The German-American Relationship Illusion

Demonstrators march through Berlin to protest U.S. President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2017. (Omer Messinger/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

 

Germans see relations as negative; Americans see them as positive. What is going wrong?

Germans and Americans have very different ideas of the relationship between their two countries, according to a survey published by the Körber Foundation and the American Pew Research Center last month.

While 73 percent of Germans surveyed described relations with the United States of America as “somewhat bad” or “very bad,” 70 percent of Americans said that relations with the German Federal Republic were “somewhat good” or “very good.”

Stocking Up for World War III

 

Nuclear nonproliferation efforts are ending. A new arms race has begun.

Since the United States and the Soviet Union backed away from the precipice of nuclear war in the 1980s, the world’s stocks of nuclear weapons have declined from an estimated 60,000 to an estimated 10,000.

According to a 2014 study by science journal Earth’s Future, however, it would take just 100 nuclear detonations to create a worldwide climate catastrophe causing massive famine and death.

North Korea used Berlin embassy to acquire nuclear tech, says German spy chief

 

North Korea used its embassy in Berlin to acquire technologies that were almost certainly used to advance its missile and nuclear weapons programs, according to the head of Germany’s counterintelligence agency. For many decades, Pyongyang has used a sophisticated international system of procurement to acquire technologies and material for its conventional and nuclear weapons programs. These secret methods have enabled the country to evade sanctions placed on it by the international community, which wants to foil North Korea’s nuclear aspirations.

NATO Crisis: Germany’s Entire Submarine Fleet Is Paralyzed

 

Throughout 2017, America’s control of NATO policymaking has become more evident than ever, with the sole objective of war-making against Russia. NATO and Russia continue to build up arms, equipment, and troops along the eastern region of Europe, but there is a new development that has NATO worried.

Germany’s operational readiness of its entire submarine fleet is dead in the water.

Germany Heading for Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

As this article clearly points out, their ideas and vision for Germany, as well as the European Union, are the same. Schulz and the SPD are touted as far left whereas the Merkel and CDU are center-right… yet the people chew it up and believe it although both have the same objectives in mind. As in Russia and also America (Trump being the exception) today, both sides of the political spectrum are of the same party. The opposition plays along while the winner has already been chosen. No matter who wins, the Kremlin gets its man in office while the ‘Deep State’ gets its man in the White House.

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) and her main election opponent, Martin Schulz (left), whose policy positions on key issues are virtually identical. (Image source: European Parliament/Flickr)

 

• The policy positions of Merkel and Schulz on key issues are virtually identical: Both candidates are committed to strengthening the European Union, maintaining open-door immigration policies, pursuing multiculturalism and quashing dissent from the so-called far right.
• Merkel and Schulz both agree that there should be no upper limit on the number of migrants entering Germany.
• Merkel’s grand coalition backed a law that would penalize social media giants, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, with fines of €50 million ($60 million) if they fail to remove offending content from their platforms within 24 hours. Observers say the law is aimed at silencing critics of Merkel’s open-door migration policy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is on track win a fourth term in office after polls confirmed she won the first and only televised debate with her main election opponent, Martin Schulz, leader of the Social Democratic Union Party (SDP).

Five more years of MERKEL: German Chancellor set to glide to victory ahead of Schulz

Angela Merkel is expect to win a fourth term as German Chancellor [Getty]

 

GERMAN Chancellor Angela Merkel is set to easily glide to victory for a fourth term in power at the general election to be held in September, according to two new polls.

In one conducted by polling institute infratest-dimap, in conjunction with German public broadcaster ARD, Mrs Merkel scored her highest approval rating since the beginning of the refugee crisis in 2015.

Reaching for the Bomb

WARSAW/HAMBURG/BERLIN (Own report) – The Polish government’s éminence grise, Jarosław Kaczyński, has picked up the German establishment’s call to acquire its own nuclear weapons. He would welcome it, if the EU would become a “nuclear superpower,” Kaczyński told a leading German daily. Last week, the left liberal, government critical “Panorama” television program of the ARD’s Norddeutscher Rundfunk channel called for launching an “open debate” on the “German nuclear bomb,” because “no state” could presently be “confident” that the USA, under President Trump, would “unconditionally defend the other NATO allies.” To “deter” Russia from attacking a member of the Alliance, in this situation, it is necessary to have national control over nuclear weapons, claimed the authors of the program. Numerous experts from think tanks, the media and from the political domain have expressed similar views, even while differing, on whether to confide the nuclear war potential to the authority of the EU’s military bodies or to the German government.

German Default Risk Spikes To Highest Since Brexit As Merkel Lead Plunges To Multi-Year Low

 

Germany’s Social Democrats narrowed the gap with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bloc to the closest in more than four years, reinforcing a poll bounce after they chose outsider Martin Schulz to challenge Europe’s longest-serving leader. As Bild reports, the 6-point surge in opposition support was the biggest ever recorded for the party… and may explain why German sovereign risk spiked to its highest since Brexit.

As Bloomberg reports, support for the SPD jumped 8 percentage points to 29% from a month earlier, the highest level since the last election in September 2013, according to the Infratest-Dimap for broadcaster ARD. Merkel’s Christian Democratic-led bloc, known informally as the Union, slid 3 points to 33%. Half of those surveyed would support Schulz if the chancellor were elected directly, compared with 34% for Merkel.

Germany: Beginning of the End of the Merkel Era?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left) suffered a major blow on September 4 when the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany, led by Frauke Petry (right), surged ahead of her Christian Democratic Union in elections in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

 

• The anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged ahead of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in elections in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.
• The election was widely seen as a referendum on Merkel’s open-door migration policy and her decision to allow more than one million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East to enter Germany in 2015.
• Merkel rejected any course correction on migration policy: “I am very unsatisfied with the outcome of the election. Obviously it has something to do with the refugee question. I think the decisions that were made were correct.” She went on to blame German voters for failing to appreciate her government’s “problem-solving abilities”
• Many of the AfD’s positions were once held, but later abandoned, by the Merkel’s CDU.
• A September 1 poll showed Merkel’s popularity rating has plunged to 45%, a five-year low. More than half (51%) of those surveyed said it would “not be good” if Merkel ran for another term in 2017.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel suffered a major blow on September 4 when the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged ahead of her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in elections in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

European Values (II)

BERLIN/WARSAW (Own report) – Whereas Berlin is attacking the Polish government because of its media law; massive criticism is being raised against the German public broadcasting. While German politicians are calling for sanctions to be imposed on Poland, because it is placing its public media under government supervision, a right-wing conservative former CDU minister has become Chair of an influential panel of Germany’s ARD public television channel. Observers note that, even after the Federal Constitutional Court’s intervention, state officials or individuals with close government ties exercise significant influence on the public broadcasting steering committees. Due to their structural relationship to the state, on the one hand, and the programs’ political orientation toward government policy, on the other, one could speak of “embedded journalism” in Germany, a former correspondent of the ZDF public television concluded a few years ago. The journalist went to work for the Swiss Television, because it does not have “a NATO state’s obligatory alignment.” The German public television’s foreign news reporting is even increasingly being accused of using falsifications.

Russian hackers accused of Bundestag attack

A cyber attack on the German Bundestag lower house of parliament reported last month is still stealing data and could force officials to spend millions of euros replacing the entire computer system, German media reported on Wednesday.

The online edition of news magazine Der Spiegel also quoted what it said were experts from an internal investigation saying there were indications that a Russian intelligence agency had staged the attack.

Germans Furious After Varoufakis/Tsipras Admit “Greece Will Never Repay Its Debts”

And Varoufakis was was right when he mentioned that in 2010 Germany knew Greece would never be able to pay back its debts. However, that doesn’t go far enough. Germany knew from the get-go that Greece, among many other nations who never really qualified but were intentionally let in as EU members, was let into a system that was designed to fail. In other words, the failure was planned by Germany’s Fourth Reich in order to subjugate the continent via chipping away at national sovereignty in exchange for bailouts via its Troika proxy which kept the members from descending into chaos and riots. Furthermore, all the bailouts really did was bailout the French and German banks.

In the end all roads lead back to Berlin, the only winner in all of this.

 

The Greco-Germanic war of words continues… Having pissed off The Greeks with his “Troika” remarks, Germany’s Schaeuble went on today to more ad hominum attacks by reportedly calling the Greek FinMin “foolishly naive.” The Greek ambassador has ‘officially’ complained to “friend and ally” Germany about the personal insult. But The Greeks had the last laugh, as first Varoufakis and then Tsipras explained respectively that “Greece would never pay back its debts,” and “Greece cannot pretend its debt burden is sustainable.” The German response, via tabloid Bild, “there must be an end to this madness. Europe must not be made to look stupid.”

Farewell to the “Commemorative Culture”

BERLIN (Own report) – Several citizens’ initiatives are unambiguously repudiating the semi-official German “commemorative culture.” Particularly the “Train of Commemoration” is raising serious accusations against the German government, on the occasion of the upcoming commemoration of the Nazi November Pogroms. According to the initiative’s voluminous publication, Berlin is crossing the line between revisionist theses and open denial of Nazi mass crimes. Aside from the token public events, the Federal Republic of Germany is expending a great amount of energy and mobilizing all official means in opposition to the survivors of Nazi terror, to avoid having to face the inherited debt left by its predecessor state (“Train of Commemoration, the Deutsche Bahn and the Struggle against Forgetting”). These accusations against Berlin are not new, however they are now accompanied with documentary evidence. The publication of this work comes at an embarrassing moment for Berlin, because demands are becoming louder in other European countries for a complete settlement of debts from Nazi crimes. In October, Italy’s Supreme Court ruled that lawsuits against the Federal Republic of Germany on the question of compensation are subject to review by courts.

Breath-Taking Progress

What you see here is the notion that without humans in combat, there’s less risk involved, therefore there is stronger public support for the usage of UAVs in war, and war itself. Such might be the current situation in America today, as it’s waging 74+ wars, both declared and undeclared. If there’s no human intervention (i.e. drone strikes) or a small teams of special ops are being used, it’s not thought of as a war.

BERLIN (Own report) – The German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) is propagating in favor of the deployment of combat drones. The influential think tank, headquartered in Berlin, has published an opinion poll indicating that more than two-thirds of the German population are in favor of using Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles or UCAVs in warfare. The results of this poll can be found in the current edition of “Internationale Politik,” the journal published by the DGAP. The journal extensively treats the subject – with an unambiguous tenor: UCAV development is characterized as an “enormous technological leap” that the German armed forces cannot evade. The authors consider the construction of combat drones, which, based on artificial intelligence can quasi “autonomously” carry out killer functions without human intervention, to be a “logical consequence.” The PR campaign, launched by the DGAP, accords with the German government’s intention to increase the reliance on UCAVs in future wars.