Talks in the Chancellery

BERLIN/CARACAS (Own report) – Chancellor Merkel will meet one of Venezuela’s leading government opposition politicians today in the Chancellery. Julio Borges, who, according to reports, supported the 2002 putsch attempt in Caracas, will discuss the political development in Venezuela with the chancellor. Fierce power struggles are being waged in that country. The opposition, mainly composed of representatives of the traditional wealthy elites, has ties to Western powers und is also supported by Berlin. With its operational assistance, for example in advising Borges’ Primero Justícia (Justice First) party in “political communication,” the CDU-affiliated Konrad Adenauer Foundation has been playing a special role. Primero Justícia had also participated in the 2002-attempted putsch. Berlin is pursuing an approach similar to that used in other Latin American countries, wherein it regularly supports the traditional elites. This resembles the German authorities’ interventions in the run-up to the putsch in Ukraine.

German Politician: Turkey Like Nazi Germany After Reichstag

The leader of Germany’s liberal Free Democrats (FDP) likened Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan’s purge of state institutions to the actions of the Nazi party in the 1930s in comments published on Sunday.

FDP leader Christian Lindner said he saw parallels between Erdogan’s behavior and the aftermath of the Reichstag fire in 1933 portrayed by the Nazis as a Communist plot against the government and used by Adolf Hitler to justify massively curtailing civil liberties.

U.S. Intel: Turkey’s purge of military has undercut U.S. operations against ISIL

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says Turkey’s purge of military leaders is hurting efforts to defeat the Islamic State militant group.

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Clapper and U.S. Central Command chief General Joseph Votel said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on July 28 that the purge had swept aside many Turkish officers who assisted the United States in its efforts to defeat IS, and landed some of them in jail.

From Račak to Maidan

KIEV/BELGRADE/BERLIN (Own report) – A year after Berlin helped instigate the putsch in Ukraine, new information is coming to light about the February 20, 2014 Kiev Massacre. That bloodbath, of more than 50 people killed, accelerated the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych and was also used – even in Germany – to justify the putsch. As has now been confirmed by witnesses, armed demonstrators were the first to open fire on police, and only then, did repressive forces return fire, when they were caught in a hail of bullets while retreating. If this proves to be true, it could not have been a government-planned massacre. Furthermore, evidence indicates that also the snipers, who had shot to kill, were on the side of the government’s opponents. Today, the responsibility for that bloodbath is as unsolved as that for the deaths of more than 40 Kosovo Albanians in Račak in mid-January 1999, which the West labeled a mass execution – in spite of all contradicting evidence. Račak served as a decisive justification for the military aggression on Yugoslavia. The political and media establishments’ other forgeries and lies preceding and during the war on Yugoslavia demonstrate that manipulations, such as the ones we are currently seeing in the Ukraine conflict, are nothing new. They are rather consistent props in the German establishment’s standard repertoire for escalating conflicts.