An economist with an international reputation, Professor Jeffrey Sachs has increasingly raised his profile in the world media. A U.S. citizen, he accuses his country of all mortal sins and openly supports President Putin. The son of Jewish parents, he slathers mud on Israel and supports Hamas. Whilst the principles of free speech should extend to the most radical and detached people, the same principles of free speech allow us to expose charlatans and traitors who cover themselves with the fig leaf of professorial rank.
Jeffrey Sachs was a highly successful advisor to the Polish government in its groundbreaking “shock therapy” approach (1990-92) leading to the country’s rapid but painful transformation to a vibrant market economy. Building on this, he served later as an advisor to Presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Kuchma.
He once knew both Russia and Ukraine quite well. But in recent years he’s gone from expert to venal propagandist for Russia, Hamas and Iran. Some pundits say that Sachs has a radical and marginal world view, but that doesn’t take away from his academic gloss. A fact check reveals that Sachs has long since ceased to be an analyst and turned into a falsifier. All his main theses are false.
In recent speeches, Sachs claims that the U.S. has been engaged in NATO expansion since the late nineties and thus provoked conflicts on the European continent. Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark spoke at length on how the countries of Eastern Europe started to join NATO. Clark himself and some other U.S. statesmen were against NATO expansion, but were in the minority. But most importantly, the U.S. and Western Europe never sought or initiated NATO enlargement. They were pressurized by the Eastern European and Baltic countries, who simply broke into NATO and used their diasporas in the US to lobby for their aspirations to become part of the Alliance.
It was the same with Ukraine and Georgia. No one lured these countries into NATO. Their strained relations with Russia led them to conclude that only NATO membership could spare them from Russian aggression.
Jeffrey Sachs constantly talks about Russia as a victim of American and Western intrigues. as if Russia has always been a victim of Western aggression and attacks. If we take a fact check on history, it is clear that Moscow started World War II with Germany when it attacked Poland, invaded Western Ukraine and the Baltic states, and attacked Finland. Later, Moscow invaded Budapest, Prague, and Afghanistan. It has sponsored the most nefarious terrorist movements.
We see the utter charlatanism of this American professor when he accuses Ukraine and the West of refusing to negotiate with Russia. Nothing could be more remote from reality. From the very first days of his rise to power, Volodymyr Zelensky tried to reach direct negotiations with Putin. He believed at that time that he would be able to solve all conflict situations by personal communication with Putin. We are talking about many public attempts and even more behind-the-scenes attempts on Zelensky’s part to enter into direct negotiations with the Kremlin. Time after time he has been rejected. All these facts are easily verifiable from open and Russian sources.
The most outrageous thing was Sachs’ last claim that the West unfairly rejected Putin’s latest peace proposals. He simply forgot to say that Putin’s condition for negotiations should have been a complete withdrawal of Ukraine from four of its own regions. Putin did not offer a ceasefire and negotiations, but demanded, in effect, the surrender of Ukraine.
The same anti-U.S. propagandist from the U.S. often lambasts the U.S. for the U.S. anti-terrorist operation against Islamic State in Syria. At the same time he fully justifies the Russian aggression there, which has victimized hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians.
In a recent interview, Sachs explicitly refused to condemn Putin, blaming his own country, the U.S., for the aggression and whitewashing of its aggressive adversary. This is unheard of behaviour on the part of a U.S. citizen. Not one negative word about Putin or Hamas.
Equally stunning is Sachs’ refusal to condemn Hamas for the largest terrorist attack of the 21st century, which victimized more than a thousand Israeli civilians. Most of them were Jewish, as were Sachs’ parents.
Since the beginning of Hamas’ war against Israel, Sachs has been acting as a propagandist on the Hamas side. As in the case of justifying Russian aggression, Sachs systematically falsifies facts and misinforms the general public. He presents the current war as an act of inhumane Israeli and U.S. aggression against Hamas. He has gone so far as to say that people are starving in Gaza. Not a word about humanitarian aid through Israel. Not a word about Israel supplying electricity, gas and water to Gaza to this day. Not a word about Hamas and only Hamas being responsible for the suffering of civilians.
These terrorists didn’t just attack Israeli civilians, they surrounded themselves with civilian human shields in their region. They did not take to the battlefield, but in a most cowardly way hid behind civilians as camouflage for their terrorist actions. These widely known facts are concealed by Sachs in his propaganda in favour of terrorists.
Freedom of speech is a great value when it comes to discussing ideas and real facts. In this case, however, free speech is to protect freedom from being aggressively distorted by a man who has betrayed his country and his nation and sold his soul to the blackest forces in the world.
