RUTHLESS CRITICISM

“If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.” — Karl Marx

October 2025

Chronicle of an announced peace

Trump’s 12-day war in the Middle East

On June 2025, the time has come – the world gets to witness a double premiere: For the first time ever, the Iranian nuclear program, long contested by the West and its Middle Eastern outposts, becomes the target of an open air war by the Israeli Air Force; and for the first time, Trump orders the long threatened deployment of the US Air Force directly against the Islamic Republic in case the nuclear diplomacy he has initiated with the Iranian leadership fails.

From “finally!” to “oh my God, oh my God!”, the usual commentaries are delivered by the usual parties, and after the deed is done, the usual experts get to express their unconditional satisfaction with its military-technical quality and weigh a few problematic aspects of its international legal dimensions. Trump celebrates his military, i.e. himself, in his familiar way, and his great victory can’t be denied even by those who begrudge him his success and so are once again seeking and finding some flies in an essentially delectable ointment.

What remains somewhat overlooked is the real progress made in terms of Trump’s programmatic realignment of American foreign policy, i.e., the world according to America’s newly defined interests and imperatives – and the accompanying lesson about the beautiful thing called peace in America’s world.

Recommended readings:

Notes on a new type of asymmetric war (2020)

Comments on D. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran (2018)

Why and how the United States wants to get Iran to give up its nuclear program (2012)


September 2025

Trump calls off the Ukraine war –
Europe sticks to its policy of incompatibility with Russia

Ending the Ukraine War is high on Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda. On the campaign trail, he already promised to immediately end it, within one day, and with him in power, it wouldn’t have started in the first place. The interesting thing about the first statement is his political judgment on the war. Trump doesn’t mean that the job America undertook under his predecessor has been adequately completed and can therefore be ended. He considers America’s involvement there over the past three years to be utterly wrong. Therefore, the second statement doesn’t mean to say that America’s deterrent power against its main enemy has failed in Ukraine, but clarifies: Under Biden’s presidency the warring parties there failed to show their respect for America as the force for peace. And even more: Trump’s predecessor steered his country into a war that wasn’t America's concern from the start. Three years of war without any tangible progress, especially without any apparent benefit for America, but instead a damage caused by squandering beautiful US weapons and billions of dollars, are proof of this. Under Biden, America allowed itself to be embroiled in and exploited for an enterprise that is none of the world power’s business. So Trump isn’t giving up on the war, let alone conceding defeat.


July 2025

A “common sense revolution” on the world market

Trump’s tariff offensive

According to Donald Trump, the greatest victim of the American world order is his own country, which has been exploited by friend and foe alike for decades.

This is now ending, and in order to finally make America first again, the president has decided to launch a tariff offensive, which the public is receiving with interested astonishment: The US president’s erratic maneuvers fly in the face of any economic sense, hurt the global growth on which America in particular ultimately depends, and burden the already tight budgets of his own voter base – isn’t Trump ultimately hurting himself?!

The American president makes no secret of what this is all about: Economic measures which should ensure, as political levers, that the rest of the world finally accepts that its all-important trade with America is a privilege that can no longer be had for free.

Trump is updating the American position that global competition between nations for power and money was set up by America for America.


January 2025:

What can be learned from Trump
about democracy and the discontent with it

The political and journalistic guardians of democracy are astonished at the openness with which Trump touts his authoritarianism as not just the style, but as the very substance of his presidency. And above all – especially after his election victory – by the success with which Trump advertised his campaign. Are American voters not taking him seriously? Or don’t they care? Or is that what they want? The election doesn’t provide a clear answer to these questions. But the media has come to the conclusion, supported by the opinion polls, that the voters see things the way Trump wants them to: a critical mass of voters not only don’t see Trump as a threat to democracy, but as its savior. Namely, from the very politicians who upheld the defense of democracy as the only issue on which they thought, until the end, they could be sure of a majority. And now this: a proto-fascist as the savior of democracy – how can that be?

Recommended readings:

Trump’s perfect first days:
Consolidating power, unleashing the nation’s will and ability to win –
Biden’s successful farewell:
A message of love to the world power of democratic affections

Why Americans need strong leadership:
The issues of the American election campaign

What must an American president be able to do and be

The Capitol attack: The last battle (for now) in the “Fight for America’s soul”

America in election year 2020: Chronicle of a “Fight for America’s soul”

Populism: Six remarks on an alternative way of exercising democratic rule

Trump praises the proletariat!

Trump’s struggle against the establishment media and for the establishment of a new one

‘Honesty first!’: Trump renovates the moral standards of democratic rule

Donald Trump and the World

Donald Trump and his nation — united in the pursuit of happiness


Dissenting views on the Israel-Hamas war

March 2025:
Accompanied by humanitarianism, judged from a legal point of view, disputed on moral grounds:
Israel’s Gaza war — a challenge to the powers and moralists of the imperialist world

October 2023

Once again Hamas strikes Israel, and this time succeeds in a bloody attack on its heartland, which is otherwise successfully shielded from Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, on a somewhat unusual scale. The first profound analyses range from “completely unprovoked terror!” to “it was bound to happen eventually!”, supplemented with anxious to hopeful expectations of an overwhelming Israeli counterattack and questions about the “prospects for a rapprochement between Israel and the Arab states,” which the Palestinian question has been so thoroughly erased from. There is, of course, no room for the question of why the “Palestinian cause” exists in this way and only in this way: as periodic terrorism against Israel. The explanation for this can be found here:

Gaza War 2014: Israel’s Struggle for the One State Solution

Operation “Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip

And in this latest edition of the orgy of violence in the Middle East, the media, despite all the orchestrated horror, proves its astonishing ability to distinguish between this act of violence and that act of violence, these victims and those victims, these and those perpetrators of violence... The nasty, nonspecific logic that sorts the violence of war in other countries into moral categories, its relation to the actually valid political standpoint that the state power here takes to the violence in the Middle East and the people there, and the specific position taken by the Free World under the “indispensable” (Biden) leadership of the USA toward Israel and its enemies, about which the slogan “we stand with Israel!” says it all, is criticized in this article:

Notes on the general relation of war, war morality and war publicity

In addition, some basic knowledge about Israel’s unique reason of state:

An exemplary imperialist democracy with a Zionist mission

And on Israel’s most recent progress with regard to the de facto settlement of the Palestinian question and the period of state crisis shortly before the outbreak of the current war:

Turmoil in the home of the Jewish people:
Remarks on how Israel’s state crisis is connected with the success of its no-state solution for Palestine

Criticism — what’s that?

Shouldn’t criticism be constructive, helping to improve what it criticizes? Do we just want to be negative? It is not our program to contribute well-intentioned suggestions for the success of what we criticize:

These are not unfortunate side effects, “problems” that our politicians must continue to work on. The causes are also not:

All these are inevitable consequences of an economic system, the so-called free market economy, which aims at nothing as trivial as providing for human needs, but only and exclusively the accumulation of capital.

Because one cannot make this system better – on the contrary, it already functions too well! – we have no suggestions for improvement. We insist that these problems exist because of the system.

contact: ruthless_criticism@yahoo.com