This article sent chills up my spine.
If there is truth to that article then this could be a very disturbing development. It may also go some way towards explaining a lot of recent policies.
So we should just take the word of this guy? Please.
Hey, it’s on the National Review Online. It MUST be true.
I did say if there is truth to it.
In the US, I think if we found verifiable photos of a high ranking government offical beating a police officer he wouldn’t be in office very long.
Oh Lordy.
Okay, suppose that this elaborate web of circumstantial “evidence” has a glimmer of truth in it. So what? So the current foreign minister of Germany had ties to the KGB. And this “may also go some way towards explaining a lot of recent policies?” How? Because the very recently elected German government would never adopt a stance on Iraq in line with the opinion of the vast majority of its population without a former Soviet Bloc stooge pulling strings behind the scene, even though they campaigned on precisely that issue? Oooooookay. And next I suppose we’ll learn that the reason the French are taking the same position is because they are offended that Jerry Lewis was never properly appreciated in the US.
August 2001 article in The New Republic by Paul Berman:The Passion of Joschka Fischer
Editorial earlier this week in the Washington Post by Michael Kelly Germany’s Mr. Tough Guy partly based on information from above article.
Slate opinion piece today by Berman criticizing Kelly for putting the wrong interpretation on Berman’s earlier article: Why Germany isn’t convinced: Behind Joschka Fischer’s reluctance to back an Iraq war
And so it goes.
The proper interpretation of all this is probably best handled in Great Debates, so I’ll move this thread over there.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
As a sidenote,
The author of the article, General Ion Mihai Pacepa, is the former chief of the DIE, the former Romanian intelligence agency; he defected and the DIE got disbanded; to form a new intelligence agency, I guess. I read his book “Horizons rouges”, very very interesting.
Terrorist? No, and almost certainly not an actual KGB member, too. Someone with disturbing friends, yes, someone not quite fit to be the leader of the 3rd largest German political party, yes, but no terrorist.
(Besides, if memory serves right, the CDU (German conservative party) doesn’t support us either. Not liking American foreign policy is a game that all the political spectrums play in Germany and France play.)
As controversial as this might be, the Germans and especially the French are not to be trusted in anyway, shape or form. At this point in time they are bad guys plain and simple. The French have an affinity for purposely loosing their grip on sensitive material. Where did all the parts for the breeders come from? Take a guess. What does France do with all those spent fuel rods? I know - they give them to charity. Next, they will show the “terrorists” how to effectively boost a device or even a technique designed to reduce the amount of enriched uranium or plutonium required for a given yield, and to reduce the weight of the bomb. If these are our friends…
The real reason these governments are crying foul will become apparent soon enough and then we can sit back and listen their posturing, after which we can laugh in their faces. They really are quite pathetic excuses and they should be proud of that fact they have made the world a much more dangerous place to be. Oh yeah, do you think North Korea just whipped those fuel rods out of there ass? Where could they have come from?
Me too. It was a well-written article. The New Republic article cited by bibliophage is even better.
However, the accusations against Joschka Fischer seem to be about things he allegedly did over 25 years ago. That doesn’t mean he’s a terrorist now.
However, the articles certainly changed my view of the Green Party. I used to thing of Greens as sweet gentle persons, interested in sniffing the flowers. Knowing that they’re headed by an ex-thug shattered that image forever.
Sheesh, people, it was 30 years ago, and he apologized for it when it first came up, which was two years ago.