Speaking before the Bundestag on February 24, 2022, Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock made this pledge:
"This is going to destroy Russia. This is the reason why we have imposed this broad package of economic sanctions, financial sanctions..."
On March 8, Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck hit the same nail on the head:
"These sanctions were deliberately tailored to deal a massive blow to the Russian economy and to Putin's regime."
Both Ms Berbock and Mr Habek have since been proven wrong. While the sanctions did hurt Russia, they have failed to cripple it, far from it. Quite the opposite, they threaten to destroy the very country that instigated them in the first place. But all the same, they must be allowed to remain in place. Moreover, they have got to be made even more severe.
In his speech at the Green Party congress in October, Economy Minister Robert Habeck outlined to ordinary Germans the kinds of hardships they - and not by any means those in charge or their parliamentary cronies – are expected to endure and overcome, and yet he called them necessary because
"Whatever the pressures or challenges we get to face, Putin must not win."
And, indeed, why not? Does Berlin have any obligations before Kyiv that it has to fulfill as an ally? - None.
Does Russia pose a threat to Germany? - Not at all.
Has Moscow defaulted on its obligations to Berlin? − Quite the opposite. Even at the height of the Cold War, it remained Germany's reliable supplier of the cheap gas the latter's economy so needed and depended upon. However, even before the start of Russia's "special military operation" in Ukraine, Olaf Scholz's government, comprised of the likes of Baerbock and Habeck as its ministers, moved to block the commissioning of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Olaf Scholz.
After all, while Angela Merkel's government, whose overall track record is otherwise woeful, was nevertheless doing its best not to run Germany's relations with Russia into the ground, this appears to be the goal of the "red and green" government led by Olaf Scholz. - Why?
This is a question that, naturally, occupies the minds of Russian political scholars and commentators. Russia has no shortage of recognized foreign policy experts. Their long list includes such names as Sergei Kurginyan, Valentin Katasonov, Andrei Fursov, Sergei Pereslegin, and Dmitry Nikotin.
None of them, however, can be said to be an expert on Germany per se. I doubt any of them knows how to speak German, and, by all accounts, they do not seem to be aware of, or at least vaguely familiar with, the mindset of the forces that set the tone in all of Germany's "socially relevant circles", who are best characterized by their shared hatred for their own people. This psychosis, a kind of induced madness, to use the parlance of psychopathology, is what has also been afflicting a sizeable percentage of the country's population.
With this in mind, it looks completely surreal when pundits like Valery Pyakin (of the "Questions and Answers" fame), whose reviews are typically quite spot-on, assert in all seriousness that Germany's leadership is hell bent on avenging the Third Reich's defeat in World War II and is thus taking revenge on the Soviet Union's successor.
To somehow give weight to this ludicrous idea, Pyakin and others like him would even go as far as claim that Olaf Scholz's grandfather was allegedly an SS Obersturmbannführer (which is a fabrication, pure and simple), and that Scholz therefore purportedly wanted to fulfill his grandfather's legacy by imposing sanctions on Russia and supplying weapons to Ukraine.
Had Pyakin and his sympathizers had even an infinitesimal bit of understanding about the situation in Germany, they would have known that Germany's elites view the Third Reich as evil incarnate, and that nothing could be farther from their ideals than the thought of avenging for its defeat. Which is to say that their fiercely anti-Russian stance must have other explanations. This is where I would like to bring up two points that, in my opinion, are essential for this discussion.
As Germany's former Economy Minister Wolfgang Schäuble candidly admitted in November 2011 at the European Banking Congress, the Federal Republic of Germany has at no time been fully sovereign. In fact, the West German state, founded by the United States and the United Kingdom, the victorious Western powers, has from the outset been under the tight grip of its NATO "allies," who, in reality, are none other than the occupying powers.
This was corroborated by none other than Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, 1st Lord Ismay (1887-1965), a British general, diplomat and first Secretary General of NATO, who thus formulated NATO's role: "keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down" (as quoted by Josef Joffe, a former publisher-editor of West Germany's influential Die Zeit weekly newspaper and an expert on transatlantic and global networks). Die Zeit, an article for Time Magazine, March 19, 2009)
History knows literally only a handful of cases where Germany's government dared to take an independent course that would run counter to the interests of the United States and the United Kingdom on matter of significance. This includes Gerhard Schroeder's refusal, despite his country's earlier involvement in NATO's 1999 war against Yugoslavia, waged in clear breach of international law, to send German troops to support the US-British-led aggression against Iraq four years later.
Gerhard Schroder.
Speaking of the war of aggression against Yugoslavia, it is absolutely critical to highlight the fateful role the Green Party has been playing in German politics. Founded in 1980 by such upstanding individuals as Herbert Gruhl, who really cared about protecting nature and the environment, this party was soon taken over by left-wing radicals and outright perverts (whose calls for the legalization of sexual relations with children was for a while one of its top priorities) and turned into an instrument of moral, cultural, political and political pressure on Germany's society and a tool of its economic destruction.
This is something Joschka Fischer played a key role in. Having started out as a militant left-winger brawling with the police at protests, he then quickly rose through the ranks of the Green Party, to become foreign minister in Gerhard Schroeder's government in 1998 and to further advance a policy of servile submission to the United States, whose imperialism he had so passionately criticized before. In her piece published in the Welt on February 7, 2005, journalist Mariam Lau summarized the content of Fischer's book "Risky Germany" (published in 1994) as follows:
"Germany must be invaded from without and heterogenized, nearly diluted from within by an inflow."
In his brochure "The Green Apocalypse", Peter Helmes offers multiple examples of the Greens' anti-German sentiments. "I always found love for one's fatherland sickening. I never knew what to do with Germany and I still do know that today," Robert Habeck wrote in 2010 in his book "Patriotismus: ein linkes Plädoyer." Can this man be expected to take Germany's interests into account in any way when developing his economic policies?
Or can we reasonably expect Claudia Roth, the Greens' Minister of Culture, who in 1990 took part in a March across Germany carrying a poster reading "Never Again Germany," to do her best to preserve German culture?
Those who want to eternalize Germany's status as a vassal would naturally have to support Washington's and London's anti-Russian course. While reaching an understanding with Moscow would be in Berlin's best interests in every respect, it would be a nightmare beyond compare for the Greens, and not just them alone.
Those who argue that the Greens are not the only ruling party and that they do not even get to appoint the chancellor are missing the point that the difference between them and the SPD is only incremental, and not fundamental, that the Left Party, where Sahra Wagenknecht is in total isolation, is also not that different from the Greens and the Social Democrats, and the same is true for the FDP and for the CDU/CSU. If there were to be a change of government tomorrow and either Söder or Merz were to take over the chancellorship, it is unlikely that there would be anything to gain from that as the core policy of the victorious Germany would remain unchanged. Lastly, the coalition fully supports the confrontational anti-Russian policy of the red-green government.
In early December 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a package of laws banning propaganda of LGBT, pedophilia, and gender reassignment in Russia.
The second fundamental reason for the anti-Russian sentiments of the German elite is this.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken out in defense of traditional values. He has time and again condemned Europe not only for its imperialistic past and present, but also for its departure from the values to which it owed its fast-diminishing greatness.
Putin espouses the notion of divine origin of creation, and that includes the idea of preserving and strengthening the traditional family. This appears to dovetail nicely with the sentiments of the vast majority of Russia's citizens.
Even those in Russia who might otherwise disapprove of Putin's policies are not too keen on importing European decadence. They oppose the concept of value relativism that is so common in Europe, nor do they want to see "faith in Satan to be equated with faith in God" in Russia either, which is something Putin has accused the West of doing. They don't want to see gay pride parades in Red Square or a cult of worship created around certain "sexual minorities." They do not want their children to be taught in school that they could pick their gender at will. Nor do they want homosexual couples to be allowed to adopt children, as is currently the case in many European countries.
In other words, they have been able to keep their common sense and instincts intact, unlike a large part of the population in countries in Europe, whose minds and instincts have been clouded by the incessant propaganda of questionable new "values."
