Analysis: War preparation as a “new way of life”
The EU is advising its citizens to build up emergency supplies. A war with Russia cannot be ruled out.
The advice is based on a European Union study, the report by former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö. Last year, he emphasized that the Russian threat of war compelled the EU to prepare.
“Preparedness” is the oft-repeated key word in this report. “We must be prepared for everything,” said the responsible EU Commissioner, Hadja Lahbib, to the Handelsblatt newspaper. This is our new “way of life.” That means preparing for war will become a lifestyle, as normal as brushing our teeth or vacuuming daily. This sounds familiar to the older ones among us.
“I designed this bunker for six people,” said cabaret artist Gerhard Polt in the late 1970s, “four adults, two children.” Anyone who might be visiting unfortunately has to stay outside. In the legendary parody of preparations for a so-called emergency, the Bavarian Mr. Biedermann furnishes his bunker with the attention to detail of a tax official: “A certain level of security and yet also comfort.” This includes board games, Mikado and chess, but also Christmas cassettes, Mozart, and the like. And: “We’ve now had the toilets tiled in sapphire blue, beautifully done.” The 100% disease-proof air filter is unfortunately a cost factor, but it’s also important “to keep the smell of decay out.”
The European Commission’s official announcement that we should immediately prepare for a major war with Russia is being received by the general public like traffic reports or the weather forecast. One could call it the trivialization of the monstrous. Walking into the catastrophe as a Sunday stroll or a leisurely bus ride towards the “Final Victory” stop.
Citizens should be encouraged to build up emergency supplies for at least 72 hours. Schools should also offer crisis training for “emergency situations.” This would likely be similar to the way we were taught as schoolboys to hold our schoolbags over our heads and seek shelter under our desks to mitigate the radiation when the atomic flash came. Today, high-ranking politicians are demanding that the European Union build up its nuclear weapons. We have – or so it seems to them – too few nuclear bombs.
“Would you fight for Switzerland?” – How the topic of war becomes an obsession.
“Russia is preparing for a major war,” is the headline of the Sunday newspaper published by TX Group, just in time for our leisurely weekend reading. The report cites the notorious experts who should know: the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Lithuanian Intelligence Service (VSD), and so on. BND President Bruno Kahl has been spreading the “fear” for months that Moscow could “test” the NATO alliance with a limited attack on the Baltic states.
The idea that we’ll “soon have war again” is spreading through the public like a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder. The media are grateful for a strong topic, and prominent intelligence circles and security experts know how to convey their “fears” to the media to prevent the ideological worst-case scenario, which could be that people are no longer afraid and no longer believe in armament as a solution to their problems.
The war cry is not without widespread impact. At every bar, the wisdom prevails that Putin wants to overrun Europe with his tanks. There is no indication of this in any reputable Russian sources, and even the US intelligence services consider it highly unlikely. When asked by a journalist whether the Russians intend to march through Europe, US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, after his talks with Vladimir Putin, replied: “Absolutely not.” That Russia would enter into a war with NATO, i.e., with 32 European and North American states simultaneously, cannot be deduced from any logic, however twisted.
Nonetheless, the feared war with Russia is being aired daily in the media. It is discussed, invoked, predicted, and justified. “If there were a war: Would you fight for Switzerland?” asks the Sunday newspaper, informing us of a Gallup poll from which a ranking of the willingness to fight in various European countries is derived. And the Neue Zürcher Zeitung can easily keep up with this weekend’s topic: Civil defense officials warn that they would be “hardly able to protect the Swiss population in the event of war.” The “war against the Russians” is, so to speak, at the top of the worry barometer. Or should we say, in the hit parade of collective sensitivities? While this is madness, there is at least a method to it, as Shakespeare says.
Deutschlandfunk: Daily military readiness.
The public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk (DlF) evidently feels compelled to prepare the German people for the inevitable that may come, in lockstep with a “coalition of the willing” (desk-bound veterans of the Iraq War, so to speak). Not a day goes by without contributions on military capability and combat readiness. Recently, I heard a report from a minesweeper in Kiel, where a German marine casually remarks at the end that he is prepared to die in action. At the same time, it is reported that the German Air Force has “intercepted a Russian reconnaissance aircraft” east of Rügen.
A DlF weekend journal features nearly an hour of voices from the Bundeswehr uttering ideas like: “I have sworn to serve the Federal Republic faithfully.” This is the tone of the Luftwaffe and also of Panzer Battalion 203, which is scheduled to be deployed to Lithuania to “defend NATO’s eastern flank.” From an air force base near Cologne, voices of pilots are heard who will one day drop the US nuclear bombs stationed in Büchel. One says they train daily because “nuclear sharing needs to be maintained uninterrupted.”
It’s this general staff language, this matter-of-fact, diligent technocratic German, with which the psychic mobilization for a war against Russia is talked and written about daily. It’s the same “expertise,” bordering on rabid, with which Gerhard Polt’s bunker-bound fellow citizens rant that the “destruction coefficient of a hydrogen bomb” is naturally dependent on the general weather situation. They chatter on as if 1918 and 1945 had never occurred. As if it were “the Russians” who destroyed Japanese cities with atomic bombs.
Germany should finally become “war-ready” again, demanded a German defense minister. EPP/CSU MEP Manfred Weber lectured all those who still believe we aren’t at war, saying the German economy should immediately convert to a “war economy.” But, according to Professor Klemens Fischer, a security expert at the University of Cologne, on ZDF, that’s the wrong term; it would be better to stick with the term “defense capability economy.” Creative word inventions have always been the essence and an effective tool of propaganda. Unlimited indebtedness to feed the military-industrial cuckoo in its nest is now called “special funds.”
The self-fulfilling prophecy
It sounds as if war against Russia is as certain as the Amen in the prayers. And it’s true: If we prepare for war long enough, we’ll end up with it. In 1948, Robert K. Merton described the phenomenon in an article titled The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy as follows:
“The self-fulfilling prophecy is initially a false assessment of the situation, causing a new behavior that makes the originally false perception correct. The superficial validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the beginning.”
Anyone who repeats long enough that more weapons are needed because there will be war, will need a war to prove that the weapons are needed. One can wish for what one supposedly fears, only to prove one’s case in the end. Because one won’t want to admit that “it could all have been in vain.” Anyone who – like the EU in Brussels – is demonstrating an 800 billion euro debt orgy to support the arms industry will soon have to prove to the tax-paying public that investments in self-propelled howitzers were more important than in old-age pensions or healthcare.
A government that places war preparation at the center of its thinking, life, and economic activity will reap the benefits of war when the seeds sprout. That, at least, is a lesson learned as early as 1914. Germany alone has temporarily approved an open-ended half-trillion euro budget for rearmament. This has “electrified stock investors and strongly moved the financial markets,” writes the NZZ in its “The Market Daily” column. Since the lifting of the debt brake on defense spending, defense stocks like Rheinmetall have doubled their prices.
Weapons aren’t made for war, war is made for the weapons. The philosopher Günther Anders put it so succinctly and aptly. The Pentagon is the largest employer in the United States. In the Western industrialized world, there isn’t a major corporation left that isn’t involved in armaments and war with billion-dollar contracts. Even if terms like “security policy,” “defense readiness,” or “reconstruction aid” have been invented for this purpose. The satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo once wrote: “The war will be over when the arms dealers have reached their quota and the concrete dealers think it’s time to step in.”
The fantasy of the “atomic balance of terror”
Only those who are strong enough will not be attacked, is the doctrine of those who want to arm themselves for deterrence. With unlimited quantities of weapons, the enemy can be taught to fear and thus avoid war. There are hundreds of examples in history that refute this logic. Those who strive for balances of terror also studiously overlook the fact that we no longer live in the times of the Battle of Trafalgar. We have arrived in a world in which artificial intelligence already partially controls our computers, handles our correspondence, and autonomously reorders yogurt for the refrigerator. When “intelligent programs” “decide” for us in seconds when the moment of greatest danger and threat occurs and “action must be taken,” then the game of deterrence becomes Russian roulette.
The nuclear “balance of terror” worked during the Cold War, according to the pontificate of the arms builders. A dangerous illusion. All of them are recommended to read the tape recordings of the discussions in the White House during the October days of 1962 (see Bernd Greiner, Cuban Crisis: 13 Days in October).
It wasn’t knowledge, intelligence, or rational control of the situation that prevented a nuclear war, but rather synchronicity and a great deal of luck (or better said, God’s Grace). Only 25 years later, when the secret tapes were made public under the US Freedom of Information Act, did horrified arms experts realize how narrowly the world had avoided nuclear war in 1962. At the time, the narrative spread to the public was that a smart President J.F. Kennedy had achieved a great victory with courage and confident crisis management.
Today we know that US generals, behind the president’s back, had made all the preparations for a preemptive nuclear strike and had their finger on the trigger, and that the Soviet Union had already stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba, enabling it to respond in seconds to a US attack. In this power game, it was ultimately thanks to the concessions of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that World War III was avoided. The fact that NATO, as part of the deal, quietly withdrew the nuclear missiles it had previously placed on the Russians’ doorstep in Turkey was kept secret from the general public.
The British mathematician, philosopher and Nobel laureate for literature Bertrand Russell, who was in contact with Khrushchev, wrote in a telegram to President Kennedy: “I urge you to respond to Khrushchev’s decisive offer with a broad compromise and postpone the clash with the Russian ships long enough to allow for meetings and negotiations. After an exchange of fire, it will likely be too late.”
Kennedy responded that he lacked in Russell’s position the criticism of the Soviet Union, which wanted to station missiles in Cuba: “In my view, you would be better off focusing on the burglars than on those who caught the burglars.” (Bertrand Russell. The Future of Pacifism. 2023, p. 73)
“We have red lines, you have none”
Kennedy’s statement is a statement of unheard-of significance. Cuba was a sovereign country and not US territory. Therefore, there could be no question of invasion. But Washington was determined to prevent any deployment of nuclear weapons in its sphere of influence immediately, and if necessary by using military force. This strategy is naturally appropriate for a global policeman, but not for the Russians, according to the doctrine of NATO’s allies to this day. Mirror-image parallels to the Ukraine conflict are therefore not coincidental, but rather an expression of the way of thinking of Western strategists that have not changed since 1962.
Moscow had warned for decades that it would not tolerate the deployment of nuclear weapons on its borders in Ukraine. NATO ideologues, however, argue that Ukraine, as a sovereign state, has the right to ally itself militarily with whomever it wishes. This is precisely the right that the sovereign state of Cuba did not have in 1962 or the sovereign state of Panama in 1989. US neoconservative power groups have sought to integrate Ukraine into NATO at all costs, even though it was foreseeable that this would tear apart Ukraine’s culturally and politically divided society and lead to a serious conflict with Russia.
Stephen F. Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at Princeton and New York University, was one of the many Russia experts who pointed out in 2015 that the escalation was becoming more dangerous than it had ever been in the decades of the Cold War because the West no longer recognized the enemy’s red lines:
“Putin says: You’re crossing our red line. Washington counters: There is no red line. Only we have red lines, you don’t. You can’t have military bases in Canada or Mexico. But we can have as many bases on your borders as we want.”
The same media outlets that report Russian attacks on Western Ukraine “according to Kyiv reports” every time I turn on the radio news, remained deafeningly silent for eight years, from 2014 to 2022, when they should have been reporting the Kyiv government’s daily, merciless military attacks on rebellious Eastern Ukraine. There have been and are many culprits on both sides in this war, and it’s not easy to see where and when it began.
Seventy years ago in the spring of 1955, Bertrand Russell, together with Albert Einstein, published a memorandum against rearmament, which was signed by prominent scientists in both the Eastern and Western blocs. It states:
“We need to learn to think in a new way. We need to stop asking ourselves what steps should be taken to help any group we favor achieve military victory; because such steps no longer exist.”
Even back then, scientists foresaw the destructive capabilities of weapons growing immeasurably. They also foresaw ever-shortening warning times and the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse:
“Therefore, we put to you this question, a question of harsh, inescapable cruelty: Do we want to abolish humanity, or war? People do not want to face this alternative because abolishing war is so difficult.”
Author: Helmut Scheben
yogaesoteric
April 11, 2025