The question “Germany – where are you going?” is derived from a novel that was published 130 years ago in 1895. It was written by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz and is entitled Quo Vadis.

The story is set in the year 64 A.D. and deals with the persecution of Christians in Rome during the reign of Emperor Nero. Henryk Sienkiewicz describes how Christians were tortured and banished alive as torches.

Rome was an empire in decline at the time. It is characteristic that contemporaries were unaware of its decay. However, internal and external violence is obviously a characteristic of falling empires. 

In today’s Germany, there is once again a persecution of dissidents who deviate politically and ideologically from the line of the power elites, just as the early Christians did back then. The display of public burnings is also celebrated, albeit not in the physical but in the figurative sense.

The censorship complex publicly pillories dissidents, ruins their reputation, enforces dismissals and de facto professional bans, destroys livelihoods. Journalists and representatives of aid organizations are placed on sanctions lists beyond the law.

These processes add up to an anti-democratic “censorship industry” through which governments, with the help of secret services, digital companies, transatlantic think tanks, the so-called GONGOS – government organized nongovernment organizations -, media and associations, control and monitor their citizens and combat undesirable opinions. 

Why is Germany destroying the remnants of its parliamentary democracy and, orchestrated by NATO and its leading power, the United States, running into new wars after the devastating wars of annihilation that started on German soil in the 20th century?  

You just have to look. That is precisely the task of the journalist: to “see and say”, as my American friend Patrick Lawrence puts it. That is the status quo. This leads to the question of why, a look back in anger, and future options for action – quo vadis.

In twelve theses, I outline an overall picture that shows Germany as an example of the decline of the West. 

Status Quo 

Thesis 1: Economically, Germany is on the brink of collapse.

The sanctions against Russia have proved to be a boomerang. The severing of energy relations with Russia and the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline, which investigator Seymour Hersh blames on the U.S., have made the German economy uncompetitive.

De-industrialization has reached the tipping point at which it has become irreversible. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are currently being lost. Inflation is galloping. The German economy is shrinking, while the Russian economy is growing (+4.5% in 2024). Many billions are being withdrawn from consumption and the welfare state and are flowing into the pockets of the U.S. arms industry.

The deal struck by E.U. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and U.S. President Trump in the customs dispute is clearly to Germany’s detriment. German free rider imperialism has failed.  

Thesis 2: Berlin’s political self-enslavement to the U.S. is now taking its revenge.

On Aug. 18, Europe’s representatives sat in the Oval Office like schoolboys who have been up to no good – a farce of submission. The European leaders begged for the war to be prolonged—what a cynical capitulation in a sea of blood!

Germany allowed itself to be dragged into the war in Ukraine, even though it was clear from the outset that Ukraine could not win this war. Nevertheless, the NATO West tried to bring Russia to its knees with a combination of arms aid for Kiev, economic pressure through sanctions (exclusion from SWIFT; oil price cap; theft of Russian foreign assets worth around 300 billion euros) and diplomatic isolation.

This strategy has failed. Russia has restructured itself economically and turned to Asia politically and economically. A total of 153 out of 193 nations in the U.N. continue to trade with Russia. Germany is being restructured under the hegemon’s tutelage as the poorhouse of Europe. The bill is being paid by dependent employees and the middle class. 

Thesis 3: In military terms, Germany and NATO have lost the war in Ukraine.

Russian troops are advancing on a broad front. Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson have been formally incorporated into the Russian Federation and will not return.

If the war is prolonged, four more oblasts will be up for grabs. In the end of August 2025, more than 1.7 million Ukrainian soldiers were dead or missing. The Russians currently have more than 700,000 troops in Ukraine. They are superior in terms, artillery and missiles. It is a matter of time before the front collapses.

The summit ins of drone Anchorage between Putin and Trump has shown this: The U.S. now wants to write off Ukraine as a losing proposition and europeanize the war. The master is leaving his European slaves out in the cold and blaming them for a devastating defeat.

The rapprochement between Russia and the U.S. is pushing Europe into the periphery and into geopolitical insignificance. Europe is not only becoming the backyard of the U.S., but also the backyard of Russia. Moscow’s pivot to Asia will last at least 100 years. There is nothing left to grain in the E.U.. 

Thesis 4: Germany is experiencing a process of civilizational decline and cultural neglect.

The method by which this war is being waged: We supply the weapons, you supply the corpses – is cynical and a sign of moral disinhibition.

Slogans such as: “The Russians are not actually Europeans, but have a different relationship to blood and violence”, “The Russians are animals and pigs”, “We are waging a war against Russia”, “These sanctions will ruin Russia”, “We must become fit for war” contradict the peace commandment of the Basic Law. They do not belittle people for what they have done, but for what they are: Russians.

“Germany is experiencing a process of civilizational decline and cultural neglect. The method by which this war is being waged: We supply the weapons, you supply the corpses — is cynical and a sign of moral disinhibition.”

In contrast, the suffering of the population in Ukraine is overlooked. Ukrainians are treated like sub-humans. This is a renaissance of racism, which, undead from the Hitler dictatorship and co-transformed from Ukrainian fascism, is once again capable of winning over the majority today. I see this as a relapse into anti-democratic thinking and a civilizational regression.

Looking back in anger

Let me take a look into the forgotten history, at the hidden causes, the how and the why.  

Thesis 5: The decline of the German economy stems from long lines of self-destruction.

The tax exemption of capital gains through the Schröder government’s 2002 reforms led to banks selling their industrial holdings. They put the money into toxic securities. This had two consequences:

1. U.S. financial investors bought into all German DAX companies.
2. Germany got caught up in the maelstrom of the financial crisis.

This in turn had also two consequences: 1. in order to save the banks, their debts were taken over by the state and central bank money was pumped into the system, which drove up debt and fueled financial capitalism. Bad bank loans became government bonds. 2. the banks were able to clean up their balance sheets and the bonds ended up in the unregulated shadow banking system. They are held by financial investors, special purpose vehicles and insurance companies.

In the shadow banking system, the investments are usually leveraged using derivative instruments in order to maximize profits. The refinancing of the German state has therefore fallen into the hands of U.S. financial investors who are making billions from the war.

Locusts such as Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are speculating against the bonds of every country that abandons the war course. In doing so, they are also putting Germany’s state refinancing under considerable pressure. 

Thesis 6: German policy follows the primacy of the financial industry and thus destroys its industrial foundations.

Studies show that the profit rate is falling in all western industrialized nations. The profit rate is the ratio of capital employed to profits. The tendency of the profit rate to fall can be counteracted – by lowering wages, opening up new markets, rationalization, cheaper raw materials.

Ukraine offers all of this. Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz is acting like a branch manager of Blackrock on German soil and quite rationally when he fuels the war and wants to send German troops to Ukraine. After all, financial investors not only make money from war, but also from reconstruction.

In war, capital is destroyed and the original accumulation can begin again. Rosa Luxemburg: “The proletarians fall, the stock market prices rise.” The war was a stock market bet. Nobody expected the Russians to win. That is why the stock market bet became Russian roulette. 

Thesis 7: NATO’s eastward expansion is the main cause of the war in Ukraine. Germany could have prevented it.

As former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explained to the E.U. Parliament on July 9, 2023, the war in Ukraine did not begin with the Russian invasion in February 2022, but back in 2014.

The war began with the coup organized by the West on the Maidan in February 2014: during this coup, E.U. diplomats negotiated with Ukrainian fascists as if at a bazaar over the number of murders that were deemed necessary to force the democratically elected President Yanukovych out of office.

An agreement was reached on around 100 assassinations, which were, according to eye witnesses, carried out by eight sniper groups of around ten men each – from western Ukraine, Georgia, Poland and Lithuania.

In April 2014, the coup government in Kiev attacked the separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, which had broken away from the central government that had been brought into office by force, following the example of Kosovo.

Grayzone has published a paper by the Institute for Statecraft, an offshoot of MI6 and NATO, from 2014. It describes in detail how Russia was to be lured into Ukraine in order to inflict a defeat on Moscow there. German agencies were also involved in all of these operations.

The Minsk II agreement on peace in the Donbas can now be seen as an attempt at deception; compliance was not intended. Moscow’s treaty offers of December 2021 and January 2022 were rejected. The peace negotiations in Istanbul in early 2022 were thwarted. NATO wanted war, and Germany went along with it.

Thesis 8: The Ukraine war is the most brazen propaganda lie that has been fed to the Germans since 1945.

The German population is being knowingly and willfully hoodwinked about the causes of the war, the actual situation on the front, the geopolitical context and the decline of their own country.

“A transatlantic comprador rule is to be maintained by force of arms against its own population.”

This cognitive warfare is orchestrated by NATO; it is implemented by the propaganda and censorship industrial complex consisting of the propaganda press, GONGOS, press offices, think tanks, transatlantic organizations, foundations, universities and churches. The social carriers of opinion making are transatlantically corrupted politicians, scientists and managers as well as the academic precariat.

Some have tied their careers to transatlantic organizations; they stand like Washington’s governors in their own country. The others shimmy from freelance work to temporary contract, from project position to project position. This academic precariat will do anything for a contract extension or a new assignment. U.S. hegemony in Germany is now institutionalized through both.

The transatlantic rift is a myth. Overall, these transatlantic networks act like consensus factories in the interests of U.S. hegemony. The result is a mental filter bubble in which the intellectual horizons of the inhabitants are limited, the emotional reflexes are conditioned to Russophobia and bloodthirstiness, the imagination is stunted, and in which the steering of behavior is not perceived as coercion. All this completes the loss of reality of the German elites.

Quo Vadis 

In his story, Henryk Sienkiewicz sends the apostle Peter to Rome:

“In the simplicity of his heart, Peter marveled that God had given Satan such incomprehensible power to oppress the earth, to pervert it, to trample it underfoot, to wring out its blood and tears, to sweep it away like a whirlwind, to rage upon it like a hurricane.

His heart was frightened at this thought, and he said to his Master in his spirit: ‘O Lord, where shall I begin in this city to which you have sent me? She owns seas and lands, the beasts of the field and all the creatures of the water, she has kingdoms and cities and thirty legions to guard them; but I, O Lord, am only a fisherman on a small lake!'”

But where are we going then? 

Thesis 9: Economically, Germany – like Europe – is on the brink of collapse.

The Europeans have now invested many hundreds of billions in the war in Ukraine. Germany alone has already invested at least 50 billion euros, the massive arms expenditure and the funds that have flowed through the E.U. add to this.

If Donald Trump forces the E.U. to accept Ukraine, the costs of the war and reconstruction will be communitized in the E.U.. They are estimated at 800 billion dollars, and the war is not over yet. Funds from the E.U. agricultural and cohesion funds are then likely to flow into Ukraine.

The almost 300 billion euros of Russian foreign assets frozen at Euroclear and elsewhere in Europe should be stolen from the Russians after a victory in Ukraine. However, financial investors point out that Putin and Trump discussed in Anchorage the possibility of removing these almost 300 billion dollars from Europe and investing them in the U.S. – a lucrative deal for both countries. The Europeans would then lose out.

If peace is reached, the shadow banks will speculate massively against European bonds. The subsequent devaluation of government bonds could cause Germany’s refinancing to collapse. 

Thesis 10: Most European leaders have no chance but to prolong the war militarily.

The danger of a sovereign debt crisis and a collapse of the European financial system is forcing the heads of government to prolong the war. They are driven by the desperate hope that somehow Kiev will hold out to the last Ukrainian. They hope that in the next five to ten years, European troops in Ukraine will be able to stand up to Moscow and wrest Ukraine’s resources: black earth, gas, lithium and rare earths from Russia.

The political elites cannot go back: from the Maidan killings to the almost two million dead in Ukraine – they have too much on their plate. Defeat will inevitably lead to a reckoning. Then they would either have to resign or be held criminally responsible. The fear of their own downfall drives the bloodthirst of German functionary elites to the point of frenzy.

There is only one catch: without the U.S., the Europeans cannot bring Russia down. That is why they want to keep the U.S. in the war at all costs. 

Thesis 11: The war is a war against its own population and against democracy.

The armament in Germany has a completely different purpose: to abolish democracy and replace it with a new form of dictatorship, to arm the military so that internal unrest can be quelled and the ruling party cartel can continue as before.

A transatlantic comprador rule is to be maintained by force of arms against its own population. This could be constitutionally organized by declaring a state of tension with a two-thirds majority of the Bundestag in accordance with Article 80a of the Basic Law.

The aim of the propaganda bloodlust is to restore a meaningful cohesive force to an E.U. in which the centrifugal forces are growing, and the interests of the member states are drifting apart: Having failed as a peace project, it is now to lead a zombie existence as a war machine of the Pan-Germanic drive to the east. 

Thesis 12: Germany – a country without opposition.

War and the destruction of democracy go hand in hand in Germany. This is possible because the population shows no resistance. Obviously, civil courage and democratic fighting spirit are completely paralyzed. Becoming accustomed to state control during the coronavirus pandemic, aggressive diversity teachings, war propaganda and digitalization have robbed people of their capacity to act and their ability to make decisions for themselves.

Digital capitalism makes it possible to sedate people as consumers through digital freebies, while at the same time exploiting them in the work process and monitoring and manipulating them as political subjects. The result is a blocked conflict.

This also blocks the Oedipal conflict on a psychological level: There is a lack of critical engagement with political elites; authority is fundamentally trusted. This opens the door to the re-coding of history, a re-framing in the service of the prevailing propaganda, and the implementation of historical lies.

In Germany in particular, a reinterpretation of history is fatal in view of the singularity of the Nazi crimes committed not only against Jews but also against Soviet citizens, as it enables a psychological reversal of guilt and thus a shift of aggression towards Russia as the enemy. The result is a country on autopilot, trapped in a digital economy of affect, without opposition, unresisting in its relapse into barbarism. 

Farewell  

A departure from the war course of the German ruling elites can only be forced through fundamental opposition. Here we need to see whether the coming massive social cuts will persuade people to take their protest to the streets. What is needed is a broad alliance for peace and the welfare state that takes the protest to the streets. But the Germans are currently dozing off to their doom.  

Henryk Sienkiewicz once again. It is July, 64 A.D. At dusk, he leaves Peter standing before the backdrop of Rome with the Christian Lygia, in all his despair before this city: “How shall I defeat their wickedness?”  

‘The whole city seems to be on fire,’ Lygia interrupted him in these reflections. The sun was just setting in marvelous splendor… and as the sun sank, the glow became redder and redder. ‘The whole city seems to be on fire,’ Lygia repeated. Peter put his hand over his eyes and said, ‘The wrath of God is upon her!'”  

This is how it will be for the Western hegemonic power and its vassals. Don’t seriously believe that the people in the global South will ever forgive us for the genocide in Gaza, the genocide in Donbass, the provoked war in Ukraine and the more than 20,000 sanctions against Russia. Nothing will be forgotten.

Germany once again sits sullied among the nations – sullied with the blood of those who lie in the streets in our imperialist wars. Those who cling to toppling empires will be dragged down with them. 

The preceding remarks were delivered on Aug. 29 at the annual “Mut zur Ethik” conference in Sirnach, Switzerland.

Source: Consortium News.