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War is Always Justified

Posted by M. C. on November 27, 2023

Charles Eisenstein

I repeat: for there to be peace, people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.

If I am on a side, it is the side of peace.

https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/war-is-always-justified?publication_id=427455&post_id=138948478&isFreemail=true&r=1a9m4

I just heard someone say, “One war crime does not justify another.” My reflex as a peace advocate is to agree with that statement, but something gives me pause. It starts with a grammatical issue but it doesn’t end there.

The only beings on earth that perform the act of justifying are human beings. “War crimes” do not perform that act. What the statement intends to say is something like, “One cannot legitimately use one war crime to justify another.” But what is this “legitimate”? A substitute for justifiable. One cannot justifiably use one war crime to justify another. We are on the brink of an infinite regress that seeks to convert the subjective act of justifying something into an objective property, as if one could filter all acts through a moral sieve that separates them into two categories, the wrong and the right.

Seen this way, the statement about justifying war crimes is exactly wrong. People do indeed use one war crime to justify another. With the exception of crimes of passion, which people typically justify in retrospect, all wars and most violence begins with justification. The heinous acts of the other side are high-octane fuel for the justification engine.

In the objective sense of an ethical principle, we can argue whether this or that war was justified. But in terms of the rhetorical act of the human being called justifying, all wars are justified. Someone is justifying them.

This is why, as I have argued over the past month, we must exit the conversation about what is justified if there is ever going to be an end to the violence in the Holy Land.

The word just comes from the Latin justus — upright, equitable, lawful, right, proper. To justify literally means to make it right. To take something self-interested or indeterminate and make it into something right, that is justification. It is much easier to override the heart’s repulsion and harm others when aided by a story in which it is right.

Both sides in the Gaza conflict believe they are right. Hamas and the Israeli government both justify acts of carnage. So it has always been, and so it shall ever be. To end it, we have to appeal to something outside of what is justified, who is right, and who is wrong.

Force me to speak in terms of right and wrong, and I would say, yes, it is wrong to kill 4500 children in a bombing campaign. I would say it is wrong to kidnap and murder innocent festival-goers and children in a kibbutz. I do not mean to establish the two sides as equivalent here. I understand well the assymetrical dynamics of oppressor and oppressed. If forced to, I could tell you which side I think is wronger or righter than the other. I am fully capable of understanding each side’s logic and adjudge one or the other more valid. But like many of you, I am sick of being asked to pitch my tent in one camp or another.

I am unwillng to do that, and it is not because, sheltered by my circumstances and privilege, I have the luxury of not taking sides. I am unwilling because I want to see the violence end, and that means that people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.

I repeat: for there to be peace, people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.

If I am on a side, it is the side of peace.

I know I am not alone there. In fact many people who do not enjoy the shelter of circumstance and privilege are saying something similar. I already shared the video “In my name, I want no vengeance” by Michal Helav, whose only son was murdered by Hamas. There are many others. Here are a few examples from the article, “Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge.”

  1. In a eulogy for her brother Hayim, an anti-occupation activist who was murdered in Kibbutz Holit, Noi Katsman called on her country “not to use our deaths and our pain to cause the death and pain of other people or other families. I demand that we stop the circle of pain, and understand that the only way [forward] is freedom and equal rights. Peace, brotherhood, and security for all human beings.”
  2. Ziv Stahl, executive director of the human rights organization Yesh Din, and a survivor of the hellfire in Kfar Aza, also came out strongly against Israel’s assault on Gaza in an article in Haaretz. “I have no need for revenge, nothing will return those who are gone,” she wrote. “Indiscriminate bombing in Gaza and the killing of civilians uninvolved with these horrible crimes are no solution.”
  3. Yotam Kipnis, whose father was murdered in the Hamas attack, said in his eulogy: “Do not write my father’s name on a [military] shell. He wouldn’t have wanted that. Don’t say, ‘God will avenge his blood.’ Say, ‘May his memory be for a blessing.’”
  4. Maoz Inon, whose parents were murdered on Oct. 7, wrote in Al Jazeera: “My parents were people of peace … Revenge is not going to bring my parents back to life. It is not going to bring back other Israelis and Palestinians killed either. It is going to do the opposite … We must break the cycle.”
  5. When Yonatan Ziegen, the son of Vivian Silver, was asked by a journalist what his mother — who is thought to have been kidnapped — would think about what Israel is doing in Gaza now, he replied: “She would be mortified. Because you can’t cure dead babies with more dead babies. We need peace. That’s what she was working for all her life … Pain is pain.”

I am in awe of the courage of these people. It is not easy to speak against the howls of a bloodthirsty mob — and the bloodthirsty inner mob that wants to relieve the grief for a moment by converting it into hate. I was on a call a few weeks ago with a group of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. “If you speak out, they slap you down,” one said. They were afraid to say anything publicly, afraid to protest, and trying to think of more indirect forms of peace action.

In times of conflict, the advocate for peace draws more hatred than even the enemy. The enemy by his existence validates the drama that affirms the partisan’s role and identity (and, in the case of a nation, an agenda of domination or conquest). The more abhorrent the enemy’s acts, the better. But the peace advocate undermines that drama and the roles and justifications that it creates.

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Did Anyone Ask You About War in the Middle East?

Posted by M. C. on November 15, 2023

Our policymakers seem to have made up their minds without consulting the people or their representatives.

https://archive.is/EKpyl

Peter Van Buren

Did anyone ask you—or at least Congress—if it was O.K. to go to war again in the Middle East? After literal decades of fighting in that troubled part of the world, it looks like the U.S. is, without discussion, never mind vigorous debate, already at war in various sub-theaters of someone else’s conflict. See if anything that’s going on seems like war to you.

The U.S. is flying drones over Gaza. The Pentagon says the unmanned aerial vehicle flights began after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and are being conducted “in support of hostage recovery efforts.” The drone missions are also providing “advice and assistance” to Israel. A total of seven different aircraft are flying across the region, four of them per day, passing information to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The U.S. is also supplying precision-guided munitions, fighter aircraft, and air defense capabilities, such as interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome counter-drone systems, to the IDF.

U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) are in Israel. Officials anonymously told the New York Times several dozen special operators are on the ground working with the FBI, the State Department, and other U.S. government hostage recovery specialists. A senior Pentagon official told the “Forever Wars” blog that SOF are preparing for “contingencies,” which may include the active retrieval of hostages from Hamas. The U.S. previously said it has sent military advisers to help Israel. Christopher Maier, an assistant secretary of defense, indicated other soldiers have also been deployed. “We’re actively helping the Israelis to do a number of things,” Maier said.

Two American veteran-run organizations, the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA) and Save Our Allies, sent roughly two dozen volunteers, all former special operators, into Israel and Egypt to support evacuations. Each volunteer was chosen based on them having experience working with Egyptians or Israelis.

The volunteers arrange for local nationals to provide food and medical supplies to trapped Americans, and they have interfaced with the Egyptian military personnel who ultimately have to approve Americans’ departure. The special operations volunteers also coordinate directly with the IDF to ensure Americans are not targeted. They call their work “shepherding” and forswear a kinetic role. SOAA staff are also in Tel Aviv helping to coordinate evacuations. The volunteers’ actions, particularly working with the Egyptian and Israeli forces, come very close to off-limits traditional governmental roles, though the groups deny that.

See the rest here

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The Dehumanization of War: A Meditation for Veterans Day

Posted by M. C. on November 10, 2023

“The answer is directly in front of us if only we would pay attention. Please don’t kidnap, maim, starve, or deny water, electricity, or healthcare to children anywhere. Don’t separate them from their parents, drown, bomb, rape, burn, imprison, shoot, bury in rubble, use as human shields, or kill the children. Please, do not find ways to justify such horrors. Instead, look them squarely in the eye and decide that you will demand an alternative.

“If we are to remain human on this planet in this devastating moment, there is — or at least, should be — no other way.

antiwar.com

by Kelly Denton-Borhaug and Tom Engelhardt

When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities.

On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her home in Hiroshima, Japan, burning her mother into an unrecognizable block of ash. Afterward, the only feature that could identify her was a single gold tooth.

Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where she was living. “There were skeletons all over the area,” she said, “so when they built the airstrip, the bones were crushed into dust.”

The American soldiers handed out chewing gum and chocolate to orphans like her. Some of the Japanese children quickly learned how to say “hello” in English, but Sakue confronted the soldiers in her native Japanese. “Why?” she insisted. “Why did you kill my family? Why did they deserve to die?” She added, “Of course, they didn’t understand Japanese. They just smiled at me. ‘Give them back to me!’ I shouted.”

Recalling such memories so many decades later, Sakue’s face still reveals how that historically disastrous bombing blotted out her inner light. As she put it, “I carried this pain that I couldn’t talk about. Even today, I can’t say my sister’s name aloud. It hurts too much.”

Dehumanization and People Living Under the Mushroom Cloud

In recent years, I’ve traveled to Japan numerous times with university students to study the legacy of the first and only use of atomic weapons as World War II ended. In that way, my students and I became moral witnesses to the consequences of the terror for people under those mushroom clouds that shattered, incinerated, and flattened the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But in my own country, the United States, the continuing specter of nuclear catastrophe generally fails to pierce a commonplace apathy toward such weaponry. Instead, most Americans hold war’s ultimate horror at arm’s length, while rationalizing the way our country and so many others on this planet all too regularly lurch into such conflicts as the only right and just way to address human greed, tyranny, and fear.

Almost 80 years after those first atomic blasts, Americans have yet to seriously reckon with how easily we learned to rationalize such structural violence. Meanwhile, our country continues to pour endless money into the wasteful creation, stockpiling, maintenance, and now the “modernization” of those weapons of mass, even global, destruction. In his poignant diagnosis, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton concluded that we developed a deep “psychic numbing,” while becoming detached and morally disengaged from the growing possibility that such weaponry could, in the end, create a “nuclear winter” and destroy humanity.

In Japan, my students and I have had the distinct privilege of meeting atomic bomb survivors, or hibakusha as they are known there. One hibakusha, an elderly, somewhat stern man, told us that he was outside of the city of Nagasaki with his brother when the second bomb exploded. The two boys rushed into the city to search for their father and finally found his body near his workplace, burned (like Sakue’s mother) almost beyond recognition.

We listened as his testimony viscerally evoked that horror from so long ago as if it had only taken place days earlier. He remembered how, as a child, when he tried to prepare the body for burial, he touched his father’s head and the skull crumbled beneath his fingers, while parts of the brain oozed into his hands.

In those precious moments in Japan when my students and I heard the stories of hibakusha, we could also ask questions. “Do you hate Americans?” the students often asked. “What kind of assistance was there for you and other hibakusha in the terrible aftermath of months and years after the war?” And we would thank them for sharing their painful and invaluable stories with us, but it never felt like enough. So many of them have a single request: that we take their words back to the United States with us and share them with others here.

During our conversation with that elderly man in Nagasaki, one moment was particularly unforgettable.

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Wider War Will Bring Inevitable Attempts At Martial Law In America

Posted by M. C. on October 30, 2023

I believe the Israeli trigger may be bigger than covid in terms of the potential global disaster and global tyranny that could unfold. If it continues to escalate and turns into a multi-regional conflict the chances of the fight coming back to America are high. Not just in terms of terrorism, but also in terms of civil unrest and war on our doorstep. If we support the war, martial law is a certainty. If we don’t support the war, martial law will be attempted but at least there are scenarios where it could fail.

alt-market

By Brandon Smith

Not long ago at the height of fear over the global pandemic the US underwent a change that many people argued would never happen. For years I have heard people say that authoritarian controls in America are “tinfoil hat conspiracy theory” and doom mongering – All the prepping, all the talk of community organizing, all the guns and the gear and the training were for nothing. Then…the covid agenda hit like a freight train.

Our constitutional rights were no longer set in stone, but mere guidelines that government officials could bend or break in the name of “public health safety.” Laws no longer had to be passed through a series of checks and balances; mandates could be implemented as if they were laws without public oversight and enforced unilaterally.

There was talk (primarily among Democrats) of severe punishments for people who refused the pointless covid vaccines. They wanted vaccine passports, they wanted prison time for those that spoke publicly against the vax, they wanted people’s jobs taken away, they wanted their children taken away, and there were even plans to build covid detention centers to segregate and lock up “vax deniers.”

It boggles the mind, but this was serious debate within the US and it was all triggered in the span of a year. Nearly half the country was willing to abandon the Bill of Rights over a virus with a survival rate of 99.8%. The conspiracy theorists were right all along; our freedoms rest on a razor’s edge and preparing to survive and fight for those freedoms is perfectly rational.

Luckily, the covid agenda failed. The mandates were ultimately blocked by red states and in many rural areas they were barely enforced at all. Biden’s vaccine passport attempt was stopped cold by the Supreme Court, but I have long believed that the Supreme Court made this decision exactly because of the level of public resistance.  They knew if they pressed the issue, civil war was on the table.

Medical authoritarianism collapsed because conservatives and independents were not onboard and they could not be shamed into compliance. But what happens when there is a crisis that DOES scare conservatives? What happens when the political right perceives a true threat? Does freedom then become untenable?

Viruses frighten progressives (most things frighten progressives), but what frightens conservatives?

Well, it’s not a hard fast rule, but generally speaking conservatives are most disturbed by the threat of invasion. Ask any conservative if they were worried about covid or worried about the crisis on the southern border during the pandemic and the vast majority of them would say the border without hesitation. Conservatives fear cultural infiltration and co-option, they fear the steady and deliberate whittling away of their American heritage and by extension their freedoms by alien impostors. And, they fear the certain blitzkrieg of the US by organized terrorism should the borders remain open.

The question is, are they willing to assuage their fears by sacrificing the very freedoms they want to protect?

In 2001 after 9/11, the conservative movement was a much different animal than it is today. This was pre-Ron Paul and pre-Libertarian influence. The Neo-cons ruled the roost and had far reaching power over public perception, making the push for the dismissal of constitutional rights unprecedented. The Patriot Act mentality was widespread and the thirst for war was palpable. I have seen conservatives stray from the Bill of Rights in the past in the name of fighting against a possible invasion.  I remember this vividly.

Today, the elements in play are not the same as 2001. Anyone who argues otherwise was likely a child during the 9/11 era or has a skewed understanding of the changes that have taken place among conservatives since those days. The Ron Paul movement changed a lot for the better, but primarily within the conservative constituency. Regular people changed their thinking on what it means to trade liberty for security. The GOP? It’s a pipe dream to think we could ever completely change the GOP.  At least covid proved we have allies at the state and local level

The real problem is in the old guard of Neo-cons still influencing the path of the Republican Party. These are people who happily ally with Democrats behind the scenes, they have close ties to establishment elites and their loyalty rests in the hands of globalists. If the globalists want war, then the Neo-cons want war and they will do anything to get it, including create it. That’s how it works.

And this time around I think they’re going to get what they want. The Ukraine event failed to lure Americans into supporting direct intervention (a majority of Americans don’t even support funding for Ukraine), but Israel is another matter. There are very old and tribal implications than pull on the souls of conservatives when it comes to the conflicts in the Middle East. There are religious factors, yes, but I suspect this is overblown by critics who think evangelicals are running the show. This is not reality.

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American Neocons Push For War With Iran — But Israel Does Not

Posted by M. C. on October 11, 2023

The Ron Paul Liberty Report

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Stone Cold Dead Republic: When Everything is Cast as a War

Posted by M. C. on September 29, 2023

“Among other things, calling something a “war” opens up the possibility of endless emergency measures and executive powers permitting the president to circumvent the legislature altogether and enact whichever laws he prefers. At the same time, widespread propaganda campaigns are used during wartime to secure the support and the obedience of the populace under the assumption that “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Sound familiar? It should.”

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/stone-cold-dead-republic-when-everything-is-cast-as-a-war/

by Laurie Calhoun

kyiv, ukraine december, 2019: injection of fentanyl medical glass ampoule.

Several politicians have vaunted a muscular but myopic plan for dealing with the fentanyl crisis: to eliminate sources of the drug near the U.S.-Mexico border through the use of military force. The fentanyl crisis is being portrayed as an international conflict, not a failure of domestic policy, but a problem entirely caused by the evil members of Mexican cartels who, it is being claimed, deserve to die, along with, apparently, anyone who happens to be at their side. But even assuming, against an abundance of evidence from history, that the deployment of military force would have any effect beyond persuading traffickers to move their operations elsewhere, the proposal to whack anyone at the border who appears to be involved in the illegal drug trade threatens the most basic principles at the heart of what remains of the U.S. republic.

As in the U.S. drone program deployed so ruthlessly against thousands of tribesmen throughout the Middle East, the proposed plan to summarily execute suspected fentanyl dealers assumes that they are guilty and that the presumption of innocence is a “quaint” notion which can and should be inverted when it comes to matters of national defense. Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has observed that more than thirty times more Americans now die of overdose deaths each year than died on September 11, 2001. From this he infers, fallaciously, that the use of military force has become necessary in order to stem the tide of the crisis. Apparently unaware or unconcerned that the Global War on Terror culminated in the deaths of many thousands more innocent people than died on 9/11, Ramaswamy sophistically suggests that because the sheer magnitude of overdose victims within the United States is so high, this implies that it is time for yet another war.

For what should be obvious reasons, government leaders love to paint every new problem as necessitating a new war. Among other things, calling something a “war” opens up the possibility of endless emergency measures and executive powers permitting the president to circumvent the legislature altogether and enact whichever laws he prefers. At the same time, widespread propaganda campaigns are used during wartime to secure the support and the obedience of the populace under the assumption that “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Sound familiar? It should.

Such dynamics are fresh memories in the minds of many people because we only recently witnessed and survived the “War on COVID-19,” which, like every other recent U.S. war, left only a crime scene in its wake. No matter, politicians are calling for a new War on Drugs, a “War on Fentanyl,” which implies, among other things, that “collateral damage” will be unavoidable. This is taken by war supporters to follow from the platitudes that “What must be done must be done!” and, in wartime, “Stuff happens.” The tactical parallels with 9/11 and the COVID-19 crisis are telling as well. People were so traumatized by what happened on September 11, 2001, that they agreed to anything the government proposed in order to protect themselves and their loved ones from the possibility of further terrorist acts. Likewise, having been propagandized to believe that everyone was in serious danger of death by virus, much of the populace agreed to severe limitations on their liberty, and some went even so far as to call for the injection of an experimental substance into the bodies of people who declined voluntarily to roll up their sleeves.

Self-proclaimed “libertarian-leaning” Ramaswamy says, on the one hand, that, as president, he will eliminate the Deep State, deleting entire departments of an undeniably bloated federal government. Unfortunately, however, his disdain for the bureaucratic state does not extend to the minimalist form of government better known as tyranny, wherein a single leader, the only remaining office holder, replaces the legislative branch of government and asserts his own power to issue executive orders binding on the people of the land. Ramaswamy’s populist rhetoric notwithstanding, by asserting the right to kill persons designated by himself as enemies of the state who are guilty of capital crimes, he would be appointing himself the king.

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They Dupe People Into Debating War With Russia Vs War With China, Instead Of War Itself

Posted by M. C. on August 23, 2023

https://substack.com/inbox/post/136298257

Caitlin Johnstone

One of the most brilliant propaganda maneuvers the managers of the US empire have pulled off lately is splitting the debate over US military policy along partisan lines, with one side supporting aggressions against Russia and the other preferring to focus aggressions on China. In this way they’ve ensured that mainstream discourse remains an argument over how US warmongering should occur, rather than if it should.

Senator Bernie Sanders has a new article out in The Guardian titled “The US and China must unite to fight the climate crisis, not each other,” in which he argues in favor of de-escalation measures comparable to those reached between Washington and Moscow after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“Instead of spending enormous amounts of money planning for a war against each other, the US and China should come to an agreement to mutually cut their military budgets and use the savings to move aggressively to improve energy efficiency, move toward sustainable energy and end our reliance on fossil fuels,” Sanders argues.

Which is a fine sentiment as far as it goes, and it’s not the first time Sanders has expressed this view; last month in The Guardian he argued that the US government should be focused on resolving the climate crisis “instead of fomenting a new cold war with China.” But it’s worth noting that while acting as a dovish detente proponent with regard to China, Sanders has for years been acting as a hawkish cold warrior with regard to Russia. 

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Earthquake

Posted by M. C. on June 30, 2023

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake“

Jeannette Rankin

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TGIF: Foreign Policy Matters

Posted by M. C. on June 23, 2023

Other burdens on people’s freedom include economic regulation, trade barriers through sanctions and tariffs, the militarization of local police departments, and the corruption of the news media. It’s said that the first casualty of war is truth. (Noninterventionist Sen. Hiram Johnson said that in 1917.) War and government lying go hand in hand.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-foreign-policy-matters/

by Sheldon Richman 

leviathan

In an extra special way, foreign policy matters crucially to champions of individual liberty. Not that it doesn’t matter to other people too — just not in all the same ways. Anyone who understands the importance of keeping government power strictly limited in domestic matters (if such power must exist at all) will also grasp the paramount importance of constraining government power abroad. They’re cut from the same cloth.

This is obvious to libertarians, but not necessarily to others. When Randolph Bourne wrote that “war is the health of the state,” he expected his readers to understand that this is a bad thing because the state is dangerous. But do most people know that? For neoconservatives and humanitarian interventionists, war being the health of the state is a feature, not a bug.

I think it was Richard Cobden, the 19th-century British free trader, peace activist, anti-imperialist, and member of Parliament, who demanded, “No foreign politics.” He meant that the government should be too busy dismantling power at home to engage in deadly balance-of-power intrigue abroad. In America a century later, Felix Morley, the anti-interventionist and pro-market newspaper editor, said in opposing the advocates of war and central bureaucracy that politics will stop at the water’s edge only when policy stops at the water’s edge, which he favored.

War naturally repulses individuals because — obviously — it kills and disables people, most atrociously, noncombatants. It’s so obviously repulsive that many soldiers have to be turned into killers during training. Another count against war is that it encourages a self-destructive, indiscriminate, and collective hatred of foreigners and even local individuals who are invidiously identified with the designated “enemy.” (Russian athletes and even long-dead Russian composers are targets of hostility these days.)

But those who understand that full individual liberty is a necessity — and not a mere luxury — include another count in the indictment against war. It inevitably fosters the general growth of government power, which then infects all aspects of life and society. That doesn’t happen all at once, but it sets in motion a deadly process that menaces everything in its path unless it is stopped. Few things approach war fever in this regard. (A pandemic and a major economic crisis can have similar effects.)

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Why Do We Elect Politicians and Governments that Wage War on Sovereign States?

Posted by M. C. on June 8, 2023

This deprives the people of their elementary right to peace and freedom. Are governments a clique separate from the population?

Many adults react to these politicians like children in the form of a magical belief in authority, uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And this has consequences: Belief in authority inevitably leads to allegiance to authority, which usually triggers the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience and paralysis of the mind.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-do-we-elect-politicians-governments-wage-war-sovereign-states/5821440

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*** 

Introduction

After reading two articles in “RTD”, I asked myself again why we citizens elect politicians and governments year after year that go to war against sovereign states – for example against the nuclear power Russia? The article by “RIA Novosti” is “NATO plans direct war against Russia” (1) and the second article is a documentary by Anna Chapman “Red Alert: Why is Germany so bent on war?” (2), which was probably first published on 24 January.

The people and their citizens are deprived of the management of their own affairs, the determination of their own actions and the care of their own welfare by such an election. Why should the people not be able to realise their own ideas and put their self-developed concepts of life into practice?

My demand therefore remains: “Hand over power to no one!” (3) and on the question of war and peace the people should have the last word. We humans are capable of living together without weapons and wars (4).

NATO’s secret plans for military action against Russia

According to Viktoriya Nikiforova, a columnist for “RIA Novosti”, the US magazine “Newsweek” reports on secret plans of the NATO alliance to go to war against Russia. These plans are to be adopted at the next NATO summit, which will take place in Vilnius on 11 and 12 July (5).

Literally, she writes:

“Officially, the summit programme lists only six tasks for the bloc in connection with the confrontation with Russia. These are the harmonisation and coordination of the Alliance’s forces in all theatres of war, long-term cooperation with private companies in the field of defence, increasing the production of weapons and ammunition, and building up reserves in the event of a long-term war. These are not tasks just for today – it is openly admitted that the realisation of these goals will take several years.” (6)

Why is the German mainstream so obsessed with war?

The opening credits of Anna Chapman’s documentary state:

“Ken Jebsen, Liane Kilinc, Dagmar Henn… The number of people persecuted for their opinions in Germany is growing inexorably: anyone who does not obediently follow the anti-Russian, pro-Ukrainian war course is in trouble. Why is the German mainstream so bent on war?” (7)

Towards the end she writes:

“Those who oppose the self-destructive course, advocate peace with Russia and call for an end to the European imperialist expansionist course in Ukraine are muzzled in various ways, up to and including prosecution.

What has become of Germany? Why and where are we heading? Why is Berlin so bent on imposing sanctions and supporting Kiev at the expense of its own economy and population? Who is really steering the country? And who is manipulating the German mainstream?” (8)

Surely the truth is that Germany has a great responsibility both to the previous generation and to its youth?

The post-war generation did a great deal to make Germany a respected and economically strong state again after the Hitler blow and the horrors of the Russian campaign. A war against Russia must not be repeated and should be taught to the partly history-less German youth both at the family table and in school.

In her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem. An Account of the Banality of Evil”, Hannah Arendt reproduces a quote by Bertolt Brecht from 1933 in the preface:

“O Germany, pale mother!

How besmirched thou sittest

Among the nations.

Among the stained

You stand out.

…

Hearing the speeches that come from your house, people laugh.

But he who sees you reaches for the knife.”  (9) 

Are governments a clique separate from the population?

Every four to five years in our Western democracies, corrupt politicians are elected to high government offices and are regarded as respectable authorities. Politicians immediately associate this attribution with claims to power, create a relationship of superiority and subordination and impose their will on the citizens; more precisely, the will or instructions of their clients, the global power elite.

In doing so, they pursue a policy at the expense of the working population that enables the billionaire elite in the background to steal so many billions of dollars that they can buy almost anything or anyone, from venal politicians to the corrupt World Health Organisation (WHO). These rulers cannot be trusted now or in the future.

The government or the state is the totality of all political, legislative, judicial and military institutions that deprive the people of the management of their own affairs, the determination of their own actions, the care of their own welfare.

Do government politicians then possess certain moral qualities such as wisdom, justice or impartiality? Are they so exceptionally gifted that they can put themselves in the place of the whole people and take better care of the interests of the people? Are they infallible and morally uncorruptible, so that the lot of anyone can reasonably be entrusted to their goodness?

In any case, the rulers are those who have the power to make laws to regulate the relations of men with each other and who have, among other things, the power to make war or peace with the governments of other countries.

Who puts them in their high places? Do they impose themselves by the right of war, conquest or revolution? Or are the governments “elected” by universal suffrage? But this in no way proves the justice, the wisdom, the abilities of those elected. Often those who can best lie (Tolstoy) and deceive the people are elected and the minority, which may be half of the electorate, is sacrificed.

As a rule, governments are made up of the haves and those who serve them; therefore, they are completely at the service of the haves. The very richest among them do not even have to bother to be part of the governments, MPs or ministers themselves. It is enough for them that the deputies and ministers are at their disposal.

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Be seeing you

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