Jan. 15—Major protests this weekend marked the 100 days of fighting in Israel and Gaza. Protests in Washington and London drew hundreds of thousands. Rallies in many other nations, including Ireland, Italy, France, South Africa, and Malaysia joined the call for a ceasefire and a durable peace.
This week begins with a large planned protest in Berlin, Germany, led by farmers but addressing much more than the anti-agriculture policies of the current terrible German government.
Germany’s 1989 reunification opened a brief window of great opportunity for the world. But it is now leading the way in destroying its energy supply and reliability, economy, and foreign relations.
In a statement headlined “Namibia Rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza,” the southern African nation refers to its own colonial past under German occupation to denounce Germany’s support for Israel at the ICJ. “On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil,” writes Namibia’s President Hage G. Geingob. “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”
German farmers join in repudiating national policy and demanding a new organizing principle, a new national direction.
Meanwhile, the U.S./U.K. bombings of military sites in Yemen have not resulted in dramatically reduced Houthi capabilities, according to the New York Times, which estimates that only one-fourth of Yemen’s strike capacity has been taken out of commission. They have, however, dramatically escalated and expanded the warfare in the region. A former U.S. diplomat in Yemen assesses: “U.S./U.K. bombing campaign in Yemen is another failure of Biden diplomacy: He did not want a region-wide war, he’s now got one … he wanted peace in Yemen, he’s now at war with the Houthis—whoever advised him this would deter them was quite wrong, this will further radicalize them!”
The UN Security Council resolution that provides a rough semblance of something vaguely resembling justification for the strikes was passed with only eleven votes. Russia, China, Mozambique, and Algeria all abstained from the resolution, warning that attempting to resolve Red Sea shipping issues independently of the Israel-Gaza conflict would not work. “Can this restore peace in the Red Sea?” asks a Global Times editorial on the subject of the strikes. “The answer is obviously no.”
It is almost a miracle that so far the conflict has not escalated to directly involve Iran, a leading nation of what Netanyahu refers to, with great originality, as an Axis of Evil.
The world cannot survive on a string of temporary miracles of this sort.
What is needed is an active miracle: The replacement of geopolitical hegemonism with a new security and development architecture, free of both the militarism and domination exercised by Anglo-American NATO and the anti-human Malthusianism that the British are experts in promoting as a “soft” form of murder.
Advance the discussion of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture to create such a miracle!
