In the past century, around 190 million people have lost their lives in wars and civil wars. However, learning from this disaster requires more than blaming individual politicians. After all, all members of the civilized societies of the time were jointly responsible for the nationalistic, narrow-mindedly disputed atmosphere, in which polarizing politics could develop - far away from pan-European solidarity,. This was particularly true for journalists and other media representatives.
In a democracy, the free press should ensure balance, loyalty to principles and understanding. But freedom of the press is not guaranteed simply by the fact that a large part of the media is in private hands. On the contrary, the factual concentration of media control (not always identical with property) in a few hands constitutes a fourth socially effective power which, in contrast to the three classic state powers of legislature, executive and judiciary, is outside democratic control. (The theoretical free market choice of information sources is limited by de facto oligopolies.) The manipulation of opinions, which develop in this ambience, is widely verified, among others, by the social critic Noam Chomsky.
Influencing opinions even gains a literal, namely a military impact, in connection with the activities of a fifth socially relevant power.
If one takes a closer look at the forces in the West which are currently keeping the spiral of escalation in the Ukraine war moving towards in a risk maximization for Europe, one comes across assertive militarists who are supported by three pillars of power. These are media domination, the government, and the military. The possibility of the legitimate sovereign of the state, i. e. the citizens, to democratically control this polarizing group of people, is most indirect through appointed representatives of representatives of elected representatives: People elect the members of parliament who elect the head of government, who in turn appoints the defence minister, who then controls, or more correctly should control, the military.
While the term of office of a minister is measured in a few years, the tenure of the established military extends over decades. In such protected biotope, the development of exclusive networks is inevitable according to psychological rules, if only because higher-ranking people let up those lower-ranking people who share their own viewpoint. A separate military jurisdiction, as in Great Britain and the USA, makes it even easier to shield against outside control. These structures should have been criticized by the free press and corrected by politicians long since.
The interdependence between media, state and military, including secret services, can be traced back historically. For much of the 19th century, the young United States had held the highly respected position of a role model which inspired libertarian and democratic movements around the world. However, influential forces with completely different “ideals” had already positioned themselves behind the shiny facade. The change of direction first became evident in the Spanish-American War (1898-1899), particularly in the Philippines. At that time, the inhabitants of the archipelago had broken away from long Spanish rule with American encouragement. Afterwards, however, they did not find themselves in the expected democratic self-determination, but under a new, much tougher foreign rule by the USA, more correctly, by strengthened anti-liberal forces. Within a few years, about 10% of the then 7 million inhabitants succumbed to the brutal actions of the military.
Under perfect rule of law conditions, the inhuman practices would have been stopped immediately due to growing public pressure. But that is exactly what was prevented by a censorship that was valid until 1901 and "protected" the American public from information from the Philippines. This censorship could be exercised by the military on their own behalf.
But even when in 1901 private soldiers' mail shed light on what was happening on the islands, defence of the damaged foundation of values remained weak. More precisely, it was the press that failed miserably in its function as a critical guardian of freedom and the rule of law; because after initial outraged voices, a “level-headed” comment soon prevailed in the mainstream newspapers, propagating understanding for the brutal treatment of the Filipinos. 1.)
At the time, the media's narcosis of democratic vigilance prevented future attempts to set up censorship being decisively put a stop to. Predictably, the attacks on the freedom of the press were repeated at the next opportunity and in an intensified form.
The First World War offered this opportunity. A few days after the USA entered the war in 1917, the Committee on Public Information (Creel Committee) was created, whose work consisted of censoring military reporting. Their "competencies" also included targeted propagandistic misinformation and polarizing emotionalization of citizens. The American participation in the war, this way shielded from criticism and opposition, was able to prevent the already foreseeable understanding between the exhausted European war opponents "in time" - which, in addition to more victims, also resulted in the peace treaty of Versailles, which was characterized by hatred and which already preprogramed the Second World War, which again brought to life a propaganda agency, the Office of War Information (1942 to 1945).
After the Second World War, politicians came to the conclusion that in the future international conflicts must be settled in a non-violent manner and in June 1945 they adopted the Charter of the newly founded UNO. It is a separate issue that this valuable initiative proved to be a flash in the pan, in that the right to self-determination proclaimed in Article 1 of the Charter as the basis for contemporary peacekeeping has not yet reached maturity for application. Instead, a competing right, namely that of states to the integrity of their territory, was accorded precarious priority.
At the latest, the bloody events surrounding the dissolution of Yugoslavia have shown how urgently a strengthening, crystal-clear regulation and impartial application of the right to self-determination are needed.
If there were such clear regulations, the Crimea question would have been finally resolved in 2014 with an internationally controlled referendum, regardless of whether the result was an annexation to Russia, the status of an autonomous region within Ukraine or an independent republic. It is therefore foreseeable that the Ukrainian conquest of Crimea, which is being propagated more and more openly as a war aim, will trigger a maximum escalation. Ignoring the Russian identity of its inhabitants since 1783, who have already expressed their will in 2014, will pose an existential threat to European civilization.
The unfinished draft of an international order in form of the UNO Charter shows that politicians have not learned enough from the three previous fratricidal wars, including the Crimean War of 1853-1856. The hopeful path taken in June 1945 with the proclamation of the UN Charter towards a replacement of military violence with peaceful conflict resolution led to nothing, as the well-intentioned set of rules was insufficient due to the lack of a binding demarcation between the right of self-determination of peoples and the claim to sovereignty of states has reached application maturity.
But media representatives have not even managed to pull off such an incomplete approach. It would have been mainly their task to denounce the discrepancy between a theoretical right to self-determination and its “consistent” disregard in political practice – at the latest with the beginning of the Vietnam War (1955-1975) which had its roots there, too. Instead, the lack of critical vigilance from the days of Philippine censorship was able to persist, leaving the gates wide open for further attacks on media freedom and the related freedom of expression in general.
In particular, the above-mentioned interdependence of private media power with state power and the military could continue to grow dangerously in the absence of fundamental criticism. The opacity of the network has increased, among other things, due to the fact that a large number of secret services (currently 24) have emerged in the USA. These not only influence the activities of the military they also essentially determine the information that is presented to the public about them. The fact that the CIA spends so much on propaganda - about 1/3 of its budget - shows that it is not about simply telling the truth.
In 1989, the high-ranking former CIA agent Victor Marchetti (1929-2018) stated in his revelations (which were only released after partial censorship): "... democratic governments fighting totalitarian enemies run the risk of imitating their methods and thereby destroying democracy. By suppressing historical fact, and by manufacturing historical fiction, the CIA, with its obsessive secrecy and its vast resources, has posed a particular threat to the right of Americans to be informed for the present and future by an objective knowledge of the past. As long as the CIA continues to manipulate history, historians of its activities must be Revisionist..." 2)
This revisionist work of historians now has to struggle through an extremely confusing thicket of truth, half-truth and untruth. Explosive revelations can often only be recognized as reliable truth after decades. This applies, for example, to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the Watergate affair in 1972, which cost Richard Nixon the presidency. Only recently evidence has been found that both events were intertwined and the CIA with them. 3)
While, for psychological reasons, citizens, politicians and journalists do not react to the belated discovery of the truth with the necessary initiative for an authentic liberalization of the information systems, the already difficult investigative journalism is additionally hindered on the legal level, more correctly on the level of undermining the principle of the rule of law. Investigative whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are threatened by an anachronistic law that is just as anti-liberty and unconstitutional as the creation of the above-mentioned Creel Committee, namely the Espionage Act of the same year 1917. The secondary aspect of a possible access by enemies to individual secrets distracts from a incomparably higher legal interest, which is the protection of citizens from a security apparatus that systematically refuses effective democratic control.
On closer inspection, the case of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange - who has uncovered various machinations on the part of the security apparatuses like no other person - is the perfect indicator for the question of whether the nations of the West will be able to stop the polarizing forces in time and THEREBY to avert the danger of a nuclear escalation - which has been downplayed in the media. The example of the DU shells (ammunition containing around 60% Uranium-238) now also being delivered to the Ukraine shows how dangerous the routine, uncritical subordination to the sovereignty of opinion in NATO military circles is. The threat to humans and the environment is roughly downplayed by uncritically adopting the militarists' narratives and ignoring independent expertise. 4)
The nations of European civilization yet can be saved from a third fratricidal war – but this requires the same factual enlightenment and democratic determination that is necessary to save Julian Assange. 5)
Politicians, journalists and citizens are therefore called upon to learn more about the case and to immediately campaign for Assange in a way that corresponds to democratic co-responsibility. There is nothing to avoid the findings of the UN Special Envoy Prof. Nils Melzer. According to his judgement "..., the case is of symbolic importance and affects every citizen of a democratic country". 6)
Protected by an atmosphere of deficient democratic vigilance, the Western security establishment made up of the military, secret services, politics and armaments industry was able to launch and maintain plenty of military operations for decades, many of which were directed against the interests of the citizens and against the principles of freedom, social solidarity and self-determination. Because these failures never were identified as parts of a general threat, the necessary vigorous criticism lacked as well.
Since revelations appear with a long time delay in a meanwhile umpteen times updated news environment, the psychological effect of emotional shaking is almost always not strong enough to draw lasting lessons from the past and to correct detected mistakes. As seen, this was already the case after the Spanish-American War and it has remained so to this day.
The way people were treated during the Philippine occupation was enabled to continue in the 20th century, as the Vietnam War 1955-1975 showed, among other examples. In particular, a large number of Latin American countries suffered from permanent interventions by the US security establishment. In Guatemala the civil war from 1960 to 1996, accompanied by US military advising and weapon delivery to different groups, had its roots in the CIA-initiated 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected government and its replacement by a dictatorship.
All in all, the extremely costly foreign missions of the US military and secret services were highly unsuitable for enforcing the proclaimed libertarian principles. They not only failed to establish democratic self-determination, the rule of law and social harmony, but impeded it. Almost nothing represented the American Foundling Father´s spirit to lead people towards an independent, free life. On the contrary, the interventions proved to be polarizing, brutalizing and permanently destabilizing with great regularity.
Cynically, the only level at which long-term lessons were learned from the empathetic military operation in the Philippines of 1898-1901 was to replace the heavy-handed news blackout (still practiced during the Korean War) with ever more adept forms of propaganda distortion and whitewashing. Every citizen, politician and journalist can find out what investigative journalism and revisionist historian work have found out about the American and/or British foreign missions of the post-war epoch YEARS LATER - but what had been suppressed or presented in a distorted way at the moment of execution.
Inevitably, the overall picture of an information war 7) emerges, a war that was not and is not mainly directed against enemy powers, but against the own Western citizens - aimed to let them accept astronomically expensive actions that run counter to their security interests, their ideals of freedom and pan-European solidarity. This way they ruin the worldwide reputation of Western democracies and flush less democratic groups to power - e.g. in Vietnam, Somalia 8) and the countries of the “Arab Spring”.
The disastrous Afghanistan mission from 2001 to 2021 (actually since 1979) and the Iraq war from 2003 to 2011 also corresponded to this pattern. The attack on Iraq by the British and American military took place after double propaganda preparations, namely with false accusations (possession of weapons of mass destruction according to CIA reports) and with the declared but in reality thwarted war aim of liberation: "We're coming with a mighty force to end the reign of your oppressors. We are coming to bring you food and medicine and a better life... and we will not stop... until your country is free." / George W. Bush.
Rapid military victory was followed by a politically extremely unstable period of occupation until 2011, during which the true face of the claimed liberation came to light, namely that of a brutal conquest and chain of disciplinary action, interrogation and humiliation. And as elsewhere, different population groups were set against each other. But this truth was only fully recognized by contemporary witnesses in Iraq and, in part, by a global media audience outside of the West.
In the case of this military operation, too, only subsequent revelations brought to light what never should have happened, namely a treatment of the civilian population that, according to the simplest psychological rules, could not create an emotional atmosphere of solidarity and trust. Instead, the formation of terrorist resistance groups was provoked during this period, including IS 9)
In addition to the destruction of the reputation of free democracy (by installing corrupt "democratic" governments and by training of conspicuously brutal security forces), there was inevitably a loss of respect over time, in that the dwindling support within the population also prevented any final military success against the extremists.
But the mainstream media have allowed the self-destructive military operations to pass for years without substantive criticism. To this day, there has been no urgent critical questioning of the continuing Western engagement in Syria, which is already half destroyed and depopulated, where IS (which jumped over from Iraq) was already considered defeated in 2021 and the now announced US goal is the overthrow of the (allegedly radical) elected government Assad. It should make free journalists suspicious that Assad is a member of the Alawites, the Muslim denomination group known for its peaceful coexistence with the Christian population.
Even during the Ukraine war, the military-media complex kept the (actually primary) security interests of the inhabitants of the conquered, re-conquered and re-re-conquered areas out of focus. A warning call for the implementation of the right to self-determination enshrined in Article 1 of the UN Charter would be urgently needed - to replace the anachronistic military struggle now and in the future. After this law had been lying in a drawer for unfinished tools since June 1945 with disastrous consequences worldwide, the fateful decision between world war and peace now depends on its immediate fair application in eastern Ukraine.
From this perspective it should be clear that the actual front in the Ukraine war is not the one between the fighting opponents, but that between rational pacifism and the clumsy militarism on both sides. The latter has been turning the mill of escalation in automatic mode since May 17, the day when the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia were broken off by the Ukrainian government.
However, all rational considerations for ending the militaristic escalation remain useless theory until the moment when journalism is able to free itself from the authoritarian pressure of expectation of an undemocratic propaganda apparatus with the claim of a monopoly on truth (political correctness). Because even by the most reasonable politicians, a consistent peace policy against the resistance of the warmongers in the background can only be enforced with the backing of a critical and vigilant journalism, which also would press for new elections as soon as the change in opinion within the population has reached the mark of obviousness.
The impending mental liberation begins with individual citizens, politicians and journalists becoming aware of the fact and the circumstances of their actual bondage. This involves recognizing the psychological mechanisms that keep people in a subservient status in which independent, responsible thought and action is quietly discarded in favour of general conformity.
Psychologist Prof. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of ingeniously simple and extremely revealing experiments on this subject in the early 1960s. The subject of his investigations was the switching off of the critical mind under certain conditions. Milgram recognized the pressure of authoritarian expectations as the triggering ambience. 10)
Politicians, journalists, the military and other members of the Western establishment are subjected to such pressure of expectations without being aware of it. This also applies to the influence of the relevant phenomenon of hierarchy, more precisely the subjective perception and acceptance of a hierarchy.
In the Ukraine war, the pressure of expectations comes from militarists - leading military as well as politicians in the USA and Great Britain. Their claims for superior rank are threefold, firstly through the involvement of the military, an institution with a strict hierarchy, secondly in the form of the high positions held by the people concerned, and thirdly through the great power image of the United Kingdom and the United States. Rejecting this claim of superior rank with resolution represents the psychological switch which can immediately stop the danger of escalation. – This is not difficult at the justification level, since the claim lacks any factual basis:
Armed forces and military officials like a Secretary General of NATO have an extremely indirect and therefore almost worthless democratic legitimacy.
Furthermore, the track record of their foreign assignments is so shockingly bad that it is high time for insight and error analysis (especially in the area of their psychological and sociological training) - but by no means for new engagements.
The militarists' flamboyant claim to a high rank is not only in blatant contradiction to the performance they have delivered, but also to their legitimate position in the structure of the democratic constitutional state. In this structure, it is always the political and military representatives of the citizens who owe the latter respect and less vice versa. This applies even more for representatives of representatives of representatives, as in the case of the military and the secret services (as well as the EU Commission). But on the contrary, the propaganda used to mislead citizens into accepting counterproductive actions shows disrespect and a lack of solidarity.
In the game with hundreds of billions in armaments and with democratic citizens on the spectator bench, for decades military operations were uncritically accepted, which have been eroding the worldwide reputation of free democracy. The largely uncritical media environment has also shielded people in the West from the vital insight that the withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 marked the ultimate failure of an American world power policy based on militarism - and thus the end of an international security structure that had long been crumbling. The Taliban, who "accidentally" got their hands on weapons worth around 85 billion dollars - since consider themselves as a superpower. 11)
With the current political course promising to lead unerringly into a violent chain of wars and civil wars, the time has come to follow an old Indian adage that one should dismount when one realizes the horse is dead.
The only chance for the USA to continue to exist as a democratic republic lies in returning to the successful concept of its founding decades and thus once again assuming the role of an authentically liberal-democratic, constitutional and principled role model that no longer goes astray nor leads its community of values on suicidal paths - neither to that of appeasement nor that of militarism.
The task assigned to the free media is outlined in a statement of Thomas Jefferson: "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions ... will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of the day."
- Vgl. Thomas Spekmann, Amerikas Sündenfall, in Der Tagesspiegel 2009, Referenz https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/geschichte/guerillakrieg-amerikas-suendenfall/1467292.html
- Victor Machetti, in The Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1989 (Vol. 9, No. 3), pages 305- 320.
- Tucker Carlson, Here's what a source said about the CIA and JFK's assassination, December 2022 in Fox News, https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-heres-source-cia-jfks-assassination
- Leuren Moret, Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War, 2004/ 2011, in Voltairenet.org, https://www.voltairenet.org/article169437.html
- Christian Hamann, Kommentare zum Ukrainekrieg in Aktion Frieden, Freiheit & Fairness, https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/kommentare-zum-ukrainerieg-d-1-bis-d-4
- Nils Melzer im Interview mit Daniel Ryser 2020 in Republik.ch, Referenz https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-about-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange
- Thymian Bussemer Medien als Kriegswaffe - Eine Analyse der amerikanischen Militärpropaganda im Irak-Krieg, 2003, in Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/27247/medien-als-kriegswaffe/
- Harun Maruf, Dan Joseph, Inside Al Shabaab The Seret History of Al Qaeda´s Most Powerfull Ally https://archive.org/stream/InsideAlShabaabTheSecretHistoryOfAlQaedasMostPowerful/Inside%20Al-Shabaab%20The%20Secret%20History%20of%20Al-Qaeda%E2%80%99s%20Most%20Powerful_djvu.txt
- Christian Hamann, Das Konzept für Frieden, Freiheit und Fairness, Anhang C 6, https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/anhang-c-6
- Christian Hamann, Das Konzept für Frieden, Freiheit und Fairness, Kapitel A 1
- Uwe G. Kranz TRIUMPH DER TALIBAN: “Nach Kabul kommt Rom” in Ansage! 06.10.2021, https://ansage.org/triumph-der-taliban-nach-kabul-kommt-rom-teil-2/