L’Europa torna ai fascismi…?
Victor Grossman, un americano a Berlino (Est) da oltre sessant’anni – disertò per sottrarsi alla persecuzione maccartista – ha ora qualche motivo in più per rimpiangere la DDR: allora mancavano i beni superflui, oggi, nella Germania unificata e ricca, cominciano a mancare anche i beni essenziali, ed è ripartito il riarmo. Grossman non pronuncia le parole revanscismo tedesco, ma la sostanza è quella. Come ai tempi di Weimar, sono i socialdemocratici – questa volta con la spinta dei verdi – a preparare la strada ai guerrafondai tutti d’un pezzo.
John Laughland è uno studioso inglese di scienze politiche, che ha insegnato alla Sorbona, e che dagli anni ’90 contesta l’egemonia americana denunciando i pretesti che ne hanno giustificato le continue guerre. Qui racconta la sua disavventura: al suo arrivo a Heathrow, una settimana fa, proveniente da Budapest, è stato fermato dalla polizia, interrogato e trattenuto per ore. Intanto i suoi bagagli venivano perquisiti, e computer e telefonino attentamente esaminati. Il tutto senza alcun capo d’accusa o avviso di garanzia, nel pieno rispetto quindi della “rule of law”, vanto, come si sa, dell’Occidente. Purtroppo, osserva Laughland, la legge del 2019 che ha dato tali poteri alla polizia non è un’esclusiva della Gran Bretagna: l’UE, con il Human Rights Sanctions Regime del 2020, è infatti avviata sulla stessa strada. Anche in considerazione del devastante potere della propaganda, che impedisce ai più di ragionare, potremmo definirla la strada del totalitarismo. Ecco dove porta la politica dei valori, l’aria fritta che ha sostituito la parola pace nel gergo europeista.
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In 1990, on October 3rd, Germany could rejoice; unity at last, a single flag, a single anthem (“Deutschland über alles”), a single currency, a single foreign policy; in other words, freedom and democracy triumphant! And with it what Chancellor Ludwig Erhard had called a “social market economy, the foundation of our liberal, open and democratic society, with functioning competition, pricing freedom and a wide range of affordable goods, while absorbing its disadvantages, such as monopolization, price fixing, and protecting citizens against illness and unemployment … while at the same time fostering prosperity”. And that is just what so many East German “Ossies” expected, demonstrated and voted for in the polling booths.
Are they still rejoicing thirty-two years later?
Russia may indeed have yearned for the Ukraine, as we are daily instructed, or for some form of close alliance with it and Belarus. But – and I may be wrong or forgetful – while I do recall pleas by Lavrov for negotiations on Russian security guarantees, which were rejected by Secretary of State Blinken as “very obvious nonstarters” – I cannot recall Russian imperialist demands or expansive aggressivity toward Ukraine before the 2014 putsch. Nor can I escape the conviction that Putin’s primary motivation was self-defense against that increasingly tightening noose. And I still think the question valid: What would the USA do if China conducted military maneuvers with ultra-modern weapons in Acapulco or Oaxaca? We can guess the answer by recalling the bloody “defense of US security” in Cuba, Guatemala, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, even little Panama and Grenada.
Was the Ukraine conflict a carefully laid trap for Russia – as in Afghanistan? Twenty years after the event Zbigniew Brzeziński revealed that in July 1979 President Carter’s secret military aid to the Mujahidin, fighting against Soviet support for the Afghan government, had been such a trap. “We didn’t force the Russians to intervene but we consciously made it far more likely that they would… In the long run that led to the downfall of the Russian empire.” Does today’s Ukraine war contain parallels? Nor can Russia forget Nazi Germany’s sudden attack in June 1941 or the death of 27 million Soviet fathers, husbands, mothers and children which followed, far worse in number even than the Shoah. Were there genuine Russian fears of a recurrence – a third invasion this century?
But, trap or not, history or not, two – or even ten – wrongs do not make a right. Unless there was a huge, immediate military threat to Russia – which I cannot know of and Putin did not detail – I must view the invasion as a terrible, indefensible move the results of which are horrifying. They can all too easily prove fateful – for everybody on earth. Far too often I hear the word “nuclear.” From a Nobel Physics Prize winner it would be admissible – but absolutely not from Moscow. Or Kiev or elsewhere!
One recent event deserves mention. A Washington policy in Europe has long been to hinder or prevent closer business relations between Russia and Germany, a potential rival. So it railed against the cheaper, more easily available, ecologically less harmful pipelining of Russian gas through the Baltic in favor of shipping its own expensive fracking gas. Some Germans balked. But while the media dutifully puzzle over why that nefarious Putin exploded his own pipeline, very few recall Joe Biden’s words on February 7th: “If Russia invades Ukraine, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” When a journalist asked how he could do that, with Germany in control of the project, Biden replied: “I promise you: We will be able to do it.” And in fact someone has done it!
But at Pennsylvania Avenue, Wall Street or such sites, far more damaging matters were getting thrown around than pipelines – or even hurricane Ian. While preaching the need for US leadership in causes like freedom, democracy, war on terror, anti-authoritarianism or unipolarity (and occasionally sneaking in ”a free market economy”), the goal of the generals and presidents, once centering on Central America, then expanded to South America, jumped after 1945 to Western Europe, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Eastern Europe, and always the “Indo-Pacific region” and South China Sea. But the unipolar end goal, the wish for world hegemony, is still blocked by two big powers; the need to control or remove one or both has been the crux of US policy for one hundred years, with only a four-year interlude – an alliance against a temporary common foe. And now there was a search for allies, primarily with that one-time common foe against that short one-time partner.
Only Germany’s oldest citizens experienced that fearsome “total war” in which their young years saved them from becoming accomplices. But bitter memories of war were passed on, and at least a slim majority or more opposed any German involvement in opposing Russians, descendants of victims of that murderous war. These anti-war sentiments seemed to be weakening under unceasing, almost unanimous pressure from on high, which enjoined a taboo on any questions about those brave friends in Kiev whose most honored national hero, Stepan Bandera, joined the Nazis in murdering Jewish and Catholic Poles by the thousand. (When an interviewer confronted the evil-mouthed Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, about a wartime Bandera leaflet saying “Muscovites, Poles, Hungarians and Jews are your enemies, destroy them!” he answered, “I am not going to tell you here today that I distance myself from it. And that’s final!”)
The German ruling trio in Berlin, happily labeled “Ampel” (traffic light) because of their green, red, yellow party colors, can not be so fully happy about the heavy burden its Zelensky solidarity requires and its difficult apportioning. In the face of expected electricity, coal and gas shortages how long and how many of the Greens’ celebrated anti-atom, anti-coal climate achievements should be put off? How cold must public and private rooms be kept? What about shut-down factories and soaring prices at the gas pump, the grocery store, with tax returns? While Green co-chair and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, whose mission to “ruin Russia” led to her words, “Next summer the Ukraine will still be needing new, heavy weapons from its friends,” she must now worry about the coming winter and growing opposition to what some call “cutting off our noses to save our faces”.
Not cutting noses but counting them became important on the Day of German Unity. This year’s ceremony was in ancient Erfurt, in East German Thuringia, because its minister-president Bodo Ramelow, now holds the rotating chair of the German Upper House, the Bundesrat. This first and only LINKE politician to hold that post, once denounced as a Bolshevik menace (because of his party), is now accepted by all the proper people. Once a West German trade union staffer who joined the move to the East in 1990, he is a leader of the moderate or “reformer” wing of the LINKE. He made headlines a year ago by urging a compromise on opposing NATO and military deployment outside Germany – so as to gain acceptance by the Greens and Social Democrats on a federal level, as he has achieved on a state level in Thuringia. His more recent media laurels were for angrily opposing the far more militant Sahra Wagenknecht and any LINKE who rejects such compromises.
Ramelow’s highly-publicized holiday speech decried the all-too slowly diminishing disadvantages for East Germans– his obvious duty as one of their rare representatives. He repeated the standard, dutiful calls to oppose anti-Semitism and racism and praised the goal of a close-bound folk which, despite historically-rooted divergences, was moving forward, united in friendship and in solidarity and zeal in opposing authoritarianism, above all criminal Putin-imperialism. Well-delivered – Ramelow is a good speaker – much of it could have been said by almost anyone in any party and state capital. No mention of strike actions, now growing in number, not a spoonful of militancy in the face of emerging conflicts, or fight-back against 200 billionaires who rule the economic roost and much of the political roost, increasingly menacing all our lives and all our lands. Not any response to the threat of nuclear conflict or the need to fight against it. Yes, Putin’s inhumanity was evil, but he said not a word about the bombing of Yemen, about Germany replacing “Putin-gas” with that of such gentle partners as Saudi Arabia or the Emirates. No word about Julian Assange. But then, such topics might have been out of place in Erfurt on the Day of German Unity.
But this time, a Monday – often a conflicted weekday because of the “We are the people” Monday marches in 1989 – there were defiant protest demonstrations in almost every city in Thuringia, and cities and towns up and down East Germany – and some in West German cities as well. They were not big marches, mostly counting between 1000 and 4000, but were bigger than on the previous Monday and in far more towns and cities. They rejected a planned extra 100 billion euro outlay for armaments, opposed the export of weapons and, some were against sanctions on Russian oil with their chilly or icy result in homes and factories, schools and museums, when the poorest would be hit worst and the richest would continue to rake in piles. The most common slogan was “Heating, bread and peace!”
There were problems; some marching groups were remnants of past anti-masking, covid=conspiracy demonstrations. Far right elements again tried to muscle in. And indeed, rightist AfD support for Putin while also demanding an even greater beefing-up of German armaments has caused confusion. Most protesting groups drew sharp lines, including physical ones: “No far-rightists!” But the media, eagerly denouncing the whole action, had found its main line of attack: “Pro-Putin joins with the far right against Ukraine.” Can a left-led campaign for peace grow strong enough to overcome such problems?
The government coalition, faced by an urgent need to prevent the worst misery and head off more and bigger protests with growing rebelliousness, was also torn by quarrels, with Greens “postponing” or forgetting nearly all ecological principles and the Free Democrats, unable to overtly prevent increased taxes on the very wealthy, weakened enough to OK deficit measures whose burden would be shouldered onto later governments – and working people. But the coalition was displaying conspicuous incompetence and widening cracks. Holding it together was the Ukraine policy. The weakest Social Democrat, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, tied up tightly in Corona confusion, could be bold on at least one point: “What good can it do us to kowtow to Putin? We are at war with Putin, we are not his psychotherapist. It’s necessary to keep fighting consistently and win victory by liberating the Ukraine.” Not a whisper about negotiating or peace – only about victory, “Sieg” – no matter what it costs ordinary people, most of all the Ukrainians. All are enthusiastically united under the pronged star flag of NATO. Or almost all. Anyone with doubts, or “whoever betrays the Ukraine…” – this in the words of Christian Democrat opposition leader Friedrich Merz – “is also betraying our freedom and our democracy”! And had better watch their step! A curious, very worrisome warning!
Some are daring to take such steps – in the streets of many towns and cities. But while this includes many members of the LINKE, not too many leaders are among them. The war fever now so quickly bubbling up in Germany has engulfed them too, like Bodo Ramelow, or LINKE Bundestag delegate Caren Lay who just spited China by visiting Taiwan with delegates from other parties, in the provocative footsteps of Nancy Pelosi and shortly after German Eurofighter planes paid a visit to Japan, a precedent and omen of expansion.
It’s so much easier to run with the crowd. But running or walking, in such footsteps, hand in hand with happy warriors like Baerbock or Lauterbach, will not win the votes either of the “Fight on to victory – ruin Russia!” crowd, who will choose the other colors anyway, nor of those who defy flag-wavers and censureship and demand a cease-fire and negotiations by all sides and who once saw the LINKE as an uncompromising “Party of Peace”. It can and must still be saved; there are so many good fighters in its ranks. This coming winter may be facing bitterly icy winds inside and out, and possibly winds of change – in the LINKE, in Germany and the world. Almost any direction is possible, militantly progressive or tragically acquiescent. Brave decisions are certainly necessary.
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/10/12/german-unity-war-or-peace/
