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Samizdata quote of the day – Russian influence… no, not Brexit The green transition was paid for in roubles, and the people who signed the cheques sat in the chancellery, not on the fringes. When Donald Trump warned the UN General Assembly in 2018 that Germany was making itself dependent on Russian energy, the German delegation was filmed smirking. Merz now tells a British Prime Minister that Russia’s friends sit on the AfD benches. Russia’s most useful friends in Germany wore SPD and CDU rosettes, and they were doing exactly what RT asked.
And look how it turned out. Labour went into the 2024 election promising to ban fracking for good. The Bowland shale stays where it is. Britain buys gas from Norway’s pipelines and from tankers out of Qatar and Texas, at whatever price the world sets that winter. Whether or not Moscow lifted a finger, it got exactly the British energy policy RT spent years asking for, and Burnham’s government is the one delivering it.
So here’s a question for the next time he walks into Number 10 asking what the Russians have been up to. Not the referendum. Ask about the shale.
– Gawain Towler
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Would be curious to see this tweet fact-checked:
https://x.com/RealProstoSerge/status/2111101522721317109
If he really said this, it’s over from our side.
An addendum: I posted the above after a quick reading of the article, thinking it responsive in the “meddling in internals” sense.
If the PTB think my response is . . . unresponsive . . . to the OP, I won’t take it amiss if it disappears. I’m not looking to hijack.
FWIW, @bobbyB grok says there is no credible evidence that this he said this, and Grok reads a lot more newspapers and news sources than you or I could. So I think it is very unlikely that he said it, in public anyway.
Thanks, FO. I am going to have to figure out how to start using Grok.
This is why I think those European countries that condemn Trump on the recent diesel fuel deal with Putin (and I condemn it) would do well to reflect on Europe’s own fecklessness and hypocrisy on the whole Net Zero agenda. It’s a massive act of self harm, as foolish as granting asylum to hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly Muslim immigrants from the Near East and ME, with little regard to the pace of change and framework of assimilation, as encouraged by Angela Merkel, the worst German Chancellor since unification.
Germany should have been expanding, not reducing, its nuclear power. Given its engineering capabilities, the country would be well placed to develop small modular reactors at scale. So why not?
I think that Germany, and many (not all) European countries, have in different ways allowed the Man-diminishing Dark Green environmentalism to drive policy. The underlying philosophy is that human flourishing isn’t important, or shouldn’t be. This is a religious dogma.
A few years ago I attended an off-record briefing with German businessmen and policymakers and I asked about Germany’s gas imports from Russia and its nuclear power policy. I was told that the state of public opinion wouldn’t permit a change.
Decline is a choice. And here we are.
In Russian culture to smile without reason (other than with close family of very close friends) is the sign of either an idiot or a liar – that is why (for example) the Marxist rulers of the Soviet Union made people smile and laugh – you can see the newsreel footage and the smiling and laughing is clearly false, it was form of ritual humilation for Russians (“act like an idiot – or we will kill you and your family” every person in the crowd knows this).
When people on “RT” and so on, talk about the need to combat the evil of Carbon Dioxide, or the institutional racism of the West, (and-so-on) they often can not help themselves from smirking – they are lying (saying things they know to be false), and so the little smile appears (as opposed to the Po Faced Western media types – who actually believe their own bovine excrement).
The German government and other governments, have indeed done exactly what Mr Putin would want – close down their nuclear power stations and make themselves dependent on Russian energy, and import massive numbers of Third Worlders (who, naturally enough, engage in the increase of their own numbers via births – if you are waiting for these populations to “assimilate” I have a nice bridge to sell you) – thus causing chaos in Western nations, in order to avoid the dreaded charge of “racism”. The West is in terrible decline – and Mr Putin is delighted, because Mr Putin does not understand that the Slavophiles were WRONG – Russia is itself part of the West (something that both Mr Putin and his Western enemies would angerly deny) and if the West dies – Russia-dies-with-it. Mr Putin’s “friends” the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic world (at least the Shia Islamic world – although most of the Islamic soldiers in the Russian Army are Sunni) are NOT really friends, indeed they would happily torture him to death the second he is no longer useful.
bobby b – President Zelensky does not care what people like you and me think – he has made a bet on the Democrats, and that bet is likely to pay off – as the Dems are likely to take Congress.
Of course the Dems do not give a damn about Ukrainians, indeed they want to replace this historic Western people – as they wish to replace all Europeans (including those in North America, Australia and New Zealand) – as part of the international agenda.
But the Dems do support the war – they support the war unconditionally, and Mr Putin’s invasion was UNJUST (that much is TRUE). The real reason they hate Mr Putin is somewhat different, his refusal to obey orders (which was clear even back in the Clinton Administration days) Mr Putin’s desire to be an independnent Dictator (vicious, cruel, but also independent – which makes Mr Putin’s present dependence on Islamic soldiers and on supplies from the People’s Republic of China rather ironic, he is NOT now independent at all), rather than be a servant of the International Community. But President Zelensky does not care WHY the Dems hate Mr Putin, he just cares that they do hate Mr Putin.
They will give President Zelensky a blank cheque – and permission to do whatever he believes is necessary.
In his position, that is all President Zelensky cares about – and I can understand him thinking like that.
I do not share the worship of him that is common in the West, indeed even when he was elected he reminded me too much of Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Trudeau (I would not have voted for him – but I am not Ukrainian, so it is not my decision) – but I can understand why he would bet on the Dems, do things for them (such as increase diesel prices – to help with the MidTerm elections) so they will do things for him – in his place, I might do the same.
Even his conduct in 2020 is perfectly understandable – President Zelensky was told (by all the members of the international community) that President Trump was going to LOSE – that no matter what the voters did, the number of votes (votes – not voters) supporting Mr Biden would be higher than the number of votes for President Trump.
So why help President Trump by exposing the corruption of Hunter and Joseph Biden?
After all, regardless of what the voters wanted, Mr Biden was going to become President.
By the way – Mr Putin’s media and the Western “liberals” who hate Mr Putin, are on-the-same-side in every election or other conflict in Africa, East Asia or Latin America.
They both support the leftist side in all these areas – in every country in these regions.
The only difference is that the Russian government KNOWS it is supporting shits – whereas the Western “liberals” seem to kid themselves that they are supporting people who will “make the lives of the people better”.
Not just Russian roubles – Chinese renminbi is a big part of the “green energy transition” away from having any actual energy.