Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). With its brutal attacks on Iran, Israel, backed by the US, is continuing its series of serious violations of international law. The German government defends this as a ‘rule-based preventive strike’. No wonder: Israel serves the West as a proxy to save its imperial claims.
The West is losing ground. It is becoming increasingly aggressive in its attempts to save its imperial supremacy. Germany, as the economic powerhouse of EU imperialism, is drumming up propaganda at the forefront to ideologically militarise its 84 million population. Double standards, post-colonial arrogance and Orwellian projection are becoming increasingly absurd.
What began in recent years with anti-Russian smear campaigns and bans on the ‘enemy press’ to justify the multi-billion-euro rearmament of the German war machine, while impoverishment and fear of social decline are exploding, is now evident in reverse form towards the Western military proxy in the Middle East: German politicians and media are reinterpreting Israel’s clearly illegal attack on Iran as a ‘rule-based preventive strike.’ Civilians deliberately killed, such as Iranian scientists and television workers, are being labelled ‘combatants.’
Rule-based double standards
The double standards are obvious: While the German propaganda machine portrayed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as completely unprovoked and deliberately ignored the long history leading up to it – including the Maidan coup in 2014, the neighbouring country’s planned NATO accession for the purpose of threatening Russia, and the eight years of shelling of the Donbass population by the Ukrainian army and fascist paramilitaries – it now justifies Israel’s war of aggression against Iran with the ‘rules-based world order.’
Chancellor Friedrich Merz trotted out familiar platitudes: Israel has ‘the right to defend its existence and the safety of its citizens.’ Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul dismissed Israel’s obvious breach of law with the words that this could not be clarified at present. Perhaps, he said, a ‘pre-emptive strike’ could be justified under international law. The fact that this is based on the decades-old but completely unsubstantiated claim that Iran is on the verge of developing a nuclear bomb is irrelevant.
One could counter the German government’s argument by pointing out that Israel has been clearly violating international humanitarian law for decades: through the expulsion and expropriation of Palestinians, through the illegal occupation and siege of their homeland, through constant attacks on its neighbouring countries, through land theft and annexations, through the installation of a racist apartheid system, through extrajudicial killings, terrorist intelligence activities in foreign countries and, not to forget, through its campaign of destruction against the crammed inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, which has been going on for a good 20 months and is in danger of being overshadowed by the attack on Iran. But it does not want to know anything about that.
Barbarism under the Western protective shield
It is obvious that Israel is not even sticking to its own justification of merely destroying Iran’s allegedly threatening nuclear facilities. Apart from the fact that this would also be illegal due to its devastating effects on large sections of the civilian population, the results of the Israeli waves of attacks since 13 June include hundreds of targeted civilian killings, including scientists and press workers, burning gas fields, a bombed hospital in Kermanshah – the focus once again seems to be on general destruction.
Not only the illegal targeted killing of civilians – because these are scientists and TV workers – but also the mass destruction of civilian infrastructure is a well-known practice of Israel, whether in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank, in Syria or Lebanon. This does not bother the German leadership as long as the perpetrator is a Western partner.
The German government wants to sweep the Israeli attack under the carpet, just like Israel’s ongoing genocidal massacres in the Gaza Strip, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and the bombing of Syrian and Lebanese territories. All this barbarism is taking place under the protective umbrella of the West.
Western proxy war in the name of ‘values’
There has been a lot of discussion about international law lately. The German government even claims to respect it, although it clearly does not. From the West’s point of view, international law still only applies to others: to rebellious ‘dictatorships,’ to Russians and Africans, to Muslims and ‘mullahs.’ It applies different standards to itself, labelled as ‘rule-based values.’
When Western politicians rant about their ‘values,’ they mean imperialist domination. With a presumptuous and arrogant master race attitude, they try to enforce this ruthlessly and bloodily. It is remarkable that the West is increasingly doing this in the very way it accuses others, such as Iran, of doing: it uses proxies for proxy wars to weaken supposed enemies (who ‘coincidentally’ sit on resources that the West would like to have at a lower price).
Its highly militarised proxy in the Middle East is undeniably Israel, which is lashing out wildly and using its population for imperialist interests just as the US, Germany and Ukraine use their own. The latter, under US command and with Western financial and military backing, is fulfilling a similar task: weakening Russia in order to gain long-term access to its markets and resources. It is in the economic DNA of imperialism to constantly expand for the sake of power.
Vassal regimes and PR shows
For decades, the West has dictated its imperialist rules to the world, forcing the Global South in particular under its exploitative yoke. But now it is beginning to suffocate under its own rules. Its ability to redraw the world in its favour through war and military blackmail has dried up. What remains are proxy wars, fomented unrest and even regime change in order to install compliant vassals as heads of state. The fact that the latter is now to be attempted in Iran has not only been leaked in the Israeli press.
Neither the fascist Banderists in Kiev nor the genocidal troops around Netanyahu in Israel would have been able to commit their crimes on such a scale as they have done so far without the flow of Western money and weapons. And the more barbaric the means become, the higher the death toll rises, the more absurd the media propaganda cries sound, and the harder the warmongers crack down on ‘enemies of the state’ at home. The propaganda show also includes sham negotiations for the purpose of deception.
Crumbling hegemony
But what all this also shows is that the hegemony of the Western empire is crumbling. Some media outlets have already speculated about the possible collapse of the G7. Only by grovelling servilely to ‘deal maker’ Trump can the German and other Western European governments probably prevent this.
This seems to be the main reason for the current return of the German ministerial team around Merz from (not serious) shallow criticism of Netanyahu at a time when the devastating (and ongoing) hunger blockade in Gaza could no longer be denied, to even more hypocritical evasiveness and even a complete reversal of perpetrator and victim, according to which Iran itself is to blame for the Israeli attack.
In order to pull the German population by the symbolic nose ring through the circus ring, politicians and the media are spouting one racist story after another, starting with blunt clichés about the ‘threatening’ Iranian ‘mullah regime’ and obligatory claims about ‘command centres’ under hospitals run by Hamas, Hezbollah and Co., to genuine conspiracy theories that ‘left-wing extremists’ have conspired with ‘Islamists.’
Desired ‘culture of subservience’
It is so clear that Israel and the United States, which backs it, are violating the UN Charter with their attack on Iran and thus completely undermining it, and the consequences for the world could be so serious that German propagandists have to resort to cultural racism in order to explain their support for the ongoing crimes. Once again, the enemy stereotype of the ‘backward’ and somehow ‘inferior’ Muslim must serve this purpose.
What they fail to mention is that it is in fact the resistance to imperial oppression, expulsion, excessive sanctions and warmongering in oppressed countries as well as at home that drives German politicians and the media so crazy. When they start praising ‘Western democracy’ or their ‘rule-based world order’ as a supposedly culturally liberal counter-model, it is above all a hidden message to the population: shut up, work hard, march along – in other words, a proper German ‘culture of subservience’.
