DUNKIRK—The fields of Flanders lie peaceful in the mild autumn air. Fat cows either lazily graze or lay contentedly chewing their cud. In the grain fields, combine harvesters are busy reaping the season’s crop. The orange-colored tiles of the roofs of ancient barns and farmhouses contrast with the whitewash of equally ancient walls. Viewing this scene of rural bliss it’s hard to think that once these same flat lowland fields thundered and crackled with the sound of artillery batteries, mortar, machine gun and rifle fire of two great world wars. Yet the local farmers still occasionally unearth ordinance dating back to the two greatest wars in mankind’s history—wars that between them slaughtered multiple millions of souls. The fields of Flanders have a history as fields of blood.

Could it ever happen again?

One of the wisest commentators on that history, the famous economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises, wrote during the closing stages of World War ii, “A new war is unavoidable if the United Nations do not succeed in establishing a world order preventing the Germans and their allies from rearming. … The alliance of the victorious nations must be made lasting. Germany, Italy and Japan must be totally disarmed. They must be deprived of the right to maintain armies, navies, or air fleets” (Omnipotent Government—The Rise of the Total State and Total War).

How the mood changes as the memory of the devastation of war fades and the generations that gained hard victory from the cruel forces of tyranny die out.

The United Nations, far from establishing a world order preventing the arming of the Axis nations that wreaked such havoc 70 years ago, has, in concert with the victors in World War ii, rather aided and abetted their rearmament. This these nations will live to regret, massively, in the not-too-distant future.

The potential for the disruption of peace in Europe, and indeed the whole world, viewed from the most realistic perspective within Europe, today, is most alarming. We are guilty of forgetting what another distinguished German historian and commentator, Sebastian Haffner, warned against—“the underlying moral” of “unknown events inside Germany” (Defying Hitler).

Numerous comments have been made in the popular press and mass media about the so-called lackluster political campaign leading up to Germany’s federal election this Sunday. All of them miss the point. It is not so much that which is made public in the approach to this election that is of major concern. It is, akin to much in German politics, that which currently lays hidden behind the scenes, which is but an extension of that which has been going on, out of sight of the public eye, since the prime movers of the German imperial dream went underground during the closing stages of World War ii.

As Herbert W. Armstrong so often declared, the German elites who have long desired an new world order under German hegemonic rule, learned well that to obtain their goal they must first pursue it by economic and financial means, before consolidating their efforts militarily. This perspective, which Herbert Armstrong drew from Bible prophecy, is paralleled by the farsighted view of Ludwig von Mises, a German ethnic who well knew the German mind, and who had deep insight into German history.

The introduction to von Mises’s book, Omnipotent Government, could well have been written today, its relevance being as potent in 2009 as it was when first published 65 years ago. In essence, he seeks to take us back fully 125 years to the source of our current-day economic and financial woes.

Writing that introduction in 1944, von Mises observes that “European governments and parliaments have been eager for more than 60 years to hamper the operation of the market, to interfere with business, and to cripple capitalism. … They have erected trade barriers, they have fostered credit expansion and an easy money policy, they have taken recourse to price control, to minimum wage rates, and to subsidies. They have transformed taxation into confiscation and expropriation; they have proclaimed heedless spending as the best method to increase wealth and welfare. But when the inevitable consequences of such policies … became more and more obvious, public opinion did not place the blame on these cherished policies; it indicted capitalism.” It goes without saying that this overarching European view has powerfully influenced the manner in which the source of current Anglo-Saxon economic woes is being described today.

Communism, fascism and Nazism have at least one thing in common. They each propound that the state should control business. What is currently being proposed by the elites of central banking and the corporate moguls of global trading empires—which operate internationally, beyond the control of any single national government, yet which exert powerful control over and within such governments—is a system of regulation and control of finance and business that will pale all other such efforts into seeming insignificance.

That’s really what’s developing behind the facade of this week’s G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. And at its roots it is a very Germanic Catholic idea. This is no conspiracy theory. This is realpolitik at its most real! As von Mises wrote of the aftermath of World Wars i and ii, the “crisis of human civilization has its focal point in Germany” (ibid.). The plain truth of the matter is that Germany, in terms of its documented history as a united nation, has figured at the forefront of the state of the world economy just before it figured at the forefront of bellicose military action. Yet once again we see the world’s leading export nation—the prime mover of the richest trading entity in the world, the European Union, the leading light of the central bankers—Germany, at the forefront of global economic action.

Students of German history, of the history of the German central banking, corporatist and statist policies of the past 125 years, can trace current efforts at the global regulation of the world economy to its very Germanic roots. The gravest of dangers arises when, if frustrated in this effort, Germans don a uniform. That’s what happened twice in the 20th century, dyeing those wide, flat expanses of the fields of Flanders red with blood. We would be committing a very grave mistake indeed to ignore the possibility of such an event occurring again, given similar serious economic conditions that prevailed just prior to the previous two occasions—economic conditions much akin to those the world faces today.

Read our booklet Nahum: An End-Time Prophecy for Germany for a deeper understanding of the biblical revelation of the history, current state and the future of the German nation. Read, and watch for an arresting outcome to Germany’s federal election on Sunday.