Volkswagen is planning to convert one of its factories to produce Iron Dome components.
© Fatima Shbair/Getty ImagesRockets launched towards Israel from the northern Gaza Strip and response from the Israeli missile defense system.
If the project is realized, VW will convert one of its German factories in the historic city of Osnabrueck from making automobiles to producing components of Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system.
There are good reasons why this has raised eyebrows. For one thing, it reflects not only VW's growing problems, but those of Germany's vital automobile sector and
the German economy as a whole. As the
Financial Times has noted, the VW-Rafael project would mark
"the highest-profile example yet of the German car industry, where profits have plunged," trying to save itself by entering the
"booming defense sector."These plunging profits are due to many factors: Chinese competition; Germany's failure to keep up with cutting-edge technology, communication infrastructure, and business practices; American sabotage by tariff warfare and filching German companies via subsidies; and last but not least, the horrendous energy costs that the entire EU has inflicted on itself by going to war - by Ukrainian proxy and sanctions - against Russia.
The shift to making things for the military, meanwhile, is just a small part of Germany's breathtakingly misguided response: Namely, a
policy of going into massive public debt - under a so-called conservative - to finance a bizarre form of military Keynesianism that is based on illusions (no, Russia is not about to attack),
produces self-reinforcing Russophobia (which makes a return to normality even harder), and won't work as an economic boost, as even the usually government-aligned
Spiegel has admitted.
In short, like a prism, the Osnabrueck plan bundles together many of Germany's worst - and self-inflicted - problems, and the single silliest idea of how to tackle them.Yet, there is obviously a whole other dimension to the VW-Rafael project that is even worse:
The plan also encapsulates Germany's complicity with Israel's crimes, an obstinate policy that is deeply immoral, has twisted Germany's domestic politics and discourse toward
cynical racism,
censorship, and authoritarian restrictions on free speech (
as a UN report has confirmed), and, moreover, is stupidly shortsighted as well, since it alienates most of the world, and in particular, its rising part in the Global South.
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