This article appears in the December 23, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
In Germany, Demonstrators Ring the Dessau Peace Bell
[Print version of this article]
Dec. 6—The following report appeared in Nouvelle Solidarité, the newspaper of the French LaRouche co-thinker organization, Solidarité et Progrès. It has been provided to EIR with permission, and has been translated from the French.
On Sunday, November 27, 2022, a motorcade passed through the town of Schwedt in the northeastern state of Brandenburg, Germany, and a demonstration took place downtown, whose aim was to defend the PCK, the oil refinery located in Schwedt. It supplies 90% of the gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and fuel oil for Brandenburg and Germany’s capital, Berlin.
Since the German government refuses to buy Russian oil, the refinery, until now supplied by the Druzhba (“Friendship”) pipeline from Russia, Germany will now have to rely on oil from the international market arriving at the port of Rostock on the Baltic Sea. The small detail that kills, is that this will bring only 50% of the quantity previously supplied by Russia. This will result in serious supply difficulties and price increases at gas stations, and shortages of kerosene at Berlin’s Brandenburg Airport.
In front of the approximately 400 participants in the demonstration on the Theaterplatz, master craftsman Karl Krökel from Dessau (founder of the non-partisan movement “Craftsmen for Peace”) spoke, together with representatives of Schwedt, and various organizations.
As an introduction, the speaker showed a video of the famous Friedensglocke (Peace Bell) in Dessau. It is a monument commemorating the (peaceful) political turning point in 1989 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The bell was cast from the metal of the weapons of the fighting groups, collected, transported and stored by the People’s Police. There were 1250 AK-47 assault rifles, 174 light machine guns, 87 anti-tank guns and 171 pistols melted down.
For Krökel, the Dessau Peace Bell still symbolizes the same will for peace on five continents.
Krökel may not know it, but his speech echoes that of Jean Jaurès, delivered in Basel, Switzerland on Nov. 24, 1912, before the outbreak of the “Great War.” In that speech, Jaurès said:
We were received in this church by the sound of the bells, which seemed to me, just now, like a call for general reconciliation. It reminded me of the inscription that [Friedrich] Schiller had engraved on his symbolic bell: “Vivos voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango! Vivos voco.” (I call the living, I mourn the dead, I break the proud! I call the living.) I call the living to defend themselves against the monster that appears on the horizon. Mortuos plango: (I mourn the dead). I weep over the countless dead lying there towards the East and whose stench reaches us like a remorse. Fulgura frango: (I break the proud). I will break the thunderbolts of the war which threaten in the clouds.
Herr Krökel, like the speakers who followed, pointed out the serious consequences of the ideological stubbornness of the Federal government on the standard of living of the average citizen and businessmen.
Frank Bornschein, one of the organizers of the demonstration, spoke of the fate of the refinery’s subcontractors, hundreds of whose jobs depend on the refinery. According to him, it is not the war in Ukraine that is causing the misery, but the “New Green Deal” decided on long before by the EU, which provides for the abandonment of all fossil fuels.
Klaus Fimmen of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity (BüSo) spoke of the national and international echo of the struggle against the deindustrialization of Germany. Many cities and municipalities have sent open letters to the federal and regional governments, warning that the coming wave of bankruptcies will deprive them of the financial possibility of fulfilling their obligations to their constituents. He then cited the letter of support from French mayors for the peace initiative of the Stralsund City Council, which has offered its city hall as a venue for peace talks between Russia and Ukraine.
