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punk rebel ecks posted:You'd think Germany would be very anti-left due to the whole East Germany being Communist thing. Nah, it was specifically the other way round. After the war, what became West Germany in 1949 realised that it was in a direct contest of ideologies with its eastern counterpart. The founders of the FRG weren't dumb, they knew that naked Capitalism wouldn't work as a system; when they wanted to win that "contest" they had to lay the ground for a country which was better to live in than the East. The concept of the welfare state as well as organised labour had a long and honoured tradition in Germany as well, and finally many of the founders were devout Catholics who were socially rather conservative, but greatly influenced by Catholic economic teaching which basically said/says that giving the markets free reign doesn't work, that workers should be fairly compensated and that the benefit of many trumps the benefit of the few (the 1931 papal encyclica Quadragesimo anno was especially important for Catholic thinkers and politicians during that time). This even led to things like the 1947 party platform of the CDU stating that The Ahlen mainfesto posted:The capitalist system of economy hasn't satisfied the public and social needs in life of the German people. After the terrible political, economic and social collapse which was the result of criminal power politics, a complete restructuring of the social order is needed. The goal of this restructuring can't be the capitalist drive to profit and power, but only the welfare of our people. Based on a common order of society, the German people shall receive a economic and social constitution which satisfies the rights and the dignitiy of man, serves the spiritual and material rebuilding of our people and secures peace within and outside of our borders. While the left wing of the CDU which was responsible for the manifesto ultimately didn't prevail, many of their demands were at least partially met by the 1949 constitution, especially in the second paragraph of article 14 which simply states: "Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good." (which in a similar form already had been in the 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic) Jedit posted:The RAF were hardly left wing. As pretty accurately summed up by a Not the Nine O'clock News sketch of the time, they were what happens when a couple of sociopathic fanatics convince young people that direct action - by which we mean "killing people you don't like" - is just as valid a route to becoming a socialist as actually studying Marxist theory. Communism wasn't the reason for the RAF, it was the excuse. While there is no direct path communism->RAF of course, the history behind that is a bit more complicated. Even though the Allies did a comparatively good job with de-nazifying Germany after the war (at least when compared with Austria and similar attempts in Japan or Italy), the German governments of the 1950s and 60s still relied heavily on former NSDAP members or otherwise people who had worked for the Nazi regime before in some way - not too surprisingly, seeing as a 100% denazification would have limited the pool of potential civil servants and politicans to a relatively small number of former dissidents and resistance fighters as well as severely disrupting the governmental and official continuity - in a situation as difficult as post-1945 you want to be able to rely on people who are experienced and know what they're doing, after all. Also there was a growing desire within Germany to move on from the past and not "rock the boat", as it were. Enter the generation of men and women born in the late stages of the Third Reich or even after the war. They rightly see themselves as in no way complicit with what had happened, are horrified at what the generation of their parents had done, are full of the zeal of youth to create a better world with new politics and ideas, look toward an Eastern bloc which appears to fulfill just that promise and find themselves to be citizens of a state which still admits former Nazis to the highest offices - Hans Globke (director of the Federal Chancellery under Adenauer who was instrumental in formulating and enacting the Nuremberg Laws directed against Jews), Heinrich Lübke (Federal President 1959-69 who had been a supervisor on a military faciliy where he had repeatedly used concentration camp prisoners for forced labour), Hans Filbinger (prime minister of Baden-Württemberg 1966-78, military judge who had sentenced at least four deserters to death, though that admittedly only became public in 1978), Kurt Georg Kiesinger (chancellor 1966-69, former NSDAP member) or Fritz Ries (powerful industrialist with close ties to conservative politicians who had used thousands of camp prisoners as forced labour in his factories) were just the tip of the iceberg. The (re-)establishment of a German military in 1955 and the question of nuclear armament resulted in furious resistance of the pacifist movement, which had grown strongly in numbers after the war and during the early Cold War. In 1962, the Adenauer government tried to suppress the SPIEGEL magazine after an article criticising the preparedness of the military in case of a Soviet attack: citing the publication of classified material (which turned out to be bullshit) the minister of defence Franz Josef Strauß ordered the arrest of several journalists and the searching of the magazine offices (which was super illegal for him to do). Even though the public uproar was massive and Strauß was quickly forced to resign, it isn't too strange that many left-wing students believed to see the republican and democratic facade of the new German state crumbling away, exposing the ugly old authoritarianism which already had led to two world wars,. They weren't completely wrong about that, either. The young left, which was mainly comprised of university students, also benefitted from a massive swell in students numbers during the 60s and especially from the particular status of West Berlin, which was legally speaking not a part of West Germany at all. Conscription laws didn't apply there, and so tens of thousands of students refusing to enter the German military moved and congregated there, forming a fertile ground for student opposition to the conservative government of the time. Soviet influence and propaganda also led to a quickly growing anti-Americanism within the political left, which was only fuelled by the beginning of the Vietnam War in 1964 (which can't be understated in its importance for the radicalisation of the left) or the CIA-backed coup d'état deposing a democratically elected Iranian prime minister in 1953. In 1967, things came to a head when the Iranian shah (many would say: dictator) visited Berlin. The government wanted to keep up the facade of order at all costs during the visit and therefore had no problem giving Iranian secret agents free reign to deliver heavy beatdowns to students protesting the shah, while the police watched and did nothing. One student named Benno Ohnesorg was killed by a police officer (who curiously later turned out to be secretly working for East German intelligence, even though it's unclear whether this had anything to do with Ohnesorg's death) during the protests, and a prominent student leader named Rudi Dutschke was shot and nearly killed by a fanatic the following year. Many people active in left-wing politics were horrified and saw this as the beginning of a brutal persecution of dissidents by the state. The emergency laws which had been enacted in 1968 put more fuel into the fire; many thought that the recreation of the 1933 regime was imminent and decided to move from passive to active resistance. By 1969 a not too small number of students and other activists had decided to adopt violence as a means of what they saw as self-defence. Partly they were also influenced by maoist teaching of the use of violence in order to speed up the road to a communist revolution; other influences were guerilla groups like the Shining Path in Peru, the ELN in Bolivia or the FARC in Colombia, and the armed fight of socialist or communist Palestinian groups against Israel and "the West". East German intelligence also tacitly lend them their support. You have to see the first generation of the RAF in front of this background. They genuinely believed that a) the state was out to get them and b) that any peaceful attempts to institute socialism had been proven to be dead ends and that the use of violence against the capitalist oppressors was what was needed to incite the masses. This also explains why the RAF could always count on massive support networks of thousands of left-wing activists, at least during the first few years of its existence. Many believed them to be the vanguard of a socialist uprising in Germany. A bumbling, inept and heavy-handed response of government and police and a knack of the first generation for effective propaganda cemented this public image of the RAF. Thousands of people attended the funeral of RAF member Holger Meins (who had died as a result of a hunger strike he had begun to protest against what he claimed were inhumane circumstances of his incarceration), and tens of thousands protested on the streets, and it was only when the second generation of the RAF (which had formed out of the desire to get the first generation out of prison) showed that they had no qualms about killing innocent bystanders that leftist support started to disappear. This way way too long a reply to something which you probably knew anyway, so sorry that I kinda got carried away here  But yeah, the RAF wasn't just a number of nutjobs out for blood, they were the direct consequence of a radicalised left and a conservative state (although it's interesting to see that the peak of RAF terrorist activity happened during the social democratic government 1969-82) within the framework of the Cold War, in which Germany was the frontline.In this context I should probably add that a couple of months ago there was a failed attempt of three people to rob a money transport - later DNA analysis showed that they were indeed former members of the third and last generation of the RAF (which dissolved itself in 1998). They're still at large and probably need the money to keep up their life in the underground. One of the last RAF fighters also ended up in Baghdad, where she and her husband vanished after the American invasion in 2003. I wonder if there's a former RAF terrorist living under ISIS rule now (probably not).
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Mar 30, 2016 15:22
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:55 |
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