Below are a transcript and video of a very interesting speech, “Living Without NATO, Ideas for Peace,” given by long-time German peace activist Dr. Eugen Drewermann at Humboldt University in Berlin on May 21, 2022.
From Initiative from the Peace Movement | Original Article
How can we regain peace and how can we keep it?
Round the clock, we’re being blasted, awed, and dragged into a game-changing campaign in which we’re taught that everything that’s been attempted toward peace since 1945 has been a blunder.
Egon Bahr and Willy Brandt and East-West reconciliation, wrong!
Making peace with fewer weapons, Helmut Kohl , wrong!
” We have not been robust enough against Russia” is the lesson we should now adopt.
And I’m giving this lecture to generally say “No!” to this turnaround program , because it’s nothing more than a somersault into the past. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been hearing that the Russians are coming and that we need bombs, need atomic bombs, that we need NATO, that we need to be highly armed militarily. But that’s not how you create peace.
War is contrary to the culture of humanity
On April 3, the ZDF late program showed a picture of a Ukrainian woman who had lost her son in Bucha, a woman dissolved in tears and bitterness. The boy was 27 years old when he wanted to walk about 500m to his place of work and was shot. Now he is lying in this woman’s room. She has spread a rug over him. And desperately she screams: “They should all go where my boy goes, under the ground!” One can understand the misery, the sadness, the anger, the helplessness of this woman more than well.
But what of a policy that uses the desperation and suffering of the people to prolong a senseless war with more and more weapons being supplied? And how does a party that calls itself Christian get to the point of driving the government before it, finally supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine, waging a war of attrition against Russia, “ruining Russia”, in the words of Ms. Baerbock ?
All this is not for the sake of pity for the suffering. Only suffering will become universal if this war continues. Then there will be countless such pictures. You don’t lose weight! It is precisely on behalf of this grieving Ukrainian woman that we must expect that there will no longer be armament, but that peace negotiations will be initiated. The understanding for the Ukraine does not serve Zelensky ‘s rearmament for a long, long-term war under the sponsorship of the NATO members. It must be possible to communicate with one another and to make peace. It’s not just the victims of war who are passively to be pitied, as relatives of the dead. It’s also the soldiers themselves.
We, the Germans, attacked the Soviet Union on June 21, ’41 with 3 million soldiers of the Greater German Wehrmacht and said goodbye with 27 million dead. About 30 million was the Nazi target to thin out the whole corridor for Germanic population strategies. Apparently it’s all forgotten.
But the son of a soldier from back then told me about what that does to 20 or 25-year-olds: “For forty years my father didn’t say a word about his life, but then, on his deathbed, he confided a secret to me at how it was. He had been evacuated from Stalingrad in one of the last planes and had two legs amputated. His account: ‘In every place we advanced to, there were no longer any people. Suddenly a door opens and an old man comes out with a small child by the hand. My comrade draws the gun and I yell at him, ‘No!’ But he shoots.’ My father never stopped crying that day. Forty years later, the trauma of witnessing a murder.”
We humans are not set up to become soldiers. If we saw what we were told to do, we wouldn’t do it. Harold Nash was a Royal Air Force bomber pilot involved in the July 1943 Operation Gomorrah attack on the Hanseatic city of Hamburg under Marshal Harris . In a single night in Hammerbrook, more than 40,000 people died from being starved of oxygen from the bunkers by the stick incendiary bombs.
Harold Nash describes his impression as follows: “ It lay beneath us like a black velvet ribbon embroidered with pearls. But we knew what we were doing down there was worse than Dante’s inferno. But we only saw fires, we didn’t see any people. Otherwise we could not have done this.”
In a word, what we call war, what we call military, is the undermining of everything that means culture. 12 years after the so-called First World War, Erich-Maria Remarque was able to describe exactly this in his book “Nothing New in the West” :
If that – by which he meant artillery fire, bayonet attacks, hand grenades, poison gas, tank tracks, typhus – if that was possible, then everything we have ever called culture from Plato to Schopenhauer was in vain.
The military is the counterworld to the civilian world. Everything you are forbidden to do: lying, killing, pillaging, robbing, murdering, is practiced as a commanded strategy in war and forced upon normal 18-year-old boys and now even girls.
And the Bundeswehr here in Berlin advertises with the inscription on the buses: “Do what really counts!”
That was ‘body-counting’ every day in 1970 during the Vietnam War under General Westmoreland . Which unit killed how many numberable dead? There were rewards for that. Kill efficiently because it counts. How inhuman do you have to be to accept this propaganda? She rocks through the streets of Berlin and she deserves every kind of contradiction.
Remarque could also tell how to get there to become a soldier:
6 weeks of barracks yard has been enough for us to crawl through the mud in front of a former postman just because he’s wearing the right epaulettes and kill anyone he orders to kill. We have become beasts, become murderers. If your own father came from over there, you would shred him with your hand grenade. That’s what they made of us.
To this day, you can observe how it happens in every textbook of every barracks yard in every country on earth: The de-souling of the body into a mere puppet . “Eyes straight ahead! Pan left! March!”All of this is so senseless that the purpose becomes all the clearer: those who are in attendance should not think. They should stop having a personal conscience. They should stop taking responsibility as subjects for their own feelings and decisions. Nothing counts anymore what their mother said, what their father said, the teacher, the pastor, the books. Now the drill sergeant commanding the howler monkey in the background applies, and only that. Good and bad are no longer meaningful categories. You are not responsible for the commands themselves, only for their execution.
Even the Americans understood in the war crimes trials of 1947 that these are inhumane principles. The Nazi grandees were accused, and they all replied:
We did what all soldiers do. Order is order.
At that time, the American prosecutor could say: This is your actual crime. You put on the uniform and stopped being human. You put your steel helmet over your head and stopped thinking. You tied the belt over your stomach and it said: “God be with us”. And you haven’t understood how you blaspheme God if you believe what the Nazis and the Fuhrer are pressing into your conscience instead of God. The disclosure of personality is the real crime, the prerequisite for everything else.
But then we would need people who stand firm and do not allow themselves to be deformed under orders. This is the real courage it takes to have peace in this world: to say “no” with personal responsibility.
Hermann Hesse , when the Federal Republic of Germany was rearming in 1955, was able to answer one of his letterwith the following example when asked what was meant by his novel “Demian” :“It’s possible they’ll pull you in and tell you, ‘Get the gun! Goals! Pull the trigger!’ And you do. Then the newspapers will say that you are a loyal, brave soldier. Then the military chaplain may bless you for obeying orders. The bourgeois world will agree that you defended it. But it is also possible that a small voice within you speaks: ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ So you take the gun and break it over your knees. Then you have them all against you, the press, the pastors, public opinion. Then you are a lateral thinker, a dreamer, a pacifist. But you said “no” to say “yes” to yourself.
This is the real struggle we face today, more than ever. It is not possible to remain human and be trained to become a soldier. The two don’t go together!
None other than Albert Einstein said that back in the 1920s. Only if we get rid of the military will we not repeatedly experience a relapse into the Stone Age without this parallel society, into a murder below what we call historical reason. Civilization can only be had on the condition that we say goodbye once and for all to the readiness for war, preformed in politics, trained in the barracks, industrialized in armaments .
Get out of the spiral of fear
Of course we will be told that this is a fantastic program not to be followed. Because then we are defenseless. Then we must be afraid. And that’s why – out of fear – we have the military. All of human history over the last six or ten thousand years can be plotted against this parameter. The organized associations up to state structures and alliances are afraid of a potential attacker.
And how do our states respond?
Not by overcoming fear. But on the contrary! By frightening every potential aggressor more, we who are afraid. In other words, while we already have hideous murderous weapons, maybe the Russian or the Chinese, someone, has worse weapons. We do not know that. But because it could be, we certainly must invent weapons that are worse than our opponents ever will be. The program is to calm fear by spreading fear. And the means to do this: to systematize and install increasingly heinous murderous instruments, a spiral without end.
What we experienced during the Cold War was then even called peace through mutual deterrence, ‘balance of power’ .
And what comes out of this logic of fear?
On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay took off from the Mariana Islands with Major Tibbets on board. After the weather reports, the group was directed to Hiroshima. And at 8:15 a.m. with a single bomb, more than 100,000 people died in a few seconds. At that time the world held its breath.
Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian, said: “We never have to talk about war again. There can be no more war. He is the absolute wrong. Hiroshima is the end of what was ever called war.”
What you didn’t know: 14 days later, the Americans sent their camera teams into the ruins of Hiroshima to record everything. Not to document the horror and make it impossible forever, no, to find out at what distance the pressure wave, the radiation wave, the heat wave irradiated and destroyed people so that next time we could do it better, more efficiently. And so it went on until 1952. A uranium fission bomb has its physical limit when it emits neutrons, a critical mass. You can’t store more of it together. So we need solar energy thatFusion of hydrogen to helium from heaven to earth, the hydrogen bomb, it is physically without limits. If we have that, we’ll have the worst weapon, we’ll be superior to Soviet Russia, so we’ll have it. It went on like this all the time. Incidentally, when testing the hydrogen bomb, it was necessary to take 40,000 vertebrates with you in order to see exactly: when do the eardrums burst, when does the skin burn, in which generation do deformities occur as a result of genetic changes as a result of radioactive radiation. It was tested so that it could be done, not to prevent it.
The fear of each other drives us to ever more insane, paranoid ideas about military armaments. And it does not create security, it is the threat to all of mankind from man, from no one else. So we must break out of this spiral and learn the simplest and most important thing: peace does not come from the strength of weapons, from the superiority of Armor. The Sermon on the Mount is absolutely right, in the words of Jesus:
In this world I dare to call happy those who have the courage to remain defenseless. Only they prepare the peace. (Mt 5:5-9)
Disarmament instead of rearmament! Not just fewer guns, but no more guns at all!
Immanuel Kant could imagine that more than 200 years ago. If one state arms, it frightens the neighboring state and it will also arm. And the spiral of violence will continue to escalate. In the end, spending on armaments is so expensive that you have to go to war to make it profitable. In view of the Prussian armaments policy, even Montesquieu could say that we now have more weapons than food. – Today we have 60 million refugees,internally displaced persons in Africa alone. But we have to promise 100 billion for armaments in the near future, for the next two years. Have you ever heard that we had even two billion dollars for refugees, that we had one billion dollarswould have ignored every winter for the people who have been sitting as refugees on Lesbos or Samos for five years? We don’t have any money for that. But for armor anyway.
How do we break the death cycle of fear?
Simply by stopping being afraid and letting ourselves be done.
The problem with this also lies in the peace movement. It has always gained a lot of support with the argument that we ourselves are at risk. The deployment of the Pershing 2 was already mentioned in the speech before me. At that time in Bonn, the influx was enormous. Also in 1991, during the first Gulf War, there were thousands on the market places because people were afraid. The US Navy had over 400 nuclear bombs in the Persian Gulf. What about the energy supply? disaster scenarios. Fear should be a motive for peace. But what we are experiencing is something completely different. There is, first and foremost, a motive to arm and prepare for war.
And then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a new enemy was identified for NATO, Islamism. At that time it was not a problem that Putin started the second war in Chechnya in a completely pointless manner. It was an action of the anti-terrorist campaign,
together. It was a crime no less than the invasion of Ukraine. But it went through because we do it the same way.
When do we get out of the cycle of fear?
There is no doubt that Mahatma Ghandi is right. Peace does not come from the motivation of fear, on the contrary, solely from the strength of one’s own person. By being true to yourself, by having the courage to have your own conscience. In Indian: Satyagraha (persistent adherence to the truth), “think for yourself” Kant would have said, “be yourself” Gandhi said. The resistance to the willingness to go to war and to prepare for war really lies in no longer being intimidated. And that would be the campaign for noon today: we would have to explain to those in government: we will no longer let you fool us with ever new horror scenarios such as “The Russians are coming!”, like “The Chinese are coming!” That you are coming is bad enough! And now we’re scaring you up there because we won’t be scared anymore. We want to eliminate once and for all the cycle of death of the constant escalation of who can kill more efficiently, better and more extensively. Those who represent us have the duty to sit down together and to negotiate their goals and their interests in an agreeable manner.
Overcoming fear is akin to looking your own dog in the eye. Your neighbor said he’s a calf biter, but you like him and you know he’s just scared, so he can get snappy. You have to calm him down, but not bully him with the whip. With four-legged friends we know that. With humans we don’t seem to need to do the same. Let’s look into the eyes of the one we declare the enemy. He’s scared of us exactly that we scare him because we’re scared of him. And this vicious circle must end.
There was a brilliant opportunity in 1973 when Helmut Schmidt spoke to Brezhnev about the deployment of the Pershing 2. And Brezhnev said, that scares us. And Schmidt replied, your rockets scare us. What a wonderful situation to say: We’ll stop doing this. No one has to be afraid of the other, that’s the end of it. Instead, Schmidt pushed through the deployment of the Pershing 2, believing it to be part of his policy of successnot militarily, but economically: Russia had been badly armed. That’s what we see in the background. If we were only dealing with the reflex of fear, we would be in a psychologically understandable, universally human situation. But what we are witnessing is the misuse of fear reflexes through targeted politics that use fear to enforce their own power strategies. And that brings us to the problem that is to be addressed today: Get out of NATO!
NATO defends US power, but not peace
Since it was founded, almost at the same time as the founding of the Federal Republic of West Germany in 1949, we have had a military alliance whose strategic goal was actually defined as early as 1945.
At that time, Winston Churchill could declare that the wrong sow had been slaughtered: Adolf Hitler . The war should actually be continued straight away, against Stalin, against Moscow. And the Germans are the best soldiers. They were already 40 kilometers from Moscow. If we win them and let them march, weakened Russia will finally be at an end after 27 million dead. This is our chance. The Federal Republic was founded with such a program , as a deployment glacis against the Soviet Union.
And joining NATO in ’55 fitted that pattern perfectly. What few of you know was the secret war that was carried out illegally. In any case, a seizure of power by communist parties in Italy, in Greece, wherever else, had to be prevented through staged civil wars, surveillance and targeted killings. Even SPD chairman Ollenhauer was on the list of threats to US imperial targets. If he had come to power, one would have had to fear for his life. The Gladio secret army did underground what NATO was officially doing anyway.
As early as 1952, under Adenauer , we were in the process of signing the European Defense Community Treaty. Seven years after the disaster of World War II, Germans had to be there again because Americans wanted to. At that time the French didn’t want it, nor did the Germans in uniform east of the Rhine again. Three years later we had what we have maintained to this day. We must be armed against Russia.
In 2001 we were amazed that Germany’s freedom could be defended in the Hindu Kush. I was eleven years old when I heard from Konrad Adenauer that we were defending Germany’s freedom in Korea. None of these sayings has lost its relevance or even nonsense. It has been heightened, made into a habit through the repetition of what is wrong. And what you have in the form of NATO is not just an endless spiral of armaments, but also of propaganda for imperialist power enforcement.
Who is threatening who, quite simply?
US policy is backed by over 750 military stations around the world.
Russia, if you count it up, has over 30. The American military budget is $750 billion, and Russia’s is barely a tenth of that. America alone spends more than the next nine militarily armed states in the series, China, Russia, Germany, France together. And the program is as obsolete as it can get.
In 1989, for the third time, it was the Russians who, this time in the person of Gorbachev , made the proposal to demilitarize so that there would finally be peace. No more weapons from the Urals to the Atlantic, instead the conversion of knowledge, money, industry, commitment to goals that could humanely alleviate the misery on this planet. That was on the table. Gorbachev was promised that NATO would not expand an inch to the east. It is lied today, that would not have been the case, but it can be had in writing. Genscher wondered whether the new federal states could be used militarily and promised that no. We could have had peace if we could have wanted it. In 1990, however, the ‘think tanks’in the US are already thinking about how we are going to proclaim a 21st American Century. The Soviet Union has collapsed and now we must fill the power vacuum for ourselves.
This is the program of all that came. One war after another in the Middle East. Since 2001, the US has bombed 7 Islamic states, not the Russians. But they wanted to appropriate everything that Russia will no longer actively defend. And that’s where we’re sitting today. Afghanistan just failed, but Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, the southern flank. The Baltic anyway. And now two new states, more than 1000 km border length after Sweden and Finland: We can put rockets exactly there. Imagine what if Russia tried to create a second Cuban Missile Crisis or set up military bases against the US in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, we would have exactly the same crisis as we had in Cuba in 1962.America first! That cannot be threatened, we are strong, Mr. Stoltenberg will say as head of NATO. And we won’t go back an inch. We’d rather go hundreds of miles forward against Russia, but that wouldn’t be a threat; it would be a misunderstanding to think that this is just an extension of power, rather it is a response to Putin’s attempt to restore the Soviet empire.
We must defend ourselves against these official narratives. We are not threatened by Russia. We are being hallucinated of a danger that serves no purpose other than US strategic geopolitics and power expansion. The fact that it is described differently does not prevent it from being so.
There is an argument from the Greens in particular today, beyond fear, inflated will to power and the claims of imperialism, that is: the world belongs to us and no one else.
Why? Because we are Americans, because we are ‘ the good guys’ , because we are ‘first’ and because we, the Europeans, have to get involved.
The war that Putin is waging can be called a crime. That’s him. But you could also say what has become a proverb in France: it is worse than a crime. He’s a mistake! Because now Russia is getting everything it wanted to prevent by attacking Ukraine: countless rockets, right up to the border. The military supply of Ukraine is in full swing. Whether it becomes a NATO state or not, the fact has long been established. Everything that should have been prevented is there now, the entire EU, man for man, heels together. The allegiance to the USA – it couldn’t have gotten any better. “We get him at the nuts!”you would say in American. We managed that. By the way, the dirty language of the military is typical. Everything that was meant for love and tenderness has to be perverted in order to be a soldier.
But at the same time we are morally taught one thing, the second level of lying: the so-called responsibility. Out of pity for people we must refuse war. We have to overcome the fear that leads to it through community, in respect for the fear of the other, whom we breed as opponents in the first place.
That’s what we just said. But one thing will now be said to us: We must start humanitarian interventions out of responsibility and keep military intervention troops on standby all over the world. 20 years in Afghanistan have not changed these thoughts, quite the opposite. In Mali we are still there on the French side, we can keep counting. ‘International Responsibility’.
You can’t say it loud enough: We, one of the richest countries in the world, have a responsibility for the world, of course, but then you have to look at how it is perceived. People who no longer know where to go, we let them drown in the Mediterranean, let Frontex, organized militarily, send them back to the concentration camps in Libya with push-backs, cut off their escape routes because they’re just a nuisance because they cost money. Refugees from Ukraine are now very welcome to us for political reasons. You will still be in 20 yearsCurse Russia and hate Putin. That’s politically correct. We are uncomfortable with people just asking as human beings for a place to live, they need to be kept away. We would then be responsible for more than 50 million people who starve to death every year. A new drought is threatening right now in East Africa.
What is our responsibility there?
So that the Chicago Food Exchange speculates on hunger; everyone can learn that in business administration . The less a product is thrown on the market, the more expensive it is when it is needed. A drought in East Africa means less food in East Africa. So the prices will rise, and what a real ‘moneymaker’ is, he has to act now, otherwise he will lose his chances. How do you make money from the deaths of millions of starving people? This is capitalism as we have it. Responsibility as it is preached to us.Hiding out the real hardship we need to solve and inventing virtual fears that are completely superfluous. 100 billion for armaments, just promised, upgrading of the Bundeswehr, fully deployed lately, that’s how we should go into the future.
In reality, we prevent the humanity of the future by locking humanity away with nonsensical power tirades. That’s why we say out of responsibility: No to rearmament, no to the military and let’s refuse military service.
The perversion of morality
And then it gets even worse. One would think that morality would be an instrument to prevent inhumanity. Not so when the word ‘war’ is pronounced. Then you will see that morality is used as a weapon in advance. You read the newspaper. Who are we at war with now? Putin. And this is: a murderer, says Mr. Biden, a criminal, we should all say, a demon, the Bild newspaper will say, a devil, absolute evil, which we absolutely, for moral reasons, must fight and destroy with all means.
We have also experienced that here since 1945. The West has never waged a war, except against Hitler. Ho Chi Minh – Hitler, Saddam Hussein – Hitler, Gaddafi – Hitler, Milosevic – Hitler, we always fight absolute evil in advance for moral reasons. The idea is so wrong that in 1520 you will find the unmasking of this self-hypnosis of inhumanity described in a few sentences by Erasmus von Rotterdam.
Who, if there is a war, asked Erasmus exactly half a millennium ago, would then declare his cause to be the wrong one among the combatants? Different! Because one can not agree on good and evil, right and wrong at the negotiating table, one drives oneself insane to declare the battlefield as the place of divine justice, an orlog. And then the most efficient killer, because he has won, will take the right to claim that he has always been right. In truth, he just proved himself to be more inhuman than the one he defeated. Because victory requires the use of the most terrible means of destruction.
And that’s what you really need to learn now. In the run-up to any war, you are tricked into hating your potential adversary with lies and propaganda. He was always bad, it was always the Russian’s fault. In fact, he never was in the whole twentieth century, but he had to be because we want power over his corridor. Let’s be more specific.
Brzezinski could boast that, as a pioneer of American foreign policy, he explained what we had to fear: not the Russians, but that Western Europe and Russia would be combined into an economic area from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Eurasia as a closed economic area, that would be the end of the American world power illusion. We must fear that. That’s why Nord Stream 2 can’t be built, that’s why we have to land expensive liquid gas from ‘fracking’ in special ports that are still being built so that America can prevail.
But all this is garnished with moral reasons: those over there are evil. That’s the way it has to be: If you’re supposed to kill people, you can’t kill people anymore, you’re dealing with vermin, plague pathogens, lice, devils, whatever. And the terrible thing is that concepts which belong to morality and therefore include every human being because he is a human being are fractionated into the contrast between the ‘good guys here’ and the ‘bad guys over there’. And of course we are always the good guys and of course those on the other side of the border are the absolute bad guys. This calculation alone changes everything we could call humanity.
Phil Zimbardo , an American psychologist, has written two books on it: ‘The Stanford Prison Experiment’ and ‘The Lucifer Effect’ on Abu Ghraib. He just wanted to describe what happens when a group of people present themselves as ‘the good guys’ and assign themselves the task of having tofight the opposing group as ‘the bad guys’ .
We have just seen in the case of armaments that we have to arm ourselves more and more dangerously, brutally and terribly. We must now take the same statement into the moral realm. We, who are ‘the good guys’ , in a way the archangel Michael fighting the devil, will in this way absorb the ‘evil’ that we want to fight into our own soul and psychology. We must be more evil than any conceivable evil could be. We want to send the bad guy to hell, but we make the whole world, first and foremost ourselves, the domain of the devil. This split in morality corrupts even well-intentioned people into being able, or even obliged, to do the worst things. At some point we have to break through this spiral as well. And again the Sermon on the Mount would be absolutely right: Do not fight against evil , it says. (5th chapter Matthew, verse 39)
For these very reasons, when you fight evil, Isaac Newton is right: Pressure breeds back pressure, The evil you fight creeps into you. In your soul, it improves nothing. The ‘crash’ of two levels of pressure produces itself, squares itself, grows higher and higher. Fighting evil is therefore not possible at all. But how then?
I just said that we could look into the eyes of your vicious dog, better yet, your supposedly dangerous opponent and you are interested in his fear. Then you are close to doing what would be the only right thing to do morally: you are trying to understand the other person and why he is doing what he is doing. If you don’t want to read it from the Sermon on the Mount, you can also hear it from the Buddha 500 years earlier : Of course there is good and evil, but both have their causes.
Then we cannot avoid agreeing with the Pope when he says that there are reasons for the war in Ukraine. Those that are with us. Why in our society do people get angry? But not because they thought of it or because they would enjoy it. You can still see Putin in the German Bundestag in 2001, where he gives a speech in German and the MPs at the time give him a ‘standing ovation’ . That was in 2001.
In 2005 you see Schröder , whose name you can no longer pronounce as a Putin friend, standing on the steps of the university in Königsberg, in Kaliningrad, opposite the Kant monument by Marion von Dönhof . About 400 meters further from the dugouts, which have been formed as a museum to commemorate the time when Koenigsberg was to be held as a fortress against the onslaught of the Red Army. Commands are exchanged in Russian and German and certain scenes are played.
Immanuel Kant’s reason , the thoughts of eternal peace, confronted with the eternal madness of the shelters – we must fight! Putin and Schröder jointly inviting for a European peace.
It shouldn’t happen. When a year later in Munich at Mr. Ischinger ‘s rearmament conference , Putin more or less declared that if we carry on like this, a cold war is imminent, German gazettes were able to write: Putin: Cold War! He wanted to avoid that! We wanted it, badly, through the permanent expansion of NATO. It had sixteen states in ’89, today it has 30 states, the day after tomorrow 32 states, Moldova and Georgia are already in the target. It should go on like this. No reconciliation! Exploiting other people’s weaknesses! power gain! Strategically assert yourself with all means!
The war in the Middle East alone has claimed over two million lives. Did you hear anything that we committed a crime doing this?
When Assange takes the pictures leaked by Chelsea Manning of a helicopter attack on civilians in Baghdad, when it shows the jargon used to shoot people to pieces, unrepentant, ruthless, and it gets on the internet, the crime of the GIs isn’t the crime, but that it is communicated on the Internet. For this, Assange should be imprisoned for 175 years, prosecuted for ten years, driven with false claims. Is he only allowed to stay in London, if at all, because he is so ill that he cannot be extradited to the USA, not because we, the Europeans, once said that it must be possible to expose the crimes of the military, to make them stop?
The lie must end!
What we see is that the simplest of moral responses to the criminal military must be suppressed by secrecy, and that is the history of the military at large. You must never know what is being done and planned. After all, they are the citizens who must feel protected by the strong state, which only wants what is good. Again: Immanuel Kant could say that the moral of the political is quite simple: Act in public in such a way that you could publicly declare your intention. All lies, secret diplomacy, espionage, weapons that the opponent shouldn’t even know about but are intended to deter him would come to an end immediately.
And then there would be something else to morality: we should no longer allow ourselves to be persuaded that the separation of good and evil is legally and ethically unavoidable. If someone really does something that must be described as evil according to a moral assessment, we do not have the duty to fight it, but to look into the context, with what intentions, under what conditions the other person was driven into a corner in such a way that he thought he should act that way. And we have to deal with these circumstances, for which we are partly responsible.
What about Ukraine?
The war would not have been necessary until the very last day if one had accepted what Russia demanded: military-political neutrality of Ukraine and finally peace in Donbas and Crimea’s belonging to Russia.
Instead, the United Kingdom had to undermine the very beginning of such a possible negotiation and then back Zelenski with ever new promises. He has to persevere, he’s the strong one, he has to agitate against the Russians.
I don’t want to comment any longer on the politics behind it in terms of cultural history, but I would like to remind you that Kyiv was once the place of origin of Russian Orthodoxy around 900, and Russian culture has its roots there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for longer than the United States of America. It is well known that Ukrainians were not exactly happy under the rule of the tsars and even less so under Stalin . The Russians also made gigantic mistakes. The granary, Ukraine, with millions starving under Stalinin the thirties, all this is a whole series of crimes which we must not overlook and which can confirm and explain the hatred of some Ukrainians for Russia. We must also not forget that when the Nazis invaded, whole parts of Ukraine hailed the Germans as liberators from Stalin . And there are still a number of Bandera supporters of this kind of thinking in the Kiev government today .
Imperialism and capitalism
We must understand all this and we must answer it with peacefulness, but not with rearmament – strengthening our back against the enemy. Reconciliation should be a goal, but then we would have to stop pursuing imperial power politics, then we would also have to understand that imperialism is not just a political gesture of power, but to a certain extent a capitalist necessity. An economic system like ours cannot want peace. It insists on the belief that the better is the enemy of the good, so that in competition with each other we have to put the others in front of the wall faster and faster. Faster, bigger, further, richer, more extensive, that’s war in the economic area. And there shall be no survivors, only the victors. ‘The winner takes it all’. And second is the worst loser; if he could run just a little bit faster, he would have won. What a pity!
We can no longer accept this world of constant competition, even if it is taught to us in school, even in kindergarten, and encouraged in performance comparisons. What is not encouraged is the simple humanity of developing compassion, sensitivity, empathy, the commitment of feelings promised to each other, the validity of promises that serve peace. We can only reject a policy that systematically denies all this, a permanent press that wants to write the opposite into our souls every day, because what is human in it is falsified with consciousness.
Put the simplest test to the test. Take the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Hundreds of thousands dead! And what’s in the newspapers? How bravely our soldiers hold their position under the enemy’s gunfire, how they shoot back and inflict terrible wounds and injuries over there, a victory hymn from the orgy of terror. Never, I contend, has any newspaper written the truth about what a battlefield is. Tucholsky could do that. He called 1914 to 1918 ‘the big boulangerie’. Sworse than slaughtering pigs is slaughtering people, but that’s why we call it a battle, that’s why we call it a battlefield. And no newspaper shows us the reality. In the end you have to wipe away the feelings of guilt, the rest of humanity with trophies, confetti parades and new media side effects.
In 1991 during the first Iraq war, when Bush , the elder, invaded a Third World country with around 50 states and – one can estimate – left behind around 700,000 dead, in the USA, ‘ in God’s own country’, it took six months for the six weeks war, between Los Angeles and New York City, for the Parade of Victory. Finally, after Vietnam, America had triumphed and, after the collapse of the Soviet empire, showed the world who was the master of the world. That had to be applauded, and so it went on.
The Great Opportunity of Non-Violence
Or 2001, 9-11. At the time, only one person told the truth, which I was able to say here on the Freies Berlin radio station on the same day in a conversation with my friend Michael Longard : America must be careful not to react violently. If they understand that, peace would be near. Two days later in southern Italy I heard the Dalai Lama answer a question from a rather horrified American journalist about what had happened in 9-11.
‘That’s a great chance for non-violence’ , said the Dalai Lama , a great chance for non-violence. I’m sorry, sir? A great opportunity!
Imagine if America had asked itself in 2001: Why do they hate us? What are their reasons? Centuries of colonial policy, in which we devastated, made dependent, drew borders and exploited the entire cultural belt in the Middle East. There are 100 reasons why you don’t like us. We’ll have to look into that; there is only one thing we must not do: answer hate with organized military strikes in which we turn the whole world into an invisible, but then very concrete battlefield.
And then: drone murders! Secrecy again! The German government must not know that over 10,000 drone murders, signed by Barack Obama , winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, have now been staged via Ramstein alone. He also said during his visit to Germany that no rockets were launched from German soil. This is the usual ‘double-speak’. They are guided, the rockets, from German soil. But you shouldn’t know that, not Ms. Merkel , not Mr. Steinmeier . Then we would have to refuse America and say we stop being your colony. We should be in 1949, but now it’s over.
And we’re finally tired of being your foot soldiers in your power games. Now the Europeans are supposed to attack Russia so that you can encircle and attack China in the Pacific in containment policy, AUKUS – Australia, Great Britain (UK), USA plus Japan, Taiwan, possibly India, a belt completely tied around China, the next state , whom we must demonize and terrorize. We could learn from the Silk Road what economics means: One gives the other what he doesn’t have and therefore gets what he doesn’t have. Peace would be trade.
And that from Lisboa to Vladivostik, we could have had it! But then we would have to say no to the imperial policy of the USA, to NATO! Get out of NATO! No peace is possible with her because it is not meant to be.
There should also be no peace because we believe that we can afford war through armament superiority, through military superiority, as the stronger. We’re already number one, and now we have to show that we are, and will remain, 21st-century America.
We would have to respond with what we have learned in Europe about humanity, about kindness from our philosophers, from the New Testament, from the cultural tradition, which is part of knowing in Europe that war creates nothing but disaster. 30 years from 1618 to 1648 we experienced how one can devastate the whole of Europe, only in power games, under the pretext of religion, of absolute correctness.
We learned that and you could have learned it in 1863 in your civil war. We could shake hands across the Atlantic for peace. But if you want to carry on as before, let’s not go along with it any longer and say:
Get out of NATO! Responsibility for the world! No to armor! and
Yes to a universal humanity! I like to end with a sentence that comes from Mahatma Gandhi . We are constantly considering what needs to be done to save and preserve the peace. Quite simply: there is no way to peace. Peace itself is the way.
And if you don’t start with it, you can’t get there. Then you have the whole program of the New Testament: Disarmament, one-sided, that’s what Jesus, five days before he’s going to be nailed to the cross, sets an example for mankind – when entering Jerusalem. He quotes a saying of the prophet Zechariah: If someone came who could change the world in the name of God, his first action would be to break the bows, burn the chariots. (Zech 9:9; Mark 11:2.)
This is Jesus’ program. And then Paul is absolutely right when he says, 1 Corinthians, if you want to read it, chapter 2 verse 8: The rulers of this world call the nature of God, his goodness, pure and simple madness. And that’s why they killed Jesus.
We have to say what they call madness in reference to God’s goodness only shows the paranoia in which they exist. And we are breaking out of the madhouse of this policy once and for all.
We choose to be free.
And then we come to what Wolfgang Borchert was able to say in 1947 in Basel on his sick bed, as his legacy to humanity.
“Man at the workbench! If they come back and tell you to pull cannon barrels and hand grenades instead of cookware and water pipes – man at the workbench, say NO!
man in the lab! If they come back and tell you to invent the new death against the old life – man in the lab, say NO!
And mother in Germany, mother in Ukraine! When they come back and tell you to give birth to children: boys for the front, girls for the hospitals – mother in Germany, mother in the Ukraine, say NO!
And pastor in the pulpit! When they come back and tell you to bless the guns and proclaim war as a sentence of God – pastor in the pulpit – say NO! “
Because if you don’t say NO, it will always go on like this and it will always get much worse.
Thank you very much for your attention.
