Meta, to be clear, hasn’t (sort of) fessed up because Mark Zuckerberg’s behemoth has suddenly discovered a conscience. Instead, it was pressure from Brazilian investigative reporting that has forced the company’s hand.

Whatever effect the American meddling will have on the election result, one thing is already certain: it has made the contest and the fierce political struggle behind it even more polarized than before. A few days before the decisive and very close final round, Lula and Flavio Bolosonaro are trying to have each other excluded from the election: when dealing with a badly divided country, just leave it to Washington to make everything even more vicious.

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We now know that these atrocity tales were lies calculated to generate domestic and international outrage against the Palestinian resistance and Palestinians in general. They were part of the same poisonous Israeli narrative that labeled them “Amalek” – in a reference to a perversely “exemplary” genocide in the Old Testament – and denied that they were human beings. They were part, in other words, of starting a genocide.

These atrocity propaganda lies were made up and spread by, for instance, Israel’s Zaka activists and Western mainstream journalists, such as at the New York Times, high public officials such as the UN’s Pramila Patten, and activists, for instance former Meta cadre Sheryl Sandberg acting as a Zionist propagandist, who chose to rely on Israeli disinformation.

In reality, there were no mass rapes; there were no sadistic baby murders by beheadings or in microwave ovens; no pregnant woman was found killed by a headshot, with her baby stabbed and still attached to the umbilical cord. It “simply didn’t happen,” as a detailed investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz found.

What did happen on 7 October 2026 was not a savage, sadistic rampage but a daring military resistance operation. It was also a mass break-out from a Gaza Strip under a long Israeli siege so brutal that Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the Strip the “world’s largest concentration camp ever” already almost a quarter-century ago.

The core of this offensive targeted Israel’s Gaza Division, which, according to high-ranking Israeli officers was “overpowered.” In the process, Palestinian resistance fighters killed and captured Israeli military personnel. While Israel’s propaganda has done its best to obfuscate this fact, these actions were neither “terrorism” nor hostage-taking but legitimate acts of armed resistance under international law.

The Palestinian fighters also attacked a music festival as well as several settlements. There, according to an amnesty international summary in early 2024, they did commit crimes, including the deliberate killing of civilians and the taking of hostages, that is, civilians, not soldiers, whose capture makes them POWs and not hostages. A crime, in any case, is a crime even if it’s only realistic to recognize plenty of mitigating circumstances in the immense injustice, dispossession, and often sadistic and humiliating violence Palestinians have suffered from Israelis over decades.

Honesty also requires taking three key facts into account: First, the leader of the pro-Israeli UAE, has revealed that he warned Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu personally of Hamas’s plans. In a similar vein, Qatar’s leader claims that Hamas was ready to free all civilian hostages immediately after the attack (which would have left it with only military prisoners). Yet the Israeli leadership ignored the warning and rejected the offer to free all civilians.

Almost as if it wanted the attack to happen, as a pretext to initiate a massive ethnic cleansing-by-genocide campaign, and the civilian hostages to stay in Gaza, as a pretext to continue that campaign.

Second, it has long been clear that Israeli authorities activated an expanded “Hannibal Directive”: Usually prepared to kill their own soldiers rather than let them be captured, on 7 October Israeli forces also killed Israeli civilians and, most likely, in large if unknown numbers, deploying tanks as well as helicopter gunships to – in the words of an Israeli officer - “mass Hannibal” their own. Of the roughly 1,200 casualties on 7 October, hundreds are likely to have been due to Israeli-on-Israeli violence; others were soldiers and as such legitimate targets.

And finally, a simple point all too often drowned out by Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda: A legitimate military force does not lose its overall legitimacy – or that of its goals – even when some of its members commit crimes. If that were the case, most armies in this world would have to be dissolved because none of them have a history entirely free of crimes. Armed Palestinian resistance is fundamentally legitimate under international law – and morally, too, obviously – and remains so. In fact, in the future, the outnumbered, outgunned, and abandoned Palestinian defenders of Gaza will be remembered as heroes, as they should.

Things are different, as a matter of fact, if we look at the actions of the Israeli military since 7 October. Unlike with anything that individual Palestinian resistance fighters may have done, in the case of Israel’s euphemistically mis-labeled Defense Forces – a “citizen army [and] representative sample” of Israeli society – we are looking at a clear case of a whole, large organization deliberately and enthusiastically dedicated to committing every war crime and crime against humanity in every book, including ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Because that is a precise description of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians of Gaza – and not only – since 7 October 2023. It is also by now the consensus among honest observers, including the global community of genocide experts. This, indeed, has been the most public genocide in human history, despite Israeli attempts to seal Gaza off and mass murder its journalists under false pretexts.

Israeli perpetrators – high and low – have proudly advertised their own crimes. Israeli society as a whole, virtually continuous polling has shown consistently, supports the genocide. In a world of real-time media and social media, the reality of Gaza could not be hidden. Only recently, Google has finally adjusted its maps to reflect it.

The nature and extent of Israel’s crimes is obvious and exceedingly well documented, and that is a very important thing. Humanity owes an enormous debt of gratitude to those, Palestinians and others, who have undertaken the harrowing task of compiling and analyzing the evidence, such as, to name only a few, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese or the tireless staff of the Electronic Intifada.

What needs at least as much attention is what the Gaza Genocide says about our world as a whole: namely that genocide is not only possible – it was before – but can take place over years and in full global public, with the active support of most of the establishments of virtually the entire West and the passive acquiescence of the elites of most other countries.

In a more or less sane world, fulfilling its obligations under the short and clear UN Genocide Convention of 1948 – it bears recalling – the Israeli genocide perpetrators would long have been stopped by a combination of diplomatic, economic, and, of course, military intervention. That would have been the minimum of what both international law and basic ethics obviously demand.

Yet, instead, we live in a world, where – apart from the Palestinian resistance itself – only a handful of states and political organizations have done anything at all to interfere with Israel’s mass murder campaign: Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ansarallah – the “Houthis” – in Yemen.

Think about the above what you want, like or dislike their politics, it is a fact that no one else has even remotely tried to apply the Genocide Convention in practice. If that is irritating, don’t blame Ansarallah, for instance, but blame the many who have failed to act.

But failure to act has been only part of this real-life horror story. In the West, many governments and mainstream establishments, including in the media and academia, have pro-actively supported Israel-while-genociding. This is a shameful history of criminal collaboration and complicity still to be written. Indeed, in the worst cases, such as the elites of the US, the UK, and Germany, complicity seems too weak an expression: they are better described as genocide co-perpetrators.

The obvious inference from this state of the world is that international law does not matter. There is no more devastating attack on the very idea of international law and a law-based order than the impunity of Israel and its accomplices. Benjamin Netanyahu, with an International Criminal Court warrant to his name, has been able to brazenly deny his and his country’s crimes at the recent UN General Assembly and even repeat the Amalek reference, as Craig Mokhiber has pointed out. Outside, meanwhile, his critics were being arrested.

Annalena Baerbock, who in her time as one of Germany’s most embarrassing foreign ministers ever, also justified, shielded, and supported Israel, has just finished her ill-begotten sinecure as the UN General Assembly’s president to make a lateral move to another absurdly undeserved position at Columbia University. The examples could be multiplied endlessly: the elites of the West, including the American presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have devastatingly compromised themselves by their complicity with Israel. And yet, they keep thriving.

So, not only has international law been discredited as literally never before, but international establishments also have, and in particular those of that part of the world that still has the arrogance to claim global leadership as if it were some kind of birthright, the West.

Now add the fact that Israel has not “only” been committing the Gaza Genocide but has also escalated ethnic cleansing terror in the West Bank, invaded Syria and Lebanon, attacked Yemen, participated in and triggered brutal assaults against Iran that have also tanked the world energy economy, and, in general, has followed its usual modus operandi of assassination, subversion, torture, rape, and relentless aggression. And yet: no discernible consequences beyond ludicrously inappropriate, purely symbolical measures at best and, of course, massive continued support.

Meanwhile, those in the West who dare be human and show their solidarity with the Palestinian and other victims of Israel and its accomplices and co-perpetrators, are harassed, beaten up by police, arrested, and blacklisted.

What the Gaza Genocide has shown with respect to the world as a whole is simple: Those who rule us will go much farther much more shamelessly and openly than most of us, even the pessimists, used to be able to imagine. More importantly, they will get away with it, and they will let each other get away with it. Gaza is not an exception. It is a harbinger of a world of horrors. Resistance is not an option; it is the only one.

Yet the presidency is no mere decoration. According to a 2014 summary by Germany’s constitutional court, the authority of the office derives, above all, from the intellectual and moral influence it should exert, and whoever holds it “embodies the unity of the state.” In short, Germany’s president has two real jobs: to stand for national togetherness, especially when tensions increase and politics polarize, and, secondly, to be a widely acknowledged moral authority.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the current president, has failed quite spectacularly on both counts, and his recent speech on the Day of German Unity has shown once again how and why. This is a scandal, but it is not a surprise. Even before his latest performance, Steinmeier had earned himself the nickname “Walter der Spalter,” which translates as Walter the Splitter.

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I intuitively agreed: It is obvious that the mass murder in Gaza outlines a pattern, a set of tools and measures of extermination, subjugation, and expulsion that are ready for export and will be in high demand – just like so much else of Israel’s spying, policing (if that is the word), and murder skills and tech have always been.

Of course, this Gaza Method – clearly, whoever made that perspicacious sign was alluding to the Cold War “Jakarta Method” so brilliantly dissected by Vincent Bevins – does not only point to the future. It is also embedded in a long past: a novel stage rather than something radically new. Yet the Gaza Method is innovative – or shall we call it “disruptive”? – enough to raise an important question:

What is it about it that almost all Western (or Global-North) governments find so valuable and attractive that they protect its screamingly criminal substance and application, even at the cost of completely, finally, and – I believe – irreversibly ruining their standing with everyone else on the planet?

The answer, in one word loaned from but not restricted to the field of jurisprudence, is: Precedent.

To see how, consider the West’s (with some laudable exceptions) response to the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that the Israeli genocide of Palestinians is a plausible enough description of current reality to require a set of immediate injunctions (here called “provisional measures”) against Israel, the perpetrator regime. These measures include the following:

“Israel must, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of … this Convention, in particular: (a) killing members of the group; (b ) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; ( c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

And, in addition: “The Court further considers that Israel must take immediate and effective measures to

enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the

adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Yet the USA and many of its accomplices and vassals (including major if self-debasing states, such as Canada, Britain, and Germany) have openly defied the ruling – as if they had the right to do so. They don’t, of course: It’s as if a mafia boss reacted to being convicted by declaring he doesn’t believe in the sentence. “What’re you gonna do?” as Tony Soprano might have shrugged.

They also continue their massive – and essential (a whole new-old meaning to American “indispensability”) – support for Israel’s genocide. They have, in addition, attacked the UN’s agency for, essentially, helping Palestinians, UNRWA – under the flimsiest of pretexts, based on the usual Zionist lying, certain to also involve “confessions” under torture.

UNRWA is a vital lifeline for the Palestinian victims that Israel has long tried to cut off (including by murdering the its staff systematically): The West has found a way to be even more helpful than before the ICJ ruling in the Israeli genocide and also, specifically, the war crimes of siege and collective punishment. All these Western actions fly in the face of the ICJ’s orders. Just like that. “Rogue regime – it’s us!” is what the West chose to yell at the world.

And that despite the fact that the 1948 UN Genocide Convention explicitly proscribes not “only” committing a genocide but being complicit. Western states are textbook cases of complicity. The individual leaders, politicians, and the bureaucrats devising and executing these criminal policies bear personal responsibility. If we lived in a sane world, they would all find themselves in the dock at the International Criminal Court – and, never lose hope! – one day some of them still might. (Although my personal preference is for them to face future Palestinian courts, of course.)    

How to explain this behavior? Madness? Blackmail (island vacations with the under-age anyone?), bribery by Israel and its lobbies (and every bribe also, obviously, becomes a tool of blackmail)? Sure. All of these factors play large roles. Do not overestimate the base criminals and psychopaths who rule us now. Many of their motivations come straight from the lowest gutter.

But there is something else, something that is neither simply insane (in the sense of technically delusional) nor the product of ordinary (if that’s the word) corruption. There also is a horrifying form of rationality at work. (And, please, no misunderstandings: The term “rationality” carries no positive or apologetic associations here: The rationality we are talking about is that of the architects of Auschwitz or of Adolf Eichmann getting his train schedules to the extermination camps in order.)

This rationality brings us back to the issue of precedent. The Gaza genocide and the West’s brutal participation in it are meant to defy existing laws, not to speak of those infamous rules that are always open for opportunistic Western re-definition anyhow. And, perhaps even more importantly, the Gaza Genocide is meant to alter those elementary understandings of reality on which basic ethics depends: If we all agree that murder is wrong, the most effective way to get away with murder is not to challenge that agreement directly but to persuade us that shooting a helpless civilian with a white flag, for instance, is either not murder or simply not worth our attention.

Put differently, what Israel and its Western accomplices are doing to the Palestinians of not only but especially Gaza is supposed to alter our baseline perceptions of reality. We are being trained in accepting genocidal warfare as a new normal.

Why?

The general reason is obvious, and while there would be much to say about it, let’s just summarize it here: The West is in decline in a severely crisis-ridden world (it has produced most or even all of these crises, but let’s pass over that irony for now). Its “elites” have decided not to adjust constructively – which would be entirely possible by compromise, cooperation, and sharing – but instead are adopting a Darwinistic (with apologies to Darwin for the loose usage) mindset.

They will fight for what they hubristically see as their “garden” and against what they racistically dismiss as the “jungle” – that is, everyone else, also inside the West, by the way. Since they are in decline, however, their ability to conduct that fight is restricted: They have, for instance, already ruined their soft power; their capacity for globally shaping discourses is deteriorating rapidly, partly, again, because they are destroying it themselves by rampant lying and crude abuse, and partly because everyone else is talking back more and more powerfully; the West’s economies are not doing well either; in particular, the West’s ability to cajole others through dependency and the international financial system is about to be lost.

All of the above means that the West is left with one option: the hardest of powers, if the dumbest, too: military force. And that is where the Gaza Genocide precedent fulfills its most important function as method-setting and method-“normalizing.” In a very concrete way, too: For since the 1990s (at the latest), Western militaries – with the US in the lead, obviously - have been thinking intensely about fighting in cities.

And not just in any cities: Most attention has been spent – as a quick perusal of this rich, sinister literature shows – on fighting in densely populated and poor cities in the Global South, often also imagined as located on coasts (there, these theories overlap with “littoral” warfare ideas also in great fashion). Marked by already fragile infrastructure, large, overpopulated, and replete with built-up structures that favor defenders (usually imagined as insurgents or “terrorists”) and make life harder for the invaders, these cities have been described, with a nice, nasty touch of good old racism, as “feral.” Guess what that implies about those living in them.

You see where this has been going, right? To Gaza. Gaza is not the first but, for now, the worst instance of a doctrinal body of pseudo-technical and rationally vicious thought coming into practice: How to subdue the cities of the Global South (and the poor in general, make no mistake, Northerners), by all and any means. And for this type of very-near/present future warfare everywhere, humanitarian law as we know it – with all its immense flaws – is still too “soft,” too restraining. The same holds, of course, for our notions of crimes against humanity, including genocide.

In short, our Western “elites” want to have the whole Israeli “toolbox” of “urban warfare” – i.e. slaughtering the poor in dense cities – at their disposal, too. They want to be permitted to raze all infrastructure, impose information blackouts, kill journalists, aid workers, local elites, destroy hospitals systematically, conduct massacres at point-blank range and by the usual bombing, use flooding, fire, starvation, and disease to kill women and children without limit (and blaming their deaths on their defenders), burn down everything that remains to make ethnic cleansing complete, create “buffer zones” of death, use the biggest weapons in the their arsenals on the most vulnerable people, and, last but not least, help each other while they are doing it. For our “elites,” this is a dream package, and they want one, too.

And remember: If we all agree that murder is wrong, the best way to cheat us is to either redefine your murder as not even murder or to distract us so much that we find watching a murder requires no action on our side. The same holds for mass murder and genocide.

Gaza is a method. A Western method. Fascist, Zionist, apartheid, sadistic Israel is a pioneer, a trailblazer into yet more evil to be done from those above to those below. That is why those above will shield Israel. They are shielding themselves and their future deeds.

At this years Davos meeting of our global non-elites (or would that be “anti-elites”?), the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, already widely known for her frequent blunders and faux pas, has surpassed herself. Most likely carefully done up by expensive stylists, comfortably seated on a shiny white chair on a state-of-the-art podium in a small town in Switzerland brimming with power, money, and, last but not least, partying, she explained her position regarding the ongoing genocidal Israeli attack on the Palestinians in Gaza.

A “sustainable ceasefire,” she declared, is what is needed. That is, of course, code for “no ceasefire.” Her preference is for the fighting – really, mostly, massacring – to continue, because, as she pronounced, ceasefires do “not fall from the sky.” Many have already commented on just how much obtuse cynicism it takes to reach for a “sky” simile, when telling the world why you think a genocide committed largely by bombing (although there is of course also much starvation, the promotion of diseases, repeated dislocation…) must not stop.

But we have long known that Baerbock is a past master of malapropisms. Remember that “360-degree turn” Putin was supposed to perform to become a different man, her casual declaration of war against Russia, and, of course, that “bacon of hope” thing in, of all places, South Africa?. In particular, her particular combination of incompetence in proper German and even greater incompetence in English makes for breathtaking results when she bravely tries to transfer (“translate” does not seem to be quite the word) her cogitations from one to the other.

What is much more important is the cold-hearted brutality she felt no need to hide. In the manner of a strict governess telling off a gaggle of quarrelling children, she decreed that the genocide – which doubles as a mass slaughter of children, of course – must go on, until… until what, really? Until something she calls “sustainable” – as if shopping in an upper-class organic food store for a bottle of decadently expensive Kombucha – has been achieved. By which she means, in effect, genocidal apartheid Israel’s victory, and the end of any resistance from the victims. In the bad old days, Germans used to call such a thing a “Siegfrieden” (a victory peace).

What to make of the larger meaning of this atrocious moment? While morally and intellectually anything but significant, Baerbock is, after all, Germany’s foreign minister – presumably, a diplomatic master from Germany to address the world, no less.

And does she represent! The question is what? History may help.

In 1963, Hannah Arendt argued that there was something deeply banal about a key perpetrator of genocide, the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. She did not mean to diminish the horror of his crimes, of the Holocaust as whole, or his responsibility and guilt. Rather, her Eichmann, a chief organizer of the Holocaust who was executed in Israel in 1962, emerged as in many ways stunningly ordinary, while still vigorously engaged in superlative evil.

That interpretation, of course, was as much about Eichmann as the Germany and, more broadly, the modern world in which he lived and made a steep career by his enormous crimes. Where that type can appear “normal,” clearly, the “normality” he lives and thrives in must be anything but.

Arendt’s take on the evil of Nazi genocide was controversial as well as often badly (including, I believe, deliberately) misunderstood. In addition, those sharing a déformation professionnelle with me, nitpicking historians, have plausibly argued that their sources show them a different Eichmann: less ordinary, even slightly less ill-educated, and more ideologically driven.

Arendt’s main point, however, still stands: There was, as you would expect, something extremely disturbing about the genocide perpetrator Adolf Eichmann. But that something was not what many would intuitively expect, or at least not only: Apart from fanaticism, cynicism, and sadism, there was – notwithstanding Eichmann’s initially lackluster school and professional record – a high degree of conformism and careerism, of fitting-in successfully: a good team player in a world of mass murder.

Eichmann was, of course, a textbook perpetrator. He played a crucial role in making a large part of the Holocaust run on schedule, quite literally. He also visited murder sites extensively. He was not, literally, what Germans call a “Schreibtischtäter,” a desk-bound perpetrator but a hands-on manager of mass murder in the field.

None of the above could be said about Baerbock. Her case and that of Eichmann cannot be compared or, even less, equated. And yet, if we take the 1948 UN Genocide Convention seriously, then Baerbock’s viciously callous statement cannot but make us think of Arendt’s resonant phrase. For the Convention explicitly outlaws not only the crime of perpetrating a genocide, but also that of complicity in it. The Convention also demands that signatory states prevent genocide.

This is not a court of law, and there is no presumption here to replace one (while I do believe that a court should get to work on the whole German government). But it is my opinion that Baerbock has done nothing to prevent a genocide, thus failing not only in her basic ethical but also legal obligations as a representative of a Convention signatory state with special responsibility for foreign policy (which, of course, does not mean, other members of that government are off the hook). Further, I also believe that a compelling case can be made for accusing Baerbock of complicity in genocide.

The genocide I am referring to is, obviously, the one already mentioned above, currently being committed by Israel against the Palestinians. It would be tedious to recapitulate, once again, the arguments for qualifying Israel’s actions as precisely that. No, this is not “ordinary warfare” or “self-defense”; and the nature and extent of these heinous, premeditated actions as well as the intent that is openly, almost compulsively displayed – quite literally ad nauseam – by the Israeli perpetrators mean that we are dealing not “merely” (for want of better words) with war crimes and crimes against humanity either. Make no mistake: Israel has a sterling and constantly growing record of those too. But the totality of its actions amounts to what the Holocaust and genocide expert Raz Segal has called a “textbook case of genocide.” (For those still in need of a detailed, thorough summary of this totality, so as to finally face reality: Please consult South Africa’s 84-page Application to the UN’s International Court of Justice.)

Against this background, the German government has taken a position of unconditional support for the perpetrators state Israel: Germany has escalated its arms sales during the ongoing genocide; German authorities have been viciously aggressive in suppressing and smearing as “antisemitism” criticism of Israel and resistance against its crimes; German media have gone out of their way to follow that government line. And, last but not least, Germany has gratuitously and revoltingly, leapt to Israel’s side in the ICJ proceedings in The Hague, for which Namibia, a victim of a German genocide, has roundly and rightly condemned Berlin. Thankfully, Stefan Talmon – Professor of Public Law, Public International Law and European Union Law, Director at the Institute of Public International Law at the University of Bonn, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St. Anne’s College – has already explained in detail in just how many ways the German government’s abominable initiative also makes no sense.  

Against this backdrop of moral and intellectual failure, of which Germans will live to be ashamed, again, Baerbock is nothing special. She simply corresponds to the German mainstream and average, displaying her lack of individuality and conformism. There is your banality.

But that is not all. There also is something perversely over-achieving about her performance. A crudeness that can only emerge when great moral failure meets massive intellectual deficiency. Or to be more polite, when an abject lack of compassion has the redeeming feature of being accompanied by a blunt lack of sophistication, and, thus, the truth will out. With brutal “frankness,” if that is the word.

What can we call this? My guess, the debility of evil.

As you would expect, that war is, of course, framed as strictly defensive. In propaganda textbook manner, the message is both very simple and very repetitive: The UK is in great danger of a Russian attack, and its whole population must prepare itself to withstand and resist it.

It goes without saying that Moscow’s repeated declarations of having no such intention make no difference.

Britain is certainly not alone in its establishment-induced hysteria. Much of NATO-EU Europe is undergoing, in essence, the same treatment. In France, for instance, President Emmanuel Macron has called a theatrical all-manicured-hands-on-deck meeting to give what can only be called a national scare talk about “Russian hybrid warfare”; in Germany, Berlin and its mainstream media won’t stop stirring the pot about the murky drone affair at Leipzig-Halle airport.

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The stunning successes of the new-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in two of them (Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) have attracted most attention. And rightly so: For one thing, any remaining establishment delusions about marginalizing the AfD out of German politics by a “firewall” are now where they have belonged for a very long time: on the trash heap of history. Last desperate firewalling efforts may continue for a little longer here and there, but it’s a Zombie now: not only ugly and brainless but dead to boot.

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As a historian who also happens to be German, that was my spontaneous reaction to Ursula von der Leyen’s annual grand – and always grandiloquent – “state-of-the-union” address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

It’s not really a “union,” of course, and not really a “parliament,” either: technically, the EU is a confederation messed up by the ideological construct of “supranationalism”; and the parliament has no independent legislative power, but let’s not dwell on the obvious.

At the head of her Commission (read: over-reaching Central Committee) of career bureaucrats, von der Leyen is the unelected de-facto leader and personification of the Frankenstein wanna-be-super-state that has long gobbled up idealistic dreams of European unity.

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The stakes are high: Berlin has taken substantial punitive measures against Russia; Moscow has responded in kind. More importantly, Russian government representatives have been explicit about considering the German allegations and initiatives a deliberate escalation.

Germany’s mainstream media are even more hysterical than usual: the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), once, a long, long time ago, the country’s flagship of serious conservative-centrist journalism, is comparing the Leipzig-Halle incident – with zero casualties or damage – with the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the US.

Which is, as has been pointed out to me, ironic, considering the ever growing number of skeptics who believe that 9/11 was also not what we were told but a false flag operation to initiate a quarter century - and counting - of mass-murderous Israeli-Western aggression, including genocide, in West Asia/the Middle East. (Rest assured, though, no one at FAZ would dare imply that much; it’s a place exclusively for true believers of Western “value” dogma.)

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For, just like “The Tank,” most so-called “antiwar” movies are, in reality, war movies, fascinating their Homo sapiens primate audiences with the action, suspense, and drama of fighting, while inviting identification with at least some of those who do that fighting, be they cast as heroes or anti-heroes. Consider, for instance, the American films “Platoon” and “Full Metal Jacket” (both set it Vietnam) or the Russian “9th Company” (set in Afghanistan). Indeed, it is hard to think of any genuine and consistent anti-war movies. Two that probably qualify are the American “Paths of Glory” (World War One on what the Germans called the Western Front) and the Soviet “Come and See” (World War Two on what the next generation of Germans called the Eastern Front).

“The Tank” certainly has heroes, and they form a classical “band of brothers,” Hollywood-style. There is the brave stoic (the commander) with ice in his veins but a humane, even self-sacrificing side reserved for his men, the intellectual and – mild – doubter (in civilian life a teacher of Latin with eternal-student glasses), the urban proletarian (the cursing driver, speaking not with a New York accent but in the demotic Berlin version of German), the man from the country (just not Kentucky or Alabama, but the Austrian Wachau and its vineyards), and, of course, the youngster, innocent, frightened, but, ultimately, up to a – German – man’s job (removing a booby-trapped tank mine).

At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), it is true, the fantastically implausible story of the men in the tank on their way to their own heart of darkness on the “Ostfront” has an unsurprising twist: “The Tank” is really a “Schauergeschichte,” a tale of sublime dread, a sort of “Erlkönig with Tanks” or “Sleepy Hollow and Nazis.” The crew’s militarily bizarre special mission is not, it turns out, real but a near-death experience or vision – think “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990) – confronting the commander with his responsibility for burning to death women and children in Stalingrad. The gray zone crossed by the “Tiger” to retrieve a mysterious and inexplicably important German officer holed up in a remote bunker – think Colonel Kurtz from “Apocalypse Now” (1979) – turns into …

Please find the remainder of this text at https://www.newglobalpolitics.org/the-new-german-militarism/

Germany’s dark star of unpopularity was, of course, talking about the results of the regional elections in the Land of Saxony-Anhalt. They have produced a landslide victory for the new-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, under its shooting star Ulrich “Uli” Siegmund and a colossal, devastating fiasco for the CDU and, of course, Merz personally: The AfD has scored 43.8 percent of the vote, the CDU 17.2 percent. Compared with the last Land election, the AfD gained 23 percent, while the CDU lost 19.9 percent.

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The German public has been subject to what looks like a systematic campaign of escalating innuendo for almost a month. The story emerging from this barrage of unfounded claims and speculation masquerading as self-evident certainty has been changing: the role of an airport bus driver has remained unclear and contradictory: Did he merely discover the drone sitting quietly on the tarmac next to an extra-large Ukrainian transport plane or did he kick it to the ground with a Bruce-Lee-type flying kick, as initially claimed? Early reports of another drone colliding with a plane in flight had to be retracted when traces of birds became too obvious.

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In terms of religion, Iran is shaped by pious Shia Islam; Canada displays the flaccid mix of an emasculated Christmas-and-jingle-bells-only Christianity and aggressive anything-goes consumerist secularism typical of the contemporary West.

Geopolitically, Iran is a proud and victorious opponent of the US and Israel; Canada is a fairly ordinary vassal in the American empire.

Accordingly, Canada is deeply and proudly involved in the West’s proxy war against Russia by way of using up Ukraine. Indeed, the Canadian contribution is particularly ironic because it also serves a frenetic and powerful nationalist Ukrainian lobby, rooted in deliberately privileged fascist World War Two runaways and Cold War conspirators. Iran, on the other side, has long helped Russia and, for its efforts, been directly attacked by Kiev’s Zelensky regime. In return, Western sources claim, Moscow has been helping Tehran with its ongoing defense against the US and Israel.

Most importantly, Iran is a country on the side of elementary decency, fundamental human ethics, and international law and therefore against the genocide committed by Israel, the US, UK, Germany, and various other Western accomplices against the Palestinian nation. Canada – Israeli murders of Canadian citizens and some cheap and, in effect, empty gestures from Ottawa notwithstanding – has been, at the very best, yet another camp follower of the Western genocide coalition.

And yet, strange as it may be, recent events have produced something that Iran and Canada have in common. Or to be precise, it’s Washington’s bizarre policies that have created this odd overlap: both Canada the long-standing vassal and Iran the steadfast antagonist are currently at the receiving end of both fresh attempts at coercion by economic warfare and escalating rhetoric from Washington.

Of course, there are orders-of-magnitude differences between the Trump administration’s “Operation Economic Outcast” against Tehran and the latest round of tariff-and-trash-talk launched against Canada.

The “Operation” targeting Iran, according to its mastermind and cheerleader Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, aims to combine a naval blockade, intelligence gathering, “mapp[ing] every node, every facilitator and every network that Iran” is using to trade abroad, and wide-ranging secondary sanctions to, in Bessent words, “asphyxiat[e]” Tehran. The declared end goal is to “collapse” Iran by inflicting an “Economic D-Day,” as President Donald Trump has put it.

There’s no such intention to wage total economic war in the case of Canada. Regarding Ottawa, Washington has merely initiated a pressure campaign within its empire. Its goal is not absolute destruction but the punishment and coercion of a wayward vassal.

In essence, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Mark Carney has rejected Washington’s offer of a crudely disadvantageous and interfering trade deal, featuring, according to the Financial Times, “ludicrous” American demands.

Faced with “clodhopping bullying” so extreme no leader could have submitted – except maybe, say, the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen or Germany’s Friedrich Merz – Carney had an excellent opportunity to make a stand. He declared that Canada is under US attack and, in effect, at war – all restricted to the economy, of course – and that his government will retaliate tit-for-tat, dollar-for-dollar.

Washington is striking at Ottawa with 50-percent tariffs on Canadian goods worth 20 billion dollars, and, in return, Ottawa will give as good as it gets. That’s the plan at least. But while the Wall Street Journal reports that both sides are getting ready for a long fight, there also is still some time for last-minute off-ramps.

Things need to be kept in proportion: the new US tariffs would affect about 5 percent of Canadian exports to the overbearing southern neighbor. The Canadian retaliation would target about 6 percent of what the US sends north. Meanwhile, US rhetoric is surging. Trump has renamed Lake Ontario into Lake America and posted an extraordinarily odd AI-generated video about it, featuring (Canadian?) wild geese marching in lockstep under US flags and firing assault rifles. In Canada, for now at least, Carney’s hardline response is popular.

In short, what is really happening between Ottawa and Washington may well seem like a farce if compared to the state of things between Washington and Tehran. Unsurprisingly, the Iranian leadership has declared that it won’t budge. And why should it? It has already won two rounds of war against Washington. While its economy is certainly suffering, the American-Israeli aggression has, in effect, fully immunized Iranian society against any regime-change schemes.

Finally, Washington will not succeed in making key players submit to its secondary-sanctions blackmail. China, now the world’s great oil power, as The Economist concedes, and a crucial partner for Iran not merely in economic terms, has already made that much clear. Russia is very unlikely to be impressed either.

But take a step back and look at the picture as a whole. Here we are: the US is waging economic war – of different intensity – against both opponents and so-called allies. More importantly, it is meeting resistance in both cases. And most importantly, in both cases, there is no reason to assume that Washington will win. All of that is happening against a background of the US escalating its use of brute force: There is the fresh “deal” – really, steal – to siphon off 65 billion barrels of crude from the de facto US protectorate of post-Maduro Venezuela. Regarding the much-disturbed bond markets, meanwhile, Trump has openly threatened to use the US military to shape them to Washington’s advantage.

The idea is about as smart as trying to fix a microchip with a sledgehammer. But, with the US, that doesn’t mean it won’t be tried. For the red thread running through all of the above is a combination of slipping real power, escalating aggressiveness, and rising resistance from others. What makes this so dangerous is that Washington seems to have entirely lost the ability to realistically adjust its aims and demands to its declining capabilities. Think of it as a bully past his prime who is not only very violent but also not smart enough to see when being more flexible would be in his own best interest.

That is what I, some other foreigners, and quite a few Ukrainians, too, were thinking and even saying then. The country was politically and even culturally polarized, extremely corrupt, and a sham “democracy” even more fake than most of the rest.

It was dominated and bled dry by a greedy, hypocritical, and – despite all the cheap talk, the pious singing-of-anthems-hand-on-heart, and the cheesy peasant braids and stitched shirts – deeply unpatriotic establishment of typically post-Soviet turncoats, thieves, liars, and sell-outs. There was no rule of law, the courts were a bad joke, and the police was a racket.

And yet, while the usual business-crime complex took its toll and there was the occasional state murder of a journalist, there was no large-scale violence. There was bitter grumbling galore, including about Crimea, all the time. But there was no civil war – as the almighty US intelligence services had infamously as good as predicted in the even darker 1990s – and no one was reaching for a gun either to leave an unbearable country or keep others in it by force.

While the Americans were busy thinking about the possibility – and perhaps opportunities – of Ukrainians killing each other in large numbers, their UK cousins were considering another kind of doom: For them, more than three decades ago, the most interesting question was whether Ukraine and Russia would go to war, specifically over Crimea. There, British spooks back then warned with unusual honesty, “most of the population is Russian,” and things might become less than cordial if Kiev didn’t watch its steps.

And here we are now: On the 35^th official anniversary of its existence outside the former Soviet Union, Ukraine has become the sum of all fears, much worse than even its pervasively corrupt, brutally unfair, and de facto lawless pre-2014 version. It is now ruled by its worst, most corrupt, and most authoritarian and bloody regime ever – hands down – under Vladimir Zelensky and his cronies. They steal, embezzle, and launder piles of dirty money as if there’s no tomorrow, which, to be fair, there really probably isn’t for them, at least not in Ukraine.

They literally hunt and, in effect, sell their subjects as cannon fodder, so that they can profit and the West can have its slaughterhouse war against Russia, in an insane, evil, and futile attempt to eliminate Moscow as a power to be reckoned with. This is the reality of “busification,” and nothing remotely like it happened before Zelensky and his accomplices took over. Those who do not readily submit to being treated as combat cattle regularly die mysteriously (not really) from “falls” or maybe just blowing their nose.

The Ukrainian mass media have never been remotely clean, objective, or reliable. But then where are they? But the zombified and self-zombifying propaganda machine created under Zelensky is unprecedentedly awful. Those who openly resist the national brainwashing are incarcerated by kangaroo courts, tortured, and killed.

Or consider basic demography: Ukraine’s real population has almost halved since the end of the Soviet Union, and the future looks even worse. And while part of this catastrophe is due to the current war, much of it has been produced by the ceaseless class–war-from-above of injustice, exploitation, and hopelessness that Ukraine’s anti-elites have waged on their own subjects for a third of a century while blabbing sanctimoniously about nation this and nation that.

And the results of all these horrors? They are abysmal even on their own perverse terms. Just look at the map: Crimea is gone and so are substantial portions of Ukraine’s post-Soviet east due to a combination of regional rebellion, Kiev’s cack-handed, violent attempts to stomp it out, and a war with Russia. All of this could have been avoided.

Yet it was not. Indeed, Ukraine’s short post-Soviet history is, among other sad things, a record of at least sleepwalking toward and, more frequently, pro-actively provoking this twin catastrophe. But Ukrainians – or rather their rotten establishment – did have plenty of help in getting it so wrong. Take, for instance, the mean-spirited and asinine obsession with suppressing the Russian language to eradicate Ukraine’s windfall advantages as a mostly bilingual country of Russian and Ukrainian speakers.

That perverse and self-harming pursuit – recalling Freud’s hunch about nationalism as neurosis – was obstinately cultivated by both a narrow-minded but hyperactive and arrogant minority of ukrainier-than-though nationalists at home and descendants of run-away World War II nationalists, mass murderers of Poles, and Nazi collaborators from the West who were eager to infest post-Soviet Ukraine with their hoary bigotry.

Personally, I remember being naïve enough back then in the 2000s to ask Lviv acquaintances why Ukraine couldn’t just codify its own variant of Russian (comparable to the way American English is different from British English) and also promote Ukrainian (I know both languages, as it happens), and then focus on actually important matters. Blank stares were the answer, at best.

Ironically, well into the current war, there was a short news blip about someone in Ukraine having discovered the same obvious idea. How catastrophe can concentrate the mind and how sad that even now, after an estimated 1.5 million battle field casualties, such pragmatic thinking is still a minority taste: Kiev’s policy is only doubling down on a daft campaign to win the lexicon while losing the war.

Entitled, patronizing exile nationalists projecting their selfish tunnel-vision fantasies on and throwing their Western hard currency at desperate people freshly shell-shocked by ultra-predatory “transition” capitalism were one noxious outside influence vitiating Ukraine’s post-Soviet trajectory. But it was far from the only one. Indeed, as time went on, the West as a whole – its politicians, intellectuals, and mainstream media – became ever more interested in and vastly detrimental to Ukraine.

To be fair, the first yet already extremely harmful steps the West took to, ultimately, ruin Ukraine had very little to do with it: When Washington decided – not once but repeatedly – to cheat and humiliate Russia and break clear promises not to expand NATO eastward, it was first Germany, then multiple east European countries that were at the center of attention, but not Ukraine. Yet, ironically, even while neglecting it, the West’s reckless expansion already set the stage for phase two of putting Ukraine in the crosshairs.

That was reached in 2008, when, at an infamous summit in Bucharest, the high and mighty of the West, led by the indispensably destructive US, artfully maneuvered Ukraine into the very worst position imaginable: by making a promise of NATO membership for Ukraine sometime in the future, they inevitably poked Russia in the eye once too often. By keeping the reckless promise vague, they left Ukraine completely exposed, as if baiting Moscow to intervene. The whole mad scheme took willfully ignoring the clear warnings issued by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in Munich one year before and multiple equally explicit warnings produced by not Russians but widely acknowledged Westerners such as George Kennan and, back then, even William “Bill” Burns.

Georgia shared this fate – lethal promises, no back-up – with Ukraine. And yet even after a short war there quickly demonstrated that this time Russia would stand its ground and defend its basic national security interests, the West stayed its course in Ukraine.

Indeed, it doubled down on it. If only the West had dropped Ukraine the way it dropped Georgia in 2008. Many Ukrainians would still be alive and the country would have lost none or far less territory. Instead, in the Ukrainian case, the West got involved ever more deeply, offering a poisonous EU association agreement and the shaping a regime change coup in 2014. After that, it bound the country so closely into official and black-ops NATO structures that formal membership looked increasingly irrelevant, while helping Kiev sabotage the last realistic chance to return to peace and avoid large-scale war, the Minsk II agreement of 2015. Meanwhile, demagogic public intellectuals, such as Tim Snyder and Anne Applebaum did their worst to pour oil into the fire by a mix of silly nationalism-by-proxy and nasty Russophobia.

Finally, the West almost non-chalantly refused to seriously consider Moscow’s, as it turned out, last pre-February-2022 offer to return to substantial diplomacy and compromise. Once the war had greatly escalated, the West sent Britain’s most evil clown to kill an excellent opportunity to make peace quickly produced by the Istanbul talks of spring 2022.

Since then, since locking Ukraine into a devastating, perfectly unnecessary, and futile yet deliberately provoked war to weaken Russia, things have only gotten worse and worse, and there seems no end in sight. Indeed, as a remarkably sane former German general has just explained, Kiev is still eager to drag all of Europe (at least) into an open shooting war with Russia. In Europe, many establishment figures seem to be all too willing to go along. Ukraine has become the outstanding example of how the West risked and then destroyed the opportunities of the post-Cold War period. Ukraine could have been a prosperous country profiting from its links to both west and east. Instead it’s a ruin.

Next up: Doing the same to all of Europe?

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