A Socialist Defector, page 36
Joining them in taking such risks are refugees from countries torn by warfare, caused mostly by the United States, France, Britain, and their allies, who support warlords and corrupt politicians or engage in massive military bombing, droning, or direct invasion, as in Somalia, Libya, and Mali in Africa and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen in western Asia. Although Germany has not been militarily involved in every one of these conflicts, it has been a source of weapons for all of them. Much the same took place in conflict-ridden Central America.
In Europe it was the arrival of these refugees from hunger, warfare, or both, reaching their highest numbers in 2015–16, which made it easier to divert working-class people in the North from seeing the true causes of their problems. Stories spread that lazy refugees were grabbing jobs, housing, and all kinds of social benefits. This malice was not hard to spread. It was undeniable, after all, that refugees had different languages, religions, clothes, and customs, all so terribly strange and alien to simple souls. Some such bigotry was an almost exact translation of similar prejudices poisoning most of the past 150 years in the United States.
Many companies, always out to slice wage levels and benefits, gladly hire refugees eager or desperate for any jobs, regardless of conditions, to help gain permission to remain in the “haven country” or simply to survive. This can lead to more bigotry on the part of those “Northern” workers, who see only that wage scales are being undercut and are led to blame not the employers but the hardworking immigrants. The mass media, while piously decrying racism and dutifully calling for tolerance, rarely miss a chance to play up any immigrant misdeed. It is obvious that with so many untrained and unwanted young foreign men, often without families and constantly hit by discrimination, a few may indeed do nasty things once in a while (as do local men). The advent of ISIS, although its origins lay clearly in earlier U.S. intentions and blunders, also created the danger of “terrorists,” some of them seeking revenge for war atrocities by Western troops, planes, or drones in their countries of origin. The resulting tragedies become an overriding theme, consuming kiloliters of printers’ ink and untold hours of broadcast time, augmented by thousands of hate-laden comments in the social media, while self-righteous politicians hold forth on how best to get rid of the refugees without looking openly racist.
The mass media have always tried to turn dissatisfaction and anger among those who speak the native language into hatred against those who don’t, or not so well, to blame underdogs instead of top dogs, to keep people apart, pitting older workers against younger ones, those with steady jobs against those with temp jobs, better-paid men against worse-paid women. But always against “those furriners,” those “Others.” In medieval times witches were to blame—or the Jews, most tragically in the twentieth century. Sometimes the latter are still utilized for this purpose. In the United States the scapegoats nowadays are very often the Latinos, always the blacks, and more recently the Muslims and all immigrants, legal or not, refugees or not. If there is no active progressive movement to build solidarity, then racism spreads most easily. Donald Trump’s basic core of support is motivated by such thinking—or lack of thinking. How close are the ties of the alt-right, the Ku Klux Klan, and a wide assortment of hate groups to people wielding great power? Recent events have shown that some people, more than ready to use weapons, have little difficulty in getting them and arming themselves to the teeth. Add to them the many racists in police uniforms. These alarming arsenals have been made possible by politicians and their backers.
In recent German politics, what began with weekly marches and rallies in Dresden by PEGIDA, “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Western World,” with loose links to older pro-Nazi groups and gangs, was largely replaced by a new party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), which grew quickly and won a worrisome number of seats in city and state legislatures. Most parties lost voters to the AfD, including the Linke (Left), especially in Eastern Germany. In the federal elections in September 2017, the AfD made big gains and won ninety-two seats in the Bundestag, which provided far better media possibilities than those already granted it for its hateful messages. Its other positions are hardly known—tax cuts for the wealthy, a military buildup, resuming the draft of young men, opposing abortion and same-sex marriage—but all the more its rabid crusade against Muslims, Turks, Kurds, and Arabs living in Germany, and especially against the recent refugees.
Current polls show the AfD overtaking the weakening Social Democrats as the second-largest party. Thus far the established parties have officially rejected any cooperation with the AfD, but many show signs of moving to the right to win back voters from it, and the Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party seem to be flirting with the idea of possible coalitions with it, like what has happened in neighboring Austria. But Germany is far bigger, weightier, and better armed than Austria, and some people are already thinking back with a shudder to 1930 or 1931, the years just before Hitler seized total power. When resentful citizens find no other alternatives, no convincing advocates of their rights and needs, they may continue turning to the far right.
Derek Scally, reporting for the Irish Times from a middle-sized East German town, gave an indication of this:
Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Quedlinburg on a federal election campaign stop. Polite applause from supporters was drowned out by hundreds of angry protesters from the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), furious at her refugee policy that saw 890,000 people granted asylum in Germany in 2015 alone.
“Go to your Moslems,” read one sign from a protester from the AfD, which finished second in last year’s state election here, with 24 percent.
In the federal elections this district gave the AfD about 19 percent, more than enough to set off the alarm signals. (Derek Scally, “East German Town’s Blossoming Landscapes Mask Major Threats,” Irish Times, July 20, 2017.)
The very institution charged with “protecting constitutional democracy” in Germany was built up by former Nazis, whose experience lay only in fighting leftists, and who maintained murky ties to racist extremists. A ten-year series of murders of men with Turkish or Greek backgrounds, including an explosion in a Turkish area with many casualties, provided a few brief glances at these ties, though much of the evidence was either “mistakenly shredded” or hidden away, some of it for the unprecedented period of 120 years. Protection of prominent names may thus be granted even to their great-grandchildren! In the summer of 2018 the head of the institution was so defensive of neo-fascists that he had to be removed.
When chips are down in critical times, even those who are loudest in praising “Western democracy,” if faced with a choice, prefer those on the far right to anyone on the left. The world saw this in Russia in the 1920s, with military support for the tsarist generals, in Spain in 1936–39 for the Franco fascists, in Chile in 1973 for the Pinochet dictatorship, and on many, many other occasions, from Athens and Cairo to Ankara and Caracas.
Racism and hatred toward foreigners within national borders are often paired with preparations for conflict with those outside the borders. As long as Germany was divided, with strong memories of the past war in many minds, German military units never went into action, not the Bundeswehr and not the People’s Army, which, in 1968, luckily refrained from joining other Warsaw Pact members sending troops into Czechoslovakia. Indeed, West Germany’s Basic Law, its constitution, decreed that the Bundeswehr exists only for defense purposes. But the GDR was hardly down the drain before this changed. First came “peace-keeping” military actions in line with UN mandates in 1991–92 in Cambodia and Somalia, then surveillance and transport planes in a UN-backed mission in Croatia, and then in 1999 the first active participation of German troops abroad since 1945 in NATO’s war, without UN approval, against Serbia. The Social Democrats backed all these actions, while the once pacifist Greens, after finally achieving coveted government status in a coalition, enthusiastically joined in.
In 2004, the SPD Defense Minister, Peter Struck, stated that “self-defense is no longer the first priority of the Bundeswehr” and “Germany’s security must also be defended in the Hindu Kush mountains” of Afghanistan. Peace advocates, blasting his statement, said it could lead to world chaos and permit Pakistan, India, China or any other country to declare that they must defend themselves along the Rhine. But Christian Democrats, SPD, and most Greens agreed that Germany must not only be defended in Afghanistan but in the sandy Saharan wastelands of Mali and along the seacoast of Lebanon.
“Patriotism” is almost always invoked to create the bellicose atmosphere required for such missions and attacks. But aggressive nationalism, often to divert domestic dissatisfaction, gives rise to the fascists, waiting in the wings, ready to crush all opposition. I have written about the fascist takeover offer to Major General Smedley Butler in 1935. It was luckily not successful in the United States, but it was in Europe and Japan. In his Message to Congress on Curbing Monopolies (April 29, 1938) President Roosevelt warned: “The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”
He had to lead the United States in a war against that awful force, whose power, in Europe and Asia, was not broken until 1945, at the cost of over 50 million lives. Niklas Frank, whose father was Nazi governor of occupied Poland and one of the worst war criminals, came to despise all his father represented. Out of personal experience and emotions he, too, warned of a renewed fascist danger: “As long as our economy is great, and as long as we make money, everything is very democratic…. But if we have five to ten years of heavy economic problems the swamp becomes a lake, a sea which will again swallow everything.” (Niklas Frank, BBC HARDtalk, World News, April 26 2017.)
Where could such a sea emerge the next time, and who would be there this time to block its flooding?
OVER HALF A century ago, on August 17, 1975, Senator Frank Church appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and discussed the National Security Agency (NSA), without naming it:
In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air…. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology. (Sen. Frank Church, Meet the Press, August 17, 1975.)
83—Solutions
I think back to a personal experience many years ago. Our family was vacationing at beautiful Lake Balaton in Hungary. One day I left them at the beach and took the train to a marsh area farther south, famous for its wonderful bird life. I rejoiced to watch the herons, egrets, spoonbills, a marsh rail. But when it came time to head home I saw not one or two but three thunderstorms moving in from different directions, as if to converge right over my head. (More likely their goal was the big lake nearby.) As it began to patter, I saw a big tree and wondered, with the station fifteen minutes away, if I should take refuge there till the worst was over. But that was dangerous nonsense, so I walked on as fast as I could, getting to the station’s safety just as all three storm clouds thundered down. Today, I again perceive three menacing clouds, not arising in the heavens but man-made. Dr. King called them giant triplets: extreme materialism, militarism, racism. Unlike the thunder showers, it is not necessary to escape them but to combat them!
A more drastic simile occurs to me, not so very different in meaning. In Revelations, the last book of the New Testament, we can read of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with riders on different-colored horses symbolizing conquest, war, famine, and death.
Similar threats, nearly two thousand years later, make it urgent to block such murderous horses by unseating their super-wealthy riders. To achieve this, I am completely convinced, it is necessary to confiscate their factories, banks, and mines, their huge expanses of farm acreage and their hoarded billions, in coins, paper, gold, or long columns of numbers. This wealth derives from sacrifices so many of the 99 percent have endured; it was created by the muscles, brains, skills, and dedication of countless millions of ordinary people. That is what makes confiscation fully justifiable. My thirty-eight GDR years and all the years before and since have fully confirmed my deeply held belief, based on a very different magic formula than theirs: Dethrone the kings of wealth! Get rid of them!
Of course, I don’t want their physical destruction. Execution is still practiced in some countries, even by governors in Arkansas and Texas. But for me capital punishment is evil; I reject all forms of it—chopping blocks or scimitars, guillotines, gas chambers, or gurneys. No, it is not their heads but their giant possessions that must be chopped off. As for those who are genuine inventors, engineers, or efficient managers, if they and their work can benefit the majority, not private profit, then they should be rewarded for their efforts and contributions like everyone else. But not their children and children’s children, and never in astronomical amounts, financial light years away from what others earn. When a baseball club manager can pocket $20 million a year while the seamstress sewing the baseballs in Haiti or Costa Rica gets, also in a year, less than $800, then that must come to a swift end. After all, I don’t believe he invented the game, or its balls. Nor does he play it well enough.
Such a takeover should not affect mom-and-pop shopkeepers, small businesses, artisans, artists, or other independent souls, as long as they do not engage in chiseling on wages or other exploitation. Closing down many such “little fishes” by the GDR in the 1970s under pressure from the Brezhnev patrons in Moscow was hard and harmful and should be avoided.
It has been proven often enough in many countries that private ownership of big enterprises is not more efficient, and all too often it can hurt the economy while robbing all but its top ranks. I saw good, well-planned management in many GDR enterprises, despite a multitude of obstacles and without the kind of giant rewards and bonuses so often awarded capitalist retirees even after the worst of failures.
No, I am not proposing a sudden revolution for, say, 7 a.m. tomorrow. Not even for the day after tomorrow. When I see groups waving red banners on high and demanding a revolution—maybe for Sunday afternoon or sooner, then I may sometimes admire their devotion, perhaps their zeal. But, to express it in German: I am no “Naivling.” The timing must be set by the people, very large numbers of people! And when I see black-masked youngsters, sometimes perhaps the ones with those banners, throwing cobblestones, shattering shop windows, and setting dumpsters on fire, all in the name of an almost immediate revolution, I suspect that, consciously or not, they are fulfilling the wishes of the media, providing chances to denounce all opposition as “leftist extremists.” I also wonder how many of them are just looking for the same excitement hooligans get at European soccer games, how many are inebriated or otherwise stimulated, and how many, behind the masks, are agents provocateurs throwing the first cobblestone or breaking the first window. Sometimes a few get exposed, like the leading stone-thrower at the G-8 Summit Meeting in Heiligendamm in 2007. When his mask slipped, another man recognized him and cried out: “That’s the same guy who arrested me last year in Hannover!”
I am fully convinced that the best, if not the only way to win out is by winning people, not antagonizing them, by explaining one’s views and, more important, getting as many as possible involved in organized action—together, on a broad basis, with energy, solidarity, and also group self-discipline.
So, I don’t yearn for any bloody revolution! “Ballots not bullets” should be the aim. But not just with biannual visits to a polling booth. Far more important is action in the streets and workshops, in strikes, demonstrations, marches, or wherever people can take part, learn to appreciate their own strength when they stick together, and be convinced about acting for the good of themselves and their related human beings in all corners of our one and only globe. That means seeing through media miasma and seeking not quarrels but coordination with other good souls. And being aware that the wealthy fight back, hard and dirty.
The chances for common people to take over the wealth of this world suffered huge setbacks with the tragic derailments and defeats of the twentieth century. Who deserves how much of the blame is still hotly debated; the minds and political muscles of those hoping for change are still recuperating, far too slowly, from all the blunders and failures. They are too often splintered and weak.
That leads some to believe that a takeover is unrealistic and local workers’ or farm cooperatives should rather strive for progress on their own, with constructive people, usually the workers involved, proving what can be accomplished without idle coupon-clippers or super-wealthy bosses in skyscraper offices and handsome mansions. And in fact a few endeavors in Spain and Argentina have indeed organized work in self-run enterprises by people who had been pushed into poverty by mechanized agriculture or robotized industry. Their successes can be dramatic; I see no reason why they couldn’t exist in a world of the future.
However, I feel that although this might work well for some farms, factories, or even towns, it offers no basic alternative. Self-sufficiency may be right on a local scale or on some Robinson Crusoe island or in a wonderful Shangri-La valley. But in today’s hard world, it is too easily crushed. Since making refrigerators or even flashlights requires parts, materials, and chemicals delivered by road or rail over bridges or waterways and, when produced, must be distributed to retail outlets, and since such production, either by hand or by robots, requires well-educated experts, some forms of central planning are necessary. Centrality can be overdone, it often was in the GDR, but it was also the key to many of the successes I witnessed and admired. I cannot imagine how limited local efforts can really dent the overall control of the few and mighty. And yet I say: more power to them as omens or models for the future! May they flourish!
