Equity  vs.  EQUALITY

03 / 2023



This website for longer was edited under the headline „Water Equity and Dignity“.
Then I discovered Adom Getachew's Book
"Worldmaking after Empire –
THE RISE AND FALL OF SELF-DETERMINATION" (1)

the translation exactly derived in that context of equity = cheapness and adequacy,
which insofar is the complete opposite zu equality = being equal on the same level (2).

In addition to that Adom Getachew emphasizes, that this error also happened to
Jan Smuts, finally one of the sharpest protagonists of South African Apartheid also
in the course of developing his own political theories after WW 1. The question,
whether this once happened intentionally or by accident shall be left aside here. 

It's a fact though, that also in the League of Nations Smuts was a sharp promotor
of racial segregation, he wanted to extend far beyond South Africa (3).

Adom Getachew  here describes a significant etymological point of the words

Equity and Equality. As a non-native English-speaker I need to lower my gaze
facing that accurate derivation of terms in that context and have to thank Adom and
the translator of her book, Frank Lachmann that they stressed that difference so concisely. .

Nonetheless the American title "WORLDMAKING AFTER EMPIRE“ with its willful 
cosmopolitan approach, Adom Getachew also ascribes to masterminds of post-colonialism
particularly in the aftermath of WW2 is translated rather weakly into German. Anyway:
humans are humans, the color of the skin doesn't matter therein (4).

Notes:

1. Here a collection of  reviews of the book of the book by the Ethiopian-US-American
   political scientist teaching at Chicago (German): 
   https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/adom-getachew/die-welt-nach-den-imperien.html 
   and  an interview in the Austrian journal Standard (German):  https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000142178645/politologin-adom-getachew-ueber-ausbeutung-und-beherrschung?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-de-DE
2. Getachew, Adom – “Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination”; 
   Princeton University Press, 2019. (“Die Welt nach den Imperien. Aufstieg und
   Niedergang der postkolonialen Selbstbestimmung”; © Suhrkamp-Verlag, Berlin 2022,
   German edition, p. 102).
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Smuts 
4. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179155/worldmaking-after-empire

“Thinking War from Its End” and

“The Global Green New Deal”

Transitional and Marginalized Spaces: Afghanistan and Ukraine

Rebuilding Essentials for Enabling Dignified Human Life throughout

a Possible Future

May 8th, 2022

1.  Personal Histology

2.  Ukrainian and Afghan Perspectives 1:
     Parallel Lines and Differences Regarding their Transitory Marginalization

3.  Ukrainian and Afghan Perspectives 2:
     Premises for the Way from “Conflict to Post-Conflict”, thus to Post-War-Regulations

4.  „New Deal“, „Marshall-Plan“, „Manhattan-Project“
     and other historical Necessities today thought
     from their Beginning and their End.

5.  Interim Solutions for Contemporary Dislocations
     in the 21st Century and Beyond 



1.  Personal Histology

There are many voices, many wake-up-calls these days, early spring / late winter 2022. „Splintered realities“ or: fragmented ways of perception of „truth“ and „facts“ are overlapping each other. War and its multiple dangerous realities are neither to be foreseen in “post-post^Xy-modern” ways of story-telling, nor are there many outlooks possible regarding “post-war-scenarios”. These require retrospective forecasting and insight as much as out-of-the blackbox of warfare movements themselves. Thinking around different corners. Exchanging different experiences. And: sticking together. Solidarity. Invigorated Brother- and Sisterhood. Respect, rather than fear.

“Thinking war from its end” enabled my father’s family to survive in a somehow sane way the 2^nd World War. Bringing seven children through the “accelerated change” called war, they were forced to go through. Is society, are we able to resist the threats of that “accelerated change” again? How can we prevail peace? And: how can we sustain peace also in and with our neighborhood? Where does that neighborhood begin, where does it end? Who is humanity in days like these?

My grandfather in 1936 one evening at the family’s kitchen table burst out: This Hitler man was a lunatic and the whole thing would end up in a catastrophe. He raised my dad, who was born the same year to never lift his arm for hailing someone pretending to be superior. In this case the local gauleiter. As in every bigger family particularly in weird and poor times my dad mostly was raised by his elder siblings. Two sisters. One aunt told me about the kitchen table scene in 1936 shortly before she and her mind finally came down with Alzheimer. She herself had already been a widow before she wanted to get married after WW2.

My mother’s family was the opposite. The grandfather I got to know in my “real” life “hailed the leader” from the beginning. As a poor man, fearing the same or even bigger poverty particularly after the stock market crash in 1929 for his not yet founded family he urged “change”. When I was a child, I always sensed a certain pity for that broken man. But I also sensed early enough, that I had to explore deeply buried history. Particularly when I once as a six year old found my granny in a weak moment. Feeling once more the house and its buried history weighing heavily on her shoulders. And feeling the pain, the broken man loaded on her in her big heart.

Whether this man, my grandfather really burnt the local synagogue in 1932, as he was accused for after WW2, whether he was alone in doing so or: whether he was forced to sacrifice a pawn for another “willful executioner”, who immediately continued his personal political career on top of the local administration after what Americans just call “The War”: I don’t know.

He was indicted for war crimes and spent about 10 years in Belgian and French prisons until the mid 1950s. My granny kept the family and everything together. And my grandfather kept these secrets in his broken mind and they were shoveled with him into his grave.

My other grandfather worked on a US-airbase close by until his much too early death in 1963, eight months before I was born. In the 1950s in my father’s house there were GIs every evening going in and out, learning German with grandfather and he learning and improving his English. My father though never properly learnt any English at all. But he has taught me to abundantly “get to know people” and to “gain experience” in life.

Our parents’, mothers’ and fathers’, aunts’ and uncles’ ”neuroses and crankiness” from a not that remote distance don’t get appreciated as what they also are: expression of resistance and in that sense also “resilience” facing the destruction of views of the world and their universal expression, they had to witness in their early childhood and youth. As they are also the generation of rubble women and rebuilders from scratch after WW2 their noticeable dying out weighs even harder.

What does the term “sustainability” mean facing the destruction of a country close by?

What about “infrastructures” and other networks for sustaining human societies: families, individuals, households, neighborhoods in cities and on the countryside?

Some say, despots and backwards thinkers, sending soldiers to war are acting completely rationally, following a straightforward strategy. Some say, they are completely irrational. Nobody – no soldier, who’s used as canon fodder, no civilian, whose basic livelihood is destroyed, no one, who’s trapped in war and the acceleration movement mostly backwards really cares. Families try to defend themselves, their own pure and naked lives. Saving a somehow safe future for themselves and their beloved ones. The future itself shrinks into moments then. Eternal moments of horror. And short glimpses of warm comforting moments of relief. Of safety. Of love. Longing for the protection of a mother’s womb before being born.

Historians are posing complex sequences and  causes and effects into contemporary correlations. Politicians are thinking their thoughts and do express them. Scientists do combine their things. Experts and Non-experts. Who cares for the day after the bombs are falling, while rockets and missiles are still turning time forwards and backwards? Who cares for rebuilding protection against even greater threats, when guns are easier available on the market than bread and water? We should. Now.

War is always cruel. People are loosing their homes. Their beloved ones. Their own lives. But also the term „WAR“ itself has many facets and many layers. To most French people it’s something completely different than to most Germans. To most Russians particularly these days it’s a different matter than to most Ukrainians. To most Spanish citizens it’s something completely different than to most Finnish or Polish citizens. Not to mention most Kurdish people, Iraqi and Lebanese or Israeli or Afghan people. Or US-and Canadian citizen. And so on.

We need to break through the fog of “WAR” whirled up by its horror.

Thinking war from its end means starting to act towards its end. But also thinking this “end” in different phases and varieties and equivalent ways of action according to “Plan A, B and C”. Enabling survival of glimpses of hope in the debris surrounding us. Thus evaluating the ruins already before that. How can we keep memories alive without loosing our dignity? How can we build up things with keeping memories alive without being overwhelmed by pain and by anger? How can we even win hope and relief again while rebuilding our protection spaces? How can we make them become more sustainable within the regeneration and rebuilding process? How can we become more resilient that way?

In the midst 1980s I bought a printout of a huge painting by a French artist in his studio at Vezelay in Burgundy. “Homage à Allende” described the rising hope of the Chilean people connected with their elected president in the early 1970s and the way, that hope was destroyed. War and the short moment of the coup were depicted as “the beast”, which surprised everyone with its sudden attack. The painter and poet of the five verses, describing the five paintings of the sequence, Serge Jamet signed my personal printout with the dedication, that he was sure, that I would note the awakening of the beast one day, if I was confronted with that. And that I would take action.

It doesn’t matter, when and how historians or other scientists terminate the beginning of the 3^rd World War. “The beast” then will have been awoken many times at many different places. And people at remote places will look at “the place of the awoken beast” in a rather irritated way from their safe distance.

Also in 2013 retired Prof. em. for Eastern European History Karl Schlögel speaks in his urban history regarding Lemberg / Lwiw / Lwow from 1988 about the „Thirty Years‘ War, which began in 1914 and ended in 1945”. The “sequence of dissolution” of Galicia, located in today’s Poland and Western Ukraine and the urban center Lemberg in there he subordinates to a completely different historic event. A “historically incorrect rhetorical term” for underlining the dramaturgy of events at that recently that much marginalized combustion point of Central- or Eastern European history. (1)

In relation to Czernowitz Schlögel also says in 1988: “You want to return to the Czernowitz beyond the times of the World Wars of the 20^th century, you want to contact communities, whose buildings are still there.” (2)

The quote of the former German state secretary of defense, Peter Struck from March 2004 regarding the Afghanistan-mission of the German army, that “German security is defended at the Hindu Kush” then caused many weird discussions and even more appeasement than agreement in the public. The pointed statement leaves some space for interpretation. The focus on “freedom” also in the following hot-headed discourses neglects once more in its basic tendency the other two fundamental values of the French Revolution as the “core event of enlightenment”: “Equity” and “Solidarity”, respectively “brotherhood” and “sisterhood”. (3)

2.     Ukrainian and Afghan Perspectives 1:
        Parallel Lines and Differences Regarding their Transitory Marginalization

War always has a long creeping previous history. The cracks, which ultimately become deep abysses in the narratives have been fueled for quite some time. Attempts for bridging those gaps eventually fail as much as the readiness for using violence in the most subtle way in secrecy is increasing. The current scheme of “victim competition” sometime legitimates the assault. Territorial gains soon then are exploited and legitimated facing the enemy and the own people back in the “hinterland”. The own atrocities aren’t only just relativized by the enemy’s atrocities to be permanently judged in the light of the breach of law. The own atrocities are permanently justified and presented inside of all terms of international law and human rights’ conventions, whereas the enemy’s are unconditionally outside of these legal systems. Right in wartimes can only be on one side. And of course – civilians and multiple “infrastructures” and services for the public safeguarding their well being are the first targets to be assaulted.

In “multiethnic states” multiple narratives about the past and the present times up to promises for the future of “the one chosen people” in some (re-) interpretation care for accumulating explosive agent for the public. The more as once more legal terms and their assignments like “national state” and “public international law” or rather the “right of self-determination of nations” and many more are deriving from post WW2 times. Particularly regarding the way, these are applied legal claims and legal realities and practices for more and more humans and their peoples differ. The lack of any protection of human and material, thus cultural historical heritage in the case of war that way becomes evident.

Both countries, Ukraine as much as Afghanistan have one thing in common: a long history of war, of occupation and attempts of alien domination in the 20^th century and now again. The marginalized and transitory element already is expressed in both countries within their geographic assignments: Afghanistan predominantly is assigned to Central Asia, but also to South Asia, according to an old Soviet terminology also to “Middle Asia”, Ukraine mostly is assigned to Eastern Europe, but sometimes also to Central Europe. (4)

There are multiple historic roots of definitions of that kind. “Historic and political change” (4) regarding events and finally the heritage of the past mostly are underlying “common meanings” and their “narratives”. Respectively they can be transformed over time. The way, it’s most useful. And once more in the most site-specific way.

The “turning point in history” of the new war in Europe also confronts us in a society named by some thinkers or “philosophers” a so called “post-heroic” society again with discourses about the term of “war heroes”. The term “war” itself with its straight threat doesn’t work regarding “proximity” and “closeness” of events and the spectator’s position. In addition to that the borderlines between “heroism” and Hans Jonas’ “principle of responsibility” are unclear. The borderlines between “heroism” and “celebrity cults” up to “Kitsch” are even more fluent. President Selenskyj has bolstered up Ukrainian forces, which have been armed also with Western support since the takeover of Crimea with his steadfastness. The apparently overpowering aggressor needed to take some weakening in his safely from a distance ordered war. (5)

In the 20^th century Ukraine became a battlefield between aggressors and their narratives from the West as much as from the East. Before the 1^st World War the country and its institutions as much as large-scale landed property were firmly in tsarist Russian hands. Following the October Revolution in 1917 a short phase of independence as the “Ukrainian People’s Republic” followed. The troops of the “Central Powers” of the German and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire invaded in February 1918 and installed their separate Peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the “Ukrainian People’s Republic”. But they also reinstalled the Russian great landowners of the former Tsarist Empire again. The Ukrainian-Soviet War, the Polish-Ukrainian War about Galicia, where Poland, which had disappeared from the map since 1772 and now was resurgent again wanted to stand up against its powers, who had partitioned it: after the end of the 1^st World War many small wars about territorial claims in Eastern and Central Europe started. Then followed the Russian Civil War between the Whites and the Reds and in January 1919 at Kiev the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. The end of the short existence of the “Ukrainian People’s Republic” followed in February 1920, when the Red Army finally took power over the whole Ukraine.

When Stalin then in the 1930s wanted to push through the “claim for equality” with his own martial methods with the “duty for collectivism” and the famine going with that in the course of the Holodomor in the “breadbasket Ukraine” again 1000 fold, yes million fold death, poverty, affliction and mismanagement came from the East over the country. Then the occupation came from the West, by Nazi-Germany. The genocide executed there in 1941-43 brought again 1000 fold, yes million fold death, poverty, affliction and mismanagement over the country. The re-occupation of Ukraine by the Red Army and annexation into the Soviet Empire: the country again and again got “grinded” between East and West and the people had to pay a high death toll for that. Ukraine after 1991 also was the core of the first state like nation on Russian soil after the decay of the Soviet Union. (6)

Insofar President Selenskyj fulfills a responsible role after the Russian invasion and follows the “collective memory” of its people. The fact, that his country as a young, self-responsible state has many deficits, particularly regarding corruption and oligarchy possession ( “Landlordism and Warlordism“) needs to be evaluated. But it should be debated seriously, when one can build up a peaceful post-war order with a respective constitution looking for adjustment and balance together with Kiev. Up to then there’s still a long road to go to. Well-meant advice or even proposals by economists and others miss many points or seem to rebuild one’s own illusion of a peaceful world, but it doesn’t do any service to the people from Ukraine. The fact, that rebuilding and acceptance, thus also the executive implementation of a post-war-order and a concept for rebuilding the country goes with evaluating battlefields of the past and integration of many faculties and experts from public international law, economists and ecologists, sociologists, urban and regional planners, agronomists and engineers and many more often sadly is lost with media snapshots of that kind it is proceeded these days. (7)

Thus in Ukraine we’re facing primarily Western- and Central European and Eastern- in the first line Russian imperial heritage shaping the continuous transitory and that way hardly fought character of the country and its fragile existence. Germany itself has in the course of its heritage as the legal successor of the empire of WW1 under Prussian leadership as much as the 3^rd empire of Nazi-Germany of WW2 much more part of responsibility for a dissolution of the current dilemma as the political leadership and the country’s “elites” seem to be aware about.

In Afghanistan we’re primarily facing British and Russian imperial heritage shaping the continuous transitory and that way hardly fought character of the country and its fragile existence between South Asia, Central Asia and in the course of the Soviet reading, brought into the game again by Putin and his followers “Middle Asia”. (4)

President Ghani left Afghanistan in August 2021 shortly before the Taliban took over the country again. Big parts of the army had already capitulated after several months without any payments. The West wasn’t interested into that country any more. Regarding Ukraine these days though the West is quite interested.

Considering that there are again many more questions: how long will the Western interest in Ukraine prevail? Which country is what way protected by what kind of “public international law”? As acquirement and acquisition of cultural and human heritage in the course of any kind of “invasion” soon makes the aggressor an invader and occupant: what kind of rules and institutions do we need furthermore for enabling a peaceful cohabitation of people and for safeguarding the protection of small countries, which don’t possess nuclear weapons? How can a rebuilding process appreciating cultural and human heritage of one country or the other move forward?

In the “war’s wind shadow” there are always reports about other regional conflicts flaring up: if it’s the fights between Azerbaijan and Armenia about Nagorny-Karabach, if it’s the Turkish military fighting the Kurdish PKK again as a consequence of their own “war against terror” in Eastern Anatolia. Or if it’s fights in Transnistria, also in Western Ukraine, in the Moldova, where in addition to that a second front from Moscow’s side is a serious threat. In that sense we also have to ask: how can we rule conflicts of that kind in a better diplomatic way for finally safeguarding better protection of human, cultural and material heritage?

Particularly the history of the first great genocide in the 20^th century, the predecessor of the mass murder of European Jews by Nazi-Germany leaves a sad and bitter aftertaste: when the interests in the “Near and Middle East” and the region’s oil resources was growing in 1913 the “three Pashas” took over the Ottoman Empire. When WW1 then was ongoing, in 1915 they started with the genocide of about 1 million of the 2 million Armenians, a Christian minority in the Muslim Sultanate. British, French and also Russian media reported about the horror of the crime. In December 1915 one of the three, Djemal Pasha offered in a dispatch to the Allies France, Russia and the UK to stop the genocide against the Armenians and to withdraw from the war on the side of their enemies, the Central Powers, thus the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Kingdom of Bulgaria. The core condition was, that France and the UK would give up any claims on areas of the Ottoman Empire in the Near and Middle East, that they would give “security guarantees”.

As this didn’t happen the genocide at the Armenians continued.

“The lesson here regarding Ukraine is grim, but it should be faced honestly. Powerful countries have far-reaching strategies that they are determined to carry through, and human suffering is not part of the equation.“ (8)



3.     Ukrainian and Afghan Perspectives 2:
        Premises for the Way from “Conflict to Post-Conflict”,
        thus to Post-War-Regulations

War as a incisive event in the collective memory, in the cultural and social, material and immaterial heritage requires that way also when “Thinking War from its end” accurate case studies and derivations of motives for determining respective scenarios of the continuous process: 

a.     What are the targets of the belligerent parties?

b.     How will they proceed and

c.     How and to what grade will they be satisfied with
        what kind of primary or secondary targets? Or

d.     How can the aggressor soon be put into his place, how can he soon have to recognize his limits and how can the     

         attacked party on the other hand be invigorated and:

e.     What are the military and economic scenarios to be calculated? And:

f.       Which forms of separation of powers and checks and balances need to be surveilled in which way in the course

         of implementation of law and order, so that society as a whole can participate from that? Or said the other way

         around:

g.     How can balances between strong private and weak common particular interests be created and

h.     How can forms of balancing out interests regarding building and rebuilding of a constitution be institutionalized?   

         And last, but not least:

i.       How can internal and external reconciliation, creating brother- and sisterhood go along with that and become part

         of that institutionalized process as well?

Concerning a.: Regarding the aggressor Russia it seems rather clear, what Putin and his fellowmen want in the first line: neutralizing up to eliminating Ukraine. Demilitarization going with that shall happen that way, that the country together with its Western partners cannot become any threat for its overpowering neighbor any more. Whether and to which extent this threat from the Russian side is rather made up shall not yet be considered for the current evaluation.

One of the main reasons for the minimal target of the Russian “military operation” though is definitely the former “Ukrainian booty”, the strategically important harbor Sevastopol and the Black Sea fleet positioned there. Going along with that the control of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

As Karl Schlögel impressively gives an account of, the “Urbicide” of Donetsk, already committed in 2014, thus the annihilation of the city of Donetsk, which already by its history of industrial culture already is deeply fissured is followed up nw by the much faster “Urbicide” of Mariupol with its gigantic steel work and its metallurgic complex in the course of Putin’s “Blitzkrieg” now.

Going with that Russia is getting hold of a corridor from Volgograd and Rostov on Don via Luhansk and Donetsk up to Sevastopol and Crimea. (9)

Safeguarding, keeping and extending that “land corridor” shall also be named the definite minimum target of the Kremlin for outlining also b. and c. here for the Russian side.

Regarding these three points a., b. and c. from the Ukrainian side inevitably EU, NATO and the US become part of the game. To what extent the expansion of NATO to the East and the integration of Ukraine into the EU, which has been supported from many sides now is one main reason for the Russian invasion and the “Urbicide” of Mariupol and million fold suffering of the Ukrainian people doesn’t count for now. Most important for now are the options and needs of Ukraine and its people: security and protection and continuing or rather returning to a safe life in protected borders, without having to fear continuous new invasions of such a terrible content as they now have to go through it. In the current situation that means: a reinforced military capacity for defending oneself for fighting back the aggressor and for restraining him. For challenging the necessary respect. That definitely also means: “heavy arms” and heavy tools for defending the country and for afterwards safeguarding the rebuilding process.

That way we’re coming to d. here: in mid-and long terms things will stay rather instable. Further Russian charades are to be feared. The minimal target of the land corridor to Sevastopol won’t be given up by the Kremlin. The “new iron curtain” in Europe also requires a safeguarded rebuilding process directly along the rather scraggy borderline, which will be a subject of continuous fights and in the “hinterland”. Like in the first cold war though means and ways have to be guaranteed in the most generous way.

Regarding e.: it’s also a “competition of systems”, which will take place there. In that case the crucial question also is, how capable Europe and the West are concerning their ways of changing and taking action for confronting Russian oligarchy with participatively organized ways for rebuilding Ukraine and invigorating Central and Southern Europe after austerity and neoliberalism.

F, g, h and i shall be exemplified here in more accurate outlines.

The question of soil and real estate, thus land use and easement and right of use, thus shares of management and planning, profit and yield, revenue and expense are crucial points in there. At the end of the day it’s all about breaking up the discourses regarding the subtle role of austerity and neoliberalism and the continuously grown inequality in the West and confronting the completely shameless oligarchy in the East with the will for enabling more freedom, equality and solidarity for everyone here again.

4.     „New Deal“, „Manhattan-Project“, „Marshall-Plan“
        and other Historical Necessities today thought
        from their Beginning and their End.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal“ in the early 1930’s was an adequate economic answer to the dislocations caused by the Great Depression, the global economic crisis of the late 1920’s. It was arranged steplike in different phases. Joint with that were multiple welfare and job programs, which also evidently later prepared and accompanied armament and the US entry into “The War”, the 2^nd World War.

The ”Manhattan-Project“ started on the occasion of a letter, Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd wrote to FDR concerning the planning of a “bomb of a new kind” by Nazi-Germany in August 1939. In the confusion of the war the German program for developing an atom bomb got lost. The top secret project in the US though lead to advantage and leadership of the US on that field and to the nuclear first use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ultimately to the “balance of terror” in Cold war between the blocks led by the super powers, the US and the Soviet Union, lasting from 1945 to 1989.

The plan then named after Five-Star General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the Army, who in that function coordinated allied operations in Europe and the Pacific in the 2^nd World War then even goes further again.

Many people in Germany though apparently have completely forgotten, that and how the country 77 years ago had to get up from the dust and ashes of the ruins. Also the way, many take that for granted and always quote the “Marshall-Plan”, but completely ignore, that the well-deserved General immediately got humiliated by the new rebel-rousers in cold war around Sen. McCarthy and soon then equivalently withdrew from politics and public life is shocking. (10)

The European or even Global „Green New Deal“ pushed forward by the EU or by the US Democrats though apparently always capitulates in its possibilities regarding its implementation in front of the increasingly accurate abstract dimension of challenges. Whether the political will also confronting aggressive cheap propaganda and deniers of climate change is missing: that cannot be judged here. Things are getting even clearer when reading the statements by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin in „Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal“. Despite of always increasing heat records and many turbulences and droughts and flooding and and and: the political will of confronting the bigness and the power of global events in the local and national framework in a globally coordinated and appropriate way apparently still seems to be too weak.

Also now in the Ukraine war there’s many talks about a “turning point in history”. Significant ways of reaction though crepitate over time in national constraints. What kind of “solidarity” will prevail that way for how long is hard to tell. Particularly as it’s getting more and more evident, that war might also find an end with assigning Ukrainian territories to the Russian aggressor. What doesn’t mean, that the new lines of demarcation between the West and the East won’t always give new reasons for armed conflicts. At the end of the day one decisive result will also be turning Ukraine into a “failed state”. But for working with these consequences the “turning point in history” also holds a serious lecture for the West. Particularly after Afghanistan and the aftermath of the “war against terror” in the near and middle east. (11)

For bringing together different subjects and for safeguarding implementation though a multilateral and multi layered cultural change is essential. And the will for doing so. A rising appreciation of manual work on the ground also expressed in wages: craftsmen and soldiers as fighters for our values urgently need that change. Besides that: who shall accomplish rebuilding and extension of “infrastructures”? In a “digitalized manner” these works can hardly go “hand in hand”.

In the wind shadow of the pandemic and of war, as Eastern European researchers say in the middle of Europe, as many here, who first of all want to move the events far away from themselves are saying, far away in Eastern Europe there is that much “collateral damage”, which is hardly debated in political everyday’ s business, not to mention, that mid- and long term solutions are brought on the way: around 1/3 of children, who lost track with “home schooling”, now new growth with refugees and migrants. “climate crisis”, which also requires more “resilience” of “infrastructures” etc. The “turning point(s) in history” also increase the necessity of looking back to former phases and measurements of collective regeneration and rebuilding. Lately we need to transfer these themes and values anew into our times.

But many citizens, also politicians seem to have disconnected themselves from the collective memory of the most people, they have to represent. And that also seems to be one of the main problems generally: the look at the constituent generation of our parents, of “Rubble men and women”, not to mention the war generation of our grandparents seems to have been lost. Who though cuts the cord from the narratives of one’s ancestors without having shared those is endangered to encounter human suffering with an impenetrable filter of suppression.

When I worked in Afghanistan in 2009 / 10 as “rebuilding aide” I encountered many elements from the stories of my parents also via and over my grandparents and beyond in different forms again. I don’t want to miss that and have written down most of it. 

Insofar: maybe people are also overwhelmed by war and cannot really think neither of peace, nor of war, because both are somehow happening outside of the own bubble of suppression?

Regarding China and its economic heavy weight, also with the focus on the dangers for Taiwan in the aftermath of the Russian invasion in Ukraine has to be added here: Particularly the dependance of the US-trade deficit from China’s growth, caused by Beijing buying masses of US-state loans in the recent decades and the dependance of the German car industry from China as greatest location of production and outlet market are to be recognized. Insofar there aren’t really any economic measurements for sanctions possible without causing a crash, which would outshine 2008 by far. Further: for decades "Follow the money trail" was the paradigm of global action and trade and Western entrepreneurs have also avoided and bypassed all achievements regarding working rules and protection and environmental protection by shifting their industries to low-wage countries. The primary interest of all that never was any kind of “democracy export” but maximization of profit gains. Caused by all that the Middle kingdom, which always struggles to find its own center again has achieved an enormous global potency within these rapid rebuilding processes of global markets.

Concerning Taiwan: the invasion on an island with what in WW2 was called Amtracs and air-borne troops and paratroopers in the hinterland is in any case quite intricate and complex. In addition to that the Chinese way of "ad-hoc-neoliberalism" in the last decades economically could always find ways for saving face through all crises. The gigantic real estate bubble, which 2011 also was approved with numbers by Western media: in the course of “global system stability” this didn’t become a reasonable topic at all and that way more “sustainable empty spaces” were produced. Within my work 2011/ 12 at Hangzhou in “the rich European like East of China” me myself I have also witnessed architecture as an important tool for guiding back the country into the feudal state by grace of the party. Ultimately everywhere it’s still only about enlarging power and authority of ruling oligarchs. (12)

That way everything seems to dilute once more into arbitrariness and randomness. No crisis, whose dangers are also used as chances. As if “business as usual“ was the only valid paradigm of human being or not-being. The that way confirmed “Homo oeconomicus“, still pretending that paradigm though seems to have unlearnt many themes of being human in his or her (d)evolution. Or maybe she or he has just unconditionally suppressed all of that.

Also Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin emphasize again and again, how fatal a continuation of neoliberalism and austerity going with that would be just with slightly changed prefixes. Something we’re facing since years and decades continuously. Also now with that war and its consequences. (13)

The Marshall-plan once upon a time also meant rebuilding Western Europe from the rubble and the ashes of the 2^nd World War as a fortress against the enemy of Cold war. Particularly of Germany, which had started the war.

Thinking war from its end and the European Green New Deal thought together and implemented together requires more than continuously weakening things with “greenwashing” and other “sustainability gossiping”. Thinking things further that move forward can also lead to Noam Chomsky’s und Robert Pollin’s Global Green New Deal. When we finally summon up the courage to push the themes consequently forward. Without already giving up hope initially in faintheartedness. Then selling that as “lacking any alternatives”. We could. But for that we also need to think things together to their bitter end. For further on elaborating and working things out together.



5.     Interim Solutions for Contemporary Dislocations
        in the 21^st Century and Beyond  

The awakening of the Russian Bear as a desperate human was to be feared for quite long. Desperate humans and their unrestrained violence can only be encountered with resoluteness.

The beast, which woke up with them though also has a face, it might loose behind its hatefully threatening ice-cold facial expressions. Also when it threatens with nuclear extinction and with that ultimately sooner or later with its own martyrdom and death.

The 77^th anniversary of the end of “The Great War for the Fatherland’s” victory over Nazi-Germany on May, 9^th 2022 was expected quite differently by the desperate human and his fellowmen. The country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, for whom the event lasting from 1939, particularly after landing in Normandie 1944-45 is just “The War” has also recently awakened “the beast” at many different places. Not always for the best of the people living there.

Insofar the Ukrainian people should be entitled to use any kind of self-defense possible. Any support with “heavy weapons” and heavy equipment for the later rebuilding also safeguards Central- and Western Europe, the hinterland of the new iron curtain to be installed currently in a still relocatable way. For how long: that also depends on our resistance. The other iron curtain after all lasted 44 years, from 1945 to 1989.

The „Urbicide“ of Donetsk and Mariupol has had many predecessors in the fossil thinking of the past century. Bagdad, Falluja, Rakka, Mosul, Aleppo, Kabul and many other places. There were many forces actively joining in the destruction of cultural heritage of mankind altogether and their shelters. That doesn’t free us from the duty to look closer there and to examine, what and particularly how that heritage can become livable for future generations again. How it can give protection to humans and creatures again.

The desperate man in the Kremlin and the ones attacked in Ukraine, who of course reject any capitulation and who are talking about genocide: in a talk with Noam Chomsky Jeremy Scahill impressively describes the “The Hague Invasion Act”, where George W. Bush in 2002 not only rejected any international legislation for the US, but where he finally authorized US-military to free US-citizens, accused at The Hague. Following the systematic war crimes of Russian invaders in Ukraine, also Chomsky and Scahill are emphasizing, international law finally should become mandatory. For all. There to it’s still a long way though. (14)

The accelerated building of LNG-terminals in Germany now: the right of self-determination of indigenous inhabitants of the North Americas, who protested for decades against spilling their water resources by fracking and pipelines like Keystone XL is as important as the right of self-determination and the right of self-defense of Ukrainian citizens. For getting away from “fossil thinking” in the 21^st century we need to examine “national energy safety” in mid- and long terms and in the context of international law and the right to physical integrity. Thus, we also need to go for the essential processes of adapting “law and order” in a post-fossil way according to the responsibility we all share in the Anthropocene: not just the fittest one and the one who is actually the financially strongest has all rights. People at their place also have the tight to have clear drinkable water and a breathable air available. That’s valid for other oligarchies, from where we now get LNG as much. Thus Qatar and its society, where “foreign workers” even have less value then the German expression already says and has effectuated over generations amongst the people coming her for actually supporting “the economic miracle”, which was only possibe because of the Marshall-plan and Germany’s debt relief, which was also agreed by Greece.

The attempted and in fact thousand and more times carried out fratricide at Ukraine by Russia is at the end of the day aiming at the Ukrainian state failure. Afghanistan already in 1955 was a “failed state“ and needed to claim its state bankruptcy. The definition of the term of the “failed state” by political sciences just followed in the early 1990s. The fact, that the West doesn’t want and cannot really deal with state failure and rather even makes things worse it has approved once more in Afghanistan. Helping people to help themselves though requires good collaboration and armed protection. From that we’re still far away with our many-voiced gossiping these days. The brothers Klitschko at Kiev will agree to that as much as Tanja Maljartschuk from a Shtetl in Western Ukraine, living at Vienna and many others as well. Not to forget my Afghan friends at all. (15)

In addition to that: in recent years here we almost got conditioned to talking about our “sensitivities” and “existential orientation”. But with sorting out these “sensitivities” we were mostly left alone, except one had media supporters beyond (anti-)social media, who like these days can use their fears for giving Abel his part of responsibility for Kain’s fratricide in the most subtle way: my personal alienation with that country here continues. Latest since summer 2010, my “demission” after living and working for 1 ½ years at Kabul and many lines, I’ve written about that, culminating into the phrase: “When you return from Afghanistan to the West nothing can be the way, it used to be”, I can only look at Germany from the outside. And people are always showing me, that people like me don’t have a place, nor a voice here. Just the way, some young social democrats looked at me, when I talked about soldiers as “armed social workers” is unforgettable. Some of these young guys would rather today than tomorrow like to decide about foreign missions of the German army as “battle-field-tourists”, as Heike Groos (RIP) once named them in a highly polemic manner. The fact, that without such partners no rebuilding of a country and its society, that failed again and again was possible didn’t come into those guys’ minds at all. Some of them might even have studied social or political sciences. People lock themselves up from the world and project their fears somehow in images and cliché on the outside world. Paternalism of others outside there that way sometimes becomes authoritarian in a highly subtle way. Formation of opinion and decision-making that way becomes a very strange game, where the four I’s: Ideology, Ignorance, Inertia and Irrationalism in the name of “enlightenment” as the last word on the subject, the be-all and end-all shall be kept up.

The biggest challenge, chance and danger of the 21^st century rests global warming. The genocides just cover the tremendous, rather abstract power of ecocide. Every genocide reinforces ecocide. Also for recognizing that it needs a closer look. And bringing things together. Something, which also in post-democratic Western societies shall not be that successful. Or isn’t allowed to be that successful. Fragmented realities in their increasingly splintered formation can only be thought ahead by tautologies, thus “generally valid truths” beyond contradictions and with some help of decrypting correlations. Despite of Wittgenstein’s quote, that experience is subordinated to logic, in the course of joining slivers and splinters is an essential factor for finding truth. It’s assigned to logic. Insofar Baudrillard’s finding of the splintered condition of any kind of realities isn’t “postmodern” but timeless. Paul Virilio’s combination though with cinematographic and acceleration ultimately is based on his experiences. And his being or not being as a child of war. Despite of all that, Hamlet needed to experience and what Wittgenstein meant to pose as a logical construction before and above experience. The experience of being or not-being in the first place enables logic. And the equivalent undisguised look on reality. On presence, past and with that on possibilities for a future. (16)

Notes

1       Schlögel, Karl – “Entscheidung in Kiew – Ukrainische Lektionen”; („Decision at Kiev – Ukrainian Lectures“) © Carl     

        Hanser Verlag, München 2015, 3^rd edition Fischer Taschenbuch, 03 / 2022, P. 279

2      Schlögel, Karl – a.a.O., P. 263

3      Jahn, Egbert - „Verteidigung Deutschlands am Hindukusch. Die deutsche Rolle in Afghanistan“; (“Germany’s

        Defense at the Hindu Kush. The German Role in Afghanistan“)
        © 2012 VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften   Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH –
        P. 178 / 179 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-531-94312-1_10

4      Wikipedia (German) „Central Europe“: „Besides that the interpretation of the term underlies historic and political     

        change. Central Europe that way isn’t defined definitely, but the question after the fall of the iron curtain and the 

        end of cold war is discussed with more attention.”  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitteleuropa

        Wikipedia (German) „Central Asia“:  “Central Asia or Middle Asia is a term summing up the vast region in the center

        of the Asian continent.  In the course of recent decades the imagination, which countries should belong tot hat

        always has changed.”  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zentralasien

        Regarding „South Asia“ is written there: “Afghanistan doesn’t count in many definitions of South Asia, as the country

        is located at the intersection of South and Central Asia and historically, culturally and linguistically rather has

        affinities with Iran in Asia Minor (the Near East) and the Central Asian Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.“

        https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCdasien

5      Ribi, Thomas - „We Had Perorated with Heroes. Now also in the West War Heroes are Adored again, although a War

        Doesn’t Create Heroes. After two World Wars with Millions of dead people on the Battlefields Heroism was corroded

        Hopelessly. But the Heroes never were dead. They just have changed“.

        NZZ from 14.04.2022, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/helden-wir-ertragen-sie-nicht-aber-wir-brauchen-sie-ld.1679218?mktcid=nled&mktcval=123_2022-04-14&kid=nl123_2022-4-14&ga=1

6      https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainische_Volksrepublik

7      Imwinkelried, Daniel – “Rebuilding Ukraine: Economists already create Plans, but who creates Peace before that? –

        Well-known Economists have worked out a plan, what to evaluate regarding rebuilding Ukraine. Unfortunately they

        have made their bills without the politicians. Besides that there’s also the „Question of Versailles“.

        NZZ from 21.04.2022;  https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/ukraine-wiederaufbau-nach-dem-krieg-ld.1680332 mktcid=nled&mktcval=164_2022-04-22&kid=nl164_2022-4-21&ga=1
        Maron, Monika – “Everyone’s talking about Peace – Is it about caring for one’s own Wealth or German Arrogance? –

        There are many reasons for fearing an escalation of the conflict. But why do the defenders of Peace pose their

        Challenges at Ukraine and not at Putin?” - NZZ from 22.04.2022; https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/monika-maron-der-preis-fuer-den-frieden-ld.1680388?mktcid=nled&mktcval=174&kid=nl174_2022-4-22&ga=1

8      Schwarz, Jon – „The Armenian Genocide Holds a Bitter Lesson for Those Who Weep for Ukraine. From 1915 through

        today, politicians have made lots of great-sounding speeches. But human suffering is never part of the equation.“ 

        The Intercept Voices, 18.04. 2022: https://theintercept.com/2022/04/18/ukraine-war-russia-armenian-genocide/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

9      Schlögel, Karl – a.a.O., P. 201-235 and by the same author:

       “At Mariupol Another Military End Game Is Taking Place, Which Could Become a Writing on the Wall for Europe’s

       Future. Since some Short Time ago the Ukrainian harbor town located at the Sea of Azov wasn’t known at all. These

       days a military End Game is Taking Place here in the Stranglehold of Russian Occupation, which might become a a

       Writing on the Wall for Europe’s Future.” NZZ from 25.04.2022; https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/eine-stadt-die-es-nicht-mehr-gibt-erinnerung-an-mariupol-ld.1680576?mktcid=nled&mktcval=174&kid=nl174_2022-4-25&ga=1

10   https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt and

       https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_C._Marshall.

       Further on to be added here: Under the title “Happy Presences!” in that article on the blog of the Munich based

       discussion group of the “Reflection Pages” it’s amongst other things also about “Post-war orders”. And about the

       heroes, quoted here initially. In this sense also about Willy Brandt, George C. Marshall and others: 

       https://nachdenken-in-muenchen.de/?p=4559

11    Müller, Hansjörg Friedrich - “For Some here I’m the Warmonger, not Putin. This Kind of Pacifism Is a Crime: Four

       Ukrainians are sharing their experiences in Germany.

       For a long time Ukraine for many Germans was an intermediate empire and most oft hem just thought about

       Chernobyl. The lack of understanding, that has been brought forward against their country also has contributed to

       war, Ukrainians, who are living since many years at Berlin are claiming. - NZZ from 17.04.2022;

       https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/dieser-pazifismus-ist-ein-verbrechen-ukrainer-ueber-deutschland-ld.1679214?mktcid=nled&mktcval=174&kid=nl174_2022-4-18&ga=1

       Puglierin, Jana – “Germany and the War in Ukraine: Now some Action has to Come.

       The German Government has to Do their leadership contribution to invigorating NATO and needs to become the

       backbone of conventional union defense in Europe. If not, the propagandized „Turning-Point in History“ stays an

       empty promise“ - NZZ from 21.04.2022; https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/deutschlands-zeitenwende-jetzt-muessen-taten-folgen-ld.1680033?ga=1&kid=nl164_2022-4-20&mktcid=nled&mktcval=164_2022-04-21

12   Zoll, Patrick – “The Course of Russia’s War in Ukraine is Giving Hope for the Future of Taiwan – the Island can be

      Defended against China – The war in Ukraine, which is actually stuck in a difficult Phase for Russia gives Taiwan

      some hope and needs to give Beijing some hard thoughts. For defending the democratic island from an assault of

      the communist mainland though it needs more support from outside”. - NZZ from 22.04.2022;

      https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/ukraine-krieg-gibt-hoffnung-fuer-verteidigung-taiwans-gegen-china-ld.1679629?mktcid=nled&mktcval=164_2022-04-23&kid=nl164_2022-4-22&ga=1 and

      “China's Ghost Cities and Malls”, a documentary by  SBS-Dateline, an Australian TV-channel from March 2011 about

      the Chinese real estate bubble, where also the number of about 64 Mio.vacant new-built residential units is

      mentioned and verified:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPILhiTJv7E&t=4s

13   Chomsky, Noam; Pollin, Robert and others – “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal - The Political Economy

      of Saving the Planet” – Verso – US 2020 - © by the authors

14   Chomsky, Noam and Scahill, Jeremy on the Russia-Ukraine War, The Intercept 14.04.2022, ab ca. Min. 31:00:

       https://theintercept.com/2022/04/14/russia-ukraine-noam-chomsky-jeremy-scahill/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

15   Klitschko, Wladimir – „We won’t Capitulate- regarding the letter of the 28 “intellectuals” , FAZ from 03.05.2022;     

       https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/wladimir-klitschkos-antwort-auf-offenen-brief-zu-waffenlieferungen-18002508.html

       Maljartschuk, Tanja – „We can only stop that War, if the West also is Ready for sacrifying things. The Ukrainian author

       Tanja Maljartschuk about “Westsplaining“, the blind alleys of Pacifism – and about what against all odds gives some

       comfort”.  The Swiss Journal “The Republic” from 29.04.2022: https://www.republik.ch/2022/04/29/dieser-krieg-ist-nur-zu-stoppen-wenn-der-westen-opfer-bringt

16   Wittgenstein, Ludwig – „Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung“; edition Suhrkamp

       12, 10. Ed. 1975- © Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1959, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, P. 87.



“The Great Game” and “Fossil Thinking” in the 21^st Century

April 3rd, 2022

Part One

Intro and Definition of Terms

Revision and Self Construal of History

Continuity and “different, extended Contextuality”?

2nd Part

(Cultural) Human Heritage and its Complete Lack of Any Protection

Fossil Thinking, once More

3rd Part

Acceleration in the Horror of War

The 21^st Century: wēijī - Crisis = Chance and Danger

The Demand of “Post-fossil Peace-Frameworks” already at Wartimes themselves

"Why do things here not work out the way, they worked out with you guys?"

Part One

The “Blitzkrieg”, Wladimir Wladimirowitsch Putin wanted to apply for bringing back Ukraine “heim ins Reich” –

“home into the empire” has taken everyone by big surprise. Just shortly before me personally had thought, that

a higher concentration of armed forces surrounding the country from the Russian and Belarussian side and in

Poland, Rumania and the Baltics, thus new NATO-states from the territory of the former Warsaw Pact rather

would make a continuous mutual stalking bristling with weapons “Cold War style” from the 1950s to 1989 a

permanent state.

Insofar the tenor by the media of a “Continuation of Cold War”, the New York Times intones for us here in

Central Europe is rather deceptive. Putin’s aggression does a disservice to the persistence of Western politics,

the “way of diplomacy”, the Italian Stampa quotes. But just the other way around it should also be allowed to

ask: did the West, who recently rather acted in a slightly complacent way in the name of “the international

community” or the liberal “community, sharing the same values”, the way the Belgian de Standaard says,

“the advocate of the International Legal System” that way give the world’s despots too many through passes

over the past years and decades?

The Vienna based newspaper „The Press” even attests Putin some kind of  “megalomania”.

In principle though Putin’s action in manifold regard in the imperial way is rather consistent:

Apparently 19^th century’s “Great Game” goes on here. Or it breaks the mold for starting a new round.

The rather “bipolar” 20^th century with its “nuclear safeguarded stalemate” between power blocs following the

European and global tragedy of two world wars in turn just seems to play an underpart. But, as Murtaza Hussain accurately says in the Intercept: At the end of the Soviet Union Ukraine was the home to the third biggest armory

of nuclear weapons of mass destruction in the world. Independence in 1994 also was attended by Ukraine’s

disclaimer of nuclear weapons and in return the commitment by the US, the UK with Northern Ireland and the

Russian Federation, not to threaten the country’s territory and its political independence. Hussain again

demonstrates quoting other examples, how easily susceptible to blackmail particularly small countries

without nuclear weapons are. The more so, as narratives and that way constructed partnerships or

enmities might easily be changed over time.

“Fossil thinking“ that way describes as much the battle of material within the conventional war of conquest here

as the revisionists’ view of history claiming the casus belli, the reasons for war. The “archaic element of fratricidal war”

is intensified therein as much as the complete irrationality of injured vanity up to complacency and egomania and

to demonization and to bloody-minded thirst for revenge. And once more the complete ignorance facing one of

the crucial questions of the 21^st century exposes itself: global warming.

Revision and Self Construal of History

Also when Yugoslavia as one of the leading state formations of “Non-Aligned States” of the times of Cold War

collapsed in an act of war revisionists’ historiography helped to fan the flames of nationalistic and ethnically and religiously motivated conflicts: Slobodan Milošević’s speech from June 28^th , 1989 on the occasion of the 600^th anniversary of the Battle of Amselfeld often is mentioned as one of the key moments for the

“four battles of Yugoslavia, which took place between 1991 and 1999 in the Balkans”.

In 2019 the Turkish news channel TRT World speaks about “Four Disturbing Facts about the Srebrenica Genocide”

from July 1995. One year later then the German “World” writes: “Before the Massacre there Was a Twofold Treachery”. The article describes impressively, how the Dutch UN-Blue Berets-troops “Dutchbat” under leadership of Lieutenant Colonel Thom Karremans based at the “UN-protected area” requested help and urgent support several times but

fell on deaf ears at UN employers and then ultimately needed to witness the massacre with up to 8000 Muslims committed by Bosnian-Serbian troops under Ratko Mladić deedlessly.

But many Eastern European citizens and scientists from all faculties dealing with these matters also look with rather mixed feelings at the entry into the war of 19-NATO members on March 24^th, 1999 with 200 fighter planes bombing military and civil targets throughout the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Some even name it

“NATO’s original sin” or even a war crime.

The Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO during the Kosovo War back then though, General ret.

Wesley K. Clark also in the sense of contemporary history is quite a remarkable personality. His interview with

Amy Goodmann by “democracy now” from March 2^nd, 2007 and many speeches and talks later reveal

fascinating and frightening insights into the chaos of the first George W-Bush-administration

in the aftermath of September 11^th, 2001.

Beyond doubt the Eastern European expansion of NATO has touched Russia’s security interests in a highly

sensitive way. Maybe we could even call it an “injury”. But spinning a kind of “stab-in-the-back-legend”, going

together with the complete demonization of the government at Kiev as “drug addicts” and “gang of Nazis”,

heroizing the “national victimhood” by calling the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “Russian tragedy of

the 20^th century” and more similar things: in these moments information warfare announces the bloody

imperial storm of steel and fire.

A “new era”? Rather the return of old times in new garment.

Regional powers and their oligarchs move on imperial pathways for hoovering small to medium sized

territorial advantages by using pinpricks and like now heavy strikes. Sometimes charades, history interpreted

in a highly unilateral and revisional, thus self-construal way deliver motives, which are embellished in the

most populist’ way to them. The nation shall be sworn into the enemy.  

If this might be successful? The Moscow based historian Andrei Subow after two weeks of war against

Ukraine in the Daily Mirror names “Clear Evidence for Putin’s Military Failure” and sees some parallel lines

to Stalin’s war against Finland 1939-40.

Continuity and “different, extended Contextuality”?

„Das große Spiel“ – „The Great Game“ originally describes the historic conflict between Great Britain and Russia

about dominating Central Asia after the withdrawal of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from Russia in 1813. The British

Empire then acted mostly with and from its “outpost” British-India. The two Anglo-Afghan wars 1838-42 and 1878-80

are to be mentioned here as much as the Opium-wars, particularly the first one lasting from 1839-42.

When Julia Lovell, researching and teaching at Birkbeck in 2011 edited „The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and
the Making of Modern China“ – (here a review in the Guardian), she could somehow “demythologize” or even debunk history with the temporary distance of about 170 years rather sympathetically and sometimes even with a somehow humorous undertone. The cascades of cultural and personal misunderstandings, which caused ultimately an impressing event particularly in Chinese narratives that way became less hazardous and received a somehow enlightening analysis. With Xi Jinping now we have to deal with the first Chinese party leader for life time since Mao Zedong. Lacking any own agenda he repeatedly invigorates nationalistic narratives.

These days Beijing keeps a position for still saving face. The violent bending of Taiwan “back home into the Empire”, which is struggling for its Middle since quite some time that way though in the wind shadow of Putin’s war of aggression might take place soon. Ultimately shifting great contingents of soldiers into the Pacific was also one

of the basic reasons for the US-withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was scarcely perceived here in Central Europe.

The “right of self-determination of nations” to be employed again and again recently though was also degraded to some kind of wastepaper by the West particularly following 2001. The invasion in Afghanistan in October 2001 was still legitimated by digging trenches for finding the alleged terrorists of September 11^th in a strange kind of power and

legal vacuum, the Taliban had provided also as their area of retreat. But the invasion into Iraq then in 2003 was a massive violation of public international law. It was accompanied by many lies and the only member of the Bush-administration, who then was in a responsible position to draw consequences from that was the honorable retired General and back then US-foreign secretary Colin Powell (1937-2021).

Insofar Putin also doesn’t have to fear a trial at the International Court at The Hague. His reverential entry into
history books is guaranteed.

Western “failure” in Afghanistan and ultimately Mrs’. Merkels withdrawal from power politics in addition to that
opened up a smart imperial momentum for the man in the Kremlin. For every soldier here in Germany but also
in the US and at other partners, particularly for many Afghanistan veterans it’s once more very painful to see, how defenseless we’re standing there. Not to mention the Ukrainian people. But: the domino-effect of failed policy of alliances is also one of the basic reasons for WW1 1914-18.  

Eric Gujer, chief editor of the Swiss “Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)“ transcribes his “Different View” on
February 25^th, 2022, thus the day after the aggression on Ukraine with the words:

“Putin also attacks the West – NATO must go through a Renaissance.”  

The justified pithy words though crepitate, when there’s no substantial change also in the media and culturally
and in our history books. Thus: an accentuated elaboration of geopolitics and its dislocations and dismissals. And
much more.

The chief editor of the German “Times”, “Zeit” and others have summarized that in a highly accurate and pointed
way in the expression “vulgar pacifism”. On the occasion of an answer to a petition from 2009, put forward by 25 prominent artists and other persons engaged in the cultural sector appealing for a German withdrawal from Afghanistan until 2011 writer and TV presenter Thea Dorn commented that quite impressively:

“What does war mean for generations, who never have learnt that the hard way and who that way also thoughtlessly might take the fatal mistake for real, war would just be an intensified role-play? And how do we deal with German soldiers killed in combat in public? A nice memorial bordering the ministry of defense won’t make it. It’s dishonorable to keep these nagging questions apart from one’s soul, hiding behind a vulgar pacifism, which one wouldn’t be able to tolerate in one’s own life for just a single moment.”

At the end of the day though both poles are living their fiasco in the last 20 and more years.
Also the terms “resilience” and “vulnerability” need like many others to be transformed into the relations of the 21^st century. The event “war” per se requires also regarding its hierarchies within levels of communication and the many grades of symmetric and asymmetric lines of relations expressed within that a decided revision. The respective
national heritage imprinting any kind of general perception expressed in there needs to be revised as much.

Lately a casual chat after having taken a bath in the draft of Panjshir-River in Afghanistan, floating between the wrecks of the two Soviet tanks here in summer 2009 illustrated me once more, that the right of self-determination of

all people is much stronger than all imperial show of power.

2^nd Part

(Cultural) Human Heritage and its Complete Lack of Any Protection

In Afghanistan Western failure was on the horizon since a long time.

In fall 2008 German press agency (dpa) journalist Can Merey edited:

“The Afghan Misery. Why the West is Threatened to Fail at the Hindu Kush”.

A brilliant, multifaceted and multi-layered analysis of what became apparent reality 13 years later. On Persian

New Year Nouruz, March 21^st, 2010 I met Can by chance in front of the empty Buddha caves at Bamiyan. As

someone fathoming possibilities for rebuilding urban and rural spaces at Kabul in a British-US-American NGO

his book had been part of my reading preparation of my work at the Hindu Kush.

...

The blast of the Buddhas had its 21^st anniversary on February 26^th, 2022.

The Taliban are holding power again. The book was praised with lauding reviews. But it flopped.

The mission of around 150.000 German soldiers at the Hindu Kush, from where 59 of them returned in
tin plate coffins won’t be rehabilitated that way.
We owe that not only to the families of the soldiers killed in action there.

The minarets of the Musallah Madrasa Complex at Herat are sad relicts of “The Great Game” in Western Afghanistan,

not far from the Iranian border. The huge complex was built between 1417 to 1432 and was damaged in fights between Russian and Afghan troops in 1868. Then in the 1880s it was blasted by the British and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan,

who united Afghanistan with the sword. They feared a Russian invasion to come from the line of sight, the vast

building was blocking.

Archeological and urban historian research in the country at the Hindu Kush uncovers time and again stunning

and multi-layered findings. This research though cannot and must not be continued. Just blaming the Taliban, who now have returned to the controls with their fundamentally nationalistic reading of Islam and the place’s history

per se doesn’t go far enough at all though.

Noam Chomsky immediately after the Western withdrawal and the Taliban take-over early September 2021 said,

“that the most basic reason for US failure in Afghanistan was America’s intelligence information, which is rarely accurate.“

In the case now of the Russian invasion to Ukraine though US-intelligence services with their warnings

were frighteningly accurate.

Corinna Kuhr-Korolev overwrites an article on “Zeitgeschichte online“ with the headline: “ENDANGERED WORLD HERITAGE! – Looking at the State of Ukrainian Museums, Libraries and Architectural Monuments in the War.”

Unfortunately this heritage is in a very bad way. Regarding the over all rather (national) “Business as Usual”

attitude there rarely will be solid protection, not to mention rebuilding measures or even programs to come soon.

The “marginalized borderlands” Ukraine, the way Florian Peters names the hijacked country raising the question “RUSSIA’S AGGRESSION ON UKRAINE – A TURNING POINT IN HISTORY?” that way is endangered to become a

long and bloody battlefield. Controlling a country with a surface of almost 1,7 times Germany hosting scarcely

half of its population requires a brutal logistics of occupation forces. Also Putin’s Russia will fail with that long

lasting and back-breaking effort.

Fossil Thinking, once More

The battle of material within the military mission primarily by armored tank divisions on the ground and air

support at a rather small scale on the Russian side and the alerted air raid defenses in NATO-space these days,

midst of March 2022 simultaneously with five huge tankers for supplying aircraft squadrons hints towards almost completely neglected indicators of an imperial way of thinking of that kind.

In 2019 scientists in the UK found out, that “US-military forces, if they were a national state with their Logistics

and Geopolitical Ecology, would be ranked 47th with their ‘Carbon Boot‐print’ “.

I myself could witness Chinese defense readiness in spring 2012 in the air space between Hangzhou, Ningbo

and Shanghai of what also party leaders call “the rich European East of China” in the course of the saber rattling between Israel and Iran back then. The Russian aggression now and NATO - defense readiness will regarding

their “Carbon Boot-print” definitely dwarf and outshine everything.

Nobel Prize Winners for Economy Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo in „Poor Economics“ are speaking of

the “three I’s”, being the mainly responsible figures for the poor rates of conversion in policy particularly when

fighting poverty: “Ideology, Ignorance and Inertia”, thus laziness and convenience, causing a lack of possibilities

for transferring ruling principles on the actual action on the ground. As already mentioned before here

“Irrationalism” might be added as the fourth I to the other three.

We also have to scrutinize anew WAR and “inequality” on all levels inevitably going with that.

In the rich and somehow indeed “sated” West people always talk about “freedom”. “Equality” and “solidarity”

as the least coequal targets of the French Revolution in 1789, the central event of “enlightenment” though are completely marginalized in those mostly primarily ideological discourses. This might also sometimes cause

dangerous narratives, where many things are blocked and where schemes of perpetrators and victims are

stipulated and certain ruling existential orientations might be carved in stone. Up to war now as an “accelerated

way of changing things”. Where to though, to which kind of “post-war order”, to which kind of sustainable peace,

to which forms of reconciliation and brother- and sisterhood inside of a peace process to be laid out already

during the war going on?

The role of “Inequality” itself hasn’t been picked out as a central theme by no one else as deeply and as

continuously as by “the French Rock star of Economics Thomas Piketty”. He therein has deeply analyzed “post-democratic developments” at our places as much as the continuously growing social gap between some

oligarchs and the masses of ordinary people in Putin’s Russia.

Once more here I have to emphasize: It’s not about “relativization” here, but it’s about “extended contextuality”.

Nothing shall be offset against something else here. The sufferings of the Afghan people over now more than

four decades aren’t comparable with the sufferings of the Ukrainian people, who got befallen by the “Russian

storm of steel and fire”. When the Austrian journalist and author with Afghan roots Emron Feroz speaks about

“Racism in the media reports” and “First and Second Class Victims of War” watching the massive exodus out

of Ukraine he speaks for the people coming from his ancestor’s homeland. “Against oblivion” of injustice, that

happened in the recent past, but that is as present as the newly awakened injustice shown us quite plainly now.

The multiple human sufferings between the narratives of stagnated and backward-looking thinking.

3^rd Part

Acceleration in the Horror of War

Paul Virilio sometimes is called a “philosopher“ and “thinker”, sometimes an urbanist and “media critics”

or “media theoretics”. He was born in 1932 at Paris as the son of an Italian partisan and a catholic nurse from

Brittany. In his childhood at the Breton city of Nantes occupied by Nazi-Germany he experienced his father’s

Gestapo-prosecution and soon then after D-Day the bombings of allied forces. Generally said:

“The war was his university”.

“Dromology”, the teaching, he developed is dealing with the distortion of time and space caused by technology

and power and its use: processes of speeding-up and of deceleration, their control and impacts on humans and

on the material.

Watching images of “precise pinprick bombings without causing civil casualties” during “the first Gulf War with Western participation” 1991 in front of the TV he wrote “War and Television” and called the war a

“third world war in miniature”. Further he says in there:

“The message of this media war is less the information about the current ongoing battles but more
about promoting future wars.”

The decentralized events about “interest spheres and power on the Eurasian tectonic plate”, the blue planet’s

vastest mass of land located between Lisbon in the West and Vladivostok in the East and ultimately

reaching also beyond there already in 1979 registered essential fire accelerants:

-    The Iranian Revolution swirled up the Shia

-    The assault and seizure of the Grand Mosque at Mecca did the same with the Sunna. Following these events
      the strict reading of the Holy Qur’an in Wahhabism became one of Saudi-Arabia’s most important “export
      goods” initially in the Muslim World, reaching from Mauretania to East-Timor.

-    At Christmas 1979 the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan started. The country became one of the continuous
      sources of fire in what might already be called the Third World War.

-    September 2001 then and the consequences of 911 then extended these series of events again

-    The Yugoslav Wars and Chechnya and many other local sources of fire, also the “Blitzkrieg” in fall 2020

      about Nagorni Karabach and other places between Armenia, rather fighting conventionally and Azerbaijan,

      which eliminated the enemy’s troops by drone warfare should just be marginalized here.

-    Azerbaijan was just capable to use expensive drone technology, here now produced in Israel and Turkey 
      because of the country’s wealth as an export nation of oil. Drone technology itself ultimately was made

      perfect particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan by the West after 2009.

-    The long forgotten invasion by Russian troops deeply into neighboring Georgia in 2008, as  
      Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne, Alina Jašina-Schäfer and Jannis Panagiotidis remark again on „Zeitgeschichte-online“ 
      also deserves to be evaluated anew in this regard.

-    Syria and once more Iraq, Libya, Yemen: the general conflicts between regional powers at rather foreign places,
      their people and their multi-faceted and multi-layered heritage, thus: “centre” and “periphery” conflicts amongst   

      different stakeholders and proxies; the “similar handwriting” of massive bombings of Aleppo in Syria and Mariupol

      now in Ukraine: for arriving at general preliminary conclusions and a rather extended overview we will have

      to find parallel lines in these complex series of events.

Also Armenia, also Ukraine, also Georgia, also all other places mentioned here host many cultural sites to be

destroyed in these wars. Or to be appropriated anew by new narratives forced on them in the course of imperial

change. Common “Eurasian heritage”. Consequently “global heritage of humanity as a whole”.  

Karolina Wigura und Jaroslaw Kuisz are describing these fears of loss burnt into the collective memory of Eastern European people under the headline “Eastern Europe and the fear of Western Betrayal” in a quite impressive
way in the Swiss NZZ. Particularly their homeland Poland and its built manifesto of preserving the places’
identity by reconstruction and rebuilding from the debris are admirable.

“UN-Urbanism“ and so called “Post-Conflict-Urbanism“: Are there real answers to be expected regarding
“decisive questions and challenges for the outcome of the war” in the 21^st century?

Virilio also says in his first book “Bunker Archeology” from 1975, in an afterword for a new edition in 2008, that
the 21^st century is endangered to let the stupefying event of the genocide now follow the ecocide.

In its scale and ways of implementation the genocide committed by the Nazis is immeasurable. But many
other genocides followed. The narratives, which were taken as a basis for these events though are drawing
an often tragical image of mankind and its motives and incitements.

The 21^st Century: wēijī - Crisis = Chance and Danger

Also the “Project for a New American Century (PNAC)” was riddled with “fossil thinking” in the truest sense of

the word: almost all members of the first Bush-administration 2000 till 2004 originated from the US-big oil

lobby. Many were also masterminds of the PNAC-manifesto for “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”. The direct grip

on the oil fields in the Middle East were a direct imperial target of the agenda. The rest is history. With all its tragic. Changing suffering to joy is one of the most important seeds of hope.

Hastily building LNG-terminals in Central Europe, in particular Germany for fracking gas from Qatar and

North America in the framework of reinforced sanctions against Russia is a slap in the face of indigenous people. Particularly “Native Americans”, in Canada “First Nation People” have protested for years against Keystone XL

and the dangers for their and their ancestors’ resources of drinking water by pipelines and fracking. One of the

leading and also temporarily first climate researcher in the US, former director of NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) James E. Hansen then during the protests also went once more into jail.

Another “original sin” of the green party, which once lined up also for enforcing environmental interests in the parliament? Are the first target “keeping national wealth” in Germany and the second one, “the right of self-determination of indigenous people” in North America (and in the borderland Ukraine!) and third, “the global

threat by climate change” and fourth “ostracism of an aggressor”, who has trampled the “assumed rationality of international law, of the so called law of nations = bilateral or multilateral treaties or minimum standards

under his feet” unreconcilably opposed to each other? What are the chances for getting out of that dilemma? Or,

for asking the other way around: What is “political realism” in the 21^st century? How “realistic” actually is “political realism” in consideration of threats, which for most people appear rather abstract, particularly regarding global warming? And what’s the difference between a correspondingly necessary “realism” and 20^th century’s “idealism” employed again and again?

All the questions raised here though cannot be burdened on the green party for sure but rather are caused by

a “post-democratic” and “neoliberal mind”, where all thinking outside of the box is more or less excluded.

Progressive movements now are respectively challenged to break up that consolidation and to clear the

not always nonhazardous ways out of danger zones. A task, which goes beyond usual terms of legislative periods.

Noam Chomsky dates the “liberation of the genie in a bottle” of the Anthropocene on August 6^th, 1945,

when the first atomic bomb of the US sparked above Hiroshima.

Who has read Eugene B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed” though might be able to relate a bit more deeply to

the cruel dimension of the “Pacific War Theater“. Also this story, written down by a young marine and later teacher

for biology from Mobile / Alabama is a cathartic and dignified balanced accounts with war. Human suffering and solidarity amongst comrades, but also the respectful observation of humans, who are deadly enemies in wartimes:

only by meeting contemporary witnesses and listening to their experiences one might be able to judge things.

“Opinions” and “experiences” are definitely completely different things, happening on different levels. Experiences

now of people in Ukraine, who eventually already survived the horrors of WW2 are hardly measurable.

“Genocide” and “ecocide” do show many faces. They happen on many levels.

In his book  “Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal“, edited in 2020 with Robert Pollin Noam Chomsky

quotes the Australian climate scientist Andrew Glikson saying in 2018:

“Climate scientists are no longer alone in having to cope with the global emergency, whose implications have

reached the defense establishment, yet the world continues to spend near to $1.8 trillion each year on the

military, a resource that needs to be diverted to the protection of life on Earth. As the portents for major conflicts –

in the China Sea, Ukraine, and the Middle East are rising – who will defend the Earth?” (P.5)

Also German politicians these days talk about the dangers of “World War 3”. Fear is an overwhelming feeling

also visible in their faces, hearable in their voices. Just the perception of war per se, ultimately predominantly

based on the collective memory regarding the 20^th century in “the international community” and its many

places and countries is as different as the heritage expressed by different sources of experiences and the

narratives related to those.

In Germany people associate war mostly with the event and dimension of “total warfare”. Seizure and destruction

going with that of Mariupol though in the aggressors running amok with complete deterioration first of vital infrastructures, then housing and shelters of inhabitants when bombing a land corridor between Russia and

Crimea with the strategically important harbor Sevastopol are exactly of that caliber.

“Ecocide” and “genocide” there are close by. Willful vandalizing destruction of the habitat and its confidential

protection spaces and shelters and the lacking will for safeguarding cultural and social heritage of people at their respective places there are merging, maybe even transitioning into each other. A world on the brink? Maybe.

There’s not that much time left for the human species on that pathway.

Putin as much as Trump were or better are vehement and highly aggressive climate change deniers.

James E. Hansen, who then still was employed by NASA speaks about appalling and hair-raising harassment and falsifications up to open censorship of his work under the administration of George W. Bush in the years 2000’s.

The Biden-administration now undercover proceeds with the ultimately also nationalistic mantra “America first”

(and alone there) first of all because of appeasement facing the GOP in the bipartisan US-system. With other

words: there is no real choice for President Biden and his government. Facing the IPCC-report 2018 Oxford

Professor of Physics Raymond Pierrehumbert that way underlines Gretha Thunberg’s words, that there’s really a lot of reason for panicking in consideration of the future of our habitat planet Earth for humanity. For us.

Also Canadian journalist Naomi Klein in the Intercept of March 1^st, 2022 draws comparisons, which for “appeaser

of real politics” apparently seem to be scarcely thinkable or even comprehensible: “Toxic Nostalgia, From Putin
to Trump to the Trucker Convoys”, who as their protest against limitations of their “freedom” caused by the
pandemics are seizing the Canadian federal capital Ottawa since some longer. In the subtitle she states in a
down-to-earth-manner: “War is reshaping our world. Will we harness that urgency for climate action or
succumb to a final, deadly oil and gas boom?”

The human species, we cannot afford the three, now four I’s, mentioned here initially: Ideology, ignorance and
inertia, thus laziness and indifference and irrationality. We cannot really confront global warming with
national wealth programs.

The Demand of “Post-fossil Peace-Frameworks” already at Wartimes themselves

In 2011 at a symposium of TU Dortmund here about “The Impacts of Global Warming on Cities” I asked a climate scientist, whether he despite of increasing data pools from many sciences bundled in climate research could

really forecast the consequences of the 2°C-target then predominating before the Paris Agreement in 2015.

Actually I meant, that with continuing suppression we might arrive at temperatures far beyond 2° C. Something,

David Wallace-Wells also had researched about like nobody else in “The Uninhabitable Earth – Life after Warming”.

The speaker back then at Dortmund immediately saw a “climate denier” in me.

It was shortly after my return from Afghanistan. There and at other places in South Asia I had studied deeply about the impacts of global warming and the complete anaphylaxis of humans in regard of neglected, overloaded and in huge parts also destroyed “traditional” as much as “modern, thus mostly rather technical infrastructures. Based on these researches I also had developed regeneration and rebuilding concepts.

Global issues can never be sorted out just on the national level. Still there’s an urgent need for basic concepts to be implemented and safeguarded locally. Water infrastructures and cultural and social heritage of places, hosting their communities of humans and creatures there are these basic elements of being, which urgently have to be protected and particularly after a war like now in Ukraine have to be rebuilt in that contextuality. For that we need many hands and some heads for surveying and controlling that. But particularly elements of participation should be encouraged within the whole process.

The strange lack of interest of the public, I always recognized: at the end of the day the West in Afghanistan also
failed due to the four I’s: Ideology, Ignorance, Irrationality and Inertia. The West will also fail in Ukraine, when we
don’t confront Putin and other despots in the world with the strategically smart and “sustainable” will for
implementing such an integrative and also resilient peace process.  

These days it doesn’t seem, that we even want to realize that. Apparently we’re completely overloaded with
the war itself. Marc-Felix Serrao states in the NZZ, that it’s kind of shame, that facing the Ukrainian president
Wolodimir Selenskyj in a video speech in the German Federal Parliament members there didn’t even show a
humble look downwards or any kind of gesture for searching an apology for our own complete misjudgment
about Putin’s irrationality. Instead there’s now more kinds of public debates, whether Putin is following a
completely rationally planned agenda or whether he is acting in a most irrational, even “psychotic way”.

Apparently though it’s a fact, that single individuals, predominantly men are deciding in a lonely manner about
the world’s fate. That the same person now seems to be the Commander in Chief for the area-wide destruction and most cruel seizure of Mariupol, who was already commanding the carpet bombing of Aleppo in Syria 2016, Russian colonel general Michail Misinzew: that should make us think further. Human suffering and many people dying in
the ruins of their destroyed homeland is one thing. In the case of Aleppo regarding its cultural heritage one of the richest cities not just of the Middle East was destroyed. Rebuilding that heritage for generations to come and
making it livable: that won’t work just with video games. The homeland and the respective safe spaces that is
offering for local people are something to be newly defined as a universal human right.

Members of parliament, who ultimately also have to decide about war deployment of the German army like in Afghanistan, that way seem to become, what Heike Groos (1960-2017) is naming “battle field tourists”. Apparently
they are having a kind of “post-heroic problem of distance” with the proximity of death in “exceptional
circumstances”. And finally war is a continuous situation of that kind.

We should never forget though: demonizing Putin in the West, particularly in Eastern Europe might also have
led to a kind of “self-fulfilling prophecy”. The lonely despot in the Cremlin, who was trapped in his revisionist’
bubble of history now has liberated himself from that, before he for himself couldn’t find any air to breath any
more in that situation. The debris of the bursting bubble though now are terrifying all of us.

In “Planet Earth’s Sadness” Éric Vuillard tells the story about Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull anew.
The folkloristic spectacle for the masses of the Wild-West-actor and the sad role of the proud Sioux Chief,
ultimately dismantled in there: hopefully regarding the similar highly asymmetric relationship between
Wladimir Wladimirowitsch Putin and Wolodimir Selenskyj once we will have to tell different stories.

“Water, Equity and Dignity” are to be thought together “anew” again.

Water, the flowing element, life-giving source. And threat. About 70% of our body. In a child’s body about 80%. Decreasing with age. In drying-out and desertification of the body. Of being human, which then is running off.
Which then might nourish itself by dried experience.

Things, relations, being and becoming and the narratives to be assembled “anew”.

Not an easy thing to do, when the view is always blocked by one’s own nose. And when that also seems to be encouraged and demanded mostly.

The war in Ukraine once more shows us, where we stand, at which crossroads. Not only the tough people
in Ukraine themselves. All of us, the human species as a whole.  

As far as that here “fossil thinking” and our times’ cracks, which now are laying frankly open in front of us.
Multiple and multilateral smart discourses are required for confronting old narratives in new cloths.
And the action resulting from that. Discourses, which are also led to action and a kind of resistance against
that destructive manner. Lifting peace and its appreciation, the dignity of places and people “in a
sustainable sense” as priorities on the schedule.

"Why do things here not work out the way, they worked out with you guys?"

“Safeguarding the new external borders of a free Europe”, a term also Annalena Bärbock in the foreign office

uses after three weeks of war in Ukraine requires more input and commitment. Whatever will be the “Bitter
Scenario of a New Peace Framework between Russia and Ukraine for both Sides Saving Face” ending fights
on the ground as a start: here a complete realignment of “Global Security Policy” is necessary.

The ”new international alliance”, Wolodimir Selenskyj talks about in front of the US-Congress, that should have
the task to “immediately intervene in the case of war”: this also needs to go along with a rebuilding of the UN. A rebuilding process aiming at a bureaucratic cutting-back towards more pragmatism and more direct labor on
the ground. The terms of nations themselves and “public international law” as they were basic to the foundation
of the UN after WW 2 cannot protect many threatened peoples any more anyway. As we have increasingly
witnessed in the last decades. The “United Peoples” under the rooftop of the UN as a coequal partner
organization should absorb this vacuum in particular.

This institutionalized rebuilding program though generally requires shaping out a clear political will. And
previously a respective multilateral approach to reasons for war and its consequences. That also significantly
includes the “feistiness” of the population. “Resilience”, thus in the broadest sense “resistance against multiple
kinds of threats only goes along with a common identity aiming at accomplishing common targets. We’re
still far away from getting there.  

It should be crystal clear, that currently the Ukrainian army has “safeguarded” some strategically important
urban centers with all kinds of landmines available against the invaders. Cities, where people also go to do
their daily work while sirens are howling. Sirens are also howling outside of the everyday changing frontlines
on the ground because of the small- and large-scale aerial support of the invaders’ ground troops. Thus: just the airspace these days is ruled by the enemy. Meanwhile many people on the ground just want to go on with their
“normal life” particularly serving the community as long as possible.  

The definition of “Conflict“ and “Post-Conflict“ in that sense has in addition to that to be reshaped again. Once
more it’s evident, that a long rancorous and grim static warfare might follow here. “Civil war” – another term,
which in its many facets and its multi-layered dimension of conflicts now also has to be defined and made comprehensible anew.

Karl Schlögel, Prof. ret. for Eastern European History at Frankfurt / Oder in 2015 wrote in his book:
“Decision at Kiew. Ukrainian Lectures” on the last but one page (289):

“Now we’re arriving at a case of emergency, we’re not prepared for at all. Regarding the necessary ways of
thinking and acting, not to mention practical forms of peace-keeping, also including military feistiness
we’re just imaginably poorly prepared for that”.

He wrote that in 2014 / 15. Seven to eight years later his warning observations are readable as if he was there
just now in these moments. But it’s less like that: it’s rather in the original sense of the word “interest” being
in between places and the people living there, what chronists like him, like Can Merey make become
“Admonishers in the Desert”. Becoming Cassandras, whose warning cries as often and again and again
aren’t heard.

Afghanistan is much further abroad. The Western fiasco there was long foreseeable and was feared by
many of us as well. Despite all that the “international community” sleepwalked there inertly like a steam roller.
And then left in a hurry. Schlögel’s “we” in the case of Ukraine now emphasizes once more, how naive and
blue-eyed we were. The pathway to a “Post-fossil Peace Framework”, not to mention a “Sustainable
Rebuilding Process” will only work out with a realistic introspection of ourselves and our role in war
there itself. In consideration of all other scenarios of crisis we’re finding ourselves in these days more
pragmatism and more decisive input of multiple experience and empirical values bottom-up and
top-down are required.

A talk with Richard Ned Lebow, Professor for International Political Theory at King's College
in London in the NZZ from March 19^th, 2022 with the title

“Money? Power? Nope, We’re Going to War for Completely Different Reasons,”
continues with these thoughts once more. The same way, we’re continuously learning about the
fragile conditions and states of internal and external systems of life in the course of continuously growing
data-pools of climate research and we’re confronted with new chances and dangers for our own existence
again and again, Putin’s invasion in Ukraine regarding conflicts and their immanent nature confronts us
with long hidden chances and threats. Challenges, we should bear and accept.

For that particularly here in Germany more “interest”, thus real “being there and being in between and
together” in “rebuilding a new security architecture” is required. The new crack, going through Europe
and the world asks for many more and further and deeper going ways of regarding and discussing
things and then also enlarging possibilities for acting.

The question where to go I’ve already addressed to the “Post-post-Modern Human” in 2014 without
any glimpse of an answer. The “crack through Europe” becoming visible then I’ve also described back then.
Ukraine back then for me was a completely blank area, a “terra incognita” for me. Maybe we’re also learning
too slowly about the multiple peoples on earth. And about their living spaces. About the planet itself and its
high fragility brought home to us again and again.  

The crack, I recognized in 2014: it has become a bloodied and soon suppurating and ulcerating wound. But
also the people from Ukraine, whose suffering and whose blood brings this home to us these days isn’t a
homogenous mass at all. Particularly for that reason we need new and more open and more flexible approaches
to other peoples and their conflicts.

Also regarding that target we still have some road to go here in Western and Central Europe. In Germany
though because of its powerful position this slow way of learning always tends to become a fatal point.

Rebuilding a new peace framework and a new security architecture is a challenge, where the experience of
Germany after WW 2 is substantial. But also the experiences of Poland and Ukraine itself are essential: countries,
which initially fell victim to the Wehrmacht aggression and then suffered a lot under the destruction
also caused by the Red Army.  

Looking away the way also parliamentarians in the German Federal Parliament somehow have done
in the talk with Selenskyj and going back to normal immediately afterwards: that doesn’t work anymore.  

Regarding that events in recent years and decades have been too drastic and incisive. Regarding that
crisis and chances as much as threats joined with them weigh much too heavy on us.

Lately it’s high time now to follow down to earth, what a US-helicopter pilot asked me in September 2009 at Kabul:   
"Why do things here not work out the way, they worked out with you guys?"
Our chat before that and afterwards is memorable.

The universal quote “Hope is the last thing to die” in the recent 20 + years has yielded to the quote
“It might always get worse”. Acceleration of events on the pathway back to dark times increasingly overloads
most people. Answers also here are becoming more and more thin-skinned. If there’s ever answers.  

Future, ultimately the projection of enlightened present times emerging from the past that way subsides more
and more. News from the shift of the closest frontline on the ground and of all-time record temperatures in the
Arctic and Antarctic are overlaying each other. Humanity is giving up its own fate in the Anthropocene. Is there
a grey image of us to stay, as we’ve continuously ignored all the writings on the wall? Or will we be able
to steer against that? Together?

We’re in need of a ”feisty breakup” on many levels, to many sides. When the US now are opening their fossil fuel
reserves and declare, that they will continue doing that; will they save the “neoliberal project of business as usual”
then and start a new run on mostly fossil resources and their availability? Thus: Are “Big Oil and Gas” the
preliminary winners also of that war?

That would be more than fatal.

Winning Peace is the fundamental challenge of any war.

“War-mongering” as much as “appeasement” and “vulgar pacifism” are continuously going through their
fiasco in the last decades. It’s high time for the revival of other approaches. At the very most highest time.

“Thinking War from its End” that way might become something like a strategy for survival. Not only for the
citizens of Ukraine. Also for other European citizens. And for the world.

The World is a fascinating, the most beautiful place.           

All photos © by the editor

Petition on Change.Org

Reanimation of the
"European Recovery Program (ERP)"
and Start of a
"Near and Middle Eastern Recovery Program (NMERP)"

History doesn’t repeat itself. But certain patterns do. Particularly, when short-sighted oversimplifying

dogmatism and bossiness in judgement and evaluation of complex situations predominates, learning

from history becomes a hard job or even gets obstructed. When it’s moreover about distant places

and their history, many people just soon switch off anyway.

„The Afghan Misery“, which after the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989 continued with the country’s

implosion and civil war and then ended in the Taliban dictatorship after the withdrawal of Western

troops seems to lead again to the dominion of Islamic fundamentalists. Besides that though it’s also

becoming apparent, that the country at the Hindu Kush in addition to that might become a theater of war

between international IS and local Taliban. With the Afghan people taken hostage in between.

Everyone, who him- or herself has worked on the ground there in the last 20 years, if as soldier or as civilian

definitely could easily recognize, that only by “balancing measurements” between rich and poor the country

could be brought on a peaceful track. A long and drawn-out process.

But: also Germany and Europe didn’t immediately revive from the debris particularly of WW2.

Also that regeneration and rebuilding required a lot of time.

Maybe the main reason for the “Western failure” and the failure of the “War against terror” at the Hindu Kush

was, that the will to surrender the country as a whole and its people from their misery wasn’t too distinct.

To say it the other way round: the humble realization, that regeneration and rebuilding are important

for all layers of society didn’t have a chance.

A humble and respectful, deeply human insight, George C. Marshall as one of those US-Generals,

who decisively defeated Nazi-Germany in 1947/48 displayed with his "European Recovery Program (ERP)”.

What instead in the US immediately got torpedoed by Senator McCarthy and others and then in 1951 caused

the retreat of the merited 5 Star-General and founder of the “Marshall-plan” from politics.

Time will tell, how moderate the Taliban now will deal with social and more or less unpolitical institutions.

25 years ago the first generation of Q’ran scholars also protected important social and development services.

Also, if those were managed by “Westerners”. How this will go on also depends from the reworking in the West.

Thus: in the US and particularly also here in Europe.

After all we’re not separated by the Atlantic Ocean from the “Central Asian Bridge” between

South- and East-Asia.

Finally the way, the “Western failure” happened also shows once more, that the “war against terror” long ago has already become a war “up against down” and “rich against poor”. A balance and dealing out the equivalent

challenges of the 21^st century also requires the will power for doing that.

Therefore: a change of culture also in those parts of the world, which call themselves civilized and enlightened.

The escape movement, coming with the battle fatigue of the Afghans and their delivery to the Taliban

really requires taking the challenge of tackling “reasons for migration on the ground”.

Also the increasing number of bankrupt states altogether in the “global South” as a consequence

of war and inflation finally requires drastic changes.

In addition to that climate change and its impacts can be perceived since much longer in the “global South”.

For increasing local resilience and that way for efficiently tackling reasons for migration and casus belli a

better collaboration in rebuilding infrastructures is essential.  

Water and food security once more are the leverage, where to start with.

And: regarding that we’re all sitting in the same boat. And we’re challenged to work together more efficiently.

It’s always and everywhere all about people. For getting to know places and the people better and

for finding out, what really is essential you have to focus and open up your eyes. You have to

listen to humans and their stories. You also have to face their wounds. And: Afghanistan

is a deeply wounded country. Like always also amongst the majority of Afghans are great people.

Also their lives matter. What is most important and how to achieve Peace and better living

conditions for more and more people: that requires a realignment of trade and exterior policy.

Furthermore a deepened and multilateral approach.  

For all these reasons we should now open up the way for a comprehensive and extensive

"Near and Middle Eastern Recovery Program (NMERP)". Besides that this should also effect

a new vitalization of the "European Recovery Program (ERP)". It’s high time for that. Respecting

the UN-Human-Rights-Charta and the dignity of all humans over all should per se be the basic

condition for any agreement and any transaction.

Petition on Change.Org



Bibi Mahroon Hill at Kabul with the Soviet diving pool and a poster of Ahmad Shah Massoud there in front of that.

The Afghan national hero was assassinated by Al Qaida on September 09 th, 2001.  His son Ahmad Massoud now, in August and September 2021 couldn't defend their province Panjshir that long against the Taliban. Perhaps he also didn't want to prolong war again. We don't know. But we should encourage any movement towards Peace in the country.

Afghanistan and the „Admonishers in the Desert“

August 27^th,2021 – after the Taliban coming into power again



These days Peter Scholl-Latour and Helmut Schmidt are often named as “admonishers in the desert”,

regarding Afghanistan and Western failure there. Particularly Scholl-Latour (1924-2014) is quoted quite often.

Senior chancellor Schmidt (1918-2015), who ultimately had to do the splits between equalization policy

following “Change Through Rapprochement” introduced by Willy Brandt und Egon Bahr on one hand and

NATO-Double Track Decision of the early 1980’s, particularly as a reaction to the Soviet-invasion into

Afghanistan 1979 in his great old age wisdom eventually at the beginning of the 21^st century said

correspondingly, that “certain forms of state terrorism” sometimes might be the worst kind of terrorism.

He didn’t want to specify that back then.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) once said, that he didn’t know about the end of WW3. But he knew,

that WW4 would be fought again with clubs and hand-axes.

Paul Virilio (1932-2018) called the first US-Gulf War in 1991 a “3^rd World War in little”, which as a
“media war” was used for presenting the possibility of future wars and for preparing the audience
for that. The “drone war as remote controlled warfare”, which particularly recently between Armenia
and Azerbaijan in the once more flamed up conflict about Nagorno-Karabakh ultimately caused a
“lightning victory” of Baku therein goes even one step further.

The “ethics of the drone“ is just like the “ethics of the nuclear fission” after Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Chernobyl and Fukushima in the 20^th century one of the greatest challenges of the 21^st century.

Afghanistan became a proving ground for the drone war particularly at the beginning of the

presidency of Barack Obama around 2009 / 10, when the strategically important Swat-District
on the Pakistani side of the Khyber-Pass was ruled by Taliban. It shows, that also such
a “cyber-war” cannot be won in the long run.

In addition to that many other things get evident with that defeat. Particularly regarding the
complete ignorance against all warnings and hints from the military as much as from the civilian
side. Not only regarding those ones currently governing.

Wesley K. Clark, retired ****General of the US-forces and Supreme Allied Commander Europe of
NATO during the Kosovo war in 2007 quotes a befriended General in the Pentagon at the
end of September 2001:”When the only tool you’re having is a hammer every problem has to
look like a nail.” Clark speaks about a “political coup”, which was performed after September 11^th,
2001 in the US by some “hard-nosed people”. Political gamblers, who wanted to attack 7 countries
in 5 years. Anyhow Clark emphasizes, that he sees soldiers as being exploited by such a kind of politics.
That way he also significantly describes the “continuous political resistance against any advice”
in matters like these.

20 US-Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, committing suicide per day, 7300 per year are quite
a significant number. Many were just looking for chances regarding education and some career or
health insurance, as Iraq- and Afghanistan veteran Mike Prysner says in an impressive speech
in December 2010. Many of them broke at the cruel realities at the fronts of “asymmetric wars”.
The estimated number of unreported cases of “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” also amongst
Germans, who in the war zones worked as armed or unarmed social workers according to their own
esteem might even be much higher. The suffering of locals there themselves: immeasurable.

Also Marcus Grotian and Lothar Hanke with their network for the evacuation of local staff
of the German army shall be named here as admonishers and once more Heike Groos (1960-2017),
representative for all soldiers killed in action or died afterwards shall be remembered. Heike
died many years after her last "mission" at the Hindu Kush. And her interview partner once,
Roger Willemsen (1955-2016), who indefatigably pleaded for the country and its people. Also
Can Merey’s book “The Afghan Misery”, which 2008 already sums up this in the most accurate way
shall be mentioned here as a decisive appeal.

Also that shouldn’t be forgotten here: Germany’s tactical maneuvering regarding refugees
was always first of all determined by questions regarding the European Union. The continuous
procrastinate hesitation though has not only “left behind” many people: the employer as part of
the protecting power that way debunks itself more and more as occupying power. You don’t aggrieve
friends and loyal colleagues like that.

Me myself in 2013 I got a request via a friend in the South of Germany: the translator and friend of a
colonel of the German army, who had been garrisoned at Kunduz was on the run inside of the country.

His father had already been killed by Taliban. The young man himself just had become father
for the first time. For protecting his family he had distanced himself and asked urgently for political
asylum. When I contacted a befriended development and social worker, who had been working
in the country through all phases within some decades, I soon then got a disappointing answer:
also this highly merited man didn’t have any access anymore to the German embassy or consulate.
That way he also couldn’t work towards an urgent appeal for getting into a procedure for granting
the right of asylum to the young man and his family.

An open end. Once more. Authorities, which first of all are protecting themselves apparently
mostly seem to be too stiff and immobile for finding equivalent flexible answers and for acting
strategically smart and pragmatically human in complex situations of that kind on the ground
of such an “asymmetric war”.

The first victim to be killed in any war is “the truth”. It’s assassinated for “legitimating” war.
The “whole and complete truth“ or „partial-truth“ or “fragments of truth”: this is continuously
getting more obscure. And: that also is the intention after all. In the case of Afghanistan this
permanent claiming of “fragments of truth” now has lasted 20 years. The suppression of many
deeply human issues and the subordination under the current narratives of completely fractured
communities up to a stone age society: the Soviet Union back then had “bought” 12 more years after
the invasion at the Hindu Kush. 1989 the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, 1991 the Soviet Union decayed.
The “political elites” in the West now also will have to go through a deep crisis of credibility. The simple
narratives of Afghans as “backward people”, Ulrich Ladurner for example debunked in September 2010
in the German “Zeit” under the Title: “They are not capable for democracy! The West denounces the Afghans –
and distracts from its own failure”: till lastly these narratives also pleased the majorities. Apparently not only
politicians preferred these simple reductions of any complex circumstances.

2009/10 I worked in Afghanistan. The military and the civilian rebuilding of the country, particularly
also chances and possibilities weren’t regarded in an appropriate way by the media. They didn’t want
to regard “the family as a whole” and “all the people from Afghanistan” but predominantly women and girls.
“Moderate Pashtunwali” and generally: the middle of the population that way was disembodied.
The constitution was already before the Taliban took over based on the Sharia.
“It will be about the interpretation of Sharia”: for women this is definitely valid. As a man, who worked there I appreciated female colleagues and their power: their knowledge and their pride. But you also recognize,
how important the family and coherence and solidarity in there are. How desperate, but also how carefully
loving most people are in their poverty and their gracefulness. Like many peoples, who were dominated
by strangers again and again Afghans initially offer their hearts on their hands to their guests. When the
guest then tries to grab the heart, then he will get to sense their honor and pride. Who instead also
appreciates this ethos won’t loose his Afghan friends that easily.

The current “narratives” though were different. Casus belli and reasons for escaping the country as a whole
were rather neglected. Also “geostrategic consequences” from the state failure in 1955 up to today through
the ages were scarcely analyzed. The fact, that many ANA-soldiers hadn’t received their pay since about
9-12 months and that way the country was kind of “delivered”: no comment on that. A deeply wounded
country and its people were betrayed. Once more.

A close friend, a proud Pashtu and outstanding physician, generally: one of my smartest friends already
in 2015 said, that it would boil down to the Taliban and IS someday soon wading in the blood of
the Afghan people. He then was shortly before migrating to the US.

This sad perspective stays. And it’s getting more and more into the focus these days.

When Tamim Ansary then describes the resistance on the part of the son of legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud
from Panjshir, then once again also in this respect the frightening perspective of a new civil war with
different fronts appears, the deeply wounded, war-weary and once more deluded Afghan people
has to carry the can for.  

But how to prevent that?

Panjshir Valley, end of July 2009. Wrecks of Soviet tanks in the current of the cold mountain river. In the background at the slope
the ruins of a village destroyed by Taliban at the end of the 1990s.

Also defending that province by the troups of the smart Tajik and Afghan national hero Ahmad Shah Massoud caused many victims.
Him going to Kabul before though after the withdrawal of the Soviets even had more devastating consequences.



Afghanistan and its many peoples are not less complex as Germany and its states with their many
different people living there. The history of the country at the Hindu Kush and its geostrategic position
at the end of Cold War and its continuation to the “clash of civilizations” between the frontlines
particularly with China as a new superpower is quite complicated. Nonetheless: the simple narratives,
which were repeated again and again cannot at all come up to the country’s and the people’s majority’s
beauty and their dignity.

In 2011, about one year after my “demission” from Afghanistan I somehow also worked out my own PTSD
with a closer look on the country’s younger history. In the fourth part of “Afghanistan – Indicator for the System Decadence” - 1989 and afterwards – in Afghanistan and - in Kabul” I describe in a more or less neutral way
the implosion of a state after the withdrawal of a “protection and / or occupying power". Like everything
also this warning died away. The price has to be paid by a deeply wounded and insofar completely fatigue people.
And: PTSD first of all results from the lack of hope and any perspective.

Neither Peter Scholl-Latour, nor Helmut Schmidt had climate change on the screen. Also the
28 smart thesis regarding the country, the back then 92 years old former chancellor wrote in January 2010
don’t look at this important subject. Albert Einstein couldn’t have that subject down pat more than ever.
Paul Virilio though, who as a small child first experienced his father’s, an Italian Partisan’s prosecution by the
Gestapo and then the bombings of allied forces following D-Day in a basement at Nantes though
in an afterword, he added 2008 to a new edition of the initially 1975 edited “bunker archeology” regarding
Hitler’s North-Atlantic-Wall in Normandy therein speaks about the “egregious possibility of an ecocide”,
appearing like once the presence of  the “genocide” as a similarly suppressed threatening on the horizon.

Often it was also said, that the Taliban now had “conquered the cities as a rural power”. That term,
transposing the old conflict between conservative countryside and swanky, sometimes even wicked city
on the Hindu Kush also is too short-sighted in a country, a region, which is exposed to climate change
without any protection already much longer as our latitudes.  

A fundamental reprocessing of the Western failure particularly in the current bloody transition phase
quickly has to be led to perspectives for the Afghan people, who once more are trapped in hopelessness
and despair. The people there definitely have deserved something better.

The urgent challenges for the whole human species cannot be permanently confronted with
white- or greenwashing and fragmentation of truth. Giving people a chance, who are unprotected
and exposed to human made elements and early and late consequences of human action and human
ignorance for working particularly for their protection and their hope is also a possibility.

Particularly there Europe and its Near and Middle East should start with.

“Post-democratic culture of lack of responsibility” and “pushing responsibility from one department
to the other one”, which ultimately has caused an “exorbitance of cynical unreason” and a rampant
lack of perspective and hope amongst most people also here in Central Europe finally must have an end.   

Joe Biden’s billion Dollar plan for refurbishing infrastructures is definitely nothing more than the famous
“drop in the ocean”. This will be just enough for rebuilding some bridges crossing Hudson, Potomac and
Mississippi. “Neutrality regarding emissions” or “climate adaption”, thus: increasing the resilience against
consequences of climate change is something different. Joe Biden’s plan doesn’t even mean that under
the banner of “America first”. Europe finally has to bring other ways and other proposals to maturity.
“Good craft”, with “head, heart, hand and foot” also requires ways out of the “Afghan misery”.

Development of these ways and the dialogue for that now have to be on the schedule.

Kabul, end of August 2009: (private) courtyards, vegetated by well-drilling and increasingly dried out (public) spaces. Both
phenomena accompanied by continuously sinking ground water level. The drought in the country, which is now, in late
summer 2021 pointed out in a more tightened way has a long case history. Between city and countryside, rich and poor. As in
all “asymmetric conflicts” these border situations are only partly geographically, rather “monetarily” conditioned.

Epilogue to that comment and that kind of “field report“ one week later, September 4^th, 2021:

It’s rather stunning, how many critical voices now can be heard. Voices, which have been ignored by
the politics of “Business as Usual” continuously. Are Western rulers of the last 20 years still capable
to say, what was the reason for the “war against terror”?

“Not the Taliban, but we have Destroyed the Afghan State”, says Gilles Dorronsoro, Professor of
Political Science at Pantheon Sorbonne University, Paris in the Swiss NZZ. And the experienced
conflict- and particularly also “field-researcher” is proving that in a quite impressive way. The
historical amnesia of “State-building” also led to the dishonesty of “fragmented truth”, serving
as a continuous legitimation of war. What would have people said in Germany after 1945, if the
“Morgenthau-Plan”, which ultimately had led the country into bondage was implemented
by young “Non-Governmental Organizations”? Kids, who first of all believed into the neoliberal
dogma of “free markets” and their career chances back home?

“I would have liked to be able to do more for the boys”, says Sascha Richter, Captain of the German
army, who was the “leader of local staff” there at Masar-e-Sharif in 2019 and 20. He describes similarly
deep friendship, as people like us also experienced it.

“The revengeful suffering orchestrated by the American empire on Afghans will be of Biblical proportions”,
writes the former NYT-reporter Chris Hedges bitterly.

What was Western policy during the last 20 years also with the “War against Terror” really aiming at?
Despites of just “smudging nests of terror”? Maybe Nouriel Roubini helps people like us with his
“Mother of all Debt-Crisis Warning” in July 2021? Time for a haircut on debt? Maybe a “global haircut
on debt” in consideration of permanent threats of deflation and stagflation and inflation and recession
and depression on the wall during the last 20 years?  Threats now culminating once more, which
have already caused soaring inflation and increasing hardships in many countries particularly
in the Global South? Time also for regeneration and rebuilding of a better and more equal
“financial system” and first of all of infrastructures for increasing the resilience against the
writings on the wall of climate change and the financial crash and that way ongoing wars
of the rich against the poor? Namely waking up the power and the will of people. Many people,
who want to maintain the right to help keeping up a dignified future also for their children.     

“Peace” now after the Taliban coming into power: the West had the watches, they are having time.
They said so. Really? After the Versailles treaty 1919 John Maynard Keynes spoke about the
“hypocrisy of the winners”. The consequences of that, “the catastrophe following the catastrophe”
is history.

Who meanwhile now is dissembling more?

And: who and what is winning time?



As multinational laws by the UN and its bodies and even on national levels are already laid out and mostly are also confirmed,

Potential supporters for campaigns and initiatives,
field work and case studies outlined here.

Individuals:

.

Organizations, e.g. schools and universities
and their different faculties:

Global Wealth Foundation

“Good luck with this project”    Thomas Piketty

"Good luck also from our side! It's important to spread the word, to make initiatives like your's more popular.

We’re rather focused on the operational field, but: that way we’re actually offering a good additive approach
to Jean-Paul Fonteijn's and a growing number of supporters' initiative.

Or vice versa. Whatsoever."

(WEaD/sf; Dec. 6th, 2020, also in memoriam David Graeber (1961-2020): "Debt: The First 5000 Years",
and "In Memory of David Graeber – COVID 19-related debt relief")

Articles on DiEM 25, Democracy in Europe Movement:



Is there a Pandemic? Yes, there is!

Are there Alternatives to
post-democratic Answers? Yes, there are!

edited Dec. 14th, 2020

Or – to say it with other words: is the slump, we’re moving into unavoidable? Is it just caused by Covid-19 alone?
Are we endangered to move even towards a recession? Might this recession even turn out to become a depression?
Maybe even similar to the Great Depression with its initial rock bottoms in autumn 1929?

Does the pandemic alone have the power to cause or at least to trigger all that economic downfall?
And: how to get around that downward spiral?

Fragmentation of knowledge and information, including monocausal explanations for multicausal
action triggers fear and anxiety. Perceiving a “corroded reality”, or a “splintered image of truth” people tend
to easily getting nervous. They are sensing their own personal identity that way as the most endangered thing.
Sheltering from that current threat many people tend to return to their “tribal roots”. Elderly people though
tend to return to the “official truth” for keeping up their own weakened personal powers for
enjoying their last moments here with us.

Trust and faith that way become as well part of “splintered realities” and their perception.
The partition of any society between generations increases that way. The exchange of experiences
amongst different age groups suffers from that not only on the “Old Continent Europe”
with its aging majorities all over the place.

Public anger as a “moral outrage against injustice” also according to old Greek ideas of “Democracy”
should be an “appropriate and legitimate emotion”. “Tribal rage” though should be observed very carefully
regarding its tendency towards violence. Exploited by senders of “unilateral images of multiple facets of reality”
though people might easily sense that kind of “overload of despair”. Thus: how can we channel that?

The masses themselves are already the greatest problem per se. You might say: the greatest problem of
“Democracy”. Particularly David Harvey always emphasizes this fact. In an amazing talk with David Graeber
from 2012 as much. “Who produces and reproduces urban life?”, Harvey asks. And the relation between
urban centers and the region and the countries, people are located in reveals other dimensions of the terms
“masses” and “Democracy”. And “space” and its “ownership” within that. Once more here the definition of
“infrastructures” as "networks linking and nourishing all sides and levels of society" becomes useful.

Macroeconomists amongst many other scientists are cautioning since quite some years about bubbles
bursting particularly in decentralized local markets with high concentrations of global assets.
If it was Moritz Schularick with his vast research on real estate assets in
“The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870 – 2015” or later, in 2018 with the German headline
“It cannot go on too long any more that way”. On “Prime – Policy Research on Macroeconomics” recently
T. Sabri Öncü also gives warning under the nice and charming headline
“In Memory of David Graeber – Covid-19 related Debt Relief”: “Given what we have documented,
unless the world takes extraordinary measures, it is undeniable that a developing country’s debt crisis
will develop if it has not started already.” 

Climate and other political activists also raise their voices at many places.

DiEM 25 and Progressive International as much are in that game. The “Green New Deal for Europe”
campaign by DiEM 25 is highly ambitious. Great job.  

Politicians though still tend to play national, sometimes even tribal cards. If it’s in Europe or elsewhere.
Thus: What’s going wrong, thinking inside and out of the box? Is the world still trapped in neoliberal foxholes?
And: Are we failing to network for enabling change to happen in the bigger picture? Are our networking
infrastructures too weak and – do they need tighter bonds? Amongst many different people with many
different backgrounds, coming from many different places? Amongst us?

Anyway: all kind of communication and networking also can take place with a mask covering mouth and nose.
Splintering us is rather the target of apparently planless rulers in “free market capitalism”. Most people in Europe
perceived the “War on terror” as far out from their own reality. Climate change and environmental destruction
invigorated by ways of production, which rather destroy than recycle resources though now within the pandemic
are coming much closer. And they now require changes, which have to be coordinated in much better ways.

For getting closer to “Jubilee-reboots” though we need to achieve a better performance of collaboration.
We have to build stronger and more willful unions than conservative and neoliberal groups and their forces.

Then we can be smart enough to get over that paralyzing situation.
Then we can be heroes. Not just for one day, as David Bowie once sang.

Solidarity, which at least here in Germany in the course of the pandemic recently has been another
“hijacked term” has to be earthed again.

One of the many tasks, WE have to go for.

Photos from right to left: Children proudly presenting their toys at Kabul’s Old Town.

A man running from the bus at the first raindrops of the Monsoon season at Feni in rural Bangladesh.
Pedestrians waiting at a traffic light at Downtown Shanghai.

All photos (c) by the author.



Pillars and Foundations of a Common European Constitution

edited Dec. 5th, 2020

In times of turmoil and crises one of the key things is to clear pathways for getting out of that painful situation.
But which obstacles are there in the way? And which kind of tools are required for clearing the track?
The track as much as the sight? For achieving a clear view also into a hopeful and promising future?
Particularly, as we’re facing growing nationalism and other rather violent developments these days?
Not only, but also on “the old continent Europe”.

One thing is for sure: Getting people on board for fighting for a common European Constitution requires a lot of work.
From many different sides.

And on many different levels.

Integration, participation and balancing interests of different stakeholders are keywords. For building up those pillars.
Or rather: for giving them sustainable foundations. Foundations and any kind of building can only be built by different
people knowing different skills. Even for building up a tent you often need more than two hands.
And mostly also a plan for coordinating the at least two left ones.

Integration: A parliamentary assembly ruled by commissions run by single persons from different places does need
a common target to work for. A plan or rather a framework of commons, all the people living in the area run
by these institutions share. A “collective memory” as much as “basic interests” and a certain common
definition of “human needs” and “basic human rights and duties”.

Participation and balancing interests of different stakeholders include many (building) details on many levels and sites.
“Common welfare” or “public weal” are some other keywords in that sense. The antagonism of these rather
decentralized principles for the sake of local communities is nationalism or other kinds of establishing supremacy
by one single group or individuals in or outside of the country or the union. Nationalism as a ruling principle creates
more obstacles and powers of disintegration. For getting together though we do need a closer look on the
forces separating us as much as on the commons we are sharing.

Pretense and reality of a constitution and the gap in between these also is another matter to face
within that building process. Also when building up foundations and pillars of something rather (meta-) physical.
As in the case of a constitution. Certain details then approve the amount of pretense or reality of single rights.
That also leads to other decisive terms for building up a common constitution for all European citizens:
in the North as much as in the South. The East as much as in the West.

Equality and justice within that are decisive terms again. The old rivalry between France and Germany,
the Visegrád-Group, the Mediterranean countries of Greece and Italy and the refugees as human bargaining chip
in a shortsighted deal between Turkey and the EU, the Benelux countries, where there’s already huge economic
and cultural differences just between Belgium and the Netherlands, not to forget Brexit to be fulfilled soon and
its impacts on Scotland and the UK: splintering processes within the union have become increasingly serious
and devastating in the last decade. On the other hand the permanence of crises, we’re facing also is used
by foreign powers, who these days aren’t too trustworthy. Particularly as we’re also geographically located
between the US on the other side of the Atlantic and China at the other edge of the Eurasian massif.

Thus: there’s a whole lot to do on all fields. Thomas Hobbes wrote his Leviathan facing the turmoil

of the British Civil War. A slaughter, that took place at the end of the 30-year war in Central Europe.

The brutal situation of a “state of nature” of "the war of all against all" according to his evaluation and

his bitter experience could be avoided only by “strong, undivided government”. This challenge might

also be tackled by a (re-)building program of multiple infrastructures for fighting climate change.

And by increasing people’s resilience against impacts of climate change already taking place.

The fight against local environmental destruction. Building up sustainable recycling systems

serving public weal. For and with the people. Not always ignoring, what Marc Blyth calls Angrynomics.

Cause: is it what Noam Chomsky already since quite some time calls the “policy of fear”, what actually

starting from the “war on terror” now is continuing to the “fight against the virus”? The virus serving

as explanation for all economic turmoil? For all bursting bubbles? Instances to be forecasted since

quite some time? Where the rather irresolvable question, what came first: hen or egg, egg or hen turns

more and more into a taboo?

And: was there a winner of the “war against terror”? Or:

Can there only be losers, as Mike Prysner clarified it in a very impressive speech together with

many other US-veterans December 2010 at Washington DC?

And once more: what is Europe’s position there? Does it stay together or is it rather divided?

Or even splintered?

From  “No Future“ by the Sex Pistols in the 1980s via „Open Future“ of the 1990s following

paralyzing years at the start of the 2000s and all through the 2010s now even “For Future“?

But not only on Friday, but 24 / 7?

“Extrapolating ourselves into the future“, “the future’s past”: Or, to ask with Christian Geulen:

what kind of future are we buying, when we are expanding the presence endlessly?

Leaving the dirt track of man being a wolf to the other. Maybe bundling projects to programs

for increasing chances and possibilities for a Europe of collaborating regions instead of competitive

national pressure groups might be the key. As the crisis, named after the pandemic might soon become

an increasingly urgent recession, threatening more and more people on the ground:

A tough fight to move to. But an important one.

Once more the last link to “WEaD: Water Equity and Dignity” as one approach to moving things

towards building foundations for pillars and soon also for a roof – a “strong, undivided constitution”

for a united, not divided and splintered Europe. An “old continent” moving towards a real foreign policy

for not repeating the fatal stereotypes of the last decades. And the sleep walking into the catastrophes

of the first decades of the 20^th century. A Europe balancing out its own position between power plays.

Shifting towards realism. Avoiding the old abysses of idealism.

Inside and outside.

Hope and firm and sustainable bonds amongst humans from all levels from societies are creating

better conditions for building columns and founding communities than separation and isolation.

That also has to go with a Green New Deal.
Maybe we also need a “Jubilee”, or a “Sabbatical year”. In a similar way than more than 2000 years ago.

A “Restart” with fairer conditions for everyone. Similar to 1949. But without the global catastrophe of 1939-45

coming before that. That’s a reason to struggle for. And to fight for. To go for.



European Taxpayers Should Decide:

Tax Deduction (up to 2% of GDP) for

Military Interventionism or for

(Re-)building Multinational Infrastructures?

edited Nov. 21st, 2020

The struggles regarding "foreign policy" and raising military expenses reveals a "certain European vacuum"

in that matter. Particularly recent disputes between France and Germany but also in the German

administration itself unfold this conflict.
Should we continue following the US, claiming all NATO members (particularly Germany)
shall contribute min. 2 % of their GDP for military expenditures or should we develop

"new ways of international trade and communication"?

Regarding the status quo these days in global affairs LaunchPad Education's evaluation of the SIPRI REPORT 2019

does quite a great job. Mr. Sumit Sharma does that mostly from an Indian perspective. But in a certain way

he does that from the other, the South Asian side of the geostrategic turmoil we're facing these days in the "Middle East".

The debris of a shattered region, which for Europe is the "Near East" and which for India might be named the "Near West".

But for the Subcontinent it's Pakistan and Afghanistan to the West and Bangladesh and China to the East.

Thus: its geostrategic position is as fragile as the European, bordering the Mediterranean and Turkey in the

South and Russia to the East. Not to mention historical burdens, the Subcontinent shares as

much as "the old continent" Europe does.

What could that change of European foreign policy effectuate in details?

First of all: it doesn't mean at all to abolish national armies. It means a change of strategy.

Safeguarding rebuilding projects in shattered and war torn countries requires boots on the ground

for protecting infrastructures and their rebuilding. Balancing interests between (private) landlords and

(public) matters e.g. water, health etc. requires appropriate evaluation and planning. Building up trust.

And "armed social workers" for protecting these processes.

Or, to say it with Gen. ret. Wesley Clarke, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe at

Global Citizen Forum 2017: "Our system is a global system, and if it doesn't raise others up,
and build stronger communities of value, then what's it about?"

Second: "Climate and war refugees".

Martin Gerner, experienced journalist reporting in and from the country since almost two decades 
says after a recent two month stay on Lesbos, that these days about 80 % of refugees in Greek
camps are Afghans. After 40+ years of war and neglect, 65 years after the country's state bankruptcy
people are more than exhausted.
The human catastrophes in Yemen and Syria, Lebanon's state bankruptcy etc.:

is "business as usual" the right approach in the move forward of "European foreign policy"?

Also focussing on our own safety and security here on the "old continent"?

Third: Building up infrastructures is quite more than just acting with and at foreign places.

It's more about networking and building relations and friendship. It's about tackling local

challenges in global context. And getting people into participation processes.

Not the easiest job at all.

But an important move to do.

For further information: "WEaD - Water, Equity and Dignity" is attempting to convey extended

approaches of that kind. Approaches to be operant internally as much as externally.

Thus regarding "foreign policy". For any kind of feedback we're very grateful. Thank you.

Have a great weekend.