A Decisive Year for Freedom
The militarization of Germany is an attack on the very democracy that supposedly needs to be defended against Putin.
Now that it has become increasingly clear in the course of the Ukraine war that some politicians have learned absolutely nothing from two world wars, it is high time to remember the warning words of Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell speech in January 1961 and to confront the drivers of escalation in all clarity with the irresponsibility of their actions. This requires an awareness of the wider political context of the conflict, because what is presented to citizens as a resolute defense of freedom is in fact the path to its unerring destruction.
By Christian Hamann, March 16, 2024 — English translation by DeepThought
Freedom is not a gift
According to the title of George Orwell’s prophetic novel “1984”, the liberal democracy founded in the USA in 1776 could have been supplanted 40 years ago by a dictatorial empire, a state structure that uses sophisticated surveillance technology and an army of obedient agents to transfer its citizens to a status of disenfranchisement, oppression and dependency. Such an empire would have stabilized its power by personally spying on the attitudes of each individual subject in order to discriminate against them or accept them into the ranks of its functionaries, depending on the results. Criticism of the system would have been suppressed by this personnel policy and by a propaganda apparatus.
Since the beginnings of civilization with the emergence of the first cities, autocracy has shaped most of human history, while freedom and democracy have been limited to episodes—one of the longest during the time of the Roman Republic. The simple reason is that freedom is not a gift, but must be fought for, guarded and defended against never-ending claims to power by authoritarian individuals. However, this necessity has been insufficiently anchored in the consciousness of the citizens of Western countries for well over a century—too long to have remained without serious consequences.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the co-founders of the democratic model of society in the USA, recognized that a sovereignly superior great power has the role of a peaceful paragon and not that of a world police that needs to enforce its ideas of order by military means: “I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be”. This quote conveys the unspoken spirit of understanding, generosity and fairness—not cowardly appeasement!—that characterize the politics of an authentic democratic superpower, shaped by idealistic, liberal-minded people.
The concept is linked to the “Pax Romana”, the Roman peace. Once it had risen to become a sovereignly superior great power with the corresponding authority, the expansion of the Roman Empire took place primarily according to the model principle, with marginal peoples assimilating the Romans by adopting their advanced technology, way of life and language.
Under the conditions of modern transportation and communication technology, the whole world would have been open to the USA after its rapid rise in the 19th century, in order to unite the majority of peoples and nations in a prosperous community of values along this non-violent path to this day. However, due to a lack of the necessary critical vigilance, power-ambitious individuals have succeeded in undermining the hard-won principle of mutual respect for civil liberties and legal equality in democracy and establishing a privileged power of money.
The—also ideological—roots of this undemocratic group of people lie in Great Britain, where a mutually intertwined feudal and moneyed aristocracy has had a decisive influence on the course of politics for over 400 years. The crown colonies of the British Empire formed the vast experimental field of the ultra-rich, where their trading groups—protected from competitors thanks to royal privileges—were able to make gigantic extra profits against the rules of the fair market. Since a lot of money corrupts character, it was no wonder that plundering, disenfranchisement, slave transportation and drug trafficking, and in China also the forcing of drug imports, were part of the business model.
Autocracy is the mother of militarism
As these privileges also included sovereign rights, only the EIC, the East India Company, was able to maintain a military force larger than that of the British state. It is surely no coincidence that Orwell highlighted opaque militarism as one of the hallmarks of “his” totalitarian regime in his vision of the future “1984”: “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia”.
The fact that militarism has its roots in democratically uncontrolled, autocratic rule should actually be familiar to Western citizens from the chilling examples of feudal aristocratic rule. Back then, princes and kings sacrificed their citizens, and in particular their soldiers, in wars that served not to defend the population but to maintain and expand their personal power.
However, as this important connection has remained outside the consciousness of the citizens, even the forceful words of Dwight D. Eisenhower could not be clearly categorized when he warned his fellow Americans about the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) in his farewell speech after eight years of presidency in 1961 and in the middle of the Vietnam War. This military-industrial complex made up of high-ranking representatives of the secret services, the military, the arms industry and politics is leading the USA and the Western world down a suicidal militaristic path. “MIC” should really be called MIFC, where the F stands for Financial and emphasizes that the financial establishment is the main force behind militarism.1
Sponsored military actions against free civilization
The absolute counterproductivity of the militarism pushed by people with autocratic ambitions for the spread of freedom and democracy should have been recognized as early as the Spanish-American War from 1898 to 1899. In particular, the absurd military actionism in the Philippines caused the most serious damage to the American nation and its liberal-democratic ideals. When the US military oppressed the civilian population there with brutality bordering on genocide, the American public was shielded from this truth by censorship, so that criticism remained too weak to put an end to such military action and the censorship antiprinciple for all future.2
At the beginning of the 20th century, the direct interference of American bankers in the politics of other countries caused further damage to the concept of democracy. In Japan at this time, large sections of society were already strongly inclined towards the progressive influences from Europe and the USA, so that the emergence of a peaceful community of values across ethnic and cultural boundaries was in the offing. However, such integrating tendencies would have contradicted the old strategy of the autocrats to keep their rivals at odds with each other. The “solution” came in the form of loans from the financial establishment to Japanese militarists, which enabled them to go to war against Russia in 1904 – 1905.
Western financial oligarchs have had an even greater influence on the course of history in China, again to the detriment of the democratic model. After the end of the backward imperial rule, Dr. Sun Yat-sen, an admirer of the USA, was elected as the first president at the end of 1911. However, “thanks” to the intervention of the financial elite, he and the republic were replaced just a few months later by the dictatorship of the primitive militarist Yuan Shikai. This “successful” intervention was followed by decades of civil war until Taiwan’s secession in 1949.
The list of examples of destructive influence by the moneyed elite to the immeasurable detriment of the ideals of freedom, democracy and also the reputation of the United States includes the financing of Lenin and Hitler.
The information war
Now, at the beginning of 2024, we would not be facing this shambles of Western security policy and the prospect of a suicidal third world war if rational lessons had been learned from the history of past wars and civil wars. But citizens and politicians have not been given a fair chance to do so. For how, for example, could people learn from the dozens of interventions in Latin America—following the standard pattern of replacing democratically elected governments and moderate forces with dictatorships by means of militant insurgents—after the commentaries on television and in the print media generated sympathy for each of these gross violations of self-proclaimed principles and presented cheap pretexts as valid justifications?
The information war launched during the Spanish-American War continues to this day. Only now, after decades of paralyzed critical vigilance, is the number of citizens, journalists and politicians who perceive this war as such by other means growing since the corona crisis. If the grotesque encroachments on freedom of information 125 years ago during the Spanish-American War had been countered with determination in their early stages, the original simple filtering of unwelcome information could not have developed into a complex propaganda system that makes a fair assessment of the situation extremely difficult, especially in times of war.
The establishment of the Creel Commission (CPI, US Committee on Public Information) during the First World War and the United States Office of War Information (OWI) during World War II clearly demonstrated the disingenuous intent and polarizing effect of one-sidedly influencing opinion towards readiness for war.
Today, the CIA takes on part of this immoral “task”, as can already be seen from the fact that the secret service spends around a third of its gigantic budget on presenting its demonstrably not always correct information to the public.
This propaganda-like presentation regularly amounts to a whitewashing of Western military actions, which are consequently accepted by the citizens, while the disastrous consequences have been kept out of their consciousness for over a century. The distraction has worked so well for so long because the propaganda apparatus has billions in budgets and the latest technology at its disposal and because in Western countries the structures and representatives of the democratic state have been given the benefit of the doubt. In this atmosphere, citizens, journalists, governments and parliamentarians reinforce each other in the illusion that their own policies, especially those of the USA, always represent the morally correct principles.
In principle, mutual trust is a key element for the stability of a society. However, after decades in which the MIFC has done very little to justify the trust placed in it by the citizens of the West, the situation is becoming dangerous in terms of foreign and domestic policy unless critical vigilance is restored. Beyond the countries currently involved in the war, EU-Europe, Iran, China, Taiwan and the USA are threatened, the latter especially by a looming civil war.
The following statements are intended to help mentally arm people against being incited to military “solutions”. In this context, criticism of US policy is not criticism of the USA but, on the contrary, solely of its actual rivals, who have successively undermined the liberal democracy and fair market economy of this great nation founded in 1776.
As soon as citizens break away from the comfortable consumption of the standardized news offered by the mainstream and inform themselves independently, they come across two gaping gaps: firstly, that between the dizzying expense and the “success” of Western military policy, which can often be sought with a magnifying glass, and secondly, that between the ideological and moral claim and the actual results.
If one considers, for example, the enormously diverse and elaborate activities of the Western secret services in developing highly effective interrogation methods, biogenetic manipulation, inconspicuous methods of eliminating people and in perfecting surveillance systems, methods of psychological warfare and techniques of cyber warfare, then one should expect the results to be an effective fight against crime, in particular a paralysis of the international drug trade and a massive curbing of corruption.
Military operations should be the rare exception and should be concluded within a short period of time with lasting success, so that people are not uprooted and traumatized in endless civil wars, but actually liberated and handed over to their right to self-determination.
Misguided development policy has created dependencies and destroyed balances
By undermining the original concept of the peaceful diffusion of progressive models of life along the lines of the Roman Empire and replacing it with a numb militarism, influential forces of the MIFC have placed the leading nations of civilization in the current existential peril. Instead of serving our security, this fundamentally flawed policy, which disregards the simplest psychology, has dangerously undermined the international security structure despite an unprecedented effort—over 40 countries involved in the “coalition of the willing” against Iraq.
At the same time, the backward regions have been led on a disharmonious course in which the free development of individuals has been restricted and the ecological balance with their environment has gotten out of control. Africa is growing by over 100,000 inhabitants every day. The demographic distortions in relation to the low-birth-rate liberal civilization threaten the latter above all through migration flows, the extent of which overwhelms the possibilities of integration.
Development aid, which began soon after the Second World War, arose from the constructive basic idea of accelerating the non-violent spread of democratic civilization. However, the power to shape projects shifted unnoticed from the hands of Western donor countries to those of a growing number of supposedly charitable non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and non-profit organizations (NPOs), the United Nations (UN) and its sub-organizations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This development was not only questionable because it made large international corporations the real winners of the big money redistribution mill instead of people striving for freedom. The erroneous fragments of principle and ideology that determined the course of development policy under this regime proved to be far more destructive.
The functioning of the fully automatic, self-financing model of the spread of ideas through undisturbed trade, imitation effects and migration from the civilized centers to the more backward peripheral regions would have required nothing more than the continuation of the truly free and fair market economy that existed during the founding decades of the USA. Instead, large parts of state development aid have flowed into the coffers of already privileged corporations (including those with tax privileges) by commissioning them with development projects or aid programs.
Small businesses, which could have acted as an important role model for the lagging countries, have been widely pushed aside, including by bureaucratic obstacles such as group-friendly customs regulations. Banking system practices also contribute to the SME-hostile environment, for example by including surreal hurdles to opening accounts and transferring funds. The underlying money laundering laws have not brought the drug trade under control, only weakened the middle class.
If you read the programmes and visions for the future of the NGOs and other organizations that dominate development aid, you will notice that it is rarely about promoting self-employment or building small businesses, but more often about large investments. Of course, these can only be made by said organizations, corporations or rich investors.
This makes democracies just as dependent as autocratically governed countries. This is because they all have to position themselves in a way that is friendly to investors and corporations in order to avoid being left off the money redistribution carousel. In this development model dominated by the financial establishment, an essential basic rule is violated — namely that sustainable aid must ALWAYS be help for self-help. Any other approach leads to dependency — and is therefore entirely in the interests of all autocrats who desire control over everything and in return want dependent, compliant subjects.
The revival of critical vigilance
Now, at the beginning of 2024, with the threat of a third world war looming ominously close, it is time to become aware of the criminally neglected vigilance against autocratically ambitious forces. It is about overcoming a naivety that is attributed to Germans in particular, but which is hardly less common among other peoples and nations in the European-American cultural area. It is largely due to this immunodeficiency against manipulative influence that they are now on the verge of being sent into a gigantic war against each other for the fourth time — because the First World War had already been preceded by the Crimean War (1853 to 1856). In this war, Great Britain and France had intervened in a conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire — against the primacy of European solidarity on the side of the Turks. As a result, the manageable regional dispute escalated into a major war with around one million casualties.
In the historical context, this war marked a change of course in the wrong direction. While the fledgling USA had exemplified the excellent functioning of a peaceful integration of free people from all parts of Europe, the united British moneyed and feudal aristocracy not only thwarted such a process in Europe, but turned it into its opposite by marginalizing Russia, of all nations, as the largest European nation.
The war in Ukraine and the fifth Middle East war are just the beginning of a longer, long-predictable chain of wars and civil wars, the deeper causes of which are not so much to be found in Russian militarism and the intransigence of Hamas or in Israel’s crackdown. Rather, these deeper roots can be found in the West, more precisely in the money-driven NGOs, in the drowsy media, in the lack of democratic control of the MIC militarists and in politicians whose complacency makes it extremely difficult for them to recognize the hypocrisy of their political perception in the mirror.
The best way to break away from this is to follow the rule recognized by Martin Luther King as essential for survival, according to which one must (learn to) understand one's opponents and enemies.
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This article was first published on manova.news on March 16, 2024
About the author:
Christian Hamann, born in 1949, studied geography and biology from 1968 to 1973. He then worked as a secondary school teacher until his retirement. He has lived alternately in Germany and South America (Uruguay, Paraguay) for several years.
(4) Victor Machetti, in: The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1989 (Vol. 9, No. 3), pages 305 — 320