What happened to Germany’s pacifists?

Green Party election poster from September 2021. Translation: No delivery of weapons and armaments to war zones. We are ready because you are. On 09/26 vote Green.

Well… they have become the party most influenced by US Democratic lobby interests, which is the same exact message put a little bit more vulgarly in this German language blog I enjoy reading quite a lot.

The practical consequence being that Chancellor Olaf Scholz keeps having to scramble to curb the enthusiasm of militaristic demands from Green politicians by appeals to reason and most recently, promises of a pay-off of Ukraine rather than delivering the heavy assault weaponry that the same people who support Greta Thunberg’s climate movement (meaning educated, urban upper middle class bubble) now somehow seem to be demanding with a blood thirsty vengeance. Has the whole world gone bananas?!

Here is a sample of German press from the last 24 hours:

  • Minister of the Economy Robert Habeck (Greens) demanded that the “Ostermarsch” (Easter March) this year deliver a clear anti-Russia message. These pacifist marches have a long tradition going back to the fifties and have traditionally been anti-nuclear and anti-cold war. Clearly, this year’s motto of “Put down the arms - stop the war in Ukraine! Stop the 100-billion-Euro armaments deal” is now not going far enough for the Greens, with Habeck making sure to stress that “Pacifism for now remains a far away dream” and demanding that this year’s Easter Marches take up a clear position against “Putin’s war” and that there should be no doubt which side is to be supported, also with weapons. Habeck of course still falls short of the foreign policy expert of the Liberals (FDP, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff) who went so far as to call the peace demonstrations “The Fifth Regiment of Vladimir Putin”.

  • Don’t let the friendly hippie look of Anton Hofreiter, (ex-)leftist Green party member deceive you. He joins the club of Green war-enthusiasts touring the Ukraine, intent on dragging us into World War III but probably only after laying waste to the German economy. In his newest attack he joins forces with FDP transatlanticist rider-of-the-apocalypse Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (with whom he went on tour this week to Lwiw in West Ukraine…you read it right) and lays the blame thickly on Olaf Scholz’s Chancellor’s Office for dragging their feet on the delivery of heavy attack weapons to Ukraine and refusing to introduce a complete fossils embargo on Russia - a step that according to Scholz would lead to German economic catastrophe and mass unemployment.

  • And even Father of Green Pacifism Joschka Fischer joins the club of trans-atlanticist warmongerers and Russian regime change advocates. In this interview in TAZ as well as in his new book, Fischer subscribes to the theory that Putin is leading a kind of anti-cultural war in the Ukraine which rather than being against NATO expansion is targeted against European and Western values. He also speaks of a supposed Russian obsession of becoming a world power (spoiler alert: they are) that is supposed to stem from the days of Ivan the Terrible, and that this obsession could only be defeated by a “democratic revolution” in Russia - basically parroting policy of regime change that is mainstream in the US. How are the mighty fallen!