By Theodore Shoebat
The German government is now planning on changing its view, from seeing the United States as a friend, to seeing the US as an enemy. This is all happening in the midst of the revitalized trend of isolationism and ultra-nationalism.
General Mattis recently warned the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that its EU states must spend more on their own security, or else the United States will bring less support for Europe’s defense. Now EU states, to show the United States that it can handle its own security, will be jointly purchasing planes and submarines, and possibly opening a new headquarters for elite troops. Defense ministers from Germany and France, have affirmed that they will be buying Martin C-130J transport planes. German, alongside Belgium and Norway, will be joining a fleet controlled by the Netherlands consisting of Airbus A330 tanker planes. Rose Gottemoeller, NATO’s deputy secretary general, said:
“This multinational cooperation through NATO is a clear way for countries to significantly improve their armed forces while ensuring the greatest value for money for their taxpayers”
France agreed to allow Belgian and Dutch jets to fly in its airspace in case of “a conflict with a foreign threat.” Germany and Norway have also agreed to buy a new class of submarines, known as U212As, that more effectively detect, track and fire at enemy submarines and ships on the water. Germany has also agreed to train Romanian and Czech troops, with both Romania and the Czech Republic ready to deploy thousands of soldiers under German leadership. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said allies faced a “more demanding and challenging security environment” that the alliance needed to respond to. “This is a way to make what we do more efficient, and increase output,” he said of the agreements signed.
These actions are being done under the justification that Europe must protect itself, since not much faith can be put upon security from the United States. Part of Mattis’ threat towards the EU was: “No longer can the American taxpayer carry a disproportionate share of the defense of western values. Americans cannot care more for your children’s security than you do.” This is not the first time that the US has pushed NATO allies to spend more on security, but what makes this instant different is that there is this widely accepted “America first” perception, which has been overtaking the populace. In other words, isolationism is trending. As Trump declared at his inauguration, America has “subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military.” This talk reflects the sentiments of the changing political climate.
The fact that Germany and its EU states are acting more and more independent of the United States, shows that the EU really desires to run its own security free of American superintendence. Isolationism is trending not just in the US, but in the EU as well, with EU politicians pushing more and more for increased military technology. What this also shows is that currently we are seeing an arms race growing larger and larger. This is a sign of an impending war. The renown WW1 historian, David Fromkin, writes:
“Looking back, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the prewar international landscape was the accelerating arms race. The German armaments firm Krupp was the largest single business in Europe. … Each adjusted its military manpower requirements — its blend of regular army, conscripts, and reserves of one sort or another — to at least match the levels of its potential adversaries. The unrelenting competitiveness achieved the opposite of what was intended. The buildup in the armed forces was intended to achieve national security, but instead undermined it: the arms race, driven by mutual fears, ended by making all the Great Powers of Europe radically secure.” (1)
A return to German militarism is not some conceived thought or speculation, it is something that is being discussed within the German government itself. Niels Annen, a lawmaker with the center-left Social Democrats, recently expressed concern about “a return to geopolitics in the way that we saw in the 20th and maybe 19th centuries.” Mr. Annen pointed to Steve Bannon as one of the major figures fueling fascistic groups in Europe, saying: “Someone like Mr. Bannon sitting in the White House who has contacts with right-wing, up to fascist, groups here in Europe… is really concerning.” Mr. Annen’s concern is justified, since it is true that Bannon, through outlets like Breitbart, is coordinating various identitarian cults with the purpose of forming a network by which to further the cause of European fascism.
Post World War Two Germany has conducted a policy of “peacemaking” in the world, but, according to Ulrich Kühn, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Germany is coming to a point where it is unable to continue on the road of the peacemaker. “That’s a nice idea,” said Kühn, but Germany “is being confronted with a reality where we cannot continue that way anymore.”
While in the public Germany refers to the US as an ally, in reality behind closed doors Germany foresees the day in which it will view America as an enemy. According to a senior German government official, who spoke anonymously, German officials are in fact preparing for the day in which the US will be seen as a threat to Germany. According to one report:
“Behind closed doors, according to a senior German government official, officials are preparing for the day that Berlin could be forced to treat its longtime ally as a threat, necessitating radical changes in German foreign policy.”
Roderich Kiesewetter, a former military officer who is now a lawmaker with the Christian Democrats, is pushing for Germany to become militarily independent. He believes that “we should not wait” to consider accelerating military independence. Kiesewetter is demanding for a “European-only defense against Russia” and believes that such a plan would make Germany stronger in a conflict against Russia as opposed to the current status-quo. Such talk is not simply being spoken by a few reactionaries. Talk about a return to militarism is widespread in Berlin, as is being reported by policy analysts.
Roderich Kiesewetter
FALSE PEACE
The general opinion is that Germany is now a nation of peace, but the same type of sentiment could have been made before the eruption of the Second World War. After the First World War, Germany was utterly reduced to extreme poverty; the nation became an absolutely devastated place, and the mark was worthless. Germany, for all of the destruction its soldiers caused in France, owed the French billions of dollars. But the Germans weren’t paying up, so the French invaded Germany’s industrial center, the Ruhr. On January 11th, 1923, tens of thousands of French troops entered the Ruhr. The German civilians, terrified and upset, saw themselves faced with sixty thousand French soldiers. By March of that year, the French had cut off both the Ruhr and the Rhineland from the rest of Germany.
French soldier in the Ruhr
Back in France, the French war veteran and parliamentarian, Andre Maginot, demanded that the entire area of the Ruhr be burned to the ground, do to unto Germany what Germany had done unto France. But the French were not interested in destroying the industrial center of Germany, they were interested in taking its coal. The French demanded that the Germans in the Ruhr work to supply France with coal. But the Germans resisted, refusing to work; miners declared that they would not dig, and trains did not run. Of 170,000 workers, only 357 agreed to work. The French had to use force, and 147,000 German men, women and children, were forcefully exiled. Hundreds of railway workers revolted, committing acts of sabotage. Four hundred railway workers were imprisoned, and 120 Germans lost their lives. Now, there are many people who would say that what the French did was unjust. But, when the Germans had invaded France in the First World War, they executed thousands of French civilians (2), and even attacked churches. What the French did, by making some of the Germans work to pay back compensation for all of the horrors that Germany committed against the French, was actually quite civilized.
The French occupation of German land was effective; the exchange rate was reduced from 7,260 marks to the dollar, to 49,000 marks to the dollar. By June of that year, it plunged further to 150,000 marks to the dollar, and then by August it went down to one million marks to the dollar. Starvation was rampant in the Ruhr and dozens were killed in food riots. It was so bad, that three hundred thousand starving children were transported from the French occupied Ruhr, to mainland Germany. The Germans became so desperate that they began to beg the Americans and the British for help. The Americans were very hesitant to act, with Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, saying: “America was the only point of stability in the world and … for this reason, we absolutely could not make any move unless it would surely be successful”. President Harding was not too interested in helping, because he did not want his administration to be stuck between Congress and Europe. (3)
Evans told the British ambassador, Lord D’Abernon, that the French and the Germans would have to “enjoy its own bit of chaos,” until they reached a settlement. On July 20th, the British had made the suggestion that perhaps some sort of cooperation between London and Washington could be done to help with the controversy of reparations towards France on the part of the now famished Germany. But, tensions were still high between Germany and France. Berlin had been encouraging the Germans of the Ruhr to softly resist the French. And when the French Prime Minister, Raymond Poincare, told Germany to call for a stop of the resistance, and Berlin refused, the United States and Britain decided to withdraw from the tension.
In 1923, Gustav Stresemann became Chancellor of Germany. Stresemann believed that the rise of the American empire brought in a new world order, in which American economic power dominated the earth. Stresemann, just like the Japanese before the Second World War, believed that in order for Germany to survive it needed to conform to American hegemony and to create “an American-sized greater economic sphere in central Europe.” On September 26th, Germany could no longer handle the French occupation of the Ruhr, and acquiesced. Germany, weak and pathetic, plunged so deep into a dismal state far away from its former power, had to submit to the United States and to the Entene if it as going to survive.
Gustav Stresemann
The right-wing in Germany was furious, abandoning Chancellor Streseman in their hatred of him. Not only this, Streseman was also abandoned by the Socialist Party. The center-right party of Stresemann, The German People’s Party, was left to rule alone. In this time, there was much factionalism in Germany. German communists were trying to fulfill a revolutionary takeover of the country, with Marxists establishing their own state within Saxony; the far-right was rising up in Bavaria where admirers of Mussolini congregated, and a loud-mouthed Austrian named Adolf Hitler began to conspire rebellion in the violent anger against the French. Hitler began to call for the National Socialists to attack the Marxist state of Saxony. Civil War was being fomented, and Stresemann needed to abate the situation.
He called for the German defense forces (the Reichswehr), to strike against the Communists and the National Socialists. The head of the Reichswehr, General Hans von Seeckt, replied that he would not mind attacking the Marxists, but against the National Socialists, he did not wish to do so. (4) What is most interesting is that it was this very von Seeckt who was heavily involved in facilitating the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. While the Turks were butchering the Christians, von Seeckt wrote in a letter to Berlin: “It is an impossible state of affairs to be allied with the Turks and to stand up for the Armenians. In my view, any consideration, Christian, sentimental or political, must be eclipsed by its clear necessity for the war effort.”
General Hans von Seeckt with his soldiers, 1925
Von Seeckt supported the Ottomans in their genocide and did not desire at all to stop them, and he as well did not want to stop the National Socialists in their violence. What does this mean? It means that fascists — the National Socialists — saw the Ottoman Muslims as fellow fascists. When Hitler invaded Poland, he ordered the extermination of the Poles, and referenced both the Mongols and the Ottomans — both peoples of Turkic blood — as his inspiration. In a 1939 letter he wrote:
“Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter — with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command — and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad — that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”A Third Reich soldier poses next to civilians shot dead in Yugoslavia
The Armenians were butchered by the Ottomans, and Genghis Khan and his barbarian hoard spent six months slaughtering and pillaging China. These were Hitler’s inspirations, and they were both Turkic peoples. What makes this interesting is this: The Germans were the ones who destroyed the Western part of the Roman Empire, under the Germanic warrior, Odoacer, in the year 476; and it was the Turks, in the year 1453, who destroyed the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. Lets not forget, that the ones who destroy the Roman Empire, take the mantle of Antichrist. If the Turks will be the people of Antichrist in the future because they destroyed the Eastern half of the Roman Empire, then the Germans will as well be the people of antichrist because they destroyed the Western half of the Roman Empire. Thus, the future empire of the Antichrist will consist of a Turkish-German alliance.
In 1923, the leading coal and steel baron of the Ruhr, Hugo Stinnes, and the German statesman, Konrad Adenauer, concluded that the United States did not care about Germany, and that no “significant help” was to be “expected either from America or England”. Stinnes wanted to create a “continental block” based on the Ruhr and the Rhineland that would be able to resist “Anglo-Saxon” power. (5) What this reminds me of is how German officials are talking today in regards to the United States; they say the US is no longer interested in securing Europe, and so a new order of military policy must be configured.
When the Germans began talking like this in the 1920s, the United States got scared of a rising Germany with an economy that could overshadow that of the US. The Americans then began to, as a front, sympathize with the Germans. (6) The British as well began to express sympathy for the Germans. British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald even went so far as to condemn the French, calling France’s occupation of Germany a conquest of a “broken and disarmed” country by a “well-armed and powerful country”, and even a triumph of “evil”. For MacDonald the only way for peace to prosper was for France to cease “her policy of selfish vanity”.
Philip Snowden, the Labour Party’s first Chancellor of Exchequer, condemned the French occupation of the Ruhr as the attempted “enslavement” by France “of sixty or seventy million of the best educated and most industrious and most scientific people”. (7) Look at this way of talking, this praise of the German people as some sort of elevated race; it is reminiscent to the type of vain extolling that you would hear from today’s “Alt-Right” fanatics. There is another situation that took place in Europe that also parallels with today’s jargon. When the French had occupied Germany, they were not just French troops but Senegalese auxiliaries as well. Some stories began to spread around about how Senegalese soldiers were supposedly raping German women. The stories made great propaganda to swell the rage of the nationalists. One of the propagandists behind this was a British man named E.D. Morel, who would headline it as the “Black Horror on the Rhine”. Well, not surprisingly, Morel used his mouth to propagandize against the French occupation of Germany, asserting that France wanted “to tear the lungs and heart out of the living body of Germany.” (8)
Sympathy for Germany as a nation whose women are being raped by foreigners, and using these stories as propaganda to pour fuel on the fires of nationalism. This is what happened then, and we are seeing quite a similar situation today, with stories of German women being sexually assaulted by migrants being used as a means to propaganda by neo-Nazis and Identitarians.
In March of 1924, Chancellor Stresemann spoke against working with Hitler, whose National Socialist movement was growing in popularity. Speaking for the right-wing German National People’s Party (DNVP) in Hanover, Stresemann said that while it would be the easiest thing to become the most popular man in Europe by joining Hitler, populism was not a prudent road to take. The “cry for a dictator” was the worst “political dilettantism” to Stresemann. But, when the DNVP ran for election on May of 1924, it became the second party in the Reichstag. Over a fourth of the German electorate had voted for the far right in this time. 19% of the vote went for the DNVP, and 7% went for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP). Stresemann rejected the suggestion to join forces with the nationalist radicals in the DNVP, for to him pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism was not fitting “for export”. (9)
Hitler took 7% of the vote in 1924, and the Chancellor of Germany expressed his disgust with National Socialism. If we were living in those times, the idea of Germany coming back to militarism would have been inconceivable as the tide of nationalism would’ve seemed so minuscule. But it did happen, with the rise of National Socialism eventually dominating the country. So who is to say that it can’t happen again? The sentiments of the world powers of military disarmament and perpetual peace had pervaded the world after WW1, as they do today anytime the conversation pertains to harmony between Western countries.
On September 14th, 1926, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, France and Belgium, ratified the Locarno Security Pact, under which these countries agreed to maintain perpetual peace. In 1927, Chancellor Stresemann was given the Nobel Peace Prize, and in his acceptance in Oslo, he declared that the Locarno Pact was the realization of a common European dream, the Carolingian vision that “Treuga Dei, the peace of God” might prevail on the Rhine. (10)
From left to right, Gustav Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain and Aristide Briand during the Locarno negotiations
On August 27th, 1928, fifteen nations, including Germany, gathered in Paris to endorse a treaty that required its signatories to “condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with another”. (11)
From these agreements and talks of peace, was there truly peace? No. Germany had broken its word of peace. So what makes us think that Germany will not return to the warpath? If talks of peace and diplomacy are your reasons for believing that Germany will never go back to militarism, then you would be making the same mistake as believing that the diplomacy that was conducted prior to the Second World War was actually believable.
Behind the destruction of the Roman Empire, there were Germans and Turks. One from the land of the Rhine and the other from the Orkhon and Selenga valleys. Belisarius struck the first, while many an emperor of Byzantium combated the second. One day the slaves of Odin invaded Rome, and the throne of the West toppled.
And after some hundreds of years had passed, the people of Osman crushed the last and final seat of the empire in which our Salvation was born. There it was, Goth and Gokturk, under their hands had civilization died, leaving the world to rebuild in the storm of chaos, whatever it could with the knowledge it had preserved.Before the Empire of the Ottoman collapsed, the sons of Cain desired to strike the defenseless sons of Abel. The Ottomans slaughtered millions of the carriers of the Cross — Armenians and Assyrians, the Christians of Hellas — and behind the Turk, was the German. The former slaughtered, while the latter contrived the bloodbath.
When many a flower shrivels, when many springs have gone passed, when many winters come and go, the sword of Odoacer and the sword of Mehmet will arise again, ready to destroy the world again in the war upon humanity.
The question that lies in the soul, is where will be Christendom?
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