Again too long—after a long gap in Bulletins despite many, many events! I have been very busy translating my book on the Spanish Civil War from German into English—for publication as soon as possible. I hope you will read and like it. It is hard-hitting—and still all too relevant today! —V.G.
Despite the hot sun, few Americans were wearing rose-colored glasses these days, but rather fear dark clouds ahead. Many feel worried, even despairing. But sometimes they could rejoice at bright spots. The victory of Zohran Mamdani in my home town, with an amazingly courageous, even defiant platform, is causing the wealthy spenders to move heaven and earth to stop him. Can they?
Far bigger geographically, two, three, maybe five million Americans marked “No Kings Day”—Trump’s birthday—in over 2100 cities and towns, even in Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgins. The motivation varied, but fightback protests were even bigger in number than on Viet Nam or civil rights!
Resistance is urgent against Trump’s frightening domestic plans. His foreign policy is unpredictable; I‘d bet he hasn’t a clue about the outside world, hardly knows Liberia from Siberia, except where golden Trump towers or golf courses are involved or fat contracts for the family. This has meant crazy, merry-go-round tariff plans, criminally illegal air raids, the murder of undesirable generals, brutal genocide in Gaza. At times there seemed to be glimpses of steps towards peace. It would be reckless and stupid to trust him or have illusions, but I think even weak feelers, if any remain, should be built upon!
Have you noticed? Many who listed all of Trump’s dangerous plans made sure to slip any idea about peace in Ukraine in among the negatives. With some folks, I suspect that their main worry is that some peaceful solution might indeed be found, and words like war-readiness, security-defense or armament-buildup give way in media headlines to reconciliation or rapprochement. How fearful!!!
Above all in Germany, I’m afraid, I must remove any rose-colored specs: I hear too many echoes from the past! For those pushing German expansion, some with the same bloody corporation names as in 1939, 1914, even the 1860s, their big victory was “German unification” (still called “annexation” or “colonization” by many affected). Combined with similar victories elsewhere in eastern Europe, all barriers were down, all gates wide open to investment, exploitation and control, the latter most obviously in the land-by-land extension of NATO, despite all promises of 1990 “not to move one inch further eastward.”
This eastward ”Sturm und Drang” has meant permanently stationing a brigade of German soldiers in Lithuania, almost within spitting distance of St. Petersburg. Also domination of the Baltic Sea, Russia’s key exit to world trade and world economy, with a new naval control center in Rostock (once the main GDR seaport, built up with rocks collected voluntarily by young people all over the republic).
A clearly orchestrated media barrage insists: “Putin threatens Germany, we need a powerful war machine! Urgently!” Constitutional budget limits on debt have been scrapped; for weapons, the sky’s the limit! It is all a myth; Russia would not dream of attacking Germany: NATO outnumbers Russia . in aircraft 22,377 to 4,957, in naval power 1,143 ships to 339, in battle tanks 11,495 to 5,750. NATO surrounds Russia geographically, north, west and mostly south, with Georgia, Moldava and Ukraine meant to close the circle. France and Britain have atomic weapons. Some twenty U.S. nuclear missiles are polished and ready to fly eastward with swift German planes from Büchel Air Base. That threat has always been a myth!
But it still works, and training is in! TV demands ever more admiration for dashing young men (and women) in full uniform and painted faces charging bravely through the woods, or tanks splashing across rivers. There is a new ”Soldiers’ Day” and a ”Veterans Day”— to honor the lucky and less lucky ones (after waiting for survivors from 1939-1945 to die out and avoid confusion as to which veterans were being honored) and give little boys and girls a chance to climb into a tank or fighter plane. The message is clear: “Be patriotic! Join in the fun!” and the war fever increasingly recalls, with modern variants, the heel-clicking and barked Prussian commands of past years! “Intelligence experts” who predicted 2030, maybe 2027, as the year “when Putin’s army will be fit enough to fight us after his losses in the Ukraine war” now say such dates offer a “false sense of security” and even speak of 2026.
Marching in the vanguard, with military bands for background music, is the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz. He seems more genteel, more intelligent, than his new friend in Washington, and avoids loud-mouth rabble-rousing. But his texts go even further: he has already concluded that “we are already under attack from Russia…the dividing line between war and peace is a fluid one.”
There are loud dissonances, however. For decades economically proud and powerful, Germany is stagnating. The halt on inexpensive Russian gas, thanks to the liquefied fracking gas lobby in the USA and the strangely predicted (by Biden) explosions on the Baltic Sea floor, but also due to higher costs, cheaper but high-quality competition from China, especially in the key auto industry, now the uncertainties of friend Trump’s high tariffs—all hurt bad!
Hitler’s answer to the Depression was clear. That of Franklin Roosevelt, totally different in many ways, had to resort to a similar therapy: build armaments, from tanks to U-Boats—or tanks to Liberty Ships. Both solutions ended unemployment. Both ended with war. EU members have agreed to spend—no longer 2%, not just 3.5% but an impossible 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GMP) on war preparations. That seems a low sum, but would mean over €215 billion for Germany alone. 1,5% would be for “infra-structure”- with a stress on re-enforcing highways and bridges, ports and rail lines to carry tons of tanks and artillery, all heading eastward, openly aimed at Russia! Dilapidated schools, too few pre-K facilities to teach kids good German or swimming pools to teach them to swim, shutting down hospitals and clinics, miserly care for the elderly, cuts in aid to music schools, theaters, youth clubs? Oh, let them wrangle over what each can squeeze out of tight budgets! For Merz & Co.—first things first! Defense, Security, Safeguarding Freedom and Democracy from Putin!
Who loves these virtues most? If we go by reward, a top candidate would be Rheinmetall. Founded in 1889 to build weapons for the Kaiser, gaining huge wealth in World War I. Forced by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 to end armament production, it began again in 1921. A top weapons makers for Hitler, using 500,000 slave laborers, then shut down after defeat in 1945, it had to wait until 1956 before starting up again.
With the Ukraine war it is now Germany’s biggest weapons-maker. Share-holders’ value jumped from €4 billion in 2022 to more than €91 billion today. Orders for its tanks and other weapons surpass €55 billion, and its CEO, Armin Papperger, boasts: “With 50% sales growth in defense, Rheinmetall is transitioning from a European systems supplier to a global leader.” It plans new factories in the Ukraine, one for armored vehicles, one for munition. The last time we checked Papperger’s salary stood at €8,000,000 a year. We do not know how he feels about a cease-fire and peace in the Ukraine. But we can guess.
Possibly sharing such feelings in a happy swarm is an even bigger fish. BlackRock, with 70 offices in 30 countries, is the world’s largest manager of assets, now worth over $10 trillion. Its sharp fangs bite into economic innards everywhere, from Exxon Mobil and Fox Broadcasting to the Deutsche Bank. In May 2024, after a clearly well-informed insider deal, BlackRock became the biggest stockholder and influencer of Rheinmetall! And who was Asset Management Chairman for BlackRock in Germany at the time? None other than Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz, today Germany’s chancellor!
Those were good years for Merz. “I was happy working for this enterprise,” he has said. That’s understandable. He was making €5000 a day, even Saturdays and Sundays, €1.980.000 a year, even for a bad year. But bad years for clever lobbyists were rare. According to the German Enterprise Alliance, his income “approaches the upper limits but is not unusual.”
He had to suspend that job when he moved back into politics. His income as chancellor is still comfy, but much lower. Not as low as those on jobless assistance, a sort of home relief providing €563 a month for food and other such necessities. 1.3 million senior men and 2.1 senior women and over 2 million children are under or near the poverty danger level.
Most leading politicians blame Germany’s growing woes not on horrendous military spending or gaping loop-holes in taxing such as Rheinmetall and Blackrock—and definitely not on “the system” -but rather on refugees greedily storming the gates of “our Europe” or the children and grandchildren of those who once made it across “overly porous” frontiers. With Merz, these gates are being shut so tightly, at the cost of border commuters and retailers, that some are retaliating like Poland, sending armed soldiers to check vehicles 7-24 at the borderline “Bridge of Friendship” over the Oder.
That supposed German ability, efficiency and, yes, assumption of its superiority, once frightfully cited against allegedly “non-German” Jews, is now deployed against people of different color, language or religion, most loudly by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), aided by a media which stresses any felony if an “Ausländer” is involved. The AfD now leads in three East German states, is second in the other two, and holds second place in national polls, only a few points behind the Merz-CDU. The others, running scared, loudly attack the AfD as fascist, demand it be forbidden as anti-constitutional—but also move in the same “anti-foreigner”-“over-full boat!” direction. Merz, nastily capping this off, denounced those foreigners “who sit on the dental chairs and get new teeth made while German citizens can’t even get appointments.” There are whispers that some Christian politicians might break their taboo against joining in a coalition with the AfD, despite the so-called “fire-wall.” But for now, nationally, the Social Democrats remain as junior partners. After the worst election results in their history and worsening figures in recent polls, they hold far weaker cards in any coalition quarrels. But aside from a currently murky squabble on approving or rejecting a new top-level judge because she favors freer abortion laws, and a cover-up scandal about a Christian big shot who wasted 3 or 4 billion euros on a buddy’s surplus, faulty covid masks, there are no major disagreements.
For many years the SPD was divided (unofficially). The stronger faction was more conservative, friendlier toward big business, loud on labor rights and gains before elections, useless or worse after them, and as bellicose as the other parties in blindly supporting a Bush or Blair, a Netanyahu or Zelensky.
But a weaker wing clung to a few ancient SPD traditions (mostly buried back in 1914). In June one hundred Social Democrats, led by the courageous caucus chair Rolf Mützenich, dared to publish a manifesto calling for a new policy, leading away from the growing war fever and toward peaceful solutions in conflict situations, like Ukraine. Though many rank-and-filers agreed fully, this upset major apple carts, with apples as poisonous as in the Grimm Tale of “Snow White and the Dwarfs.”
Nearly every leader of the Christians, the Greens and most especially Mützenich’s own party was enraged and called him everything: stupid, naive, obsolete or treacherous. Leading the angry pack was ambitious right-winger Lars Klingbeil, who immediately grabbed the party reins, pushing out Scholz, Mützenich and his quiet erstwhile co-chair, Saskia Esken, the most prominent woman in the party, a modest left-winger hitherto suppressed by the SPD-rightists for demanding higher taxes on the super-wealthy, less police brutality, fewer privileges for rich car-makers. Klingbeil ousted her in such a nasty, misogynist way that, in the party congress which soon followed, he received not the usual nearly unanimous approval but an exceedingly embarrassing low, 64.9% while his little-known new co-chair, Bärbel Bas, got a normal 95% approval.
And yet he won—and became vice-chancellor and finance minister with Merz. The only minister he saved from the previous Scholz cabinet was the popular but bellicose Boris Pistorius, who can now buy all the weapons he wants, in support of Merz with war or genocide from Gaza to Donbas or Tehran about which he approved the Merz words, “They (the Israelis) did our dirty work for us.” Though not close buddies, the two coalition partners agree on ”essentials”.
What about the other parties? The AfD, too crudely far-right, is still ostracized nationally. Clearly pro-capitalist, rabidly nationalist, backward on social questions, homophobic, strongly pro-Netanyahu (who also hates Muslims), otherwise hateful against foreigners, but also against any assistance to the Ukraine, and leaning toward pro-Russian positions. Is that a paradox?
There are many paradoxes these days. Despite her party’s homophobia, the best-known AfD leader, the cultivated, clever, well-spoken but hate-ridden Alice Weidel has a Lesbian relationship with a foreign woman (and two children). And recently, in hopes of breaking the “fire-wall” against them, AfD delegates in their Bundestag caucus (152 out of 630) decided to switch from casual clothing to suits and ties and reduce loud, nasty heckling, and thus become more palatable as possible partners.
Is one potential partner the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW)? (Its leader has promised to change that embarrassing name.) Many in the media love to predict Alice Weidel and Sahra getting together. Although her alliance is a breakaway from the LINKE (or Left) party, presumably further to the left, Sahra surprised everyone by rejecting as undemocratic any ban on the AfD and a fire-wall against a party supported by 24% in the polls. Was this a hint of a possible alliance? Sahra said No! It was the right-wing “Christians” who were really close! A ban would help, not hurt the fascists. But agreement between Alice Weidel’s AfD and Sahra’s BSW on rejecting aid to Zelensky, on opposing sanctions against Russia and on tough rules on immigration left room for speculation. But also speculation on the life of Sahra’s BSW. After an impressive upward start last year, above all in the eastern states, its ratings sank lower and lower, even in the east, where for some it has become part of the establishment. Nationally, a heart-breaking result of 4.95 % in February left them less than 9600 votes short of 5% (with 60 million voters) and not one single seat in the Bundestag. The result seemed falsified, but now, nearly six months later, they seem all but glued to 4% in the national polls. Despite brave words, their future looks far from rosy.
Which leaves the LINKE. For a long time it was also glued to that useless 4% figure, and seemed doomed even in its home bases in the East German states. Until late 2074! Then, unlike the other parties, the LINKE did a self-analysis and changed its feathers. With a new election approaching, it turned to the people, sent out thousands of newly-trained, often newly-won campaigners to ring or knock at over 100,000 doors and ask what people wanted from a new government. Most common wishes were a halt to high prices for groceries, affordable housing and utilities and, above all, an end to steep rent increases. And that’s what the LINKE stressed, in meetings, speeches, and actions. New advisory centers where created where tenants could check on whether they were being cheated by landlords, and if so, how they could end the cheating. Other parties blamed immigrants, the LINKE blamed the big real estate robbers. And it worked! Within two-three months the LINKE jumped from the stick-in-the-mud 4% loser status to nearly 9 % percent and in Berlin an astounding first place, 19.9%, more than any of the other 6 main contestants. Its membership has jumped to over 100,000!
Part of this was due to its new party co-chair Ines Schwerdtner and its new caucus co-chair Heidi Reichinnek, both young, attractive, youthfully attired, and Heidi with bare arms full of tattoos, a high-velocity speech pattern with a vigor appealing above all to young people, and a snappy, challenging little smile for the journalists. The LINKE, almost alone in moving upwards, stands in the polls at 11 %, now tied with the increasingly meaningless Greens. It leads them all with young women voters!
But caution is advisable. Its big gains were due in part to an obvious agreement within the party to avoid quarrels or controversial debate on military and foreign issues. This basic compromise was largely retained, at least for the media and broader public, during the early May congress in Chemnitz. But important differences remain. Will the LINKE go the way of the SPD and the Greens, planed down to gently critical but polite acceptance of systemic status quo with an ever more frightening acceptance of a huge military build up, masked as security, but clearly a plan for aggression? Top level pressure for conformity is turning increasingly to repression aimed at protests against NATO expansion and above all regarding Palestine, with all opposition to Bibi-led genocide labeled ”anti-Semitism.” A majority of LINKE officialdom, while opposing German support and the sending of more weapons, has been wobbly on these decisive questions:
Some critics in the party have presented it this way:
Is the war in the Ukraine, though violating international law (about which others disagree), an expression of Russian aggressiveness or would it never have taken place if the NATO had not broken its promise not to expand eastwards, thus violating a Russian need for security? Does the death of 27 million Soviet victims of German-fascist aggression during the World War deserve only abstract recollections or forgetfulness—or rather also a reflection on current policy?
Is the Federal Republic in danger of being attacked or is the current alarm campaign really the ideological basis for rearmament and militarization of all fields of society worse than ever since 1945? Does German membership in NATO and leadership in militarizing the European Union represent a growing menace to world peace? Would a military draft—now being planned—and military units stationed outside Germany—long since in practice—improve or endanger peace?
These questions are being debated within the LINKE. How they are resolved and how many can be activated, also on closely related issues like rent, jobs, social assistance and, definitely, environment—will not only affect Germans. Rheinmetall and Blackstone, Amazon and Springer, Lockheed, Bezos, Musk and all their billionaire ilk, with their ubiquitous pawns or allies, are exceedingly powerful. On occasion, however—though still far too seldom—so can be those on the other side—our side! It has won some tough struggles—and can do it again—and again!