This article appears in the February 10, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Opportunities for Peace
Were Thrown Away
[Print version of this article]
This is a chapter of Dr. Bittner’s 2023 book, State of Emergency: Geopolitical Insights and Analyses Regarding the Ukraine Conflict. It is translated and published by EIR with the author’s approval. A subhead has been added.
Dr. jur. Wolfgang Bittner is an author and journalist living in Göttingen, Germany. His recent works include The Robbery of Europe by the U.S.A. (2014), The New East-West Conflict (2019), and Germany—Betrayed and Sold: Background and Analyses (2021). Dr. Bittner spoke at the June 2022 conference of the Schiller Institute, endorsing the Institute’s calls for a new development and security architecture and to support the Vatican’s offer to host negotiations in the Ukraine conflict. He, like Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is on the “blacklist” of Ukraine’s “Center for Countering Disinformation.”
Wars almost always begin with lies: The U.S.A.’s entry into the Vietnam War in 1964 was based on a sham incident in the Gulf of Tonkin; the bombing of Serbia in 1999 occurred on the basis of an alleged “Horseshoe offensive” against the Kosovo Albanians; the first Iraq War began in 1991 with the so-called incubator lies,[fn_1] the second Iraq War in 2003 due to an “acute threat” from Iraq’s (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction; the destruction of Libya in 2011 was justified by a massacre in Benghazi which did not occur. Grounds for interventions and economic warfare were fabricated, while the real reasons were hidden with aid of willing politicians and journalists.
The beginnings of wars are usually preceded by months- or even years-long campaigns of hatred against the adversary, which thus becomes an enemy guilty of aggression. To justify these tactics which are used around the world by the U.S.A., the so-called human rights strategy was developed by the spin doctors[fn_2] in the think-tanks, in order to recast the aggression. This is how the murderous wars against Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen were “legitimized” as claimed defense of human rights, defense against terrorist threats, or “introduction of democratic institutions” into these countries.
The sanctioning of unpopular or opponent nations is a particularly perfidious form of conducting a disguised war. The suffering or even deaths of many people through the resulting deprivations are taken as acceptable. In regard to this, “Western values” are invoked, which for the most part are never upheld in their own countries. In the simplest case, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan merely contrived to declare the Soviet Union the “empire of evil,” and thus created the supreme justification for the policy of aggression, which over the course of years was turned more and more sharply against Russia, to the disadvantage of the European countries—especially Germany. But up to now the German government, supported by the media, has willingly obeyed the directions from Washington.
Forgotten is [German Chancellor] Willy Brandt’s detente policy of the 1960s and 1970s, of which it was said, “We want to be a people who are good neighbors—both domestically and abroad.”[fn_3] In the Declaration of his government of Oct. 28, 1969, Brandt announced a new policy toward the East and for Germany, and declared that the German Federal government would “allow there to be no doubt of the defensive principle underlying its defense policy”; it would intervene in international organizations for “worldwide agreements on disarmament and arms limitation,” and for the “peaceful coexistence of peoples” which was constantly coming under new threats. Its motto was: Reduction of military confrontations in Europe, and change through rapprochement.
The government of Social Democrats and Liberals of that time succeeded in creating a climate of tolerance in domestic politics and in foreign policy the relaxation of the tense situation of the Cold War. Germany, according to Brandt, would direct itself to “cooperation and agreement with the Western nations and accommodation with the Eastern nations.” He expressly emphasized that—
[T]he German people need peace—peace in the full sense of that word—with the peoples of the Soviet Union as well, and all the nations of Eastern Europe.
Civilization Destroying Itself
The opportunities for peaceful cooperation which resulted from Brandt’s détente policy, and not only in Europe, were gambled away, and the potentials for surveillance and regimentation by the authorities were radically expanded and strengthened. More recently, during the coronavirus pandemic declared by the World Health Organization, the population has experienced far-reaching interventions into basic rights and freedoms. In this process the earlier generations’ concern for peace has been betrayed and forgotten, and many of the hard-won rights of working people increasingly torn down.
The American economist and political leader Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019), one of the pre-eminent activists for human rights, came to the conclusion already in the 1990s:
An immoral civilization is racing to its own doom, a self-inflicted doom.... Our societies are being led by people who have no idea what the human species is.[fn_4]
LaRouche forecast the breakdown of the financial and economic system and advocated a fundamentally new orientation of economy which places the human being in the center.
But his proposals were ignored; he was sentenced to 15 years in prison by a spectacularly politicized proceeding in the U.S.A. for “conspiracy and mail fraud,” as a result of which he served five years in prison.
It appears that these alarming developments will continue in the upcoming period, the more so as there are now manifest attempts to organize and control a globalized world by civil society organizations—and thus not openly or democratically. And it is clear: If the possibility does not remain to arrest this, the future not only for Germany but for all of humanity—if it survives the next few years—will lie in a technologically perfectly organized totalitarianism.
[fn_1]. It was alleged that Iraqi soldiers, in the occupation of Kuwait in August 1990, had torn newborns from their incubators and left them to die. This lie, put out by a public relations agency and spread by the U.S. government and nearly all leading media, led to the invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition. [back to text for fn_1]
[fn_2]. Spin doctor means a political and communications advisor. [back to text for fn_2]
[fn_3]. Willy Brandt: Government Declaration in Bonn, Oct. 28, 1969. [back to text for fn_3]
[fn_4]. From a June 18, 1997 speech in Washington: “We Are Watching a Great Civilization Destroy Itself.” [back to text for fn_4]
