by Alex Christoforou, The Duran:
Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, first took office at the very start of the 21st Century, when he hoped and intended for there to emerge a real partnership between Russia and the rest of The West. He then interpreted The West (U.S.-and-allied countries) to be motivated by basically benign intentions, which he shared himself. He considered himself to hold Western values, in the best tradition of The Enlightenment. However, continued Western criticisms against Russia’s Government, while he continued to speak only respectfully of The West, built up in him, and, increasingly, came to disturb him, and caused him to think that maybe nothing that he could do would overcome a continuing rejection of Russia by The West. Gradually, a questioning of The West’s sincerity that it — like Russia — had actually ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, arose in him, especially so in the wake of the clearly lie-based U.S-and-UK invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, and other instances of the U.S. Government’s failing to adhere to basic democratic standards, and even to trustworthiness — at all — in international affairs.
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Finally, on 10 February 2007, at the “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy”, he publicly set forth, both to The West and to his fellow-Russians, the reasons for his growing distrust of The West.
A Google search for the speech produces “About 1,010,000 results”, but (unless maybe on the thousandth page) not the reliably full and easy-to-read transcript by the Russian Government, which is at http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034, and which has been saved in the Web-archiving services, such as at https://web.archive.org/web/20230116012656/http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034 and https://ghostarchive.org/archive/E1xji. However, Google’s algorithm does produce one of the official Russia transcripts, but it’s the least easy-to-read one, lacking any paragraph-breaks. The Google-search also produces, as its finds, loads of hostile U.S.-and-allied commentaries about the speech, such as Politico’s “Opinion | The Speech In Which Putin Told Us Who He Was”, which states “15 years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin used the [Munich Security Conference] gathering to issue a broadside that definitively rejected the European security order many in his audience had spent years trying to build. [That’s a false statement: Putin criticized instead The West’s behaving in ways that directly contradicted The West’s own statements and promises. He was saying they’re deceitful and aggressive.] In February 2007, Putin stood in Munich’s Bayerischer Hof for 30 minutes and accused the United States of creating a unipolar world “in which there is one master, one sovereign.” He added, “at the end of the day this is pernicious.”” So, if what Putin said was true, then what’s wrong with his statement? The article didn’t address that question, but merely assumed it to be false. The article equated “the U.S.-led liberal order” as constituting “the Free World” and said that Putin had said that this “was of no intereest or value to Russia.” The article said that “what Putin meant by Russian greatness was not strengthening the rule of law and building up Russia’s economy and international stature in the world.” But, in fact, nothing even remotely like a phrase such as “Russian greatness” appeared anywhere in the speech, and not even in the Q&As afterward — the entire article is a string of Cold-War lies about post-Cold-War Russia, and especially about Putin, and most especially about the speech itself — which it failed to quote from even once (other than the phrase “at the end of the day this is pernicious,” which was distorted by quoting it out-of-context, the actual context being: “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign [the imperial power] itself because it destroys itself from within”). That article is typical of what comes up from a Web-search for Putin’s speech: total misrepresentations.
There are some favorable references in The West to that speech, but only on Web-sites that are suppressed or even banned by Google. The great geostrategist, and former U.S. Marine and Chief U.N. Inspector for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (who found them all and oversaw the destruction of them all), Scott Ritter, did an interview at the “U.S. Tour of Duty” Web-site, on 11 January 2023, “Scott Ritter Extra Ep. 35: Ask the Inspector” in which he said, at 51:19 in the video, in which he said, “The speech itself was brilliant, but the mark of true genius — political genius — came in the extended question and answer period that Putin gave afterwards, where he made every western official in the crowd twitch uncomfortably in their seat because he was hitting them with the hard truth.” Since Ritter is a person of proven and enormous personal courage and honesty, and he knows whereof he speaks, that is exceedingly high praise. A listener then asked him to help her find the speech online, and since Ritter’s response (in a video, in which there is no way to provide a live link to click onto so that a reader can easily check out and examine the evidence itself, on one’s own) might not have been helpful — especially given Google’s algorithms that are used in the search — I shall here provide what I consider to be key excerpts from Putin’s speech, and from the Q&A after it, so as to represent adequately what Putin said, and the spirit in which he said it, on that occasion:
I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee”. Where are these guarantees? [For the answer to that, see this: GHW Bush personally instructed Helmut Kohl on 24 February 1990 that, despite Bush’s having instructed all of his emissaries to say this (that the Cold War would be over when it would end on the Soviet Union’s side) off-the-record, they will now all proceed forward to deny having ever said it and to continue the Cold war, but now against — and to conquer — Russia itself. This, however, was not publicly known yet, in 2007, when Putin was speaking.] …
It is hard to overestimate the significance of the intercultural, interreligious, intercivilisational dialogue in the formation of a stable and democratic global management system backed by international law and the central role of the UN [i.e.: NOT of the U.S. nor any other mere country or grouping of countries, to create international laws]. “The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one nation… it must be a peace which rests on the cooperative efforts of the whole world.” These words by Franklin Delano Roosevelt are engraved on the memorial in Fairbanks (Alaska) honouring the Russian and US pilots who flew aircraft as part of the Lend-Lease program during World War. …
And, of course, we would like to interact with responsible and independent partners with whom we could work together in constructing a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few [referring here to the U.S. and its allies], but for all.
