Upside Down: German Left-Wing Media taz Calls for NATO to ‘Liberate’ Ukraine
Weep as a (former) Maoist-turned-Green-turned-SPD party hack surrenders his intellect calling for NATO to kick out the Russians without as much as an afterthought (to say nothing about a forethought…)
In these pages, we chronicle the decay and self-destruction of what used to be called ‘the systemic Left’. While this process was, arguably, well under way before self-styled ‘New Democrats’ (Bill Clinton), or ‘New Labour’ (Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder) took over from exhausted conservatives in the 1990s and 2000s, twenty years later we are able to clearly see the wreckage these politicians have caused:
Foreign policy-wise, that destruction would, of course, include major boondoggles (Somalia in the early 1990s, of which Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down speaks, albeit very one-sidedly and partially), great human catastrophes in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegowina, NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia in 1998/99, and we haven’t even gotten to the post-9/11 era…
As to the US-instigated aggression of NATO against Yugoslavia, let us not forget that Europeans aided and abetted this abominable course of action in 1998/99. Today, these politicians and their brown-nosing camp followers in legacy media condescendingly scoff at, and put sanctions in place against, Russia, as well as feeding their peoples’ futures to the gods of mammon and death.
For evidence of my harsh claims, we turn to Chris Clark’s (Regius Prof., U Cambridge) bestseller The Sleepwalkers (London: Allen Lane, 2012), whose work—as establishmentarian as any—gives away the game (on pp. 456-7, my emphases):
It would certainly be misleading to think of the Austrian note [the ultimatum to Serbia delivered on 28 July 1914] as an anomalous regression into a barbaric and bygone era before the rise of sovereign states. The Austrian note was a great deal milder, for example, than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the form of the Rambouillet Agreement drawn up in February and March 1999 to force the Serbs into complying with NATO policy in Kosovo. Its provisions included the following:
‘NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access through the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.’
Henry Kissinger was doubtless right when he described Rambouillet as ‘a provocation, an excuse to start bombing’, whose terms were unacceptable even to the most moderate Serbian. The demands of the Austrian note pale by comparison.
Yet, here we are, in summer of 2022, with the below call for action—aggression—by NATO, no less, found in the Berlin-based Tageszeitung, or taz, which offered German politician and left-wing activist Udo Knapp (more on him below the piece) its op-ed space to engage in warmongering.
Note that the Tageszeitung styles itself as ‘bringing you all that is important in the left media house in Friedrichstraße’. Note, furthermore, that the (German-language) version of the Ministry of Truth™ boldly declares that the Tageszeitung is
A supra-regional daily newspaper described as green-left, alt-left, and dissenting [systemkritisch].
Note that the same entry holds that the Tageszeitung is run by two women.
If you’d only click on the English-language version of the same entry, you wouldn’t know about these ‘interesting’ self-identifiers, though.
Now, would you be surprised by the above-related call for foreign military adventurism reproduced below. As always, my translation and emphases, while credit for all content and images belongs to those sources mentioned.
Russia’s War of Aggression
Is the West Giving Up?
Why NATO ground forces must repel the illegal advance of Putin’s army into Ukraine.
A famous announcement from the early Christian New Testament reads: ‘But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ [KJV] Unfortunately, in the history of civilisation, doing so has never been able to contain evil in either private or public life, nor has it been able to prevent wars. Matthew 5:39 has remained religious faith, unfulfilled longing for the power of love to domesticate all evil, the peaceful reconciliation of irreconcilable interests, which has never been observed even by Christians themselves, apart from a few martyrs.
[Note the dual projection: ‘history of civilisation’, which is, to the author of the piece, intimately tied to Latin Christianity, i.e., excludes Orthodoxy and specifically Russia. This is an appalling smear, which will in all likelihood go unnoticed.]
Within states, evil and violence have been tabooed and contained throughout the history of civilisation, through wars, mountains of corpses and devastation, solely by the rule of law and a state monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Externally, there is indeed international law, which is supposed to regulate the peaceful interaction of all states with each other. But strictly speaking, international law only exists because liberal democracies maintain highly armed militaries. In this way, they signal that they are prepared to go to war in the event of excessive threats to their own security.
[This entire paragraph is wrong, in particular in terms of its historical veracity. International Law, from Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius to later thinkers, including Thomas Hobbes, and many more, is meant to regulate interactions between sovereign entities, be they absolutist monarchies or democratic republics (ahem). Peace—and war—are thus subjects of int’l law, and to claim that the former is it’s raison d’être while the latter is, well, merely incidental, is fake history at its worst: propaganda and virtue-signalling. Furthermore, liberal democracies don’t ‘maintain highly armed militaries’ to ‘signal that they are prepared to go to war’: this is a historical fact only after 1945, for before WWII, there were very few liberal democracies, all of which were thoroughly ill-prepared to maintain the status quo in the face of the challenges posited by Fascism, National Socialism, and, yes, Soviet Communism, but to claim so is a classical way of intellectual fallacy, to say nothing about the utter absurdity to claim that high military spending would entail peace.
Also, note that last sentence: liberal democracies do accept ‘national interests’, as in ‘excessive threats to their own security’. In other words: Putin’s Russia, it is alleged, is not a ‘liberal democracy’, hence it cannot, ipso facto, experience such ‘excessive threats to their own security’. What Mr. Knapp is doing here is not only denigrating Russia and the Russian people, but he very explicitly denies that they are part of civilisation and thus entitled to the pursuit of their own interests.]
Violence as the Last Means of Self-Preservation
The Christian principle of [holding up both the] ‘right cheek and the left cheek’ has been replaced in political reality by weighing the price that military intervention in wars could cost in terms of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, and human rights, as well as for the comforts of everyday life. This weighing does not change the unpleasant fact that there are always situations in which there are no longer any alternatives to war and to violence as the last means of self-assertion.
[Now, last time I checked, natural law-deriving freedoms and liberties don’t include the right to ‘the comforts of everyday life’. Violence and wars are inescapably parts of the human condition, and to state the obvious, Mr. Knapp has wasted your time as well as mine to reveal his pro-war stance.]
The West has now reached this point in the case of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. Even without drawing historical parallels, it can be stated: Putin has risen to become a self-centred, autocratic dictator [Alleinherrscher] who apparently sees his mission in life as not only pushing back the liberal Western world and its liberality, but to destroy it. He wants to turn back history. Russia is to become an alternative to Western life, thought and rule again. To this end, he is forming alliances with the world’s other dictators in China, Syria, Iran and with many other would-be autocrats. He knows that his military chances of achieving this goal in his lifetime are dwindling ever faster due to the end of the use of fossil energies.
[There’s no evidence whatsoever to support both major topics alleged by this paragraph. One doesn’t have to condone Russia’s ‘special military operation’ or whatever one wishes to call it (I certainly don’t), but it’s not too difficult to understand that Mr. Putin is executing operations that he warned his ‘Western partners’ frequently and repeatedly, but to no avail. I think what Mr. Knapp’s framing intimates isn’t merely the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the self-styled progressive and politically left-leaning juste milieu of what remains of ‘the West’, but it’s the dread of him and his ilk that Russia might indeed provide a non-Communist ‘alternative’ to the decadent Western models, grounded in virtually everything so lividly abhorred by the Gutmenschen of our time (the suburban Karens, in US parlance), including patriotism, family, and a place for organized religion in public life. Make of it what you will, and I certainly find all of these aspects entirely appealing, but that’s what enrages Mr. Knapp and his ilk, in particular as much of world beyond ‘the West’ would, seemingly, rather side with Russia on these issues.
I don’t know why the mentioning of fossil fuels is in the paragraph, well, apart from the Tageszeitung being a self-styled trendy Climate Change™-aware outlet.]
Prelude to a Global War of Systems
Putin unscrupulously uses all conceivable economic instruments to divide the West and drive it into internal crises. He supports anti-democratic, even fascist movements. Now he is showing in Ukraine that he is prepared to enforce his goal with uninhibited violence against the population. For him, the war in Ukraine is only the prelude to his global systemic war.
[I won’t emphasise much in this paragraph, for it’s mainly repetitions and projection of the above. Do note, however, that the emphasised adjectives all indicate pejorative character traits, of which merely one side stands accused. Interestingly, Mr. Putin drives ‘the West…into internal crises’, which indicates that the potential for such crises was already there in the West, hence, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Knapp admits to the fact that, at best, Russia’s actions are tantamount to a catalyst, which, as any chemist knows, isn’t part of either the basis or the result of the reaction. In other words: if ‘Mr. Putin’ is, indeed, such a catalyst, the problems decried by the op-ed writer are, in fact, germane to the West. Hence, this piece doesn’t merely a reek of double standards and hypocrisy, but it’s a dual projection of the West’s own decay that is blamed on external actors, in this case Russia.]
The states of the West, above all the USA, have decided not to accept this declaration of war on its livelihoods. Although they condemn the imperialist attack on the West in Ukraine, which is contrary to international law, they downgrade it to a regional event. Ukraine has to cope on its own with the thus almost insoluble task of repelling Russian aggression. While hesitant to supplies insufficient amounts of armaments, the West is trying to arm Ukraine in such a way that Putin, forced into a war of attrition, cannot win on the battlefield.
[As to the final paragraph: it’s just more BS of the more stupid sort. Russia’s actions aren’t the result of a ‘declaration of war on [the West’s] livelihoods’. These are the results of Western actions, mainly, in particular the artificially high energy prices coupled with the already severe dislocation in financial markets, mainly due to the rapid and seemingly unstoppable money ‘printing’ since early 2020. Note the admission that Ukraine cannot win militarily, but instead of, for instance, calling on European politicians to go to D.C. and try to make the U.S. change its stance, Mr. Knapp calls for more fighting.]
Bottom Lines
Who is Mr. Knapp? Well, according to the Ministry of Truth™, he’s a long-term leftist activist since his student days in Cold War West Berlin. And ‘leftist’ in Mr. Knapp’s biography also includes affiliation with the Maolist faction Proletarian Left (Proletarische Link/Parteiinitiative) in the 1970s. He lost his job as a public official in Spandau, by the way, because he wouldn’t rise in honour of a person killed by the similarly ultra-left, extremist, and terrorist Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion). German-language Wikipedia cites him as follows:
Of course, I am against this murder; I distanced myself from the terror [as political means], but I did not want to have the state impose mourning on me.
After repeatedly switching political affiliations in the ultra-leftist corners, Udo Knapp eventually became a member of the Greens in the 1980s before following his then-boss, Green MP Otto Schily, to join the SPD. Despite his unreliability in terms of loyalty, he eventually rose through the ranks and managed to end up running education policies under the Schröder government as well as in charge of portfolios dedicated to the reconstruction efforts in the former GDR.
His political positions are as fluid as this colourful biographical sketch indicates. According to this German-language Wikipedia entry, Mr. Knapp, in August 2019, alleged that the East Germans didn’t contribute to the end of Communist rule and had remained indifferent to two dictatorships (I’m assuming one to be the Soviet-style Communists with the other being, according to another hare-brained op-ed in the same Tageszeitung, the fact that the ‘loosers of post-1989/90 modernisation’ [Modernisierungsverlierer]—that would be the ‘deplorables’ in US parlance—voting for the right-wing Alternative for Germany.)
At that point, if you’d wonder about Mr. Knapp’s sentiments concerning the Covid Tyranny, well, here goes: in 2020, he denounced calls for strikes by the union ver.di (1.9m members) and others as ‘lacking solidarity’ with the declared state of public health emergency.
In other words: a charming, public pension-funded agent provocateur whose ties to the Greens indicate high levels of potential that this piece of crap op-ed will be read by the fellow members of the juste milieu.
What could go wrong?
The most depressing fact of this entire piece of junk, to me, is that Mr. Knapp calls for NATO intervention in Ukraine—which I hold to be a suicidal idea: NATO couldn’t win against sandal-wearing and AK-47-toting Afghans: how do people like Mr. Knapp imagine the way such a combat would work out vs. Russia with its much more sophisticated hardware, to say nothing about nuclear weapons? My biggest worry, though, isn’t even that: note the absence of any thought about the day after military intervention in Ukraine would have resulted in a Russian defeat: what then? Would NATO try to march on Moscow? Would Russia accept defeat? This op-ed is as dangerous as it is intellectually devoid of any thoughts, but that’s not the reason I brought it to your attention: it’s the Greens and their fellow travellers in progressive (ahem) legacy media that are pushing the West towards escalation with Russia—and they do so without as much as a fore- and afterthought. Be afraid, be very afraid, if these people ever get to run a major country, such as…Germany.
Oh my.
Ha! There it is, the "Russian war of aggression" (der Russische Angriffskrieg).
Here's a case with similar symptoms (in German: https://cm27874.jimdofree.com/). Joachim Gauck, former Bundespräsident and Lutheran pastor, is arguing pro war, and has of course been pro vaccine mandate.
Thoughts, apart from being thankful and impressed by you doing so much work:
Knapp's text can largely be summed up as "Russia doesn't conform to our moral and societal standards so therefore we ar morally obligated to attack them", a very unmodern sentiment and the rallying cry of crusaders and jihadis and puritans of all sorts throughtout time. I much prefer people like Attila, Genghis Khan and Ragnar Lodbrok: "Those people over there have ricjes what they can't defend, so let's go tax them!" Brutally honest and upright, not the slimy smarmy contortions of right-thinking gutmenschen.
Actually, the text in taz can also be summed up, if one focuses on the bit about Putin using the cracks in the West's facade (and foundations...) to exert political pressure, as "Dolchstoss". I'm not sure Knapp would apporve of being likened to Julius Streicher, but it feels similar in style and tone, possibly even intent - the slavic nations were after all to become farmland and areas for resource exploitation once the slavs were done away with.
Now, Knapp isn't advocating that as such, nor is any german - but that is what it lookslike to Russia, an just as it is Knapp's words and emotions that are the only valid points ofreference when understanding Knapp, so is Russia's when it comes to understanding why they act the way they do. It's no use trying to understand Russia as "should behave like us but won't so they must be stupid or evil". Besides being inherently racist (or culturally racist I guess one would say nowadays) it also means any analysis will come out wrong.
Far better for the Knapps of the world if they accepted that Russia's stance is valid to Russia, if not to others, and straight out said: "We say what Russia is doing is wrong, so we are going to stop them and force them to do right according to us".
Perhaps one of the reasons for all the new-speak and doublethink is, that such statements in both press and by politicos would have quite sharp reactions from certain african, arabian, and asian nations... Problem is of course that engage in doublespeak and new-think long enough and you might just start believe in it for real.