But here we’re talking about his Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, who yesterday said, "We are fighting a war against Russia.”
Baerbock seems unclear about who is meant by ‘we.’
She can’t be speaking for the EU, which has its own foreign minister, Señor Josep Borrell Fontelles. Nor for Germany, whose founding constitution the Grundgesetz declares (article 26:1):
(1) Acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, especially to prepare for a war of aggression, shall be unconstitutional. They shall be criminalised.She does happen to be one of NATO’s thirty Ministers of Foreign Affairs, but surely she cannot be saying that NATO is formally at war with Russia, even though NATO’s actions increasingly resemble a de facto war of aggression, what with supplying the money, the arms, the training and - we may soon learn - the active involvement of some of its personnel (perhaps under the guise of having resigned and joined private military companies.)
Ironically, Baerbock was addressing the Council of Europe, which last February declared that the Minsk agreements remained ‘the only basis for a settlement of the conflict in Donbas’ and which despite its institutional commitment to human rights seemed to have little to say during Ukraine’s eight years of persecution prior to the Russian incursion, and its murder of thousands of Russian speakers there.
But then, Baerbock is a queen of ambiguity. Last September she said she stood with Ukraine ‘no matter what my German voters think.’ The irony is that Germans hadn’t voted for her, as such; she got her seat under the party-political-list part of her country’s hybrid direct-election/proportional representation system, having failed in her own person in 2009 and 2013.
A further twist is that her party is the Greens, who jointly with ‘Alliance 90’ issued a statement of principles that includes ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights and non-violence.’ Crimea has voted overwhelmingly to secede (and it had only become part of Ukraine in 1954), but that democracy clearly doesn’t count.
Baerbock is like many of our modern politicians, who as soon as released from the voters’ hands soar upwards like weather balloons, increasingly disconnected from those below and subject instead to the strong international winds of power and money.
The war emergency that confronts us is part of a wider and deeper crisis of legitimacy. Like the conspiratorial nexus of Common Purpose, they seek to ‘lead beyond authority’ and the inconvenient little people who employ them.
Historically, Britain, and after us the United States, reached up to pull down that balloon of overweening arrogance and get it back into the people’s hands.
We need to deflate it now, before it triggers 98 more:
No comments:
Post a Comment