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The problem with philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and other German 'intellectuals' opposing weapons for Ukraine is that their own pacifist sentiment has developed in a narcissistic Cold War monoculture of moral self-aggrandizement that is unable to move beyond its socialization
Guilt over the crimes of the Nazis and the ideological confrontation between the generation of the perpetrators and their children was translated into a wider anti-imperialism that was almost exclusively anti-American and anti-NATO in nature. The reincarnation of the fascism and
militarism was perceived as re-incarnated in US-capitalism, the war in Vietnam, and the military and political institutions of the USA, NATO, and West-Germany. German left-wing politicians that today see weapons for Ukraine as irresponsible escalation had no problem donating
money to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to back them in the fight against CIA-backed contras. The root of war, aggression and Empire was only ever located in the West, not the East. At the same time, a political culture of moralizing, smug self-righteousness developed in Germany,
where we, the vanquished, had learned the 'lessons from history' oh so much deeper and more profoundly than anyone else: diplomacy and economics instead of hard power and credible military force. When the US, Britain or France intervened militarily abroad, they followed their
unfortunate colonial reflexes of great power politics that we had purged ourselves from so lastingly. However, this narrative of a moral rebirth was always somewhat of a convenient lie. The export champion of the world had outsourced its own security to the Americans under whose
nuclear umbrella one sat quite comfortably, the occasional proselytizing finger wagging against uncultured 'cowboys' and their shoot first mentality notwithstanding. When others were forced to act, whether the US after 9/11 or France after a series of terror attacks, Germany
would send addresses of solidarity and send military forces in support, but never perceive war as a genuine political instrument to achieve strategic objectives. Germany also reserved the right to both be on the pitch and comment the game critically from the sidelines. When it
comes to Eastern Europe, however, Germany has for decades demonstrated a more or less neocolonial altitude that marginalized and neglected the concerns and complaints of countries like Ukraine, Poland, or the Baltics. Fixated on good relations with Russia, the mantra of security
with Russia, never security against Russia lives on in an appeasement mentality that essentially sees Ukraine in toto or in parts as territorial bargaining chip to purchase a cold peace with Putin. The callous disregard for the most fundamental rights of Ukraine, its national
sovereignty, territorial integrity, its very statehood and right to exist are fed by a bigoted egocentrism that is all the more despicable, because it is clad in a patronizing language, presenting political solutions and negotiations as supposedly morally superior alternatives.
That in war, only military victory guarantees politically favourable conditions for negotiations is an intellectual hurdle that is virtually impossible to cross for a strand of German left-wing pacifism that never quite moved past 'USA-SA-SS' in its engagement with int. politics.
Diplomacy with one side having a gun held to its head is not diplomacy, it is surrender. But the enduring Stockholm syndrome of people like Alice Schwarzer, Jürgen Habermas, Johannes Varwick and others vis-à-vis Vladimir Putin not only manifests in the striking similarity of
their moralizing, paternalistic rhetoric with Kremlin talking points, but it shows in their thinly veiled disdain and arrogant dismissal of Ukraine's heroic defence of its freedom as unfortunate archaic reflexes of a somewhat uncouth president and its people. The suffering of
Ukrainians is not primarily located with the cluster bombs, thermobaric munitions, tanks, and guns of Russia, which usually only gets a token mention, but the stubborn refusal of Ukraine to surrender and their foolish insistence to fight on. The height of that moral bankruptcy
and decay, however, is the sinister insinuation by German intellectuals that Selenskyj harnesses the heroic iconography and martial rhetoric of the Nazis to morally blackmail us post-heroic Kantian Germans, to force us out of our postmodern EU governance paradise and to once
stare into the abyss of our own demons of the past. How dare they make us talk about war, soldiers, fighting and weapons again, those uncivilized rednecks populating a Slavic backwater. Don't they realized what we have accomplished here since 1945! Shame on them. This toxic
narcissism is, however, only the fighting retreat and last gasp of an ageing group of boomer intellectuals, who had their intellectual heyday in the 1980s in West-Germany and whose relevance is chronologically and ideologically fast being relegated to the dustbin of history. end
