[Marxism] Dresden: new holocaust anxieties in an age of ideological uncertainty

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Seems like these days, in an age of mainly negatively-defined politics
appealing to what we don't want to happen rather than to a positive vision
of what we do want, it's fashionable for politicians to scratch around for
holocausts in history to morally bolster and justify their current
policies - which is to say that a coherent, consensually held moral
framework for evaluating current policy is now really lacking, and that
themes which can politically unify and mobilise large masses are few; less
and less people in fact belong to political parties as such.

Liberal market democracy is supposed to be the "end of history", the
culmination of all human striving, but the problem is that, in truth,
markets provide no morality of their own beyond what is necessary to settle
transactions, nor - contrary to myth - do they spontaneously generate
democratic norms. Hence a renewed "battle for human values" in which an
attempt is made to interpellate people, if not with a rational appeal to
their interests, then by wafting at them images from the past that move
them.

Insofar as this means that the past is mobilised to justify the present,
this becomes a largely reactionary exercise: it aims to force the
ideological dividing lines of the present generation into the moral
framework of a past generation. The logic of the "lesser evil" has as its
corollary the logic of the "greater evil": current evils are excused by
pointing to a greater evil in the past that is being prevented now... even
if this prevention has some undesirable "by-products" in the present. Thus
the present is justified by saying that things "could be so much worse".

Lacking in this "management of the present" is a constructive vision of the
future. Probably that cannot however be specified, because as soon as it is
specified, it is revealed to be a response to partisan interests. And of
course the purpose of ideology is to portray sectional interests as being in
the common interest, to unify people in the pursuit of a project that in
reality is not, or not fully, in their self-interest.

See, for an extreme illustration, this clip from Der Spiegel about how the
bombing of Dresden might be twisted into bolstering the neo-Nazi cause,
which in turn feeds into new anxieties about barbarians running amok:

(February 2, 2005) On the eve of the 60th anniversary of the firebombing of
Dresden by Allied forces in World War II, a major neo-Nazi party in the city
is seeking to reinvent history by calling the attack "Dresden's Holocaust of
bombs." Problem is: the party is finding resonance in a city still deeply
scarred by an attack that left at least 30,000 dead.

At a meeting of parliament in the eastern German state of Saxony on Jan. 21,
politicians wanted to debate the best way of commemorating the victims of
the decimation of Dresden by Allied bombers on Feb. 13, 1945. What
parliament got instead was one of the most embarrassing outbursts yet from a
right-wing, neo-Nazi party whose leader calls for the creation of a new
German "Reich."

As the parliament held a one-minute moment of silence in memory of the
victims of National Socialism and World War II, 12 members of the National
Democratic Party (NPD) demonstratively walked out of the chamber. Later,
they declared they would only commemorate victims killed during the bombing
of German cities. In the subsequent debate, the NPD's Juergen Gansel
described the British Royal Air Force-led attack on the city as "mass
murder," calling it Dresden's Holocaust of bombs." "Today we in this
parliament are taking up the political battle for historical truth, and
against the servitude of guilt of the German people," he told the outraged
parliament.

The NPD's political antics have fueled a major national debate across
Germany, where sensitivities are still strong about how the bombing should
be interpreted. (...) To complicate matters, for decades, the Communist
government of East Germany routinely portrayed the bombings as a campaign of
"Anglo-American terror." The NPD has capitalized on this rhetorical
tradition that finds traction in some quarters. (...) Perhaps most
disturbingly, the NPD's stab at historical revisionism, by directly
comparing the conventional bomb attack with industrialized genocide, has
found greater resonance than one might expect. A poll by the Welt am Sonntag
newspaper found that 27 percent of Germans under 30 found the term to be
acceptable. Among the 60-plus crowd, 15 percent found it okay to call the
attack "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs."

Those are exactly the kind of voices that embolden the extremist NPD, which
entered the Saxony parliament after garnering 9.2 percent of the vote in
state elections in September. The party has long propagated the idea that
Dresden is a city of German victims, and for five years it has helped pour
gas on the flames of a symbolic battle over the history of the Saxon
capital. Every year, the number of people participating in the NPD-organized
"funeral march" to commemorate the bombing grows -- in 2004 close to a
thousand young men showed up, and this year 5,000 sympathizers from across
the country are expected. (...) Though that's a fraction of a fraction in a
country of 82 million, it has nevertheless brought the historical debate
close to the boiling point. That's why the organizers of the memorial events
are working hard to dissipate the dark cloud cast by the NPD. Some state
politicians have also sought to marginalize the neo-Nazi party, whose basic
platforms involve keeping foreigners out. (...)

Complete article:
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,339833,00.html

Jurriaan


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