The NSA, Glenn Greenwald, and Angela Merkel - April 18, 2014Germany’s so-called “unique relationship with Russia” means that the country gets 36 percent of its natural gas imports and 39 percent of its oil imports from Russia.
The increasing dependence on Russia is related to Merkel’s decision, after the accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, to phase out Germany’s nuclear energy program. Pressure to cancel Germany’s nuclear program had come from the German Green Party.
A prominent member of the German Green Party, Hans-Christian Ströebele, met with Edward Snowden in Moscow and gave him a “whistleblower” award. He previously served as a lawyer for the Soviet- and East German-backed terrorist group, the Baader Meinhof Gang (also known as the Red Army Faction), and was sentenced to 10 months imprisonment in 1982 for setting up a communications network between the terrorist prisoners and activists outside the jails.
Merkel, who grew up in the formerly communist East Germany and spent 35 years of her life under the dictatorship, is the subject of a book by Günther Lachmann and Ralf Georg Reuth titled, The First Life of Angela M., which suggests that she had deeper ties to the communist regime than previously known or acknowledged. She has admitted joining the Free German Youth, the communist youth organization, and a photo has surfaced showing her in a communist uniform. But the book argues that she hid her role in the youth group as secretary for agitation and propaganda, instead depicting herself as someone engaged in “cultural” affairs.
One of Merkel’s defenders said she “couldn’t remember whether she was involved in agitation and propaganda.”
Russian ruler Vladimir Putin, of course, was a KGB spy in East Germany, and speaks German.