Mützenich and Strack-Zimmermann are Putin's strongest allies: one does not want to confront him, the other does not want to socially cushion the policy.

Photo: Serhii Nuzhnenko/Radio Free Europe/Reuters

Even if the news channels bombarded you all week with frozen fantasies, young officers, civil and national security: on the only front on which Vladimir Putin can win his war against Ukraine, let's call it the Mützenich front, there is a stalemate.

In July 2022, almost six months after the start of the Russian attack on Ukraine, the journalist and writer Stephan Wackwitz described in the taz the fertile ground on which the information war of the Moscow mafia regime fell in certain Western media.

According to Wackwitz, who was a member of the DKP organization, “established union officials, directors of studies, editors-in-chief, German academics and agricultural engineers” met in a report on a meeting of veterans of the Marxist student association. Spartakus, people “between the DGB, the Left Party and union educational work.” Even back then, most of them advocated “negotiations, Ukrainian territorial cessions, 'compromises' and, of course, the all-time classic of real and existing socialism of yesteryear, the 'struggle for peace'.”

Clearly: anyone who fights for peace without even realizing the person who is being attacked simply cannot help but ask them to stop resisting. It is not reality that determines the thinking here, but the defense against it, not empathy with the victim, but fear of the perpetrator.

Mützenich to Hessian Siberia?

In this sense, the current indignation over the statements of the leader of the SPD parliamentary group, Rolf Mützenich, who in the Bundestag session of March 14, on the eve of the super election year, asked the nation if it was not time to “think too” about how to do this “Freeze the war in Ukraine and end it later”, understandable, but a bit unnecessary.

No matter how superfluous the warnings are in a culture of debate that is still somewhat open, in this country you have to be able to think of statements of this type: you can think them, you must say them, they are broadcast on all channels and no one goes. to a prison camp in Hesse-Siberia or be poisoned with Novichok.

In the end, he even has a nice slogan for the election campaign: “Chancellor of Peace Scholz.” Not surprisingly, Putin's former employee Gerhard Schröder mischievously asked: “If someone is called 'Chancellor of Peace', is that a negative thing?”

So nothing new on the Mützenich front; Nothing decisive for the war is happening on the real Eastern Front, which, given the balance of power, remains a miracle achieved with the greatest Ukrainian sacrifices, a lasting victory. And finally, we have to agree with the former candidate for Chancellor of the Union, Armin Laschet, who said in an intelligent conversation about the situation in Germany between internal and external fascist threats: “You cannot tolerate the extremists of right. But on questions of war and peace one can have different opinions. Even if I don’t share them.”

“Solidarity surcharge for a free Ukraine”

In reality, support for Ukraine requires democratic legitimacy. We have to fight for them. The opponent in this fight is not only Rolf Mützenich, but also Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann and her party, the FDP. Because if our freedom is defended in Ukraine and, therefore, we have to let it come to pass – whatever the cost -, then it is a policy that stops debt and frustrates socio-ecological modernization every day, not to do .

Any talk about weapons systems to be delivered will become obsolete if the entire country is not mobilized and motivated at the same time. And on the crucial material side, that means those who can afford it must make sacrifices.

The FDP, as a party of “big winners”, has the historic task of presenting to its clientele the idea of ​​a “free surcharge of solidarity with Ukraine” that they – and only they – can manage, instead of demanding what they themselves are. they are not willing to contribute, as in reality is the predatory nature of the regional CSU party (“I know few ministers who contribute as much money to Bavaria as Andi Scheuer”, Markus Söder, 2021).

Mützenich's SPD and Strack-Zimmermann's FDP are just two sides of the bet that Putin, like every gangster, maintains: that the democratic State is at the same time paralyzed by fear and antisociality; who trusts his citizens as little as he bears a grudge against them.

An unprecedented moment

Not surprisingly, US President Joe Biden opened his State of the Union address with a quote from his predecessor FD Roosevelt: “I address you at an unprecedented time in the history of the Union.” And Biden continued: “President Roosevelt wanted me to wake up Congress and remind the American people that these were not normal times. “Freedom and democracy were in danger around the world.”

And he continues: “The special thing about the current situation is that freedom and democracy are being attacked simultaneously from within and from without. Abroad, Russia's Putin is on the rise, invading Ukraine and wreaking havoc across Europe and beyond. If anyone in this room thinks that Putin will stop in Ukraine, I assure you that he will not.”

Under Roosevelt's leadership, “the top tax rate in the US was 79 percent and the inheritance tax was 77 percent” (Ulrike Herrmann, “Learning from Roosevelt”, taz October 23, 2011 ). But also the way As Biden addressed the American public and points out a void in this country.

“My message to President Putin, whom I have known for a long time, is very simple: we will not flee. We will not submit. “I will not submit,” Biden said. What warm, humane and courageous rhetoric, an appeal with historical depth, democratic and understandable pathos – oh! – There is no definition of what should be done and what is excluded in our frozen country. That's exactly what the time has come.