When I was here in 2018 I was struck by the powerplant’s size — how could a visitor not be? The plant and the coal crane dominate the museum site, just as the ruins of the oxygen generator plant dominate the town. I had been so focused on the museum though, that the powerplant was something in the way, or an adjunct to be taken a look at after the main event. The position of the plant in the state’s history and state’s current image, especially in the wake of the Nord Stream lines, wasn’t something I considered.

An exhibit of photographs contrasting the appearance of the site during the time of operation with what remains today is very visually appealing, but it’s the text of the commentary which really captured my attention. The theme is how humanity transformed the landscape. Construction and operation of a Nazi airfield “massively intervened in a bird sanctuary”. Again and again these texts ignore the specific nature of a rocket program built to bombard another country’s cities, instead presenting the installation as a human transformation of the environment. I had not seen this approach before.

The repeated use of phrases like “the ruin is a monument to the victims of National Socialism” I’ve seen various aspects of many times. A ruin is a ruin. Any portrayal as a representation of victims, of oppressors, of anything at all is a value given by an observer, and different observers will interpret what they see differently. Historical texts generally, though, speak as the voice of academic social authority, telling the masses how they “should” interpret artifacts. This framing allows only one interpretation possible. Unfortunate victims suffered and gave their lives in part so that we future generations might benefit. We mourn them. How tragic that these people were subject to the oppression of a malign force which appeared from nowhere to captivate and enslave the helpless. We must firmly resolve to never again allow Jews to be loaded onto railroad freightcars.

There’s an ownership of the dead and an attribution of meaning to their suffering and murders as it relates to us that I find arrogant. I picture myself in the place of a man dying in a tunnel at Nordhausen. I am dying because I was a civilian Pole caught on the street during a Nazi round-up. I am dying because I am Dutch and my own municipality’s police delivered me over to the occupier. I am dying because I am a German Jewish citizen of Köln who believed or pretended to myself to believe that I was being relocated to some eastern work camp at the direction of our – my – government. I am not dying “for the benefit” of a future generation of museum-goers. I am dying because I mistakenly trusted, because I was betrayed by governmental authorities, because governments lied, because dissident citizens were unable to organize meaningful enough opposition. “Unable”? Again and again the narratives of contemporaries reinforce the extent to which those going to their deaths failed to organize, refused to organize, believing that if they trusted in the authorities, in anonymity if they just kept their individual head down, in social customs, in religious faith, in the goodness of man, all would be well.

There is an allied approach used to discuss the responsibility/guilt of the scientists and engineers who designed and built the facilities. Repeatedly we are told Peenemünde scientists didn’t simply stand by watching while tens of thousands died producing V-1 and V-2 weapons at places like Nordhausen, that in fact Peenemünde staff were very actively involved in supervising production. After the war the US “sanitized” Nazi pasts of scientists recruited to US missile programs. Guilt is treated always as a question of individual responsibility, a question of individual shame. We exhibition visitors are ashamed at the weakness of these men, our ancestors with weak consciences. We resolve to never assist Nazis who ask us to lend our rocket scientist skills to implementation of their evil plans.

Berliner Zeitung:

Was man sieht ist: nicht viel. Kaum ein Passant reagiert auf die Aktion. Manche nehmen einen Flyer mit, doch am Ende wird es nur dieser eine Mitarbeiter der Deutschen Bank gewesen sein, der eine Form von Emotionalität äußerte.

Die rund 20 Zuschauer gehören hingegen alle zur Gruppe. Sogar der Mann und die Frau, die mit ihren Notizblöcken wie Journalisten aussehen, sind Teil der Perfomance. An wen soll sich das denn richten? Vermutlich ist es ein Auftritt allein für die Social-Media-Kanäle. Protest in Zeiten der Digitalisierung.

Wolfgang Streeck, Makroskop:

Die EU, eine Zeitlang Motor der Globalisierung, ist deshalb dabei, sich in eine Agentur der Entglobalisierung zu verwandeln – einer Entglobalisierung, die bis vor Kurzem nicht mehr zu sein schien als eine linke Absurdität.

Ω Ω Ω

Ein europäischer Superstaat, so sentimental ansprechend er für manche in Deutschland auch sein mag, wenigstens solange man sich seine Eigenschaften vorstellen kann wie es einem gefällt, wird langfristig niemals mehr sein als ein Luftschloss. Die europäischen Staaten werden deshalb über andere Wege nachdenken müssen, wie sie ihre Interessen in der Welt außerhalb Europas zur Geltung bringen können – wenn sie sich nicht damit begnügen wollen, dies den Vereinigten Staaten zu überlassen.

Ω Ω Ω

Die Schlussfolgerung liegt deshalb nah, dass Europa, wenn es in einer zukünftigen multipolaren Welt eine Stimme haben will, lernen muss, sich statt als vereinigter Einheitsstaat oder als amerikanisches Imperium als quasi-genossenschaftlicher Zusammenschluss unabhängiger Nationalstaaten zu organisieren, die ihre Interessen manchmal allein und manchmal im Bündnis mit anderen vertreten – als ein Europa, heißt das, der “variablen Geometrie” oder der „Vater“- bzw. „Mutterländer“, das sich in ein globales Bündnis anderer bündnisfreier Länder einfügt und sich so aus der Dominanz der Vereinigten Staaten löst, in der Hoffnung, dass diese sich am Ende vielleicht sogar selber bereitfinden werden, sich friedlich als ein Land unter anderen einem weltweiten Bündnis der Bündnisfreien anzuschließen.

Berliner Zeitung:

Hätten die Klimaaktivisten am Sonntag brutaler agiert, hätte man diesen Protest mit dem Terroranschlag beim Marathonlauf in Boston in Beziehung gesetzt. Größere Proteste hätten von Gegnern instrumentalisiert werden können und die Diskussion nur noch weiter angeheizt.

Stattdessen war es den Berlinern vergönnt, den Herbstanfang mit bester Laune und ein wenig Weltvergessenheit zu zelebrieren.

…

Die Sicherheitskräfte zogen am Nachmittag ganz offiziell eine positive Bilanz. Pressesprecherin Anja Dierschke sprach gegenüber der Berliner Zeitung insgesamt von einem ruhigen Verlauf. Mehrere Protestaktionen der Letzten Generation seien verhindert worden. 15 Personen seien vorübergehend festgenommen worden. Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass so eine Bilanz nicht die Regel bleibt. Der Alltag geht schließlich bald wieder los.

Michael Brenner, Scheerpost:

The United States is being defeated in Ukraine. One could say that it is facing defeat – or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. We prefer to look at the world through the distorted lenses of our fantasies. We plunge forward on whatever path we’ve chosen while averting our eyes from the topography that we are trying to traverse.  Our sole guiding light is the glow of a distant mirage. That is our lodestone.

It is not that America is a stranger to defeat. We are very well acquainted with it: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – in strategic terms if not always military terms. To this broad category, we might add Venezuela, Cuba, and Niger. That rich experience in frustrated ambition has failed to liberate us from the deeply rooted habit of eliding defeat. Indeed, we have acquired a large inventory of methods for doing so.

Ω Ω Ω

What were Washington’s objectives in sabotaging the Minsk peace plan and cold-shouldering subsequent Russian proposals, in provoking Russia by crossing clearly demarcated red lines, in pressing for Ukraine’s membership in NATO; in installing missile batteries in Poland and Rumania; in transforming the Ukrainian army into a potent military force deployed on the line-of-contact in the Donbas ready to invade or goad Moscow into preemptive action? The aim was to either pin a humiliating defeat on the Russian army or, at least, to inflict such heavy costs as to cut the ground from under the Putin government. The crucial, complementary dimension of the strategy was the imposition of economic sanctions so onerous as to implode a vulnerable Russian economy. Together, they would generate acute distress leading to the deposing of Putin – whether by a cabal of opponents (disgruntled oligarchs as the spearhead) or by mass protest. It was predicated on the fatally ill-informed supposition that he was an absolute dictator running a one-man show, The U.S. foresaw his replacement by a more pliable government ready to become a willing but marginal presence on the European stage and a non-player elsewhere. In the crude words of one Moscow official, “a tenant-farmer on Uncle Sam’s global plantation.”

The taming and domestication of Russia was conceived as a vital step in the impending great confrontation with China – designated the systemic rival to American hegemony. Theoretically, that objective could be achieved either by enticing Russia away from China (divide and subordinate) or totally neutralizing Russia as a world power by bringing down its stiff-backed leadership. The former approach never went beyond a few desultory, feeble gestures. All the chips were placed on the latter.

Ancillary benefits for the United States from a war over Ukraine that would bring Russia low were a) to consolidate the Atlantic alliance under Washington’s control, expand NATO and open an unbridgeable abyss between Russia and the rest of Europe that would endure for the foreseeable future; b) to that end, the termination of the latter’s heavy reliance on energy resources from Russia; and c) thereby, substituting higher-priced LNG and petroleum from the United States that would seal the European partners’ status as dependent economic vassals. If the last were a drag on their industry, so be it.

Ω Ω Ω

In a sense, the most noteworthy inheritance from the post-Vietnam experience is the honing of methods to photoshop history.  Vietnam was a warm-up for dealing with the many unsavory episodes in the post-9/11 era. That thorough, comprehensive cleansing has made palatable Presidential mendacity, sustained deceit, mind-numbing incompetence, systemic torture, censorship, the shredding of the Bill of Rights and the perverting of national public discourse  – as it degenerated into a mix of propaganda and vulgar trash-talking. The “War on Terror” in all its atrocious aspects.

Cultivated amnesia is a craft enormously facilitated by two broader trends in American culture: the cult of ignorance whereby a knowledge-free mind is esteemed as the ultimate freedom; and a public ethic whereby the nation’s highest officials are given license to treat the truth as a potter treats clay so long as they say and do things that make us feel good. So, our strongest collective memory of America’s wars of choice is the desirability – and ease – of forgetting them. “The show must go on” is taken as our imperative.

Ω Ω Ω

The focal shift from Russia in Europe to China in Asia is less a mechanism for coping with defeat than the pathological reaction of a country that, feeling a gnawing sense of diminishing prowess, can manage to do nothing more than try one final fling at proving to itself that it still has the right stuff – since living without that exalted sense of self is intolerable. What is deemed heterodox, and daring, in Washington these days is to argue that we should wrap up the Ukraine affair one way or another so that we might gird our loins for the truly historic contest with Beijing. The disconcerting truth that nobody of consequence in the country’s foreign policy establishment has denounced this hazardous turn toward war supports the proposition that deep emotions rather than reasoned thought are propelling us toward an avoidable, potentially catastrophic conflict.

A society represented by an entire political class that is not sobered by that prospect rightly can be judged as providing prime facie evidence of being collectively unhinged.

Seymour Hersh:

The American intelligence official I spoke with spent the early years of his career working against Soviet aggression and spying has respect for Putin’s intellect but contempt for his decision to go to war with Ukraine and to initiate the death and destruction that war brings. But, as he told me, “The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going.

“The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.”