Preparing for war as a new “way of life”

by Helmut Scheben*

The EU is advising its citizens to stock up on emergency supplies. A war with Russia cannot be ruled out and is expected to be possible by 2030 at the latest.
  This advice is based on a study by the European Union, the report by former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö.1 Last year, he emphasised that the Russian threat of war was forcing the EU to prepare.
  “Preparedness” is the often-repeated key word in this report. “We have to be prepared for everything”, said the responsible EU Commissioner Hadja Lahbib to the Handelsblatt newspaper.2 This is our new “way of life”. In other words, preparing for war is becoming a way of life, as normal as brushing your teeth or vacuuming every day. To the older ones among us, this will sound familiar.
  “I planned this bunker for six people,” said cabaret artist Gerhard Polt at the end of the 1970s, “four adults, two children.” Unfortunately, people who might be visiting would have to stay outside. In the legendary satire about the preparations for the so-called emergency, the Bavarian Mr. Biedermann sets up his bunker with the attention to detail a tax official might pay: “A certain security and yet also some comfort.” Including board games, Mikado and chess, but also cassettes for Christmas, Mozart and so on. And: “We’ve now had the toilets tiled in sapphire blue, beautifully done.” One cost factor, unfortunately, is the one hundred percent disease-proof air filter, but this is also important “so that the smell of decay won’t get in”.

The trivialisation of horror

The official announcement by the European Commission that we need to prepare for a major war with Russia immediately – official assumption: by 2030 at the latest – is being received by the general public like traffic congestion reports or the weather forecast. You might call it a trivialisation of horror. Walking into disaster as a Sunday stroll or a leisurely bus ride towards the “final victory” stop.
  There are plans to encourage citizens to stock up on emergency supplies for at least 72 hours. Schools are to offer crisis training for “emergencies” – probably in the same way that we were taught as schoolboys to hold a school bag over our heads and seek shelter under the desk to mitigate radioactive radiation, if the nuclear flash came. “Let the spark of the gods light us up, spark of plutonium”, sang Franz Josef Degenhard in the seventies. Today, high-ranking politicians are calling for the European Union to arm itself with nuclear weapons. In their opinion, we have 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 in the SonntagsZeitung, published by the TX Group, just in time for our leisurely weekend reading. They refer to the notorious experts who should know: the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), the Lithuanian secret service (VSD) and so on. BND President Bruno Kahl has for months been spreading the “apprehension” that Moscow may “test” the NATO alliance with a limited attack on the Baltic states.
  The idea that “we will soon be at war again” is spreading among the public like a collective obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The media are grateful for a strong issue, and the well-known secret service circles and security experts know how to feed their “fears” to the media in order to prevent that ideological super-GAU, which could consist of people no longer being afraid and no longer believing in armament as a solution to the problem.
  The war cries are not without widespread effect. at every beer table, the “wise knowledge” that Putin wants to overrun Europe with his tanks is gaining ground. There is no evidence of this in reputable Russian sources, and even US intelligence services consider it highly unlikely. When asked by a journalist whether the Russians want to march through Europe, US special envoy Steve Witkoffreplied after his talks with Vladimir Putin: “Absolutely not.” That Russia would engage in a war with NATO, i.e., with thirty-two European and North American states at the same time, cannot be deduced with any “logic”, however twisted it may be.
  Nevertheless, the apprehended war with Russia is being ventilated in the media on a daily basis. It is discussed, invoked, predicted and justified. “If there was a war: Would you fight for Switzerland?” asks the SonntagsZeitung and instructs us about a Gallup survey 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 topic: Civil defence cadres warn that they would “hardly be able to protect the Swiss population in the event of war”. The “war against the Russians” is at the top of the worry barometer, so to speak. Or should we say: in the hit parade of collective sensitivities? “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” as Shakespeare says.

Deutschlandfunk: readiness for military action on a daily basis

The public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk (DLF) obviously feels compelled to prepare the German people in lockstep with a “coalition of the willing” (desk veterans of the Iraq war, so to speak) for the inevitable to come. Not a day goes by without contributions to military fitness and combat readiness. Early in the morning I hear a report from a minesweeper in Kiel, at the end of which a German marine casually remarks that he is ready to fall in action. At the same time, it is reported that the German air force has “intercepted a Russian reconnaissance plane” east of Rügen.
  In a DLF weekend journal, there is just under an hour of voices from the Bundeswehr along the lines of: “I have sworn to serve the Federal Republic of Germany faithfully.” This is what it sounds like in the air force and also in tank battalion 203, which is to be deployed to Lithuania to “defend NATO’s eastern flank”. From an air force base near Cologne, voices are heard from pilots who will one day drop the US nuclear bombs stationed in Büchel. One of them says that they train every day because “nuclear sharing must be maintained without interruption”.

Mental mobilisation

It is this general staff language, this matter-of-fact, eager technocratic German language, which is used to talk and write about the mental mobilisation for a war against Russia on a daily basis. It is the same “expertise”, bordering on rabies, with which Gerhard Polt’s bunker fellow citizen rants that the “coefficient of destruction of a hydrogen bomb” is of course dependent on the general weather situation. They talk away as if 1918 and 1945 had never happened. As if it was “the Russians” who destroyed major Japanese cities with atomic bombs.
  A German defence minister demanded that Germany must finally become “fit for war” again, and all those who still believe that we are not at war are instructed by EPP/CSU MEP Manfred Weber that the German economy must immediately switch to a “war economy”. However, according to Professor Klemens Fischer, security expert at the University of Cologne, on public broadcaster ZDF, this is the wrong word; it would be better to use the term “defense capability economy”. Creative word inventions have always been the essence and efficient means of propaganda. Unlimited debt to feed the military-industrial cuckoo in the nest is now called “special assets”.

The self-fulfilling prophecy

It sounds as if the coming war against Russia is gospel truth. And it really is true: if we prepare for war long enough, we will have it in the end. In 1948, Robert K. Merton described the phenomenon in an article entitled “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy” as follows:
  “The self-fulfilling prophecy is initially a false determination of the situation; it introduces a new behaviour which causes the original false view to become 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.”
  Whoever repeats long enough that more weapons are needed because there will be war, will need a war to prove that weapons are needed. You can wish for what you supposedly fear in order to be right in the end. After all, they will not want to admit that “everything could have been in vain”. Anyone who – like the EU in Brussels – presents an orgy of debt of 800 billion euros to support the arms industries will soon have to prove to the taxpaying people that investments in howitzers were indeed more important than investments in pensions or healthcare.
  A government that places preparations for war at the center of its reasoning, its life and economy will reap war when the seeds are sown. That, at least, is a lesson that had to be learned back in 1914. For the time being, Germany alone has decided to spend an open-ended half a trillion euros on armaments. This “has electrified equity investors and moved the financial markets considerably”, writes the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” in its column The Market Daily. Since the lifting of the debt brake on defense spending, arms stocks such as Rheinmetallhave doubled in price.
  Weapons are not made for war, war is made for weapons. The philosopher Günther Anders put it so succinctly and aptly. The Pentagon is the largest employer in the USA. There is no longer a large corporation in the western industrialised nations that is not involved in armaments and war with contracts worth billions. Even if words such as “security policy”, “defense readiness” or “reconstruction aid” have been invented to mask this. The satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdoonce wrote: “The war is over when the arms dealers have reached their quota and the concrete dealers think it’s time to enter the stage.”

The fantasy of the “nuclear balance of terror”

Only those who are strong enough will not be attacked – that is the doctrine of those who want to arm themselves as a deterrent. With unlimited quantities of weapons, the enemy can be taught the meaning of fear and war can be avoided. There are hundreds of examples in history that refute this “logic”. Moreover, these balance-of-terrorists are studiously overlooking the fact that we no longer live in the days of the Battle of Trafalgar. We have arrived in a world in which artificial intelligence already partially controls our computers, handles our correspondence and independently reorders yoghurt for the fridge. When “intelligent programmes” “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, armament experts sermonise – a dangerous illusion. We herewith recommend you all to read the tape recordings of the discussions in the White House of October 1962.3
  The reason why a nuclear war was avoided was not knowledge, intelligence or rational control of the situation, but chance and a lot of luck. It was only 25 years later, when the secret tapes had to be made public under the US Information Act, that horrified arms experts realised how narrowly the world had escaped nuclear war in 1962. At the time, the popular narrative was that a smart President J. F. Kennedy had won a great victory with courage and sovereign crisis management.
  Today we know that US generals had made all the preparations for a pre-emptive nuclear strike behind the president’s back and had their finger on the trigger, and that the Soviet Union, too, had already stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba in order to respond to a US attack in a matter of seconds. In the power poker game, it was ultimately thanks to the Soviet head of government Nikita Khrushchev’s relenting that a third world war was avoided. The fact that as part of the deal, NATO quietly withdrew the nuclear missiles it had previously placed in Turkey on the Russians’ doorstep was concealed from the general public.
  The British mathematician, philosopher and Nobel Prize winner for literature Bertrand Russell, who was in contact with Khrushchev, wrote at the time in a telegram to President Kennedy:
  “I would urge you to respond to Khrushchev’s decisive offer in a spirit of compromise and to postpone a clash with the Russian ships long enough to make meetings and negotiations possible. After an exchange of fire, it would probably be too late.”
  Kennedy replied that he thought Russell’s position lacked criticism of the Soviet Union, which wanted to station missiles in Cuba: “In my opinion, you had better concentrate on the burglars than on those who caught the burglars.”4

“We have red lines, you have none”

What Kennedy wrote here, is a sentence of unprecedented significance. Cuba was a sovereign country and not US territory. So there could be no question of burglary. But Washington was determined to prevent any deployment of nuclear weapons in its sphere of influence – immediately and, if necessary, through the use of military force. A world policeman is entitled to this strategy as a matter of course, but this did not apply to the Russians, according to the doctrine of NATO’s friends to this day. Mirror-image parallels to the Ukraine conflict are therefore not coincidental, but rather an expression of Western strategists’ thought patterns, which have not changed since 1962.
  Moscow had warned for decades that it would not tolerate the stationing of nuclear weapons on its borders in Ukraine. NATO ideologues, on the other hand, 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 in 1962 or the sovereign state of Panama in 1989 did not have. Neoconservative power groups in the USA wanted to integrate Ukraine into NATO by hook or by crook, although it was foreseeable that this would tear Ukraine’s culturally and politically divided society apart 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 back in 20155 that the escalation would be more dangerous than had ever been the case in the decades of the Cold War because the West no longer recognised the enemy’s red lines:
  “Putin says: you are crossing our red line. Washington counters: “There is no red line. Only we have red lines, you have none. You cannot have military bases in Canada or Mexico. But we can have bases on your borders all we want.”
  The same media that “according to information from Kiev” report Russian attacks on western Ukraine every time I turn on the news on the radio were resoundingly silent for eight years, from 2014 to 2022, when they should have been reporting the daily, merciless military attacks by the Kiev government on the seditionary eastern Ukraine. There were and are many culprits on both sides in this war, and it is not easy to see where and when it began.
  In the spring of 1955, seventy years ago, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einsteinpublished a memorandum against rearmament, which was signed by renowned scientists in the Eastern and Western blocs. It states:
  “We must learn to think in a new way. We must stop asking ourselves what steps to take to help any of our favoured groups to military victory; for such steps no longer exist.”
  Even then, scientists saw the destructive capacities of weapons grow sky high. Even then, they saw the ever-shorter warning times and the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse:
  “Therefore we submit to you the following question, a question of harsh, inescapable cruelty: do we want to abolish war or humanity? People do not want to see this alternative because the abolition of war is so difficult.” 

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2025/nr-9-15-april-2025/kriegsvorbereitung-als-neuer-way-of-life

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