In September AD 9, the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, also known as the Varian Disaster (Clades Variana) by Roman historians took place at modern Kalkriese in Germany’s lower Saxony region that forever shaped Roman attitudes towards the Germans.
In the ensuing bloodbath, almost 20,000 Roman legionnaires and auxiliaries were slaughtered when an alliance of Germanic peoples led by Arminius, ambushed this force led by Publius Quinctilius Varus.
Arminius had a Roman upbringing and military education allowing him to beat the Romans at their own game. It was Arminius’ cunning pretence at being a thoroughly Romanised ‘barbarian’ that allowed him to deceive Varus and build up his barbarian army right under the nose of Varus himself.
However, the legacy of Arminius was that the river Rhine was seared into the Roman mind as the border between western civilisation and eastern ‘barbarity’ for the next 400 years.
It seems little has changed.
In November AD 2005, Angela Merkel was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, a role ‘Mutti Merkel’ or ‘Mother Merkel’ as she became known held until early December 2021.
Described by The Guardian as being “…measured, cautious, methodical, pragmatic, sometimes maddeningly noncommittal and seemingly always in control,” Merkel has in many ways personified the German ‘brand’, “… calm, unflappable, non-ideological consensus builder who brought stability to her country and the EU in a string of major crises.”
While this may be true, the fact remains that multiple things can also be true at once.
One of those is that Merkel helped facilitate the rise of Vladimir Putin by making the German power sector so dependent on Russia, that at the end of last year, Germany decommissioned its last nuclear reactor used for power generation.
This was all because Germany was supposed to be going ‘green’ in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions. But that of course, simply was, and remains today patently untrue.
In fact, it’s a downright lie.
“For all Angela Merkel's headline-grabbing "green revolution", Germany's image as a world leader on environmental policies is in danger of falling under the shadow of the smoke stack and a cloud of exhaust fumes,” wrote Scientific American as far back as 2014.
At the same time, Germany was transformed into an energy vassal state of Russia, one which has sent hundreds of billions of Euros into Putin’s coffers, money which today is being sent back in the form bullets, bombs and missiles used to destroy Ukraine.
All this under the chancellorship of ‘Mutti Merkel’.
But the warning bells were sounded years ago.
As Dave Keating writing in 2016 in Forbes said, “…the underlying economic reality is more stark. Germany may not be ‘controlled’ [by Russia] by a dependency on Russian gas at the moment, but if the disappearing coal and nuclear energy is replaced by Russian gas, it would quickly be in a situation where it is. And that has many in the West very concerned.”
After passing legislation for its “Energiewende” or the transformation towards renewable energy in 2010, Merkel’s government drastically reduced subsidies for solar panels, relying heavily on thermal coal for its energy needs. Germany even opened a new coal-fired power plant in 2020 despite committing to a coal phase-out in the same year.
Days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany had to be forced while virtually kicking and screaming to stop the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.
Therefore, it’s no shock that Germany's CO2 emissions rose by 13 percent in 2021, according to estimates released by the German Federal Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW).
Moreover, writes The Guardian, “Germany is forecast to record its biggest rise in greenhouse gas emissions since 1990 this year as the economy rebounds from the pandemic-related downturn, according to a report by an environmental thinktank.”
According to Clean Energy Wire, “Almost 60 percent of the EU’s energy needs were met by net imports of oil and gas in 2020. Germany’s energy import dependency was still higher at 63.7 percent – a “slight decrease compared to the previous year’s 67 percent.”
The ‘Germany is Green’ mantra is a fallacy environmental groups the world over have celebrated, emulated, and promoted as a model for how to ‘transition to a low-carbon economy’.
Many world leaders and politicians, including here in Australia such as former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, bought into this charade, lauding Germany for its energy ‘environmentalism’ and ‘energy ‘security’.
This would be akin to Australia increasing its carbon emissions while at the same time claiming environmental superstar status on the global stage.
A quick check of Google shows that over the past few years, the world’s media has waxed lyrical about Germany’s ‘environmental credentials’ that Berlin has gone on to convert into a form of soft power.
But this was also an unstainable lie – both environmentally as well as geopolitically, a fact now obvious to all with Germany’s lethargic response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Only days ago, Peter Altmaier, Germany’s Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy was quoted as saying his country will become independent of Russian gas - “…by the summer of 2024”, that is.
Going green has now it seems has become an exercise in time shifting.
And it’s not just with the environment where Germany has been duplicitous.
In his profile of Merkel in the New Yorker, George Packer wrote about the complex relationship that she and Vladimir Putin developed. Merkel, he says, “…grew up in East Germany and spent her young adulthood there, shares a common geography with Putin, a former KGB major from Dresden, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.”
Not only was it also well-known that the two leaders built up a rapport, but as someone who was familiar with the East, Merkel must have, or at the least should have known what Putin’s end game was likely to be.
After all, for the past 20 years, Putin made no effort to hide his ambitions.
The demise of the Soviet Union 30 years ago was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, he once claimed.
While Germany paid more than €40 billion in 2021 for Russian oil, gas and coal, extrapolated over Merkel’s 16-year reign, that’s some €640 billion going to Moscow.
That buys a lot of bullets, bombs, planes, missiles and tanks.
But when asked to provide these same items to the defending Ukrainians, Berlin dragged the chain. At the time of writing, Germany promised 2700 anti-air missiles to Ukraine, but only 500 have been delivered 32 days after Russia’s invasion, according to reports.
In fact, according to a story in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told Ukraine’s ambassador Andriy Melnyk on the day of the invasion there was no point in sending Kyiv weapons because “you’ve only got a few hours left” before Moscow installs a puppet govt.
Despite seeing Ukrainian cities and civilians being mercilessly bombed, the leader of the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) Friedrich Merz gloomily warned that suspending Russia from the SWIFT global financial transactions and payment system would trigger an “atomic bomb in the capital markets.”
As Politico noted: “From Germany’s veto of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 to its pursuit of gas deals with Moscow to its resistance to send arms to Kyiv — the country’s leaders have served as Putin’s useful idiots.”
“All the while, the so-called Russlandversteher, the smug Russian sympathizers who populate the country’s political establishment, rejected criticism of their course, insisting they knew better while (literally) laughing in Washington’s face.”
As the article says, “No one’s laughing anymore.”
While Germany and its enablers in the media fool the world with fairy tales of the country being ‘environmentally-friendly’, Berlin has paid and continues to pay billions of Euros to buy Russian hydrocarbons in order to keep warm, money that is now being used to destroy a European nation who’s only crime it seems is its geographic location.
Much like with Arminius, death, destruction, and a loathing of the east seems to be the enduring legacy of ‘Mutti Merkel’ and Putin’s useful idiots.
Image: https://www.vocaleurope.eu/nord-stream-ii-shaking-hands-with-the-devil/merkel-and-medvedev-inaugurate-nord-stream-gas-pipeline/
