[3] News from Hypocristan - Cheap Talk and the Armchair Resistance Fighter

Germans like to advertise their uncompromising anti-fascism - the more so the less the cost of acquiring such a reputation.

"Why did you not fight against Hitler?" asks a son his father.
"I was born in 1946 [one year after Hitler's death]," replies his father.
"Well, why didn't your generation...the contemporaries...?"

Let me highlight two problems with German Vergangenheitsbewältigung [the effort to come to grips with the Nazi-past].

First, there is a convenient tendency to be so historically specific about the issue as to effectively take a uselessly ahistoric stance. Nazism is not likely to reoccur in its historic form. By couching anti-fascism in terms of the reality of the historic Nazi-regime, one is barking up a tree that is no more and will never grow again.

It is not the paraphernalia of historic Nazism that should preoccupy us but the alarming state of being intellectually disarmed so as not to understand freedom and the horrendous dangers of its absence. And in that all-important respect, people nowadays are hardly more knowledgeable and ready to act appropriately than at the time when Hitler gained and held power in Germany.

Second and relatedly, relying on the benefit of hindsight is much easier than living up in the present day to the standards of courage and political discernment that today's critics demand of people who lived in the Nazi-period.

Part of "coping with the past" should consist in appreciating how difficult it was for many people in the 1920s and 1930s to see through and oppose what then constituted "political correctness".

The Weimar Republic (1919-1933), preceding the Third Reich (1933-1945), was - irrespective of constituting a democracy - completely dominated by enemies of freedom - Marxist social democrats, communists, national socialists and other anti-liberal (European meaning, i.e. anti-libertarian) forces, who in one way or another preached the nation's birth theme of the citizen's duty to obey and live for an authoritarian and paternalistic state.

After dropping the "national" prefix in 1945, socialism continued to be viewed as being capable of assuming a desirable form and was supported by the majority of Germans immediately after the war.

It was a fluke of history that one man - Ludwig Ehrhard - was able to put Germany on a non-socialist track in 1948 (pulling off almost an accidental coup, see the first post in this blog).

But the totalitarian forces would eventually prevail, most notably in the form of the Studentenbewegung (the student's movement) in the mid and late 1960s - a movement that would prove formative for the political development of the country ever since.

When the rebellion's spontaneous fire subsided, the Marxist student's resolved to go on "a long march through the institutions" - der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen - and have largely succeeded in this attempt, with their anti-libertarian thinking now permeating the social institutions of the country. Incidentally, the student's movement drew much support, sympathy and admiration from its anti-fascist stand, while the more fundamental fact that it - like the Nazi movement - was utterly opposed to the values of freedom and fiercely advocating a totalitarian society remained largely unnoticed.

That totalitarian structures can take other forms than those experienced under the Swastika or the Hammer and the Sickle is little appreciated in a country obsessed with backward looking views of totalitarianism.

Opposition to the system is no longer en vogue, the radicals with leadership potential are busy at the troughs of a political infrastructure that invites and rewards special interests, especially when embellished by socialist mystique ("capitalism is destroying the planet").

Those who demand - as a matter of course - that people living in the 1920s and 1930s should have known what we know today about the Third Reich and should have risked their lives to stop Hitler, are (or could be, if they cared) much better informed, command more resources and have far more leeway for resistance than Germans living 50, 60 or 70 years ago.

Yet, when you ask them to do something about the things they do not like in our political culture, they drop back into their armchair and mumble: "There is nothing you can do about it."

The roots of apathy are manifold, but an important contributor to it is the primitively truncated conception of democracy that prevails among the population - essentially, the accomplishment of compulsory state education: the government has been democratically elected, so what it does is legitimate.

And this superficial and facile philosophy of legitimate power has so lulled the majority that the political caste is increasingly confident to stretch their presumed mandate further and further away from any meaningful source of empowerment or even drop any democratic pretences - which, in turn, gradually weakens democracy and heightens the importance of pure marketing - the strong preference for alarmist contentions attests to it, and who would not be willing to concede little understood freedom and democracy to, say, the need to save the planet? Hence, also the proliferation of "Wars" on this, that and the other.

Recently, we had the case of a young man, Murat Kurnaz, born in Germany and spending his life here, only to end up in Guantanamo after being seized during a sojourn in Pakistan. There was a brief flare of indignation when his gruesome fate as a suspected terrorist and his total innocence were eventually revealed to the German public. The domestic authorities, heavily involved in the history of Kurnaz's imprisonment, however, pointed out that the man holds a Turkish, not a German pass board - and that settled the matter. No more indignation.

People in Germany do not know a concentration camp when they see one, it seems. Even worse, one does not generally encounter the position here that Guantanamo is not a concentration camp. It is just that - it kind of is not our business. So much for Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Maybe, it will take several decades for people to feel sufficiently removed from any risks to ardently denounce what has been done to that young Turk.