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Jan06

am 6. Januar 2017

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein

Victor Grossman

TARGETS HUMAN AND POLITICAL

Berlin Bulletin No. 123

Victor Grossman

No, Berlin did not have a good old Merry Christmas. Tragedy hit hard, in the form of a long, heavy truck steered right into the Christmas market by a fanatic Tunisian immigrant, already in serious trouble in his home country and Italy, and scheduled for expulsion from Germany. Twelve were killed, also the Polish driver of the hijacked bus, and nearly fifty were injured, many of them foreign tourists. The killer died a few days later in an almost accidental shootout in Italy, and Berlin did its best to mourn the loss but keep a sad but stiff upper Christmas lip for the holidays.

My question: Would a well-publicized decision by the government that German troops and weapons will be removed from all Muslim territories (and any others as well) and no more murderous arms shipments sent anywhere near conflict areas perhaps be the best long-term answer to „terrorism“?

Soon local politics again took center-stage. City-state elections in Berlin were back in September. After many weeks of negotiation, the city’s first three-party coalition agreed at last on a joint program, with almost 90% of the LINKE members voting Yes per postal referendum, and on a ruling Senate (cabinet). The SPD (Social Democrats) won fewer election votes than ever before but still more than any other party, so incumbent mayor Michael Müller keeps his job; his party gets four seats, one of them the mayor’s. There are three seats for the LINKE, one for youthful, smiling Klaus Lederer, until now head of his party in Berlin, but now deputy mayor and in charge of culture, always a hot theme. And there are also three Senate seats for the Greens, their first in Berlin city rule.

What will this new team bring to Berlin? A double whammy broke the suspense. When LINKE city planning engineer Katrin Lompscher finally got the job she always wanted, Senator for Housing and Construction, she amazed everyone by naming university sociologist Andrej Holm as one of her two deputies (called state secretaries). He is known as a scrapper, even a radical; aside from academic duties he has long fought the squeeze of Berlin’s low income renters, over half the total, out of the main city area and off to the outskirts. He even approved of the once so frequent „squatting“, with young people defiantly occupying buildings cruelly rid of low-income renters and permitted to decay so they can be replaced by fancy, expensive condominiums. Holm was arrested in 2007 on suspicion of working with „underground anarchists“; some of his vocabulary, it seems, matched theirs, like the then new terms „gentrification“ and „precarization“. He was freed after three weeks and world-wide protests and is highly respected as a fighter against the advancing take-over by the wealthy.

This frightened many in the newly-sidelined CDU, who quickly launched their counter-whammy. They dug up the fact that in September 1989 at 18 Holm had agreed to join the Stasi, for which his father worked. His family was pro-GDR leftist, the Nazis had imprisoned his anti-fascist grandfather in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. His few months of Stasi-apprenticeship were ended after the Berlin Wall fell. That was 27 years ago; not just the LINKE but the two other coalition parties dismissed the matter as a long-dated youthful decision which had never damaged a single person.

But then the ferrets dug up more; in 2005, when taking on a university job, he had allegedly admitted his application and brief membership in the Stasi but not that he had been paid for a month or two. His appointment now rests with the university authorities. The media smell blood; a few weaker supporters are joining in a chase whose motivation is all too clear. The real estate gentry, already rubbing their hands, are most raucously „indignant at such an evil-doer“!

Though without knowing his full story, I cannot help recalling my own. Drafted during the McCarran-McCarthy Era, I was told to sign a paper denying any leftist memberships. I fearfully signed; admitting the truth would have brought immediate big problems and could have ruined my entire life. Perhaps his situation had not been so very different; the atmosphere certainly wasn’t! I must applaud the LINKE for naming such a fighter and for supporting him at least thus far.

The tripartite coalition in Berlin inevitably leads speculation to the coming German elections next September. The dream of some in the LINKE is a similar coalition, just like here. The polls of the three parties currently add up to about 42%. Can this grow a little? And would the LINKE, to beat the „openly right“ and get into government accede to the ultimatum of the SPD and the Greens by breaking their „Peace Party“ pledge against the sending of any German troops abroad?

The traditional partner of the Christian Union sister parties has always been the big-biz Free Democratic Party. If it manages to regain the needed 5% and edge back into the Bundestag and rejoin that team that could almost exactly reach about 42%, like the others. It’s all tight!

Could the Christmas market tragedy hurt the chances of Angela Merkel? Ever since she first announced her welcoming policy toward refugees she has been under attack by parties of the Far Right, by a few strident opponents within her own party and by her further-right Bavarian sister party, who want ever more video cameras and ever more people behind bars or expelled. She and her stalwarts have been moving backward, step by step, on a delicate tightrope, making life harder and harder for one group or nationality after the other. Was that enough to stem the tide? There was a sudden swing in the polls against her party, strengthening the menacing Alternative for Germany (AfD) but at present this trend seems to have subsided, with the AfD back down to its 13% status – alarming enough. But if those seats in the Bundestag are needed to continue in power, would the Markel party break all taboos and make a deal with the extremist AfD? Tensions are mounting by the month, many are wobbling – and often hoping for shining victories – and comfy cabinet seats.

www.european-left.org

Germany is biggest, strongest, central in Europe and muleteer of a scattering herd. And it was in Berlin on December 18-19th that just such matters were debated by representatives of 25 left-wing parties (with six sending „observers“) from all over Europe. Their goal: to strengthen the Party of the European Left. Though not a new organization, it has hardly played a noticeable role thus far. This, 300 participants decided, must be changed!

The members vary widely. Some, tiny vestiges of former Communist Parties, still strictly correct, require little more than a large phone booth for their membership. Others are strong opposition parties, and Syriza is the controversial government party in Greece. More than one party was represented from some countries – France, Spain, Finland. And some were conspicuous by their absence, like those from Portugal. One hot question still divides them. Should leftist parties battle within the European Union, where some belong to a Leftist-Left/Green coalition? Or should they reject it as a largely German-dominated force for reaction and fight it from without. The meeting in Berlin decided that disagreement on this must no longer weaken their efforts. The far right is ever more menacing, with Le Pen, Wilders in the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Austria and the AfD. And who knows what Trump may bring? There must be a united fight against it, against austerity measures, racism, misogyny, union-busting, anti-immigrant hatred, against ecological disaster and, finally for nuclear disarmament and for peace initiatives in the Mideast and Eastern Europe.

The new president of this European Left, elected by only 67.7%, was Gregor Gysi, no longer in any leadership job in the German LINKE he did so much to build. An Executive Committee was chosen with representatives from France, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria. Gysi said the European Union was antisocial, undemocratic, ecologically inconsistent, non-transparent, lacking in solidarity, bureaucratic and was grasping at military power. He sees the reasons why some abhor it but, despite its current crisis, favors helping it stay alive as a balancing factor in the world, important for keeping peace at least in Europe, and because it enables young people to travel at will through most of the continent. Gysi pledged to help make the European Left a much bigger force, with annual congresses and actions like a united demonstration protesting violence against women or a united march to Brussels to demand an end to „precarious jobs“. The need for such unity is becoming desperate.

More by Victor Grossman: Berlin Bulletin No. 122, No. 121 (deutsch), No. 121, No. 120, No. 119, No. 118, No. 117, No. 116, No. 115, No. 114, No. 113, No. 112, No. 111, No. 110, No. 109, No. 108, No. 107, No. 106, No. 105, No. 104, No. 103, No. 102, No. 101.
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Kommentar

Jan08

am 8. Januar 2017

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein

Victor Grossman

THE YANKS ARE COMING!

Berlin Bulletin No. 124

Victor Grossman

Hit that old song again, loud and clear! “Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word, That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming…”

Yes, sirree! Shades of 1918 and the Battle of the Marne! Shades of 1944 and the beaches of Normandy! But no, not just shades and not just words have already been sent.

2017 had hardly begun in Germany’s port of Bremerhaven when 4000 lads and lasses in Yankee uniform disembarked and unloaded three shiploads, over 2,500 tanks, trucks and other combat vehicles, and sent them on by rail, on ferries through the Baltic or clanking along those Autobahn highways through North Germany. So many memories!

The military equipment on arrival in Bremerhaven, Photo: EPA

Colonel Bertulis at US Command Headquarters in Stuttgart called it “the greatest redeployment operation of the US Army to Germany since 1990…It will ensure that the necessary combat power is brought to the right place in Europe at the right time.” Higher up the ladder, Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges, commander of US forces in Europe, said, “Three years after the last American tanks left the continent, we need to get them back.”

What dangerous front are they moving to defend? Where, this time, is “over there”?

Well, it is not exactly a front. Or not yet! Not one BB gun has been fired along the Russian border with Latvia or Estonia, nor along the short Polish or Lithuanian borders around the small, fully surrounded Russian enclave at Kaliningrad. Nor has anyone heard Putin or any other Russian leader utter a single threat or make one demand directed at any of those countries.

But, as General Hodges told journalists, the measures were a “response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the illegal annexation of Crimea.” He added consolingly, “This does not mean that there necessarily has to be a war, none of this is inevitable, but Moscow is preparing for the possibility.”

Peace demonstrations (far too few) point out that Russia has 900,000 armed troops while NATO has 3.5 million, stationed in over a hundred bases in a world-wide ring around Russia. It threatened to shut off Russia’s only warm-water naval base on the Crimea (where most people, Russian-speakers, voted for their “take-over” in a referendum) while moving to close the ring from the south. It’s coup d’état Ukrainian government of Russophobes (and many fascist types) was largely set up by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in 2014. “’Yats’ is our man,” she telephoned and, after more money and violence, Yatsenyuk it was! People wondered what Washington would do if friends of Russia moved right up to American borders. Then they recalled coups or invasions in Guatemala, Cuba, Grenada, Panama, Chile. Not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, hardly closer to US borders!

Some Europeans even wondered at the planned arrival date of the new troops at the Russian borders, January 20th of all days! Were there any star-struck generals or well-groomed connivers who hoped to end an era not with a whimper but with a bang? Did some fear that Donald Trump, while switching back and forth on nearly everything else he said in his campaign, might just possibly, for whatever reason, keep his word about getting along peacefully with Putin? For the highest ranking neo-con enthusiast down to the last deluded riveter at Lockheed-Martin – that sounded alarming!

How many Germans believe all the New Year’s fireworks from Washington about Putin’s electoral hacking? Most of them certainly drew other conclusions as to why Clinton was defeated. They have many questions about that mysterious American institution, the Electoral College, which somehow offers nothing remotely resembling anything like an academic degree. Many have lost old faiths in their great friend and protector.

The 1.8 ton heavy bomber from Augsburg,
Photo: dpa

But some welcome this operation, “Atlantic Resolve“, like smaller ones which preceded it. Although it is not sponsored by the UN, not even by NATO, but only by the outgoing US administration, some political leaders, as in Canada and Britain, now want to have the German Bundeswehr get into the act and send a battalion to Lithuania. The Baltic countries are not far from St. Petersburg. Then still called Leningrad, a million and a half people died there, mostly of hunger and cold during the genocidal Nazi siege in 1941 to 1944. The flags and uniform colors of those who maintained that siege were different, but some traditions have long lives, as too many have been demonstrating in loud marches and more and more voting booths.

As yet, at least, not too many in Germany like the idea of playing mass scale Russian roulette. In Augsburg, over 50,000 people, many old-timers unable to walk, had to leave homes and hospitals on Christmas Day so a giant triple-fused bomb from World War Two, 75 years ago, could be defused. And now there are those, only a hundred miles away in Stuttgart, who speak lightly of a Number Three! And today’s missiles can have phosphorus, uranium and nuclear components, and be delivered by unmanned drones.

If this Operation Atlantic Resolve somehow recalls the idea of New Year’s resolutions, millions could supply a few of absolute, overriding urgency; move troops and weapons out and away, negotiate, make peace, break with the conscience-less plans and ambitions of a limited number of greedy adventurers and turn to the planet’s vitally crucial problems – a decent life for all its people and plans for saving our tortured planet.

More by Victor Grossman: Berlin Bulletin No. 123, No. 122, No. 121 (deutsch), No. 121, No. 120, No. 119, No. 118, No. 117, No. 116, No. 115, No. 114, No. 113, No. 112, No. 111, No. 110, No. 109, No. 108, No. 107, No. 106, No. 105, No. 104, No. 103, No. 102, No. 101.
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└ Tags: Rüstung

Kommentar

Jan17

am 17. Januar 2017

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein

Victor Grossman

ROSA AND KARL AND BERLIN TROUBLES

Berlin Bulletin No. 125

Victor Grossman

Rosa and Karl: Like every mid-January Sunday in Berlin, their names are recalled by those with a social conscience. Once again thousands laid red carnations, brightening the snowy surroundings, at the monument honoring them and those named nearby who lived and died for a good cause. Karl Liebknecht was a fighter, the one Social Democratic delegate in 1914 to defy a party decision and vote against the World War, and to keep opposing it until he was jailed. Rosa Luxemburg, with him in opposition, and also jailed, wrote bitterly, “The dividends rise and the proletarians fall.”

In the bloody days of the November Revolution at war’s end they fought for a socialist Germany, helped found a Communist Party and, two weeks later, 98 years ago, were both brutally murdered by forerunners of the Nazis. Rosa is still especially loved; she was not only a truly revolutionary fighter against injustice, war and oppression, but could also dream. Even in prison she described the sky, songbirds, even the ants and beetles she could observe, and wrote: “I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.”

The “old faithful” and many young people, too, walk several blocks from the subway to the site. And, as every year, a militant mix of leftist parties, grouplets and national groups from all Germany and beyond, Czechs and Turks, Kurds and Basques, Austrians and Danes, prefers to first parade for several kilometers through East Berlin, with music, slogans, banners and flags (also a few of the forbidden Kurdish People’s Party, whose bearers were again nabbed by the police).

The day before, as ever, the newspaper junge Welt organized a leftist conference. 2800 people, a record, heard reports on events in Brazil, the Basque country, Mexico, Turkey, Cuba and the USA, also a taped greeting from Mumia Abu-Jamal, the framed Black journalist in prison since 1981.

Rosa Luxemburg Memorial at the Landwehrkanal in Berlin

In the crowded rooms two themes could often be heard: Donald Trump and the position of the LINKE party. Not surprisingly, there was little affection for Trump; some were planning to demonstrate in Berlin against him. But some expressed fears at the unprecedented movement of US tanks and weapons through Germany and Poland to the Russian border.

Could war hawks be planning some provocation there and using it to oust Trump, not because of his racism or misogyny, but because he wants to negotiate peacefully with Putin? Was the hectic, more than dubious hacker campaign so planned that Trump could be labeled a pawn of Putin and potential traitor in the face of a new emergency? Heightening such fears were reports of a US Marine unit just arriving in Norway to “learn skiing” and “get used to polar conditions” near the Russian border and then join the big units gathering near St. Petersburg. What would the next days bring?

As for the LINKE, debate centered on its willingness, or refusal, to join the Greens and Social Democrats in a coalition government after the September elections. Would the LINKE join up, if the results permit, dropping its strict opposition to deploying troops outside German borders? Thus far it had voted solidly, often alone, against involvement in Afghanistan, Turkey, Syria and Mali. This was the basis of its claim to be the one party of peace. Social Democrats and Greens insist it cannot be so stubborn on this if it wants to join in and some LINKE say, “OK, let’s agree on some exceptions”. Others recall the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent, soon followed by legs, hump and all!

But those elections are nine months away, and one difficult baby has already been born in this connection. In Berlin just such a three-party coalition is now in charge, its joint program supported per referendum by almost 90 percent of all LINKE members in Berlin. The new LINKE cabinet minister in charge of city planning, herself an engineer, courageously chose as deputy Andrej Holm, an expert, and known as a militant fighter against gentrification and for the rights of low-income tenants, for keeping rent rates down and building more homes for those who need them most.

Then it was found that Holm, after high school, had followed the bidding of his father (the son of an anti-Nazi concentration camp prisoner) and his feelings for the GDR and, in September 1989 signed up for a uniformed sector of the State Security Ministry or Stasi. Four months later came the end of the Stasi, and soon after the GDR. But not the animosity of its foes, not in 27 years. The masters in digging dirt found that when Holm applied for a university position in 2005 he had admitted to joining the Stasi but not that he had received pay for three or four months. Had he forgotten after 15 years? Was he trying to save his livelihood and career against the lasting taboos? For his foes that was unimportant. The city, they insisted, could not have such an untrustworthy man in office!

Luxemburg-Liebknecht Memorial memorandum 2017, photo: Uwe Hinksch

All this landed in the middle of the Liebknecht-Luxemburg Conference. Then came the news that Mayor Michael Müller, a Social Democrat, without waiting for a university report, as agreed, had decided to fire Holm. One speaker recalled bitterly how Hans Globke, one of those most responsible for preparing the Holocaust, remained a deputy minister and “second most important man in West Germany” until 1963. And so many others had cleansed or concealed a Nazi past! The conference ended with a unanimous call on the LINKE to answer this move by quitting the city government coalition. Yet it was clear to most that this would not happen. The real estate sharks won out, and a day later Holm decided to quit before he was fired. But he vowed to stay militant!

This was no pleasant start for the Berlin coalition, and may even have relevancy for the national election campaign. It was good, therefore, that Sunday ended with a wonderful meeting in a big theater, with all top leaders of the LINKE party in a friendly row of brief speeches, also the LINKE candidate for German president, speakers from other countries and good music, German and Turkish, all under the slogan “Labor Unions strengthen Humanism (Anti-Communism destroys it).”

In conclusion Sahra Wagenknecht, the party’s most prominent leader, made a powerful, fighting speech. She denounced the forces in Germany and elsewhere who are responsible for wars, death, destruction and poverty, with resulting waves of refugees. She accused German rulers of bribing some groups of workers into acquiescence while pushing others into ever worsening part-time, temporary, unprotected jobs, divided in each plant to prevent unity, and thus lowering wages. The cheaper-built products helped force countries in southern Europe into “austerity” measures and those in Africa or Asia into extreme poverty, with half their young people facing joblessness and hopeless futures. Only if the LINKE hits at these problems, offering German working people a true alternative to establishment politics, can right-wing extremists be beaten back. It was a wonderful speech, the crowd was galvanized into new determination to fight back and to fight forward. This meeting, like all the weekend’s events, was truly in the spirit of Rosa and Karl!

More by Victor Grossman: Berlin Bulletin No. 125, No. 123, No. 122, No. 121 (deutsch), No. 121, No. 120, No. 119, No. 118, No. 117, No. 116, No. 115, No. 114, No. 113, No. 112, No. 111, No. 110, No. 109, No. 108, No. 107, No. 106, No. 105, No. 104, No. 103, No. 102, No. 101.
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Kommentar

Feb12

am 12. Februar 2017

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein

Victor Grossman

BEARS AND MUSICAL CHAIRS

Berlin Bulletin No. 126

Victor Grossman

Those who, like me, grew up with the writings of A. A. Milne may recall not just Winnie the Pooh but two other little bears and how “one of them was Bad and the other was Good” and kept getting better. In a way that recalls German politics. The goodie in next September’s elections, it had seemed, would certainly be Angela Merkel with her two “Christian” parties, one in Bavaria, the other in all the other states. And despite scolding from her own rightists due to her refugee policy, now backtracking, she was well ahead in the polls, heading towards a fourth term.

Her main rivals, the Social Democrats, always seemed to get things wrong, like the poem’s “Bad bear” who “left all his buttons undone“ and whose “nicketies were terrible tore”. They plummeted – (not their nicketies (?) but their poll results). But then, as in the poem, “quite suddenly (just like Us), One got better and the other got Wuss.” A turnaround which seems to be echoing in Germany.

Martin Schulz, the new shooting star of the SPD

The reason for the sudden SPD upturn is simple; lack-luster party boss Sigmar Gabriel, 57, less popular by the day, withdrew as party head and chancellor candidate in favor of jolly Martin Schulz, 61, who, like one little bear, somehow “learnt his Twice Times Three” and managed within two short weeks to boost the Social Democrats from an almost hopeless minus of thirteen percentage points behind Merkel’s backers to a slim four point margin, an amazing jump. Achieved by cutting away at nearly all other parties, and with seven months left to go, this opened the door to all kinds of hopes and aspirations. More and more favored him, keen, fresh Schulz, over her, a tiring Merkel.

What made it possible? Martin Schulz has been in the European Parliament since 1994 and its president since 2012. That won him lots of TV time, but rarely about German politics. Unlike Gabriel, who was Vice-Chancellor and Economics Minister, he was never a visible part of the Berlin Establishment, which many German voters distrust as much as many Americans dislike pols from “inside the Beltway” in Washington. And Angela is the truest symbol of a German “Beltway”.

So, turning again to the children’s world, there was a game of Musical Chairs.* Schulz, followed as EU Parliament chief by one-time Berlusconi spokesman Antonio Tajani, was now free to replace Gabriel as SPD party boss and chancellor candidate. Gabriel then replaced Frank-Walter Steinmeier as Foreign Minister. And, on Sunday, Steinmeier will replace retiring Joachim Gauck as new German president, a largely ceremonious job and a largely ceremonious election, with 1260 delegates, all the Bundestag members plus an equal number of celebrities and minor dignitaries. The outcome is certain, since both coalition parties support Steinmeier, but there are other candidates, like Cologne Professor Christoph Butterwegge, 66, an expert on the fight against poverty, who will hardly get more than the votes of the LINKE (Left) who proposed him but who hoped that as a candidate he might get a genuine chance to present leftist views. He didn’t. Remember how the media treated Jill Stein?

But otherwise everybody except Angela Merkel should be happy. Or maybe not. Martin Schulz, with his bald head and clipped beard, looks nothing like stout Gabriel. But his program, as far as we can tell, is no different, and that is nothing to rejoice about. In fifteen of the past twenty years the Social Democrats were in coalition governments, as senior partners with the Greens or, like now, as juniors with Merkel’s Christians. They thus share responsibility for many or most of the measures so painful for working people, for those who lose their jobs, those needing medical care or a decent retirement. Germany, starting out far ahead of the USA in such matters, has been slipping downward in all of them – especially since the demise of the East German GDR in 1990. The SPD party (and the Greens) joined in Germany’s first military involvement since 1945, in Yugoslavia; it is now engaged in Afghanistan, Mali, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Germany used its economic and political weight in Europe to force devastating austerity pressures on weaker countries, all with the OK of the SPD. Martin Schulz has given eloquent, socially-conscious replies to interviewers’ questions on some topics, but has refused to say anything definite, not on a decent minimum wage, not on a fairer share of medical care expenses, not on higher taxes on the wealthiest. But what he doesn’t really say he really says so very well! And most of his party and many others just eat it up. At least for now!

He is even less clear about foreign policy but refused to oppose CETA and TTIP, the TPP equivalents. Far more worrisome, not just for Germans but for the world, is another matter he has not been quoted on. One thousand NATO troops from seven nations, with two more to follow, now stationed in Lithuania, 100 km from the Russian border, have been placed under German command. Hawkish Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, belligerent as always during her frequent trips to fire up the troops, said: “To prevent any danger arising from Russia is precisely the reason why we are here.” In view of the lack of any threats from Moscow against the USA, which is organizing this entire rotation of military units all along Russian borders, or against Lithuania, or against Germany, it is hard to avoid a shudder at the memory of a not all too distant yesterday – involving Germany and Russia, also starting near here, and ending in the death of over 50 million human beings. Or to think of what some incident, provoked, accidental or misunderstood, might mean to the world tomorrow. (And some wondered what Washington would say to Chinese troops similarly stationed in Baja California with guns aimed at San Diego, perhaps citing as justification the US invasions of Libya, Iraq and its actions at the Chinese border to Afghanistan!

Little is said about this danger, not in the media and not in the words of those playing Musical Chairs. Their main worry today – to return one last time to children’s games – is how to avoid the economic and political results of “London Bridge is Falling Down” for the EU and possible copy-cat decisions after elections soon to be held in France, the Netherlands and Austria.

For the LINKE the changing scenery can also get dramatic. Current gains by the Schulz-SPD might indeed make it numerically possible to form a tripartite coalition after September. The SPD is still labeled “red”, so this would be a “red-red-green coalition”. The second strongest party in a coalition gets the job of Vice-Chancellor and either Economics or Foreign Minister, and with the SPD ahead, and the Greens and the LINKE about neck and neck, the possibilities are increasing temptingly, and so, too, may be some unspoken hopes.

But if the LINKE should enter such a government, what would happen to its strong pro-working class positions, to its “tax the wealthy” demands and, above all, to its rejection of any military involvement by Bundeswehr troops outside German borders? Both Social Democrats and Greens – whose right wings have grown stronger – would certainly demand LINKE compromise, dilution – and compliance, especially on military expansion! If this were granted, what would then remain of its genuinely left position?

The year ahead may become very complicated and difficult in many places on both sides of the Atlantic. Let us hope that it will become more peaceful!

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

*We used to call this game Going to Jerusalem, but I don’t want to get into that question, not in this bulletin, anyway.

More by Victor Grossman: Berlin Bulletin No. 125 No. 124, No. 123, No. 122, No. 121 (deutsch), No. 121, No. 120, No. 119, No. 118, No. 117, No. 116, No. 115, No. 114, No. 113, No. 112, No. 111, No. 110, No. 109, No. 108, No. 107, No. 106, No. 105, No. 104, No. 103, No. 102, No. 101.
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Kommentar

Apr06

am 6. April 2017

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein

Victor Grossman

MIRACLES CAN HAPPEN

Berlin Bulletin No. 127
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Victor Grossman

To follow German politics these days you have to like arithmetic. At first only up to six, for that many parties are now vying to get good grades, lots of votes, and more power in the September elections to the Bundestag, which will lead to a government ruling until 2021.

Leading a current coalition is the strongest party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), combined, usually peaceably, with its Bavarian offshoot the Christian Social Union (CSU). They have been having some worries lately. The leading figure, Angela Merkel, often described sort of affectionately as “Mutti” (Mutti means Mommy and the “u” is pronounced as in “put” not as in “mutt”), is no longer the one and only choice of a big majority. Her controversial “welcome” words to all refugees lost her right-wing voters, her backtracking on it stopped this tide only partly, and a note of tiredness is sometimes visible behind her friendly, vigorous, plain-talking nature, which has covered many a sin at home and abroad. She has been moving down, up, down and up again in the popularity ladder.

With proportional representation it is the vote on a party basis which determines the route ahead. The current junior coalition party, the Social Democrats (SPD), has had a tightrope job; being in the government but also sounding critical and independent enough to win votes for itself and away from its partner. It was teetering alarmingly; even its one coup, winning overwhelming support for its man as new president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was a mixed blessing, for the president has little to say politically except at celebrations and to foreign kings and presidents, and the removal of their most popular leader from all election endeavors left them with only the increasingly unpopular party chairman, Sigmar Gabriel, to wave their banner.

And this banner was sinking lower and lower. The faces of SPD leaders looked as glum as any child having trouble moving from adding and subtracting to percentage. By early 2017 the polls showed a measly 20% heading downward, while Merkel’s position in the front row, or that of her combined two parties, was way ahead in the mid-30 range. What hopes for September could survive that gap?

Merkel or Schulz

Then, in late January, it happened! German politics did a headstand! Martin Schulz, 61, for five years president of the European Parliament, left that job, entered German politics, replaced Sigmar Gabriel, who obligingly switched to the job of Foreign Minister, and was elected both SPD president and its main candidate for September. Every vote within his party gave him a rare, amazing result – unanimous 100 % approval. This was followed by a wave of popularity in all the land, with several thousand joining the party within a week. And the SPD poll figures moved higher and higher, soaring from the poor 20% on January 11th to 26% by February 1st and 31% a week later. A little numbers dance followed; in one poll the CDU-CSU was ahead by a point or so, in the next one the SPD.

There were several reasons for the euphoria. Schulz was known to TV viewers thanks to his position in the European parliament, but in German politics his face was new and unblemished. And his face, with bald head and clipped beard, was always a jolly one (or almost always), always exuding confidence that he would replace Merkel as next Chancellor. But more important were his promises. He surprisingly admitted the mistakes of the SPD-Green coalition before 2009, which had been great for the wealthy and super-wealthy but tough for pensioners, working people and especially those who lost their jobs. He promised to reverse such laws and improve the lot of precarious workers and the jobless. Such unprecedented honesty and a promise of better breaks are what won him the amazing gains, which cut into the numbers for the other parties, less those of the CDU-CSU, but rather of the Greens, the LINKE (Left) and the racist, ultra-reactionary Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Now arithmetic was again useful, and juggling, because even 32-33% is not enough to form a government; 50% of the seats are required. Who then would go with whom – and who couldn’t?

The AfD is still branded taboo and not in the coalition race, although the media have given it far too much time and some on the CDU-right have been sniffing around like a hound dog hunting a mate. But somehow Schulz has won back many voters who voted AfD to protest establishment politics leaving them behind economically and threatening with worse to come. Schulz offered them new hope while the AfD, torn by inner quarrels, has dropped back to 8-9%. That’s one good thing anyway!

As for the Greens, so long as their one-time favorite partner, the SPD, dropped so low in the polls they chose conservative leaders and turned their eyes to the right. The party, totally unlike USA-Greens, was once youthfully rebellious, especially on climate issues, opposing atomic energy and women’s rights. Its interest in working people’s rights, never too strong, waned further as its members, often well-educated intellectuals, got older and more successful. They were showing interest in cuddling up to Angela Merkel and her right-wing crowd, perhaps reaching the 50% mark with the help of the newly-revived right-wing Free Democrats. Then suddenly, with the rise of Schulz, they saw the chance of a so-called red-red-green coalition with the SPD and the LINKE (which both use red as party color) and started to sound more leftish again.

The LINKE, which lost protest voters to the AfD and now some to the Schulz bandwagon, dropped from its 12 % rating of 2009 to a low of 7-8%. But the rise of Schulz suddenly roused new hopes to get cabinet seats in just such a red-red-green coalition! Indeed, if it stays ahead of the Greens (one point) it would be in second place in the triple coalition, and that means getting the Vice-Chancellor title and maybe even the Foreign Minister post! It sounds very, very enticing.

But there are still Cassandras, cynics, dogmatists or whatever, who warn that Schulz, with all his promises, has somehow remained vague about the details, and they recall how often in the past the SPD sounded vigorously leftist in its campaigns – until it won government power, when most or all promised gains were diluted or drowned. And the SPD and Greens, greedy as they are to gain power again, would make demands of the LINKE requiring a retreat on its basic principles, like barring German military involvement outside its borders, barring weapons shipments to the Near East or any conflict areas, or guaranteeing pensions high enough to keep seniors from poverty. Compromises on such issues would make the LINKE meaningless as a party fighting the status quo and working towards a truly socialist future.

Then on March 26th, in elections in the small state of Saarland, the CDU came back strong, keeping its lead there, while the SPD stayed in an unexpected, sad second place, while the LINKE also disappointed in its strongest state in West Germany, and despite the popularity there of Oskar Lafontaine, dropping a point to less than 13%. Has the SPD euphoria ended? Will the pendulum swing again? Some say this changes the whole picture. Others say: Wait for the state elections in May in northern Schleswig-Holstein and especially North-Rhine-Westphalia, the state with the largest population, both now headed by Social Democrats. They may really provide an omen for September.

Meanwhile Wolfgang Schäuble, Merkel’s Finance Minister, is still trying to impose austerity on an all-suffering Greece while Ursula von der Leyen, Merkel’s Minister of Defense, at first frightened that President Trump might leave NATO in the lurch, is now rejoicing at his demands that every NATO member spend more on armaments, exactly her song from the start, now especially desirable and especially dangerous – frighteningly so – as tensions increase with more battalions sent to confront Russia at her borders from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and with new dangers in Syria. It is scary!

But here, to close with, is a less momentous note from Berlin. The elevated tracks, in Berlin called the S-Bahn, pass so close to one of the wonderful museums on East Berlin’s Museum Island (the most famous is the Pergamon Museum) that passengers get quick glances into museum windows. On March 27 a few men took some time and not only looked but with the help of a long ladder, a sledgehammer and a wheelbarrow broke at around 3 AM and stole the one meter diameter, pure gold Elizabeth II coin contributed by the Canadian government and managed to get it out and drive away with it. Melted down the gold’s worth up to 3.7 million euros, near $4 million. They may well have had insider help. The only moral I can see: Be careful whom you trust, whether it be a museum watchman or a politician. And don’t leave any big gold coins near windows!

More by Victor Grossman: Berlin Bulletin No. 126, No. 125, No. 124, No. 123, No. 122, No. 121 (deutsch), No. 121, No. 120, No. 119, No. 118, No. 117, No. 116, No. 115, No. 114, No. 113, No. 112, No. 111, No. 110, No. 109, No. 108, No. 107, No. 106, No. 105, No. 104, No. 103, No. 102, No. 101.
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Kommentar

Mai05

am 5. Mai 2017

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein

Victor Grossman

Curiouser and Curiouser

Berlin Bulletin No. 128
.

Victor Grossman

A story worthy of a mystery author – or dramatist – has been hitting German headlines. It began when police at the Vienna airport in Austria arrested a first lieutenant of the German Bundeswehr army when he picked up a pistol hidden some weeks earlier in a bathroom. He denied it was his and was released. But his fingerprints somehow matched those of a refugee who had applied for German asylum two years earlier.

Like Alice in Wonderland when she got bigger and bigger, the story turned “curiouser and curiouser” and here too, odd language was important. This young blond German officer, 28, had been registered in the German states of Hesse and Bavaria as a refugee from Damascus in Syria. He had said he was Catholic but the men of ISIS had persecuted him and killed some of his family because of his partially Jewish background and Jewish name – “David Benjamin”. Strangely enough, he spoke little or no Arabic and was questioned in French – with a German accent. No-one had ever been suspicious, or so it was claimed. He then seems to have commuted between his job as officer in a

A 28-year-old soldier of the German Armed Forces is said to have registered as a Syrian refugee and apparently planned under this identity.
Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / dpa

mixed French-German unit in French Alsace and his false existence as a Syrian refugee in Germany.

He remains mum, but it seems he was planning to commit some crime which would then be blamed on Syrian immigrants, in line with a current media wave against “criminal foreigners”. Two things are known: his accomplice, a 24-year-old German student now also under arrest, stored munition for the lieutenant. And a “death list” found in his quarters includes the name of a young woman delegate of the LINKE in the Berlin Assembly who is known for her defense of immigrants.

As with Alice, the story took on ever greater proportions. How could the Bundeswehr, including the military snooping department (with the acronym MAD) somehow miss out on such strange goings-on? It now seems that they did indeed know; the French military college where he had taken courses advised the German military authorities two years ago that his final thesis was racist and pro-fascist. Somehow this did not overly disturb anyone.

It does now! Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, who has been leaning out the political window to attract rightist votes away from the even-further-rightist party AfD (Alternative for Germany), stated vigorously – to cover his past negligence, or worse: “Our investigation of this incident will leave no stone unturned”!

Probably damaged far more was Ursula von der Leyen, the ambitious Defense Minister, hitherto preoccupied with building up an aggressively-oriented Bundeswehr with the latest, most “effective” rifles, tanks, drones and other shiny utensils, ready to embark within days or hours to the furthest corners of the globe. Now, suddenly, she was on the defensive – or not quite so suddenly, since more and more reports have surfaced in recent months of brutal customs in the armed forces, especially the hazing of recruits and other underlings often involving sexual abuse. In her usual clipped, efficacious manner she took the unprecedented step of admitting weaknesses in processing and leaning doors open to “extremists” who are not supposed to be in the Bundeswehr – but always have been, sometimes at the top. Her words were really aimed at absolving herself and blaming subordinates, although she has been responsible top boss for three years. Her words quickly led military men, hitherto her closest buddies, to yelp like whipped dogs, thus weakening her usual position of coolly smiling superiority. Just such wrinkles could hurt what some have speculated were her hopes of succeeding, or even replacing, Angela Merkel.

Beate Zschäpe at the Oberlandesgericht Munich on 20.12.2016 next to her lawyer Mathias Grasel

How many knew of the officer’s double existence – and perhaps of his plot? How many have similar views? The story echoes the case of the National Socialist Underground group which murdered nine Greek or Turkish immigrants and one German policewoman and set off a disastrous bomb in a largely Turkish neighborhood. The trial of Beate Zschäpe, a surviving member of the group, is now in its 5th year in Munich while Bundestag investigations drag on – and there are more and more suspicious connections between the murders and official authorities who have somehow been shredding key documents incriminating secret service agents and politicians at high levels, and now, strangely enough, even the American FBI!

There is no lack of dirt flying around, much of it related to elections. On Sunday, May 7th, the same day as in France, there will be much tamer voting in northern Schleswig-Holstein, where the Social Democrats are strong. One open question is whether the LINKE (Left) will get back into the state parliament. Five years ago they were down to 2.2% and weren’t, but current polling has them teetering on the hurdle of 5% where a single vote can make the difference. Any and every win in a West German state is, for them, a pleasant surprise.

Another election is due a week later in Germany’s most heavily populated North-Rhine/Westphalia (with Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen and Bonn). Can the Social Democrats and Greens, governing as a coalition since 2010, reach a majority again? The chances look skimpy. They might manage if they bring in the LINKE, whose polls are at a wobbly 6 %, but would they accept it as a partner or prefer a taboo even if it means losing their own chances to stay in office? And would the LINKE consent even if invited to join?

The same question may recur in September after the all-German vote. The sudden surge for the Social Democrats after cheerful Martin Schulz took the reins has slipped considerably, while Markel’s Christian Democrats, after dimming, has recuperated and is well ahead again. But with four smaller parties all balancing at about 8%, attaining a 50% coalition majority is tougher than ever. Except for the present solution, with two big boys, CDU and SPD, ruling together though neither is happy about it, it’s hard to find any way to squeeze “three men in a tub” with four smaller parties getting in each other’s way. The Greens are slipping downward fast. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is also slithering downhill, luckily, after infighting led to pushing out of the top job its very attractive, a tiny bit more moderate leader and very pregnant Frauke Petry, a main force in building the party. It is possible that her shape had a negative effect on the chauvinist, racist, ultra-reactionary delegates, but who then surprisingly replaced Petry as candidate with Alice Weidel, 38, a partner in a same-sex, parental partnership, and also a far-right business consultant who once worked with Goldman-Sachs. Her co-candidate, Prof. Alexander Gauland, 76, is just as far right as she is. As the oldest delegate in the new Bundestag he will probably get to make the opening speech. (A side-note: before departing the GDR as a youngster he attended the Friedrich Engels High School in Karl-Marx-Stadt. They left little mark!)

As for the LINKE, some leaders yearn to join in an SPD, Green, LINKE coalition, which might become numerically possible. Others in the party say that any compromise on withdrawing German troops from current threatening bases in Lithuania, near the Russian border, and anywhere else in the world, would mean abandoning the basic principles of the party. But just such a program change would be a condition for their admission to a coalition. For those who have a constant fear of provocations or even war with Russia by such NATO forces, or maybe kicked off by something like the Maidan Square events in Kiev, this is the most vital question in the world. They hope that Merkel’s meeting with Putin will lead to de-escalation!

The months ahead – in France, Britain, Germany and the USA – could be crucial ones, for the European Union – minus Britain – and very possibly for the world. Unlike with Alice, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” does not apply here. We are not in Wonderland!

More by Victor Grossman: Berlin Bulletin No. 127, No. 126, No. 125, No. 124, No. 123, No. 122, No. 121 (deutsch), No. 121, No. 120, No. 119, No. 118, No. 117, No. 116, No. 115, No. 114, No. 113, No. 112, No. 111, No. 110, No. 109, No. 108, No. 107, No. 106, No. 105, No. 104, No. 103, No. 102, No. 101.
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Kommentar

Jul27

am 27. Juli 2018

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

A nasty witch and apes – Not from Oz

Berlin Bulletin No. 149
.

Victor Grossman

Does anyone remember “The Wizard of Oz”? Recent news made me recall its song line: “Ding-dong the witch is dead. Which old witch, the wicked witch, the wicked witch is dead”. This “Wicked Witch of the East” is still alive. German law has no death penalty; she was sentenced to life in prison. While her appeal has little chance of success, the law permits those with life sentences to apply for parole after 15 years, often with success. But her murderous career is ended.

The trial in Munich of Beate Zschäpe and four minor accomplices lasted five full years! Many breathed a sigh of relief on hearing the verdict against this evil woman, who appeared in court every day, carefully coiffed and attired, with a mysterious smile and almost total refusal to say anything.

Convicted fascist Beate Zschäpe

Beginning in 2000 she assisted two male friends in killing ten men in cities all over Germany. Mostly small shopkeepers, their only connection was their immigrant background, Turkish, in one case Greek. The killers also robbed banks, killed a German policewoman and set off an explosion in a Turkish-German neighborhood, wounding many. Their motive was to spread hatred; their cause, the National Socialist Underground, from the lying title Hitler chose for his party, in other words – fascism. In 2011 the two male killers allegedly shot themselves, or each other, in a single moment, and set fire to the mobile home they had rented, while Zschäpe set fire to their joint apartment.

Many unsolved mysteries remain. How did the local police chief immediately know the identity of the two dead men? Why had he inquired about them with the German FBI-equivalent just a day earlier – or was it the same day? Why were the two cops who immediately arrived at the scene so vague and contradictory about everything else, like their chief, but insistent that no-one else could have been involved – and escaped? Why was the vehicle, only partially burned and still unchecked for clues, towed away bumpily to a garage, making any proper search of the death site impossible?

The questions piled up. Why, after each murder, all in different states, did the police reject the idea that hatred of foreigners might be involved, encourage suspicion of the victims’ families and, when intimidating searches produced nothing but distress, push the idea that some “Turkish Mafia” must be involved, thus hindering genuine searches which might have prevented the next tragedies?
And why was a government agent, one of many active participants in fascist movements they are spying on, right in the internet café of one victim when he was shot, and leave without hearing, seeing or knowing about the murder or the corpse he must have passed? Why was he protected from inquiries? Why did the Interior Minister of Hesse, where the killing took place, stubbornly reject being questioned about his agent – and hinder scrutiny of the relevant documents, which are now locked away from public (or legal) view for an amazing 120 years? (No, that number is not a typo!).

And why is the same man now Minister President of the state of Hesse and a powerful figure in the party of Angela Merkel, who promised a full examination of the case five years ago!

As in the Land of Oz, there seem to be swarms of “Winged Monkeys” flying around, not subservient to any Wicked Witch of the West but “obedient to anyone wearing the Golden Cap, pure gold with a circle of sparkling diamonds and red rubies running round it… Whoever owned it could call upon the Winged Monkeys, who would obey any order they were given, no matter how evil or silly”.

For author Frank Baum in 1900, that was certainly a metaphor. It is for me too! In my metaphor, wild creatures are also flying around, not just in Hesse. I see two sub-species: one, for me especially frightening, is looking for trouble in the world, seeking confrontation, even conflict, condemning dialogue as “treason” and pushing hatred of an “adversary” stupid enough to use a crazy alphabet and strangely fervent in opposing a threatening military power, at least ten or fifteen times its own strength, which regularly flexes its muscles – tanks and war planes – in maneuvers perilously close to its most vital borders.

And the other sub-species? The racist, secret groups like the National Socialist Union, now perhaps defunct, an openly fascist assortment of violent, booted, swastika-tattooed thugs, but also well-dressed citizens, welcome guests on talk shows and now holding 92 AfD seats in the Bundestag but also to be found in the two “Christian” parties and elsewhere. They are the ones who preach hatred, sometimes against Jews again but most commonly now against Muslims, “Islamists”, immigrants or anyone they can label as a foreigner.

In their spirit a racist tornado hit Germany recently, like the Kansas twister which sent Dorothy spinning to Oz. The spinning in this case was with soccer balls. This game, called football here, is a constant topic, though for some the skilled kicking seems to get less attention than: Who’s playing whom! Hurrah for the home team! This is fairly normal, but it becomes highly emotional when the national team aims at another victory trophy, like last month in Russia. German fans, sure of victories like in Rio in 2014, jammed the broad avenue cutting through the central park (Tiergarten) as 100,000 or so watched the giant screens waiting to cheer every German advance. A real carnival!

But alas, this time the magic was missing, in three games the team failed to even make the quarter finals. Bitter tragedy – and that carnival mile stayed almost empty! Top-notch world football or not, who wanted to watch England, France or Croatia if no Germans were playing?

The anger at this national tragedy quickly found a scapegoat: Mesut Özil, one of the best players, who played well in all three games but not well enough to turn the tide.

The Gelsenkichen football player Memet Özil has been under contract with Arsenal since September 2013. In 2014 he became world champion with the German national team in Brazil. In 2011, 2012 and 2016, there were meetings between Özil and the Turkish President Erdoğan, which remained largely unnoticed by the German public.

In addition, he had made a blunder. Several weeks before the games he and another team player with Turkish background, born like him in Germany, had appeared on TV in England in a smiling exchange with Erdogan, the president of Turkey, shortly before the election there. Erdogan was gunning for all those in Europe with Turkish roots who can still vote in Turkish elections, especially in Germany, where many have double citizenship. For the two possibly unpolitical athletes, they were flattered, and wanted to make clear that, although German, they were not ashamed of their Turkish roots and felt attached to the country of their parents and grandparents. Whatever the reason, it was politically a stupid mistake.
But that did not justify the vicious campaign unleashed against Özil after the team flop. Although he was second in the number of shots at the goal, and perhaps second-best player in the lost games, the media-inspired boos of the fans were directed against him. Media analyses of the lost games almost always featured him in the middle, like one headlined “German Downfall”. An anti-foreigner tone was obvious; one paper spoke of 23 team members and two Turks; condescension ranging to hatred dripped from the pages, the TV voices, the social media. When top football officials, instead of defending him, joined in the attack, Özil broke a long silence with a statement, in English, that he is quitting the national team (both Turkish Germans, like other players, have season contracts in England or elsewhere.) He asserted: when the team wins he is “a good German player”. When it loses he becomes “the Turkish-German player” or “the Turk” and takes the blame.

This issue split the fans, also non-fans, and aroused new disputes about discrimination, revealing often ignored racist views. In response, some with a Turkish background are re-considering their decision to dismiss their past and become Germans. Too often they are met by intolerance – and also murder!

With militarism and race hatred, as with animals generally, similar sub-species can mate.

Leading the anti-foreigner mob (though not anti-Russian), is the “Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now competing with the Social Democrats in the polls, with the AfD nationally teetering between 13 and 17%, while the SPD has dropped to 17-19%. The AfD may soon win second place!

I close with an item from Leipzig, the industrial center of Saxony, where the AfD is strongest. That meant nothing in the fight at a big iron foundry. In GDR days it was the pride of the region, successful enough in the 1980’s to commission a Japanese company to add an ultra-modern automated section. The number working here varied between 6000 or more…

Striking workers at Hallberg Guss Leipzig,
photo: Maritta Brückner

After the demise of the GDR and almost all its industry, this foundry held out, almost alone, saving jobs for 700 employees. After various typical buy-outs and sell-outs, with a French, then a Dutch owner, it landed in the arms of a Bosnian billionaire with a firm called Prevent. A speculator, he tried to charge Volkswagen and Opel higher prices for the well-made motor blocks and drive shafts. But they proved stronger, punished him, and he planned bankruptcy for next year, meaning joblessness and only a few cents in severance pay for the 700 in Leipzig and 1300 in western Saarbrücken.

The workers’ answer – all 2000 – was to go on strike. Locomotive engineers have dared that in recent years, also kindergarten teachers, airline personnel, post office workers, hospital staff, with varying success. But East German factory workers, with bitter joblessness staring them in the face, have rarely risked a strike. Of course the media called their step “hopeless”, “counterproductive”, “stupid”. Other VW and Opel suppliers cursed them for causing difficulties. But the 2000, in East and West, held out together. They organized well, came to strike posts each day and did their best to keep scabs from entering and products from leaving.

They resisted all arguments and pleas, until last Monday, after six weeks, the company finally agreed on arbitration, with an arbitrator chosen by the union. The workers agreed to stop the strike – or to interrupt it. They want to see the results of the arbitration – and then vote on it.

Even little victories are rare in the East German industrial landscape. But it is always worthwhile to oppose evil witches and even defy autocrats wearing golden caps full of diamonds and rubies.

More by Victor Grossman

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Only the author is responsible for the content of this article.
It doesn’t have to be the opinion of the editorial board.

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Kommentar

Sep02

am 2. September 2018

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

Nazis on the march

Berlin Bulletin No. 151
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Victor Grossman

Ten eventful days in Germany set alarm signals clanging louder and louder – worst of all in the East German state of Saxony – but in Berlin as well!

In the first episode, in Saxony, the neo-Nazi PEGIDA movement, which has marched in Dresden on many Mondays since 2014, has faded with the growth of the more respectable-looking, more successful but equally racist Alternative for Germany (AfD), which now, with 25% in the polls in Saxony, is second strongest party, with a strong chance of winning next year’s state elections and forming or at least sharing the next government. In fact, it is close to edging out the Social Democrats as second strongest party in all of Germany.

On August 16th the two closely-related far-right rivals, PEGIDA and AfD, joined in anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim togetherness for another protest meeting in Dresden, Saxony’s capital.

At a PEGIDA rally six weeks earlier, at a time when a ship full of people rescued from drowning in the Mediterranean was desperately seeking a port, the crowd had chanted “Let it sink! Let it sink!” For the August 16th rally a TV channel sent out a team to film these or similar goings-on.

Suddenly an ugly-looking demonstrator with an odd cap in the colors of the German flag ran in front of the camera shouting that they were filming him without his consent, thus breaking the law. The journalists told him to simply walk away if he didn’t want to be filmed. Instead, after shouting angrily into the camera, he called the police and insisted that they arraign the “law breakers”. The police obliged and held the team virtually captive for 45 minutes to “register their identity” and write up the mutual accusations. This effectively blocked their filming – clearly what the man had intended.

The story, with the angrily shouting face, hit the national media, accompanied by accusations that the police had worked hand in hand with PEGIDA to curb freedom of the press.

What followed was curious: the minister-president of Saxony, a right-wing Christian Democrat (Merkel’s party), sided not with the TV crew but with the police – for “properly doing their duty”. Under pressure he promised to “further investigate” the case.

The rabid provocateur, an employee of the State Criminal Police Office of Saxony

Then came the crowning revelation – a discovery that the angry protester was himself an employee of the state police authorities – “not in duty but on vacation”. Police and PEGIDA seemed somehow in cahoots!

Two days later it was Berlin’s turn. Every year the Nazis, old and new, mark the death in 1987 of Hitler’s Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, who flew a famous solo flight to Scotland on May 10th 1941 in an unsuccessful attempt to make peace with Britain six weeks prior to the Nazi attack on the USSR. Hess committed suicide in 1987 while imprisoned for life in a four-power prison in West Berlin’s Spandau district, and while the prison was torn down years ago to prevent its becoming a shrine, the Nazis meet there anyway. Last year they were outnumbered by anti-fascists – 2000 to 800 – and thus kept from carrying out their planned march.

Neo-Nazis with a banner „I do not regret anything“,
a quote from Altnazi Rudolf Hess,
Photo: Sebastian Püh

This year they again called for a march. Berlin’s city-state minister responsible for law and order, a Social Democrat, stated regretfully that he could do nothing to legally prevent them and OK’d it. So the anti-fascists again organized a protest, with church groups, party groups, unions and others organizing a big counter-rally and, by some, a blockade of the Nazi march route. About 2500 showed up. There were very few Nazis, they could hold no rally and the battle seemed won; church bells knelled in triumph and local political leaders were jubilant.

Then it leaked out that this was the wrong place! The Nazis had evidently agreed with the police to forget Spandau and switch their march through a left-leaning area in East Berlin, with one section known for so-called “autonomous”, action-prone young people, whose anti-fascist action often included bottles and stones. Police units, part of the 2300 assembled that day, now marched alongside about 700 Nazis from their starting place (now United Nations Square, in GDR days it had been Lenin Square) along the entire route, protecting them against small, hastily assembled groups of anti-nazis, including a very few bottle or stone-throwers of the masked, “black bloc kind which the mass media love to stress. Some rules for the march had been handed down: no boots, no uniform, no mention of the name Rudolf Hess. Instead, their big banner at the front quoted him in big letters: “I regret nothing”!

Carpenter Daniel Hillig, family man, murdered on 27 August 2018 by Nazis in Chemnitz

In the meantime the main anti-fascist group in Spandau, off in the city’s western outskirts, was trying to get back into town to stand up properly to the Nazis. But the police first hindered them from reaching the train station and, when many finally did slip through, the police prevented them – and other passengers – from leaving the train stations nearest the Nazi march and even stopped a train which would have taken them close to the final Nazi rally.

The police could thus boast, by and large, that peace and order had been maintained. The Nazis could boast that they had accomplished what they had planned. As for the city government, a delicate coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and also the LINKE (Left), they had nothing to boast of; indeed, there were no audible statements of any kind.

Peace and order were frighteningly absent the next weekend in Chemnitz (after Leipzig and Dresden the third biggest city in Saxony). A Saturday evening city festival was suddenly ended by a murder; a young man of 35 died of knife wounds after a fight. Two young immigrants were arrested, a Syrian and an Iraqi. The mass news rag BILD quickly spread a story that he was killed while protecting a German woman harassed by the foreigners. The story, a total invention, spread like wildfire in Facebook and other social media; the fact that the victim’s father was Cuban and the background of the fatal fight was still a secret was of no importance; the victim was “a German killed by knife-wielding foreigners, asylum-seekers”. On Sunday evening a memorial march to the site of his death, with flowers and candles, swiftly turned into a wild chase by 800 fascist types against anyone who looked “foreign”, against those calling for calm, against any and all journalists, considered enemies, and against the pitifully small contingent of police trying to separate opposing groups.

By Monday evening the fascists – with supporters from all over Germany – had rallied a mob of about 7000 thugs who basically seized and controlled the city center. The police, although certainly forewarned, had strangely assigned only a puny contingent of 600 cops with two water cannon, which proved almost totally ineffective. The wild attacks of the previous evening were multiplied against journalists but especially against the courageous 1000 to 1500 who held up banners saying “No to Racism and Violence” or “Chemnitz – Free of Nazis” – and were only partially protected by the police. Luckily, except for one man whose nose was broken, only a few were injured – but this was less a result of police “separation” than the steadfastness of the anti-fascists.

Chemnitz has a varied history. An industrial city specializing in heavy machine tools, it leaned strongly to the left before Hitler took over. It was hit heavily by wartime bombing. In 1953, in the days of the East German Democratic Republic, it was renamed Karl Marx Stadt, with the approval of one sector of the population and the silent disapproval of another. After German unification in 1990 76% voted to return to the name Chemnitz. But part of its heritage included a massive bronze bust of Karl Marx, erected in 1971 – 23 feet high and with its granite pedestal 43 feet. Perhaps surprisingly, the Chemnitzers decided to keep this monument, which they fondly nicknamed “nischel”, a slang word like “noggin”. It became a main attraction of the city, with souvenir replicas even in chocolate. Offers to buy it from West Germany and the USA were rejected. Behind it, in large stone letters, are the Communist Manifesto words “Workers of the world unite” in German, English, French and Russian.

The famous Marx Monument in Chemnitz (formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt)

Last Monday the mob surrounded the Marx bust. They did not damage it physically, but films show thugs shouting from the pedestal, with one man raising his arm in the legally forbidden Hitler salute! The slogans, written or shouted, were in a similar vein. The biggest banner said in local dialect, “We wanna be German – and free”. Many shouted the “We are the people” slogan used by the anti-GDR crowds in 1989, but now directed against foreigners, Merkel, LINKE, the press, anyone but fascists.

How could this happen? Although unification (or “annexation”) was 28 years ago – it will again be celebrated on October 3rd – wages in Saxony are almost a quarter lower than in Germany nationally, although hours average longer. The all-German average jobless rate is 5.1% – but 7.3% in Chemnitz, with a high proportion of hope-destroying “precarious” jobs. Many here are angry – and misled, and there are a variety of racist and fascistic groups, which all joined together!

The fascistic Alternative for Germany, although always disparaged by the other parties, has been given surprisingly generous treatment by most of the media which, although the fascists attack them as pro-immigrant, have actually played up every criminal deed by an immigrant or other “non-German”, often for weeks and months, while hardly mentioning or quickly dismissing countless attacks on people of color or wearing head cloths or with other “non-German” characteristics.

Merkel’s CDU party, despite its “tsk-tsk” rejections of mob actions, almost always condemns both “left and right extremists” but often stresses the former, who are usually the most active and often the only sector really fighting the Nazi menace. In Saxony, recent years have seen many violent but hardly punished attacks on immigrants and often revealed suspicious connections and collusion between conservative government institutions on many levels and the fascist mob, most alarmingly with the Bureau to Defend the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), which is much like the FBI. What will happen if in states like Saxony the AfD shares or even heads a state government? Déjà vu 1932?

The fascists marched again Thursday evening, but a big anti-fascist counter-rally is planned for Chemnitz on Saturday, September 1st. Other major protests are planned for Berlin and Hamburg in September and October. A big new attempt to push back this scary onslaught is due to be launched on September 4th; Aufstehen – Stand Up – hops to create not a new party but a movement, uniting people Social Democrats, Greens, the LINKE or any others in a combined effort to win successes for working people: affordable homes and controlled rents, better wages and pensions, taxes on the super-wealthy, stronger unions, and peace in the world. This and the other efforts represent hopes for fighting back. Their success could be crucial in all of Europe, indeed in all the world.

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└ Tags: Daniel Hillig, FBI, PEGIDA, Rudolf Hess, Saxony, Victor Grossman

Kommentar

Jun15

am 15. Juni 2022

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman 15. Juni 2022

Berlin Bulletin No. 202

BERLIN MUNICH KYIV

Victor Grossman

The tide of public opinion in Germany is as overpowering – and changeable – as elsewhere: “Stop the Russian invasion!“ – “Defend Ukraine!” – “Send money” – “More, bigger, further-reaching weapons!”- “Defeat Russia!” Sustaining this tide is an all-encompassing media campaign. No politician is exempt; even President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel are pressured to make excuses for long-past efforts to achieve detente and decrease confrontation with Russia, now denounced as “appeasement”. (Steinmeier has abjectly apologized, Merkel stubbornly refuses to do so.) And the calls to defend Ukraine are expanding: now we are told to defend our “democratic rules of order” in a new crusade.

Every epoch has had its call to battle the Forces of Evil. Once it was Anarchism, then Bolshevism, Communism. After those menaces were defeated new ones were required; in 2001 it was Terrorism. With that frightening term eroding, it is being replaced by Authoritarianism. The gargoyle staring at us from magazine covers – after Stalin, Mao and Fidel have died and Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Gaddafi been eliminated – is now a scowling Putin. And with him Russia, which must be ostracized, sanctioned, wrecked, starved and, above all, defeated. I have not yet heard any direct use of the word “bombed,” but the weapons are ready, with $800 billion spent annually in the USA, about thirteen times Russia’s military budget, not counting the others in NATO. In Germany, on top of its already huge military outlay, a special €100 billion fund was added, after receiving the required 2/3 parliamentary majority to overrule constitutional limitations. Its use is restricted to strengthening and modernizing the Bundeswehr, for F-35 planes, capable of dropping atomic bombs on Moscow in record time, for warships capable of landing at any shore, for latest-model, deadliest tanks.

Change of course: Germany is now supplying arms to Ukraine after all. | Photo: YouTube

All this is “to achieve security”. German borders are nowhere threatened, but the Ukraine invasion, it’s said, proves Putin’s plans to regain the area of the USSR or the czarist empire. So who knows? And any call to reason, to push for a truce and negotiations instead of demands to defeat and “ruin” Russia, oust Putin and put him on trial, is denounced as appeasement, with allusions to the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Neville Chamberlain and French premier Daladier sold out Czechoslovakia.

I also see parallels, but very different ones. Hitler’s main aim, proclaimed in his Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy and Japan, was to invade and destroy the USSR, seizing the wealth of its giant expanse and moving closer toward hegemony, with Japan, of all Eurasia.

How did “the West” view such plans? In a secret meeting on November 19 1937, Lord Halifax, Britain’s representative, congratulated Hitler „that the Fuehrer had not only achieved great things in Germany, but that by destroying communism in his own country he had blocked its way to Europe and that therefore Germany can rightly be regarded as a bulwark against Bolshevism.“

The West, though not itself fascist, admired Hitler’s hatred of the USSR and hoped he might attack and destroy it, thus eliminating any nasty socialist threat. It demonstrated this by supporting Hitler, Mussolini and Franco in Spain, uttering hardly a whisper of disapproval of the Nazi takeover of Austria, agreeing to the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia which brought Germany to the Russian border, and rejecting calls by Soviet Foreign Minister Litvinov in the League of Nations for “collective security” against German expansion. Litvinov’s hopes for unity against fascism died with the West’s speedy recognition of Franco’s victory on April 1 1939. Within a week Stalin drew the consequential conclusion, ousted Litvinov and set his successor, Molotov, to making a deal with Germany.

As Litvinov commented: British and French leaders “… had done everything they could to goad Hitler’s Germany against the Soviet Union by secret deals and provocative moves … The Soviet Government, in order to avoid an armed conflict with Germany in unfavorable circumstances and in a setting of complete isolation, was compelled to make the difficult choice and conclude a non-aggression treaty with Germany.”

The two years it gained made the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin possible, but only after the death of over 50 million people, about 27 million of them Soviet citizens. The events following the West’s rejection of Litvinov’s “collective security” were bloody and devastating. So too are the events of 2022. Of course the world is very different and neither NATO, Putin nor Ukraine are Nazi Germany. But has it not been USA policy to push its NATO closer and closer to Russia, building up its neighbors militarily, with annually threatening border maneuvers, organizing provocations like the putsch against an elected Ukrainian president in 2014 for wanting trade with both Russia and the West? Has it not been trying to totally surround Russia, weaken it economically, aiming at a final goal of “regime change” with a pawn like Yeltsin providing full access to a giant region and a ramp for an attack on the last big barrier to world hegemony, China? Doesn’t current US (hence NATO) policy recall eastward pressures of the past – called “cordon sanitaire,” “containment“ or “rollback”?

That ugly agreement of Stalin with Hitler was necessitated by an overwhelmingly existential threat. Did Putin view the present scene similarly? We cannot tell. Of course he saw how Ukraine was being steadily armed with Javelin antitank missiles, modern artillery, drones and howitzers that fire deadly Excalibur shells “with pinpoint accuracy”. He most certainly knew of deadly, joint US-Ukrainian “biological research facilities,” as admitted by Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland (the same official who guided the 2014 putsch in Kyiv). And we needn’t simply guess at what steps Washington would take if China conducted heavily-armed maneuvers in Tijuana or Baja California; we can look up the Bay of Pigs invasion or the attacks against Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic, not to mention Korea, Vietnam, Iraq , Libya, Afghanistan, all of them far distant from Washington or New York. Luckily, the toll in lives and damage in Ukraine has not approached that in some of those invasions. Of burning necessity today; those numbers must never be approached!

But even the most valid comparisons with past or present dangers cannot minimize the Putin government’s share in the guilt for present horror! Nor can they overcome worries that Putin may indeed be dreaming of Czar Peter, of a Greater Russia, denying Ukrainian rights to independence and sovereignty. Nor do accusations of Nazi rule justify the violation of international law, the wrecking of so many towns, cities and families, despite a very real Bandera cult and the strength of Azov thugs. It is more than likely that a massive attack against the Russian-speaking Donbas republics was planned and Putin moved to prevent it. But was invasion the only method of prevention? I cannot say.

There is much we do not know. But there can be only one answer to current escalation, with growing election-related American belligerency, ever more powerful weaponry which will cost ever more lives, mostly Ukrainian ones – and the constant menace of atomic war. The answer must be to pressure Biden and Johnson, Baerbock and Scholz to support negotiations and peace. Difficult as such a response may be, I think it must top the agenda, worldwide, of every progressive! And it also means welcoming similar conclusions by a very mixed crowd including Erdogan in Turkey, the Pope in Rome, courageous Lutheran leaders in Germany and even that old war hawk Kissinger.

The call for peace is also heard from inside Russia, despite attempts to silence it. I hope it bears fruit – but not for those Russians who yearn for a NATO victory – and one more regime take-over!

In Germany, weak attempts to avoid total confrontation and work for peace were heard from Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, who dared briefly to look to the future, when a Europe deprived of its Russian component, unalterably aligned against it, should be unthinkable. But timid words in this direction were soon shushed by his coalition partners: the right-wing Free Democrats, ready to spend billions for war and weapons but not tax the billionaires one more euro, and the Greens, once seen as progressive, now nicknamed “Olive-Greens”, with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock loudest in the ravenous pack, outdoing even European Union Commission boss Ursula von der Layen. Scholz knows that resisting either partner could sink his coalition ship and end his captaincy. Both of them (and his own party) have happily joined in many state-level coalitions with the rightist Christian Democrats and could try it again nationally. His fears of their desertion could explain his loud support for the €100 billion package for the military. But the trend is strong all over Europe, as seen in the efforts of Sweden and Finland to break long-held traditions and apply to join NATO. The bellicose “Atlanticists” have used the Ukraine war to please the Pentagon and the Raytheons and defeat the pragmatic, business-minded advocates of trade and rapprochement with Russia and China.

Olaf Scholz now plans to forget past insults from Kyiv and pay a visit, together with Emmanuel Macron and Italian premier Mario Draghi, all of them somewhat hesitant till now but all fearful of media accusations of being slouchers, the threesome will be listening favorably to Zelenskyy’s insistent demands for heavy weapons. They will undoubtedly be spared embarrassing encounters with the Nazi-like flags, insignia and tattoos of the Azov battalions or visits to giant Bandera statues.

Scholz has already paid a first-time state visit to Vilnius, where he assured the heads of state of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia that Germany was thinking of them and would send more troops to their countries, near Russian St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. No mention was made of Hitler’s use of this Baltic area when attacking the USSR in 1941 and laying deathly siege to Leningrad for 2½ years, nor the eager participation of Baltic volunteers in SS units fighting for Hitler. During the visit none of the traditional, police-protected marches of SS veterans and supporters were held; their current accent has switched to support of Ukraine.

While the western winds were blowing stronger, partly out of sympathy and solidarity, partly tainted by the smell of nationalism and hatred, where in Germany was DIE LINKE, The Left, a party traditionally standing for peace and opposing the weapons race? Sadly said, it’s better not to ask!

After its disastrous results in the national election last September, where it sank to 4.9%, down from 9.9% in 2017 and only squeezed back into the Bundestag thanks to a rule by which, if three or more delegates were elected directly by their districts, proportional representation (PR) came into force. Just three won, two in Berlin, one in Leipzig, so the party stayed in the Bundestag, but no longer the largest opposition party with 69 seats but as the weakest, down to 39. Drastic changes were more than urgent! But they were not made, and in three state elections the Left again lost catastrophically.

Despite participation in four state coalitions, in Berlin, Bremen, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Thuringia, the party’s further existence was clearly endangered. A heavy blow hit in April, when the more “reformist” co-chair Susanne Hennig-Wellsow resigned, because of her “personal situation” as mother but with a veiled attack on her more militant co-chair, Janine Wissler, based on a nastily distorted article in the crafty magazine »Der Spiegel«, always an enemy of Die Linke, which falsely wrote of Wissler covering up a case of misogyny by her ex-partner. Almost certainly allied with its usual behind-the-scenes snoopers and manipulators, it wrote of Die Linke’s mishandling of “sexism.“

Because of the co-chair’s resignation, the many election defeats, and the charges of sexism flying around (although Die Linke has a female majority in its Bundestag delegation and in state legislatures), it was decided to elect an entire new leadership at the party congress in Erfurt on June 24-26. Defying the unjust media attacks, Janis Wissner will run again for the top office. Since she is a left-leaning female West German, a likely co-chair might be a reformist-leaning male East German.

But the party is sharply divided. The “reformers,” who based their disastrous campaign last year on hopes of joining a national coalition with the Greens and the Social Democrats, had to bury this dream (for now). Even if feasible, the party would have had to abandon opposition to NATO and the deployment of German troops in foreign wars and occupations, as in Afghanistan and Mali, and its resistance to big armament plans, or sending heavy weapons to Ukraine. The ”left wing” of Die Linke insists that this would mean giving up its position as a lone party of peace, thus becoming irrelevant: a slightly left-leaning Social Democratic sector of the establishment, forgetting its opposition to the capitalist system and its mighty billionaire potentates!

Such basic questions will likely be at the center of debate in Erfurt at the end of the month – and in the choice of co-chairs and all other positions. Will the party choose sides? Will it find some compromise? Could it split, forming two weak parts, leaving a peace position unstated in the Bundestag and the media? In two weeks we should know

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Despite the current catastrophe, about forty people, also calling the past to mind. met at a small square monument at Berlin’s Lustgarten park to commemorate a tragic failure.

In May 1942 the Nazi war machine, after all its Blitzkrieg victories and early gains in its attack on the USSR, had begun to bite on granite. Unexpected reverses and heavy losses meant flagging morale, so a big, multimedia exhibition, sarcastically named “Soviet Paradise,” was set up to show the desolate, poverty-stricken Soviet they were destroying – and regain enthusiasm for ”our boys in uniform”.

Two underground groups, young Communists, decided to set fire to the exhibition. Five from one group, seven from a second, Jewish group, severely restricted but not yet hit by the deportations, were led by Herbert Baum, 29, highly talented, in sports, musically, and in support of Marxist ideas – and dearly loved by all of them.

But on the date set, May 18th 1942, the combustible material secreted around the exhibition failed to ignite; the plot was discovered and nearly all members of both groups were caught, tortured, and sent to the guillotine. Baum was found hanged in his cell. The small monument in East Berlin was erected in 1981 and only slightly altered after unification, partially veiling references to the USSR.

++++++++

On May 8th, to mark the anniversary of a great victory, many hundreds of Berliners resumed the traditional annual visit to the Soviet Memorial Monument in Treptow, one of three in Berlin, with its statue of a Red Army soldier holding a small child protectively in one arm, in the other a sword, smashing a swastika at his feet. The long green lawn below the statue contains the remains of 7000 soldiers who, after four terrible war years, died in the last fierce battle to defeat Hitler fascism.

++++++++

1. Additional side-notes: Elon Musk has started production of his electric autos in a gigafactory complex in a previously wooded area southeast of Berlin, to be his biggest plant in Europe.

2. With prices here also soaring upwards, various schemes are constantly being debated, either to allay misery or blunt growing militancy, now seen in strikes by nurses, airline attendants, hospital personnel and others, with demands as high as 8% in raises.

3. In a curious experiment, a single €9 ticket in June, July and August will grant free transportation for one month each on all subway, elevated, streetcar, bus and railroad travel, except only the fancy international routes. From the start, trains to Baltic and North Sea beaches were jammed.

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└ Tags: Annalena Baerbock, Britain’s representative, ed Army, Friedrich Merz, Germany, Groko, Horst Seehofer, liberation of Berlin, Lord Halifax, magazine Der Spiegel, NATO, Putin, Russia, Soviet Government, St. Petersburg, Ukraine, USSR, Victor Grossman

Kommentar

Jul12

am 12. Juli 2022

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman – 12. Juli 2022

THE WAR * GERMANY * THE LEFT
BERLIN BULLETIN NO. 203

Victor Grossman

In 1307 in Switzerland, so goes the legend, the Habsburg rulers’ local bailiff, Gessler, stuck his hat on a pole and commanded every passerby to salute it. Wilhelm Tell refused. As fearsome punishment he had to shoot an apple from his own little boy’s head with his crossbow. His aim was sure, the boy was safe. But „Gessler’s hat” still means forced obeisance to some symbol. Or else!

In current media, every mention of the war in Ukraine must start with a denunciation of that monster Putin. Or else! What epithet is more withering than “Putin-lover”!

I, too, am not a Putin-lover. And I have a great hatred of war, especially war rained from the skies or aimed from a distance. Waging war, against civilians, even against young uniformed “adversaries,” is inherently wrong. But I will not bow my head to this modern “Gessler’s hat”, no matter what epithets I may be pelted with (crossbows are rarely available). Actually, for my last Berlin Bulletin, while some readers accused me of being too “pro-Putin” others said I was too “anti-Putin”!

Despite my horror at the death, destruction and misery I see daily on TV, my entire background demands a careful analysis of a conflagration which may yet fling flames across more borders and can all too easily kindle atomic annihilation. Why did Russia send an army into Ukraine? Was it pure imperialism? A terrible miscalculation? Did Putin see it as a dire necessity? Or was it a baited trap?

To start with, I cannot forget, deny or ignore what I have seen happen since 1945; how the Pentagon, White House, Congress and those behind them sought the defeat of one pro-socialist effort after another. They failed in Cuba and Vietnam, they succeeded in Ghana, Grenada, Chile – and, most important, in Europe! By utilizing every weakness, blunder, even offense, and exerting every form of pressure, Poland was won by a team led by Ronald Reagan, “Polish Pope” John Paul II, the CIA and a few experts in the AFL-CIO. In 1989-90 it was the GDR’s turn, with help from US Ambassador to Bonn Vernon Walters, a former CIA Deputy Director who had played a major role in Poland. In 1991 came the glorious victory over the USSR, where Yeltsin, an alcoholic marionette, opened the gates to ten years of chaos, desolation and sell-out to new Russian oligarchs and not so new US corporations.

That’s when Putin stepped in, just in time to save Russia from total collapse, using his own set of oligarchs, crossing himself piously as he knelt in church but keeping a tight state hold on banks and basic resources. This was not at all what American businessmen and politicians wanted. So the US-led military pact NATO, breaking its promise of 1990 not to move an inch eastwards, advanced, one regime-changed ally after the other, towards complete encirclement of Russia: in 1999 Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, in 2004 Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; then the hinterland in fragmented, bombed ex-Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia. Only a few more were needed to close a tight ring around Russia. Afghanistan did not pan out, nor did Georgia (though attempts are vigorously continuing). But most important was Ukraine, which could block Russia from the Black Sea and reached to within 400 miles of Moscow.

The elected president of that huge gem, unwilling to become part of the encircling noose, sought a more neutral position. “Not enough!” said NATO and sent in Nuland. Victoria Nuland, deputy in Hillary Clinton’s State Department (and wife of a top cold war strategist), went to Kyiv, dealt out at least $5 billion and even tasty cookies to a largely right-wing, anti-Russian crowd, and maybe a few to the mysterious snipers who forced the president to flee for his life. In a famous hacked phone call she personally chose the next Ukrainian ruler, banker-politician Yatzenyuk, a man supported by the “Freedom Party” of Oleh Tyahnybok, who had denounced a “Jewish-Russian Mafia” and praised Ukraine’s new hero Stepan Bandera, who led in murdering thousands of Jews and Poles in 1941.

One of the new rulers’ first measures discriminated against the many Russian-speakers, limiting the use of all but Ukrainian, making them second-class citizens and in Crimea angry enough to vote, with a big majority, to break with Ukraine and rejoin with Russia (to which they had belonged until 1954) and in eastern Donbas to form two separate republics, much as Albanian-speaking people in Kosovo broke away from Serbia in 2008. In such decisions national pride, or self-defense – superseded complex international rules. Military operations against Donbas were soon launched, using the fascistic “Azov” militia units.

With Ukraine now a new segment in the ring around Russia, USA-NATO built up its strength there, first with “non-lethal” arms and trainers, letting allies like Lithuania pass on bigger stuff. Then came a series of military maneuvers. Defender-Europe 20 was hindered by Covid-19 but, in 2021, Sea Breeze was conducted in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea with more than 30 warships and 40 planes from 32 countries not far from the Russians’ southern naval base of Sevastopol.

Then it was Operation Cossack Mace, this time to “improve compatibility between British and Ukrainian military formations, strengthen mutual relations, joint planning and perform battalion and tactical operations.” Two British-built naval bases were planned near the short Russian coast.

In September 2021 it was Rapid Trident 21. -“To increase combat readiness, defense capabilities and interoperability, the exercise features joint jumps of Ukrainian and U.S. paratroopers and, for the first time, service members will conduct battalion tactical exercises of a multinational battalion with combat shooting in a single combat order … The purpose is to prepare for joint actions as part of a multinational force during coalition operations.” Joining the USA and Ukraine were Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Lithuania, Moldova, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Turkey and the UK.

Such activities were allegedly for peace, defending Ukraine against “authoritarianism.” But Russia viewed the threat of cutting it off in the Baltic and Black Sea, plus 700 or 800 big or small USA bases on six continents, in a very different way. Washington was a safe 7800 miles away; St. Petersburg and Moscow were under the noses of those missile launchers, warplanes and warships, and the USA alone had a 13-1 preponderance over Russia in military spending. Bipartisan American politicians were outdoing themselves in reviling Russia, nor could the Maidan events with Victoria Nuland be forgotten.

As for Putin, like him or hate him, it is hardly surprising that he was alarmed, perhaps even for personal reasons in view of the fates of other leaders disliked by Washington: Allende, dead in his bombed residence, Lumumba, tortured and murdered, Saddam Hussein, hanged, Muammar Gaddafi, fatally sodomized, the Afghani Najibullah, castrated and stringed up, Usama Bin Ladin, shot in his rooms and dumped into the ocean, Slobodan Milošević, mysteriously dying in a prison cell. (Fidel Castro was luckier, surviving over a hundred bungled CIA assassination attempts.)

hier geht es weiter »

In a 14-page historical summary, Putin wrote:

“We respect the Ukrainian language and traditions. We respect Ukrainians’ desire to see their country free, safe and prosperous.” … “Russia is open to dialogue with Ukraine and ready to discuss the most complex issues. But it is important for us to understand that our Ukrainian partner defend its national interests not by serving someone else’s, that it not be a tool in someone else’s hands to fight against us.”

That was in July 2021. How sincere were such words? What did they mean in February 2022? Daring to ignore the “Gessler hat,” I think basic Russian policy must be seen not as expansionist but as defensive. In 2015 Russia agreed to the Minsk II agreement to avoid further warfare in Donbas and resolve the conflict with negotiations and compromises. Kyiv ignored, indeed undermined Minsk II; Germany and France, its co-sponsors, abandoned it. Foreign Minister Lavrov made proposals to discuss a neutral Ukraine. At first Zelensky seemed interested – until pressure from Washington and London to “stay tough” prevailed; Lavrov’s further requests to negotiate differences, above all to remove NATO troops and maneuvers from Russian borders, were rejected in December 2021 by Secretary of State Blinken, as “very obvious nonstarters”. Was that rejection Putin’s “red line”? Who knows? I only wish they had been “starters” instead – for the White House and Pentagon. That could have saved the Ukrainians immense suffering and exile – although it might have meant fewer billions for Northrup-Grumman or Raytheon.

And on February 24? Did Putin perhaps march into an elaborate trap – as Russia had once done in Afghanistan? Did he consider a big impending Ukrainian offensive against the Donbas republics and their Russian-speaking population, where 14,000 had died in ten years of battle, as an immediate danger to Russia? Did the many US-Ukrainian biological laboratories – admitted to by Victoria Nuland in a US Senate committee hearing – seem an immediate threat? I cannot know.

One commentator, turning to history, recalled the surprise attack on the USSR by the Nazi armies in 1941, resulting in up to 27 million deaths and vast destruction. He surmised that Putin, seeing a growing, hostile Ukrainian army, with NATO (or the USA leaders) guiding it from the wings, decided that a first attack was necessary to prevent any repetition of 1941.

Putin defended the invasion of Ukraine with the following words:

“Today we are told that we started a war in Donbas, in Ukraine. No, it was unleashed by this same collective West which organized and supported the unconstitutional armed coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, then encouraged and justified genocide against the people of Donbas …

“The West is fighting Russia with all the tools that are also used in a war: weapons, sanctions, money, media, diplomacy. The only thing that slows the West down from intervening with its own soldiers is the danger of nuclear war.

“Ukraine is only the unfortunate sacrificial pawn of the West, which had been prepared for this role since 2014 and with which the West has provoked Russia (with the Maidan coup in 2014, arms deliveries, construction of NATO bases, etc.) until Russia saw no choice but to take military action to protect its own security interests. At the beginning of February 2022, the West rejected the security guarantees proposed by Russia in December 2021 and even refused to talk about them.”

That is Putin’s position. True or not, and for whatever reason, invasion was a tragic choice! Aside from the misery in Ukraine it has led to a dangerously explosive polarization, painfully splitting the world’s weak left-wing forces for peace and progress.

And in Germany? For years the unified country was torn between two forces. Some economic groups, like gas importers and exporters of manufactured and agricultural goods, wanted to get along with Russia (and even more with China), a policy symbolized by Angela Merkel and the Baltic pipelines. This was angrily opposed by men along the Potomac, in Charles Koch’s Wichita HQ and similar locations, who wanted both to export fracked gas and to head off even limited German-Russian reconciliation. They were aiming at the eventual defeat of Russia, then China, as major barriers to their plans for world hegemony, prudently labeled “the rule of order,” democracy, liberty (and free markets!) as against “authoritarianism.”

Closely beholden to them was that force in Germany, the Atlanticists, whether because of ideology, intertwining corporate and financial interests, or perhaps even personal career hopes. After February 24th, inside and outside the governing coalition, the Atlanticists won full victory, filling the media with angry denunciation of everything Russian, working to permanently break off all commercial ties with Moscow, starting with the Baltic oil pipelines, even though this may well cause industrial shutdown s and maybe very chilly room temperatures. Christian Democrats, Free Democrats, and first and foremost the Green party joined the attack, with the young Green foreign minister Annalena Baerbock demanding that as many and as heavy weapons possible to be sent to Kyiv, with her cherished goal the “ruin of Russia”.

The Social Democrats were not so clear, with Chancellor Scholz hesitant about sending heavy weapons to Kyiv and getting deeply involved in what could become an open war, NATO vs. Russia. But media attacks grew fiercer, and Scholz bowed to that “Gessler hat,” siding with NATO and Washington, stationing more German troops in Lithuania and demanding an unprecedented sum of €100 billion for more armaments to “protect German security”.

The competition in denouncing Russia grew strong enough to revive half-forgotten tones from the 1930s, like when Lars Klingbeil, a leading Social Democrat, claimed that “Germany’s allies have great expectations and Germany must fulfil them… It is time for it to exit the end-of-history mode and become a leading power on the world stage after almost 80 years of holding back.“

Frightening words! Even more frightening were those of top air corps General Ingo Gerhartz: “For a credible deterrent, we need both the means and the political will, if necessary, to implement nuclear deterrence.“ The “old guard” in the established parties were beginning to summon up past glories!

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is all out for those past glories but, like some other far-righters in Europe, did not join the verbal attacks on Russia and opposed armaments for Ukraine! Their main mission in nearly all matters is opposition – above all to the European Union. But as dyed-in-the-wool nationalists, they also support a big German military build-up, a renewed draft and/or compulsory civil service for young men (as also recommended by President Steinmeier!).

The Left – Die Linke – has always stood out as the one party of peace, opposing deployment in Serbia, Afghanistan, Mali or anywhere outside German borders. Now it was split, with the main bone of contention the Ukraine war. Actually, disagreement on related issues was by no means new, though rarely so emotional as at the party congress session in late June.

It was a disastrous year for The Linke. In the September elections the party received only 4.9%, down from 6.9% four years earlier. Its caucus in the Bundestag was only just saved by a special rule; if three or more delegates were elected directly in their districts the caucus was saved, even without 5%. Exactly three scraped through, but proportional representation now gave it 39 deputies, not its previous 69; no longer the strongest opposition party, it had become the weakest. The urgent party reassessment and changes called for by this disaster failed to materialize and the party lost bitterly in three state elections: Saarland – from 12.8% to 2.6%, Schleswig-Holstein, 3.8 to 1.7% and in the key industrial North Rhine-Westfalia from 4.9 to 2.7%! Few workers voted Left. Some prominent members quit. The magazine Der Spiegel falsified a sex-related event (some obscure member’s alleged assault) into a malicious “Me-too” attack on the more militant co-chair Janine Wissler for allegedly covering it up. Her “reformist” co-chair, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, quit her leadership position in a huff, and with new leadership elections now necessary, the party faced total defeat, perhaps a split and even its demise!

In the main dispute the so-called reformers weakened the party’s basic opposition to NATO in hopes of being accepted in a government coalition with the pro-NATO Greens and Social Democrats. Such dubious hopes were rendered fully impossible by the Left’s poor election results. But the reformers still tended to play down or absolve the NATO’s current role, giving Russia and Putin the entire blame for the Ukrainian tragedy while the militant wing of the party viewed the NATO, especially the USA, as provocateurs, whose expansionist policy of deploying armaments and maneuvers along Russian borders was clearly looking for trouble – and, sadly, getting it. The quarrel reflected a deeper rift – between those who called for improvements in child care, pensions, minimum wages but saw socialism only as a future goal in vague clichés while basically accepting a systemic status quo in which they strove to become accepted, despite the growing menace of the billionaires. The militants, while not calling for revolution tomorrow (like some ultra-leftists), nevertheless saw a rejection of the capitalist system as vital – and basic opposition a necessity. The one group accepted NATO, the other opposed it. Their differences colored often hot but very brief Congress debates, which were dominated by the reformers, who won out in the end with about a 60-30 ratio – and managed to slip some very ardent pro-NATO advocates into leading positions. Janine Wissner was re-elected as co-chair (thus rejecting the malicious media smear). For co-chair, the usual male-female, East-West, leftish-reformist balance formula was maintained, and the militant, popular Sören Pellmann from Leipzig, one of the three delegates to save the Left caucus by winning a seat in his district, lost out to the rather moderate Martin Schirdewan, till then a delegate in the European Parliament, who promised to put far more stress on working-class struggles while opposing armament sales to Ukraine and organizing for peace. He seemed to seek Left reconciliation – and, at last, action.

Some on the left deplored the Congress results. Others were glad there had been no split, some political positions had been rescued, a threatened stress on “gender issues,” even in grammar and punctuation, had been averted and a shaky compromise arrived at. It remain to be seen whether The Left can regain roots among working people for the many hardships and big menaces now looming. And much may yet depend on its position regarding Gessler’s hat. A side note: In the famous play by Friedrich Schiller, the events involved led to the Swiss rebellion against Habsburg tyranny.

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