From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2022 by Uwe Bahr

Of all parties, the Green Party in Germany – which emerged from the peace movement in the early 1980s in the old Federal Republic of Germany – currently supports German arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia more than anybody else.

Self-deception in one’s own cause and mendacity apparently know no bounds in my country anymore. The Greens have betrayed their own ideals: Supplying weapons to war zones, reactivating coal-fired power plants, extending nuclear power plant lifetimes are all things the party vehemently opposed until recently. A turnaround that is unparalleled in German history.

For when German arms deliveries to Ukraine the topic are, Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has adopted a widespread style of argumentation: the Greens (who are currently part of a so-called traffic light coalition: Red for the Social Democrats, Yellow for the Liberals, Green for the Greens) demand these deliveries because Ukraine needs to defend itself against the aggressor Russia.

This is how a German government twists the facts nowadays, and every day the German public is more and more fooled. The system of propaganda and lies is no longer inferior to the American one. Because when it comes to German arms deliveries to Saudi Arabia and not to Ukraine, an aggressor suddenly no longer plays a role.

With regard to deliveries of German armaments to the Arabian Peninsula, Baerbock recently had the cold-bloodedness and impudence to say the following:

“We do not deliver directly to Saudi Arabia, there are no arms deliveries from Germany to Saudi Arabia, where human rights are trampled underfoot.”

Oh, so that’s what my compatriot wants to express – if German weapons are not delivered “directly” to Saudi Arabia, but via third countries, then that is not German support for an aggressor.

A brutal civil war has been raging in Yemen since 2014, with women and children suffering the most. A war coalition led by Saudi Arabia, including the U.S. and the U.K., intervened a year later with aerial bombardments. According to the UN, at least 150,000 people have died in the war so far.

Saudi Arabia is conducting regular offensive operations, including air strikes, in a country where, according to the UN, 20 million people are at risk of famine. The U.S. – under the pretense that Iran had interfered in Yemen – provided the government of Yemen with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, most of which reportedly went missing in Yemen.

A German peace party now wants to supply weapons to such a war zone in support of Saudi Arabia. It is not difficult to figure out what caused the sudden change of mind: In addition to Russian natural gas, which is still flowing to Germany in a very limited way and not via Nord Stream 1, Russian oil is to be stopped. Germany, which joined the nonsensical sanctions against Russia and suffers from them like no other country, is begging the world for natural gas and oil.

For this, the responsible politicians are now throwing overboard all the values that brought my country back into the world community after a devastating Second World War and after Hitler, transforming it into a recognized, admired nation that was once the envy of the whole world in the light of its technological uniqueness, its outstanding products under the label “Made in Germany”, and its exemplary social system.

Of course, things change over time and space; new circumstances require new thinking. A historian is aware of this. But the way my country has developed in the last two or three years, it is hard to understand, especially for a conservative German, how all this could happen and become what it is today.

I do not recognize my own country anymore since I left it a quarter of a century ago, and all that remains are the memories of better times.