KLAUS HARTMANN – President of the World Union of Freethinkers, speech on March 22, 2024 at the Belgrade Forum
Klaus Hartmann
In 2022, the German government proclaimed a ”turning point“, a ”new era“ – to accuse the Russian Federation of waging a war of aggression in violation of international law. Russia would thus have destroyed the European peace order.
Propaganda in all countries of the ”Collective West“ follows this same paradigm. Suddenly and unexpectedly, NATO politicians and their media have rediscovered international law. They are speculating on the public’s forgetfulness. They want to make us forget their own wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, the Jemen and Palestine.
In particular, they want to make us forget that it was they who destroyed this European peace order in 1999 with their aggression against Yugoslavia. We are also supposed to forget that NATO, in breach of its word, moved ever closer to the borders of the Russian Federation and finally refused to fulfill its demand for security guarantees on the basis of equal mutual security.
The NATO invasion on March 24, 1999 and the seventyeight days of bombing terror against Yugoslavia was not only – as we said at the time – the ”door opener war“ for the coming wars of aggression against international law. The series of imperialist wars since 1999 followed a long-term strategy of encircling and weakening the Russian Federation, of ”containing“ Russia (and China). It served not at least to prepare the current NATO war against Russia.
Geostrategic planning games dating back to the time before the First World War and spun right up to Hitler were based on the premise: ”Whoever has Ukraine can force Russia“ and ”Russia cannot be a European power without Ukraine“. After the Second World War, US policy was aimed to undermine cooperation between Russia and Western Europe. In Ukraine NATO has acted on this basis since the early years of the 2000s.
In December 2013, US Deputy Secretary of State Nuland (”Fuck the EU“) announced that over the previous years the USA had invested five billion US dollars in what they call the ”democratization“ of the country. The aim was to create a NATO stronghold in Ukraine and threaten Russia directly on its border.
To this end, they strengthen nationalism there and turning a country that was once committed to neutrality into an anti-Russia country.
The pattern of the coup d’état in Belgrade in 2000, led by the Soros ”NGO“ Otpor, was followed by numerous other ”color revolutions“ up to the culmination of the ”Kiev Maidan“ in 2014. In April 2014, the German government announced that Ukraine has taken part in almost all NATO-led operations to date and is closely involved in its exercise program.
In this April 2014, the putschists launched an ”anti-terrorist operation“ against the population in Donbass, who did not want to live under the new Nazi rule and were defending the constitutional order. By the beginning of 2022, 14,000 people had fallen as a result of this war.
If the term ”turning point“ is to have a serious meaning, it is that ”after thirty years of progressive geographical encirclement, economic policy containment and military provocations, including the eight-year slaughter of the ethnic Russian population in the Donets Basin, the Russian Federation has taken up the military response to NATO aggression“, said Sebastian Bahlo, Chairman of the German Freethinkers’ Association. He continued: ”We know that this turning point is a historical necessity. The imperialist robbers, whose domination of the world is based on centuries of plundering humanity, must give way to a new world order based on the sovereign equality of all peoples.“
Hence the aggressive screeching, the hysterical outcry about the war that Russia is supposed to have started in 2022, even though it began in 2014 and Russia set out to end it. The media in the collective West are acting ”as if brought into line“, as the ”4th branch of the armed forces“, just as we know it from the time of the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999. Just as the writer Peter Handke was accused of being a ”propagandist of the Milošević regime“ back then, everyone who contradicts the rampant Russophobia and the prevailing NATO ideology is to be silenced today.
The USA, NATO and the EU they pride themselves on being a bastion of freedom and democracy. Strangely enough, they also claim that these values are being defended by the Nazi regime in Ukraine. The same powers that bombed Yugoslavia 25 years ago are now promoting themselves as Serbia’s new friends. Everyone can see that they are false friends. After the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia, the installation of Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo and NATO membership from Montenegro to Macedonia are further building blocks of this aggressive course against Russia.
As a precondition for EU membership, Serbia must relinquish its historic province Kosovo and Metohia, which was segregated by NATO. Next, Serbia is asked to choose between ”the West“ and Russia. The blackmail is to continue, as Serbia is also to adapt its relations with China to the hostile course of the West. Your own experience teaches that peace in the Balkans prevailed in the years of non-alignment.
Membership of the European Union also means joining the military bloc of the West. At the beginning of 2023, NATO and the EU signed a further declaration on an ”even closer strategic partnership against common security threats“. According to the Lisbon Treaty of 2009, all member states are obliged to constantly increase their armaments. As in Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, there is Article 42(7) in this EU Treaty, which contains an analogous obligation to provide assistance in the event of an armed attack on the territory of a member state.
The EU budget includes an item with the misleading name European Peace Facility. It is used to purchase lethal weapons, which have so far been delivered to Ukraine in seven tranches for 3.600.000,00 Euro. In the EU, Serbia would not only be forced to cut its traditional ties of friendship with its Russian brothers and to impose sanctions against Russia but also to use Serbian taxpayers’ money to allow Ukrainian Nazis to murder Russians. Like NATO, this EU stands for war and for the end of national independence and sovereignty.
In a nutshell, the question is: who wants to lie in bed with a murderer? Do we want to descend alongside the USA and the collective West, or do we want to stand alongside the emerging powers in a multipolar, polycentric world order?
If we want to honor the victims and fighters against the NATO aggression in 1999, if we remain faithful to the legacy of Slobodan Milošević as a fighter against imperialist robbery and slavery, it can only mean for us: Friendship with the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China!
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