Germany Stokes War With Russia, Insists They’re the Good Guys This Time

Will Russians once again be forced to save the world from European brutality?

The German military plans to reinstate compulsory service, it was reported this week.

German defense chief Boris Pistorius is seeking proposals to restore conscription by April of this year, and hopes to implement the measure before parliamentary elections in 2025. The country has required military service for most of its postwar history but suspended conscription in 2011, instead moving towards a professional all-volunteer force.

The announcement comes after Russia leaked telephone conversations between Pistorius and US Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland revealing Ukrainian plans to attack Russia using Germany’s top-shelf Taurus missile system. The incident prompted major controversy in Germany, revealing the depth of anti-Russia sentiment among the Bundeswehr’s leadership even as Chancellor Olaf Scholz assures the country he won’t formally send German troops to the Donbass.

As the European country takes another step towards what many fear may be an inevitable war on Russia – and perhaps China – security analyst Mark Sleboda joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program on Thursday to provide context for the development.

“Sweden just reintroduced conscription already,” said the international relations expert, noting that countries throughout the continent are reexamining military policy in the wake of the Ukraine proxy conflict. “In the United Kingdom the outgoing chief of the General Staff there, top general Patrick Sanders, has suggested training a civilian army, and doing it like yesterday.”

“The situation that they are all really preparing for, they won't tell their own citizens this – why are they talking about conscription? Because they want to put troops in Ukraine,” said Sleboda. “They want to put NATO troops in Ukraine.”

Sleboda noted European countries already have a documented presence in Russia’s neighboring country, originally justified under the pretense of training and advising Ukrainian troops to operate specialized weaponry. News has also emerged of foreign mercenaries killed in action by Russia, with observers speculating about the Western role in organizing their deployment.

“Even if it's in the hundreds rather than the thousands at this point, we can all see where that trend is going,” said the analyst. “They are preparing for war. They've begun the slow ramp up, and they give different timelines about when that war will take place. But all the indications are that NATO countries, at least individually right now, are considering some type of panicked, desperate escalation because they don't know what else to do and they can't accept losing.”

Host Garland Nixon argued Western leaders are “at war with their own people,” attempting to manufacture consent for a conflict against the wishes of a war-weary populace. “I'm in the US and the taste for any war or anything else with Ukraine – even sending money to Ukraine – here is collapsing,” he said.

Meanwhile Nixon noted that European citizens are seemingly far more fixated on economic concerns than war with Russia, with major protests bringing European capitals to a standstill over the past several months. When Europeans have weighed in on issues of war and peace it’s been to reject the political establishment, Nixon argued, pointing to the recent election of pro-Palestine firebrand George Galloway in the United Kingdom.

“According to a YouGov poll taken just last year, only 11% of Germans are ready to defend Germany with weapons if it is attacked, and only 5% of those would actually volunteer for that job,” said Sleboda. “A full quarter of the population would leave Germany as soon as possible.”

Another recent poll found Germans also reject the defense minister’s proposal to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine.

“But I think that we have seen in Ukraine with the Kiev regime how a population can be forcibly abducted off the streets and thrown into trenches,” the expert observed. “And when you have a powerful security service – brownshirts – that work to, shall we say, encourage the people to be mobilized, this can be done.”

“If it can be done in Ukraine, why couldn't it be done in Germany or in New Jersey?”

Western leaders are able to draw from a deep well of historic anti-Russian sentiment to attempt to stoke domestic support for Ukraine. Russophobia in the United States is deeply ingrained within many older Americans who came of age during the heated ideological struggle of the Cold War. In Germany anti-Russian sentiment arguably goes back further, with the threat of so-called Judeo-Bolshevism forming a major part of the Nazis’ propaganda.

The October Revolution marked a deep and fundamental break from Russia with its past, with the newly-formed government dedicating itself to national liberation. After taking power the Bolsheviks published the text of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, a secret colonial pact drawn up with approval from the Czar to divide the Ottoman Empire amongst the major European powers. Russia, it was made clear, would not take part in imperial plunder.

Germany was forced to repent for the crimes of the Nazi regime when the Soviets rolled into Berlin. But the country, and the continent as a whole, has never faced a similar reckoning with the colonial past that undergirds its modern hegemony.

Today Russia threatens this dominance by insisting on its own sovereignty, just as it did a century ago. And again it seems Europe is committed to protecting its power at almost any cost.