No alternative to a negotiated solution!

by Wolfgang Herzberg*

(6 December 2022) As a descendant of Jewish-German survivors and a political writer of many years’ standing, whose family members perished in the genocide of the Nazi regime or were scattered all over the world. My parents, out of a deep sense of political responsibility, returned to Berlin after the Second World War, to help build an anti-fascist and peaceful Germany. Against the background of these existential family experiences, I ask myself the following fundamental questions about the war in Ukraine, which I would also like to address to the public and all those with political responsibility.

Can the enormous military, economic and financial means that have so far been used by NATO to end the Russian campaign in Ukraine actually bring about a “value-based foreign policy” (Baerbock) and thus an end to this most dangerous war on European soil since 1945? Or will it achieve exactly the opposite? Does it really defend “our European peace order”, “international law”, the “free democratic order of values”, or are these noble goals not rather destroyed and reduced to absurdity by a wrong choice of means?

The logic of war

For what we hear every hour in the form of extraordinarily disturbing news from the media and from leading politicians on all sides, speaks a steadily increasing, dangerous language of war and leads to the ever further escalation of this terrible conflict.

Could it be, not only I ask myself, that this logic of war is also based on the continuation of a wrong policy? Because it is precisely not the “value-based policy” of the West, but the failure of this policy all the way round.

Does anyone really believe that more and more state-of-the-art weapons, toughest sanctions and huge financial injections could produce peace? Current developments, most recently the Russian partial mobilisation, the accession of eastern Ukraine to Russia, the attack on the pipelines, show abundantly clearly that this is precisely not the case. I am firmly convinced that only a policy of diplomatic negotiated solutions can lead to peace. This is the intuitive view of many people I have spoken to in recent months. But these warning voices have so far hardly penetrated a broad political public. Such discourse, at eye level, is not wanted and is pushed to the side lines. This is a dangerous ostrich policy.

Illusory victorious peace instead of negotiated settlement

In contrast, we are drifting into an ever faster spiral of war. A negotiated solution capable of compromise, which in my view is the only alternative, seems to be unwanted, especially by NATO and the Ukrainian rulers. Instead, they are counting on Russia’s capitulation, on an illusory victorious peace against Russia, which has long been allied with China. A Russia that once could not be brought to its knees and be defeated by the Swedes or the Huns, by Napoleon, by the First World War, nor by the wars of intervention, let alone by the Second World War. Russia and China together represent the largest, industrially and militarily highly developed and most populous territorial countries on earth. For the time being, I am only stating these geopolitical connections on a factual basis, regardless of who really caused the escalation of this global conflict. For the answer is by no means as simple as the “West” would have us believe.

War party “betting on the wrong horse”

Could it be that the West’s war party is again betting on the completely wrong horse, after the recent failure in the Afghanistan war? Are these the right lessons to be learned from that grandiose disaster, where it was supposedly also about the enforcement of human rights? Where even hundreds of modern equipped army contingents from all over the world fought for two decades with heavy losses, only to be defeated in the end by the much weaker Taliban fighters?

Thousands and thousands of deaths due to “value-based politics”?

I therefore ask urgently: what kind of “value-based politics” is this that accepts thousands and thousands of deaths on all sides? On what “values” is a policy based, if in its execution more and more war destruction is being wrought – in areas that are supposed to be liberated from it? What kind of “value-based policy” is it that creates more and more refugee misery and streams of refugees on all sides and thus also drives many votes to nationalists and racists worldwide? What kind of “value-based policy” is this, through which a global energy crisis and a world hunger crisis is in reality getting worse and worse. And moreover the catastrophic consequences that are also to be “cushioned” in retrospect in the West with a frantically reacting, social symbolic policy by billions of new debts? On what “values” is a policy based, when it results in the collapse of global supply chains and in the explosion of inflation rates for all living costs.

Does anyone seriously believe that more and more people in the West are not asking such probing questions when this supposedly “value-based” policy is making them worse and worse off every day and is eroding their hard-earned living conditions?

No, this allegedly “value-based policy” is not a goal-oriented peace strategy at all. It is quite the opposite. It is therefore once again doomed to failure in Ukraine and worldwide; indeed, it even harbours the danger of a Third World War of unprecedented nuclear proportions.

A “New Ostpolitik” is called for

I therefore ask: what is the basis for the misjudgements of this global conflict, especially by the Western world, with the rulers in the USA in the lead? Or does anyone seriously believe that only the rulers in Russia and China have to ask themselves these questions? Hadn’t the détente policy of Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, the “New Ostpolitik”, which finally focused on “change through rapprochement”, once helpfully begun, step by step, to dismantle the walls of the “Cold War”? They did it by means of tough negotiations, through the CSCE process, through disarmament agreements, finally through the treaties between the two German states. That was a “values-based”, a successful policy of détente and peace, which ultimately also led to the end of the division of Germany and seemed to put an end to the bloc confrontation after the Second World War. Wasn’t the life’s work of the late Michael Gorbachev recently praised hypocritically, according to whose foreign policy vision a “Common House of Europe” was to be created with fewer and fewer weapons?

Continuation of the Cold War

Could it be that the expansion of NATO to the East, contrary to the promises made by the West to Gorbachev, as well as the gradual rearmament of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, symbolised the real “turn of the times”? This was reintroduced by the USA in 1990 against the successful policy of peace and détente, as a continuation of the methods of the “Cold War”. Could it be that the allegedly “values- and human rights-based foreign policy” of the West actually represented a continuation of the peace-endangering arms and confrontation policy after 1945? After 1990, this was led by the USA, beginning with the Yugoslav war and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Was it an attempt to impose an interest-led, Western foreign policy and a regime change policy in order to finally install an allegedly “democratic capitalism” worldwide? Was this the right response to Gorbachev’s accommodating foreign policy? It was apparently supposed to finally create a Western world order in which capitalist globalisation, “economic liberalism” and NATO’s global military strategy were given absolute priority over welfare state influence through independent national politics. Is this not a neo-colonial understanding of values and society, in which economic growth and profit maximisation, primarily for wealthy minorities, is ascribed hegemonic priority and the repression of social, national and ethnic polarisation and exploitation has become secondary?

Anachronistic, neo-colonial and imperial understanding of politics

Do the political leaders really believe that such an anachronistic, neo-colonial and imperial understanding of politics, which has been based on countless genocides, ethnic cleansing and enslavement for many centuries, is also compatible with a Christian worldview? Could this be the model for a diverse and multipolar world of tomorrow, in view of the fact that more than 80 percent of humanity does not live in the Western industrialised countries? It would be a world increasingly determined by social upheaval, ecological crises, exploitation and lack of democracy.

Protecting the spirit of peace in the UN Charter

Is it not clear to those politically responsible in the West that if they continue this violent foreign and domestic policy, they are in the process of destroying the value-based UN Charter created after 1945? This policy will also destroy the entire post-war order of the United Nations, which had finally drawn the right conclusions in international law from the murderous basic experiences of the First and Second World Wars, with the express aim of securing world peace and international cooperation?

Is it not clear to them that no claim to leadership by neither the USA and the Western world or any nation, nor Russia or China, can be derived from the letters and the spirit of the peace and values order of the UN Charter and UN resolutions, when it says in the preamble:

“We, the peoples of the United Nations – are determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.”

And further, Article 2 (1) therefore expressly states against any claim to leadership what so ever:

“The Organisation is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.”

And in Art. 13 (b) a values-based peace, security and cooperation policy is defined as follows:

“...to promote international co-operation in the economic, social, cultural, educational and health fields and to assisting in the realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”

I ask again: were Western wars after 1990 really able to enforce these UN values worldwide, or did they not thereby finally sink into apocalyptic chaos?

Does NATO violate the UN Charter?

The political leaders of the Western world and the entire world public can no longer avoid the burning question of the present and the future. Does the unilateral NATO partisanship and war support for the Ukrainian rulers not in fact violate the existential vital interests of the people both in the West and in Russia and Ukraine, and thus the “principle of the sovereign equality of all its members”? As before the First and Second World Wars, humanity is once again at a crossroads in its history, and once again Walter Benjamin’s sentence takes on an oppressive topicality: “That it goes on like this is the catastrophe!”

Breach of oath by the government?

Moreover, I ask, whether it is compatible with the substantive terms of NATO’s treaty, as a “defence alliance”, that it has been instrumental as a belligerent for non-NATO member Ukraine both in bringing the present Ukrainian government to power and in its conduct of the war today. Where is the call for an international court that could independently judge this NATO strategy? For the Ukrainian regime obviously rejected a federal solution with Russia, which had a centuries-long, albeit contradictory, economic, interethnic, intercultural and interreligious history intimately connected with Ukraine.

At the same time, I ask myself whether this violent foreign policy is compatible with the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, of if it is even anti-constitutional, because Chancellor Scholz swore to the German electorate and to no other people that he wanted to “avert harm from the German people” when he took office. Wouldn’t a legal clarification of this breach of oath before the Federal Constitutional Court be imperative here?

And lastly, I wonder whether a German government whose predecessors in the First and Second World Wars were jointly responsible for millions upon millions of dead Russians and Ukrainians as well as death and destruction among many other peoples, not least the genocide of the European Jews, to which parts of my family also belonged, that this present traffic light government does not therefore have the damned duty and obligation to stand up for a negotiated and compromise solution without any alternative, instead of continuing to add fuel to the fire of this most dangerous global conflict since 1945, only to distinguish itself, in misunderstood solidarity, as a loyal vassal of the USA and the Western alliance.

Germany: “Never again war!”

Particularly in Germany, those with political responsibility should play a decisive role in ensuring that the fundamental peace and anti-fascist values of the United Nations, probably the most valuable diplomatic legacy of humanity since the end of the First and Second World Wars, which is consistent with the oath of Buchenwald: “Never again fascism – never again war!” Are they destroyed again by the wrong means of a mutual war policy?

Destroying creation

I say all this in the full knowledge that our earth is a unique planet. That in the infinite vastness of the universe we have so far found nothing comparable in wonderful nature, in creative, highly developed life in the universe. And I ask myself again and again, how responsibly am I myself and are we dealing with our world today? What kind of irrational, anti-democratic, authoritarian “master race” ideology would it be if supposedly only the Western world held the basic recipe for a humane future for the entire Earth in its hands, and then enforced it by warlike means? How can it be that in such an infinitely diverse world there should only be a warlike way out of the endangerment of our entire creation? Is it not a peaceful and federal coexistence of many opinions and different social systems, which could enrich each other in the future, thereby transform themselves and come together?

Therefore, my unmistakable message is once again: only through a negotiated solution without alternatives, in the here and now, can there be a path to peace in the future in this crisis-ridden world, to a common security and cooperation, and can a global war over Ukraine and elsewhere still be averted!

* Wolfgang Herzberg, born in England in 1944 as a child of emigrants, family returned to Berlin-Steglitz in 1947. 1962 A-levels, 1963 skilled film copying worker, work as civil engineering and agricultural labourer. Studied cultural studies at Humboldt University from 1964 to 1971, then did cultural work for the trade unions until 1974. From 1974 to 1979 freelance work on documentary films. 1979-1981 aspirant at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR on the subject: Biographical Interviews with Workers of the Berlin Light Bulb Factory. From 1981 freelance author and publicist, rock lyricist, songwriter, collaborator on documentary film and monograph on the author Elfriede Brüning. Interviews and analytical texts on the GDR history of left-wing Jews. Latest publication: Jüdisch & Links. Erinnerungen 1921-2021. Zum Kulturerbe der DDR. Vergangenheitsverlag, Berlin, September 2022. ISBN 978-3-86408-281-8

Source: Ossietzky. Biweekly for Politics / Culture / Economics, 8 October 2022

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)