Berlin – Two bestsellers of long ago focused on this city and its turbulent 20th century history: Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich and Leon Uris's Armageddon. I've been reading them in a new context, the 21st century American foreign-policy collapse.
Speer wrote first-hand of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Uris wrote of the heroic Berlin Airlift, when the city was saved from the grasp of the Soviet Union by a constant rotation of supply aircraft between Berlin and the western zone.
Berlin is now capital of a free, democratic, united Germany and de facto leader of Europe. The sacrifices of Americans to defeat the Nazis and the communist totalitarians paid off, which should be a constant celebration of a united America.
Instead, past American sacrifices and efforts are now being mocked in our own country and around the globe by those who would tear down the free world step by step through disinformation and propaganda and replace it with authoritarian governments subservient to the likes of Russia, China, Turkey, Hungary, and the Philippines.
Germany has a special history with propaganda. Speer reminds us how Josef Goebbels mastered its use in the rise of the Nazis with his Hitler-featured rallies and his command of the mass media. It is no wonder that the current German government is mounting its own counter-propaganda campaign against authoritarianism by reminding its citizens that it is a Rechtsstaat, or country of the rule of law.
Today, at the S-Bahn at Botanischer Garten and the U-Bahn at Kottbusser Tor, I saw large billboards placed by the federal ministry of justice. See an example in the photo below, which offers the Rechtsstaat, the backbone of democracy, as protection against arbitrariness and as pursuer of justice.
The billboards are shocking, not for what they say, but that they exist at all. They are evidence that the American successes of the last century to help establish Germany as a strong democracy, and to protect our own, are in peril, the sacrifices perhaps for naught. This is more than sobering, it is frightening.
