Post photo: NATO Logo | © Pixabay
Not only a somewhat older topic, but also the currently best available litmus test for one's own democratic attitude.
NATO, the Council of Europe and the European Union are fundamentally and conceptually democratic alliances for peaceful coexistence, whereby NATO goes one step further and promises its members comprehensive military protection against aggression and attacks from outside the alliance.
After the collapse of the Soviet system, which was only logical and which can be viewed very positively for humanity as a whole - the largest apparatus of genocide, oppression and terror of all time - all the doors of the Western world were wide open to all former Soviet republics. It was believed that the "end of history" and the one world had already been reached — even the Chinese were beginning to take an interest in Western values.
And so it happened that right from the beginning of this new era everyone was thinking about how the Russian Federation could be included in NATO and thus turn it into the ultimate peace project. The Russian Federation sent the first political and military representatives to NATO headquarters and it was almost as if they had reached their destination.
The fact that not all countries trusted this development, especially not those countries that had only recently escaped from the clutches of the Soviet regime, surprised some of us at first, but over the years it became more and more understandable even for the western partner countries - revanchism and totalitarianism are simply not to be killed and probably the yang of peace and democracy.
And so it soon became quite obvious that the totalitarians were once again tinkering with stab-in-the-back legends from the start. One of these stab-in-the-back legends is the "illegal" NATO eastward expansion.
And this stab-in-the-back legend, namely that NATO is expanding eastwards against all agreements and treaties, is the ultimate democratic litmus test!
The Council of Europe, the European Union and also NATO are alliances which, based on their very own principles, are open to all other countries that agree to their ideas, principles and agreements. The extent to which countries can then be integrated into these alliances is a very complex and often very lengthy process — let's take Turkey's accession to the EU as an example.
In any case, on the one hand, these alliances do not want to or cannot forbid any of their member states to leave (see BREXIT) and, on the other hand, they do not want to or cannot (!) forbid any other state from applying for membership.
To think this, namely that NATO can forbid other countries to become democratic or even strive to join NATO, gives a deep insight and reveals one's own totalitarian way of thinking!
Heinrich's remarks on the NATO expansion are very instructive and – in my opinion – correct.
Walther Heipertz
Thank you Walther! Unfortunately, we still have far too many fellow citizens who are deeply rooted in totalitarianism. The really bad thing is that a lot of them sit in our parliaments.