Re: The war, Germany and The Left

On 7/25/2022 2:18 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
> The war, Germany and The Left
> 
> Contested positions on the war in Ukraine – its origins and
> contributing factors – have led to divisions in Die Linke, writes
> 
> VICTOR GROSSMAN
> 
> IN 1307 in Switzerland, so goes the legend, the Habsburg rulers’ local
> bailiff, Gessler, stuck his hat on a pole and commanded every passerby
> to salute it.
> 
> William Tell refused. As fearsome punishment he had to shoot an apple
> from his own little boy’s head with his crossbow. His aim was sure,
> the boy was safe. But “Gessler’s hat” still means forced obeisance to
> some symbol. Or else!
> 
> In current media, every mention of the war in Ukraine must start with
> a denunciation of that monster Vladimir Putin. Or else! What epithet
> is more withering than “Putin-lover!”
> 
> I, too, am not a Putin-lover. And I have a great hatred of war,
> especially war rained from the skies or aimed from a distance.
> 
> Waging war, against civilians, even against young uniformed
> “adversaries,” is inherently wrong. But I will not bow my head to this
> modern “Gessler’s hat,” no matter what epithets I may be pelted with
> (crossbows are rarely available).
> 
> Despite my horror at the death, destruction and misery I see daily on
> TV, my entire background demands a careful analysis of a conflagration
> which may yet fling flames across more borders and can all too easily
> kindle atomic annihilation.
> 
> Why did Russia send an army into Ukraine? Was it pure imperialism? A
> terrible miscalculation? Did Putin see it as a dire necessity? Or was
> it a baited trap?
> 
> To start with, I cannot forget, deny or ignore what I have seen happen
> since 1945 — how the Pentagon, White House, Congress and those behind
> them sought the defeat of one pro-socialist effort after another.
> 
> They failed in Cuba and Vietnam, they succeeded in Ghana, Grenada,
> Chile — and, most important, in Europe. By utilising every weakness,
> blunder, even offence, and exerting every form of pressure, Poland was
> won by a team led by Ronald Reagan, “Polish Pope” John Paul II, the
> CIA and a few experts in the AFL-CIO.
> 
> In 1989-90 it was the GDR’s turn, with help from US ambassador to Bonn
> Vernon Walters, a former CIA deputy director who had played a major
> role in Poland.
> 
> In 1991 came the glorious victory over the USSR, where Boris Yeltsin,
> an alcoholic marionette, opened the gates to 10 years of chaos,
> desolation and sell-out to new Russian oligarchs and not-so-new US
> corporations.
> 
> That’s when Putin stepped in, just in time to save Russia from total
> collapse, using his own set of oligarchs, crossing himself piously as
> he knelt in church but keeping a tight state hold on banks and basic
> resources.
> 
> This was not at all what US businessmen and politicians wanted.
> 
> So the US-led military pact Nato, breaking its promise of 1990 not to
> move an inch eastwards, advanced, one regime-changed ally after the
> other, towards complete encirclement of Russia: in 1999 Poland,
> Hungary, the Czech Republic, in 2004 Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania,
> Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; then the hinterland in fragmented, bombed
> ex-Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia.
> 
> But most important was Ukraine, which could block Russia from the
> Black Sea and reached to within 400 miles of Moscow.
> 
> The elected president of that huge gem, unwilling to become part of
> the encircling noose, sought a more neutral position. “Not enough!”
> said Nato and sent in Nuland.
> 
> Victoria Nuland, deputy in Hillary Clinton’s State Department (and
> wife of a top cold war strategist), went to Kiev, dealt out at least
> $5 billion and even tasty cookies to a largely right-wing,
> anti-Russian crowd, and maybe a few to the mysterious snipers who
> forced the president to flee for his life.
> 
> In a famous hacked phone call, she personally chose the next Ukrainian
> ruler, banker-politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a man supported by the
> “Freedom Party” (Svoboda) of Oleh Tyahnybok, who had denounced a
> “Jewish-Russian Mafia” and praised Ukraine’s new hero Stepan Bandera,
> who led in murdering thousands of Jews and Poles in 1941.
> 
> One of the new rulers’ first measures discriminated against the many
> Russian-speakers, limiting the use of all but Ukrainian, making them
> second-class citizens and in Crimea angry enough to vote, with a big
> majority, to break with Ukraine and rejoin with Russia (to which they
> had belonged until 1954) and in eastern Donbass to form two separate
> republics, much as Albanian-speaking people in Kosovo broke away from
> Serbia in 2008.
> 
> In such decisions national pride, or self-defence, superseded complex
> international rules. Military operations against Donbass were soon
> launched, using the fascistic “Azov” militia units.
> 
> With Ukraine now a new segment in the ring around Russia, US-Nato
> built up its strength there, first with “non-lethal” arms and
> trainers, letting allies like Lithuania pass on bigger stuff.
> 
> Then came a series of military manoeuvres. Defender-Europe 20 was
> hindered by Covid-19 but, in 2021, Sea Breeze was conducted in the Sea
> of Azov and the Black Sea with more than 30 warships and 40 planes
> from 32 countries not far from the Russians’ southern naval base of
> Sevastopol.
> 
> In September 2021 it was Rapid Trident 21 — “To increase combat
> readiness, defense capabilities and interoperability, the exercise
> features joint jumps of Ukrainian and US paratroopers and, for the
> first time, service members will conduct battalion tactical exercises
> of a multinational battalion with combat shooting in a single combat
> order … The purpose is to prepare for joint actions as part of a
> multinational force during coalition operations.”
> 
> Joining the US and Ukraine were Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Germany,
> Italy, Jordan, Lithuania, Moldova, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Turkey
> and Britain.
> 
> Such activities were allegedly for peace, defending Ukraine against
> “authoritarianism.” But Russia viewed the threat of cutting it off in
> the Baltic and Black Sea, plus 700 or 800 big or small US bases on six
> continents, in a very different way.
> 
> Washington was a safe 7,800 miles away; St Petersburg and Moscow were
> under the noses of those missile launchers, warplanes and warships,
> and the US alone had a 13-1 preponderance over Russia in military
> spending.
> 
> Bipartisan US politicians were outdoing themselves in reviling Russia,
> nor could the Maidan events with Victoria Nuland be forgotten.
> 
> As for Putin, like him or hate him, it is hardly surprising that he
> was alarmed, perhaps even for personal reasons in view of the fates of
> other leaders disliked by Washington: Allende, dead in his bombed
> residence, Lumumba, tortured and murdered, Saddam Hussein, hanged,
> Muammar Gadaffi, fatally sodomised, the Afghani Najibullah, castrated
> and strung up, Osama Bin Laden, shot in his rooms and dumped into the
> ocean, Slobodan Milosevic, mysteriously dying in a prison cell. (Fidel
> Castro was luckier, surviving over a hundred bungled CIA assassination
> attempts.)
> 
> In a 14-page historical summary, Putin wrote: “We respect the
> Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians’ desire to
> see their country free, safe and prosperous.” … “Russia is open to
> dialogue with Ukraine and ready to discuss the most complex issues.
> But it is important for us to understand that our Ukrainian partner
> defend its national interests not by serving someone else’s, that it
> not be a tool in someone else’s hands to fight against us.”
> 
> That was in July 2021. How sincere were such words? What did they mean
> in February 2022? Daring to ignore the “Gessler hat,” I think basic
> Russian policy must be seen not as expansionist but as defensive.
> 
> In 2015 Russia agreed to the Minsk II agreement to avoid further
> warfare in Donbass and resolve the conflict with negotiations and
> compromises.
> 
> Kiev ignored, indeed undermined Minsk II; Germany and France, its
> co-sponsors, abandoned it. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made
> proposals to discuss a neutral Ukraine.
> 
> At first Volodymyr Zelensky seemed interested — until pressure from
> Washington and London to “stay tough” prevailed; Lavrov’s further
> requests to negotiate differences, above all to remove Nato troops and
> manoeuvres from Russian borders, were rejected in December 2021 by
> Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as “very obvious non-starters.”
> 
> Was that rejection Putin’s “red line”? Who knows? I only wish they had
> been “starters” instead — for the White House and Pentagon. That could
> have saved the Ukrainians immense suffering and exile, although it
> might have meant fewer billions for Northrup-Grumman or Raytheon.
> 
> And on February 24? Did Putin perhaps march into an elaborate trap —
> as Russia had once done in Afghanistan? Did he consider a big
> impending Ukrainian offensive against the Donbass republics and their
> Russian-speaking population, where 14,000 had died in 10 years of
> battle, as an immediate danger to Russia?
> 
> Did the many US-Ukrainian biological laboratories — admitted to by
> Nuland in a US Senate committee hearing — seem an immediate threat? I
> cannot know.
> 
> Putin defended the invasion of Ukraine with the following words:
> “Today we are told that we started a war in Donbass, in Ukraine. No,
> it was unleashed by this same collective West which organised and
> supported the unconstitutional armed coup d’etat in Ukraine in 2014,
> then encouraged and justified genocide against the people of Donbass …
> 
> “The West is fighting Russia with all the tools that are also used in
> a war: weapons, sanctions, money, media, diplomacy. The only thing
> that slows the West down from intervening with its own soldiers is the
> danger of nuclear war.
> 
> “Ukraine is only the unfortunate sacrificial pawn of the West, which
> had been prepared for this role since 2014 and with which the West has
> provoked Russia (with the Maidan coup in 2014, arms deliveries,
> construction of Nato bases, etc) until Russia saw no choice but to
> take military action to protect its own security interests.
> 
> “At the beginning of February 2022, the West rejected the security
> guarantees proposed by Russia in December 2021 and even refused to
> talk about them.”
> 
> That is Putin’s position. True or not, and for whatever reason,
> invasion was a tragic choice. Aside from the misery in Ukraine, it has
> led to a dangerously explosive polarisation, painfully splitting the
> world’s weak left-wing forces for peace and progress.
> 
> And in Germany? For years the unified country was torn between two
> forces. Some economic groups, like gas importers and exporters of
> manufactured and agricultural goods, wanted to get along with Russia
> (and even more with China), a policy symbolised by Angela Merkel and
> the Baltic pipelines.
> 
> This was angrily opposed by men along the Potomac, in Charles Koch’s
> Wichita HQ and similar locations, who wanted both to export fracked
> gas and to head off even limited German-Russian reconciliation.
> 
> They were aiming at the eventual defeat of Russia, then China, as
> major barriers to their plans for world hegemony, prudently labelled
> “the rule of order,” democracy, liberty (and free markets!) as against
> “authoritarianism.”
> 
> Closely beholden to them was that force in Germany, the Atlanticists,
> whether because of ideology, intertwining corporate and financial
> interests, or perhaps even personal career hopes.
> 
> After February 24, inside and outside the governing coalition, the
> Atlanticists won full victory, filling the media with angry
> denunciation of everything Russian, working to permanently break off
> all commercial ties with Moscow, starting with the Baltic oil
> pipelines, even though this may well cause industrial shutdowns and
> maybe very chilly house temperatures.
> 
> Christian Democrats, Free Democrats, and first and foremost, the Green
> Party joined the attack, with the young Green Foreign Minister
> Annalena Baerbock demanding that as many and as heavy weapons possible
> to be sent to Kiev, with her cherished goal the “ruin of Russia.”
> 
> The Social Democrats were not so clear, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz
> hesitant about sending heavy weapons to Kiev and getting deeply
> involved in what could become an open war, Nato v Russia.
> 
> But media attacks grew fiercer, and Scholz bowed to that “Gessler
> hat,” siding with Nato and Washington, stationing more German troops
> in Lithuania and demanding an unprecedented sum of €100 billion for
> more armaments to “protect German security.”
> 
> The competition in denouncing Russia grew strong enough to revive
> half-forgotten tones from the 1930s, like when Lars Klingbeil, a
> leading Social Democrat, claimed that “Germany’s allies have great
> expectations and Germany must fulfil them … It is time for it to exit
> the end-of-history mode and become a leading power on the world stage
> after almost 80 years of holding back.”
> 
> Frightening words! Even more frightening were those of top air corps
> General Ingo Gerhartz: “For a credible deterrent, we need both the
> means and the political will, if necessary, to implement nuclear
> deterrence.” The “old guard” in the established parties were beginning
> to summon up past glories.
> 
> The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is all-out for those past
> glories but, like some other far-righters in Europe, did not join the
> verbal attacks on Russia and opposed armaments for Ukraine.
> 
> Its main mission in nearly all matters is opposition — above all to
> the European Union. But as dyed-in-the-wool nationalists, they also
> support a big German military build-up, a renewed draft and/or
> compulsory civil service for young men (as also recommended by
> President Frank-Walter Steinmeier).
> 
> The Left — Die Linke — has always stood out as the one party of peace,
> opposing deployment in Serbia, Afghanistan, Mali or anywhere outside
> German borders.
> 
> Now it was split, with the main bone of contention the Ukraine war.
> Actually, disagreement on related issues was by no means new, though
> rarely so emotional as at the party congress session in late June.
> 
> It was a disastrous year for Die Linke. In the September elections the
> party received only 4.9 per cent, down from 6.9 per cent four years
> earlier.
> 
> Its caucus in the Bundestag was only just saved by a special rule — if
> three or more delegates were elected directly in their districts the
> caucus was saved, even without 5 per cent.
> 
> Exactly three scraped through, but proportional representation now
> gave it 39 deputies, not its previous 69 — no longer the strongest
> opposition party, it had become the weakest.
> 
> The urgent party reassessment and changes called for by this disaster
> failed to materialise and the party lost bitterly in three state
> elections: Saarland — from 12.8 per cent to 2.6 per cent,
> Schleswig-Holstein, 3.8 to 1.7 per cent and in the key industrial
> North Rhine-Westfalia from 4.9 to 2.7 per cent.
> 
> In the main dispute the so-called reformers weakened the party’s basic
> opposition to Nato in hopes of being accepted in a government
> coalition with the pro-Nato Greens and Social Democrats.
> 
> Such dubious hopes were rendered fully impossible by Die Linke’s poor
> election results. But the reformers still tended to play down or
> absolve Nato’s current role, giving Russia and Putin the entire blame
> for the Ukrainian tragedy while the militant wing of the party viewed
> Nato, especially the US, as provocateurs, whose expansionist policy of
> deploying armaments and manoeuvres along Russian borders was clearly
> looking for trouble — and, sadly, getting it.
> 
> The quarrel reflected a deeper rift — between those who called for
> improvements in child care, pensions, minimum wages but saw socialism
> only as a future goal in vague cliches while basically accepting a
> systemic status quo in which they strove to become accepted, despite
> the growing menace of the billionaires.
> 
> The militants, while not calling for revolution tomorrow (like some
> ultra-leftists), nevertheless saw a rejection of the capitalist system
> as vital — and basic opposition a necessity.
> 
> The one group accepted Nato, the other opposed it. Their differences
> coloured often hot but very brief Congress debates, which were
> dominated by the reformers, who won out in the end with about a 60-30
> ratio — and managed to slip some very ardent pro-Nato advocates into
> leading positions.
> 
> Some on the left deplored the Congress results. Others were glad there
> had been no split, some political positions had been rescued, a
> threatened stress on “gender issues,” even in grammar and punctuation,
> had been averted and a shaky compromise arrived at.
> 
> It remains to be seen whether Die Linke can regain roots among working
> people for the many hardships and big menaces now looming.
> 
> And much may yet depend on its position regarding Gessler’s hat. A
> side note: In the famous play by Friedrich Schiller, the events
> involved led to the Swiss rebellion against Habsburg tyranny.
> 
> Source:
> 
> <https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/war-germany-and-left>
> 
> 
> 
>   

This is an excellent article you link to.  Even in March, 2023 it is 
relevant and elucidating.  Thanks for posting it.


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