German media on the way to war against Russia

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Following the German media in recent days, one would be forgiven for thinking that its commentators have lost their minds. They seem determined to wage war against Russia or the Soviet Union for the third time in just over a century, as if World War I and World War II had not brought enough suffering and destruction to the world. ‘Europe.

The Spiegel appeared this weekend with the editorial “Treat Putin as an adversary, not as a partner”. The news magazine calls on NATO to “finally deliver lethal weapons to Ukraine”. Americans and Europeans have “long tried to contain the Russian president through dialogue,” he says. ” In vain. It is time for a radical change of strategy: the West must raise the price of an invasion of Ukraine so high that it is too high even for Putin. And this is only possible by seeking confrontation – diplomatically, economically and indirectly also militarily.

SSO fighters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces during training [Credit: Wikipedia/ArmyInform]

the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung accused Russia of seeking “hegemony over all of Europe”. The newspaper compared Moscow’s “claim to power” with the policies of Hitler, who backed the 1936 fascist putsch in Spain and then crushed Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

The response of the FAZ is nuclear deterrence. The president of nuclear France, Emmanuel Macron, has already proposed to EU partners to discuss a nuclear strategy in 2020, the newspaper notes. This offer is still “on the table”. It is associated with serious risks: “Eventually, a conflict on the eastern border of Latvia could then lead to a strike against Paris.”

Therefore, according to the FAZ, “First of all, the conditions must be created so that all participants are ready to take this risk.” For this, the unification of Europe must progress rapidly. In this spirit, the Berlin traffic light coalition speaks of the goal of a “European federal state” and Macron of a “sovereign Europe”.

Die Zeit published a guest post by Ulrike Franke titled “The hardships of the world are not for softies”. The 34-year-old employee of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote her doctoral thesis on the use of drones in Western armies, complains bitterly that members of her generation who are now becoming politically active in Germany are fighting against the “politics of power”. ”

“A skepticism towards geopolitics, a reluctance to think in terms of power and interests, and a rejection of the military as an element that determines geopolitical influence” dominate, laments Franke. “My generation has developed an almost romantic idea of ​​international relations.”

To ensure that “our” interests are heard, she concludes, “we need to think more about the power and influence of Europe and Germany. We have to relearn geopolitics. It is also “the question of how the Bundeswehr should be equipped and managed in order to be taken seriously again as a deterrent force”.

There is hardly a newspaper or news program that does not advocate something similar. Rumors spread by the CIA and US government of an impending Russian attack on Ukraine dominate all news as if they were established facts. They are about as believable as the weapons of mass destruction misinformation with which the United States justified the war on Iraq in 2003.

The German foreign minister also stepped up her tone towards Russia after the change of government in December. Yesterday, Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock again threatened in Kyiv that Moscow would pay a “high price” in the event of an attack. She should not be expected to adopt a different tone during her inaugural visit to Moscow today.

Baerbock also said it was working to diplomatically defuse the highly dangerous situation and rejected the Ukrainian request for German arms deliveries. But this task is currently taken on by the United States, which is massively arming Ukraine and openly threatening to unleash a bloody guerrilla war in Ukraine, as it has done in Syria and many other countries.

According to a report from New York Times, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley warned their Russian counterparts by phone that the CIA and Pentagon would support a bloody insurgency against a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Former NATO Commander-in-Chief James Stavridis also warned: “If Putin invades Ukraine with a major military force, US and NATO military assistance – intelligence, cyber, weapons anti-armour and anti-aircraft, offensive naval missiles – would increase significantly. .”

The war against Russia that the governments in Washington and Berlin and the servile media are preparing is sheer madness. It is unlikely that any of the writers who today preach confrontation, power politics and nuclear deterrence have even considered the catastrophic consequences of the path they pursue.

In their eagerness to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, they completely overlook the fact that no Russian government, no matter who led it, would be willing or able to tolerate NATO’s steady advance. In the successor state of the Soviet Union, which played a decisive role in the defeat of Nazi barbarism in World War II and lost 25 million people, the memory of this horrible experience lives on.

It has not escaped the Russian public that in Latvia, a member of NATO and the EU, every year on March 16, “Day of the Legionnaires”, SS veterans who committed unspeakable crimes in sides of the Nazis are celebrated, and statues of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, who was implicated in mass murder, are erected in so-called democratic Ukraine.

The myth of Russian hegemonic aspirations also upsets reality. Since Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin’s political mentor Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union 30 years ago, NATO has increasingly encircled Russia, despite promises to the contrary. It is now directly on the Russian border.

He dismembered Yugoslavia, in flagrant disregard of existing borders, which he now declares inviolable in the case of Crimea. He even waged an illegal war to separate Kosovo from Serbia, collaborating with elements who have since been accused or convicted of crimes against humanity and organized crime.

The United States and its NATO allies have also fought wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria in order to defend their geostrategic hegemony. But each of these wars ended in disaster. Tens of millions of people had to flee, millions died and whole societies were destroyed. The United States and its allies could not even defeat the Afghan Taliban, despite investing billions of dollars in weapons and bombs. A war against Ukraine would spell even greater disaster, destroying much of Europe.

In Eastern Europe, the enlargement of the EU and NATO has not led to prosperity and democracy. Instead, low wages and poverty prevail, while a corrupt elite enrich themselves immeasurably. The governments of Poland and Hungary now so openly disregard basic democratic rights that even the European Union felt compelled to act.

The Kiev regime was swept to power in 2014 in a US-German backed coup that relied on fascist militias.

On the same day of German Foreign Minister Baerbock’s visit to Kiev, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko also returned to the country for trial. The billionaire oligarch came to power following the 2014 coup and remained the country’s president for five years. Now his successor Volodymyr Zelensky is suing him for high treason. He allegedly made lucrative deals with pro-Russian separatists during his presidency while supporting right-wing nationalists, which Poroshenko denies.

The bitter power struggle between the various cliques of Ukrainian oligarchs is another factor increasing the risk of war. Preparations for war against Russia are like playing with fire in an ammunition depot. Only a ruling class that has completely lost its mind can carry out such adventurous policies.

Ultimately, the war thrust is the result of the bankruptcy of a capitalist system torn by insoluble contradictions. The pandemic has pushed social contradictions to extremes. While at least 15 million people worldwide have died from the virus and 163 million have been pushed into poverty due to the pandemic, the world’s top 10 billionaires have doubled their wealth to $1.5 trillion, according to Oxfam’s latest report. On the other hand, there is growing resistance from the working class.

The ruling class reacts to this – as in 1914 and 1939 – with its senseless war policy. Only a united movement of the international working class, fighting against social inequality, war and capitalism, and for a socialist society, can stop this madness.

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