Thank you very much for organising this broad and ambitious conference, and thank you also for allowing me to speak here on behalf of the SDAJ, the youth organisation “ Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterjugend” (Socialist German Working Youth).

The SDAJ gathers high school pupils, apprentices, students and young workers throughout Germany. In my speech I will focus on the consequences for young people of the course the war is currently taking, and how we are opposing it.

What German military strategists and economic experts have been demanding offensively since 2015 at least has not only taken the concrete form of an epochal change but has above all made great strides since then. The idea is to „take on more responsibility in the world„, i.e. the autonomous emergence of German militarism, so that German economic interests can be imposed on the world – and if there is any doubt, by military force.

This is not an interpretation on the part of the SDAJ, but it is what can be read, or in similar terms, in various strategic documents of the German army, for example in the Bundeswehr White Paper (German Armed Forces White Paper).

To be able to impose this, the federal government depends, on one hand, on the concentrated military power represented by alliance constellations such as the EU or NATO, but on the other hand, it must also have a strong federal army and the support of society, which has to accept more rearmament, arms exports and interventions abroad.

The consequences for young people are catastrophic.  It is social regression that enables the financing of the current rearmament, which has reached historic proportions. This results in insufficient funding for education, health and leisure, as clearly seen in the federal government’s new budget. To us, it means, above all, school buildings in poor condition, a shortage of teaching staff, bad conditions of hospitalisation and, as a final consequence, increased pressure on results in education and training.

But young people are also confronted with increasing military propaganda. At schools, universities, career fairs and job centres, the German army advertises its death-inducing jobs. This not only exploits, for military purposes, the poor chances of finding an apprenticeship, but also promotes greater acceptance of foreign missions and rearmament. The Bundeswehr is invited to schools to boast about the lack of alternatives to war missions with shortened artificial scenarios. And with slogans like: „Nobody really likes war, but sometimes it’s necessary. We owe respect to our soldiers for their altruism, and we must ask ourselves whether we too want to enlist for our country“. We are promised an increasingly uncertain future and lured with the pretence of job security, which is becoming increasingly rare these days. We are even offered the opportunity of paid study. Not to mention the free teaching materials provided to teachers, which are modelled on Bundeswehr military courses and thus find their place in apparently normal education.

The SDAJ claims that it is not defending human rights when, for example, the German army trains soldiers in Mali who then execute defenceless villagers as they flee, or when Colonel Klein orders the murder of unarmed civilian women in Afghanistan, or when Ukrainian soldiers are trained in Germany to operate tanks.

We clearly oppose the rearmament and the extension of the German army’s competence because it only increases once again the possibility of a major war breaking out, including on German soil – particularly considering the current course of the aggressive confrontation against Russia and China, which the German state is playing a major role in developing.       

This is why we are taking action in schools and career fairs where the German army presents itself as a defender of human rights, and we are trying, with local partners, to disrupt the German army’s interventions and not to allow military propaganda to run unchallenged.

We fight in schools against mouldy toilets and rain-dripping ceilings in classrooms, while explaining clearly that the problem can only be tackled if the money that goes to armaments and war is used to secure our future. By way of comparison, the special fund dedicated to the German army could cover more than twice the cost of the overdue renovations of German schools. We fight for better working conditions and pay rises in collective bargaining, as well as for cost-cutting and in negotiations in the public sector, and we show that we must act against the federal government’s warmongering policy.

We say:

• Bundeswehr out of schools, universities, career fairs and job centres!
• Disarmament instead of rearmament! 100 billion for young people, not for armaments and war!