Onlinezeitung AmericanRebel

Within NATO German officers will now command a „Very High Readiness Joint Task Force“ which can be sent anywhere within three days. During her visit to troops stationed in Lithuania, this Snow Queen announced that by 2021 Germany will invest some 110 million euros in Lithuania’s military infrastructure and reiterated Germany’s commitment to deploy troops near Russia, in regions which her predecessors once leveled. „We will stay as long as the security situation requires…We are the only European continental country to maintain a forward presence in the Baltic area, protecting our Baltic friends.” And, she boasted, we are “the second largest supplier of troops in Afghanistan”.

NATO plans are to be coordinated with a new military arm of the EU which von der Leyen has been building up as a junior partner, dominated by Germany. In March the European Commission, which she hopes to head, reported plans to strengthen and widen highways, bridges and rail lines so troops and tanks can move quickly eastward from West German bases and ports. Déja vu 1935!

One week before her nomination by the big shots some 5000 very peaceful people camped out in southwest Germany to protest just such developments. In talking, singing, dancing and protest demonstrations, they demanded that the huge US Army base at Ramstein, the biggest base outside US boundaries, be shut down. It is from here that top generals direct troop movements in Africa and the Near East, and from here that orders, sent per cable from safe spots in Nevada (in a relay made necessary because of the earth’s curve), deploy drones to murder anyone the Pentagon decides is an enemy, together with any men, women or children in the vicinity. Wedding parties are destroyed, farmers blown up, countless boundaries violated, most recently and dangerously those of Iran.

“When you see what a turn-table Ramstein is,” General Mark August boasts, “when you look across the tarmac and see those giant planes, then you can grasp that this is a place where we get things moving, in the direction of Africa, the Near East or Eastern Europe.”

The counterdemonstrations now take place annually. Others are directed against the US Air Force base at nearby Bueckel where an estimated twenty B61-3/4 atomic missiles are stored, each one with thirteen to twenty times the annihilation power of the bomb at Hiroshima. Germany’s Tornado planes are there, too, ready to carry them eastward at any moment.

The demonstrators, demanding an end to such menaces, named names: „Chancellor Merkel and Minister von der Leyen bear personal responsibility here!“

The encampment at Ramstein was bigger than in recent years. But it could hardly reflect a general desire for peace by a majority of Germans, in spite of a lasting campaign by the media, rivaled only by the media of the USA, against imagined Russian plans of aggression.

Sadly, the only German party to achieve big gains in the EU vote, the “Greens”, has not distinguished itself as a party of peace. At its start, while stressing environmental questions, it leaned strongly to the left, even the radical left. But radicals grow older – and often tamer. Its ecology became tainted with business interests during coalitions with right-wing Christian Democrats, as in Baden-Wurttemberg, where the only Green minister president of a state, Winfried Kretschmann, is very cuddly with Daimler-Benz and Porsche, neighbors of his capital in Stuttgart. A similar marriage of Greens and “Christians” in the state of Hesse led to abandoning a fight against a damaging expansion of the huge Frankfurt airport and against cutting down the venerable Hambacher Forest to dig lignite coal. In foreign policy the Greens often lead the pack in a threatening belligerency toward Russia. And yet, seen by many as an alternative to the two older established parties, and with attractive young leaders, the party soared in the EU vote from 9.8% five years ago to 20.5% this May!

As for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), its gains in the EU vote were less than many had feared. But the menace remains, especially in coming elections in the East German states of Brandenburg and Saxony. It was also brutally dramatized by the murder of one decent Christian Democratic politician by a fascist who hated his courageous defense of immigrants and foreigners.

And the Left, Die Linke, the only Bundestag party to oppose expansion, militarism, belligerency? In the EU vote it slumped from 7.4% in 2014 to a dangerously low 5.5% in May. Inner-party quarrels, a split about strategy and a failure to fight “in the streets and factories” have prevented it from winning the increasing numbers of dissatisfied union and low-paid SPD voters. Its participation in coalition governments in East German states, seen by some as “the Establishment”, has certainly lost it votes. There are hopes it may be moving to cure such ills by fighting hard for rent controls, even confiscation of real estate carnivores – developments I will discuss in future Berlin Bulletins.

One interesting new local development may remind some readers of a jolly tale published by the Grimm brothers just 200 years ago – about a donkey, dog, cat and rooster who, threatened with culling due to useless old age, joined to escape this fate by going to Bremen as musicians – braying, barking, meowing and crowing. En route they succeed in scaring off a band of robbers.

In an election in today’s Bremen, Germany’s smallest, poorest state, the Social Democrats were outnumbered by the Christian Democrats for the first time since 1949. But they saved their governmental skins all the same, not with barnyard music but by daring to join not just with the Greens but, for the first time in a West German state, also with the Left, which had made modest gains in the Bremen vote. Will this triple coalition work? Can local left-wing factions in the SPD and Greens and a militant leadership in the Left unite and, defying large debts, achieve improvements in education, housing and environment? The experiment will be watched, closely and critically! Maybe these three, in Bremen at least, can harmonize, without making too many compromises with all those menacing robbers. After all, fairy tales do often have happy endings!

Fourthly, I wonder if Trump is perhaps less inherently racist – against African-Americans, Mexicans, Central Americans and especially Muslims – as he is just uninterested and pragmatically ready to utilize and encourage such feelings – and actions – among a sector of the population which is indeed motivated by hatred – and whose support he most crucially requires. But true or not, this does not make his strategy one bit less vicious or dangerous. Here, too, I can disregard any difference.

My last idea is most controversial. I wonder if Trump, despite all his greed, narcissism and alliance with militant fascist elements, and what seems like further mental deterioration, does not have, deep down, some inner feeling that in world affairs peace might be better than war. True, he has again and again made bloody threats to reduce whole countries to ruin or ashes – North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran and now Turkey – and has supported actions which were anything but pacifistic, at the cost of Yemen and East Jerusalem to name only two.

And yet, I feel forced to ask myself; were his threats, vocal and otherwise, based on pressures by men who influenced and in part determined his foreign policies, the latest examples being Bolton and (still) Pompeo? Key sections of the Pentagon-CIA-armament lobby crowd are powerful and clever, far cleverer than Donald Trump, especially in the Middle East but also in efforts to break Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela (thus far in vain). There are sometimes hints that he did incline, though as always awkwardly, unpredictably and with many contradictions, towards making peace with North Korea, in Afghanistan and even, on one or two occasions, with Iran. And, most importantly, in a world threatenened by the chance of the least little spark in Estonia, Poland, the Baltic or Black Sea igniting the atomic incineration of the entire world, did any such fears – along with hopes for a Trump Tower in Moscow – play a part in a wish for detente rather than confrontatiion with Russia (and somewhat similarly with China)? I can only speculate.

But aside from any of Trump’s cerebral waves, other waves roll in from Moscow,from Putin. One can hate him, ridicule him or perhaps love him, but it is far wiser to  carefully analyze his policies; deserving at least to be read are his relevant speeches which, largely unnoticed, constantly oppose confrontation and call for de-escalation. Even if viewed as bluffs, if they can possibly move us an inch toward lasting peace then such bluffs should be called. But, as in most of the past century, this very idea frightens some people – above all those who manufacture heavy modern weapons or cherish shiny medals. Atomic finality be damned! They always opposed any step toward rapprochement or the very word detente, in the northern Baltic, southern Syria, the Ukraine, or anywhere, coming from Trump or, for that matter, from anyone else!

It was basically pressure from the Russiagate brouhaha – whose exaggerations, I suspect, were encouraged by those same hypocrites who prefer tension between the world’s main powers, which led Trump to retreat from his less belligerent positions, sometimes at the last minute. Was he, in the end, defying Bolton’s urging when he called off the bombing of Iran? Did he retreat from a peace agreement in Afghanistan because he could not withstand pressure from Bolton, Pompeo and those behind them? Was the failure of the rather promising meeting with Kim due to Bolton’s and Pompeo’s spokes in the wheel?

I don’t know and I cannot know. But I think such questions deserve serious  consideration.

I could never vote for Donald Trump. On the U.S. domestic scene, no matter how his cerebral waves are surfing on any one day or week, the militia gangs of bigots and thugs which support him recall far too menacingly the forces organized by Hitler in his power seizure. Their American imitators already threaten severe unrest if he loses the election or the House impeaches him and the Senate votes him out. So: Stop Trump!

Worrying me all the same, however, is that the main impeachment thrust aims at minor events in the Ukraine, like that D.C.-Kiev telephone call. It was undoubtedly tainted and no doubt very illegal. But this whole approach ignores, indeed covers over the fact that the whole US policy of violently turning the Ukraine into a US-dominated satrapy and advanced base was achieved by a Democratic administration. This was vividly illustrated by then Vice-President Biden’s televised boast about withholding a billion dollars if the Ukraine did not obey orders and, within six hours, fire an undesirable prosecutor. I find that worse than Trump’s call, with or without any nepotism involved.

The current impeachment move, although supported by many progressives, seems to be a fight against Trump for just the wrong reasons, based on a minor scene in a complex drama where Democrats have been at least as villainous as Republicans. This can distract from genuine reasons for fighting him; his racist actions, his kowtowing to big business, his repression of refugees, ecological insanity and the rest. Avoiding such matters, much of the media has stressed a phone call and now the withdrawal of US soldiers. Is it possible that this decision, ill-advised and ill-timed as it was, may really have reflected a wish for the USA to get out of the Middle East where it doesn’t belong and has created death, destruction and misery for decades, with both parties responsible?

Here, too, hypocrisy rules; for years the Kurds (in Turkey) were all „terrorists“ – they become our allies and heroes – tragically abandoned by Trump – only as long as they can oh so heroically provide us with oil and strategic bases in Iraq or Syria, close to Iran and Russia. Our friendship with the Free Syrian Army has been just as volatile; when fighting Assad they were almost holy crusaders. Now, fighting with Erdogan, we observe their media-metamorphosis into vicious murderers of our now heroic Kurds.

Will the impeachment campaign, while perhaps distracting from Trump’s genuine nastiness and homeland threat, also provide excuses for more fateful missteps in the Middle East and further confrontation on a world scale – while trying to salvage a sagging Biden and weaken left-leaning pressures in the Democratic Party? We’ll see!

Since it is now impossible to halt what I see as a questionable impeachment move, it seems imperative to try to alter its thrust; at home, toward opposing his racist actions, brutal immigrant repression, environmental destruction and enrichment of the rich by further impoverishing the poor. And abroad, by opposing him whenever his unpredictable, spasmodic path leans toward confrontation or self-serving regime change, as against Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, but not by applauding or assisting hypocritical steps which really serve only bellicose ambitions and further filling obscenely swollen Raytheon-Northrup-Lockheed portfolios.