WHILE Donald Trump dominates the news daily in the U.S. with his racist diatribes, tweets, and rallies, the American public can’t be blamed if it fails to notice that on a world scale and here in Europe, in particular, the right wing is pushing for a level of militarisation and war planning that goes beyond much of what we have seen before. NATO, with the backing of Germany, the U.K, and the United States, is quietly arming to the teeth dangerous Governments in Europe and Africa and readying itself for military strikes in the Middle East and against Russia. On a regular basis, thousands are camping out in protest against these plans at the Ramstein military base in south-western Germany, the largest American military base outside the continental U.S. Peace activists from around the world have also descended upon another location in Germany where the U.S. has readied 20 nuclear missiles for use at any moment. 

 

Developments this week here put Germany, the power behind the European Union, squarely in the camp of NATO’s war hawks with Ursula von der Leyen’s narrow election to the chairmanship of the European Commission, the 28-member “Cabinet,” so to speak, of the European Union. Each of the member countries nominates a member of that commission whose chair is then elected by the 751-member European Parliament. Despite having cultivated the reputation internationally as a “reasonable” leader, especially when compared to Trump, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been pushing for the elevation of von der Leyen, an extreme militarist, to that post. As the Christian Democratic German Defence Minister for the last five years, von der Leyen has led the biggest military expansion of Germany in three decades. While the racist and fascist forces in Germany use the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) to push their agenda, the military-industrial complex has been able to accomplish much of its agenda through the mainstream Christian Democratic Union party.

 

The centre-Left Social Democrats had said up until this week that Merkel never consulted them, her partners in the German coalition Government, when she selected von der Leyen and, because of her extreme militarist positions, they said they might not vote for her in the EU elections. The balloting this week was secret, however, and von der Leyen could not have squeaked in by just nine votes in the 751-member European Parliament without some of the German Social Democratic parliamentarians voting for her.

 

Von der Leyen had campaigned in support of European Commission plans, announced in March, to strengthen and widen highways and rail lines that run west to east across Germany so that troops and tanks “can move quickly eastward from German bases and ports.” Her justification for “improved” east-west highways echoed Hitler’s justification for similar highway “improvements” across Germany in 1935. Von der Leyen has strongly advocated support for an EU military wing in addition to NATO and is now in the position to oversee its development.

 

NATO has already integrated into its operation a group of German officers who command what NATO is calling a “high readiness task force” that, according to the U.S. NATO general in command at Ramstein, Mark August, “can be sent anywhere in three days.” Echoing August, von der Leyen said, “Tensions and crisis require quick, solid organisation to move troops great distances, and it must be planned with speed and efficiency.”

 

If her actions prior to her election this week are any indication, she has been scouting out potential sites to host massive increases in German armaments. She recently visited German troops in Lithuania and elsewhere near the Russian border. When Soviet troops pulled out of one country after another in Eastern Europe in 1990, no time was wasted replacing them with U.S. and German troops, under the umbrella of NATO, of course. NATO didn’t stop after rolling the tanks into just the countries from which the Soviets withdrew, however. They pushed far into territory that had been part of the Soviet Union itself. That territory included the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, all former republics of the USSR.

 

The expansion of NATO into all of these areas violated promises the U.S. made to the former Soviet Union that such expansion would never take place and increased the danger of nuclear war between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers, who now maintain military hardware virtually within sight of one another. That level of potential conflict involving the U.S. and Russia has not happened since U.S. and Soviet tanks faced one another head-on only a few feet apart on the streets of Berlin in the early 1960s. It took the construction of the Berlin Wall to de-fuse that confrontation, which also had the potential to turn into nuclear war.

 

The German militarists would not be able to operate today except for direction they get from the U.S. military. They work in sync today with the U.S. operations directed out of the base at Ramstein.

 

General August bragged recently that “when you see all the planes lined up here (at Ramstein), you see that this is the place that gets things moving in the direction of Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe,” with the obvious targets he has in mind including Russia and Iran.

 

 

As he said, “things” have been moving out of Ramstein for quite a while. It is from there that drones are dispatched to kill individuals in locations in Africa and the Middle East, including Iran, without regard to whether the operations violate international borders.

 

There is huge public sentiment here for peace, which is a counterbalance to the influence of the war hawks—both the home-grown ones and the ones imported from the U.S. Many Germans, as well as many Europeans, haven’t forgotten the horrific effects of war.

 

On the domestic political front, the Christian Democratic Union, the single party with the largest vote in Germany, supports militarising the country. The Social Democrats go along with or oppose them depending upon which wing of the party is involved. The Greens, which recently seem to be replacing the Social Democrats as the second party, do not, unfortunately, play a major role in the peace movement. The obvious connection between saving the environment and cutting the military hasn’t become a part of their rallying cry, at least not on a national level. Overall, the party is far less radical than when it was founded 30 years ago. There are some State branches, however, where they take better positions, particularly when they enter coalitions with Die Linke, the Left Party.

Die Linke is the only major party, however, that consistently opposes any military spending and consistently opposes the placement of any German troops outside the borders of Germany. (IPA)