Angela Merkel Declares: ‘We Must Rebuild Germany’s Military.’

By Theodore Shoebat

Angela Merkel has just declared that the German military must be rebuilt. This is happening in light of her other recent statements in which she said: “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.” This is all about reviving the German reich. As we read in a report from DW:

At a CDU event in Berlin criticized the Chancellor: “The state of the Bundeswehr is unsatisfactory.” She sees that the armed forces “are not enough at every turn” and that the operational capability is also “capable of improvement”. “As far as the Bundeswehr is concerned, we have to move forward,” emphasized Merkel. With less money, the Bundeswehr will certainly not get better, “she warned, rather, she pleaded for an increase in defense spending.

At the same time, Merkel added that many things are working for the armed forces. She argued that between 2013 and 2017, five times more had been invested in the Bundeswehr and its equipment than in the previous legislative period. Only these investments paid off only in the longer term. “These are processes that take a decade.”

We are currently beholding the rise of a Europe Spring. Just as a few years ago we saw the commencement of an Arab Spring, so now we are seeing the start of a precipitous European nationalism. Just this month, hundreds of thousands of people in Barcelona rallied together to push for the release of Carles Puigdemont, the leader of the movement that wants to sever Catalonia from Spain.

With the rise of nationalism, will come the rise of also militarism and despotism.

On February 28th, Vienna’s Task Force against Street Crime (Einsatzgruppe, or EGS) police squad — which is usually used for fighting street criminals and burglars — raided the home of staff members of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (mainly known as the BVT), supposedly on the orders “of anti-corruption prosecutors – allegedly without prior notification via ministerial channels.”

The German publication, Tagesschau, says that the EGS unit confiscated from the intelligence group documents “on right-wing groups”. The officers raided the homes of one intelligence unit that specializes in “extremism” (in this case, “right wing” extremism), according to the Austrian newspapers, Profil and Der Standard, which also added that three of the BVT unit’s members were suspended. The chief of the BVT, Peter Gridling, was suspended. The reason being given for Gridling’s suspension is that he is being investigation for possible abuses. But, An Austrian publication, OE24, has said that it is strange that he was suspended because he is being investigated, given the fact that the investigation has been going on for weeks. Minister of the Interior, Herbert Kickl of the ultra-nationalist Freedom Party, stated that Gridling was “suspended with immediate effect provisionally until further notice from the service”.

German publications have reported that, due to the raid, 19 gigabytes of electronic data were seized by prosecutors that included intelligence on right-wing groups such as the fraternities often close to the FPÖ headed by Heinz Strache – now Austria’s vice chancellor alongside Sebastian Kurz of the ÖVP.

There are different reasons being given as to why the raids were done. One thing that is said is that the raid was done “against three officials for embezzlement.” But according to Profil, the financial police would have taken care of such crime, and not the Task Force against Street Crime (EGS). However, Reuters reports that “Five BVT staff are under investigation on suspicion of misuse of office for failing to handle sensitive information properly, including a failure to delete it, the Justice Ministry said. … The newspaper Der Standard and weekly Profil jointly reported last week that one of the raids was at the home of a BVT official who is a witness rather than a suspect but who heads a department on extremism, and that information on extremist groups including rightist ones had been seized.”

These staff members are under investigation for refusing to delete “information,” and “information” on extremist groups was seized. Austria’s secretary general Christian Pilnacek argued that “The extremism data… has not been seized,” but that only private files were taken in the raid: “Only those files that were marked as private were secured…. Because here the suspicion was that information that should have been deleted was copied into private files”. The private information could have been the intelligence on right-wing extremist groups that was simply kept in private files. So, files on extremists groups were taken, but because such information was kept privately, Pilnacek is arguing that merely private files that should have been deleted was confiscated.

According to Der Standard, authorities confiscated 19 CDs with “current cases”, such as data about one “Isabella K.” who is “one of the few women among the cadres of the Viennese neo-Nazi scene”.

Another claim that is being used to justify the raid is that a spy for the BVT was giving blank North Korean passports to South Korea. The spy’s name is unknown and he has filed a legal complaint over the raid. His lawyer argues that the giving of blank passports to North Korea was a routine intelligence measure and thus did not warrant the police raid.

The final decision to commence the raids was made by one Peter Goldgruber, who is Secretary General of the Vienna Ministry of the Interior and was appointed by FPÖ Minister of the Interior Herbert Kickl.

The head of the EGS is a member of the Freedom Party, which is the second largest party in the Austrian parliament and is in a coalition with the Austrian People’s Party, the dominating and ruling party in Austria. According to one Austrian report, the EGS is “under the aegis Wolfgang Preiszlers, now drug coordinator of the Vienna State Police Directorate and FPÖ Municipal Council in Guntramsdorf (district Mödling).” 

What is also interesting is that amongst the entities that the BVT was investigating was a website, unzensuriert.at (“uncensored”) whose boss works today in the Ministry of the Interior and who is a member of the Freedom Party.

The website, unzensuriyet.at, was founded by Martin Graf, a member of the Freedom Party. From 1994 to 2002, and again since 2006, Graf has been a member of the Austrian parliament.

The BVT investigator, Sibylle Geissler, who was gathering information on the website, had her files taken in the raid. The editor-in-chief of the website is Alexander Höferl, who is today Head of Communications in the Cabinet of Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the Freedom Party.

Geissler wrote a report on “unzensuriert.at” and also on a right-wing conference called “Defender of Europe”, which Kickl visited in autumn 2016. Geissler’s report states that the conference was a “networking meeting of the right-wing extremist scene” and that the website, unzensuriert.at, would publish content in support of the event, “some of which are extremely xenophobic” and had “anti-Semitic tendencies”. It is quite convenient for the Freedom Party, that the reports of an intelligence agent who was working for the government, investigating extreme nationalist groups, is confiscated in a raid that was ordered by the Freedom Party itself, all under the claims of an “anti-corruption” investigation.

The Austrian People’s Party and a European military force

The Austrian People’s Party’s, which is in coalition with the Freedom Party, has firmly agreed to a the creation of an EU military force. Othmar Karas, the head of the Austrian People’s Party’s delegation to the EU parliament, said: “Given the latest unpredictability of the United States, it is clear that the EU cannot afford any further delay in taking its security and defence into its own hands.” All this shows is that the nationalists, such as those of the Austrian People’s Party, are part of the same plan towards Germanic militarism, and are using the same strategy of using the protectionism of Trump to justify this plan towards a militaristic goal, which is a pan-European army force, headed by Germany. 

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE EURO

In June of 2011, the Freedom Party, with its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, held a conference with the major German economist and banker, Wilhelm Hankel, in which he made a firm prediction that the EU will fragment and that the euro will be replaced by former national currencies: “Even better, we’re all going back to national currencies and forming a European Exchange Union… a single EU economic space would not work anyway and would be similar to the Soviet Union, a step towards non-democracy.”

What makes this meeting even more interesting is that it took place in the Vienna Stock Exchange, which is mainly known as Wiener Borse. It is not coincidental that such an event would happen in the Vienna Stock Exchange in 2011. According to a document from Wiener Borse, 2011 was a year in which “the Vienna Stock Exchange faced an extremely harsh market environment in 2011 especially in the second half of the year. In particular the sovereign debt crisis caused major turbulences on the financial markets.” The debt crises that erupted in Europe in 2010 helped spark the boost for nationalism, and it seems that this falls right in line with a deliberate plan to fragment Europe.

The economic crises in Europe was, in the words of Lord Mervyne King, the former Chief of the Bank of England, “almost as a a deliberate act of policy which makes it even worse”.  In fact, that the financial crises in Europe was a deliberate part of policy, was confirmed in 2008 by Bernard Connolly, a global strategist for Banque AIG and AIG Trading, who worked in the Industrial Trends and Forecasting Unit of the Confederation of British Industry, and who worked for years for the European Commission in Brussels, where he was head of the unit responsible for the European Monetary System and monetary policies.

In his 2008 lecture entitled, Europe – Driver or Driven?, Bernard Connolly said that the EU wants a “global financial crises”. By allowing the 2010 financial crises, and the migration crises of 2015, the EU sparked its own fragmentation. The Germans wanted the system to crash. They know that regardless of however many systems crash, they will be supreme. We saw this with Black Wednesday, in which the British the European Monetary System. 

After the Second World War, European countries decided to integrate their economies together, with the hope that a united monetary system would prevent another conflict between Europeans. The materialization of this was the European Exchange Rate mechanism (ERM), which was created in 1979. It was the precursor to the European Union, which did not come into existence until 1999. Germany, being the most powerful country in western Europe, had the most powerful currency. Because of this, European countries valued their currencies based on the value of the Deutschmark.

In October of 1990 Britain joined the European Monetary system, at the spurring of John Major, Margaret Thatcher’s chancellor of the exchequer. Major convinced Thatcher that the European Monetary system was the only anti-inflationary device. In 1992, Major won the general election for the Tory party, and declared with confidence that sterling was to become the strongest currency in the European Monetary system. The British believed that they could keep their currency at 2.95 deutschmarks for each British pound.

A few months passed, and Britain found itself in economic danger. The British greatly struggled to keep sterling up with the deutschmark which was on the rise thanks to the very powerful Bundesbank which was ratcheting up German interest rates to manage the cost of Germany’s recent reunification. The British thought that they could beat the deutschmark, only to get dominated in the end. The British could not maintain their pounds to be worth 2.95 deutschmarks each. But, economies depend heavily on the psychology of the people. The value of currency, like stocks and bonds, is determined by optimism.

The British believed that as long as people perceived that England was committed to buying pounds for around 2.95 deutschemarks each, then the status quo would be maintained. This was kept up, until the summer of 1992 when the Germans deliberately made the British pound collapse. The Germans did this by sending messages to the press predicting that the pound was going to diminish, and thereby ruining optimism for the British currency. For example, an official from the Bundesbank, who spoke anonymously, told the press that “the devaluation of sterling was inevitable.” 

The Germans gave a direct hit to the pound when the president of the Bundesbank, Helmut Schlesinger, did an interview with the Wall Street Journal and a German publication. He agreed to the interview only under one condition: if the journalists wanted to quote him directly, he would have to review the statements first, but if they decided to just paraphrase his statements then no review was necessary. In the evening of September 16th, 1992, a paraphrasing of the statement from Schlesinger went out to the newswires:

“The President of the Bundesbank, Professor Helmut Schlesinger, does not rule out the possibility that, even after the realignment and the cut in German interest rates, one or two currencies could come under pressure before the referendum in France. He conceded in an interview that the problems are of course not solved completely by the measures taken.”

When morning came, the report was on George Soros’ desk. The wolves smelled blood. In 1992, Britain was heavily impacted by a global recession, with the unemployment rate spiking to 12.7%. With the weakening of the British pound, out came the wolves — the speculators — with George Soros as head of the pack. Soros believed that the British pound was one of currencies that Schlesinger predicted “could come under pressure”. Soros, in 1992, was a 62 year old currency predator who ran the Quantum Fund, a hedge fund he founded in 1970 that bet on macroeconomic trends, or in the words of Rohin Dhar: “investing capital to make a specific bet that something will happen.”

Since August, Soros’ hedge fund was amassing a $1.5 billion position to bet that the price of Sterling would fall. However, the British were still saying that the pound would not fall, making the crash of the pound more difficult. But, Stanley Druckenmiller, a senior member of Soros’ fund, read Schlesinger’s statement and knew at that point that betting $1.5 billion against the pound would make it fall. Soros’ said: “Go for the jugular.” Soros’ would increase his bet against the pound from $1.5 billion to $10 billion. As Dhar explains:   

“Soros and his fund increased their short position against the British pound from $1.5 to $10 billion. It was the perfect bet with a mitigated downside and a limitless upside. It was like betting on a coin flip, were if the coin lands on heads (the pound devalues), they make a lot of money. If the coin lands on tails (the exchange rates remained fixed), they only lose a small amount of money on loan interest. That’s the kind of bet Soros would pour money into all the day, even if he had to borrow billions.”

Soros would later recount on the bet:

“Our total position by Black Wednesday had to be worth almost $10 billion. We planned to sell more than that. In fact, when Norman Lamont [the British finance minister] said just before the devaluation that he would borrow nearly $15 billion to defend sterling, we were amused because that was about how much we wanted to sell.”

In one evening, as Europeans slept, Soros bought pounds from and sold pounds to anyone that he could. Soros’ Quantum Fund exceeded $10 billion in pounds. Other hedge funds, seeing what Soros was doing, and reading the statement from Schlesinger, began to copy Soros and borrow and sell tremendous amounts of pounds. By the time London markets opened for work, tens of billions of pounds were sold. Soros, in the words of Varoufakis, “led a syndicate of speculators, pooling $10 billion, with which he took his wager against the Bank of England and sterling. His estimated profit was in the vicinity of $1 billion for a few hours’ ‘work.’” Black Wednesday is what got the British to leave the European Monetary system. Varoufakis affirms that what happened to the British sterling in 1992 was “engineered” by the German bankers. (And The Weak Must Suffer What They Must?, ch. 5, pp. 121-127)

These deliberate policies of crashing economies are done by Germany to ruin its enemies and to dictate policy. Just as the Germans wanted the British out of the European Monetary system, and used propaganda to do so, the Germans wanted the British out of the Euro, and used the migrant crises to fulfill this. Now with the British leaving the EU, the Germans are now beginning to have space and leverage to bring to fruition what the British did not want: a pan-European military headed by Germans. The fragmentation of Europe will lead to another world war.

The Germans did their manipulation to the Mediterranean countries in the 2010 crash. Between northern and southern Europe, there is a huge difference in culture. The former is industrial, financial and mechanical, and filled with death. The latter is agricultural, and is one that has less of a tendency towards debt. Before the crash, the Mediterranean Europeans did not have any where near as much as the debt as the northern Europeans did. As Varoufakis tells us:

“in places like Greece, Spain and southern Italy, private indebtedness was extremely low. People were of course poorer than Northern Europeans, lived in humbler homes, drove older cars and so on, but nevertheless they owned their homes outright, had no car loan and, generally, displayed the deep-seated aversion to debt that recent memories of poverty engender.” (And The Weak Must Suffer What They Must?, ch. 5, p. 147)

These were the types of countries — the ones that avoid the slavery of banks — who the northerners desired to shackle with debt. There was indeed a wanton plan to depress the economies of southern Europe. One can see this in some of the recent history of the German banks’ moneylending. Before 1998 — before the Euro came up in 1999 — German moneylending involved bankers making it very difficult for people to receive loans. People who wanted German money would invite bankers to the most expensive restaurants, presenting them with complex business plans, taking them to operas  just to impress them and prove that they were wealthy enough to pay money back.

Before the end of 1998, when the euro was on the horizon and the markets knew that European countries, including Greece, were going to be integrated under the euro, bankers began to be pressured by their bosses to give out loans away for almost nothing. Banks even had a weekly quota of how many loans they were to give. The fancy restaurants, the operas and trips, all for ego pleasing, was replaced by a system of free loans. Moneylenders no longer felt important.

Spanish businessmen, Irish developers, Greek bankers and Italian industrialists pushed the German banks for loans that they now knew would easily come to them. Part of the plan of lending money to the poorer southern European countries was to increase Germany’s share of the eurozone market, to make it higher than other banks, especially the French banks which were also in a spree of lending money. The British and the Dutch clients were up to their ears in debt, and thus were not in a position to borrow more money.

The Greeks and the Spanish, on the other hand, had room to borrow money because they had such little debt. With money flowing from the north to the south, came the increase in sales of German goods and products in southern Europe. More and more people in the south were buying German washer machines and and cars. So German wealth was flowing into the south, but then wealth was going back to the north. The German economy was getting wealthier, while the southern economies were getting more entrenched in debt. “Whereas richer Greeks, who lived off the back of German and French bank loans, prospered,” writes Varoufakis, “poorer Greeks fell increasingly into a poverty trap.” (And The Weak Must Suffer What They Must?, ch. 5, pp. 144 – 148, 155)

With these Mediterranean economies depressed and heavily indebted to bailouts, a deluge of violent nationalism and racism is rising in Europe. Varoufakis alludes that this all part of a plan:

“With every toxic bailout, with each triumph of the Eurogroup over a democratically elected government, Europe is pushed further into a dark and arid future consistent with the serpent’s plans. … In the Baltics, memorials to the local Nazis who joined the SS, and fought on Hitler’s side alongside the 33rd French Charlemagne Division, are being held frequently, often attended by democratically elected government ministers. Political parties and paramilitary groups with allegiance to the memory of the Nazi’s wartime collaborators remain influential in the Ukraine, in Serbia, Croatia, Albania.”  (And The Weak Must Suffer What They Must?, ch. ch. 7, p. 204, ellipses mine)

Germany, the Netherlands, and other surplus countries in Europe are very wealthy, and then there are the indebted Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy and Greece. These Mediterranean countries have become, through deliberate policies, an economic drain on the euro zone. What may end up happening is a fragmentation of the EU to the point that a new bloc of wealthy European countries, led by Germany, will form. This was actually suggested by Wilhelm Hankel, the German economist who collaborated with the Austrian Freedom Party, in his 2010 article, the Euro-Project at Risk, in which he wrote that “an organized exit of current surplus countries of the euro area, led by Germany, might become an option, leading to a new, smaller, and more coherent euro area with similar economic structures that might be able to achieve a monetary and fiscal union.” Hankel goes on to affirm that if Mediterranean countries exit the EU, it will relieve Germany and other European surplus countries:

“For the core euro member countries, the exit of some or all Mediterranean countries certainly would reduce potential fiscal burdens and also reduce pressure on the euro.”     

Hankel wants EU countries to go back to their own national currencies, while still having the euro. This means the return of the German deutschmark and its preponderance over other European currencies, with the euro’s value still being based on the deutschmark, giving Germany even greater economic dominance than it does now. In an interview Hankel said:

“We need a parallel currency system. My suggestion: We reintroduce all national currencies, but keep the euro as clearing unit and reference value. This creates a European umbrella over re-nationalized currencies.”

The interviewer asked Hankel: “How do you want to deal with the problem of high old debts in euros? It threatens a wave of action when creditors suddenly get back drachmas for their Greek government bonds.” To this Hankel responded: “For the German tax authorities it would be a brilliant business. He could redeem euro debt cheaply in deutschmark.”

In a 2005 interview, Hankel expressed his fury against the European Union, vexedly describing it as a realm in which the poorer nations can odiously compete with the richer countries:

“Relatively poor, backward economies can now compete—thanks to their very backwardness—with advanced economies. Backwardness, has become the competitive edge! With the euro, countries whose currency is weak and capital formation scant, enjoy a currency risk close to zero. The poorer national economies, which have low wages, low living standards, and where costly infrastructure is less developed, and which therefore have low taxes, are drawing away investments from more developed nations—thanks to their “cutting edge” in terms of tax levels, social costs, and wages.

What we find here in Germany, namely investors fleeing into the Europe’s “rim states,” is a manifestation of an utterly distorted competition, which violates the law of productivity. The more productive nations, those that have worked damn hard to build up costly infrastructure, high social standards, and high wages, are now being punished for their prosperity.”

In the same interview Hankel went on to lament Germany replacing its deutschmark (D-mark) with the euro, describing this as a weakening of Germany:

“On losing the D-mark, Germany no longer had the magnetic drawing power of its highly productive economy.”

Hankel went to far as to describe the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the euro, as “a second Versailles Treaty.” The implication is obvious: Prosperous Germany is being dragged down by another Versailles, and so we need another savior — another Hitler — to ascend Germany above the present mess of the EU. The migration crises, as we have said many times, was engineered as a transcontinental suicide bomb, made to destroy the European Union so that Germany could then ascend to its own pan-Germanic ideological caliphate. 

The Versailles Treaty was what was forced on Germany after it lost in WW1, forcing the country to pay tens of millions of dollars as compensation to the victors. What took place in the era of WW1 should not be seen as unparalleled to our own times.

In September of 1918, when it was obvious that the end of the war was near, and that Germany was going to lose, president Woodrow Wilson made a speech in which he affirmed that the one “indispensable instrumentality” of peace would be a “League of Nations.” The concept of the League of Nations was that a body of nations could work together for collective self-defense and disarmament, being reminiscent of some of the transcontinental entities that we have today, like NATO.

Max von Baden, who then was the chancellor of Germany, gestured his full agreement with Wilson, and on October 7th, Berlin offered peace negotiations based on Wilson’s September speech. Von Baden’s government enthusiastically agreed to withdraw all German troops from occupied areas. Wilson was not credulous to the deception of diplomacy, and was not naive to the German strategy. He himself said that the plan of the Germans was to “…stand pat if they win, yield a parliamentary government if they lose”. Germany, according to US foreign policy, had to go through a process of democratization, and comply with the American demand that its Kaiser, Wilhelm II, had to be removed from power.

The British and the French were not enthusiastic about this policy. London and Paris correctly pointed out that any democratic politicians in Germany would only appear as puppets of the Americans, and thus would not maintain peace in Europe. Changes in a government do not change the soul of a nation. Only the Christian faith can transcend the savagery of a warlike culture.

If we learned anything from Iraq, it is that democracy cannot prevent war. The world would behold this same lesson after WW1. When Germany’s far-right found out that the Americans were demanding for the removal of their Kaiser, they were enraged. Germany’s main general during World War One, Erich Ludendorff, travelled to Berlin to make his protest against this policy, and to rally up the right to his cause. But on October 26th, Max von Baden dismissed Ludendorff.

On October 26th, the German Admiralty went into a nationalist frenzy and ordered for a full on, suicidal and apocalyptic naval attack on British fleets in the North Sea. However, in November of 1918, German sailors refused to obey these orders in what is known as the Kiel mutiny, an event that would inspire the German revolution against the Kaiser which led to the creation of the democratic Weimar Republic. Wilson, in his ideology of progressivism, believed that the greatest force against German militarism was liberalism. Before arriving in Europe for the first ever such tour made by an American president, Woodrow Wilson lectured his staff:

“Liberalism is the only thing that can save civilization from chaos — from a flood of ultra-radicalism that will swamp the world… Liberalism must be more liberal than ever before, it must even be radical, if civilization is to escape the typhoon.”

But Wilson was wrong. All that American policy did was try to put the pieces that the Great War had severed, back together, in the hopes that they would not fall apart again. But they didn’t. After German troops withdrew from Ukraine, Bolshevik forces seized the opportunity, made their own invasion and took Kiev. Wilson’s idea, that an internationalist committee, like the League of Nations, could maintain peace, was a chimera. Germany, in its own post-WW1 democracy, did not go full leftist, but rather dropped the far-left in favor for a coalition between the center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Liberals — the same type of political coalition that Germany has today, with Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats.

In 1918, the coalition between the center-left and center-right only strengthened the far-right, the nationalists. Today, there is a coalition between the center-right (Christian Democrats) and the center-left (Social Democrats), and in the midst of this we are seeing the rise of the nationalists Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD). British historian, Timothy Garton Ash, made a very interesting observation recently, that in post-war Germany, there was the Grosse Koalition, consisting of the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, and that this has only swelled the popularity for the AfD:

“We know from history that a grand coalition of the main centre-left and main centre-right parties tends to strengthen the extremes – and this has already happened. It was partly as a result of there having been this same grand coalition – or GroKo (for Grosse Koalition) – for eight of the previous 12 years that the AfD garnered the support of one in eight German voters in last September’s election.”

Many Germans are exasperated that their tax-dollars are being spent on the economies of poorer southern European countries, reflecting the nationalist beliefs of Henkel, that the EU must fragment because the more economically diminished Mediterranean countries are a drain on Germany and the wealthy countries of Europe. Ash warns about this in a description of a possible sequence of events:

“Play out a mildly pessimistic but entirely plausible scenario. The German economy falters in a couple of years, and at the same time eurozone arrangements put in place by the grand coalition – responding to Macron at the insistence of the Social Democrats – result in Germany having to make financial transfers to a crisis-torn southern European state. Imagine the response among disgruntled German voters. Twenty per cent for the AfD?”   

The internationalism that was promoted and advanced by Woodrow Wilson did not prevent another war from taking place. World War One ended with an armistice, and resumed years later in World War Two. The days of the internationalism that we have been seeing since the end of the Second World War, are numbered. The League of Nations had all of the rules to help prevent another world war.

For example, no member of the League was to declare war without first submitting its case for a war to a council for adjudication. A ruling for permitting the conflict was to be given in six months, and the belligerents were expected to honor a three month waiting period before going to war. No member of the League was allowed to declare war against a nation that was complying with this rule. Failure to comply with the arbitration process would have been seen as an act of aggression against all the members of the League and deemed worthy of sanction under Article 16. Regardless of all these rules and regulations, war still happened.    

The world sees success and peace between European countries, but diplomacy is a tool to cover national motivations, a taking advantage of the trend of peace as a front for the seizing of power. As Makino Nobuaki said a number of years after World War One: “The respect for peace and rejection of high handedness are trends of the world today”. Yoshino Sakuzo, considered to be amongst the most influential of Japan’s liberal thinkers, called the internationalist peace that reigned after World War One “the prevailing world trend”. And thats all it was: a trend, and like all trends, they die and are eclipsed by the rising sun of the true natures of nations.

The fad of peace will always dissipate; warlike nations conquer, and weaker nations are conquered, and in the midst of this chaos one hears the voice of the prophet: “We looked for peace, but there was no good; And for the time of healing, and there was trouble.” (Jeremiah 8:15) Make way for the Europe Spring.