The Nazis and Post-War German Conservatism, The CDU

That determined opponent of all forms of racism and Fascism, and their Jewish version, Zionism, Tony Greenstein, has written a passionate open letter to the mayor of the German city of Aachen, Marcel Philipp. His letter is a protest against Philipp’s decision to withdraw an artistic prize from Raad, a Lebanese-American artist, because Raad supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement against Israeli goods and businesses operating in the Occupied Territories. In his letter, Greenstein shows how the BDS campaign is actually an anti-racist movement, despite the official condemnation of it as anti-Semitic by the Bundestag, the German parliament. Boycotts are the weapon of the oppressed. He notes that it was used against slave-produced sugar from the West Indies, and takes his name from Colonel Boycott, an Irish landlord shunned by his tenants in County Mayo in 19th Ireland. He also points out that the anti-BDS legislation is supported by outright racists and genuine anti-Semites like the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Trump in the US. They do so not because they are friends of Jews, but because they believe that Israel is their real home, and would like the Jewish people in their countries to move there.

Philipp is a member of the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union. This is the German equivalent of our Conservative party, and was formed after the war from the merger of the Catholic Centre Party and a few other parties. Greenstein accuses Philipp himself of racism, due to the presence of former Nazis in the party after the War. He points out that the closest adviser of Conrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-War Chancellor, was Hans Josef Globke, the legal expert, who drew up the infamous Nuremberg Laws for the Nazis. This was the legislation that put the Nazi social policy of racism, anti-Semitism and vicious discrimination and persecution into official state action. After the War, 77 per cent of legal staff in the German department of justice were former Nazis. At the Eichmann trial, Adenauer was determined to stop any mention of Globke and his role in the Holocaust. And so he sent Israel military aid, including submarines, and assistance with David Ben Gurion’s nuclear programme. 

Greenstein ends his letter

It is perfectly understandable that racists and white supremacists the world over should oppose the Boycott of Israel.  Racists have always opposed the use of BDS.  It is therefore no surprise that as a member of a racist German party should oppose Boycott.

My only message to you Mr Philipp is not to expiate your guilt over the Holocaust at the expense of the Palestinians. It was people like you who were responsible for Auschwitz and Treblinka, not the Arabs of Palestine.

The annihilation of the Jews in the Holocaust is no justification for the racial oppression and genocidal murder of the Palestinians today. Your party was once full of Nazis.  It would seem that old habits die hard.

http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/10/open-letter-to-aachens-racist-mayor.html

The letter’s interesting, not just for Tony’s protest about the withdrawal of the prize and efforts by German, American and European Fascists – he also mentions Italy’s Matteo Salvemini, amongst others – supporting and calling for a ban on the BDS movement, but also for the light it sheds on the Nazi past of many members of the CDU. The Baader-Meinhof gang in the 1970s arose because of scandals like this. They were furious that former Nazis like Globke were continuing their lives and careers, untroubled by proper punishment for their horrendous crimes. And as Ken Livingstone pointed out in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour, NATO and the various western intelligence agencies actively recruited them during the Cold War as part of their campaign against Communism.

In fact, the party that consistently fought against the Nazis and their persecution was the SDP and later the KPD, the German Socialists and Communists. These formed resistance cells even after they were formerly banned. Not that German Conservatives were alone in possessing extreme right-wing sympathies. Our own Conservative party and its press, like the Daily Mail, also had Fascist sympathisers before the War, and a Fascist fringe afterwards.

Forget the lies about Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in the British Labour Party, anti-Semitism is and has always been far more prevalent on the right. Which is why we need to have decent, left-wing parties presenting an alternative to poverty, austerity and neoliberalism in government all over Europe. And to fight all forms of Fascism, even when it tries to present itself as friendly towards Jews, like Zionist imperialism.

Ken Livingstone on the Rehabilitation of Fascists to Protect Capitalism

Ken Livingstone has always been a fierce opponent of racism in all its forms. He makes this very clear in the chapter ‘Labour Should Have Listened to Black People’ in his 1987 book, Livingstone’s Labour. He states clearly that all forms of racism, whether against Blacks, the Irish, or anti-Semitism, are the worst form of reaction and should be fought against. His anti-racism and anti-Fascism are made even clearer in the chapter, ‘Made in the USA’, which is about how the US gained economic and political hegemony over Europe from the end of World War I as part of its campaign to halt the advance Communism. Leninspart is justifiably outraged out how, at the end of World War II, America and the Western powers began to rehabilitate Fascists and Nazis as part of this global power struggle. He writes

The policy of reviving capitalism in Germany, as well as the attitude taken towards Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal, by the United States and Britain required the rehabilitation of Fascists. This was made simpler by the fact that most Allied leaders, contrary to their claims, had not objected to Fascism as such. What was unacceptable was fascism which threatened Britain and US interests. The US banker Morgan had financed Mussolini’s Italy and Churchill had summarised his attitude towards Mussolini in his History of the Second World War:

He was, as I had addressed him at the time of the fall of France, the ‘Italian lawgiver’. The alternative to his rule might well have been a communist Italy, which would have brought perils and misfortunes of a different character both upon the Italian people and Europe … Even when the issue of the war had become certain, Mussolini would have been welcomed by the Allies.

In line with this attitude, Adenauer, the United States choice to lead West Germany, was perfectly prepared to consort with Nazis. As Walter Laquer Smith admits in his pro-cold War Europe Since Hitler:

While Adenauer’s anti-Nazi record was above reproach, he was less than scrupulous in the choice of his closest collaborators: there could be but one opinion about the career of men like Oberlander and Globke in the Nazi era, but the former was dropped only after protests from all sides and Globke, a lawyer who had provided the official interpretation to the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws of 1935, remained for years the Chancellor’s close associate and confidant, despite heavy pressure.

Similar policies of rehabilitating ex-Fascists were pursued in the other ex-Axis states. In Italy, out of 800,000 pre-liberation civil servants, many of whom had been members of the Fascist Party, no more than a few hundred were removed from their posts. An amnesty was granted in October 1946 after which only 3-4,000 Fascists and war criminals remained in prison. The surviving Fascist dictatorships of Franco and Salazar were propped up by the United States. The support later given by the United States and Britain, to regimes such as that of South Africa, Pinochet in Chile, and Stroessner in Paraguay had its direct forerunner in the support given to rehabilitating European Fascists.

He goes on to describe how Britain and the US were deeply implicated in this odious policy.

The problem for the USA and Britain in this policy was that the war had been fought under an anti-Fascist banner and the majority of the population of Europe was strongly anti-Fascist. For that reason much work of rehabilitating Fascists and war criminals had to be done under cover and its truth is coming out only today. Ed Harriman has been prominent in exposing this and it is wroth quoting at length from his article in the New Statesman and Society of 5 August 1988:

The first to champion this dubious cause [of protecting war criminals] was Hector McNeil, the Labour government’s man at the United Nations. At the UN General Assembly’s second session in 1947, Soviet, Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Yugoslav delegates taxed McNeil to explain why Britain was sheltering war criminals in displaced persons camps in Germany … ‘In the town of Hoxter in the UK zone of occupation lives the butcher of the Byelorussian people, … Rodoslav Ostroski’, charged a Russian delegate … Ostroski … the Nazi-groomed ‘Fuhrer’ who press-ganged 60 battalions of his countrymen into fighting, and killing, for the Nazi cause. The liquidation of Jews in Byelorussia … was by then well known. Yet McNeil was unmoved. In 1961, Soviet authorities charged three Estonians with organising the mass murder of some 120,000 Jews, prisoners of war and other ‘untermenschen’ … in Estonia. Two pleaded guilty and were shot. The third, Ain Mere, was then living in Leicester. The Soviets said Mere was the Estonian police boss under the Nazis who personally ordered prisoners to be exterminated in the Jagala concentration camp, and joined the local SS. The Soviet request for his extradition was refused. ‘My record was checked when I came to England over 10 years ago,’ Mere told The Times. The Foreign Office reply was to inform the Soviet government that Britain did not recognise Estonia as part of the Soviet Union.

Harriman notes:

In 1945 the Joint Intelligence Committee declared that the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany, was Britain’s prime intelligence target … In the perverse logic of the spying world, there were few better sources for this than the Gestapo, which had devoted enormous resources and considerable vigour to liquidating communist suspects. The united States government now admits that Gestapo agents and their files were avidly sought be American intelligence. In 1983 the US Justice Department published a hefty report spelling out exactly how the Americans recruited one such agent – Klaus Barbie [the Butcher of Lyons] – and then gave him a free ride to South America. The appendix of the US report explains that before the Americans bagged him, Barbie was being recruited, in 1945, by a pair of ex-Nazis working as agents for Britain’s SIS, a Dr Hoffman and his superior, a man called Markus. Markus had been aide-de-camp to SS Intelligence General Walter Schellenberg, who set up a network of spies and saboteurs amongst Soviet collaborators… Shortly after the war Markus became the mayor of a small town in the British zone in Germany and, according to US documents, ‘was given the task of forming for the British a network of agents in Germany’… Prosecutions of war criminals quickly became an embarrassment to [the Labour] Government. They impeded the cold war… Churchill was one of the first to call for an end to war crimes investigations … Shortly afterwards Churchill made a much publicised donation to the support fund for Nazi Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, who was being 5ried in Hamburg for murdering prisoners of war on the eastern front. Proceedings against Manstein’s fellow officers had already been dropped by British prosecutors on grounds of the defendants’ ‘poor health’. In 1941, in the Crimea and short of food, von Manstein had ordered: ‘The Jewish-Bolshevik system must be wiped out once and for all… especially in the occupied cities, a large part of the population will have to starve.’ By 1952 Manstein was a free man serving in the West German army. The UN War Crimes Commission was quickly wrapped up. Prosecutors such as Gerald Draper found their efforts thwarted. the British and American authorities were not cooperative. General Lucius Clay declared that as of the end of 1947, no more suspected war criminals would be handed over for prosecution from the American zone in Germany. The British followed suit. (Pp. 170-2).

These are clearly not the words of someone who denies the existence of the Holocaust, let alone an anti-Semite. Rather they show that Leninspart was acutely aware of the horrific reality of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews, and was rightly revolted by the way his country’s leaders and the US, including the Labour, had protected Nazi war criminals as part of the Cold War against the USSR. And just as some members of the Labour party were involved in this, so was that great Conservative hero, Winston Churchill.

Vox Political Attacks Islamophobic Survey in The Sun

Murdoch’s leading populist paper has been living down to its reputation again. It’s published the results of a survey, which it claims shows that 20 per cent of British Muslims support ISIS.

This is nonsense, and highly dangerous, malicious nonsense at that. Mike’s written an excellent article taking the survey apart at http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2015/11/23/no-one-in-five-british-muslims-do-not-support-isis/. The article shows how the questions are too vague for anyone to draw that conclusion. It appears that the survey asked people whether they sympathised with Muslims fighting in the Middle East.

Mike rightly points out that you can sympathise with someone, without approving of what they’re doing. General De Gaul famously said that he understood why the Algerians were fighting for their independence. In that sense, he sympathised with them, and many patriotic Algerians thought that meant that he would end the war and negotiate a peace. But he didn’t, he carried on fighting until Algeria was lost completely.

Furthermore, the Middle East is now a cockpit of groups, sects and nations, all fighting each other. ISIS are merely one, albeit the nastiest. Sympathy for those fighting in the Middle East can mean sympathy for ISIS and other Salafist groups, like al-Qaeda. Or it could mean sympathy for those fighting for their homelands against ISIS, like Hamas, Hizbollah, the Shi’ah in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or the Kurds. There have been reports on the news of western blokes, who have gone to fight against ISIS and the like in the Middle East. One of these was a Kurd; another was a White guy, who was horrified at ISIS’ butchery. Now most of ISIS’ victims are Muslims, and I’d say that it was highly likely this fellow had Muslim friends. If he has, then they presumably would respond that they sympathised with someone fighting in the Middle East. This would not, however, mean that they supported ISIS: quite the opposite. They would sympathise with someone who was actively fighting ISIS.

The Long History of Racism at the Sun

Now let’s put this into some kind of perspective. Unfortunately, it’s just about proverbial that the Sun is a nasty, vile racist rag. It’s got a long, long history of complaints about racism, including judgement against it from the Press Complaints Commission. This includes not just Blacks, but also Arabs. A decade or so ago, they ran a cartoon with the caption that ‘even pigs are complaining about being compared to Arabs’. That got them prosecuted by the Commission and an entry in Private Eye, which noted the number of complaints of racism against the paper that have been upheld. It was something like 25, and that, as I said, was nearly a decade ago.

And this is not casual racism either. The hatred being peddled here is part of a carefully crafted, political strategy to produce a Conservative consensus. It looks like the old Neo-Con trick of finding an enemy, who can be presented as the enemy of the West and so produce social solidarity at home. And in the case of the Neo-Cons, this was first the USSR and Communism, and now Islam, according to the Huntingdon thesis of the clash of civilisations.

It’s the old Nazi strategy of finding an outgroup you can demonise, in order to gain maximum approval for your party and their plans for social cleansing. Last week, Zelo Street put up an article attacking some of the columnists over at the Telegraph blogs for criticising Corbyn for not being sufficiently bloodthirsty over the death of ‘Jihadi John’. These included the usual right-winger, including Mark Steyn. Steyn is almost quintessentially Neo-Con. He is bitterly critical of Islam, and pushes the ‘Eurabia’ nonsense. This forecasts that in a few decades, Europe will be overrun by Muslims, with the indigenous, non-Muslim population pushed into ghettos. He is also extremely right-wing in his domestic policies, a true low-taxation, small-government Conservative, who has consistently advocated cutting tax and welfare in order to lower the budget deficit.

To my mind, this is pretty much the same direction the Sun’s article today is coming from. And it’s not just nasty, it’s actively dangerous. Mike points out in his article that attacks on Muslims has escalated by about 300 per cent since the Paris attacks. Most of these assaults have been on women and girls wearing traditional Islamic clothing.

That would be bad enough, but it becomes even more chilling when you consider the horrifying anti-Muslim policies now being mouthed by Donald Trump. Trump has apparently decided that he wants all Muslims to be registered and carry some form of identification.

And you’re right. This is exactly like the Jews – and other political, racial and religious groups in Nazi Germany. Somebody from NBC asked Trump this exact question – how did his policy differ from that of the Nazis?

And chillingly, Trump didn’t have an answer. He just kept on repeating, ‘You tell me. You tell me.’

This bigot is the Republican front-runner.

And this is how Nazism started. Not by overtly persecuting the Jews, but by beginning the discrimination quietly. And when they were taken to the extermination camps, the German people were told that they were being ‘resettled in the east’.

And just as the Nazis did that to the Jews, so they rounded up their political opponents, and forced them to wear identifying badges. Communists, trade unionists, Socialists, Liberals, even Conservative non-Nazis, like Conrad Adenauer, who became post-War Germany’s first president, were ‘taken into protective custody’, as the pretext went. The Nazis claimed they weren’t persecuting them, but taking them under arrest for their own protection.

This is terrifying stuff. I hope Trump doesn’t get in, or if he does, that the vast majority of decent Americans won’t stand for that nonsense and block it. But if he did, I can’t see Cameron or Osbo doing anything but copying it over here. Of course, at first it’ll be entirely voluntary, you know, for the Muslims’ own protection.

I don’t know whether the Sun wants Muslim to be compulsorily registered. It might be too much for them, but considering how frothingly extreme they’ve always been, I wouldn’t put it past them.

This is a nasty, dangerous, disgusting piece of hate, and the Scum should be properly vilified for it.