(German text below. Deutscher Text unten)
Contribution to the 8th International Communist Seminar, Brussels, 2-4 May 1999
The military strategy of German Imperialism
Klaus Hubig, Workers League for the reconstruction
of the Communist Party of Germany
First I want to thank the Belgian comrades for giving me the opportunity to speak here about -The Military strategy of German Imperialism’.
Considering the time available I want to summarise the most important points in eight theses. In these theses I would like to confine myself especially to the developments after 1990, the date of annexation of the German Democratic Republic.
1.
In addition to war being the continuation of politics by other means, military strategy is naturally the continuation of political strategy by other means. This political strategy of German Imperialism has consisted in tearing down all the limits set by the allies of the Anti-Hitler-Coalition with the Soviet-Union at its helm in the Potsdam Agreement. Let us remember: the Potsdam Agreement proclaimed, among other things, the complete liquidation of German militarism.
2.
The annexation of GDR in October 1990 has not only drawn a further 16 million people under the direct rule of German imperialism. It has also created a qualitative advance in the aggressive German foreign policy and a qualitative change in military policy. In January 1991 Chancellor Kohl declared in an inaugural speech, I quote: "Germany has concluded with its history, it can now declare itself openly for its world-wide power role and it should expand it." Reactionary forces are working for the aim that Germany should understand itself as the most powerful state in Europe and use this power consciously to implement its imperialistic interests in the world.
Under the mask of ‘humanity’ and ‘human rights’ the Federal Republic of Germany has supported systematically every military intervention by the United Nations. At the time the Social Democrat Party and the Green party said: No combat missions, at most UN ‘peacekeeping’ missions. Nowadays Germany is involved in every foreign mission - whether UN mandated or not.
It may be in imperialistic countries like it is, that soldiers are stationed in foreign countries. You could say the rule of monopoly capital and the sharing out of the world in their spheres of influence implied it. This is right in general, but truth is concrete.
The world had already been divided up between a handful of imperialists when German soldiers on behalf of German Imperialism marched into other countries before as well as after both World Wars, so that a renewed battle for a new sharing out was caused. It’s just one imperialism too much, which declares its claims. To be the latest among them and to be therefore the most aggressive, that is the nature of German Imperialism: on the one hand its relative weakness and on the other hand its special danger. Already twice in this century this battle has brought terrible results.
I hope you can understand my feelings, why I insist on that, because in this context I have in mind Ypres, here in Belgium, Verdun in France, Guernica in Spain, Lidice in the Czech Republic, the island Crete in Greece, and so on and so on. There is not enough time to list all cities, which have been victims of German dreams of world domination.
3.
What with the current marking of 50 Years of NATO many articles are being written about the history of this alliance of imperialist powers. Its first General Secretary, Lord Ismay, described the basic idea as follows:
"NATO was founded to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down." What is left 50 years later?
For years the Federal Republic of Germany has been working actively and methodically to undermine and finally break up of this imperialistic alliance system, which was built after World War II also against Germany. And now, it is getting to the point of this plan, it turns the slogan ‘Out of NATO!’ to its own imperialistic advantage.
In place of so the called transatlantic security doctrine Germany is in the process of installing a purely European military identity, namely the Western European Union, without and therefore against the United States. In deep and sharp battle with other European states, as proved by all minutes of European Union Conferences, German Imperialism is prepared and armed very well: no bilateral or multilateral military agreement without Germany, no Euro-Corps without participation of the FRG. The German Army has been the force behind the formation of east-European armies.
4.
The war-mongering in the ideological way against the people in the home country has intensified since the annexation of GDR in a disastrous measure. The splitting off and the liquidation of the mass organisations and parties in the territory of GDR has worked like a boomerang against the working class and the people of FRG: no organised resistance is going into action against the fascist pogroms organised by the state. The never broken tradition of nationalism and anti-Semitism have a clear way. Reactionary forces have claimed that Auschwitz and the holocaust must not further be used against the self-confidence of the Germans. They claimed: Germany has to be normal. And this claimed normality, what has that already produced twice in this century? This can be never forgotten by the people of Europe!
5.
German Imperialism is a nuclear power. It has all the facilities at its disposal to produce the bomb. Because of the fact that it could not demonstrate it yet officially, it is obliged to make concessions to the other nuclear powers. Nevertheless it uses each opportunity to provoke in this case its concurrence. Last time, it was the recommendation of Joschka Fischer, foreign minister, to change the NATO first use doctrine regarding nuclear weapons. It is obvious that the motive of this recommendation is not the Greens’ love of peace, but the disarmament of potential enemies or the justification for Germany’s own nuclear armament. What other reason can there be than the following: They see the possibility of such an option or have a feeling for it and so the new social democratic government protects itself from a war against its own bourgeoisie.
6.
The test of German military strategy in the war against the Yugoslavian people shows the real face of German Imperialism. The liquidation of imperialistic alliances is advanced under our eyes so far away that international peoples rights only consist in an important scrap of paper. The bombing by a part of the NATO imperialist powers is driving the people of the world to the decision either to submit totally to the imperialistic powers as protectorate or to be bombed. They bomb hospitals and blow up factories. They murder and put hundred of thousands peoples to flight.
German Imperialism is mainly responsible for this war of aggression. The Federal Republic of Germany stirred up national conflicts inside Yugoslavia and in summer 1991 it blackmailed the European Union countries into the recognition of the small states, Slovenia and Croatia. After that, it wasn’t any more a question of the internal affairs of Yugoslavia, but an international affair, in which international politics can intervene. Every German expansion towards eastern and south-eastern Europe which succeeds with impunity smoothes the way for another German ‘Drive towards the East’ (an old Nazi slogan). It was none other than the German government, the German military forces and the German civil and military secret service which built up, financed and trained the Albanian terror group the UCK (KLA).
The war against Yugoslavia proves: German Imperialism is not an imperialism like any other. No other imperialism is able to drive Europe in a confrontation of World War with the United States of America. German Imperialism is able to do it. While and especially because German Imperialism creates by many attempts a United Europe under the dominance of Germany.
Second: The terrible war against Yugoslavia is followed by a much more terrible war.
Up to now German Imperialism has conducted its war against Yugoslavia from within the NATO alliance. But, the German press is already asking: Why? And it replies: After the dissolution of the Soviet-Union NATO has lost its real enemy. What is holding it together? The common interest of imperialists of pressing their war-aims on other countries. But, what will happen if these common war-aims are lost? Then, I would like to continue, we will face a war between the imperialist states themselves. That will be the so-called ‘German special-way’. Today there are already strong supporters of German monopoly bourgeoisie, especially in the CDU and CSU parties, who refuse to support the operation of ground forces. They say: Germany must not be dragged once more into a war. Germany can do it without the straitjacket of USA dominated alliances. This kind of refusal of German participation in the war against Yugoslavia is as bad as agreement to it.
7.
With the election victory of the social democratic led Schröder-government, they have taken up the war-policy of the reactionary Kohl-government and are continuing it on a new level. For the German working class, as well as the international proletariat, struggle isn’t any easier following this change of government. The necessity for a common struggle by the people of Europe against German Imperialism is not diminished. In Europe, it is German Imperialism that annexes states, that stirs up to wars, that destabilises economies, that moves borders and subjugates regions - in order to implement its hegemony in Europe. This happens undiminished by a government, which still is regarded in huge parts of the working class in FRG as ‘its own’ government and which is under permanent pressure to demonstrate to the bourgeoisie its capability to govern by pressing ahead always anew. These facts do not diminish but increase the danger of war. That is what has changed in the last year in our country.
Social democracy, that is the attempt of the bourgeoisie to submit the working class totally under its world-wide plans of conquest, by so called ‘peaceful’ ideological means and not by open terroristic means. If social democracry cannot fulfil this task, the bourgeoisie will give it a kick and immediately dismiss it from government. If social democracy fulfils this task really well, the bourgeoisie will give it a well-deserved kick too, because of the same fact, that it is exactly that, that it has to do for the bourgeoisie.
8.
The huge majority of workers in the Federal Republic of Germany have gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie. For communists it is a lengthy, tough and laborious fight to move the workers in our country to resistance against the war.
Our task is to explain again and again as tangibly as possible how great the secret is behind war, what things were like in recent wars and why they could not have been any other way. What we have to uncover in each day’s struggle is that our lives begin just at the point and only at the point, when the struggle commences against war, that means the struggle of workers against the main enemy in their own country.
Communists never shy away from this struggle.
War in Europe will only end if the workers send the capitalists of their countries packing so that the imperialists will be forced to make peace with the successful proletariat. The first battle of nations in this century could only be finished by the workers themselves. There were the Russian workers, who defeated the tsarist war-mongers and built up a proletarian peace in socialism. It was the work of the Serb and Albanian workers who liberated Yugoslavia - and not only Yugoslavia - from the furious Hitler fascism and built up in place of that a peoples democracy of peaceful living together. That is also one reason for the special hate of German reactionary forces against the people of Yugoslavia to this day.
The fact that we in West-Germany were able to live to see the liberation from Hitler fascism, this was the decisive work of the revolutionary and victorious working class of the Soviet-Union, which, with more than 20 millions of own victims, created peace in Europe for many decades. They also created the German Democratic Republic, in which 16 million could live free from German war-mongers.
By the way: one of many consequences of that is the fact that today, on the territory of annexed GDR, the majority of people are against this war being waged by the FRG.
Finally let me end with the following historical comparison:
It was Karl Liebknecht, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany, who showed on 1 May 1915 the way out of the impending battle between the nations with his call: Down with the war! Down with German Imperialism!
At first, there were only a few who held that slogan aloft, but without that call of 1915 there would have been no German Revolution in 1918.
Contribution to the 8th International Communist Seminar, Brussels, 2-4 May 1999
Theme: Imperialism means War