PRESS RELEASE
German Political Leader Oskar LaFontaine Blasts U.S. Policy Toward Russia
June 24, 2015 (EIRNS)—RT reported yesterday that Oskar Lafontaine, a left-wing German politician and former German Finance Minister, made a strong attack on the U.S. for its policies on Russia and Ukraine in a recent posting on his Facebook page, where he also urged the European Union to oppose Washington.
Russia’s RT reports that Lafontaine’s Facebook post "cannot be quoted fully quote due to strong language," and shows a picture of the posting, in German, which begins: "F**k the U.S.!..." Lafontaine proceeds to call U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter "the Secretary of War", and Washington’s policies "imperialism." "The U.S. Secretary of War calls on Europeans to confront the Russian ‘aggression’," Lafontaine writes, [but] "The Europeans have every reason to oppose the U.S. aggression."
Lafontaine catalogs the U.S. military build-up ordered by Ashton Carter, including the deployment of 250 military vehicles, including Abrams tanks near the Russian border. Then Lafontaine cites "the Grand Master of U.S. diplomacy George Kennan, who served as US Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1950s and to Yugoslavia in the 1960s." Kennan, says Lafontaine, "described the eastward expansion of NATO as the biggest mistake of U.S. foreign policy after the Second World War, because [the expansions] have resulted in a new Cold War."
Lafontaine attacked Victoria Nuland on his Facebook page, quoting her boast that the U.S. "spent more than $5 billion to destabilize Ukraine." Lafontaine said the EU, with the encouragement of the U.S., recently agreed to extend economic sanctions against Russia for six more months... but, RT reports, LaFontaine points to a recent study which shows they are hurting the EU more than initially expected, threatening some 2.5 million jobs.
Lafontaine also reminds readers of a leaked phone call where Nuland made the "F**k the EU" retort to the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev, and concludes on his Facebook page: "You [the U.S.] continue to play with fire, and Europe has paid with revenue declines in trade with Russia and the loss of jobs ... We need a European foreign policy that restrains warmongering U.S. imperialism!"
In his long career, Lafontaine served as minister-president of the tiny state of the Saar on the French-German border; mayor of its capital, Saarbrücken; German Secretary of Finance; Chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SDP); and later co-chair of the new left-wing party Die Linke (The Left). In the late 1990s, the English tabloid The Sun called him "the most dangerous man in Europe" for advocating the regulation of financial transactions at the European level. Following a well-orchestrated media campaign and losing ground to the neoliberal forces in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) around Chancellor Gerhard Schrüder, Lafontaine resigned from all his posts, prompting the German stock markets to rise by five percent. In 2005, Lafontaine left the SPD after four decades and joined the new Die Linke formation. Under his leadership, the party grew electorally. But Lafontaine came under attack again, this time from the government-oriented wing of Die Linke, who saw in Lafontaine a barrier to forming future coalitions with the SPD and the Greens. After battling cancer, Lafontaine resigned from the party’s leadership in 2010, but still leads the organization in Saar.
