Warmongers unwanted!

Speech by Jürgen Rose,* Germany

Dear participants,
dear friends of peace!

(9 March 2024) It is a great honour that so many of you have come here today to set an example for peace in the world, even though it takes a lot of energy and courage to stand up in these times of omnipresent and all-encompassing war and claims of victory and raise your voices against the mass murder on the “killing fields” of this world. Especially as people like us are often bluntly defamed as “shoddy pacifists” by numerous political and journalistic claqueurs of war, who conversely would probably be most aptly dubbed “rogue militants”.

This weekend, an illustrious selection of this species gathered here in Munich for the sixtieth time as part of the so-called “Munich Security Conference” – and not to discuss peace in the world and possible ways to achieve it, such as confidence and security-building measures, arms control and disarmament as well as détente and peaceful coexistence.

No, this rendezvous of NATO warlords under the leadership of the USA – that nefarious empire of barbarism which continues to pose the greatest threat to world peace and international security – is primarily about profitable rearmament in favour of a massive arms industry. Furthermore, it is about planning for victorious wars now and in the future. NATO’s current “Strategic Concept”, adopted last year in Madrid, bears eloquent witness to this. And that is why the so-called “Munich Security Conference” is a gross misleading of the public, because in reality a highly disgraceful “unsecurity conference” is being celebrated here before the eyes of the world public.

Pope Francis was crystal clear about the “masterminds of war” in his Christmas message of 25 December 2023, when he called on us

to “say ‘no’ to war – and to do so with courage: to say ‘no’ to war, to every war, to the logic of war itself, which is a journey without a destination, a defeat without a victor and a madness for which there is no excuse. [...] But to say ‘no’ to war, one must say ‘no’ to weapons. [...] How can one speak of peace when the production, sale and trade of weapons are increasing? [...] The people who don’t want weapons but bread, who struggle to make ends meet and ask for peace, don’t know how much public money is spent on armaments. But they should know! We should talk about it, we should write about it, so that the interests and profits that are behind the wars become known.”

The “masterminds of wars” addressed by the Pope are well known to the world: They are the NATO warlords who have just gathered not far from here. First and foremost the USA, about which the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, in his “appeal to the Europeans” back in 1953, stated with extraordinary foresight that they

“treat Europe as an economic colony, a military base, a glacis in the future nuclear crusade against Russia [...], as a piece of earth of antiquarian interest and worth travelling through, but whose complete ruin will be the devil’s own business when it comes to the struggle for world domination.”

This is exactly the situation today, as the war of aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, instigated and provoked by NATO under the ring leadership of the USA, strikingly proves. It was the current NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg himself who confirmed this fact in March 2022 when he stated:

“It must be borne in mind that since the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the NATO allies trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who are now on the front line. And we have equipped them. The Ukrainian army is now much stronger, much better equipped than in 2014.”

In addition, Stoltenberg openly boasted that NATO had brusquely rejected any offer from Russia to resolve the conflict diplomatically and had thus contributed significantly to unleashing the war in Ukraine:

“The background was what President Putin declared in autumn 2021 and sent a draft treaty for NATO to sign, with the promise that there would be no further NATO expansion. [...] And that was a precondition for not invading Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that. [...] So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, near his borders.”

It may seem astonishing, but sometimes the “masterminds behind the wars” drop their masks and – for whatever reason – say something honest. In view of the overwhelming facts, there is only one possible answer to the question of who is behind the war in Ukraine: without NATO, there will be no war in Ukraine and without NATO’s eastward expansion, there will be no Russian troops in Ukraine!

The former Inspector General of the German Armed Forces and Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, retired four-star General Harald Kujat, spoke out about these warmongers and the devastating incompetence and dereliction of duty of those (un)responsible in the German government with almost spectacular candour. Harald Kujat, the former highest-ranking German soldier, expressed himself with almost spectacular candour:

“The whole problem is that since the latest change of government here in Germany, we have people at the top of the country who [...] let’s just say that these people make mistakes because of their incompetence and ignorance, and we have to bear the policies that they pursue. [...] This is a dangerous policy. It is being pursued fanatically, on the same principle as a horse wearing blinkers. Nobody looks neither to the right nor to the left. Gains and losses for the Germans are not taken into consideration.

But the most important thing is: Nobody thinks about the consequences such a policy will have for the Ukrainians. Yet they are suffering first and foremost from the current fighting. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, the country has been destroyed. Our politicians take all of this out of context and proclaim loudly: 'The main thing is that Ukraine must win. That sounds like a mantra. [...] But, listen, that’s not politics! That’s fanaticism. That is a great disappointment. And of course, it is very difficult to watch how all the experience we have gained over the last few decades is being forgotten. This experience is simply being treated with contempt by the German leadership, even though it was very useful both in foreign policy and in the security sphere. It was this experience that enabled us to achieve the reunification of Germany. Thanks to policies based on this experience, we have been living in security and prosperity for decades. [...] I consider this behaviour [of German politicians] irresponsible.”

This does not bode well either for war-torn Ukraine or for a European security architecture that is indispensable for the future. The essential premise for a reorganisation of the latter was summed up by the director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, US professor Jeffrey David Sachs, when he addressed the United States of America as the main imperial power responsible for the war in Ukraine with the words:

“The war in Ukraine can and will stop if the US finally stops its efforts to extend NATO to Ukraine and instead negotiates directly with Russia on urgent issues of mutual security, including renewed nuclear disarmament diplomacy.”

For the civil societies in “NATOstan” this means, as in the times of the criminal war of the USA in Vietnam and as in the times of excessive nuclear armament in the 1980s, to “stand up for peace”, to forge “swords into ploughshares” and to create “peace with less – or even better – without weapons”, because as Kurt Tucholsky once so irrefutably warned: “But war is deeply immoral under all circumstances.”

* Speech given by retired Lieutenant Colonel Jürgen Rose on the 60th Munich Security Conference on 17 February 2024. He is Chairman of the “Darmstädter Signal” working group and a member of the Advisory Board of the German Freethinkers’ Association.

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)