Tag: UnionCountyGA

Germany on the Nose Ring

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The White House calls the shots

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2023 by Uwe Bahr

German tanks for Ukraine.

As a German and believing to be halfway familiar with the history of my country, I can’t trust my own eyes when I read something like the following. Discovered today on CNN:

In supposedly free countries like the USA or Germany, do media still exist that are not addicted to unconditional warmongering – media that do not have in mind to almost uncritically pass on the views of their respective governments to a bleary-eyed population?

Are there any historically literate scribblers or even politicians, called “Western officials”, who still use facts from history to assess today’s situation, even if they only refer to a quotation? How is Ukraine supposed to achieve lasting peace if old mistakes are repeated during the war, possibly also after the war, and the country – which is actually to be feared – continues to be used by the West as a protective shield against Russia?

Didn’t German tanks kill Ukrainians 80 years ago as well? Such an argument to justify German arms deliveries to Ukraine today is not only cynical, but in its naively simplified form it also bears no causal relation to history as it actually happened. Because in reality, by far more ordinary Ukrainians have suffered from a criminal collaboration of German Nazis and Ukrainian nationalists than from German tanks.

Bandera monument in Lviv, western Ukraine, a city which once was called Lemberg.

Of course, from the point of view of those who think they have to use weapons to resolve a conflict that cannot be judged in black and white, it is inevitable to resort to such naive platitudes.

The author of the nonsense at CNN obviously has no knowledge of the fact that when Hitler’s Wehrmacht invaded Ukraine, large parts of the Ukrainian population received the German soldiers as liberators from Stalinism – a mistake for which they were later to pay bitterly. I had former soldiers of the German Wehrmacht in my own relatives who reported about it. It is part of a narrative about a cruel war that brought us (by that I mean: we Germans) too late to the realization: “Whoever picks up a gun again, let his hand fall off.” Unfortunately, the quote does not stem from me, but from Franz-Josef Strauss, an arch-conservative Bavarian politician who himself fought as an officer on the Eastern Front during World War II.

The historical knowledge about the collaboration of Ukrainian extremists with Hitler is linked to an astonishing development, according to which there were and are political forces in Ukraine, which not only strived for a plausible independence of their country, but also wanted to ethnically cleanse it. Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian ideologist and national movement leader of the 20th century, with his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) played into the hands of the Holocaust with active assistance. Under their “cooperation” the German occupiers killed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews. Tens of thousands of Poles who escaped with their lives were expelled from their ancestral homeland.

All this suited the OUN because its goal was to transform Ukraine into an ethnically homogeneous country. It was clear to the organization that this could only be achieved by means of mass killings. The West, with all its peace-preaching politicians, no longer wants to know anything about all this.

What does that have to do with today?

Some. For to this day, Bandera is revered as a national hero in western-oriented parts of the Ukrainian population. Not only are there several monuments to Bandera in Ukraine, erected after the breakaway from the Soviet Union, but a main street in Kiev was renamed after him in 2016 – much to the dismay of the Russians living in eastern Ukraine, and also, by the way, of Israel.

It is not only the memory of Bandera that is glorified today in large parts of the non-Russian speaking population. The notorious Azov regiment, which today plays a large part in Ukraine’s military resistance to Russia, is infested with Nazi ideology; until recently it was seen with symbols closely associated with the German Waffen SS.

So, when Vladimir Putin blathers about wanting to purge Ukraine of “fascist elements,” the West does not have history on its side at all. The problem is that peace cannot be achieved with such attitudes on either side.

And by the way, even German tanks cannot solve problems that have their multi-layered origins in social spheres. Politicians and media should stop poisoning people’s minds with irresponsible war polemics.

One more remark: A country like the U.S., which for sole interest demonstrably carries out one military aggression and intervention after another or has them carried out by third parties, cannot hold the leadership of a pretended defense alliance like NATO. Europe should take care of itself instead of submitting to American market interests. The idea is realistic if the will to implement it were there – but it is not.

Defense, protection from Russia? France, unlike Germany, is a nuclear power, and together the two countries have a higher military budget than the largest country in the world – Russia.

But none of this seems to play a role in the deliberations of those responsible in my home country. Germany is in a politically neglected state and lets itself be led by the Biden administration on the nose ring through world history. It does not seem to occur to any of those playing with fire today how much the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with Russia endangers Europe in particular. The Americans always wage their wars far enough away from their own country and withdraw as soon as things get dicey, or they run away altogether with their glorious military – see Afghanistan – and are then no longer directly affected for the time being.

Ukraine, however, is barely a two-hour flight from Germany.

The Christian Misbelief about Adam and Eve

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Of course, mankind does not originate from a single couple, as the Christian story about Adam and Eve would like it to be in the realm of mythical creatures. Our genes – those of every living human being – go back to hundreds of Adam’s and Eva’s who lived at different times. This is scientifically provable.

This means that we are not descended from one single pair, but from originally about 12,000 human-like beings, which have evolved in Africa over millions of years to today’s man by the natural selection of evolution. Of this early man, a number have gradually spread throughout the earth. There was never just one Adam and Eve.

If there was no first Eve and no first Adam who could sin according to church doctrine, then of course there was and is no sin to which we are all hereditarily exposed – even if we have not committed such a sin ourselves (Christian diehards insist that we are all sinners). Consequently, Jesus of Nazareth could not have been nailed to the cross on behalf of each of us when he was cruelly executed by the Romans to sacrifice himself (for us!).

His remains have never been found because he rotted away like any other dead person. He also didn’t reach heaven on a cloud, as it was quite understood in the literal sense at his time.1 Science leads the whole Christian doctrine ad absurdum. The Bible, which was essentially written only a short time after Jesus’ death, goes back to deep superstitions that were prevalent in the first century, when most people could neither read nor write and rarely lived past the age of 35 to 40.

To this day, there has been no one who has been able to return from the dead to the living. The Jesus shirt, kept by the Catholic Church for 500 years, has turned out to be a fabric of the same age. Where have the remaining 1500 years gone?

In the year zero, when Jesus is said to have been born in Bethlehem, there was no Roman census at the behest of Emperor Augustus, as described in the Gospel of Luke. So, neither Joseph nor Mary nor the three shepherds (of whom I was one in the nativity play of my home church in the early 1970s amidst GDR-Socialism!) could make their way to Bethlehem to see the Christ Child wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger.

A beautiful story, unfortunately too beautiful to be true. The Bible was written to make people willing servants to the authority. To this day, clerics and their believers threaten their little sheep: You will be freed from your sins, but only if you believe in the Savior and pray to “Him”.

Those who refuse to obey are threatened with the eternal fire of hell. What a warm-hearted Christian characteristic.

The greatest deception ever successfully instilled in humanity began with Christianity 2000 years ago. Until today this hoax has persisted, because many people have the weakness of not finding their own direction and therefore want to cling to the supernatural, even if it is only Christian assertions without any evidence, reminiscent of the fairy tales from the Thousand and One Nights of our early childhood days.

But the supernatural also embodies superstition, which makes every religion what it is: A belief that owes every proof for the existence of deities. Superstition, i.e., religion, in turn, is dangerous, because one can fall victim to all kinds of charlatanry without noticing it. Also, in our time people have denied medical treatment for religious reasons, sometimes even on their children – and some of these people have died from it. The bereaved had to live on with the proof that there is no God who has an influence on things or can even determine them.

Religious self-deception could be one of several explanations for why 78 percent of evangelical Christians in the U.S. voted for a pervert like Trump for president and are, in their majority, willing to do so again at any time. They are the easiest prey for any propaganda that does not have to present any evidence for its claims, because especially religiously influenced people are gullible for everything that fits into the scheme of their own wishful thinking. In doing so, they blot out unpleasant truths like man-induced climate change from their perception – even when they know full well that the evidence is clear.

Notes:
1 It was inevitable that most of the content of the Bible has been reinterpreted into an allegorical account as times advanced and much of the scripture appeared to be too preposterous to be sold seriously. The literalists were increasingly sidelined. It is one of many proofs of how much this booklet can be interpreted at will – a perfect concoction for the gullible, who do not care about evidence for thrown assertions.

The USA: A War Winner This Time

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Russia – apparently incapable of succeeding in the war against Ukraine with ground troops – is now reacting once again with intensive air strikes, under which, as always in wars, mainly the civilian population has to suffer. A handful of corrupt politicians in Kiev who keep all of Europe in check have been massively armed by the USA and its accomplices with the aim of bringing Putin to his knees. President Biden has no intention of negotiating, because his country profits massively from the conflict, not least in the energy sector. Europe basically no longer gets Russian natural gas and has to buy it from elsewhere at much higher prices with catastrophic consequences for the population. Russian oil is also expected to stop flowing to the West soon.

The current world situation plays brilliantly into the cards of American imperialist strategy. With wars, in which American armaments are used up and new ones can be produced, the country’s moneyed elite and the politicians they pay earn trillions. This is the real reason why the Biden administration, like every aggressive administration before it, is concerned with expanding American hegemony: speculation and aiming to gain access to new sales markets as well as access to unimaginably rich sources of fossil fuels in order to make billions at the expense of poorer regions and climate change. At the same time, they feign to the international public an alleged commitment to combating the manmade climate crises.

Thus, if parts of Russia were to fall under U.S. control through the installation of puppet regimes such as those in Kiev, American world power would be expanded. What neither succeeded in the direct US-wars of aggression against Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011, could now lead to the fulfillment of true American intentions against Russia – as long as Ukraine can be prompted not to negotiate with Putin in a real way.

In connection with the U.S. wars against the three countries mentioned, the majority of the populace in the U.S., and not only there, obviously forgets with what brute air strikes these wars were opened. Exact casualty figures cannot be determined, but conservative estimates assume that several hundred thousand people, mostly civilians, have fallen victim to the terrorist attacks of the USA.

In the end – and this is also part of the truth – the Americans have not succeeded in installing regimes in Libya, Afghanistan, or Iraq that are obedient to them. From Afghanistan, where the Taliban returned, the brilliant US-military – the most expensive one in the world – ran away from one hour to the other, leaving equipment behind to the delight of medieval warriors in sandals, but also a country they have plunged into misery and chaos with their senseless invasion. The American military, at the behest of decisive politicians, has not solved a single problem anywhere – it has created more conflict and havoc wherever it has appeared. These are the facts.

Generally, fingers today are pointed at Putin, while George W. Bush (“God told me to start this war”) has never been held accountable for the war crimes committed under his presidency.

God’s Whoremongers

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From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

“Rather a poor sinner be than a shameless hypocrite.”

They play the Good Samaritan by asking their misguided cult members to do charity in order to create an appearance in public that is a lie from top to bottom. The Baptist sect, once founded by slaveholders who maintained that God and the Bible allowed them to own slaves. Today, they leave everything up to their great designer, but they need guns. Currently, like many other churches, deeply involved in sexual abuse. An institution of fraud and mass dumbing down.

Source: New York Times

Criminal organizations like these should have been banned long ago. Any decent person would be ashamed to associate with such a debauched club. However, it is unbridled business and profiteering as usual in America: a bunch of charlatans shamelessly line their pockets by enriching themselves on the naiveté of their brainwashed adherents. A modern-time gangster gang of populists, corrupters, fornicators, rapists, cover-up specialists and tax dodgers in the name of their creator, as it can hardly be worse.

And these criminals tell others that they are all sinners from birth because they have inherited the sins of Adam and Eve, and Jesus frees them from these sins – of course only if they follow his word. What mindless nonsense, it doesn’t get any more stupid.

Be careful which institution you send your children to. “Let the little children come to me” is not necessarily a demand that attentive people with sense should comply with.

Fight Socialism

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How American Neo-Liberals lie to their People

From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr

I once wondered why so many US media outlets, in concert with especially right-wing politicians, almost exclusively use the empty phrase “former communist East Germany” whenever the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) is mentioned. It’s misleading because it’s historically wrong – and I think the commenters know that very well in most cases. A fear-mongering is deliberately staged in order to drum into people’s heads over and over again a phrase about a social system that, according to a widespread American understanding, only compares to hell. In truth – and I say this as a contemporary witness – this communism did not exist on German soil at any time.

For in communism, by definition, neither money nor private property exists. Fact is we had both; money in most cases even in abundance – only you couldn’t do much with it. That’s because basic needs in the GDR – housing, food, medical care – were guaranteed by state order and dirt cheap, and spending on big extras was almost impossible because those extras most of the time simply didn’t exist. Generally, the GDR-customer had to wait up to 15 years after registering for a new car, and when the first Soviet-made color televisions became available in the early 1980s, they cost around 6,000 GDR marks. The average wage of a skilled worker at that time was 800 to 900 marks, and I paid 66 marks monthly for a two-room rental apartment of very good quality. A beer in the pub (0.5 liters equal to 0.13 gallons) cost 0.40 and 0.51 marks; for a loaf of mixed rye bread (1.65 pounds), fresh and delicious from the bakery, the price was 0.93 marks.

I remember a student – we were still children – asking our teacher how shopping without money could work under communism and in general. The teacher’s answer: In communism, everyone is considerate of others and therefore only puts as much in the shopping cart as he needs for himself – no more. He does not have to pay for it, because there is no money. – My school friend Bernd spoke up, his index finger raised far above his head, and he was excited: “That can’t work. My father would lug all the beer out of the store, right down to the last bottle, if he didn’t even have to pay for it.”

Communism was to be the final stage of fulfillment of all desires and dreams, while socialism is only the penultimate step to pave the way. But Socialism didn’t work out well in the GDR either. This is because the idea of socialism requires that the means of production are not in private hands, but in the hands of the state. I have personally worked and lived in this state-controlled economy that did not allow personal innovation in the first place. Of course, such a command economy with hardly anyone interested in progress cannot function in an effective manner. Apart from subsidized basic supplies for the people, the economy in the GDR was an economy of scarcity; a condition that worsened especially in the 1980s.

Many years later, I worked for the largest private employer in the United States of America, a retailer named “Walmart.” That’s when I went from the frying pan into the fire – so to speak. Although there was a lot more to buy at Walmart than in “communist East Germany” back then, most of my American colleagues barely had any extra money available and often couldn’t make it from payday to payday without relying on government handouts. There was no legal protection for workers either; instead, they were subjected to arbitrariness of a kind not seen even in the supposed communism of East Germany. It is true that in the GDR was no freedom of travel, and also no freedom of expression without taking the risk of serious consequences, especially when the remarks were of critical political nature – consequences relatively harmlessly described by the term “reprisals.” But also at Walmart I witnessed blatant threats by management against young employees during a meeting: ‘Be very careful what you say about the company publicly, including in your spare time and via Facebook. Be careful what you write about Walmart. There could be consequences for you, up to and including termination.’

Maybe they will come after me now when they read the truth about themselves and what I and others have witnessed. Land of the free … What I heard and saw opened my ears and eyes to how little American corporatocracy seemed to differ from socialist despotism, except that no one could lose their job in the GDR workforce. The right to a job was codified in the command economy system.

During those eight years with the corporation, I have often wondered why Americans accepted in such a docile way their fate of low wages while being treated like second class people. I had to go back to 1997 in my research to find an even halfway, yet not very satisfactory answer, provided by no less a figure than Alan Greenspan. The American economist, who served five terms from 1987 to 2006 as chair of the Federal Reserve, warned in his testimony about the performance of the US economy in front of the Joint Economic Committee: “Job insecurity cannot suppress wage growth indefinitely. Clearly, there is a limit to how long workers will remain willing to accept smaller increases in living standards in exchange for additional job security.”***

And yet, he was probably not quite correct at the time – or the situation had changed over the years and was subject to regional differences. When I was working for Walmart, people were literally toiling for barely more than a starvation wage, while the corporate family of roughly two dozen made 30 billion in profit per year, almost untroubled from any significant legal regulation in favor of the workers. Now and then a grumble could be heard behind held hands, but I never saw a potential for more. If they were afraid to make demands for better conditions from their employers for reasons of Job security, then the high labor turnover rate I witnessed didn’t fit the picture. At Walmart, there was a constant coming and going – employees often simply didn’t show up at the store the very next day. After three or four years, I realized I was one of the “longest-serving” of the 90 or so employees in the store.

Contrary to Greenspan’s thesis, my colleagues gave me the impression that they could do nothing to change the unjust conditions. They seemed to accept their situation with drastic cuts in their rights rather as a “God-given” fact. These are dire realizations, especially from younger people who supposedly lived in a country of freedom and liberty.

Those who have to live constantly in existential dilemmas through no fault of their own can hardly feel any sense of freedom. They worked in a lawless space, and there was no real legal representation of workers’ interests. No one dared to even utter the word “trade union.” Unions in the US, of course, also smack of socialism – again, an argument as intentionally scattered as it is nonsensical. In this context, American history tells a different story: The first American president to openly side with unions was Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt – not a Socialist, but a Republican, as we know. The man knew what hardly anyone in the US seems to know today: membership in a union representing the interests of the vulnerable is one of the fundamental rights of a truly free and democratic social order. An upper class that does not have to disguise its actions will have no problem recognizing this basic right. Only in a system that systematically represses a large part of its own population while wanting to remain undisturbed is there a deliberate intention to nip in the bud views that run counter to corporate interests.

This gives rise to the profound suspicion that the United States of America is anything but a free country, for the majority of its populace is in various forms subjected to neoliberalism, which restricts social services, gives excessive power to corporations, enables political corruption without legal intervention, and exacerbates economic inequality. In this way, social division in the US has become more and more pronounced, thereby further undermining the old American creed of freedom and equality.

Consequently, those trying to identify the true forces in the US suppressing American basic rights and liberties, will have to look at the domestic corporatocracy and its propaganda aids, the corporate media – led by outlets like Fox News, which CNN and others are currently somewhat behind in misleading the people. Most media outlets systematically distort and suppress reality to serve big business in the US, which provides these media with advertising spots worth billions of dollars. It’s about purchased opinion, ratings and against everything that could spoil the business. It is the profit interest of a few to the detriment of the many.

Right-wing ideologues like to use the specter of socialism in the most primitive way to distract attention from the real culprits of the problems in their country and to make their own political mark. And masses of Americans are falling for it in rows. Socialism as a bogeyman is cited as often as possible, if necessary even in the distant past of the former “communist East Germany”, although rather unknown to most Americans. Yet, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is particularly fond of invoking my nation when it comes to spreading delusions of an impending red tide in America, made up of “radical leftists.” At the same time, the man can’t be so stupid as to believe his own words – he just seems confident in his ability to dumb down his compatriots, since they obviously don’t know too much. If he doesn’t feel that way about them – then why is he telling all this easily disprovable nonsense? What he has to say about Germany in general is historically sheer baloney and can be refuted with a minimum of knowledge. Nevertheless, he does not seem to care what truth is and what nuisance – and neither obviously do those who manage to vote for him.

Are these people entrusting their future to such demagogues still in their right minds? What – to cite just two current examples – does a compulsory mask regulation in the midst of a worldwide pandemic or a vaccine have to do with socialism?

In the USA, neither socialism nor anything else is in sight to oust the prevailing neoliberal system. Those who should have a particularly guilty conscience throw around terms like socialism or communism for the sole purpose to keep people in line and stir up fears about an ideology that is considered un-American anyway. And rest assured: even those confounded Democrats who barely mention Socialism by its name – Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, or Chuck Schumer – are more afraid of socialism than the devil is of holy water. Why? Because they get their billions from one and the same source as their Republican counterparts: The Corporatocracy.

They can fight each other in public as much as they want. How does an ancient German proverb say? “When it really comes down to it, one crow doesn’t peck out another’s eye.”

Or have you ever seen a different version yet?

Notes:

*** Source: Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan, Performance of the U.S. economy,
Joint Economic Committee, United States Congress, March 20, 1997. Available in the Internet at FRB: Testimony, Greenspan — Performance of the U.S. economy — March 20, 1997 (federalreserve.gov)