Tag: UnionCountyFetchYourNews

Marx and Lenin

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Does Mrs. Noem know what she is talking about?

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem actually said the following sentence yesterday during the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Houston: “Let me tell you the truth about the enemies of the Second Amendment. They are schooled in the ways of Marx and Lenin.”

Soviet propaganda banner with the heads of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx (from left). We were fed up with such images in GDR times, because they hung in every classroom. I can’t believe that I have to come back to these pictures now, in the supposedly freest country in the world, of all places. At least no harm happened to us in school during our childhood, not once in the whole country – and that in the midst of a socialist dictatorship.

What pathetic nonsense.

“In the ways of Marx and Lenin” I was trained against my will in 1987/88 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the Kalashnikov, the most widely used sub-machine gun in the world at the time – and I did not like that at all. Even that “schooling” did not change my attitude towards guns.

In the GDR, where I lived for 29 years, military education was a compulsory subject in schools, as well as military camps – by the way, also for girls -, where the young people were trained on weapons. This also included hand grenades.

Notice something? Marxists, Leninists, Communists, Socialists, were sinister propagandists in line with Mrs. Noem and the NRA in their opinion about guns. Both sides for different, but in both cases self-serving purposes. Both are characterized by efforts to sell their propaganda with all sorts of history distorting arguments to disguise their true intentions. Politicians in the U.S. for reasons of votes and donations from the gun industry, no matter how many children have to die in their own country due to gun violence. Communists and socialists believed that guns were desperately needed to succeed in the “revolutionary struggle against the class enemy.” I am not sure anymore which is worse.

So, I don’t know where the lady from South Dakota gets her wisdom from. But she doesn’t care about historical facts – because she knows how well any nonsense goes down propagandistically with the majority of her countrymen as soon as terms like “Socialism” or “Marxism” come into play. My special friend Ron DeSantis from Florida uses far-fetched allusions to German history, including odd remarks about the Cold War, with such regularity that you can’t help but laugh at them. But with a majority of Americans, that kind of thing resonates.

The radical, naive and inflammatory speeches of the Trumps, DeSantis’, Cruz’ are easy to see through, especially for those who are informed about the historical background. I understand more and more why the political right, together with the churches in the fairway, wants to teach children in schools only what they think is right. For there is nothing more dangerous for the goals of propagandists than an enlightened humanity.

No Guns in Private Hands

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

If the previous reports are somewhat accurate, then it is difficult to understand for a layman like me how parents could be so quickly in front of the school building and still heard the gunshots which killed the children …, while the local police in Uvalde/Texas allegedly could not do anything to stop the murderer for an entire hour. Because they had to wait for the “Tactical Team?”

In terms of gun advocates, then, following the theory, how are armed teachers or school security personnel supposed to stop a heavily armed murderer – when not even trained, local police officers can accomplish this?

Even in previous mass shootings at American schools, armed protective personnel have never been shown to contain, let alone prevent, a crime. These are the facts.

So, what are the gun-obsessed people talking about who believe that only guns in the hands of do-gooders can prevent such carnage? What if these good guys are scared to use their guns as apparently happened in Uvalde? Gun rights advocates generally talk incoherent, visionary, brainless stuff to justify their own motivations for carrying a gun, invoking a manipulated Second Amendment from 1791. They are kaput.

The spread of such nonsense paves the way for the next massacre. What kind of people are they who can support such a thing – what is their spiritual and mental state? They scream their throats out about abortions, while their born children literally have to run for their lives every day.

Those who still talk about weapons protecting lives should be ashamed of themselves. Weapons kill, and for this reason, without exception, they do not belong in the hands of private individuals. No stricter gun laws can stop the madness in the USA.

Profit and Power over Corpses

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

There was an entire political clique standing in the front row at yesterday’s press conference in Texas after the mass murder of school children the day before. Almost all of them are gun lobbyists who receive large donations from gun manufacturers and the National Rifle Association (NRA) to provide for “laws” that make crimes like yesterday in Uvalde possible in the first place.

Texas Governor Greg Abott signed a bill into law just last year that de facto allows any Texan over the age of 21 to openly carry a gun without a permit. By steering the issue in the complete opposite direction of common sense and community responsibility, politicians have been complicit in the deaths of school children. They would have long been convicted of this abuse of power for self-interest if it were not for a widespread mentality for legalized criminality in the United States. Such a mentality of leading politicians has already been brought to the minds of Americans even before a dysfunctional personality like Trump could gain the presidency.

Are there really Americans mentally incapable of recognizing these proven connections and naming them accordingly? It is simply not humanly possible that a large part of the general public allows itself to be dumbed down in this way.

“I’m for stricter gun laws” – what a sentence either full of cluelessness or hypocrisy and sanctimony. Any reasonable person honest to himself knows that because of the lobby, stricter gun laws will not only seriously not be tackled, but moreover would be insufficient to stop the mass shootings in the country.

And the so-called “Christians” care about embryos, but when it comes to children’s lives, political alignment and the need to present themselves as “real, conservative Americans” supporting the “right” to bear arms are at the forefront. Most do not even notice the glaring contradiction in their ideological bigotry. In this way, they are fully in line with the corrupted mission statement of the politicians they elect.

I don’t know about you – but I couldn’t live a single day with so much shameless simplemindedness.

The Message of Hitler Admirers

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The reasons why it is hardly possible to acquire a gun legally in Germany

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

I often ask myself what I am doing here in the “United” States of America. People of my host country shoot their own people in droves every day. The good thing is that even after a quarter of a century, I don’t owe this alienated land of the Brave a single crumb.

My country of origin, Germany, has one of the strictest gun laws in the world. This has to do with both our culture and our history. Growing up, my generation sat at the dinner table with family members and relatives who had lived through Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and now left a message for us that has been imprinted for a lifetime: Only an idiot voluntarily picks up a gun.

Shocking: As always, the USA leads by a wide margin.

These people, long in their graves, were anything but wimps. They had gone out to conquer the world for Hitler and Germany. They were in France with Guderian, on speedboats in the English Channel, on the Eastern Front at Stalingrad, in the desert with Rommel. Several great uncles were in Soviet captivity for several years, which hundreds of thousands of German soldiers did not survive. We were still children when our old soccer coach suddenly took off his shirt in the middle of the sports field and showed us his war wounds, caused by shell splinters. We were shocked at the sight. “Memory of Stalingrad”, he called it, and “look, what it does.” In the end, they had at least come to their senses after initial enthusiasm for their beloved Fuehrer, and this clearly reflected on me and my generation.

Today I am glad, almost proud, to have been surrounded by people who had their minds together. Their legacy is deeply rooted in me, because they spoke out of a very deep experience that was, as it were, extremely painful for them and for which they had had to pay a high price.

Of course, they saw this experience with weapons from a different perspective than is the case today in the U.S. – from the perspective of war. A society in their own country where people justify their gun ownership by claiming they need to protect themselves from their own people – not even the former Nazi supporters could imagine such a thing. But that is exactly the daily reality in the USA, the most Christian of all countries, where gun advocates and proud gun owners sit in their churches on Sundays and call themselves anti-abortionists to boot. How can someone who calls himself pro-life and anti-abortion, in all seriousness, not be firmly against any private gun ownership when tens of thousands of innocent people, including even school children, are murdered in his country every year?

For obvious and logical reasons, the German system of gun control restricts the acquisition, possession, and carrying of firearms to those who have a credible justification for carrying a weapon. Fully automatic weapons are absolutely prohibited.

European Energy Trap

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The original failure is not the energy dependence of Europeans from Russia

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

One can imagine how the situation would be now with an American president Donald Trump. Someone in Moscow would rub their hands, and the unity in the appearance of the Europeans would hardly be as determined as it is at present. Hopefully, politicians from Brussels to Berlin and London to Paris remember in this hour that already the next president of the United States might not be a transatlantic friend like Joe Biden.

While his approval rating is dropping dangerously at home, Biden can score points abroad and improve the U.S.’s international standing. But that doesn’t sit well with many of his compatriots, who think along the lines of “America first” and thus in reality support autocratic aspirations – a dangerous path that Trump had already led the U.S. down. Biden’s increasing unpopularity is unlikely to change due to the fact that the Europeans now actually want to buy environmentally harmful fracking gas from overseas.

It is hard to understand why ludicrous sanctions exist against Russian private citizens while the real lever that helps finance Putin’s war on Ukraine is left untouched. Germany, for example – according to Robert Habeck (Alliance 90/The Greens), Federal Minister of Economics and Climate Protection, – is still dependent on Russian natural gas until mid-2024 and is using this argument as justification to continue trading with Russia. A unified and convincing policy against Putin looks different, who now wants the natural gas to be paid for in rubles. Perhaps Germany will experience its decisive showdown next week, when one of the two sides will have to relent. So far, it is hard to imagine that Putin will give in.

A loss of Russian gas supplies would have a devastating impact not only on the German economy and most private households, but also on the entire European market. For the announced gas supplies from America can only cover ten percent of Europe’s demand in the short term.

There has long been criticism that Germany and Europe have become too dependent on Russia, and now we are seeing the consequences. But Germany’s energy agreements – given the country’s long and guilt-laden history with Russia – were seen not least as a guarantee of mutual trust by building reciprocal dependencies. It was assumed that the Russians would have no interest in completely throwing themselves over with us if they themselves have advantages through economic cooperation.

The project has failed. But how to solve the world’s problems without a giant country like Russia? Russia cannot be downgraded or dissolved. Isolated, it would be a constant threat to world peace.

The long-term mistakes were not made in the energy sector, but in geostrategic matters. The West, under U.S. leadership, has not made consistent efforts since the 1990s to integrate Russia into security structures while providing security guarantees to bordering countries without integrating them into NATO and thus not cornering Russia.

From the very beginning there have been no serious efforts to transform the former Soviet Union into a partner after its disintegration. If this had happened, even in America today hardly anyone would be talking about Europeans’ energy dependence on Russia.

German State Secretary: Refugees across the Atlantic as well

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Visiting a shelter for Ukrainian refugees today in Hannover, Lower Saxony, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) said every country in Europe must take in refugees. She added: “We must also bring people across the Atlantic.” Given the dramatic situation in Germany and the economic capability of the countries on the American continent, she could only have meant Canada and the USA.

The German Foreign Minister’s demand is more than justified. The refugees from Ukraine are clearly an overall responsibility of the West due to its misguided policies towards Russia in the 1990’s. In concrete terms, this means that all NATO countries should be required to accept refugees from Ukraine, as the Alliance as a whole has been moving its external border closer and closer to Russia since 1999, thereby unnecessarily provoking the country. Of course, this does not entitle Russia to the war in which it is now bogged down. But the disintegrating Soviet Union should have been treated more carefully by the West, instead of pushing it into the corner of a possibly Asian peripheral power via the American Wolfowitz Doctrine.

Germany’s Secretary of State Annalena Baerbock (Alliance 90/The Greens).

In the meantime, it has almost been forgotten that in 1990 there were even brief considerations of admitting the Soviet Union to NATO.

At that time, there were many opportunities to integrate Russia into European security structures based on reciprocity. These opportunities have been punitively squandered. A prudent policy by the West would have made this bonding possible under the acceptance not to impose Western-style democracy on Russia. Anyone who was able to observe the political upheavals in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980’s from close quarters knows that this is true.

Now the European Union expects ten million refugees from Ukraine – that would be a quarter of the country’s entire population. This represents an enormous social burden and at the same time an opportunity for the entire West, including the U.S., to show its true Christian commitment.

A Human Disaster

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

In 2015, Germany mastered the refugee crisis with flying colors – it is remarkable how a million people were integrated into what was already Europe’s most populous country. But now I am anything but optimistic. Special trains from Warsaw carrying Ukrainian refugees reach the German capital Berlin almost at hourly intervals. 10,000 people arrive here alone every day.

The solidarity of the local population still holds.

At Berlin’s main train station, numerous signs in Russian and Ukrainian warn young women in particular not to accept overnight offers from private individuals. Most refugees are women and children. If they do not register upon arrival, every trace is lost. The police patrol everywhere.

On the tarmac of Berlin-Tegel Airport, which was shut down in November 2020 and where my wife and I had landed just three years ago, an arrival center was opened where refugees are registered, cared for and then transported on to other federal states in Germany. The City of Leipzig has already signaled that it has reached its intake capacity.

The German government now assumes that one million refugees from Ukraine will end up in Germany, almost 300,000 of whom are already in the country. But this figure is vague, because no one knows how long the war will last. And it can hardly be assumed that most of the refugees want to return to their destroyed country.

By comparison, the U.S. is about 27 times larger than Germany, but it has barely four times as many inhabitants.

This is the largest movement of refugees in Europe since 1944/45, when 14 million people from the former German eastern territories were fleeing the approaching Soviet army at the end of World War II. One of them was my father from East Prussia.

The End of Globalization

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

The headline to my blog page is “Wind of Change.” However, this is not how I imagined the changes – I have to say that honestly. It is a caesura in the lives of people, especially in Europe, that was considered unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

When the war in Ukraine ends one day, Putin will be sitting on a pile of rubble that he conquered, isolated from most of the world. He is already turning to China as an ally because there is nothing else left for him. Once again, humanity is facing a division into hostile power blocks: We are returning to a phase of power politics that defined the European modern era from the 15th into the 20th century and that we thought we had overcome – but that we have now fallen back into.

These are anything but good prospects for the West, because it believed – correctly – that all problems of mankind can only be solved globally, which means: with at least the largest powers of this earth on one and the same side. Because the climate crisis, the hunger crisis in the southern part of the globe, and the refugee movements, such as now from Ukraine, do not stop at national borders. Instead, achieving these goals will now be even further away.

Where Trump had failed for the time being with his “America First” policy, Putin is now much more advanced in his own, Russian sense (which is why the two got along so well). This means: Only what I want counts – and I can enforce that by any means, even by force if necessary (see storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021). Such political means fall under the category of “autocracy.” That was the concession for the stunning decision of 75 million Trump voters in the U.S. in 2020, many of whom believe to this day that this election was rigged.

From now on, globalization in its true sense will no longer be practicable, because the world community is falling back into power blocks, with all these global problems becoming a matter of negotiation that always result in mediocre compromises instead of really tackling the problems. Moreover, the world sees itself divided into two ideological, fundamentally opposed camps: Authoritarian states on the one hand, democratic ones on the other – with even the U.S. a shaky candidate, as Christian pseudo-conservatives reject progress in a fierce determination to fight anything that threatens their supposed values.

In addition, there is a threat of social unrest in countries like Germany, because the reversion to high levels of armaments means that budget funds are being reallocated to unproductive areas like the military, which are then – logically – lacking elsewhere. Unlike people in the U.S., however, Germans are not used to being abandoned by their welfare state. The German government is already talking about subsidizing gasoline and heating costs so that the burdens on citizens do not rise ad infinitum.

Putin has succeeded in destroying the global world order. The consequences will be catastrophic worldwide. This will also be felt by those who still live with their heads in the sand and believe that they alone can solve their country’s problems with feigned ostentation.

The “Me First” policy will come with a dear price.

Only China can make Putin see Reason

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Putin will never succeed in bringing all of Ukraine under his control. I am sure that is not his intention either. Contrary to Western assumptions, the man is not a lunatic, far from it – he knows how to play his cards. He is a Machiavellian. Therefore, he also knows what could exceed the forces of his country.

If anyone at all can mediate in this conflict, it is not the Americans, and certainly not the Europeans. Europeans no longer play any role at all in the big decisions. China – to the detriment of the USA – has the decisive key role to play. If Putin listens to anyone at all, it is Chinese leader Xi Jinping. For the same reason, all channels of communication with Putin must be kept open if the war in Ukraine is to be ended as quickly as possible. As things stand, there will be no other way.

Even then, Putin is unlikely to back down from his demands: Recognition of Crimea as Russian territory, the same for the Donbass, but above all: a guarantee by the West of Ukraine’s neutrality. If peace is wanted – and this peace must come – then this is the price that the West will have to pay for its reckless policy of hubris toward Russia.

The only other possibility would be to bring Russia to its knees militarily or, in the end, even economically. Neither seems very realistic, as Biden’s “no” vote on fighter jets from Poland for Ukraine underscores. It would provoke Russia even more with devastating consequences for the whole of Europe. Here, the West is already showing signs of giving in. And the more the West fights Russia with sanctions, the more it brings the majority of patriotic Russians to Putin’s side.

Even the pictures of protests in Moscow do not change that. For more than a generation, the majority of Russians have wondered what the country actually fought for and won in World War II – only to lose so much again afterwards under its own concession. One has to put oneself in this position of Russian patriots – of a country which was, after all, allied with the USA in the last Great War. All this is directly related to the war in Ukraine.

The other victorious nation, the United States, after the destruction of Hitler’s Germany and with far fewer casualties than the Soviet Union, did not shrink a square inch, did not lose power, although it too has since instigated unjust wars in other parts of the world.

Lindsey Graham wants a Stauffenberg in Moscow

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

US Senator Lindsey Olin Graham from South Carolina asks for a Stauffenberg in the ranks of the Russian leadership to “eliminate Putin”, referring seriously to the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on July 20th, 1944, at Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) in Rastenburg/East Prussia. Only someone who either has not the foggiest clue of the historical background himself or believes he can delude an uneducated part of his own people unable to distinguish an X from a W, can publicly express such a pathological train of thought.

At the same time, an American politician would be well advised these days to avoid any historical proximity to the time of World War II if he wants to attack Putin at least verbally.

For at the time when Stauffenberg and consorts were trying to prove the Aryan superiority of Hitler’s ideology, Mr. Graham’s country was allied with a dictator who was not only a Communist and a Bolshevik but, according to American historians, was every bit the tyrant Hitler: Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, predecessor of today’s Russia.

Is Mr. Graham even aware that just a few years before the Americans allied with the Bolsheviks, Stalin deliberately starved millions to death – in Ukraine, of all places? Or is the man really that ignorant? Who does he think he can sell his story to?

It is unknown to me to date that there was even one single American politician at the time, at least until the Berlin Blockade, who would have publicly called for the assassination of the mass murderer Joseph Stalin, the ally of the USA. On the contrary – in their books, historians such as Thomas Flemming and David McCullough unanimously describe that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Soviet leader Joseph Stalin if he could call him “Uncle Joe.”

Apart from that, the comparison with Hitler’s assassin, Colonel Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, is completely nonsensical from a historical point of view, because the assassination coup in the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia was amateurishly carried out by a military clique that could not get close enough to Hitler beforehand and courted him wherever possible. Without the same officers, Hitler could not have started his wars of aggression in the first place. It was only after Stalingrad, the collapse of Army Group Center, and the Allied landings in Normandy six weeks earlier that most Germans realized the war was no longer winnable, and only then did Stauffenberg decide to kill Hitler.

Not a single one of this military clique had the courage to stand in front of Hitler with the pistol drawn and shoot the Fuehrer at close range. It would have been easy to eliminate Hitler in this way – long before July 20. For Hitler did not give much thought to security measures for himself until shortly before the end of the war – because he believed that he had been chosen by fate to redeem the German people.

Incidentally, the Germans also have their difficulties with the interpretation of their own history. Every year the conspirators of July 20th are commemorated in Berlin’s Bendlerblock, while those who were murdered for their genuine resistance immediately after Hitler’s seizure of power or before are given secondary attention everywhere in today’s Germany. This concerns the tens of thousands who were imprisoned and died in the first concentration camps as early as 1933: unnamed communists, socialists, Christians, trade unionists, social democrats, centrist politicians.

Of the noble officers, with few exceptions, most made common cause with Hitler or were in tacit acceptance until they saw that all was lost. In his book “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) and his speeches Hitler never made a secret about his true intentions. With Putin, however, things are somewhat different. The war he conducts is as much a crime like the war was in Vietnam – but it does not make him a Hitler or Stalin.

Of all things, to associate a Nazi officer, albeit one who turned in the end, with an assassination of Putin shows a lack of knowledge that extends to naivety. Graham’s remark is an insult not to Putin but to the Russian soul, whereas the American probably knows the name Stauffenberg only from a movie with Tom Cruise, in which not even Stauffenberg’s uniform is properly depicted, not to mention the historical sequence of events. So how would a Mr. Graham know that the memory of the Great Patriotic War is still very much alive in today’s Russia, since the country suffered by far the most casualties in World War II?

The Americans who buy Graham’s gossip should educate themselves before they fall for such disastrous nonsense. The senseless American Rambo talk does not help especially the people in Ukraine.