Saturday 30th of March 2024

abandoning neutrality to satisfy the american capitalist clientele....

In their article “Neutrality must not undermine international law” in the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” of 14 December 2022, two members of the Pro Militia association call on Switzerland to review the stipulations of its perpetual neutrality. They state “after a careful analysis” that the Federal Council acted wrongly when it refused to accede to Germany’s request and waive the non-re-export declaration for procured war material.

 

by Dr phil René Roca*

 

The article culminates in an attempt to bend the current law, i. e., the Swiss Federal Act on War Material (WMA), in such a way that “extraordinary circumstances” would apply to the Ukraine war (as if such circumstances do not apply to every war). Such “circumstances” would then allow to deliver the ammunition to Ukraine.

 


    Apart from such legal quibbles, this statement fits seamlessly into a narrative that attempts to undermine Swiss neutrality by hook or by crook. Only one circumstance still seems to preoccupy many associations of whatever hue and political exponents of parties: How can Switzerland finally supply weapons to Ukraine? How can legal hurdles be overcome in this regard, treaties broken and a one-sided understanding of international law fulfilled?

 

No one thinks about peace

The main thing is to continue supporting the war. Nobody thinks about peace any more. As the state of political contemporary, one rubs one’s eyes: in connection with arms deliveries to Ukraine, centre-right party leaders demand emergency law, an armament of their own army and further rapprochement with NATO. Only yesterday, they were jointly responsible for the Swiss army being saved to death and degraded. Left-wing exponents (SP and Greens) including GSwA (Group for a Switzerland without an army), renounce pacifism („Where have all the flowers gone ...“) and outlaw any peace option. Only yesterday they wanted to abolish the army and have tightened the WMA.

There seem to be only a few left who can think straight and who, in our history-forgotten times, know what an important role Switzerland has repeatedly played in conflicts and wars. For then it should be clear that Switzerland’s neutrality does not mean simply standing on the side-lines and passively watching, but actively bringing the peace option into play. Such quiet diplomacy does not make the headlines, but it does ensure the credibility of neutrality and the necessary trust. Several times already, Swiss officials and the Federal Council would have had the opportunity to bring this peace option into play, they have all failed miserably. They prefer to sit dutifully at donor conferences, even organise them and distribute funds. Money for reconstruction in the middle of a war notabene.

So, they want to supply weapons for the destruction and are already talking about money for reconstruction, it doesn’t get more absurd than that. The destruction of Ukraine is not being prevented, but actively promoted with a proxy war. The trenches are getting deeper and deeper, the war is getting more and more intense and the suffering of the civilian population is getting worse and worse. Meanwhile, the USA is working hard to make decisive moves on the “chessboard”. In this context, it would be worthwhile to re-read Brzezinski’s “The Grand Chessboard”.

 

Return to integral neutrality

The Swiss historian Wolfgang von Wartburg wrote in connection with Swiss neutrality that there must be a place in the world that exclusively serves peace. The importance of neutrality urgently needs to be appreciated again, because it has a tremendously important dimension in times of peace as well as in times of war. Why is this no longer recognised? In the current discussion, Swiss neutrality is eroding more and more, which means that the ICRC and the Good Offices cannot fully unfold their impact. On the contrary, the work of the ICRC is becoming increasingly difficult and the Good Offices are being ridiculed (Switzerland as a “postman” ...), much to the chagrin of the civilian population in numerous conflicts. In order to stop this erosion and to fill neutrality with content again, Switzerland must return to integral neutrality. That is why it is important to sign the neutrality initiative1 and thus ensure an important debate that gives Switzerland – and also the Federal Council and Parliament – a compass and logbook again for this important state maxim. Otherwise, the Federal Council and the Swiss people will continue to be on a “ship of fools”, as Reinhard Mey sings in his profound ballad, heading for the reef.•

 

1www.neutralitaet-ja.ch 

*René Roca holds a doctorate in history and is head of the Research Institute for Direct Democracy(www.fidd.ch)

 

 

READ MORE:

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2022/nr-28-27-dezember-2022/die-aechtung-der-friedensoption

 

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

the awfully biased RSF....

 

by Jacques-Marie Bourget

 

My friends and Palestinian support organizations discouraged me while I was writing this text on the turpitudes of RSF [Reporters Without Borders]. Their refrain sang to me: everyone knows that this organization is a tool of the West. Your paper won't tell us anything ". Too bad, I wrote anyway. Because the latest “Assessment” published by RSF is a disgrace to humanity.

Every December Reporters Without Borders publishes its “ Summary of the year ". A document with global claims supposed to list all the bad luck done to journalists wherever they are. The 2022 issue stretches over 24 pages, punctuated with statistics giving a serious look to the judgments of RSF's freedom experts. In the end, a notice of "Methodology" comes to enlighten the reader necessarily collapsed by human cruelty. Too bad that these judges, appointed referees by themselves, do not deliver their definition of "journalist". Thus, the NGO having clashed in France with young Web adventurers, we understood that the “mainstream press and well-thought” were the home port of RSF. Anyone who does not wear the glasses of the NGO is quickly stamped "conspirator"1,2.

Funded by the richest part of our planet (United States, Europe), RSF's priority is therefore to support its sponsors. Exemplary democracies which, in less than half a century with the Carters, Reagans, Clintons, Bushes, Bush bis and gentle Obama, have more than 3 million corpses in their cupboards. Leaders skilled enough to fill both the bank accounts of their trusts and the graveyards of the ugly world. Without criminalization of "crimes against humanity" or even criticism. In any case, never serious issues from RSF 3,4. The "2022 Review" which delights us today is preceded by a text by Christophe Deloire, the new Robert Ménard who, as Secretary General, heads the Organization:

"Dictatorial and authoritarian regimes fill their prisons faster by imprisoning journalists. This new record for the number of journalists detained confirms the imperious and urgent need to resist these unscrupulous powers and to exercise our active solidarity with all those who promote the ideal of freedom, independence and pluralism of information". As a note of style, it's not terrible. Using “journalist” twice in six words does not make Flaubert. But here is no shame. It is in the absence in this editorial of two family names, because they are ours, those of exemplary journalists: Shireen Abu Akleh and Julian Assange. One murdered by Israel, the other imprisoned and mentally tortured by the United Kingdom and America, two states that are a model for RSF.

Go to the supermarket and ask this question to the citizens who have come to surf between the gondolas to meet the expensive life: “Can you cite the example of journalists murdered or imprisoned in 2022?". There will be many “noes”. For the answers (I tried the experiment) you will get a mix of: “the journalist killed by Israel” and “Assange who is in prison”. These are the priorities that RSF does not want to hear. The organization shows it in the Pharisaic construction of this last "Assessment" that it has just presented before our eyes.

So fake a report, RSF treats the assassination of our Palestinian colleague as a car accident in The Western Mail. Remember that this is a targeted assassination committed by an Israeli soldier. An occupying force presented in the lexicon of fashionable journalism as "the only democracy in the Middle East". In the "Bilan 2022", we are on page 18, section 2.

Here finally appears, on four and a half lines, the crime committed against the iconic journalist of Al-Jazeera. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was again deadly for journalists in 2022. Two Palestinian journalists were killed, including famous Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Despite multiple independent investigations concluding that the Israeli army had intentionally targeted the journalist, who was clearly identified, no one responsible has, to date, been questioned.".

Alive, Stéphane Hessel would drum his “Indignant!". In these lines recounting a war crime, the tone, the choice of words are ignominious in their desire to hide human dust under the carpet. Have you noticed the banal, "no official has, to date, been worried" ... RSF gives us this story of the prospectus as a notice of passage of Chronopost. RSF does not tell us about the revolt that should inhabit it, its actions taken to protest, its appeals before the States, the UN, or before the judges. But read better this sentence which is worth its weight as a corpse, it mentions in passing “two Palestinian journalists”…

- Oh good ! But who is the other?

Overwhelmed readers, I am therefore forced to replace RSF, which requires the stomach. Two clicks to lose, and you check that Deloire's silhouette does not appear in the images taken when Shireen's defenders come to The Hague to lodge a complaint with the International Criminal Court. As for the "other" dead, the unknown soldier, here too a click is enough: "Ghufran Harun Warasneh, 31, a graduate in journalism from the University of Hebron, carrying out her first mission to "Radio Dream was murdered on June 1, 2022 near the Al-Arroub refugee camp. Shot at point-blank range by an Israeli soldier, it should be specified. Amy Brouillette, the lawyer for the reporter's family, recalled the right to the ears of the assassins, that of the Geneva Conventions:

Journalists are civilians and deliberately attacking them is a war crime. "On the day of Ghufran's assassination, RSF tweeted already shameful lines that came, upstream, to mitigate the murderer's guilt: it seems that she could not be identified (and targeted) as a journalist". They are like that the boys of Deloire, intractable. What a giddy, this Ghufran, to be a journalist without a bib 5.

The proceedings against Julian Assange are also a crime but also a dishonor for humanity. While he is the promoter of radical journalism, practiced with a scalpel. That we torment this exemplary man, who exposes the entrails of States, does not disturb the course of the calm river of RSF. His case is exposed; him too in a few lines. We find this on page 11 of Section 1. On the wall of the tortured Assange comes in seventh position, thus aligned between Mohamed Mouloudj, an Algerian punished by 13 months in prison for a simple text message and Allaa Abdel Fattah, imprisoned in Egypt since 2019 announced by RSF as "at the gates of death". Which by rebound tells us that Assange risks nothing. Since we have to relax the reader, here RSF takes the opportunity to use a joke from the state comic Dupont-Moretti:

"175 years is a long time..."..."especially towards the end" commented one of his former lawyers, Éric Dupond-Moretti, before becoming Minister of Justice in France. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces a total of 175 years in prison if the US secures his extradition from the UK. Julian Assange has been charged with 18 counts for the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of leaked classified documents that revealed information of public interest. Pending the UK High Court's review of the appeal of the extradition order, the WikiLeaks founder remains incarcerated in Belmarsh prison, London, where his mental and physical health is at risk.

Assange is a Galileo of our time, but RSF is joking in a cemetery and, faced with those who will criticize its softness, the NGO will produce all the protest statements published, the petitions, the banners. But no serious action with the powerful as RSF navigates their waters. Today Deloire is asking for UN intervention to obtain the release of a journalist imprisoned by Algiers. That's some nerve. But Assange does not have this distinction. We understand why by reading a text published by RSF in 2014 which paints a portrait of the Australian journalist: "Cantor of transparency for some", "terrorist for others". With such a compliment, no need for enemies.

But let's come back to Palestine, the treatment of which makes it possible to calibrate the rigor of the “Bilan de RSF” in the face of the crimes and abuses of the Israeli occupier. According to the count of the "Committee for the Support of Palestinian Journalists", in 2022 our colleagues counted 1003 violations of their professional status. In the same year Israel detained 130 journalists and 4 of them were deported to Israel. 20 reporters are still in prison, two more than the count given by RSF concerning Russia. And the fate of Mahmoud Issa, locked up since 1993, does not make any comma spring from Deloire's pen. Note, however, that the NGO joined a suggestion from the European Union asking Israel to treat the press with more urbanity.

The "Palestinian Journalists Support Committee" also recalls that 48 colleagues have been assassinated by Israel since the year 2000. Then it offers other statistics: 44 direct attacks against reporters, sometimes even in their offices or homes. In 242 cases, representatives of the press had their equipment confiscated. 215 times the occupying forces opened fire with live ammunition towards a place gathering journalists. From January to November 2022, the Coordinator of the “Gender unit in the Palestinian Ministry of Information” reports 79 attacks against 40 female journalists. And RSF says nothing about the 410 Palestinian citizens arrested (NGO activists or journalists) for expressing an opinion on social media 6. The clemency of the NGO for Israel is known, almost institutional. So much so that in 2019 RSF received what Tel Aviv calls the “Jewish Nobel Prize”, 700 dollars to be shared with a Hungarian professor from Georges Soros University.

So goes death. To exist in RSF's telescope, it is preferable to be a corpse from the camp of good. There you hold a posthumous pride in Deloire's pantheon. Since the creation of the NGO, its clemency for Israel has been institutional 7 ,8.

The imprecision and levity of the "Bilan 2022" unfolds in horror without revolt. This time we are in Viet Nam where journalist Pham Doan Trang has been "detained for nine years" and the editor adds, "three other journalists who similarly languish behind bars". We want to know more about these women RSF is talking to us about, to see their faces, to know their names, the name of their newspaper! No. They must suffer anonymously, stagnant. Did Deloire launch a shock action to get information, to put pressure? The balance sheet does not say so.

Let's end our trip to hell with Mexico. Biden, Libya's friend of freedom and destruction, has just visited Mexico, an essential friend whose "Institutional Revolutionary Party" is nothing more than a bad nightmare for Washington. This great country is only a big pocket of slaves which, according to the needs of American capitalism, must inflate or deflate. A capital subject also for RSF? The NGO presents Zapata's homeland to us as "The most dangerous country at peace for journalists: 11 of them were killed there in 2022 (compared to 7 in 2021). In total, no less than 80 journalists will have lost their lives in Mexico in ten years (including 46 in the last five years)". Good. Alright, why say more? Who, however, murders these colleagues if not a wild capitalism Arturo Ui way. This is an interesting field of investigation when the “2022 Report” is just a big news item piling up nameless journalists.

The distinctions, the hierarchy, made by RSF between the victims make me nauseous. Having once been shot by an M16 in the left lung, I know the price of words when they become evils. A dead or imprisoned journalist is a piece of truth that is murdered, wherever he is. Whatever. By forcing the scourge of its balance RSF engages, old story, in a fight where the North is always right against the South. But remains unable to explain why this perfect West has provoked, under the banner of democracy, these mass crimes that we do not count.

source: The big night

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....

bullsit from poland.....

Ukraine’s defeat may lead to a Third World War, meaning Germany and other NATO countries must step up and send Kiev more weapons, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki claimed on Monday.

Speaking in Berlin at a celebration of German politician Wolfgang Schauble’s 50-year career, Morawiecki insisted that Germany must allow the delivery of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Poland and Finland have promised Kiev the tanks, but need formal German permission to actually hand them over.

“Today Ukrainians are fighting not only for their freedom, but also in defense of Europe,” Morawiecki insisted. “I call on the German government to act decisively and deliver all types of weapons to Ukraine.”

“The defeat of Ukraine may become a prelude to World War III, so today there is no reason to block support for Kiev and postpone matters indefinitely,” he added.

The Polish PM also spoke of “Ukrainian blood being shed” to prevent what he claimed could be a Russian attack on other EU countries. Last week, Ukrainian Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov said in an interview that Ukraine was shedding blood to carry out “NATO’s mission,” so the US-led bloc ought to supply it with weapons.

Germany has about 110 Leopard tanks that it could potentially hand over to Ukraine – 88 of which are the old Leopard 1s – but actually making them fit for service would cost hundreds of millions of euros and take about a year, Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger claimed in an interview over the weekend. 

Moscow has repeatedly warned the West that sending weapons to Kiev prolongs the conflict but will not change its outcome. German tanks “will burn like the rest” of Western weapons, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday.

Morawiecki’s visit came on the same day German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht confirmed she was stepping down. Germany has pledged to begin the deployment of a Bundeswehr-operated Patriot air defense battery to Poland. That move was arranged after a Ukrainian missile struck a Polish village in November, killing two civilians. Warsaw ended up having to debunk Kiev’s claims that the missile had been Russian.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/569966-poland-germany-ukraine-tanks/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

NOW YOU KNOW WHY I CALL POLAND AN EXTREMIST CATHOLIC FASCIST COUNTRY FOR PEDERAST PRIESTS WHO DEAL WITH UNDERAGE FARE.... IDIOTS. THE PRIME MINISTER OF POLAND HAS TO KNOW THAT A) RUSSIA WON'T ATTACK ANY NATO COUNTRY AND B) UKRAINE HAS BEEN NAUGHTY IN REGARD TO ITS LARGE RUSSIAN POPULATION. SHOULD WE MENTION C) MERKEL AND HOLLADE AND KIEF TOLD PORKIES THE SIZE OF THE MILKY WAY ON A GOOD NIGHT. 

THE PRIME MINISTER OF POLAND IS A PRICK.

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW....