Angela Merkel, a Neocon as
President of the European Union
by Thierry Meyssan*
Angela Merkel was born in Hamburg in
1954 (Federal Republic of Germany). Shortly after
her birth, her family made the unusual choice of
moving to the East. Her father, a pastor in the
Lutheran church, then founded a seminary in the
German Democratic Republic and became director of a
home for handicapped persons. He refrained from
making any public criticism of the regime and
enjoyed a privileged social status, having two cars
and making frequent trips to the West.
Angela Merkel was a brilliant
student, graduating as a doctor of physics. She
married a physician, Ulrich Merkel, whom she soon
divorced. She then moved in with Professor Joachim
Sauer, divorced like herself but already the father
of two children. Angela Merkel obtained a research
post in quantum physics at the Academy of Sciences.
At the same time, she became
politically involved in the Freie Deutsche Jugend
(Free German Youth), the state organisation for
young people. She rose within the organisation to
the post of Secretary of the Agitprop department,
becoming one of the main experts in political
communication in the communist dictatorship. For
professional and political reasons, she often
travelled within the Soviet bloc, above all to
Moscow, particularly since she spoke Russian
fluently.
Although for many years hoped and
prepared for, the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November 1989 nevertheless took all governments by
surprise. The CIA attempted to take over by
recruiting senior individuals under the old system
who were willing to serve the USA like they had
previously served the USSR.
One month later, Merkel changed sides
from one day to the next and joined the
Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Revival), a new
movement inspired by the West German Christian
Democrat party. She immediately took over the same
functions that she had held before, except that the
position was now, in West German terminology, “Press
spokesperson”.
However, it soon became known that
the president of Demokratischer Aufbruch, Wolfgang
Schnur, had been a collaborator of the Stasi, the
political police under the communist dictatorship.
Merkel herself informed the press of this painful
news, obliging Schnur to resign and enabling herself
to be appointed in his stead as president of the
movement.
Following the last parliamentary
elections in the GDR, she joined the government of
Lothar de Maizière, becoming the latter’s
spokesperson, although Demokratischer Aufbruch only
picked up 0.9% of the votes. During this period of
transition, she was actively involved in the “2+4”
negotiations that ended Berlin’s quadripartite
status and the allied occupation, as well as in the
negotiations aimed at reunifying Germany. In order,
as she said, to avoid a mass exodus from the East to
the West, she argued strongly in favour of getting
the GDR to join the market economy and the
Deutschmark zone.
Her partner, Joachim Sauer, was
recruited by the US company Biosym Technology,
spending a year at San Diego (California) at the
laboratory of this Pentagon contractor. He then
joined Accelrys, another San Diego company carrying
out contracts for the Pentagon. For her part, Angela
Merkel was perfecting her English, which she soon
spoke fluently.
Once the GDR had been reunified with
the Federal Republic and the Demokratischer Aufbruch
had become part of the Christian Democratic Union
(CDU), Angela Merkel was elected member of the
Bundestag, the German federal parliament, and joined
Helmut Kohl’s government. Although strict in matters
of morals, he selected this young childless divorcee
from the East living with a partner as Minister for
Family, Youth and Women.
Within 14 months, the communist
Agitprop leader of the DDR youth movement had become
a Christian Democrat minister of Youth in the
Federal Republic. Incidentally, she achieved very
little in her first period as minister.
Continuing her career within the CDU,
Angela Merkel launched an unsuccessful bid to get
herself elected president of the Brandenburg
regional party. However, Lothar de Maizière, who had
become deputy president of the national party, was
convicted of having distant relationships with the
East German political police and was obliged to
resign, to be replaced by Merkel.
In 1994, Klaus Töpfer, the Minister
of the Environment, the Protection of Nature and
Nuclear Security, was appointed director of the UN
environment programme, following a series of clashes
with the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce,
which accused him of underestimating economic
reality. Helmut Kohl then ended the crisis by
appointing his protégée Merkel as Töpfer’s
replacement. Immediately after assuming office,
Merkel sacked all the senior officials of her
ministry who had remained loyal to her predecessor.
It was during this period that she formed a
friendship with her French counterpart at the time,
Dominique Voynet.
In 1998, Chancellor Kohl informed the
USA of his opposition to an international
intervention in Kosovo, while the Social Democrats
under Gerhard Schröder and the Greens under Joschka
Fischer compared Slobodan Milosevic to Adolf Hitler
and were calling for a humanitarian war.
The pro-US press then thundered
against the Chancellor, accusing him of the economic
difficulties that the country was suffering from as
a result of reunification. In the September 1998
elections, the Christian Democrats were swept out of
power by a wave of red and green, Schröder becoming
Chancellor and appointing Fischer his Foreign
Minister.
However, Helmut Kohl and his closest
associates had apparently accepted money from
obscure sources for the CDU, but refused to reveal
the names of the donors, arguing that they had given
their word. Angela Merkel then published a
courageous article in the Foreign Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung [1]
in which she distanced herself from her mentor. In
this way, she forced him to withdraw from the party,
with Wolfgang Schäuble, CDU party president,
resigning shortly afterwards. Thus, in the name of
public morality she grabbed the presidency of the
party and, in the same surge of morality, adopted
the Christian Democrat line and married her partner.
From then on, Angela Merkel was
publicly supported by two press groups. Firstly, she
was able to count on the support of Friede Springer,
who had inherited the Axel Springer group (180
newspapers and magazines, including Bild and Die
Welt). The group’s journalists are required to
sign an editorial agreement laying down that they
must work towards developing transatlantic links and
defending the state of Israel.
Angela Merkel can also rely on her
friend Liz Mohn, director of the Bertelsmann group,
the number 1 in the European media world (RTL group,
Prisma group, Random House group, etc.). Ms. Mohn is
also vice-president of the Bertelsmann Foundation,
an intellectual pillar of Europe-American
relationships.
Angela Merkel relies on the advice of
Jeffrey Gedmin, specially dispatched to Berlin to
assist her by the Bush clan. This lobbyist first
worked at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) [2]
under Richard Perle and Mrs. Dick Cheney. He
enthusiastically encouraged the creation of a Euro
with Dollar parity exchange rate. Within the AEI, he
led the New Atlantic Initiative (NAI), which brought
together all the America-friendly generals and
politicians in Europe. He was then involved in the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and wrote
the chapter on Europe in the neocon programme. He
argued that the European Union should remain under
NATO authority and that this would only be possible
by “discouraging European calls for emancipation.” [3]
Finally he became the administrator of the Council
of the Community of Democracies (CCD), which argues
in favour of a two-speed UN, and became director of
the Aspen Institute in Berlin [4].
Subsequently he turned down the offer from his
friend John Bolton [5]
of the post of deputy US ambassador to the UN so as
to be able to devote himself exclusively to Angela
Merkel.
In 2003, the State Department
entrusted Jeffrey Gedmin and Craig Kennedy with a
huge programme of “public diplomacy”, in other words
propaganda, including the clandestine funding of
journalist and opinion formers in Western Europe [6]..
In 2003, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
opposed the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq.
Angela Merkel then published a courageous article in
the Washington Post [7]
in which she rejected the Chirac-Schröder doctrine
of European independence, affirmed her gratitude and
friendship for “America” and supported the war.
In May 2004, she established a new
situation by pushing through the election as
President of the Federal Republic of the banker
Horst Köhler, main author of the Maastricht Treaty
and creator of the Euro, later president of the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)
and director of the IMF. She then began a
“patriotic” campaign against radical Islamism.
Throughout the 2005 electoral
campaign she criticised the increase in unemployment
figures and the Social Democrats inability to deal
with it, gaining for the CDU a lead of 21 percentage
points in public opinion polls. It was then that her
mysterious adviser, Jeffrey Gedmin, published an
open letter to her in Die Welt. After criticising
the German economic model, he wrote: “Before
advancing the country, you need to defeat
intellectually those nostalgic individuals who are
dragging their feet. If Sarkozy succeeds Chirac,
France might experience an upswing. It would be
regrettable if Germany continued to decline.” In
reply to this invitation, Merkel finally revealed
her solutions. She promoted one of her advisers, the
former Constitutional Court judge Paul Kirchhof, and
entrusted him with the Initiative Neue Soziale
Marktwirtschaft (Initiative for the New Social
Market Economy). She announced the abolition of
graduated income tax, proposing that the rate should
be the same for those who only just have what is
necessary and those who live in luxury. The outgoing
Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, severely criticised
this proposal in a televised debate. The CDU’s lead
was decimated, and in the actual election, the CDU
polled 35% of the votes and the SPD 34%, the
remainder being spread amongst a number of small
parties. The Germans didn’t want Schröder any
longer, but nor did they want Merkel. Following long
and laborious negotiations, a Grand Coalition was
agreed, with Merkel, although Chancellor, obliged to
surrender half of the minister posts to her
opponents.
She pushed through the participation
of a German contingent in the multinational force
under US command in Afghanistan. Then, when Israel
intervened in Lebanon, she successfully achieved the
involvement of the German navy in the FINUL, arguing
that “if Germany’s raison d’être is to guarantee
Israel’s right to exist, we cannot say, now that
this existence is threatened, that we will do
nothing.”
As of 1 January 2007, Angela Merkel
is the president of the European Union. She has
never made any secret of her intention to force
France and the Netherlands to accept the equivalent
of the Constitutional Treaty project that they both
rejected in referendums, nor of her intention to
relaunch the proposed merger of the North American
Free Trade Area and the European Free Trade Area,
thereby creating a “great transatlantic market” to
use the words once pronounced by Sir Leon Brittan.
[1]
Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22 décembre
1999.
[2]
«
The American Enterprise Institute in
the White House
», Voltairenetwork, June 21th, 2004.
[3]
« Europe and NATO : Saving the Alliance » by Jeffrey
Gedmin in Present Dangers. Crisis and Opportunity
in American Foreign and Defense Policy,
Encounter Books, 2000.
[4]
«The
Aspen Institute Educates the Sharks of Business
», Voltairenetwork, September 2nd, 2004.
[5]
«
John Bolton and Disarmament through
War
», Voltairenetwork, November 30th, 2004.
[6]
« Selling America, Short » by Jeffrey Gedmin and
Craig Kennedy, The National Interest n°74,
winter 2003.
[7]
« Schroeder Doesn’t Speak for All Germans » by
Angela Merkel, The Washington Post, February
20th, 2003.
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