"Germany’s foreign policy: Time to step up" by Daniel Benjamin | May 18, 2014
The Germans are stirring. The question is whether Europe’s economic superpower will rise to the occasion.
At issue is Germany’s global role. For most of time since World War II, the word to describe the country’s foreign policy has been Bescheidenheit — modesty or restraint.
In the wake of Hitler’s aggression and the Holocaust, West Germans rightly felt the only good option for them was to bury themselves in the key institutions of the West — NATO and, as it was called for most of this period, the European Economic Community. German leaders let the United States, the United Kingdom, and France handle the big military and diplomatic issues of the time while they focused on building their economy and wrote checks to support the integration of the poorer EC members and global security efforts. With the exception of a brief period of activism that began with the Yugoslavia crises of the 1990s and ended with deployment of forces to Afghanistan, German troops stayed home.
More recently, under Chancellor Angela Merkel and hapless Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, Berlin has pulled back, abstaining on a 2011 UN Security Council vote to authorize a no-fly zone over Libya — to the astonishment of allies — and shying away from supporting military action after Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Meanwhile, German defense spending has declined to 1.4 percent of GDP — far below NATO’s agreed standard of 2 percent.
Now, though, since elections last fall brought a new coalition to power last fall, some of Germany’s leaders believe this has gone on long enough. Germany’s new Defense Minister, Ursula van der Leyen, with an eye on the problems of Mali and the Central African Republic, declared earlier this year, “We can’t look away when murder and rape are taking place daily.” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has also signaled his desire for a more active policy, noting, “The world has changed, and we need to do a few things differently.”
Only when it is an ally doing it.
Related: The Next Rwanda
Turns out western powers were in on it. Has nothing to do with humanitarianism and everything to do with resource control.
Perhaps the most striking call for a new approach came from the country’s much admired President Joachim Gauck, a former dissident clergyman in East Germany and the first head of the archive on East Germany’s “Stasi” intelligence agency. Speaking at the annual Munich Security Conference, he acknowledged that many view Germany as a “shirker” and that the time had come for the country to “do more to guarantee the security that others have provided it for decades.”
That makes some people nervous.
So the stirring is clearly coming from above, from the upper levels of the German elite who know better than most about global realities. (Chancellor Merkel hasn’t been heard from yet, but it is hard to imagine she’d allow her ministers to take this route without her tacit support.)
Building support in the German public will be more difficult, however. Decades of being sheltered from direct engagement in most of the world’s hotspots has left the German citizenry cosseted and comfortable. It may be a cliché — though one validated by years of polls — but Germans want their country to behave more like Switzerland than a great power.
Don't you Germans just love the insult? Wait until you see which elite $cum delivered it.
Maybe the German people just hate war.
Nonetheless, this effort to refit German foreign policy should be welcomed, however overdue. To begin with, it comes at a moment when the lights have been dimming on America’s partnership with Europe. US policymakers have been chafing for years at declining defense budgets across the Atlantic, the feeling that Europe has been free-riding on America’s global security presence, and the continent’s persistent introspection. With staggering bills for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — conflicts not paid for in the traditional way by taxes — US patience is a low point, even if all agree that Iraq was our mistake.
Oh, it is a MISTAKE now, huh?
Not a victory!
Not a mass-murdering exercise built upon lies.
It'a MISTAKE!
It's a MISTAKE!
Yeah, sorry for dragging you all along on our military adventurism, Europe!!
Perhaps the Ukraine crisis will change European thinking, but few analysts are holding their breath.
Not with Europe's economy tied to Russian gas.
Over the long term, the much-discussed pivot to Asia may reflect an understanding that the East promises both more economic dynamism and potentially more vigorous, globally engaged partners.
Germany, with its robust economy, could be an exception, even if Berlin is saddled with much of the cost of European economic recovery. A Germany that steps up to global responsibilities commensurate with its stature would help resuscitate the Western project of promoting democracy, strengthening institutions, and integrating outsiders into the international economy. Good luck to Germany’s leaders: Building support for this new role would be an historic achievement.
Daniel Benjamin served as ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department from 2009 to 2012. He is now director of Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
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Related: Japan Joins With U.S.
Another WWII power the neo-con globe-kickers are trying to push towards war!
Memory Hole:
"In 1942, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Stilwell, frustrated over being driven out of Burma by Japanese troops during World War II, told reporters in Delhi, India: “I claim we got a hell of a beating.”
"Adolf Eichmann’s Israeli interrogator reburied in Berlin" by David Rising | Associated Press May 24, 2014
BERLIN — With the words of ritual mourning and a sprinkle of earth over his remains, the Israeli official who interrogated Adolf Eichmann was reburied Friday in Berlin’s Wannsee neighborhood, not far from the house where the Nazi who helped organize the Holocaust outlined his genocidal plans in 1942.
So we have been told by the gatekeepers of history.
What do you mean it was all distortions at best, lies at worst?
Though the choice of the final resting place for Avner Less — near the mansion that hosted the infamous Wannsee Conference — was more coincidence than symbolism, his son told the Associated Press his father would have appreciated the irony.
Coincidence = conspiracy when coming from my agenda-pushing paper.
‘‘I think he would be quite pleased at the contradiction of these two men who had different ideas,’’ Alon Less said. ‘‘It is quite a good contrast.’’
Friday’s cemetery ceremony brought Avner Less back together with his wife, Vera, whose remains were reinterred on the spot after being moved from her original Hamburg resting place. That fulfilled a pledge Alon made to his dying father in 1987: to bury his parents together in their native Germany.
‘‘I made a promise to my father on his deathbed to bring him to his wife, because they belong together,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a beautiful love story.’’
I don't want to hear it.
Avner and Vera Less married in 1936 in Paris, where they met after both fled Nazi Germany. A year before the outbreak of World War II, they immigrated to what was then British-controlled Palestine, where Avner found work as a policeman. Many others in their family remained in Europe and died in the Holocaust, including Avner’s father and stepmother, who were deported to Auschwitz, and Vera’s mother, who escaped Germany only to be hunted down by the Nazis in Belgrade.
Because the Zionist-controlled Jewish war pre$$ has been caught lying about so many things I no longer believe even this.
In 1960 after Israeli Mossad agents captured Eichmann in Argentina, Avner was chosen to be part of the unit preparing evidence for Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.
Eichmann, a top deputy of Adolf Hitler, is known as a primary architect of the Holocaust for his role in coordinating the Nazi genocide policy.
During the interrogations, Eichmann tried to present himself as a small cog in the Nazi machine, and insisted he was simply following orders. Avner Less got him to talk — for 275 hours. He caught Eichmann in lies by confronting him with meticulously collected evidence, and rattled his subject with well-timed revelations of his own family’s experiences.
No torture?
‘‘Eichmann at one stage asked my father, ‘How is your family?’ ” Alon Less recalled. ‘‘My father smiled back and said, ‘My older brother and sister are OK. But you sent my father to Auschwitz.’ ’’
Eichmann was found guilty in 1961 on 15 charges, including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people. He was hanged the following year in prison, the only time Israel has carried out a death sentence.
Officially. Thousands of Palestinians have received one over the last 66 years.
Vera Less died in Switzerland in 1980 and was allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in her native Hamburg even though she had been cremated, a violation of traditional Jewish customs. When Avner Less died in 1987, he also was cremated and the Hamburg cemetery refused to make an exception for him.
Instead his urn was interred in Switzerland, where Alon lives. After the lease on the Swiss plot expired 25 years later, he again attempted to have his father’s remains reburied in Hamburg, but again was refused. He found the solution to have them reburied in his father’s native Berlin.
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Related(?):
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
It shows. That is who my jew$paper is written of, for, and by.
Time to rebury that piece along with these:
"US Nazi suspect case advances in Germany" by David Rising | Associated Press May 23, 2014
BERLIN — Germany’s highest criminal court has ruled that the country has jurisdiction over the case of a retired Minnesota carpenter that an Associated Press investigation exposed as a former commander in a Nazi SS-led unit.
The Federal Court of Justice said in its ruling published Thursday that 95-year-old Michael Karkoc’s service as a commander in the SS-led Ukrainian Self Defense Legion made him the ‘‘holder of a German office.’’ This gives Germany the legal right to prosecute him even though he is not German, his alleged crimes were against non-Germans, and they were not committed on German soil.
They are REALLY REACHING NOW! I suppose anyone they can lay their hands on before they die! Glad to see German courts aren't suffering a backlog.
Someone in that role ‘‘served the purposes of the Nazi state’s world view,’’ the court said.
Karkoc’s son, Andriy Karkos, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment and hung up on a reporter who reached him via cellphone. A home number for Michael Karkoc was no longer working Thursday.
The German investigation began after the AP published a story last year establishing that Karkoc commanded a unit accused of burning villages filled with women and children, then lied to American immigration officials to get into the United States a few years after World War II.
He wasn't one of the German war criminals we brought back to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip? Not part of the Org?
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"German probe finds 20 former death camp guards" by David Rising | Associated Press May 21, 2014
BERLIN — About 20 former guards at the Majdanek death camp could face charges in Germany, following a widespread probe of the Nazi SS men and women who served there during World War II, war crimes investigators said Tuesday.
I guess German justice has nothing better to do.
So am I going to have to wait this long to see Bush and Bliar charged with war crimes?
Federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm, who heads Germany’s special Nazi war crimes office, said he expects to turn the cases over to state investigators within two weeks for them to pursue accessory-to-murder charges.
Then the U.S. and British government are criminal, right down to the last social service worker.
Lead investigator Thomas Will said that about 30 suspects were identified and located, but about 10 had already died. The remaining 20 men and women all live in Germany, he said.
Some 220 others are still being investigated for possible charges but have not been located.
The Majdanek probe is the second major review of death camp guards undertaken after Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk in 2011 became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
He's dead now. Ya' happy?
Yup, an ACCUSATION is as GOOD as GUILT in Germany! They have come full circle!
Though Demjanjuk always denied serving at the death camp and died before his appeal could be heard, Schrimm’s office in September recommended that state prosecutors pursue charges against 30 former Auschwitz guards based on his case.
The office then started investigating about 1,000 former guards at Majdanek, another death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where some 360,000 Jews and others were killed.
Whatever. I'm sick of hearing about it when we have so many millions of fresh deaths since then, most of them at the hands of the EUSraeli empire or its communist enemies.
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"Thousands block far-right march in Berlin
BERLIN — Thousands of Berliners blocked a group of right-wing extremists from staging a march through the German capital Saturday. Police said some 2,000 people stood in the way of the planned route of a demonstration organized by the far-right National Democratic Party. The party had planned to march through Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, which has a large immigrant population. Germany’s security services say the party has a racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic agenda (AP)."
The same could be said of my war-promoting new$paper.
Doug Mills/New York Times/File
Her look sums up my feelings regarding the Globe these days. Sorry.
"Germany to probe foreign spy tactics" Associated Press March 21, 2014
BERLIN — German lawmakers have agreed to launch an inquiry into surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services, including the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
Merkel’s governing coalition and opposition lawmakers both voted Thursday to establish a parliamentary investigation.
It will explore the scope of spying on Germans’ private communications by America and its allies in the so-called ‘‘Five Eyes’’ network — Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — and the extent of German officials’ own knowledge of these covert operations.
The inquiry is expected to start next month.
Opposition lawmaker Hans-Christian Stroebele said parliamentary investigators should seek to question NSA leaker Edward Snowden, even though US officials might object.
German federal prosecutors are mulling whether to open their own investigation into NSA activities.
A report disclosed earlier this week said NSA is recording all telephone calls and their routing data in one foreign country and retaining that information for a month so that it can be analyzed later.
The report, based on a top secret intelligence document, was disclosed Tuesday by the Washington Post. The Post said the report noted that “every single” phone call in one foreign country was saved for 30 days before being purged.
Assuming it was purged. No guarantee, and a lying, agenda-pushing paper is no confirmation. Just because the AP says it doesn't make it true.
Similar but less comprehensive efforts exist in at least four other foreign countries, according to a classified 2013 document provided by Snowden, a former NSA contractor. None of the countries was identified.
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This is all much ado about nothing. Germany's leaders raise a ruckus about U.S. spying, but the citizenry is still spied upon. Nothing has changed there.
"Germany to probe foreign spy tactics" Associated Press March 21, 2014
BERLIN — German lawmakers have agreed to launch an inquiry into surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services, including the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.
Merkel’s governing coalition and opposition lawmakers both voted Thursday to establish a parliamentary investigation.
It will explore the scope of spying on Germans’ private communications by America and its allies in the so-called ‘‘Five Eyes’’ network — Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — and the extent of German officials’ own knowledge of these covert operations.
The inquiry is expected to start next month.
Opposition lawmaker Hans-Christian Stroebele said parliamentary investigators should seek to question NSA leaker Edward Snowden, even though US officials might object.
German federal prosecutors are mulling whether to open their own investigation into NSA activities.
A report disclosed earlier this week said NSA is recording all telephone calls and their routing data in one foreign country and retaining that information for a month so that it can be analyzed later.
The report, based on a top secret intelligence document, was disclosed Tuesday by the Washington Post. The Post said the report noted that “every single” phone call in one foreign country was saved for 30 days before being purged.
Assuming it was purged. No guarantee, and a lying, agenda-pushing paper is no confirmation. Just because the AP says it doesn't make it true.
Similar but less comprehensive efforts exist in at least four other foreign countries, according to a classified 2013 document provided by Snowden, a former NSA contractor. None of the countries was identified.
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This is all much ado about nothing. Germany's leaders raise a ruckus about U.S. spying, but the citizenry is still spied upon. Nothing has changed there.
