Attacked heavily by the anti-Russian war party, signers of the Open Letter to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz which calls for a ban on German heavy weapons supplies to Ukraine and peace diplomacy instead, are striking back against the witch hunters.
Peter Weibel, an Austrian art manager and co-initiator of the Open Letter, tells a rather hostile interviewer of the Standard daily: “The rhetoric with which the signatories of the letter are showered is not reminiscent of the free world, but rather of Russian state television, which also showers its opponents with ridicule and scorn. The warning of a third world war is admittedly based on a hypothesis. We know that today’s nuclear weapons are much more sophisticated than they were in 1945. Today, it is possible to detonate graphite bombs, which are used to render electrical installations such as power plants, substations or overhead power lines inoperable for a limited time by short-circuiting them. So nuclear strikes are quite realistic because of their local limitation and targeting, precisely because they no longer trigger an uncontrolled, devastating conflagration.”
“The chapter on the eastward expansion of NATO is the crucial point in my eyes,” Weibel says. “Again and again it is doubted whether Gorbachev was actually promised at the dissolution of the USSR and promised at the reunification of Germany that there would be no eastward expansion of NATO. And again and again documents emerge that prove exactly this promise. When Putin is accused of clinging to great power dreams, it obscures the realization that his phantom pain is a broken promise by the West, not the loss of the Soviet republics.”
