The 2000s were the years when the Social Democrat parties in Europe began to melt down. They were incapable of providing solutions to the raging neoliberal attacks of the globalization. With the financial crisis of 2008, which started in the US and spread across Europe, this meltdown accelerated. The leading Social Democratic parties in Europe, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the French Socialist Party (SP), faced splits.
Oscar Lafontaine, who had served as SPD chairman from 1995 to 1999 and Minister of Finance in Schröder’s cabinet, left his party in 2005. In 2007, Lafontaine founded with others the Left Party (Die Linke), merging the Party of Democratic Socialism (PdS) – successor of German Democratic Republic’s Party of Socialist Unity of Germany (SED) and the Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice (WASG).
The same process took place in France, when Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of today’s Unsubmissive France Party, left the Socialist Party and founded the Left Party. Oscar Lafontaine was invited to address the founding rally in the Paris suburb of Saint Ouen as the head of Die Linke.
In those years, these parties advocated a mixed economy against globalist neoliberalism, nationalisation of the major sectors, opposing privatization (especially the energy companies) withdrawal from NATO. To this day, these parties remained committed to their opposition to NATO and advocated friendship with Russia.
Oscar Lafontaine harshly criticized the German government in an article which first appeared in the German daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung on August 30. The article was entitled “Germany is acting as an American vassal in the Ukraine War”. Later on, the article reappeared in english on nationworldnews.com.
Below we present the text as translated from German and published by nationworldnews.com. Editing by UWI.
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Germany is acting as an American vassal in the Ukraine War
For the vast majority of German politicians and journalists, the war in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. From this point of view, which ignores the entire history of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, Germany cannot make any contribution to peace.
The sentence is attributed to the poet Aeschylus: In battle, truth is the first casualty. This leads to the conclusion that in order to find peace one must return to the truth, better: to the truthfulness. And that means every war has its own prehistory. And the prehistory of the Ukraine War begins with the United States’ self-image as a chosen nation, claiming to be and remain the sole world power.
Therefore, America must do everything possible to prevent the emergence of another world power. This applies not only to China and Russia, but also to the European Union or, in the future, perhaps India or other countries. If you accept that claim, and at the same time know that the US has by far the greatest military equipment in the world, you may come to the conclusion that taking refuge under the wing of this single world power is the thing to do.
“Germany is not a sovereign country”
However, this view holds true only if the protective power pursues a peaceful foreign policy and does not militarily surround emerging adversaries, continually provoking them and thus accepting the risk of war. If the defending power has military facilities in the territory of its allies with which it does its war, it puts not only itself but also allies with aggressive geopolitics at risk.
For example, Ramstein Airport was indispensable to the United States’ war in the Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine. So, when Americans are at war, Germany is always on the side of the war, whether it likes it or not. Because he saw this connection, Charles de Gaulle, for example, did not want any NATO, i.e., US, facilities on French soil. He said that a country should be able to make its own decisions about war or peace.
Germany is not a sovereign country. This became clear again when US Secretary of War Lloyd Austin invited a conference in Ramstein to allow vassal states to contribute to the Ukraine War. Of course, the US also claims to decide over whether a country like Germany can commission an energy supply line like Nord Stream 2.
War with a long history
The history of the Ukrainian War also includes the views of American strategists, according to which Ukraine is the dominant state in terms of dominance on the Eurasian continent. For this reason, according to Brzezinski, a former national security adviser to President Carter, in his 1997 book titled The Only World Power, Ukraine should be made a vassal state of the United States.
Although shrewd American politicians such as George Kennan warned against turning Ukraine into a military outpost on the Russian border, Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden proceeded with the eastward expansion of NATO and the armament of Ukraine – in spite of Russia indicating since more than 20 years it would not accept US troops and missiles on its Ukrainian border.
At the latest with the Maidan coup in 2014, the United States showed they were unwilling to take Russia’s security interests into account. They established an American puppet government and made every effort to integrate Ukraine’s armed forces into NATO formations. Joint exercises were conducted and persistent objections of the Russian government were ignored.
In this context it is hypocritically argued that each state has the right to freely choose its alliance. But no state should deploy rockets from a rival power on the border of nuclear power without warning and naively justifying it with a coalition’s free choice. Imagine if Canada, Mexico or Cuba allowed Chinese or Russian troops into their territory while allowing missile bases to reach Washington without warning.
Since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, we have known that the US would never accept it and would risk nuclear war when in doubt. These considerations lead to the conclusion that an aggressive superpower cannot lead a “defensive alliance”. After all the experiences of the past decades, how long will it take for Germany to understand that it must take its own security into its own hands and become independent from the United States?
There were German politicians who saw the danger posed by American policy and attempted an independent German foreign policy. For example, Willy Brandt knew that peace would have to be made with Russia and its Eastern European neighbors after World War II. They called for disarmament and detention and were convinced that security could be achieved not against each other, but only together. Helmut Kohl negotiated German unity with Gorbachev and believed that peace and cooperation with Russia were prerequisites for European peacekeeping.
Hans-Dietrich Genscher was at times not on the side of American politicians because he feared a limited nuclear war in Europe and therefore did everything to ban short-range missiles and strategic nuclear weapons from German and European territory. “Genscherism” became a dirty word in Washington. In his excellent book National Interests, Klaus von Dohnny recently pointed to the attitude of some American strategists that a nuclear war confined to Europe could very well be waged.
How to stop escalation
At present, there is no indication of a foreign policy putting Germany’s interests first. Traffic light leaders Scholz, Barbock, Habeck and Lindner are loyal vassals of America. Scholz advocates re-arming and takes pride in being able to announce the delivery of weapons to Ukraine at an ever shorter interval. He acts as if he had never heard of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and detente policy. Armaments lobbyist Streck-Zimmermann, who calls for new weapons for Ukraine every other day, dominates the foreign policy of the FDP.
The Greens have changed from a party that has changed from a German peace movement to the worst war party in the German Bundestag. Annalena Berbock’s statement that we should “destroy Russia” should be called fascist. The largest opposition party is also absent. As a former employee of American financial giant BlackRock, CDU president Frederick Merz is a loyal Atlanticist, demanding the delivery of even more weapons and even the closure of Nord Stream 1.
German foreign policy harms the interests of our country and does not contribute to peace in Europe. It needs a complete restructuring. If American geopolitics threatens war between nuclear powers, it is the job of German and European politicians to do everything possible to keep our region out of this conflict.
“Europe needs to seperate itself from the United States”
Europe needs to separate itself from the United States and play the role of mediation between rival world powers. Together, Germany and France have the potential to develop an independent European foreign and security policy.
It’s high time to start. When war escalates, we can’t always rely on cool-headed military officers to prevent a nuclear world conflict. Examples include Soviet naval officer Arkhipov, who prevented nuclear torpedoes from being launched during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or Soviet Colonel Petrov, who, in 1984 – when Russian computers falsely alarmed on incoming nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States – decided not to follow the given procedure for such a situation and rejected ordering the nuclear “counterstrike”.
It is time to stop leaving the peace initiative only to Turkish President Erdogan. Even if the United States, by its own admission, is unwilling to work toward a ceasefire and an early end to the war in Ukraine, it is in the survival interest of the Europeans.
The founder of the music group Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, is right when he points out that peace can still be achieved on the basis of the Minsk Agreements. On the other hand, when the United States declares that it aims to undermine Russia so that it cannot start a similar war again, it is cynical. How many more Ukrainians and Russians are expected to die before they get much closer to their geopolitical goal of significantly weakening Russia?
Europe now has the highest energy prices. European industrial companies are in the process of relocating to the US and setting up new branches. The huge orders for the US ordnance industry and the huge profits that the environmentally damaging US fracking industry is bringing to the table makes it abundantly clear who benefits from this war and sanctions.
Given this situation, even traffic light politicians inexperienced in foreign policy must understand that Europe has no way of self-affirmation. The first step would be to insist on a ceasefire, present a peace plan, and put Nord Stream 2 into operation.
Continuity of the current policy, on the other hand, leads to the impoverishment of large sections of the population, destroys entire sectors of German industry and puts Germany in danger of engaging in nuclear war.