Mathew D. Rose – Germany has sealed its own demise
With the passage of its huge military spending bill last week Germany has assured its economic and political decline.
Mathew D. Rose is an Investigative Journalist specialised in Organised Political Crime in Germany and an editor of BRAVE NEW EUROPE
Neo-liberal warriors: Friedrich Merz, future German chancellor, and Annalena “Butcher” Baerbock, future president of the UN General Assembly
After fifteen years of German legacy political parties lecturing their citizens that the Swabian hausfrau was the sole paradigm for government spending and that “our grandchildren” could not be burdened by today’s profligacy, the same German political parties have abandoned “fiscal responsibility”, having voted over one trillion euros in new debt, defying not only its own debt brake, but the one it imposed on the rest of the EU. To understand the dimensions of this military Keynesianism one only needs to know that German national debt currently amounts to round 1.6 trillion euros. This corresponds to a national debt to GDP ratio of 62.4%. With the new bill this could ostensibly add another 1.7 trillion euros, a doubling of the national debt.
Deficit spending was long overdue in Germany. But these funds are not being used to rebuild the German economy and make it sustainable. Instead it is principally for military expenditure and refurbishing the nations infrastructure so that bridges do not collapse under the weight of tanks and the German railway can transport soldiers, weapons, and supplies swiftly to the Eastern Front. That means less spent on productive investment and more on unproductive destructive investment. As part of the package a major increase in austerity has already been announced. This beggars belief.
Before delving into the economic aspects it is important to understand the political elements of this development. First, the recent German general election was a massive defeat for the liberal authoritarian West German legacy political parties. Combined their vote dropped to 60 percent after they received 76 percent in the previous election three years earlier. Their era has passed. Desperation has set in. Being so dogmatically set in their neo-liberal policies, they are incapable of accepting socially just policies and investing in their own citizens to win back voters. Instead, to save themselves they are repeating German history, preparing the nation for war, which was a disastrous failure twice in the previous century. Just to make this panic palpable, this bill was questionably passed in the last minute by a lame duck parliament voted out of office weeks ago. As they knew that these measures would be blocked by the newly mandated parliament, they broke political tradition that does not foresee a parliament that has been voted out passing such a landmark law.
The delusional claim that Russia is likely to launch a full-scale attack on Europe in the coming years is being presented by the legacy parties in Germany as an inevitable fact. That the new-old enemy is Russia is no coincidence. For a thousand years the Germans have seen themselves as European defenders of civilization against the Slavs in the East, but as A. J. P. Taylor pointed out, they have done so as barbarians. This is an integral part of German culture. Their current support of Ukraine has nothing to do with democracy or rule of law, which certainly does not interest Germany in the case of Israel’s ongoing holocaust in Palestine. Ukrainian lives, like those of all untermenschen are expendable. Germany’s fanaticism with regard to the war in Ukraine is driven by bloodlust against Russia, turbocharged with the thrill of vicariously conducting a war where Germany has no casualties. It is no wonder that as World War II was lost the SS divisions from the East Front fled to the West to be taken prisoner by the Western allies following their egregious war-crimes against the Slavs.
Most Germans see the war in Ukraine as a surrogate revenge for their defeat in the Second World war. It is acceptable to lose a war to the Americans and French, but to be defeated by Slav untermenschen is ignonimy. Eighty percent of German casualties were on the Eastern Front. It is worth going through the internet to view the glee expressed by retired German officers during Ukraine’s Kursk incursion, which they saw as retribution for their own major defeat there at the hands of the Soviet Union in 1943.
Germany’s outgoing Foreign Minister Annalena “Butcher” Baerbock made no secret of the true nature of Germany’s support for Ukraine: declaring in her address before the Europarat in 2023 „We are fighting a war against Russia.“. This was reiterated by Germany’s future chancellor, Friedrich Merz, last week when he declared before the Bundestag: “Putin’s war is not only directed against Ukraine, but also against Europe – against our security and our freedom”.
The question is, is this Russophobe war rhetoric going to be as effective as it was three year ago? After three years of war and the realisation, still denied by the German government as well as state and corporate media, that NATO – and that includes Germany – and Ukraine have been defeated by the Russians, the Ukraine war fanaticism in Germany has cooled down. But sociopathy is an integral part of fascism, so anything is possible in Germany
The next question is if Germans of military age, especially men, can be whipped up to a frenzy, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the fatherland. After being programmed to think only about their careers, making money, and consumerism, joining the army and a war does no really fit in with the their life work balance. In 2022more soldiers left the German army than there were new recruits. As the job market is still strong, one does not need join the German armed forces due to economic desperation. Building up an army would thus probably entail re-introducing conscription. This could well be problematic. It is one thing sending Ukrainians to the Eastern Front to die and quite another to order your own children to do the same.
I am not sure on this, but young Germans are hardly accessible for state and corporate media propaganda. Like many of their peers, they rely on social media for their information. In how far they are confronted by and susceptible to state propaganda, I do not know. If we draw from the recent general election results, over half of young voters did not support the liberal authoritarian West German legacy political parties. But one should never underestimate the scope of German hate oriented fascist socialisation.
A further element is the belief by many older German politicians in the West German legacy parties who grew up with the Cold War and military conscription that these were golden times for West Germany. They forget that West Germany was a happier nation not due to a heightened militarism, but because of the social democratic policies that served most of the nation’s populace. This has long been abandoned for neo-liberalism and dedicating economic policy towards increasing corporate profits. This same political class does not comprehend that the planned increase in military spending beyond the already ongoing (civil) deindustrialization of Germany will obviously make matters even worse for the lower- and middle-income classes, increasing the discontent manifested in the recent general election. They seem to be doing their best so that the AfD wins the next one. In recent polls AfD support is once again increasing and they could well soon be the most popular party in the near future.
The Russia/Ukraine fanaticism has not solved any of Germany’s problems. It has exacerbated them. The economy is suffering, the ruling class is losing its grip on power, social unrest has increased. Now they are asking for further sacrifices for a patriotic war that many do not see coming. In fact, most Germans do not know what to make of current geopolitics. Half a year ago everything was clear for Germans: Putin was the new Hitler and the incarnation of evil. With a strong United States behind it Germany was not only on the side of virtue, but also on the winning side. With the arrival of Donald Trump, Germans are now being warned of a second incarnation of evil, as the American president admits that Russia’s reaction to NATO nearing its border was understandable, and diplomacy, not more dead Ukrainians, was the best way to end the war. Worse yet, Trump is imposing more major tariffs on European imports, especially Germany’s leading export product, cars. At the same time US officials are publicly declaring how geopolitically irrelevant Europe, including Germany, and its political elite are. The Americans are also threatening with a major policy shift with regard to NATO. The German liberal authoritarian political class is now not only propagating Russophobia, but also anti-Americanism.
In other words, Germany and Europe are confronted with a major crisis: political and economic. As the eurozone fails, the more frantic Europe is becoming. This would be a challenge in the best of times, but Germany and Europe are being led by an incompetent, delusional, and corrupt liberal authoritarian political elite trying to cling to power. These are the same people who got Europe into this dire situation. One can only ask how they could possibly be capable of getting Europe out of it? To the contrary, finding themselves in a hole, they keep shovelling. Many like the Germans, British, and French have only one trump card left to play for their domestic political survival: the external threat from Russia.
Germany now has hundreds of billions of euros to invest in its military. There are a number of problems here. First, planning of the economy was turned over to corporations twenty years ago. German politicians are no longer capable of creating economic policy. Nowhere has this been more obvious than with arms acquisition. The German weapons programme has become a conveyor belt for government funds to the weapons industry, not about an effective defence of Germany. The past has been one continuous scandal as German weapons and weapons systems costing much more than planned and delivered way past the date scheduled, many already obsolete. Worst yet, many of them are dysfunctional. Here an example I used in a previous article:
The German government had sent one of its frigates to the Red Sea at the beginning of 2024 to demonstrate its military power against the Houthis. In February in its first engagement the frigate due to a malfunction mistakenly opened fire on an expensive US drone. A debacle was avoided when both anti-aircraft missiles fired failed and crashed ineffectively into the sea. Purportedly the German navy ordered new missiles to be delivered to the frigate only to discover that the company producing them had terminated production.
From Ukraine there have been repeated reports of German arms being of inferior quality. It is no wonder that Germany is so far behind in technology and production. The same is true of Europe, although it spends round 4.5 times as more on defence than Russia.
And please let us not forget why Ursula von Leyen is president of the EU Commission. When she was appointed to that office, she was German Defence Minister. There she had opened a new field for corruption: the massive use of consultancy firms. An investigative committee initiated by Germany’s Federal Audit Office had found irregularities into how contracts worth tens of millions of euros were awarded by von der Leyen’s ministry to external consultancy firms. Two of von der Leyen’s cell phones that were to be searched for evidence concerning the contracts were wiped clean before being handed over. Shortly afterwards von der Leyen was bustled off to Brussels. Giving hundreds of billions of euros to the endemically corrupt German political class is like giving alcoholics the key to the brewery.
Even in passing this new massive spending package, dirty backroom deals were present. A day after the bill was passed thanks to the unexpected support of the Green Party, the outgoing Foreign Minister, Butcher Baerbock, the premiere German warmonger for the conflict in Ukraine and Israeli holocaust in Palestine, who outrightly dismissed the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, and blatantly lied that she had seen a film of Hamas militants raping Israeli women on 7 Ocotber, was named by Germany as the candidate to become president of the UN General Assembly (in the UN rotational system it was Germany’s turn), instead of a highly regarded career diplomat as planned. This is how institutions are corrupted and then fail. This has been the fate of Germany.
What the Germans have initiated with this new militarisation is not thought through. It is desperation. One hears the oddest things, such as the German weapons producer Rheinmetall can convert the Volkswagen factories being closed down to build tanks and other military vehicles. Who is going to buy all these tanks? Certainly not the Russians, US, or Chinese. Apparently the EU is to create a massive internal market for weapons that are to be produced by its member states, financed not only by the ramping up of defence spending, but also supported by the EU’s Rearm Europe Plan which also aims to mobilise up to €800 billion to finance military spending. This is assuming that Trump does not insist on the EU buying American weapons. The question is, what sort of future does such an economic programme promise?
Politically the EU is no less delusional than Germany, made clear when the unelectedEU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas, who has called for breaking up the Russia, spelt out EU foreign policy: “If together we are not able to put enough pressure on Moscow, then how can we claim that we can defeat China?”. EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced last week “(Russia) has massively expanded its military-industrial production capacity… This investment fuels its war of aggression in Ukraine while preparing it for future confrontation with European democracies.”
So there we have it. A war with Russia is being used as an excuse for an escalation of the authoritarian liberal political class in its neo-liberal offensive against the EU’s own citizens. Gone are the EU lodestars: prosperity, democracy, and peace. The EU and Germany have a new goal: Warfare, not welfare.