“The further a society drifts away from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it” George Orwell
Interview with Gonzo Blogger Miquel Puertas
East and West: Hi Miquel, how are you doing?
Miquel Puertas: I am fine, thank you, I am here in Donetsk, I am enjoying the New Year’s holidays.
E&W: If you read just Western media, like most people do, it looks like Donetsk is a very scary place to be right now, occupied by Russian forces and terrorists.
MP: This is the narrative that has been imposed by the NATO propaganda machine. I have actually tried to look for the infamous “little green men” since I arrived here, but I have not found any until now. Just volunteers from Spain, France, Italy, Finland, Brazil, Serbia, USA, Poland that came here to fight against the Maidan far-right battalions. The whole Maidan was a coup, an operation against the Ukrainian Constitution and the Ukrainian democracy. It was a violent coup organized by the US intelligence and some EU countries to remove from power a rightfully elected President. A bloody coup that also got support from the Soros network. George Soros himself admitted it several times.
E&W: How did you end up in Donetsk?
MP: I arrived in Donetsk from Lithuania in July 2016 . I was living in Lithuania until then, I was teaching there for many years in several institutions (LCC International University from Klaipeda, International Business School at Vilnius University, KTU gymnasium) or working as a trainer for several companies, municipalities or institutions like the LPK (Confederation of Lithuanian Industrialists). Since 2010 I have been working as a lecturer at Vytautas Magnus University, in Kaunas, the second city of the country.
E&W: How long have you been teaching there?
MP: Ten years, I started living there in 2006. In 2013 I was involved in a project financed by the European Union. Thanks to this project I went to Odessa (August 2013) and Lviv (November 2013). And there in Lviv I saw the beginning of the Maidan with all the nationalist and far-right symbology used by the militants of Svoboda party and their cult of the war criminal Stepan Bandera. I realized that Ukraine had taken a dangerous drift. So when I came back to Lithuania I started to post my impressions and thoughts simply using my Facebook account. I created on this platform a group called “International Observatory of the Ukrainian Conflict” (IOUCO) and I got very positive feedback from many people around the world. The IOUCO has two groups, one in English and the other one in Spanish language with more than 10.000 members. In Lithuania if you say that the “Maidan” was a coup against the Ukrainian Constitution, the VSD (the Lithuanian post-KGB), the highly biased and government controlled local media and the supporters of President Grybauskaite will automatically accuse you of doing “Russian propaganda”. At some point, because of my Facebook posts, I started to get contacted by the Lithuanian security services and by trolls working for the VSD and I was asked by my boss, the Rector of Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, to stop my Facebook posts against the Maidan regime or I would lose my job. They asked me to delete my Facebook account. I told them that I would not do such a thing. Then my contract was not renewed and the Lithuanian government controlled media started a campaign against me and other Lithuanian citizens, some of them educators and professors. People that were posting on Facebook their point of view against the Maidan, the regime installed in Kiev by the Euroatlantic Axis and the militarization of the Lithuanian society by President Grybauskaite. At least two more professors were removed from their positions. Several operations against Lithuanian dissenters were conducted by the VSD who even entered in the private apartments of some locals looking for a “Russian connection”. A famous person, Milda Bartasiunaite, a TV celebrity who has been very active against the Maidan coup since the very beginning was one of their targets. VSD officials entered her house and took her laptop, smartphone and documents. Of course they could not prove anything since this woman has nothing to do with Russia. She is simply posting on Facebook what she is thinking about Poroshenko and the authoritarian rule of President Grybauskaite. The Lithuanian security services created and trained a network of stalkers, trolls and informants that were hunting local dissenters. They were targeting the dissenters in social media and sending information about the dissenters to the VSD. They are also contacting their employers. Telling them that their employees are “Putin agents”, “vatniks”, “kolorados”. Virtually Lithuanian citizens are living in a new gulag where the security services are able to destroy lives and reputation of those citizens that don’t accept the narrative imposed by President Grybauskaite on the Ukrainian conflict. And this is happening in Lithuania, a country member of the European Union and with a democratic Constitution where freedom of speech and thought and academic freedom should be enshrined. But there are not such thing in Lithuania anymore, Lithuania has morphed into a highly repressive and authoritarian regime that I like to call “Fascisthuania” in my posts, videos and writings.
E&W: It sounds really like a not very pleasant thing …
MP: But there was even a more shocking moment when militants of the crypto-fascist Aidar battalion, came to my university in Kaunas, to speak to my students and tell all their bullshit and spread their far right propaganda. Not only that. They came to collect money there, collect money for their war in the Donbass. After that I sent a letter to the Rector and asked him to gather more information about the sort of people he was inviting to the university. Because according to Amnesty International too, the Aidar battalion has a record of human rights violations. Even the university where I am currently working now here in Donetsk was bombed by the Aidar battalion and other far rights groups doing the dirty fight for the Ukrainian government. And the best they could do was to accuse me of being an agent of Putin. I never talked about politics with my students, not a single time. So I had to choose between my dignity and my bread. And I chose the only thing that could make me feel like a free citizen of the world. I started to realize that I could not live any longer in Lithuania when the Lithuanian security services contacted the mother of one of my former girlfriends. She has a government job and it was made clear to her that if I continued with my dissident activity she would lose her job. It was not a very subtle threat. This is really sick. My ex-girlfriend was not involved at all in my activities and I was not even having a relationship with her at the time. Also the VSD contacted at least one of my friends who is a businessman and a member of the council of a small municipality. He invited me to his birthday party. So I attended the party. Days later the security services and some pseudojournalist working for the state controlled newspaper “Lietuvos Rytas” contacted him. They told him why he was inviting me, a dangerous enemy of Lithuania, to his party. Totalitarianism came back to Lithuania after the Maidan coup. I always have said that the first victim of the Maidan coup were not the Ukrainian people but freedom of speech and thought in Europe. Especially many Eastern European countries without long democratic traditions have suffered a dramatic degradation of civil rights and liberties.
E&W: So why Donetsk?
MP: I was then called by the rector of the Donetsk Technical University to teach here in Donetsk. I feel very much safer here in Donetsk than in Lithuania. I am very grateful for this opportunity which has been given to me. Lithuania has become a crypto-fascist country, where the corrupted local mafia, known as “Landsbergis clan”, is using the state propaganda machine to criminalize the local opposition. For more than 3 years the Lithuanian citizens have been told that they are under the threat of an immiment Russian attack. The government has imposed a campaign based on fear, blaming Russia for all the problems that Lithuanian citizens are facing. Blaming others for the problems generated by the local oligarchy. According to the local media, the government and the main institutions of the country, the Russians are going to invade Lithuania (“Russia puola”) and if somebody says that there are not any proofs of anything like this, he is labeled by the local media and the VSD as an agent of Putin, a “communist” and an “enemy” of Lithuania.
E&W: Lithuania entered the European Union in 2004 and you have been there all these years. Have you seen the benefits of this choice and could Lithuania be a model for European integration of Ukraine?
MP: Lithuania is in fact ruled by a mafia clan. The fact that one third of the people left the country is a testimony of their great success in looting and devastating their own country. Not much has been done in terms of infrastructure since the country became independent. Without the money sent by those working abroad the economy would be totally broken. All the industry that was here has been dismantled and the young people are gone. Lithuania is ruled by a corrupted oligarchy where a few people have made big profits out of the integration in the European market but most people need to live on a salary of 400 euros or less. In no way this could possibly be a model of success for Ukraine. I am actually a progressive person, a sort of a left-wing liberal and I respect everybody’s opinion. I share the so-called European values and I believe in democracy, human rights, sovereignty and freedom. But after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 the EU became a de facto protectorate of the US military-industrial-financial complex. There is no freedom or democracy in the European Union anymore. The European Union became a prison of peoples and nations. The old dream of Jean Monnet morphed into the dystopian nightmare depicted by George Orwell in “1984”
E&W: Miquel, thank you this very interesting talk.
MP: Thank you for having me.
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More information about Miquel Puertas can be found in his personal site:
http://mpuertas.blogspot.com/p/vdu-spanish.html
He has also his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/coronelbarrido1
EAST AND WEST 