 Get out your notebook, Laura. Two, one. Welcome to CN Live, season five, episode 12, Global Greens, War or Peace. I'm Joe Laurier, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News. With the dangers of a wider Middle East war threatening to break out in the perilous conflict in Ukraine far from over, where do Green parties around the world stand on the question of peace and war? The Green Party movement began in the Australian state of Tasmania in April 1972, when the first Green Party in the world contested in state elections. Later that year, the first Green Party in Europe was founded in Switzerland. The next year saw the first British Green Party, which began as the Ecology Party. From the first, an anti-war and non-violent position was at the core of the Green Party politics worldwide. Indeed, peace was one of the four pillars of the Green movement, along with ecology, social justice and democracy. In the Australian capital of Canberra in 2001, the Global Green Charter was adopted by 800 delegates from 72 national Green parties. It called for ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, non-violence, sustainability and respect for diversity. So peace was a bedrock principle of the Green movement from the start, including in what became the largest and most influential Green Party in the world, in Germany. They began as an anti-war party too in 1980, but within 20 years the German Greens had broken with this tradition, supporting NATO's attack on Serbia in 1999 and then NATO's war in Afghanistan in 2001. This split the Global Greens movement. Today, under the leadership of Annalena Baerbach, a German foreign minister, the German Green Party is one of the most pro-war parties in the world, rivaling the US Democratic Party. Baerbach is infamous for saying we, meaning the West, are at war with Russia over Ukraine. Last week she was in Israel, giving unqualified support for Israel as it pursues policies of shutting off water, food and electricity to 2.2 million Gazans, demanding hospitals in the North of Gaza evacuate 2,000 patients in a war zone, had already killed more than 2,500 Gazan civilians with Arab bombardments, and is poised to launch a ground war that threatens to engulf the entire Middle East in war. Indeed, differences within the Global Greens movement were starkly demonstrated earlier today, Monday, in Australia, when Federal Green Party leader Adam Bant, according to the Australian newspaper, quote, tried to amend a statement of support for Israel with one condemning, quote, war crimes perpetrated by the State of Israel, including the bombing of Palestinian civilians. Quote, quote, in the Australian, Mr. Bant said the Greens condemned the Hamas attack on innocent Israelis and called for Israeli hostages to be released, saying there was, quote, no place for anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. But he said the upcoming invasion of Gaza loomed as, quote, not just a humanitarian catastrophe, but a war crime. Quote, Australia cannot stay silent and indeed back that invasion, Mr. Bant said, backing UN condemnation of Israel's decision to prevent food, water, fuel from getting into the enclave. The Greens amendment was defeated 107 to 7 with a number of MPs outside the chamber at the time. The motion was ultimately supported, overwhelming 134 votes to four, but only the Greens voting against. That was from the Australian today. Our guests to discuss this issue are Senator David Shubridge, a Green Senator, former Senator Lee Rayonan, also from Australia. Dimitri Laskaris, who we hope will join us later, a Green politician from Canada. And yesterday we interviewed Diana Johnstone, an American journalist who was a former EU Greens group press officer at the European Parliament. She spoke to us, she was on the ground in those days during the changes in the German Green Party. And we're going to begin by speaking to Lee Rayonan. I'm Joe Valoria, and this episode is produced by Kathy Volgen. Ali, thank you very much for joining us. I want to begin with you. Just a little bit background of the Green Party movement began in Australia and the state of us as Tasmania, as I said, what prompted the start of the Green Party and tell me what role did the stance of non-violence and anti-war play in its formation? Well, I've got a very proud history, the Greens in Australia, and I've been very fortunate to be part of much of that. I do just need to correct you, there is contested history here, but the history book show that the first Greens party was actually formed in New South Wales. But I think we can explore that at another time. And happy would love to do that with you. Look, what's wonderful about the history of the Greens is that we literally grew out of those very impressive social change movements of the 1980s and the last half of the last century, the women's movement, the environment movement, the social change movement, also the work of the trade union movement. And this has been incredibly important for the work that we've been involved in for our success in getting more people elected. But it's also, I think, we face many challenges as a party. And how we work in social change movements is something that I hope we can explore in this discussion, because you've outlined a number of the problems that the Greens have run into in other countries, and we've had our fair share in Australia too. And often that is when we get out of touch with what is going on in the wider movement. So I hope we can talk about that, because I think the Greens have a great deal to offer, like we do in this present issue with the tragedy that's happening in Gaza. But if you're not rooted in the social change movement, not working closely with unions, you can get out of touch and make the mistakes that we see to this day in the German Greens. Thank you, Lee, for that answer. I just wonder, what was your role personally in the formation of the Green Party? Can you tell us about that? The first Green Party was the Sydney Greens in Australia. It formed in 1984, registered in 1985. I joined in 1990. And what inspired me to join was those four principles that you have already outlined to our listeners. So in the 1980s, I saw the work of the Greens. I saw them as very courageous people and people who weren't just locked into parliamentary solutions. They were locked into building alliances, alliances that were about really making life better for ordinary people. And this is, I think, now a really big challenge for the Greens, because these days, to be frank about it, we're a very middle-class party. We are the majority of our members, the majority of our voters. Middle-class, tertiary educated. And that's just how it's played out. But we need to address this, because it means that our work with working-class people is not being developed. We hardly ever hear people even talk about class issues, who let alone use terms like class analysis, working class, etc. One, they're a big block of voters. But two, these people are becoming more and more disadvantaged across the world. The world is becoming a more unequal place, greater inequality, greater wealth concentrated amongst the rich, and it is happening at a faster rate. So I think this is a critical issue to keep the Greens grounded, to actually help grow our vote and get more people in parliament, but to grow the social change movement that will drive the progressive change this world so desperately needs. Well, as an emeritus member of the Green Party, and can you tell me how you see the global movement developing and what role Germany has played the German Green Party, particularly this leader, Anna-Lena Baerbach? Look, initially, the German Greens inspired people enormously. There's a beautiful story, actually, how the German Greens took the name Greens from Australia, not actually from the Green Party, but from because this is prior to when we're formed, from the Green Band, which is this wonderful movement that has relevance to today that brought unions, students, residents, various radical activists together in actually going on strike and building community support for public housing, housing to save urban bushland, and a whole number of other fantastic campaigns. So that was a big part of our early history. Look, the situation in Germany, I've got to say I'm not an expert on that. I'll leave it to other speakers who are on this session tonight, but I've followed some of their changes in policy around nuclear energy, what happened in the Kosovo developments decades ago. And again, I think that's really troubling. And it's a real reminder that the Greens need to learn these lessons because we can fall into more and more of these traps that the social democrats, social democrats were formed to do good things by the people of this world. And so often they're sold out, and we need to learn the lessons and ensure we don't go that path down that path. Thank you. David, David Shubridge, did you take part in what happened on the floor of the parliament today? Could you tell us exactly what went down? Well, we had parallel motions in our House of Representatives, our lower house, and in the Senate where I sit. So the divisions and the debate that you talk about in the House was being mirrored in the Senate as well, where my colleagues moved the same amendment to the government's motion. But I think probably the real ideological divide that we saw playing out in parliament today in the Australian parliament was one of, which is rooted in that fourth pillar for the Greens of peace and disarmament and peace and nonviolence. The most offensive thing in the motion that was being moved by the government today, it's a Labor government notionally as socially, you know, a social democrat notionally left of center government in Australia. The core failure in that motion was to condemn the collective punishment and the war crimes that have been instituted by the state of Israel and to fail utterly to place any context in the appalling violence that we're seeing. And I want to condemn the violence that Hamas instituted against Israeli civilians. But the failure to, in any way, ground what we're seeing in decades and decades and decades of illegal occupation and violent assaults against the Palestinians, people's rights to a homeland and their rights to live within secure UN mandated borders. The failure to even mention those two things in a motion about the violence that we're seeing now, it was extraordinary. How could any fair-minded observer, any fair-minded friend, look at what is happening at the moment with Israel threatening the lives of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, almost half of them are children, some 40% aged 15 and under, telling them that if they don't flee their homes to heaven knows where, there's nowhere they can flee to, that they risk being literally blown apart in their homes and in their neighborhoods and in their communities. These are innocent civilians who have committed no crime. At the same time as Israel is conducting an indiscriminate bombing campaign killing thousands and thousands of Palestinians, issuing statements of collective punishment to exclude water and medicines and basic essentials of living. And at the time that the World Health Organization has said the directive from the Israeli military to evacuate hospitals was a death sentence to the patients in those hospitals. Now, how could you put a motion to a parliament, notionally coming from a Senate-left party, which what Labor asserts to be in Australia? How could you put a motion about what is occurring at the moment and not reference that? And so that was the ideological debate, that was the core debate that was playing out in both the Senate where I am and in the House of Representatives. And we wouldn't put our name to a motion, although much of it was unobjectionable, calling out anti-Semitism, calling out Islamophobia, being deeply concerned of the violence that's been inflicted against Israeli civilians. But to not express the same concern about Palestinian lives, to not call out the war crimes of Israel, to not put it in the context of the occupation, that was what was being played out. And remarkably, in a democratically elected chamber, it wasn't a close vote. We saw the right-wing coalition parties and Labor join together and oppose our position and adopt a deeply, deeply unsettling motion. I think it's troubling that it takes an enormous amount of courage to be able to say what you just said and to say that in an amendment to a resolution, and that there is a living in a context where the same thing happened with the Ukraine war. There were certain things you weren't allowed to say whether that was an historical context that created that war without in any way supporting one side or the other, just giving facts about it. This was shut down in many various ways, and it seems like that's the same process going on here, that they wouldn't allow you to even say that, and one cannot say that. Can you tell me a little more about this environment now that we're living in, this political climate? Well, I don't think this is new for advocates of any kind of justice for the Palestinian people. I've been in politics in an elected capacity, first at SAID and now federal for over a decade, and this brutal attack on anybody who stands up for the basic essential rights of the Palestinian peoples to state, to self-determination, to the core. What I would assume would be the core human rights that all democratically elected representatives would advocate for have been mercilessly attacked. Too often you see people advocating a sense of global human rights, and there's an elastics on there, advocacy for global human rights, and when you go to the footnotes it says, well, human rights, everybody but Palestinians. What I will say though is that in the discussions we're having in the community, we had a very large rally on the weekend in Sydney, thousands and thousands of people came out to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and call for an end of the war crimes against the Palestinian people, as well as calling out anti-Semitism, as well as calling out the crimes of Hamas. But that rally in Sydney was covered in a more balanced way than I have seen in the past. I think that the mood in the centre of the Australian public is more open to seeing the reality of what's happening on the ground, and I think the ability of a small media clique to completely own the narrative is more limited now than it was even five years ago. And that rally that we had, thousands of people, Australians, many of them obviously, from the Palestinian diaspora and the broader Middle East diaspora but also from across society, came out even though our police, with the active encouragement from, again, a labour premier of the state of New South Wales, were threatening to use extraordinary powers and arrest anybody who turned up and dared protest for the rights of Palestinians. Those threats were vicious and they were nasty coming from the premier and the police in New South Wales. I, together with a bunch of lawyers and advocates stood up and opposed those, said we bring legal challenges if they brought those kinds of actions against peaceful protest, but in the face of those threats, we still saw thousands and thousands and thousands of Australians come out and rally and I think we should also look for what's changing and for the seeds of hope in this and I felt that on the weekend of the rally. Well, in the face of all that, how important is a united green movement around the world? Should green parties be speaking with one voice when it comes to these questions of war and the dangerous time we're living in? Well, I think a global peace movement has never been more critical. I would hope that the Greens can be a part of that and make those global connections to speak about peace and non-violence, to call out war crimes, call for a de-escalation and advocate for converting those trillions of dollars from weapons into the things that are absolutely threatening to our existence, not just the war that those weapons create, but imagine redirecting those funds to fight impoverty and climate change and the benefits that the global community could have for that. I don't think there's more important time for us to have global solidarity. I think the Greens party are a part of that and I hope a growing part of that. I just note that in the recent New Zealand elections, we saw an increase, a significant increase in the Greens vote in New Zealand as well. So, I am hopeful that we can be a part of that, but I think we're setting too high a bar if we say we must have global unanimity amongst the Green party. There will be regional differences, there will be local differences, but I think one thing that hopefully will distinguish us going forward is that global commitment to that fourth pillar of peace and non-violence. In our interview with Diana Johnson, who was the press officer for the European Green group in the late 80s, she said that it was the pursuit of power in coalitions in Germany that allowed the Greens to make these decisions to support the war in Afghanistan and before that the NATO war on Serbia. Is it ever worth giving up principles like that to get power as much as it's important to have power to affect change? Well, I think Lee spoke to one of the ways that hopefully a well-grounded Greens movement can avoid some of those parliamentary traps. The Labor Party that has been behaving in the way in which I described earlier started as a left-wing party committed to social progress and to opposing the status quo. They got trapped in parliamentary politics and trapped. The end result for some of these parties that initially came with a strong left-wing progressive drive to them becomes obtaining power and remaining in power. If that is the beginning and the end of your parliamentary goals to obtain power and remain in power and you're willing to cut your cloth accordingly, junk the principles that get in the way of coming into power and remaining in power, then why are you there? What is your purpose if it's just to be another politician desperately keen to junk their principles to come into and remain in power? This is a long-term game for me. In many ways, the planet can't have too long a game. We've really got to solidify our global position on the left, I think, urgently. But you can see it. If you go into parliamentary politics, you just simply look around you. You can see that how enticing it is to junk your principles, to just say, oh, well, in the future, oh, well, I'll just abandon this principle now. And at some point in the future, I'll have sufficient power that I can actually act in the manner of principle. Are you surrendering your soul in those moments? And if you look at parliamentary politics, it does tend to be a permanent surrender of the soul. Under danger of a wider war in the Middle East, Ron has told Israel through the UN that if they should launch a ground invasion, that they will respond, most likely from Hezbollah in the north. We're looking then at a possible intervention, even by the US, which has sent two aircraft carrier groups to the Eastern Mediterranean, which might bring any wrong. What I'm saying here is a real possibility of global conflict here, let alone what's happening between Russia and the West over Ukraine. Can we actually stand today and allow Western leaders to go to Israel and to condemn absolutely what Hamas did? But to give carte blanche to the Israelis when they have stated openly they're going to cut off water, which in a few days could kill everyone in Gaza. I mean, there's been nothing so horrendous that Israelis have ever said in this long 70 year history that anyone could remember, that I could certainly remember. What message has to be sent to Western leaders right now? The role of democratically elected leaders needs to be a global call for enormous restraint, a global call to the Israeli military to stop the bombing, stop the invasion. Remember here, one side is a modern state with a modern administrative arrangements with a notionally democratic political culture, with one of the most powerful militaries in the world backed up by a global superpower. The other side are two million people without a defence force, without F-16 fighter planes, without the capacity to defend themselves. They have been mercilessly and brutally attacked by one of the most powerful militaries in the world. How could we not be demanding restraint? How could we not be raising the fact that what we're seeing here are war crimes on a large scale? And how could we not be calling for restraint? And in the absence of restraint, actually placing significant repercussions against the Israeli state for this escalation of violence against the Palestinian people. 600,000 people, it's estimated, have fled their homes. They have nowhere to go. They may run out of food and water in days. And my government, the Australian government, has said nothing about restraint. The United States government has said nothing about restraint. The UK government has said nothing about restraint. How could that be? Lee, what would you like to add something to what we've been discussing? It just makes me incredibly sad. I've got to say on a personal level, I was in Palestine a few months ago. I've been there a number of times. I've been in Degas once and the thought of what they're doing, like terrible things happen in the world and genocide has been committed on many communities. But now the world is watching. We've got no excuse. David's outlined it very clearly. And I think we've all got to see how we can take action and put pressure on the leaders. Western leaders need to wake up to themselves. And history teaches us that it's when the public has a strong voice of anger. And at the moment, that's certainly growing in Australia. And I'd encourage everybody to be talking to their friends, their workmates, their families and picking up the phone and just telling their representatives that they have to change. Like they are complicit in one of the most horrendous war crimes we've actually ever seen, because we know it's happening. We have to act. Yeah. And as David said, the world leaders need to loudly call for restraint on Israel. And we have had the German Fire Minister going there and doing the opposite. We had Diana Johnstone speaking to us in detail about what happened with the German Greens. And I think we're going to play that now, Kevin. I want to thank... No, Dimitri is here. Oh, I'm sorry. We have our other guest. He must have just arrived. He did. Dimitri. Dimitri Lesker is coming from Greece. I'm sorry. I was about to just shut down this interview. So you arrived in the nick of time. Can you hear me? I can. Actually, I got here in my sincere apologies. I had a little emergency, but I've been here since about 105. And I've heard I've had the benefit of hearing the excellent and insightful discussion. So thank you very much. Can you add to that, please? We were talking, of course, about the history of the Green Movement, anti-war position being a major aspect of it. And we've seen the German Green Party moving away from that from 20 years ago and backing America's war, Israeli war, et cetera. What about in Canada? How is the Canadian Green Party right now, in terms of the question of peace and war? Is it still committed to the original principles of the Green Movement, or is it sort of aligning with the U.S. Democratic Party and with the German Greens? Certainly aligned with the German Greens. And I think I have painfully experienced in a very personal way this struggle within the Green Movement between the so-called centrists and those who support the imperialistic and colonial policies of the United States government and its allies on the one hand and those who are truly committed to the core values of the Green Party, which haven't been mentioned yet. And those core values are sustainability, non-violence, social justice, respect for diversity, ecological wisdom, and participatory democracy. And I believe that those are the core values of all Green Parties around the world, including the German Greens. And I've said many times as a Green that those values are inextricably intertwined. You can't have social justice without non-violence. You can't have sustainability. You can't have participatory democracy without non-violence. And sending lethal weaponry to Ukraine in a hot war zone when we ourselves provoke the war is the precise antithesis of non-violence. Now I said that I was in the painful personal way I've experienced this struggle. It started for me personally when I was appointed to the shadow cabinet of the Green Party of Canada by the current leader, Elizabeth May, in 2016. I was appointed as the Justice Critic. And at that time, for professional reasons, I'm a lawyer, I had to go to Israel to interview some witnesses and a class action that I was pursuing here against a Canadian mining company. And I took the opportunity at the end of that trip to tour the West Bank. I was guided by a Palestinian Canadian artist by the name of Reheb Nezal, who had been shot by an Israeli sniper six months earlier in the West Bank while she was peacefully photographing an Israeli skunk truck. What I saw so appalled me that when I came back to Canada, I had to take action. And just to clarify, what I saw is not nearly as bad as what is happening today in the West Bank and certainly nowhere near as bad as what's happening to Gaza. What I did when I came back in my capacity as Justice Critic was I brought forward a resolution calling for the Green Party of Canada to support the BDS movement. Immediately, the leader, Elizabeth May, opposed me, even though I was a member of her own shadow cabinet. And in the convention that year in August in Ottawa, the nation's capital, to my great surprise, the party members adopted this resolution over the vigorous objections of the leader. The next day, she threatened to resign. And with effectively a political gun to its head, the federal council of our party decided to convene another emergency meeting to give the members an opportunity to rescind the decision that they had made to support the BDS movement. Over the next three months, I think it became, before that emergency meeting happened, it became quite clear to, I think, Elizabeth May, and to those who supported her, that the numbers were not there for her to sheet the outcome she wanted. And so she negotiated a compromise resolution with me. The so-called compromise resolution removed the acronym BDS, but was in all other respects substantively the same. And in fact, contained new provisions calling, for example, for Israel to be hauled before the International Criminal Court. And so we were the only party in Canada that stage, the only party that had a policy, a formal policy member approved, calling for Israel to be subjected to some form of sanction for its unspeakable crimes. So fast forward to 2020, Elizabeth May resigned after 13 years in the position of leader, and a leadership contest was called. I threw my hat into the ring and did so explicitly on an Ecosocialist platform. And one of the planks of my platform was Canada's withdrawal from NATO. And of course, a complete ban on the sale of weapons to human rights violators, including but not limited to Israel. And I was opposed by seven other candidates, one of whom was a centrist, and I think fair to say a Zionist. Her name was Annemie Paul, and she was explicitly supported by the leader, Elizabeth May. And you don't have to take my word for that because Elizabeth May admitted it in an op-ed in the drama star afterwards that she had supported her. And I ended up finishing second with 45% of the vote on the the eighth and final ballot in Annemie Paul one. Within four months of her becoming the leader, Israel began attacking Gaza to a much smaller degree than it has attacked Gaza within the past week. And two of our MPs, we had three MPs in the parliament of Canada at that time. Two of our MPs, not Elizabeth May, came out and quite properly condemned Israel as an apartheid state. At that point, the spokesperson of the leader, Annemie Paul, who I think it's fair to say was a fanatical Zionist, fanatically committed to Israel, called both of our own MPs anti-Semites in the Canadian press. So we had this extraordinary spectacle of the spokesperson of the leader of the Green Party of Canada accusing two MPs of the Green Party of Canada of anti-Semitism because they had called Israel an apartheid state. This caused an enormous, as you can imagine, division within the party. And one of these MPs, Genika Atwin, ended up defecting to another party. The other MP was defeated six months later with the assistance, I should say, of Annemie Paul's spokesperson. And by the way, she refused to fire him when he accused our two own MPs of being anti-Semites. And in the following election, some six months later, the Green Party of Canada achieved its lowest result in the entire time since Elizabeth May became the leader back in 2006. By far, we were reduced to double two percent of the popular vote and we lost MPs. And Annemie Paul then resigned a month later and another leadership contest was held and I was presented with the opportunity to run and frankly, I declined. Because at that point, I was so disenchanted with what I was seeing within the Green Party and the party had been so damaged. And the frankly, political environment for speaking honestly about these issues had become so oppressive that I chose rather than to enter the political ring and be confronted with those choices that my colleagues talked about, those painful choices between compromise and principle. I decided to remain independent. I'm still agreeing, but I decided to remain independent in terms of my public advocacy. And now we come to the current atrocity or series of atrocities. And I think it's bearish pointing out that within the space of a week, Israel has not only begun to starve a civilian population, approximately one half of whom are children, but it has also killed over 1,000 Palestinian children, more than twice, I believe, the number it killed in 2014, which was up until now the deadliest assault it had launched against Gaza since the blockade began. It has bombed hospitals. It has bombed civilian convoys. It has killed UN staffers. It has killed two reporters on the border in Lebanon. And I frankly, I'm trying to rack my brain for an atrocity that Israel has not committed within the space of seven days with the, I think it's fair to say, enthusiastic support of Western governments. The Green Party has been co-opted. The Green Party of Canada has been co-opted. I can't speak for my colleagues in Australia or in all countries, but I can say that certainly in Canada and in Germany, that is crystal clear, the Green Party has been co-opted by forces of neoconservativism and neoliberalism. Up until now, we on the left, the Ecosocialists, I'm sad to say, have lost that battle, although we continue to fight. And the only way forward, I think, especially, I'll speak for my own country, it's not enough at this stage for people on the left to be making demands of our politicians, you know, and I'll go back to a story I've heard Chris Hedges tell a couple of times. He talks about an excerpt from the autobiography of Henry Kissinger. I myself could not bring myself to read Henry Kissinger's autobiography, so I'm going to take Chris Hedges' word for it, but he tells the story of an interaction that Mr. Kissinger had with Richard Nixon at the height of the Vietnam War protests, where they were standing in the White House looking out on the irate throngs, you know, clamoring over buses that had been put in front of the White House. And according to Chris, you know, Nixon turned to Kissinger and said, Henry, they're coming to get us. And it wasn't long after that the United States government finally brought an end to that monstrous war. I think that what we need to do at this stage is to get into the streets. We need to be angry, not in a violent way, of course, but we need to come out in large numbers. We must be relentless. We must peacefully express our rage and our indignation to the point where we begin to inspire fear in the hearts of Western leaders. They can stop this. It's entirely within their power to stop this. And ultimately, they hold the key to peace. And if we inspire just enough fear by peaceful means in their hearts, I think we can finally begin to move down the path of justice for the illegal Palestinian people. You know, it seems to me that there's this frightening obedience that we're seeing displayed in parliaments around the world and in parties like the Greens, who shouldn't be obedient to these matters when it comes to a position on war. But if you can briefly explain, how did this happen in Canada? Was it purely indigenous reasons influenced from the U.S., from Germany or somewhere else? How did this come about that the Green Party has been co-opted, as you said? Well, I think it has to do with political financing, you know, people. So for example, you know, we have to report our campaign contributions, those of us who ran to be the leader. And I and others examined the campaign contributions for enemy Paul in the 2020 leadership contest. And a number of people who are known in Canada, quite wealthy people known to be quite aggressive in their Zionism, made the maximum political contribution to enemy Paul. And these are people who had no history of having contributed to the Green Party of Canada before. So it has just certainly has something to do with political financing. It has to do something with the structure of our media industry. Anybody. So for example, I was pilloried when I ran explicitly as an eco socialist and called for the the Canadian government to withdraw Canada from NATO by the mainstream corporate pests. I had a very different reaction from the independent not-for-profit media. But effectively anybody who criticizes the neo-conservative, neoliberal policies of the Canadian government is going to confront extraordinary obstacles from the mainstream corporate media. And you have a lot of people, politics today, and I'm sad to say that Elizabeth May, I believe, is one of them who fears the wrath of the corporate media. And I would draw attention to one particular thing, which I think is really sort of instructive. It has to do, I believe, an article you wrote, Joe, for consortium news, when I think it was some organization, some propagandistic organization called News Guard, took issue with consortium news coverage of the Ukraine war. And you had to lay out in extraordinary detail the evidentiary support for the claim that I and many others, and you made that this war was provoked. And it was remarkable. I read your article a couple of times, and I was struck by the fact that in the face of so much evidence, how is it that the corporate media could say with a straight face that this war was not provoked? But they're able to do it. And ultimately, there's a simple reason for that. They are not there to serve the public interest. They're there to serve the interest of their owners, as all for-profit corporations do. So that's the obstacle that we confront. But at the end of the day, I think I agree with my colleagues from Australia that what's the point of being in power if at the end of the day you're going to sacrifice your principles? You may as well find another way to contribute. I'd like to bring David in and leave to have anything to add. Well, look, I think there are a number of matters to sort of raise. I don't know the history of the Canadian Greens, and I'm not going to pass a comment on the history of the Canadian Greens party. I do know that there's been powerful solidarity for the Palestinian people from the New Zealand Greens who are much more familiar with the work they've been doing, powerful solidarity with the Palestinian people. And I think, though, that we could have an argument one way or another about Ukraine or we have an argument about other conflicts, I think if you're going to be genuinely committed to peace and nonviolence, then you need to apply that uniformly. Wars of aggression, acts of unprovoked violence, need to be condemned and called out if you're going to be consistent on a peace and nonviolent platform. And I think that's been some of the power in what I've seen from some of the strongest pro-Palestine advocates, thousands of whom, as I said, who gathered in Sydney only very recently, they are humanizing conflict. They are calling out, not on some sort of false equivalence in terms of the scale and the cause. And I think you can make a mistake of false equivalence on scale and cause, but you can have empathy and you can condemn the killings of civilians and innocents and children on both sides of a conflict, and you can deal with a common humanity. And we should, if we're committed to peace and nonviolence, do that with a common humanity. And in doing that, search for the root causes of those violence, of that violence, search for the root causes of those conflict and focus our attention on removing the root causes of those conflict at the same time. And that's the kind of subtlety that should be a kind of obvious statement. You can have a common humanity with those victims of violence and also at the same time search for a political solution and look to the historical causes of the violence. That shouldn't be that complicated, but somehow or another that can be, you know, you can be deeply attacked when you take that position. And I think that's what is needed right now with this conflict, a common humanity, but a clear political analysis and historical analysis of the root causes of those violence. And of course that should unite us all in a call to an end of the occupation and to demand in writing the Palestinian people at the same time as we are appalled by Israeli civilian deaths and appalled by Palestinian civilian deaths. And you can do that without falsely having an equivalence between the violence. Lee? It's a critical time for us. This war could expand. It could engulf so many people. And I think it's a critical time for the Greens too, because being frank about it, I've been in the party since 1990. I've seen a growth in electoral success that I had not expected to see in my lifetime. We have had people elected to the lower house, which means you need to get more than 50% of the vote. But what goes with that is danger. And that danger is his parliamentaryism that we've talked about before. And how do we and we can still make this wonderful contribution if we don't go down that dangerous path that we've seen so often, particularly with the Social Democrats, you've talked about the German Greens, et cetera. How do we avoid that? I think as Greens, we really need to be identifying with the problems that people confront. And this, what I'm about to say, directly does the dots go very clearly back to the need to build a global peace movement to stand with the people of Palestine. So what I find so tragic and before I mentioned how our Greens parties, from what I can see, certainly not just in Australia around the world, fairly identify with working-class people. We do take up some issues that would make a real difference to working-class lives, but still there's a fracture there. And I think that we've really got to work on this, because so many of those people, they're often, some people describe themselves, journalists use the term, they're left behind. They've gone to Trump, they've gone to Brexit, et cetera. We've just had this tragic situation in Australia where we literally voted against First Nations people getting recognition. And why does that come about? It comes about for a whole range of reasons. And I think these cost of living pressures that people are feeling, unless we can stand with them on the issues around the impossibility to get secure housing, to have fair wages in your work, all those things that matter to people about how they raise their children, et cetera. If we stand with them on issues that matter to them, they're more likely to stand, get back to issues of international solidarity. I do believe these issues are interconnected. And this is where I think the Greens can play a critical role if we can use our parliamentary position. And I do congratulate David. He does a lot of international work where he works with these communities. He takes their message into Parliament, speaks about the Moors motions, and then he's back on the streets with them. And that activism, parliamentary activism, I think will be critical to our success. And it's where the Greens can make a contribution to building a global peace movement that is absolutely critical to assist the people of Palestine. They're doing everything they can to save lives of their fellow Palestinians. But my goodness me, what we're seeing, I've never seen anything like it. I've read about it. But to see it on the television, what we want, it's enormous. So it's good to talk together about it. And I hope we can get our parties on track to make these contributions. Can I just make one observation? I have worked for many years with Lee and have enormous respect for politics and for principles. But I do want to say there are now 15 Greens in the Federal Parliament in Australia, which is a record number of Greens for us. And we have been united on this position in the face of some significant external pressure. We've been united on the position that we've adopted in the Parliament. And we have, we've had my Greens colleagues and myself and others attending rallies in solidarity with the people of Palestine. And we have at the same time been campaigning on, I think, some of the critical material issues facing at least Australians, the centre of which is the right to have a safe and secure home. And building those connections, I hope, between campaigns on the ground, connections with multicultural Australia, material needs and material conditions, and sticking to our principles. Now, are you going to be perfect in that, in a parliamentary democracy or not? The nature of a parliamentary democracy means you end up working with people like the Labor Party and others as best you can. And there will always be an element of compromise in getting the numbers needed in a parliamentary democracy. I think what I hope that some of the constraints we have on that compromise are remaining connected with movements on the ground, remaining connected with union movements, remaining connected with global peace movements, remaining connected with struggles for Palestinian justice and other justice, and maintaining those connections outside of parliament. But it is a real struggle and that the very fact of parliamentary democracy pushes you into positions of compromise, sometimes essential for material gains, but it's something you need to keep a constant eye out for. Dmitry, we could close with you. Before we listen to Diana Johnson to give us the real details of what happened in the history of the German Green Party, why it happened, what it did, what kind of damage you think the German Greens are doing, particularly on Elena Baerbach to not only the party, the Green Party movement around the world, but to the world? I think Ms. Baerbach has done immense damage to the Green Party. She's certainly conveyed the impression they are the most prominent Green Party in the world and have been since they entered this coalition government with Olaf Scholz, and she's conveyed the impression to the global left and to the global south, where we haven't, as a party, as a movement made as many inroads, that we have absolutely no commitment whatsoever to non-violence despite the global Greens charter, and that we have been completely co-opted by the military industrial complex. That's the impression that she's conveying and her colleagues, Mr. Habeck and others, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, the greatest favor that the German Greens can do to the global Green movement is to change their name, because they're besmirching us all. And the last thing I want to say is I certainly agree that we should apply the principles of non-violence and international law universally. We shouldn't simply point the finger at Israel, but we should be equally diligent in applying the law to all violators of international law and humanitarian law. But I would also say that our primary responsibility is the actions of our own governments and those governments with which our governments have allied our countries. We pay our taxes here, we vote here, they purport to speak in our name. It is in our own countries where we have the right to vote, where we can make the greatest difference, and so we should be focusing on the crimes of our governments and our supposed allies, first and foremost. Thank you, Dimitri, for that. We're going to go shortly to Diana Johnston's interview. Now, I wanted to thank Dimitri and Lee and David. I think Kathy has something she wants to say. Our producer. Not yet, not yet. Okay. So let's move on to Diana Johnston's interview that we did earlier. And again, thank you all three very much for your input on this crucial issue that gets more crucial by the day as we see the unfolding events. And don't forget Ukraine. That is far from over that. Thank you again very much. Thanks. Bye-bye. Joining us now from Paris is Diana Johnston, an American journalist who's a very keen observer of European politics. She's lived in France and elsewhere in Europe for many, many years. And she also worked for a time as the spokesperson for the green group in the European Parliament. Thank you, Diana, for joining us here on CN Live. It's good to have you back. Well, it's good to talk to you. So we're talking about the evolution of the Green Party and you had a front row seat with the Green Group and the European Parliament. Tell us a little bit about your time there. And what did you see of the Green Party at that time that's different from today? Oh, well, I watched the beginning of the Green Group. I had a little kid up there in Bonn to see the Greens come into the German Bundestag and I got to know them then. And then I became the press officer for the Green Group. That is all of the Green Parties in the European Parliament at the end of 1989. And so I watched the evolution and when I joined at first I was interested in the Greens because they were an anti-war party. In fact, that's what attracted me to them. And then I saw, especially in the European Parliament, I saw the change. And there were individuals who took a big role in that change. And that was some rather, not the early Greens, not the ones who founded the party, but who joined in Frankfurt. Daniel Kohn Bendit, who was famous in France for his role in the May 68 uprising and Yoshka Fischer, who had been a sort of street fighter in Frankfurt. And they became identified by the press especially as the realists in the Greens. And this evolution, I want to start off by saying that the press media played a role in this evolution because the media created sort of this conflict in the Greens between the Realos, the Realists, and the Fundamentalists, Fundies. And the Fundamentalists were those who wanted to stick to the principles of the Greens. And the Realists were, well, what the Realists, what realism really meant was making up compromises that we can get into a government coalition. That's what realism means in a country like Germany where the government is my coalition. Now, of course, in the United States, that temptation doesn't exist because of the political setup. But in a country which is governed by coalitions, the temptation is right there to make whatever compromises are necessary to get into a governing coalition. And that's what Realolo really meant. And the media, the German media picked out on, Yoshka Fischer was elected to the parliament and they would say, oh, his speeches are wonderful, he's great, he's wonderful. So they built him up as a great figure, although he was not a founder. And as a matter of fact, he was never much of an environmentalist or a peace person, but he was sort of spectacular. And then what happened in the, what I saw in the European parliament, it was, it all happened with the problem in Yugoslavia, with the conflict in Yugoslavia. Now, at first, the Green Group, the person responsible for the international policy was someone elected in the Italian Green Group, Alexander Langer, who came from, I'll tell Adita, Tirol, a place of mixed German and Italian. So he was very sensitive to the problems of ethnic mixed. And Alexander was one of those people, and he was not the only who was sponsoring groups between intellectuals and different groups of in Yugoslavia in order to find a peace compromise. And these meetings, I attended them and I attended some other people had to, there was definitely a possibility of finding compromise in Yugoslavia. And Alexander was somebody who was pursuing this effort. And the pursuit of a compromise, you say, over the Yugoslavian crisis, you thought the large one. And in July of 1995, Alexander Langer tragically died, a very strange suicide. And the question came up in the Green Group of replacing him. And at that time, Danny Kohnback, who was a fairly new member of the group, said it'll be me. And he bid to be the replacement. And I remember terribly well that meeting in the Green Group, where Danny Kohnback said, well, I know that a lot of you don't agree with me. But if you talk to the media, they'll pay no attention. But everything I say, the media takes up. So that's why you should choose me, because the media listens to me. And stunningly, he was elected against another German who came from East Germany, who was a peace person. And as a matter of fact, it wasn't even the Germans who gave him the majority, but he got the majority and he became then the spokesman for the Green Group in foreign policy. And he was wanted to get out into a war against the wicked serfs. And so that began a change within the European Greens. And the Germans were the most influential. And of course, then later in 1998, when there was this trouble in Kosovo, which was very much distorted in media, there was a left government in Bonn, where Yoshka Fischer was chosen as foreign minister. That was the comrade of Danny Kohnbendit, who followed the Kohnbendit line. And at that time, it's very strange. The media was one influence. The other influence was the United States. Because actually, and it became very clear as one time went on, Yoshka Fischer had become the pet of the American political establishment. Now, this is very remarkable because Richard Holbrook, who was mainly responsible for Ugo South policy, said publicly, before Fischer became foreign minister, he will make a great foreign minister. Now, that is surprising for somebody who hadn't even finished high school, who had been a street fighter, who was not educated or prepared in any way to be foreign minister. And here comes Holbrook saying, he will be a great foreign minister. Well, he was a foreign minister who was totally for the war. How did Fischer get into the Green Party, Green politics, as well as Kohnbendit? How did they both get in, you know? Well, they just said they wanted to be in and since they were both kind of notorious. And you see, you've got to realize the Green Party was a great social elevator at that time. Sort of anybody could get in. They didn't have to go through much testing, because it was a small growing party. So you want to be in and you're famous, come right in and you can run for parliament. And it happened just as easily as that. No vetting, no vetting to see, sorry, that they were going against one of the four pillars of the Green Movement, which was non-violence or anti-war. They, nobody knew that when they came in. No, because the media paid attention to them. So basically the lust, the pursuit of power, political powers, would ruin the Greens at that moment. And the rest of the party members who didn't agree with them were intimidated by both of these men or did not stand up to them because they may have wanted power as well. And there was a meeting of the Greens when this was going on, of the German raids. And there were people who were very much, there was a woman as a trade unionist who was very, very much against the Fisher line and was going back to the peace line. And Fisher made a speech defending his line on the theme that there must never, because the German slogan had been never against war, never against war from coming out from Germany. And he said, no, the slogan is never again Auschwitz. So he went back to the Holocaust religion, because it is a religion, it's become a total religion. I mean, you can't say anything against it, you go to jail, that becomes a sort of state religion. And so he's never again Auschwitz. Well, a lot of the more peaceful Greens left the party at that time, as a matter of fact. But the war went on and Fisher became, by the way, he then had an extraordinary career under the wing of Madeline Albright, who brought him into the consultancy business, which he made, he's made him a millionaire, he's become very rich as a consultant. Of course, Albright had a big role in the Yugoslav conflict as Holbrook did. I knew both of them at the UN at that time. So that had to do with the Yugoslav. That's where they came together then, right? Albright and Fisher. It was. And you see, what happened around then is you have this fight between values. Anti-war had been the value of the left since Vietnam War. And then the US promoted another value, human rights. And of course, no more Auschwitz is human rights. So human rights trumped anti-war as your leading value. You mustn't prevent war, although war is where the human rights violations happen, including the Holocaust, by the way. It's the wars that produce all these human rights violations. But the idea began, oh, we must have a war to prevent these things from happening, to prevent genocide, to prevent Auschwitz. So you make up there's going to be a genocide. You say, no, they're going to commit a genocide. So we've got to go and bomb them today. And this idea of. Sponsibility to protect, yeah. Human rights. You see that the Nobel Peace Prize is practically never given for peace. It's given for human rights. Human rights has become the dominant value of the West. Not peace. No, no, no. Human rights, which can be the opposite of peace, because we have to make war on behalf of human rights. And that's the way it's worked out. And then there's, there's another slight element that comes in with the Germans. And that I also observed in the parliament to my great surprise of Germans who have been on the left. I mean, social democrats and so on that have been in the peace movement of the 80s. All of a sudden, when the enemy was Serbia, there was something atavistic that happened, because Serbia was the enemy of Germany in World War One. And the peace movement had been slogan, we mustn't have any more enemy stereotypes of people we had war. All of a sudden they jumped on the stereotypes against the Serbs. And now you see it against the Russians in a big way. This was sort of, the war against Yugoslavia was, was an exercise to prepare for breaking up Russia, which is what they're trying to do now. As a matter of fact, with Serbia being the role of Russia and then the other nationalities, try to get them against the main one in order to break up the country. This strategy of breaking up an enemy country by considering that minorities are victims of human rights violations. See, that's the whole thing. If the minorities have leaders who claim to be oppressed, well, we must support them and break up the country. And that's, that's the scenario. And of course, Diana, it's only the human rights violations of the conveniently the enemies of the United States and the West. For example, human rights violations by the Saudis or the Israelis or, or Pinochet, for example, well, that was excuse was only the human rights violations of Russia and China, et cetera. That's the hypocrisy of it, isn't it? Of course, of course, because there are all sorts of countries that have ethnic minorities and so on, but it's only the ones that we target that because they are not obedient to our world order, the rules based order, meaning the rules that we set at a particular time. Well, if those that are targeted, it's totally according to the, the Tenduklion. It depends on which country it is. But particularly Yugoslavia was seen as this kind of miniature Soviet Union, which was very miniature, very much smaller. And so they used the techniques to break it up that then they, they didn't use against the Soviet Union because the Soviet Union was broken up by its own elite, by the way. It wasn't this at all. It was broken up by its own elite, elites who decided they could get richer in a different way. But it's now used against Russia, let's see, with, with Ukraine and so on. Because now there's all these projects to break Russia into pieces. Yeah. And that's totally only Yugoslav model. Now, in a couple of years later in 2001, the Greens were again in a coalition, government in Germany and they agreed with Gerhard Schröder was the chancellor to back the 2001 Afghan war to have Germany. What role did Germany play in the Afghan war after 9-11? And what about the German Greens then? And what was the reaction from other green parties in Europe and around the world to that? They pretty much followed this human rights versus anti-war to my amazement. I mean, people that were my friends, for instance, in the Finnish Greens, and they go, they end up going along with it. I can't tell because I know what goes on. I know a few countries personally. I know Belgium personally. I know France personally. I know Germany and Italy, the other countries I have not lived in. I'm not sure exactly how this happened, but the fact is that the German Greens were the first ones and the great success. You see, look at the success of Joschka Fischer. He has honorary degrees from universities. He's never got to high school. He's a millionaire consultant. Wow. You see, I mean, that's a career. He had a marvelous career. You don't get that kind of career being a peacenake. You just don't. So in 2001, Germany sent over 4,000 troops to Afghanistan. I think this had to be the first deployment outside of Germany of German troops. Was it not? I'm trying to remember. Well, they were sort of marginally involved in Yugoslavia and the air or some things like that, but then this opened the dam. From then on, from then on, whenever, well, it's true that Germany did stay out of the Iraq. Iraq invasion. That's correct. Yeah. They voted against it in the Security Council. That was the government. That wasn't the Greens. Right. Greens would have wanted to get involved in Iraq. That's interesting. I don't know about that because they didn't know anything to do with that. But the fact is that the Greens have been for everything on the name of human rights. What happened after that between 2001 and leading up to today's government where the Greens play a big role in the coalition with the Social Democrats and the Foreign Minister, as we know, became an Alina Baerbach, the leader of the Green Party. What Robert Habeck is the Economy Minister. Tell us about the rise of these two figures and what that means for the Green Party in Germany and the reaction of Greens around the world to those two. I can't quite explain this, but I would like to call attention to the fact that Germany has been a militarily occupied country for over 75 years. Germany is militarily occupied. And this occupation takes many forms. The German economy is heavily influenced by U.S. investments. The Marshall plan sort of arranged so that U.S. investments would be favored in European countries and Germany most of all. And so for instance, Blackrock has a huge day, perhaps, in the German arms industry. So when Germany makes weapons, as it's now planning to do more and more, the profits go to shareholders in Blackrock. So Germany is direct, is influenced by U.S. investments. It's influenced by all kinds of foundations and the Marshall plan, this and the Trans-Atlantic Bucca and all of these who vet young people, who are the future leaders, the future leaders. And the leadership of Germany, both in the media and politics, is heavily directly influenced by the United States. Now they also, they have similar things in other countries, but Germany is the most thoroughly occupied of the countries. Added to the fact that there's an ethnic harmony between Germany and the United States, which doesn't exist in with France or Italy. French don't feel Americans and the American don't feel French. But Germans and Americans, since the majority of European settlers in the United States are German, the United States is full of German customs, German food, German ethnic people. And the Germans find it quite easy to be American, which other Europeans don't. And the soldiers that go to Germany love being in Germany. They feel practically at home, there's beer and there's sausages and stuff like that. And so this occupation, the Americans occupy other countries, but there's not quite the harmony. There's not quite the ease of occupation of other countries as with Germany, because of this ethnic factor. How did Baierbach get her start? Can you tell us? Where did she come from? Well, she went to school and she spent time in the United States in school. And then also England, where she greatly exaggerated her accomplishment she put on, she said she had a degree when she didn't. And even with that she didn't learn English as well as most Germans have seen. I mean, so I don't think she's terribly bright, because despite all this exposition to the English language, she hasn't mastered it particularly well at all. As I say, Germans generally learn English quite easily. And I saw a latest poll shows that school children in Germany are getting worse in German and better in English. So the Americanization of Germany is well underway, but now with this some strata of revenge against Russia, because part of being with America is we can sort of re-end, give a new happy ending to World War II by being on the good side. You see, a lot of Germans don't like decades of being on the bad side of being the bad guys. And now they're on the good side because they're with the Americans against the bad Putin Russians. And this is an element, again, which is psychological. But these psychological elements can help explain why Germany has accepted policies that go straight against its own economic interests, which is kind of a mystery because they're ruining their own industry. They're raising their own energy prices, policies that are against their own interests, but there's some kind of subjective satisfaction. I'm talking about leadership people because there's a lot of opposition to this policy, but it's being very repressed, even legally, even legally. Laws that are saying, if you justify or just explain the Russian position, you are apologizing for a crime and you can be arrested for that. You wrote an article for Consortium News originally for us in May of 2021, and you wrote that next September, that would be 2021, the Germans will hold parliamentary elections, which will decide who is to be the next Chancellor succeeding Angela Merkel. Now, foreign policy, the choice maybe between pragmatism and moral posturing, and it is now not clear which will prevail. Aggressive self-righteousness has its candidate, Annalena Baerbock, chosen by the Green Party to be the next Chancellor. Her Baerbock's virtuous signaling starts with scolding Russia. She was only 40 years old, you wrote, a year younger than the Green Party itself. Of course, the Greens didn't win, and she became Foreign Minister instead of Chancellor. You wereifying her. That's the first I'd ever heard of her when you wrote that article for us. She was only 40, and she has played a very, very aggressive role in the war in Ukraine. I mean, tell us a little bit about that. She's a Green, and totally betraying the origins of the Green Party and what many Greens around the world still believe in. No, she's the total opposite of Patrick Kelly. She has a very simple-minded, moralistic view of, you know, we are the good, we are the good, they are the bad, and it's very simple. There's nothing diplomatic about her as a Foreign Minister. She just goes in and tells people what they should be doing, and you know, Habeck has made a sort of a sentence about how we lead by serving. Sort of the idea, I think behind that, he's, we're leading Europe by serving the United States. We become the leader in Europe by being the best servants of the United States, and that's a little what this government is trying to do. Although Schulz is the Prime Minister, the Greens influence his overwhelming in this government. The whole thrust of this government is now Germany is, after all, we are the biggest country here. Germany is becoming the leader by being the number one follower of the United States. That's the thrust of it, and Habeck said that going to Washington, and Lena makes such statements also, you know. They just, the main thing is we are together forever with the United States and with Ukraine, you know. And of course, the anti-Russian hysteria is really, really quite sick of it, really quite sick of it. Yeah, the article, the headline of that article was Washington, that you wrote Washington's green branches in Europe. And you said the Greens are in perfect harmony, are in perfect harmony with the Biden administration's new ideological crusade to remake the world on the American model, echoing Russia gate and with no evidence to Greens accused Russia of malevolent interference in Europe. So, you're basically saying that they have totally been captured by the U.S., the Green Party. As opposed to the Social Democrats, they're also in Germany, cow towering to Washington, aren't they? Well, I mean, we sort of helped set up the Christian Democrats. So, but then I will say, I was going to say that the problem is that the polls show and midterm elections here and there show that the Greens are losing support. In Germany. In Germany. And the alternative for Germany, which is demonized as far right, is gaining. And it's all, it's gaining, especially any, but not entirely, not exclusively in East Germany. Right. And the Greens are losing support. I would say, for two reasons, partly because of their war policy, but also because, and I have to bring this up to our Green friends and other places, also because there's a kind of backlash brewing against Green environmental policies, because these policies, in fact, are because now they, certain things are not working and they're working very much against ordinary people. So, I think that there is going to be, I see brewing a certain revolt, because initially Green was sort of such a good word, you know, anything that's green is going to be good. But once you put it into concrete policies that begin to make people uncomfortable here and there, it loses that luster of virtue. And I will warn people that this is these green agenda things, which are very much in harmony with the World Economic Forum, rather than being original, progressive policies, are running into opposition in popular complaints, you would say. And so, if I can speak a bit about that, because I would say that their popular revolt is brewing against the Green agenda in three areas. Well, to start with, you have to see that the Green agenda has been based on a very narrow idea of environmental policies. It's been based on the idea that we can prevent global warming for which we personally are responsible by reducing CO2 emissions. So, it's been a policy of preventing global warming, perhaps we can't, by the way, because their effect is like the sun, which play a role, rather than adapting. And also, it ignores other aspects of the environment. It's so concentrated on that. And that means it has been particular policies. And there are three areas where there is really a growing discontent. One is energy, of course, the cost of energy. In Germany, the windmills simply haven't worked. They simply have not managed to provide the energy. So, Germany stopped its nuclear power. Now, nuclear power does not have CO2 emissions. The German Green campaign against nuclear energy has stopped nuclear energy. The windmills have not been able to provide it. And so, Germany is actually, with the Green government, going back to coal and using more coal. So, there's something wrong there in this energy policy. It's not working. And France is considerable discontent because France had cheap energy due to its nuclear industry. Germany, via the European Union, has done everything to sabotage the French nuclear and force the French to buy energy on the same prices that the Germans have to pay. And that's causing quite a lot of discontent in France. So, this energy business seems to be quite confused. And then there's a question of transport where people are, they are supposed to use electric cars, which most people cannot afford. There's, again, the contradictions. They're building new highways, although they're saying people can't drive. Nothing has ever been done to make train traffic to promote that. So, there's something in the policy that just doesn't add up. And then there's housing. And that's going to cause a lot of trouble because the European Union regulations, which now are coming down all over the place, are going to, particularly, I see this in France because this affects me, they are going to make it impossible to rent a housing which isn't properly insulated. And they have this, well, it so happens, the France, the Paris is full of very small apartments. And a lot of middle-class people own a little apartment like that. And the cost of insulation, as they said it, is something that such owners can't afford. So, they'll be, they'll have to be met, they're going to take millions of apartments off the market with this. And there's already a housing shortage. So, you have these three aspects of green policy. And, meanwhile, fossil fuels are being squandered on wars. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, the wars can all, you know, they just use it up just like that. Well, that's interesting. The green pro-war policy is hurting its environmental argument. And I want to ask you about the Nord Stream pipeline. When it blew up, it was the worst, one of the worst, if not the worst, release of methane gas in history in one incident. And what did the Green Party say about that? I don't remember them saying too much at all, do they? No, no, they're nothing. And they seem quite happy about that because they didn't want to, they were against it. They were against it. And so, you see, there's too much incoherence in this green policy. So, it's just, it's not making sense to people, really. It's not making sense. And so, I think this will have electoral effect. I think Greens elsewhere should think carefully about all of, not just follow whatever is being said, you know, globally, but you should, you know, really think about what environmental policy should be to be to be really progressive and good for people and popular. Because these things are just coming down in an authoritative way with the whole attitude is you're the fault. You're destroying the planet. It's your fault. And, you know, you can't get, you can't get a receipt from your store anymore because we're saving the planet. But they did this squandering everything on big wars. It says Savapa. Savapa. Let me, before we go, Diana, I want to ask you about France and the French Green Party. First of all, you talked about the nuclear energy, the cost, the cost of energy going up in France from mostly nuclear. And one of the reasons, of course, is they've lost the cheap or they're losing the cheap uranium from Niger after the rebellion there, the coup, and the rejection of the French in Niger. This is a quite interesting development. How does that impact the German energy costs? And how is, what is the state of the French Green Party right now as well? Are they going out of the Germans or are they still holding on to some progressive views when it comes to war and peace? No, no, no, not at all. In fact, in the French policy, French Nupais, it's called this coalition of the left, the Green Party is, the French Green is in that. And it's now in the state of rupture because Melanchol, who is head of the, and to me, one of the groups has, has not condemned Hamas as a terrorist, an unprovoked attack on Israel. And so the others in the left are moving away from him. And the Greens, of course, are among those who are moving away from him. So that the, what is going on, what is very likely to happen is that this, this Hamas war is, is helping France move toward a right wing government in the next election. I'll explain why. In the 80s, Mita Hall, very cleverly, when he moved away from the common program with the communists, which was a left wing program in order to, to conform to European, the European thing, took up anti-racism as the theme and branded the natural front of, of the pen as an extreme right that is outside of the, of the decent Republican arc. So you can, and you see what that meant was that the right, the Republican right could never make a coalition with, with the pen so that the left would have to win the elections. Now the opposite is happening. They're going to, there's a whole move to say that Melon Sho is the one that's outside the Republican because he, he, he's Islam on Goshi and he's Islam or leftist, he's, he's a boy. And, and that will mean that the left can never have the coalition that can win. So, so you're, you're having, so this pro-Israel attitude, which is fanatic here. I mean, it's extraordinary. Including Le Pen, right? Including Le Pen. Irene Le Pen as well. Exactly. So she's going, so she's okay now because she's going along with, she's going along with, with that. So, so, so now the idea is that she's included and Melon Sho's the outsider. So it's, so now, now it'll be all right to have a right, a right-wing coalition with the far right, but it won't be all right to have a left-wing coalition with the far left because of, better because he's. Because of Israel. You know, I interviewed Irene Le Pen about seven years ago, around 2015 in New York. She was there and we spoke for an hour and I was shocked by her views about Israel and the Palestinians. She, her father may have been called an anti-Semite, but she is certainly very pro-Israel. She really did not, she's an Islamophobe and that's the thing that really disturbed me the most about talking to her. And so it's very clear now what you're saying. It's quite interesting. She can be catapulted into power because of the war in Israel. However, they don't like her views on Russia, do they? The establishment in France, they don't like. No, no. Well, actually there are a lot of people in France including military and other people who do like her views, but she's hardly dared to say them anyway. I mean, she'd been rather quiet about that because, but she's not the most right-wing because there's more has come along and he's, he's more fanatic about, about this than she is, which makes her look relatively okay. So, so in fact that thing that, because there's someone to her right who is more extreme against, against Muslims. She's not, she's, she's a little bit blah, blah, blah, blah, but she, oh yes, she's proved for, for Israel. But the fact is so was Le Pen. That was all, that was all exaggerated. I mean, there was never any proof that he was anti-Semitic in fact. Right. I mean, he made one remark which he was sued for and had to pay huge fines for when he simply said that the gas chambers were a detail of World War II. Unfortunately. And he was, he was fined twice for that. But once he said, well, if it's not so, then World War II was a detail of the gas chambers. Well, as a matter of fact, that's what a lot of people believe. So Diane, thank you very much for being with us. And is there any hope now for the Greens in the future? Where might it go from here in France, in Germany, around the world? I, I think that they're, they are so, I think Annalena Baerbach has done their grave as far as I'm concerned as in Europe. And maybe one should find another label. I don't know. Because certainly she, she has gone very, very far with this. And the, and, and her party is going along with her. And the European Greens have gone along with her. And of course, it has nothing to do with the Greens and the United States. I realize that. But it's very difficult. It's, I think it puts all green moments in a difficult position. Right. Thank you, Diane and Johnston for joining us from Paris today. Thank you. Thank you.