{"id":49558,"date":"2014-11-10T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2014-11-10T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=49558"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:32","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:32","slug":"german-politicians-are-us-puppets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/11\/german-politicians-are-us-puppets\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018German Politicians Are US Puppets\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNow the Americans are even considering blowing up a nuclear power plant in Ukraine and then insisting that the culprits were either separatists or Russians,\u201d claims the German journalist Udo Ulfkotte,<\/strong> former correspondent from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em>, one of the largest German newspapers.<\/p>\n

He has published a book, Gekaufte Journalisten<\/em><\/a> (\u201cPurchased Journalists\u201d), in which he describes how American and German politicians sway the German media, so that those journalists give the desired spin to world events<\/strong>. Ulfkotte claims that reporters are urged to bias their writing primarily to favor the American position and to oppose Russia. Udo Ulfkotte spoke to about how exactly this occurs and about the path his life is taking today after these revelations were made public.<\/p>\n

\"Udo<\/a>Q: Mr. Ulfkotte, you\u2019ve said that you were given a lot of money to write pro-American articles. How profitable is to be a pro-American journalist in Germany?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Udo Ulfkotte:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t get money \u2013 I got gifts. Things like gold watches, diving equipment, and trips with accommodations in five-star hotels. I know many German journalists who at some point were able to take advantage of this to buy themselves a vacation home abroad. But much more important than the money and gifts is the fact that you\u2019re offered support if you write pieces that are pro-American or pro-NATO.<\/em> If you don\u2019t do it, your career won\u2019t go anywhere \u2013 you\u2019ll find yourself assigned to sit in the office and sort through letters to the editor.<\/p>\n

Q: According to what you\u2019ve said, journalists are corrupted surreptitiously, by inviting them for all-expense-paid trips to the US. But do serious professionals really sell themselves for so little?<\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> When you fly to the US again and again and never have to pay for anything there, and you\u2019re invited to interview American politicians, you\u2019re moving closer and closer to the circles of power. And you want to remain within this circle of the elite, so you write to please them. Everyone wants to be a celebrity journalist who gets exclusive access to famous politicians<\/em>. But one wrong sentence and your career as a celebrity journalist is over.<\/strong> Everyone knows it. And everyone\u2019s in on it.<\/p>\n

Q: Why have you only now decided to go public with your opinion about German journalism? <\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> I\u2019ve had three heart attacks, I no longer have children I have to support, and day after day I kept watching the Americans on the news, once again gearing up for their next war. This time it\u2019s in Ukraine against Russia. But it\u2019s always the same game. Not even a complete idiot could have been oblivious to the Americans\u2019 one-sided anti-Moscow propaganda after the crash of flight MH17.<\/em> Now the Americans are even considering blowing up a nuclear power plant in Ukraine and then insisting that the culprits were either separatists or Russians. I hear it all the time. It\u2019s unconscionable!<\/p>\n

Q: You claim that Germany is a \u201cbanana republic.\u201d Isn\u2019t that an overly harsh assessment? After all, Germany does have opposition movements, including radical ones, and the media is critical of the government. For example, the recent broadcast of the TV program Die Anstalt<\/em> caused quite a stir with its pointed criticism of the heavily biased German media. <\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> After that broadcast aired, with its journalists using satire (!) to express criticism of the German media \u2013 and, above all, against its purely pro-American coverage of events \u2013 complaints were filed and they were taken to court. This is perfect evidence of the fact that Germany is a banana republic: you can\u2019t even use satire to criticize the one-sided coverage.<\/em> We have only the appearance of a free press. It\u2019s crazy.<\/p>\n

Q: What do you think about the targeting of politicians whom the German press has lumped together in a group known as \u201cRussian sympathizers\u201d (Schr\u00f6der<\/a>, <\/strong>Gysi<\/strong><\/a>, <\/strong>Wagenknecht<\/strong><\/a>, and others), and the pro-Russian journalists? <\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> Those \u201cRussian sympathizers\u201d are well-educated, sincere people. I say that, although I\u2019m not aligned with them politically. But I respect their integrity. The fact that they\u2019re being targeted is typical of banana republics such as Germany, where any deviation from mainstream opinion is harshly suppressed.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: You mentioned that Germany is still concealing the fact that in March of 1988, the regime of Saddam Hussein \u2013 at the time a Western ally \u2013 committed an act of genocide in a Kurdish city near the Iranian border, using chemical weapons manufactured in Germany. Can it be true that in all these years not a single newspaper, even an opposition paper, has written about that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> No, they did write about it, but it took them a year to do so! I photographed Iranians who had been poisoned by German chemical weapons under the eyes of the US, but that was not supposed to be made public. At that time, the Iraqis, Germans, and Americans were celebrating their \u201cfinal\u201d victory over the Iranians. I found it ghoulish that in Baghdad they were celebrating the fact that they had jointly gassed human beings. I suffered greatly from the gas \u2013 later I got cancer. I did everything I could to record what had happened there, hoping that it would prompt an international outcry. But no one ever published it.<\/strong> Instead everyone celebrated their victory. To this day I ask myself why it\u2019s no problem for German chancellors to travel to Israel and go down on their knees and ask the Jews for forgiveness for gassing them, but then the Iranians killed by German gas are just second-class citizens? Have you ever heard of a German chancellor apologizing for that in Tehran? We can see that German politicians are nothing more than puppets of the US. They should obediently do as Washington tells them. We continue to be a US colony, a banana republic, and not a free country.<\/p>\n

Q: You say that intelligence services provided you with information about Libya, which you published under your own name. And you claim that that was doing what you were assigned to do by the CIA and the Bundesnachrichtendienst. But if the information was interesting and true, couldn\u2019t it be that your interests simply coincided? After all, you could have refused to publish it. <\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> Yes, yes, I could have said \u201cno.\u201d You know, the ADAC \u2013 the biggest German automobile club \u2013 had an employee working for its helicopter rescue service who refused to cooperate secretly with the BND. He was immediately expelled from the ADAC and then went to court, but the judges decided that a person cannot refuse to work with the BND, and it\u2019s not a problem that one might lose one\u2019s job for resisting. Do you get it? Do you see what I\u2019m saying? I didn\u2019t want to be unemployed.<\/p>\n

Q: You\u2019ve said that the intelligence agencies ordered your home to be raided six times. But if you were simply publishing what the intelligence agencies gave you, why did they feel they needed to search your house? Or, on the other hand, if you were still coming up with information on your own that the intelligence agencies were trying to conceal, then doesn\u2019t it mean that you were still acting as an independent journalist, and not at all like an \u201cunofficial CIA agent\u201d? <\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> That\u2019s a translation error \u2013 it wasn\u2019t the intelligence agencies that ordered the raids, but the secret state police. What the Nazis used to call the Gestapo is now called the Department of State Security. And they came and conducted raids six times under the pretext that I was betraying state secrets. These types of scare tactics are typical of banana republics.<\/em><\/p>\n

Q: You say that the publication of this book could create problems for you. What kind, for example?<\/strong><\/p>\n

UU:<\/strong> Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em> informed me in writing that they will file court charges against me for violating criminal, civil, and labor legislation, as well as corporate standards in journalism. That alone could destroy me. I\u2019ve heard that many others want to put me in jail because I\u2019ve once again exposed \u201cstate secrets.\u201d Perhaps it would be worth it for me to fly to Moscow like Edward Snowden and ask for asylum there. Let\u2019s wait and see how the leaders of the banana republic of Germany react, because they\u2019ve been compromised, and everyone can read in my bestselling book how they manufacture the appearance of a free press here, and that democracy in Germany is merely an illusion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

Source in Russian:<\/em> VZ.RU<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Translated by Oriental Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 orientalreview.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNow the Americans are even considering blowing up a nuclear power plant in Ukraine and then insisting that the culprits were either separatists or Russians,\u201d claims the German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, former correspondent from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest German newspapers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}