Author: gdrthinktank

Germany and Europe: On a fatal Path

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2024 by Uwe Bahr

On the second anniversary of the war in Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz chooses strong words. And he is obviously forgetting the successful policies of his own Social Democratic Party not too long ago.

Not without a small pinch of uncertainty, Scholz told his fellow citizens in all seriousness yesterday: “A return to the policy of deterrence was necessary. Words such as ‘deterrence’ and ‘defense readiness’ are unfamiliar words for some [people] coming from a German Chancellor. However, they stand for an important task: Together with our allies, we must be so strong that no one dares to attack us. This is how we ensure our security. And this is how we defend peace in Europe.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party of Germany).

He is thus contradicting the spirit of all reason and history, from which the Germans in particular should have learned their lessons. For it is not difficult to see that his statements will only lead to an endless spiral of rearmament and further deaths, including the mutual waste of resources affecting generations to come – for the other side will of course respond with the same.

Recent history teaches a different path, which was successful and ultimately led to the – temporary – end of the division of Europe, the Cold War. The West German policy of détente in the 1960s/70s, often to the annoyance of the Americans at the time, led to de-escalation in small steps, although wars were also the order of the day back then. The Soviets subjugated the entire Eastern Bloc, and a Leonid Brezhnev as the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in World War II allied with the USA, was anything but an easy negotiating partner – certainly worse than a Putin in the first decade of our century. But at least the channels of communication between the two power blocs always remained open, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

The certainty has long since solidified that an economically and socially staggering Germany today no longer pursues an independent foreign policy, but has made itself the vassal of interests that cannot be German interests.

Instead of submitting unconditionally, the Europeans, led by France and Germany, should form their own protective alliance, which represents the interests of Europe and not those of the USA. France has nuclear weapons, France and Germany together have more people than Russia, a higher economic power than Russia and a higher military budget than Russia. If a deterrent were needed, the potential for it would be in European hands and not in the hands of the USA, which does not want to grant a fair partnership based on reciprocity.

The reaction of the USA would remain to be seen if they no longer had their hands in the pie everywhere in order to expand their influence and their quest for endless profit.

For the USA is not a protective power, but an aggressive world power that is exclusively pursuing its own expansionist interests. It has proven this fact with its senseless wars, interventions and bombings throughout its history.

Such a country cannot lead a defense alliance.

This has become of Germany

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2024 by Uwe Bahr

After the Second World War, the Germans had sworn off any involvement in war. The world agreed, for we were the evil Nazis.

In 1999, however, active participation in military operations was resumed – the conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl had been voted out of office a year earlier – with the bombing of Serbia at the behest of the USA.

This was followed by 20 years in Afghanistan, where we finally fled the country with the Americans and their military, which proved to be completely helpless. To this day, no German government can explain what the purpose of this mission with German participation was.

In 2015, we supported the bombing Americans in Syria with aerial reconnaissance. As always, Ramstein in Germany is used as a US military base and hub for global drone attacks. This is one of the reasons why Russian nuclear missiles are aimed at our country. Nobody in Germany talks about this – but in the USA they do.

Now we are firmly locked into and integrated into a US proxy war in Ukraine. Tanks with the Iron Cross on their turrets are once again rolling against Russia, where the German invasion in 1941 and following years cost 26 million Russians their lives. There is always talk of 6 million Jews that we have killed. We support Israel with carte blanche, no matter what that country does. That doesn’t apply to Russia – because of the Americans’ claims to power.

What is striking is that every time the Americans have come to the end of their tether with their bombing and their Latin, waves of refugees have set in, of which Germany has always been the largest host country at horrendous cost – now it is no different with Ukraine. On top of this, however, Germany is being admonished by the Americans to spend more on joint defense within NATO. And Germany is complying here, too.

Someone like Trump is simply too stupid to recognize the correlations. However, if an overall account were to be drawn up, then it would be clear who would have to pay whom.

As a consequence, money is lacking elsewhere in Germany. And then we give the Americans another ten billion euros in bribes for the Intel settlement in Magdeburg and buy the dirty fracking gas from them at inflated prices, for which nearly the entire German economy and the average German consumer have to bleed.

No one can be that completely crazy like the German government. It’s simply not possible.

A Missed Penalty Kick

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

A missed penalty kick and an inappropriate smile – already some blinded American “patriots” are gasping for breath. Instead of blue hair and woke policies they should think and name what makes them so proud of their country.

The storming of the Capitol by a mindless, antisocial horde, making the U.S. look like a third world country?

A proud military running from medieval warriors in sandals in Afghanistan – in a country where no U.S. soldier has any business being?

Proud of an inhumane “health care system” that leaves out millions of Americans because insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations have to line their own pockets with billions in profit?

Proud of a country that is considered the richest in the world, but where there are hundreds of thousands of children who are categorized as disadvantaged and do not get three meals a day?

A country where more than two-thirds of all so-called “Christians” voted for a pervert like Trump?

A country where racial discrimination and the discrimination of dissenters are the order of the day?

A country where usury and profit for the benefit of the few count more than the common good?

Proud of a country where children can’t go to school without fear because of an insane gun culture in the most Christian of all countries?

Proud of a country that maintains military bases in more than 100 countries under the pretext of being the world’s policeman for democracy and freedom, only to interfere wherever expansionist US interests are threatened?

But the missed penalty kick of an American soccer player who has led her country to so much success in previous events becomes a troubling factor in a lost person’s damaged psyche for a perceived would-be patriotism. That says it all.

It is voices of ignorance like the one below that are dividing the United States of America, contributing to unrest and creating a dangerous atmosphere:

With Stones Against Russian Tanks

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Long before the Berlin Wall was built, the Soviet satellite state of East Germany was doomed to fall

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

Seventy years ago, on June 17, 1953, about one million people took to the streets in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany, which had been called the “German Democratic Republic” (GDR) since 1949. They demonstrated against the poor supply situation and, above all, against the ordered norm increases for workers without wage compensation. During the uprising, political demands were added: free and democratic elections and the restoration of German unity.

For a few hours on June 17, 1953, the communist leadership in East Berlin had lost all control over the GDR. Then the Soviet tanks came and crushed the workers’ uprising. More than 100 people lost their lives.

No help came from the West.

While GDR citizens defended themselves against Soviet tanks with stones and sticks, head of state Walter Ulbricht and his communist comrades had to flee to the custody of the Soviet military administration in Berlin-Karlshorst. For a few hours, the GDR, which was not even four years old, was actually already destroyed. The West stood idly by during these days, as it did later during the building of the Berlin Wall, and indeed could not help. For any active interference would have triggered a military confrontation with the Soviet Union including unimaginable consequences.

Thirty-six years later, GDR citizens again took to the streets against the Stalinist system – and in peaceful protests they were successful this time, eliminating the SED regime of injustice and making the reunification of Germany possible in the first place. When the Berlin Wall fell, Soviet tanks stayed in the barracks, while the Western powers, who held the protection of West Berlin, did not dare to intervene openly. As a contemporary witness, I saw myself in disbelieving amazement at this – then, as now. The Soviets at the End of the Cold War had their own difficulties, mainly of economic nature – that’s true, but they were still a nuclear power and could have reacted very differently in the fall of 1989.

Today, there are politicians in Germany who, in their unquestioning allegiance to the U.S., want to certify directly or indirectly to the same former East Germans who brought down the Cold War that they sympathize with today’s Russia and Putin out of “nostalgic attachment” to the former Soviet Union. This is the reason why fewer people in the German East allegedly support the war in Ukraine against Russia than in the West.

How is that possible? Those who actively opposed the totalitarian occupying power back then now all of the sudden feel sympathy for it in the aftermath? There can hardly be a greater contradiction. Or are they perhaps the ones who can see through the mendacious policy of the West because of the experiences they made in two German states? Do they still feel gratitude? Without Gorbachev and his relenting there would probably not have been a German reunification. In Gorbachev’s back, as is often forgotten today, Stalinist die-hards were ready to undo history, as the attempted coup in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1991 proves. At that time, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were still stationed in the East of the reunited Germany, the last of whom did not leave until 1994.

It is an impertinence beyond compare when people with a lack of expertise assume the right to judge pejoratively those who had the courage to speak out against a Stalinist dictatorship. For this, those attacked are nowadays publicly put in a corner in my home country as unruly citizens. Any opinion other than the official one does not correspond to the spirit of the times. This also shows the hypocrisy when Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and others talk about events like June 17, 1953. Yet it was people like Steinmeier who courted Putin and pushed natural gas supplies from Russia – they just don’t want to talk about it anymore.

When then as now there is talk about the “evil Russians”, most commentators fail to realize that there was also a time in between, which was not long ago. Perhaps the “old GDR people”, people like me, are a bit more sensitized by their life experiences. We probably feel the new injustice in today’s system the most and understand how much the aggression policy of the USA including the eastward expansion of NATO, but especially the interferences in Ukraine, has destroyed Russia’s initially benevolent attitude towards the West.

We know who, after German reunification, failed to reach out to Russia as a partner and instead build it up as a new enemy.

How the Americans “Won” a Nazi Ship

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

Three-masted barque “Eagle”, formerly “Horst Wessel”

On the German Baltic coast, not only are seawater-polluting LNG terminals being built to accommodate environmentally harmful American fracking gas, but every now and then useful things are also being done.

In the Hanseatic city of Stralsund, the original three-masted barque “Gorch Fock,” now only a museum ship, is currently undergoing extensive restoration at a cost of ten million euros to at least keep it floatable. The ship, which was commissioned in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, was lifted by the Soviets in the Strelasund after the end of the war and confiscated as reparations. It last sailed under the Ukrainian flag before a club managed to bring the completely run-down tall ship back to Germany.

Because the ship sailed under the Russian name “Tovarich” (Comrade) during the Cold War and thus seemed lost forever, the Federal Republic of Germany rebuilt the “Gorch Fock” in 1958, so that today there are two sailing ships under the same name. However, only the second “Gorch Fock” is still operational.

Another, identically constructed German sailing ship – the “Horst Wessel”, named after an SA storm leader and built in Hamburg in just one hundred days in 1936 – was seized in 1946 by the Americans. They “won” the 295-foot, three-masted “Nazi Vessel” in a sort of prize lottery against the Brits and the Soviets but needed some German crew members to get the ship from Bremerhaven across the Atlantic to Orangeburg, New York.

“Horst Wessel” is now called “Eagle” and serves as a training cutter for the US Coast Guard. At least, unlike Ukraine, the Americans have taken care of the ship and kept it immaculately maintained.

Eisenhower, the Union Man

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

In our age of cutting-edge technology, where greedy corporations shamelessly exploit the labor of the mass of their employees and leave them to live little more than from payday to payday, no one remembers words like the following. They did, in fact, come from a Republican president:

Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower (1890-1969)

“Today in America, unions have a secure place in our industrial life. Only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice. I have no use for those – regardless of their political party – who hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice.”

The statement was made in 1952 by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II and 34th President of the United States of America. Eisenhower, a Republican socialist; a forerunner of Bernie Sanders, so to speak. Imagine that.

The fools today would be: Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Starbucks …, to name just a few. They all have one thing in common: they suppress workers’ rights by all legal and illegal means and do everything they can to prevent representation of the interests of the weak. They all rake billions into their own pockets and have little more than starvation wages left for their ordinary employees, who can barely make ends meet.

This is what the modern age of the 21st century looks like.

If Eisenhower’s words are anything to go by, then the fools of our day would unfortunately also be those who are sorely informed and believe they must elect Trump, DeSantis or even Biden to represent the interests of the American majority. The exact opposite is the case: for these sorts of politicians use their power and influence in the interests of the billionaire class and ensure that corporations can continue to wallow in their greed.

The latter is obviously not what Eisenhower wanted for the American future. “Ike” would be shocked to hear today’s bullies like Trump and DeSantis talking.

American Socialism

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Most Americans today don’t seem to know this – that in their history they have had presidents from both major parties who were nothing more than socialists helping millions of people out of economic despair with government measures, such as FDR during the Great Depression. The views of Bernie Sanders today are not even half as radical as those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt yesterday.

Harry S. Truman, President of the United States of America 1945-1953

Of course, there are also institutions and agencies in the U.S. that can be called socialist, because they are actually state-controlled, such as the police, the fire department, the U.S. Army, the United States Postal Service, Medicare, Medicaid, and many others.

As a result of widespread, deliberate misleading, the majority of Americans today confuse socialism with the authoritarian version I grew up with in the GDR and think that democratic socialism is the devil incarnate because that is what is drummed into them every day from the corporate media to the churches at the behest of big money, and that is why in all their Christian grandeur they will vote for Trump again. They are ill-informed? Only ignorant people can vote for a pervert like Trump, a demagogue like DeSantis, or another big money directed person like Biden, who on top of it all calls himself a “capitalist” so as not to give any other impression.

Those who really want something good for their country should internalize the following:

Gone

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If I weren’t so appalled at the state of my own homeland, I could laugh my head off at the Trump saga. Germany is in the process of ruining itself beyond repair, and in the U.S. the Punch and Judy show is ruling to the detriment of the people, only a minority of whom – as on the other side of the Atlantic – seem to have their wits about them.

For the first time in 25 years in the U.S., it feels like my native country is slipping away from me – a process I would not have thought possible until recently.

A human being has to stay somewhere. Perhaps one should only enjoy butterflies and self-grown tomatoes and peppers, as long as it is still possible.

Once upon a time there was a country … I no longer have one.

A Free Country

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It’s not because I am writing this – it’s something to think about:

As a child, I had no choice but to attend a so-called “socialist school.” There was no other kind of school in my childhood. We sometimes had a bleeding knee or elbow, which we got while playing in the schoolyard. But none of us died.

I grew up in the middle of the Cold War and on its immediate front line. Only a hundred yards away from my school, columns of Soviet military vehicles drove by every hour. There were thousands of soldiers there, under the tarpaulins were strategic missiles, possibly even nuclear weapons.

We could hear the engines humming and smelled the stinking Russian gasoline.

And we heard foreign sounds.

But not a single one of us children in the entire country did not return home after school because he or she would have been shot and killed – unlike thousands of schoolchildren in the USA today. Today I am convinced we grew up in a mentally healthy society, as paradoxical as this may sound in historical retrospect. In any case, firearms were strictly forbidden. Why do you need firearms in a halfway normal, civilized community?

The overwhelming cause of death among children in the United States of America is death by gun. This is the result of the influence of the gun lobby in Congress, which most likely reaches down to the local level, owning lawmakers and officials like pawns through bribery and corruption and making billions in profits at the expense of the lives of their country’s children. Because that’s what it’s really about, and that’s why the true meaning of the Second Amendment has been deliberately distorted by the US Supreme Court.

Who calls this country Christian and the freest country in the world, where not even children can be sure of their lives in their schools? Really – this is a free country?