Matthew Read says that instead of confronting the economic roots of fascism and sections of the ruling class who abetted Hitler, Germany, since 1949, has fostered a narrative of collective guilt.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in May 2023. (European Parliament, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
By Matthew Read
Peoples Dispatch
The extent of the German government’s support for Israel during its ongoing offensive in Gaza has taken many by surprise.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been even more restrained in his criticisms of Tel Aviv than U.S. President Joe Biden.
A central point of reference for German politicians is the notion of Staatsräson (“state reason”).
This was a term first coined in an essay by Germany’s former ambassador to Israel, Rudolf Drebler, in the early 2000s and repeated by Angela Merkel, the former chancellor, in a speech before the Knesset in 2008.
It has since become a centerpiece of German public statements and an ideological tool to legitimize Israel’s “right to self-defense.”
As Scholz said on Oct. 12, 2023:
“At this moment there is only one place for Germany. We stand with Israel. … This is what we mean when we say, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson.”
In this context, a growing number of nations from the Global South have begun to challenge Germany for whitewashing and even justifying the genocide of the Palestinians.
In January, [shortly before his death on Feb. 24] Namibia’s late president Hage Geingob released a statement strongly criticizing Germany for its uncritical defense of Israel and emphasizing that the German government was now actively supporting a genocide in Palestine whilst it has still not atoned for its genocide against the Herero and Nama in Namibia (1904-1908).
For similar reasons, the Nicaraguan government is now taking Germany to the International Court of Justice for aiding and abetting the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
To understand what lies behind Germany’s Staatsräson and its bilateral relationship with Israel, it is necessary to understand the origins of the current German state and the tradition in which it stands.
Historical Context
The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, commonly referred to as “West Germany” during the Cold War) was founded in May 1949.
In a similar way to South Korea and Taiwan, the FRG was created after the Second World War under the wing of the U.S. to act as a bulwark against socialism.
As a central actor in the West’s “containment” and “rollback” strategies, the West German state had to be both aggressive towards the socialist East and docile towards the capitalist West.
The influence of the corporations that had funded Adolf Hitler was thus intentionally restored and the businessmen with ties to the Nazi party were unofficially pardoned for their role in fascist Germany’s crimes against humanity, despite often directly profiting from forced labor during the Third Reich (e.g., Daimler, Siemens, Rheinmetall, etc.).
At the same time, the FRG was tightly bound into the U.S.-led order through the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which to this day includes the stationing of tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Germany.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, in black coat, during his visit to U.S. Africa Command headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, in April 2021. (U.S. Africa Command, CC BY 2.0)
The leaders of the young FRG were immediately confronted with the problem of how to publicly address the Holocaust. Pictures of concentration camp inmates sent shock waves around the world and gave rise to the international call: Never again!
Yet domestically, West Germany could not afford a thorough denazification of society, for this would destabilize the capitalist basis of the FRG as it had done in East Germany, where Nazi war criminals and businessmen had been rigorously expropriated.
Thus, rather than addressing the economic roots of fascism and prosecuting sections of the ruling class for abetting Hitler, conservatives and liberals in the FRG fostered a narrative of collective German guilt that all citizens would have to atone for. It was not capitalism and the liberal system of the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) that had enabled the rise of fascism [according to this narrative], but the cultural propensities of the German people.
In this election poster from 1949, the Liberal Democratic party (FDP) – today a member of the governing coalition in Germany – lists an “End to Denazification” as its first demand. (Graphischer Grobbetrieb Georg Stritt & Co, Haus der Geschichte, Bonn; Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
This political strategy has been evident in West Germany’s support for the state of Israel, which had been founded one year prior to the FRG.
The first West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had publicly described the FRG’s first reparation agreement with Israel in 1952 as being “based on a compelling moral obligation.” In the face of domestic criticism over the 3-billion-marks agreement — particularly from the Liberal Democratic party (FDP) and from his own Christian Democratic Union party (CDU) — Adenauer announced that “there are higher values than good business.”
Yet, recently uncovered documents from the German Foreign Office reveal that Adenauer was in fact only “willing to negotiate reparations [with Israel] due to pressure from the USA.”
The chancellor had referred to West Germany’s relationship with the USA and said that “breaking off negotiations with Israel without results would create the most serious political and economic dangers for the Federal Republic.”
In other words, it was stipulated by the U.S. that if the FRG wanted to become a powerful player in European politics again, it would have to provide significant political, economic, and military support to the state of Israel. While there was considerable domestic discontent over this precondition in the beginning, the leaders of the FRG have come to appreciate relations with Israel as conducive to their own interests, both in terms of geopolitical strategy and profitable ventures for German industries.
For instance, arms sales to Israel have skyrocketed in recent years. Siemens regularly profits from Israeli contracts, such as the 2018 tender by Israel Railways that was worth roughly one billion euros; and German drugmaker Merck (the founding family of which were staunch Nazis) also maintains research sites and projects worth millions across Israel.
In the face of horrific images coming out of Palestine, the German media will justify the export of arms and capital to Israel by uncritically repeating the official government line about Israel’s security being Staatsräson in view of the murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi Germany.
Solidarity protest on the Pariser Platz in Berlin on Oct. 8, 2023. (Leonhard Lenz, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
Concepts such as Staatsräson and collective German guilt have thus been developed as ideological instruments to both deflect responsibility from the German capitalist class for Nazi war crimes in the past and disguise the brutal pursuit of their economic and political interests in West Asia in the present day.
This helps the German government to create extremely narrow confines for the public debate around these policies. Since Oct. 7, Staatsräson has also been employed to drastically intensify anti-migrant measures. The most brazen of these is perhaps a new decree in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where applicants for German citizenship will now have to pledge allegiance to Israel’s “right to exist.”
The Global South Challenge
While the FRG’s unconditional support for Israel is nothing new, it has come into the limelight as an increasing number of states from the Global South are speaking out against the Israeli genocide.
In the German press, commentators scrambled to delegitimize South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) as “blatantly one-sided.”
Responding to South Africa’s case, German Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck (Greens) simply brushed it aside: “Accusing Israel of genocide, in my view, is a complete reversal of victims and perpetrators, and is just wrong.”
The role of the German capitalist class in fueling Nazism is conflated with a “special historical responsibility” that all Germans share towards Israel.
“Due to the darkest chapters of our history, Germany has to live with the terrible responsibility for genocide perpetrated in its name,” [the German Embassy in South Africa posted on social media in response to the ICJ case].
“Nazi Germany committed one of the worst crimes in human history, the Holocaust against Jews in Europe. Bearing all of this in mind, we think that self-defense against a terrorist regime that hides behind the civilian population as human shields to maximize suffering and to render defense against its actions impossible, is not genocidal intent.”
#ICJ Due to the darkest chapters of our history, Germany has to live with the terrible responsibility for #genocide perpetrated in its name.
1/x— Germany in SA (@GermanyinSA) January 14, 2024
Such arguments continue to sway a large section of the German population, but leaders in the Global South are less susceptible and have begun to challenge the German government’s hypocrisy.
The first serious accusation came at the beginning of 2024, when Namibia’s then president Hage Geingob published a statement reminding the world that Germany had “committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions.”
Namibia’s Hage Geingo in October 2023. (European Union, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Implicitly turning German Staaträson on its head, Geingob argued that by intervening at the ICJ “in defense and support of the genocidal acts of Israel”, the FRG has in fact revealed its “inability to draw lessons from its horrific history.”
[See: “The ‘Afterlives’ of German Colonialism in East Africa”]
In early March 2024 the next public challenge from the Global South came: Nicaragua filed a new case in the ICJ, this time directly against Germany, accusing Berlin of violating its obligations to the “Genocide Convention” of 1949.
Through its political, financial, and military support to Israel and by defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), “Germany is facilitating the commission of genocide and, in any case has failed in its obligation to do everything possible to prevent the commission of genocide.”
German liberals were quick to write this case off as “a cheap diversionary tactic […] by a dictatorship that denies its own citizens any guarantees under the rule of law”.
Yet just several weeks later, the German government was once again publicly condemned, and this time it did not come from the “autocratic, left-wing governments” in Latin America, but from a hitherto close ally, Malaysia.
At a joint press conference in Berlin, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim responded to Scholz’s continued insistence on Israel’s right to self-defense by provocatively asking,
“Where have we thrown away our humanity? Why this hypocrisy? Why this selective and ambivalent attitude towards one race?”
These developments are the latest signs that the West’s ideological and economic hegemony is faltering. Concepts such as the “rules-based international order” and Germany’s Staatsräson no longer hold enough weight to silence dissent internationally. An expression of the “new mood” in the Global South is the struggle over the ownership of international bodies such as the ICJ.
Undermining its Own Ideological Hegemony
The Federal Republic of Germany stands in the tradition of German capitalism, with all of the skeletons hiding in its closet. Its unconditional support for Israel is the product of, on the one hand, self-seeking economic and geopolitical interests in the region and, on the other, the effort to deflect responsibility for the holocaust and the unwillingness to denazify West German society.
The other Germany — the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — stood in a very different tradition. It was governed by the communists and social democrats that had languished in exile or Hitler’s concentration camps during the Third Reich.
There, the demand “Never again!” was understood not as collective guilt to be carried by all Germans, but as a militant duty to combat fascism and racism, regardless of the specific form they took. As such, the GDR was a staunch support for the Palestinian’s right to self-determination and resistance to occupation.
In Germany today, the space for public debate on this issue is becoming increasingly narrow. Support for Palestineis being censored or outright banned.
Yet the German government cannot so easily silence Global South states. As it continues to travel from country to country, incessantly justifying the Israeli genocide in Gaza while propagating the notion of “feminist foreign policy”, the German government is rapidly undermining the West’s ideological hegemony and exposing its own hypocrisy to the world.
Matthew Read is a researcher with the Zetkin Forum based out of Berlin.
This article is from Peoples Dispatch.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
So the German state, heir to a heinous and systematic crime, imagines that it expiates its sins by supporting a foreign regime which repeats them.
Correct. I live in Austria and it seems the leadership of the two countries…the political establishment…in entrenched in their determination NOT to pay attention to what should be the true lesson of the Holocaust they perpetrated.
America’s history of interfering in other countries elections goes back to after WW2. John LeCarre’s early spy novels refer to how in Germany, the same old grey men still ran things after the war. Not exactly the same people. The factory manager under the fascists was gone, but the assistant manager just got a promotion. The song remains the same.
The English and the Americans actually interfered to make sure the anti-fascist resistance that had arisen during the war was kept out of power. The mantra of the corporate-government tag team had become ‘anti-communism’, and those ‘lefties’ in the resistance just were not ‘the right people’ to hold power.
Thus, the English and the Americans made sure there were no real, fundamental changes after the war. This now leads to the surreal side of the Green Party as key ministers in German re-armament and some of the most militarist voices in favor of sending the German tanks, still named after big cats, again eastward. Germany is Germany today because America and the English worked very hard to make sure it did not change.
Allen Dulles and his brother John had connections with German industrialists and worked hard to protect them and keep them in positions of control, for financial reasons and for keeping an anti-USSR bullwark in place. David Talbot tells the details of this story in “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Making of America’s Secret Government”. Their efforts included protecting many German officers from prosecution for war crimes at Nuremburg.
I was struck by the fact that the United States restricted compensation for the damage done in World War II to be that given to Israel by Germany, and although the USSR suffered enormous casualties, profound internal damages, relief to that country, and to the nations that it freed from Nazism did not exist.
Most evident among those events was the usurpation of German scientist to the United States. Perhaps most notably, the arrival of Verner von Braun, who was the chief scientist in the development of the V2 rocket. Actions such as these create a great deal, of confusion, tension, and fear regarding the machinations of our leaders, regarding the desire for peace and cooperation, amongst nations, and willingness to allow a peaceful and competitive world to exist.
The Federal Republic of Germany BRD Bundesrepublik Deutschland is Not Deutschland (Germany).Germany(Deutschland) is still occupied and the State Deutschland/Deutsches Reich within its original boundaries de-activated.Potsdamer Abkommen for freedom,no peace treaties could be signed yet because of the lack of sovereignty-not applied,as well as the prescribed de-Nazification .For more infos:see staatenlos.info
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” As western governments and corporations are wont to do, they privatize the profits and socialize the losses. Got guilt? Spread it among the many, and some will even internalize it. I am not proud of my country’s stances on war and peace, and I deny anyone saying I am guilty of their evil machinations. I about froze my fingers off at a recent local protest of the massacre in Gaza. I had a German immigrant friend who learned Reiki in addition to her engineering employment. She was shot dead by a boyfriend she was trying to separate from. I am glad she at least didn’t have to suffer through Covid and now this genocide that is shining light on the psychopathy of those in power.
There’s no question that a number of people (are %s available based on polls? I don’t think so) in Germany and Austria are shocked by what Israel is doing. And not just now. I am an American married and living in Austria for 18 years. I remember my wife’s then young daughter in 2006 expressing dissent with what Israel did to Lebanon in 2006. However, like in most countries, too many people simply keep their heads down and do not want to get involved, or even learn enough about what’s happening. This allows the so-called ‘leadership’ to continue steering the countries along the lines of their ‘atonement syndrome’. Kudos, kudos, kudos to those Austrians and Germans who are acting on their consciences and commitment to human rights by protesting and working to make others in their countries aware.
Germany has the largest Palestinian Diaspora in Europe
GDR had lots of Nazis in SED
Especially in Erfurt and Gera
It is a fact that they were parked at Der Spiegel Magazine in the West and inside Daimler-Benz
No judges or doctors were ever de-Nazified as US lost interest
The truly grotesque fearure of German poltics is the emasculation of the Greens into a party that is barely distinguishable from the other 3 mainstream parties. As a kiwi Green, I feel zero kinship with the war loving German Greens.
This is intended for internal consumption only, just to save CN from being targeted. However you folks need to know how I really feel about needless murders.
I’m an impatient man, it is my deathly negative failure as a person. So be it, I’m also a certified U.S. Grade A PRIME product of my life’s environment. A Government Mule of sorts. But I regress.
Over on the ‘Counter Punch’, Dated March 31,2024, Israels War Psychosis, Palestine: The Ongoing History of Terrorism, Racism, Confiscation, and Dispossession, by Gerald Sussan. The article supports most all written observations I make of this very tragic history, save the , IMHO, most important contributing factor.
I adamantly refuse to cow – tow to the black and tan by licking boots. I have bad knees from working fora living, not kneeling for the Emperor. As a blue collar, come white collar technician I firmly consider my self a layman.
Simply stated I’m “way more right, than I’m ever wrong” on the stuff that counts.
Screw Bidden, Bibbi and their ilk for taking pleasure and profit from the massive suffering they unleash on those who are defenseless. It is what it is, totally FUBAR!
On my recently passed K-9 “Poochy”, may she have mercy on their decayed corpses.” My dog sweet as she could be dies and this fucking putz ,’Benny the Blade’, continues to kill innocent people.
Thanks for the therapy CN, the check is in the mail!
FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW NOW YOU PERVERSE ASS HOLES.
The elephant in the room that I wish some of the Twitterati would address before jumping to conclusions.
If you look into some of the Twitter posts, some of the responders act as if Germany were an independent, sovereign nation whose support for Israel is of its own volition and not part and parcel of US occupation of Germany (especially the “collective guilt” gaslighting). It’s like those Tweeters either don’t know or don’t care what the quoted snippets from this article demonstrate.
On another note, what a difference it must make between now and at least a decade ago when the likes of GermanyWatch(.blogspot.com) complained about Germany being anti-Israel and pro-Iran. I can only imagine that the US influence got stronger and more servile politicians got installed as Merkel gave way to Scholz, notwithstanding episodes of Merkel’s own subservience to the US.
Several points here are well made but there really is a lot of blame for Hitler and the holocaust throughout Germany. Yes Industrialists played a powerful role, but so did the protestant Churches where 80 percent of ministers supported Hitler. His support was very large in rural Germany.The misery brought by reparations from WW2 produced hatred and misdirected blame. The majority of scientists and academics also supported the Reich. The unequal application of war crimes trials was widespread and brought SS officers into the CIA. Fascism roots deep into a society with aspirations of glory and the taste of victory over the weak, the thrill of certainty, order and power. Did fascism end with WW2 or just morph, with US military bases across the planet? Still it is baffling that Germans seem unable to lift their heads from what their parents and grandparents did, and realize that being good and decent is not an identity but a practice incumbent on al,l and a practice to be claimed by courage and reason and the simple moral precept of treating others as you want to be treated.
I think you mean the reparations from WW1, not 2, which were Versailles peace conference measures to punish Germany for initiating its aggression of crossing through Belgium on the way to France. The economy was thus broken, and the stage was set for someone to step in and raise living standards for the German people. Which Hitler did. In addition, it was very very dangerous to resist the Nazis once they were in control. Most people know what happened to the resistance group known as the White Rose in Munich once they were caught distributing leaflets of dissent. It meant death. In comparison, in the West where there is still a modicum of free speech, though effectively marginalized by governments and their mainstream media gatekeepers, people are free to speak out and resist what the West is doing in Gaza and also in Ukraine, without the threat that faced Germans under the Nazis. But not enough do. Some combination of apathy and indoctrination through narrative propaganda.
Germany also eliminated the death penalty because of political parties’ concerns they were executing too many Nazis – something to remember whenever Europeans and Germans in particular want to lecture anyone else internationally about the inhumanity of the death penalty.
They would rather have seen Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Co. continue running the show and “rehabilitated” if it were possible, and if it were up to them, since killing people who commit or are complicit genocide and crimes against humanity with a focus on “punishment” is obviously inhumane as any unthinking person can tell you. Of course, luckily, the worst Nazis like the aforementioned self-executed, or they would’ve surely been spared and assigned important positions in West Germany, America, and NATO.
Some among British military had it right, having suggested summary execution of all Nazis, which Americans of course objected to since they were good friends with the Nazis and had helped educate them and bring them to power in the first place; not to excuse the Bank of England that, like the Federal Reserve, had of course helped fund them, although the English contribution was still a pittance compared to the American which included the whole private sector.
The German people have well and truly been gaslighted throughout the whole twentieth century and up to now. Well, starting at Versailles.
They have been weighted down with a massive guilt complex for the actions of the Nazi Third Reich—which never won an election in Germany.
The self-righteousness of Americans and others vis-a-vis the Germans has always sickened me—the casual, yes, racism that has allowed people to make any and all sorts of sweeping negative judgments of Germans and a whole lot of conceited and ignorant armchair psychologizing. I always knew Americans/Westerners would fail the “What did you know/do?” test when push came to shove. And they have.
But back to Germany, I appreciate this analysis from Matthew Read, as it states more clearly something that I have always felt in my gut. The wrong people were being blamed for the actions of the Third Reich. Once the totalitarian system was installed and Gleichschaltung was imposed on Germany, what the hell were the citizens actually supposed to do about it? Most of them were along for a very rough ride, after being put through the grinder after WW1.
We in the US ignore significant corporate support for Germany as a weapon against the USSR. The end of WWI with the USSR is the 20th century in nutshell, one war creating the next. But the oil of the Ottoman Empire was the desired resource for all warfare technology of the 20th century too profitable and exciting for any outlawing of wars to get in the way.Now nuclear weapon are again being reconditioned resources from WWII. We were so confident about WWII because of it. If anything Oppenheimer and the rest may have been stalling all along but their curiosity finally won out anyway.
It is still necessary to outlaw permanent wars and western addition to it. Monotheism appears to be too self serving for human civilization to survive with excessive profit motives of a;; kinds. Antisemitism was also born by stealing a religion and weaponizing if for a Roman occupation that also set off centuries of more wars and genocides.
This talk about guilt, all of it, is a cop out by the U.S., Germany, France and the Britts. I’m sure I have missed a country here or there, but you get my drift.
As is most positively apparent to this person the ruling governments of Israel, the U.S. and Germany, along with the France and the Britts seem to me to be brain dead, def, dumb and stupidly ignorant on the subject of how they collectively find themselves in their current, seemingly inextricable quandary. Their individual excuses for inaction expose them for the spineless, apparently blood lusting, villains they are.
Spewing unlimited bogus propaganda, poorly designed and inconsistently delivered world wide in an effort to cover their collective asses as to justify their inadequate feeble efforts to recognize this genocide for exactly what it is.
They have outed themselves. The reality of what the world is witnessing which they refuse to acknowledge because of big money politics.
The truth of their collective actions, driven by either ignorance or design, can be detected in the incongruity of their propaganda claims, which conceal the driving force limiting their actions to stop Israel from killing these helpless people.
This group, especially, seems to expect everyone to heed their insistence that actions by HAMAS have left them perched on the horns of a dilemma. Wrong, each one chose this perch. It was not until they each made the fateful choice to climb out on this limb, one of known inhuman actions, did their very obviously poor choices reveal them for what they are, fools caught playing a fools game.
Benny and his ilk have created a horror death and the countries mentioned here, and also in Ukraine, are responsible because of own their irresponsibility.
The incestuous nature of the relationships here have rendered each and every nation mentioned helpless to do what is right. Humane actions needed to end the blood baths. They are guilty of trapping themselves.
Netynyahoo needs to be replaced, months ago. When this bastard is humored and encouraged his out of control ego is revealed. He simply cannot do the right thing. Ever. Witness is attack on the Iranian Consulate today in Syria.
Given any encouragement at all he goes berserk. This behavior by psychotic right wing Israeli leadership is nothing new.
This is no moral dilemma, instead a self inflicted error of judgement fostered by years of each and every country refusing to acknowledge the creation of an unsupervised entity in the bowels of religious conflict and not setting hard fast rules for those who seem unable to govern themselves without bathing in blood was an unmitigated failure and mistake.
This is not to mention that irresponsible behavior of persons, still publicly unknown in the U.S., who allowed Israel to acquire nuclear weapons.
WTF could go wrong.
Thus was some great stuff from Mr. Read here.
Thanks CN
From my recollection, France supplied Israel with a nuclear reactor in 1954. France was viruently anti-Arab due to its colonial problems in Algeria etc.
In 1979, the US detected an atomic explosion in the southern Indian Ocean. That was a bomb set off in cooperation between South Africa and Israel. The then Carter admin. ignored the matter and attributed the distinctive double pulse as being due to a computer fault.
September 22, 1979 the incident known as the Vela incident from the name of the U.S. Satellite ,”Vela Hotel” or “Vela 6911″, purposely designed to detect nuclear explosions, detected just such an event. Further analysis of the date collected and coordinated with other data observed and verified confirmed the event.
See the Vela Incident wiki for a quit start on the topic of U.S. detection capabilities and The Nuclear weapons for Israel wiki for a quick mind blowing run down on what all is known about the program authorized and ran by individuals who , in my humble opinion, live in an alternate reality.
While the U.S. Government still publicly refuses to acknowledge the reality of Israel having nuclear weapons, such is very much the case.
At the Nuclear Weapons and Israel wiki, See Especially the section titled, the rift between Israel and France.
John Kennedy knew exactly what Israel was doing and desired to stop their program.
The Wikipedia – Nuclear Weapons and Israel is a great place to start any study of the issue of Israeli Nuclear Weapons, BTW.
Mr. Bennett, a couple of thing I’d like to address. SEE: hXXps://nuke.fas.org/guide/israel/nuke
Israel sought French assistance and France agreed to provide such in the fall of 1956 in the form of 18MWt research reactor, however a nasty little development occurred with the Suez Canal to slow things down.
Oct. 3, 1957 France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling or France to build Israel a 24 MWt reactor with cooling systems and waste handling facilities to handle three times the power.
The site provided above gives and very good history of these events.
Additionally at hXXps://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/22/blast-from-the-past-vela-satelitte-israel-nuclear-double-flash-1979-ptpb-south-atlantic-south-africa
One can find a very informative essay on the entire event, including something you may be interested in. The various reasons why Carter refused to enforce the PTBT, partial test ban treaty, against Israel.
I feel for very good reason it is unfair to claim Carter ignored the issue. Carter was on his way to becoming a submariner when his father died and he left his Navy position, to run the peanut farm.
In fact Carter had a rather storied Naval experience working at the Chalk River, ” taking the fry” as is known in the nuclear business, working to assist the shut down of the failed reactor.
Informed people want to know the truth.
Thanks CN
I’m currently in Berlin for The Ring at the Staatsoper. Interestingly the first person I met walking back to the hotel was a man who after we spoke for a few moments said he was from Tel Aviv where there aren’t any options to hear Wagner. I asked him what he thought about what was happening in Gaza. He said it was horrible and he didn’t see how to end it. It wasn’t the time or place to push that discussion further.
I mention it because I have, so far, not had the same courage to bring up this topic with any Germans. I love Berlin and I simply don’t know if I could handle hearing what they might have to say. Perhaps they would surprise me, but…
I’d be interested in hearing if others have had more courage than I in bringing this topic up in Germany.
“Investigators have found that in 2007 the German Intelligence Service (BND) destroyed files of 250 BND employees who had been in the Nazi SS or Gestapo.
The BND confirmed the loss, calling it ‘regrettable and annoying.’
[…]
Reinhard Gehlen, who set up the BND after World War II, spied on the Soviet Union for the Nazis during the war.
About 10% of BND recruits during the Cold War had previously served in the SS, the German news website Spiegel reports [some of whom were prolific war criminals that did double-duty working for and alongside the Israeli Mossad, alongside repressive Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern governments, including Klaus Barbie and Walther Rauff – for instance, see “Israel, Bolivia, and the Grooms of Death,” Spanishhalyon (WordPress), July 14, 2019, and Ofer Aderet, “Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents,” Ha’aretz, June 1, 2023 (archive.is/j54Lt)].”
Source:
“German Intelligence Files on Ex-Nazis Shredded,” British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), November 30, 2011
And this is why Hannah Arendt wrote that when ALL are declared guilty, NONE are guilty, an outrageous absurdity. This is one of the most foul and disgusting bits of sophistry that Western “civilization” has ever devised. We can see its use today in so-called critical race theory which holds that ALL white people are to blame for slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, etc, when anyone possessing any critical analysis knows that it is a very small percentage of people who have benefited from these grotesque practices.
In Germany after WWII, where many people were never tried and many of those tried never served prison sentences, let alone faced execution, this ideology was used to tell ALL German people that they were equally guilty along with the hierarchy of the Third Reich. Yes, there is a level on which ordinary people bear responsibility for their government’s decisions, but there is no comparison between an ordinary German fearing the Gestapo — quite similar to today’s Ukraine in which all dissidence is brutally suppressed — and, let’s say, Adolf Eichmann.
Germany’s current love affair with Israel demonstrates quite clearly that it is still a Nazi state.
How we do resist fundamental change! Easier to rationalize support for a perpetrator and double commit genocide – Nazi and today Palestinians- under the rather inert energy of guilt than the dynamic confrontation of materialism and wealth (power) standing as identity. Jesus was sold for thirty shekels. Looks like he continues to be sold. What is naked truth anyway but where the buck stops and relation to truth honored by self responsibility and sacrifice of the lesser for the greater value. Sobriety.
Supporting israel…but supporting the massacres it is committing…supporting this too? SCHANDE, Germany…SHAME israel
Thank you so much for this informative piece. I had coffee with a colleague the other day, who is from Germany. When I raised the issue of the Israeli genocide in Palestine she became vehemently defensive of Israel and exclaimed her undying support, even though her husband is against what Israel has been doing and continues to do. Now I understand where she is coming from, and all of Germany for that matter. So much for “never again!”
How so very convenient for the ZIONIST NAZIS to totally obscure the facts of all that Palestinians have had to endure since the founding of israel May 1948!!! I guess talking about this, today, is considered anti Semitism. Don’t push your luck any further, israel…
No, it most certainly doesn’t apply to all of Germany. There has always been strong support of Palestine in Germany, especially on the left. I’m German and personally don’t know anyone who currently sides with Israel.
I sure am glad to hear that because I will traveling in Germany soon and have been wondering just how gaslighted they really are. One acquaintance seems to be totally unaware of any alternative media for non-MSM news of the events in Palestine and elsewhere.
The world (U.S. and Germany in particular) is suffering a guilt complex over the Holocaust – and BiBi is capitalizing on that. But that guilt seems only to apply where what the Zionists are concerned even though there were 6 million other atrocities carried out by the Nazis
And it’s always good to remember that some wealthy German Jews who settled Palestine were helped in their endeavor by the Nazi state!