Quo Vadis Germany

Quo Vadis Germany

An obituary in 12 theses or the downfall of an obsolete model. Speech at the annual "Mut zur Ethik" conference from August 29 to 31, 2025 in Sirnach, Switzerland by Patrik Baab.

By Patrik Baab

Thesis 1: Economically, Germany stands on the brink of the abyss. The sanctions against Russia have backfired. Severing energy ties with Russia and blowing up three of the four Nord Stream pipelines – for which researcher Seymour Hersh holds the US responsible – have rendered the German economy uncompetitive. Deindustrialization has reached an irreversible tipping point. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being lost, inflation is rising, and the economy is shrinking while Russia grows (+4.5% in 2024). Billions are draining away from consumption and the welfare state into the pockets of the American arms industry. German free-rider imperialism has failed.

Thesis 2: Berlin’s political subservience to the US is now taking its toll. On August 18, European representatives sat in the Oval Office like schoolboys who had done something naughty – a farce of submission. European leaders pleaded for the war to be extended. Germany allowed itself to be dragged into a war that Ukraine could not win from the start. The NATO strategy – arms aid, sanctions, seizure of Russian assets, diplomatic isolation – has failed. Russia has restructured itself and pivoted to Asia; 153 of the 193 UN countries still trade with Moscow. Under American hegemony, Germany is being restructured as the poorhouse of Europe. The bill is being paid by workers and the middle class.

Thesis 3: Militarily, Germany and NATO have lost the war. Russian troops are advancing across a broad front; Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson have been incorporated into the Russian Federation. By late August 2025, more than 1.7 million Ukrainian soldiers were dead or missing. Russia has over 700,000 troops deployed and is superior in drones, artillery, and missiles. The Anchorage summit between Putin and Trump demonstrated that the US is writing off Ukraine and wants to Europeanize the war. The rapprochement between Russia and the US is pushing Europe toward geopolitical irrelevance. Moscow’s pivot to Asia will last at least a hundred years. There is nothing left to cultivate in the EU.

Thesis 4: Germany is undergoing a process of civilizational decay. The way this war is being waged – we supply the weapons, you supply the corpses – testifies to moral decline. Slogans such as "Russians are animals" or "We must become war-ready" contradict the peace principle of the Basic Law. They demean people not for what they do, but for who they are. The suffering of the Ukrainian population is ignored; Ukrainians are treated as inferior. This is a resurgence of racism, partly shaped by Ukrainian fascism, which once again manages to convince the majority. I see this as a relapse into anti-democratic ideology and a regression of civilization. Let us look at the forgotten history, at the hidden causes.

Thesis 5: The decline of the German economy is the result of a long series of self-destructive processes. The tax exemption on capital gains under Schröder (2002) led banks to sell their industrial holdings and invest in risky bonds. American financial investors bought shares in all DAX companies, and Germany became entangled in the financial crisis. To save the banks, their debts were socialized, making the state dependent on financial capitalism. The refinancing of the German state has fallen into the hands of American investors – BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs – who earn billions from the war and speculate against any country that halts its war course.

Thesis 6: German policy follows the dominance of the financial sector, thereby undermining industrial foundations. The declining profit margin in all Western countries is countered by lowering wages, opening new markets, and seeking cheaper raw materials. Ukraine offers all of this. Chancellor Merz acts as a branch manager for BlackRock on German soil and acts rationally when he fuels the war: financial investors profit from both war and reconstruction. In wartime, capital is destroyed and accumulation can begin anew. Rosa Luxemburg: "The proletarians fall, the stock prices rise." The war was a bet on the stock market that turned into Russian roulette.

Thesis 7: NATO’s eastward expansion is the primary cause of the war. As Stoltenberg admitted in September 2023, the war did not begin in February 2022 but in 2014, with the Western-organized Maidan coup. EU diplomats negotiated with Ukrainian fascists over the removal of President Yanukovych. In April 2014, the coup government attacked the separatist republics. The Minsk II agreement was an attempt at deception; compliance was never intended. Russian treaty proposals from December 2021 and January 2022 were rejected. NATO wanted war, and Germany went along with it.

Thesis 8: The war in Ukraine is the most shameless propaganda lie presented to Germans since 1945. The population is deliberately misled about the causes, the front-line situation, and the geopolitical context. This cognitive warfare is orchestrated by NATO and executed by a propaganda and censorship complex: press, GONGOs, think tanks, universities, and churches. Transatlantic networks serve as consensus factories for American hegemony. The result is a mental filter bubble where the intellectual horizon is limited, emotional reflexes are conditioned toward Russophobia, and behavioral steering is not experienced as coercion. This completes the German elite's loss of touch with reality.

Thesis 9: Economically, Germany – like Europe – stands on the brink of the abyss. Germany alone has invested at least 50 billion euros in the war. The costs of war and reconstruction are estimated at 800 billion dollars. Money from EU agricultural and cohesion funds will flow to Ukraine. In Anchorage, Putin and Trump discussed the possibility of moving frozen Russian assets from Europe to the US – a lucrative deal at Europe’s expense. After peace, shadow banks will massively speculate on European government bonds, which could cause Germany’s refinancing to collapse.

Thesis 10: Most European leaders have no choice but to prolong the war. The danger of a sovereign debt crisis forces them to do so. They hope that European troops can withstand Moscow for the next five to ten years and seize Ukrainian raw materials – coal, gas, lithium, rare earth metals. The political elite cannot turn back: from the Maidan murders to the nearly two million dead – defeat inevitably leads to a reckoning. Without the US, Europeans cannot defeat Russia. Therefore, they want to keep Washington in the war at all costs.

Thesis 11: The war is a war against one’s own population and against democracy. Armament in Germany serves a different purpose: suppressing internal unrest and maintaining the ruling party cartel. A transatlantic comprador rule must be maintained by force of arms, constitutionally possible via a state of tension (Article 80a Basic Law). Having failed as a peace project, the EU now leads a zombie existence as a war machine for the Pan-Germanic advance to the East.

Thesis 12: Germany – a country without resistance. War and the destruction of democracy go hand in hand, made possible because the population offers no resistance. Civic courage has been paralyzed by state control during the pandemic, war propaganda, and digitalization. Digital capitalism numbs people as consumers while they are exploited and manipulated as political subjects. This blocks critical engagement with the political elite and opens the door to rewriting history. In Germany, this is fatal given the uniqueness of Nazi crimes: it enables a psychological reversal of guilt and shifts aggression toward Russia as the enemy. The result is a country on autopilot, trapped in a digital economy of emotions, without opposition, helplessly regressing into barbarism.

Farewell

A deviation from the bellicose course can only be enforced through fundamental resistance. We must see whether the coming massive austerity measures will move people to protest in the streets. What is needed is a broad alliance for peace and the welfare state. But the Germans are dozing off into their own downfall. Thus shall it befall the Western hegemonic power and its vassals. 

The Global South will never forgive us for the genocide in Gaza, the genocide in the Donbas, the provoked war in Ukraine, and the more than 20,000 sanctions against Russia. Nothing will be forgotten. Germany sits once again defiled among nations – defiled with the blood of those lying in the streets in our imperialist wars. Those who cling to crumbling empires will be dragged down with them.