Germany

Conspiracy theory goes international

Over the last year or so Jackie Walker has campaigned to present Labour politics as a drama centred on the alleged "lynching" of herself. In May 2016 she was suspended from the Labour Party for allegedly antisemitic comments on Facebook. She was reinstated, and then suspended again in October 2016 for new comments (in public) found to be prejudicial by Jewish Labour members. Despite talk about the issue being "free speech on Israel", none of those comments were about Israel, still less were any of them statements of support for Palestinian rights. Like many, she remains suspended without a...

The SPD and GroKo

By 56 to 44 per cent the delegates at the German SPD’s Extraordinary Party Congress (Sunday 14 January) approved coalition negotiations for a new “Grand Coalition” (GroKo). But this will not end the crisis of social democracy: on the contrary. After the Young Socialists (JuSos) and smaller SPD state associations had tried to stop the GroKo, Martin Schulz and the entire SPD party leadership had to go in with all guns blazing to win delegates to give special permission for coalition negotiations with the right-wing CDU and CSU parties. Always the same message: the results of consultation might...

'Anti-Zionism’, Antisemitism, and the German New Left

To download this as a pdf click here During the night of 8/9 November 1969 monuments in West Berlin commemorating victims of Nazi persecution, including one marking the destruction of a synagogue in the city’s Schoneberg district, were vandalised. “Shalom”, “El Fatah” and “Napalm” were painted on the monuments, in the colours of the Palestinian national flag. On 9 November itself a member of the “Black Rats, Tupamaros West Berlin” planted an incendiary device in the city’s Jewish Community Centre, timed to ignite when the annual commemoration of “Kristallnacht” took place in the grounds of the...

Germany: far right scoops social discontent

The recent election night was a shock for many: [Merkel's centre-right Christian Democrat] CDU and the [Bavarian sister party of the CDU] CSU each had their worst result since 1949, the [Social Democrats of the SDP] got the worst result in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany; and [far-right] AfD, according to official estimates, came away with 12.6% of the vote and 94 representatives in the Bundestag. Alongside AfD, the [arch-neoliberal] FDP had reasons to celebrate, namely 10.7% and 80 seats which brought them back into the Bundestag, from which previous recent elections had...

Merkel: suppressing inconvenient truths

No-one is a better representative of a united Germany than Angela Merkel. First mocked as [Helmut] Kohl’s girl, Forbes magazine has for some years listed her as the most powerful woman in the world. After Donald Trump’s victory in the US general election, the New York Times describes Merkel as the last defender of the liberal West. Merkel is modern: as a trained physicist, being a housewife is just as alien to her as climate change denial. Against Trump and other xenophobes she defends an open world, and, in spite of grumbling on her right flank, she is doing well at it. Short of a miracle she...

Mass gathering of European neo-Nazis

On 15 October, more than 5,000 neo-Nazis from all over Europe met in Unterwasser, a small mountain village in eastern Switzerland. Even though the Swiss police is supposed to monitor the activities of far right groups, it was only when busloads of Nazi skinheads crossed the border that they became aware of the event. Completely unable to match the far right’s forces, they stood idly by and watched whilst hundreds of thousands of Euros were collected to finance neo-Nazi structures in Europe, but mainly in Germany. The Nazis had rented out a local sports hall under the guise of organising a...

Bankers’ greed brings us down

“For questions about the survival of big European banks to be swirling almost ten years after the financial crisis started is utterly damning”, writes the big business magazine The Economist. Questions are indeed swirling. On 26 October, the Bank of England asked British banks to say how much they are owed by Germany’s huge Deutsche Bank and Italy’s oldest bank, MPS, in case those banks prove unable to pay. Deutsche Bank’s share price has fallen by over 50% this year. The stock markets value this giant of international banking at less than Snapchat, a social-media business with a few hundred...

Labour needs new policy of solidarity with migrants

Jeremy Corbyn has said he will defend freedom of movement in the negotiations around Brexit. He has declared: “I have visited the camps in Calais and Dunkirk, which are in an appalling state. Those people are in a very perilous situation. They are all humans, to whom we must reach out the hand of friendship and support”. He has called for Britain to admit more refugees. By contrast, the legacy of the 1997-2010 New Labour Government, of which Owen Smith aspires to be the successor, was seven Acts of Parliament restricting civil liberties on the pretext of fighting terrorism; six on immigration...

Ports and workers’ power

"The RWG [container] terminal [in Rotterdam, 2.35m teu capacity], with its fully automated cranes, is operated by a team of no more than 10 to 15 people on a day-to-day basis. Most of its 180 employees aren’t longshoremen, but IT specialists” (Journal of Commerce, 4 Feburary 2016). The managing director says: “We are in fact, an IT company that handles containers”. Compare: in 1900 the Port of London was the busiest port in the world. It had 50,000 workers shifting cargo mostly by hand, as they had done for thousands of years. It handled 7 million tons of cargo. “Teu” means “twenty-foot...

Ernst Nolte and right-wing anti-Zionism

Right-wing German historian Ernst Nolte died on 18 August at the age of 93. Nolte was born to a Catholic family in Witten, in western Germany, in 1923. He studied with phenomenologist philosopher and Nazi sympathiser Martin Heidegger, who would be a major influence. Nolte first came to prominence with his 1963 study Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Fascism in Its Epoch, which was translated into English two years later as The Three Faces of Fascism). This work downgraded social or class-based explanations of fascism, in favour of an idealist and philosophical approach, in which ideas in the...

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