Thursday, December 24, 2015

Iran calls on China to step up contribution to anti-Daesh fight

News | 24.12.2015 | 19:40
 
PressTV - A senior Iranian official has called on China to increase its contribution to the fight against Daesh Takfiri terrorists.
“By becoming more active in practical combat against Daesh, China can greatly contribute to peace and stability in the region,” Mohsen Rezaei said in a Thursday meeting with a visiting delegation from the Communist Party of China.
Rezaei, who is the secretary of Iran’s top political arbitration body Expediency Council, said that Iran is open to further interaction with China’s Muslim population to "counter the infiltration of Takfiri currents into Central Asia."
The Iranian official also called for enhanced economic cooperation between Tehran and Beijing in light of a July nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, saying the current level of trade between Iran and China is “inadequate.”
The Chinese delegation, which is visiting Iran upon an official invitation by Rezaei, has held meetings with other senior Iranian officials.

UN can’t confirm Amnesty’s ‘remote investigation’ of Russia’s strikes in Syria

News | 24.12.2015 | 14:08
 
RT - The UN “cannot independently confirm” information presented in Amnesty International’s report on alleged civilian casualties of Russian airstrikes in Syria. The Russian defense ministry dismissed the paper’s findings as “cliches” lacking hard evidence
 
The human rights watchdog’s latest report exposing “Russia’s shameful failure to acknowledge civilian killings” is focused on six attacks in Homs, Idlib and Aleppo provinces, which the NGO pinned on “suspected Russian airstrikes.” Amnesty researched the attacks “remotely”, going as far as to accuse Russia of war crimes by causing “massive destruction” of residential areas through the alleged use of internationally prohibited cluster munitions.
The information presented in the Amnesty International report was alarming, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, noting, however, that the UN cannot verify the NGO’s sources and findings.
“The Secretary General notes with concern Amnesty International report on alleged violations of international humanitarian law resulting of the Russian airstrikes in Syria. The UN cannot independently confirm the cases presented in the report,”Deputy Spokesman for the Secretary-General, Farhan Haq said.
Based on witness accounts gathered via phone interviews, information from local human rights defenders and after reviewing videos and pictures posted online, Amnesty came to the conclusion that at least 200 civilians had been killed in at least 25 Russian airstrikes since the air campaign began.
The Russian defense ministry dismissed the report for its failure to provide any concrete evidence or new factual information whatsoever, besides groundless assumptions and accusations.
“Once again, nothing concrete or new was published, only the same cliches and fakes that we have already debunked repeatedly,” Russian defense ministry spokesman, General-Major Igor Konashenkov, said after reviewing the report.
“The report constantly uses expressions such as ‘supposedly Russian strikes,’ ‘possible violations of international law’ – a lot of assumptions without any evidence,” he noted.
Furthermore Moscow doubts the authenticity of the aerial photos used by Amnesty International and called upon the NGO to at least name the sources of the information it had used in the report.
“The barrage of lies was aimed at accusing Russian forces of bombing Syrian hospitals. We immediately rejected these claims, presenting comprehensive photographic and video evidence to the public. A characteristic feature of all these allegations is the lack of concrete evidence and references to anonymous witnesses,” Konashenkov told reporters.
“As for cluster munitions allegations. Russian aviation are not using them,” the general-major added. He reminded that dozens of international journalists who visited Russia’s Kheimim base in Latakia filmed the jets preparing for sorties but“have never presented footage or asked questions about them because there are no such weapons at our base.”
The general in turn accused the NGO of not covering jihadist atrocities in Iraq and Syria or illegal activities of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Konashenkov told reporters that Amnesty also failed to investigate the use of cluster munitions by Kiev’s troops in eastern Ukraine.
“We have a question for Amnesty International: why did this organization keep silent and turn a blind eye to material, undeniable, real evidence of the use of cluster munitions by the Ukrainian Armed Forces against cities in eastern Ukraine?”
The general-major concluded that such fake reports are manufactured to distract the international community from the four-year civil war in Syria and to divert public attention from real concerns on the ground.
There are indeed some “serious defects” in the credibility of Amnesty’s report, security analyst and former counter-terrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge told RT, suggesting that was rather an emotional call to avoid civilian casualties, than an independent and impartial investigation.
“Of course nobody would say that it is not difficult in Syria’s circumstances to carry out such an [impartial] investigation, particularly since these areas, the targets of Russia’s attacks are of course under the control of rebel and in many cases extremist Islamist groups, which of course very much restricts what local members of the public are allowed to say,”Shoebridge explained.
Shoebridge insists that “some degree of civilian casualties” is almost inevitable from any aerial campaign even with the most precise weapons, but says that even people witnessing the attacks on the ground can’t point to the perpetrator with any degree of certainty.
“People on the ground, particularly doctors that have been interviewed or working inside hospitals dealing with injuries they of course can say these are blast injuries, shrapnel injuries, but they themselves cannot say with any certainty in most respects… It is certainly the case that I think people on the ground will have great difficulty to differentiate in between not only blast that was caused by perhaps the artillery or rocket, or even explosions from car bombs in some cases, but particularly who it is that is dropping bombs on them,” Shoebridge said.
Besides the questionable effectiveness of the “remote investigation technique”, Amnesty’s own credibility and impartiality should be looked at, Shoebridge added.
“It is important to look at the nature of Amnesty itself in terms of the credibility of its reporting. For a large part of this Syria conflict Amnesty, particularly here in its London office, has made no secret of its support for large part of Syria’s rebellion, even at some point a couple of years ago calling – which many people would find bizarre for human rights group – for the arming of Syria’s rebels, even though at the time Syrian rebels were known to be carrying out human rights abuses themselves of very serious nature.”
 
Tags: Amnesty International UN ISIS Russia Syria
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/24/un-cant-confirm-amnesty-remote-investigation-russia-strikes-syria.html

The Frankfurt School at War in Foreign Affairs




The Marxists Who Explained the Nazis to Washington


Purchase Review




Secret Reports on Nazi Germany: The Frankfurt School Contribution to the War Effort. by FRANZ NEUMANN, HERBERT MARCUSE, and OTTO KIRCHHEIMER. edited by RAFFAELE LAUDANI. Princeton University Press, 2013, 704 pp. $45.00.
War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- a precursor to the CIA -- and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis.
Donovan was a decorated veteran of World War I and a Wall Street lawyer linked to the Republican Party. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt tapped him to create the United States’ first dedicated nonmilitary intelligence organization. At that time, many in the foreign policy establishment saw intelligence and espionage as somewhat undignified, even unimportant. So Donovan cast a wide net, recruiting not only diplomats and professional spies but also film directors, mobsters, scholars, athletes, and journalists.
Even in that diverse group, Franz Neumann stood out. Neumann, a Marxist lawyer and political scientist, had fled Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He arrived in the United States a few years later, where he was hailed as an expert on Nazi Germany after the 1942 publication of his book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, which depicted Nazism as a combination of pathological, monopolistic capitalism and brutal totalitarianism. Neumann’s work brought him to the attention of Donovan, who was eager to mobilize relevant expertise regardless of its bearer’s political views.
Donovan put Neumann in charge of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS, studying Nazi-ruled central Europe. Neumann was soon joined by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and the legal scholar Otto Kirchheimer, his colleagues at the left-wing Institute for Social Research, which had been founded in Frankfurt in 1923 but had moved to Columbia University after the Nazis came to power. What came to be known as the Frankfurt School combined an unorthodox brand of Marxism with an interdisciplinary approach to research that stressed the pivotal roles played by culture, law, politics, and psychology in buttressing injustice. Its members always disdained the more rigid leftist thinking that had claimed Marx’s mantle in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Despite the vast political and cultural gap separating Donovan from Neumann and his team, the spymaster trusted the radicals with the vital security task of providing advice about the Nazis. In the words of John Herz, another young refugee assigned to Neumann’s office (and later a major figure in postwar international relations theory), “It was as though the left-Hegelian World Spirit had briefly descended on the Central European Department of the OSS.”
The result of this unusual collaboration was a series of fascinating reports prepared for U.S. policymakers on topics ranging from anti-Semitism and the Nazi political economy to the impact of air raids on civilian morale and the best way to prosecute war criminals. Despite their backgrounds in such abstract fields as jurisprudence, philosophy, and political theory, the Frankfurt School thinkers turned out to be shrewd and down-to-earth political analysts. Yet their reports also point to the limits of wartime policy advising, the difficulty of applying theory to practice, and the sobering reality that even astute prognosticators are likely to remain imprisoned in the political past.
BACK TO SCHOOL
Much of this story has already been told, but this new volume -- ably assembled by Raffaele Laudani, a young Italian historian based at the University of Bologna -- conveniently collects a substantial chunk of the original documents penned by Neumann and his research team. Although German translations of some of this OSS material have been published before, this is the first time that an Anglophone audience can read the documents without having to visit a U.S. National Archives facility in Maryland.
Neither lifeless bureaucratic memos nor jargon-ridden academic tomes, the reports still make for good reading. To be sure -- bearing in mind, of course, the luxury of hindsight -- Neumann and his colleagues sometimes got things wrong. They never really understood the true depth of Nazi anti-Semitism, seeing it less as a political pathology than as a way for the Nazi regime to test new repressive strategies on one group before employing them on others. Relying on Neumann’s Behemoth, which depicted modern capitalism as Nazism’s main basis, they argued that the revitalization of German democracy depended on a socialist overhaul of the country’s economy, failing to anticipate the possibility of a fresh recalibration of capitalism with liberal democracy, along the lines that emerged after the war in the Federal Republic of Germany and elsewhere.
But they also got many things right. Their assessment of political and social conditions during Nazism’s final years has been substantially corroborated by a great deal of more recent scholarship. The group’s criticisms of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s plan to dismantle modern industrial Germany, foolishly endorsed by Roosevelt and forced on a skeptical Winston Churchill, might have played some role in President Harry Truman’s eventual decision to abandon it. In one of his reports, Kirchheimer presciently identified the legal difficulties that would ultimately face the United States when it came time to punish war criminals and expunge Germany of Nazi influence. Although he and his colleagues ultimately were disappointed by the Nuremberg trials and by what Herz later bitterly described as “the fiasco of denazification,” both of which they deemed insufficiently far-reaching, their OSS reports nevertheless provided much of the theoretical basis for the U.S. approach to postwar justice in Germany.
Most revealing, though, is the general advice that frames the Frankfurters’ message to U.S. policymakers: the Allies needed to stop viewing Nazi Germany through old lenses molded during World War I. Only if the United States grasped how contemporary realities broke with familiar historical precedents could it win the peace and lay the groundwork for a new German democracy. Neumann and his team excoriated U.S. policymakers for relying on anachronistic wartime images of Germany as “Prussian” and dominated by a military elite, as though the country were still ruled by the Kaiser. Backward-looking propaganda might gin up public support for the war in the Allied countries, but it falsified the realities of the Nazi power structure.
The Frankfurt School thinkers also feared that by mistaking the Germany of 1945 for the Germany of 1918, the Allies would fail to appreciate the ways in which the Nazis had made it unlikely that ordinary Germans would accept the kind of humiliating surrender they had suffered at the end of World War I. As Marcuse wrote in a report in September 1943, “The system of National Socialism has been devised for the very purpose of making a repetition of 1918 impossible.” The Frankfurters argued that the Nazis’ radical anti-Semitism was an attempt to guarantee the complicity of the broadest possible swath of the populace in Nazi crimes. With their hands dripping with blood, most Germans would likely see no real choice but to fight to the death against the Allies. Even if some evidence coming out of Germany suggested that wartime morale was low, the Nazis were doing everything possible to make sure that ordinary Germans had every incentive to stay the course.
SEEING 1945, THINKING 1918
Curiously, the Frankfurters occasionally failed to heed their own warnings about the perils of relying on misleading historical analogies. The most obvious example is their inability to foresee the possibility that a new and relatively robust German democracy -- built on a foundation of regulated capitalism combined with a generous welfare state -- could arise after the war. The Frankfurt scholars also worried incessantly about a possible replay of the crises of 1918, when the victorious Allies forced an unpopular peace on a new parliamentary German government dominated by moderate Social Democrats, making them easy targets for antidemocratic groups. In order to maintain order and neutralize the uprisings inspired partly by the Bolsheviks, the Social Democrats cut a series of deals and turned to traditional forces in the army and the reactionary paramilitary Freikorps to put an end to the unrest. The result was not only deep divisions on the political left that eased the way for Nazism but also a political system in which the bureaucracy and the military remained in the stranglehold of groups hostile to democracy and social reform. As Neumann argued in Behemoth, this cancerous antidemocratic “antistate” within the Weimar Republic eventually helped kill it off in 1933.
Yet despite their own warnings about relying on images of 1918, the Frankfurters succumbed to the same error by failing to acknowledge Nazism’s total decimation of civil society. Germany in 1945 witnessed none of the social upheavals that shook the country after World War I. The Frankfurt intellectuals’ Marxist faith in working-class resistance and militancy kept them from fully grasping the extent of Hitler’s successful obliteration of even the barest rudiments of political opposition.
The preoccupation with 1918 also explains the Frankfurters’ views about how best to end the war and promote German democracy. Their reports exude anxiety about the prospect that the Nazis might successfully exploit divisions between the Allies and so prevent Germany’s total military defeat. Such a short-circuiting of the war, they argued, would prove counterproductive since it would lead to a replay of Germany’s last defeat: powerful antidemocratic groups would remain in place. If the Americans and the British made a separate peace with groups within the German military willing to depose Hitler, it would only be a matter of time before the country’s familiar political pathologies resurfaced. As Marcuse warned, such a deal might even play out to the Russians’ advantage, since the West would lose any credibility with a German populace likely to demand radical political and social change, as it had in 1918.
The key to uprooting Nazism’s foundations, the Frankfurters argued, was Allied military and political unity. Only the Allies’ combined muscle could smash the pillars of Nazi power -- and German militarism -- once and for all. To help Germany make a clean start this time around, the Allies would need to fully occupy the country and round up the elites responsible for the crimes of the Third Reich. The Nazi Party would have to be banned and its leaders tried and imprisoned. Should the jails prove already full, Kirchheimer recommended, the Nazis could be temporarily housed in their own former concentration camps. Meanwhile, the Allies would also have to rid the bureaucracy of all authoritarian influences. Since big business not only used Nazi slave labor but had actively supported the regime and its imperialist policies, top industrialists should also be subject to strict denazification. As for the military elites directly involved in war crimes, they should face tribunals. And Germany, the Frankfurters urged, should never again be permitted to develop into a military power.
Whatever the virtues of their specific proposals, only some of which were ever partially implemented, the Frankfurters at least identified a perennial challenge facing occupiers after the defeat of a dictatorship: How can a foreign military government help dismantle authoritarianism and promote democracy without usurping those tasks properly left to indigenous democratic groups? Neumann’s team wanted an Allied military government to clean the political slate, allowing German democrats to create a new order. Not surprisingly, the reports show that the Frankfurt analysts struggled to figure out how this could best be accomplished. Firmly committed to the Marxist thesis that modern capitalism constituted a root cause of Nazism, they wanted the Allies to prepare the way for the nationalization of German heavy industry. Yet the reports also suggest that the Frankfurt School advisers were not quite sure about who should pursue this nationalization or when it was best to do so.
Their own leftist political agenda meshed, or so the Frankfurt scholars conveniently hoped, with the imperatives of wartime power politics. The Allied unity that the Frankfurters argued for would require that any joint postwar military government “embrace elements from both Anglo-American and Soviet social structure and practice,” as Neumann argued in a revealing September 1944 memo. Assuming that the alliance would survive the war’s conclusion, he advised Donovan that a stable military government could rest only on reform ideas fusing Anglo-American democracy with socialist economics. Power politics demanded what he and his Frankfurt School compatriots had always desired: a democratic socialist Germany. This assessment quickly proved mistaken, not least because of the explosive divisions between the West and the Soviets that soon emerged. As the increasingly frustrated Frankfurt scholars quickly grasped, their leftist vision was destined to have little impact on postwar U.S. policy or the remaking of Germany.
THE SECRET SHARER
The Frankfurt School’s role in wartime intelligence had almost been forgotten when, in the 1990s, the U.S. government declassified Soviet intelligence cables intercepted and deciphered in the 1940s by the United States and the United Kingdom as part of the so-called Venona Project. Some of the cables suggest that Neumann, operating under the code name “Ruff,” had passed along U.S. government secrets to Soviet agents. Although Laudani mentions the controversy, he seems reluctant to discuss it, as have been many others sympathetic to the Frankfurt School.
Laudani’s caution is understandable yet unfortunate. Neumann was a lifelong social democrat whose writings evince neither sympathy for Soviet communism nor any whiff of the fellow-traveling commonplace among radicals during the 1930s and 1940s. During the Cold War, he spoke out against Soviet tyranny in East Germany, helping establish the Free University of Berlin as a bulwark against the Sovietization of intellectual life in Germany’s great metropolis. Alarmed by the specter of a separate peace between the Soviets and the Germany military no less than the possibility of one between the West and right-wing elites, his OSS intelligence reports exhibit no affinity for Soviet communism.
So why then might Neumann have shared secret documents with the Soviets? The OSS reports point to one possible explanation. The most interesting materials he passed to the Soviets speak directly to a concern that also surfaces in the Frankfurters’ OSS contributions: that the wartime alliance could prematurely fall apart, and antidemocratic groups in Germany might finesse a deal with the West that prevented Germany’s total defeat and again left the pillars of German authoritarianism basically unharmed. “Ruff” shared secret OSS reports about a May 1944 meeting in Switzerland between an OSS official, Allen Dulles (who would later head the CIA), and a retired German general who told Dulles that the German military might overthrow Hitler and clear occupied western Europe of German troops as part of a deal with the Allies in which Germany would be permitted to continue waging war against the Soviet Union. Ironically, Soviet intelligence mistakenly classified the report from “Ruff” as disinformation. The meeting did in fact take place, but despite Neumann’s apparent efforts to warn the Soviets, they ignored him.
To judge from the Venona cables and Neumann’s work for the OSS, it appears that Neumann engaged in espionage not as a result of naiveté or illusions about Soviet communism but because he believed that only Allied unity and Soviet participation in bringing the war to a successful close could save democracy in Germany while leaving open some chance of radical social reform. Of course, given what soon happened wherever Stalin’s armies arrived, this view now inevitably seems misguided.
THEORY HEADS
Today, the Frankfurt School is widely associated with hostility to empiricism and even to science. On university campuses, its aficionados are typically found in literature and cultural studies departments, but not in economics, law, or political science. It is true that the most prominent Frankfurt School figures, the social philosopher Theodor Adorno and the cultural critic Walter Benjamin, had little patience for the sort of hardheaded research featured in the OSS reports. But the publication of those reports should serve as a reminder of the Frankfurt School’s neglected face, as represented by the enigmatic Neumann and his OSS colleagues, for whom rigorous empirical inquiry always constituted a core component of what they called the “critical theory of society.”
Their work for the OSS also highlights the prospects, as well as the perils, of any attempt to harness such research to government policymaking. Stepping directly into the political arena, the Frankfurters were forced to take risks generally spared those who remain safely cloistered in the academy. For his part, Donovan also gambled by tapping a group of foreign-born radicals to handle an important job for U.S. intelligence.
The Frankfurt thinkers’ own ideological and political preferences sometimes got in the way of providing sound policy advice. And in Neumann’s case, those preferences led to an unfortunate interlude with Soviet agents. Yet as the philosopher Raymond Geuss points out in his foreword to the book, present-day policymaking is plagued by “intellectual conformism,” and Geuss is right to worry about how intellectual standards for government analysis have sunk. It is worth wondering how many high-level officials in today’s Washington would bother to listen to scholarly advice drawn from outside the political and intellectual mainstream.

Weihnachtsbrief 2015 von Irene Eckert


Liebe Freunde, liebe Kollegen und um den Weltfrieden Besorgte,

verzeiht mir, wenn ich zur Weihnacht und zum Jahresende statt Persönliches anzumerken und zu berichten, grundsätzlich werde.

Natürlich ist auch das Persönliche politisch und das Politische persönlich, wie schon der gute alte Schweizer Dichter Gottfried Keller im 19. Jahrhundert wusste. Für ihn war alles politisch und zwar vom „Dachziegel bis zur Schuhsohle“. In Anbetracht all der Hiobsbotschaften, die uns das Jahr 2015 ins Haus brachte, möchte ich mit Bezug auf das bevorstehende Lutherjahr - hi gut protestantisch aller Wege - sagen: 

Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär,
und wollt uns gar verschlingen,
so fürchten wir und nicht so sehr,
es soll uns doch gelingen“ (Martin Luther „Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott“)

Auch die Worte eines französisch-katholisch geschulten, kommunistischen Dichters seien in Erinnerung gerufen:

Es ist nötig zu sprechen, es ist nötig zu sagen, was ist, selbst wenn viele Münder anders gesprochen haben – selbst wenn alle anders gesprochen haben“ Henri Barbusse, „Jesus“, Leipzig/Wien 1928, S.126

Das nahende Christfest mag auch den Bezug auf den älteren Teil der Bibel erlauben:

"Das Volk, das im Finstern lebt, sieht ein großes Licht; hell strahlt es auf über denen, die ohne Hoffnung sind. (...) Die Soldatenstiefel, die beim Marschieren so laut dröhnen, und all die blutverschmierten Kampfgewänder werden ins Feuer geworfen und verbrannt. Denn uns ist ein Kind geboren! Ein Sohn ist uns geschenkt! Er wird die Herrschaft übernehmen. Man nennt ihn "Wunderbarer Ratgeber", "Starker Gott", "Ewiger Vater", Friedefürst". Er wird seine Herrschaft weit ausdehnen und dauerhaften Frieden bringen." aus dem Alten Testament Jesaja 9, Verse 1, 4-6a

Diese Weihnacht könnten wir theoretisch mit Bezugnahme auf die alttestamentarische Botschaft als großes Friedensfest begehen. Wir feiern schließlich 70 Jahre Kriegsende und 70 Jahre Ãœberwindung des mordbrennerischen Hitlerfaschismus. Wir gedenken der 70 langen Jahre einer völkerversöhnenden UN Charta, eines universell gültigen Friedensinstruments. Wir können uns sogar auf die 2 700 Jahre alten Worte des biblischen Propheten Jessaja berufen, der die Ankunft des „Friedefürsten“ damals schon verkündet hat. Als christliche 'Wertegemeinschaft', an dessen Spitze der bibelkundige Theologe Gauck und die Pfarrerstochter Merkel stehen, müssten wir uns auf die ur-christliche Weihnachtsbotschaft vom Gerechtigkeit stiftenden Frieden beziehen und deren Symbolhaltigkeit modern ausdeuten. Gerechtigkeit und Wahrhaftigkeit müssten wir politisch anzustreben uns bemühen und somit die beiden meist genannten Vokabeln der Bibel praktisch umsetzen. Der einstmals gefeierte französische Antikriegsautor Henri Barbusse legt uns in zwei Jesus-Schriften aus den Zwischenkriegsjahren eine moderne Jesu-Deutung nahe, aus der die Verwandtschaft zwischen Christentum und Kommunismus abzulesen ist. 

Noch immer aber scheint „das Gedächtnis der Menschen für erduldete Leiden kurz“, wie uns der deutsche Dramatiker Bertolt Brecht in den 50iger Jahren mahnend ans Herz legte. Wieder einmal legen uns moderne Menschen die Mächtigen mit Lügen herein. Jene, die noch stets vom Kriege proftiert haben, rechnen mit unserer Unkenntnis der Geschichte und der Gesetzestexte. Sie suchen uns blinden Kätzchen wie ehedem ein X für ein U vorzumachen. Sie appelieren an unser Angstgefühl und Mitleidsempfinden gleichermaßen. Wofür einst das Gespenst des Kommunismus herhalten musste, ist heute die unaufrichtige Terroristenhatz gut. Eigenartiger Weise wächst das Terrorgeschwür je mehr man es zu bekämpfen vorgibt.

Am Freitag, den 4. Dezember 2015 beschloss der deutsche Bundestag über die Köpfe der Mehrheit der deutschen Bevölkerung hinweg im Tornado-Tempo, sich an einem völkerrechts-und grundgesetzwidrigen Angriffskrieg zu beteiligen. Eine siebenfache Mutter und gelernte Medizinerin verbucht das Ergebnis in ihrer Eigenschaft als „Verteidigungsministerin“ als Erfolg. 

„ … und das Gesetz, das die Reichen zu ihrem Erfolg erlassen und das Beispiel der Reichen verhängt den Krieg“ so spricht Jesus laut Henri Barbusse (ebd. „Jesus“ S. 67)

Deswegen lesen wir wohl in der Bibel wörtlich:„Eher geht ein Kamel durch ein Nadelöhr, als dass ein Reicher in das Reich Gottes gelangt.“ – Markus 10,25 

Aber die Mächtigen können nicht selber rechnen und sie scheinen auch jeder Vernunft verlustig gegangen. Sie rechnen vor allem nicht mit dem - noch weitgehend passiven - Widerstand der Massen gegen ein neues Kriegsabenteuer. Die Flüchtlingsströme, die sie mit ihren Kriegen bereits breitgetreten haben, sorgen immerhin auch in Europa und auch in Deutschland entgegen aller staatstragenden Propaganda für erheblichen Unmut. Bedauerlicherweise werden noch immer Täter und Opfer verwechselt, werden falsche Parolen ausgegeben und leider allzu oft befolgt .

Auch wenn unsere Gesellschaft als Ganze von der Ausbeutung fremder Kontinente, die wir bekriegen helfen, profitiert, so sind doch die Dividende sehr ungleich verteilt. Auch bei uns gibt es Massen-Elend. Auch bei uns klafft ein Abgrund zwischen dem akkumulierten Reichtum der Wenigen und der verbreiteten Not vieler in mitten des Konsumrausches.

Am schlimmsten wirkt inzwischen die öffentliche Armut, die Vernachlässigung unserer einst hervorragenden Infrastruktur. Ein neues Raubrittertum zieht dem Bürger den letzten Groschen aus der Tasche, während korrupte Eliten für Banken und Rüstungskonzerne allzeit bereit die Hand heben. Schulen, Krankenhäuser, Straßen und Brücken verkommen, während der private Reichtum immer weiter wächst. Das Versagen einer die Mehrheitsinteressen längst nicht mehr angemessen repräsentierenden Opposition führt allerorten zum Erstarken populistischer Rechtskräfte.
Dagegen muss immer wieder betont werden, nicht der unfreiwillige Hartz IV Empfänger oder die unfreiwillig lohndrückenden arbeitslosen Massen noch die hereinströmenden Flüchtlinge sind unsere Gegner. Unser aller Gegner ist eine kriegstreibende Politik, eine Politik, die den Terror züchtet und zwar mit tatkräftiger Unterstützung unseres Landes und seiner Eliten. Aber selbst unter jenen gilt es noch zu differenzieren. Es gilt unter ihnen die Stimmen der Vernunft auszumachen und zu unterstützen.

Es ist vor allem an der Zeit, sich neu zu organisieren. Überall müssen wir uns auf die Vernunft, auf Recht und Gerechtigkeit, auf völkerrechtliche Vorschriften berufen. Alte Etiketten haben ausgedient. Nicht überall ist nämlich drin, was drauf steht. Nur auf neuer Basis organisiert haben wir als Mehrheit eine Chance gegen die Wenigen. Wir müssen uns verbünden mit den neuen, sich weltweit formierenden Widerstandskräften gegen Terrorismus und gegen kriegerische Einmischung in fremde Hoheitsbelange.

Diese neuen globalen Kräfte sind beim Namen zu nennen und aktiv zu unterstützen. Es sind dies allen voran Staaten, die einen eigenen Weg beschritten haben. Das kleine Cuba und das volkreiche moderne China mit seiner uralten Kulturtradition und mit seiner Erfahrung im Widerstand gegen koloniale Versklavung sind – bei aller Unvollkommenheit - Leuchtfeuer im Kampf gegen imperiale Bevormundung. Es gilt deren Unterstützung der Völker Afrikas auf dem Wege zu einer unabhängigen Entwicklung positiv zur Kenntnis zu nehmen. Es gilt China als umzingelter Nation Beistand zu zollen und ihm nicht kleinkariert krittelnd in den Rücken zu fallen. Es gilt die Nationen Lateinamerikas gerade jetzt - wenigstens in Geist und Wort - solidarisch zu unterstützen. Wo das Imperium wieder Erfolge zu verzeichnen scheint, so in Argentinien und Venezuela ist unsere argumentative Unterstützung der Gegenkräfte erforderlich. 
Es gilt, sich in Europa vor allem auch schützend vor die Russische Föderation zu stellen, die wieder einmal fast allein, stellvertretend auch für uns gegen das Krebsgeschwür des faschistischen Terrors ankämpft. Die Russische Nation weiß um die strategische Bedeutung seines Bündnispartners Syrien. Es stellt sich aus gutem Grund an die Seite des in dem kleinen arabischen Land populären und legal gewählten, nur auswärts bösartig verleumdeten Präsidenten Bashar Al Assad. Unter seiner Führung bekämpft das syrische Volk immer wieder erfolgreich die von auswärts eindringenden Terrorbanden. Seine immer noch schlagkräftige Armee hält wie der Präsident seit vier Jahren dem räuberischen Gesindel von 84 Staaten stand. Dieser Söldner-Abschaum der Menschheit - man kann die sich auf syrischem Boden austobenden, zu jedem Verbrechen bereiten Gangster nicht andres bezeichnen - wird vom Ausland immer wieder neu bestückt, trainiert, finanziert, orchestriert. Wenn das säkulare, kulturell einst hochstehende Land fällt, dann ist auch der Iran, dann ist auch die Südflanke Russlands nicht mehr sicher. Deswegen kämpfen Iraner und Russen gemeinsam. Auch wir sind gut beraten, diesem treuen Bündnispartner der Menschheit in seinem anti-kolonialen Bestreben vorurteilsfrei zu begegnen. Das gleiche gilt für die ebenfalls ethisch motivierten und wertvollen, vom Westen genau deswegen stigmatisierten, Kämpfer der libanesischen Hisbollah. Zu danken ist der hohen Diplomatie des großen, ruhig und besonnen agierenden Russland. Unter Putins kluger Führung hat sich Russland wieder auf die Beine gestellt, sich auf seine besten Traditionen besonnen und sich auf die Seite der fortschrittlichen Nationen gestellt hat, von Nationen, die einen anti-imperialen Kampf führen. Russland hat die richtige Haltung gegenüber dem leidgeprüften palästinensischen Volk, ebenso gegenüber den Völkern Afrikas, Asiens und Lateinamerikas. Der russische Vielvölkerstaat führt, ungeachtet seiner „kapitalistischen Unvollkommenheit“, den Friedenskampf im engen Bunde mit den BRICS-Staaten und seinen lokalen Vebündeten. Diesen Staaten gebührt Dank und nicht die ihnen vom Westen unisono dargebotene Verächtlichkeit.

Erinnern wir uns heute an die mahnenden Worte der beiden US-amerikanischen investigativen Journalisten Michael Sayers und Albert E. Kahn in ihrem 1946 zuerst in Amerika erschienen Buch

Die große Verschwörung gegen Russland“

Der Zweite Weltkrieg begann 1931 mit dem Überfall der Japaner auf die Mandschurei, der als Rettungsaktion gegen den nach Asien vordringenden Kommunismus hingestellt wurde. Zwei Jahre später stürzte Hitler die deutsche republikanische Regierung unter dem Vorwand, Deutschland vor dem Kommunismus zu retten. 1935 fiel Italien in Abessinien ein, um das Land vor 'Bolschewismus und Barbarei'' zu bewahren. Im April 1939 setzte Mussolini über das Adriatische Meer und fiel in Albanien ein...
In einer Rede am 10. März 1939 in Moskau erklärte Stalin, der in Europa und Asien von den Achsenmächten unter dem Deckmantel des Antikominternpaktes ohne Kriegserklärung geführte Krieg richte sich nicht nur gegen Sowjetrussland, sondern ebenso gegen die Interessen Englands, Frankreichs und der Vereinigten Staaten.“ 
aus Michael Sayers/Albert E. Kahn „Die grosse Verschwörung gegen Russland“, Berlin 1949

Am 22. Juni 1941 griff Hitlerdeutschland die Sowjetunion an. Am 8. Mai 1945 endete der II.Weltkrieg mit einer Bilanz von über 60 Millionen Toten weltweit. Annähernd die Hälfte davon waren Bürger der ehemaligen Sowjetunion. Daraus wären für heute wichtige Lehren zu ziehen.

Leider ist uns das Feiern eines Friedensfestes zur Weihnacht - 70 Jahre nach Kriegsende - noch nicht vergönnt, auch wenn wir von den Bomben, die wir zielgerecht anderswohin schicken hier so gut wie (noch) nichts merken. Die neuerliche Entwicklung ist durchaus kriegerisch bedrohlich. Es hilft aber niemandem, wenn wir den Kopf hängen lassen oder in den Sand stecken. 

Feiern wir also, um neue Kräfte zu sammeln, nutzen wir die Feiertage zu ideelen und physischen Ertüchtigung und Besinnung.



In diesem Sinne wünsche ich uns allen - trotz alledem - eine frohe Weihnacht und einen entsprechend engagierten Neustart im Zeichen einer von uns neu zu belebenden internatioanlen Solidarität im Jahr 2016

Ein guter deutscher Politiker zur Weihnachstzeit

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Anläßlich des 15. Jahrestages des Beginns des NATO-Ãœberfalls auf Jugoslawien fand im März letzten Jahres in Belgrad das internationale Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals statt. Vertreter des ICDSM (International Commetee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic) und der Friedensbewegung nahmen an der Konferenz teil. Im November 2015 besuchte Willy Wimmer das Belgrader Forum. Sein Redebeitrag: …
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Serbien: Großes Wandbild zu Ehren des getöteten russischen Su24-Piloten erstellt 
22.12.2015 • 13:58 Uhr 
Serbien: Großes Wandbild zu Ehren des getöteten russischen Su24-Piloten erstellt
Quelle: RT 
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Drei serbische Organisationen haben in Novi Sad [dt. Neusatz], der zweitgrößten serbischen Stadt, ein großes Wandbild zu Ehren des getöteten russischen Su24-Piloten, Oleg Peschkow, dessen Flugzeug durch die Türkei über Syrien abgeschossen wurde, erstellen lassen. Am 24. November hatten die türkischen Behörden einen russischen Kampfjet wegen einer angeblichen Luftraumverletzung über Syrien abgeschossen. 
Der Pilot konnte sich zwar mit dem Schleudersitz retten, doch Turkmenen-Milizen schossen mit Maschinengewehren auf ihn, während er am Fallschirm in der Luft hing.