Neo-Nazism

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The masses wanted to fight, but they were obstinately prevented from doing
so by the leaders. Tension, uneasiness, and finally disorientation
disrupted the proletariat from within. It is dangerous to keep molten metal
too long on the fire; it is still more dangerous to keep society too long
in a state of revolutionary crisis. The petty bourgeoisie swung over in its
overwhelming majority to the side of National Socialism only because the
proletariat, paralyzed from above, proved powerless to lead it along a
different road. The absence of resistance on the part of the workers
heightened the self-assurance of fascism and diminished the fear of the big
bourgeoisie confronted by the risk of civil war. The inevitable
demoralization of the Communist detachment, increasingly isolated from the
proletarian rendered impossible even a partial resistance. Thus the
triumphal procession of Hitler over the bones of the proletarian
organizations was assured.

(Leon Trotsky, The German Catastrophe: The Responsibility Of The
Leadership, May 28 1933)

====

NY Times, Sept. 8, 2000 Odd Couple of German Politics: Left-Right Alliance

By ROGER COHEN

BERLIN, Sept. 7 - They are the unlikeliest of allies - a former West German
Army officer trained in the United States and a longtime member of the East
German Communist Party who spent much of his life teaching Marxist theory.

But Udo Voigt, who still sports a military mustache, and Michael Nier, who
still quotes Lenin, have found common cause in the rightist National
Democratic Party, creating the heady platform of nostalgic nationalism and
"German Socialism" that the movement now proposes.

Since neo-Nazi violence, much of it directed against foreigners, became the
chief object of debate here after a bombing on July 27 in Düsseldorf, the
government has discussed at length a possible ban on the party, whose youth
wing is widely seen as providing a meeting point for rightist thugs.

But little of the talk has focused on the diffuse makeup of a party that
has tried to broaden its support by grafting East German grievances onto
its West German tradition of revisionist nationalism. In their different
frustrations, Mr. Voigt and Mr. Nier suggest the diversity of German anger
and the potential difficulty of quelling it.

They also display how the extreme right in Germany, as elsewhere in Europe,
awkwardly mixes traditional conservative values like nationalism with
traditional left-wing values like the defense of workers in an effort to
build a new power base.

The migration of center-left parties toward the embrace of the market has
opened new opportunities for such parties with the less well-off, as Jörg
Haider's Freedom Party has illustrated in Austria.

For now, the odd alliance - Mr. Voigt is the party leader and Mr. Nier is
its chief theorist - seems to have had some limited success. The party has
doubled its membership, to 6,600 members in the last three years, with many
new members younger than 30 and coming from Mr. Nier's state, Saxony.

Thousands of inquiries about membership have poured in since the discussion
of a ban began, and the party's new aim is to attract 20,000 members. "Then
we could have real influence," Mr. Voigt said.

Portraying himself as the defender of the "ordinary German under siege by
foreigners," Mr. Voigt, 48, traced his convictions from the time when his
father, Richard, slapped him in a dispute over the Nazis.

"I was about 12 and I had been shown films of Auschwitz at school, so I
believed that anyone who fought with Hitler was evil," he said. "I came
home and confronted my father. I told him he was a criminal.."

Richard Voigt had served as a Wehrmacht soldier in a tank division, first
on the French front and then in Russia. He told his son that he had known
nothing of Auschwitz or other camps until after the war.

He told his son that ordinary Germans like himself were not criminals. He
recalled, in defense of the army, how he had witnessed the execution of a
German soldier condemned by a military court for the rape of a Polish girl.

So began Udo Voigt's transformation into a nationalist, convinced that his
father's generation had been unfairly sullied, that the Holocaust had
become an industry intended to impose permanent shame on Germany and that
other genocides, including "killing the native Indians in America," had
been forgotten.

"When the Jews speak of collective German guilt for the Third Reich, we get
angry," he said. "Their aim is an extension of the Morgenthau plan for the
dismemberment of Germany, an attempt to paralyze us by passing guilt from
generation to generation."

In World War II, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. proposed turning
Germany into a politically meaningless state by destroying industry and
allowing only an agrarian economy. His ideas were rejected.

"The generation that was responsible for Hitler's crimes has had to pay for
them, and the criminals were judged," said Mr. Voigt, who spent 12 years in
the West German Army, rising to captain. "We have handed out more than $100
billion in reparations. I was born in 1952, and my generation had no
responsibility. Those who are young today have even less. But the
imposition of guilt continues."

Mr. Voigt said the constant "intimidation" of Germany is intended to ensure
that no new national sentiment is possible. It is also meant to create a
guilt complex feeding a sense of obligation in Germany that leads it to
take in more and more foreigners to prove its tolerance.

But foreigners, to Mr. Voigt, are Germany's chief problem. In his time in
the United States in 1973 and 1974, training on missile systems in El Paso,
he saw what he called severe racial problems in the United States Army.
There lay one seed of his opposition to a "multiethnic and multicultural
state."

He said that if his party gained power - an extremely remote possibility,
given that it has about 1 percent of the vote - any foreigner without work
for three months would immediately be sent back to his home country.
Foreigners would not be allowed to own real estate and would be excluded
from welfare, "because that is one of the main reasons they come to this
country."

"We would have a five-year plan to send foreigners back," he said. "A large
number will go. Not in 24 hours. But I believe that in the end 80 to 90
percent would leave."

There are more than seven million foreigners in Germany, 9 percent of the
population.

Mr. Voigt deplored recent anti-immigrant violence and said his party had
nothing to do with it. But, he said, high unemployment and high immigration
were bringing Germany to a breaking point.

"Our course of action now is to represent the frustrated German worker," he
continued. "The Social Democrats have deserted the worker for foreign
capitalist interests. Yet poverty is growing. Ours will be a new German
Socialism."

Enter Mr. Nier, born into the Third Reich in Dresden in 1943, the son of a
convinced Nazi, a member of a family traumatized by the Allied bombardment
of Dresden that forced them to flee, a child of the postwar East German
Communist state.

His is a different frustration, far from that of a Rhineland military man
who feels Germany has been on the receiving end of American- or Jewish-led
claims and criticism for too long. Mr. Nier's is the frustration of a man
who feels he lost his Communist home. Both frustrations are potent and, in
some degree, widespread, if seldom expressed publicly.

Mr. Nier joined the Communist Party in 1965, worked in an automobile
factory and moved on to study philosophy in Dresden. "Then," he said, "I
started teaching at the Technical University in Chemnitz and other
technical institutes, before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and I lost my
job like just about everyone else."

Holding a succession of jobs - he describes the latest as "teaching history
to 15 women who have no reason to learn history" - Mr. Nier remained in his
party until two years ago. Then he abruptly switched to the extreme right
and the National Democratic Party.

"Look, Voigt is a former officer and I'm a former Communist, but we have
one shared perception," he said. "That is, that the Social Democrats and
Christian Democrats have abandoned ordinary people. The only party for the
simple people today is ours. That is why I developed the slogan, `Socialism
in Germany.' "

Mr. Nier insisted that the party should have nothing to do with the terror
of the Third Reich and said a pivotal battle was engaged between "the
destructive Nazi side of the party, which is stronger for now, and my
battle for a progressive people- based national movement."

He added that German pride would have to be restored by "building back the
European Union to acceptable levels," making clear to immigrants that "this
is our land, clear and simple" and preventing German soldiers' serving as
"pawns" of Americans in places like Kosovo.

That message would eventually prevail, Mr. Nier insisted, adding that he
would welcome a party ban, because it "would be seen as antidemocratic and
give us a huge boost." He smiled confidently and said, "Even Lenin had
small beginnings."


Louis Proyect

The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org