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Courageous Discourse

Reviewing NATO’s Rationale

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9 minute read

By John Leake

“To keep the Russian’s out, the Germans down, and the Americans in.”

To an observer who has studied history, it’s very difficult to assess what Europe’s heads of state are now thinking with respect to NATO, Ukraine, and Russia. Judging by their pronouncements, it apparently hasn’t occurred to them that they have no rational grounds for maintaining a state of mortal enmity with Russia. The Germans are being especially obtuse.

After Germany was reunified in 1990 and the Soviet Union was dissolved, it was, above all, the Americans who wished to maintain enmity with Russia because doing so served as the rationale for:

1). Maintaining the American military occupation of Germany.

2). Maintaining America’s vast Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex.

3). Maintaining a weak Russia with a weak leader like Boris Yeltsin who was amenable to American financial players and their cronies in Russia exploiting the country’s natural resource assets.

The clearest evidence of this state of affairs was Washington’s hatred for German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and their Nord Stream Pipeline deal, which became (in Washington) the hated emblem of fruitful German-Russian relations.

The last few years have been crowded with spectacular acts of stupidity, but of all these, none was more stupendous than the U.S. carrying out Joe Biden’s avowal—with German Chancellor Scholz present—“to bring an end Nord Stream.”

Not only was this a massive crime against pipeline’s owners, it was an act of war against Germany, which is purportedly a U.S. ally. Finally, blowing up the pipeline was the single largest human point source of greenhouse gas emission in history—yet another example of how those who push the “Green Agenda” are ruthless humbugs.

And how did the German government respond to this stunning act of crime and war against its people and industry? Not a peep of protest against the Biden administration—a perfect act of submission to the most demented and depraved U.S. action in the history of American-German relations.

This brings me back to one of NATO’s three key objectives—namely, to keep the Germans down. Since Bismarck united the various German principalities into a unified nation in 1871, the country has been periodically plagued with dreadful leadership. Bismarck himself was a reasonable man, as were Adenauer, Kohl, and Schroeder. However, starting with Angela Merkel in 2005, Germany has been led by inveterate nincompoops. Olaf Scholz has proven to the worst.

Now President Trump is signaling that the Europeans—and especially the Germans—may be free to be their own masters, and equally free to forge a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia. And yet, somehow Europe’s leaders have managed to forgot what all those who attended the Bucharest NATO Summit in 2008 perfectly understood at the time—namely, the Americans were aggressively pursuing an agenda of enmity and provocation with Russia by declaring NATO’s intention to expand yet further east into Ukraine and Georgia.

To reiterate: the Americans hated German Chancellor Schroeder because of his friendship with Vladimir Putin and their Nord Stream deal. They equally hated Schroeder because he was reluctant to support their stupid Iraq invasion in 2003. In the dubious person of Angela Merkel, Washington found a submissive servant. In 2008, Merkel voiced her opinion that George W. Bush’s agenda in Europe would make needless trouble with the Russians, but she didn’t push back against it.

During the Obama years, Vice President Joe Biden was made a sort of American Proconsul to Ukraine, where he and his cocaine addict son forged lucrative relationships with the country’s corrupt oligarchs. Likewise, Hillary Clinton and the Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, became fast friends.

While none of the Ukrainian oligarchs during this period held particularly strong anti-Russian sentiments, they were incentivized to adopt such sentiments by the promise of a lucrative relationship with Washington’s creepy denizens. They should have understood that getting into bed with the U.S. to poke the Russian business was a risky business. Of course, it wasn’t especially risky for them, because if things got hot in Ukraine, they could always take refuge in one of their innumerable houses in London, the South of France, Vienna, Switzerland, or Miami. Needless to say, ordinary Ukrainians, with their annual median household income of about $1,000, haven’t had this luxury.

The Obama years were the era in which Washington developed its current, bizarre sentimentality about Ukrainian nationalism. I remember a time not so long ago (in the 1980s) when Ukrainians were viewed with deep suspicion for their collaboration with Nazi Germany during the war. There was a great deal of chatter about this in the American press in 1988, when the American citizen of Ukrainian birth, John Demjanjuk, was extradited to Israel to stand trial for being “Ivan the Terrible,” a notorious watchman at Treblinka extermination camp.

Back then, Ukrainian nationalism was regarded as having been badly corrupted by Nazism. But then, around 2014, the narrative lurched to the other extreme, and suddenly the American media started peddling stories about the sacred blood and soil of Ukraine and valiant struggle of its people against the Russian aggressor. America’s newfound love for das Volk of Ukraine culminated with Ukrainian flag waving in the U.S., whose people couldn’t have identified Ukraine on an unmarked map just three years earlier.

Almost as stupid as the Biden and Scholz administrations has been the French administration, which somehow forgot that their great post-war President Charles de Gaulle correctly perceived that NATO was primarily an instrument of American domination. On could argue that de Gaulle’s decision to withdrawal from NATO in 1966 was premature, but how on earth did rejoining NATO in 2009 serve the French people?

Last but not least are the English, which now has the most abominable ruling class in the nation’s entire history—a ruling class that has enthusiastically embraced every form of naked tyranny that has emerged in the west since March 2020.

The historic cradle of free speech is now a country in which the police are sent to the homes of people who express politically incorrect opinions on social media. In 2022, Konstantin Kisin— a strident critic of Vladimir Putin—pointed out that while 400 people were arrested in Russia in 2021 for online speech violations, 3,300 were arrested in Britain. With this record, how can the British government reasonably claim to be a valiant defender of Western civilization from the odious Putin?

If British, German, and French leadership could somehow muster a shred of common sense, they would drop their kindergarten mindset, join President Trump in burying the hatchet with Russia, and do beneficial deals with the world’s largest nation.

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Courageous Discourse

Europe Had 127,350 Cases of Measles in 2024

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By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

US Mainstream Media Maintains Myopic Focus on Less than 1000 Cases

As the measles story in the US continues to unfold with reporting of a few cases here and there come in through mainstream media, I wondered about measles in Europe.

The WHO casually reported that the Europe Region had 127,350 cases in 2024.

According to an analysis by WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), 127 350 measles cases were reported in the European Region for 2024, double the number of cases reported for 2023 and the highest number since 1997.

Children under 5 accounted for more than 40% of reported cases in the Region – comprising 53 countries in Europe and central Asia. More than half of the reported cases required hospitalization. A total of 38 deaths have been reported, based on preliminary data received as of 6 March 2025.

Measles cases in the Region have generally been declining since 1997, when some 216 000 were reported, reaching a low of 4440 cases in 2016. However, a resurgence was seen in 2018 and 2019 – with 89 000 and 106 000 cases reported for the 2 years respectively. Following a backsliding in immunization coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic, cases rose significantly again in 2023 and 2024. Vaccination rates in many countries are yet to return to pre-pandemic levels, increasing the risk of outbreaks.

Many regions in Europe have lower rates of measles vaccination than the goal of 95%.

 

Less than 80% of eligible children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Romania were vaccinated with MCV1 in 2023 – far below the 95% coverage rate required to retain herd immunity. In both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro the coverage rate for MCV1 has remained below 70% and 50% respectively for the past 5 or more years. Romania reported the highest number of cases in the Region for 2024, with 30 692 cases, followed by Kazakhstan with 28 147 cases.

The WHO Report does not mention adjudication of hospitalizations or deaths. Presumably hospitalization of healthy kids is routine for contagion control. So if measles is so common and presumably well-handled by Europe, why is it such a big deal in the United States? Don’t look for Sanjay Gupta or Anderson Cooper to tell you that a similar size region and population handles >100K cases per year without much fanfare.

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

President, McCullough Foundation

www.mcculloughfnd.org

 

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Courageous Discourse

Europe Turns Totalitarian

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In case anyone doubted what Vice President J.D. Vance said in Munich back in February, I can confirm that everything he said was correct—but I can also add that it was only a scrape on the surface.

Europe is going downhill. A wave of anti-democratic, anti-freedom laws, policies, and campaigns are rewriting the landscape of the continent where democracy and freedom were born.

This is nothing new per se—the Europeans not only invented the institutions of modern, Western civilization, but they also created Fascism, National Socialism, and Stalinism. It also ignited two World Wars in the last century. On the upside, its political leaders spent a good long time after 1945 trying to stamp out all forms of totalitarianism—and yet here we go again:

A 16-year-old was recently removed from her high school by police in Germany. Her crime? Reposting a pro-AfD video on TikTok involving the Smurfs (the populist-right wing party’s color is blue). A woman in the United Kingdom was detined for silently praying outside of an abortion clinic; the land of George Orwell has someone arrested for a literal thought crime.

It gets worse:

An Austrian woman was arrested for calling Muhammad, who married a nine-year-old girl, a paedophile. Another woman, this time in Germany, was fined €80,000 [$87,190] for making a Nazi salute. Again in Germany, an AfD politician was arrested and fined for claiming that migrants commit more gang rapes than German citizens do (the court did not dispute her facts, but said they incited hatred).

On February 3, a court in Stockholm, Sweden, sentenced a man for so-called “agitation against an ethnic or national group”. The court applied the Swedish “hate speech” laws, make it a crime to criticize any ethnic or national group—except for ethnic Swedes. You can de facto get sentenced for blasphemy against Islam, but not against Christianity.

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Most of the attacks on individual freedom are taking place within the borders of the European Union. The Orwellian Digital Services Act from a few years ago, and by ominous rulings by the Court of “Justice” of the European Union, show that the crackdown on citizens’ freedom is not a spur of the moment. However, as Britain is demonstrating with its efforts to lead the anti-freedom crusade. leaving the EU is no guarantee that a country will protect even the most basic rights of its citizens.

The totalitarian ambitions of Europe’s political leadership are not limited to free speech. Back in January,

Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview … that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu.

In other words, Bretton—who has also been referred to as the EU’s special “censorship czar” for his role in advancing encroachments on free speech—openly admits that the EU interfered with the domestic affairs of a member state to have an election result nullified. Why? Because the EU’s top brass did not like the outcome of the election.

The annulment of the election result was ordered by Romania’s supreme court, which—it might be worth mentioning—is a mixture of judges and politicians. It based its decision on allegations of “foreign interference” where foreign, of course, refers to Russia.

To date not a shred of evidence has been presented in support of the supreme court’s ruling.

After Thierry Breton admitted to the EU’s active, foreign interference in the Romanian election, he threatened that the EU would do the same to Germany if the national conservative party Alternative fur Deutschland, AfD, got too many votes.

Along the same line of contempt for conservatives and for the integrity of democratic elections, the EU has waged an administrative, judicial, and increasingly fiscal war on Hungary. For the past 15 years, the Fidesz party has governed Hungary based on a consistent but in not way radical conservative platform.

Given the unending hostility toward Hungary, you might think that the country’s prime minister Victor Orban has been restraining free speech and rigging or annulling elections. He has done none of that: all his government is ”guilty” of is promoting traditional families, protecting children from the LGBTetc movement, enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, keeping taxes moderate, and encouraging foreign direct investment.

The result is a safe, economically thriving, socially cohesive, and family friendly country, right there in the heart of Europe. The Hungarian election system—the integrity of which has been proven time and time again—is an intriguing combination of proportionate and simple-majority representation. Voters get not one, but two votes to cast, one for each part of the system.

Four elections in a row, the Hungarian people have elected conservatives who prioritize Hungary and the needs of the Hungarian people. For this, they have received repeated showers of scorn from Brussels, including a barrage of accusations that Hungary is a semi-totalitarian state.

The implication, of course, is that Hungary does not have free elections, and yet every single election since at least 2010 has been meticulously scrutinized by foreign election observers. Not a single one of them has come up with any evidence of interference or wrongdoing by the government.

This is unsurprising, but it is also a point that leads us directly back to what former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton said about the Romanian and German elections. In the view of the European Union, the democratic nature of an election is not determined by the form under which the election takes place. It has nothing to do with the secrecy of the ballot, the equal right of every citizen to vote, or the government’s respect for the election outcome. The democratic nature of an election is determined entirely by what opinions the winning parties hold.

If those opinions are conservative, the election was undemocratic.

The European Union has now reached the point where it actively tries to prohibit election outcomes that it ideologically disagrees with. This means that elections where the EU engages in foreign interference—as Breton explained happened in Romania—are about as democratic as elections in Russia.

Add the growing crackdown on free speech, and the comparison to Russia becomes even more compelling. Throw into the mix the blatantly political prosecution of Marine Le Pen in France, which has eerie similarities to the prosecutions of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny—and the difference between the European Union and the Russian Federation boils down to a matter of time.

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