[AUT] Fake Anti-Racists

[Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://negativepotential.blogsport.de/2008/07/05/fake-anti-racists/

Fake Anti-Racists

Germany?s Left Party issues a call to protest asylum
policies that their own chairman Oskar Lafontaine
supports.

By Markus Ströhlein

The disinterested have to be mobilized for action. On
the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the effective
abolition of the fundamental right to asylum, the
executive committee of the Left Party issued a ?call
to action?. Members were urged ?within the bounds of
possibility? to ?support? the demonstrations on the
5th of July in Berlin.

As a reason for the call, the executive committee of
Die Linke mentions that in May of 1993, members of
parliament from the CDU and CSU, the SPD and FDP
resolved to effectively abolish the fundamental right
to asylum. But the prehistory has been left out: it
was thanks to the tireless propaganda work of the
then-minister president of Saarland, Oskar Lafontaine,
that the federal states governed by the SPD approved
the measure in the Bundesrat (Germany?s upper
parliamentary house).

Already as mayor of Saarbrücken, Lafontaine advocated
detention camps and non-cash benefits for refugees. In
1990, when a pogrom mood arose in the town of Lebach
in light of the presence of 1,400 Roma who had fled
Romania, Lafontaine, as SPD candidate for chancellor,
advocated a tougher course of action against ?fake
asylum seekers? and for a change in the asylum laws.
His wish was granted in 1993.

That was a long time ago. Lafontaine can look back
with satisfaction at the beginnings of a policy
towards refugees to which he has remained committed.
After ?asylum seekers? had become almost numerically
insignificant opponents, Lafontaine, in a March 2002
column for the tabloid Bild, demanded immigration
limits for ethnic German repatriates. In the same
column in the year 2004, he defended the proposal of
then-interior minister for the SPD, Otto Schilly, to
erect detention camps for refugees in North Africa.

What?s the reason for all that? ?We cannot allow that
many people become unemployed due to the problem of
the immigration of foreign manpower being
unregulated?, Lafontaine stated in an interview after
his ?Fremdarbeiter? speech in 2005. The national
answer to the social question ? this atavism is
familiar in Germany. Lafontaine has internalized it,
not only in regard to asylum policies.

The anti-racism of the Left Party, as manifested in
the call to protest against asylum policies that the
party chairman advocates and which are tolerated,
accepted and supported by the party, stands revealed
as a folkloristic declaration, recited for the sake of
publicity. That certainly doesn?t really help the
small number of refugees who still manage to make it
into Germany despite the efforts of Lafontaine and
others.




      
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