GERMANY, THE RE-ENGINEERED ALLY
Part 3: Hail to the chief, or else
By Axel Brot
Hoisting the American flag
Germany had honed its ability to fly below the radar of international
controversy to a fine art. Its dependence on foreign trade for its economic
well-being required this and it resisted, moreover, for most of the last 40
years rather successfully American attempts to subject its economic relations
with the world to the more extravagant demands of economic warfare. No wonder,
therefore, that the detente years of the 1970s and the globalization of the
1990s are remembered with fondness. German economic interests and the
philanthropic basso continuo of its declaratory foreign policy were in
tune. No wonder, too, that Washington regards these GDP-cored sentimentalities
as completely out-of-tune with rousing the West against the "enemies of
Western values".
After the shocks the German political class suffered in 2002/2003, it agreed,
be it out of conviction, opportunism or fear, with the views of the American
political class. But as poll after poll reveals, both have to deal with the fact
that they are the opposite of rather fundamental attitudes of the majority of
Germans. Germany has gladly internalized what was preached over the decades in
political Sunday sermons about peace and prosperity, about the role of Germany
in the modern world, its relationship with the West and, in particular, what
kind of society Germany should aspire to. This message has not only managed to
take hold; it has become the prism through which many, if not most, Germans
look at the world, at the government, the media - and, not least, at the US.
This is neither surprising nor extraordinary. The German lower classes have
always been very reluctant heroes, having been dragged sullenly into the two
world wars. It even took all the efforts of the Social Democratic and union
leaderships to crush the grassroots movement for a general strike that was
about to disrupt the mobilization schedule of the German army in the run-up to
World War I; and Nazi domestic intelligence documented their distinct lack of
enthusiasm when Germany attacked Poland and the sense of fear and foreboding
when Germany went on to eradicate Jewish Bolshevism.
The German educated middle classes, still hung over from their half century of
ideological debauch with its jingoism, imperialism and Nazism, from Germany's
role as a genocidal ogre, and still remembering its war fright from the 1980s -
that, by the way, had reached deeply into the political class itself as well as
into the senior levels of the German military - acquired a reflexive pacifism
and take, in general, great satisfaction in Germany's reputation as a mostly
harmless global social worker. They are, to say the least, very difficult to
get again behind a program of endless (race) wars, torture and an ideology of
global mayhem. A strong majority may even resist it actively via another peace
movement if the German government gets too eager, or too blatant, about
demonstrating militarily its commitment to the global "defense of Western
values".
German pundits - "opinion-makers" in German - take all this as an
expression of deeply-rooted, popular "anti-Americanism", and
anti-Americanism as a facet of anti-semitism, and both as the resurgence of
anti-Western, pro-totalitarian attitudes. This effort in guilt-mongering has
led to some interesting myth-making, amusing if it were not so sinister.
Taking their cue from former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's inanity
regarding Venzuelan President Hugo Chavez that "also Hitler had been
elected" by popular vote, those journalists who read the opinion pages of
the correct American newspapers as well as former foreign minister Fischer
repeated it enthusiastically and frequently. Notwithstanding their authority,
the historical facts are, of course, quite different: after his election setback
in 1932, Hitler was not elected but chosen by a cabal of leaders of right-wing
parties, industry and the media, to head a coalition government between those
parties and the Nazis, to save the country from the left. Any schoolchild
should know this.
But delegitimizing "anti-Americanism" seems to require heavy
myth-making because it has turned into a problem not only for the German
political class but for the whole of the EU. The European populations are, with
a few exceptions, completely out of tune with the ideological mobilization
required to wage "World War IV". Nevertheless, the change has been
most dramatic in Germany.
The post-September 11 spike in public support for the US was not only wiped out
by 2002/2003 but the 50-year fund of popular and confident pro-Americanism had
evaporated and given way to distrust, fear and loathing. The same holds true,
somewhat less dramatically, for attitudes towards Israel. As a danger to the
world, both countries rank with North Korea and Iran. Russia and China are still
(and stubbornly) regarded as basically benign and unthreatening.
This is surprising since even educated Germans tend to rely for their news on
German sources - and have no access to the many sources of critical news
coverage and opinion still available in the Western world. One might have
expected, therefore, a quick payoff when public TV as well as the print media,
from high-brow to low-brow, rediscovered their avocation to educate the German
public into "the Americans may make mistakes, but the others are
incomparably worse".
An ironic or regretting undertone towards President Bush and the
neoconservatives, and dismay about their ineptness - frequently slanted as
basically benevolent American naivete - has nevertheless crept into the
presentation of US policy. This rhetorical flourish connects easily with the
stereotypes of the self-correcting permanence of American moral leadership, the
brutal fanaticism of Arabs, totalitarian Russians, and ruthless Chinese, and
the almost superhuman difficulties in finding the right balance between force
and suasion. Nevertheless, the generalized suspicion that something is wrong -
and the distrust of journalists and politicians - seems to have resisted up to
now the best journalistic efforts.
Since disquiet had spread even among segments of the high bureaucracy, the
leaders of the German and American political elites moved quickly and
decisively to counter any consequences the breakdown of the American political
image might have on the attitudes of those eligible for recruitment into elite
functions. A large-scale program was set in motion to knit young civil
servants, management cadres and promising students institutionally and socially
to their American counterparts and to expose them to senior officials of both
countries - a kind of ideological Marshall Plan that saw virtually no week
without an American-German or an American-EU get-together. Indeed, the German
Marshall Fund, heavily supported by the most prominent German media
conglomerates - together with the Bertelsmann Foundation - came into its own by
leading it. And more stringently than ever before, to be considered a
"safe" cadre for career advancement in politics, the civil service,
the media, business and science, requires the aspirant to have been successfully
connected to the right kind of American or American-German institution at least
once.
Dealing with the reflexive pacifism and the politically correct humanitarianism
of the majority of Germans is still a much harder nut to crack. The print media,
in particular the weekly Die Zeit, the flagship of German neoconservatives, and
Der Spiegel, the middlebrow infotainment weekly, made their dissatisfaction
with their readers repeatedly clear. And they give a certain depth to the main
subject of political talkshows: the sorry state of mind of the average German,
his lack of patriotism, his addiction to peace, and his reactionary notions
about the welfare state.
It did not help that several efforts to reeducate Germans went seriously awry
when the mainstream media (public TV, the German associate networks of CNN,
plus newspapers) gave visibility and legitimacy to what might be termed the
"occidentalist new right". Their interventions were so well tuned to
American policies and performance expectations that they confirmed
involuntarily the worst expectations of what was in the offing.
'Without torture the war on terror cannot be won'
Before the images of Abu Ghraib helped to visualize what "the gloves are
off" implied, Americans were given the opportunity to introduce the German
public to the need for torture, with the "ticking bomb" scenario.
There was no talk-show format that did not have torture on its schedule - with
the former director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, Jeff Gedmin (now president
of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) as the most indefatigable of its
proponents.
But it was the German-Israeli Michael Wolffsohn, a prominent professor at the
Armed Forces University in Munich, who publicly moved the subject from the
"ticking bomb" to affirm the West's fundamental obligation to use
torture against terrorist suspects.
Torture, however, though normal in Israel, would be in breach of the German
constitution and for a civil servant to propose it, a breach of the civil
service laws. He should have been fired. He wasn't.
Instead, then-interior minister and Social Democrat Otto Schily went out on a
mission of damage control. In an interview with Die Zeit he presented the
concerns about torture as a tempest in a teapot. Knowing full well what really
was happening, having been privy to intelligence briefings about the material
of the US military's Taguba Report about Abu Ghraib as well as profiting from a
very close relationship with former US attorney general John Ashcroft, he still
ridiculed the concern about torture as a matter of suspects who have to sit on
a stool instead of lounging in an easy-chair and who have their faces
illuminated to study facial expressions. Regarding Guantanamo, he ascribed it
to the understandable American dilemma of what to do with the worst of the bad,
a dilemma that required for him, too, the need to change international law and
the Geneva Conventions.
No wonder, then, that he and Fischer obviously had no qualms about letting the
CIA airlines use Germany for "rendition" traffic. No wonder, too,
that both refused to lift a finger to rescue from Guantanamo a young German
resident of Turkish origin, who had lived all his life in Germany, innocent
even to his interrogators, or to follow up on the kidnapping of a German to
Bagram. In the end, it was the images of Abu Ghraib that put paid to this
effort to acclimatize the Germans to the harsh demands of the global "war
on terror". But at least the legal innovations introduced by then-interior
minister Otto Schily to get Germany on a civilizational war footing - and those
promulgated or ventilated by his successor, Wolfgang Schäuble - are fully
compatible with the mindset and the intentions of the US Patriot Act.
100 million superfluous young Muslim men
Die Zeit, once the leading liberal weekly, the standard-bearer of "secular
humanism" and enlightened Atlanticism, and now the flagship of German
neoliberal neoconservatism, a hybrid of The New Republic and National Review,
is indefatigable in its mission to convert its mostly educated readers to the
new demands of the German alliance with Israel and the US. It opened its pages
to hate-mongers in social-science disguise whose wares bear an uncanny
resemblance to those peddled in earlier days by the ideologues of the extreme right.
Among those is sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, professor at the University of
Bremen where he heads the Raphael Lemkin Institute for Comparative Genocide
Research.
He maintains that the "youth bulge" - the rapid increase of un- or
underemployed young men in Islamic countries - presents the West with the
imperative of culling them to keep the terrorist threat from becoming
unmanageable: either by instigating civil wars in these countries or by
intervention (one might call them "wars of demographic sanitation").
In Die Zeit he developed this thesis with reference to the problems the
"civilized" Israelis encounter in dealing with the terrorist
barbarians and especially, with suicide bombers. The Palestinians, though,
present for him not only the terrorist problem in a nutshell, but the spawn of
a particularly depraved and defective society that even produces female suicide
bombers. Heinsohn sees, therefore, no difference between the Hutu woman
wielding a machete to slaughter her Tutsi neighbors and the Palestinian woman
donning an explosive belt to slaughter innocent Israeli civilians.
The publicized disgust with female suicide bombers, by the way, is limited to
Palestinians. The Chechen women with explosive belts who threatened to kill a
whole theater full of people in Moscow were treated in the German media with a
great deal of understanding and commiseration. Disgust and rage were, instead,
directed against the Russian authorities for their refusal to withdraw from
Chechnya and for their victimizing the innocent theater audience. And when a
school full of children was held hostage in Beslan, the German media, again,
made the terrorists all but disappear behind their indignation and venom
directed against the Russian authorities.
Following the lead of Die Zeit, the high-brow formats of public TV offered
Heinsohn the opportunity to expand on his theses before a larger audience. And
contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, did not withhold his
admiration for Heinsohn's bold challenge to the pussyfooting humanitarians. And
bold it is. Even the economists and race strategists of the Third Reich did not
anticipate the need to kill more than 40-60 million subhumans during and after
the victorious campaign against the Soviet Union.
In propagandizing the need to take off the gloves in the fight against the
Islamic threat, Die Zeit recruited also a Dutch writer of middle-brow novels,
Leon de Winter. He exposed the hopelessly defective nature of Arab
civilization, the inbred resistance to acculturation of the Muslim immigrants
in Europe, and the gynophobe (or genocidal) obscurantism of Islam. Since he
preached this message often enough, one of the most prestigious German honors
was bestowed on him.
Die Zeit also saw to the requirements of creating empathy with Israel's
struggle at the front lines of Western civilization. Its publisher, Josef
Joffe, did see to it that one of his editorial team was embedded with one of
the covert operations and assassination squads of the Israeli Defense Force
(IDF) to report about the pride and the suffering of those soldiers. At the
same time, Die Zeit refined the use of images, already characterizing the
German media in toto, that opposes the dignified tears of a pretty young woman
in an IDF uniform to the TV images of howling, old Arab strumpets and
menacingly strutting young men.
Similar messages dominate the German media either in an even more vulgar
fashion or somewhat less stridently. But there is virtually a complete absence
of any challenge to its common denominator. The same holds true, by the way,
for France - with the exception of the monthly Monde Diplomatique.
Nevertheless, the German general public seems to continue to resist at least
its intended consequences.
'The Germans have to learn how to kill'
Thus, "the Germans have to learn how to kill". This strange and most
revealing conclusion about the German state of mind was brought back from a
NATO meeting at the end of last year by Karsten Voigt, the eternal Social
Democratic "coordinator for German-American relations". It was
occasioned by the allied indignation (American, Canadian, and Dutch) about the
German refusal to do combat duty in "Operation Enduring Freedom" in
Afghanistan: the mandate of the German forces is still limited to reconstruction
assistance, peacekeeping in the Tajik north, as well as policing and training
duties. But since the German commitment there is already highly contentious and
enjoys hardly any support among the German population, this sardonic comment is
addressing more directly the failure of the German political class to create
the climate for getting the "Germans to the front" than just the
limits of the Afghanistan commitment. And its meaning was not lost. For a
while, one might have been able to enjoy the spectacle of shamefaced German
opinion-leaders barely able to restrain their impatience with the rabble they
are forced to educate.
To placate the allies, Germany sent six Tornado reconnaissance planes to
Afghanistan, either as the thin end of a wedge or as the timid admission that
more is not possible under prevailing conditions. Time will tell what it is
going to be.
'The Germans have to learn to die'
What has not yet been picked up in the wider campaign of re-educating Germans
is Rafael Seligmann's recent pronouncement that "the Germans have to learn
to die" in the "war of civilizations". Though a prominent
novelist and journalist, and richly endowed with public honors, he obviously
had lost his
sangfroid. The purpose of the whole effort is, of course, about killing and
dying, but the cooler heads among journalists and politicians know now - from
the backlash of their earlier offensiveness - that the average German needs to
be much more terrorized, beleaguered and anxious to be confronted with this
truth.
In the meanwhile, the dissatisfaction with the German mice refusing to roar
found different venues of expression. A lead writer of Der Spiegel, Hendryk
Broder, also showered with prestigious awards, took last year's failure of the
Germans to rally in the streets, when they should have demonstrated their
support for Israel and protested against the Hezbollah "war of
aggression", as proof of the ineradicable German anti-semitism. And this
is connecting well with the historical myths that have come to dominate the
public discourse, particularly those which hold the German lower classes
culpable for the German misfortunes of the last 100 years, the latest one being
their reluctance to man the barricades for the defense of the West.
Trying to leverage the German consensus on anti-semitism has become all the
rage since a majority of Germans turned against American (and Israeli)
policies. The quasi-genetic disposition of Germans to "genocidal
anti-semitism" has become the first and last resort for explaining their
recalcitrant pacifism.
Nevertheless, though the stridency of the consensual reporting and commenting
in the German media seems to have somewhat leveled off with regard to the wider
Middle East, there is another front line in the war of civilizations where
hostility and venom remains the only currency of media opinion - namely,
Russia. So much so, in fact, that the large minority of the political class
which considers normal relations with Russia possible and desirable has lost
all influence on the public discourse.
The rediscovery of the Russian enemy - also dating from around 2002/2003 - and
the demonization of Putin's Russia might have originated in the search for
countermeasures to the crash of the American public image. But it has now
reached a depth that only a large majority of the political class - unafraid,
at that, of a media campaign against it - could recondition the public
discourse. This is highly improbable - for domestic as well as for American
reasons.
A new cold war with Russia is something the Russians fear far more than they
are apt to let on and this fear has acquired a real and influential
constituency. Though the West might err about the risks, a cold war's perceived
benefits are simply too substantial to reconsider its wisdom. It is, of course,
driven by the expectation that the Russians can be forced to return to the
state of affairs that US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad
dubbed "adult supervision". It may end in war born out of
desperation.
And war, the German war against the Soviet Union, has become central to the
myth making underlying so many of the efforts to reshape the German collective
psyche. Though by the 1980s, many German generals and senior officials had
forgiven the Soviets for defeating the Wehrmacht, the fashionable view now is
that the Soviet victory was illegitimate - because it was achieved by
"Stalinist methods" - and that Stalin and Hitler were equally
responsible for the war, and equally victimizers of the Soviet population. But
since democratic Germany repented its sins, and Russia didn't, Russia will
remain in thrall to its totalitarian heritage, and will still have to pay for
the war it finally and justly lost in 1991.
Undergirding this caricature of history with applications for the present are
endless series on public TV about the Soviet barbarian ineptness in fighting
the war, the suffering of German women at the hands of Red rapists, about the
strafing and torpedoing of refugees and refugee ships, the driving-out of
Germans, and the Soviet anti-semitic refusal to recognize the special place of
the 6 million Jews among the 20 million civilian victims of the German crusade
against Jewish Bolshevism.
In fact, in connecting the debate among the Israeli right and the ideological
continuity in those "history" series, one might come to the
conclusion that the German crime is the one of the Holocaust of
"innocent" Jews - innocent in the sense of non-communist. It is,
therefore, completely unsurprising that the cry of "anti-semitism"
that meets any opposition to Israel's policies and its propagandists, leaves
the Jewish non- or anti-Zionist left as it has always been, fair game.
Unavoidably, these tales to shape the public conscience will eventually have
effect. But for now they seem to have failed their mission. The polls still
show a substantial majority of Germans regarding Russia as non-threatening and
basically benign. Though not for lack of trying.
Last year's climax of the efforts to take down Putin in a public relations
sense - with hopes, obviously, of getting the German public to scent blood -
was an interview in the run-up to the G-8 Petersburg meeting.
It was led by Maybrit Illner, a popular TV political talk show host known as
one of the three "Compassionates" (as the Furies were eulogized in
classical times) of public television. Since these events are always heavily
scripted and choreographed with the involvement of the political appointees
heading public TV, there was nothing accidental or unforseen in its conduct.
Illner waged this interview like a prosecutor interrogating a defendant. Her
"You don't want us to believe", "you talk too long", her
pulling faces and interrupting Putin, demonstrated that her parents were quite
amiss in teaching her manners.
This was not a question of evading subservience or not challenging Putin, but
she behaved in a fashion more appropriate for the old American shock-talk TV
Jerry Springer Show than for a serious political interview. Though Putin
neither lost his smile nor his sangfroid, it was unavoidable that the Kremlin
drew conclusions about the future of German-Russian relations as well as about
its ability to get a fair hearing for its point of view.
This interview was even more remarkable for its contrast with an interview of
President Bush by Sabine Christiansen (the second of the three Compassionates).
Her demeanor suggested a coyly suppressed obsequiousness and her challenge (re
Guantanamo) dissolved in the shared relief about the upswing in US-German
relations and the wisdom of Chancellor Merkel. It was not "hail fellow,
well met" but the demonstration of measured awe before the burdens of the
president's office, of the willingness to have the world explained for the
yokels at home, and of a slight willingness to succumb to the manly charms of
power.
Both interviews are emblematic for the hormonal change of German policies and their
public debate. It does not matter in the longer run whether the German
population will vicariously partake in its thrills or not. What counts is that
the German political class is gorged with the will to follow its temptations,
losing in the process prudence and reason. The American political elites are
already failing; the German ones are following suit.
Axel Brot is the pen name for a German defense analyst and
former intelligence officer.
(Copyright 2007, Axel Brot)