A baffling clip celebrating a new tank brigade stationed in Lithuania shows the depth of Berlin\u2019s military delusions<\/p>\n
A dark clearing in a forest at dusk, flaming torches, a blazing brazier with an almost runic-looking sword shape cut into its cast-iron shell, a machine gun pointing into a foreboding sky in a steep Leni Riefenstahl angle, the oddly grating voice of the leader holding forth about ‘Kameraden’, ‘kriegst\u00fcchtig’,\u00a0and ‘siegen’\u00a0in German, and a lot of men in uniform enthusiastically hollering in response.
\nAll set against a score that seems to have been composed by Richard Wagner on acid to accompany a horde of burned-out German tanks riding off into Valhalla, circa 1943.
\nSounds a little too retro for you?
\nYou are not alone. Many Germans as well have reacted with bewilderment and alarm to a recent video clip officially posted by the ‘Heer’ \u2013 the land-army core of the German military, the Bundeswehr \u2013 on its Instagram account. It depicts a recent meeting between the new head of the Heer, Major-General Christian Freuding and his officers and soldiers of the German army\u2019s 45th Tank Brigade, aka the ‘Lithuania’\u00a0brigade.
\nThe head of Germany\u2019s BSW party \u2013 currently not in parliament only because of an extremely suspect \u201cmiscount\u201d \u2013 Sahra Wagenknecht and the party\u2019s spokeswoman on foreign policy Sevim Dagdelen have criticized the torch-guns-and-brazier fest as a \u201cdisturbing propaganda video\u201d reminiscent of \u201cthe most sinister times\u201d (Wagenknecht) and a sinister mummery leaning into Nazi aesthetics (Dagdelen).
\nAnd not only prominent politicians are aghast. On the German Army\u2019s own Instagram account, users have commented that, clearly, someone has badly failed to learn from past catastrophes.<\/p>\n
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The dark score, to get that out of the way, is not really by Wagner. Instead it\u2019s composer Howard Shore\u2019s clearly Wagner-inspired ‘March of the Nazgul’.\u00a0The Nazgul are powerful and virtually immortal arch demons serving supreme evil in J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s fantasy classic ‘The Lord of the Rings’.\u00a0Their rousing march stems from director Peter Jackson\u2019s films. It’s German militarist aesthetics: from ancient tales about Siegfried, dragons, and the end of the world to a newer iteration that deals in Hobbits, dragons, and the almost-end of Middle Earth.
\nFor the high priests of Germany\u2019s ‘Long Way to the West’\u00a0cult in the country\u2019s mainstream media and academia, it\u2019s probably a good sign that registers have shifted from that older Ring of the Nibelungen to a tale thought up by an Oxford don whose son Michael fought for the Western Allies.
\nBut then again, the Nazgul? Really? If anyone qualifies as the Waffen-SS of Tolkien\u2019s Uber-villain Sauron, it\u2019s them \u2013 his black-clad, faceless, entirely humorless, and, last but not least, eternally cursed top retainers.
\nEven Berlin\u2019s otherwise reliably Russophobic and NATO-Green taz\u00a0newspaper has struggled to explain that choice: Is the German army trying to tell us it\u2019s ready to march for evil incarnate (again) or that its soldiers are Hobbits, most of whom are notoriously small, big-footed, and un-warlike? Weird choice there, Bundeswehr, but you do you.
\nIn short, Freuding\u2019s strange appearance at Germany\u2019s brigade in Lithuania is ridiculous and indefensible. That is probably also why most in the German mainstream media are simply keeping mum about it. In a way, though, to be fair, Freuding doing clumsy stuff is not really news. While a favorite of Germany\u2019s bellicose and inexplicably popular defense minister, Boris Pistorius, the current head of the German military\u2019s most important branch has a record of being, let\u2019s say, unusual.<\/p>\n
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Boyishly excited \u2013 and totally misguided \u2013 commentary on Ukraine\u2019s Kursk kamikaze offensive and blatant regurgitation of fake news from Kiev after the latter\u2019s Operation Spiderweb\u00a0were peak, but by no means exceptional, performances in Freuding\u2019s career as Germany\u2019s \u201cYouTube general.\u201d Demonstratively hanging out with Oleg Romanov, a commander in Ukraine\u2019s notoriously far-right\/fascist Azov forces \u2013 now flimsily disguised as the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade \u2013 was also typical. Romanov\u2019s soldiers occasionally have fun visiting Auschwitz in T-shirts displaying Hitler quotes.
\nMeeting Romanov marked Freuding\u2019s unprofessional and apparently obsessive need to provoke Russia because he couldn\u2019t find a better date for hanging out with the Ukrainian commander than Russia\u2019s 80th Victory Day. And it also indicated how exactly Freuding has gone from bad to worse. Always a career climber, a long stint as the German military\u2019s Ukraine supremo has clearly radicalized and unhinged the German general.
\nBut say what you will about Freuding\u2019s scary eccentricities, he is, in his way, the man of the hour and emblematic of so much else that is wrong now with Germany\u2019s self-destructive \u201celites.\u201d\u00a0There is his obvious delight in anticipating \u201cgoing toe to toe with the Russkies\u201d \u2013 as Dr. Strangelove\u2019s densely insane Major Kong would have said (yes, that\u2019s the one jubilantly riding a nuclear bomb to his and everyone else\u2019s demise at the end of the film).
\nThen, Freuding\u2019s teenager-ish romanticizing of Ukraine, where he believes he has learned what fighting for freedom means, is resolutely immune to the reality of a brutal Western proxy war calculus, in which Ukrainians are being used up systematically to pursue the futile aim of defeating Russia.<\/p>\n
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Last but not least, like all too many other German leaders, opinion shapers, and \u201cexperts\u201d of the Carlo \u201cI can tell Girkin from Strelkov\u201d Masala type, Freuding seems oblivious to history\u2019s lessons. Instead of seeking national security in a rational combination of deterrent defense capacity, diplomacy, and mutually beneficial interaction with Russia, Freuding projects a senseless and groundless fatalism in which the next war is already certain and all that remains to be done is to propagandize Germans into believing in that delusion.
\nFinally, there\u2019s the 45th Tank Brigade, where Freuding has staged this latest whopper. Badly misplaced in Lithuania and facing both Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, this is an unfinished unit that, in effect, serves as a through-and-through political pet project in particular of Pistorius. It is a classic case of over-extension, a military move made for reasons of badly conceived PR instead of the cautious and realistic logic of national defense. Draining other units back in Germany, it exposes some of its best troops to unnecessary and unrewarding risks.
\nYet that, too, is, alas, typical now: If there is one common denominator of Berlin\u2019s current security policy \u2013 from debt-driven, ruinous over-armament to cognitive warfare on the often unwilling home population \u2013 it is putting the interests of NATO, that is, the US, and of East European hardliners over those of Germany itself.
\nThere is nothing wrong at all with being ready to defend Germany. But everything is wrong about entangling Germany\u2019s security with the interests of reckless Polish and Baltic politicians when some of them dream of dismantling Russia and others do not dream but act by helping blow up Germany\u2019s pipelines. For German generals, giving loud, provocative torch-lit speeches in Lithuania is not patriotism but simply very silly, at best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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