen, 2) Nazi death camp pris­on­ers were fed bet­ter than Ger­mans in gen­er­al and 3) those gas cham­bers were just designed to make sure no-one got nits dur­ing their stay. It’s vile, men­ac­ing and hor­ri­ble stuff.

    markri­boldiAnd the staffer who invit­ed him – Mark Ribol­di – has a Linkedin page shows he claims to have been a “researcher,” a “com­mu­ni­ca­tions assis­tant” to the NSW Greenspar­ty, not before he start­ed as an elec­torate offi­cer work­ing for David Shoe­bridge, in a self-titled role “Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Pol­i­cy Advi­sor”. His duties extend to answer­ing the phone, the tweets and invit­ing Nazis to anti-Israel events. The bloke can use Google. It’s frankly impos­si­ble to imag­ine he hadn’t heard of him, while tak­ing such a keen inter­est in the Mid­dle East.

    And even when the Greenspar­ty high com­mand decid­ed there was too much heat to allow Töben to attend in full-dress Nazi uni­form, Shoebridge’s staffer didn’t say we don’t like your views, he apol­o­gised for the incon­ve­nience and mere­ly said his views would “like­ly offend a num­ber of guests who we work with fre­quent­ly.” Noth­ing about Shoe­bridge or the staffer or the Greenspar­ty them­selves being offend­ed. Ribol­di wrote:

    “Hi Fred­er­ick, I’m afraid we’re going to have to rescind our invi­ta­tion to this event. I have been informed that, based on your past actions and views, your pres­ence will like­ly offend a num­ber of guests who we work with fre­quent­ly. Apolo­gies for any incon­ve­nience. Mark for David.”

    It appears Toben got angry as a result of being unin­vit­ed, demand­ed his hosts pay him for his air­fare to Syd­ney and appears to have pro­vid­ed details of his cor­re­spon­dence to max­imise the trou­ble for the Greenspar­ty as a pay­back. While all that’s amus­ing, it’s no laugh­ing mat­ter that the Greenspar­ty and Australia’s most promi­nent Holo­caust-denier have been so close­ly con­nect­ed at all.

    The Greensparty’s con­tin­ued involve­ment in the Nazi-emu­lat­ing Boy­cott, Divest­ment, Sanc­tions blitzkreig against the Jew­ish state, their exten­sive inter­ac­tion with Holo­caust deniers and Nazis is per­plex­ing, con­fus­ing for those who like to peg them as self-indul­gent ide­al­is­tic left­ies who love koalas and didn’t grow out of stu­dent pol­i­tics.

    Maybe some of them are like that. Maybe some of them mean well. The anti-Labor left tra­di­tion is a long-term, albeit fringe, part of Aus­tralian pol­i­tics.

    herrshoe­bridge

    But the fact the Greenspar­ty attracts and is com­fort­able with sup­port from Nazis ought wor­ry all of us.

    Not every­one sym­pa­thet­ic to the plight of the hope­less­ly divid­ed and poor­ly led Pales­tini­ans is an anti-Semi­te or is even anti-Israel. But those who impose impos­si­ble stan­dards on Israel (that they nev­er seek to apply on oth­er Mid-East coun­tries), those who find them­selves sup­port­ing the Gazans or the West Bankers or Hezbol­lah or even the Syr­i­an rebels who snack on the hearts of their ene­mies are get­ting into bed with the polit­i­cal ene­mies of every­thing we polit­i­cal­ly val­ue in Aus­tralia: human rights, indi­vid­ual lib­er­ty, reli­gious free­dom and democ­ra­cy.

    It should come as no sur­prise that those who oppose Israel attract Nazis and far-right groups like flies to rot­ten eggs. The long sweep of his­to­ry shows they are part of the same tra­di­tion, fre­quent­ly employ­ing the same tac­tics (like boy­cotts), with think­ing sim­i­lar­ly twist­ed and trou­bled, moti­vat­ed by deeply wor­ry­ing sen­ti­ments we once dared to dream were extin­guished when the Nazi death camps were lib­er­at­ed and Israel from the ash­es of the Holo­caust.

    At Yad Vashem, the Holo­caust Muse­um, there’s a memo­r­i­al wall that reads in the lan­guages of the world “Nev­er again.” When you con­front the fact that cur­rent­ly elect­ed mem­bers of Aus­tralian par­lia­ments – from the Greenspar­ty no less – are in league with those who pre­tend the Holo­caust didn’t hap­pen because they are sym­pa­thet­ic to its per­pe­tra­tors, we’re pow­er­ful­ly remind­ed that those words “Nev­er again” have a great deal of mean­ing still. “Nev­er again” isn’t a boast, it’s a reminder that there is evil in the world and we must always be ready to iden­ti­fy it and have the courage to act against it.

    UPDATE: The Greenspar­ty MLC respon­si­ble for this unpleas­ant­ness says it’s all a big mis­un­der­stand­ing and that he didn’t intend for the Holo­caust denier to be invit­ed to the anti-Israel booze cruise:

    “Prob­a­bly the most offen­sive view you can have in rela­tion to the issue of Israel and Pales­tine is to be a Holo­caust denier,” he told the ABC.

    Yeh, prob­a­bly.

    UPDATE: David Shoe­bridge has refused to sign the Lon­don dec­la­ra­tion con­demn­ing anti-Semi­tism.

    UPDATE: David Shoe­bridge gives a rea­son­ably good account of him­self on Syd­ney radio, dis­tanc­ing him­self from the actions of his rogue staffer.

    UPDATE: The Aus­tralian reports in a fol­low-up yarn that a “split” has emerged in the Greenspar­ty over how to han­dle their Greens-Nazi rela­tion­ship. Some – like for­mer Chris­tine Milne staffer and vio­list – Tim Hol­lo impressed with his no-holds-barred attack on those respon­si­ble for build­ing friend­ships with Nazis:

    The invi­ta­tion was sent to Dr Toben after an email exchange with Shoe­bridge staffer Mark Ribol­di, who sent a link to a March 25 debate in the NSW Leg­isla­tive Coun­cil on a study trip to Israel that was hijacked by pro-Pales­tin­ian MPs. In the exchange Mr Ribol­di agreed he would “def­i­nite­ly not” be bend­ing to Jew­ish pres­sure.

    Mr Hol­lo con­demned Mr Riboldi’s con­duct: “As a proud Jew­ish Green, I have spent years con­vinc­ing peo­ple it is wrong and offen­sive to con­flate crit­i­cis­ing Israel’s gov­ern­ment and armed forces with anti-Semi­tism. In this con­text, David Shoebridge’s staffer’s approach to Fredrick Toben is an inex­cus­able error that is com­plete­ly out of step with Greens poli­cies, val­ues and action.

    “He should not be allowed to tar­nish the great work done by the rest of the par­ty.”

    You can’t fault Hollo’s tough-on-slime approach. Oth­er Greenistas were less cer­tain of just how crit­i­cal they could be of those seek­ing the black-leath­ery embrace of Nazi chums.

    For exam­ple, Com­rade Hollo’s old boss-cocky Chris­tine Milne thought it was best to just con­demn anti-Semi­tism rather than those cud­dling up to it:

    “The Aus­tralian Greens total­ly reject and con­demn anti-Semi­tism . . . It is abhor­rent. We con­demn unre­served­ly Holo­caust denials. It has no place any­where in Aus­tralia soci­ety,” Sen­a­tor Milne said. “The hor­ren­dous con­se­quences of the Holo­caust are still being felt around the world and I am appalled that peo­ple like Dr Toben engage in fab­ri­ca­tion of his­to­ry and . . . spread and engage in anti-Semi­tism.”

    But she stopped short of con­demn­ing Mr Shoe­bridge.

    UPDATE: This issue has done as much to dam­age the rep­u­ta­tion of the Greenspar­ty as any­thing else they’ve ever done.

    It comes as no sur­prise – to them or any­one else – that if they attack, cam­paign against and besmirch the Jew­ish state of Israel they will inevitably attract the atten­tion and sup­port of anti-Semi­tes, in Holo­caust-denier and/or Nazi form. It doesn’t help that Nazism itself had a conservationist/environmental ele­ment to it.

    This should give them pause. The Greenspar­ty is not a par­ty of race-hate. But their will­ing­ness to engage with those who are, to even invite them on booze cruis­es, is a wor­ry about how they are evolv­ing.

    It boils down to this: they are wrong about Israel. Israel’s Tel Aviv san­dal-wear­ers and beach-bums have far more in com­mon with Greens than they could imag­ine unless they’ve been there. Israel’s vibrant, puz­zling and flu­id democ­ra­cy is far more con­sis­tent with the pro­por­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion vot­ing sys­tem and poli­ty favoured by inner-city left­ists who’d love a Stephen Jol­ly Social­ist list to get a cou­ple of MPs, next to the Greenspar­ty, a cou­ple of Assange-ites and oth­er space cadets. Our sys­tem is far bet­ter, of course.

    Israel was – once – a lefty dar­ling. But it kind of fell out favour when it proved its capac­i­ty to defend itself against the invad­ing armies of Arab dic­ta­tor­ships (some Sovi­et-linked, many ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive), and main­tained close ties with the Unit­ed States. By defend­ing its bor­ders and peo­ple suc­cess­ful­ly and – after many decades of ter­ri­ble strug­gle – build­ing a suc­cess­ful export-ori­ent­ed, inno­v­a­tive econ­o­my, Israel lost its under-dog sta­tus and there’s noth­ing a lefty loves more than an under­dog. Now it’s the Pales­tini­ans who look like they’ve got the rough end of the stick. Any sen­si­ble analy­sis of recent events shows that it’s entire­ly self-imposed, usu­al­ly by their inept, thiev­ing and extrem­ist lead­er­ship. Ter­ror attacks on Israeli civil­ians caused Israeli secu­ri­ty to tight­en up. Some­how this was con­flat­ed into Israel being an “apartheid” state despite a rich cul­tur­al and eth­nic diver­si­ty in Israel, which no-one could rea­son­ably deny. It is a remark­ably cos­mopoli­tan, diverse and inclu­sive soci­ety with a great pas­sion for lib­er­ties and free­doms, cer­tain­ly as much as our soci­ety is, if not more.

    The Greensparty’s indul­gence in sup­port­ing a “boy­cott” of the Jew­ish state is an out­rage.

    They are – indeed – as the Australian’s pow­er­ful edi­to­r­i­al per­sua­sive­ly argued this morn­ing “a ship of fools.” They put it best:

    By flirt­ing with BDS, the Greens for­feit the right to be con­sid­ered a main­stream par­ty. It demon­strates a pref­er­ence for the com­pa­ny of the num­bats and con­spir­acists in the dark and dan­ger­ous fringe­lands. Until the par­ty dis­en­tan­gles itself, force­ful­ly and unam­bigu­ous­ly, from the BDS move­ment and those who would see a demo­c­ra­t­ic, sov­er­eign nation wiped from the map, its chances of being tak­en seri­ous­ly are zero.

    Posted by Vanfield | June 22, 2013, 9:46 pm
  5. [...] are call­ing for Ger­many to give Snow­den Asy­lum. (As dis­cussed in oth­er pro­grams, the Ger­man Greens them­selves have a fas­cist his­tory and work–perhaps with­out their full aware­ness–in [...]

    Posted by Snowden’s Ride, Part 2: Geo-Politics, the Earth Island and the Underground Reich | The Freedom Report | July 7, 2013, 8:37 am
  6. http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=318973

    The Nazi roots of the Ger­man Greens
    By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
    07/07/2013

    Aca­d­e­m­ic and jour­nal­is­tic research over the past five years shows the key role of Nazi fig­ures in the party’s found­ing and devel­op­ment.

    BERLIN – The Ger­man Green Party’s leg­isla­tive action to label Israeli prod­ucts from the West Bank has cast a spot­light on the role that for­mer Nazis played in cre­at­ing the par­ty.

    Aca­d­e­m­ic and jour­nal­is­tic research over the past five years shows the key role of Nazi fig­ures in the party’s found­ing and devel­op­ment.

    After strong sim­i­lar­i­ties were revealed between an ini­tia­tive by Germany’s neo- Nazi NPD par­ty last year in a state par­lia­ment to demar­cate Israeli prod­ucts and a Green Par­ty fed­er­al ini­tia­tive in the Bun­destag to impose a sim­i­lar sys­tem on Israeli goods, crit­ics point­ed to the “Brown” — the col­or sym­bol­iz­ing Nazism – roots of the Green Par­ty in an effort to explain the puni­tive mea­sure direct­ed at Jew­ish busi­ness­es.

    The pop­u­lar pro-Israel web­site Lizas Welt tweet­ed last month, “Not sure what the Greens actu­al­ly have against Nazis. They even some­times copy from them.”

    Lala Süsskind, for­mer head of Berlin’s Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty and chair­woman of the NGO Jew­ish Forum for Democ­ra­cy and Against Anti-Semi­tism, termed the Green Par­ty ini­tia­tive hos­tile to Jews at an event last month.

    Dr. Mar­tin Kloke, an expert on con­tem­po­rary Ger­man anti-Semi­tism, urged the Greens in a blog post on Die Achse des Guten (The Axis of Good) to crit­i­cal­ly exam­ine and work through their “ambiva­lent role in the his­to­ry of left­ist Ger­man anti- Zion­ism and anti-Semi­tism.”

    Dr. Clemens Heni, a lead­ing Ger­man researcher on mod­ern anti-Semi­tism, told The Jerusalem Post that Wern­er Vorgel, a for­mer mem­ber of the Nazi Par­ty and of its SA stormtroop­ers, “was among the first elect­ed mem­bers of the Greens to the Bun­destag in 1983.”

    After the media exposed Vogel’s back­ground, he resigned from the Bun­destag.

    Heni said that lead­ing Green Par­ty politi­cians at the time did not object to Vogel’s mem­ber­ship in the par­ty.

    Heni added that the founders of the Greens wel­comed August Haus­sleit­er, who, as co-founder of the Greens in 1979, played an impor­tant role in the party’s devel­op­ment. Haus­sleit­er was active in Hitler’s Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 and praised the Ger­man Wehrma­cht in 1942. He stoked anti-Amer­i­can and anti-Semit­ic sen­ti­ments in post-World War II West Ger­many, said Heni.

    Bal­dur Spring­mann, a for­mer mem­ber of the SA, also played an impor­tant role in the nascent phase of the Ger­man Green par­ty. He left the par­ty in 1980.

    Heni said that Hen­ning Eich­berg also played an impor­tant role in the found­ing the Green Par­ty in the south­ern Ger­man state of Baden-Wurt­tem­berg in 1979, although he did not choose to become a mem­ber. Eich­berg had clos­es ties with for­mer Nazi anti-par­ti­san spe­cial­ist Arthur Ehrhardt of the SS.

    When asked about the role of for­mer Nazis in the cre­ation of the Green Par­ty, Michael Schroeren, the party’s spokesman in the Bun­destag, wrote the Post by email that such alle­ga­tions are absurd and queries along these lines lead nowhere.

    The his­to­ry of the Green Par­ty and Nazism has added greater scruti­ny to the role of Green MPs toward Israel.

    The Green Par­ty MP Ker­stin Müller, who is slat­ed to head the party’s Hein­rich Böll Foun­da­tion branch in Tel Aviv, helped hand­maid­en the ini­tia­tive in the Bun­destag to label Israel prod­ucts.

    Germany’s Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty has slammed her views toward Israel and the secu­ri­ty of the Jew­ish state over the years.

    The Cen­tral Coun­cil of Jews in Ger­many said in 2010 Müller dis­plays an “intol­er­a­bly pater­nal­is­tic tone” toward Israel and toward Jews in Ger­many. That year, she sup­port­ed an anti-Israel par­lia­men­tary res­o­lu­tion and attacked the coun­cil in a let­ter because its lead­er­ship crit­i­cized the res­o­lu­tion. The res­o­lu­tion rebuked Israel for its inter­cep­tion of the Turk­ish ves­sel Mavi Mar­mara, which tried to break Israel’s legal block­ade of the Hamas-con­trolled Gaza Strip.

    The Post obtained a copy of Müller’s let­ter blast­ing Germany’s Jews for crit­i­ciz­ing the res­o­lu­tion. In it, Müller writes that the Cen­tral Council’s crit­i­cism of the par­lia­men­tary res­o­lu­tion as “one sided and tak­ing sides against Israel” is inde­fen­si­ble.

    The Simon Wiesen­thal Cen­ter con­sid­ers Müller’s appoint­ment to run the Böll Foun­da­tion in Tel Aviv as scan­dalous in light of her activ­i­ties against the Jew­ish state.

    Posted by Vanfield | July 7, 2013, 2:55 pm
  7. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013–06-20/greens-confirm-invitation-to-holocaust-denier/4767324

    Greens invit­ed Holo­caust denier Fred­er­ick Tobin to fundrais­er ‘by acci­dent’

    Updat­ed Thu Jun 20, 2013 10:25am AEST
    Fred­er­ick Tobin talks to reporters in June 2011. Pho­to: Holo­caust denier Fred­er­ick Tobin talks to reporters out­side the Fed­er­al Court in Ade­laide, June 2011. (AAP: Guy David, file pho­to)
    Map: Aus­tralia

    The Greens say they acci­den­tal­ly invit­ed a noto­ri­ous Holo­caust denier to a func­tion in aid of Pales­tini­ans last month.

    Fred­er­ick Tobin, who has spent time in jail in Ger­many because he denies the Holo­caust took place, was invit­ed onto a Greens boat trip to raise mon­ey for Gaza.

    New South Wales Greens MLC David Shoe­bridge says his name came onto the mail­ing list by error.

    “Prob­a­bly the most offen­sive view you can have in rela­tion to the issue of Israel and Pales­tine is to be a Holo­caust denier,” he said.

    “As soon as it became aware who he was his invi­ta­tion was sum­mar­i­ly with­drawn.”

    Mem­bers of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty have expressed dis­ap­point­ment that Mr Tobin was invit­ed to the func­tion in the first place.

    Posted by Vanfield | July 9, 2013, 3:29 pm
  8. Are we going to see a Black-Green alliance form? It’s pos­si­ble:

    TheLocal.de
    Green Par­ty warms up to Merkel coali­tion

    Pub­lished: 2 Oct 2013 15:32 CET

    Germany’s Green Par­ty appears to be warm­ing to the idea of join­ing Angela Merkel in gov­ern­ment with its lead­ers giv­ing off sig­nals that the eco­log­i­cal par­ty would wel­come a return to the cor­ri­dors of pow­er.

    Although Merkel’s CDU/CSU union is most like­ly to form a “grand coali­tion” with the Social Democ­rats (SPD), the chan­cel­lor is also expect­ed to meet with the Green Par­ty next Thurs­day for explorato­ry coali­tion talks.

    All week lead­ers of the main polit­i­cal par­ties have been vis­it­ing Pres­i­dent Joachim Gauck to dis­cuss where Ger­many goes after the elec­tions on Sep­tem­ber 22nd and on Wednes­day it was the turn of the Green Party’s lead­ers, Clau­dia Roth and Cem Özdemir.

    Although an alliance between the Union and Greens would seem unlike­ly giv­en their his­to­ries – a con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty join­ing with a 1970s anti-nuclear, peace and envi­ron­men­tal move­ment – Merkel adopt­ed the Greens’ key demand of phas­ing out nuclear pow­er after Japan’s Fukushi­ma dis­as­ter in 2011.

    Katrin Göring-Eckardt, who stood along­side Jür­gen Trit­tin as the Green Party’s chan­cel­lor can­di­date, said on Wednes­day she would take talks with the CDU “seri­ous­ly”.

    The Green Par­ty leader in the Sax­ony state par­lia­ment Antje Her­me­nau said her par­ty should take on gov­ern­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties. She told the Säch­sis­chen Zeitung: “We must prove that we can apply what we’ve been say­ing over the last few years prac­ti­cal­ly in gov­ern­ment.“

    And deputy state pre­mier of North-Rhine West­phalia Sylvia Löhrmann out­lined what the Greens would want from gov­ern­ment — a con­tin­u­a­tion of the green ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion, Energiewende and a more relaxed immi­gra­tion pol­i­cy.

    She told the Berlin­er Zeitung: “From a Green per­spec­tive the Energiewende is the most impor­tant thing.” She added the CDU would also have to show that it was pre­pared to be more lib­er­al with its immi­gra­tion poli­cies if an alliance was to be formed.

    Merkel will meet for the first time on Fri­day with the SPD to open talks about a pos­si­ble “grand coali­tion” but her Union is look­ing to keep its options open.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 2, 2013, 12:05 pm
  9. Here’s a sto­ry one does­n’t expect to read every­day: Swe­den’s hous­ing min­is­ter stepped down. Why? For get­ting caught hang­ing out with some unsa­vory char­ac­ters. Specif­i­cal­ly, the local leader of the Turk­ish Gray Wolves ultra-nation­al­ists as well as the lead­ers var­i­ous Turk­ish Islamist orga­ni­za­tions. And the guy is a mem­ber of the Green Par­ty. It’s an unfor­tu­nate turn of events for Swe­den’s Greens:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Swedish min­is­ter quits, accused of links to Turk­ish rad­i­cals

    By KARL RITTER
    Apr. 18, 2016 10:32 AM EDT

    STOCKHOLM (AP) — Swe­den’s hous­ing min­is­ter stepped down Mon­day amid mount­ing ques­tions over his con­tacts with Islamists and ultra-nation­al­ists from his native Turkey.

    Mehmet Kaplan, a 44-year-old Green Par­ty mem­ber and for­mer spokesman of Swe­den’s Mus­lim Coun­cil, did­n’t admit any wrong­do­ing but said he was resign­ing because the crit­i­cism against him was inter­fer­ing with his abil­i­ty to per­form his job.

    “Let me be clear: This is not a con­fir­ma­tion of reports about me that I con­sid­er wrong­ful. I know who I am and what I have done,” Kaplan told reporters in Stock­holm.

    Kaplan came under pres­sure last week after Swedish media pub­lished pho­tos show­ing him din­ing with Turk­ish Swedish lead­ers, includ­ing the local leader of the Gray Wolves, an ultra-nation­al­ist group.

    Kaplan said he did­n’t know the per­son in ques­tion and dis­tanced him­self from the group, but soon found him­self on the defen­sive again, as media report­ed that he had met rep­re­sen­ta­tives of a Turk­ish Islamist orga­ni­za­tion on sev­er­al occa­sions.

    Kaplan, who was briefly detained in Israel in 2010 for join­ing a Gaza-bound aid flotil­la, also faced crit­i­cism for hav­ing com­pared Israel’s treat­ment of Pales­tini­ans to how the Nazis per­se­cut­ed Jews.

    Kaplan said he will remain an active mem­ber of the Green Par­ty, and that he still has the sup­port of the par­ty lead­er­ship. The Greens are the junior part­ner in a coali­tion gov­ern­ment led by the Social Democ­rats.

    Prime Min­is­ter Ste­fan Lofven called Kaplan “a man with human­ist and demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues” but said his deci­sion to step down was cor­rect after an “over­all assess­ment” of the sit­u­a­tion.

    ...

    “Prime Min­is­ter Ste­fan Lofven called Kaplan “a man with human­ist and demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues” but said his deci­sion to step down was cor­rect after an “over­all assess­ment” of the sit­u­a­tion.”
    Yeah, an “over­all assess­ment” of the sit­u­a­tion is prob­a­bly in order when you Green Par­ty min­is­ter is caught cavort­ing with Turk­ish Islamists and ultra-nation­al­ists. Keep in mind that this isn’t the first time Mehmet Kaplan has a raised an eye­brow over his casu­al embraces of Islamist (he called Swedish jihadis trav­el­ing to Syr­ia “free­dom fight­ers” that no one needs to wor­ry about, back in 2014), so any over­all assess­ment is prob­a­bly over­due too. And as the arti­cle below points out, it’s more than just Mehmet Kaplan’s resume that needs an over­due over­all assess­ment. The gen­er­al sec­re­tary of Swedish Mus­lims for Peace and Jus­tice, a group co-found­ed by Kaplan, also just had to resign from his Green Par­ty posi­tion. Why? He refus­es to shake wom­en’s hands:

    TheLocal.se

    Politi­cian quits after refus­ing to shake wom­en’s hands

    Pub­lished: 20 Apr 2016 17:17 GMT+02:00

    A Swedish Green Par­ty politi­cian, who ignit­ed a storm of con­tro­ver­sy after refus­ing to shake hands with a female reporter on grounds that it vio­lat­ed his Mus­lim faith, announced on Wednes­day that he was quit­ting pol­i­tics.

    Yas­ri Khan is the sec­ond Green Par­ty politi­cian to resign in acri­mo­ny this week.

    Dur­ing an inter­view with a female reporter from the TV4 broad­cast­er on Tues­day, Khan placed his hand over his heart instead of shak­ing her hand in greet­ing.

    “Peo­ple can greet each oth­er in dif­fer­ent ways. The most impor­tant thing is to show respect by see­ing each oth­er, to meet each oth­er… to respect each oth­er,” Khan said dur­ing an inter­view with state broad­cast­er Swedish Radio.

    Khan, also the gen­er­al sec­re­tary of the orga­ni­za­tion Swedish Mus­lims for Peace and Jus­tice, has faced strong crit­i­cism from with­in his par­ty since the inci­dent.

    “It is unac­cept­able. You can’t have a man in the par­ty who can’t greet women in the same way you greet a man. I’m upset,” Sti­na Bergström, a Green Par­ty par­lia­men­tar­i­an, told Swedish tabloid Afton­bladet.

    In inter­views with Swedish media, Khan lashed out at his crit­ics and said that the debate, and his fel­low Mus­lim Green Par­ty mem­ber Mehmet Kaplan’s res­ig­na­tion, had caused him to run out of ener­gy.

    “In today’s polit­i­cal cli­mate, I won­der if pol­i­tics is right for me, and if I want to be a media cir­cus clown,” he told the Nyheter24 news site.

    ...

    “In inter­views with Swedish media, Khan lashed out at his crit­ics and said that the debate, and his fel­low Mus­lim Green Par­ty mem­ber Mehmet Kaplan’s res­ig­na­tion, had caused him to run out of ener­gy.”
    Get­ting out­ed as an Islamist in a Green Par­ty is a pret­ty good rea­son for Khan’s res­ig­na­tion. And hav­ing two par­ty mem­bers resign in a week over Islamist ties is a pret­ty good rea­son for the Green Par­ty itself to have an over­all assess­ment. Is Swe­den’s Green Par­ty ties to Islamists lim­it­ed to just these two? Hope­ful­ly, but unlike­ly:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post

    Swedish Greens jolt­ed by claims of Islamist infil­tra­tion

    By Karl Ritter|AP April 26 at 10:25 AM

    STOCKHOLM — One refused to shake hands with a female jour­nal­ist. Anoth­er com­pared Israel to Nazi Ger­many. A third was seen doing hand signs asso­ci­at­ed with Egypt’s Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the back­ground of a live TV broad­cast.

    The behav­ior of some Mus­lim mem­bers of Sweden’s Green Par­ty, which is part of a coali­tion gov­ern­ment since 2014, has sparked con­cerns that the small envi­ron­men­tal­ist group may have been infil­trat­ed by Islamists.

    It also has trig­gered a wider dis­cus­sion about whether Swe­den has tried so hard to be inclu­sive and tol­er­ant toward migrants that it’s failed to stand up for its own fem­i­nist ideals.

    “In our eager­ness to embrace a diverse and mul­ti­cul­tur­al soci­ety, we have turned a blind eye to unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic views,” said Gulan Avci, a Stock­holm city coun­cil­woman for the Lib­er­als, a cen­ter-right oppo­si­tion par­ty.

    Green Par­ty lead­ers said Mon­day there’s no evi­dence of Islamists influ­enc­ing par­ty poli­cies, but admit­ted the par­ty needs a “reset” with greater focus on envi­ron­men­tal issues.

    The party’s prob­lems start­ed when Hous­ing Min­is­ter Mehmet Kaplan, a Green Par­ty mem­ber and for­mer leader of a Swedish Mus­lim youth group, resigned last week after media reports that he had con­tacts with ultra-nation­al­ists and Islamists in his native Turkey. Though he denied any wrong­do­ing and the par­ty lead­er­ship defend­ed him until the end, he stepped down when a video sur­faced of Kaplan com­par­ing Israel’s treat­ment of Pales­tini­ans to how the Nazis per­se­cut­ed Jews.

    Try­ing to cool things down, Green Par­ty co-leader Asa Rom­son only made them worse when she went off on a bizarre tan­gent in a TV inter­view, describ­ing the Sept. 11 attacks as “acci­dents.” She lat­er clar­i­fied that she con­demns the attacks.

    But it didn’t end there. New images emerged where Kaplan and oth­er Mus­lim mem­bers of the Green Par­ty were seen hold­ing up four fin­gers, a hand ges­ture used by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Egypt. One of them, a Green Par­ty youth leader, walked into the pic­ture dur­ing a live broad­cast on Swedish tele­vi­sion and flashed the sign behind the pre­sen­ter.

    The ges­ture isn’t ille­gal in Swe­den but many Green Par­ty mem­bers ques­tioned whether the brotherhood’s con­ser­v­a­tive views are com­pat­i­ble with the fem­i­nist and gay-friend­ly plat­form of the Swedish Greens.

    The biggest out­cry came after Yas­ri Khan, a 30-year-old run­ning for a seat on the Green Party’s exec­u­tive board, refused to shake the hand of a Swedish TV reporter. He said shak­ing hands with some­one from the oppo­site sex is too “inti­mate,” and instead put his hand on his heart in a Mus­lim greet­ing.

    A fero­cious debate ensued in Swe­den with Khan’s crit­ics call­ing his behav­ior insult­ing to women and his sup­port­ers dis­miss­ing the crit­i­cism as Islam­o­pho­bia. Even Prime Min­is­ter Ste­fan Lofven weighed in, say­ing that in Swe­den “you shake hands with both women and men.”

    Dis­mayed, Khan with­drew his can­di­da­cy for the Green Par­ty exec­u­tive board and also quit his seats on a region­al board and city coun­cil. He told The Asso­ci­at­ed Press he’s keep­ing his par­ty mem­ber­ship for now, though he ques­tioned whether prac­tic­ing Mus­lims still are wel­come in the par­ty.

    “I think the Green Par­ty needs to work on their inclu­sive val­ues,” he said. “How do you com­bine diver­si­ty and reli­gion with an eth­no­cen­tric and prej­u­diced idea of gen­der equal­i­ty?”

    Asked whether he would describe him­self as an Islamist, he said he doesn’t even know what the word means.

    “If it means a prac­tic­ing Mus­lim who is con­tribut­ing to pol­i­tics, then I’m an Islamist — or was, since I’m leav­ing. But if it means a ter­ror­ist or against gen­der equal­i­ty then I am as far away from an Islamist as you can get,” Khan said.

    Like many Mus­lims, he said he was drawn to the Greens because of their embrace of diver­si­ty, human rights and “all kinds of peo­ple who stood up for green pol­i­tics.”

    Crit­ics ques­tion whether the Greens opened their ranks to mem­bers who care more about pro­mot­ing their reli­gion than the envi­ron­ment.

    “Peo­ple who are close to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood, which is an Islamist par­ty, obvi­ous­ly have a big foothold in the Green Par­ty,” Lars Nican­der, a secu­ri­ty expert at the Swedish Defense Uni­ver­si­ty, told Sweden’s TV4. He com­pared it to how Sovi­et agents tried to infil­trate polit­i­cal par­ties in the West dur­ing the Cold War.

    The Greens didn’t dis­miss his the­o­ry out­right.

    “Even though at this point there are no indi­ca­tions that fears of an infil­tra­tion are real, the Green Par­ty will go ahead and inves­ti­gate our poten­tial vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to infil­tra­tion,” senior par­ty offi­cials Jon Karlfeld and Anders Wall­ner wrote in an opin­ion piece.

    ...

    “But it didn’t end there. New images emerged where Kaplan and oth­er Mus­lim mem­bers of the Green Par­ty were seen hold­ing up four fin­gers, a hand ges­ture used by the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Egypt. One of them, a Green Par­ty youth leader, walked into the pic­ture dur­ing a live broad­cast on Swedish tele­vi­sion and flashed the sign behind the pre­sen­ter.”
    Yeah, when your par­ty lead­ers start flash­ing Mus­lim Broth­er­hood hand ges­tures on live TV, you might have an Islamist infil­tra­tion prob­lem. But at least it appears Swe­den’s Greens are tak­ing this seri­ous­ly:

    ...
    “Even though at this point there are no indi­ca­tions that fears of an infil­tra­tion are real, the Green Par­ty will go ahead and inves­ti­gate our poten­tial vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to infil­tra­tion,” senior par­ty offi­cials Jon Karlfeld and Anders Wall­ner wrote in an opin­ion piece.
    ...

    Well, it’s a start. But it’s worth keep­ing in mind that the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood orga­ni­za­tions around the globe have a long his­to­ry of feign­ing mod­er­a­tion for the pur­pose of achiev­ing polit­i­cal power...for the final pur­pose of end­ing pol­i­tics and cre­at­ing a theoc­ra­cy. So if the Greens do dis­cov­er that they have an Islamist infil­tra­tion prob­lem, one of the more inter­est­ing pos­si­ble approach­es to the sit­u­a­tion would be sit down the alleged Islamists with one of the Greens’ more for­mi­da­ble fem­i­nist debaters, and just have an extend­ed dis­cus­sion over all sorts of issues that Islamists tend not to like to talk about in pub­lic set­tings. Would that be fun? As Yas­ri Khan put it:

    ...
    “I think the Green Par­ty needs to work on their inclu­sive val­ues,” he said. “How do you com­bine diver­si­ty and reli­gion with an eth­no­cen­tric and prej­u­diced idea of gen­der equal­i­ty?”
    ...

    Yes, Khan is charg­ing Swe­den’s Green par­ty with eth­no­cen­tric and prej­u­dices ideas of gen­der equal­i­ty. Ok, well, that seems like a great excuse to have an in-depth dis­cus­sion with an Islamist over his ideas of gen­der equal­i­ty, ideas that appear to involve men not shak­ing hands with women. So how about Mr. Khan sits down with Swe­den’s actu­al fem­i­nists and have a nice long back and forth about what Islamist vari­a­tions of fem­i­nism entails. It prob­a­bly would­n’t be as reveal­ing as, say, the recent VICE inter­view of an Afghan MP who threat­ened to cut the nose of the VICE reporter off when she ques­tion him about his views on mar­i­tal rape, but it could still be use­ful. And if it’s done respect­ful­ly, just imag­ine the impact that could have with the large num­bers of Mus­lim refugees who may not have had a chance to real­ly hear a vibrant debate between a fem­i­nist and Islamist. That kind of debate can’t hap­pen in many of the coun­tries those refugees are flee­ing from so Swe­den, or any­where in Europe with large num­bers of Mus­lim refugees, is kind of ide­al set­ting for that kind of dis­cus­sion right now.

    So if Swe­den’s Greens find them­selves with an Islamist infil­tra­tion prob­lem, why not turn that prob­lem into a vehi­cle for infil­trat­ing the Islamist mind­set with mod­ern ideals. What par­ty is bet­ter suit­ed for that task than the Greens?

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 26, 2016, 6:27 pm
  10. @Pterrafractyl–

    Always worth remem­ber­ing who the Turk­ish “rad­i­cals” real­ly are:

    “On the Trail of Turkey’s Grey Wolves” by Mar­tin A. Lee; Con­sor­tium News; 6/27/2015.

    https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/27/on-the-trail-of-turkeys-terrorist-grey-wolves/

    . . . .Led by Colonel Alpaslan Turkes, the Nation­al Action Par­ty espoused a fanat­i­cal pan-Turk­ish ide­ol­o­gy that called for reclaim­ing large sec­tions of the Sovi­et Union under the flag of a reborn Turk­ish empire. Turkes and his revan­chist cohorts had been enthu­si­as­tic sup­port­ers of Hitler dur­ing World War II.

    “The Turk­ish race above all oth­ers” was their Nazi-like cre­do. In a sim­i­lar vein, Grey Wolf lit­er­a­ture warned of a vast Jew­ish-Mason­ic-Com­mu­nist con­spir­a­cy and its news­pa­pers car­ried ads for Turk­ish trans­la­tions of Nazi texts.

    The pan-Turk­ish dream and its anti-Sovi­et com­po­nent also fueled ties between the Grey Wolves and the Anti-Bol­she­vik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a CIA-backed coali­tion led by erst­while fas­cist col­lab­o­ra­tors from East Europe. . . .

    Posted by Dave Emory | April 26, 2016, 9:00 pm
  11. On the web site of the Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States, you would find the fol­low­ing state­ment on the his­to­ry of the Green Par­ty in the Unit­ed States:

    “The Green Par­ty in the Unit­ed States is now in its fourth decade, found­ed in 1084 the par­ty has run a nation­al tick­et in every pres­i­den­tial elec­tion since 1984.” (gp.org)

    The above is a mixed his­to­ry of The Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States with the his­to­ry of The Greens/Green Par­ty USA.

    Amer­i­ca’s first green par­ty was The Com­mit­tees of Cor­re­spon­dences that was estab­lished in 1984. In 1991 it changed its name to The Greens/Green Par­ty USA. There was a press con­fer­ence about this that was aired on C‑SPAN on August 27, 1991. This press con­fer­ence can now be seen on the inter­net. Noth­ing was said about The Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States because that par­ty did not exist at that time.

    In 1996, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of state green par­ties, which had few active mem­bers at that time,and inde­pen­dent of GPUSA, met behind closed doors, lock­ing on GPUSA lead­ers and its mem­bers from that meet­ing, and formed a new polit­i­cal par­ty: The Asso­ci­a­tion of State Green Parties.(Why Are There Two Green Par­ties) (Twen­ti­eth Anniver­sary of the Amer­i­can Green) Movement)greenparty.org

    In 2001, the Asso­ci­a­tion of State Green Par­ties changed its name to The Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States. GPUSA mem­bers felt that new name sound­ed too much like that of Greens/Green Par­ty USA and was changed to that name in order to cause con­fu­sion in peo­ple’s minds between the two par­ties which are as dif­fer­ent frpm each oth­er as night is from day.

    GPUSA is a mem­ber­ship orga­ni­za­tion fund­ed by dues and small dona­tions. There are no dona­tions from busi­ness or the rich. This is to avoid hav­ing to answer to spe­cial inter­ests,

    On the oth­er hand, GPUS is just like any oth­er par­ty, tak­ing mon­ey from wher­ev­er it can get it, be it large cor­po­ra­tions it claims to be against or rich Repub­li­cans. For exam­ple:

    Flori­da Repub­li­can Mon­ey Flows to Green Par­ty Can­di­date Ursu­la Razum, she gives it to char­i­ty, by Michelle Brei­den­bach (mbreidenbach@syracuse.com)

    The sto­ry: Mem­bers of the Grace fam­i­ly gave URSULA Razum a check of $6000 for her cam­paign. Turns out that the donors were mem­bers of the fam­i­ly that owned the Grace Nation­al Bank, now known as Marine Mid­land Bank and also gave much big­ger donors to Ann Marie Buerkle, the Repub­li­can can­di­date run­ning against Demo­c­rat can­di­date Dan Muffie.

    “it is appar­ent that these dona­tions are intend­ed to help me win votes that might oth­er­wise go to Dan Maf­fei and help Ann Buer­rle win the elec­tion”, said Ursu­la Razum in the above arti­cle.

    And here’s anoth­er sto­ry on Repub­li­can mon­ey going to a Green Par­ty Can­di­date:

    Green Par­ty Can­di­date Finds He’s a Repub­li­can Pawn, by Sam Howe Ver­havek
    New York Times, August 8, 2001.

    Accord­ing to the arti­cle, Green par­ty can­di­date Young S Han received dona­tions and help with his cam­paign from Stan Shore, a Repub­li­can, whose job is to siphon votes from Democ­rats in close races.

    It gets worse. In 2006, Carl Romaneli, GPUS can­di­date for Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor for Penn­syl­van­ian, ran his cam­paign with 99% Repub­li­can mon­ey.
    Green Par­ty Pol­i­tics: Penn­syl­va­nia Green takes GOP dona­tions in Bal­lot Dri­ve. Democ­ra­cy Now! aired Octo­ber 25, 2006 and arti­cles at greenparty.org, web site of The Greens/Green Par­ty USA.

    But not only is GPUS ready and will­ing to take dona­tions from The Repub­li­can Par­ty and rich Repub­li­cans, it has also worked with them in brak­ing the law.

    Did the Texas Green Par­ty Will­ful­ly Break the Law? by Matt Glaz­er, Burn
    orange Reporter, lone Star Project.

    The Texas Green Par­ty worked hand in hand with Repub­li­cans of that state to use mon­ey, set up by a non-prof­it cor­po­ra­tion for such items as office expens­es, to pay for the gath­er­ing of sig­na­tures to help get GPUS can­di­dates on the bal­let.

    “We just did not have enough mon­ey to get the peti­tion sig­na­tures on our own,” said Green Par­ty Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Kat Swift.

    More infor­ma­tion on Amer­i­ca’s green par­ties at a lat­er date.

    Posted by David | September 20, 2016, 7:55 am
  12. con­tin­u­ing from above:
    Take Insti­tute Amer­i­ca was the name of the Repub­li­can orga­ni­za­tion help­ing the Texas Greens to get the sig­na­tures need­ed for the upcom­ing elec­tion at that time. Turned out that Take Amer­i­ca was being run by Mike Toomay, who paid a Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas stu­dent to get the sig­na­tures the Greens need­ed. Mr Toomay had been Rick Per­ry’s chief of staff, at one time.
    (Car­la Mar­inc­ci, Chron­i­cle Polit­i­cal Writer)

    And get this:When Demo­c­rat nation­al Comm

    Now, let’s take a look at the left­’s darlig, Ralph Nad­er.

    Nad­er Defnds GOP Cash: Can­di­date says he’s keep­ing mon­ey, by Car­la Marinic­ci.

    And get this: When Demo­c­ra­t­ic nation­al Com­mit­tee Chair Ter­ry McAu­li­ff and Howard Dean told Nad­er to return the Repub­li­can mon­ey, he called what they said a smear effect. Yet, even Nader’s Green Par­ty run­ning mate, Peter Cam­r­jo told Mr Nad­er to return the mon­ey. Not Nad­er. In fact, in yet anoth­er arti­cle, GOP Donors Fund­ing Nader/Bush sup­port­ers give inde­pen­den­t’s bid a finan­cial lift, by the same author for the same news­pa­per, it reads that of dona­tions of $10,000 or more to Nad­er, one in ten came from rich Repub­li­cans.

    Today, Don­ald Trump has said that he wants peo­ple to vote for green Par­ty can­di­date Jill Stein. And lots of peo­ple are going to do just that because they just refuse to believe the con job being played on them by the Green Par­ty.
    more infor­ma­tion com­ing

    Posted by David | September 20, 2016, 4:22 pm
  13. So what­ev­er could be said about tak­ing dona­tions from Repub­li­cans, the Green par­ty of the US, has always been on the right side. No, it has not.

    Dur­ing the sec­ond war with Iraq, GPUSA issued a paper, No Blood For Oil — Stop the War In Iraq, and orga­nized street protests against the war, of which GPUS tried to take cred­it for but in fact did very lit­tle to protest the war. Al this mase GPUSA a tar­get for the gov­ern­ment.

    In Novem­ber of 2001, Nan­cy Oden of GPUSA, was pre­vent­ed by the nation­al Guard from board­ing a plane to attend a nation­al Green Par­ty meet­ing.

    She told the press that her name had been flagged in the com­put­er because she was a mem­ber of The Greens/Green Par­ty USA and that the nation­al Guards at the air­port did their best to try to get her to do some­thing stu­pid so she could be arrested.She also said that some unknown per­son had called the hotel she would have been stray­ing to can­cel.

    Because of this, she and GPUSA called for oth­er groups to join them in form­ing a Nation­al Bill of Rights Defense Com­mit­tee to defend the civ­il rights of these speak­ing out against war. One of the groups asked to join was The Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States. The response from that group was shock­ing.

    Walt She­a­by of GPUS called GPUSA a small splin­ter group of the green move­ment in the US that is just look­ing for press and that Nan­cy Oden was just some kind of a nut who refused to fol­low sim­ple instruc­tions and made a big screen out of noth­ing that could have been avoid­ed had she behaved in a more civ­il man­ner, he said in so many words. And Nan­cy Allen, also of GPUS, agreed with every­thing She­a­by had to say.

    Green Pary Coor­di­na­tor Detained at Airport(www.counterpunch.org) Novem­ber 15, 2001

    What’s hap­pen with the Banger Air­port Inci­dent, by Nan­cy Oden (Coun­ter­pun­chorg

    it’s Not Always Easy being the Right Shade of Green Par­ty, by Bruce Kyle (Ban­go Dai­ly News)

    As for GOUSA being a small splin­ter group. At that time, it was a much big­ger and more impor­tant pary than Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States.

    more infor­ma­tion tomor­row.

    Posted by David | September 21, 2016, 7:45 am
  14. After Gore lost to Bush. GPUS was in deep finan­cial trou­ble. So it turned to two peo­ple for help: Cather­ine Austin Fitts and Franklin Sanders, two most unusu­al peo­ple for this green par­ty to be deal­ing with, if one believes every­thing Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States tells about itself.

    Cather­ine Austin Fitts, Green Par­ty del­e­gate from Ten­nessee, had worked as Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Hous­ing for George Bush Sr. Franklin Sanders was a lead­ing thinker of the Con­sti­tu­tion Par­ty and Chair­man of the Ten­nessee wing of the League of the South, a group, to make a long sto­ry short, would like to see black peo­ple in Amer­i­ca again slaves. Of all the peo­ple in the world, why would this Green Par­ty pick these two? And how many like them hold high places in this Green Par­ty? I am not say­ing this is the case. But I think we should be ask­ing the ques­tion.

    The Mak­ing of a Polit­i­cal Sil­hou­ette, by Joshua Frank

    In Feb­ru­ary of 2005, The Greens/Green Par­ty USA had its sta­tus as a polit­i­cal par­ty removed by the FEC. Two rea­sons are giv­en: A can­di­date in New York State made an error in fil­ing papers with the FEC and the par­ty had not had shown any income expens­es in years. How­ev­er, it is FEC pol­i­cy to send a let­ter to give a can­di­date a chance to cor­rect the mis­take. FEC does not remove the polit­i­cal sta­tus of a par­ty because of a mis­take in fil­ing papers with it. Sec­ond, if GPUSA tru­ly had no finan­cial actions, how could it run a can­di­date for pub­lic office?

    When Nad­er ran as the Green Par­ty can­di­date for pres­i­dent in 1996, he did not file with the FEC because he stat­ed he would keep his dona­tions below the $5000 lim­it called for in fil­ing with the FEC. But he soon bypassed that lim­it and still did not file. Yet, no action that I know of was ever tak­en against him by the FEC.

    Nad­er Watch: a project of vot­er revolt: com­plain against Ralph Nad­er
    to the FEC on Sep­tem­ber 9, 1996, for his fail­ing to reg­is­ter with the FEC and open his cam­paign and per­son­al finan­cial to the FEC as is required by law.

    still more to come

    Posted by David | September 22, 2016, 6:38 am
  15. The above is by no means the whole sto­ry about the Green Par­ties in Amer­i­ca. But it is a part of the sto­ry that most peo­ple do not know about and should.

    Posted by David | September 22, 2016, 3:24 pm
  16. Green Appease­ment Pol­i­tics Dash Hopes of Uni­ty, by Dan Fitz, Green Par­ty of St. Louis/Gateway Green Alliance, Sep­tem­ber 1999 Pub­lished by the Greens/Green Par­ty USA

    This paper deals with the roots of where we are today with the Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States and Ralph Nader’s role in bring­ing this about.

    One group of greens saw work­ing on day to day issues, help­ing peo­ple to have a bet­ter life, as the key to a bet­ter word, with an eye toward doing away with Cap­i­tal­ism. Elec­tions were an issue, but help­ing peo­ple with prob­lems faced every day came first. The sec­ond group want­ed elec­tions to be the main focus. The fist Group was the orig­i­nal green par­ty in Amer­i­ca, the Greens/Green Par­ty USA and the sec­ond lat­er became the Par­ty that is now run­ning Jill Stein for Pres­i­dent, Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States.

    GPUSA was a dues pay­ing orga­ni­za­tion, and most­ly left wing, The oth­er was most­ly right wing that saw noth­ing wrong with the cap­i­tal­ism sys­tem that could not be fixed and reject­ed the left green’s views that cap­i­tal­ism needs to be done away with. The left was will­ing to work with the right for the greater good. Not the right. it set out to destroy GPUSA.

    In 1996, the Cal­i­for­nia Green Par­ty nom­i­nat­ed Ralph Nad­er for Pres­i­dent against nation­al votes not to run a can­di­date for pres­i­dent, even spread­ing lies about GPUSA approval of Nad­er. As the move­ment for Nad­er took off on its own, GPUSA had no choice but to joint it or risk going against what seem to be a pop­u­lar move­ment with its mem­bers.

    While the issues Nad­er spoke of were on the mark, Nader,himself was a prob­lem. He did care for the views of oth­ers or even to give inter­views to the green press. It was like GPUSA mem­bers were just chil­dren to do what they were told to do by their dad­dy, Ralph Nad­er. But more prob­lems were to fol­low when the right mem­bers saw Nader’s run as a change to leave GPUSA and to start their own Green Par­ty because Nader’s author­i­tar­i­an views on how the par­ty should be run, with the mass of mem­bers hav­ing almost no say but to obey orders from the top. But hav­ing their own par­ty was still not enough. GPUSA still had to be destroyed. The best way of doing this was to attack its dues pay­ing sys­tem. Some mem­bers of GPUSA were will­ing to bend over back­wards to the tricky demands of the right to reform its dues mem­ber­ship sys­tem to that of just sign­ing up mem­bers whose names were on a piece of paper. But with­out dues, GPUSA could not exist, which is what the right real­ly want­ed.

    This paper was writ­ten in 1999, when GPUSA was still the impor­tant Green Par­ty. But it clear­ly pre­dicts how Green Par­ty of the Unit­ed States gained pow­er and how Green/Green Par­ty USA lat­er lost it. Peo­ple need to read this paper to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing as to what Green par­ty of the Unit­ed States is real­ly all about and why peo­ple should avoid it.

    Posted by David | October 2, 2016, 7:59 am
  17. Jill Stein, as of Octo­ber 25,2016, has joined Don­ald Trump in claim­ing that the polls are fixed in fla­vor of Hillary and that she, Jill Stein, get this, is real­ly ahead of both Clin­ton and Trump! Could you believe this bull­shit?

    Posted by David | October 25, 2016, 7:26 pm
  18. @David–

    Can you pro­vide us with a link doc­u­ment­ing this?

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | October 25, 2016, 10:40 pm
  19. Don’t know about Stein claim­ing that she is ahead of Trump. But what did hap­pen was Stein claim­ing that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­maries were “rigged” in favor for Hillary.

    Oct 21 2016
    https://twitter.com/DrJillStein/status/789640049025486852
    “If you vote for a par­ty that dis­en­fran­chised mil­lions by rig­ging its own pri­ma­ry, that per­pet­u­ates a cor­rupt sys­tem.”

    And a cou­ple days lat­er, Bre­it­bart is pro­mot­ing Jill Stein’s com­ments to bol­ster the Trump rigged-elec­tion lie.

    Octo­ber 23 2016
    http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/23/jill-stein-dems-manipulate-voters-media/

    Par­tial quote of Bre­it­bart arti­cle:
    “Stein explained that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty “rigged” the sys­tem to “dis­en­fran­chise” its own pri­ma­ry vot­ers. Stein warned that any vote for Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­dates “per­pet­u­ates” this “cor­rupt sys­tem.”

    “The Dems act more lib­er­al than GOP, but their role in the sys­tem is to pre­vent pro­gres­sives from defy­ing cor­po­rate rule,” Stein tweet­ed, adding: “If you vote for a par­ty that dis­en­fran­chised mil­lions by rig­ging its own pri­ma­ry, that per­pet­u­ates a cor­rupt sys­tem.”

    Stein explained that cor­po­rate media’s con­trol over the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion has placed a “stran­gle­hold… over our democ­ra­cy.” Stein has pre­vi­ous­ly explained that the cor­po­rate media is “prop[ping] up” Clinton’s cam­paign and has essen­tial­ly enact­ed a media “black­out” of her own “peo­ple-pow­ered” cam­paign.

    “Despite Greens being on the bal­lot for 98% of vot­ers, main­stream media has giv­en us less than 1% of cov­er­age they’ve giv­en Trump & Clin­ton,” Stein tweet­ed. “Amer­i­cans feel the estab­lish­ment isn’t address­ing issues we care about. So why do debates & media shut out com­pet­ing visions of our future?”

    “Let’s enact the no-brain­er solu­tions to put an end to the stran­gle­hold the cor­po­rate media has over our democ­ra­cy,” Stein wrote.”
    ==========

    Posted by Mother Muckraker | October 28, 2016, 3:45 pm
  20. @Mother Muck­rak­er–

    Bre­it­bart News–just what we would expect to be bang­ing the drum for a reign­ing in of cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca.

    Jill Stein is a clas­sic “Turd Par­ty” can­di­date, along the lines of Old Shop-Lifter Face–Ralph Nad­er.

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | October 28, 2016, 5:10 pm
  21. I can’t find Jill Stein’s state­ment on her being ahead of Clin­ton and trump, but I did find this:
    New Polls show Jill Stein win­ning — media does­n’t want you to know, by James Walk­er (10/14?16)Source plane

    Posted by David | November 7, 2016, 5:26 pm
  22. How a vote for Jill Stein in 2016 could help Gov. Rauner in 2018, by Philip O’Con­ner (Chica­go Tri­bune)

    Instead of the Green par­ty, I would take a seri­ous look at “Our Rev­o­lu­tion.” This past elec­tions it ran 50 can­di­dates of which 25 won, run­ning from the Sen­ate to Con­gress and beyond; it seems to know how to win in major elec­tions. Some­thing the Green Par­ty has nev­er done. It’s still too soon to endorse, but it is worth tak­ing a look at for any­one inter­est­ed in what the Green Par­ty talks about but nev­er real­ly does.

    Posted by David | November 19, 2016, 2:10 pm
  23. Slight­ly Off-Top­ic. Apolo­gies don’t have a link appeared in NYT June 1, 2012

    Klaas Faber, War Crim­i­nal Who Escaped Pun­ish­ment, Is Dead at 90 — The Ger­mans had refused to extra­dite him on the ground that he had Ger­man cit­i­zen­ship under an edict issued by Hitler in 1943 con­vey­ing it on for­eign­ers who had aid­ed the Nazi war cause.

    Posted by Emily Dickerson 29 | November 20, 2016, 11:33 am
  24. Mass Sen­a­tor Eliz­a­beth War­ren and oth­er Pro­gres­sive Democ­rats run­ning for elec­tion are going to be prime tar­gets of the Green par­ty to help you know who.
    Come on, peo­ple, let’s get the truth about this par­ty out there now!

    Posted by David | February 11, 2017, 8:24 am
  25. @David–

    Do you have a link and/or source for this?

    Best,

    Dave

    Posted by Dave Emory | February 11, 2017, 4:05 pm
  26. We got a big update on the squab­bles over the ‘tanks for Ukraine’ debate among West­ern gov­ern­ment that’s been play­ing out: the US just announced it’s plan­ning on send­ing 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine. Ger­many then declared that it was lift­ing its oppo­si­tion to the dona­tion to Ukraine of Ger­man-build Leop­ard tanks by NATO allies.

    It was­n’t a coin­ci­dence that the two announce­ments were made on the same day. The Ger­man gov­ern­ment, led by chan­cel­lor SPD leader Olaf Scholz, had held the posi­tion that Leop­ard tanks could only be approved for dona­tions to Ukraine as long as the US sent Abrams tanks too, some­thing the US had so far been resist­ing. That’s part of the sto­ry here: while 31 Abrams tanks is just a tiny frac­tion of the num­ber of tanks Ukraine would need, the deci­sion was need­ed to get a much larg­er num­ber of Leop­ard tanks approved for deliv­ery.

    But as we’re going to see in the Naked Cap­i­tal­ism piece below, there’s anoth­er sto­ry here. Because while the pri­vate nego­ti­a­tions that led to the joint announce­ments by Ger­many and the US over the week­end were described as “inten­sive”, it turns out there’s been a much more pub­lic form of nego­ti­a­tion tak­ing place on the issue. A pub­lic debate led by none oth­er than Annale­na Baer­bock, Ger­many’s for­eign min­is­ter. It turns out Baer­bock, a green par­ty mem­ber, is quite the hawk when it comes to issues like Rus­sia and Chi­na. A hawk with a pen­chant for mak­ing pub­lic state­ments in oppo­si­tion to the posi­tions held by her boss chan­cel­lor Scholz.

    And that’s exact­ly what Baer­bock did in a recent inter­view with French jour­nal­ists where she blunt­ly stat­ed that “if we were asked, we would not stand in the way,” to the Pol­ish deliv­ery of Leop­ard tanks to Ukraine. When the inter­view­er asked for con­fir­ma­tion on the com­ments, Baer­bock replied, “you under­stood me well.” Ear­li­er this month, Vice Chan­cel­lor Robert Habeck also stat­ed that Ger­many should not stand in the way if Poland decides to send Leop­ard tanks to Ukraine. And it also sounds look the FPD part­ners in the coali­tion gov­ern­ment share the Greens’ view.

    Oh, and it turns out Baer­bock has ambi­tions to become chan­cel­lor some­day and she’s one of the most pop­u­lar politi­cians in Ger­many today. That’s part of the larg­er con­text here with this sud­den US/German rever­sal on the ‘tanks of Ukraine’ issue: it hap­pened in the mid­dle of an intra-coali­tion Green mutiny led by some­one who just might be Ger­many’s next chan­cel­lor.

    Ok, first, here’s a look at the sur­prise flip on the US’s posi­tion on the Abrams tanks. Although, giv­en the rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of tanks involved, it’s less a flip and more a grudg­ing com­pro­mise designed to get Ger­many to give the green light on all those Leop­ards:

    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    EXPLAINER: Why the US flipped on send­ing tanks to Ukraine

    By TARA COPP and LOLITA BALDOR
    Weds Jan 25, 2023 15:51:12 CST

    WASHINGTON (AP) — For months, U.S. offi­cials balked at send­ing M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, insist­ing they were too com­pli­cat­ed and too hard to main­tain and repair.

    On Wednes­day, that abrupt­ly changed. Ukraine’s des­per­ate pleas for tanks were answered with a sweep­ing, trans-Atlantic yes.

    The dra­mat­ic rever­sal was the cul­mi­na­tion of intense inter­na­tion­al pres­sure and diplo­mat­ic arm-twist­ing that played out over the last week. And it result­ed in in a quick suc­ces­sion of announce­ments: The U.S. said it will send 31 of the 70-ton Abrams bat­tle tanks to Ukraine, and Ger­many announced it will send 14 Leop­ard 2 tanks and allow oth­er coun­tries to do the same.

    A look at the mas­sive bat­tle weapon, why it is impor­tant to Ukraine’s war with Rus­sia, and what drove the Biden administration’s tank turn­about.

    ...

    WHY THE U.S. KEPT SAYING NO

    The Abrams’ jet engine needs hun­dreds of gal­lons of fuel to oper­ate.

    It will burn through fuel at a rate of at least two gal­lons per mile (4.7 liters per kilo­me­ter), whether the tank is mov­ing or idling, But­ler said, which means a con­stant sup­ply con­voy of fuel trucks must stay with­in reach so it can keep mov­ing for­ward.

    The U.S. wor­ried that the fuel demands would cre­ate a logis­ti­cal night­mare for Ukrain­ian forces. While an Abrams can storm through the snow and mud, fuel trucks can’t. In addi­tion, like any jet engine, the Abrams’ tur­bine needs air to breathe, which it sucks in through fil­tered rear vents. When those vent fil­ters get clogged — whether by sand, as sol­diers report­ed to GAO in 1992, or by debris they might encounter in Ukraine — they can’t per­form.

    “The Abrams tank is a very com­pli­cat­ed piece of equip­ment. It’s expen­sive, it’s hard to train on. ... It is not the eas­i­est sys­tem to main­tain. It may or may not be the right sys­tem,” The under sec­re­tary of defense for pol­i­cy, Col­in Kahl, told reporters last week at the Pen­ta­gon.

    The Abrams also will require months of train­ing. Ukrain­ian forces will have to learn how to oper­ate its more com­plex sys­tems, and how to keep it run­ning and fueled.

    THE ARM-TWISTING TURNABOUT

    Despite all the draw­backs expressed by the U.S., when all was said and done, it came down to polit­i­cal real­i­ties and a diplo­mat­ic dance.

    Ger­many had been reluc­tant to send the Leop­ards, or allow allies to send them, unless the U.S. put its Abrams on the table, due to con­cerns that sup­ply­ing the tanks would incur Russia’s wrath. The U.S., mean­while, argued that the Ger­man-made Leop­ards were a bet­ter fit because Ukrain­ian troops could get them and get trained on them far more quick­ly and eas­i­ly.

    The impasse frus­trat­ed Euro­pean allies, such as Poland, who want­ed to send Leop­ards but couldn’t with­out Germany’s OK. Thus began the more fierce nego­ti­a­tions.

    U.S. and Ger­man offi­cials both used the word “inten­sive” to describe the talks that ulti­mate­ly led to the tank turn­about by both coun­tries.

    “This is the result of inten­sive con­sul­ta­tions, once again, with our allies and inter­na­tion­al part­ners,” Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz said in an address to Ger­man law­mak­ers on Wednes­day.

    Echo­ing Scholz, a senior U.S. admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial said talks had been going on for some time but “in a much more inten­si­fied way over the last num­ber of weeks.” The offi­cial spoke on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty to pro­vide details on the deci­sion.

    From Pres­i­dent Joe Biden on down, calls were made, includ­ing to Scholz. Defense Sec­re­tary Lloyd Austin and Army Gen. Mark Mil­ley, chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke and met with their Ger­man coun­ter­parts and oth­er allies.

    Last Fri­day, the pres­sure was pal­pa­ble. Top defense lead­ers from more than 50 coun­tries met at Ram­stein Air Base in Ger­many to dis­cuss Ukraine’s ongo­ing weapons and equip­ment needs. Tanks were a key sub­ject. Lead­ers from coun­tries that have Leop­ard tanks met with the new Ger­man defense min­is­ter.

    Grad­u­al­ly, the Ger­man stance began to pub­licly soft­en, lead­ing to Wednesday’s announce­ments. Asked repeat­ed­ly what changed, Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials side­stepped. Asked direct­ly about Ger­man pres­sure, Biden told reporters, “Ger­many didn’t force me to change our mind.”

    HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE

    Tim­ing for both deliv­ery of the tanks to Ukraine and the train­ing of Ukrain­ian troops is fuzzy. U.S. offi­cials would only say that it will take “many months” to deliv­er the Abrams tanks, but that the Leop­ards will arrive faster.

    Doug Bush, assis­tant sec­re­tary of the Army for acqui­si­tion, said the U.S. no longer buys new Abrams, but uses old­er ones as “seed vehi­cles” and refur­bish­es them. Doing that, how­ev­er, isn’t quick or easy, he said.

    The train­ing can begin more quick­ly, and the Pen­ta­gon is devel­op­ing a pro­gram.

    ...

    ———–

    “EXPLAINER: Why the US flipped on send­ing tanks to Ukraine” by TARA COPP and LOLITA BALDOR; Asso­ci­at­ed Press; 01/25/2023

    “The dra­mat­ic rever­sal was the cul­mi­na­tion of intense inter­na­tion­al pres­sure and diplo­mat­ic arm-twist­ing that played out over the last week. And it result­ed in in a quick suc­ces­sion of announce­ments: The U.S. said it will send 31 of the 70-ton Abrams bat­tle tanks to Ukraine, and Ger­many announced it will send 14 Leop­ard 2 tanks and allow oth­er coun­tries to do the same.”

    It was indeed a rever­sal. Although not nec­es­sar­i­ly a com­plete rever­sal. The US oppo­si­tion to send­ing any Abrams tanks has shift­ed. 31 tanks are slat­ed to be deliv­ered. It’s not exact­ly a mas­sive deliv­ery. But it does­n’t look like that was real­ly the point. The point was to give in to Ger­many’s demands that the US first deliv­er some Abrams tanks before the Ger­man gov­ern­ment would approve the dona­tion of a larg­er num­ber of Ger­man-built Leop­ard tanks to Ukraine by EU allies like Poland:

    ...
    Despite all the draw­backs expressed by the U.S., when all was said and done, it came down to polit­i­cal real­i­ties and a diplo­mat­ic dance.

    Ger­many had been reluc­tant to send the Leop­ards, or allow allies to send them, unless the U.S. put its Abrams on the table, due to con­cerns that sup­ply­ing the tanks would incur Russia’s wrath. The U.S., mean­while, argued that the Ger­man-made Leop­ards were a bet­ter fit because Ukrain­ian troops could get them and get trained on them far more quick­ly and eas­i­ly.

    The impasse frus­trat­ed Euro­pean allies, such as Poland, who want­ed to send Leop­ards but couldn’t with­out Germany’s OK. Thus began the more fierce nego­ti­a­tions.

    U.S. and Ger­man offi­cials both used the word “inten­sive” to describe the talks that ulti­mate­ly led to the tank turn­about by both coun­tries.

    ...

    Grad­u­al­ly, the Ger­man stance began to pub­licly soft­en, lead­ing to Wednesday’s announce­ments. Asked repeat­ed­ly what changed, Biden admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials side­stepped. Asked direct­ly about Ger­man pres­sure, Biden told reporters, “Ger­many didn’t force me to change our mind.”
    ...

    And that brings us to the fol­low­ing Naked Cap­i­tal­ism piece with some fas­ci­nat­ing con­text on the “inten­sive” nego­ti­a­tions that led up to this series of joint announce­ments by the US and Ger­many. Con­text that amounts to an effec­tive intra-coali­tion mutiny led by none oth­er than Annale­na Baer­bock, the Green for­eign min­is­ter in Olf Scholz coali­tion gov­ern­ment of the SPD, FPD, and the Greens. As we’re going to see, while Scholz had remained resis­tant towards approv­ing the export of Leop­ard tanks to Ukraine, both the Greens and the FPD had dif­fer­ent views. And they made those views appar­ent to the world repeat­ed­ly. Ear­li­er this month, Vice Chan­cel­lor Robert Habeck from the Greens stat­ed that Ger­many should not stand in the way if Poland decides to send Leop­ard tanks to Ukraine. And then, over the week­end, Baer­bock told inter­view­ers that “if we were asked, we would not stand in the way.” When asked for con­fir­ma­tion on her state­ment Baer­bock replied, “you under­stood me well.”

    That’s some of the key con­text to keep in mind when try­ing to inter­pret the sud­den deci­sion by the US to send a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of Abrams tanks: it hap­pened right after Ger­many’s for­eign min­is­ter basi­cal­ly put Olaf Scholz into a cor­ner on this issue. Scholz had an intra-coali­tion cri­sis on his hands after Baer­bock gave that inter­view. A polit­i­cal cri­sis that was ulti­mate­ly resolved with the joint announce­ments by the US and Ger­many.

    But there’s anoth­er big of con­text here to keep in mind: it turns out Baer­bock has chan­cel­lor ambi­tions of her own. Along with a vision for an EU with a new­ly robust for­eign pol­i­cy backed by a much stronger mil­i­tary over­all. Along with much harsh­er stances on issues like Chi­na. In fact, Baer­bock declared that Ger­many can “no longer be so fun­da­men­tal­ly depen­dent on a coun­try that does not share our val­ues that we can be black­mailed in the end,” ahead of a vis­it to Chi­na by Scholz back in Novem­ber. That was a state­ment by Ger­many’s for­eign min­is­ter. And as we should expect, DC loves hers. Beyond that, she’s one of the most pop­u­lar main­stream politi­cians in Ger­many today. And that’s part of the larg­er con­text around the Ger­many coali­tion mutiny that was just resolved with the joint US: the per­son who led that mutiny is well posi­tioned to become Ger­many’s next chan­cel­lor. And she has big plans:

    Naked Cap­i­tal­ism

    Ger­man Greens on the Warpath

    By Conor Gal­lagher
    Post­ed on Jan­u­ary 24, 2023

    With out­side pres­sure from the US and oth­er Euro­pean states grow­ing, on Sun­day Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz and his new defense min­is­ter Boris Pis­to­rius con­tin­ued to slow-walk the deci­sion on allow­ing Ger­man-made Leop­ard tanks to be sent to Ukraine.

    But then for­eign min­is­ter Annale­na Baer­bock dur­ing an inter­view with French tele­vi­sion sta­tion LCI, said that “if we were asked, we would not stand in the way.” The inter­view­er dou­ble checked, to which Baer­bock con­fi­dent­ly replied, “you under­stood me well.”

    Now Berlin is try­ing to walk back Baerbock’s state­ment with gov­ern­ment spokesman Stef­fen Hebe­stre­it say­ing that any Pol­ish request regard­ing the re-export of tanks would be sub­ject to “stan­dard pro­ce­dure” and would go through Germany’s Fed­er­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, a body that deals with arms exports.

    By say­ing Ger­many won’t block Poland from send­ing Leop­ard tanks, Baer­bock is basi­cal­ly dar­ing Scholz to over­rule her.If he does—and blocks oth­er coun­tries from send­ing Leopards—it will show that Scholz is iso­lat­ed not only from Ukraine & Ger­man allies, but in his own coali­tion. https://t.co/iYkJTRlk4r— Aaron Gasch Bur­nett (@AaronGBurnett) Jan­u­ary 22, 2023

    Poland is already fol­low­ing Baerbock’s lead and seek­ing Berlin’s per­mis­sion to send the Ger­man-made Leop­ard tanks to Ukraine.

    “We will seek this approval,” Poland’s Prime Min­is­ter Mateusz Moraw­iec­ki told reporters on Mon­day. “Even if we didn’t get such an approval in the end, we will give our tanks to Ukraine any­way — with­in a small coali­tion of coun­tries, even if Ger­many isn’t in that coali­tion”, Moraw­iec­ki said.

    Baerbock’s com­ments also opened up divi­sions in the Ger­man coali­tion:

    That senior fig­ures in the FDP are back­ing Baer­bock­’s state­ment on not stand­ing in the way of tank deliv­er­ies while Hofre­it­er for Greens and Strack-Zim­mer­mann for the FDP are essen­tial­ly coor­di­nat­ing state­ments should be a warn­ing to the SPD lead­er­ship about coali­tion dynam­ics— Alexan­der Clark­son (@APHClarkson) Jan­u­ary 23, 2023

    Scholz is fac­ing heavy pres­sure from the US and oth­ers to relent on the tanks:

    Accord­ing to Ukrain­ian Defense Min­istry they have received assur­ances from 12 Coun­tries that they will pro­vide a total of 100 Leop­ard 2 Main Bat­tle Tanks if or when Ger­many approves the trans­fer. pic.twitter.com/tWlBFsZFSr— OSINT­de­fend­er (@sentdefender) Jan­u­ary 24, 2023

    But the Ger­man gov­ern­ment had want­ed the US to send its Abram tanks before it sends any Ger­man ones. This led to a melt­down in the empire’s cap­i­tal. The Wash­ing­ton Post edi­to­r­i­al board, in a piece titled Ger­many is refus­ing to send tanks to Ukraine. Biden can­not let this stand. Biden can­not let this stand, advised Biden to bring the vas­sal state to heel:

    [Olaf] Scholz is sac­ri­fic­ing sound strat­e­gy on the altar of polit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion by waver­ing in the face of oppo­si­tion from some polit­i­cal allies and a seg­ment of the Ger­man elec­torate. It is a mis­judg­ment that can­not stand.

    Pesky Ger­man elec­torate. US Sec­re­tary of Defense Lloyd Austin appar­ent­ly had a big blow up in Berlin:

    Inter­est­ing report from SZ on the Leop­ards 2 deba­cle and the dis­cus­sions between the US and Germany“The refusal from Berlin led to vio­lent reac­tions in Washington“Lloyd Austin is said to have got­ten into a heat­ed argu­ment with Scholz’s chief of staffhttps://t.co/gm1qcU2af0 pic.twitter.com/P9qBwB9tNw— Fay­tuks News ? (@Faytuks) Jan­u­ary 22, 2023

    Austin is one of the main oppo­nents of send­ing Abrams to Ukraine. Accord­ing to NBC News::

    But both Defense Sec­re­tary Lloyd Austin and Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Mil­ley have rec­om­mend­ed against send­ing M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the three U.S. offi­cials said.

    Mil­ley and Austin have cit­ed how long it takes to train per­son­nel to oper­ate the tanks and how dif­fi­cult the tanks are to main­tain. They also have argued they are not the right vehi­cles for the fight in Ukraine right now, accord­ing to the offi­cials.

    One U.S. offi­cial said Austin has argued the train­ing to oper­ate and main­tain the tanks would take months, and even though the Ukraini­ans have proven adept at learn­ing many new plat­forms, he con­tin­ues to resist send­ing the Abrams.

    ...

    Berlin’s hes­i­tance is under­stand­able. It has already sent advanced air-defense sys­tems, anti-air­craft, mul­ti­ple-rock­et launch­ers, and plans to send dozens of Marder infantry fight­ing vehi­cles. But while the tanks like­ly won’t make a big dif­fer­ence on the bat­tle­field, there look to be oth­er forces at work:

    ??????????????????????“If Ger­many gives oth­er coun­tries the go-ahead to re-export “Leop­ards” to Ukraine, then they can lat­er be replaced by Amer­i­can “Abrams”,that is, Ger­many will lose its cur­rent mar­kets.” Swiss news­pa­per Neue Zürcher Zeitung— AZ ???????? (@AZgeopolitics) Jan­u­ary 23, 2023

    While the US was frus­trat­ed with Scholz drag­ging his feet, Washington’s woman in Berlin came through. Some back­ground:

    One year ago, Olaf Scholz was elect­ed as the ninth Ger­man chan­cel­lor since World War II, and leads a “traf­fic-light coali­tion” of the Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (SPD), the Greens and the Free Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (FDP) — named after the three par­ties’ sig­na­ture col­ors of red, green and yel­low.

    Scholz, from the SPD, hails from the pol­i­tics of Wan­del durch Han­del (“trans­for­ma­tion through trade”). It relied on cheap Russ­ian gas imports and exports to its largest trad­ing part­ner, Chi­na. Scholz start­ed his term with attempts (if we take them at face val­ue) to achieve a diplo­mat­ic solu­tion with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin. He also defend­ed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline until its demise.

    The Greens, on the oth­er hand, are the war-mon­ger­ing par­ty in Ger­many, who along with the Amer­i­cans, have dragged Scholz fur­ther into the Ukraine morass. Vice Chan­cel­lor Robert Habeck from the Greens already said ear­li­er this month that Ger­many should not stand in the way if Poland decides to send Leop­ard 2 bat­tle tanks to Ukraine. Baer­bock went a step fur­ther, which is noth­ing new for her.

    She was the only chan­cel­lor can­di­date dur­ing the 2021 elec­tion who cam­paigned against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and she’s con­sis­tent­ly been one of the loud­er voic­es call­ing for Berlin to send more heavy weapon­ry to Kiev. Baer­bock is also now call­ing for the estab­lish­ment of a spe­cial tri­bunal to bring Putin and his gov­ern­ment to tri­al over the war.

    In an inter­view with Black Agen­da Report back before the Ger­man elec­tion Diana John­stone, who was press sec­re­tary of the Green Group in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment from 1989 to 1996, had this to say about Baer­bock and the Greens:

    Frankly, I hope they don’t [win] because they are the most dan­ger­ous when it comes to for­eign rela­tions. … Peo­ple who are real­ly on the left in Ger­many con­sid­er [Baer­bock] and the Ger­man Green Par­ty extreme­ly dan­ger­ous. They’re most like­ly to stum­ble us into a major war between world pow­ers.

    Baer­bock, whose intro­duc­tion to transat­lantic gov­er­nance began with mem­ber­ship in the Ger­man Mar­shall Fund, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum’s Young Lead­ers Pro­gram and the Europe/Transatlantic Board of the Green Party’s Hein­rich Böll Foun­da­tion, deliv­ered an August speech at the New School in New York that pro­vides insight into her vision for Ger­many. She describes Feb­ru­ary 24 (the date Rus­sia began its spe­cial mil­i­tary oper­a­tion) as a date that changed the world and uses it to jus­ti­fy her plans for a rearmed Ger­many to take on a much more aggres­sive for­eign pol­i­cy as an equal part­ner to the US:

    For a long time after 1989, secu­ri­ty was not an issue of con­cern for many Euro­peans and par­tic­u­lar­ly Ger­mans – after the end of the Cold War, my coun­try con­sid­ered itself final­ly “sur­round­ed only by friends”. But that per­cep­tion has def­i­nite­ly changed. Chil­dren are ask­ing their par­ents now at break­fast: Mom, what exact­ly is a nuclear weapon? Oth­ers are say­ing: I real­ly like NATO. In the mid-1980s, when I was born, mil­lions of Ger­mans who are the grand­par­ents of these chil­dren took to the streets to protest against arma­ment. Now, these grand­par­ents, moth­ers, fathers and their chil­dren are sit­ting at the kitchen table debat­ing about arma­ment, or they are march­ing in the streets in sup­port of Ukraine’s free­dom.

    And the same holds true for oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries: Swe­den and Fin­land are leav­ing behind long tra­di­tions of neu­tral­i­ty to join NATO.

    In Berlin, Russia’s war has prompt­ed us in the new Ger­man Gov­ern­ment to re-exam­ine some long-held views on secu­ri­ty – and to fun­da­men­tal­ly change track in many fields. Think­ing with­out a ban­is­ter means for us:

    Ger­many has set up a spe­cial fund of 100 bil­lion euro to strength­en our mil­i­tary. We have reversed a decades-old arms export par­a­digm, with Ger­many now being one of Ukraine’s strongest mil­i­tary and finan­cial back­ers. And we have expand­ed our con­tri­bu­tions to NATO: We are lead­ing the NATO bat­tle group in Lithua­nia and are assign­ing a brigade with up to 800 troops which can be deployed there if required. We are help­ing to secure the air­space over the Baltic States with our fight­er jets – and to pro­tect Slo­va­kia with Patri­ot air defense.

    But we know that we can­not stop here: Our aim is to fur­ther strength­en the Euro­pean pil­lar of NATO, because we want to have a lead­er­ship in Euro­pean and US part­ner­ship. Europe mat­ters – also secu­ri­ty-wise, that’s what we saw after Feb­ru­ary 24th. If that premise is to hold, we have to prove it and see it through in the long term. That means build­ing a more strate­gic Euro­pean Union – a Union able to approach the Unit­ed States at eye lev­el: in a part­ner­ship in lead­er­ship..

    Baer­bock is the fre­quent recip­i­ent of glow­ing media reviews in both the US and Ger­many like this from the Wash­ing­ton Post, “Germany’s Green for­eign min­is­ter is tak­ing the lead on Ukraine:”

    She did promise more weapons — which, she said, would help Ukraine “free its cit­i­zens who are still suf­fer­ing under the ter­ror of Russ­ian occu­pa­tion.” That was far more force­ful than any­thing Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz has said in recent weeks. The war in Ukraine, it turns out, is Baerbock’s fight too — for the chance to become the next Ger­man chan­cel­lor.

    The sur­prise vis­it to Kharkiv was Baerbock’s fifth to Ukraine since she took office at the end of 2021. She trav­eled there for the first time in Jan­u­ary 2022. Scholz, by con­trast, need­ed five more months to make it to Kyiv, and only in response to con­sid­er­able inter­nal and exter­nal pres­sure.

    Baer­bock has made her inten­tions clear. Where Scholz is all reluc­tance and realpoli­tik, she is posi­tion­ing her­self as a can-do politi­cian with strong prin­ci­ples.

    Still, it’s some­what shock­ing to see her with the high­est approval rat­ing of any of Germany’s main politi­cians, espe­cial­ly after she told Ger­man vot­ers she doesn’t care about the toll her sup­port for Ukraine takes on their lives and the coun­try, which sure enough, it is doing:

    ??????“The con­flict in Ukraine and its con­se­quences will cost Ger­many €175 bil­lion in 2023, that is, about 4.5% of GDP.”- Insti­tute of Ger­man Eco­nom­ics (IW)— AZ ???????? (@AZgeopolitics) Jan­u­ary 23, 2023

    This also wouldn’t be the first time that Baer­bock under­mined Scholz. Ahead of a Novem­ber trip to Chi­na, which had sud­den­ly become con­tro­ver­sial in the West, Scholz received pub­lic advice from the Chi­na hawk Baer­bock. Com­par­ing Chi­na to Rus­sia, she added that Ger­many should “no longer be so fun­da­men­tal­ly depen­dent on a coun­try that does not share our val­ues that we can be black­mailed in the end.”

    Then, as Scholz was en route to Bei­jing, Germany’s for­eign office released a pho­to op of a gath­er­ing of Baer­bock and her G‑7 coun­ter­parts. Baer­bock sits at the head of the table next to US Sec­re­tary of State Antho­ny Blinken with Under Sec­re­tary of State Vic­to­ria “F**k the EU” Nuland behind them. Accord­ing to for­mer India diplo­mat M.K. Bhadraku­mar:

    Quin­tes­sen­tial­ly, Baer­bock has high­light­ed her dis­con­tent with Scholz’s Chi­na vis­it by assem­bling around her the like-mind­ed G7 coun­ter­parts. Even by norms of coali­tion pol­i­tics, this is an exces­sive ges­ture. When a country’s top leader is on a vis­it abroad, a dis­play of dis­so­nance under­cuts the diplo­ma­cy.

    Equal­ly, Baerbock’s G7 coun­ter­parts chose not to wait for Scholz’s return home. Appar­ent­ly, they have a closed mind and the tid­ings of Scholz’s dis­cus­sions in Bei­jing will not change that.

    First thing on Mon­day, Scholz should ask for Baerbeck’s res­ig­na­tion. Bet­ter still, [the] lat­ter should sub­mit her res­ig­na­tion.

    Nei­ther hap­pened, and Scholz may pay the price. Despite her unsuc­cess­ful run in 2021, Baer­bock still wants to be chan­cel­lor, an out­come the US would no doubt wel­come. Elec­tions are not sched­uled until 2025, but with the traf­fic light coali­tion increas­ing­ly on thin ice, she might get her chance soon­er rather than lat­er.

    ————=

    “Ger­man Greens on the Warpath” By Conor Gal­lagher; Naked Cap­i­tal­ism; 01/24/2023

    “But then for­eign min­is­ter Annale­na Baer­bock dur­ing an inter­view with French tele­vi­sion sta­tion LCI, said that “if we were asked, we would not stand in the way.” The inter­view­er dou­ble checked, to which Baer­bock con­fi­dent­ly replied, “you under­stood me well.”

    Ger­man for­eign min­is­ter Annale­na Baer­bock was­n’t going to be mis­un­der­stood. She was quite explic­it about what the Ger­man gov­ern­men­t’s stance would be should Poland decide to send Ukraine those Leop­ard tanks. Which was pre­sum­ably a sur­prise to her boss, Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz. It was an intra-coali­tion for­eign pol­i­cy dis­pute and Baer­bock appeared to be intent on uni­lat­er­al­ly resolv­ing it. But as the piece not­ed, it was­n’t entire­ly uni­lat­er­al. Vice Chan­cel­lor Robert Habeck from the Greens deliv­ered the same mes­sage ear­li­er this month and senior FPD fig­ures appear to be ful­ly on board. So in the lead up to the “intense” nego­ti­a­tions between the US and Ger­many the result­ed in the big joint announce­ments the both Abrams and Leop­ard tanks were going to be sent to Ukraine, Scholz was fac­ing a coali­tion mutiny:

    ...
    Now Berlin is try­ing to walk back Baerbock’s state­ment with gov­ern­ment spokesman Stef­fen Hebe­stre­it say­ing that any Pol­ish request regard­ing the re-export of tanks would be sub­ject to “stan­dard pro­ce­dure” and would go through Germany’s Fed­er­al Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil, a body that deals with arms exports.

    ...

    Baerbock’s com­ments also opened up divi­sions in the Ger­man coali­tion:

    That senior fig­ures in the FDP are back­ing Baer­bock­’s state­ment on not stand­ing in the way of tank deliv­er­ies while Hofre­it­er for Greens and Strack-Zim­mer­mann for the FDP are essen­tial­ly coor­di­nat­ing state­ments should be a warn­ing to the SPD lead­er­ship about coali­tion dynam­ics— Alexan­der Clark­son (@APHClarkson) Jan­u­ary 23, 2023

    ...

    While the US was frus­trat­ed with Scholz drag­ging his feet, Washington’s woman in Berlin came through. Some back­ground:

    One year ago, Olaf Scholz was elect­ed as the ninth Ger­man chan­cel­lor since World War II, and leads a “traf­fic-light coali­tion” of the Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (SPD), the Greens and the Free Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty (FDP) — named after the three par­ties’ sig­na­ture col­ors of red, green and yel­low.

    Scholz, from the SPD, hails from the pol­i­tics of Wan­del durch Han­del (“trans­for­ma­tion through trade”). It relied on cheap Russ­ian gas imports and exports to its largest trad­ing part­ner, Chi­na. Scholz start­ed his term with attempts (if we take them at face val­ue) to achieve a diplo­mat­ic solu­tion with Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin. He also defend­ed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline until its demise.

    The Greens, on the oth­er hand, are the war-mon­ger­ing par­ty in Ger­many, who along with the Amer­i­cans, have dragged Scholz fur­ther into the Ukraine morass. Vice Chan­cel­lor Robert Habeck from the Greens already said ear­li­er this month that Ger­many should not stand in the way if Poland decides to send Leop­ard 2 bat­tle tanks to Ukraine. Baer­bock went a step fur­ther, which is noth­ing new for her.
    ...

    And as we can see, Baer­bock­’s dec­la­ra­tions that end­ed up back­ing Scholz into a cor­ner were basi­cal­ly in line with what the US was push­ing Ger­many to do and just approve the release of the Leop­ard tanks. So when we hear about the US deci­sion to send a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of just 31 Abrams tanks, it real­ly looks like a deci­sion done pure­ly to pla­cate the domes­tic Ger­man polit­i­cal ten­sions at work here:

    ...
    Scholz is fac­ing heavy pres­sure from the US and oth­ers to relent on the tanks:

    ...

    But the Ger­man gov­ern­ment had want­ed the US to send its Abram tanks before it sends any Ger­man ones. This led to a melt­down in the empire’s cap­i­tal. The Wash­ing­ton Post edi­to­r­i­al board, in a piece titled Ger­many is refus­ing to send tanks to Ukraine. Biden can­not let this stand. Biden can­not let this stand, advised Biden to bring the vas­sal state to heel:

    [Olaf] Scholz is sac­ri­fic­ing sound strat­e­gy on the altar of polit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion by waver­ing in the face of oppo­si­tion from some polit­i­cal allies and a seg­ment of the Ger­man elec­torate. It is a mis­judg­ment that can­not stand.

    Pesky Ger­man elec­torate. US Sec­re­tary of Defense Lloyd Austin appar­ent­ly had a big blow up in Berlin:

    Inter­est­ing report from SZ on the Leop­ards 2 deba­cle and the dis­cus­sions between the US and Germany“The refusal from Berlin led to vio­lent reac­tions in Washington“Lloyd Austin is said to have got­ten into a heat­ed argu­ment with Scholz’s chief of staffhttps://t.co/gm1qcU2af0 pic.twitter.com/P9qBwB9tNw— Fay­tuks News ? (@Faytuks) Jan­u­ary 22, 2023

    Austin is one of the main oppo­nents of send­ing Abrams to Ukraine. Accord­ing to NBC News::

    But both Defense Sec­re­tary Lloyd Austin and Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Mil­ley have rec­om­mend­ed against send­ing M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the three U.S. offi­cials said.

    Mil­ley and Austin have cit­ed how long it takes to train per­son­nel to oper­ate the tanks and how dif­fi­cult the tanks are to main­tain. They also have argued they are not the right vehi­cles for the fight in Ukraine right now, accord­ing to the offi­cials.

    One U.S. offi­cial said Austin has argued the train­ing to oper­ate and main­tain the tanks would take months, and even though the Ukraini­ans have proven adept at learn­ing many new plat­forms, he con­tin­ues to resist send­ing the Abrams.

    ...

    But then we get to this inter­est­ing detail: it looks like one of the rea­sons Ger­many was wor­ried about approv­ing the send­ing of Leop­ard tanks is con­cerns that the donat­ed tanks will ulti­mate­ly be replaced with Abrams tanks — like the $4 bil­lion sale of Abrams tanks to Poland announced last month — instead of more Leop­ard tanks, effec­tive­ly reduc­ing Ger­many’s long-term mar­ket share in the tank export mar­kets. And don’t for­get what we saw in the above arti­cle: the US isn’t build­ing new Abrams but instead refur­bish­ing old­er ones. In oth­er words, every Abrams tank that isn’t sent to Ukraine is a tank that can be sold to a NATO ally instead of a Leop­ard tank. It points towards one of the under­ly­ing ten­sions that could ulti­mate­ly play out here: the more US Abrams that are sent to Ukraine the less wor­ried Ger­many will be about the loss of its tank mar­kets. In oth­er words, don’t be sur­prised if we see future rounds of “Leop­ards, but only of Abrams are also sent” nego­ti­a­tions:

    ...
    Berlin’s hes­i­tance is under­stand­able. It has already sent advanced air-defense sys­tems, anti-air­craft, mul­ti­ple-rock­et launch­ers, and plans to send dozens of Marder infantry fight­ing vehi­cles. But while the tanks like­ly won’t make a big dif­fer­ence on the bat­tle­field, there look to be oth­er forces at work:

    ??????????????????????“If Ger­many gives oth­er coun­tries the go-ahead to re-export “Leop­ards” to Ukraine, then they can lat­er be replaced by Amer­i­can “Abrams”,that is, Ger­many will lose its cur­rent mar­kets.” Swiss news­pa­per Neue Zürcher Zeitung— AZ ???????? (@AZgeopolitics) Jan­u­ary 23, 2023

    ...

    It’s also impor­tant to note how Baer­bock isn’t just a hawk aligned with US long-term geostrate­gic inter­ests when it comes to Ukraine. She’s a Chi­na hawk too. A Chi­na hawk with ambi­tions to become chan­cel­lor:

    ...
    This also wouldn’t be the first time that Baer­bock under­mined Scholz. Ahead of a Novem­ber trip to Chi­na, which had sud­den­ly become con­tro­ver­sial in the West, Scholz received pub­lic advice from the Chi­na hawk Baer­bock. Com­par­ing Chi­na to Rus­sia, she added that Ger­many should “no longer be so fun­da­men­tal­ly depen­dent on a coun­try that does not share our val­ues that we can be black­mailed in the end.”

    Then, as Scholz was en route to Bei­jing, Germany’s for­eign office released a pho­to op of a gath­er­ing of Baer­bock and her G‑7 coun­ter­parts. Baer­bock sits at the head of the table next to US Sec­re­tary of State Antho­ny Blinken with Under Sec­re­tary of State Vic­to­ria “F**k the EU” Nuland behind them. Accord­ing to for­mer India diplo­mat M.K. Bhadraku­mar:

    Quin­tes­sen­tial­ly, Baer­bock has high­light­ed her dis­con­tent with Scholz’s Chi­na vis­it by assem­bling around her the like-mind­ed G7 coun­ter­parts. Even by norms of coali­tion pol­i­tics, this is an exces­sive ges­ture. When a country’s top leader is on a vis­it abroad, a dis­play of dis­so­nance under­cuts the diplo­ma­cy.

    Equal­ly, Baerbock’s G7 coun­ter­parts chose not to wait for Scholz’s return home. Appar­ent­ly, they have a closed mind and the tid­ings of Scholz’s dis­cus­sions in Bei­jing will not change that.

    First thing on Mon­day, Scholz should ask for Baerbeck’s res­ig­na­tion. Bet­ter still, [the] lat­ter should sub­mit her res­ig­na­tion.

    Nei­ther hap­pened, and Scholz may pay the price. Despite her unsuc­cess­ful run in 2021, Baer­bock still wants to be chan­cel­lor, an out­come the US would no doubt wel­come. Elec­tions are not sched­uled until 2025, but with the traf­fic light coali­tion increas­ing­ly on thin ice, she might get her chance soon­er rather than lat­er.
    ...

    Beyond that, Baer­bock appears to be ful­ly on board with the grand “EU Army” ambi­tions cham­pi­oned by the pre­vi­ous for­eign min­is­ter Ursu­la Von der Leyen. That’s also part of the con­text of Baer­bock­’s pol­i­cy mutiny: It’s part of her clear plans to run of chan­cel­lor on a plat­form of an aggres­sive for­eign pol­i­cy backed by grow­ing EU mil­i­tary might. It’s quite the ‘green’ plat­form:

    ...
    She was the only chan­cel­lor can­di­date dur­ing the 2021 elec­tion who cam­paigned against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and she’s con­sis­tent­ly been one of the loud­er voic­es call­ing for Berlin to send more heavy weapon­ry to Kiev. Baer­bock is also now call­ing for the estab­lish­ment of a spe­cial tri­bunal to bring Putin and his gov­ern­ment to tri­al over the war.

    In an inter­view with Black Agen­da Report back before the Ger­man elec­tion Diana John­stone, who was press sec­re­tary of the Green Group in the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment from 1989 to 1996, had this to say about Baer­bock and the Greens:

    Frankly, I hope they don’t [win] because they are the most dan­ger­ous when it comes to for­eign rela­tions. … Peo­ple who are real­ly on the left in Ger­many con­sid­er [Baer­bock] and the Ger­man Green Par­ty extreme­ly dan­ger­ous. They’re most like­ly to stum­ble us into a major war between world pow­ers.

    Baer­bock, whose intro­duc­tion to transat­lantic gov­er­nance began with mem­ber­ship in the Ger­man Mar­shall Fund, the World Eco­nom­ic Forum’s Young Lead­ers Pro­gram and the Europe/Transatlantic Board of the Green Party’s Hein­rich Böll Foun­da­tion, deliv­ered an August speech at the New School in New York that pro­vides insight into her vision for Ger­many. She describes Feb­ru­ary 24 (the date Rus­sia began its spe­cial mil­i­tary oper­a­tion) as a date that changed the world and uses it to jus­ti­fy her plans for a rearmed Ger­many to take on a much more aggres­sive for­eign pol­i­cy as an equal part­ner to the US:

    For a long time after 1989, secu­ri­ty was not an issue of con­cern for many Euro­peans and par­tic­u­lar­ly Ger­mans – after the end of the Cold War, my coun­try con­sid­ered itself final­ly “sur­round­ed only by friends”. But that per­cep­tion has def­i­nite­ly changed. Chil­dren are ask­ing their par­ents now at break­fast: Mom, what exact­ly is a nuclear weapon? Oth­ers are say­ing: I real­ly like NATO. In the mid-1980s, when I was born, mil­lions of Ger­mans who are the grand­par­ents of these chil­dren took to the streets to protest against arma­ment. Now, these grand­par­ents, moth­ers, fathers and their chil­dren are sit­ting at the kitchen table debat­ing about arma­ment, or they are march­ing in the streets in sup­port of Ukraine’s free­dom.

    And the same holds true for oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries: Swe­den and Fin­land are leav­ing behind long tra­di­tions of neu­tral­i­ty to join NATO.

    In Berlin, Russia’s war has prompt­ed us in the new Ger­man Gov­ern­ment to re-exam­ine some long-held views on secu­ri­ty – and to fun­da­men­tal­ly change track in many fields. Think­ing with­out a ban­is­ter means for us:

    Ger­many has set up a spe­cial fund of 100 bil­lion euro to strength­en our mil­i­tary. We have reversed a decades-old arms export par­a­digm, with Ger­many now being one of Ukraine’s strongest mil­i­tary and finan­cial back­ers. And we have expand­ed our con­tri­bu­tions to NATO: We are lead­ing the NATO bat­tle group in Lithua­nia and are assign­ing a brigade with up to 800 troops which can be deployed there if required. We are help­ing to secure the air­space over the Baltic States with our fight­er jets – and to pro­tect Slo­va­kia with Patri­ot air defense.

    But we know that we can­not stop here: Our aim is to fur­ther strength­en the Euro­pean pil­lar of NATO, because we want to have a lead­er­ship in Euro­pean and US part­ner­ship. Europe mat­ters – also secu­ri­ty-wise, that’s what we saw after Feb­ru­ary 24th. If that premise is to hold, we have to prove it and see it through in the long term. That means build­ing a more strate­gic Euro­pean Union – a Union able to approach the Unit­ed States at eye lev­el: in a part­ner­ship in lead­er­ship..

    ...

    Final­ly, note how Baer­bock isn’t just a favorite to the for­eign pol­i­cy estab­lish­ment in DC. She’s got the high­est approval rat­ing and any major Ger­many politi­cians:

    ...
    Baer­bock is the fre­quent recip­i­ent of glow­ing media reviews in both the US and Ger­many like this from the Wash­ing­ton Post, “Germany’s Green for­eign min­is­ter is tak­ing the lead on Ukraine:”

    She did promise more weapons — which, she said, would help Ukraine “free its cit­i­zens who are still suf­fer­ing under the ter­ror of Russ­ian occu­pa­tion.” That was far more force­ful than any­thing Chan­cel­lor Olaf Scholz has said in recent weeks. The war in Ukraine, it turns out, is Baerbock’s fight too — for the chance to become the next Ger­man chan­cel­lor.

    The sur­prise vis­it to Kharkiv was Baerbock’s fifth to Ukraine since she took office at the end of 2021. She trav­eled there for the first time in Jan­u­ary 2022. Scholz, by con­trast, need­ed five more months to make it to Kyiv, and only in response to con­sid­er­able inter­nal and exter­nal pres­sure.

    Baer­bock has made her inten­tions clear. Where Scholz is all reluc­tance and realpoli­tik, she is posi­tion­ing her­self as a can-do politi­cian with strong prin­ci­ples.

    Still, it’s some­what shock­ing to see her with the high­est approval rat­ing of any of Germany’s main politi­cians, espe­cial­ly after she told Ger­man vot­ers she doesn’t care about the toll her sup­port for Ukraine takes on their lives and the coun­try, which sure enough, it is doing:

    ??????“The con­flict in Ukraine and its con­se­quences will cost Ger­many €175 bil­lion in 2023, that is, about 4.5% of GDP.”- Insti­tute of Ger­man Eco­nom­ics (IW)— AZ ???????? (@AZgeopolitics) Jan­u­ary 23, 2023

    ...

    We’ll see if ‘Chan­cel­lor Baer­bock’ is in Ger­many’s future. Polit­i­cal winds can change. Espe­cial­ly when war is involved, as Olaf Scholz just dis­cov­ered in a big way.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 25, 2023, 5:39 pm

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