Friends, Germans, citizens from all over, sisters and brothers. We once had a dream. It was the dream of what Europe could have been: Not a single market, a single currency or a common budget. No, we dreamt of Europe as a Peace with Justice Project. That dream has gone, it evaporated in the cold hard light that woke us up.
Fifteen years ago, a bankers’ crisis led to austerity for the majority across Europe and massive money printing for the few. It was the End of Justice and the beginning of Europe’s long winter, of Germany’s long winter – the winter of deindustrialisation, stagnation, of a vicious class war waged against the majority in every country. And before we knew it fascism and war were in the air – again.
To stop the victims of their austerity from questioning them, the ruling class terrorise you. You heard Herr Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, say that Putin is the new Hitler an we, peace activists, are Putin’s appeasers – his useful idiots. I ask Mr Pistorius, Mrs von der Leyen, Mr Mertz:
“If you truly think that Putin is no different to Hitler, then why are you not sending allied soldiers immediately to take Moscow and drag Putin through a New Nuremberg Trial or at least force him to commit suicide in a Moscow bunker? Do you not see how cowardly it is to send weapons to Ukraine and to expect exhausted Ukrainians to take Moscow, or even the Crimea?”
The truth is that our rulers do not really think Putin is the new Hitler. After all they did excellent business with him for decades. No, they are in the business of a never-ending, extremely profitable – for them – war. That’s what they want.
Having failed to invest in the technologies of the future, in our social infrastructure, Europe’s ruling class is banking on guns and bombs, on drones and iron domes. And they want to spend your money on them. And if this means endless deaths in the killing fields of Ukraine, they don’t give a damn.
Friends, Germans, demonstrators from all over, comrades. Since we were here last year, there have been two major developments: The International Criminal Court has acknowldged the genocide of Palestinians and issued arrest warrants for the Israeli PM and his former Defence Minister. And Donald Trump has returned to the White House openly advocating the completion of the Palestinians’ genocide.
Why am I talking about Palestine again here in Munich? Why this fixation with Palestine? First, because if this were 1938 and it was the morning after Kristallnacht, we would have only one duty: to defend the Jewish people from Nazi pogroms. Today we have a similar duty: to defend the Palestinian people from genocide. But there is also another reason:
What started in Gaza does not stay in Gaza! Such brutality cannot be contained, especially when our leaders gave the supremacist settlers the green light to commit genocide with our weapons. With their flag projected on our Parliaments, the ideology of supremacism was reinforced here in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Greece, in Spain, in Italy. You can see this in the polls and I fear you will see it on election night soon.
Eighty years after defeating the Nazis…
Eighty years since the peoples’ representatives gathered in the United Nations to proclaim NEVER AGAIN,…
it is happening AGAIN! With our governments’ blessing…
By allowing international law to die in Palestine, they killed international law everywhere, including here in Germany. For international law either applies to everyone or it applies to no one. This is why we are here in Munich today. To say once more: NEVER AGAIN! ANYWHERE!
To tell the fools in government
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who behave as if the despicable crimes of the Holocaust can be washed clean in rivers of Palestinian blood, and
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who think that the authoritarianism of Putin will be stemmed by piles of the dead bodies of more and more Ukrainians,
