These are confusing times. A dictatorship invades a democracy, and significant sections of the German left find it difficult to think first of the country under attack.
Left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht and publicist Alice Schwarzer have published a “Manifesto for Peace” in which they call for an end to German arms deliveries to Ukraine and immediate negotiations with Russia. Well-known people from Margot Käßmann to Reinhard Mey to Martin Sonneborn were among the first to sign the petition, and later AfD boss Tino Chrupalla also shared them. The lyrics culminate in the sentence: “It’s time to listen to us!”
Us! Not: the Ukrainians. Ironically, the political left, historical guarantor for justified and necessary criticism of the regulation arrogance of imperial states like the USA or Great Britain, adopts cold great power thinking as their own. It is part of the democratic basics not to make any demands about groups affected by injustice. This is one of the central lessons of the 20th century.
When British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier promised the dictators Hitler and Mussolini in Munich in 1938 that Germany would be allowed to incorporate the part of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, the table was missing: Czechoslovakia. “Above us, without us” was the feeling in Prague. In distant London, people celebrated “Peace for Our Time”.
The examples are endless. At the end of the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1945, two US military personnel in Washington hurriedly bent over a map and decided where the country should be divided. The Soviet Union agreed, the Koreans were not asked.
In 1972, US President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger traveled to China. Her deal with Beijing, hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough, maneuvered millions of Taiwanese into decades-long status as political absurdity. The population of Taiwan played no part in the US calculation.
There is no peace without justice
A colonial mindset is inherent in such thinking: we know what is best for you. The cheerful tone of paternalism also speaks from Wagenknecht’s and Schwarzer’s demands.
No, negotiations are not bad. They end wars and will very likely be at the end of this war as well. But the conditions have to be right for those who were attacked, that’s what matters. If the Ukrainians wanted a ceasefire and negotiations tomorrow, that would be decisive for us third countries.
But they want to defend themselves, and it is morally, politically, legally and militarily worthy of support that they resist an invasion whose aim is the annihilation of their country.
In a representative survey commissioned by the Munich Security Conference, 95 percent of those surveyed said they would not accept a ceasefire as long as Russian troops are on Ukrainian territory. As Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviychuk put it in this newspaper: “Peace does not come easily when an attacked country stops fighting. This is not peace, but occupation.”
We, who are not attacked and murdered, have to respect that. Anti-fascists and anti-colonialists in particular, who one can mistake for most of the signatories to the Wagenknecht-Schwarzer petition, should remember this virtue: it is time them to listen to. you, the ambushed.
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