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Nov08

am 8. November 2019

Veröffentlicht in: Harry Popow, Hosteni, Victor Grossman

Der 9. November 1989

Parole der KPD/ML in Westberlin. Bild: Archiv Roter Morgen

30 Jahre ist es nun her das die in Ost und West verhasste Mauer zwischen den beiden deutschen Staaten, der DDR und der BRD unter Freudengeschrei überflüssig wurde.

Seit Wochen trommeln die Medien ihre Legende vom Mauerfall. Eine große Propagandablase von Freiheit und friedlicher Revolution. Filme, Veranstaltungen usw. überziehen das Land. Einseitig wird über die Ereignisse an der Staatsgrenze der DDR berichtet. Einst, nachvollziehbar, als „Antifaschistischer Schutzwall“ und zur Verhinderung von Republikflucht gebaut, wurde sie in der Bevölkerung nach und nach immer verhasster und warf kein gutes Licht auf den deutschen Staat, der vorgab, der Staat der Arbeiter und Bauern zu sein.

Ein Großteil der Kommunisten und der kommunistischen Parteien und Organisationen in Deutschland unterwarfen sich dem Diktat der seid langen revisionistisch entarteten KPdSU unter Chruschtschow und Breschnew. Nur die kleine KPD/ML kämpfte als revolutionäre, kommunistische Partei in der DDR und der BRD für ein vereintes, unabhängiges, sozialistisches Deutschland. Sie war die einzige gesamtdeutsche Partei die die Interessen aller Werktätigen vertrat. Aber bedeutungslos war sie nicht, denn dann hätten die Herrschenden und ihre Organe das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und der Verfassungsschutz, die übrigens in dieser Sache auch gern zusammen arbeiteten, sie nicht so brutal und unnachgiebig verfolgt. In über 200 westdeutschen Betrieben gab es Rote Betriebsräte, die konsequent die Interessen ihrer Kollegen/innen verfolgten. Tausende von politischen Prozessen in der BRD wurden gegen die Genossen/innen der KPD/ML geführt. Lange Haftstraße und Zerstörung der Familien und Freundeskreise erhielten viel KPD/ML-Genossen/innen in der DDR.

Bildnis das 1977 von Berliner Künstlern erschaffen wurde. Es war über 4 Meter breit und wurde z. B. bei Westberliner 1.-Mai-Demonstrationen auf einem LKW mitgeführt. Bild: Archiv Roter Morgen

Als es 1989 zum Volksaufstand kam, war sie letztlich, auch geschwächt durch die Zersetzungsarbeit von Trotzkisten, zu schwach um die Führung bei der Schaffung eines revolutionären sozialistischen deutschen Staates zu übernehmen.

Nachfolgend fünf Artikel die einige Geschehnisse um den 9. November 1989 näher beleuchten. Wir bitten auch um die Beachtung der umfangreichen Kommentare, die oft erzänzende Fakten offenlegen.

Redaktion AmericanRebel, 9. November 2019
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Harry Popow

Die neue Mauer.

Harry Popow

Dreißig Jahre Mauerfall! Und wie die Meute der Eroberer jubelt! Da meinen wirklich ganz Schlaue, die vollendete Demokratie erwischt zu haben. Mitwirkung in der Wirtschaft? Mitbestimmung gegen Rüstung und Krieg? Veröffentlichungen von gesellschaftskritischen Autoren? Nein, das gehe nicht, damit erreiche man keine Wirtschaftlichkeit. Medien, die sich zumauern, wenn grundsätzlich andere Machtverhältnisse angedacht werden. So lehnte kürzlich eine Zeitung aus dem Chor der „Qualitätsmedien“ eine Buchbesprechung mit der vagen Begründung ab, „dass aus grundsätzlichen redaktionellen Erwägungen Rezensionsvorschläge und -anerbieten von außen nicht berücksichtigt werden können…“.

So fallen die angebliche freie Meinungfreiheit von vornherein unter den Tisch. Unter dem Deckmantel der Wiedervereinigung streckte die Heilige Kuh des Profits ihre staatlichen und parteigebundenen Stellvertreter aus, um neue Weideflächen zu besetzen. Sie nahm den einstigen gemeinschaftlichen Besitzern Grund und Boden weg und verhieß angesichts der nunmehr im Westen aufgehenden Sonne „Blühende Landschaften“. Ihren Siegeszug bemäntelte sie mit den großen Worten „Freiheit und Demokratie“. Im Namen dieser seit der Französischen Revolution aufgekommenen Losung kam man nach der Konterrevolution auf die glorreiche Idee, von nun an allen und jedem zu gestatten, seine Innereien vor dem Volk auszuschütten, so dass man glauben sollte, die persönliche Freiheit sei das A und O jeglichen Wohlbefindens, darin stecke der Sinn menschlichen Daseins. Im Namen von Freiheit und Demokratie werden sämtliche Demos gegen Machtwillkür gestattet, um im nächsten Moment unter der gleichen Losung der Verteidigung des Abendlandes die Teilnehmer von TIPP-Demos zu diffamieren und gar in die rechte Ecke zu stellen.

Einkaufen mit 4,20 € am Tag. „Leben“ mit Hartz 4. Bild: Youtube screnshott aus einem Selbstversuch

Wer täglich für andere schuften muss und Geld verdient, der ist gut dran. Wer mit knappem Geld einkaufen geht, muss tüchtig überlegen. Wer die Miete nicht mehr bezahlen kann, der fliegt unter Umständen auf die Straße und sucht seinen Unterschlupf unter Brücken. Wer in den Fernseher glotzt, der findet tausende Gewalttaten, Korruptionsfälle und sämtliche Sauereien. Aber nur im Miniformat. In Talkrunden zum Beispiel. Da befinden sechs Leutchen über zunehmende Taschendiebstähle in Berlin. Und das man aufpassen solle. Zwei Stunden Gequassel über Symptome und kein Wort über Ursachen, gesellschaftlicher Art natürlich. Symptome, Symptome! Über Zustände wird offen und „ehrlich“ debattiert. Damit hat sich`s. Was Wunder, wenn die Glotzer zunehmen und keine Fragen nach Ursachen mehr stellen. Man ist so daran gewöhnt, zu stöhnen und festzustellen, es ist halt wie es ist…

Das Arbeitsamt als Kontrollorgan der Herrschenden setzt die Schraube der Erpressung und Demütigung bei den Erwebslosen an.

Beginnt mit zunehmender Ich-Bezogenheit und Gleichgültigkeit nicht der langsame Seelentod? Freiheit des Wortes. Freiheit der Meinung. Ob so oder so. Du schüttelst den Kopf, schaltest aus, gehst zu Bett. Das alles geht dir sozusagen am Arsch vorbei. Und niemand wird verschämt zurückblicken, als sehr viele bereits gedanklich gen Westen marschierten und dabei das Lied sangen „…und die Augen fest verschlossen“. Statt die „Reihen“ fest geschlossen. Ha,ha..

Was gibt es Wichtigeres als das einzigartige Leben? Mit all diesen Hoffnungen und auch Enttäuschungen? Mit all den Mühen und auch dem Spaß? Manchmal ist es zu viel des „Guten“. Gewalt, Korruption, Kriegsgefahr, Trauerspiel in Europa, nicht verfügbare Visionen, Resignation, Zerfallsprozesse, Theater und Filme, die oft genug nur Banales bieten, Talkrunden, die nur Symptome aufzählen. Inhaltsloses als Denkvorgabe. Was Wunder, dann droht Acedia: Gleichgültigkeit. Überdruss. Denkfaulheit. Trägheit des Herzens. Innere Leere. Langeweile. Ignoranz. Trostlosigkeit. Wer dem unterliegt, hat es schwer. Das Gegenteil von acedia: Sich rühren, zornigen Widerstand leisten, etwas tun. Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen. Im Bündnis mit anderen. Nicht vereinzelt. So wird ein Schuh draus.

Zukunft sieht dann anders aus. Dann droht Einsamkeit. Dann bist du ausgestoßen. Dann spürst du dein Alleinsein doppelt stark, abgehängt worden zu sein. Angewiesen auf Almosen, weil du ein außen vor bist, ein Arbeitsloser? Und dann heißt es noch, du bist selber Schuld an deinem „Missgeschick“. Und so tappst du ohnmächtig in die Falle der Selbstverschuldung, suchst nach Auswegen in dir selbst, gerätst immer tiefer in die Sackgasse der eigenen Ohnmacht, während sich der Staat aus sozialen Problemen immer mehr heraushält. Begehrst du aber auf, dann ist das dein gutes recht. Nur – das juckt niemanden. Dein Zorn verpufft wie der Schrei einer Nachteule.

Die Fragen nach dem WARUM haben den Abgang gemacht, die geistige Einengung nimmt ihren Lauf, nur wer tief gräbt hat Chancen, neue Blüten zu entdecken. Der Widerspruch liegt in allen Dingen – es kommt nur darauf an, die lösbaren zu finden, gute Ideen, neue Knospen zum Blühen zu bringen.

Unter einem Dach? Ein Volk, ein Führer. Brüder und Schwestern? Eine Nation? Eine Familie? Ein Staat? Du und ich? Die Liebe eint alle? Gut und Böse? Oben und unten? Geld und nicht Geld? Arm und reich? Gläubige und Ungläubige? Einheimische und Ausländer?

Selbst der unterschiedliche Drang nach Frieden spaltet jeden und alles!!!

Unterstreichen möchte der Autor auch die Feststellung der zwei Zeitzeugen Armeegeneral a.D. Heinz Keßler und Generaloberst a.D. Fritz Streletz in ihrem Buch „Ohne die Mauer hätte es Krieg gegeben“ auf Seite 169: Mit 1989 sei „zugleich der Versuch einer antikapitalistischen Alternative in Deutschland aus der Welt, die DDR war Geschichte. Aber mit ihr keineswegs die Vorstellung von einer anderen als der kapitalistischen Welt. Denn mit diesem Staat DDR ist ja nicht die Idee untergegangen, sondern ein bestimmtes Modell, dass den dauerhaften Angriffen des Imperialismus erlag.“ Sofern sich die deutsche Arbeiterklasse ihrer Erfahrungen bewusst wird und sich diese nicht ausreden lässt, habe sie jedoch noch eine Perspektive.

Frühere Artikel von Harry Popow

hier geht es weiter »

Hosteni

9. November 1989

Berlins Senat war auf den Mauerfall 1989 vorbereitet

Hosteni

Die Mauer fiel sanfter, als heute viele denken. Apparatschiks Ost und Bürokraten West fingen die Wucht des Sturzes ab, eine ungewohnte Zusammenarbeit lange vor der Vereinigung. Berlin – Die DDR hatte den Mauerfall angekündigt! Nicht für den 9. November 1989 aber für den Dezember 1989. Das geht aus einem Brief hervor, den Berlins Regierender Bürgermeister Walter Momper (SPD) am 6. November an Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl schickte.

Darin schreibt Momper: Er gehe „davon aus, dass voraussichtlich im Dezember 1989 für die Einwohner Ost-Berlins und der DDR eine weitgehende Reisefreiheit hergestellt wird“. Momper schreibt, die DDR-Bürger dürften seiner Information nach dann auch mit dem Personalausweis rüber. Momper schreibt auch, dass der Berliner Senat seit 31. Oktober 1989 eine Arbeitsgruppe für die Maueröffnung eingesetzt habe. Seit dem 3. November sei er in Gesprächen mit den Stadtkommandanten der West-Alliierten. Momper teilt mit, was mit den Alliierten bereits imGeheimen vereinbart wurde:

► Die bestehenden elf Grenzübergänge nach West-Berlin werden verbreitert.
► Elf neue Grenzübergänge werden eröffnet.
► DDR-Bürger sollen „aus Gründen der Luftreinhaltung“ kostenlos mit öffentlichenVerkehrsmitteln fahren dürfen.
► Ost-Berlin sei in einem Geheim-Gespräch vorgeschlagen worden, auf Kosten West-Berlins zwei U-Bahn-Umsteigebahnhöfe einzurichten
► Zwei gekappte S-Bahn-Linien sollen geöffnet werden.
► Ein Brückenbauprogramm solle zusätzliche Verbindungen zwischen Ost und Westschaffen.
► Sollten bei einem Millionen-Ansturm aus dem Osten die West-Berliner-Stellen mit derAuszahlung von Begrüßungsgel überfordert seien, solle dies schon im Osten erfolgen –durch die Staatsbank der DDR.
► Um eine grassierende Inflation in der DDR zu verhindern, solle unverzüglich mit demOsten ein fester Umtauschkurs Ost- zu D-Mark geregelt werden.
► Da West-Berlin schon genügend Probleme mit den Zoll-Kontrollen polnischer Pkw habe,solle diese Kontrolle von den DDR an der DDR-Grenze zu Polen übernommen werden.
► Bahnreisende aus Polen könnten am Bahnhof Friedrichstraße nur stichprobenartigkontrolliert werden.
► Er gehe davon, so Momper, dass etwa zehn Prozent der Besucher aus der DDR nicht zurück wollen. West-Berlin habe aber keine Wohnungen, schon jetzt lebten 23 000Menschen in Behelfsunterkünften. „Es muss daher kurzfristig geeignete Transportkapazität für die Weiterleitung bereitgestellt werden.

Treffen im Palasthotel am 29.Oktober 1989 zwischen Vertretern aus Ost- und West-Berlin. Günter Günter Schabowski (l.) und Walter Momper (r.). Foto: Bundesarchiv

“Momper stützte sich nach BILD-Informationen bei dem Brief und den Vorbereitungen auf den Mauerfall auf Informationen aus einem Geheim-Gespräch mit dem damaligen Ost-Berliner SED-Chef Günter Schabowski (85). Beide hatten sich Ende Oktober im Palast Hotel neben dem Berliner Dom getroffen. Schabowski hatte darum gebeten. Dafür, dass die Mauer aber dann nicht im Dezember, sondern schon am 9. November fiel, hatte Schabowski dann selbst gesorgt. Am 9. November stotterte er auf einer Pressekonferenz den sofortigen Mauerfall herbei – ohne Momper über die Plan-Änderungzu informieren.

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Hosteni

Wende 1989 – Bei Anruf Mauerfall

Hosteni

Kam der entscheidende Tipp aus der SED? Der Reporter Riccardo Ehrman, der am 9. November 1989 mit einer Frage an Politbüro-Mitglied Günter Schabowski den Mauerfall in Gang brachte, hat vorher einen Hinweis bekommen. Den mysteriösenAnrufer will er nicht outen – es war ein Mann aus dem SED-Zentralkomitee. Ehrman galt seither als eine Art stiller Held und als „Maueröffner“ – 2008 erhielt erdas Bundesverdienstkreuz.

Womöglich war Ehrman mit seiner berühmt gewordenen Frage nur ein Rädchen ineinem größeren Spiel – und die SED nicht gar so gelähmt, wie sie zu diesem Zeitpunk twirkte.

äh, äh, äh. Günter Schabowski, Mitglied des Zentralkomitees der SED und ab dem 6. November 1989 Sekretär für Informationswesen bei der Bekanntgabe der Reisefreiheit. Bild: YouTube screenshot

Auffallend ist zudem, dass ADN die Neuigkeit, die an den Grundfesten der DDR rüttelte, bereits um 19.04 Uhr vermeldete, zeitgleich mit der dpa. Dies könnte dafür sprechen, dass die Genossen von der staatstragenden DDR-Presseagentur auf die Nachricht vorbereitet waren – wäre sie überraschend gekommen, hätten sich die Verantwortlichen sicher noch einmal beim Politbüro rückversichert, bevor sie so eine grundstürzende Meldung verbreiteten.

Bleibt die Frage, wem diese Durchstecherei – sollte sie sich so abgespielt haben – nützen sollte. Hat sie ihren Ursprung bei SED-Generalsekretär Egon Krenz selbst, der den Parteiapparat noch einmal nutzte, um die Neuigkeit möglichst effektiv in der Öffentlichkeitzu lancieren? Jedenfalls hat Krenz es später so dargestellt, dass er vor der Pressekonferenz Schabowski das entscheidende Papier mit den Worten übergeben habe, dies sei „eine Weltnachricht“. Andererseits versuchte Krenz zu diesem Zeitpunkt noch verzweifelt, für die Öffnung des „Antifaschistischen Schutzwalls“ von der Bundesregierung Wirtschaftshilfe in Milliardenhöhe einzufordern – gab er sein letztes Verhandlungspfund wirklich freiwillig ausder Hand? Oder gab es in der obersten SED-Spitze Kräfte, die an Krenz vorbei das Überdruckventil öffnen wollten? Es könnte das letzte Geheimnis um den Mauerfall bleiben.

Quelle: „spiegel online„, 16.4.2009

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Parolengröler

30 Jahre Mauerfall

Nicht der Sozialismus scheiterte 1989, sondern das revisionistische System der DDR und das der Sowjetunion

Parolengröler

Die Lügenmedien sind voll von Jubiläumsfeierlichkeiten zum 30. Jahrestag des Mauerfalls vom 9. November 1989, wo in allen größeren Metropolen wie London, Paris oder New York symbolisch Mauern eingerissen wurden. Aber in Berlin ist es wirklich am krassesten mit den ganzen Kulissen und Titantrons!  „Das Terrorregime ist zu Ende und endlich war der Weg frei zur Demokratie“ oder Willy Brandts berühmt gewordener Spruch „Jetzt wächst zusammen was zusammen gehört!“ Dass dieses Zitat frei erfunden ist kümmert niemanden, aber ein anderes Zitat aus der Zeit zeigt umso anschaulicher was „Wiedervereinigung“ doch eigentlich bedeutet: „Ich kenne keine Parteien mehr, ich kenne nur noch Deutsche!“   

An diesem Tag ist nicht der Sozialismus beseitigt worden, dies geschah viel früher, sondern ein entartetes System, ein wahres Arbeiter- und Bauerngefängnis musste aufgrund seiner inneren Widersprüche untergehen. Die Arbeiterklasse war längst nicht mehr Herr über diesen Staat, ihre Diktatur, die Diktatur des Proletariats, war lange schon beseitigt  worden und eine neue Ausbeuterklasse war an ihre Stelle getreten, hatte die Macht in Partei und Staat an sich gerissen. Wie in der Sowjetunion und den anderen Staaten des Warschauer Paktes waren es revisionistische Systeme, die nichts mit dem Sozialismus gemeinsam haben.

Parole der KPD/ML aus den siebziger Jahren. Bild: Archiv Roter Morgen

Diese Systeme unterdrückten und beuteten die werktätigen Massen aus, sie nahmen ihnen alle Rechte und stellten sie unter das Diktat dieser neuen Ausbeuter. Die Frage, zu welchen Zeitpunkt es sich um bürokratisch-kapitalistische oder eine sozialfaschistische Form der Ausbeutung handelt, kann an dieser Stelle nicht behandelt werden – was aber zutreffend ist, ist, dass in allen diesen  Staaten das Proletariat nicht mehr an der Macht war und dementsprechend diese Staaten auch nicht fortschrittlich waren.

Noch heute kommen von Revisionisten/-innen verschiedenster Spielart Kommentare und Einschätzungen, wie z. B.: „Die DDR war das fortschrittlichste, was die deutsche Arbeiterklasse je erkämpft hat!“ oder “ Die DDR hatte zwar ihre Fehler, aber zumindest war sie sozialer als jedes kapitalistische Land“. Diese Kunden verblenden bewusst die Klassenverhältnisse, um diese  Systeme zu rechtfertigen. Die Arbeiterklasse braucht keinen „Fürsorge-sozialismus“, wo eine Schicht bzw. Klasse sich um das „Weh und Wohl der Massen“ kümmert. Der Sozialismus ist das System, in dem die Arbeiterklasse die Macht im Staat hat, sie im Besitz der Produktionsmittel ist und zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der Menschheit tatsächlich die Mehrheit der Gesellschaft herrscht. Sie führt ihre Diktatur über die Räte aus, in denen die werktätigen Massen über alle gesellschaftlichen Belange entscheiden. Dies geschieht nur mit einer marxistisch-bolschewistischen Partei, die es versteht, die schöpferische Kraft der Arbeiterklasse zu nutzen, um die Klassenunterschiede abzuschaffen und zum Kommunismus zu gelangen. Nach dem Mauerfall hat sich überall eine Tendenz des Defätismus breit gemacht. Gerade für viele revisionistische Organisationen war das ein herber Rückschlag. Selbst nach dem Untergang konnte und wollte man nicht von diesen bankrotten Systemen loslassen, man sprach nun von einer „Konterrevolution“, die 1989 das Ende der ehemaligen Ostblock- Staaten besiegelte.

Für uns Marxisten/-innen-Leninisten/-innen ist klar, warum sie so sprechen. Diese Revisionisten möchten einen „Sozialismus“, in dem die Arbeiterklasse in Ketten gelegt ist, in dem sie ihrer Rechte beraubt ist. Ein Sozialismus, in dem die lange erkämpften demokratischen Rechte als „bürgerlich“ abgetan und verboten wurden. Sie wollen nicht die Diktatur des Proletariats, sondern  die Diktatur der Partei, sie wollen dass eine Handvoll Führer der Partei, Bürokraten-Kapitalisten und Direktoren den Staat schalten und verwalten, denn „die wissen es ja am besten…“.

An dieser Stelle sei gesagt, die imperialistischen Mächte hatten natürlich ihren Anteil am Untergang der revisionistischen Staaten gehabt, durch Aggression und Sabotage, – das war aber nur ein untergeordneter Faktor: Die revisionistischen Staaten sind aufgrund ihrer inneren Widersprüche zugrunde gegangen. Gerade das vergessen dreißig Jahre danach so manche „ML-Organisationen“ und machen sich damit zu Apologeten des Revisionismus. Wenn wir uns nicht bemühen die Widersprüche auf historisch-materialistischer Weise zu analysieren und uns scheuen, auch eigene Fehler und Falschauffassungen zu widerlegen, werden wir nie aus den Fehlern der Geschichte lernen.

Die Arbeiterklasse in Deutschland hat nicht ihre geschichtliche Aufgabe vertan, gerade heute, in Zeiten von Hartz IV, Sozialabbau und Massenarbeitslosigkeit, wo die Verhältnisse sich immer weiter verschärfen und die Proteste von Arbeitern, Bauern, Angestellten, Studenten, Schülern und Erwerbslosen sich formieren, wenn auch noch schwach, zeigt sich dennoch, dass die Notwendigkeit einer Alternative zum Weltkapitalismus bei immer mehr Leuten angelangt ist. Das linke Spektrum des Sozialdemokratismus, wie die Linke oder auch Attac sind nicht in der Lage, die verschiedenen Kämpfe zu verbinden. Auch Bewegungen wie „Zeitgeist“ aus den USA mit ihrer „ressourcenorientierten Wirtschaft“ die offen keine klaaenkämpferische Aktiion ausser des Konsumboykotts fordern, verblenden nur die Arbeiterklasse sowie Bauern und schaden dem Klassenbewustsein. Auch mit diesen Organisationen muss sich näher ausseinander gesetzt werden, aber heute muss die Aufgabe von Kommunisten sein, den Weltozialismus als einzige Perspektive in die Gesellschaft hineinzutragen.

Wir als Marxisten-Bolschewisten arbeiten an dieser Aufgabe, auch wenn wir heute schwach sind. Deswegen muss es die Pflicht von Marxisten-Bolschewisten sein, sich für den Aufbau einer starken marxistisch-bolschewistischen Partei einzusetzen!

  Für ein unabhängiges, vereintes und sozialistisches Deutschland!
Es lebe die proletarische, sozialistische Revolution zum Sturz und Zerschlagung der BRD!
Es lebe die antisozialfaschistische Revolution !
Es lebe die sozialistische Weltrevolution!
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Weitere Beiträge von Parolengröler

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Victor Grossman

THE WALL AND GENERAL PYRRHUS e

Berlin Bulletin No. 169
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Victor Grossman

Media jubilation reaches a climax on November 9th, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their “welcome present“ of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system. Within less than a year they would end the experiment known as the German Democratic Republic to join, and fully enjoy, the wealthy, healthy, prosperous united Germany, with its freedom of the press, speech, travel and consumer bliss.

The jubilation thirty years ago is easy to understand and to sympathize with. Alone the ability, whenever and as often as desired, to meet and celebrate with friends and relatives, sufficed to bring tears to many, many eyes and the almost universal cries of „Wahnsinn!“ – “Simply crazy!“

But moving as those scenes were, and happy to so many in their recollections, a history-based, sterner evaluation awakens doubts that, despite the paeans in the world media, this was not purely a peaceful revolution, a choice of freedom by the masses, another successful victory for freedom and justice as in past centuries. We recall that even revolutions are complex, that the American Revolution was followed by Shay‘s Rebellion, a bolstering of slavery and a bloody six year war which forced most Indians from Ohio. The short era of Robespierre meant almost a year in prison for Tom Paine. And enthusiastic crowds can also make very false judgements.

Meeting at the Palace Hotel on October 29, 1989 between representatives from East and West Berlin. Günter Günter Schabowski (left) and Walter Momper (right). The dismantling of the wall was planned and East and West Berlin prepared for it. Photo: Federal Archives

East Germans soon learned that freedom of the press was for those who owned the presses, that freedom of speech helped most those who ruled over studios and cable connections. Most tellingly, they learned very quickly that those 100 West-marks were soon spent and new ones, for all those glistening commodities and travels, had somehow to be earned, while over 95 % of the industry they had built up was taken over by Westerners and, robbed of any machinery of value, for the most part shut down. It was now very simple to move westwards; several million did, now not for freedom, consumer goods or better-paid jobs but for any job at all. Professors, teachers, scientists, journalists, administrators at every level were thrown out, replaced by second and third string West Germans who were certain they could do everything better – and got “bush bonuses“ for making the sacrifice of taking over East Germany. For workers, the wage level is still below that in the West, while jobless figures and the work week for those now finding a job are both above the figures in the West.

The victory thirty years ago brought other changes. The old GDR had, until the end, no drug problem, almost no AIDS, no organized crime, no school shootings, none of the free food pantries now so prevalent, since people n the GDR, while lacking food items like oranges, bananas and other southern imports, all had enough to eat. Nor was there anyone in those years begging or sleeping in the streets, since there were always jobs a-plenty and evictions were illegal. So was any discrimination against women, who got equal pay, at least a half-year paid maternal leave, free abortions, cheap summer vacations and summer camps, and one paid day off a month for household duties.
Oh yes, there were blunders a-plenty, stupidity, careerism, dogmatism. Envy and greed could not be eradicated from the human soul, but with almost no feverish competition they were lessened, as the polls found. True, where people gained positions of power they were as capable of misusing it as elsewhere. Nor could all the remnants of fascist poison be erased from 16 million heads in one or two generations. But they were forbidden – and those with racist thoughts and prejudices kept them to themselves or within their closest circles, while truly masterful films, books and plays endeavored to combat them. Today, nazi thugs march every weekend , and the pro-fascist Alternative for Germany party has 94 seats in the Bundestag and won second place in three state elections.

Here we hit on the main problem with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. The GDR had thrown out – lock, stock and barrel – all the giant cartels and monopolies which profited from World War One, built up Hitler when, during the Depression, working people became rebellious, then earned billions from slave labor during World War Two and, afte r 1945, regained immense wealth and power. In the West! Bayer and BASF, major perpetrators of Auschwitz, are on top of the chemical pile, world-wide now with Monsanto. Powerful old fascist fat cats like Daimler (Mercedes) and Quandt (BMW) are cheating the environmentalists, Rheinmetall and Heckler & Co. are again making billions with their tanks and guns and missiles. All their properties were confiscated by the GDR – which is why they hated it and conspired against it, successfully. Also because the GDR, as opposed to its rival in Bonn, supported the Algerians in their fight for freedom, Allende against the Pinochets, Mandela and the ANC and SWAPO, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam and freedom fighters from Nicaragua to Aden.

The very existence of the GDR represented a barrier against further expansion by the Bayers with their control of ever more seed sources and their destruction of natural life, from frogs and butterflies to orchids, cacti and rain forests, but also against weapon+ makers who desire nothing more than further world tension, especially with Russia and China, the two main remaining barriers to world hegemony of thebillionaires. They demand the use and replacement of their products. After 1945 and until 1990 no uniformed Germans were shooting presumed enemies anywhere in the world. With the GDR out of the way the Bundeswehr flew missions and dropped bombs in the mountains of Afghanistan and trained soldiers in the desert sands of Mali – after beginning by bombing Serbia, repeating Germany‘s crimes in two world wars.

United Germany’s Minister of Defense, who hopes to become chancellor, has demanded that Germany play a far bigger role in today’s world – and plans a big build-up of weapons to achieve this. She has found smiling support from Secretary of State Pompeo, who came to Berlin and joined in the hallelujahs for the victory of democracy thirty years earlier. Yes, Pompeo!

The GDR had countless faults and limitations, caused by poor leadership – mostly aged anti-fascist fighters, trying to save the endeavor to achieve socialism in at least this small corner of Germany, but overtaken by modern developments and never able to find rapport with large sections of a vacillating population tempted by daily TV images of a wonderful world in the Golden West, which had been built up to become one of the world’s richest countries. The GDR was battered by a world of problems from all sides, domestic and foreign, pressured into “arming itself to death“ militarily, limited by the giant costs of the new electronic, computer age, with no help from the east and a boycott by the west, plus its giant humanitarian project – supplying good, modern homes for everyone while keeping rents to about one tenth of income.

In the end the odds were against it. But just as a World Series victory by the Washington Nationals did not mean that team was morally better but simply that at the time it was stronger, the defeat of the GDR did not mean that the system it was trying to develop, strengthen and improve – socialism – was proven false by its defeat.

The opening of the Berlin War was seen then and is still regarded by many as a wonderful victory. Looking around today’s deteriorating situation in Germany and much of Europe, with fascist movements on the rise and world-destroying weapons deployed and maneuvering dangerously, one might well recall the words of the Greek general Pyrrhus. After beating the Romans in the Battle of Asculum in 279 BCE, but with terrible losses for his own troops, he is quoted as saying: “Another such victory and we are lost!“

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Jan19

am 19. Januar 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

DEFENDER AND SPEARHEADS

Berlin Bulletin No. 172
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Victor Grossman

”ALARM! Twelve thousand residents must immediately leave their homes! All hospital clinics must be evacuated! No exceptions! Hasten!“

Not in burning Australia nor a besieged town in Syria or Afghanistan, but on January 12th 2020 in the otherwise peaceful if no longer prosperous Dortmund, in Germany’s Ruhr Valley; once again, unexploded bombs were detected under a central street and needed delicate defusing. Peaceful life had again been disrupted by remnants of World War Two; Dortmund, on March 12th 1945, was hit by the heaviest air raid of the war, costing 6341 lives and most of its remaining buildings. Last week’s detonations went safely – but restated a sad fact: in dozens of cities people still fear leftovers of a war which ended 75 years ago.

Again and again bomb alarm in Dortmund. Image YouTube screenshot

One month after the air raid in 1945 American GI’s freed Dortmund, just one day too late to save a last group of over 300 German antifascists and slave laborers from France, Belgium, Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Poland, the USSR, whose bullet-ridden corpses their Nazi killers had dumped into a mass grave. Three weeks later GI’s and Red Army men met and shook hands on a bridge over the Elbe River. Ten more days and the Soviets overcame desperate resistance to finally free Berlin, ending a 12-year nightmare which cost an estimated 27 million lives alone in the USSR – including huge numbers of civilians in burned villages, starved, frozen, in countless mass graves like the one in Dortmund. Europe turned to healing its wounds, to repairing colossal destruction. It, and the whole world, yearned for lasting peace.

Now, 75 years later, we watch the incredible turn-around. The happy handshakes and yearnings of that momentous springtime seem fully forgotten, erased. Troop movements today promise anything but peace. Every two years military maneuvers encircle Russian borders; every nine months a new brigade of 4500 US soldiers was flown over to “gain experience”. This year it will be a division of 20,000, joined by soldiers from 18 countries, 37,000 in all.

The „Defender 2020“ maneuvers will include mock attacks by Polish soldiers playing “the enemy” in tanks from one-time Soviet production. But at a press conference US Maj. Gen. Andrew Rohling, backed up by a German lieutenant general, insisted that the maneuvers are “not directed against Russia” but “simply to demonstrate a military ability to react quickly if it ever become necessary.”

Germany’s state-owned TV channel ARD was more explicit. Its commentator, Birgit Schmeitzner, explained:
“In an ideal world soldiers and armies are superfluous. But our world is not ideal… The old principle is still valid: ‘If you want peace you must prepare for war.’ … Maneuvers like ‘Defender 2020’ are part of this. Firstly, to keep in practice. To test how quickly the US Army can move its forces over long distances. Whether German roads and bridges hold out under deep-loaders carrying tanks. Whether communication works out between soldiers of different countries…. But secondly, this exercise is a signal: ‘In any and every case we are ready.’ The recipient is easily discerned: Russia. Appeasement is worthless. It is seen by the Kremlin as weakness. That is why the so-called NATO spearhead was built up in the Baltic countries.”

Defender 2020. Germany becomes the central hub for NATO maneuvers. Photo by Spc. Mathew Blas, source: YouTube screenshot

Not a few spearheads are being brandished these days. Some were weapons shipments to the Ukraine, where a heavily-financed, well-planned ‘regime change’ in 2014 featured violent mobs boldly exchanging Hitler salutes, wearing Nazi symbols and complementing the Baltic spearhead near St. Petersburg with one closer to Moscow, while trying to sever Russia’s outlet to the Black Sea. One need not be a “Putin-lover” to look at a map and grasp the Crimea story!

In the Near East a preferred form of spearhead was the drone. It proved effective against military leaders who, despite their key successes in fighting ISIS, were not to the liking of experts like Pompeo or Trump. Drones, aimed from comfortable chairs off in the Rocky Mountains, also proved effective against “terrorist” groups, which sometimes turned out to be wedding parties or peasants and children gathering pine-nuts. In the first half of 2019 alone 150 Afghani children were killed.

Because of the earth’s curve, aiming drones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or Yemen requires a relay station in Europe. This is at the base of Ramstein, HQ of the US Air Forces for both Europe and Africa and the biggest American base outside US boundaries. It is balanced further north in Germany by the base in Bückel, where ten to twenty B-61 bombs are stored, each of them four to 13 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Next door are hangars for German Tornado fighter-bombers to carry them eastward. Occasional promises, even votes, to oust the bombs – illegal on German soil – have thus far been ignored or weakly rationalized. It is not only TV commentators who like strong spearheads.

For years the German peace movement has fought to shut down those bases. This year their efforts will tie in with protests against “Defender 2020” and all its attempts to whip up sympathy, with flag-waving to mark eternal German-American friendship and army bands flown over to play the Star-Spangled Banner, Deutschland über alles and the best of John Philip Sousa’s marching music. What will they play on May 8th to mark the defeat of the Nazis 75 years ago? Since Russia is no longer invited even to events marking the liberation of Auschwitz and Treblinka (by Red Army soldiers), its anthem will hardly be intoned. The date may well be overlooked anyway, for uncomfortable recollections in this direction also run the risk of being viewed as “Putin-friendly”.

But in Berlin the leftish coalition (Social Democrats/Greens/LINKE-Left) surprisingly designated that date as a holiday, at least in this one city for this one year. Germany has mixed currents, even some which, despite all epithets, prefer selling cars and vegetables to Russia, or building underwater gas pipelines, to waving spearheads.

Mixed currents flow through many political parties. Peaceful ones are hardest to find in the words of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (“AKK”), who replaces a more moderate-sounding Angela Merkel as Christian Democratic chair (and hopes to succeed her as chancellor). Frau AKK seems to favor keeping German troops in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Mali, Niger and Iraq, if not more. She is for toughness; the armed forces, now costing € 43 billion a year, should choke down billions more in future, with the fastest planes and deadliest drones. Germany must “have the courage… when necessary, together with our allies and partners, to resort to the full spectrum of military measures.”

The Social Democrats, still partners in the government coalition despite all the losses it has cost them, are hunting desperately for popular policies. The members, sharply reduced in number and polling at only 14%, chose two new leaders reputed to tilt somewhat leftwards, but the cabinet members, most notably Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, while occasionally mumbling disapproval of confrontation and assassinating opponents, back off fearfully from a possible total collapse if they break with their Christian partners, their Washington patrons, or their hushed ties to men and women of money, power and influence.

The once left-leaning, so very non-conformist Greens, while still pushing environmental issues loudly enough to soar into second place in the polls, often seem to overlook working-people’s rights and to sing the loudest in the spearhead-waving chorus. In one state after another they show willingness to join up with the “Christians.”

The quasi-fascists AfD, in a tie with the Social Democrats at 14% in the polls, sometimes praises a vote-getting peaceful policy but always insists on more and more armaments and men in uniform. In the last century Germans experienced – and still experience in cities like Dortmund – what such twists and turns lead to.

And the LINKE? On January 11th the annual Rosa Luxemburg conference, again organized by the daily ‘Junge Welt’, brought together 3000 leftists from all over Germany plus foreign guest speakers from Bolivia, Turkey, Colombia, Israel-Palestine, also Tory Russell from Ferguson who described Black Lives Matter. This year again a moving message was recorded by Mumia Abu Jamal in his Pennsylvania jail cell.

The next day, like every year, the “old faithful” and younger enthusiasts laid red carnations at the memorial site for the martyred Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and many other 20th century socialists and communists. In the afternoon, LINKE Bundestag delegates offered a program with good music, fiery speeches and a first chance for many to see and hear the new co-chair of the LINKE caucus, Amira Mohamed Ali, who replaces the retiring Sahra Wagenknecht. Most party members and supporters are waiting in great suspense for a big conference on February 29th, hoping to break out of their current slough with a fighting new program and militant struggles, like the five year rent price ceiling planned for Berlin, a daring attempt, per referendum, to confiscate thousands of apartments owned by giant real estate sharks – and support for the peace movement in its opposition to “Defender 2020” and all atomic spearheads now menacing everyone – whether in Dortmund or Donbass. Damascus or Denver!

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And, as usual, I recommend my book, “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee” – full of description, discussion, provocation, personal anecdotes and jokes. If you read it and disagree, tell me. If you like it, tell others (and maybe tell me too)!

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└ Tags: AfD, AmericanRebel, Arbeit Zukunft, Dortmund, February, Karl-Marx-Allee, Krieg, Lyrik, Rosa Luxemburg, Sozialismus, USA, Victor Grossman

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Apr22

am 22. April 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

WHAT CAN NORMALCY BRING?

Berlin Bulletin No. 176

Victor Grossman

With COVID-19 figures slowly receding, Germany is limping back to some kind of normalcy. Auto and bike shops, book dealers, barbers and most shops less than 800 m2 can now re-open (with customers 5 ft apart). Bigger shops and department stores are squabbling: “Why not us?” So are churches, mosques and synagogues, possibly worried that their flocks may get used to doing without them on Sundays, Fridays or Saturdays. Schools are debating when and if which classes can start up again. A big “IF” is always attached. IF things continue to ease up, and IF no second wave hits.

Capitalism causes considerable harm to people. Image / photomontage: Arbeit-Zukunft

Germany has been spared the very worst, although at least 145,000 were hit, over 4500 fatally. But here at least everyone must be medically insured (except for hopeless “street people”, often wanderers from an East Europe liberated from Communism). For a monthly tax, matched by the government and employer if there is one, basics are largely covered at minimal prices; hospital stays, drugs, many health aids, tests, therapies. Private insurance costs more than the state-aided kind and offers quicker, better service for a privileged 11%. But all are guaranteed treatment. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck started it off in 1883 to steal the thunder of the Social Democrats, the radicals of his day. Similar or better coverage is now widespread in most (but not quite all!) developed countries.

The pandemic has enormously aided Angela Merkel’s ruling party, Bismarck’s descendant, with large numbers “rallying round the flag” and accepting closures and restrictions. Many cover their faces as recommended (despite a disregarded “Verboten” law once aimed at masked “left terrorists”). In some states face covering may become compulsory. The twin Christian parties now poll at 38%, up a full 10 points since January. Merkel’s personal popularity has largely recovered, and so has that of her former rival, Jens Spahn, Minister of Health, who softens his daily TV warnings with assurances of improvements. He almost certainly has his eye on the soon-to-be vacant chancellor throne.

The junior partners in the government, the Social Democrats, descendants of those radicals hated and forbidden by Bismarck, are far tamer today, but have also gained about four points since January, possibly ending their long, threatening slump down to 13%. As for the other parties, Corona did not help. It stalled the swift upward climb of the Greens. The LINKE has settled down to a measly 8 % (down from a brief high at 10-11%.
The one bright spot, an important one; the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) slumped from 14% to its current 9-10%. The defeat of fascism, in all its old and newer forms, must retain top priority. German history is the clearest tragic proof of that! We can hope that the AfD, at least in its present form, cannot recover its former alarming momentum “after normalcy returns”.

Those three words are heard everywhere, usually framed by vocal question marks in bold-face. Though quite obedient, people can hardly wait for their return to schools and shops, soccer games, dance clubs, giant concerts for young people and, more for the older crowd, religious services.

Real demonstrations should also be possible again, not the electronic substitutes which replaced the annual Easter Peace Marches and must now replace 75th anniversary commemorations of the liberation of Germany and Europe from the Nazis, disproportionately by the Red Army – an event all too relevant today. So we can expect new rallies to protest drone attacks, a transparent crescendo of hatred against Russia justifying dangerous maneuvers on its borders, and hyped up threats against Venezuela and Iran. Or will the leaders in Berlin try to extend current “crisis restrictions and controls” of political action indefinitely, as some now fear? Will it really be “normalcy“ we will be back to?

In these critical months the government felt compelled to provide financial help for many, to postpone rent debts and stop evictions. Also to subsidize idle corporations if they keep large numbers on their payrolls at 60% of their pay (while the unions demand 80%). But how many small shops, hotels, cultural groups and entertainers can pick up scattered career shards? How many will be hopelessly bankrupted? When will evictions start up again? How long before people start again to buy cars, furniture, and package vacation tours? The German economy depended largely on its exports – vehicles, machinery, chemicals. When will demand recover in southern Europe, China, the USA (with Russia still under “punishment sanctions”)? Will the economy ever be the same?

Will people’s thinking undergo a change? Will they question the rapid privatization of hospitals and seniors’ homes in Germany which proved so damaging, the growing shortage of overworked doctors and underpaid staff, with constant cuts in the number of beds and the patient/nurse ratio?

Many will be forced to think harder about contradictions also outside the health scene. Why did so many working people earn barely enough for a decent living, with nothing for an emergency? Why were there more and more “precarious” jobs, with no certainty for young workers’ future? That video showing hundreds of Americans in good cars waiting in an endless line for free food, led to thinking about free food pantries in Germany, with fewer and fewer elderly volunteers, now masked, growing increasingly desperate as closed restaurants no longer provide unused groceries to feed a fast growing number of families who cannot make it alone. Why were they ever necessary?

Some may even reflect on a growing resemblance to hard-hit countries like Greece, Spain and Italy, and that jobless Greeks were really no lazier than jobless Germans, despite the poison spread by the mass media, while the same banks got richer by exploiting all of them, north or south.

Some may discover that not only do the 42 wealthiest men in the world own as much as 3.7 billion other people, but that Germany is similar, with 45 men and women owning as much as the entire lower half of the country’s population. Some already see it as more than likely that, with the planned government subsidies to heal the damage of the pandemic, the lions’ share will slither into the bottomless bellies of those 45 raptors and a greedy group of lesser jackals and hyenas.

The corona virus may well inspire some unusual new thinking. A few articles dare to question an almost single-minded concentration on bottom lines (not those in the mirror), the fixation of many on wealth and conspicuous consumption, a yearning for ever larger, faster cars, for closets filled with the latest, fanciest clothing, for travels to the farthest deserts, mountains and spectacular Antarctic scenery, and generally to ape as well as possible the admired, envied 45 billionaires. And this while so many others are struggling to afford a roof over their heads and regular meals for their kids, and so many in other continents toil long hours for pennies, harvesting coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas and palm oil, sewing clothes in shaky, fire-prone factories or scraping up valuable coltan with hand tools – bringing billions to some but also permitting prices in the western democracies low enough to keep most people more or less obedient. And all at the cost of a gasping environment! The question remains: Is there hope for alternatives to that species of normalcy?

The most powerful challenges to status quo normalcy, after 1917, then after 1945, were finally smashed, partly owing to mistakes and some false (also bloodstained) detours taken by those challengers, but more basically because the forces of status quo normalcy were much stronger, thanks to key geographical and historical advantages but also due to the giant attacks against the proponents of change – the devastating invasions of 1919-1923 and especially that which ended 75 years ago, the threat of a new, atomic missile attack but finally to the deft use of the mighty weapon of consumer demand or consumerism – as described above.

This total defeat thirty years ago has been used ever since to refute every criticism of a status quo based on greedy profit and poverty, every hope for genuine change with fingers pointing to the demise of 1989-1993 as proof of its eternal incapability. The media developed this into hard and fast formulas; in Germany, hardly a day goes by without TV insisting in a hundred sly ways how terribly we all lived in the GDR. Balancing voices find no microphones. China’s sins are detailed almost daily in the media, but rarely the fact that hundreds of millions there have been raised from abject poverty and that China, after its early, hopefully lasting success in combatting corona 19, has offered and provided help to so many others. Countless Italians, ignored in their pleas for help from their European Union brethren, are grateful for Chinese shipments and for the brave Cuban medical teams which came to their aid, and in so many countries. The media, almost unanimously, take no notice.

No, news of such facts and troublesome doubts are unwelcome. And yet some voices are calling for good long looks at a status quo normalcy which has failed so many and now faces a possibly catastrophic recession.

In a sharply critical article, Hans Modrow, the last minister president of the GDR before its downfall, and now head of the Seniors’ Council of the LINKE party, called on his party and all leftist parties not only to analyze and criticize social struggles, globalization, the shape of democracy and political leadership, but to offer tactical and strategical alternatives, drawing upon past and present experience. “This must encourage the European Left to free itself from any accommodation with the capitalist system and formulate the goal of a socialist world!” His was a daring call not for adventurism but for wise, calculated analysis and then action to overcome the status quo. Will anything come of such calls?

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└ Tags: Berlin Bulletin No. 176, COVID-19, WHAT CAN NORMALCY BRING?

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Mai12

am 12. Mai 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein, Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

ASPARAGUS AND BOMBERS

Berlin Bulletin No. 176

Victor Grossman

In late spring an age-old tradition places asparagus – the white kind preferred here – at the very top of German menus. But only until St. John’s Day, June 24th (the summer solstice). After that date farmers stop harvesting – to give plants at least 100 days to convalesce for the next year before the first frosts arrive (if frosts do arrive this year!).

Asparagus field. Photo: webandi, Pixabay CC0

But 2020 presents two problems. The arduous harvesting was done in the past by laborers, usually Eastern Europeans, Germany’s “braceros”. But with European Union borders locked shut by the virus epidemic, who would cut the bleached asparagus? And when cut (as cut they must be, four or five times a season), with restaurants and hotels closed by the virus and many private customers having less or no money for expensive vegetables, who would buy and eat them? (Side note: the GDR employed no braceros – so asparagus was mostly quite rare).

Strong pressures have achieved some solutions. The virus figures are slowing down just enough to try a limited re-opening of business. Germany’s sixteen states differ on when, which and how much social distancing is required, so there’s almost total confusion, and Angela Merkel warns of a possible second round of infection – and shutdowns. But some portion of the asparagus may now get sold and eaten before June 24th – and not get dumped, like all too much milk and other foodstuffs.

As for labor power; while it required lengthy bargaining and red tape to rescue 70 child refugees from the immensely over-crowded, filthy camps on the island of Lesbos, it somehow proved quite possible to break though all restrictions and fly in 80,000 Rumanians, quarantine them and let them dig up the asparagus – until St. John’s Day.

But while prices and recipes for asparagus, dates and restrictions for re-opening bars or restaurants and for rescuing major league soccer dominated the media and many conversations, a far more significant matter found little attention. Ever since 1955 an estimated twenty American nuclear bombs have been stored underground at the US Air Force base in Büchel in Rhineland. Just a short sprint away the German Luftwaffe’s Tornado aircraft sit ready and waiting to transport and fire those bombs. There is no secret as to where and whom they are aimed at. What a jolly symbol of NATO cooperation!

Until now, despite inspired, moving rhetoric by top politicians about world peace and solidarity, the presence of those US bombs, viewed by many as a violation of basic German law, is commonly met either with silence or mumbled explanations and excuses. All political parties tend to stare into their laps or out the window when questioned about this – except for one single party in the Bundestag which demands that they be removed – and banned! That is DIE LINKE (Left)! But who listens to them – or reports on their statements?

Then, in late April, Defense Minister Anneliese Kamp-Karrenbauer (AKK) sent an E-mail to her USA colleague Mark Esper. She wanted to replace Germany’s poor, aging old Tornado bombers with thirty more modern, efficient killers, Boeing’s F18 Super Hornets and fifteen of its Growler-type F18 jets, which pierce deep into the ground. Since each plane costs over $70,000,000, that amount, multiplied by 45, would certainly be a welcome contribution to Boeing’s sagging accounts.

But halt, Boeing beneficiaries! Don’t count chickens – or Hornets – before they hatch! Frau AKK made a silly mistake. She was sure of support from the leaders of her own “Christian” party, who routinely support anything with fire power. She also felt certain of approval by the two Social Democratic (SPD) leaders of the government’s junior coalition party. Those two, Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, enjoy the closest buddy-buddy relationship with their CDU senior partners. But somehow she totally forgot to consult with either the caucus or another man with a key position in the party, the chair of the Social Democratic caucus in the Bundestag. It suddenly turned out that he, Rolf Mützenich, a representative from Cologne, dares to oppose the purchase of new belligerent warplanes. This neglectful little boo-boo of hers created at least a minor sensation!

The SPD has always gone along with the military policies of the “Christians” (CDU and their Bavarian sister, the CSU). They were solid “Atlanticists”, who happily embraced the big brass in the Pentagon and leading men (or women) in Washington as welcome protectors from an eastern menace – which never existed. As German strength grew, they show a willingness to be a strong auxiliary force in the pursuit of world hegemony, both military and economic, with happy results measured in billions for a few dozen powerful giants. And surely some shiny new gold stars, fancy crosses and other awards for the big brass.

But the apple cart had begun to totter. Its weak-kneed social position had cost the SPD more and more votes and members; the party threatened to sink into a sycophantic crawl and minor league status. Then, in a party referendum, the remaining members (still in the mid six-digit range) shocked everyone – except the majority of members – by choosing as co-chairs a man and a woman, till then not widely known, who lean toward the party’s weak left wing. The mass media predicted the party’s quick demise as a result, but were disappointed. It has held its own and even gained a little. But only a little; it is still competing with the Greens simply to preserve its once unquestioned second place status in the polls.

And now came this jolt! Faced with the confusion of Donald Trump’s changing mix of accusations and demands for more and more “security” billions, Mützenich declared: “Atomic weapons on German territory do not increase our security, they do just the opposite.” That, he stated, “is why I oppose the purchase of any replacements for war planes projected for use as atomic bombers … It is high time that Germany rejects any future stationing!”

And, even more worrisome for some, the new co-chair of the party, Norbert Walter-Borjans, backed him up: “I maintain a clear position against the stationing, the control, and most definitely the use of nuclear weapons…” Walter-Borjans made it double clear: “That is why I oppose purchasing any successors for planes meant to be used as atomic bombers.“

This was mutiny from the top – quite unknown (except perhaps in DIE LINKE)! Mützenich’s opposite number in the Bundestag, from the CDU, said indignantly: “Speaking for my caucus, the continuation of nuclear participation cannot be put in question … That position is not negotiable. Nuclear deterrence is indispensable for the security of Europe.” (For him, evidently, Russia was somehow no longer part of Europe.)

Minister of War Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer with the troops in Mali. For God, Krupp, Tyssen, Daimler, Deutsche Bank and Vaterland. Photo: Yutube

The Atlanticists jumped to defend Frau AKK: “Only if we remain within the nuclear framework will we have a say in using – or not using – such weapons. If we back out, we can no longer join in NATO decision-making on military engagement.”

To which Mützenich responded by calling the risk of escalation unpredictable and asking: “Does anyone really believe that, if Donald Trump decides to use nuclear weapons, Germany could restrain him in such a decision simply because we might be willing to transport a number of the warheads?”

It remain to be seen which side is stronger in a divided SPD; it would be an amazing upset if the anti-missile forces were to prevail. They are the same people. a minority, who urged Germany to break away from its inborn interdependence with Washington, defy imposed economic sanctions against Russia and oppose growing NATO threats along the Russian border – and now newly against China as well. Instead, these voices urged reasonable relationships with both countries, replacing the increasingly bellicose propaganda campaigns with words and policies conducive to world peace and cooperation. Pandemics and the frightening increase in ecological damage demand nothing less. How much better if Germans no longer had no more war plans to chew on but rather, very peacefully, asparagus – and far longer than any St. John’s day deadlines.

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May I close on a happier note, which is not un-related? On May 8th for German Berliners and May 9th for the many Russians and other former Sovietniks in Berlin, the 75th anniversary of the final defeat of Nazi military power was celebrated at the moving cenotaph in Treptower Park. The virus epidemic hindered the customary mass gathering, but thousands kept the tradition as best they could on both days, a constant stream of people – thousands, certainly, often with flowers – came to preserve the memory of that globally decisive event. One noteworthy impression: the number of young people who were there. How relevant this memory is today! The Berlin state government, SPD, Greens and DIE LINKE, made May 8th an official work-free holiday this year. There are now attempts to extend this decision to the rest of Germany and beyond 2020. (For photos, check Google: Berlin Treptow Ehrenmal. Or Sowjetisches Ehrenmal im Treptower Park. The main statue shows a Red Army soldier protecting a child and destroying a swastika with his sword.)

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PS. Also noteworthy – but worrisome: A movement calling itself Widerstand 2020 (Resistance) demonstrated once again in Berlin and other cities. A strange amalgamation of bizarre leftists, libertarians and right-wingers claiming to be the nucleus of a new party, in some ways they resemble the gangs in American state capitals who oppose government controls and defy social distancing and face masks as “restrictive of our liberties” yet seem undisturbed by obligatory seat belts, bans on smoking or traffic lights. A curious development! More in my next Berlin Bulletin.
And may I again recommend my book: “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee”?
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Jul13

am 13. Juli 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein, Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

BREAKUPS AND LEAKS

Berlin Bulletin No. 178
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Victor Grossman

Despite the continuing corona-virus danger, and despite anger, loathing or fear about “that man”, some people may still have an eye or an ear for international relations. If so, and if they listen hard, they may just fancy hearing an unusual tearing sound. Could it be emanating from a recent development, not conclusive or complete and yet undeniable; the painful ripping apart of that eternal brotherhood between the German Federal Republic and its great patron, provider and protector, the USA, a seemingly indestructible alliance cemented after World War Two?

D. Trump. Photo: YouTube

One key location in this process, however – in or under the Baltic Sea – is soundless. The chug-chug of the special Swiss ship which had laid over 1000 kilometers of the underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany – called Nord Stream 2 – is now silent. It had only a measly 150 km left to reach its goal when Washington made good on the very undiplomatic threats barked out by then US Ambassador Richard Grenell (once a commentator for Fox and Breitbart): any company helping with the pipeline would get slammed by sanctions as tight as those used against Russia or Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. To the surprise and anger of Angela Merkel and many German businessmen, that is just what happened. The imposed stranglehold was all too suffocating, the Swiss seamen shut down their engines and went home to the Alps, while the only Russian ship equipped for the job needs renovations and repairs and is docked in Vladivostok. Many commentators saw this Verbot as an insult to Germany and a blow, not for ecology but for selling more fracking gas from the USA while also damaging or wrecking the Russian economy.

Bückel, US nuclear weapons base. Photo: YouTube

Stationed in the small town of Büchel are about twenty American atomic bombs, next to a German base with Tornado planes ready to carry and fire them at a moment’s notice – each one far, far more horrendous than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs are both doomsday weapons and likely targets. In 2010 a large majority in the Bundestag called on the government to „work effectively to achieve the removal of USA atomic weapons from Germany”. But the government did nothing of the sort and annual demonstrations in Büchel were largely ignored. Until May 2nd, that is, when a leading Social Democrat (whose party is in the government coalition) repeated this demand – and found surprising approval from the new leaders of his party. This too was a sign that the alliance was crumbling. Of course, it will take far more than that to close Büchel or the giant base at Ramstein, the European relay station for all US drone attacks (and the protests continue).

Then in June Trump announced plans to pull 9,500 US soldiers out of Germany, from a total 35,000. Was this to punish Germany for refusing to spend 2% of its Gross Domestic Product on armaments, as NATO (and Trump) demanded, but only 1.38%. That too is a huge pile of euros, but disobeyed the boss’s orders! Or was it a penalty by thin-skinned Mr. Trump after Ms. Merkel spurned his invitation to a G7 summit in Washington, spoiling a campaign device to show himself as a “world figure”?

Whatever the reasons, the “Atlanticists” in Berlin, who cherish Washington ties, were shocked and dismayed. One top adviser groaned: „This is completely unacceptable, especially since nobody in Washington thought about informing its NATO ally Germany in advance.“

Many would be glad to see them go; they love neither Trump nor having Pentagon troops in Germany since 1945, more than in any other country. But their pleasure was short-lived; Bückel and Ramstein would not be closed down and the troops would not fly home but to Poland, perilously close to the Russian border, even worsening the dangers of a tragic – if not final – global catastrophe.
Even for a junior partner there had been problems; majority opinion just before an election kept Germany out of the Iraq wars and the aerial bombardment of Libya. But it dutifully followed its leader in bombing Serbia, it joined in battering Afghanistan, obeyed the embargo-blockade of Cuba, Venezuela and Russia, bowed to pressure to bar Iran from the world trade market and supported the USA in nearly every UN controversy.

Where might a more independent path lead? Can some leaders break with the dangerous anti-Russia, anti-China campaigns in the USA and search for a new detente? Is that more than a dream?
Many with strong muscles and influence prefer to strive for Germany, the heavyweight in the European Union, to head up a continental military force, ready and willing to hit any overseas target area, just as in the Kaiser’s day, and more essentially, just as in the days of a later Führer, to aim straight eastward, where its warriors already join eagerly in NATO maneuvers along the Russian borders. Whatever the goal, Minister Kamp-Karrenbauer, chair of the leading Christian Democratic Union, keeps demanding ever more devastating bombers, tanks, armed drones and military robotry. The more the better! Worrisome recollections of events ending just 75 years ago are inescapable!

Such nightmares just got new steroid shots. One of those “damned whistleblowers”, a captain in the elite, top-secret Special Forces Command (KSK), leaked out that his company was jam-packed with Nazi memories – and hopes. Blind obedience was demanded during duty hours, but jolly after-duty parties almost required one to shout Sieg Heil and give a Hitler salute to avoid getting ostracized. Then it was found that one Hitler-loving noncom had hidden army weapons, ammunition and 62 kilos of explosives in his garden – and the scandal exploded. Kamp-Karrenbauer expressed her utter shock and published a list of 60 measures to remove such “aberrations” with “an iron broom”. Cynics recalled that her predecessor, Ursula von der Leyen (now head of the European Union), facing similar shocks, also wanted an “iron broom”. It seemed advisable to keep such a utensil close by at all times.

Cynical historians recalled that the Bundeswehr, the West German military force, was first headed by Adolf Heusinger, who as early as 1923 called Hitler “…the man sent by God to lead the Germans”. He helped plan strategy for almost every Nazi blitzkrieg and ordered the shooting of thousands of civilian hostages in Russia, Greece and Yugoslavia. When he was promoted to chair NATO’s Permanent Military Committee in Washington his successor was Friedrich Foertsch, who had ordered the destruction of the ancient cities of Pskov, Pushkin and Novgorod and joined in the genocidal siege of Leningrad. He was followed by Heinz Trettner, a squad captain in the Legion Condor bomber unit which destroyed the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. After the pensioning or death of the last Nazi generals, their successors maintained the traditions of the “patriotic” Nazi Wehrmacht, if possible without too openly alarming western patrons, providers or protectors.

But omens and signals have become too alarming, with racist and fascist attacks often ending in cold-blooded murder – of a Christian Democratic official who was too “immigrant friendly”, in the killing of nine people in a hookah bar, the shooting up of a synagogue, the burning of the car of an active anti-fascist, in constant attacks against people who look too “foreign”.

In case after case it proved strangely difficult for the police to find the culprits, or the courts to punish them, while mysterious threads led to the very authorities responsible for observing such fascist groups. That elite-unit non-com with the hidden explosives, and his background, had long been known to the military police. The car burning in Berlin was committed by a fascist group whose leader was seen chatting in a bar with a cop supposed to be hunting for clues. When an immigrant café owner was murdered in Hesse years ago – one in a series of nine such killings – a secret government spy was sitting at a nearby table. But all interrogation with him was barred by the Hessian government and evidence was shredded or locked away from investigation. The minister in charge of police later became the powerful prime minister of Hesse – and still is.

Last week, Hessians got into the headlines again. Janine Wissler, 39, state leader of DIE LINKE (and a vice-chair of the national party), received messages threatening her life, signed “NSU 2.0”. National Socialist Union, NSU, was the name used by the Nazi group which committed the nine murders mentioned above. Such threats are by no means uncommon for leading left-wingers, but the messages this time contained information about Wissler with only one possible source: the computer of the local police department in Wiesbaden. It has now been officially admitted that police and other institutions authorized to protect the citizenry are permeated by far-right networks. Federal Minister Seehofer, in charge of these institutions, finally admitted that they are more dangerous than the “left-wing extremists” which were always favored targets in the past. Strict measures will now be taken, he promised; the old “iron broom” is again to be taken out of the closet.

Meanwhile, untouched by the broom, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a legal party represented in all legislatures and the Bundestag, with members at work at all government levels, while maintaining personal ties to all the spider webs of semi-underground pro-Nazi groups. Happily, recent AfD blunders down-playing the corona virus plus personality quarrels between open pro-fascists and those who prefer a more dignified, democratic mien instead of overt rabble-rousing have caused the AfD’s decline with the voters – already down from 13% to about 10%. And that despite an amazing amount of “objective” talking time afforded by both the private and state-owned media.

Germany, which is weathering the corona pandemic better than most countries, will soon face giant economic problems, with disaster threatening many citizens. It also faces federal and many state elections in 2021. Will there be an effective opposition to increased racism, militarism, widespread surveillance and political controls? Hard confrontations may well be in the offing, in the domestic and foreign spheres. Will their outcome steer Germany to the right – or just possibly leftward?

+++++

One greatly-loved voice will be missing in future events. Heinrich Fink, born in a poor rural family in Bessarabia, thrown around by war events as a child, became a theologian in the (East) German Democratic Republic and was lecturer, professor and then dean of the Theology Department in East Berlin’s Humboldt University. During the brief era when the GDR opened up to choices from below, in April 1990, faculty, students and staff elected him – 341 to 79 – to be rector of the whole university. But within two years the winds changed. West Germany took over and he, like innumerable “undesirables”, was unceremoniously thrown out, charged in his case with having helped the “Stasi”. Countless doubts about any and all accusations, protests by many prominent writers and big student marches for the popular rector were all in vain.

After one session as Bundestag deputy he was elected president of the Association of Victims of Fascism and Antifascists and, later, its Honorary President. Remarkable for his modest friendliness, humility, almost tenderness, one could never imagine him harming or scolding anyone or ever even raising his voice. But just as impressive was his devotion to his principles – his belief in a humane Christianity based on struggle for a better world. He was both a Christian and a Communist – and saw no contradiction in the combination. He will be greatly missed!

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Aug26

am 26. August 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein, Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

MIRROR MIRROR AND POLITICS

Berlin Bulletin No. 180
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Victor Grossman

“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” Nearly every German knows the story of Snow White. Currently, the question of who is “fairest of them all” faces nearly every German political party or, in modern terms, who can attract more votes in next year’s election. The U.S. equivalent question, which will seek and hopefully find answer much sooner, is simpler; the poisonous apple has been exposed often enough. As for dwarfs – a political species – they abound in both countries, though never so cute as Walt Disney’s. As for the wicked witch, I must be cautious about any German analogy!

In Germany a year is left to go, but with the corona crisis, threatening economic collapse and a tattering friendship with Trump’s America, the suspense is already heightening. Choices are getting urgent. And for the Social Democrats (SPD), while Vice-Chancellor Olaf Koch’s smiling face is not exactly the fairest of them all (although nowadays bald is seen as sexy), some hope he can at least become the gallant prince riding to the rescue!

Germany’s oldest party needs rescuing! It has had a troubled history. In its militant youth Chancellor Bismarck outlawed it from 1878 to 1890, but after regaining legality it became, by 1913, the largest party in the Kaiser’s unified empire. But alas, its youthful ardor had cooled, or twisted, and it betrayed all its principles by joining in the “On to Paris!” cheers at the start of World War One. When Germany’s November Revolution ended the murderous, lost war, SPD-chief Ebert joined the far-right officers’ corps and war profit millionaires in blocking a socialist path – and at least abetting the murder of its devoted advocates, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

In the following years the SPD made many compromises with Right and Center. As Hitler gained strength, it opposed the Nazis, though never as militantly as the Communists. The failure of the two to join in this fight proved fateful, but (despite many such interpretations) this was not only the fault of the Communists, who continued to lead in the resistance – before and, until 1945, in the underground. The exiled SPD failed sadly when it came to supporting the elected Spanish government against Franco and Hitler in 1936-39. After 1945 it joined in Cold War policies and massive attempts to wreck the (East) German Democratic Republic. When the SPD’s Willy Brandt won the top job as chancellor (1969-1974) he helped pass a tough witch-hunt law copied from McCarthy while switching to a cooler “Eastern policy”, not attacking with a Holy Crusader battering ram but with Lorelei temptation, which proved successful in 1990.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) 1998 to 2005. Popularly known as: „Comrade of the bosses“. Photo: YouTube

In its next administration (1998-2005), this time with the Greens, the SPD joined in the bombing war against Serbia and supported every policy of its protectors and patrons in Washington and the Pentagon (except, in an election-related abstention, the Iraq war of 2003). It also pushed through an economic austerity program under which the jobless and poorer seniors suffer to this day.

And yet, contrariwise, its policies on some economic issues were contradictory enough to keep the allegiance of nearly all labor leaders and a large portion of the working class, who saw no other alternative. (Think Clinton, Obama, etc.) But in recent years German workers have become very skeptical, causing a drastic slump in the polls, now between 14-17 %, less than half that of its current coalition partner, Merkel’s “Union” of two “Christian” parties (one is a purely Bavarian sibling). This position as the weak junior partner of its traditional rivals has surely been a main cause of its slump.

November 2019 brought a big surprise. After its latest electoral losses new leaders were urgently needed, if possible a male-female team (thus copying the Greens and the LINKE). In a first-ever mail-in referendum vote by its membership, the SPD made a flip-flop worthy of any Brothers Grimm tale. Instead of the expected team with Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, always on the right in the party, the membership squeezed in two little-known Social Democrats, their names hardly known outside their own bailiwicks, but who definitely belonged to the SPD’s left wing! Norbert Walter-Borjans (the name after the hyphen was from his wife) was for protecting whistle-blowers, legalizing marijuana and most forcefully for taxing the wealthy. Saskia Esken was strong on opposing racism, reining in police brutality, supporting antifascists (even when they were called “antifa”) and also legalizing marijuana (at least medically). Neither of them liked the current coalition with the right-wing rival party.
This result was a shock to the leadership, it was almost as if AOC and Ro Khanna were to win a referendum to head the Democratic Party National Committee!

A second shock followed in May. For years leftists and other anti-war activists have been warning and demonstrating against the menace of some twenty unimaginably catastrophic US atomic bombs at a base at Büchel in Germany, next door to a German air base with swift planes to carry them to an all too obvious destination. There are now plans to replace them with more modern, even more murderous planes. But not many listened to the warnings – the media saw to that!

All of a sudden the co-chair of the SPD caucus in the Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich, little-known but important, joined in demanding the removal of U.S. bombs from German soil. There was an angry outburst against him, also from within his SPD, including Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. But then the new party co-chairs, Saskia Esken and Norbert Walter-Borjans, backed him up against the bombs!

It began to look as if a majority of left-leaning members had moved their party to the left. Some in the LINKE have long hoped to join a possible national coalition with the SPD and Greens but have been restrained by LINKE membership rejection of NATO’s aggressive military policy and of once again sending German troops far and wide to police the world. But these new statements seemed to be steps onto a bridge spanning such differences. The three parties now work together in governing the city-states of Berlin and Bremen and the state of Thuringia; why not on a national level?
But the powers behind the SPD throne took another look in the mirror, seemingly more one of the twisty fun-house variety, and found conservative Olaf Scholz as the fairest – or safest – for next year’s election. It looked like a repeat of that old SPD tradition; blink left – then turn right! We shall see!

+++

At the same time the chairman of the little right-wing Free Democratic Party tried to explain why he fired its young secretary-general Linda Teuteberg after less than a year and a half. Many found the young blonde fair enough, but the party was barely keeping its nose above the 5 % level in national polling. Less than that means it’s out of the Bundestag and faces oblivion. So why not blame the vivacious young East German and replace her with a dull, allegedly efficient man from the West? It’s hard to imagine that he will have more luck.

+++

The “Christian” Union parties were also scrambling in their hunt for a successor to Merkel, all three now in the running are male, ambitious and conservative. But the pandemic has caused them to postpone the face-off until – well, maybe in late autumn. Until then it’s all-out one-upmanship.

+++

But DIE LINKE has definitely scheduled its next congress in the city of Erfurt for October 30th-November 1st, with face masks and social distancing. It too must look in the mirror and make a choice, not for one but two chairpersons, somehow both male and female, eastern and western, rightish and leftish. Almost like squaring the circle! This was achieved with the current co-chairs, but their time in office runs out after a two-term limit (or will it be extended?). There may well be hot debates and some not so social distancing – on various issues, but first and foremost on that question of joining in a federal government coalition – if improved voting results permit it.

The SPD and Greens have always insisted on that one main condition: support for NATO and the use of Bundestag troops abroad. Some of the LINKE view any compromise on these issues a sacrifice of basic principles by the only genuine Peace party in Germany. Others say some compromises are necessary in politics if a party wishes to stay relevant. Hidden behind this issue is a larger one: Should DIE LINKE set its goals on attempts to win better conditions for working people, seniors, children, the jobless – concentrating on winning improvements and opposing slashes but accepting a basic status quo? Or should it use such conflicts as steps, even small ones, towards changing the system? That would mean sharply squaring off against firms like Aldi and Trader Joe’s, Volkswagen, Daimler-Benz and BMW, Bertelsmann-Random House, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Purdue, Bayer, BASF, Amazon and Facebook before they completely rule the world – and against Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and Rheinmetall – before they destroy it. And that would also require a rejection of expanding military missions and invading armies and navies, from Afghanistan to Mali or the South China Sea – the modern equivalent of all wicked witches.

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Sep20

am 20. September 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Allgemein, Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

WHICH WAY?

Berlin Bulletin No. 181
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Victor Grossman

I’ll never forget the day my father’s ancient jalopy got stuck boarding the New York-Jersey City ferry; two wheels on the dock, two on the boat, the motor stalled, my father frantic, my mother scolding, cars behind us honking, and me, just 6, looking at the swirling waters below. Two muscular ferrymen finally pushed us back on land.

The gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 has markedly different proportions. But it’s also stuck; one end near Vyborg in Russia, the other, after a thousand km under swirling Baltic Sea waters, stalled only 164 km short of its safe goal, Sassnitz in eastern Germany.

Here, too, there is plenty of honking – and more than a few muscle men, with Germany half on and half off its policy toward Russia, between rapprochement and confrontation. Donald Trump offered his customary words of wisdom; blustering threats if Germany favors pipelines over ever greater military build-up. His buddies, far-right Senators Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton and Ron Johnson, warned little Sassnitz, pop. 9186, of “crushing economic and legal sanctions” if it lets the pipeline land there.

Some German business and political leaders were outraged at this crude interference and consider it far wiser to do business with Russia, selling it cars, chemicals, machinery and farm products, than kowtowing to arms manufacturers and other war hawks on both sides of the Atlantic. This at a time when, with more and more weapons along Russian borders, one little false move, a maneuver missile accidentally fired a bit too far eastward, a fighter pilot briefly losing his bearings, a misunderstood message, could unleash a world-destroying nuclear war. Like 1962 but at far closer range.

For Angela Merkel’s government it was two wheels on and two off. Then came Belarus. And then a poisoned Alexei Navalny. Both provided the hate-Russia crowd with exactly what they yearned for, to push things their way and counteract the wishes of a majority of Germans who want to stay peaceful.

Yet both issues were far from being so very clear-cut. As the keen analyst and one-time British ambassador Craig Murray wrote:

“I have no difficulty at all with the notion that a powerful oligarch or an organ of the Russian state may have tried to assassinate Navalny… What I do have difficulty with is the notion that if Putin, or other very powerful Russian actors, wanted Navalny dead, and had attacked him while he was in Siberia, he would not be alive in Germany today….One thing we know about ‘Novichok’ for sure is that it appears not to be very good at assassination… If the Russian secret services had poisoned Navalny at the airport before takeoff as alleged, why would they not insist the plane stick to its original flight plan and let him die on the plane? ….Next, we are supposed to believe that the Russian state, having poisoned Navalny, was not able to contrive his death in the intensive care unit of a Russian state hospital. …If Putin wanted him dead, he would be dead… There are a whole stream of utterly unbelievable points there… Personally I do not buy a single one of them, but then I am a notorious Russophile traitor.”

Nor is the Belarus uprising as clear-cut as European leaders and op-ed writers quickly decided. It is obvious that Lukachenko’s 80% election victory was a poor joke; it seems evident that many or most people there want to get rid of him after 26 years, for a wide variety of reasons.

But the outside support given the protests is steeped in hypocrisy. When Lukachenko seemed to be leaning westward the invective softened, there was a sudden increase of trust in Lukashenko, as in 2010, when the Polish and German foreign ministers and the Lithuanian president met both him and the opposition, and found that he might even be won over – and was supported by a majority of his citizens.

Just last February Secretary of State Michael Pompeo visited Lukashenko and told him temptingly:

“Our energy producers are ready to deliver 100% of the oil you need at competitive prices. We are the biggest energy producer in the world and all you have to do is call us…. The U.S. wants to help Belarus build its own sovereign country… Inspired by what I saw at Hi-Tech Park (in Minsk); a great example of how Belarus can seize its extraordinary growth potential by embracing forward-looking economic policies and smart regulation. It’s clear how impactful American investment can foster prosperity across the globe.”

Two women talk with a riot police officer as police block a part of a street in the capital of Minsk, Belarus, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020. Heavy police cordons blocking Minsk’s central squares and avenues didn’t discourage the demonstrators who again took to the streets chanting „Shame!“ and „Long live Belarus!“ Police moved quickly Tuesday to separate and disperse scattered groups of protesters in the capital, but new pockets of resistance kept mushrooming across downtown Minsk. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits) Quelle: YouTube

He offered prosperity. Was he really thinking of power, not just fuel-based but strategic? Lukachenko has indeed maintained a merciless, tight grip. But Belarus is the only ex-Soviet republic to maintain public ownership of much of industry, instead of oligarch control, and permits no giant private landowners. Is a hope for good pickings behind western support for the current uprising? As for noble words; nasty as arrests and beatings in Minsk certainly are, they cannot compare with those of brutal cops elsewhere, often aiming missiles at heads, eyes and hands – in Chile, Ecuador, Iraq, France (against the yellow jackets) and the new buddy, Bahrein, or for that matter in Baltimore, Minneapolis or Staten Island. Are jail beatings in Belarus worse than in Riyadh or Abu Ghraib – or CIA “black sites”, with tortures worse than those of the Inquisition? All are horrible, but denouncing some and downplaying or ignoring others is pure hypocrisy.

Most important of all, perhaps; while Kharkov in the Ukraine is about 400 miles from Moscow, Vitebsk in Belarus is less than 300, not much farther than New York to Washington. And the US Army and Raytheon are working on a new Long Range Precision missile which can hit targets at least 310 miles away.

Ups and downs in Germany are less dramatic than in Minsk or the USA, now suffering under the corona pandemic, terrifying forest fires and worrisome election-fever, with an outcome far from certain – and possibly even leading to armed violence.
But Germany, too, could veer left or right, when countless jobs are gone, small businesses vanish, evictions multiply. Some omens foreshadow grave differences. Can humane pressures force the government to accept more than a few token planeloads with 400 child refugees from the miserable, burnt-down camp on Lesbos, where 13,000 refugees lost even their miserable tents and shanties? Most fled Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria where foreign warriors destroyed their homes and livelihoods.

In German cities a re-named “Querdenken711” movement has been gathering crowds. ”Querdenken” – “crosswise thinking”, rejecting both left and right; it is for “self-determination” and “love” – and strictly against face masks, social distancing, or even the existence of an epidemic. Its mysterious, hitherto unknown leaders offer no other program. Many of those marching and filling squares simply oppose a world-wide Bill Gates “compulsory vaccine plot”, all vaccinations, or the current “conspiracy government”. A few are non-party “super-leftists”. Much more conspicuous are far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) members and groups with fascist tattoos and flags; a mob of them even stormed the Bundestag building, whose doors were defended (peculiarly!) by only three cops. Will this movement fade – or grow?

And what will follow the uneasy coalition between Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats after next year’s elections? The Social Democrat chosen to lead the campaign against whoever succeeds Merkel – still an ongoing rivalry – is Olaf Scholz, now Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister. But poor Olaf was hit by a scandal about a phony software giant whose crooked organizer is missing (as are 1.9 billion euros), all of which he somehow failed to notice – or to deal with. And now he faces another scandal. While mayor of Hamburg he seems to have helped save the big Warburg bank from paying millions in back taxes – and later lied about his secret meetings with its boss.

And the LINKE? With a key congress due at the end of October it is facing a key issue. If it becomes possible to form a coalition government with the SPD and the Greens (current polls don’t make that possible but they could change), should the LINKE weaken or drop its basic demands to oppose NATO or sending any Bundeswehr soldiers to fight in foreign arenas. That’s a condition set by the war-willing Social Democrats and Greens. It could thus achieve a few coalition cabinet seats, always the dream of some? Or should it stick to its position: no cabinet seats but still remaining the only “party of peace” in the Bundestag?

This question will affect the choice of new LINKE leaders; the current co-chairs, after two terms, are stepping down. Two are already in the running. One, from the party’s “pragmatic wing”, is a leader in the LINKE-Social Democrat-Green- government in East German Thuringia. The other has led the LINKE quite successfully in opposition in the West German state of Hesse. She is from the militant wing of the party. Others may also run, but at present it looks possible that these two may join in a balanced slate which would make the LINKE the first party with two women in top leadership. If the two remain friendly it could also succeed in keeping both sides of the party – not only geographically – in one piece, safe from the threatening waters swirling beneath them. Like those ferrymen long ago, more working-class muscles, politically speaking, might also help the divided party to move and grow. It will be needed!

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Nov22

am 22. November 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

AIRPORTS AND RALLIE

Berlin Bulletin No. 181
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Victor Grossman

Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead! A wicked but very male Witch of the East seemed to be crushed under a houseful of angry voters, though this house, unlike Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, was definitely not from Kansas! And I have a lingering fear that the man still in the White House may plan another trump card, like a false flag operation to provoke a conflict – at home, with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, even China – then proclaim a national emergency requiring him to remain commander-in-chief. Is that just a hangover nightmare? Or can someone finally dig up a straitjacket?

Countless Germans also waited, full of angst, for final numbers from distant Ohio, Wisconsin, Arizona – while many puzzled over the mysteries of the Electoral College. (Does it have dormitories or offer a degree?) Or why, until January 20th, a weird fowl called a lame duck can keep squawking about foundless, featherless “Fouls”! But as the figures rolled in from Pennsylvania there was a collective German sigh of relief (and a few may have wondered whether Germantown, PA also played a part).

The media here are full of speculation: How much friendlier will Biden be toward Germany and Europe? There will certainly be far less friction. Is that good or bad? Federal Germany was a compliant buddy of every US government – until 2016. Its growing independence since then was partly due to dictatorial White House insistence that Germany buy American fracking gas instead of cheaper Russian pipeline gas. Also due to pressure because Germany never spent quite the giant sum on armaments demanded by NATO, also largely imported from the USA. Nor did it join heartily in provoking trouble with Iran. Will Germany now revert to its long, cosy relationship with the Pentagon, Langley and the billionaire transatlantic gang? Or will it prefer to build up its own strength as the biggest bully in its European playground, with heavy-muscled domination of a new European army and the European economy, now free of British competition – plus growing power in other continents? With the witch gone, will Germany again be caught between the devil and the deep blue (Baltic) Sea?

hier geht es weiter »

But enough of worries about Trump and other toxic mixtures, including the virus shutdown. After all, maybe a possible vaccine rescue is really in view! I turn instead, almost sadly, to the end of a different and less menacing story – that of Berlin’s Tegel Airport.

Why sadly? Except for those poor souls who lived under its arriving and departing planes – every two minutes from dawn to late evening (and who now rejoice) – most Berliners liked or even loved it. East Berliners, able to use it after 1989 and undisturbed by its Cold War/Berlin Airlift history, also came to admire it. That was easy. Only five miles from downtown, its unique hexagon shape made it amazingly practical. With no long safaris through mazes of “duty-free” shops, there was a short walk to the right check-in counter, five steps to pass control, five more steps to a short, one-line baggage check, separate for each plane, and you were right in the waiting room for your gate. No endless corridors, confusing turns, multiple escalators. When arriving in Berlin, a usually perfunctory pass control near your plane’s short exit tunnel led right to your baggage carousel. After a brief glance by the customs checkers you were one door away from bus, taxi or car slots inside the hexagon. Maybe twenty yards in all. Yes, air travel via Tegel could almost be pleasant again.

BER. Pfoto: YouTube

But alas, it proved too small, so it was decided to build a big, super-modern airport replacing it and the equally overfilled Schönefeld airport on East Berlin’s oppositer border. It would be more than double so far from downtown, but a quick, easy city rail connection was guaranteed. In 2006 work began on the Berlin-Brandenburg Willy Brandt project – named for the former West Berlin mayor and West German chancellor. It was to cost 2 billion euros.

Elaborate opening ceremonies were planned for June 2011. Then, only weeks in advance, Berlin’s mayor, Brandenburg’s minister president and a federal minister, its joint bosses, admitted shame-facedly that the deadline could not be met. Nor could the 2012 deadline. Nor 2013. Year after year new blunders, snafus, doors that got stuck, ceiling extinguishers that didn’t extinguish, etc., etc. , delay followed delay, and before long all Germany finally had something to laugh about. Bets were offered: which would be first, the airport or a human on Mars. Others advised: “Let’s just move Berlin to a functioning airport – that’s cheaper and quicker!“ Nostalgic East German “Ossies” recalled West Germans’ haughty condescension about the capitalist system’s efficiency and superiority.

It finally did open on October 30th, nine years late and with a triple price tag of 6 billion euros! An awful lot of euros sliddered into many an already very heavy pocket! The opening ceremonies were kept to an embarrassed minimum and now, alas, its great size is no longer needed, with virus-cut travel down to a minimum, airlines going broke and cutting or closing down.

Tegel closed the same weekend with an outdoor farewell dance by the big uniformed ex-staff. There was one farewell last flight, then all the lights were turned off. This – and virus masks – covered over many a tearful face.

+++

There were more tearful faces ninety miles to the south in Leipzig – for a very different reason: tear gas! Or rather for two reasons. For days there had been a nasty conflict beween the city police and young people in a neighborhood dominated by left-anarchist young people. In their opposition to gentrification – and resultant soaring rents – they are quick to throw things, but rarely want to hurt anyone – except maybe the “bulls”. One small group, led by a young women, does physically attack neo-fascists and extreme rightwingers. When she was arrested a melee began last weekend, with water cannon and tear gas coming into play.

On the very same weekend, possibly by concidence, Leipzig was hit by a giant rally of the so-called Querdenken movement – “thinking crosswise”, which refers to its welcome to anyone and everyone across the prism, left or right. Thousands are bussed in to its rallies from around the country, and while its organizers often spout phantasy figures (this time 50,000), the number was most likely well over 20,000. Their basic position is that the dangers from the Corona epidemic are greatly exaggerated, facial masks invade our privacy, social distancing is nonsense and it’s all a Merkel plot to suppress freedom. Some are opposed to all vaccination, others suspect a world plot by Bill and Melinda Gates, with just a whiff of anti-Semitism mixed in, and its far right margins, often almost openly fascistic, display far right flags, slogans and QAnon signs. All sectors defy the regulations on masks and distancing.

Just like in Berlin and elsewhere, they were permitted to gather – under the same regulations which they clearly flouted, which the greatly outnumbered police ignored till almost the last speech was ended, when it began to arrest a few unmasked demonstrators. At left-wing demonstrations in bygone years, ironically, they arrested those who DID wear masks – or balaklavas. Far more puzzling, it was the highest court in Saxony (Leipzig’s state) which rejected the city’s attempt to ban the rally to the outskirts and insisted that they had the right to the city center. The result; when the police began arresting a handful, the far right contingent went on a nasty rampage, fighting cops, journalists and just about anybody who obediently wore a face mask. A minor version of these events – openly fascist – was taking place in Saxony’s capital, Dresden, causing turmoil in the governing coalition, made up of Social Democrats, Greens and right-wing Christian Democrats.

November 9th is a highly meaningful date in German history. After rebellious navy sailors in Kiel refused to continue World War One on that day in 1918, Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils seized power in Berlin in their November Revolution. The Kaiser resigned, two days later came the armistice and German surrender and Karl Liebknecht’s proclamation of a socialist republic from the royal palace. But this attempt was immediately stymied and the “moderates” of the Social Democratic Party set up the weak Weimar Republic, soon ruled again by the same big business forces and lasting only fourteen years before it succumbed to Hitler’s mobs and secret super-rich backers.

On November 9 1938, called Kristallnacht by the Nazis because of all the broken glass, a government-led pogrom was begun; 1400 synagogues and Jewish religious sites were destroyed, usually by undisturbed fire, thousands of Jewish stores were pillaged and 30,000 Jewish men were thrown into concentration camps, where hundreds died – presaging – a few years later, the total annihilation of the Jewish community in Germany – in what was to be known as the Holocaust or Shoah.

On the same date in 1989 – surely by coincidence – an unexpected ruling led to the opening of the Berlin Wall, a major step in the demolition eleven months later of the East German Democratic Republic, an attempt, after World War Two, to build up – in at least a smaller third of Gemany – a state free of the giant monopolies and cartels which had profited from the first world war, built up Hitler and made billions during World War Two by war production, the seizure of nearly all of Europe and the toil of hundreds of thousands of slave laborers.

This year’s November 9th, although the events contained little of earlier victory, tragedy, hope or sadness, and with most German streets, aside from a few like Leipzig and Dresden, very calm and often “pandemic-empty “, nevertheless contained omens enough of what could happen in future – or what, by dire necessity, really needed to happen!

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Dez12

am 12. Dezember 2020

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

AN ICY RALLY WITH BURNING DEMANDS

Berlin Bulletin No. 182
.

Victor Grossman

The survival of polar bears, we know, is sadly threatened. The survival of a more colorful bear species seems assured. HARIBO (an acronym of HAns RIegel BOnn), which makes those little “gold bears” sweets, was founded in a laundry room in 1920. A century later, its jolly producers assure us, 100 million Goldbears and other “gummies” in many shapes and colors bring joy daily to consumer hearts in over 100 countries: “Kids and grown-ups love it so – the happy world of HARIBO!”

But sadness can intrude here too. In Wilkau-Hasslau (in southern Saxony, pop. 9,656), the candy factory was a main employer since 1898. Publicly-owned in the GDR era until 1990, it offered about 300 jobs. With German “unification” HARIBO took over and cut that in half. Now its West German owners decided to shut down their only remaining plant in East Germany; modernization of their plant near Bonn makes it superfluous. Neither 13,000 protest signatures nor pleas by the mayor or even Saxony’s Minister President disturbed their “happy world”. The bitter locals could tell them where to stuff those cute little gummies!

HARIBO won success in a very small market niche. A renowned American firm is angling higher – for the entire world retail market! Amazon, in its German section, hires about 6,000 people plus 10,000 temporary workers for the current boom – and stubbornly defies union organization.

Haribo in Saxony: Haribo brand gold bears are processed here. Even in GDR times, gummy bears were produced in Wilkau-Haßlau – also for export to the West. The photo is from 2001.

Break-through efforts are led by Verdi (an acronym for “united service employees”), Germany’s second-biggest union with close to 2 million members in dozens of mostly public-service occupations, from garbage collector to kindergarten teacher, railroad engineer, even journalist and poet. Its fight to get Amazon to sign regional contracts like others in retail and e-commerce jobs, covering wages, health and safety provisions, now so urgent due to corona, faces two disadvantages. One: Amazon’s provisional hiring system with its promise of permanent jobs for those who work hardest, squeal least and avoid any whisper of unionizing. The other: Amazon’s ability to find local scabs but also to switch to warehouses and supply systems in Poland. Every effort is now being made to develop international solidarity. When about 2500 Amazon workers in six locations went on a three-day strike timed to disrupt „Black Friday“ sales, a Verdi spokesman said it was a “higher number than in the past and, despite difficulties caused by the pandemic, a big success.“ But the hard fight against the world’s wealthiest capitalist, wily Jeff Bezos, must slug on.

Last Sunday I joined up with a bigger, far tougher fight. Some 500 of us gathered between Merkel’s Chancellery Building and the Reichstag, where the Bundestag convenes. The rally, organized by the peace movement with a motto best translated as “Don’t Arm, Disarm!”, called on legislators to reject a big hike in the armament budget, now up for debate. The finance plan for 2021 faces a giant deficit to cover losses due to tightening pandemic restrictions, compensating workers without work and hotels, shops, restaurants and theaters without customers. All the same, the ruling coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU and CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD) is charging ahead with its aggressive plans, including new multipurpose frigates for the German navy, its largest surface warships since World War Two, transport helicopters for NATO, 38 Eurofighter planes at 5.5 billion euros each. Add on faster Tornados for the base in Büchel, ready at any moment to pick up the twenty American atomic bombs storaged there, speed eastward and drop them on Russians. Each one has a destructive power up to thirteen times that of the Hiroshima bomb – which killed 70,000. The plans look more and more like one more war. It would be the last one!

Wardrohne. PIC: Vopal, Flickr, CCC-BY-SA2.0

Also under debate is a decision on drones. The Bundeswehr forces already use unarmed ones; debates about whether to buy killer drones from the USA or Israel or to produce German ones would bury basic ethical questions; should GIs sitting comfortably in Florida or Nevada be able to kill citizens of Afghanistan, Somalia, Niger or elsewhere, without trial, by using the giant US Army base and drone relay station in Ramstein, Germany? Seen by many as a violation of German law, Bundestag decisions and morals, this is being fought out in the courts. Should German drones do the same?

Such questions of war and peace, so crucial to the world, were a heavy burden for our little crowd, freezing in the icy December air near the Spree River and watchfully monitored by omnipresent cops making sure we wore face masks and stayed a meter and a half apart.

After so many peace rallies over the years, valiantly organized but with mostly familiar, largely aging faces, one might wonder whether it was worth it. I admit to chickening out after two hours, before they stretched a symbolic blue band to the Reichstag building (but not, as was hoped, encircling it).
But before I limped off I noted some hopeful omens. Best of all, the unions were very visible. Not only big, leftish-leaning Verdi, the adversary of Amazon, but the teachers, too, and IG Metall, with over two million members the biggest in Germany and, it claims, in the world. And the main speaker was Reiner Hoffmann, head of the entire union federation, the DGB, comparable to the AFL-CIO, who warmed at least our hearts with the fact that, though small in size, similar peace rallies were taking place that same day in nearly 100 towns all over the country – with many union members.

Crucial as they are, it wasn’t only the unions. Leaders of Fridays for Future, the brave hookey-playing kids group, also Greenpeace and other ecology organizations were now supporting “Don’t Arm, Disarm!” – opposing more billions for weapons. While virus fears and icy winds kept numbers too low to encircle the huge Reichstag, a growing unity might influence some inside who would be voting.

Maybe some, and every voice counts, but reality dispels any illusions. For who were they? It may not be easy for Americans, used to two main parties for 160 years, to decipher the scene here, with so many trying to balance the boat – and steer it. You may feel as mixed-up as that late great wit (and catcher) Yogi Berra, when he ordered a snack: “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.” And in fact there are six caucuses in the Bundestag.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) featured angry name-calling at its recent congress between one faction, almost openly fascist, and the other which chooses to mask its position behind a bourgeois, coat-and-tie approval of democratic methods (deceiving nobody but an unusually accommodating media). Its rabid in-fighting helped cut its popularity from 12-13% down to 9-10%. Of course both its factions favor more armaments, lots of them, as modern and heavy as possible.

The smallest of the six parties, the Free Democrats (FDP), with its genteel, pro-business right-wing stance, also favors armed drones and any other modern “security” measures.

The strongest caucus, Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) with its sister party, Bavaria’s Christian Social Union (CDSU), always pushes for more weaponry. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Minister of Defense, has made it clear; Germany must lead Europe as a NATO equal in a renewed transatlantic partnership with the new Biden government, one based on nuclear weaponry. And despite the financial strain caused by corona, it must keep developing new European weapons like the Eurofighter, the NH90 helicopter and the Eurodrone. Some generals already discuss heir future use.

What about the Greens? This once young, left-leaning party has slithered further down a slippery slope. It grew fast after the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011, achieving second place in popularity, but success has had dire results. Its stress on environment is degrading into well-phrased schemes hatched out with big industrial companies; its participation in eleven state governments, six of them with the CDU, has had few notable results. In Baden-Wuerttemberg it heads the government and maintains a cosy friendship with the auto giant Daimler-Benz. Most shocking for many old stalwarts is in Hesse, where it joined its CDU government partner in using tough police to break up 400 road blockades and a hundred tree houses trying to block the destruction of part of a 300-year-old oak and beech forest to make way for a highway expansion.

Even more important, the Green leaders have abandoned earlier anti-military principles and become the most fervent adherents of East-West confrontation. On trade? “We Greens in the Bundestag are calling on the Federal Government to abandon its support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and to stop construction…No deals with Putin!”- On cooling off tension? “If we are in the next government we must meet with Macron to discuss robust European military deployment.” And weapons? “What matters are NATO capabilities.“ But not all the members are going along.

How about the Social Democrats, still paired with their traditional CDU rivals in a coalition government? Their poll ratings have slipped catastrophically to only 15% (the CDU-CSU are at 35%, the Greens at 19%). In this past year their new co-chairs and a few deputies made daring statements opposing US atomic bombs at the base in Büchel – or any atomic bombs. But the party’s powers-that-be, somehow reminiscent of the Democratic leadership in Washington, are busy squashing such mutiny, and men like Vice-Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas seem to have the stronger biceps. We will see what influence the peace movement has had when the votes are taken.

And the LINKE, the Left? It remains the only party consistently voting against rearmament and military adventures. But it has dropped to an 8% low. It, too, has sharp disagreements; some leaders want to drop full opposition to NATO membership and foreign military deployment, conditions demanded by the SPD and the Greens for joining it in a coalition government. At present, the polls would not give these three the necessary 50% anyway, and many in the LEFT insist that such compromises would end their party’s role as the only genuine peace party. In this coming year of elections in many states and nationally in September, lots of switches and turns may be expected. Next to colossal corona-connected economic problems, war and peace will be a basic, fateful factor.

++++++

Although this Berlin Bulletin has become far too long, I will include two interesting quotations. Who said them?
„Today we are seeing new efforts to fragment the world, draw new dividing lines, create coalitions not built to achieve something but directed against someone, anyone, to create the image of an enemy just as was the case during the Cold War … We are sliding into times when, instead of a balance of interests and mutual guarantees, it is only fear and the balance of mutual destruction which are preventing nations from engaging in direct conflict.“

++++++

“For the past twenty-five years all Europe has been arming itself to a hitherto unimaginable extent … Is there no exit from this dead-end street except in an annihilating war?… I insist: Disarmament, with its guarantee of peace, is possible, indeed comparatively easy to accomplish, and Germany, more than any other … has the power and the motivation to achieve it.”
The first quotation was by Vladimir Putin. The second was written in February 1893 by old Karl Marx’s friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels, who was born just 200 years ago, on November 28, 1820. Did too few listen?

+++++++

Six weeks ago I managed to forget everything, turning from virus lockdowns, election predictions, the month-long shut-down of the elevator to my 8th floor apartment and just simply enjoy a few moments. A few relatives liked the result and suggested I send it, though dated, to all readers:
This morning, from my breakfast table, I looked across the wide expanse of green, yellow, orange trees, a fine ensemble – and was lucky enough to be rewarded with a magnificent rosy sunrise over the entire sky. Joyfully adding to this, off on the horizon, a flock of perhaps two hundred birds, wonderfully circling and soaring, most probably my favorites, the handsome black rooks, just arrived here in their winter quarters like every year in late October, truly a heart-lifting sight. But in addition to this – almost too much – a radio present; a Bach cantata (BWV 180) including a duet with the warm, vibrating tones of a cello and a clear, smooth soprano, all together almost enough to bring a tear or two of breathless joy. How wonderful it is to be able to have such an experience, how lucky I was, brief as it was!
And last but not least, for your reading in required confinement, or for the holidays, may I recommend my book, “A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee”. Some have praised it highly.

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Jun16

am 16. Juni 2021

Veröffentlicht in: Victor Grossman

Victor Grossman

BERLIN BULLETIN NO. 190

SMALL STATE BUT BIG QUESTIONS

A week ago Saxony-Anhalt voted! The media prediction – a neck-and-neck race – was cock-eyed! But outside Sachsen-Anhalt (in German), did anyone really give a damn? Yes, some did!

It’s sandwiched along the Elbe River between “genuine” Saxony to the southeast, with Dresden and Leipzig, and Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen) to the west, which has Volkswagen. And what has it got?

Tons of history,mostly German. Bach spent his happiest years in little Köthen, whose music-loving ruler-prince played in his ensemble. But Bach left the Anhalt town and moved on to Leipzig. George Frederick Handel, born and raised in Halle (Anhalt), also moved on, to Hamburg, Rome, London (and “The Messiah”). Martin Luther was more faithful; he nailed his 98 Theses on a church door in Wittenberg (Anhalt), and was both born and died in the region. That at least is worth noticing!

The state capital, Magdeburg, can claim a little fame as birthplace of Friedrich Wilhelm Gerhard Augustin von Steuben, or “Baron Steuben” – the fantastic phony! A lowly captain when kicked out of the Prussian army (maybe for being gay), he was broke, his “baron” title and noble “von” were invented, his fancy general’s uniform was a creation of Ben Franklin’s Paris tailor. But it all worked, George Washington was glad to have one of Frederick the Great’s officers build up a disciplined army at Valley Forge and help win the Revolution. And Magdeburg boasts a fine statue of Steuben.

As old as Charlemagne, its founder, it is proud of another man, who was mayor but loved to try his hand at other pursuits (quite different from those of New York’s governor). In 1654 he pumped all the air out of two large copper hemispheres, fit together to prove the strength of atmospheric pressure. It proved so powerful that two teams of horses could not defy the vacuum and pull the two apart. Once air was allowed back in they fell apart immediately.

Two strong sides were in play again last Sunday. No matter how the other political horses strained, they could not break the double-bind of the two, invulnerable despite their differences. Six parties were in the running, there was hot air in abundance, but those two kept their tight grip.

Unlike 1654, both good and bad news was involved. It was good for Saxony-Anhalt’s premier for ten years, Rainer Haseloff, 67, a serious-looking senior, whose down-to-earth manner resembled that of another East German from the same “Christian” party, Angela Merkel. As with father or mother figures in other states, his personal popularity helped win him a third straight victory.

But the 37% tally for his CDU, a fat 7.3% increase over its result five years ago and amazingly high with six parties in the race, was based on more than fatherliness. Repeated predictions that the rabid, almost openly fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD) might win out were simply too frightening for many East Germans. And though Haseloff is as conservative as other Christian Democratic (CDU) leaders, he has steadfastly rejected all attempts inside his party to cuddle up to AfD leaders and consider an agreement or coalition with them. A widespread fear of the far right was decisive.

This victory, even in a lesser East German state, was what you might call (if it were not for Covid sensibilities about tender spots) a “shot in the arm” for the “Christian” CDU, which had grown shaky on the national level. The sigh of relief from Armin Laschet, its less than charismatic chancellor candidate for September 26th, was almost visible…”We won! Hurrah for Saxony-Anhalt!”

And the other good news? The AfD came in 16 points behind the CDU and 3.5% lower than its result five years ago. Despite its boasting predictions and the media warnings, there was no neck-and-neck dash against Haseloff and no cuddly necking with right-wingers in Haseloff’s party. Not now, anyway.

But that’s where the good news sours into bad news.

True, the AfD lost ground with its 20.9% – in national polls it is just half that. It has nothing like the support in the U.S.A. for an increasingly extremist GOP, nor does the AfD possess such a fearsomely unifying Führer figure. But it remains alarming enough; in much of Eastern Germany it is in second place, as in Saxony-Anhalt. Many pundits blame oldsters, “their thinking still twisted by GDR totalitarianism.” This is nonsense; the far right is not strongest with them but with disoriented, often hopeless young males who experienced the GDR only as babies and toddlers, if at all.

Just add them up; the AfD, whose domestic policy hardly conceals its fascist ideas, plus Haseloff’s winning CDU, always on the right of the spectrum, plus the Free Democrats, bare-faced pro-capitalist, who won enough votes (6.4%) to return to the legislature in Saxony-Anhalt. The sum of 64.3% means that nearly two-thirds voted “right-handed”. Is that an omen for the September elections? The three horses pulling against them have proved very lame.

The Social Democrats (SPD) claim to be defenders of working people and world peace were hobbled long ago when they became junior partners of their traditional CDU rivals, both in Saxony-Anhalt and on the national level. They paid dearly for this, getting a pitiful 8.3% on Sunday, so low it caused tears, almost sobs, during post-election TV interviews with their candidates.

The Greens, hoping to break through in the East at last, got 6.1, a tiny 0.7% over 2017. And sad faces!

But faring worst of all was the LINKE! Once proud in the saddle, with hopes of victory in a state with long working-class traditions, they lost over 5% of their supporters in five years and dropped to 11.2%! The fact that most of those they lost switched to the Christians just to keep the fascists out was no consolation. Those voters were lost! The LINKE election slogan, simply “Better – Die Linke!” had been no great inspiration.

Can these three parties do any better on the national level where the Social Democrats are down to 15%, pitiful enough for a party whose leader, Willy Brandt, once ruled the roost. Their current chancellor candidate, Olaf Scholz, 62, now Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister, puts up a brave front but is facing two smelly scandals. A big financial services provider, Wirecard, high in the German charts, with ties to countless enterprises, proved phonier than “Baron von Steuben”! A London journalist let some air in; its debts were huge, its assets at the vacuum level of Magdeburg’s hemispheres. Some board members got arrested but the biggest fish disappeared. So did 1.9 billion euros. The Scholz office, the main watchdog to prevent such shenanigans, was somehow dozing.

Scholz seems to have memory problems as well. When the super-wealthy Warburg bank got caught defrauding the government in a billion-level tax rip-off, it called for help from the mayor of Hamburg, site of its main office. The mayor denied any connection – until the banker testified in court. Then he had to admit, looking very innocent, that if there was indeed such a call he had “no concrete memory of the content” and had never “exercised any influence in the tax matter.” But after more beans were spilled he finally recalled: yes, he had indeed met three times with the banker and given him tips per telephone. In the end the debt to the taxpayers went unpaid, Warburg remained unscathed. And Olaf Scholz, then Hamburg’s mayor, is now the Social Democratic candidate for the job of chancellor.

Who else wants the job? A major contender is the candidate of the “ecology” party, the Greens. Annalena Baerbock, young -looking at 40, vivacious, still displaying, like her party, a whiff of its left-leaning, untraditional, feminist past, in contrast with elderly establishment gentlemen. The Greens had soared amazingly in national polls, even overtaking the Christians on some days. Baerbock was given a fighting chance to replace the retiring Angela Merkel, that other daughter of East Germany.

Then her opponents found flies in the ointment. Stupid remarks by a few misogynists hardly registered, but even small blots in the squeaky-clean background expected of a Green candidate hit hard. Her official vita included more credits, academic and organizational, than fitted the facts. “In my brief, compressed resumé I unintentionally offered impressions I had not wished to create. That was crappy.“ In her income report to the Bundestag she had neglected to mention 25,000 euros paid her by her own party. “There should have been a more careful checkup… we have learned a lesson,” she noted ruefully. Minor matters, but they weakened her odds, already hit by the poor showing in Saxony-Anhalt. But more crucial matters intruded.

For reasons possibly affected by big, lucrative trade deals, some German leaders have not joined so fervently in the growing denunciations aimed belligerently at Russia and China. At times even Merkel dared to defy the commanding voices from the Pentagon, NATO-HQ in Brussels and all the media marionettes.

Now the CDU candidate Armin Laschet has dared to call “demonizing Vladimir Putin not a political policy but rather an alibi for the absence of one”. He criticized “marketable anti-Putin populism” and, while disapproving Russian policies, said it was necessary to “imagine oneself in the thinking of one’s conversation partner if one wishes to engage in foreign policy relations.”

Even Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, never a leftist peace activist, opposed attacks, verbal or otherwise, against Russia: “We can have no interest in joining in this confrontation. We want dialogue and good neighborliness with Russia,” he said and warned against “the many smart Alecs who always demand tougher and tougher measures.“

Such unusual remarks were balanced enough to anger, even enrage the bellicose elements known as the “Atlanticists”. And among the angriest “smart Alecs” were leaders of the Greens like Annalena Baerbock. Aside from ecology demands such as higher gas prices and lower speed limits, which angered those forced to drive to work, and tainted by agreements with big business, who should not be “too heavily over-taxed”, a main line of Greens like Baerbock has long been that “a tougher German stance toward Russia and China … should be a priority.” While demanding an „increase in pressure on Russia“ to counteract tanks it deployed on its own territory, she finds nary a word about NATO maneuvers along Russian coasts and frontiers far distant from German or American borders.

Is one CDU-Christian wing, feeling pressure from the voters, doing some re-thinking and leaning further toward detente while the other goes all-out to build up and train aggressive modern military forces? The question also goes to the SPD, with some realistic voices now audible. Even in the Greens, pressure from their “old guard” is pushing against modern killers like armed drones. At their latest conference the pro-drone leadership won – but only by a very slim margin of 347 to 343 delegates. At times it almost seems like a subtle tug of war.

But what about the LINKE (Left)? Despite arguments within its ranks about Putin, about using the Bundeswehr abroad, on allying with the SPD or Greens or rejecting any such ties (now out of reach anyway), its anti-war stand was never influenced by pressures from auto-makers, agricultural monopolies, banks or greedy investors, and most certainly not from armament giants like Krupp or Rheinmetall. Unlike the others, it gets not a cent from any of them. All its policies, even those debated among its members, were related to the interests of working people, children, pensioners, and to opposing every activity by neo-Nazis. Sometimes Greens, Social Democrats, even CDUers joined in. But the LINKE were certainly the most consistent .

With post-Corona threats to peace internationally and to freedom domestically demanding militant fights on many issues, their voices, votes and actions will be urgently needed. But despite very promising signs at their February congress they have largely failed to meet the challenge.

Some members are indeed waging a courageous battle against soaring rents in the city-state of Berlin, working to collect 225,000 signatures (175,000 approved ones) for a “confiscation” referendum which is truly scaring the rent-scrouging fat cats. But on the national political scene they have largely disappeared. A hostile media plays its part. But the LINKE have consumed themselves in inner controversy: disputes about imaginary future coalitions, refugees and immigration, about a loss of contact with working people as opposed to higher-educated minorities. Most recently about “identity groups” and friction with two of its best-known party personalities and most forceful orators, Sahra Wagenknecht and her husband Oskar LaFontaine. Are they to blame for splitting and weakening the party? Or are they still a force for militancy? Would Sahra win or lose votes in her state of North-Rhine-Westphalia. Should she be expelled because of damaging criticism? These questions have distracted far too many in the party from all the fights which need to be fought.

Such quarrels have already gained life and death proportions! The LINKE has not only lost calamitously in Saxony-Anhalt, in the national polls it has dropped from a year-long position of about 9-11% down to its current 6-7% level. If it drops further, below the 5% needed to maintain its presence in the Bundestag, it will have basically carved itself into political impotence! I hope my next Berlin Bulletin can report a change for the better! It is so necessary!

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Der 9. November 1989

Harry Popow

Die neue Mauer.

Hosteni

9. November 1989

Berlins Senat war auf den Mauerfall 1989 vorbereitet

. Hosteni

Wende 1989 – Bei Anruf Mauerfall

30 Jahre Mauerfall

Nicht der Sozialismus scheiterte 1989, sondern das revisionistische System der DDR und das der Sowjetunion

THE WALL AND GENERAL PYRRHUS e

Berlin Bulletin No. 169 .

Victor Grossman

DEFENDER AND SPEARHEADS

Berlin Bulletin No. 172 .

Victor Grossman

WHAT CAN NORMALCY BRING?

Berlin Bulletin No. 176

Victor Grossman

ASPARAGUS AND BOMBERS

Berlin Bulletin No. 176

Victor Grossman

BREAKUPS AND LEAKS

Berlin Bulletin No. 178 .

Victor Grossman

MIRROR MIRROR AND POLITICS

Berlin Bulletin No. 180 .

Victor Grossman

WHICH WAY?

Berlin Bulletin No. 181 .

Victor Grossman

AIRPORTS AND RALLIE

Berlin Bulletin No. 181 .

Victor Grossman

AN ICY RALLY WITH BURNING DEMANDS

Berlin Bulletin No. 182 .

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