Germany’s Missing Person

Germany’s Missing Person

Germany’s chancellor is missing in action.

By Ron Fraser

Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel has been strangely absent at a vital time in German politics. This is giving the impression of a leadership vacuum as Germany’s coalition government seems to be coming apart at the seams.

A week ago, the Times Online ran a headline “Iron Lady Angela Merkel vanishes amid trouble home and abroad.” The current edition of the Economist contains an item titled “Waiting for Angela.” Both articles comment on Germany’s chancellor strangely missing from the action while her coalition government is caught in the grip of crisis. As the Economist notes, there is even a comedy playing at a Berlin cabaret theater which has audiences splitting their sides with mirth as actors parody German political party officials rushing about asking each other “where’s Angela?” (January 21).

The Times Online commented, “Angela Merkel, once billed as a kind of Iron Lady, has become the Invisible Chancellor. Even Germans who are usually quite happy to have a non-intrusive, modest head of government, are astonished. There is trouble brewing at home and abroad but the leader of Europe’s biggest economy is distinguished by her absence. … At home, she suddenly looks weak. And abroad, there is a sense that her attention is flagging” (January 25).

Though she briefly popped out of the woodwork last week to declare Germany’s support of sanctions against Iran, even this may work against the chancellor, raising the hackles of some of Germany’s most high-profile corporations that have for years profited from exporting both technology and manufactured goods to Iran. If Merkel follows through with this, it will further strain her relationship with her coalition partner, the business-oriented Federal Democratic Party (FDP).

In a keenly focused view of Germany’s present need for assertive leadership, the Times Online observed, “Ms. Merkel looks more fallible. The first 100 days of her new government have made almost no impact on her countrymen. What is needed now is a shift from passive to active leadership, the kind that governors need in order to demand sacrifice from the governed.”

It’s been a long time since Germany has had such a leader. But an increasingly unsettled feeling has been creeping across the country this winter as Germans pine for more assertive leadership amid the present crisis of government. The once greatest export nation in the world suddenly finds itself knocked into second position by China. Unemployment gradually bites deeper into the German economy in the wake of the global economic crisis. Chancellor Merkel’s reaction to strains on the economy is to push very hard for a German to head up the European Central Bank. But that is not helping her back home.

The Times rightly points to Afghanistan as being one of the major questions on which Chancellor Merkel’s leadership will either wax or wane. Right now it’s on the downside. Roger Boyes of the Times states that “Afghanistan will ultimately determine how history judges Chancellor Merkel. It is a deeply unpopular war. Ms. Merkel has yet to tell the Germans it is a necessary war. Nor has she tried to drum up popular support for the mission of the German troops there. … Ms. Merkel does not know even how to start to be a war leader; there hasn’t been one in modern Germany …” (ibid.).

And that’s the problem. Germans are becoming unsettled once again, and it’s in such situations that they crave strong leadership. Should Merkel not soon be able to pull a few rabbits out of the hat to keep her electorate happy, the outcry could be the kiss of death to her coalition and her leadership.

In the meantime, there is a certain German politician enjoying a high profile and great popularity with the German public who is prepared to state things as they are. He has even broken a postwar taboo in Germany by mentioning the German term krieg (war) in direct association with the Bundeswehr’s engagement in Afghanistan. He is a politician to whom we have devoted much space on this website and in the February edition of the Trumpet magazine. His name is Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

The contrast between Guttenberg and Merkel is marked. He is a devoted Roman Catholic, she a somewhat diffident Protestant. He hails from the Bavarian rightist Christian Socialist Union, she from the more centrist Christian Democrats. He is a titled aristocrat, she hails from the working classes of East Germany. He is known for his decisiveness, for taking a position and not backing down easily. She has employed a leadership style which, in the words of Times journalist Boyes, “waited for issues to cluster, tribal rows to reach critical proportions and only then would she intervene.” Added to this is what Boyes terms “a certain furtiveness” in her dealings. Such an approach does not give the impression of strength in times of crisis. Rather, it gives “the impression of weakness” as she has always appeared “slow to deliver an opinion or enter a debate.”

The contrast is particularly marked between Merkel and her charismatic minister of defense when it comes to the issue currently dominating the headlines in Germany—the question of the nation’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan.

Minister of Defense Guttenberg has hardly been out of the headlines since being sworn into office in his current portfolio, completely overshadowing his chancellor and Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle in the process. He has been having a field day commanding media attention in Germany over the war in Afghanistan since the Kunduz bombing in September. Be it in Berlin or Washington, on the occasions that he is before the cameras or any audience of note—which is often—his presence is commanding. He certainly does not give an impression of waiting to see how the ball drops before engaging in action. Guttenberg is out front leading and powerfully influencing the debate in Germany on the nation’s foreign-policy question of the moment: Afghanistan.

Those cutting words of Roger Boyes—“Ms. Merkel has yet to tell the Germans it is a necessary war. Nor has she tried to drum up popular support for the mission of the German troops there. … Ms. Merkel does not know even how to start to be a war leader”—are at the nub of German politics and, in particular, Germany’s foreign policy at this particular juncture, 10 years after postwar Germany first sent a military force outside its own borders to participate in war.

Guttenberg has been singularly impressive in doing what no other postwar German defense minister has done. He has quickly demonstrated his willingness to tell the German people that their troops are involved in a necessary war and that he actively seeks popular support for Germany’s combat role in Afghanistan. He has shown, in contrast to his predecessors in the Ministry of Defense, that he knows how to lead the nation as its commander in chief in that war. Not only that, but, at the very time that his chancellor is “missing in action,” he is highly visible. In his most recent press statement, Guttenberg declared that there is no room for failure in Germany’s new approach to the war in Afghanistan, clearly indicating that there may be German casualties in the process (Bild, January 31).

Again, Guttenberg is proving himself quite prepared to work outside his portfolio, recently getting involved in both economic and foreign affairs matters at the recent Davos conference of global movers and shakers. He quite openly upset the German economics minister, Rainer Brüderle, by breakfasting publicly with the chiefs of German corporate giant basf and energy mammoth rwe. This might seem unusual till one realizes that these corporate moguls are heavily engaged in business within Iran. German corporations have a history of being involved in espionage in foreign countries. Any sanctions that Germany lays on Iran would not only potentially harm German business, they could limit the bnd (Germany’s intelligence agency) in keeping tabs on Iran and feeding information of value to the defense minister, especially in relation to Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.

No wonder then that Guttenberg—despite the efforts of his political opponents and liberal elements in the press—remains Germany’s most popular politician. In the meantime, not only has Merkel’s hand been weakened by her absence from the political action, her coalition partner of choice, the fdp, has seen its popularity sink by over 30 percent since last September’s election, placing FDP chairman Vice Chancellor Westerwelle on the back foot.

As Germans worry about a leadership vacuum in the chancellery, continue to watch the rising star of Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. He may yet fill that gap in the not-too-distant future.

Check our editor in chief’s leading article, “Is Germany’s Charlemagne About to Appear?” in our October 2009 edition for more on this subject. •

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Consider Luigi Barzini's reference to “The mutable Germans” in The Europeans where he questions: “Which is the shape of the German Proteus this morning? Which will be its shape tomorrow? Johannes Gross thinks his countrymen wear a mask. 'But the day may come when someone lifts the mask,” he wrote. “The face that appears may be less full-cheeked and rosy than today's... So long as we wear the mask, we remain hidden and continue to conceal the situation from ourselves.'”

Germany Behind the Mask
For over 50 years, Herbert W. Armstrong warned that a German-led European combine would thresh the nations. When Germany lay in ashes after WWII, Mr. Armstrong had no doubt Germany would be back with a vengeance and he pounded this theme home through the pages of The Plain Truth magazine read by millions worldwide.

Is Germany in Danger of Backsliding?
We left it up to the Germans to "deNazify" their country! Now Germany appears to be backsliding as the Nazi German spirit is beginning to stir again, getting ready to break free from imposed shackles with a fury, and come back with a vengeance from the abyss, threatening to wreak havoc upon the world.

The Real Significance of Angela Merkel’s Speech to U.S. Congress

November 3, 2009 | From theTrumpet.com

By Ron Fraser

For only the second time since World War II, a German chancellor has addressed the U.S. Congress. Amazingly, the childish commentators from the popular press ignored the most momentous of Angela Merkel’s statements and zeroed in on a topic that the most astute of climate scientists are increasingly rejecting—the global warming hoax!

Manipulators of public opinion have had a field day using the global warming fear as a smokescreen behind which to hide their true globalist political agenda. This is a reality to which the press and mass media, with few exceptions, remain largely blinded.

It’s time to face up to reality. The real meat was in the main body of Merkel’s speech, not in the global warming smokescreen tagged on the end, though this got the most applause from the Democrat side of the House.

Chancellor Merkel’s address comes at a crucial time in transatlantic relations. The U.S. is in decline politically, economically and financially. The European Union stands on the brink of overnight becoming a giant imperial power, a global power in its own right. In fact, it is becoming the very power that will fill the increasing economic, political and military vacuum being created in the world through America’s decline.

The nation that stands in the lead of the European empire is Germany. As the day approaches for ratification of the treaty that will launch the EU, overnight, as a global player, it is perhaps both a fitting and most historic—let alone prophetic—occasion of huge importance that Washington witnessed today with the German chancellor’s address. Few in that audience would have garnered the truth of the reality America faces, reading between the lines of the chancellor’s speech.

The current year has set a record for the number of EU summits. It seems no sooner is one summit over and we are hearing of the imminent scheduling of another.

Why all the chat in this whirlwind of EU summitry this year? It’s simple. It is time! It’s time for the grand EU design to emerge from behind its facade and finally reveal its true reason for being. And the movers and shakers, the powerfully influential elites who have driven this postwar grand design for Europe thus far, want their enterprise to finally emerge as a powerful global player, not only economically, but politically and, believe it or not, militarily.

The frequency of EU summitry has hinged on the progressive building of a German-dominated imperial power, not by military aggression, but by treaty. Step by step, the European elites have constructed this rising empire by a series of treaties. Each treaty was designed to build upon its predecessor in a process that has taken a simple agreement on access to coal and steel (the treaty of Paris, 1951, that created the European Coal and Steel Community) to rebuild postwar European industry, to its inevitable outcome: a treaty enabling the launching of a powerful pan-European military industry underpinning a powerful imperial military force of global reach.

That old master of international relations, Hans Morgenthau, pointed to industrial capacity as being one of the most important factors underpinning the status of a world power. “[T]he competition among nations for power transforms itself largely into competition for the production of bigger, better and more implements of war,” he wrote in Politics Among Nations. Extrapolating the point, Morgenthau went on to state the logical outcome of this competition for global power. “[A] change in industrial rank, for better or for worse, should be accompanied or followed by a corresponding change in the hierarchy of power.”

The transfer of power that has followed the transfer of industrial capacity, changing the West into major consumers and the East into major producers of goods, is now witnessing a subsequent reduction in power of the previously dominant industrial nations, significantly the Anglo-Saxons, and the rise to power of the world’s major producers, in particular China, Japan, India and a resurrecting Russia.

Perhaps the least understood of all rising industrial powers is the European Union.

People will believe what they choose to believe, regardless of reality. Most choose to believe what is fed to them by the popular press. It has thus played to the huge advantage of the rising European imperial power that it is largely ignored by a poorly educated and largely blind U.S. media machine. While the press and mass media dance to the tune of the liberal socialists’ views on such high-profile stories as the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, economic “recovery,” and the ever-present, nauseating “celebrity” personalities of the day, the behemoth rises across the Atlantic.

So well-masked has been this resurrection of old “Holy” Roman/Teutonic power that when its reality hits, it will send a massive shock wave through North America in particular. Britain, being much closer geographically to Europe, and now beginning to stand aghast at the degree to which its economy, its political and judicial system have been wrecked by membership of the European Union, at least has an increasing number of sensibly aware voices clamoring for their nation to extricate itself from Brussels/Berlin. Sadly, it’s too late for even such action to have a positive bearing on the state of the British nation.

So drastic is Britain’s economic state (the United Kingdom now being Germany’s largest EU creditor), that its prime minister has announced the fire sale of prime national assets.

Pope Benedict xvi in his recent encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” called for a global order to address the world’s 21st-century challenges. Chancellor Merkel added her voice to that call today, declaring to the joint House of Congress that the solution to the world’s problems was a “global order … under global law.”

Germany and the Vatican have a history of operating in tandem under the facade of the European Union to advance their imperialist agenda for universal government. Now that Czech President Vaclav Klaus has signed the Lisbon Treaty, there remains no known bar to implementation of the imperialist European Constitution by December 1.

During her historic address to the joint houses of Congress in Washington today, Merkel called for the institution of a “global economic order” under “global law.” The request is timely, coming on the eve of the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty/EU constitution, which establishes the EU as a globalist imperial power.

Now that the European Union stands revealed for that which it was always destined to become—a global power—Chancellor Merkel gave more than a strong hint as to what will now become the new pretense under which Berlin and Rome will aggressively move forward in the drive for global economic order. She encouraged the U.S. to join the EU in using the G-20 to achieve this end, a reality that has leaped into focus since the G-20 began imposing its globalist EU-driven agenda on the world after the great Wall Street crash of September 2008.

Watch now for the full ratification of the EU constitution in its guise as the Lisbon Treaty to take place at yet another EU summit slated for either November 12 or 19, the subsequent announcement of the appointment to the newly created positions of EU high representative and the EU foreign minister, and the implementation of the EU diplomatic service on Jan. 1, 2010.

When all that is in place, watch then for the rapid development of the European military force, the most dramatic and most dangerous of all the institutions the new EU constitution embraces.

The world would do well to take warning that Chancellor Merkel’s call for a global order under global regulation is about to become a reality—under initiatives to be enforced by the very nation from which she hails!

As you watch this rapid-fire propulsion of the European empire to global power status, remember the words of Herbert W. Armstrong: “Watch for developments suddenly to speed toward European political and military union, through religious union! … [I]n very few years at most, it must start. And when it does, events will flash by with a lightning speed that will astound the world …. This sudden blitz toward union … once triggered will move so swiftly the whole world will be caught by surprise. Yes indeed! They shall wonder in amazement!” (Plain Truth, November 1965). •

http://www.thetrumpet.com/index.php?q=6698.5218.0.0

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Pope seeks privileged status for the RCC in Europe

The Lisbon Treaty forges an empire, an emperor and an anvil for war!
 
The Rape of Europe: "No Means No"
 
http://www.davidbenariel.org/

Watch Germany!

Watch Germany!
By Ron Fraser

September 7, 2009

September is jam-packed with events of significance to observers of Germany’s rise to global power.

A week ago, both candidates for the chancellorship, incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, received a shock. The largely state-controlled media had been singing a song of praise to Merkel, claiming that she was a shoo-in for regaining the chancellorship following the upcoming September 27 federal elections. But last weekend, both candidates lost support following state elections in Saxony, Thuringia and Saar. All polled increases in the vote for minority parties, with Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Steinmeier’s Social Democrats losing support in the process.

On Tuesday, Time commented (emphasis mine),

Now German politics is no longer dominated by the two big parties—the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats—with the kind of stable two-party coalitions that were typical of West Germany. The political game is much more open, with at least five parties vying for power and reflecting the much broader spectrum of political opinion in the population. This seemingly unstable coalition system is the new normal. … According to opinion polls, Chancellor Angela Merkel seemed to be coasting to victory in September—but now the race seems more uncertain than ever. Her cdu party lost its absolute majority in Thuringia and Saar and may lose power altogether to three-party left-leaning coalitions in those states. In Saxony, the cdu and fdp [Free Democratic Party] govern together and were reelected—but for the first time in a German state parliament, a neo-Nazi party, the npd, kept its seats.

With the September 27 federal election now wide open, the left-wing daily Tageszeitung observed, “The only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain” (August 31).

For some time the Trumpet has been monitoring the run-up to this important German election. We have done so fully expecting a result at odds with the predictions of the pundits, who had confidently said Angela Merkel would win in a trot. All of a sudden, barely a month away from the election, the whole complexion of the scenario is changing. This German election could turn on a dime.

That one or more of the larger parties must figure in a coalition government is a given. Yet which one of the major parties will be the one casting around to cobble together Germany’s next governing coalition is anyone’s guess at this juncture, just as much as is the question of which minority parties will be included.

There’s no doubt that the global financial crisis will have significant influence on how people vote. Yet two burning issues could weigh heavily on the outcome, should certain influential German elites play their cards right.

To read current German politics, one must read European energy politics.

To read Germany’s longer-term political vision, one must read the history of Imperial Germany.

Dealing with the question of energy politics, one must ask, why are ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his ex-foreign minister, Joshka Fischer, embedded as senior executives in major Russian gas pipeline projects? There’s more to this than meets the eye.

Schröder and Fischer are part of a veritable rogues gallery of German leaders who carry significant behind-the-scenes influence on German elites, in particular within the institutions that are most influential in the German bureaucracy, banking and big business.

Schröder, Fischer, the current German foreign minister, Steinmeier, and his party deputy, Franz Muntefering, all form a formidable force behind the scenes in German politics. This is more so the case when one considers that they each have a cozy relationship with Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, with whom Chancellor Merkel has been particularly at odds during her term as Germany’s leader.

These four form a powerful cabal of resistance to Chancellor Merkel in her drive to retain the leadership in Germany. Given the right publicity, if Steinmeier chooses to play the energy card in a manner that convinces the public that his connections would more strongly mitigate any further threat of a winter freeze due to Russia turning off the gas tap to Europe—as has happened thrice in the past—he could quickly make up for his present lagging poll ratings.

Both Steinmeier and Putin hail from their respective nations’ spy networks, Steinmeier having headed Germany’s BND for the Schröder government and Putin being an ex-KGB agent. Steinmeier’s clandestine connections give him powerful unseen political clout of a nature not possessed by Chancellor Merkel. Polls notwithstanding, the uncharismatic Steinmeier may still give his boss a good challenge should he elect to press the right energy buttons.

But it is in considering the question of Germany’s long-term vision that we depart from most observers of the present political scene in Germany. Here we have to look to the German elites who have held this vision for generations, and passed it on through the gentlemen’s club of the German/Austrian hierarchy. These individuals have sought by various means over the past century—primarily financial, trade and the economy, then ultimately by military force—to bring their dream of European hegemony, if not global dominance, into being.

Recently our representatives in the United Kingdom interviewed Edward Spalton, chairman of the Euroskeptic group Campaign for an Independent Britain. Mr. Spalton is one of a number of Euroskeptics with whom we have had an association over the years. He and other Euroskeptic activists such as Rodney Atkinson, the late Norris McWhirter, Adrian Hilton and Britain’s oldest active member of the Conservative Party, Harry Beckough, have been deeply concerned at the political road being taken by Germany.

In response to the question, “Is Germany’s increasing assertiveness in dominating EU politics a result of deliberate intent or happenstance?”, Mr. Spalton responded:

Well, I think you only need to consult General De Gaulle on that, because when he met Dr. Hallstein, who was the first president of the EU Commission, he said, “If Dr. Hallstein is a sincere European, it is because he is first and foremost an ambitious German.” And then he went on to elaborate how through the EU, Germany would first of all rehabilitate itself in the eyes of other European countries, would gather together a constellation of other European powers who would assist Germany in regaining its unity. And indeed, that has come to pass.

And it has come to pass exactly as that wily old German politician of another generation, the Bavarian Franz Joseph Strauss, outlined it should in his book The Grand Design.

Elaborating on the long-term imperial vision that has dominated German politics over the past two centuries, Edward Spalton continued:

We have to remember that the idea of a common market, a customs union, was actually the way that Germany itself came into being, and as long ago as the 1830s and ’40s when Germany was still divided up into a large number of small states, there were economists and politicians who were clamoring to remove the customs barriers between the grand duchy of this and the elector of that so that the German economy could develop. … So, they did see the development of the common market, the EEC, very much in the same way as the history of the development of Germany itself as a political entity.

This is history of which the general public in the Anglo-Saxon nations remains largely ignorant and certainly quite disinterested, most particularly in the U.S. Yet it is a history that is about to slam the Anglo-Saxons smack in the face. A very few of the most astute observers of Germany see it, and given the history, fear the outcome of the political, economic and military direction that Germany is increasingly and assertively taking. But few there be indeed who can see the clear vision of biblical revelation which declares that the nation of Germany is rapidly returning to head up a final resurrection of the “Holy” Roman Empire.

Current German politics are leading very directly to that outcome, believe it or not!

You need to watch Germany. Most particularly you need to watch Germany over the next two months. A concentration of high-powered events that will convene in September may well consummate by the end of October in the consolidation of Germanic power at the head of the greatest single trading and political entity in the world.

To follow this trend, watch the outcome of each of the following events:

September

2: EU finance ministers meet in Brussels with central bankers to firm up a unified proposal for global regulation in preparation for mounting a solid unity bloc at G-2O summit.

4: EU foreign ministers meet in Strasbourg to discuss common defense and security policy and EU military involvement globally.

4-5: G-20 finance ministers and central bankers meet in London to discuss the global economic and financial crisis.

8: The Lisbon Treaty bill gets its second reading in the Bundestag.

15: The UN General Assembly meets under President Obama as rotating president of the Security Council for this month—to consider Middle East peace process.

17: The EU convenes an “extraordinary” heads of state meeting in Brussels to establish a unified position to address the upcoming G-20 summit.

18: The Bundesrat is scheduled to approve the Lisbon Treaty.

24-25: The G-20 holds a summit in Pittsburgh.

27: Germany holds federal elections.

October

2: Ireland votes on the Lisbon Treaty.

29-30: The EU Council meets to choose who will fill the two new and most senior posts in the EU, created by the Lisbon Treaty: minister of foreign affairs and president of the European Union.

To prepare you to understand the outcome of each of these events, how they impact on each other and what this all means for the future, read the current edition of the Trumpet magazine together with our booklet Daniel Unlocks Revelation. They will give you a perspective on events developing in Europe that will soon impact every nation on Earth!

But they will give you even more than that. They will give you a vision of real hope—not the sham, false hope promised by today’s political leaders, but what your Bible calls the “more sure word of prophecy” (2 Peter 1:19). That is real and sure hope in the future ahead! •

Ron Fraser’s column appears every Monday.
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Previous columns by this author:

• Who’s Sorry Now?
• America the Corrupt
• Germany—Military Empowerment by Stealth