Poland, of all countries, today submitted a request to the German government to supply Ukraine with German Leopard 2 tanks from its own inventory. This requires the approval of the country of manufacture. However, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki already signaled yesterday that he would deliver the German tanks without Berlin’s consent if necessary.
Hitler’s Panzer General Heinz Guderian, called “the fast Heinz” by his soldiers, is considered the father of the German Blitzkrieg. He is the author of the reference book “Achtung Panzer!” (Attention tanks!), and the originator of the saying: “Klotzen, nicht kleckern” (to not take half-measures). Is all this now coming back to relevance in Germany?
The German government is still hesitating – but the question is how long it will continue on this course.
This development is astonishing and rather reminiscent of extortionist methods, to say the least. After all, it has always been Poland that has not grown tired of reminding Germans of their Nazi past over the last decades. The unanimous view was that Germany should stay out of military interventions once and for all. This viewpoint has changed dramatically virtually overnight.
So now German tanks are to drive forward again. It opens all doors to the next political abuse: If something goes wrong and the conflict in Ukraine escalates further, the Germans and their weapons could be held responsible. Because we know: Mankind forgets quickly.
You would think that people should learn lessons from history – instead, not only ordinary people, but also the vast majority of politicians judge from the moment. Hand to mouth. This attitude is disastrous, because in this way mistakes from the past are repeated.
In the old German peace party, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), of all parties – which once rejected Hitler’s Enabling Act – a majority opinion has now emerged according to which Germany is a leading power and its army (the Bundeswehr) should consequently be upgraded to the strongest military force in Europe. Those who criticize this new German adventurism get, among other things (for example, to be called a “Putin-understander”), the answer that new challenges require a new political orientation.
All this is happening because the largest country on earth, Russia, is to be brought to its knees via corrupt oligarch capitalism in Ukraine, after the West has permanently managed over the past two decades not only to ignore Russian security interests, but to challenge the country unnecessarily.
As the former U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan rightly said about U.S. policy immediately after the collapse of the old Soviet Union: “The West is squandering the opportunity to turn a former enemy into a partner.”
Now they only talk about German tanks against Russia. The Fuehrer would slap his thigh with enthusiasm.
If it was indeed the Russians themselves who rendered the two natural gas pipelines Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the Baltic Sea south of Bornholm unusable last September – then why is the German government so reluctant to this day to release information about it? Berlin is stonewalling with a tenacity that brings the worst suspicions to the fore.
Red dot: Danish island Bornholm in the Baltic Sea. South of it, the natural gas pipelines from Russia, Nord Stream 1 and 2, were rendered unusable in September 2022 after several explosions.
Sahra Wagenknecht, a member of the Bundestag for the Left Party, has asked no fewer than three times about the circumstances of the case and received essentially the same answer to all three inquiries: The release of information of any kind was not possible for reasons of state interest – not even a committee sworn to secrecy could be provided with the facts.
This urge for secrecy naturally gives rise to the suspicion that one of Germany’s allies commissioned the blasting of the undersea lines or carried it out itself, or that Germany itself, in willing complicity with the USA, “settled” the question of restarting the pipelines once and for all.
In any case, it is striking that at the time in question in September the NATO maneuver “BALTOPS 22” under the leadership of the USA was taking place in the Baltic Sea. This also involved the “USS Kearsarge”, which was actually designed for the deployment of naval landing forces, but is also specialized in underwater operations, partly with combat swimmers. Although the warship was already a considerable distance away from Bornholm at the time of the explosions, this says nothing about the manner in which the detonations could have been set off. On the basis of various investigations, including those by Greenpeace, the only certainty seems to be that the destruction did not occur from inside the pipelines. This certainly rules out the possibility of direct Russian involvement, as there had previously been speculation in Western media about robots that could have reached the explosion site far away from Russia.
Also noteworthy is a joint press conference between Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Washington on February 7, 2022 – that is, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine took place. When asked by a journalist what the American response would be should Putin march into Ukraine, Biden gave a pinpoint answer:
“If Germany – if Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the … the border of Ukraine again, then there will be, [we …] no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” The reporter asked quite specifically: “But how will you – how will you do that exactly, since the project and the control of the project is within Germany’s control?”
Answer from the President: “We will – I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.” At this point in the press conference, a few feet away from Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, bound by oath to the good of the German people, responded with a broad grin.
Looking at the following excerpt of the press conference repeatedly (klick below, Biden’s response begins at minute 11 and 22 seconds in the video), I cannot avoid the following interpretation: Joe Biden’s face shows a richly superior smile, certain of victory. Apparently, he kept the promise he made to the reporter – in an act of state terrorism.
Yesterday, the first U.S. ship loaded with environmentally harmful fracking gas arrived in Wilhelmshaven on the German North Sea coast. American corporations are raking in billions from the business, while German private households, despite subsidies, have to pay a multiple of what the cheap Russian natural gas used to cost.
Since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, especially smart and USA-hawkish German politicians have repeatedly attracted attention with their omniscient remarks that for the first time since Hitler there is war again in Europe. From a historical point of view, this is not true: For in the spring of 1999 – some may still remember – NATO, led by the USA, bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia outside the alliance and without a UN mandate. That, too, was war.
Yugoslavia 1999: Burning Belgrade after NATO Bombing
The way of warfare at that time reminds of the current Russian strategy in Ukraine, with the difference that almost 24 years ago nobody talked about a “turn of times” as in Germany and nobody else had the idea to impose sanctions against participating, war-leading NATO countries in view of the crimes against international law. If there was an outcry of indignation, it was nowhere near as loud as it is today – in the media and elsewhere.
Although the operation, which took place between March 24 and June 10, 1999, was code-named “Allied Forces,” the main actor – I would never have guessed – was the United States. The Americans dropped a total of 28,000 bombs on parts of Serbia and Montenegro, with the death of an estimated 500 uninvolved civilians, including children and women, and “accidentally” also bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three people were killed there, all of them Chinese citizens.
The humanitarian justification for the bombings remains controversial to this day, to say the least. Nevertheless, it is always possible to invent reasons to start a war – see George W. Bush. In any case, as air strikes on Yugoslavia proved unexpectedly ineffective, the Americans suddenly had grave misgivings about allowing ground troops to advance.
So, they did exactly the same thing in Yugoslavia that Putin is doing in Ukraine today: the war henceforth focused on civilian infrastructure, targeting power plants, coal-fired power plants, waterworks, rail links, bridges and government facilities. We remember, the US President at that time was Bill Clinton.
Unlike today with regard to Ukraine, hardly any voices of indignation were heard in the West at the time, while rather timid tones came from former pacifists everywhere, such as the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who successfully refused military service in his younger years, but today, in an astonishing change of heart, seems to know his way around any tank model. Like the self-proclaimed “peace politicians” from the Greens, part of the current left-liberal traffic light coalition in Germany, Scholz calls for sending more and more weapons to Ukraine – until Russia is defeated.
A nuclear power like Russia, which has launched a brutal war against Ukraine in violation of international law, is difficult to defeat militarily. Vladimir Putin, provoked to the core by the West, is likely to fight to the end and may not recoil to pull the nuclear card as a last option. Meanwhile, US-controlled corporations are making gigantic profits from the production of war materials and the sale of their dirty fracking natural gas, which hardly anyone overseas wanted before, at a price today that is not only dragging the economy in Europe into the abyss, but from which millions of private households in particular are suffering, not least in Germany.
This is far from the end of the line: The new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives could demand a higher cost-sharing by Europeans in the war in Ukraine, which could drag on for who knows how long. It looks like anything but a good new year for Europe.
A war criminal confesses “by mistake” (see video). Whoever calls Putin a war criminal and not this man, measures with double standards and does not contribute to peace. Here you can see how mendacious the “values” of the West are.
George W. Bush once told the truth.
Those who on the one hand justified Bush’s senseless wars back then (“God told me to go to war”) or still do so today in retrospect are lying to themselves when they condemn Putin today. For all these wars were and are wars of aggression waged by imperial powers, even if Russia’s security interests around Ukraine had been blatantly and probably deliberately disregarded by the Americans and their vassals.
American democracy and freedom were not defended in Afghanistan and Iraq any more than they were in dozens of other countries where the US military bombed and murdered, just as Germany was not defended at Stalingrad or on the Atlantic coast. Propaganda, then as now, was aimed at misleading its own people while maintaining their patriotic willingness.
According to UN estimates, the US-led war in Iraq cost 151,000 lives, most of them civilians, women and children. American bombs did not distinguish between good and evil during the missile attacks on Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. The war instigated by the USA was justified, among other things, with lies about weapons of mass destruction.
Former US-Defense Secretary Colin Powell (1937-2021) himself later apologized for deliberately misleading the world with his remarks to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. In his later years, Powell spoke of “fabricated evidence” designed to make it credible that the United States was waging a justified war against Saddam Hussein.
Now the USA is waging a proxy war in Ukraine to decisively weaken Russia and expand its own sphere of influence in order to impose its own interests on other countries – as is currently happening in Europe.
A Prince Henry the Thirteenth of Reuss was apparently destined to become the new head of state after a successful coup in Germany. At least, that is the assumption of the German Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office. After a large-scale raid last week in Germany, Italy and Austria with about 3,000 police officers, the prosecutor is currently investigating at least 53 defendants on suspicion of membership and support of a terrorist organization.
In Germany, as early as August 28, 2020 – a mere four months before the storming of the Capitol in Washington – several hundred right-wingers, Reich Citizens and conspiracy theorists attempted to break into the Reichstag building in Berlin. Police forces managed to force the mob back from the stairs to the seat of parliament, while in Berlin about 40,000 people demonstrated against the federal government’s Corona measures. The storming of the Reichstag failed because the demonstrators were nowhere near as fanatical and militant as the mob in Washington later on. A woman had spoken to the people, announcing that U.S. President Donald Trump had just landed in Berlin and would use American soldiers to depose the German government that very day.
This refers to the so-called “Reich Citizens”, a movement not recognizing today’s German Basic Law and thus also denying the legal existence of the German state, arguing that there was no peace treaty after the end of World War II and the country thus continues to exist in its pre-1939 borders. According to current estimates, the Reich Citizen scene comprises around 21,000 people.
The notion that imperial acolytes of modern times, led by aristocratic specters, not only want to turn political conditions in Germany upside down, but in all seriousness pose a threat to the country and also find broad support in the process, would never have occurred to me in the past. But it is a mistake not to investigate the causes and answer the question of why people feel driven to reject the prevalent political direction – all the more so when they are left with no alternative in the field of democracy.
This is no longer a phenomenon in the USA alone. When people are disappointed or even disgusted with their government and this disappointment then turns into bitterness and frustration, they often become receptive to radical solutions – including those that no longer fall within the realm of rational understanding. A policy that serves the interests of citizens little or not at all, and by which more and more people feel abandoned, prepares the ground for dangerous polarizations and divisions across society.
In contrast to such diffuse beliefs, many people fortunately still have a basic realistic approach. In Germany, a not insignificant part of the population seems to be of the opinion that the sanctions against Russia are more or less imposed on their country by the U.S., as is the military support for Ukraine. How else would one understand the German government’s about-face on these issues from one day to the next? The Americans wanted to consolidate and further expand their world domination with a tougher policy characterized by threats of sanctions, including against China. Yet it was the Americans themselves who, out of greed for profit, moved large parts of their domestic production base to other countries in order to save production costs and circumvent socio-political regulations. China is only one of those countries.
While Germany generally has been accused of becoming overly dependent on Russia for energy supplies, U.S. corporations have themselves made American consumption dependent on others in recent decades, destroying tens of thousands of industrial jobs at home by outsourcing much of the production that used to take place in the United States. While the latter did not arise from any compulsion other than sheer greed for profit, the old Federal Republic of Germany and the former East-German GDR, as countries poor in raw materials, had to look for alternatives. The Soviets and later the Russians sold oil and liquid natural gas at much lower prices than Germany’s great friend today, the USA. The supply agreements remained unaffected by any events during the Cold War period for decades and even beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991.
The Germans must now witness how their left-liberal government fully submits to the USA and has terminals built on the country’s coasts to receive the dirty fracking liquefied gas from overseas, which had previously been so vehemently rejected. In the future, large corporations in the USA will earn 100 million euros with every ship that arrives, while German consumers, despite subsidies, will not only have to pay the highest liquefied gas and electricity prices in Europe, but will also have to reckon with energy shortages in the event of a harsh winter.
In addition, the Biden administration is pursuing a selfish policy, having introduced a $370 billion inflation-reduction bill that subsidizes U.S. companies primarily active in the environmental sector, giving them a competitive advantage over companies from Europe. The fact that this violates World Trade Organization (WTO) rules does not bother the Biden administration. More and more, even German companies are already being lured to the U.S. with anti-competitive tax promises. The USA is determining the worldwide economic liberalism once initiated by Thatcher and Reagan, which results in deregulation and social cuts above all in poorer third world countries – and increasingly not only there –, which ultimately leads to upheavals in political systems, while investors rake in huge profits on the stock exchanges. These are the veritable consequences of the so-called globalization, which was supposed to provide more justice in the entire world.
Apparently largely unnoticed by the American public, the Biden administration is following an “America First” policy at least as strict and ruthless as Donald Trump’s before it.
Who is still surprised when the reputation of the USA sinks to the lowest level worldwide and even in European countries politically radical tendencies arise, which do not stop even before a country like Germany and let officials sound the alarm when a mad prince of the thirteenth wants to coup himself to the head of the state?
It is the Biden’s and their ilk, including a Wall Street Girl named Clinton, who have failed the people with their misguided policies in the interest of big business, allowing a disastrous phenomenon like Trump to come to power in the first place. Perhaps the U.S. will soon witness a sequel, for those who called the ghosts will have a hard time getting rid of them. I would not be surprised anymore.
The Americans have committed unspeakable wartime atrocities in this Southeast Asian country, and now the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, of all people, expects Vietnam to take a clear stand against Russia in the Ukraine war. But during his visit today, the country’s communist leadership gave him the cold shoulder.
Every German politician should keep out of it. In Vietnam, the war against the American aggressor is deeply etched in the collective memory. And it was mainly the then Soviet Union that massively supported North Vietnam. How can anyone today seriously expect Vietnam to oppose Russia and side with the Americans, of all people? Put yourself in the shoes of a Vietnamese of my generation who lost siblings, parents, relatives to the American bombing, “body count” and Agent Orange war.
But the deep meaning of Germany’s intentions is discernible. Once again, Berlin proves its almost unconditional Nibelung loyalty to the Biden administration and now as its agent of fulfillment. For it is clear where the foreign policy pressure to have fewer trade relations with China comes from, so that Washington can push back its main economic competitor, China.
However, China is Germany’s most important trading partner. Olaf Scholz’s attempt to kill two birds with one stone in Vietnam is bound to fail. He will be lucky if the Vietnamese agree to new trade arrangements with Germany that could compensate, at least in small parts, for reduced trade with China. Once again, Germany is fatally complying with U.S. expectations, to its own detriment.
It was reported that in Georgia, Union County’s sole commissioner Lamar Paris contracted the coronavirus. That’s unfortunate. As probably the sole German citizen in Union County to whom the thought of acquiring property here, of all places, has occurred, I take this opportunity to wish him a speedy recovery.
However, the senior civil servant may not care much about recovery wishes from such a side. Already in the past, he saw no need to respond to a request sent to him by e-mail from the alien German. This question was simply in reference to the use of tax dollars for a proposed shooting range that apparently has not been completed to date and wastes tax dollars from just about every resident.
Can Mr. Paris do pretty much whatever he wants? It is not for me to question his performance, and certainly he did not invent the system of his own one-man show. But in fact, in that regard, he is someone who is quick to have the boardroom cleared as soon as there is too much opposition to him. When I hear something like that, dark memories come back to me.
As an old political observer on both sides of the Atlantic, it is a complete mystery to me how somebody like Mr. Paris can function in a democratic sense of pluralism. As a contemporary witness, I saw a lot of the “socialist” dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (GDR; back then elsewhere commonly called “East Germany”) during the Cold War – a state that was anything but democratic and consequently not a Republic. There, too, – in a dictatorship it must be remembered – a district commission existed, consisting of several members though, unlike today in Union County. They “voted” on everything possible, but usually these votes ended unanimously, for only one party controlled everything. Such an institution could certainly not be called democratic.
In the United States of America, still a Republic and allegedly the freest country in the world, it seems outlandish when a single person in public service can de facto say: The party, that’s me. Moreover, according to malicious tongues, Mr. Paris has claimed to be the only one who is up to the task. Somebody like a modern Jesus, in other words.
Self-praise stinks from heaven, says an old German proverb. For Paris pats himself on the back and thus feeds the suspicion of seeing himself as an irreplaceable autocrat, an impression that may or may not be justified.
How things resemble each other – one should not even think it possible. In the GDR, the dictatorship in which I was born and grew up, the comrades cheered each other on. Their party held all the power. They thought themselves infallible. I have the unpleasant and hopefully false feeling that Mr. Paris would have liked that.
Many people do not remember what happened in the recent past, but politicians in high positions of responsibility would actually be obliged to do so. This should be self-evident for a very banal reason: For yesterday’s events become the guide of action for today.
Thirty-two years may be a long time in a person’s life – in the history of the world they are only the blink of an eye. As someone who followed the events at that time very closely and was affected by them – after all, those were the basic conditions for the reunification of my country – I can understand Vladimir Putin today. The entire West – mainly Germany under the benevolent protection of the USA – have deceived and lied to the Russians and rejected Putin’s outstretched hand several times during his first term as Russian president.
Contrary to all international promises and assurances, NATO’s external border has steadily moved closer to Russia, starting in 1999 with the inclusion of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. There was absolutely no need nine years before to exploit the goodwill of the disintegrating Soviet Union in such obscurity. This is not an opinion, but an indisputable, historical fact.
For a short time in 1990, there was even discussion of admitting the Soviet Union itself into NATO. And one should also remember: At the end of a speech in the German Bundestag on September 25, 2001, there was a standing ovation for the German-speaking Vladimir Putin. All forgotten already.
Only a few days ago, the re-elected German Federal President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, had nothing better to do than to warn Putin of “harsh consequences” in connection with Ukraine. Of course, there should be no more war in Europe, but Russia feels humiliated and threatened. What would be the reaction of the USA if Putin stationed soldiers and missiles in Venezuela? It should be allowed to ask this question.
The link below shows the two foreign ministers of the United States and Germany at the time, James Baker and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, with English subtitles.
The Wind of Change 