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German Parliamentarian in Washington Says No to NATO – Yes to Peace

Peace Instead of NATO

Speech by Sevim Dagdelen, Member of the German Bundestag at
„No to NATO – Yes to Peace“-rally in Washington DC on July 7th 2024.

As NATO marks its 75th anniversary on the eve of its Washington summit, three of its great myths are unravelling.

First myth: That NATO is a defensive alliance abiding by international law.

In reality, over the last quarter century, NATO has waged unprovoked, illegal wars of aggression against Yugoslavia and Libya; and the United States, the leader of the alliance, invaded and occupied Iraq, in a catastrophic adventure – to name three notorious examples.

Second myth: That NATO stands for democracy and the rule of law.

The reality is that NATO has never had a problem with counting military dictatorships or fascist regimes among its members. Portugal, one of NATO’s founding members, murdered thousands of Africans in its colonial wars and tortured hundreds to death in concentration camps. That was never a problem for this particular collective of shared values, just as Erdoğan’s Türkiye, with its support for jihadists terrorist groups in Syria, poses no particular ethical problem for it today.

Third myth: That NATO is a community of shared values and stands for human rights.

In reality the wars conducted by the United States and its Allies over the last 20 years alone have killed four and a half million people, as calculated by researchers at the esteemed Brown University. The torture and detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is still in operation to this day. The journalist Julian Assange was tormented nearly to death for 14 years because he had published evidence of US war crimes. Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government continues to receive American and European support in the form of arms deliveries for its onslaught against Gaza, which cannot credibly be justified by recourse to the right of self-defense.

If you want to know what character NATO has, you only have to look at how NATO Stoltenberg torpedoes every initiative for peace in Brussels, and also do Washington and Berlin. The plan is escalation nor negotiations for peace! We say: We need to Stop the killings in Ukraine. Ceasefire now!

And we also say: we need to stop the killings in Gaza! Ceasefire now!

What is the role of Germany in this ongoing war in Gaza?

In fact, Germany is the second most important arms supplier for Israel after the USA. From 2019 to 2023, 30 percent of weapons came from Germany. In 2023, the figure was 47 percent while the USA supplied 53 percent. I think that is irresponsible and a shame to send weapons to an ongoing war.

The majority of the German population now no longer wishes to follow Berlin in its mindless escalation, and it likewise stands opposed to granting Ukraine NATO membership, and to funnelling endless sums of money to the corrupt, undemocratic regime in Kyiv.

It is completely irresponsible and insane to hold on to Ukraine’s NATO membership. A majority in Germany rejects this accession. 55 percent in the whole of Germany and 70 percent in eastern Germany reject it. Our governments are doing politics against the majority of the population.

It is an embarrassment and a travesty that the current German Government, like no other before it, carries out Washington’s commands at a moment’s notice, repeatedly, continuously – and shamefully, with its belligerence – puts at grave risk the well-being of the people who elected it.

We need peace instead of NATO.

We need, at long last, to stand up for democratic and popular sovereignty, and to reject the indignity of being a vassal to Washington, which is just about all we’ve gotten from the ruling coalition in Berlin.

Global NATO: Expansion and Escalation

Keynote speech by Sevim Dagdelen, Member of the German Bundestag at
„No to Nato – Yes to Peace“-Summit in Washington DC July 6th 2024

Just in time for its 75th anniversary, NATO has dropped its mask. And the NATO summit in Washington is one particularly illuminating moment in this revelation. The history of the Enlightenment teaches us never to accept a person’s or an organization’s self-image at face value. So do the early sources of Enlightenment ideas in ancient Greece. The Greeks already possessed that insight. Inscribed above the Temple of Apollo was the maxim: Know thyself.

……………………..For NATO, denial of its true nature is part of the essence of the organization. Or to put it another way, an almost meditative immersion in its own self-image is part of the essence of the military alliance. It is all the more astonishing, then, that Western media are so often content to reflect a thousand iterations of this self-image back to the public, without question and without pausing to consider whether the image adequately represents reality.

In fact, 75 years of NATO is equivalent to 75 years of denial, albeit with a dramatic expansion of scale and scope in recent years.

This is so in part because the three great myths of NATO are now fading……………………………………………………………………………

I am thrilled to be able to say finally that Julian Assange is now a free man. And Julian is undefeated.

The international campaign for Assange, all of the confidential talks and the like, were in the end successful. But we must also realize that the fight for Julian Assange’s freedom was also part of the struggle for freedom as such. And this struggle continues to rage here at the very heart of the NATO system.

Given the density of the propaganda, how tireless it operates in celebration of the NATO mythology, day in and day out, it is almost a miracle that not only is support for NATO crumbling worldwide, but that it is precisely those most exposed to its propaganda who are increasingly skeptical of the military pact………………………………………………………………

 NATO is itself causing this crisis, and people sense that.

While its defenders speak of the alliance as if it were eternal, the organization’s drive toward escalation in Ukraine and its expansion into Asia is exceeding the Alliance’s own capacities. Just as with most empires, NATO is falling into a self-made trap of overextension. In this regard, NATO is a political fossil, unprepared to learn from the defeat of the German Empire in the First World War and appears to be repeating the gross miscalculations of the Kaiser’s Germany, only on a global scale.

The German Empire believed it could wage a war on two fronts. Today, a similar conviction is gaining traction within NATO that it must not only confront Russia and China, but that it is also to involve itself in the Middle East. This is a claim to global hegemony now under formulation. What hubris!

NATO evidently sees itself waging a war on three fronts. But if it were to do this, its defeat would be certain right from the start…………………………………………….

The NATO-Ukraine Council is next on the agenda. It is to discuss how the lavish financial transfers and pledges from NATO to Ukraine can be augmented, with an increase in arms deliveries and eventual NATO membership for Ukraine. Third, there will be a session with the AP4, or Asia-Pacific partners – Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea – and a meeting with the leaders of the EU.

Seventy-five years after it was founded, NATO is to push for stepped-up belligerence in Ukraine and expansion into Asia. The intention is to advance the NATO-ization of Asia, and to put the strategy it believes it has already deployed successfully against Russia in place there.

For the moment, the primary focus in the Pacific is not on direct NATO accession for Asian countries, but rather on the expansion of NATO’s sphere of influence via bilateral security agreements – and not only with the AP4, but also with the Philippines, Taiwan and Singapore.

Just as Ukraine was erected as a frontline state against Russia, NATO is hoping to transform Asian countries like the Philippines into challenger states vis-à-vis China. The initial aim is to engage in a cold proxy war, but at the same time to prepare for a hot US and NATO proxy war in Asia……………………………………………………..

As already mentioned, public support for a NATO committed to escalation and expansion is crumbling in the West. In Germany, 55% of people reject Ukraine’s accession to NATO. The majority opposes supplying arms to Ukraine and desires an immediate ceasefire. In the United States, financial aid to Ukraine, USD 200 billion so far, has become extremely unpopular. Growing numbers of people want a stop on the flow of money to a system in Kyiv which is not only corrupt but honors a far-right state cult around the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

NATO’s myths are losing their luster. The Alliance’s strategies are succumbing to their own imperial overextension. What we need now is an immediate end to arms deliveries to Ukraine and, at long last, a ceasefire there. Those who seek peace and security for their own populations must halt the aggressive policy of expansion into Asia…… more https://worldbeyondwar.org/german-parliamentarian-in-washington-says-no-to-nato-yes-to-peace/

July 9, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international