Voice of Russia
December 26, 2013
President Putin man of the year/Obama an empty raincoat – George Galloway
John Robles
Photo: RIA Novosti
With regard to Syria, President Vladimir Putin, in the words of George Galloway, “played a blinder” and prevented a cataclysm for the entire world an accomplishment more than worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was also instrumental in preventing the evisceration of the Syrian people and Syria and also had a “great year”. Outspoken defender of rule of law, sovereignty and the rights of the people, British MP George Galloway, spoke with the Voice of Russia about these issues and more. Calling US President Obama an “empty raincoat”, he blasted Obama’s hypocrisy and callousness with regard to his attitude to the mothers of children who are “eviscerated by Hellfire Missiles” under Obama’s illegal and extra-judicially murder by drone of people around the world.
PART 1
PART 2
This is John Robles, you are listening to an interview with George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament. This is part 2 of an interview in progress. You can find the previous and the following parts of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com
Robles: Can I ask your opinion, since this is the Voice of Russia, what is your opinion about Russia’s position on Syria?
Galloway: President Putin is my man of the year. And I don’t see how anyone could stand up against that nomination. He really has played a blinder, first of all on the Snowden affair and then seizing the moment: I mean, John Kerry was in London when he presented that opportunity, when he said at a press conference with William Hague beside him, he said that: “… the only thing that can stop this imminent attack is for President Assad to give up his chemical weapons in their entirety.”
And as soon as I heard that, I realized that an opening had just presented itself, that no sooner had Kerry spoken, when President Putin and Minister Lavrov, who is another man who has had a great year, seized that opportunity and saved the world from a cataclysm. And if you don’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for that, I’m not sure what you’d get it for. Perhaps, like Obama, you get it for actually creating war and mayhem around the world.
Robles: I think that Nobel has lost its credibility anyway, especially with Obama. I mean, they should have demanded it back. He is engaged in continuous, open extra-judicial execution and he is non-apologetic about it.
Galloway: That’s right! And he holds a meeting every week, I think it is on Thursday, but it may be on Tuesday…
Robles: Terror Tuesday.
Galloway: It’s Tuesday. He goes through a kill list and signs people’s death warrants. Absolutely extra-judicially, extra-territorially, murderously. And yet at Sandy Hook and other places, he goes there and sobs and breaks into tears rolling down his face over the death of innocents in these maniacal shootouts in American schools. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him that mothers whose children are eviscerated by these Hellfire Missiles, are crying just the same as the mothers at Sandy Hook.
Robles: What did you think about Obama at Nelson Mandela’s funeral? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.
Galloway: I do, of course. I felt that the Obama myth has survived in some parts of the world, perhaps, obviously and particularly in Africa, but in truth President Obama is just an empty suit. The only thing that he has going for him, the only thing that is praiseworthy about him, is that he was a black man who got elected as President of the US.
He is a little better, if better at all, than George W. Bush, and you can’t say worse than that. And he doesn’t even have the alibi that George W. Bush had of being an imbecile. President Obama is a professor. He is probably the best educated president there’s ever been. And the alibi that Bush had just doesn’t wash with him. So, that is all the more condemnable.
Robles: Who would you say…? People have said: “Well, it is not his fault, there is this shadow government controlling everything, it is the CIA, it is the banking interests and monied interests that are controlling everything, it is not Obama’s fault that he betrayed his own people and everybody else when he became President.”
Galloway: I just don’t buy that. The elected President of the US is the most powerful man in the world. And that, at the beginning of his first term in his landslide victory, with the American capitalism on its knees, with the country embroiled in unpopular and losing wars, it was open to Obama to become Roosevelt +. He could have utterly transformed the landscape and he utterly failed to do so. He is just an empty raincoat, I’m sorry.
Robles: That’s true! I mean, even black Americans, they are worse off now than they were even in the 60s, when they were trying to get out of segregation. And they can’t say anything, the liberal left can’t say anything in the US against Obama because he is supposed to be “their” man. How can you say something bad about the first black president in history? But…
Galloway: You know, feminists, were equally wrong footed, when Margaret Thatcher became the Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, for a decade they had been telling us how different things would be if only women were in the top positions of power, how many fewer wars there would be, how much less aggression there would be in public life, how nicer and kinder and gentler politics would be. And Mrs. Thatcher came along and proved that it is not the presence of testicles in a leader that makes them venal, it is the politics and the economic beliefs that they have running through their veins; that’s what counts.
Robles: Well I think it’s what they have as well – a complete lack of conscience. Speaking about Thatcher, I was shocked when I found out about the people she’d let that had starved themselves to death.
Galloway: Indeed, the Irish hunger strikers were willfully starved to death by the Thatcher administration, and ten men were dead and blood flooded pitifully in Ireland and in Britain for many-many years, directly as a result of her obduracy. She thought nothing of assassination, she thought nothing of killing and she certainly thought nothing of laying waste industrial Britain and leaving it as a kind of postindustrial slagheap which sowed problems an ocean deep.
Robles: She devastated, as I understand, all the unions and all the working collectives and everything.
Galloway: Indeed, she destroyed the trade unionism; she destroyed 35% of manufacturing capacity in Britain which was considerably more than Hitler’s Luftwaffe managed to do. And her legacy is still causing grief and pain, even now that she is dead and twenty years after she left office.
Robles: I would call you, if don’t mind, a champion of legality and rule of law. I think you are one of the few people that I’ve heard that I agree with almost everything you say. Sergey Lavrov and President Putin have also been calling on the rule of law in solving conflicts, respect for sovereignty, respect for international law. Do you see any way to bring back, or rein in, or somehow bring sanity back into the world?
Galloway: We have to draw a line in the sand now. And that line should have been drawn over Libya. The Libyan dictatorship was a vile one. And it took an act of real genius to replace the vile dictatorship of Gaddafi with a worse set of rulers than existed before them. And this should have been stopped, and it wasn’t.
And Russia and China should have vetoed the proposal to impose the NATO-led no-fly zone on Libya, which became not a no-flies but a plenty-fly zone, it became a free-bomb zone. And it led to the thirst for regime change by foreign attack, invasion of one kind or another, and that thirst becoming literally ravenous. And we are lucky that we stopped it after Libya, and we had to.
We have to undo the Blair-Chicago doctrine – this notion of a responsibility to protect – which of course is open to the interpretation of any member state. I mean, for example, according to the Chicago doctrine which has been now used in Yugoslavia…
Robles: You are speaking about NATO doctrines, as far as I know.
Galloway: Yes, but they have been allowed to become United Nation’s doctrine. They were stopped by Russia and China over Syria. But they must be rolled back, because if you allow any member state to invade any other member state, because it claims that it has a responsibility to protect people in that country, then the recipe for a total international anarchy is complete.
Imagine now, if President Putin were to invade Ukraine, he could easily claim that he had a responsibility to protect the Russian-speaking people there and he could move the Russian armed forces in there. He could easily have done so in Latvia and Lithuania, and other places where the rights and even the safety of Russian-speaking people there were being prejudiced, some of them extreme prejudiced.
You simply can’t have a world where any member of the United Nations can invade any other member on the basis of this responsibility to protect. We have to go back to a time, it seems long and distant. Alas, I’ve lived long enough to remember when it was the norm, which is that every nation state is sovereign and that it has sovereign rights, and one of those sovereign rights is not to be invaded and occupied and regime-changed by other states. We have to get back to that situation or the world will become increasingly lawless and anarchic.
That was the end of part 2 of an interview with British Member of Parliament George Galloway. You can find the previous and following parts of this interview on our website at voiceofrussia.com.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_12_26/President-Putin-man-of-the-year-Obama-an-empty-raincoat-George-Galloway-5159/