Today, I and a fellow peace activist disrupted a pro-NATO love-fest featuring Germany’s Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Canadian Foreign Minister, M\u00e9lanie Joly.<\/p>\n
Their “fireside chat<\/a>” was held in Montreal. It was organized by the Montreal Chamber of Commerce.<\/p>\n The German Foreign Minister is a member of the Green Party of Germany. She formerly served as its co-leader<\/a>.<\/p>\n The German Green Party was founded in West Germany in 1980. The leading figure in the early days of the party, Petra Kelly<\/a>, was a peace and ecofeminist activist, a prominent advocate of nonviolence, and a leader of the worldwide fight against nuclear missiles.<\/p>\n Over the years, the German Greens have abandoned Petra Kelly’s admirable commitment to peace, non-violence and opposition to NATO. Today, they are the most militaristic and belligerent<\/a> of the political parties in Germany’s coalition government.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So compromised has the German Green Party become that the leading Green in Germany’s Bundestag, Katrin G\u00f6ring-Eckardt, recently praised<\/a> Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s disgraced ex-ambassador to Germany, after Melnyk lauded Nazi collaborator and notorious anti-Semite, Stepan Bandera<\/a>, and ridiculed<\/a> German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz.<\/p>\n During my disruption today of the Baerbock\/Joly fireside chat, I invoked the German Green Party’s past commitment to peace and non-violence and I told the Foreign Minister that she has betrayed the core values of the Green Party. You can watch my disruption here: dimitri-disruption-of-baerbock. <\/a><\/p>\n My disruption was preceded by that of Laurel Thompson, a peace activist from Montreal, who denounced NATO before being ushered out of the ballroom. You can watch Laurel’s disruption here: laurel-disruption-of-baerbock-joly.<\/a><\/p>\n Before we were removed from the ball room, the Foreign Ministers made at least two notable admissions.<\/p>\n First, Baerbock acknowledged that the Ukraine war could go on for years, but she nonetheless vowed that Germany would “support Ukraine for as long as they need us”: war-will-go-on-for-months-or-years.<\/a><\/p>\n Then, Joly responded to a question from the moderator about the reasons for which Canada recently returned to Germany a turbine that was needed to maintain Nord Stream I gas flows from Russia to Germany. Without gas from Russia, Germany will be plunged into a catastrophic energy shortage<\/a> this winter.<\/p>\n In explaining her government’s decision to return the turbine to Germany despite Canadian sanctions on Russia, Joly explained that the Trudeau government’s motivation for the decision was to prevent the Putin government from being able to blame Canada’s government for Germany’s gas crisis. (Silly me, I thought that the priority of the Trudeau government was to help the German people, not to win a propaganda war with Putin.) You can listen to Joly’s comments about the turbine here: turbine. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, I and a fellow peace activist disrupted a pro-NATO love-fest featuring Germany’s Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Canadian Foreign Minister, M\u00e9lanie Joly. Their “fireside chat” was held in Montreal. It was organized by the Montreal Chamber of Commerce. The German Foreign Minister is a member of the Green Party of Germany. 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