Letter from a European citizen to the Presidente of European Commission during the Covid19 Pandemic
Dear Presidente Ursula Von der Leyen, you were a defense minister. During your ministry, you raised Germany’s military expenses. Germany has a monstruos military expenditure, almost the double of Italy’s. And Italian spending is the eleventh in the world and the fourth in Europe.
It was you, during a conference in Talling , who asked to increase the military expenses of Germany to reach 1.5% of GDP and then the target of 2%, as requested by the Americans. You have worked well to increase Germany’s defense spending, reaching an expenditure of 45,777,806,549.46 euros . Germany, when you were defense minister, reached 8th place in world military spending. Congratulations, you did a great job. Then you understand well the very high level of European military expenditure.
Europe (and you chair the European Commission) spends over 300 billion euros a year on military expenditures. The fact that you worked to increase German military spending makes me believe that you value these hundreds of billions in military spending, which in my opinion is money invested in chaos and world disorder, as very important expenses, which you absolutely must bear, obviously with taxpayers’ money.
Very well. By analyzing your behavior, we understand that you are a person who loves the safety of her citizens very much. And you rightly think it is important to increase military spending for the security of citizens, always by using their money.
In the past ten years the European Union has spent something like 3 trillion on arms and wages for its powerful professional armies. And all of this, obviously, according to your ideology, for the safety of taxpaying citizens.
But what did this serious pandemic teach us, President Ursula von der Leyen?
Well, it has taught us that that security, which in your opinion has the characteristics of a world (and a Germany) full of weapons, cannot be guaranteed even with monstrous military expenditures.
Those who are seriously attacking us, in fact, are not terrorists who have escaped from “geopolitical laboratories,” but a virus. Are you surprised?
You are embittered because you cannot use tanks and bombers against the viruses that are killing the citizens of European peoples. I understand your bitterness and I am close to you, in solidarity. Now you find that you could have defended the citizens very differently if you had been the Minister of Health, and you had given at least half the money you gave to the military, to civilian scientific research, certainly not to militarized research, which is as we speak developing robotic weapons with which to kill human beings without feeling moral responsibility.
We know that this virus and this pandemic was more imminent and likely than a war for the West. We know this because scientists have been shouting at us for many years to prepare to avoid it. The WHO has released many documents urging governments to strengthen health systems.
Here, when you have a moment, you can ask one of your assistants to look at this long investigation that I published, which contains the direct links to some of the scientific documents that for years have been asking governments to prepare for this danger.
Evidently you did not take them very seriously Presiden Ursula Von der Leyen, and, listening to different advisors, you thought that the security of peoples could be guaranteed by selling billions of weapons across the world and strengthening armies.
I believe that taxpaying citizens should have the political strength, in the future, to make a new “Nuremberg process” against executives who have failed to fulfill their mandate for health surveillance and prevention.
These national or supranational officials should be tried by the AJA court, for the reason that, while they were aware of the serious danger of a probable pandemic, they continued to feed the parasitic military-industrial establishments, removing public money from funding to deal with the real security threats, and to give it to arms dealers and to the salary needs of the professional military .
I believe you are one of these officials who in the name of security has instead compromised safety of our peoples.
Since it was in the name of security that you politicians have, in the last decade, wasted over 3 trillion euros on military expenditures, I think you should understand that now we need to give the military the misery that was previously given to health research, and to give to health research the powerful means that were given to the military.
Because Covid19 has undoubtedly clarified where the threats to citizens’ security come from.
Since you love the safety of citizens, I’m sure you will immediately work for it.
In the face of your generosity in military spending when you were defense minister of powerful Germany, I find it ridiculous to think of the misery of a mere 100 billion euros for unemployment assistance in the Covid19 emergency.
Especially considering that this pandemic is not the result of inscrutable fate, but simply the consequence of the criminal omissions and negligence of the European political classes, which is why we, the European peoples, will certainly take you to the judicial courts. Your negligence and your omissions are the cause of thousands of deaths, the threat to democracy in this moment of suspension of civil liberties, and the economic crisis that will come.
I know that none of you possesses a very high imaginative computing power, but now, by combining all your meager intellectual abilities in the European Parliament, all of you must understand that by not avoiding an epidemic announced for years, you have triggered a monstrous social bomb that you too are sitting on, with your families.
So, President Ursula, I will tell you how to stop all this mess: Now those 3000 billion euros that in ten years you have fed to the military lobbies and professional armies (only in Europe, because if we collect the American allies, these military expenses become 14,000 billion in ten years) fueling the war and the instability of the world, they will have to be converted into social expenses to repair this catastrophe that you, political classes, have produced with your negligence.
I also say it to David Sassoli’s simpatic Holliwoodian jaw. I say this to the aristocrat Paolo Gentiloni and to the whole European Parliament. All you , now must stop using our money to forage militarism and war, and use our money to recover the prosperity and balance of our societies. Immediately convert the 3 trillion euros of this coming decade’s European military expenses into post-pandemic social reconstruction expenses. There are no other peaceful alternatives.
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Post Scriptum: A small biographical note. Dear Ursula, I know that you have important political roots, because your father Ernst Albrecht was also a famous politician, and the author of the well-known “Der Staat – Idee und Wirklichkeit. Grundzüge einer Staatsphilosophie” (Seewald, Stuttgart 1976). For 30 years, I was the pupil of Aldo Rosselli, the son and grandson of the Rosselli Brothers, and I want to remind you that in the house of the Rosselli Brothers, frequented by that Ernesto Rossi who wrote, together with Altiero Spinelli, the Ventotene manifesto in exile in Ventotene, the ideological germ of the European Union was partly born. It is from this heritage that I speak to your heritage.
By the same autor “Coronavirus – Lo stato delle cose ”
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