“War is peace” - or: 2024 is 1984

by Leo Ensel

[This article posted on 8/22/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=120003.]

The time has come. Forty years late, we have finally arrived in Orwell's 1984. And the SPD presidency, of all people, is delivering sentences that could have been copied one-to-one from this classic of all dystopias. Please sit down comfortably before reading the following text. And make sure you don't fall off your chair anyway! By Leo Ensel.

All clear? Okay, here we go:

“As the SPD, we take responsibility for ensuring that no child born in Germany today has to experience war again. The agreement between the SPD-led German government and the US administration to station longer-range US missiles in Germany from 2026 is an important building block in this regard."

Yes, you read that right! This is the statement issued by the SPD party executive committee on 12 August on the “Retrofitting 2.0” decreed by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz in mid-July - the stationing of cruise missiles and de facto hypersonic missiles with a range of around 2,500 kilometers that can no longer be eliminated on approach - which will make not only every child in Germany, but simply all of us the target of Russian pre-emptive or retaliatory strikes in the event of a crisis or even war.

Sentences that are the bottom of the barrel.

Not even bothering to lie

Nothing proves the contempt that this government has for its people - which it feeds - more than the fact that it doesn't even bother to lie to them, at least in an elaborate way!

When Scholz dropped the bombshell at the NATO anniversary conference in Washington, he merely made the nebulous remark that this had been a very good decision, only to continue verbatim: “We know that there has been an unbelievable arms build-up in Russia, with weapons that threaten European territory.” With a casual wave of the hand, his brash Minister of War wiped off the table what should be as clear as day to any of the “children in Germany” so maudlinly invoked by the SPD presidium with a little explanation: The danger of the country itself threatening to become a theater of war is, according to Pistorius, “sheer nonsense”. That's it! And Annalena Baerbock, early avant-gardist of the currently so hip Orwellian soundbite - “weapons save human lives” - promptly took this measure as an opportunity to pre-emptively insult future critics: they were “not only irresponsible, but also naive in the face of an ice-cold, calculating Kremlin”.

The fact that Scholz was once a staunch Young Socialist against the deployment of Pershing II missiles and - get this! - cruise missiles on German soil, Baerbock, according to Wikipedia, was taken to these demonstrations by her parents as a child and Pistorius was mayor of the “peace city of Osnabrück” for over six years, merely demonstrates how far these protagonists, representing their parties, have moved away from their roots.

Why Russian missiles in Kaliningrad?

But why are Russian Iskander missiles, with which the “ice-cold calculating Kremlin” (Baerbock) “threatens European territory” (Scholz), actually located in the Kaliningrad Oblast? After all, these - it was officially deemed unnecessary to give more precise details - were probably meant.

It is almost enough to study a contemporary article from the Berliner Tagesspiegel again. On 13. On November 13, 2008, under the title “Russia proposes ‘zero solution’ for missile deployment”, it was reported that the then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had suggested to his then US counterpart Barack Obama that no missiles should be deployed in the exclave of Kaliningrad if the USA, for its part, gave up its plans to deploy modules of the global AEGIS missile'defence' system - which can be turned into an attack system with a simple software modification due to its “open architecture” - in Poland and the Czech Republic (later: Romania). (By the way, the fact that this system could be 'legally' installed worldwide at all is due to the termination of the ABM Treaty on the limitation of missile defense systems by the USA at the end of 2001, which was completely unprovoked by Russia). The USA was not prepared to refrain from deploying these modules on Russia's doorstep and, according to the merciless logic of deterrence, this had its consequences. When Donald Trump then - also without coming up with a plausible justification - terminated the INF Treaty at the beginning of 2019, which banned land-based short- and medium-range missiles with a range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, the “ice-cold calculating Kremlin” was no longer bound by a range limit either.

In short, the Russian missiles “threatening European territory” were a Russian countermeasure that the West could very easily have prevented at the time with a little good will. To now use these countermeasures themselves for further counter-countermeasures - which will of course be followed by Russian counter-counter-countermeasures - represents the climax of Western hypocrisy.

It is of course no coincidence that the chronology of this new arms spiral in the short- and medium-range sector is being wisely concealed by the government; otherwise - it would be unthinkable! - The “justifications” provided instead are nothing but an insult to common sense in their audacity and kitsch. And the fact that the quality media, instead of exposing this, assist in the same Orwellian language - “weapons, including those from Germany, help to enforce pacifist principles” - is speechless.

In a word: with a forty-year delay, we have all actually arrived in 1984!

This government is finished

Let's be clear: this government is finished. It has completely degenerated morally and we are begging God to catapult it into its well-earned retirement sooner rather than later - if there were at least a halfway acceptable realistic alternative on the horizon!

But until the BSW can play a decisive role in shaping the destiny of this country, there will probably still be a lot of water flowing down the Rhine. (And it's hard to imagine what arms policy facts will have been created by then ...)

This article first appeared on Globalbridge.