What would Charles de Gaulle have said? Or done? It’s unlikely he would have found himself in Hollande’s servile shoes, since the old general was a fierce patriot and fought to keep France independent from Washington’s dominion.
Hollande: The absolute nadir of French dignity.
[box type=”bio”] We reproduce below an excerpt —annotated by us in italics—from a report by Reuters focusing on an embarrassing spat between France and Russia which underscores the EU subservience to Washington’s designs. [/box]
Sink or sell? Russia spat leaves France with warships to spare
The two Mistral-class helicopter carriers Sevastopol (Bottom) and Vladivostok are seen at the STX Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard site in Saint-Nazaire, western France, May 25, 2015. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
For sale: two French-built helicopter carriers, tested by Russians. Buy now for only 1.2 billion euros ($1.33 billion). Shipping extra.
Tensions between the West and Russia [created by the West] over Ukraine have blocked a deal in which Moscow was to buy the ships, leaving Paris trying to negotiate a face-saving compromise and work out what to do with two unwanted warships.
“There are three possibilities: deliver the boats to Russia, sell them to someone else or destroy them,” said a source close to the matter.
It is an embarrassment that is not of French President Francois Hollande’s making. [Nonsense. It is Hollande’s call. He is the current president, and he is just refusing to lead.] The deal stems from his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision in 2011 to make the West’s first major foreign arms sale to Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
But it will be difficult for Hollande politically and underlines the difficulty for France to reconcile its ambitions as a global arms supplier – a sector on which thousands of French jobs depend -[High time for humanity to eliminate having huge numbers of jobs depend on major war industries and profiteers for their existence.] with commitments to NATO allies.
It may also be very costly.
At present the delivery of the ships remains indefinitely suspended rather than formally canceled. But even Russian officials say now that they are not interested in taking the Mistral-class carriers. [Russia was buying the ships as a shortcut to their quick rearmament in view of Washington’s virulent warmongering right on her doorstep. But, in general, carriers are tactically a thing of the past: they are enormously costly to maintain and protect and in a true war easily targeted and sunk. The French capitalists reneged on the deal because they were threatened by Washington et al with the loss of bigger sales contracts to Poland, Japan, etc., and incur Washington’s wrath, which they fear more than losing their national independence. ]
Moreover France’s NATO allies, notably the United States and Poland – with whom Paris is negotiating 6 billion euros of defense deals – would be outraged if France tried to get the deal back on track with the crisis in Ukraine far from resolved. [Again, a crisis created by Washington. This historical fact cannot be erased even if the Western media ignore it and betray the truth in what now amounts to a scandalous imposture, indecent even by their pathetic standards.]
That leaves the Russians demanding not only a full refund but also the penalties that go for pulling the deal.
“That Russia won’t take them (the ships) – that’s a fait accompli,” Oleg Bochkaryov, deputy head of Russia’s Military Industrial Commission, told daily Kommersant last week. “There is only one discussion going on now: the amount of money that should be returned to Russia.” [The Russians have decided to build their own ships, and return to self-sufficiency, as they always were in Soviet times. Which makes more sense from an strategic viewpoint. Why trust the enemy to provide the weapons for self-defense? ]
IF YOU LIKE, READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT HERE.
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Remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s).
