Meet the Green Collectivists (same as the red ones) Calling for 'Purchase Guarantees'
Together with the EU Commission, Mr. Habeck is hell-bent on moving the bloc towards a planned economy
Welcome to clown world, I suppose. If you thought that, in the wake of ‘stupid watergate’, it won’t get much more idiotic, well, here goes.
Translation, emphases, and bottom lines mine.
Now Even the Greens Want Massive Rearmament
By Nikolaus Blome and Holger Schmidt-Denker, N-TV, 17 Feb. 2024 [source]
Economics Minister Habeck complains about the sluggish defence industry: ‘We can't get production ramped up.’ He wants to speed up things and get the CDU/CSU on board.
When the news of Alexei Navalny's death broke at the start of the Munich Security Conference, the mood of the many generals, politicians and experts became even darker. The impression was that warlord Vladimir Putin feels stronger than ever—’and maybe he's right’, as a high-ranking star general in the Bundeswehr said behind closed doors.
The Green Minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck is also among the rather worried and now also among the rather impatient. In an NTV interview, he explains in an almost angry tone: ‘We have to build up production capacities now. We should have done that two years ago.’ [why didn’t you? I mean, you, Mr. Habeck, are the Economy Minister of the current gov’t…] What has taken two years since the start of the war, however, was the path to the ground-breaking ceremony for a new ammunition factory in Germany. The Federal Chancellor officially opened the construction site, but it will be some time before it is up and running.
‘We can't get production up’, Habeck continued in the interview. He doesn't blame the industry for this so much as his own traffic light government. Only if the industry is provided with long-term purchase guarantees can production grow rapidly. ‘What we need is a purchase guarantee’, concludes Habeck [this is stupid, false, and historically absurdly idiotic, and I shall address this below].
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sees it the same way. She wants to install a kind of ‘defence commissioner’ in the next EU Commission—should she lead it again [that’s a threat, I suppose, and I doubt that the creation of a ‘defence commissioner’ will be contingent on von der Leyen leading the EU Commission]. This would be comparable to the ‘vaccine commissioner’ Breton, who organised the Europe-wide production and purchase of vaccines during the coronavirus crisis [what could go wrong…?]. And here, too, it was the case that the industry would only ramp up production if purchase guarantees were in place for a longer period of time—but then at a rapid pace [as an aside, that’s no longer ‘capitalism’ we’re talking about here: it’s a planned economy with production aims and pre-determined deliveries].
Rearmament as a Central Project
It's all a question of money, Habeck continued in the interview—when he was asked about a sentence from the Chancellor's speech that morning, which probably made many at the security conference sit up and take notice: ‘Without security, everything else is nothing’, the Chancellor had said. If it was anything more than a nice determined-sounding Sunday speech phrase, the consequences would be enormous: security and armament would jump to the top of the list of priorities, while ‘everything else’ would have to take a back seat. Or, in Robert Habeck's typical thoughtful tone: ‘If it means that without security everything is nothing, then it also means that the other things are worth less.’ [for the record, I shall quote Benjamin Franklin here: ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety’.]
However, the Vice Chancellor warned that the sums could not be mobilised from the already highly controversial federal budget. ‘If you look at the volumes involved, it won't be possible to mobilise them by reallocating funds in the federal budget. That would be fractions of the volumes we are talking about if we really take this sentence seriously. Security costs something.’ [He is, of course, indicating to ‘print’ ever more money to force-feed the arms manufacturers; sorry folks, no money for road or school repairs, your pensions, or anything else—priorities, you know]. Incidentally, in the 1960s and 70s, security accounted for several times as much of Germany's gross national product compared to the current figure of just over 2% [see here for data indicating that the high point of military expenditures as percentage of GDP in the timeframe given was 4.9% in 1963.]
Robert Habeck certainly seems to consider the rearmament project to be the centrepiece of the coming years. The shock seems to have got into his bones at the security conference. However, there was no shortage of gloomy predictions about the war in eastern Ukraine, the elections in the USA, and Vladimir Putin's cynical determination. Perhaps this is why Habeck garnished his demands with a barely audible appeal to the CDU and CSU opposition. ‘Security is a conservative issue’, said the Green Vice-Chancellor. And probably meant that the conservatives should help raise the necessary money.
Bottom Lines
The ills of militarism and the economic problems it entails are fairly well understood, and they have been summarised succinctly back in 1899 in The Literary’s Digest (dated 15 April, see here), from which I shall quote a few lines:
Militarism as represented in continental Europe has many disadvantages. It robs industrial enterprise of several years in the life of healthy men. It compels young men to submit to discipline at a time when they most wish to be free. It entails enormous expense. Yet there are some benefits…
That the states which are affected by the rapid development of national military training have not, as had been predicted, ruined themselves, but advanced economically at a most stupendous rate, is a fact known to all…
Max Schippel, Socialist (!) member for Chemnitz in the Reichstag, said during a recent speech: ‘The great expenditure of modern society for military purposes is not an increase, but a decrease of our economical problems. The condition of overproduction is improved rather than aggravated by the fact that many consumers are not producers…This does not make militarism more pleasant to me, but I can not join in the wail which the bourgeois-Radicals raise about our expenditure on the army.’
It would ‘later’ become labelled (military) Keynesianism, i.e., the (ab)use of productive capabilities for non-productive ends. The most helpful exposition I’ve yet read I found in John T. Flynn’s As We Go Marching (1944), which you can find here. I shall quote a bit from Pt. III, Chapter IV, entitled ‘Democratic Militarism’ (emphases mine):
War does wipe out unemployment and does create and distribute widely new money income. But far more important than war is the preparation for war. Indeed war itself is often a by-product of this preparation and of the circumstances which lead to preparation. Preparation for war is far more effective than war as an antidote against unemployment. War produces a more complete result but it is temporary, passes swiftly, and leaves behind it immense dislocations. But preparation for war can go on for a long time—for forty years in Germany and France and Italy. War or preparation for war establishes the government as the one big customer for the one big industry to which almost all industries become tributary: the armament industry. Preparation for war—national defense, it is called—can take a million or more men in this country in peacetime out of the labor market and put them in the army while at the same time three times as many can be drawn into the industries which provide them with tanks, planes, guns, barracks, food, clothes, etc., all paid for by the government with funds raised largely if not altogether by debt…
The great and glamorous industry is here—the industry of militarism. And when the war is ended the country is going to be asked if it seriously wishes to demobilize an industry that can employ so many men, create so much national income when the nation is faced with the probability of vast unemployment in industry. All the well-known arguments, used so long and so successfully in Europe, in Germany, in Italy, and in France, will be dusted off—America with her high purposes of world regeneration must have the power to back up her magnificent ideals; America cannot afford to grow soft, and the Army and the Navy must be continued on a vast scale to toughen the moral and physical sinews of our youth; America dare not live in a world of gangsters and aggressors without keeping her full power mustered; America can find a moral equivalent for war in a great peacetime army which will primarily train our youth for life and health with adequate military training thrown in, and above and below and all around these sentiments will be the sinister allurement of the perpetuation of the great industry which can never know a depression because it will have but one customer—the American government to whose pocket there is no bottom.
I highly recommend reading Flynn’s entire book (see the above link), esp. as he directly connects militarism to profligate spending and ‘autarchy’ (think: the ‘Energy Transition’):
THERE REMAINS the final ingredient—the totalitarian state. Surely that cannot come here! Let us see.
We have seen that already we have introduced:
The institution of planned consumption or the spending-borrowing government.
The planned economy.
Militarism as an economic institution, and
Imperialism as the handmaiden of our militarism.
But what of the totalitarian state? Can it be that America [EUrope, ‘the West’] will ever complete that job? It may be, I hear the critic say, that we have embraced four of the elements of the fascist state but we will not have fascism or national socialism until we add the fifth—the totalitarian political idea. Between a democratic state seeking to plan and manage its economic life and supporting it by means of national debt, even though it becomes militaristic and imperialist, and the fascist state managing these things through a dictatorship there is a world of difference…
A totalitarian government, therefore, is one—whatever its form—which possesses the power to enact any law or take any measure that seems proper to it. That government may consist of a dictator, or a king and cabinet, or a king, cabinet, and parliament, or just a parliament and a president. Provided that government is clothed with the power to do anything without any limitation on its powers, it is totalitarian. It has total power…
There is something in all this alarmingly like those ideas which flourished in Hitler’s Germany. ‘The principle of unconditional connection’, said Hitler, ‘between absolute responsibility and absolute authority will gradually breed up a choice of leaders inconceivable today in the era of irresponsible parliamentarianism.’ The state, he conceded, will not be able to do without these things called parliaments. They, however, ‘will give counsel, but responsibility can and must be borne by one man’.
I’m re-iterating my invitation to read the entire book by Flynn; here, I shall merely quote a few more lines from his concluding remarks from Ch. 7, entitled ‘Final Notes’:
IF WE WILL LOOK over the scene in America we will see clearly enough that, despite many differences in the character, customs, laws, traditions, resources of the peoples of Italy, Germany, and America, we have been drifting along identical courses and under the influence of the same essential forces. We have been moving away from free enterprise and from the essential features of constitutional government…
If you would know, therefore, who are the fascists in America, you must ask yourselves not who are the men and women most vocal in their denunciations of Hitler and Mussolini. The most ardent enemies of those two leaders were some of their rival fascist dictators in Europe. The test of fascism is not one’s rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is—how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government—then you will know you have located the authentic fascist…
If national socialism is not the answer to the troubles of the capitalist system—then what is? The question is a fair one. My own answer is that as between the troubles of the capitalist system and national socialism I will take the present system no matter how great and difficult its troubles. Anything rather than the degenerate, the degrading forms of existence which fascism requires. However, I know that the difficulties of the capitalist society are such—weighing as they do upon the least favored elements of the population—that some intelligent and rational solution must be found or the fraudulent messiahs will have their way. I am convinced that it is possible to formulate a program for the regeneration and salvation of the present system of society and for the preservation of our essential political liberties. But it must be in a wholly different direction from national socialism toward which we now move. This system of society cannot possibly be saved by men who do not believe in it, who are convinced that it is washed up, and who are contriving plans that have been tried over and over again in Europe and always with the same result—despotism and disaster.
Sigh, times three.
The person pictured in the above posting on X is Ms. Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the leading candidate of the German FDP for the upcoming EU elections; she’s a known warmonger, influence-peddler for the arms industry, and is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan:
[German ballistic missiles] Taurus for Ukraine / Together for Victory.
It sounds more demonic in German, trust me.
Have we learned nothing from history?
What the overlords have learned from history is how to do it better than last time, from their perspective.
Blackrock already owns 1/3 of all the farmland in Ukraine, via proxies. The only security Ukraine has for the loans they're getting from the US is land, so the farmland is put up as security.
When the war is over, no matter the end-result, the US will own the farmland that all of the EU depends upon for food.
And few things cause civil unrest and war as easy as lack of food - just ask Sulla and Marius.
That Greens vye with the corporate capitalists for who is more pro-war is hilarious: production of machines, weapons and ammunition to say nothing of its usage is among the absloute most polluting types of industry.
This was a rhetorical question: "Have we learned nothing from history?", but...
Well, who's "we"? If you mean your readership, then of course WE have learned something ;)
However if you mean "western" mainstream society and/or it's elected leaders then I am coming round to answering no, not very much has been learned. And what little has been learned seems to be in such rigidly restricted terms of forms/appearances/labels that the essence/nature/content of events is mostly missed. History doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
I've gotten to middle age and have realised most of the people running our governments (and many companies) are facsimile MBA graduates, or acolytes of the WEF, or just career-scheming id-politicking hacks. Perhaps it was always so, though I do think my father had more respect for the politicians of his day. The generation of European politicians who had a palpable connection to or appreciation of the destruction and horrors of WWII is gone. When I think of the current crop of Macron, Sunak, Neuhammer, Meloni, Rutte, Sanchez, Zelensky(!) (honourable mention goes to five-eyes Trudeau & Ahern) I see shallow individuals not heavyweights. That politicians like Scholz, Tusk, or von der Leyen, now represent the experienced European old guard is even more depressing. But then age does not equate to wisdom, considering the geriatric politicians in the USA and Israel seem to be blood-thirsty war-mongerers to the very last. The up-and-coming Euros are now beating the war drums, or at very least armaments and preparations.
I am beginning to feel we are living in a garish cartoon world where everything is reduced to trite slogans and news bites - fertile ground for every popular hysteria flavour of the month. Globalism, has taken a sledgehammer flattening everything into conformity while subtelty has gone from being outright unwelcome to incomprehensible. Financialism, huge fiat currency debts, the crypto craze... I'm just rambling now but this modern world of symbol manipulators and pen pushers is surely heading for a full-frontal crash with the real world of Kilogrammes, Kilowatts, and Kilojoules of physical resources and physical constraints. In Germany, we are already seeing farmers protesting on the streets, industrialists writing obituaries for Made in Germany, grocery and electricity prices reaching levels even the middle-classes are mumbling and democracy is reputedly at risk around every corner.
Lately, I've been watching the Babylon Berlin tv series set at the end of the roaring 1920s and depression of the early 1930s. One cannot but be struck by the lack of certainty the characters lived in those times, the comparably low standard of living for the masses, how unemployment, poverty, sickness, and death hovers at a short remove. I know, I know, many other countries have experienced such times much more recently or still are, but I am comfortably European so my focus is here.
Call me crazy, but I sense there is a financial crash coming up. And then things will get real all at once. In the meantime the German government is trying to convince us to sink our savings or take out loans to ditch our gas/oil heating for fancy electric-grid guzzling refrigerators and autos. This. Will. Not. End. Well.