The year 2019 has not been a year of peace. Quite the opposite, the signals for growing tensions between the great powers USA, Russia and China could not be ignored. The dominating forces of the „only world power“ during the decade following after 1990 and their allies have some difficulties to acknowledge that the world has changed greatly during the past years and that the hegemony of „the West“ is no longer accepted.
The European Union as well as the governments of almost all their member states are heading for confrontation with Russia and more and more also with China. The transatlantic link is the NATO. Their decisions at their 70-year-meeting in London are only too obvious. The Russian broadcasting station rt deutsch wrote on 19 December 2019: “Russian General Staff: NATO purposefully prepares big military conflict”. Unfortunately this is not about a Russian conspiracy theory but this analysis fits in with the magazine‘s Die Zeit headline of 20 December 2019 – unthinkable only some years ago – “Sometimes one has to wage a war...”. The article demands more compliance by the European Union and their member states to war missions all over the world.
It comes as a real surprise that such articles do not cause the alarm bells to ring, neither in the USA nor anywhere else. In the Western states the public attention is diverted from this situation threatening the whole of humanity – just think of the all-over destructive consequences of a war with weapons of mass destruction – to focus on almost only one topic – always present in the media – that is the climate catastrophe that is allegedly lurking just around the corner, and the request for a world-wide radical turnabout which should include all social, economic and political realms, marked by the three words “Green New Deal”, respectively “Green Deal” in the EU.
Just like 25 years ago concerning the issue of globalization, left internationalists submitting a radical criticism of capitalism – like Naomi Klein in her book “Why only a Green New Deal may save our planet”– meet with neo-liberal internationalists like the new EU President Ursula van der Leyen from the Christian Democratic Union, who writes just as Naomi Klein does: “Mankind faces an existential threat”. But different from Naomi Klein she writes: “The ‚Green Deal’ is Europes new growth strategy […] It will be the driving force for our new economic chances” (St Galler Tagblatt, 14 December 2019). What is more likely? The end of the world by a climate catastrophe or Doomsday by an Atomic War? What if the last-named catastrophe would is more likely? How could it be explained then that all attention is being diverted from the much more likely war catastrophe onto the much less probable climate catastrophe?
There might be a comprehensible answer to this question, for instance that it might be an attempt to direct the attention away from war preparations. Maybe talking about the imminent climate catastrophe and the inescapability of a “Green New Deal” constitutes the attempt of a former hegemonial power and their allies that has met some greater difficulties recently, to re-establish their hegemony by a great war. In order to overcome desolate economic problems many wars of aggression were waged in the past. The war leaders promised rich booty or important geo-strategic positions for rich booty in the future. Or the elimination of competition. In former decades this was about ressources or access to them. Today’s war propaganda is also directed against economic competition. The tensions between China and the USA are an example. But wouldn’t it be wiser in view of an imminent atomic war to try and attain these big goals without another great war?
A plan for the “Green New Deal” on first sight shows several traits of an all-round promising program to this end. First there is the motivating idea of world rescue, next the vision of a much better world, which will satisfy everybody and everything: social commitment, economic development and protection of the natural environment – “sustainable” is the word. And there is the political realm for which determined acting and more political power beyond any national limitations and sovereignties can be demanded. And there is also the prospect of investments and turnovers and profits in the trillions, a world-wide circulating unimaginable amount of deposit money in the hands of only a few looking for anchorage places beyond the well-known bubbles, for these are surely going to burst soon. Why not try with a “Green New Deal” bubble, when everybody sees the future there – or better is made to see the future there? In September 2019 a group of 515 financial investors informed the public in a news release that they were prepared to invest 35 trillion US-Dolar in a “green” economy.
And what would the price be for that endeavour? There is too little discussion about this question: about the price for the economic order, for freedom, for our living together, for the social cohesion, for the state under the rule of law, for democracy. Who is going to pay the social security benefits promised for all those people who are going to lose their jobs? What will be the economic, social and political consequences, when the economic structure of a country is going to be turned upside down at express-train speed? More serious questions follow:
In case the “Green New Deal” has really been planned to avoid the big war, why not choose the simpler way; realising that for all the people of the world it would be best to sit down at the table with the alleged rivals competing for power and wealth and to begin an honest dialogue, negotiate and build up an equal cooperation on eye level, so that all human beings are enabled to lead dignified lives. So that it will be more than a ceasefire while power claims still prevail? More than only a preparation for ever more wars! Something different than the continuous striving for superiority! •
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