[This was published at OpEdNews.com on Dec. 15, 2023. There is a German translation following this titled “Ein ‘Neuer Deutscher’ Spricht.”]
l have been certifiably German – which is not a disease – since 2015, but my heart isn't in it. Sometimes I "feel" Irish or French, for more or less silly reasons, and I was uncertifiably stateless for a month while waiting for my "Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States" – which sounds even worse than a disease. It also cost me $2,350. There is a certain lightness of being that comes with that but I don't recommend it. In the end one has to throw one's lot in with some lot.
I don't think it's totally accidental that I've ended up here. After all, I was here during a formative period of my life. Here I am reviewing the troops at Vaihengen:
My father was assigned to the US Constabulary after the war, and my brother and I had a lot of contact with the natives via our "house helpers": Gertrud (here holding my hand)
Johanna
and Karl
who jumped in front of a train in Augsburg because, my mother wrote in her memoir, "his own countrymen had hounded him by threatening to turn him in as an escaped Nazi." He was replaced by Walter, who could do coin tricks (no photo). Who knows what seeds of fate were planted in my brain in those days?
The proximal reason for my coming back in 1977 was employment. I got a job teaching English at the University of Kassel. I had no strong political opinions in those days. I had been against the Vietnam war, but when a student asked me during a "get acquainted" session, "What do you think of American imperialism?" I had no idea what to say.
Nine years later, I still had no clue. In fact, I distinctly remember, after hearing the news that Reagan had bombed Libya, supposedly in retaliation for the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, punching my fist into the air and thinking, "Finally, the US has done something right!" I suppose that counts as a political opinion. I had also taken to wearing cowboy boots and occasionally coloring my speech with a Texas twang modeled after Lyndon Johnson, whom I forgot I hated. I cringe at the memory. I didn't know it at the time, but I was one sick puppy.
Despite my opposition to the war, I had not read Noam Chomsky or anything else that went beyond the condemnation of a war that made no sense to me (see here). I was not a Marxist or anything close to it. I had grown up on Army posts, with a father and a brother, and later a nephew, who went to West Point, and one uncle who graduated from the Naval Academy and the other from the Coast Guard Academy. But when Muhammad Ali said “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong,” he hit the nail on the head. McGeorge Bundy and the rest of "the best and the brightest" claiming US national security was at stake in Vietnam and that we were saving the South Vietnamese from communism seemed the height of stupidity to me. Yet Kennedy had appointed them, and I had no inkling that they or the CIA had anything to do with his assassination. (Bundy as the national security advisor had to know what the CIA was up to.)
How could they have been so stupid? Exactly the same question can and should be asked about the proxy war in Ukraine today, and the genocide in Gaza. Today I know the answer. They weren't stupid, they were lying. They didn't give a hoot about the Vietnamese then, and they don't give a hoot about Ukrainians or Palestinians now. They don't give a hoot about Israelis either, because if they did they wouldn't let them destroy themselves as well by massacring thousands of innocent and helpless people, mostly women and children. No Israeli, and no Jew who identifies as an Israeli, will ever recover from this shame.
I can say these things now. But in the 60s and 70s, and most of the 80s, I was, to put it mildly, confused. I was suffering from what today we might call cognitive dissonance, which seems like a grotesque euphemism when we are talking about the death and suffering of millions of people, or hundreds or tens of thousands, or even one for that matter. The notion that "we" could be responsible for such horror and still be the "good guys" (and gals) is so absurd as to defy description, but I can't think of a better term so I'll stick with cognitive dissonance and define this form of it as "stress caused by cultural pressure (propaganda) to believe in the goodness of one's government despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary."
As is the case, I suppose, with many mental illnesses, this cognitive dissonance is only recognizable as a disease if you don't have it, or have been cured. I was cured one evening in November 1988 – and I am tempted to say miraculously because of the way it snuck up on me. Suffice it to say that I watched a TV documentary about the JFK assassination (Nigel Turner's The Men Who Killed Kennedy), and it hit me like a ton of bricks: the US government, my government (at the time), killed the president and they have been lying about it ever since. So have the mass media and all the educational institutions where I spent so much time getting "educated."
I understand that not everybody will agree with what I have just said. Noam Chomsky doesn't, even though we agree on something that is at least as extreme – that the US is the world's greatest terrorist state. I've spent enough time dealing with the Chomsky dilemma, which for me is another case of cognitive dissonance (see here and here). Chris Hedges and John Kiriakou don't "buy" the conspiracy "theory" of the assassination either (see here, from 33:59). And even if you do buy this, you may not believe that the government killed Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, killed 3000 people on 9/11, manufactured and (perhaps accidentally) released a killer virus from Wuhan, orchestrated the Ukraine war, and blew up the Nord Stream pipelines. Ironically, you are more likely to believe that the US government is guilty of genocide – by allowing the Israeli government to massacre the Palestinians. Why is it be easier to see that the US government is aiding and abetting Israeli genocide than to see that it is also guilty of those earlier crimes?
So much depends on what you see on television. Out of sight, out of mind. In my case, a television program woke me up, but more often, especially now, it is a soporific and a propaganda machine. The books have been written (e.g., James Douglass on the JFK assassination, William Pepper on the MLK assassination, Lisa Pease on the RFK assassination, David Ray Griffin on 9/11 and the Ukraine war), and the internet brings the real journalists to our computers (Maj. Scott Ritter (US Marine Corps, ret.) , Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Col. Douglas Macgregor (US Army, ret.), Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (US Air Force, ret.), Prof. John Mearsheimer, Ray McGovern, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (US Army, ret.), Col. Richard H. Black (US Army, ret.), Larry Johnson, Phil Giraldi, Alastair Crooke, Prof. Michael Hudson, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, Caitlin Johnstone, Jimmy Dore, Alexander Mercouris, Alex Christoforou, Brian Berletic et al.) but you have to look for them.
That student's question many years ago about American imperialism is as relevant today as it was then. Today I can answer it. US imperialism is responsible for 12 million deaths since 1945. "Stand with Ukraine" and "Stand with Israel" will add hundreds of thousands more to that toll, since no one can doubt (see the commentators mentioned above) that one phone call from Biden to Zelensky and one to Netanyahu would end the bloodshed immediately. The belief that the US is the "indispensable nation" that must either rule the world or the world is not worth living in will destroy the planet if it is not stopped. What has changed since February 24, 2022 is that Russia has decided to stop it, and China and the Global South are on their side. US global hegemony is no longer acceptable. The world will be multipolar or not at all. Something has to give.
It is profoundly disappointing to me as a "new German" that the Scholz government has abjectly acquiesced to US foreign policy, to our own detriment. I have written about this (here, here, here and here). Germany should have been the first country to declare its opposition to Ukraine ever joining NATO, since reunification in 1990 would not have been possible, i.e., Germany would not even exist in its present form, if Russia (then still the Soviet Union) had not accepted the assurance of US, West German and other national leaders that NATO would not expand "an inch" further eastward. There is plenty of documentation of this, despite the persistence of claims to the contrary. Germany could and should have vetoed the entry of every one of the 15 nations that have joined NATO since reunification and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the USSR in 1991. At the very least, Germany could and should have insisted on the implementation of Minsk II in 2015 instead of perfidiously using it to gain time for Ukraine to build up its military, as Merkel has admitted. It should not have cooperated in the economic sanctions against Russia or accepted (without even a peep) the destruction of its main source of cheap energy, the Nord Stream pipelines, which was almost certainly perpetrated by the US .
The current German government led by Olaf Scholz has bet on the wrong horse, with disastrous consequences. 82% of German voters are dissatisfied with this government, according to the latest poll, and the opposition has coalesced around the so-called "extreme right," the AfD (Alternative for Germany), and "extreme left," the burgeoning BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht Movement). The BSW is already estimated to have between 12 and 27 percent of the German vote, even though they are not yet officially a party. The AfD have surged to second place (21.9%), just after the CDU/CSU (Christian Democrats 30.4%), while the ruling coalition of SPD (Social Democrats), Grüne (Greens) and FDP (Free Democrats) have sunk to 14.7%, 14.2%, and 5.2% resp. (see here). The Linke (Left), after the Sahra Wagenknecht group left the party, are at a mere 3.9%.
Fear-mongering is the most powerful propaganda tool. Germans are taught to be afraid of nationalism lest they be called Nazis, Germans and Americans are taught to be afraid of criticizing Israel lest they be called antisemitic, and to be afraid of Russia lest they be called "Putin puppets." This fabricated Russophobia conceals what is the real, "primordial fear," as George Friedman said in 2015, of Russian natural resources and manpower combined with German technology and capital, which is "the only combination that has for centuries scared the hell out of the United States."
Any German leader who dares to defy the United States or, even more unthinkably, given German history, Israel will be denounced as the Hitler of all Hitlers. This is what Germans have been most afraid of for the past 70 years. Any German party that fails to distance itself emphatically enough from problematic individuals such as the AfD's Bjorn Höcke is asking for trouble. Never mind that the regime in Kiev so fervently supported by the collective West has precisely such a problematic history. This is why the BSW emphasizes, in the first sentence of their foreign policy manifesto:
Our foreign policy stands in the tradition of German Chancellor Willy Brandt and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who countered Cold War thinking and action with a policy of détente, reconciliation of interests and international cooperation. [My translation.]
Once the BSW becomes a party (perhaps in January), a coalition with the AfD could become an electoral threat. This is why the traditional parties will continue to characterize them both as "extremist" although the positions they share are only "extreme" in that they are diametrically opposed to the positions of all the other major parties on 1) military aid to Ukraine and 2) economic sanctions, especially against Russia. These are also the positions of the American (and European) commentators mentioned above. The difference is that in a parliamentary system, as in Germany, it is easier to organize opposition to a ruling regime within a relatively new party, such as the AfD, or even start a new one, as the BSW is trying to do.
Regrettably, Germany will have to share the shameful responsibility for "Standing with Ukraine," along with the US and all the other NATO vassal states, and also for "Standing with Israel." The time when "we" could hide behind Big Brother is over. It may be too late. Russia is not likely to trust Germany or any other NATO country as a security or economic partner again soon, if ever.
As is Chomsky.
I'm very skeptical of Chris Hedges, Michael. I think he's controlled opposition.