All in all, 59% of German electricity, almost six tenths, has come from renewables this year, with hydro the main source aside from wind and solar. In 2023, renewables only accounted for 52% of Germany electricity, so there has been a substantial advance. Half of that advance came from new solar installations, Ember says.

An amazing 11 gigawatts of new solar capacity has been added this year. As of mid-summer, Germany had 92 gigawatts of installed solar capacity, exceeding its 2024 goal of 88 GW.

Through the end of July, fossil fuel electricity generation plummeted 14.5% from the same period in 2024, reaching the lowest levels on record. The consumption of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, fell by 39% through September of this year compared to the same months in 2023.

Germany’s carbon emissions dropped by 10% in 2023 compared to the previous year, and are expected to fall again this year. If all industrialized countries met Germany’s performance, the climate crisis would be less severe. Energy-related carbon emissions in the US. fell last year, but only by 3%.

The rapid advance of solar, Ember explains, is the result of government policy changes, including the reduction in bureaucracy and easier permitting and “simplified grid connection for small PV systems,” as well as better remuneration for consumers who sell their electricity back into the grid.

“German Solar,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Wind installations kept pace with those of the previous year, at 2.3 gigawatts. Wind-generated electricity was up 7% this year. Although wind’s progress was not as spectacular as that of solar, it still did make impressive advances, and there is a lot of capacity in the pipeline. Germany won’t quite meet its goals for total wind installations of 80 gigawatts this year, but those goals are the most ambitious in the European Union.

Winds have been anemic in the summer and fall, but are expected to pick up in the last two months of the year. Wind has had to be replaced with expensive fossil gas for the moment. Emissions will likely still fall, since electricity demand is lower. Wind plus battery will smooth out some of these fluctuations in the future.

There are also legal reasons for which wind will advance even more in future. Ember writes, “The German government has declared renewables to be in the overriding public interest, a privileged legal status which unlocks faster permitting and simplified procedures. Furthermore, German states are now required to allocate around 2% of their land for wind turbines.”

Ember doesn’t say so, but battery capacity is also rapidly increasing in Germany, where battery storage reached 9.9 gigawatts so far in 2024. Reuters reports that grid battery capacity in the country is up by 1/3 in 2024, an incredible advance. In the next two years, through the end of 2026, battery storage in Germany is set to increase five-fold, according to Clean Energy Wire. Battery storage allows solar energy to be captured during daylight and released at night.

CEW adds that “more than 80 percent of smaller photovoltaic rooftop systems are already being installed in combination with battery storage systems.” That combination is not nearly as common in the United States, but it should be.

Two big issues loom over Germany’s energy situation. One is the closure of the country’s nuclear plants at the insistence of the Green Party, which has been in government off and on (it is part of the present shaky coalition). Despite predictions of gloom and doom, the transition to wind, solar and battery has gone well.

Clean Energy Wire observes, “Decades of debates came to an end in April 2023, when Germany finally shuttered its last nuclear power plants after the energy crisis. One year on, predictions of supply risks, price hikes and dirty coal replacing carbon-free nuclear power have not materialised. Instead, Germany saw a record output of renewable power, the lowest use of coal in 60 years, falling energy prices across the board and a major drop in emissions.”

The other issue is the Ukraine War and Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian fossil gas. Germany cut its natural gas imports by nearly a third last year, and is pressing the EU to end imports of gas from Russia, still 20% of Europe’s usage. There isn’t any doubt that replacing both nuclear and fossil gas with wind, water, solar and battery is saving Germany money and allowing it energy independence from Russia.

In 2025, as Trump comes back into office, Americans should remember the cost savings offered by renewables, the environmental benefits of reducing carbon emissions and avoiding climate catastrophes, and the significance of energy independence for the US and its allies. Germany has overtaken Japan to become the world’s third largest economy.

(The Conversation) – Germany was a significant – and often brutal – colonial power in Africa. But this colonial history is not told as often as that of other imperialist nations. A new book called The Long Shadow of German Colonialism: Amnesia, Denialism and Revisionism aims to bring the past into the light. It explores not just the history of German colonialism, but also how its legacy has played out in German society, politics and the media. We asked Henning Melber about his book.

What is the history of German colonialism in Africa?

Imperial Germany was a latecomer in the scramble for Africa. Shady deals marked the pseudo-legal entry point. South West Africa (today Namibia), Cameroon and Togo were euphemistically proclaimed to be possessions under “German protection” in 1884. East Africa (today’s Tanzania and parts of Rwanda and Burundi) followed in 1886.

German rule left a trail of destruction. The war against the Hehe people in east Africa (1890-1898) signalled what would come. It was the training ground for a generation of colonial German army officers. They would apply their merciless skills in other locations too. The mindset was one of extermination.

The war against the Ovaherero and Nama people in South West Africa (1904-1908) culminated in the first genocide of the 20th century. The warfare against the Maji Maji in east Africa (1905-1907) applied a scorched earth policy. In each case, the African fatalities amounted to an estimated 75,000.

“Punitive expeditions” were the order of the day in Cameroon and Togo too. The inhuman treatment included corporal punishment and executions, sexual abuse and forced labour as forms of “white violence”.

During a colonial rule of 30 years (1884-1914), Germans in the colonies numbered fewer than 50,000 – even at the peak of military deployment. But several hundred thousand Africans died as a direct consequence of German colonial violence.

Why do you think German debate is slow around this?

After its defeat in the first world war (1914-1918), the German empire was declared unfit to colonise. In 1919 the Treaty of Versailles allocated Germany’s territories to allied states (Great Britain, France and others). The colonial cake was redistributed, so to speak.

This did not end a humiliated Germany’s colonial ambitions. In the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) colonial propaganda flourished. It took new turns under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime (1933-1945). Lebensraum (living space) as a colonial project shifted towards eastern Europe.

The Aryan obsession of being a master race culminated in the Holocaust as mass extermination of the Jewish people. But victims were also Sinti and Roma people and other groups (Africans, gays, communists). The Holocaust has overshadowed earlier German crimes against humanity of the colonial era.

After the second world war (1939-1945), German colonialism became a footnote in history. Repression turned into colonial amnesia. But, as Jewish German-US historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt suggested in 1951 already, German colonial rule was a precursor to the Nazi regime. Such claims are often discredited as antisemitism for downplaying the singularity of the Holocaust. Such gatekeeping prevents exploration of how German colonialism marked the beginning of a trajectory of mass violence.

How does this colonial history manifest today in Germany?

Until the turn of the century, colonial relics such as monuments and names of buildings, places and streets were hardly questioned. Thanks to a new generation of scholars, local postcolonial agencies, and not least an active Afro-German community, public awareness is starting to change.

Various initiatives challenge colonial memory in the public sphere. The re-contextualisation of the Bremen elephant, a colonial monument, is a good example. What was once a tribute to fallen colonial German soldiers became an anticolonial monument memorialising the Namibian victims of the genocide. Colonial street names are today increasingly replaced with names of Africans resisting colonial rule.

Numerous skulls – including those of decapitated African leaders – were taken to Germany during colonialism. These were for pseudo scientific anthropological research that was obsessed with white and Aryan superiority. Descendants of the affected African communities are still in search of the remains of their ancestors and demand their restitution.

Similarly, cultural artefacts were looted. They have remained in the possession of German museums and private collections. Systematic provenance research to identify the origins of these objects has only just begun. Transactions such as the return of Benin bronzes in Germany remain a matter of negotiations.

The German government admitted, in 2015, that the war against the Ovaherero and Nama in today’s Namibia was tantamount to genocide. Since then, German-Namibian negotiations have been taking place, but Germany’s limited atonement is a matter of contestation and controversy.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

The pain and exploitation of colonialism lives on in African societies today in many ways. I hope that the descendants of colonisers take away an awareness that we are products of a past that remains alive in the present. That decolonisation is also a personal matter. That we, as the offspring of colonisers, need to critically scrutinise our mindset, our attitudes, and should not assume that colonial relations had no effect on us.

Remorse and atonement require more than symbolic gestures and tokenism. In official relations with formerly colonised societies, uneven power relations continue. This borders on a perpetuation of colonial mindsets and supremacist hierarchies.

No former colonial power is willing to compensate in any significant way for its exploitation, atrocities and injustices. There are no meaningful material reparations as credible efforts of apology.

The colonial era is not a closed chapter in history. It remains an unresolved present. As the US novelist William Faulkner wrote:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Namibia: The Price of Genocide | People and Power”

The country exported about 786,000 fully electric cars for a total value of roughly 36 billion euros – an increase of 58 percent compared to 2022. The most important destinations for EVs produced in Germany were the Netherlands, the UK and Belgium, Destatis added. Imports of EVs to Germany climbed about 23 percent to 446,000 units, with more than a quarter coming from China.

Combustion engine cars still accounted for more than two-thirds of all cars made in Germany last year, and their exports also increased, albeit at a much slower rate. With 1.7 million units sold abroad, conventional car exports increased 13 percent, with the US, the UK and China being the top destinations.

DW News Video: “Why the electric car market is so hard to predict | DW Business”

The total number of EVs produced in Germany was 60 percent higher than in 2022. New registrations in Germany increased roughly 11 percent to 524,200 e-cars, far below the 2.3 million new combustion engine cars that were newly registered during the same period.

The automotive industry is Germany’s most important manufacturing business in terms of revenue, Destatis added. About 60 companies in the sector generated a combined record revenue of 430 billion euros (USD $463.8 billion) in 2023, which was partly caused by higher prices.

This represented nearly one-fifth of all industry revenue in the country in that year, with exports accounting for more than three-quarters of sales. Electric car sales collapsed at the beginning of the year following an abrupt subsidy cut in late 2023.

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

( Clean Energy Wire ) The year 2023 was the windiest in Germany in more than 15 years, providing excellent conditions for wind electricity generation, said Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD).

In 2023, the average wind speed across Germany at a height of 100 metres [yards] – a typical hub height for wind turbines in this country – was just under 6 metres [yards] per second (m/s), DWD said. Wind speeds were significantly higher than the long-term average, particularly in the winter months of January, November and December and reached the highest level since 2007.

Will renewables stop the climate crisis? | DW Documentary Video

Last year was also a good one for solar PV, but not a record year like 2022, DWD added. “From a meteorological perspective, 2023 was a successful year for the use of renewable energies in Germany,” DWD vice president Renate Hagedorn commented.

The expansion of onshore wind power in Germany is picking up again and it appears that a “politically caused” dent in newly installed capacity between 2019 and 2021 has been overcome, industry lobby group BWE said earlier this month.

Preliminary data by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen (AGEB) showed that onshore wind turbines produced a record 114.2 terawatt hours (TWh) in Germany in 2023, while solar PV produced a record 61.1 TWh.

In January, the DWD had said that 2023 also marked Germany’s hottest year since records began in 1881, warning that the country had to “take intensive action to protect the climate and adapt to the damage caused by extreme weather events.”

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany’s boom in stationary batteries linked to solar PV systems accelerated last year, doubling the total number of units to more than one million, reports solar industry association BSW. The batteries have a combined capacity of 12 gigawatt-hours – enough to power 1.5 million 2-person households for a day.

“The expansion of solar electricity storage systems has picked up speed rapidly. Both the total number of solar batteries installed and their storage capacity have doubled in just one year,” said the lobby group.

“When installing new solar power systems on private buildings, electricity storage systems are now standard. More and more companies are also storing solar power from their roofs to use it around the clock,” said the association’s director, Carsten Körnig. He added that the market for home and commercial storage systems grew by over 150 per cent in 2023.

The industry group lamented that current policies still underestimate the potential of battery storage systems, and that market barriers continue to slow their spread. Against this backdrop, BSW welcomed the economy and climate ministry’s proposals for a storage strategy published in December, but said the draft didn’t address central strategic questions regarding the role of batteries in tomorrow’s electricity system.

Germany Trade & Invest (GTAI) Video : “Going Green – Germany’s Energy Transition”

Storage systems should be considered a central pillar of the electricity system, on par with generation, grid, and consumption, the industry association said.

Storage will become key in the next phase of the energy transition, as Germany aims to cover 80 percent of power demand with renewable sources by 2030. A traditional electricity system doesn’t require much storage because power generation can be adjusted to match demand.

This changes dramatically as the system uses more renewable energy, as power generation from wind turbines and solar PV systems depends on the weather. This means that production often dramatically exceeds demand but also that current power production can fall well short of what is needed at a given moment.

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

The siege was enforced by armies and navies which had come from Germany, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Norway. It was part of a war started by a coalition of forces from around Europe led by Nazi Germany on June 22, 1941.

The goal of the war against the Soviet Union was different from the war Germany had waged in Western Europe. On the day of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler declared that “the empire in the east is ripe for dismemberment”. Germany sought new living space (Lebensraum) but did not need the people who lived on it. Most of them were despised as subhuman (Untermenschen) and destined to be killed, starved or enslaved. Their land was to be given to “Aryan” settlers. To make his point in racial terms familiar to the Europeans, Hitler referred to the Soviet population as “Asians”.

Indeed, the war against the Soviet Union had aspects of a colonial war: millions of Soviet civilians – Slavs, Jews, Gypsies (Roma) and others – were systematically put to death. This surpassed Germany’s genocide in Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) in 1904-1908 when it just as systematically massacred the local tribes of Herero and Namas. True, Germany was not exceptional: this was common practice among European colonial powers. 

The intentions of the Nazi invaders were summarized succinctly:

After the defeat of Soviet Russia there can be no interest in the continued existence of this large urban center. […] Following the city’s encirclement, requests for surrender negotiations shall be denied, since the problem of relocating and feeding the population cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for our very existence, we can have no interest in maintaining even a part of this very large urban population.

As one of the Nazi commanders enforcing the siege put it, “we shall put the Bolsheviks on a strict diet”.

British Movietone Video: “Siege of Leningrad – 1944 | Movietone Moment |

The last rail line linking the city with the rest of the Soviet Union was severed on August 30, 1941, a week later the last road was occupied by the invaders. The city was completely encircled, supplies of food and fuel dried up, and a severe winter set in. The little that the Soviet government succeeded in delivering to Leningrad was rationed. At one time, the daily ration was reduced to 125 grams of bread made as much of sawdust as of flour. Many did not get even that, and people were forced to eat cats, dogs, wallpaper glue, and there were a few cases of cannibalism. Dead bodies littered the streets as people were dying of hunger, disease, cold and bombardment.

Leningrad, a city of 3.4 million people, lost over one third of its population. This was the largest loss of life in a modern city. The former imperial capital famous for its magnificent palaces, elegant gardens and breathtaking vistas was methodically bombed and shelled. Over 10 000 buildings were either destroyed or damaged. This was part of the invaders’ drive to demodernize the Soviet Union, to throw it back in time. Leningrad had to be wiped out precisely because it was a major centre of science and engineering, home to writers and ballet dancers, the see of famous universities and art museums. None was to survive in the Nazi plans.

Sadly, neither sieges, nor colonial wars ended in 1945. Britain, France and the Netherlands waged brutal wars of “pacification” in their colonies long after Nazism was defeated. Racism was still official in the United States, another ally in the fight against Nazism. Twelve years after the war, it took the 101^st Airborne Division to enable nine black students to attend a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Today’s Western values of tolerance are recent and fragile. Overt racism is no longer acceptable, but its impact is still with us.

Human lives do not have the same value either in our media, or in our foreign policies. The death of an Israeli attracts more media attention that that of a Palestinian. Severe sanctions are imposed on Iran for its civilian nuclear enrichment program while none are imposed on Israel for its military nuclear arsenal. And, of course, Western powers continue to provide arms and political support for the siege of Gaza, where civilian population is not only bombed and shelled, but deliberately starved and let die of disease. The International Court of Justice confirmed “plausible genocide”, even though it failed to stop Israel.   

Commemoration of the siege of Leningrad should prompt us to put an end to all racism, to stop the siege of Gaza and to prevent such atrocities in the future. Otherwise, the accusation thrown in the face of the European citizen by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire in 1955 would remain still valid:

.. what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

This imbalance in who is visible on television, in the press, and even often in academia is one of the things that makes the South African genocide case against Israel at the UN’s International Court of Justice so riveting.

Narratives of European history are consumed by the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet menace, and are remarkably inward-looking. From Europe Israel appears as the nation that can do no wrong because it was formed and populated by Holocaust survivors, and it would be churlish for countries like Germany, which committed the Holocaust, and France, Italy and Poland, which were implicated in it, to criticize the state into which they chased those of Europe’s Jews whom they did not simply murder.

Germany thus ranged itself against South Africa, declaring a position in support of Israel and denying that Tel Aviv is committing genocide, despite the daily video available to anyone who wants to see it of the mind-boggling daily Israeli atrocities in Gaza. Germany might seem distant from South Africa, but in fact it was once a neighbor, as I will explain. And its lack of sympathy with the mass murder of non-Europeans is embarrassing it because of its brutal colonial past.

The small southwest African country of Namibia (population 2.3 million) responded sharply to this German claim. You see, the Germans had genocided Namibians, so they are sore about this issue, and seeing Berlin whitewashing the killing of tens of thousands of brown people a little over a century later.

Windhoek’s Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in German last week,

“The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, was extremely angry at the weekend about Germany, which had sided with Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa’s complaint aimed at stopping Israel’s ongoing warfare in the Gaza Strip and also at broaching the question of whether President Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership should be held responsible for a genocide.

Numerous politicians in Namibia reacted angrily and the otherwise reserved First Lady, Monica Geingos, wrote on X: ‘The build up to the Herero-Nama genocide in Namibia, perpetrated by Germany started on 12 January 1904. The absurdity of Germany, on 12 January 2024, rejecting genocide charges against Israel and warning about the “political instrumentalisation of the charge” is not lost on us.’

Geingob had warned in his New Year’s message: ‘No peace-loving person can ignore the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza.’

The Windhoek Observer reported, “Leader of the official opposition party Popular Democratic Movement, McHenry Venaani, echoed the President’s sentiments. Venaani emphasized the inconsistency in Germany’s moral stance, criticising the nation for expressing commitment to the United Nations Genocide Convention while simultaneously supporting what he called the ‘equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.’ . . . ‘We agree with the president’s statement and Germany is misbehaving. They want to turn a blind eye. Israel cannot do a global punishment because they have lost a thousand people, yes we agree and are not disputing that but what they are is against the law. So what Germany is doing is psychological guilt,’ said Venaani.”

Ironically, Belgium, which committed an earlier genocide in the Congo, has taken the side of South Africa in this dispute.

Aljazeera English Video: “Why is Namibia furious at Germany’s ICJ intervention supporting Israel? | Inside Story”

By 1800, Europe had conquered 35% of the world. Despite the fairy tales they told themselves about their benevolence and their spreading of progress, these conquests were brutal. Philip Hoffman has argued that they depended heavily on advancements in gunpowder technology, which tells you everything you need to know about the character of European advances. By 1914 the Europeans ruled 80% of the world. Gunpowder did not become less important, i.e. the pile of dead bodies only got bigger. Of course colonialism was a complicated system that also required getting buy-ins of various sorts from the colonized, but ultimately it involved keeping guns aimed at the locals and being willing to use them.

The Dutch war on Aceh in what is now Indonesia, 1873–1904, involved killing 60,000 locals by military force or exposure and disease. The US in the Philippines killed at least 20,000 directly and some 200,000 – 400,000 died from exposure and disease.

The historians of the colonial powers have written the history, so that the colonial era is often depicted as a civilizational triumph. It is British railways in India or French road building in Senegal that is celebrated. The pile of dead bodies is mentioned in passing, surrounded by embarrassed silence, when it isn’t suppressed entirely. The history of enslavement and forced labor has often been downplayed. In the second half of the twentieth century, sometimes historians of the metropoles have dropped the colonial dimension entirely from the national narrative, obscuring it. François Furet at one point wrote that he would omit mention of Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt since the episode occurred beyond French soil. (I fixed that.) Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism that a lot of Victorian literature is incomprehensible today unless we remember that Britain was an empire at the time and not a small nation-state. Since people in the North Atlantic world don’t much read historians based in the global South, these histories have become invisible.

In 1904, the Herero people rebelled against German colonialism in southwest Africa, and the German government responded in 1904-1908 by committing the twentieth century’s first genocide against them. So writes Hamilton Wende.

Germany was awarded Namibia at the 1884 Berlin conference as part of what historians have characterized as the “scramble for Africa.” Since the Africans were just going about their lives, the “scramble” was by predatory Europeans. Some 5,000 Germans flooded into Namibia and lorded it over a quarter million local Bantus. To this day, whites, including persons of German descent, own 70% of the land there.

After a Herero attack on colonists that killed over 100 in early 1904, the German Schutztruppe or colonial military replied with Maxim machine guns and artillery (Professor Hoffman might note the prominence of gunpowder). Military commander Lothar von Trotha called for the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. As many as 60,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were mowed down just at the beginning of the punitive German campaign.

Germany grudgingly recognized the genocide in 2021, with the foreign minister saying “If you want to call it a genocide, you can.” Germany’s position is that it took place before the 1948 Genocide Convention, however, and so cannot be the basis for any lawsuit or formal reparations. Berlin did pledge $1.4 billion in aid for Namibia, to be paid over 30 years, but without admitting legal liability. At the same time, German officials have often reprimanded Namibians, saying that they cannot compare their experience to the Holocaust, as though extermination of Europeans is forever more significant than the extermination of Africans, millions of whom were killed by Europeans in the 19th century.

Namibians have complained that the sum offered in aid is not enough to compensate for the damage done or for the ancestral lands lost, which people want restored to them. President Geingob says that Namibia is not done with Berlin, and plans a further lawsuit.

So, for a traumatized Namibian population, to have Germany now engage in genocide denial when it comes to Palestinians just brings back the nightmare all over again.

And at the International Court of Justice, Namibia has a voice, even though it still won’t have access to CNN’s air waves or receive much attention in the North Atlantic newspapers of record.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – Germany has generated more than half of the electricity it used this year with renewable energy for the first time, according to preliminary calculations by the Centre for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) and utility association BDEW.

“Renewable energies will have covered almost 52 percent of gross electricity consumption in 2023,” the organisations said in a press release. “This means that the share has risen by five percentage points compared to the same period last year and is above the 50 percent mark for the first time for a full year.”

Germany’s renewables share was 46 percent in 2022. Both a decrease of overall electricity consumption and an increase in absolute renewables production – which rose six percent to an all-time high of 267 TWh – pushed up the share of renewable electricity.

Germany aims to have a renewable electricity share of 80 percent by 2030 and a largely decarbonised power supply by 2035. “The figures show that we are on the right track. Many people once thought that renewables would only account for a single-digit share of electricity consumption, but today we use more electricity from renewables than from conventional sources and have our sights firmly set on 100 percent renewables,” said BDEW head Kerstin Andreae, who called for the removal of bureaucratic hurdles that slow down the renewables roll-out.

CGTN Europe: “Sunny times ahead for German solar industry ”

The country’s environment agency UBA also said the targets were challenging. “According to current estimates, renewable electricity generation must increase to around 600 terawatt hours [by 2030] and thus more than double in order to cover the increasing demand for electrification in the heating and transport sectors,” UBA said.

ZSW and BDEW said the share of renewable electricity was particularly high in July (59%), May (57%) and October and November (55% each). In June, electricity generation from photovoltaics reached a new all-time record of 9.8 terawatt-hours (TWh), while electricity generation from onshore wind energy reached a new record of 113.5 TWh for the year as a whole, they added.

Solar and wind energy contributed around 75 percent of Germany’s renewable electricity, with the remainder covered by biomass, hydropower, and a small share of geothermal plants.

Graph shows renewables share in gross power consumption 1990-2023. Graph: CLEW 2023:

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