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February will see a vote in what was known as the “locomotive of Europe” and now seems to have slipped into an irreversible crisis. But from Scholz to Merz little will change, particularly in terms of the dogmatically Atlanticist posture.
In three months, voting will take place in Germany. “Trump’s triumph in the morning, the end of stoplights in the evening: November 6 is synonymous with far-reaching political upheavals in the world’s second and sixth largest economies” (Macroscope, Economic Policy Review, 40/2024). This so-called traffic light government (the coalition includes the SPD, the Greens, and the Liberals) celebrated itself with a trumpet blast in February 2022 with the concept of an “epochal turning point.” The epochal turning point allegedly was Putin’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022; such inaccurate use of terms to refer to any historical event of some importance is a disease of the spirit. If there has been an epochal turning point in the last, say, 100 years, it became a reality when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. In a sense, perhaps even the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was not an epochal turning point. As Ernst Jünger made us realize as early as 1932, the emergence of the worker’s figure in the technocratic age has the rank of an epochal figure. The link between this figure and the invention and dropping of the atomic bomb will have to be carefully considered.
AfD and BSW are parties that question the dogma of Atlanticism as the only solution to all problems
What is happening in Germany today? Obviously, this question can be answered at many levels: at the economic, pedagogical, historical, journalistic, philosophical level, perhaps even at the metaphysical level, etc. I believe we need another very important category of Ernst Jünger, the category of “total mobilization” (I am referring to his works of 1930, 1934, 1980, but not only), total mobilization of both labor and rearmament, to understand what is happening in Germany today. It is interesting to see, in the course of his essays spanning the period from the end of World War I to the Verdun speech of 1980, how the man who perhaps understood war better than anyone else in the twentieth century turns into a prophet who knows how to downplay the importance of peace in a technocratic age, in which war is no longer war in the Old Homeric or medieval Catholic sense, but is the slaughter of everything and everyone beyond all limits and all respect for the difference between civilians and soldiers, all respect for the adversary and the enemy. War as Moloch or as total mobilization, sacrificing 600,000 people for geopolitical ends (according to Professor Jeffrey Sachs, this is the number of casualties in the Ukraine war). Germany is in total mobilization: the system is collapsing (one cure would be retirement at 70); the German engine industry is in crisis; there is so much debt that the poorest people are obviously suffering agonizingly, supporting the madness. The madness that Pope Francis helped us to understand with his criticism of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale as an interpretation of historical events: we are talking about that utterly absurd axiom, as Professor Sachs claims, of Putin being comparable to Hitler and as the only wolf in the modern history of the world. One of Germany’s smartest politicians, Markus Söder (CSU), who, for example, as prime minister of Bavaria, transcends the fatal dialectic of the clash between democracy and autocracy by maintaining important economic relations with China, recently said that there will be two pro-Putin parties in the next German elections: one right-wing (AfD: Alternative for Germany) and one left (BSW: Sahra Wagenknecht Union). This statement is offensive and also completely disrespectful to political opponents. Because in fact neither AfD (Alice Weidel) nor BSW (Sahra Wagenknecht) are really pro-Putin parties, but they are parties that question the dogma of Atlanticism as the only solution to all problems.
From Scholz to Mertz, from the perspective of Atlanticist dogma, nothing would change.
Regarding the possible change of the chancellor from Olaf Scholz (SPD) to Friedrich Merz (CDU) from this standpoint (Atlanticist dogma) and from the standpoint of total mobilization of the workforce and rearmament (but actually the first and second standpoints are two sides of the same coin) absolutely nothing will change. Maybe if things go well, we’ll have a little more economic efficiency. But even this prediction is probably only an “ideology” and not a reality. As for the Greens, they are a mirror in which I see the truth of the analysis I heard from the New Right (Alain de Benoist) and Massimo Cacciari in the 1980s and 1990s, namely that pacifists turn into the worst warmongers when they think they have identified an absolute enemy.
As far as European history is concerned, it is clear that, since the Atlantic Alliance was the only possible alternative to the pact with Joseph Stalin, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gasperi may not have been able to do anything other than what they did in their Atlantic choice after World War II. But turning a blind eye to dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a decision that was not infallible. We must free ourselves from this guilt by recognizing it and doing a completely different geopolitical analysis. The pope, who came from Argentina, helped us a lot with his critique of Little Red Riding Hood’s logic and his suggestion of the polyhedron (in the relationship of world rulers). Anyone who leaves the Pope alone in this matter is actually committing a criminal act. Professor Jeffrey Sachs (who, among other things, is also a harsh critic of Trump, whom I actually see as a possible Augustus of our time) has accurately explained the logic of US behavior since World War II.
Is there an alternative to this? Yes, the prophecy of peace proposed by Pope Francis in his latest encyclical.
Ernst Jünger, with his predictions for the 21st century (1993), in my opinion, is wrong on two counts: first, in his judgment about Islam (on this point I trust Father Paolo Dall’Oglio and the Pope), and second, on the necessity of the era of the Holy Spirit or the Third Covenant of the poets (I say this despite my love of poetry, which I am rediscovering thanks to Jünger himself). However, he himself eventually became a Catholic. But he is not wrong on the issue of titans (the mythological figure he uses to represent technocratic power). We are now in the purest madness, and the crazies are trying to solve, predict, or analyze problems with fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood. If Hölderlin and Jünger were right about the technocratic paradigm, it could be an intermediate option. And not the final event. The stupidity of many Catholics (not to be totally self-absorbed) in supporting western society (the US empire) as the only solution to problems is so stupid that leaves one speechless. Let us hope that God will save us, that he will not make us drink the nuclear cup.
Is there an alternative to all of this? Yes, the prophecy of peace and the rediscovery of the heart of Jesus is offered by Pope Francis also in his latest encyclical when he writes: “Finally, this Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of reality, because ‘Christ is the heart of the world; his Easter of death and resurrection is the center of history, which thanks to him is the history of salvation’ (Pope St. John Paul II). All creatures ‘move with us and through us toward the common goal, which is God, in transcendent fullness, where the risen Christ encompasses and illuminates all things.’ Before the Heart of Christ, I ask the Lord to once again have mercy on this wounded land that He wanted to inhabit as one of us. May he pour out the treasures of his light and his love so that our world, which is experiencing wars, socio-economic imbalances, consumerism, and the anti-human use of technology, can reclaim its most important and essential: the heart.” (Pope Francis, Dilexit nos – Love Us #31).
