The United States has done so much through the NSA to save lives in Germany. We have done much more for Germany through the NSA than the German army has done for itself since WWII
said one Peter King, Republican representative from NY, on Fox News.
Leaving aside the obvious semantic glitch in the statement (“than the German army has done for itself since WWII”) that’s a bold statement for the representative of a country that has conducted government-sponsored industrial espionage against Germany for at least approx. 20 years through the NSA. It’d be fun if the irrefutable proof of that came out just now through Edward Snowdens leaked NSA documents:
According to a NSA employee detailed information concerning Enercon was passed on to Kenetech via ECHELON. The aim of the alleged espionage against Enercon was the forwarding of details of Wobben’s generator technology to a US firm.
(quoted from the English Wikipedia article on Enercon)
So either Mr. King is totally deluded, which wouldn’t exactly be unusual for someone blabbering on the slightly biased Republican party pet “news” channel Fox News, or he has adopted the kind of Doublethink and Doublespeak one has come to expect from a society that is moving fast towards a totalitarian state.
Needless to mention that throughout the majority of the time the NSA existed there existed two national states on the territory of Germany. Throughout that time the USA has mostly pursued its imperial interests in Western Germany as the USSR did in Eastern Germany. There were two armies, too.
How much the USA was concerned about the well-being of the majority of Germans at the time, i.e. the West Germans, can be seen by the fact that nukes were stationed in Western Germany and plans were to turn large parts of Germany into nuclear wasteland in case of an invasion from the Eastern block. Not to mention Gladio, an effort lead by the US agency called CIA, another innocent and well-meaning spy club, with the help of good old German Nazis. Hell yeah. German Nazis, if you want the real deal, work with the German Nazis, right? So fuck you very much, Mr. King!
The USA has always pursued its own imperial interests, which right after WWII happened to coincide with West German interests in the competition against the Eastern block. There is no way to sugar-coat it.
And no, I’m not trying to belittle what US soldiers have done for Germany and Europe as a whole in cooperation with soldiers from other countries, including Soviets, in driving out the Nazis. However, history moves on and in the recent past a lot of lies have been unveiled and cast a daunting shadow of doubt on “the land of the free”.
// Oliver