Out for Anti-War Day!

The war begins in our heads
by Angela Klein

[This article posted on 9/1/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.sozonline.de/2024/09/heraus-zum-antikriegstag/,]

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” That's how imperialists have always thought. With the war in Ukraine, the motto is once again enjoying great popularity in the EU. Since then, NATO has been working towards a military showdown with Russia and China.

All the stops are being pulled out: The economic war includes sanctions, tightening tariffs and protectionist measures of all kinds; the information and propaganda war is clouding people's minds and making killing in war appear to be something ordinary, even necessary.
As NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg said quite openly last year: “In ten years, NATO must be ready to wage war against Russia.” The plans for the defense budgets in Europe obey this guideline, above all the German ones: Increasing arms spending, first by a “special fund” of 100 billion euros, then to 2 percent of GDP, reintroducing a form of - initially “voluntary” - compulsory military service, militarizing society through a robust presence of the Bundeswehr in public to “accustom” them to the idea of war again. War Minister Pistorius (SPD) wants to be even faster than Stoltenberg: in his opinion, NATO must be ready in just five years, he said in June. In the first half of August, the highest-ranking British general followed suit: “No, in three years. Three years could be enough to keep the Ukrainians in line until NATO no longer needs to fear a military escalation with Russia.
The path to a third world war seems shorter than we can imagine. In such a war, Germany would be a central theater of war: the planned deployment of first-strike capable medium-range missiles from the USA and the storage of new nuclear bombs from 2026 alone ensure this - all of which are capable of bringing the war to Russia.

It is not only on the eastern edge of Europe that war is being declared the new peace. In the Middle East, the US fears an escalation, but it will not stop arming Israel with weapons for its war of annihilation against the Palestinians in order to secure US rule over the riches of the Middle East. And in the South China Sea, they have quietly abandoned their earlier policy of recognizing Taiwan as part of China, since they no longer see China as their extended workbench, but as an economic and increasingly also a political competitor.
Russia and China are the new arch-enemies. Many political think tanks and the media are working to ensure that the population, especially in Europe, eats up this fairy tale. Hence the intolerable and depoliticizing moralization of the respective war efforts: It is not enough that the enemy is an enemy, because you could come to terms with that too. But evil must be destroyed.

War begins in the mind. Brainwashing must therefore be countered first and foremost. Anyone who believes that we are defending “ourselves” in Ukraine or the Middle East (and not the political and economic interests of Atlantic capital), who believes that the Russians will be standing outside Berlin tomorrow, will take up arms now to defend our freedom not just at the Brandenburg Gate, but “at the Dnieper or in the South China Sea”. In the last century, it was German armies that twice waged war on Russia; and it was the Germans and the British who waged war on China - not the other way around.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine does not prove the opposite. Russia is no less imperialist than NATO, but it has no territorial ambitions towards EU countries; its imperial ambitions are directed towards the territory of the former Soviet Union. And it does not have the claim to autocracy that US capital has. However, the fact that Russian imperialism is the weaker one does not make it an ally of the wage-dependent classes of other countries.

We need a peace order, and this cannot exist without or even against Russia. But as things stand, we will not be able to achieve it with either von der Leyen or Putin. There is no Russian revolution on the horizon and no anti-capitalist upheaval in the EU. We are in a far worse position than before the First World War, in whose footsteps we are currently following. We have no choice but to oppose the militarization of our society with all our strength.
Because we know one thing: It won't work without the population joining in - at least not under the conditions of a democracy, albeit a formal one. If no one believes that Hannibal is at the gates, if the trade unions in particular refuse to accept the abolition of the welfare state for the Putins and von der Leyens of this world, then nothing will come of it - especially if this happens in several countries at the same time.
It is time for a new Zimmerwald Conference.