“How wise of nature to put the longest days in the summer.“This sentence was thick and black above an advertising letter from a well-known Zurich company for garden furniture. A Joke? Hardly. But a wonderful example of how cause and effect are generously overlooked.
How wonderful if you don’t have to think about cause and effect: the head of an advertising letter.
Cause and effect? Not least in politics and history an eminently important, but often a deliberately suppressed point. NATO is one such example. Some data that the participants of the current security conference in Munich should remember:
May 1945: Germany surrenders unconditionally. Europe is divided into zones of influence, as agreed in Yalta between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin.
1949: twelve Western states found NATO, the North Atlantic military alliance, with the Nuclear Power USA at the forefront, but also several colonial powers, in particular Great Britain and France, and with it, for example, Portugal, which at that time was still a dictatorship.
1952: first NATO enlargement in southeastern Europe, the accession of Greece and Turkey.
1955: US President Dwight D. Eisenhower announces on 16 March his readiness to use nuclear weapons in the event of war. On 9 May of the same year the solemn accession of the Federal Republic of Germany, i.e. West Germany, as the 15th member of NATO. In response, the Warsaw Pact was signed on 14 May by the Soviet Union and the nine states within its sphere of influence.
1982: Spain joins NATO.
1989/91: as a result of its miserable planned economy, the Soviet Union collapses, a happy turn of events for most inhabitants of the so-called Eastern Bloc. Finally open borders, finally a “free market”, finally no more queues in front of the food shops. Last but not least, a happy turning point for East Germany, the GDR, which, with the approval of Russia – although not to the pure joy of Great Britain and some other states – will be reunited with West Germany in September 1990.
Only two months later, on 21 November 1990, 35 states, including the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union, signed the “Paris charter”, in which all these countries agreed on an undivided and peaceful Europe and on respect for Human Rights.
Instead of “Charter of Paris” more and more, only NATO
The” Charter of Paris”, which was signed within the framework of the CSCE, the predecessor organization of the OSCE, was the opportunity for a future peaceful Europe. However, the mutual trust between East and West was based above all on the personal trust placed in each other by the then German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Russian De facto President Mikhail Gorbachev. The then US President George Bush (The Elder) was also in the boat. But there were personnel changes and with them also a different policy. In the summer of 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted as general secretary of the CPSU in Moscow and replaced by Boris Yeltsin. In the USA Bill Clinton became the new president in 1993 and in Germany Chancellor Helmut Kohl was also replaced in 1998.
In Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, a real Chaos arose, which brought many people to the brink of poverty in the context of privatization and made others, the clever and ruthless, billionaires. Above all, however, it was US President Bill Clinton who, at the beginning of his second term, flirted with the idea of expanding NATO in Europe to the borders of Russia. The already well-known American historian and former US ambassador to Russia George F. Kennan learned of this and warned in 1997 impressively against such a move: “the opinion is, frankly, that a NATO expansion would be the most fatal mistake of American politics in all the time since the Cold War.“But Bill Clinton wanted to know better. He supported Boris Yeltsin with a lot of money in order to allow him a second term as Russian President. And although Boris Yeltsin also explicitly warned him against this step, he initiated the eastward expansion of NATO: in 1997 Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were offered membership in NATO, in 1999 they were formally admitted into NATO, which was the first clear step to position Russia as an enemy par excellence.
In the same year 1999, NATO also made it clear with the “humanitarian” bombings in Yugoslavia that this organization was not a defense alliance, but a military alliance, in order to enforce political goals outside of the member countries by Common Force of arms: in Yugoslavia, before the bombings, no NATO member was affected or even involved in the ethnic conflicts there, and there was no authorization from the UN to intervene militarily. The bombings claimed hundreds of civilian victims; the long-term consequences of the uranium ammunition used in this process are still not sufficiently researched.
- In 2004, a further seven countries were admitted to NATO: the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Albania and Croatia joined in 2009 and Montenegro in 2017. Northern Macedonia is in observer Status and also Georgia and Ukraine are NATO accession candidates. A glance at the map shows: it is clearly about encircling Russia militarily.
Just these days – on 6 February 2020 – the 42-year-old new Ukrainian Defence Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk has put on record in an interview with the Kyiv Post what his most important goal is: the closest possible cooperation with NATO and ultimately, of course, formal accession to NATO. And he made this statement under the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selenskyi, who had declared before his election that peace in eastern Ukraine was his first priority.
A Ukrainian and an American murderer fraternize with raised thumbs on the occasion of the Joint Multinational Training Group maneuvers on November 24, 2018 in the Ukrainian training Center Yavoriv, about 60 km west of Lviv. Does the American soldier realize that his Ukrainian comrade is wearing a face bandage with the image of a skull reminiscent of the SS skull? Why did you send this picture around via Facebook? Is that particularly funny? Or is one simply blind to such symbolism?
In 1991, on the occasion of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which actually made NATO superfluous, it needed a reason to maintain this military alliance and to justify the billion orders for the arms industry in the USA and in Europe: contrary to the “Charter of Paris”, it needed an enemy again. Russia, where there was still a Communist Party, the specter of the USA, was the appropriate candidate.
What does it all mean?
“How wise of nature to put the longest days in the summer.“Or else: please do not think about cause and effect, otherwise it could open the eyes of one or the other. Rephrased something like this: “how wise of nature to let Russia become an enemy in times of Western need of a new enemy.”
A few days ago, the first troop shifts began for the largest NATO maneuver since the Cold War. In addition to 17,000 NATO soldiers who are already in Europe, an additional 20,000 US soldiers will be flown in, along with plenty of Material, including heavy guns and tanks. The chief of the maneuver is Us Major General Andrew Rohling. Where the gigantic maneuver takes place? In Poland, with a 232 km long border with Russia. There are coincidences.