Mithu Sanyal: Are the German politicians all belligerent?

“We woke up today in another world” – on the morning of the 24th. In February 2022, during the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine, this sounded surprisingly unprepared for a foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany, yes naive, but hardly an aggressive belligerence. Mithu Sanyal, known for the original novel parody “Identitti”, also experiences another world: “If you read the newspaper or watch the news of the day, you can’t help but feel that it’s itching in everyone’s fingers to reach for weapons today rather than tomorrow.” Where did this impression come from? The entire Bonn Republic of the West German years up to 1989 did everything possible to distinguish itself from the militarism of the imperial era and even less from the crimes of the Wehrmacht. Until 1989, that is, no more. Although conscription was suspended in 2011, the Bundeswehr was cut down, the conquest of Crimea and the bombing of the Syrian population overlooked for the sake of peace, aid was considered for Ukraine by 5000 helmets, each tank was delivered only after tough resistance, the author does not dispute this; It says no to the “militarization of the present”. A writer chooses her words consciously, aims precisely with her rhetorical contempt. No, not to the commanders of a war of aggression, but rather to the local personnel to whom she trusts evil: “Now we are not living in war – despite Friedrich Merz’ oracles” and “Friedrich Merz also fervently demands a new ‘language of power politics’”; For Boris Pistorius, too, the Tomahawks turned into mythical objects of desire. God knows, one does not have to be an admirer of these or other politicians, but probably no attentive newspaper reader convinces the surreal horror of Baerbock, Merz or Pistorius as bellicose militarists. Can all this still be ignored as typical rhetoric? No, it has long been symptomatic of positions with which “peace parties” are now winning state elections. Sanyal protests against a “published opinion” that “reduces the discourse to which weapons we should supply and how many and when”, and which apparently lends the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (“my heart bleeds”) “to a historian like Karl Schlögel” for the purpose of ideological protection: politics, “the media” and peace prize winners conspired to make “every talk about peace suspect”. Of course, this author also sits promptly in the self-posed lateral thinker trap, because she too does not have to complain about the notorious “narrowing of the discourse space” in a minority-resistant samisdat, but does it (“Let’s talk about freedom of expression”) unmolested in a highly respected and wide-reaching publishing house. “This essay is not about classifying current (or hopefully past) wars, but about saying that no matter how we assess these wars, more war is not the right answer.” Strange pacifism that wants to say nothing about the wars of this world! But is Mithu Sanyal even a pacifist? Certainly in the popular spectrum between Wagenknecht and Weidel, where it is enough to post "for peace" and "against war". Would there not be other women as an example? For example, Simone Weil and her painful, self-critical examination of the agonizing question of what commitment to peace can still mean if the war already begins. There is no trace of self-reflection at Sanyal. But what is a lack of reflection and what is propagandistic trickery, is left. Sanyal (and probably her readership) is not a platitude to flatten, nor even a bizarre inner contradiction. Page 9: “I’m not naive and think it’s enough to just want peace and everything will be fine.” Page 165: Or in the words of John Lennon and Yoko Ono: WAR IS OVER. If you want it. And what tempts them precisely to invoke reading fruits from Kant’s “For Eternal Peace”: “Any confidence in the enemy’s way of thinking must remain in the midst of war, because otherwise no peace could be concluded, and the hostility would turn into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum).“ This quotes an author who does not even tentatively trust democratically elected politicians in their own country to have more moral motives for their policies than the desire for weapons and war. On the contrary, every utterance from the unpopular side distorts it in the worst possible sense. Even if it were contradicted, but to understand Winfried Kretschmann’s “pacifism now means arming” would not be difficult. Instead, beautiful, meaningless words: “I would even go so far as to simplify conflicts into good/evil, we/them, light/darkness is at the heart of the problem.” Who does not want to applaud! Thirty-two times Sanyal mentions the name Gaza, and truly, anyone who does not reduce this terrible war to good and evil is shocked by the horrors, the horrific victims that first demanded the racist massacre of Palestinian Hamas, then Israel’s unprecedented murderous response. Thirty-two times Gaza Sanyal is shocked “because we don’t write and speak with equal humanity about all our children, because we don’t speak with equal humanity in every conceivable direction,” but she actually manages the impossible to name Gaza thirty-two times, but never, not even once, October 7. What is this feminism that does not say a word about the mass rape, mutilation of Jewish women? Sanyal’s partisanship is unconsensual, her “trust in the enemy’s way of thinking” is zero, and the credibility of her human indignation as well. What b..