© UnknownThierry Messan delivers a speech in Magdeburg Germany • November 4, 2023
Thierry Meyssan:
"We have seen NATO's crimes, but why affirm our friendship with Russia? Isn't there a risk that Russia will behave tomorrow like NATO does today? Are we not going to substitute one form of slavery for another? To answer this question, I would draw on my experience as an advisor to five successive heads of state. Everywhere, Russian diplomats told me: "You're on the wrong track: you're committing yourself to putting out a fire here, when another has started elsewhere. The problem is deeper and broader."
So I would like to describe to you the difference between a world order based on rules and one based on international law. This is not a linear story, but a struggle between two worldviews; a struggle that it is up to us to continue.
In the 17th century, the Treaties of Westphalia established the principle of state sovereignty. Everyone is equal, and no one may interfere in the internal affairs of others. These treaties governed, for centuries, both relations between the current Länder and those between European states. They were reaffirmed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, following the defeat of Napoleon I.
On the eve of the First World War, Tsar Nicholas II convened two International Peace Conferences (1899 and 1907) in The Hague to "seek the most effective means of ensuring for all peoples the benefits of a real and lasting peace." He and Pope Benedict XV prepared them on the basis of canon law and not on the law of the strongest. 27 states signed the final documents after two months of deliberations. The president of the French Radical [Republican] Party, Léon Bourgeois, presented his thoughts [ 1 ] on the mutual dependence of states and the interest they have in uniting despite their rivalries.
Under the leadership of Léon Bourgeois, the Conference created an International Court of Arbitration to settle conflicts by legal means rather than by war. According to Bourgeois, states would only agree to disarm when they had other security guarantees. The final text established the notion of "the duty of states to avoid war"... by resorting to arbitration.
Under the leadership of a minister of the Tsar, Frédéric Fromhold de Martens, the Conference agreed that, during an armed conflict, populations and belligerents must remain under the protection of the principles resulting from "the customs established between civilized nations, the laws of humanity and the dictates of public conscience." In short, the signatories committed themselves to no longer behaving like barbarians. This system only works between civilized states that honor their signature and are accountable to their public opinion. It failed in 1914 because states had lost their sovereignty by concluding Defense Treaties requiring them to automatically go to war in certain circumstances that they could not assess themselves.
Léon Bourgeois's ideas gained ground but encountered opposition, including that of his rival within the Radical Party, Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau did not believe that public opinion could prevent wars. The Anglo-Saxons, US President Woodrow Wilson, and British Prime Minister Lloyd George, did not believe this either. The three men substituted the Force of the Victors for the fledgling international law following the First World War. They divided up the world and the remains of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires. They placed all responsibility for the massacres solely on Germany, denying their own. They imposed disarmament without guarantees. To prevent the emergence of a rival to the British Empire in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons began to pit Germany against the USSR and obtained silence from France by assuring it that it could plunder the defeated Second Reich. In a way, as the first president of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, said, they organized the conditions for the development of Nazism.
As they had agreed among themselves, the three men reshaped the world in their own image (Wilson's 14 Points, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration). They created the Jewish homeland of Palestine, dissected Africa and Asia, and attempted to reduce Turkey to its bare minimum. They organized all the current disorders in the Middle East.
Yet it was on the basis of the ideas of the late Nicholas II and Léon Bourgeois that the League of Nations (LN) was established after the First World War, without the participation of the United States, which thus officially rejected any idea of international law. However, the LN also failed. Not because the United States refused to be part of it, as is said. That was their right. But firstly because it was incapable of reestablishing strict equality between states, the United Kingdom being opposed to considering colonized peoples as equals. Secondly because it did not have a common army. And finally because the Nazis massacred their opponents, destroying German public opinion, violated the Berlin Agreement, and did not hesitate to behave like barbarians.
Since the Atlantic Charter in 1942, the new US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and the new British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, set themselves the common goal of establishing a world government after the conflict. The Anglo-Saxons, who imagined they could govern the world, did not, however, agree among themselves on how to proceed. Washington did not want London to interfere in its affairs in Latin America, while London did not intend to share the hegemony of the Empire on which "the sun never set." The Anglo-Saxons signed numerous treaties during the War with the Allied governments, particularly those in exile, which they hosted in London.
However, the Anglo-Saxons failed to defeat the Third Reich; it was the Soviets who overthrew it and captured Berlin. Joseph Stalin, the First Secretary of the CPSU, was opposed to the idea of a world government, especially an Anglo-Saxon one. He simply wanted an organization capable of preventing future conflicts. In any case, it was Russian concepts that gave birth to the system: that of the United Nations Charter, at the San Francisco Conference.
In the spirit of the Hague Conferences, all UN member states are equal. The Organization includes an internal tribunal, the International Court of Justice, responsible for settling disputes that arise between its members. However, based on previous experience, the five victorious powers have a permanent seat on the Security Council with a veto. Since there was no trust between them (the Anglo-Saxons had considered continuing the war with the remaining German troops against the USSR) and it was unclear how the General Assembly would behave, the various victors wanted to ensure that the UN would not turn against them (the United States had committed appalling war crimes by dropping two atomic bombs on civilians, while Japan was preparing its surrender to the Soviets). But the major powers did not understand the veto in the same way at all. For some, it was a right to censor the decisions of others, for others, it was the obligation to take decisions unanimously by the victors.
Except that from the beginning, the Anglo-Saxons did not play the game: an Israeli state was self-proclaimed (May 14, 1948) before its borders had been agreed upon, then the special envoy of the Secretary-General of the United Nations who was supposed to oversee the creation of a Palestinian state, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish supremacists, under the command of Yitzhak Shamir. In addition, the Security Council seat allocated to China, in the context of the ending Chinese civil war, was given to Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and not to Beijing. The Anglo-Saxons proclaimed the independence of their Korean occupation zone under the name "Republic of Korea" (August 15, 1948), created NATO (April 4, 1949), then proclaimed the independence of their German occupation zone under the name "Federal Germany" (May 23, 1949).
Considering that it had been duped, the USSR slammed the door (the "empty seat" policy). The Georgian Joseph Stalin had wrongly believed that the veto was not a right of censorship, but a condition of unanimity among the victors. He thought he could block the organization by boycotting it.
The Anglo-Saxons interpreted the text of the Charter they had drafted and took advantage of the Soviets' absence to place "blue helmets" on the heads of their soldiers and waged war on the North Koreans (June 25, 1950) in the "name of the international community". Ultimately, on August 1, 1950, the Soviets returned to the UN, after a six and a half month absence.
While the North Atlantic Treaty is legal, NATO's internal regulations violate the United Nations Charter. They place the Allied armies under Anglo-Saxon command. Its commander-in-chief, SACEUR, must be an American officer. According to its first secretary-general, Lord Ismay, the Alliance's true objective is neither to preserve peace nor to fight the Soviets, but to "Keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans under guardianship" [ 2 ] . In short, it is the armed wing of the world government that Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to create. It is in pursuance of this goal that President Joe Biden ordered the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that linked Russia to Germany.
Upon the Liberation, MI6 and the OPC (the future CIA) secretly established a stay-behind network in Germany. They placed thousands of Nazi officials there, whom they helped evade justice. Klaus Barbie, who tortured French Resistance coordinator Jean Moulin, became the first commander of this shadow army. This network was later incorporated into NATO, where it was greatly reduced. It was then used by the Anglo-Saxons to interfere in the political life of their supposed allies, who were in reality their vassals.
Joseph Goebbels's former collaborators created the Volksbund für Frieden und Freiheit. They persecuted German communists with the help of the United States. Later, NATO stay-behind agents were able to manipulate the far left into making it detestable. This was the case, for example, with Bader's gang. But when these men were arrested, the stay-behind agents came to assassinate them in prison before they could be tried and speak out. Starting in 1992, Denmark spied on German political figures, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, on NATO's instructions. In 2022, Norway, another NATO member, helped the United States sabotage Nord Stream.
Returning to international law, things gradually returned to normal until the Ukrainian Leonid Brezhnev did, in Central Europe, in 1968 during the Prague Spring, what the Anglo-Saxons were doing everywhere else: he forbade the USSR's allied states from choosing an economic model other than the breast.
It was with the dissolution of the USSR that things began to worsen. US Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz developed a doctrine according to which, to remain masters of the world, the United States must do everything to prevent the emergence of a new rival, starting with the European Union. It was in application of this idea that Secretary of State James Baker imposed the enlargement of the European Union to include all the former Warsaw Pact states and the USSR. By expanding in this way, the Union deprived itself of the possibility of becoming a political entity. It is also in application of this doctrine that the Maastricht Treaty placed the EU under NATO protection. And it is still in application of this doctrine that Germany and France pay for and arm Ukraine.
Then came Czech-American Professor Josef Korbel. He proposed that the Anglo-Saxons dominate the world by rewriting international treaties. According to him, it was enough to substitute Anglo-Saxon law, based on custom, for the rationality of Roman law. In this way, all treaties would give the long-term advantage to the dominant powers: the United States and the United Kingdom, bound by a "special relationship," in the words of Winston Churchill. Professor Korbel's daughter, Democrat Madeleine Albright, became ambassador to the UN and then Secretary of State. Then, when the White House passed into Republican hands, Professor Korbel's adopted daughter, Condoleezza Rice, succeeded him as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State. For two decades, the two "sisters" [ 3 ] patiently rewrote the main international texts, supposedly to modernize them, in fact to change their spirit.
Today, international institutions operate according to rules laid down by the Anglo-Saxons, based on previous violations of international law. This law is not written into any code, since it is an interpretation of custom by the dominant power. Every day, we substitute unjust rules for international law and violate our own signature.
For example :
The Baltic states made a written commitment when they were established in 1990 to preserve monuments honoring the sacrifices of the Red Army. The destruction of these monuments is therefore a violation of their own signature.
Finland signed a written commitment in 1947 to remain neutral. Its NATO membership is therefore a violation of its own signature.
On October 25, 1971, the United Nations adopted Resolution 2758, recognizing that Beijing, not Taiwan, is the sole legitimate representative of China. As a result, Chiang Kai-shek's government was expelled from the Security Council and replaced by that of Mao Zedong. Therefore, China's recent naval maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait do not constitute aggression against a sovereign state, but rather a free deployment of its forces in its own territorial waters.
The Minsk agreements were supposed to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians from harassment by "integral nationalists." France and Germany vouched for them before the Security Council. But, as Angela Merkel and François Hollande have said, neither of them intended to implement them. Their signatures are worthless. Otherwise, there would never have been a war in Ukraine.
The perversion of international law reached a peak with the appointment in 2012 of the American Jeffrey Feltman as Director of Political Affairs. From his New York office, he oversaw the Western war against Syria, using the institutions of peace to wage war [ 4 ] .
Until the United States threatened it by stockpiling weapons on its border, the Russian Federation respected all the commitments it had signed or that the Soviet Union had signed. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obliges nuclear powers not to spread their nuclear arsenal around the world. The United States, in violation of its signature, has been stockpiling atomic bombs in five vassal countries for decades. It trains Allied soldiers in the handling of these weapons at the Kleine Brogel bases in Belgium, Büchel here in Germany (Rhineland-Palatinate), Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, Volkel in the Netherlands, and Incirlik in Turkey.
Then it claims, by virtue of its power grabs, that this has become the custom. However, the Russian Federation, considering itself besieged, after a US nuclear bomber flew over the Gulf of Finland, also played with the Non-Proliferation Treaty and installed atomic bombs on the territory of Belarus. Of course, Belarus is not Cuba. Placing Russian nuclear bombs there changes nothing. It's just a message sent to Washington: if you want to restore the Right of the Strongest, we can accept that too, except that from now on, we are the strongest. Note that Russia has not violated the letter of the Treaty, because it does not train the Belarusian military in these weapons, but it has taken liberties with the spirit of the Treaty.
To be effective and lasting, Léon Bourgeois explained in the last century, disarmament treaties must be based on legal guarantees. It is therefore urgent to return to international law, otherwise we will plunge headlong into a devastating war.
Our honor and our interest is to restore international law. It is a fragile construct. If we want to avoid war, we must restore it, and we are certain that Russia thinks like us and will not violate it.
Or we can support NATO, which gathered its 31 defense ministers in Brussels on October 11 to listen via videoconference as their Israeli counterpart announced that he was going to raze Gaza. And not one of these ministers, including Germany's Boris Pistorius, dared to speak out against the planning of this mass crime against civilians. The honor of the German people has already been betrayed by the Nazis, who ultimately sacrificed you. Don't let yourselves be betrayed again, this time by the Social Democratic Party and the Greens.
We do not have to choose between two overlords, but to protect peace, from Donbass to Gaza, and, ultimately, to defend international law."
References:
[ 1 ] "Solidarism" became the dominant ideology of the French Third Republic.
[ 2 ] Note well, "the Russians outside," not the Soviets.
[ 3 ] Condoleezza Rice was never legally adopted, but she lived with Professor Korbel. Madeleine Albright considered her a younger sister.
[ 4 ] " Germany and the UN against Syria ", by Thierry Meyssan, Al-Watan (Syria), Voltaire Network , January 28, 2016.
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[ 3 ] Condoleezza Rice was never legally adopted, but she lived with Professor Korbel. Madeleine Albright considered her a younger sister.