Within a few days of each other there have appeared in both The Times and The Daily Telegraph articles promoting the idea of commercial cooperation, mutual friendship and even common historical ties between Britain and Germany. While friendship and cooperation with Germans comes naturally to this writer and other American and British opponents of German Europe we are not so foolish as to conflate such personal relations with approval of growing German hegemony within the EU the redrawing of the post war European map, the German push for expansion to the East – and the extreme dangers for democracy, nationhood and European peace which those ambitions bring.
Simultaneously both the New York Times and the website German Foreign Policy have reported that the German Government has used (and even financed) American Think Tanks to write of a new era of friendship and mutual appreciation between Germany and the USA and to publish papers and articles favourable to German Foreign and commercial interests. In the case of the American propaganda offensive, as German Foreign Policy rightly reports (Von Deutschland lernen 30.9.2014) , the question arises as to whether such direct involvement by a foreign Government does not infringe the “Foreign Agents Registration Act”, which was passed in 1938 to ensure a defence against Nazi Germany’s propaganda in the USA.
Of course when Vladimir Putin passed not dissimilar regulations for foreign agencies to be registered there was the predictable criticism from the West, even though the above US legislation and of course the strict and restricted Intelligence operations of the Anglo Saxon world are well known and President Obama’s administration is found to be spying on Angela Merkel there is at best muted criticism!
The German Political Foundations – one each attached to the main political parties – are well know to be instruments of German Foreign Policy and they are in this case also very active in promoting German interests among the Think Tanks of Washington and New York.
As the German Foreign Policy website reports the US Brookings Institute organised a conference in May 2014 with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (of the German Social Democrat Party) and the Heinrich Boell Foundation (of the Christian Democrat Party) to discuss the change in German foreign policy. This is after the German foreign policy establishment and various German think tanks have claimed a new and proactive role for Germany in world affairs and in particular their desire for “leadership” in the European Union after the collapse of the french economy and the election of a left wing President (Francois Hollande) with a radical agenda has meant that France has been increasingly marginalised in European Union forums.
Needless to say the few small countries like Holland and Luxembourg which are (relatively) flourishing cannot challenge their large neighbour, the bankrupt Mediterranean countries are dependent on Germany underwriting the Euro in which their massive debts are denominated and the United Kingdom with a leader who manages to alienate both his own people and the Euro -establishment in Brussels and Berlin – none of these countries (if one can indeed call them such given their constitutional surrender to German Europe) is capable of challenging German hegemony.
And with the usual simplicitudes associated with the foreign policy of the United States US politicians seek to communicate with “Europe” preferably through one telephone line!
German Foreign Policy quotes Olaf Boehnke of the “European Council on Foreign Relations” (a clone of its classically corporatist American counterpart) speaking at the Brookings organised conference saying German influence was most effective when it was not evident. He was particularly proud apparently of the influence on the Ukraine crisis! (Where a German Foreign Minister shook hands with leading Ukrainian fascists and a new European war with Russia was deliberately provoked by the Washington Berlin axis.)
The New York Times found that the German Government was one of the leading buyers of policy influence through US Think Tanks who had received some $90m in funding from European, Asian and Middle East countries. This is of course classic corporatism – big money spent by those who do not own it (Governments or large Corporations) seeking to change Government policies. In such intimate corporatist/statist circles there is of course no room for voters or their representatives – what we used to call democracy!
Reflecting almost word for word the articles which appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph this month a study “American Perceptions of Germany in a changing world” was published earlier this year by the “Center for Strategic and International Studies” and purported to show that 60% of Americans had a favourable impression of Germany and 51% expected “Germany to take the leading role in the European Union”. The German Embassy in Washington proudly boasted that the questionnaire showed that Americans thought Germany “the best country to rescue Europe from the debt crisis”!!!
Given Germany’s role in destroying the economy of the Eurozone (17m unemployed), the destruction of the sovereignty of national Governments, the welfare collapse in the Mediterranean countries, the up to 55% youth unemployment and the resulting depopulation as young Spaniards, Greeks and Italians flee to Germany and the UK for jobs (bankrupting the British Exchequer in the process) this latter “finding” is particularly hilarious.
We live in dangerous times – but they are times which were foretold (see publications on this site and in particular my ebook And into the Fire – see http://www.amazon.com/And-Into-The-Fire-ebook/dp/B00E68O9SG)
