Iran: The Hollowing-Out of the Regime

Pictured: The Iranian city of Mashhad, enveloped in a haze of air pollution. Of the 500 most polluted cities of the world, Iran with 19 cities comes fifth. (Image source: Tasnim/Wikimedia Commons)

 

• Iran: The Hollowing-Out of the Regime The analogies with the former East Germany suggest that Iran, too, is ripe for regime change. They also suggest that a change may come in weeks, months or years, depending on chance events and particularly on whether the local authorities and their security forces, at least in some areas, get tired of killing people.
• What is likely to push such developments forward? The answer is that the new American policy, whether by chance or intent, may be as good as anything.

On December 28, 2017, major protests against the Iranian regime broke out in Mashhad and quickly spread to numerous other urban centers. Mostly merely noisy at first, some turned violent and eventually the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) suppressed the phenomenon, killing some and arresting thousands of others. Protests have continued, but news about them is scanty. How are they to be evaluated?

There are interesting parallels with the twilight of the East German regime. By a coincidence, the Iranian regime is in its fortieth year and the East German regime suddenly collapsed just after its leaders had held a large-scale pompous celebration of its fortieth anniversary in the capital, East Berlin.

Still Raising Questions: How Angela Merkel Started Her Career In German Politics

 

Angela Merkel is considered to be the world’s most powerful woman and perhaps Europe’s most powerful person. She’s about to be re-elected as Germany’s Chancellor for the fourth consecutive time. Her policies have provoked a lot of debate, from Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear energy over the Eurozone bailouts onto her refugee policies.

What has received much less attention is how she entered politics. A number of biographies have been written about her, with the most critical one perhaps being “the first life of Angela M”, written in 2013 by a journalist for Die Welt who later joined the rightwing populist AfD party. This centered on how she was a member of the FDJ, the communist youth organization, when she was at school, and how she later served as cultural secretary for the FDJ while working as a physicist at the Academy of Sciences, leading to Merkel denying this role included propaganda.

Ivanka Trump in Berlin as Merkel Seeks White House Conduit

Ivanka and Donald Trump. (Photographer: Molly Riley/Pool via Bloomberg)

 

• U.S. first daughter meeting German leader at women’s summit
• ‘Typical Merkel’ move to identify back channel to Trump

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While Angela Merkel and Ivanka Trump don’t have a lot in common, Germany’s chancellor is seeking out President Donald Trump’s daughter as a back channel to moderate his views. Merkel was impressed with Ivanka Trump’s seriousness on global issues when they first met at the White House in March, and hopes she’ll be a conduit for influence, according to three German government officials.

Christianity is Rattling: “Lights Out” in Germany

• The fall of German Christianity leaves an emptiness that seems likely to be filled by a more multicultural and Islamic society. Germany today houses Europe’s largest Muslim community.
• Christians in Germany, Die Welt reports, will become a minority in 20 years.
• The falling birth rate will remove a piece of Germany larger than the former communist East Germany. It will result in a demographic loss equivalent to the population of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Frankfurt combined.
• The German army just spent 428 million euros on various operations relating to migrants during the past year. It has been the costliest mission within German borders that the army of the Federal Republic of Germany has ever undertaken.
• In the decades after WWII, Germans have turned into hard-core pacifists, enjoying their role on the sidelines of global conflicts. The army was then turned into a humanitarian organization.

“Contemporary historians … right now, have failed to find a single historical example of a society that became secularised and maintained its birth rate over subsequent centuries,” the former UK chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently argued.

‘EU is a DICTATORSHIP’ Furious campaigners want to move German state to PUTIN’S RUSSIA

ANGRY residents of a region in Germany have lashed out at the European Union ‘dictatorship’ and launched a petition to move the state to Russian rule.

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The petition calls for fellow Saxons to join the campaign to exit Angela Merkel’s nation.

In a statement, the group, known as the Pro-Putin Party, said: “As we have repeatedly and constantly experienced, there is nothing the EU dictatorship committee would recoil from!

German president calls on US to win back lost trust

Germany’s Fourth Reich is using the NSA ‘scandal’ they’ve known and happily been apart of since the agency’s inception to cause a trans-Atlantic rift. This rift serves to allow Europe to reach its own independence without America so it can become its own superpower with German leadership at the helm. The icing on the cake will be a limited war with Russia, for example, where an incursion is made into EU territories and America/NATO sit back and do nothing, like they did with ISIS. Many Europeans despite today’s tension with Putin want NATO out and see no further need for it. Germany especially sees a need for an alliance with Russia over America as it has done twice in the past, both leading to two world wars. This would achieve Russian goals for a NATO breakup and a a foothold in Europe that it always wanted.

 

It’s been nearly 20 years since a German president was received in the White House. Joachim Gauck, a dissident who organized opposition to the East German state, is calling on the US to practice the values it preaches.

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The two men will meet on Wednesday. It’s been 18 years since a German president set foot in the White House. The timing is no coincidence of course. President Gauck has arrived in America to celebrate the 25th anniversary of German re-unification, a seminal historical event in which the United States played an instrumental role.

The Feds Are Hunting Money Retroactively – Is a Real Estate Crash Coming?

If you apply for a mortgage, you will suddenly encounter the REAL hunt for money. My sister just bought a house and to get the mortgage she had to explain every deposit and cash withdrawal in her account going back five years. My mother had simply written her a check for $400 to reimburse her for picking up some medicine. They wanted her to explain why my mother gave her $400.

The Shift in Public Confidence: 2015.75

 

There are many aspects that are lining up with the turn in the ECM (Economic Confidence Model) from the Blood Moon and the Jewish Year for forgiving the debts, to France imposing restrictions on cash in September, and even in Germany the laws that protected about half a million people so-called dachas there in East Germany expire. To date, a law protecting the tenant against dismissal by the municipality will also expire October 3, 2015. Everywhere we look, there are changes coming to a head, right down to the U.S. Federal budget with 2015.75.

Germans Are Paranoid that the US Is Spying on Their Data

The idea of personal data privacy is deeply ingrained in German culture. Germans even have a word for it: Datensparsamkeit, the principle of only collecting the bare minimum of data necessary.

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In June 2014, the German Bundestag, or national parliament, canceled its internet-service contract with US telecom Verizon, opting to entrust its data to German company Deutsche Telekom, instead. The alleged tapping of Angela Merkel’s personal cell phone in Dec. 2013, has led the German chancellor to compare the NSA to the East German secret police, and German citizens remain outraged at the NSA’s actions in their country—just yesterday, Apr. 23, national news magazine Der Spiegel revealed (link in German) that the agency had monitored Western European businesses for more than a year.

‘The Fourth Reich’: What Some Europeans See When They Look at Germany

People today are understandably confused when they hear “Fourth Reich” and Germany combined in the same sentence. They cannot put two and two together because they continue to look for Nazis running the country. There are none.

The Fourth Reich of today is economic dominance and subjugation of the European continent which will later turn the landscape into a United States of Europe — the only way for the Euro, or single currency bloc to survive. The only solution is further integration, and further integration means destroying national sovereignty from country to country and doing things the hegemon’s way.

Along with an upcoming United States of Europe will be a European Army, thanks in part to the suicide of the United States and Russian threats from the East. Many may not see it, but it’s going in that direction step by step. Whether one chooses to believe it or not doesn’t change the fact that it in fact is happening, albeit at a slow pace, before their very eyes.

If you’re still looking for Nazis, you’re 70-plus years late to the party.

 

 

 

Following World War II, a German return to dominance in Europe seemed an impossibility. But the euro crisis has transformed the country into a reluctant hegemon and comparisons with the Nazis have become rampant. Are they fair?

May 30, 1941 was the day when Manolis Glezos made a fool of Adolf Hitler. He and a friend snuck up to a flag pole on the Acropolis in Athens on which a gigantic swastika flag was flying. The Germans had raised the banner four weeks earlier when they occupied the country, but Glezos took down the hated flag and ripped it up. The deed turned both him and his friend into heroes.

Back then, Glezos was a resistance fighter. Today, the soon-to-be 93-year-old is a member of the European Parliament for the Greek governing party Syriza. Sitting in his Brussels office on the third floor of the Willy Brandt Building, he is telling the story of his fight against the Nazis of old and about his current fight against the Germans of today. Glezos’ white hair is wild and unkempt, making him look like an aging Che Guevara; his wrinkled face carries the traces of a European century.

Governments Are Broke. Now they Are Turning People Against People

 

New York City (NYC) is turning man against his brother all for money writing their own epitaph. NYC telling people to video tape cars just idling in town who they will then fine and the rats will be rewarded. This is precisely how Rome was torn apart and it is amazing to watch how history repeats because these politicians will NEVER reform so we must watch how they will destroy society leading to the inevitable crash and burn – the end of NYC as was the case for Rome.

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Now New York City is now adopting the very same policies as North Korea and East Germany. It is government’s self-interest that matters, not the welfare of the people. We already have this rating out of others in taxes and it has been greatly used scaring the public to the point of insanity. When a man recently got up on a plane to go to the lavatory, another passenger called the stewardess to say he thought he was a Muslim. He was dressed normally and had passed all the checks. Nevertheless, we have people monitoring others now in a state of paranoia.

The woman who called police because a young black man was buying a BB gun in Walmart has blood on her hands. Her paranoia led to police shooting and killing the family of a man at an Ohio Walmart shooting him dead John Crawford III gunned down inside Walmart because government has turned civilization into a state of paranoia.

Germany faces impossible choice as Greek austerity revolt spreads

As oft said here, it was known in advance the Euro would fail. You don’t make mistakes affecting millions of people and entire countries like this by accident. The Fourth Reich has landed and within time will have its predetermined solution to the engineered crisis.

 

EU elites who forced a currency experiment on countries not ready for it have only themselves to blame

The political centre across southern Europe is disintegrating. Establishment parties of centre-left and centre-right – La Casta, as they say in Spain – have successively immolated themselves enforcing EMU debt-deflation.

Spain’s neo-Bolivarian Podemos party refuses to fade. It has endured crippling internal rifts. It has shrugged off hostile press coverage over financial ties to Venezuela. Nothing sticks.

Russia considers censuring West Germany

Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of Russian parliament’s lower house, on Wednesday ordered legislators to consider an appeal from a Communist Party deputy to denounce the reunification of Germany as an illegal land grab of East Germany by its western neighbour.

The collapse of Socialist rule in East Germany – officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – heralded the end of the Cold War, and was met with jubilation in the West.

Berlin’s digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA

With its strict privacy laws, Germany is the refuge of choice for those hounded by the security services. Carole Cadwalladr visits Berlin to meet Laura Poitras, the director of Edward Snowden film Citizenfour, and a growing community of surveillance refuseniks

It’s the not knowing that’s the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. “Not knowing whether I’m in a private place or not.” Not knowing if someone’s watching or not. Though she’s under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist “hard but not impossible”. It’s on a personal level that it’s harder to process. “I try not to let it get inside my head, but… I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure I’m having a private conversation or something, I’ll go outside.”

Poitras’s documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour, has just been released in cinemas. She was, for a time, the only person in the world who was in contact with Snowden, the only one who knew of his existence. Before she got Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian on board, it was just her – talking, electronically, to the man she knew only as “Citizenfour”. Even months on, when I ask her if the memory of that time lives with her still, she hesitates and takes a deep breath: “It was really very scary for a number of months. I was very aware that the risks were really high and that something bad could happen. I had this kind of responsibility to not fuck up, in terms of source protection, communication, security and all those things, I really had to be super careful in all sorts of ways.”

Bad, not just for Snowden, I say? “Not just for him,” she agrees. We’re having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where she’d moved to make a film about surveillance before she’d ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a “watch list”. Every time she entered the US – “and I travel a lot” – she would be questioned. “It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do what’s called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and oftentimes take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff.” She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin.

Former Communists from East Germany set to return to power

Days before Germany is set to mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the way has been cleared for the former communists who ruled East Germany to return to power.

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The Left Party, widely seen as the successor to the SED, East Germany’s communist party, is expected to head the government of a German state for the first time since reunification, after the Social Democrats voted to enter a coalition with them in the state of Thuringia.

Many of the Left Party’s leadership were senior figures in the old SED, which ruled East Germany as a single-party state. And the prospect of the party’s return to power has caused alarm in some quarters.