GER politics thread

[Catfish]

^ i'm not sure how a wrench solves software problems, unless you treat the electronics with it, hard

[Skybird]

The newspaper article quoting that a software update caused the failure, maybe was just that: a newspaper report, leaked by interested circles.

Do we ordinary people know for any facts for sure? Mostly not, no. I can only quote the newspaper articles and mark in bold letters what newspaper it was.
I still do not like the Puma. Is a heavily armoured eierlegende Woll-Milch-Sau, and I do not trust its inherent complexity.

[Skybird]

Another word from the press about the Puma, although probably from the chorus of those who are closer to the truth: the Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:
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The breakdown tank: Eyes ahead into the Puma disaster

Germany affords the most expensive infantry fighting vehicle in the world. Time and again, the Puma breaks down because it is too complicated. This is also the fault of those who are now complaining to the defense industry: Politicians and Bundeswehr leadership.

Four days before the German Bundeswehr once again became a breakdown army on Dec. 16, General Björn Schulz was using slogans of perseverance. The commander of the tank troop school in Munster sat with soldiers and mused about the world's most expensive infantry fighting vehicle. The Puma, Schulz said, had its shortcomings. But they could be controlled. The tank is ready for action and war, he said, and everything will be fine. That's how the soldiers reported it.

The following day, three infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs), three of the 18 that had begun final preparations for their deployment to the NATO Rapid Reaction Force (VJTF) in Lithuania from January, took part in an exercise at a firing range a few kilometers away. The company commander was sitting in one of the three Puma when suddenly a short circuit created an electric arc and fire broke out in the engine compartment. 24 hours later, the crews of the remaining two Puma also reported a defect. After a week of firing training, all 18 Puma were thus out of action.

The general's perseverance in Munster fits the pattern of the German army's handling of the Puma. Together with politicians and the armaments companies Rheinmetall and Kraus-Maffei Wegmann, it wanted to build the "Formula 1 car among infantry fighting vehicles" 20 years ago: light, fast, precise and well protected like no other. The result was a complicated, failure-prone, expensive vehicle. The version for the NATO task force cost 17 million euros.

The tank had to fit into the new Airbus

The story of the Puma symbolizes more than any other the errors of German arms procurement over the past three decades. It begins in December 1999, when the EU heads of state and government decided to build up a rapid reaction force by 2003. This was to include armored combat troops as "medium forces" that had to be deployable by air over a distance of at least one thousand kilometers.

At that time, the German government had to decide on two major armaments projects. The first was to buy a transport aircraft to replace the "Transall". This was the Airbus A400 M. Secondly, the Army needed a successor to the "Marder" infantry fighting vehicle, which was introduced in 1971. This was the Puma. The German government decided that there would only be a new infantry fighting vehicle if it could be transported on the A400 M. This meant that the maximum transport weight of the A400 M had to be exceeded. It thus made the maximum transport weight of the A400 M the decisive design feature for the new tank.

The Puma was not allowed to weigh more than the A400 M could transport: 31.4 tons. By comparison, the "Marder" 1A5 weighs 38 tons. There were even more specifications for the Puma, this time from the Bundeswehr: it had to be similarly enduring and agile to the "Leopard 2" main battle tank and be able to engage armored targets and targets behind cover. To do this, it needed a powerful engine and a large-caliber automatic cannon. It had to offer soldiers a high level of protection against mines, booby traps and bazooka shells. For this, it needed strong armor and a modern protection system. And finally, it had to be able to repel main battle tanks. For this, it needed a guided missile system.

On the edge of technical feasibility

The Puma was supposed to be an all-rounder. But the military specifications on the one hand and the weight limit on the other were tantamount to squaring the circle. Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall wanted to build it anyway. They needed the order. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German government had raked in the peace dividend and hardly ever awarded large orders to the armaments industry. Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall announced their intention to deliver the first Puma within six years. This contradicted all experience in tank construction; the development of the "Marder," for example, had taken eleven years. It soon became apparent that they had promised too much. The Puma required numerous new and often highly complex solutions on the edge of what was technically feasible.

A new engine had to be developed that would be only half the size and half the weight of the "Leopard 2" but would be similarly powerful. It had to accelerate the vehicle, which weighed several tons, to 70 km/h within a short time. Further sophisticated assemblies were added. For example, a running gear with hydropneumatic suspension was developed that is decoupled from the hull. This ensures that the noise from the tracked undercarriage is no longer transmitted to the inside of the tank. This protects the soldiers' ears.

Weight also had to be saved on the turret. This is only possible thanks to thinner armor. However, this would have meant less protection for the commander and gunner who worked in the turret of the Puma's predecessor, the Marder. The Army considered this an unacceptable risk, which is why the commander and gunner were placed in the hull of the Puma. As a result, all the turret's functions, weapons and optics, had to be remotely controlled and monitored by numerous sensors.

A computer on chains

Therein lies one of the main problems. From the Puma's turret, 179 cables and wiring harnesses run into the interior via a slip ring. Electrical currents and signals from numerous sensors run along them, such as those of the targeting and observation devices in the turret and the directional drives for the turret and gun. Connected to a dozen computers, for whose software a million lines of program had to be written, these are thousands of potential sources of error. The Puma is a computer on chains, impossible for a classic tank mechanic to repair. Today, the Bundeswehr needs mechatronics engineers and IT experts to fix bugs and defects.

These people mostly do not work in the military. This is the next cause of the disastrous Bergen-Hohne firing exercise in mid-December. Most of the tanks failed because of problems with electronics and sensors. Specialists would have been needed to correct the defects. But they were not on site. This was not the first time this had happened. Time and again, soldiers complained that they couldn't fix many defects in the Puma without industry. Therefore, since the introduction of the tank in 2016, the question has been how it will survive in a tough and demanding battle. To date, the answer is: not at all.

The high level of automation makes the Puma vulnerable. Unlike in earlier tanks, there is no longer any manual emergency operation for important functions. In the event of failures in the onboard network, soldiers are left only with the hope of being able to leave the vehicle in time before it is hit. However, when the Puma functions faultlessly, soldiers report that it is unrivaled. No armored personnel carrier in the world is better protected and hits more accurately.

A disaster for the Bundeswehr

This is another reason why the total failure of Bergen-Hohne is a disaster for the German Army. But what good is the best tank on paper if it fails too often in practice? Army Inspector Alfons Mais had already declared weeks ago that he wanted to buy a wheeled tank instead of more Pumas, but this is not yet available. Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD) has put further modernization of the 350 Puma and the planned purchase of another 50 infantry fighting vehicles on hold. The industry, she said, must finally get to grips with the problems. Before that, there would be no more money, she said.

But the question is whether the causes of the Panzergrenadierkompanie's problems from Regen actually lay solely with the industry. Soldiers report, for example, that Panzergrenadier Battalion 33 from Luttmersen held a two-week exercise in Bergen-Hohne this year without significant failures of its 38 Puma. Members of the Bundestag told NZZ that "the Puma matter" was being hyped up by the Defense Ministry. The problems were not serious, they said, and only spare parts, tools and repair personnel were missing.

The total failure of the 18 tanks in Bergen-Hohne has now meant that the Puma will not be used in NATO's rapid reaction force for the time being. When German combat units leave for Lithuania in January, they will have the more than 50-year-old "Marder" infantry fighting vehicle with them. Meanwhile, the Puma is being repaired - and has not yet been transported once in an Airbus A400 M.
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To remind again: the tank does NOT fit into one Airbus A400M if configured for battle. The armour takes a second plane to transport it. Three tanks need three planes plus a fourth for their armour. Which also means: one single tank again needs two planes (one third of its maximum loading capacity).

[mapuc]

Reading those word
" For this, it needed strong armor"

Made remember an episode of NASA where they showed some material weighing 1/20 of metal but was 1000 times stronger and was able to be altet with.

Can't remember what they called it and it's many years since I saw this episode.

You own comment to you posting...made me remember an another documentary this time about the famous Tiger tanks-Here they had to remove the tracks and replace it before placing it on a train wagon and at destination-put ordinary track back on.

Markus

[Skybird]

Deutsche Welle (German editon):
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The demolition of Christian churches

Oh, what the churches will be full again at Christmas. May the heating stay cold in the energy crisis, people are crowding in and singing themselves warm. But that is a deceptive snapshot, says Christoph Strack.


Tradition and warmth - is that enough?

Sometime in the summer, the point was reached statistically where every second person in Germany no longer belonged to one of the two major churches, the Catholic or the Protestant. Now there are still 41 million - significantly less than half the population. Long after German reunification, the Federal Republic was still considered a Christian country.

An unspeakable bloodletting of believers

But what is happening now is no longer a mere statistical change. According to the Bertelsmann Foundation's "Religion Monitor," published in December, one in four church members in Germany is thinking about leaving, and one in five is determined to take this step. And 81 percent of all those willing to leave said they had lost their trust in religious institutions because of scandals.

Scandals and stubbornness in the churches

If churches were companies on the free market, their products would have disappeared from the shelves long ago and the management would have filed for bankruptcy. But what does the presence of the church in public look like today? There are cumbersome processes of coming to terms with sexual abuse in both large churches. Church, it seems, on the Catholic side is mostly older men who look worried and often seem unredeemed. All of this is toxic.

The Catholic Church is skilled at discussing yesterday's issues. The "Synodal Way" has been painfully wrestling for years with the concerns that were sent to the Vatican from Germany 50 years ago. They remained unanswered then, and even today Rome categorically holds to its position. The bishops have now only been able, after a process lasting many years, to agree on a new labor law that is no longer necessarily fixed on the sexual lifestyle of employees. In 2022.

The committed in the churches

What is tragic is that the crises and the loss of prestige are dragging down the reputation of those who, hundreds of thousands of times and often quietly, perform their service to society: the ambulance driver of church sponsors such as Johanniter or Malteser, care workers and educators, helpers in clothing chambers, food banks, in the telephone counselling service. "I am aware that a hundred Caritas offers cannot make up for what has been done in terms of injury and alienation from a church that closes itself off to the consecration of women and in whose thousand-year-old gowns sexual repression has found a safe hiding place in some places," said the president of the German Caritas Association, Eva Maria Welskop-Deffaa.

Secularization on the rise

What is this disappearance of majority religion doing to society? This breakdown of religious tradition and familiarity. Secularization is not a bad thing at first. The country will remain religious and yet become more secular. There are Christian, Jewish, Muslim communities, Buddhists, free spirits, humanists. Competition.

The lived religiosity will be less organized and more diverse, it will depend on the individual or smaller groups. This process will change the country with its cultural imprint. And there will be other concepts of ultimate justification.

But the core issues of society will remain. Justice, equality, solidarity, even love of one's neighbor ... These are motives that are at least also shaped by the Christian religion. However, they compete with an unconditional individual concept of freedom.

The country, the world, will need voices that counter the defiant "I" with the "we." Will the churches be heard once again for such a service to society? Full churches on one evening a year are certainly not enough.
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In the Catholic church, the main reason for people turnign away seems to be the massive children abuse scandals, also greed of certain priests and oficials, in the Protestant church it seems to be an issue that it has moved so much to the left that it has turnd into an auxiliary of the woke, the pro gay and lesbian, and the capitalism-critical environmentalist and anti-nuclear power lobby scene. When I compare the chirhces to their cliamkj of what they want to be by their message, I can not help but miust brust in laughter. They are carricatures of said claims onlky. They are the traders and barterss who have been driven out of the temple by Jesus in that in that famous metaphoric Gosple story - and they do not realise it.

For me and my parents, church and Christian dogma play no role anymore, indeed we all dispise it - the church - very much. Beside church stuff, on faith alone I live by the rule "live and let live, push me for your faith and see me pushing back in force". Christmas for us is a purely individual family and memory festival, and we gather on christmas eve only and have our traditional family raclette, we do so since 20 years. I have wonderful childhood and youth memories of christmasses back then, including tree and decorated apartment. These are warm and precious memories for me that I hold in very high esteem. But the church I was already hostile to when I was at school and had courses in "religion". Christmas to me is a family thing foremost and in the first. And over the years, my parents have turned this way, too.


There are intact Christian communities in germany, however, these you mostly find more in the south and then the rural places, say in Bavaria, that direction. Here it is also mixed with a healthy dose of "Heimatliebe", a strong sense of community and a desire to preserve customs and traditions - sometimes with and sometimes in spite of the church, and that doesn't mean the show put on for tourists. These regions are more Catholic than Protestant, the north and west of Germany are more Protestant, and therefore more "barren", self-caste, "Calvinist". Last but not least, the differences in mentality of the native regional populations can also be explained by a denominational shift running roughly in a north-south direction. The south is "saner". So, even if I am against the churches, I am aware of the integrating and defining value of cultural, historically grown contexts, and I would be stupid to deny its importance. The fact that today we claim all kinds of individual uniqueness is also the reason that our sense of community and even more: forour own identity and origin has become dramatically fragmented.

[Skybird]

The scandal deepens and could lead to serious crisis between Germany and its "allies". Trust seems to have been limited all the years anyway. Mind you, some years ago Germany asked to beocme emmber of the Five Eyes club - a and all five members said No. I can only applaude the wisdom in that rejection. FOCUS writes:
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Former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, of all people, had apparently placed a top spy at the heart of Germany's foreign intelligence service. Now Carsten L. is in custody. But the real scandal is just beginning.

The official order from the top of the authorities was brief and strictly confidential. For the time being, Maik Pawlowsky, head of counterintelligence at the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), announced to his staff, they no longer wanted to pursue normal "four-man cases". It was thus clear to the staff of several units in Department 4 that they were not to continue uncovering suspicious foreign spies, but were primarily to track down and observe neo-Nazis and Reich citizens.

Right-wing extremists, as Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) had clearly stipulated in her catalog of measures, were from now on considered priority targets of the BfV. Shadow men and hostile agent leaders - for Faeser, these seem to be figures from yesterday and the day before.

Pavlovsky's change of course, which experts believe represents a clear weakening of counterintelligence, came in January of this year, four weeks before Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Few insiders are likely to know whether suspected top Russian agent Carsten L. was already active in the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) at that time. On Wednesday of last week, he was arrested on charges of alleged treason and passing on a state secret to Russia's intelligence service.

The shock runs deep - in all German security agencies. There is a war going on in Europe - and the brutal aggressor and former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, of all people, had apparently placed a top spy in the heart of Germany's foreign intelligence service. From Moscow's point of view, this was a masterstroke, at least at times. A coup de main as in the novels of John le Carré or Frederick Forsyth.

Germany's agent hunters were also sitting in front of a puzzle over the holidays. The BfV is trying to find out whether there are any peculiarities in the alleged spy's curriculum vitae that would have made him susceptible to being recruited. The State Protection Department at the Federal Criminal Police Office is trying to clarify: Was L. being blackmailed? Could it be a betrayal for ideological reasons? Or was there simply big money to be had? Is there a Russian command officer? How were BND secrets transmitted to Moscow? Did conspiratorial meetings take place somewhere? Did L. first come to the attention of a foreign service, which then alerted the BND?

The BND seemed deeply affected. President Bruno Kahl could clearly see the intelligence service's defeat the day after the arrest. Within an hour, he invited selected media to a background discussion and urgently asked for restraint in journalistic research. Every published detail, Kahl said, could ultimately inform the Kremlin about the extent to which investigators have cleared up what appears to be a serious case of treason in the BND. More than a few in the industry have long been talking about an intelligence super-Gau.

How, the BND boss will have asked himself again and again over the Christmas holidays, could L. have survived all the stringent security checks he has to pass as a senior civil servant with access to state secrets?

The suspected spy, whose name and age are strictly concealed by the security authorities, must have made a reliable impression so far. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why he was entrusted with one of the most sensitive tasks in the intelligence agency, which has almost 6,000 employees.

Carsten L. was the BND's big ear, so to speak. He worked in a leading position in the "Technical Reconnaissance" department. The BND's special antennas, which capture and filter communications worldwide like vacuum cleaners, provide top information on the military, wars, corrupt governments, terrorists and arms dealers. From this mass of information, Carsten L. is said to have filtered the most important information and prepared it for the German government, the Bundeswehr, individual ministries or specialist committees - all of it top secret.

As a supplement to his situation reports, L. was authorized to view sensitive intelligence from friendly intelligence services and use it for his evaluation and situation reports. And that's where a huge intelligence scandal could be brewing.

At present, according to Focus information, it cannot be ruled out that Carsten L. forwarded intelligence gems from the eavesdropping operations of several NATO wiretapping services to Moscow. This would severely shake the relationship of trust between the BND and its partners around the world. Intelligence agencies exchange exclusive information, they live on give and take. Once this basis is fragile, a professional mistrust sets in very quickly that is difficult to regain on both sides.

The investigating Federal Prosecutor's Office, responsible for espionage offenses, is refusing to provide any information about its proceedings against Carsten L. these days. A report in the daily newspaper "Die Welt", according to which Carsten L. might even have had accomplices in the BND, was neither confirmed nor denied. This will not stop the major intelligence services in the USA, Great Britain, France or Israel from initiating their own investigations. The main question is: How safe are my sources and their supplies if there is a traitor in the BND switchboard?
For many, the BND has always been an insecure cantonist

For many, the BND has always been an insecure cantonist. Even at the time of the founding of German foreign espionage in April 1956, foreign countries watched the force, in which many figures from Hitler's repressive apparatus had come together, with suspicion and skepticism.

One of them, former SS man Heinz Felfe, even rose to become head of counterintelligence. For years, he shone with material he claimed to have obtained through enlisted officers of the Soviet intelligence service KGB. All lies and deception: the Russians had long since hired Felfe and equipped him with game material that ultimately accelerated Felfe's rise to head of counterintelligence. In this capacity, he betrayed tens of CIA operations and dozens of Western agents in the Eastern Bloc, who were executed or sentenced to long prison terms immediately after their arrest.

In 1961 Felfe was exposed by the Polish double agent Michael Goleniewski. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison for treason.

This did not satisfy the Americans. For 15 years, they kept their distance from the BND, appalled that Felfe, a former SS officer, remained undetected and was able to deliver so many spies to the knife in his position.

Is a new ice age threatening now, too?

Alfred Spuhler, born in Munich in 1940 and trained as a long-range scout in the Bundeswehr, also triggered a serious crisis at the BND, which in turn strained relations with partner services. Like the current suspected traitor Carsten L., Spuhler worked in the BND's technical reconnaissance unit from 1968. Starting in 1972, he betrayed military information such as the locations of nuclear weapons as well as the identities of Western agents to the GDR intelligence service. His pay: 330,000 marks. A defector from the Eastern Bloc outed Spuhler - he was sentenced to ten years in prison for his treason.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent end of the Cold War initially seemed to defuse aggressive espionage against reunified Germany. A fallacy. The resident agencies of the Russian secret services - including the KGB successor FSB, the civilian foreign service SWR and the particularly aggressive military intelligence service GRU - are currently staffed as they were in the 1960s and 1970s.

Some 200 Russian diplomats, working in Moscow's embassy in Berlin as well as in several consulates general such as Hamburg or Munich, are in fact disguised secret service agents, permanently on the lookout for informants. The diplomatic passport usually protects them from arrest. The former director of the British foreign service MI6 stated months ago: In Europe, only ten percent of the Russian spy network is known.

In early April, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) had 40 Russians expelled from the diplomatic corps because, in the government's view, they posed a danger to Ukrainian refugees in Germany. Moreover, the expulsion was supposed to be a reaction to the Russian army massacre in Butscha.

The arrest of the suspected spy in the BND led to clear confessions last week. Politicians from all parties called on the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to be more vigilant against hostile espionage. "This is a wake-up call," said FDP defense policy spokeswoman Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. Russia's intelligence services were trying to destabilize the Federal Republic, she said. SPD parliamentary group vice-chairman Dirk Wiese suggested improving the equipment of the security services if necessary.

Things are apparently not so good in terms of counterintelligence, with a lack of professionals. "Almost all the good people in the upper and higher ranks are recruited for Department 2 for the observation and reconnaissance of right-wing extremism," knows an experienced insider from the BfV headquarters in Cologne.

A federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe, responsible for espionage crimes, has been wondering for a few years: "There are more and more agent leaders at the Russian embassy, but virtually none of their German sources are discovered. I dare say that the BfV must be taken to the chase in this respect!"
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"Don't trust the Germans."


It should be noted that it was not the Germans themselves who discovered the spy. They needed first - and once again - the hint of a foreign secret service, which helped them with the appropriate information.

As far as I remember, in the past the BND was actually only considered to be reasonably capable in the Middle East, even usefully well positioned. It has never been useful for countering Russia, at least not according to its reputation. But countering Russia or counteringChina may not be seen as politically desirable anyway: it disturbs precious illusions and endagers profits from short-sighted business deals.

[Skybird]

Something's rotten in the state of Germany. Trump showed where it could lead the country. And it could even get worse. Our ancestors have been there before. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:
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In Germany, a tendency to know-it-all attitude is spreading. This could be politically dangerous

Germans don't tend toward extremism - actually. But in the political-media sphere, know-it-all attitude and paternalism are increasingly noticeable. The contempt for the normal is a cause for concern.

For a long time, modern Germany was not a country to worry about in terms of democracy. According to a study conducted this year by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, 25 percent of Germans place themselves exactly in the center of the democratic spectrum of opinion; 36 percent a little to the left, 29 percent a little to the right of this center. That adds up to 90 percent between center-left and center-right. Reassuring, actually.

The danger of Germany slipping into right-wing populism à la Donald Trump thus seems rather small. Nevertheless, it is sometimes hard to shake off the impression that Germany's youth milieu is doing just about everything it can to exacerbate existing divisive tendencies in this generally friendly "center" society without need.

There is a layer of journalists, professors, cultural workers, politicians and civil servants - presumably not overly large, but vocal - who have very clear ideas about what the good life should look like, for everyone, please: climate-neutral, gender-just, queer-tolerant, sensitive to racism, corona-solidary and in every respect against the right. Whereby the definition of what is to be considered "right-wing" lies, of course, with the holders of interpretive sovereignty.

Under the care of these well-meaning people, society is indeed polarizing. Today, survey figures according to which only 42 percent of the population is satisfied with "the political situation in Germany" must be worrying. According to an official government survey, recently published in the East German Representative 2022 Annual Report, just 59 percent of West Germans and only 39 percent of East Germans approve of "democracy as it functions in Germany."

In all eastern German states, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany is the second-strongest party. In polls, the AfD is currently even in first place, for example in Thuringia (30 percent) and Saxony (28 percent).

The dominance of the left-liberal-green milieu had begun during the three grand coalitions under Christian Democrat Angela Merkel. It is now continuing under the traffic light government of SPD, Greens and FDP. More and more often, the debates initiated by the government are about zeitgeisty secondary issues: for example, the work-life balance in the Bundeswehr, against which there is absolutely nothing to say - except that the operational capability of the troops would be ten times more important. Or it's about diversity-friendly ad campaigns by Deutsche Bahn - instead of train punctuality. When the Green mayor of Tübingen criticized this, he was criticized by his own party.

Or it is about the fulfillment of the gender quota instead of the competence of ministers; about the adoption right for lesbian mothers instead of real existing, good daycare places. It is - rightly - about maximum persecution of conspiring Reich citizens, but far too rarely about how to win people back for democracy.

"The climate of opinion is not only being poisoned by the right," writes Left Party politician Sahra Wagenknecht in her book "The Self-Righteous." The "lifestyle left" showed an obvious tendency to "take their privileges for personal virtues and declare their worldview and way of life to be the epitome of progressiveness and responsibility."

The milieu Wagenknecht calls "lifestyle leftists" resides in big cities - living, if not in the mansion districts, then around universities, working in federal and state administrations and in the media.

"They look down with arrogance on the lifeworld, the hardships, even the language of those people who have never been able to attend university, tend to live in small-town milieus and pick up the ingredients for their barbecue at Aldi if only because the money has to last until the end of the month," Wagenknecht writes. She definitely has a point, and as little comparable as the party systems and societies of Germany and the U.S. may be, it's worth looking to America here.

In the U.S., there was probably no more unintentionally honest statement in the entire 2016 election campaign than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's formulation that Trump supporters were a "basket of deplorables." Democrats also liked to refer to them as "white trash" when they had Trump supporters in mind.

James David Vance, a descendant of Irish-Scottish immigrants who grew up in Ohio and has just been elected Republican senator for that state, wrote a remarkable book in 2016 from the perspective of this "white trash": "Hillbilly Elegy.

In it, it's about the sense of a large social group, not to say a "class," of permanently fighting their way up - against unemployment, against drug addiction, and against the contempt of actual or perceived elites. "These people talk about us as "hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash," Vance writes: "I'm talking about neighbors, friends, and relatives."

Another writer, Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was less surprised by Donald Trump's election victory in 2016 than many other political observers. That might have been because she had been doing field research in her constituent state of Wisconsin for years, interviewing farmers, drinking coffee with people at the gas station.

Cramer described a "rural consciousness," a rural consciousness that was linked to a sense of being despised by urban winners. "It's not about facts and policies," Cramer wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times, "but about how these people see the world and their place in it."

The conflict between Washington and rural areas has always shaped politics in America. For Germany, east/west is probably more important than urban/rural, even if the latter contrast also plays a certain role - for example, in the dispute over private transport and, in particular, diesel, which has been branded as harmful to the environment.

In almost all opinion polls on politically sensitive issues (from Corona to the Ukraine war), there are clear differences between Germany East and Germany West. In the West, people like to shake their heads at the Easterners, who supposedly never internalized democracy and freedom. But in reality, perhaps there are completely different issues at stake here as well? About identity and wounded pride?

A second sphere of feeling disconnected, this time defined not geographically but socially, is the non-academic milieu. Anyone who talks to hairdressers, beauticians, nannies, market vendors or plumbers gets the picture of an unbearably arrogant clientele that has no idea about real life. And despite all its demonstrative wokeness, it lacks any sensitivity toward mere servants.

Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz had made "respect" a leitmotif of his Bundestag election campaign. But it is to be feared that he defines "respect" too narrowly: as a purely quantitative remuneration criterion.

The minimum wage of 12 euros per hour will provide a little sigh of relief in many households, because it is now possible to live a little better from exhausting, frustrating work. But respect actually means more: respect for ordinary people who have to fight for their little bit of prosperity every day; who do their homework with their children despite being tired; who don't suddenly want to be forced to speak to colleagues differently than they always have; who aren't excited about every politically proclaimed advance because some "progress" in the world of work and leisure is constantly coming at them, whether they like it or not. Condescension is the last thing these people need.

It can all go on for a long time. But in the long run, it's probably not enough, even in Germany, just to hope that no evil charismatic like Donald Trump rears his head - after all, no one in America seriously expected that either. Now, today, we should immediately start doing what Katherine Cramer did in Wisconsin: listening to other people.
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[Rockstar]

Suspected Russian Agent in Germany Had Access to Western Intelligence About Ukraine War
U.S., U.K. investigate whether signals intelligence officer shared material with Moscow, officials say

https://www.wsj.com/articles/suspect...ar-11672255183

BERLIN—A senior German intelligence officer arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia had access to a trove of top-secret information about the war in Ukraine as well as knowledge of how it was collected by the U.S. and its allies, Western officials say.

Prosecutors are trying to determine whether the material was shared with Moscow. If so, it could have alerted Russia to its own vulnerabilities and given away Western intelligence-gathering methods and capabilities.

American and British officials said they were trying to determine the scope of potential damage in Ukraine and elsewhere. One U.S. official said there was “grave concern” about the case.

The suspected spy, identified as Carsten L. by German prosecutors, worked for the signals intelligence branch of the country’s Federal Intelligence Service, which conducts electronic surveillance and works with the U.S. National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.

Prosecutors said the man was being held on suspicion of committing treason as their investigation continues.

The German intelligence service, known as the BND, confirmed the arrest but has declined to comment further, citing national security risks. The NSA and GCHQ declined to comment.

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, declined to comment.

Germany isn’t a member of the so-called Five Eyes intelligence community made up of the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, but Berlin does receive sensitive information from those countries, especially in relation to the war in Ukraine, officials from three countries said.

Carsten L. had worked on intelligence related to Russia’s war in Ukraine, including material gathered by German military satellites, German officials said.

His department also processed classified intelligence from Russia and Ukraine obtained by other Western spy agencies by tapping electronic devices, intercepting telecommunications and satellite imagery.

The BND, which has a staff of 6,500 and is based in a highly protected campus in the center of Berlin, has been focusing its intelligence-gathering and analysis on Russia and Ukraine since the start of the war, and is traditionally also active in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa.

The Kremlin’s suspected penetration of Germany’s most secretive security agency is the latest evidence of Moscow’s aggressive tactics in Europe, where Russia has been accused of killing political opponents, sabotaging infrastructure and trying to steal industrial secrets.

The BND received a tipoff about the suspected spy from an allied intelligence service earlier this year, German officials said. After an internal investigation, the case was passed to the federal prosecutor, who then ordered the man’s arrest last week.

The case could be the worst example of Russian penetration of Germany’s intelligence services since 1961, when a senior BND employee who was spying for the Soviet Union exposed a network of 100 CIA spies, said Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, who has written several books on the BND.

Roderich Kiesewetter, an opposition lawmaker and deputy chairman of the parliamentary oversight panel that oversees Germany’s intelligence agencies, said the case could be a potentially severe blow to European security.

He has called for Germany to set up a commission of inquiry to explore how many politicians and senior civil servants might have been compromised by Russia and China and look at how to reduce Germany’s dependence on both countries.

Germany scaled down counterespionage efforts in the early 2000s, becoming vulnerable to Russian operations, according to Mr. Kiesewetter and other experts.

However, senior German intelligence officials said the Ukraine war had marked a “paradigm shift” in German politics.

Berlin started cracking down on Russian espionage this year after Moscow attacked Ukraine. The heads of Europe’s domestic securities agencies met in early April in Paris to forge a common strategy on fighting Russian espionage. After the meeting, European governments expelled around 600 Russian officials from their countries, including 40 by Germany.

The decision was “the most significant strategic blow against the Russian intelligence services in recent European history,” Ken McCallum, the head of Britain’s MI5 agency, said in November.

Russia has since sought to offset the loss by activating so-called deep cover agents, and using informal collaborators as well as recruiting civil servants, business people, academics and others as spies, according to several Western officials.

The probe into Carsten L. hasn’t found evidence that he had received payments from his handlers. Investigators are trying to determine whether he was blackmailed or whether he was motivated by ideological convictions, people familiar with the probe said.

Russian groups, including criminal gangs hired by the Kremlin, have been using cyberattacks to target German critical infrastructure this year, attempting to hack into utilities, airports, and medical facilities, according to several German officials.

Moscow has also shifted to industrial espionage as it attempts to compensate for the loss of access to Western technology due to sanctions, especially in the fields of aerospace, control electronics, semiconductors and basic research, according to counterespionage officials.

German officials suspect Russia is behind several sophisticated acts of sabotage such as the destruction of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines and an October attack on the railroad that temporarily halted all rail traffic in the north of the country.

Russia has denied involvement.

The railway attackers crippled both the railway’s main communication network and its backup by almost simultaneously severing two data cables located more than 300 miles apart, investigators say.

The cables were inside a special manhole, one of which was covered with a heavy concrete lid, and whoever performed the sabotage had detailed knowledge of the network, investigators said.

“A temporally coordinated assault on two key points far away from each other that cut off exactly the right segments in a bundle of cables without leaving any traces was the work of experienced professionals,” one of the investigators said.

In a previously unreported incident, the homes of several CIA officers in Germany were broken into in 2020, in what some officials think was an intimidation attempt by Russian secret services.

The break-ins took place simultaneously, and nothing was stolen, according to U.S. and German officials. The investigation concluded that it was likely the work of a criminal gang, although no suspects were apprehended, U.S. Embassy officials said.

Max Colchester and Warren P. Strobel contributed to this article.

[Skybird]

^ Its a mess, and I think Five Eyes must draw consequences form this.


The interior ministress is a far-leaft leaning super-woke SPD quota-woman who shows more talent for being a left politic commissioner than a competent minister, anmd she abuses her position to have channelled practically all competent ressources in the BND from fighting foreign spoies to observing the AfD and the Reichsbürger. This may not have allowed the Russian plot alone, since Russia acts aggressive since always, but it has made sure that this new crisis in Germany again finds Germany with Germany having its according ressources in complete disarray and disorder.


Really, Five Eyes must be much more choosey regarding what they shgare with the Germans and what better not, even more so since the political goals of Bubble-Olaf regarding Russia and Ukraine are dubious, to put it mildly.


Dont trust the Germans.

[Catfish]

You think the "five eyes" are anything better? It is all lies

The problem is in Europe they are all rug rats in the political leaderships, they do not dare to jump over any hurdle alone (because of the nuclear disparity or whatever), it is always the US that has to lead them (by the nose) including the UK.

Canada had to lend tanks from Germany in Afghanistan, the US wants german locations for all kinds of and including illegal actions. Anyone believes Guantanamo is legal or a shiny example, or flying people to Poland to have them tortured there because it would be illegal in the US?
The only way is to become independent and better in all x-int branches.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Catfish

You think the "five eyes" are anything better? It is all lies

I only think that the Five Eyes is more potent in gathering intel than the BND. Just look at the scale of ELINT run by the US. The UK also are good at it. The BND - as I said, Faeser has set them all on the Reichbürger and the AfD. Anti-Russian operations and anti-left-terrorism operatiosn do npot exiost as a necessit yin here biased, one-sided little worldview. But that carricature of a Reiochbüprthger "coup" - hasn't it made you suspicious that the media all stood ready when the raids began? I say it was a staged operaiton, blowing up a mosquito to the sioze of an elephant plot to once again push it down people'S throats that rightwing terror is a problem but left violence never is, and in principla does not even exist, and iof sop,m can be exycused, since it is left and thus is for a good cause.



The BND is the German exterior, international secret service. What the heck has it to do with observing internal German groups...??? Thats the job of the Verfassungsschutz, and where links to foreign service meddling in internal German movements are a given: sometimes even the Militärischer Abschirmdienst.

[Skybird]

A small interjection for the new year: I have just read that the anarchist cabinet of Bubble-Olaf has inflated the already large civil service of the ministries by no less than 60% in the first four months of their visitation. And this in the context of over-indebtedness, declining economic performance, a shortage of skilled workers, the retirement of the baby boomer generation and an imploding German pension system. 60% more pen-pushers for the ministries.

Bureaucracy is the truest power tool of any dictatorship. As long as people's heads are spinning, they have no time left to think and revolt.

[Skybird]

A lil history class...

[Skybird]

https://www.dw.com/en/german-defense...age/a-64264937


There are lows, and there are lower lows. And then there are lows so low that you wonder wether there is any bottom.


That stunt of this incompetent quota-female was rich even for her low standards. And for the first time I see that none of the coalition politicians comes to her defence after her latest failure. I see a small chance that this may ring the beginning of her end, while she more and more becomes minister for self-.defence. Refering to the war as a time of exciting personal experiences and opportunity not meet interesting people, is a bit too low even for the standards of somebody who apparently has not even a rubber dummy for his missing functional brain.



This is embarrassing and just plain disgusting. She does not even look as if she is properly oriented in the reality surrounding her. Originally she is lawyer. Totally lost in hyper-abstraction and lack of reality-orientation, i woulds say, like her hole perception of the war. Imagine how much damage she could do in her profession for which she actually has had a minimum of interest.



Go home and bake apple pie, granny. For your own part you have brought shame enough over Germany.


"A war is raging in the middle of Europe. This was associated with many special impressions that I was able to gain. Many, many encounters with interesting, with great people. For that I say a heartfelt thank you." - A pardoy of herself. Free of any instinct. And noisy firecrackers in the background (the fireworks escalated seriously in Berlin, with some heavy violence like never before). Somebody should have told her that there are limits to shamelessness even on New Year's Eve.


Phrasendresch.



Her last report on the status of the Bundeswehr had nothing to say about ammunition reserves, Puma failures and and all the other desasters haunting the Bundeswehr. Instead: pages and pages of calculations how much paper was saved by having equipped some offices with computers, and that this and that Bundeswehr station now has so and so man bicycles and e-bikes, and how much CO2 that saves. Serious. That was the focus of the written last situation report of the last year, published on I think Friday.

Maybe the Germans have a secret plan, that is to make the Russians laugh themselves to death.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by Skybird

A lil history class...

Very interesting and informative