In Berlin, for the National Day of Mourning, wreaths were laid at Berlin’s best memorial to everything and nothing, the Neue Wache monument, while the Holocaust Memorial was used for a fashion shoot.
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Some interesting quotes from the GDR, regarding the positive orientation towards national thinking and it’s role amongst some of the leading communists and policy decisions. In his “On the Character of Hitler-Fascism,” Walter Ulbricht (head of the Communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party, and later the GDR) wrote:
“The fascist rule, which called itself ‘national’ and ‘socialist’, was neither one nor the other” (From “The Fascist German Imperialism.” 1952.).
Meaning, Nazism was not the correct form of nationalism? German fascism was, as Ulbricht explains by recalling the official definition, “the open rule of terror of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialistic elements of German finance capital” (ibid). That is, it was a reactionary movement which was used by the “monopoly capitalists” to preserve and advance their interests by “terroristic” means. In this definition, the nationalist character of German fascism falls away, giving the impression that National Socialism was not really a popular party across the broad spectrum of the population, nor did it speak to nor reflect the population’s desires nor actions. National Socialism, we are told, had nothing to do with Germans. The GDR sought not only to build a socialist society, but also a correctly nationalist one?
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Eyes Closed and Attack*
From Volker Weiss | Jungle World | Nr. 47, 19. November 2009
*Translated from the German
After the violent blockade of a film showing of Claude Lanzmann’s “Why Israel” in Hamburg, Germany, the coalition around the Internationalist Center B5 has sought to make an explanation.
This Autumn in Germany the showing of 2 films were forcefully prevented: In Hoyerswerda, a bomb threat caused the cancellation of Quentin Tarantinos “Inglorious Basterds,” and in Hamburg the showing of the documentary “Pourquoi Israel” (1972) of the French filmmaker and former antifascist partisan Claude Lanzmann was also not allowed to take place.
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This is a rough translation about a forceful blockade of a showing of Claude Lanzmann´s film “Why Israel?” in Hamburg, Germany a few weeks ago.
Seht nicht beim Juden
29.10.2009 | RedokHamburg, Germany — A group of left anti-Semites on Sunday has violently prevented the showing of a film about Israel. During the blockade of the cinema insults such as “Jewish swine” were to be heard. A Hamburg association of the Left Party published a justification of the action, saying a “Zionist propaganda film” was prevented from being shown.
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It is old news that Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch is intentionally reaching out to the Right. But below are some examples.
Alexander Cockburn, of Counterpunch web journal, has repeatedly expressed interest in working with the Right. Speaking at a conference of the Right-Libertarian group Antiwar.com, alongside Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, Cockburn claimed that the left and right have a “shared moral outlook.” In his talk at the 2000 conference “Beyond Left & Right: The New Face of the Antiwar Movement,” Cockburn argued for a coalition of the Left and Right in opposition to war, and on other issues. He wrote: “What I’m sure is attractive about the idea of the left-right opposition to war is the idea of a shared moral outlook, which of course then has to confront or perhaps gloss over temporarily economic and political differences. And I think the shared moral outlook should extend beyond war into other very, important areas.” Cockburn’s belief about a “shared moral outlook” between Left and Right was based on a quote from Noam Chomsky, where he claimed a “shared moral outlook” between Slave-holders and abolitionists. Chomsky argues that there was a common moral outlook between the abolitionists and Slave-holders when the latter group argued that they treat people better when they own them than when they rent them. For Cockburn´s text at the conference, see here or here.
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This is a selection of WWW pages that provide evidence material and resources on (extreme) right-wing influences on “left-wing” / “emancipatory” politics and campaigns, about sloppily formulated arguments in leftist campaigns that can be reused by the extreme right, and about collusion and direct alliances between left-wing and right-wing groups.
Two posts from the blog The Deliverators relevant to our subject:
Extract:
So what is needed then is a new style of opposition to the status quo in Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. I think that Zizek handles this issue well, pointing out that a revolutionary project must ultimately be about busting through the boundaries of the possible and making the impossible a reality. For this reason I believe that the only revolutionary policy would be a single state policy. Well, in honesty I believe that the only solution is a No State Solution, but we’re talking turkey here: the only hope for a broad, radical/revolutionary alternative to the brutality of both Israel and its enemies (and I am happy to draw moral equivalence between them all), and the only meaningful vision to oppose the various two-state stumbling blocks is a One State Solution. Imagine a single multiethnic, secular, socialist republic, Israel-Palestine, built on the common ground shared by Jews and Palestinians: the fact that nobody else wants them. This has been done at least once before, in North America, and its result was profoundly revolutionary. Now that the American experiment has run well past its sell-by date, Israel-Palestine would offer a place to launch a new project in human liberty, an opportunity for a realignment of the values of the world.
Extract:
Being called a racist or an anti-Semite can come as a bit of a shock, because we’ve learned never to associate it with ourselves, but only to those we can clearly define as racists (i.e. the Klan, or the Third Reich, and so on and so on). If you’re a revolutionary communist, say, who is ostensibly at war with capitalism and racism and so on, you can’t, in your own mind, possibly be a racist. And then, if you view anyone outside your political system as racist, “everyone who is not a revolutionary communist is a racist,” well…
You’re saying this zone of self-critique is basically over. The response is never (Coates sort of put it like this) “well, maybe you have a point, my bad.” It’s “how dare you call me a racist” or “maybe you’re the racist.” The second part is this weasel justification, “we’re not homophobic, we’re just defending ourselves against the gay agenda.” It’s not “we dislike the Jews,” when the synagogue gets smashed up, it’s about Zionism, it’s about the injustice that justifies the dislike.
The blog Anti-German Translation has a strand called “critique and theory“. Here are some of the links in it, which might help towards the “new style of opposition” called for in the extract above: New from Anarchist Federation: Against Nationalism. Postone v Debord. Zizek quotes Postone [via PD]. Claussen on Adorno. On Karl Korsch. Noam Chomsky and genocidal causality. ‘Productive’ and ‘unproductive’ labour. New Moishe Postone. Why anarchists should not attack banks. In Praise of Usura.
With the playing of Richard Wagner compositions at the 20th year celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall last week, various discussion threads have brought up the issue of how to relate to artists who expressed antisemitism who “lived in another era.”
The case of Wagner shows however that the musician did not passively accept anti-Jewish stereotypes and pass them on to others through simply reproducing them on the margins of his work, but rather that he was an antisemitic activist, ruining the careers of Jewish artists in particular, and transforming Christian anti-Judaism (with its forced assimilation of Jews into Christian society) into a systematic German racial antisemitism (where even assimilated Jews were blamed for the “downfall” of Christian society and who should be excluded from it).
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