German Warmongers Are Going to Kill Us All
German Warmongers Are Going to Kill Us All
On both sides of the Atlantic, so-called “Leftists” are leading us down the Neocon path to global destruction.
[Note = this article was originally published on Medium in February 2023, but it is - unfortunately - still relevant today!]
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I spent most of the 1980’s and half the 1990’s living in Germany. I have always known the Germans to be a peace-loving people, and the Germans I know — most of whom are in their 50’s and 60’s — are painfully aware of their past. They have always adopted a left-leaning attitude towards most matters, but especially war.
When the Green Party (Die Grünen) appeared on the German political scene in 1983, they ran on a popular platform. They were 100% against NATO, against nukes, and against war. In fact, the first time that Die Grünen were elected to parliament, it was thanks to the massive anti-war and anti-NATO demonstrations that had rocked Germany in response to America’s Pershing II missile deployment.
Their leader and cofounder was a radical anti-war activist named Petra Kelly (whose father was a US Army officer). I remember when Petra and her fellow Greens caused a stir by knitting sweaters while sitting in the Bundestag.
Today, I am a member of the US Green Party, and when I first joined the party, I was thinking of those sweater-knitting peaceniks in Germany.
When I saw that the Greens had joined the ruling coalition in Germany, I was relieved, even hopeful. When I saw that a Green Party official was going to be Foreign Minister, I thought, “finally, maybe the Germans can revive the concept of détente”.
How wrong I was.
The Greens today: Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing
When I first realised the unrelenting militarism of Germany’s Green Party, I was shocked and disgusted.
With the spectre of German Panzers once more rolling across the steppes toward Russia, I had to ask myself: how does that happen?
The answer was clear: Annalena Baerbock
Germany’s Foreign Minister has proven herself to be a bloodthirsty warmonger who, it seems, cannot get enough of the war in Ukraine. “We are fighting a war against Russia”, she declared during her address to the Council of Europe. Granted, it was an unusually truthful description of the West’s (long planned) proxy war in Ukraine, but certainly not one befitting a nation’s top diplomat.
Likewise, Baerbock wants NATO to be expanded as quickly as possible,. This is an amazing position, coming from a leader of the Green Party, which has always opposed NATO.
Baerbock has been very aggressive in pushing for Germany to send the advanced Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, as well as allowing third parties such as Poland to send German tanks to Ukraine as well. This is truly disconcerting.
In a Washington Post article titled “Germany’s Green foreign minister is taking the lead on Ukraine”, Baerbock is profiled as an aggressive warhawk:
As soon as she became Scholz’s foreign minister, Baerbock immediately seized the initiative. She visited Washington, Brussels, Paris, Warsaw and Kyiv before Scholz did.
Intent on restoring the prerogatives of the foreign office, Baerbock announced in March 2022 that her department would draft Germany’s first national security strategy, a vision for the country’s role and aims in the world.
“Security policy is more than just the military plus diplomacy,” she declared. In another speech, she proclaimed the need for a government that would “boldly take action.”
Her aggressive stand on arming Ukraine has angered her boss, Olaf Scholz, who has perceived Baerbock as running around “behind his back” and making promises on behalf of his government without his consent. Rumours has it that the two are “barely on speaking terms”.
In fact, Baerbock and the Greens have become Washington’s operatives in Berlin. It has been the Greens, after all , who have been most vocal in opposing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, reflecting the words and the will of their masters in the US.
The “most warlike party in Europe”
Alas, Annalena Baerbock is not the only Green politician who seems to be perfectly comfortable with war. Diana Johnstone served as the press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament during the 1990s. In an interview with The Black Agenda Report, Johnstone made this depressing revelation:
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news to the American Greens, but if they haven’t been following the evolution of Greens in Europe, especially Germany, they are in for an unpleasant surprise. The Greens are now practically the most warlike party in Europe.
Alas, I appear to be one of those naive American Greens.
But what Johnstone writes is undeniably true. Aside from Foreign Minister Baerbock, the German Minister of the Economy, Robert Habeck, is also a Green warmonger. Habeck has been a strong supporter of sanctions, and seems dedicated to destroying the German economy for which he is responsible. He, like Baerbock, is a favourite among the Washington transatlantic crowd. Indeed, Habeck was the first cabinet member to visit the United States since Scholz’s election, where he was “welcomed with open arms”, according to Der Spiegel.
Harbeck is also a warhawk who was pushing for Germany to supply high tech weapons to Ukraine in May 2021 — BEFORE Russia even invaded.
No wonder the DC elites love him.
Still, Annalena Baerbock remains the frontrunner when it comes to leading the Greens on their crusade. In fact, she has all the requisite bona fides.
Diana Johnstone, writing in Consortium News, has some startling critiques of Germany’s “Green” Foreign Minister. “Baerbock is a perfect product of transatlantic leader selection”, she writes.
Johnstone explains that Baerbock’s professional interest has always been “international relations from an Anglo-American angle”, noting that Baerbock has a masters degree in international law from the London School of Economics and Politics (which has a deep and abiding relationship with NATO).
“Her initiation into transatlantic governance includes membership in the German Marshall Fund, the World Economic Forum’s Young Leaders Program and the Europe/Transatlantic Board of the Green Party’s Heinrich Böll Foundation”.
Alas, this “transatlantic attitude” does not bode well for Germans. During an event in Prague last summer, Baerbock made some remarkable comments:
“If I give the promise to people in Ukraine — ‘We stand with you, as long as you need us’ — then I want to deliver. No matter what my German voters think, but I want to deliver to the people of Ukraine,” she said.
She went on to say that such an approach would not change even if large numbers of people were out in the streets protesting against crippling energy bills.
With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder the German Greens feel so at home in Washington DC.
Even the Green Think Tank is warlike
The Heinrich Böll Foundation is central to Germany’s Green Party. The self-described “Green Think Tank” has served as the guiding light for Green political thought in Germany. It is named after the Nobel Prize winning author who was renowned worldwide as a dedicated pacifist and anti-war activist.
How sad, then, that the latest policy pronouncements from that venerated institution have also descended into base bellicosity of the most despicable sort.
Under the leadership of Ellen Ueberschär, chairwoman of the Greens’ Heinrich Böll Foundation, and with no doubt copious direct input from fellow Board Member Annalena Baerbock, the Greens’ think tank published a lengthy position paper in 2021 entitled, “More Ambition, Please!”
According to the paper, the “ambition” was needed especially in the area of militarisation, nuclear forces, and NATO.
To put it succinctly, what Ueberschär and Baerbock proposed would have old Heinrich spinning in his grave.
The text calls for a “New Agreement” between Europe and the USA, one that enforces stronger transatlantic engagement. It asserts that “America can only maintain its role as a world power through close cooperation with a Europe that is capable of acting.”
The paper also calls for more support for NATO, which it calls the “ember of the transatlantic relationship”.
And we all know what embers are good for — STARTING FIRES.
Wait — it gets worse
The New Agreement, according to Ueberschär, should require that European NATO countries — first and foremost Germany — increase their conventional defense capacity considerably.
This is so they can “shift the burden from the United States in Europe“ and therefore “make it easier for Washington to concentrate on the Indo-Pacific, and protect the interests of liberal democracies there”.
In other words, the Green Party wants Germany to become more militarised and take on a larger military burden so the USA is free to pursue WAR AGAINT CHINA.
In return, the Agreement would stipulate that the United States “affirm its commitment to defend allied territory and substantiates this commitment through its nuclear guarantee and permanent military presence in Europe”.
And the authors are more specific: “This requires Germany to implement the agreed NATO planning goals in full and at an accelerated pace.”
The “nuclear protection commitment” of the USA should support Germany “through nuclear sharing”. This means that German planes could carry US nukes into battle against Russia when needed.
It’s bad enough that we are about to have German Panzers rolling over the Russian steppes — now we want to threaten German nuclear bombers as well. Believe me, when a German plane detonates a nuclear warhead, it won’t matter to the Russians that the weapon was actually American.
These “Green” thinkers are envisioning a German military renaissance: “a significantly improved military capacity to act alone is not enough,” they write. “Germany should increase its contribution to burden sharing”.
In other words — more German soldiers in more places.
Peace through War
Ueberschär and her “Green” cohorts have lofty ambitions for the revitalised German armed forces.
From the Far North to the Baltic Sea, Belarus and Ukraine, the Western Balkans and the Caucasus to the Mediterranean region, the Middle East and North Africa: there are crises or even actual conflicts everywhere, which could be mitigated through greater commitment, more targeted and better coordinated action. More German creativity and willingness to lead would not only help further relieve America, but also make Europe more secure.
Think for a moment what more German creativity and willingness to lead would look like.
AND REMEMBER: the Russians have access to this document as well.
Meanwhile, in the USA …
The unlikely scenario of the Green Party becoming the “most warlike” of all parties in Germany is, unfortunately, mirrored in the United States.
There, we are witnessing a similar transformation, a similar topsy-turvy, black-is-white, Alice Through the Looking Glass phenomenon: the “liberal” Democrats, the American “Left” — such as it is — has also become the Party of War.
The Democrats have voted in lock step to supply more and more weapons and aid to Ukraine. The Democrats have become the Russophobic warmongers, demanding that Russia “pay a price”. The Democrats are the ones who oppose all engagement, oppose any negotiations, any talks, any discussions about how to avoid a nuclear war.
The official policy of the Democratic Party can best be summed up by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s dictum regarding Russia:
DO NOT ENGAGE.
What is wrong with these people?
Every Democrat in Congress has voted to give Ukraine a proverbial “blank check” when it comes to aid. No arms package is too big, no weapon too advanced. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, supposedly the most left-leaning cohort in the Democratic Party, issued a letter last October suggesting that the Biden Administration should pursue peace talks, they were immediately condemned by other Democrats for being “Putin-appeasers”.
The CPC retracted the letter immediately, and the subject has never come up again.
The political Right are the doves now?
It seems the only voices of reason regarding the Ukraine war are coming from the political Right. In the USA, Donald Trump, to his credit, has been calling for peace talks for months. And the only US politicians calling for transparency and prudence in arming Ukraine to the teeth are conservatives and Libertarians like Rand Paul.
Indeed, Matt Gaetz has published a list of 10 Republicans who support his bill to end the funding of Ukraine altogether.
Not a single Democrat signed on.
Meanwhile, in Germany …
The “right wing” AfD, or Alternative für Deutschland party, is the only voice standing up to the march towards war that the Greens are pursuing. This month, they introduced a peace plan for Ukraine to the Bundestag.
Guess who opposed them? The Greens.
What is going on here? No matter what your own political orientation is, it is obvious that the Left is all for war, and the Right is preaching peace.
Now, you can say that the rightists are cynical, that they support Putin, but the fact remains: hundreds if not thousands of Ukrainians are being killed each day, and the parties of the “Right” are the only ones who are trying to put a stop to the slaughter.
The Greens in Germany and the Democrats in Washington want to fuel the war, want to to keep the war going. They want to “punish Putin”. But the fact of the matter is that as long as this war continues, more people — mostly Ukrainians — will die.
Globalism is rearing its ugly head
On both sides of the Atlantic, globalism has taken the government by the throat, and the so-called “leaders” of both the US and Germany are in thrall to the hegemonic imperative to destroy Putin at all costs. And those costs include the destruction of Ukraine and its people, but more to the point, it also means the destruction of the American and the German people.
In the US, homelessness is out of control, there are tent cities in every city, people are sleeping under every bridge and every highway overpass all across the nation. The money that the US has given Ukraine so far could solve the homeless crisis in the United States THREE TIMES OVER.
In Germany, people are facing energy bills many times higher than usual. Businesses are closing and moving to the USA or elsewhere due to the high German energy costs. The US has severed Germany’s access to the cheap gas supplies from Russia that was fuelling their economy — literally. The country is becoming de-industrialised due to the sanctions and the war in Ukraine.
And the Greens are on board with this.
Annalena Baerbock is prone to tell the truth. She rightfully said that Europe is at war with Russia. But beyond that, she has expressed the true nature of the globalist menace: she blurted out the truth of the transatlantic, elitist enterprise when she said that she will support the war in Ukraine, “no matter what”. Even if it means that Germans have to suffer in the dark, cold and miserable, with no job and no future.
Likewise, the US elites are willing to supply every manner of aid to Ukraine while their own citizens suffer immiseration, homelessness and other predations of an out of control neoliberal system.
A closing thought
I consider myself to be a leftist. I am a democratic socialist, or a social democrat, however you want to call it. But I am also a nationalist. I believe that a politician’s duty is to ensure that his or her constituents thrive, succeed and have the best life possible.
The American Left and the German Greens are globalists. They pursue an agenda that is based on transnational, homogeneous consumerism rather than what is best for the people that elected them. They should be condemned, or at the very least, voted out of office.
Assuming, of course, that we all live long enough to see the next election.
#End.
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