Such crippling economic embargoes against Russia are of course in international law “acts of war” – so the West has rather vaulted the cold war and gone straight to courting military confrontation
Steinmeier is not Hitler but he is an increasingly nationalistic socialist who like Ribbentrop in the 1930s has been willing to shake the hands of overt fascists in Ukraine after the western inspired and financed putsch against a democratically elected Government.
Steinmeier’s speech in Berlin
Not long ago the German President, Joachim Gauck, said Germany should stop hiding behind its guilt and “punch its weight in the world”. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Social Democrat foreign minister is of the opinion that “Germany is really too big to only sit on the sidelines and comment on world politics”.
Now Steinmeier has addressed an audience of big business in Berlin in which he asked for the support of industrialists to promote German power – much as the more obviously imperialist Hitler had done some 80 years before. In Steinmeier’s audience were representatives of many of the same firms who had played such a prominent role in Nazi conquests, including the successor firms of the Nazis’ most fanatical industrial and political supporters, IG Farben which the Allies broke up after the war.
Steinmeier is not Hitler but he is an increasingly nationalistic socialist who like Ribbentrop in the 1930s has been willing to shake the hands of overt fascists in Ukraine after the western inspired and financed putsch against a democratically elected Government.
According to Steinmeier “Germany should ‘lead Europe to lead the world’, ‘Europeanise Russia’ and ‘multi-lateralise the US”. While Stalin’s Soviet Union after the Molotov Ribbentrop pact initially accommodated Hitler’s expansionism while the USA opposed it, today it is a non communist, increasingly capitalist, and Christian Russia which opposes German expansionism while the Americans (who contributed $5 billion to overthrow the Ukraine Government) are backing the German State as it pushes into every nook and cranny of Eastern Europe by means of economic takeover, bureaucratic control (through Brussels) and various “cooperation” and “neighbourly” agreements including military collaboration.
Just as the American Democratic Party had strong pro fascist elements like Joseph P Kennedy (father of John Kennedy) who opposed war in the 1930s and appeased Italian fascism and German Nazism and US industrialists like Ford aided Hitler’s election and Standard Oil and General Motors aided Nazi industry so today big business America and Obama’s Democratic party attack Russia and help German expansionism.
There are of course many good Germans – even industrialists – who oppose the attacks on Putin. The Chief Executive of Siemens has defended the Russians while the former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is a Director of Gazprom and a defender of Putin while former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt fears German expansionism.
Some years ago I had a short chat with Schmidt who – to my surprise – was attending a British eurosceptic meeting in Westminster. We talked of my years in Germany (lecturing at the University of Mainz) and he expressed his worries about the rise in German power. He has done so again recently when one naive British MP said Germany was to be praised for “not using its power to dominate Europe” to which Schmidt replied “not yet!”
There are naive elements in the British press like The Daily Telegraph and The Times who have been the deliberate vehicles for German propaganda and of course that arch pro German and ultra corporatist newspaper The Financial Times is now a virtual mouthpiece for the euro-federalist German Government. When it started to print overseas in 1979 the FT went to Frankfurt to produce a German edition. Today it has twice as many readers overseas as in the UK (where it has a mere 88,000). Co-founded in 1888 by Horatio Bottomley a Liberal MP and convicted fraudster the FT has largely lost its classical liberal and Conservative readership and is now a supranational corporatist ally of the anti nation statists. The FT frequently takes the German line and defends the European hegemony of the German political and corporate class as something which has just “fallen into the hands” of a “benign” Germany which is expanding largely by accident!
The contempt for the British people by this newspaper is daily revealed in its snide attacks. Most recently a columnist suggested that London should set itself free from the rest of the UK, since the British people were holding back the great supranational success that the rich and deserving London had become. The fact that London has for decades been a parasitic burden on the 80% of the British people who do not live there – but fund its excesses – is of course lost on this ignorant commentator, as indeed it is on 90% of the British political class.
Just as Germany initially used the power of Stalin to carve up Eastern Europe (and then declared war on Russia in 1941) so today American help, via NATO, for the break up and conquest by the EU first of the Balkans and then of Eastern Europe is welcome – until it one day conflicts with the aims of certain Germans to become a rival world power to the USA.
It was no accident that the first big EU agreement with another State was with Mexico and that German political foundations are particularly active in South America. So to “multi-lateralise the USA” is an attempt to reign in a rival rather than promote US interests, while to “Europeanize Russia” is nothing short of defeating the entire Russian sphere of influence as the Ukrainian disaster proves.
So Steinmeier excitedly speaks of “the expectation of German Involvement” from “our partners abroad” – and who can blame him given the decadence of the British press, the ignorance of our parliamentarians and the full collaboration of the disastrous Obama?
The German Government apparently asked for “international experts” to express their “expectations of German Foreign Policy”. From the many responses he received to this request, Steinmeier highlighted “Germany’s destiny: leading Europe in order to lead the world” – from an Indian-born Professor Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore!!
The German foreign minister saw the global situation as strongly reminiscent of the world before the Second World War – no wonder, given that German policy has created just such a picture in Europe. Steinmeier speaks of growing “national conflicts” (“we stare at the differences between states, peoples and cultures”. Even “in dealing with our closest partners, especially the United States”) which will cause Germany to take a more foreign policy and military approach to problems which cannot be resolved by economic means alone. He sees a world in which “the struggle for influence and domination” prevails.
But many of these crises are the direct results of German policy – be it:
the collapse of the Mediterranean countries due to the crisis in the Euro,
the Eurozone sclerosis affecting demand so badly as to threaten the global economy,
the deliberate provocation of Russia in its own back yard in Ukraine and the hypocritical accusations against Putin leading to sanctions which are bound to alienate the Russian people and backfire against a critically weakened European Union
not to mention the destabilisation of Middle Eastern countries through western interventions
All these crises are the result not of national or nationalistic fervour but of supranational interventions by those building economic and political empires principal among which is Germany and the European Union.
Steinmeier’s solution is to become involved in even more foreign policy initiatives – and to seek the aid of large German multinational corporations to do so! So the State and large corporations (neither any longer responsible to the people through democratic systems) are calling upon themselves to be the “solution” to the crises they caused themselves.
The “recession of globalization” claims Steinmeier threatens the German “export-driven economy”, concluding that big business needed to support a more aggressive foreign policy. But it was precisely the State collaboration with big business – and its undermining of democratic nationhood and free and fair trade which led to the excessive debt and property booms and to the gross imbalances in world trade as Germany and China for instance run massive balance of payments surpluses.
Because of State protection and interventions in those two countries (the former through political control through the EU and the artificial boost to exports through an undervalued Euro and the latter through communist control and the contradictions of central planning) those surpluses are not re-balanced internationally and the deficit countries become unsustainable debtors.
Like all hegemonists Steinmeier exploits the disastrous economic consequences of his own policies to bring about more political power for himself:
The “first step to recovery” comes from “the consciousness of those who knew that for us Germans, we cannot stand aloof from the crisis of the global order! Where we can, we—politicians and business leaders—must rouse us Germans from any insular thinking and any feelings of comfort!”
He goes on:
“As the most networked country, we depend on a peaceful and rule-based order in the world, and we must also intercede for this! Not only in Europe but worldwide…”
But it has not been on free networking according to international rules that we have come to this crisis. It is in fact the German dominated European Union which is most frequently up before the World Trade Organisation for breach of free trade rules.
“Economic globalization alone does not guarantee political convergence … !”
Aha! so Germany’s aim is not international prosperity and democratic nationhood – the aim is “convergence” – a “political” world order, which can only mean a supranational power over democratic nations. The blueprint is of course the European Union itself with its catastrophic economic effects its total lack of democratic support, its depopulation of its poorest countries and its central bureaucratic hegemony.
Steinmeier lies through his teeth when he says:
“Through the annexation of Crimea and its actions in eastern Ukraine”, Russia had placed in question “international law and rule-based order” and thus “violated the foundations of both our security and also our well-being”.
It was of course the West – and German political and economic interventions over many decades in Ukraine (exactly the same as in Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s) – which broke the norms of international rules on national self determination just as, in preposterous indignation, the USA and the EU now impose crippling economic sanctions for protecting their own people in Eastern Ukraine, as the Putschist regime in Kiev bombs its own ‘citizens”. And of course Crimea has been Russian for over 200 years and its people VOTED to be re-united with Russia. The Washington/Berlin inspired crippling economic embargoes against Russia are of course in international law “acts of war” – so the West has rather vaulted the cold war and gone straight to courting military confrontation:
Steinmeier even has the nerve to say that the sanctions against Russia are:
“also in the long-term interests of business”
thus neatly combining the foreign policy of Germany and Europe with the corporatist interest of big multinational business – a recipe for disaster all too reminiscent of the Hitler years.
Finally Steinmeier quoted a survey by the Körber Foundation, which asked Germans “whether Germany should engage more strongly than before internationally”. Only 38 percent answered “Yes”, 60 percent said “No, please continue to hold back.”
“This is the gap between external expectations and internal readiness, ladies and gentlemen, with which I have to deal. To be honest, if I were an engineer, I would, in good conscience, not build a bridge over such a gulf. As a politician, I have to! And I would be happy—and if I was not mistaken in my presentation, it is in your interests—if German business assists a little! Many thanks.”
And this is of course a German Social Democrat speaking!! But like all fascist movements they start on the left – Hitler joined the German Labour Party, Mussolini was a leading light in the Italian socialist Party and Oswald Mosley served in a Labour led Government in the 1930s.
So much for the contempt by the corporatist/fascist classes for the will of the people – a statement which was met with great applause by the assembled corporate representatives in the Berlin Hotel!
