Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Committing heresy: Nazis and the Berlin Wall

From: People's World


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BERLIN — Close to my home here, I saw a frightening march Oct. 11 of Nazis, calling themselves the Nationale Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, leaving out only the word "arbeiter" (worker) from the name Hitler used. Several thousand of them, almost all in black, many skinheads but also many all too "normal-looking" youngsters (and a smattering of very blonde girls), with the loudest loudspeaker I've heard in years blaring out their propaganda. They were agitating against democracy, denouncing the Bundestag representatives, even the cops, spreading hatred against all foreigners, but above all against the left and the leftists. At least one big banner contained a threat: "Make sure you know where the nearest antifascist club is located."

They started at Alexander-Platz, halted at the circle near my house to yell and chant for 20 minutes, then marched along to Platz der Vereinten Nationen (UN Square, once Lenin-Platz) and along Landsberger Allee, once Lenin-Allee, stopping for a meeting, perhaps by accident halfway between where the big Lenin statue was torn down after the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the quiet, hardly noticeable little memorial cemetery with graves and a monument to those who died in the Revolutions of 1848 and 1918-1919.

After a ranting speech in tones recalling Hitler or Goebbels, too loud for me to understand much, their leader read out 50 or more names of all their "martyrs," punctuating each name with a roll on a drum and his loud call for "rache" (revenge).

The only name I recognized was the big Nazi "hero" Horst Wessel, who died 200 meters from here in the hospital which the Nazis renamed after him until 1945. The song about his alleged murder served the Nazis as a main hymn and then as a second national anthem.

Along the main route from which began at the central Alexander-Platz there were hundreds of people walking along on both sides, shouting "Nazis raus" (Out with the Nazis"), often carrying handmade signs or some banners, including a few from the Left Party, the Young Greens, the new anti-establishment "Pirate Party" (which opposes laws limiting pirating of music) and a few from union youth and antifascist groups. Between the marchers and the protesters was a giant number of police, which walked along to protect the Nazis, or to keep the two groups apart. Scores of police vehicles, including a water cannon and an ambulance, were ahead of, next to or behind the marchers.

One man who was standing next to me watching the meeting noted that the anti-Nazis, mostly the same age as the Nazis, were also often wearing black jackets, the color in fashion these days, I guess. He seemed to lump both Nazis and anti-Nazis together, a worrisome development. I don't know how many others also thought that way.

Most of the crowd was decidedly antifascist. Some, perhaps those whose emotions led them to break though to attack the Nazis, got arrested.

Especially frightening for me: many Nazis were carrying big flags, totally black except, in white letters, the county or town they came from. These represented the "fighting groups." While some of those organized in the three officially permitted neo-Nazi parties are well-dressed and often clever tacticians (who profit from the fact that their legal parties still get state subsidies granted every party with a certain percentage of the vote), these hitherto semi-clandestine "fighting groups" are loosely allied with them, and are largely made up of the worst thugs, who go around beating up people of foreign background or of color and left-wingers, whom they call "zechen" or ticks. Even the most violent ones are rarely caught or arrested and, when they are, are usually dealt with very mildly. They gather in a number of bars and "youth centers" and purchase clothing with Nazi code-signs and paraphernalia at a number of shops in Berlin and most major cities. Some jackets have SS runes or the number 88, for Heil Hitler - H being the 8th letter of the alphabet.

They were especially excited because a few days ago two Molotov cocktails were thrown into one of their best-known bars and meeting places (aptly called "At the Executioner"), injuring a few of them, one severely. They immediately blamed this on leftist opponents of the bar, but the police are now convinced the bombs were thrown by disgruntled neo-Nazis, either because of turf quarrels or simply because the doorkeepers didn't let them in some evening.

The march, the number of pro-Nazi young people, the blaring noise and the clear dedication to a fearful past made for a frightening event stirring up countless recollections here in the middle of Berlin.

The media are currently overflowing with recollections of those heroic weeks 20 years ago and of how the oppressed people of East Germany chose freedom and forced the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is the usual blatant over-simplification of a fearfully complicated matter, told in a completely one-sided way. Somehow I could not help recalling how we in the GDR scoffed or laughed when the party officialdom rejected the word "mauer," or "wall" used almost universally for the Berlin Wall, and insisted, quite in vain, on the unwieldy term "antifascist protective barrier."

Of course, everyone knew that it was erected to keep people in, not out, which was why so many rejoiced at its fall. But watching this menacing parade made me wonder: was it perhaps, in a way and in the historical long run, also indeed a kind of protection against Nazis like these?

But even considering such matters these days, at least aloud, is of course pure heresy.

Monday, October 5, 2009

America needs warriors for justice

From: People's World

October 4 2009

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Original Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

It is beyond doubt that we are living in a period of potentially great historical change in the United States.

Just a year ago we trade unionists, progressives, and Americans of good will made history with the election of an African-American President--something many of us never thought possible -- and large majorities of pro-working family Democrats in both Houses of Congress.

With the implosion of our financial services sector and the consequent economic crisis and recession, it has become abundantly clear that unregulated, unfettered free market capitalism doesn't work for anyone. We now have irrefutable proof that greed is not good, that the markets don't by themselves work for the common good in the nation's interest, that if all the money and resources go to the top, the middle and the bottom are starved. And speaking of the middle, we now know that the middle class is in peril -- endangered by the policies of free market economics -- unfettered corporate-driven globalization, illegal and immoral union busting, contracting out, working rat, privatization, benefit busting, wage thievery -- all the policies that have made up the 30 year assault on working families and unions. While some may have doubted these truths two or four or more years ago, these truths are beyond doubt today.

Those who once held themselves up to be leaders of our society and government are now scorned -- Wall St, Bush, Cheney, AIG. The recipients of the governments bailouts continue to shovel obscene amounts of our money to executives without a clue while we suffer 10 percent unemployment, continued loss of health care, and declining wages and a consequent declining standard of living, and a potentially frightening future for our kids and grandkids and beyond.

Most importantly, our people are ready for and even demanding change. By significant majorities, Americans want a public healthcare plan included in the larger health care reform package, and Americans want the Employee Free Choice Act to be passed to once again allow American workers to freely form unions and bargain collectively.

America is ready for change.

Why then is change so hard to achieve?

Those who've prosecuted and benefited from the 30 year financial assault on America's working families refuse to let go, to give up what they've come to see as theirs -- the insurance companies, the union busters, the ABC, the Comcasts, the Walmarts, Wall St and manipulators of our finances, the Radical Rightwing including Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove and Dick Armey and the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

It is clear that if we are to win the change we voted for last fall and many of us have worked for for years, we are gonna have to fight, fight hard, and fight outside the normal Washington lobbying box.

Washington politics and lobbying does not work for workers and working families.

We cannot forget that we've gotten to the verge of passing the Employee Free Choice Act by running the largest national grassroots legislative campaign in the history of the American labor movement. Over the six year course of this campaign we've put literally hundreds of thousands of people on the street and more than a million workers in motion. We delivered one and a half million signatures to the Congress, sent half a million emails, wrote 300,000 handwritten letters and made 200,000 phone calls to Senators.

That's a ton of good work. But it is more than clear that we have to do more of it.

While the Employee Free Choice Act has not yet passed, we have realized many benefits -- more than a dozen states have passed new public employee collective bargaining laws including majority authorization. Public officials from town and county commissions to city councils to state assemblies to governors and mayors to the Congress to the President of the United States now realize what hell workers go through when they try to organize and bargain for a better life. More public officials than ever have weighed in to support workers trying to organize.

We have got to ramp up our grassroots lobbying by our members.

But just as importantly, we have to ramp up our effort to engage and organize workers who don't have a union, to make use of the progress and allies we've made and enlist unorganized workers in the struggle to organize their workplaces and to fight and struggle in the public policy fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Every organizing campaign is a direct and clear reason to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

It is not enough to wait for the Employee Free Choice Act to pass. We have to demonstrate its necessity with struggle--old fashioned struggle right now, today not tomorrow. And by their actions, unorganized workers have to demonstrate the necessity for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

It is not enough to wait on the law to change.

History is not made and humanity is not advanced by those who accept the status quo. History is made and the human condition is advanced by warriors willing to struggle for a better life for their kids and grandkids, warriors who understand what they have was won by the blood and tears and sacrifice of our forebears.

America today needs warriors -- warriors to organize and struggle, to fight for change, to fight the Radical Right and corporate domination, to organize and struggle, to dare the rat bastards to stop us, to refuse to lose, to challenge the status quo, to tell those who've run our country and too many lives into the ditch that change is now, that we will fight in Washington but that we will also fight all across America.

The future is ours. Let's take it.

This article originally appeared on HuffingtonPost.com and is published with the permission of the author.

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