The gun nuts have lost

It was a disrespectful act, Trump had abandoned a system of values after just a few weeks in office; something like this had never been seen before. What a storm of doomsday scenarios hasn't been thrown at us to prove to us how fundamentally terrible Donald Trump is. And how half-baked were the declarations of unconditional solidarity with Ukraine by European politicians, often scattered massively on Twitter via copy-paste, always written in the pluralis majestatis, that "we all" support Ukraine's victory. Do we? I would rather support peace.

What exactly did Donald Trump do? He refused to sweet-talk the Ukrainian president. Trump stated what has been completely obvious for three years: Ukraine cannot win this war without provoking a third world war. There is no realistic scenario for that, period, end of story. Of course, that doesn't correspond to anyone's ideal for the end of this conflict, but unfortunately, it's also rather late to formulate ideals after three years of cheering on and arming the defeated belligerent. "You can do it, just don't negotiate, it's better to strike back!" Mind you, the claim that Putin doesn't want to negotiate has always been a lie. Likewise, anyone who threateningly announces that the Russians will be in the Baltics next if they aren't stopped is lying. This is completely unfounded; there's no reason to assume it; it's propaganda.

Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia have been in NATO for 20 years - which is supposedly a guarantee of security against Russia, which is why Ukraine should be admitted as soon as possible, according to the argument of the war advocates. Poland, where Putin, as he often claims, wants to "continue" (always repeating this stupid, parroted vocabulary), is also a member of the defense alliance. NATO offered Sweden and Finland security against Russia, but for Eastern Europe, it suddenly no longer does. Putin's army is too weak to make any significant inroads in Ukraine, but one has to fear that after three years of a war of attrition, he'll attack Europe next. So, what now?

Trump's great outrage was his renunciation of pseudo-moral assertions, which are always included pro forma with state-supporting political statements and are almost always lies. As soon as a politician starts talking about values, one can safely turn away, because he's starting to lie. And lo and behold: there's a tremendous rustling in the media of the powerful, who are firing on all cylinders to cement their own position of power and simultaneously morally enhance this struggle for their own importance. For freedom After all, it's worth fighting, and nothing but freedom is at stake in Ukraine. Zelenskyy is being touted as the new leader of the Free World after Trump's "backtracking." Regardless of the questions that arise in this regard: How free is Ukraine really? Are elections the only indicator of a functioning democracy? And: if freedom must be defended with violence, does it even exist? Freedom for which one must die is not freedom.

But the need to reinvent Europe also invites a reinterpretation of the European idea of peace, and the speed with which the masks fall is remarkable. As soon as the topic of military spending comes up, Friedrich Merz drops the debt brake. When it was still a question of investing in the social system, he was desperately opposed to spending money, but the war is now worth almost a trillion euros to him. That's a number with twelve zeros, a million times a million. And because this is so absurd, the decision on this special fund is being sought in the old, defeated Bundestag, in order to avoid the new possibilities of the blocking minority. This must be the democracy we are supposed to fight for.

Meanwhile, with his reversal of the reversal in the form of sanctions against Russia, Trump is now demonstrating his way of achieving progress: he is working with ultimatums, and these are apparently having an effect. The punitive tariffs led to the results he wanted - even if some of these results were merely a repetition of measures already adopted. But the American president is urging the international community to take a stand under certain circumstances. And he is succeeding. Now that he is punishing Russia again, is he our friend again? Or is it ultimately not about right or wrong at all, but only about what is beneficial? His predecessors did something similar. The NSA spying scandal, for example, was just as much a maneuver to maintain control over international affairs. Countless CIA missions, of which we know today, permeate thehistory of the last 50 years. The difference with Trump? He makes his authoritative interventions transparent.

And what are those whose job it is to keep an eye on the government, which is still in the midst of formation, doing? Instead of consistently questioning the announced decisions, the media and the opposition in many places seem to want to encourage even more excessive spending. They are complicit in the arms race instead of respectfully opposing it. This is a repeat of the trend that began during the Corona period, when critical reporting was primarily understood as calling for even tougher measures.

This week, we are once again reading adventurous things from people whom we have often said to be level-headed and wise. Felix Dachsel from the "Spiegel" reporting department (founded in the wake of the Claas Relotius scandal) responds to X with the post: "Taurus, now." Not "Peace, now." Not "Stop dying." It would be better to shoot another half a million people to set an example, without Ukraine's negotiating position improving even a little.

The federal spokesperson for the Green Youth, Jakob Blasel, has no shame in writing: "Anyone who still hesitates to defend Europe's freedom with weapons in this global situation is not left-wing - but naive and lacking in solidarity." Oh, so only those who want to be shot are showing solidarity! It's right-wing not to want to risk one's own life to maintain a system of power! Europe must be defended exclusively as a landmass and apparatus; individual human lives are irrelevant to the ideal of freedom. How politically perverted do you have to be to seriously believe that?

Under an episode of the "BOYGROUP" podcast, a listener let us know in a comment: The fact that we can speak out against arms deliveries without ending up in a labor camp is only possible because people fought and died for us and our freedom. However, there is a mistake in this imprisonment fantasy that the user is developing in relation to us, because his allusion to the Third Reich has a significant flaw in his argument. The Allies couldn't care less about the dictatorship in Germany.

They hadn't noticed the imprisonments, the murders, and the concentration camps until six years later, when they decided to do something now and liberate Germany from the Hitler regime as a favor to the German people, who apparently couldn't do it on their own. In short: no country wages war against a dictatorship for the benefit of the people living there. If that were the case, the West would have its hands full worldwide to this day. These peoples are often extremely obedient, and for other countries, what matters is not the well-being of their citizens in a foreign society, but the ability to do business with other states. For decades, the West didn't care that Putin was a dictator; in fact, the West happily cooperated with Putin's predecessors, some of whom ruled with even more chauvinistic stance than the current Russian president.

Any claim of moral reasons for interfering in the war is pure propaganda, and they always have been. The system of glorifying military interventions in other countries as missions for democracy originated with the inventor of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays himself. Through his PR machine, the democratically elected president of Guatemala was declared a communist dictator in the public's perception, and the US agreed to bring democracy to the Guatemalans through a special operation. This then came in the form of a military junta, which probably brought little joy to the people there, but served its purpose: to allow the Chiquita company continued access to the banana plantations in Guatemala.

The truth is: the West has repeatedly betrayed Ukraine for purely self-serving reasons. It betrayed it through interference in the Maidan, through torpedoing peace negotiations in the spring of 2022 shortly after the war began, and through repeated new arms deliveries, tactically just enough to prevent Ukraine from making any breakthroughs. With complete self-confidence and deliberateness, Europe, in particular, has maneuvered Ukraine into a war of attrition. Had Ukraine ever truly been about winning over Russia, the measures taken from day one would have had to be different.

Anyone who claims to support Ukraine today and demands the delivery of even more heavy weapons systems is a liar and a misanthropist. This mentality can only be maintained by those who regard the real fates, the actual human lives of soldiers and civilians in this war as mere statistics.tistics. Those who hold this worldview share at least as much philosophical agreement with Stalin as Putin is often accused of, usually without citing sources. Countries are not just lines on maps; they are, above all, the people who live there. Those who say from their Western living rooms that these people died for freedom and wanted to continue fighting (which, incidentally, is almost certainly also nonsense) devalue the fates of the deceased.

The inhumanity of this camp of opinion is also evident in the reaction to Russia's rejection of a ceasefire on March 13. On social media, countless smirking NATO fans posted the Bild headline "Kremlin rejects ceasefire!" and their first thought was to mock those calling for negotiations. Their first thought wasn't that it's not good news at all if the killings continue seamlessly. Nor was it the first thing that occurred to them that part of negotiations is that they occasionally don't produce immediate results. Their first thought was: "Now we've really given the Putin-sympathizers a piece of our minds!" And even that wasn't true.

It's the nature of negotiations that offers are rejected. Every flea market visitor knows this. It demonstrates absurd intellectual shallowness to interpret this news story as a petty victory for one's own argument and, as many did, to write that "Putin" had "rejected negotiations," which is simply not true. The underlying idea is, moreover, completely insane: If arms deliveries don't immediately achieve the desired effect, more weapons must be delivered. If peace negotiations don't immediately achieve the desired effect, then they have failed and are pointless. But dissonance is to be expected when people who, under other circumstances, would probably spread the hashtag #HaltDieFresseSpringerpresse everywhere imaginable on the internet, in this case, instead focus on a headline in the Bild newspaper.

It is a form of latent nationalism to claim that, in case of doubt, the country takes precedence over life. Even under current law, my state can forbid me from fleeing in the event of war and force me to risk my own murder, not to defend myself, my family, or my living conditions (which will be destroyed by the bombs anyway), but to avoid a shift in power. If defense were truly about protecting the population, an attacked state would have to seek peace as quickly as possible on its own initiative. Ukraine initially did this in peace negotiations in Istanbul. These negotiations failed due to Western interference, which needed Ukraine as a field office for a new Cold War with Russia in order to maintain control over the changing balance of power caused by the rise of the BRICS countries - and, of course, to make a lot of money from arms sales.

The tactical approach of the Biden administration was particularly exemplary in this regard: after initially offering enormous support, the previous president again held back on arms exports and primarily supplied European countries, which in turn had to replenish their own stocks after their extensive deliveries to Ukraine. Naturally, the US paid a considerable price for this from the Europeans, while simultaneously asserting that it was on the front lines in the fight against the evil aggressor and the enemy in the Kremlin.

If its interests had been different, the US would have been on the opposite side if necessary. After all, how many wars, waged by dictatorships, are currently taking place in the world without the US being enthusiastic about them for even a minute? It's not easy to make money from them. If Vladimir Putin were to purchase weapons for his war in Ukraine exclusively from Lockhead Martin in the future and pay accordingly, the White House phone lines would likely overheat for weeks with begging calls from the NRA.

Where the path of European rearmament will lead is clear: first, to immense debt that will make life considerably more difficult for my generation and that of my children. We're talking about roughly one-fifth of Germany's gross domestic product, EUR800 billion, which is now to be spent on weapons and the military, with a CDU that simultaneously swears to lower taxes for entrepreneurs. Second, however, European saber-rattling will not lead to greater security. Because the acute threat to Germany does not exist at the moment - rather, it would only arise if we proactively replenish our arsenals, which could be interpreted as a provocation.

The historically highGermany's military spending (for a long time, we were a perennial contender among the top 10 countries with the highest spending) hasn't prevented a single war in recent decades. Just as deterrence rarely prevents wars anyway. Currently, for example, there is a lot of talk about a nuclear upgrade for Europe. Let's take a look at the track record of nuclear deterrence in recent years: The presence of nuclear weapons didn't prevent the war between India and Pakistan, couldn't avert the Falklands War, and they've been of little use to Israel either.

Moreover, the concept of deterrence has been controversial for decades. During the Cold War, the various sides massively rearmed, and several times an escalation almost led to the end of our civilization. However, the end of the Cold War was brought about by peaceful revolutions, not military maneuvers. The moments when World War III almost broke out--for example, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962--would probably never have come so close without this very same weaponry.

The only thing that can preserve freedom and security in the long term is peace, disarmament, and the laying down of weapons. It's a banal truth, but an irrefutable one. Peace isn't achieved by baring our teeth and waving our swords around, yelling at everyone, "Don't touch me!" Long-term peace can be achieved in three ways: peaceful revolutions, agreements, or the total annihilation of the enemy. The latter isn't an option in this case. Russia will not be destroyed. Anyone who persists in the idea that force can still be used to gain ground in this war, or even to bring the enemy to its knees, urgently needs help--they are suffering from delusions and fantasies of violence.

The gun nuts have lost. Perhaps they don't realize it yet, wallowing in the partial successes of a united Europe again, or in Donald Trump's latest change of heart. But sooner or later, they will have to admit that, by pursuing their course of action, they were senselessly provoking their own downfall, ignoring all reality. One cannot think through the confused ideas of the war fetishists, for whom gunfire, destruction, and injury are merely numbers, without ending up in catastrophe, one way or another. Another kind. How many of them secretly own shares in defense companies? But even these won't do them any good when, sooner or later, they have to explain to their children what kind of world they left behind. Then, at the very latest, they will have to admit: they have failed. They have blood on their hands.

March 14, 2025
*Bent-Erik Scholz works as a freelancer for RBB