Germany’s newsmedia — echoing America’s — have attributed the soaring fuel-prices to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which clearly is a lie, because the source is clearly Germany’s anti-Russian sanctions and termination of the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline and other supplies into Germany of the least-expensive fuels-sources, which had been Russian, which is why Russia was the biggest supplier of fuels to Germany. Because those fuels were so much cheaper than the ones that the U.S. occupying forces demand Germany to use instead (such as liquefied natural gas from America), and because Germany’s leaders are more committed to Germany’s American masters than to the German people whom they are supposed to represent, they ought to be thrown out and replaced now by an entirely new German Government that will serve the German people instead of serve the U.S. occupying regime, which demands and enforces these sanctions. The purpose of the sanctions is to greatly reduce European fuel purchases from the cheapest source, Russia. That forces up fuel-costs in Europe, but Europe’s leaders comply anyway, which proves how obedient they are as stooges of the imperial regime across the Atlantic, in Washington.
America is run by — and its Government is effectively owned by — its billionaires, who buy politicians like hogs are bought at a pig-auction: the highest bidder wins. (It’s shown graphically here.) But at this auction, all of the highest bidders are billionaires, and the profit and nonprofit corporations that they control. Here is how the former U.S. President Jimmy Carter put it when asked about corruption in America:
It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over. … At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.
What’s happening now to Germany is profitable to those people, but is threatening to destroy the whole world if Washington pushes it too far, and produces WW III.
The long road to our present predicament started when U.S. President Harry S. Truman decisively repudiated and reversed his predecessor FDR on 25 July 1945 and determined that the U.S. Government henceforth would be set onto the path of taking control of the entire world ultimately, to become the first-ever all-encompassing global empire (now called “hegemon”). By the time of 1947, he had created the CIA and the falsely named “U.S. Department of ‘Defense'” (actually department of aggression, like the CIA was the department of coups), and replaced FDR’s entire cabinet, in order to do this. They then produced NATO in 1949. (The Soviet Union responded six years later, by forming their Warsaw Pact in 1955.) Virtually all U.S. Presidents afterwards have been committed to this “hegemonic,” actually maniacal, zero-sum-game-committed, goal of America dominating everywhere, so that any competitor is automatically viewed as being an enemy. Their obsession is to achieve “hegemony” — global control — which none of them announces publicly as constituting the Government’s top goal, but they all call it instead their support of spreading ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, as-if the country which has a larger percentage of its population in prison than does any other nation on Earth could even POSSIBLY be a democracy, or promote human rights. Germany, like all other U.S. vassal nations, is merely a tool of that plan for world-conquest by the U.S. regime. Like all of the others, it’s dutiful to its foreign masters, and not to its own population (who now increasingly will be feeling the consequences).
In order for the German people to become authentically free, they need to replace their existing westward, Atlanticist, pro-U.S.-regime, orientation, by a far more economically viable eastward, Russian, Chinese, and authentically EurAsian one, which will mean that Germany will no longer participate in imperialism by ANY nation, but will instead quit NATO and have commerce with all nations that is NOT being restricted by anything like the imperialism America’s billionaires have been imposing upon Germans ever since 1945 and especially since 1991. If German politicians are being bought by the highest bidders like America’s are, then they will all have to be replaced in order for the German people to become freed from the American regime’s imperial yoke. EurAsia is one continent, after all, and no way will exist to pipeline gas or oil across the Atlantic Ocean, from America. And the very idea of replacing pipelined energy by far costlier LNG and other shipped energy is an insult to all residents of Europe.
On Sunday 3 July 2022, Bloomberg News reported that Germany’s “Economics Minister Robert Habeck said on Saturday that the government is working on ways to address the surging costs both utilities and their customers face, without giving details.” At least as early as that date, Germany’s Government knew what they were doing to the German people, but they did it anyway. And they continued to lie about it to the German people. The entire Government needs to be replaced; but, more than that, NATO must be abandoned. Any German politician who supports it supports continued U.S. occupation, and supports continuation of the U.S. regime’s non-stop war, ever since 1945, against both Russia and China. Isolating its economy from Russia and China makes sense? To whom? Germany will do far better as a partner of Russia and of China, than as a vassal of the U.S. regime. Russia and China would welcome the new German leaders as partners — not demand them to serve as mere stooges in a mere vassal-nation (as the U.S. regime does). And any such allegation as Bloomberg ‘News’ headlined on 25 June 2022, “Putin Is Pushing Germany’s Economy to the Breaking Point” is merely pretending that the February 24th invasion of Ukraine, instead of the sanctions that America and its vassal-nations imposed in response to it, is to blame here. In fact: The U.S. and its NATO had left Russia no other option than to invade Ukraine.
Legal and Political Aspects of EU’s Possible Visa Sanctions Against Russian Nationals
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse's new book, AMERICA'S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler's Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world's wealth by control of not only their 'news' media but the social 'sciences' — duping the public.
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Just a few years ago, Russia and the EU were actively engaged in dialog on a visa-free regime. Sadly, visa matters have taken an entirely differently turn within some ten years. Today, far from discussing abolishing visa requirements for all Russian nationals, some EU nations are considering a prohibition on issuing Schengen visas to Russians.
In early August 2022, the President of Ukraine called upon Western states to close their countries off to Russians, while Ukraine itself is so far abstaining from such steps.
Virtually simultaneously, Estonia’s Prime Minister and several politicians from Lithuania, Latvia, and Finland suggested that the EU stop issuing visas to Russian nationals. Previously, Polish authorities had made a similar proposal.
After Russia recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, several EU states, on various grounds, either restricted the issuance of Schengen and national visas to Russian national, or stopped issuing them altogether, or restricted Russian nationals’ entrance by other means. However, the EU statistics for the year 2019, the one before the COVID pandemic, indicates that the states that suspended issuance of visas in 2022, taken together, issued to Russians no more than 20% of the overall number of Schengen visas back then. At the same time, some EU member states, as part of lifting COVID restrictions, resumed issuing all types of visas to Russians already after February 24, 2022.
Since the EU has a common visa space, unilateral restrictions on visas imposed by some states will not facilitate the desired effect of the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions. Therefore, by the end of summer, proponents of greater sanctions pressure on Russia were seen discussing an EU-wide ban on issuing Schengen visas to Russian nationals.
Predictably, Moscow took a very negative view of this idea, while the European Commission and leaders of other EU member states were rather skeptical. Nonetheless, plans envisage discussing this matter at the meeting of the Council of the European Union to be held on August 31, 2022.
National measures for restricting visa issuance and entry
Alongside restricting the issuance of Schengen visas, some EU member states restrict Russian nationals’ entry. For instance, since August 18, 2022, Estonian authorities restricted entry into Estonia for Russian holders of Schengen visas issued by Estonian foreign missions. Polish authorities came up with a rather original way of restricting entry of Russian nationals. In February 2022, while lifting coronavirus-related restrictions, Poland kept in place restrictions for entry via Russian-Polish and Belarusian-Polish borders. Officially, Russian nationals are not prohibited from entering Poland, and they may enter the Republic of Poland via any domestic and foreign borders except for the Russian-Polish and Belarusian-Polish border crossings. Moreover, these are blanket restrictions, since they apply to nationals of any states crossing the border with Russia and Belarus, with the exception of those directly listed in the Order of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Poland. No matter how absurd these restrictions are, they are not technically at odds with either the EU law or international law as they constitute part of anti-COVID measures where states have a broad discretion.
As for Estonia’s decision to prohibit Russian nationals from entering, this directly contravenes the EU law. Article 6 of the Schengen Borders Code establishes conditions for foreign nationals entering the Schengen space on having a travel document (passport), a visa, reason for travel, no alerts issued in the Schengen Information System, and no reasons to believe that a foreign national posits a threat to public policy, internal security, public health, and international relations. If a foreign national meets all conditions of entry, a border guard has no reason to deny entry to such a person. This norm has direct force, and Estonian authorities must comply with it.
Besides, under Article 4 of the Schengen Borders Code, all decisions on applying this code should be made on an individual basis. In other words, authorities cannot classify all Russian nationals as persons positing a threat to public policy. It means that the European Union’s law rules out blanket denial of entry to Russian nationals. It should be mentioned that the concept of “threat to public policy” has been repeatedly explained in the EU in case law and in the Union’s legislation. However, no one has ever propagated the idea of declaring an entire nation a threat to public policy.
As for individual EU member states that suspend the issuance of Schengen and national visas, such actions are dubious as regards compliance with EU law. Technically, the EU’s Community Code on Visas has direct force as it establishes the procedure and conditions for issuing Schengen visas. Any decision to deny a visa must comply with the Code’s requirements and must be well-founded (Article 32). Moreover, national legislation should envisage the possibility of an appeal. When applying the Code on Visas, law enforcement bodies must make decisions on individual basis (Article 1). However, the states that have suspended issuance of visas do not deny visas, they do not accept visa applications. In other words, these states do not conduct activities with a view to issuing Schengen visas to Russians, and the European Union cannot force them to conduct such activities since this issue comes within the purview of national governments.
By stopping issuing visas to all Russian nationals, individual EU member states violate the principles of non-discrimination and of prohibiting collective responsibility while they must comply with these principles as the EU’s members.
Prospects of a Union-wide ban on issuing Schengen visas to Russian nationals
This situation requires considering both legal and political aspects of this initiative.
Technically, the EU law does not provide for such a ban. Under Article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, restrictive measures may entail partial or complete suspension or reduction of economic and financial relations with one or several third countries, and also measures against natural and legal persons, groups, or non-State entities. Individual sanctions may envisage visa restrictions, yet the Union’s law does not grant the EU the option on introducing a blanket visa restriction against all nationals of a certain state. The Community Code on Visas does not contain such provisions either. Under the Code on Visas (Article 25a), the Council may, acting upon the Commission’s proposal, make the decision to toughen visa regime for nationals of states that refuse to cooperate in the field of readmission, i.e. states that posit a high risk of immigration. According to the EU’s own data, Russia is not a state with a high immigration risk. In accordance with the EU’s official statistics, Russian nationals lately have been issued the highest number of Schengen visas with the highest percentage of multi-entry visas and they also have one of the lowest percentages of visa refusals.
Additionally, a prohibition on issuing visas to all nationals of a certain state contravenes such core principles of modern democratic society as non-discrimination and prohibition on collective responsibility. For, should a prohibition on issuing visas to all Russian nationals be introduced, it may be qualified as punishment imposed on all persons without account for each citizen’s role and guilt, and international law prohibits collective responsibility. A blanket prohibition on issuing visas may also be qualified as discrimination on the basis of nationality which is prohibited by international law and the EU’s law. This is why the history of European integration has known no such prohibitions up to this day.
As regards the political aspect of this initiative, this step will be counterproductive in any case.
Under the guidelines on implementation and evaluation of restrictive measures (sanctions) in the framework of the EU common foreign and security policy, the EU adheres to the targeted measures principle. The point of this approach is that sanctions’ greatest effect should be aimed directly against decision-makers and persons with connections to decision-makers, and should have minimal effect on the country’s general population. If a prohibition on issuing visas is introduced, it will primarily affect regular citizens and specifically that part of the population that is to some degree connected with EU states and is fairly sympathetic to them. Supporters of visa restrictions against Russian nationals believe that prohibition on entering the EU will cause the population to become discontented with Russia’s political leadership. This prohibition, however, is more likely to induce negative attitude toward EU authorities, which will certainly be conducive to a greater escalation of tensions between the parties.
Unfortunately, even though this initiative is irrational and has no legal grounds, the possibility of this decision being adopted cannot be ruled out since the anti-Russian sanctions policy—as currently implemented—shows that the EU has repeatedly taken steps that contravene both international law and the law of the Union itself.
At the same time, the EU is fairly unlikely to adopt a Union-wide ban on issuing Schengen visas to Russian nationals. As of today, only a small group of EU member states is sternly advocating this initiative, while this decision requires consent of all EU states (Articles 24, 29 of the Treaty on the European Union) and approval of the European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (Article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union) since they are the two parties that will need to jointly draft the restriction bill. An initiative proposed by member states remains merely an initiative until the Commission and the High Representative shape it into a bill.
So far, the European Commission is evidently in no hurry to endorse such a radical step. Besides, many EU member states are not willing to sever relations with Russia and its nationals; and some do not wish to lose Russian tourists to accommodate someone else’s ambitions. Adopting such an EU-wide ban will become a very disturbing precedent that evidences the Union’s moving away from the fundamental principles of the European integration.
Dry as tinder have been the forests of Portugal and Spain this year. Ditto for those in Bordeaux just a little further north in France, and thousands of civilians have been forced to evacuate.
The French have resorted to a (European) Union Mechanism and asked participating states to send personnel to assist in extinguishing the fires for the persisting high temperatures predicted forced their hand.
The Austrians have already responded and 76 trained firefighters and their equipment, transferred by air, are already helping. The Deputy Governor of Lower Austria, Herr Stephan Pernkopf reminded citizens of Austria’s largest forest fire in Hirschwang an der Rax in the autumn of last year. At that time 115 hectares of forest were affected, in France it’s about 6000 hectares — that’s an ‘inferno’.
In addition to Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Romania and Sweden have sent help to France, which is grateful for it.
In Italy, Lake Garda, the country’s largest lake has seen water drop to a 15-year low, the River Poe, its longest, is down to 30 cm of water in places and the area surrounding has been tinder dry as everyone waited for some rain. And the River Doubs on the French-Swiss border has been so dried up that the receding water left boats stranded on the river bed. The drought has been one of the most severe in decades.
The relief from the drought finally came but unlike Portia’s ‘quality of mercy’, it has not ‘droppeth as a gentle rain beneath’ but in the form of severe storms in the region causing floods and deaths in Austria, Italy and the French island of Corsica. These included both fishermen and holiday makers like an unlucky girl crushed by a tree falling at a campsite. Ending a nightmarish holiday, some 13,000 people had to be evacuated and given shelter in public buildings.
Falling trees have caused casualties in Austria also. Two girls aged four and eight were killed near a lake in Carinthia and three women in Lower Austria. The local mayor said the area resembled a battlefield after the storm.
And in Italy a man and a woman died in separate incidents in Tuscany from uprooted trees. Also in Italy, high winds blew cafe umbrellas across St Mark’s square and dislodged brickwork from the basilica bell tower.
The simple fact is that higher temperatures evaporate more water, which rises to become clouds and then rain, resulting in heavier rainfall and storms.
Across the Mediterranean, Algeria too has been suffering extreme heat and drought and at least 42 people have been killed in forest fires. Officials report at least 39 fires still ravaging various parts of northern Algeria with the possibility of hot winds spreading the flames further. Since the beginning of August, 106 fires have been recorded which have destroyed 800 hectares of forest and 1800 hectares of woodlands.
Scientists increasingly blame global warming on humans. The warming in turn increases the frequency of extreme weather events. It is thus up to us and our governments to cut back on emissions … possibly through real consequences for emitters who often consider fines just a cost of doing business.
When Prime Minister Victor Orban recently spelled out his vision of Hungary’s frontiers, he joined a club of expansionist leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and members of the Indian power elite who define their countries’ borders in civilisational rather than national terms.
Speaking on Romanian territory in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian town of Baile Tusnad in Transylvania, a onetime Austro-Hungarian possession home to a Hungarian minority, Mr. Orban echoed the worldviews of Messrs. Xi and Putin.
Those views are on display in the South China Sea and Ukraine, as well as in statements by the Russian leader about other former Soviet republics.
It’s a worldview also embraced by members of India’s Hindu nationalist elite that endorses a country’s right to expand its internationally recognized borders to lands inhabited by their ethnic kin or territories and waters that historically were theirs.
Unlike the Russian and Chinese leaders, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been careful to avoid public support for the civilisationalist concept of Akhand Bharat embraced by his ideological alma mater.
The concept envisions an India that stretches from Afghanistan to Myanmar and encompasses nuclear-armed Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.
Mr. Modi’s silence hasn’t prevented Mohan Bhagwat, head of the powerful ultra-Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sang (RSS) or National Volunteer Organization, from recently predicting that Akhand Bharat would become a reality within 15 years.
Mr. Modi has been a member of the RSS since the late 1960s. However, he is believed to have last referred to the Akhand Bharat concept in an interview in 2012 when, as Chief Minister of Gujarat, he suggested that “Hindustan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh should rejoin.”
However, in contrast to his more recent silence, Mr. Modi has approached Indian Muslims, the world’s largest minority and its largest Muslim minority, in much the same way that Mr. Orban envisions a racially and religiously pure Hungary.
The Hungarian prime minister sparked outrage in his July speech when he rejected a “mixed-race world” defined as a world “in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.”
Mr. Orban asserted that mixed-race countries “are no longer nations: They are nothing more than conglomerations of peoples” and are no longer part of what he sees as “the Western world.” Mr. Orban stopped short of identifying those countries, but the United States and Australia would fit the bill.
Romanians may be more concerned about Mr. Orban’s racial remarks than his territorial ambitions, described by one Romanian Orban watcher as a “little man having pipe dreams.”
Romanians may be right. Mr. Orban’s ability to militarily assert his claims is far more restricted than those of his Russian and Chinese counterparts. Nevertheless, one underestimates at one’s peril.
Mr. Orban shares Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi’s resentment of perceived historical wrongs that need to be rectified irrespective of international law and the consequences of a world whose guardrails are dictated by might rather than the rule of law.
His speech seems to promise to reverse what he sees as an unjust diktat. His revanchism may explain why Russia’s alteration in Ukraine of national boundaries by force doesn’t trouble him.
Mr. Orban left no doubt that his definition of the Hungarian motherland included Transylvania and other regions in the Carpathian Basin beyond Hungary’s borders that ethnic Hungarians populate.
Insisting that the world owed Hungary, which eventually would call in its debt, Mr. Orban asserted that his country was driven by the notion “that more has been taken from us than given to us, that we have submitted invoices that are still unpaid… This is our strongest ambition.”
Mr. Orban implicitly suggested a revision or cancellation of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which deprived Hungary of much of its pre-World War I territory.
Two months earlier, Hungarian President Katalin Novak ruffled diplomatic feathers when she posted a picture of herself climbing a mountain peak in Romania’s Alba County, standing by a disputed milestone painted in Hungarian colours.
At the time, Ms. Novak advised Romanian Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu that it was her duty to represent “all Hungarians, regardless of whether they live inside or outside the borders” – a claim Romania rejected.
Mr. Orban’s grievance and racially driven nationalism may be one reason the Hungarian leader has been Europe’s odd man out in refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine fully.
In a break with European Union policy, Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjarto met his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow on the eve of Mr. Orban’s speech to request additional gas supplies.
In contrast to the EU, which wants to remove Russia as a supplier of its energy, Mr. Orban insisted that “we do not want to stop getting energy from Russia, we simply want to stop getting it exclusively from Russia.”
Mr. Orban’s speech is unlikely to ease the task of Tibor Navracsics, Hungary’s regional development minister and a former EU commissioner. Mr. Navracsics arrived in Brussels this week to persuade the EU to release €15 billion in covid recovery funds amid an unprecedented disciplinary process that could lead to the suspension of EU funding because of Hungarian violations of the rule of law.
So far, Mr. Orban’s support of Russia has isolated him in Europe with the de facto demise of the Visegrad 4 or V4 in its current form in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine and the threat of an economic recession.
Grouping the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, the Visegrad 4 were united in their opposition to EU migration and rejection of what the Hungarian leader termed Europe’s “internal empire-building attempts,” a reference to the European Commission’s efforts to stop moves that hollow out Central European democracy.
Leaving Mr. Orban isolated, Slovakian Prime Minister Eduard Heger has pledged to use his current six-month presidency of the European Council to return the Visegrad 4 to the roots of its founding in 1991 as the four countries emerged from communism: respect for democracy and a commitment to European integration.
If successful, Mr. Heger’s V4 will likely be a V3 with Hungary on the outs.
Said Mateusz Gniazdowski, an analyst at the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies: “Attempts to ideologically use the V4 brand harm mutual trust and don’t contribute to building a strong Central Europe in the EU.”
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