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  • The Tiananmen Square massacre, 30 years on - World Socialist Web Site
    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/06/08/tian-j08.html

    By Peter Symonds, 8 June 2019 - Thirty years have passed since heavily-armed Chinese troops, backed by tanks, moved through the suburbs of Beijing on the night of June 3–4, 1989, killing hundreds, probably thousands, of unarmed civilians. The military forces overwhelmed makeshift barricades with brute force as they made their way to Tiananmen Square—the site of weeks of mass protests by students and workers.

    Those barbaric events, which demonstrated the willingness of the Stalinist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime to do anything to stay in power, have gone down in history as the Tiananmen Square massacre. Yet most of deaths during that murderous assault were of workers who courageously tried to halt the progress of troops to central Beijing. Estimates vary, but up to 7,000 were killed and 20,000 wounded.

    Moreover, in the reign of terror that followed throughout China it was the workers who received the harshest penalties, including lengthy jail terms and death sentences. Around 40,000 people were arrested just in June and July, mostly members of Workers Autonomous Federations that had sprung up in the course of the protests.
    Protesters in Tiananmen Square

    What is commonly depicted as the crushing of student protesters was in fact a wave of repression directed overwhelmingly against a mass movement of the working class. What had begun in April as student protests calling for democratic reforms had swelled into the millions as workers joined the demonstrations by mid-May, making their own class demands.

    The Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation was established on April 20 with a handful of workers and rapidly expanded to become a major organising centre by mid-May. On May 17, up to two million people marched through the centre of Beijing, the majority being workers and their families under the banners of their work units or enterprises. Reflecting the impact of events in Beijing, Workers Autonomous Federations were established in a host of major cities, including Changsha, Shaoyang, Xiangtan, Hengyang and Yueyang.

    While moderate student leaders were intent on pressing the CCP bureaucracy for concessions on democratic rights, workers were animated by concerns over deteriorating living standards, soaring inflation and a wave of sackings and closures. The regime’s embrace of the capitalist market since the 1970s had led to widening social inequality and rampant bureaucratic corruption and profiteering. Workers were bitterly hostile to the accumulation of privileges and wealth by the top CCP leaders, such as Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, Zhao Ziyang, Jiang Zemin, Chen Yun and their family members, and were contemptuous of their claims to be communist and socialist.

    A statement by workers issued on May 25 expressed the rebellious currents in the working class. “Our nation was created by the struggle and labour of we workers and all other mental and manual labourers. We are the rightful masters of this nation. We must be heard in national affairs. We must not allow this small band of degenerate scum of the nation and the working class to usurp our name and suppress the students, murder democracy and trample human rights.” [1]

    Premier Zhao Ziyang had been sympathetic to the demands of student leaders and had counselled making small concessions to calls for basic democratic rights. However, no compromise was possible with the working class, whose unrest threatened the very existence of the regime. As the protest movement rapidly grew in size and confidence, paramount leader Deng Xiaoping removed his ally Zhao as premier, installed hardline Li Peng in his place and ordered the military to violently suppress the protests in Beijing and nationally.
    The crisis of Stalinism

    The resort to such extreme measures was bound up with the profound crisis of Stalinism, not only in China but internationally. In response to deepening economic and social crises, a turn was underway in China, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union toward the dismantling of centralised bureaucratic planning mechanisms, encouragement of private enterprise and establishment of market mechanisms.

    After assuming the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his keynote policies of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness and transparency) that laid the framework for greater autonomy for enterprises outside the central planning mechanisms and, under the guise of democratic reform, sought to establish a base of social support for the regime among the petty bourgeoisie.

    Gorbachev’s pro-market restructuring also encouraged the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in their plans for capitalist restoration, making desperate bids to resolve their mounting economic and political crises. These processes dramatically accelerated as Gorbachev signaled that the Soviet Union would not intervene militarily to prop up its Soviet bloc allies, as it had done in Hungary in 1956 to crush the workers’ uprising and in Czechoslovakia in 1968 to end liberal reforms. In December 1987, he announced the withdrawal of 500,000 Soviet troops from Eastern Europe.

    In a very short period of time, during 1989–90, the Stalinist bureaucracies in one Eastern European country after another moved to restore capitalism, dismantling what remained of nationalised property relations and centralised planning.

    In Poland, talks between the government and opposition Solidarity leaders resulted in a deal in April 1989 to hold limited elections. This paved the way for the installation in August of Solidarity leader Tadeusz Mazowiecki as prime minister. He unleashed sweeping pro-market restructuring.

    Similar negotiations in Hungary, where the processes of pro-market restructuring were already advanced, led to a new constitution in August 1989. Multi-party elections in May 1990 resulted in a government that junked what remained of centralised planning and carried out wholesale privatisation.

    Amid a mounting economic and political crisis, Gorbachev visited Berlin in October 1989 to urge the East German government to accelerate pro-market reforms. Erich Honecker resigned as leader two weeks later. On November 9, the government announced the end of all border restrictions and Berlin citizens tore down the hated Berlin Wall. Before the end of the month, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl unveiled a plan to integrate East Germany with capitalist West Germany—a process that was completed by October 1990.

    The collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria quickly followed. By the end of 1990, governments throughout Eastern Europe were giving full rein to the plunder of state-owned property, an influx of foreign capital and the dismantling of social services, leading to a precipitous deterioration in living standards.

    Gorbachev’s policies in the Soviet Union gave rise to intense pressures within the Stalinist bureaucracy and the emerging layer of entrepreneurs for a far speedier dismantling of all fetters on private ownership and market relations. This found expression in the installation of Boris Yeltsin in July 1991 and the implementation of pro-market “shock therapy.” In December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved.

    The break-up of the Soviet Union and collapse of the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe led to an orgy of triumphalism in the capitalist media proclaiming the end of socialism. Pundits, politicians and academics, who had foreseen nothing and could explain nothing, exulted over the triumph of the market, even going so far as to pronounce the end of history. In other words, capitalism supposedly represented the highest and final stage of human development. A new period of peace, prosperity and democracy would dawn, they all declared.

    The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), based on the analysis made by Leon Trotsky of Stalinism, had rejected the universal adulation of Gorbachev and warned that his policies were rapidly leading to the dismantling of the gains of the first workers’ state. Its perspectives resolution entitled “The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” published in August 1988, made clear that the breakdown of the Soviet Union was not a product of socialism, but rather of Stalinism and its reactionary autarchic conception of “socialism in one country”:

    The very real crisis of the Soviet economy is rooted in its enforced isolation from the resources of the world market and the international division of labour. There are only two ways this crisis can be tackled. The way proposed by Gorbachev involves the dismantling of state industry, the renunciation of the planning principle, and the abandonment of the state monopoly on foreign trade, i.e., the reintegration of the Soviet Union into the structure of world capitalism. The alternative to this reactionary solution requires the smashing of imperialism’s domination over the world economy by linking up the Soviet and international working class in a revolutionary offensive aimed at extending the planned economy into the European, North American and Asian citadels of capitalism. [2]

    In the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the ICFI identified the root cause of the crisis of Stalinism in the processes of the globalisation of production that had been underway since the late 1970s, which had undermined all programs based on national economic regulation. While the crisis of Stalinism was the most immediate and acute expression, these same processes lay behind the international embrace of pro-market restructuring by Social Democratic and Labour parties, and trade unions, and their abandonment of any defence of the social rights of the working class.
    Capitalist restoration in China

    The events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had a profound impact in China, where processes of capitalist restoration had been underway since the 1970s. The CCP’s decision in June 1989 to use the military to brutally suppress the working class was in no small measure conditioned by its longstanding fear of a repetition in China of the mass strike movement in Poland in 1980–81 that led to the formation of the Solidarity trade union.

    China specialist Maurice Meisner explained that the involvement of masses of workers in the protests in Tiananmen Square on May 17 “did much to rekindle the ‘Polish fear’ among Party leaders, their decade-old obsession about the rise of a Solidarity-type alliance between workers and intellectuals in opposition to the Communist state. And that fear, in turn, contributed to their fateful decision to impose martial law.” [3]

    While Deng Xiaoping recognised the affinity of Gorbachev’s perestroika with the policies that he had already enacted, he did not embrace the political liberalisation of glasnost, fearing it would undermine the foundations of the CCP regime. When Gorbachev visited Beijing in mid-May 1989 to cement closer Sino-Soviet ties, the Chinese leadership kept him closeted from public view, anxious that his presence would give further impetus to the protests in Tiananmen Square. The rapid collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe only heightened the determination of the CCP bureaucracy to suppress any opposition.

    The roots of the crisis in China lay in the outcome of the 1949 Chinese revolution. The monumental events that brought the Chinese Communist Party to power ended more than a century of imperialist oppression that had mired the country of more than 500 million in squalor and backwardness. It expressed the aspirations of the vast majority of the population for economic security, basic democratic and social rights, and a decent standard of living. Decades of political upheaval and a war against Japanese imperialism from 1937 to 1945 had ravaged the country and left an estimated 14 million Chinese soldiers and civilians dead.

    Like the Soviet bureaucracy, however, the new CCP apparatus was based on the reactionary nationalist program of “socialism in one country,” which was a repudiation of socialist internationalism and Leon Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution which underpinned the October Revolution in Russia in 1917.

    As a result, the course of the revolution and the subsequent evolution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) proclaimed by Mao Zedong in 1949 was distorted and deformed by Stalinism, which dominated the CCP in the wake of Stalin’s betrayal of the Second Chinese Revolution of 1925–27. Stalin subordinated the very young CCP to the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, resulting in crushing blows to the Chinese Communists and working class in April 1927, and again in May 1927. CCP leaders and members who supported Trotsky’s analysis of the tragedy were expelled.

    In the wake of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the pragmatic, nationalist ideology of Maoism led China rapidly into a blind alley. Mao’s perspective of a “New Democracy” sought to maintain a bloc with the national bourgeoisie, but the CCP government was driven, under conditions of the Korean War and the internal sabotage by bourgeois and petty bourgeois elements, to go further than intended. By 1956, virtually every aspect of the economy was nationalised and subject to bureaucratic planning along the lines of the Soviet Union, but the working class had no say through its own democratic organs.

    The organic hostility of the Maoist regime to the working class was expressed in its repression of Chinese Trotskyists, all of whom were jailed in 1952 amid the rising resistance by workers. As with the Eastern European states, the Fourth International characterised China as a deformed workers’ state, a highly conditional formula that placed the emphasis on the deformed, bureaucratic character of the regime.

    The national autarky of “socialism in one country” generated worsening economic and social turmoil, and crises for which the CCP bureaucracy had no solution, leading to bitter internal factional warfare. Mao’s fanciful scheme for a peasant socialist society, which underpinned his “Great Leap Forward,” ended in economic catastrophe and mass starvation. His factional opponents, led by Liu Shaoqi, followed the Soviet model of bureaucratic planning with its emphasis on heavy industry, but this provided no alternative.

    The economic crisis was greatly worsened by the 1961–63 split with the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Soviet aid and advisers, as the two Stalinist regimes advanced their conflicting national interests. In a last desperate bid to oust his rivals, Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which rapidly span out of his control, leading to confused and convulsive social struggles that threatened the very existence of the regime. Mao turned to the military to suppress workers who had taken literally his edict to “Bombard the Headquarters,” resulting in mass strikes in Shanghai and the formation of an independent Shanghai People’s Commune in 1967.

    Incapable of resolving the immense economic and social problems wracking the country, and facing a military confrontation with the Soviet Union, the CCP bureaucracy forged an anti-Soviet alliance with US imperialism that laid the basis for China’s integration into global capitalism. While Deng Xiaoping is generally credited with initiating market reforms, Mao’s rapprochement with US President Richard Nixon in 1972 was the essential political and diplomatic pre-condition for foreign investment and increased trade with the West.

    The process of “opening and reform” went hand-in-hand with the imposition of strict discipline and emphasis on boosting production in workplaces. Maurice Meissner noted: “Factory managers dismissed during the Cultural Revolution were restored to their former posts, accompanied by calls to strengthen managerial authority, labour discipline, and factory rules and regulations—and to struggle against ‘anarchism’ and ‘ultra-leftism.’ There were dramatic increases in foreign trade and in imports of foreign technology. Veteran party leaders attacked during the Cultural Revolution were ‘rehabilitated’ at an increasingly rapid pace; by 1973, it has been noted, ‘the pre-Cultural Revolution cadres were running the government ministries.” [4]

    From 1969 to 1975, the value of foreign trade increased from $US4 billion to $14 billion per annum. From the end of 1972 until mid-1975, China imported whole industrial plants, valued at $2.8 billion, mainly from Japan and western Europe.

    Deng Xiaoping who had been ostracised during the Cultural Revolution as the “No 2 capitalist roader,” was rehabilitated, appointed a vice premier of the state council under Zhou Enlai. Deng led the Chinese delegation to a special session of the UN in 1974 where he declared that the “socialist bloc” no longer existed and China was part of the Third World. In the factional power struggle that followed Mao’s death in 1976, Deng emerged as the dominant figure in the Stalinist bureaucracy. He embraced US imperialism ever more closely, formalising diplomatic relations in 1979, launching a border war against neighbouring Vietnam, and defending US allies such as the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.

    From 1978, Deng greatly accelerated the “reform and opening” pro-market reforms. Four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were established in 1979 in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen, where foreign entrepreneurs and joint ventures produced goods for export and enjoyed tax breaks and other concessions. A similar system was later implemented in key port cities such as Shanghai. In the countryside, the collectivised communes were dismantled and restrictions removed on the operation of private enterprises. Prices for agricultural produce were lifted. In the cities, moves were made to transform thousands of state-owned enterprises into profit-making corporations. Private enterprises were permitted, the market was increasingly allowed to determine prices for consumer goods, and a “labour market” was initiated, allowing the hiring and firing of workers.

    The pro-market reforms led to the rapid rise of social inequality. Millions of former peasants were left landless and forced to seek employment in the cities. In the SEZs, where the capitalist market was given free rein, corruption and criminal activity was rampant, including smuggling, bribery and the theft of state-owned property. The sons and daughters of the top party leaders took full advantage of their political connections to establish their own business empires. With the lifting of price restrictions, inflation rocketed to 18.5 percent in 1988, to which the regime responded by drastically reducing credit and re-imposing import restrictions. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs, as private enterprises reduced their workforces or closed down altogether. Unemployment, the loss of job security, as well as skyrocketing prices, combined with disgust at the corruption and enrichment of CCP bureaucrats, fueled the social unrest that erupted in the mass protests by workers the following year.
    Capitalist restoration following Tiananmen Square

    In the aftermath of the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square and the police dragnet throughout the country, the factional battle inside the CCP leadership sharpened in the next three years over Deng’s program of capitalist restoration. In ordering the troops against workers and students, Deng had removed his chief ally in pro-market restructuring, Zhao Ziyang, as premier. Former Shanghai party leader Jiang Zemin was installed as a compromise choice to the top post of CCP secretary general. The initiative shifted to the so-called hardliners—Li Peng and Chen Yun, who, in criticising Zhao, were also criticising Deng’s policies.

    However, in advocating restrictions on market relations, Li and Chen based their policies on the status quo ante and the nationalist perspective of “socialism in country,” which had already proven to be a dead-end. They were looking toward the Soviet Union, even as the deformed workers’ states in Eastern Europe were collapsing and Gorbachev’s policies were undermining centralised planning and nationalised property relations. Their so-called “Soviet faction” represented sections of the Chinese bureaucracy whose power and privileges resided in their control of key sections of state-owned industry and the central apparatus in Beijing.

    At the Fifth Plenum in November 1989, Li delivered the main report, based on the recommendations of a revived State Planning Commission. The adopted plan called for cutting inflation to 10 percent in 1990 and economic growth to 5 percent by maintaining tight controls on credit and balancing the national budget. Rural industries would not be allowed to compete with state-owned enterprises. While keeping the SEZs and “open door” policy in place, the new restrictions hit rural and provincial industries, particularly in the south of the country.

    While Deng no longer held any official party or state position, he still retained considerable political clout, especially in the southern provinces where the new profit-making industries were concentrated. Deng had sided with the hardliners in opposing any political liberalisation and, above all, supported the 1989 military crackdown, but he was adamant that the restrictions on private enterprises and foreign investment had to be completely dismantled.

    The snowballing crisis in the Soviet Union brought matters to a head. An attempted Stalinist putsch in August 1991 to oust Gorbachev and Yeltsin and wind back their program of pro-market restructuring ended in dismal failure. China scholar Michael Marti explained: “This one event changed the thinking about the political equation within the Chinese leadership, including that of Deng Xiaoping. The failure of the Soviet Red Army to support the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in its bid to regain control threw the CCP into a panic. The Chinese leadership feared that a precedent had been established.” [5]

    The factional battle lines were drawn. While the “Soviet faction” began to call into question the entire agenda of pro-market reforms, including the establishment of the SEZs, Deng insisted that the levels of economic growth were too low to maintain employment and social stability. “If the economy cannot be boosted over a long time,” he told a meeting of party elders as far back as late 1989, “it [the government] will lose people’s support at home and will be oppressed and bullied by other nations. The continuation of this situation will lead to the collapse of the Communist Party.” [6]

    Deng was also concerned that the crisis in the Soviet Union, following the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe, would greatly change geo-political relations. Not only had Deng’s strategy sought to balance between the US and the Soviet Union, but his economic policies depended on a large influx of foreign investment, which could potentially shift to exploiting new opportunities opening up in the former Soviet republics.

    Along with provincial leaders in the southern provinces, Deng counted on the support of People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The generals had been shocked by the way in which US imperialism and its allies had deployed hi-tech weaponry in the 1990–91 Gulf War to rapidly destroy the Iraqi military. Their conclusion was that China had to invest heavily in modernising the PLA and only Deng’s policies could transform the economy and produce the growth needed to supply that investment.

    Deng set out on his “Southern tour” in January–February 1992, just 20 days after the formal liquidation of the Soviet Union in December 1991, accompanied by top generals, the state security chief Qiao Shi and party elder Bo Yibo. As he visited the SEZs and southern cities, he declared that there would be no reversal of economic policies in the face of the Soviet collapse. Dismissing concerns about growing social inequality, he is said to have declared: “Let some people get rich first.”

    In a showdown with Chen Yun in Shanghai, Deng reportedly shouted: “Any leader who cannot boost the economy should leave office.” Openly backing capitalist restoration, he declared: “We should absorb more foreign capital and more foreign-advanced experiences and technologies, and set up more foreign-invested enterprises. Do not fear when others say we are practicing capitalism. Capitalism in nothing fearsome.” [7]

    Deng prevailed, opening the door for wholesale capitalist restoration that transformed the whole country into a giant free trade zone for the exploitation of cheap Chinese labour. The crocodile tears shed by Western politicians over the Tiananmen Square massacre were rapidly cast aside as foreign investors recognised that the police-state regime in Beijing was willing to use any method, no matter how brutal, to discipline the working class. In 1993, the CCP proclaimed that its objective was a “socialist market economy,” giving a threadbare “socialist” disguise to its embrace of capitalism.

    In 1994, the CCP formally established a “labour market,” by legitimising the sale and purchase of labour power. State-owned enterprises were corporatised into companies run for profit. The unprofitable ones were restructured or shut down. The better equipped, in sectors not designated as strategic, were sold off or converted into subsidiaries of foreign transnationals. A small number were preserved as state-owned “national flagships.”

    Between 1996 and 2005, the number of employees in state- and collective-owned enterprises halved, from 144 million to 73 million workers. Along with guaranteed life-time employment, the “iron rice bowl” of cradle-to-grave services was also dismantled. Essential services that had previously been provided by state-owned enterprises—childcare, education, health care and pensions—were now left to individual workers.
    Chinese capitalism today

    The restoration of capitalism in China over the past 30 years has only exacerbated the underlying social tensions within Chinese society and compounded the political and geo-political dilemmas confronting the CCP apparatus.

    The extraordinary economic expansion of China to become the world’s second largest economy has rested, in the first place, on the immense gains of the 1949 Revolution that unified China for the first time in decades, created an educated and skilled workforce, and developed basic industries and essential infrastructure. The flood of foreign investment into the country transformed China into the sweatshop of the world and produced a massive 11-fold increase in the economy between 1992 and 2010. This rapid growth, however, did not reflect an inherent strength of the Chinese economy, but rather its role in the world economy, dependent on foreign investment and technology.

    The imperialist powers, above all the United States, were more than willing to exploit cheap Chinese labour as long as China’s economic expansion did not challenge their own established geo-political interests. However, the vast quantity of raw materials and energy that Chinese industries require from around the world have increasingly brought it into conflict with the US and other major powers, in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and internationally. Moreover, as China has sought to create its own hi-tech “national champions” such as Huawei and ZTE, the US, under the Trump administration, has declared economic war on Beijing, not just in matters of trade. It has openly opposed Chinese plans to develop and expand hi-tech industries and to more closely link Eurasia to China through massive infrastructure projects under Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

    The delusion promoted by CCP leaders that China could, through a “peaceful rise,” become a world power on a parity with the US has been shattered. China’s expansion has brought it into conflict with the global imperialist order dominated by the United States. Under Obama and now Trump, the US has begun using all means at its disposal to ensure its continued global hegemony. Trump’s economic war goes hand-in-hand with a military build-up in the Indo-Pacific, escalating naval provocations in the South China Sea, under the guise of “freedom of navigation operations, and more open preparations for a war between the two nuclear-armed powers.

    The CCP leadership has no answer to the mounting danger of war, other than desperately seeking an accommodation with imperialism, while engaging in a frenetic arms race that can only end in catastrophe for the working class in China and internationally. Capitalist restoration, far from strengthening China’s capacity to counter the US, has greatly weakened it. The regime is organically incapable of making any appeal to the international working class, as that would inevitably lead to social struggles by the working class at home.

    Having abandoned even its previous nominal commitment to socialism and internationalism, the CCP has increasing relied on whipping up Chinese nationalism to try to create a social base in layers of the middle class. There is nothing progressive about Chinese chauvinism and patriotism, which divides Chinese workers from their class brothers and sisters internationally, and within China from non-Han Chinese minorities. Its repressive measures against Uighurs, Tibetans and other ethnic groups have provided an opening that the US is seeking to exploit. Under the bogus banner of “human rights,” Washington is promoting separatist groups as part of its ambition to fracture and subordinate China to its interests.

    Thirty years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the CCP leadership is terrified of a renewal of working-class opposition, the first stirrings of which have been seen in the more numerous reports of workers’ strikes and protests, and, significantly over the past year, in a turn by a layer of university students to assist workers in their struggles. Since 1989, the working class in China has vastly expanded to an estimated 400 million and as a proportion of the population. One indicator is the growth of the country’s urban population from just 26.4 percent of the total in 1990, to 58.5 percent in 2017.

    The CCP leadership boasts of having lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, using the UN’s very austere measures of poverty. Such benchmarks ignore the many factors that are fueling discontent among workers, including the common practice of late or unpaid wages, unhealthy and dangerous factory conditions, harsh corporate disciplinary practices, and the lack of basic social rights for tens of millions of internal migrants in the cities. All of these oppressive conditions are monitored and policed by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which functions as an arm of the CCP bureaucracy in workplaces.

    Capitalist restoration has produced a dramatic rise in social inequality: from one of the most equal societies in the world, China has become one of the most unequal countries. It is home to more dollar billionaires than any other country except the United States. While Chinese workers struggle to survive on the minimum wage of $370 a month, the wealthiest individual, Tencent chairman Pony Ma, has a personal fortune of almost $40 billion. These super-rich oligarchs, who in many cases have built their fortunes through naked corruption and the looting of state-owned property, are represented in the Chinese Communist Party and sit on powerful advisory bodies.

    The gulf between the super-rich and the vast majority of the workers and the poor is generating huge social tensions that, sooner rather than later, will explode on a scale that will eclipse the rebellion by workers and students 30 years ago. The lesson drawn by the Stalinist leadership from the 1989 events was that it had to suppress, through all available means, any expression of opposition that could become the focus of a broader movement against the regime. Incapable of meeting the pressing social needs of the majority of the population, the CCP has vastly expanded its police-state apparatus, now spending more each year on its internal security forces than it does on external defence.

    The working class must also draw the necessary political lessons from the defeat of that movement in 1989, which was rapidly assuming revolutionary dimensions. What was lacking was not determination, audacity and courage, nor numbers, which were rapidly swelling across China, but the essential problem facing the international working class in the 20th century—the absence of revolutionary leadership.

    James Cogan summed up the issue in his analysis “Ten years since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” stating:

    Inexperienced politically and lacking a political perspective outside of opposition to the existing regime, the workers’ leaders advanced no alternative to, and deferred to, the student bodies. The workers of China knew in their life experience what they were against—Stalinism and capitalism—but they were not able to articulate any perspective for an alternative social order.

    Decades of domination by Stalinism and the active suppression of genuine Marxism in China meant there was no revolutionary socialist, that is, Trotskyist, tendency in the working class. No organisation within the country could spontaneously advance the program that was implicit in the actions and sentiments of the Chinese working class—a political revolution to overthrow the Stalinist regime and introduce major reforms into the economy for the benefit of the working class. [8]

    The essential political task of building a Trotskyist leadership in the Chinese working class as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International remains. None of the oppositional tendencies that emerged out of the 1989 protests offer a viable political perspective for the working class. Advocates of independent trade unions such as Han Dongfang, who was prominent in the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation in 1989, have underscored the political bankruptcy of syndicalism by lurching to the right and into the arms of US trade union apparatus, in other words of US imperialism.

    A layer of youth, intellectuals and workers have turned to Maoism, and its banal “revolutionary” slogans, for answers. Capitalist restoration in China, however, was not a break from Maoism. It flowed organically out of the dead-end of “socialism in one country.” Maoism could aptly be termed Stalinism with Chinese characteristics, with its hostility to the working class, its emphasis on subjective will, and above all its putrid nationalism. It is diametrically opposed to genuine Marxism, that is the perspective of socialist internationalism, which alone was upheld by the Trotskyist movement, including the Chinese Trotskyists.

    The establishment of a genuinely revolutionary party in China, as part of the ICFI, requires the assimilation of the essential strategic experiences of the international working class, of which the Chinese revolutions of the 20th century are a critical component. The CCP leaders are petrified that workers and youth will begin to work over the lessons of history. They attempt to censor and black out any knowledge and discussion of the events of 1989, and continue to perpetrate the lies of Stalinism about the course of the 20th century.

    The crucial political lessons of the protracted struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism are embedded in the program, perspective and documents of the International Committee of the Fourth International. Workers and youth should make a serious study of the political issues involved, beginning with the documents of the ICFI on the Tiananmen Square massacre, republished this week on the World Socialist Web Site. We urge you to contact the International Committee of the Fourth International, which is the first step toward forging a Trotskyist leadership in the Chinese working class.

    Footnotes:

    [1] Cited in “Workers in the Tiananmen protests: The politics of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation,” by Andrew G. Walder and Gong Xiaoxia, first published in the Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No 29, January 1993.

    [2] The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International: Perspectives Resolution of the International Committee of the Fourth International, August 1988, Labor Publications, pp.30–31.

    [3] Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, The Free Press, Third edition, 1999, p.508.

    [4] ibid, p.389.

    [5] Michael Marti, China and the Legacy of Deng Xiaoping: From Communist Revolution to Capitalist Evolution, Brassey’s Inc, 2002, pp.47–48.

    [6] Cited in John Chan, “Twenty years since Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Southern tour’—Part 1”, 26 November 2012.

    [7] Cited in John Chan, “Twenty years since Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Southern tour’—Part 2”, 27 November 2012.

    [8] James Cogan, “Ten years since the Tiananmen Square massacre: Political lessons for the working class,” 4 June 1999.

    #Chine #4689

  • Rammstein Deutschland video : We got an Oxford University professor to explain what on earth is going on | Louder
    https://www.loudersound.com/features/we-got-an-oxford-university-professor-to-explain-what-the-fcks-going-on

    Poised to release their first album in a decade and about to embark on a European tour, Rammstein have returned with a new song: Deutschland. Clocking in at nine minutes and 22 seconds, the video is a mini-epic spanning Germany history. Directed by Specter Berlin, it’s a cinematic and controversial clip that’s confusing if you’re not up on your history. We asked Dr Alexandra Lloyd, lecturer in German at the University of Oxford, to explain what the fuck is happening.

    By Dr Alexandra Lloyd (Metal Hammer) 2 days ago Metal Hammer
    Rammstein have just released a jaw-dropping video for new single Deutschland – but what exactly is it all about?

    Rammstein’s Deutschland takes us on a thrilling, violent, and moving journey through German history. At over nine minutes, it gives us a panorama of events and historical and mythical figures, and there are so many references and Easter eggs that fans and commentators will be poring over it for some time to come.

    The video opens in AD 16, on the ‘barbarian’ side of the limes, the border of the Roman Empire. Roman soldiers creep through the woods in the aftermath of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The Romans were ambushed by an alliance of Germanic Tribes, led by a chieftain called Arminius (the original Hermann the German). Three legionary standards were captured, a loss symbolic and moral, as well as physical, and decades were spent trying to recover them. Rome never again attempted to take the lands east of the River Rhine, known as Germania.

    ‘Germania’ refers not just to a place, somewhere partly defined by where it isn’t (Rome) as well as where it is, but also to a national figurehead, traditionally representing the German people. Germania is a strong woman, usually armour-clad and battle-ready. Various symbols appear with her, among them a breastplate with an eagle, a black, red, and gold flag, and a crown. Look out for these in the video – they come up again and again – and the colours of the contemporary flag are there in every scene.

    We get our first glimpse of Germania here (played by Ruby Commey), who stands holding Till Lindemann’s severed head. Next, astronauts appear carrying a metal and glass box shaped like a coffin. In the background we see a U-boat – a German submarine, used in World Wars I and II. Then we move to a scene set at a boxing match which takes us to Weimar Germany (1918-1933), a period known for its political instability but also greater cultural liberalism. Here, Germania appears in the cabaret costume of a flapper girl, and the boxers fight with knuckle-dusters as a crowd cheers them on.

    We see the former East Germany, complete with busts of Marx and Lenin, the national emblem of East Germany, and a lookalike of the long-serving, insular, and repressive GDR leader Erich Honecker. There’s another astronaut, or rather a cosmonaut: Sigmund Jähn, the first German in space, who flew with the USSR’s space program (and who’s also a character in the 2003 film, Good Bye Lenin!). Medieval monks feast grotesquely on the supine Germania, tearing sauerkraut and sausage from Ruby Commey’s body, prison inmates are beaten by guards dressed in police and military uniforms from different historical periods.

    The most obviously shocking scene references the Holocaust and the Nazi period. Four members of the band, in the striped uniforms of camp inmates, wait at the gallows, about to be hanged. They wear the cloth emblems used to identify their ‘crimes’: a pink triangle for homosexual prisoners, a yellow star for Jewish prisoners, a red and yellow star for Jewish political prisoners.

    This sequence, teased in an earlier promo video, has already caused controversy. Have Rammstein the right to do this? Do they trivialise the suffering of Holocaust victims? How can they justify using Holocaust imagery to promote their new video? These are important questions that are part of a much bigger debate about the ethics of using the Holocaust in art and media.

    Other scenes include the band walking away from a flaming airship, referring to the 1937 Hindenburg Disaster, in which 36 people died. Rats scuttle across the floor when the monks first appear, suggesting the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a legend with origins in the 13th century.

    Germania walks towards the camera in a leather jacket, gold jewellery and a string of bullets across her chest, resembling the chariot drawn by four horses (the ‘Quadriga’) on top of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. The band members’ heads are shown as white marble busts, taking us to the 19th century Walhalla memorial in Bavaria, built as German Hall of Fame, its sculpted heads of German worthies on display to this day.

    In the prison, hundreds of banknotes fall from above, suggesting the devastating hyperinflation Germany suffered in the 1920s. Nazis burn books, intercut with religious fanatics burning witches. We recognise members of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader-Meinhof group), a militant organisation active in the 1970s in West Germany. And in a blink-or-you-miss-it exchange, we are reminded of the much-criticised relationship between the churches and the state during the Third Reich.

    Each scene captures in a moment the icons of an era, and the video cuts between them more and more frenetically as it goes on. Events bleed into each other, linked by the presence of the band members and the red laser beam that appears throughout the video, a ‘roter Faden’ (red thread or central theme), connecting each event.

    Germany engages with its history in a very particular way. Try to imagine the video about Britain, with Britannia played by Ruby Commey. What would the equivalent events be? Quite a few of the tableaux might be similar – Romans, Crusaders, monks, 18th-century soldiers, collarless shirts and bareknuckle boxing – but would it have the same impact?

    There’s no affection, and perhaps not much hope: its pessimistic tone seems to be quite an off-brand message for post-1989 Germany, which wants to acknowledge its past critically, while also looking to its future as a state at the heart of Europe. And actually, while we get a lot of medieval and twentieth-century history, the video’s tour through the past seems to stop in the late 1980s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification of East and West Germany. Instead, we jump into the future, where the space-suited band take Germania into the unknown, travelling in that coffin-shaped glass box.

    There’s an echo of the video for Sonne, where Snow White is trapped in a glass coffin. In fact, a piano version of Sonne plays over the end credits of Deutschland. This is a useful link for understanding something of what Rammstein is doing here. In Sonne, where the band’s characters free themselves of Snow White (naturally, they’ve been her sex-slaves), only to realise that they have made a mistake and long for her return, the overwhelming feeling of Deutschland seems to be that when it comes to Germania (or Germany): you can’t love her, and you can’t live without her.

    Alex Lloyd | Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages
    https://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/people/alexandra-lloyd

    Alexandra Lloyd, MA, PGCE, DPhil, FHEA
    Stipendiary Lecturer in German, Magdalen College & St Edmund Hall
    Research
    Alex Lloyd’s main research interests are in twentieth-century literature and film, particularly cultural memory, depictions of children and childhood, and visual culture. Her AHRC-funded doctoral thesis (Wadham College, 2012) examined post-1989 representations of childhood and youth under Nazism. She is currently running a project on the White Rose resistance movement, working with undergraduates on a new translation of the group’s pamphlets which will be published in June 2019.

    Rammstein - Engel (Official Video)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=265&v=x2rQzv8OWEY

    Rammstein - Deutschland (Official Video)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc

    Rammstein – DEUTSCHLAND Lyrics
    https://genius.com/Rammstein-deutschland-lyrics

    [Songtext zu „DEUTSCHLAND“]

    [Strophe 1]
    Du (du hast, du hast, du hast, du hast)
    Hast viel geweint (geweint, geweint, geweint, geweint)
    Im Geist getrennt (getrennt, getrennt, getrennt, getrennt)
    Im Herz vereint (vereint, vereint, vereint, vereint)
    Wir (wir sind, wir sind, wir sind, wir sind)
    Sind schon sehr lang zusammen (ihr seid, ihr seid, ihr seid, ihr seid)
    Dein Atem kalt (so kalt, so kalt, so kalt, so kalt)
    Das Herz in Flammen (so heiß, so heiß, so heiß, so heiß)
    Du (du kannst, du kannst, du kannst, du kannst)
    Ich (ich weiß, ich weiß, ich weiß, ich weiß)
    Wir (wir sind, wir sind, wir sind, wir sind)
    Ihr (ihr bleibt, ihr bleibt, ihr bleibt, ihr bleibt)

    [Refrain]
    Deutschland – mein Herz in Flammen
    Will dich lieben und verdammen
    Deutschland – dein Atem kalt
    So jung – und doch so alt
    Deutschland!

    [Strophe 2]
    Ich (du hast, du hast, du hast, du hast)
    Ich will dich nie verlassen (du weinst, du weinst, du weinst, du weinst)
    Man kann dich lieben (du liebst, du liebst, du liebst, du liebst)
    Und will dich hassen (du hasst, du hasst, du hasst, du hasst)
    Überheblich, überlegen
    Übernehmen, übergeben
    Überraschen, überfallen
    Deutschland, Deutschland über allen

    [Refrain]
    Deutschland – mein Herz in Flammen
    Will dich lieben und verdammen
    Deutschland – dein Atem kalt
    So jung – und doch so alt
    Deutschland – deine Liebe
    Ist Fluch und Segen
    Deutschland – meine Liebe
    Kann ich dir nicht geben
    Deutschland!
    Deutschland!

    [Bridge]
    Du
    Ich
    Wir
    Ihr
    Du (übermächtig, überflüssig)
    Ich (Übermenschen, überdrüssig)
    Wir (wer hoch steigt, der wird tief fallen)
    Ihr (Deutschland, Deutschland über allen)

    [Refrain]
    Deutschland – dein Herz in Flammen
    Will dich lieben und verdammen
    Deutschland – mein Atem kalt
    So jung – und doch so alt
    Deutschland – deine Liebe
    Ist Fluch und Segen
    Deutschland – meine Liebe
    Kann ich dir nicht geben
    Deutschland!

    #musique #Allemagne #heavy_metal

  • Ex-Nazis ‘gave Mossad the edge in Six-Day War’ (et, non, ce n’est pas la première fois qu’on entends ce genre de chose) :
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ex-nazis-gave-mossad-the-edge-in-six-day-war-q6fk5wp6z

    Israel was able to launch its surprise attack against Egypt and Syria at the beginning of the Six-Day War thanks to information provided to Mossad by an intelligence network of former Nazis, according to a book by an Italian who claims to have played a role.

    Adriano Monti fought, aged 15, in the international division of the German SS at the end of the Second World War and was recruited into a postwar intelligence organisation founded by General Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had run German army espionage efforts against eastern Europe during the war and worked closely with the CIA after it. His “Gehlen Organisation” became the backbone of West Germany’s foreign intelligence organisation, the BND.

  • The Nazis and your privacy / Boing Boing
    https://boingboing.net/2019/01/21/census-and-genocide.html

    Roderick Miller is a US-born historian living in Berlin and the chairman of the nonprofit organization Tracing the Past, whose online project Mapping the Lives ties personal biographies of those persecuted by the Nazi regime with interactive street maps.

    The Nazi German government conducted a census on 17 May 1939 in which a special “supplementary card” was included, where every person had to list if each of their four grandparents was Jewish or not. In the 1980s, a census was conducted in West Germany that led to a lot of resistance from the left, including massive street demonstrations. Several academic works about the planned 1980s census were published at the time, in which the thesis was put forth that the Nazis misused the 1939 census data to create the deportation lists to send the Jews to concentration camps and their subsequent deaths. The resistance to the 1980s census led to its being delayed from the original date of 1981 until they finally managed, in 1987, to meet the criteria put forth by a decision of a 1983 German Supreme Court which severely limited the extent to which the private data of individuals could be used.

    Later research, however, proved that although the Nazis did, in the end, misuse the 1939 census data, in that they sent the “supplementary cards” of people with Jewish grandparents to the local police (ie Gestapo) registration offices throughout Germany, this only happened in late 1941 and 1942. Not only were the deportations already in full operation by this point, but by this time the data on the “supplementary cards” was largely no longer valid — many Jews had already been deported, and most of those who remained had been forced in the interim to move into smaller, crowded apartments, so-called “Jew houses.”

    The 1939 census data was not needed to create deportation lists by 1941/1942 anyway, since the Jewish communities had been forced by the Gestapo to make card indexes of all known Jewish people. These card indexes — it was a typical Nazi tactic to force the people they were persecuting to directly assist in their own persecution — were usually the basis of the deportation lists. In some cases, the Jewish community was itself forced to write the deportation lists and decide who could remain and who got on the train.

    Today we don’t need the Gestapo to force us to give up our personal data, we offer it up voluntarily to social media like Facebook or major US government contractors for the military and intelligence communities like Google. Many people offer their data up to maintain their social presence on the internet or merely for convenience. The standard reply to this is often “I don’t have anything to hide,” but that’s based upon the assumption of a government that respects personal privacy and doesn’t arrest people based on their political opinions, sexual preferences, or lifestyle choices.

    If the Nazis had had access to personal data the same way that these corporate conglomerates do today, there would likely have been very few survivors of the persecution of people for their race, political stance, sexual preference or for the fact that they were somehow seen as physically or mentally handicapped.

    https://www.tracingthepast.org

    https://www.mappingthelives.org

    #cartographie #nazis #vie_privée #Volkszählungsurteil

  • Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG
    http://www.transatlanticperspectives.org/entry.php?rec=133
    Des fois que vous nauriez jamais compris pourquoi l’Allemagne est le meilleur ami des USA en Europe voici le résumé de la thèse d’Anne Zetsche

    Transatlantic institutions organizing German-American elite networking since the early 1950s

    Author » Anne Zetsche, Northumbria University Published: November 28, 2012 Updated: February 28, 2013

    The Cold War era witnessed an increasing transnational interconnectedness of individuals and organizations in the cultural, economic and political sphere. In this period, two organizations, the Atlantik-Brücke and the American Council on Germany, established themselves as influential facilitators, enabling German-American elite networking throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. The two organizations brought together influential politicians and businesspeople, as well as representatives of the media and the academic world.

    Efforts in this regard commenced in the early days of the Cold War, only a few years after the end of World War II. In 1949, two American citizens and two Germans began developing the plan to found the Atlantik-Brücke in West Germany and a sister organization, the American Council on Germany (ACG), in the United States. Their plan was to use these two organizations as vehicles to foster amicable relations between the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America. Only a few years prior, Americans and Germans had faced each other as enemies during World War II and many segments of German society, including West German elites, held strong, long-standing anti-American sentiments. The U.S. public in turn was skeptical as to whether Germans could indeed be denazified and convinced to develop a democratic system. Thus, in order to forge a strong Western alliance against Soviet Communism that included West Germany it was critical to overcome mutual prejudices and counter anti-Americanism in Western Europe. It was to be one of the central tasks of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG to achieve this in West Germany.

    Individuals at the Founding of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG

    One of the founders of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG was Eric M. Warburg. He was a Jewish-American banker originally from Hamburg where his ancestors had founded the family’s banking house in 1798. Due to Nazi Aryanisation and expropriation policies, the Warburg family lost the company in 1938 and immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. In spite of the terror of the Nazi regime, Eric Warburg was very attached to Hamburg. He became a vibrant transatlantic commuter after World War II, living both in Hamburg and in New York. In the intertwined histories of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG, Warburg played a special role, becoming their leading facilitator and mediator.

    Not long after his escape from the Nazis, Warburg met Christopher Emmet, a wealthy publicist and political activist who shared Warburg’s strong anti-communist stance and attachment to pre-Nazi Germany. On the German side of this transatlantic relationship, Warburg and Emmet were joined by Marion Countess Dönhoff, a journalist at the liberal West German weekly Die Zeit, and by Erik Blumenfeld, a Christian Democratic politician and businessmen. There were two main characteristics shared by the original core founders of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG: firstly, each one of the founding quartet belonged to an elite – economic, social or political – and was therefore well-connected with political, diplomatic, business and media circles in both the United States and Germany. Secondly, there was a congruence of basic dispositions among them, namely a staunch anti-communist stance, a transatlantic orientation, and an endorsement of Germany’s integration into the West.

    The Western powers sought the economic and political integration of Western Europe to overcome the devastation of Europe, to revive the world economy, and to thwart nationalism and militarism in Europe after World War II. Germany was considered Europe’s economic powerhouse and thus pivotal in the reconstruction process. West Germany also needed to be on board with security and defense policies in order to face the formidable opponent of Soviet Communism. Since the Federal Republic shared a border with the communist bloc, the young state was extremely vulnerable to potential Soviet aggression and was at the same time strategically important within the Western bloc. Elite organizations like the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG were valuable vehicles to bring West Germany on board for this ambitious Cold War project.

    Thus, in 1952 and 1954 respectively, the ACG and the Atlantik-Brücke were incorporated and granted non-profit status with the approval of John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner to Germany (1949-1952). His wife Ellen McCloy was one of signatories of the ACG’s certificate of incorporation and served as its director for a number of years. The Atlantik-Brücke (originally Transatlantik-Brücke) was incorporated and registered in Hamburg.

    Transatlantic Networking

    The main purpose of both organizations was to inform Germans and Americans about the respective other country, to counter mutual prejudices, and thus contributing to the development of amicable relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States in the postwar era. This was to be achieved by all means deemed appropriate, but with a special focus on arranging personal meetings and talks between representatives of both countries’ business, political, academic, and media elites. One way was to sponsor lectures and provide speakers on issues relating to Germany and the United States. Another method was organizing visiting tours of German politicians, academics, and journalists to the United States and of American representatives to West Germany. Among the Germans who came to the U.S. under the sponsorship of the ACG were Max Brauer, a former Social Democratic mayor of Hamburg, Willy Brandt, the first Social Democratic Chancellor and former mayor of West Berlin, and Franz Josef Strauss, a member of the West German federal government in the 1950s and 1960s and later minister president of the German federal state of Bavaria. American visitors to the Federal Republic were less prominent. Annual reports of the Atlantik-Brücke explicitly mention George Nebolsine of the New York law firm Coudert Brothers and member of the International Chamber of Commerce, and the diplomats Henry J. Tasca, William C. Trimble, and Nedville E. Nordness.

    In the late 1950s the officers of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG sought ways of institutionalizing personal encounters between key Americans and Germans. Thus they established the German-American Conferences modeled on the British-German Königswinter Conferences and the Bilderberg Conferences. The former brought together English and German elites and were organized by the German-English Society (later German-British Society). The latter were organized by the Bilderberg Group, founded by Joseph Retinger, Paul van Zeeland and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Those conferences began in 1954 and were informal, off-the-record meetings of American and West European representatives of business, media, academia and politics. Each of these conference series was important for the coordination of Western elites during the Cold War era. Bilderberg was critical in paving the way for continental European integration and the German-British effort was important for reconciling the European wartime enemies.

    From 1959 onwards, the German-American Conferences took place biennially, alternating between venues in West Germany and the United States. At the first conference in Bonn, 24 Americans came together with 27 Germans, among them such prominent individuals as Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, and John J. McCloy on the American side, and Willy Brandt, Arnold Bergstraesser (considered to be one of the founding fathers of postwar political science in Germany), and Kurt Georg Kiesinger (third Christian Democratic Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and former minister president of the federal state Baden-Württemberg) on the German side. By 1974 the size of the delegations had increased continuously, reaching 73 American and 63 German participants.

    A central goal in selecting the delegations was to arrange for a balanced, bipartisan group of politicians, always including representatives of the Social and Christian Democrats (e.g. Fritz Erler, Kurt Birrenbach) on the German side and both Democratic and Republican senators and representatives (e.g. Henry S. Reuss, Jacob Javits) on the American side, along with academics, journalists, and businessmen. Prominent American academics attending several of the German-American conferences included Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Representatives of major media outlets were Marion Countess Dönhoff of Germany’s major liberal weekly Die Zeit, Kurt Becker, editor of the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt, and Hellmut Jaesrich, editor of the anticommunist cultural magazine Der Monat. The business community was prominently represented by John J. McCloy, the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Herman Georg Kaiser, an oil producer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. From Germany, Gotthard von Falkenhausen and Eric Warburg represented the financial sector and Alexander Menne, a member of the executive board of Farbwerke Hoechst, represented German industry.

    Officers of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG were mainly in charge of selecting the delegates for the conferences. However, Shepard Stone of the Ford Foundation also had an influential say in this process. In the late 1950s and 1960s he was director of the foundation’s international program and thus responsible for allocating funds to the ACG to facilitate the German-American conferences. Shepard Stone was deeply attached to Germany as he had pursued graduate studies in Berlin in the Weimar period, earning a doctoral degree in history. After World War II he returned to Germany as a public affairs officer of the U.S. High Commission. Stone’s continuing interest in German affairs and friendship with Eric Warburg and Marion Dönhoff regularly brought him to Germany, and he was a frequent participant in the German-American conferences.

    The German-American Conferences and Cold War Politics

    All matters discussed during the conferences stood under the headline “East-West tensions” in the earlier period and later “East-West issues” signaling the beginning of détente, but always maintaining a special focus on U.S.-German relations. The debates from the late 1950s to the early/mid-1970s can be categorized as follows: firstly, bilateral relations between the U.S. and the FRG; secondly, Germany’s relation with the Western alliance; thirdly, Europe and the United States in the Atlantic Alliance; and last but not least, relations between the West, the East, and the developing world. The conferences served three central purposes: firstly, developing a German-American network of elites; secondly, building consensus on key issues of the Cold War period; and thirdly, forming a common Western, transatlantic identity among West Germans and Americans.

    Another emphasis of both groups’ activities in the United States and Germany was the production of studies and other publications (among others, The Vanishing Swastika, the Bridge, Meet Germany, a Newsletter, Hans Wallenberg’s report Democratic Institutions, and the reports on the German-American Conferences). Studies aimed at informing Germans about developments in the United States and American international policies on the one hand, and at informing the American people about West Germany’s progress in denazification, democratization, and re-education on the other. The overall aim of these activities was first and foremost improving each country’s and people’s image in the eyes of the counterpart’s elites and wider public.

    The sources and amounts of available funds to the ACG and the Atlantik-Brücke differed considerably. Whereas the latter selected its members very carefully by way of cooptation especially among businessmen and CEOs to secure sound funding of its enterprise, the former opened membership or affiliation to basically anyone who had an interest in Germany. As a result, the ACG depended heavily, at least for its everyday business, on the fortune of the organization’s executive vice president Christopher Emmet. Emmet personally provided the salaries of ACG secretaries and set up the organization’s offices in his private apartment in New York’s upper Westside. In addition, the ACG relied on funds granted by the Ford Foundation especially for the biannual German-American conferences as well as for the publication of a number of studies. The Atlantik-Brücke in turn benefitted immensely from public funds for its publications and the realization of the German-American conferences. The Federal Press and Information Agency (Bundespresse- und Informationsamt, BPA) supported mainly publication efforts of the organization and the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) regularly granted funds for the conferences.

    Politics, Business and Membership Growth

    Membership of the Atlantik-Brücke grew from 12 in 1954 to 65 in 1974. Among them were representatives of companies like Mannesmann, Esso, Farbwerke Hoechst, Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bank, and Schering. Those members were expected to be willing and able to pay annual membership fees of 3000 to 5000 DM (approx. $750 to $1,250 in 1955, equivalent to approx. $6,475 to $10,793 today). Since the business community always accounted for the majority of Atlantik-Brücke membership compared to members from academia, media and politics, the organization operated on secure financial footing compared to its American counterpart. The ACG had not even established formal membership like its German sister organization. The people affiliated with the ACG in the 1950s up to the mid-1970s were mostly academics, intellectuals, and journalists. It posed a great difficulty for ACG officers to attract business people willing and able to contribute financially to the organization at least until the mid-1970s. When Christopher Emmet, the ACG’s “heart and soul,” passed away in 1974, the group’s affiliates and directors were mostly comprised of Emmet’s circle of friends and acquaintances who shared an interest in U.S.-German relations and Germany itself. Emmet had enlisted most of them during his frequent visits to the meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. Another group of prominent members represented the military. Several leading figures of the U.S. occupying forces and U.S. High Commission personnel joined the ACG, in addition to ranking politicians and U.S. diplomats. The ACG’s long term president, George N. Shuster had served as Land Commissioner for Bavaria during 1950-51. In 1963, Lucius D. Clay, former military governor of the U.S. zone in Germany, 1947-49, joined the ACG as honorary chairman. George McGhee, the former ambassador to Germany prominently represented U.S. diplomacy when he became director of the organization in 1969.

    Although the Atlantik-Brücke had initially ruled out board membership for active politicians, they were prominently represented. Erik Blumenfeld, for example, was an influential Christian Democratic leader in Hamburg. In 1958 he was elected CDU chairman of the federal city state of Hamburg and three years later he became a member of the Bundestag.In the course of the 1960s and 1970s more politicians joined the Atlantik-Brücke and became active members of the board: Kurt Birrenbach (CDU), Fritz Erler (SPD), W. Alexander Menne (FDP), and Helmut Schmidt (SPD). Thus, through their members and affiliates both organizations have been very well-connected with political, diplomatic, and business elites.

    Besides individual and corporate contributions, both organizations relied on funding from public and private institutions and agencies. On the German side federal agencies like the Foreign Office, the Press and Information Agency, and the Chancellery provided funding for publications and supported the German-American conferences. On the American side additional funds were provided almost exclusively by the Ford Foundation.

    Although both groups were incorporated as private associations with the objective of furthering German-American relations in the postwar era, their membership profile and sources of funding clearly illustrate that they were not operating at great distance from either public politics or official diplomacy. On the contrary, the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG represent two prominent actors in a transnational elite networking project with the aim of forging a strong anti-communist Atlantic Alliance among the Western European states and the United States of America. In this endeavor to back up public with private authority, the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG functioned as major conduits of both transnational and transcultural exchange and transfer processes.

    #Europe #Allemagne #USA #politique #guerre #impérialisme #élites

  • Tear Down Walls, Those Manifestations Of Superficial Thinking – OpEd – Eurasia Review
    https://www.eurasiareview.com/31102018-tear-down-walls-those-manifestations-of-superficial-thinking

    By Jonathan Power*

    At first I was a bit surprised to find that the English admonition, “Good fences makes for good neighbours” exists in many other languages. I shouldn’t have been taken aback. A moment’s reflection should have told me that fences and walls to divide off peoples have been going on for millennia.

    There’s nothing in particular new about the fence between the U.S. and Mexico, the Cold War wall between East and West Germany or the one between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. Look at the Great Wall of China.

    The Mexicans have a joke about the planned wall to replace the fence. “It’s not built to keep Mexicans out of the U.S.; it’s built to keep Donald Trump out of Mexico!”

    #murs #frontières

  • Migration and Integration | transversal texts

    https://transversal.at/transversal/0718/bojadzijev/en

    One of the effects of #migration movements is to open and establish areas of conflict within the terrain of the “national-social state” (Balibar).[1] I would like to subdivide the areas of conflict that shaped migration in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, promoting massive social and political transformations, into three large fields. Firstly, #immigration practices must themselves be interpreted as political practices, insofar as they develop autonomy over state migration policies. Secondly, migrant participation in labor disputes has fundamentally contributed to the crisis of the Fordist social structure. And, thirdly, this has opened the narrow perspective of industrial struggles towards all of the living conditions of migration: everyday life and reproduction, language and culture, and, last but not least, the living conditions that formed the decisive crystallization point for the migrant struggle, alongside the factory.

  • Gregory Klimov. The Terror Machine
    http://antimatrix.org/Convert/Books/Klimov/klimov-pp-e

    About author
    Gregory Petrovich Klimov

    Russian writer, member of the Writers’ Union of Russia. Author of the bestseller “Terror Machine”, published in 12 languages ​​in the “Reader’s Digest” sold more than 17 million copies. Three films based on this book were made in England, Germany and the United States in the years 1953-1954 German film “WEG OHNE UMKEHR”, was awarded at the International Film Festival in Berlin in 1954, the title of “the best German film of the year.” English “THE ROAD OF NO RETURN” and the American “NO WAY BACK” movies for a long time did not descend from screens all over the world.

    The author of the books:

    1951 MAШИНА ТЕРРОРА (БЕРЛИНСКИЙ КРЕМЛЬ, КРЫЛЬЯ ХОЛОПА, ПЕСНЬ ПОБЕДИТЕЛЯ)
    [TERROR MACHINE 1951 (BERLIN Kremlin LACKEY’S WINGS, WINNING SONG)]
    1970 КНЯЗЬ MИРА СEГO
    [THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD]
    1973 ДEЛO #69
    [The case #69]
    1975 ИМЯ MOЕ ЛEГИOН
    [MY NAME IS THE LEGION]
    1981 ПРОТОКОЛЫ СОВЕТСКИХ МУДРЕЦОВ
    [THE PROTOCOLS OF THE SOVIET ELDERS]
    1987 КРАСНАЯ КАББAЛA
    [RED KABBALAH]
    1989 БОЖИЙ НАРОД
    [GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE]

    Grigory Klimov, born September 26, 1918 in the city of Novocherkassk, Russia, in the family a doctor. In 1941 graduated with honors from the Novocherkassk Industrial Institute, and entered the Military-Diplomatic Academy in Moscow.

    In 1945 he graduated from the Academy and was assigned to work in Berlin, as the engineer-in-chief of the Soviet military administration.

    In 1947 he was ordered to go back to the Stalin’s Moscow. After much deliberation, he fled to West Germany.

    In 1949-1950 worked at the CIA’s highly classified subject “COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM BY MEANS OF A SPECIAL TYPE PEOPLE. PEOPLE WITH THE POWER COMPLEX (Complex of latent homosexuality of Lenin).” The code name - Harvard Project. In 1951-55 he was the chairman of the Central Association of the Post-war Emigrants From The Soviet Union [ЦОПЭ] (TSOPE) and chief editor of the magazine “Freedom” and “Anti-Communist” (the latter in German).

    In 1958-59 worked as a consultant at the Cornell Project in New York, where he was also engaged in all sorts of cunning psychological studies related to the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

    The results of 50 years of work on this subject are reflected in the seven books. The last three are the abstracts of the series of lectures for the entire top of the command officers of the KGB, on the eve of perestroika.

    All the books were published by Sovetskaya Kuban [СОВЕТСКАЯ КУБАНЬ] - Krasnodar, RUSSIA. Total circulation has exceeded one million.

    For orders, please contact a representative of the publishing house Sovetskaya Kuban. Mironov Vladimir Leonidovich by e-mail klimov_gregory@yahoo.com

    You can send your opinion about books or via e-mail to klimov_gregory@yahoo.com:

    GREGORY KLIMOV
    48-34 91 place
    Elmhurst
    New York 11373
    USA

    Gregory Klimov - Search results - Wikipedia
    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Gregory+Klimov&title=Special:Search&fulltext=1&search

    Klimov (surname)
    Russian linguist Gregory Klimov (1918-2007), pen-name of Igor Kalmykov a.k.a. Ralph Werner, Soviet defector and writer Igor Klimov (born 1989), Russian

    #anticommunisme #conspirationnisme #Russie #USA #guerre_froide

  • Putin Isn’t a Genius. He’s Leonid Brezhnev. – Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/02/12/putin-isnt-a-genius-hes-leonid-brezhnev

    There are two absolutely very well-known historical experiments in the world — East Germany and West Germany and North Korea and South Korea. Now these are cases that everyone can see!” So spoke Russian President Vladimir Putin in an address to the Duma in 2012. As a former KGB operative in communist East Germany, Putin knew of what he spoke. Communism was a “historic futility,” he later explained. “Communism and the power of the Soviets did not make Russia a prosperous country.” Its main legacy, he added, was “dooming our country to lagging steadily behind economically advanced countries. It was a blind alley, far away from the mainstream of world civilizations.

    Yet Russia today is lagging steadily behind economically advanced countries — and Russia’s president is doing nothing about it. Putin recently overtook Leonid Brezhnev as Russia’s longest-serving leader since Joseph Stalin. His economic record, coupling stability with stagnation, looks increasingly like Brezhnev’s too.
    […]
    True, Russian economists, politicians, and business leaders are putting forth grand plans to revitalize the country’s economy. There are two main schools of thought. Former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who has worked with Putin since their days in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, has an array of proposals to liberalize Russia’s economy and to invest in Russia’s population.
    […]
    Where Kudrin and his allies believe that Russia can attract investment only by making its economy more appealing to the private sector, an alternative camp thinks that Russia’s government should invest more itself. Russian politician Boris Titov, for example, has urged the government to sharply reduce interest rates, making it cheaper for firms to borrow. He also wants the government to subsidize loans to corporations and to invest directly in industry. Titov’s calls for state-backed investment are supported by many industrialists, who would stand to gain from government-funded infusions of credit.

  • Workers of Germany, Unite: The New Siren Call of the Far Right - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/world/europe/afd-unions-social-democrats.html?mabReward=ART_TS7&recid=10QNLdudNovobmvNWE

    BOTTROP, Germany — Guido Reil is a coal miner, like his father and grandfather before him. He joined a trade union at 18 and the center-left Social Democratic Party at 20. Fast-talking and loud, he has been an elected union representative for over a decade.

    But two years ago, after the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Germany, Mr. Reil switched to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD. Competing in state legislative elections last May, the party won 20 percent of the vote in his home district with his name on its list — and the Social Democrats slipped 16 percentage points from a previous election.

    “Those are my former comrades,” Mr. Reil said, chuckling. “They came with me.”

    How is a far-right party drawing voters from labor, a traditional bastion of the left? The question is not academic, but goes directly to the heart of the emerging threat the AfD presents to Germany’s political establishment, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

    The AfD shocked Germany in the fall when it became the first far-right party to enter Parliament since World War II. But that breakthrough not only shattered a significant postwar taboo. It has also enormously complicated the task of forming a new governing coalition, leaving Germany and all of Europe in months of limbo.

    Ms. Merkel and her conservative alliance are negotiating a coalition deal with their former governing partners, the left-leaning Social Democrats. If they do, the AfD will be Germany’s primary opposition party, leaving a wide opening for it to pick up even more traditionally left-leaning voters who fear the Social Democrats have been co-opted.
    Continue reading the main story

    Many fear that the AfD, as the leading voice of the opposition, would have a perfect perch to turn the protest vote it received in national elections in September — it finished third with 13 percent of the vote — into a loyal and sustained following.

    “If we go back into government, the AfD will overtake us,” predicted Hilde Mattheis, a Social Democratic lawmaker from Baden-Wurttemberg, where that has already happened.
    Continue reading the main story
    Photo
    Mr. Reil driving by the Prosper-Haniel mine in Bottrop. He has worked in six mines, five of which have closed. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

    The 92 AfD lawmakers, who have been busy moving into their new parliamentary offices in central Berlin, have not been shy about using the spotlight.

    One, Jürgen Pohl, recently addressed Parliament and criticized the labor market changes that former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of the Social Democratic Party passed from 2003 to 2005, saying they created a host of poorly regulated, precarious jobs.

    The AfD, Mr. Pohl said, “is a new people’s party that cares about the little people.”

    When some center-left lawmakers guffawed, Mr. Pohl pointed at the television cameras. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said, “your voters are watching.”

    Indeed, they are. The AfD has already overtaken the Social Democrats as the second-biggest party in state elections across much of what was formerly East Germany. In Bavaria, it is not far behind.

    But Mr. Reil believes his party has the greatest potential in places like Bottrop, in the Ruhr area, once the industrial heartland of West Germany and long a bastion of Social Democratic and union power.

    The Ruhr has produced coal since the 16th century, and it shaped modern Germany in the process. It powered the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the postwar economic miracle and even European integration: The coal and steel community was the seedling of the European Union.

    But today, Bottrop and surrounding cities are in decline.

    Mr. Reil has worked in six mines, five of which have closed. Along with some 2,500 others, he will take early retirement, at 48, after the last mine ceases production in December.

    With the mines, most bars have closed, too, as has a whole social and cultural scene that once kept the area alive.
    Continue reading the main story
    Photo
    Mr. Reil won 20 percent of votes in a district where the AfD had never fielded a candidate before. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

    The AfD’s “pro-worker” platform (“pro-coal, pro-diesel and anti-immigration,” as Mr. Reil puts it) resonates in Bottrop as well as on the factory floors of Germany’s iconic carmakers in the former east and the wealthy south of the country.

    As elections loom nationwide for worker representatives who bargain with management on behalf of their fellow employees, lists of candidates close to the AfD are circulating at several flagship companies, including Daimler and BMW. There are plans to create a new national workers’ movement, Mr. Reil said. The working name is the Alternative Union of Germany.

    “The revolution,” he predicted, “will be in the car industry.”

    Trade union leaders, currently on strike for higher pay and a 28-hour workweek for those wanting to care for children or elderly relatives, publicly dismiss such talk as “marginal.” But privately, some worry.

    One of Mr. Reil’s allies, Oliver Hilburger, a mechanic at a Daimler plant near Stuttgart, founded an alternative union called Zentrum Automobil in 2009, four years before the AfD even existed.

    Mr. Hilburger, who has been at the company for 28 years, is not a member of the AfD but he votes for it. He thinks the party and his union are a natural fit.
    The Interpreter Newsletter

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    When it emerged that he had once played for a band associated with neo-Nazis, the news media reported the fact widely. But that did not stop his colleagues from giving his union 10 percent of their votes and electing him as one of their representatives.

    This spring, Mr. Hilburger, who calls his musical past “a sin of youth,” is fielding more than 250 candidates in at least four factories. Several of them, he said, are immigrants who have lived in Germany for years and support the AfD.

    “There is a feeling among workers that the old unions collude with the bosses and the government,” Mr. Hilburger said.
    Continue reading the main story
    Photo
    Mr. Reil with AfD supporters during an informal meeting at a bar in Essen. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

    “The bosses and the media talk about skills shortages and how we need even more immigration,” he said. “We want to talk about a shortage of decent jobs for those who are already in the country. The AfD has understood that.”

    The AfD is ideologically divided, with many senior members staunchly capitalist and suspicious of labor unions.

    The strategic focus on the working class speaks to the challenge of turning protest voters into a loyal base, said Oskar Niedermayer, a professor of political science at the Free University in Berlin.

    “Breaking into the union milieu is key to that strategy,” Mr. Niedermayer said.

    He warned that the reflex to ostracize the AfD could backfire. Some unions are advising members to shun anyone in the AfD. Some soccer clubs are planning to outright bar them. And as Mr. Niedermayer pointed out, lawmakers from other parties have systematically blocked every AfD candidate for senior parliamentary posts.

    “It confirms them in their role as victims of the elites,” he said. “Workers who see themselves as victims of the elites will only identify with them more.”

    As the AfD appeals to Germany’s left-behinds, it is also trying to tie them to other parts of the party’s agenda, like its hard line on immigration.

    For instance, the battle cry of Frank-Christian Hansel, an AfD member of Berlin’s state Parliament, is to save the German welfare state — but for Germans.

    “If you want social justice, you need to manage who is coming into your country,” Mr. Hansel said. “Open borders and welfare state don’t go together.”
    Continue reading the main story
    Photo
    An advertising board near the Prosper-Haniel mine. Mr. Reil said the AfD was “pro-coal, pro-diesel and anti-immigration.” Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

    It is the kind of rhetoric that sets the AfD apart from the traditional left, even as it goes fishing for voters in Social Democratic waters.

    For the AfD, it is not just those at the bottom against those at the top, Mr. Niedermayer said. It is insiders against outsiders. Social justice, yes, but only for Germans.

    In Bottrop, this message plays well.

    Residents complain about some refugees being prescribed “therapeutic horseback-riding” and courses in flirtation, courtesy of taxpayers, while public schools are in decline.

    “They get the renovated social housing, while Germans wait for years,” said Linda Emde, the manager of one of the few remaining bars. “But when you speak up against migration, they call you a racist.”

    Ms. Emde had voted for the Social Democrats all her life. But in September, she and her husband switched to the AfD.

    Mr. Reil, who never managed to rise through the Social Democrats’ local party hierarchy, is now a member of the AfD’s national leadership team. At the monthly meetings, he sits at the same table as the aristocrat Beatrix von Storch and Alice Weidel, a professor.

    The two female lawmakers are perhaps best known for a recent social media rant about “barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men.” But for Mr. Reil, the point of his comment was that he had risen socially.

    “What do a miner, a princess and a professor have in common?” he jokes. “They are all in the AfD.”

    Follow Katrin Bennhold on Twitter: @kbennhold.

    Christopher Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin.

    #Allemagne #extrême_droite #syndicalisme

  • Why is Berlin so dysfunctional? - Poor and sexy
    https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21731837-unlike-other-capitals-germanys-drain-rest-country-why-berlin-so


    Auf der Suche nach Ärger - dem bürgerlichen Schreiber fehlt die aalglatte Servicekultur der gleichgeschateten Metropolen.

    Unlike other capitals, Germany’s is a drain on the rest of the country

    Dec 2nd 2017 | BERLIN

    AT A crossroads in the middle of Tegeler Forst, a wooded part of north-west Berlin, visitors can admire the city’s longest-serving provisional traffic light. Erected in 2013 after a burning car had destroyed the pillar on which the lights were mounted, it was meant to be replaced by a more permanent structure within a few weeks. When a city lawmaker asked the government why, four years later, the lights still had not been fixed, he received an interesting response: owing to changed regulations, calculating whether or not the new structure would fall down had become “very laborious and difficult”. The government would not specify how much longer it would take.

    The traffic-light saga illuminates a wider problem. Berlin, the capital of Europe’s most successful economy, is surprisingly badly governed. The new airport, the city’s biggest flagship project, missed its seventh opening date earlier this year and may not open until 2021, ten years after it was originally supposed to. The jobless rate is among the highest in the country. Schools are dismal. Courts and police are so overworked that hundreds of millions of euros in fines and taxes have not been collected; and the city failed to keep tabs on Anis Amri, the jihadist who killed 11 people with a lorry last Christmas, despite warnings about him three weeks earlier.

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    Astonishingly for a capital city, Berlin makes Germany poorer. Without it, Germany’s GDP per person would be 0.2% higher. By comparison, if Britain lost London, its GDP per person would be 11.1% lower; France without Paris would be 14.8% poorer. “Berlin’s economic weakness is unique among European capitals”, says Matthias Diermeier of the Cologne Institute for Economic Research.

    The city’s dysfunction makes everyday life more irksome. In some boroughs the streets are constantly clogged by piles of rubbish, not to mention inexplicable roadworks that make little or no progress. Registering a new car can take weeks, depriving new owners of a means of transport and car showrooms of space for new stock. This summer desperate couples travelled out of town to get married because short-staffed town halls could only offer wedding dates months in the future. “It is hard to escape the impression that Berlin’s government has a certain contempt for its citizens”, says Lorenz Maroldt, editor of the local daily Tagesspiegel, who writes a newsletter chronicling the city’s administrative hiccups.

    Berlin’s woes are partly a consequence of structural changes. Before the second world war the city was an industrial hub. When it was divided by the victorious allies, many firms moved their offices and factories to West Germany. As an anti-communist bulwark, West Berlin was heavily subsidised, but not an attractive place to set up a business. After unification, firms that had re-established themselves in Germany’s southern industrial clusters had little reason to move back. Instead the city attracted bohemians, lured by low rents and large numbers of abandoned factories and warehouses that made ideal artists’ studios or rave venues. These new, hip residents earned little and paid little tax. In 2003 Klaus Wowereit, a former mayor, described Berlin as “poor but sexy”.

    The city’s economic fortunes are improving. A heavy dose of austerity in the early 2000s averted bankruptcy. Startups have moved into the artists’ warehouses, making Berlin the second-biggest European tech hub after London. Its rough-and-colourful image has attracted tourists. The city’s population is growing.

    Yet the bureaucratic dysfunction continues. One culprit is the complex division of responsibilities between the city and its boroughs. This makes it easy for officials to pass the blame for problems back and forth without doing anything about them. (By contrast, cities such as Hamburg or Munich have centralised their administrations to improve accountability.) That the austerity measures were implemented in a slapdash fashion probably did not help either. But the main reason, Mr Maroldt believes, is cultural, going back to Berlin’s historic anti-capitalist and anti-technocratic streak: “We have a deeply held suspicion of anything that smacks of efficiency and competence.” Abandoning that attitude may make life in Berlin easier. For some, no doubt, it will also make it less sexy.

    #Berlin #Gentrifizierung

  • Berlin Berlin on Vimeo
    https://vimeo.com/55454512


    https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/383918830_1280x720.webp

    Directors:
    Diego Agullo and Dmitry Paranyushkin
    paragullo.com

    Cast:
    Dmitry Paranyushkin, Adam, Enya Mommsen, Diego Agullo, David Guenther, Baby G, Jessica Cooke, Felix Mathias Ott and others

    Camera:
    Diego Agullo

    Places: Alexanderplatz, Bradenburger Tor, Reichstag, Hauptbahnhof, Kufustendam, Holocaust Memorial, Warschauer Bruecke, Construction Site, Empty Site, Graffiti Courtyard, Zoo S-Bahn, Lichtenberg, Rosenthaler Platz U-Bahn, Hauptbahnhof S-Bahn, Sankt Oberholz, betahaus, Mitte, Made in Berlin, Humana, Acne, Voo, American Apparel, LIDL, ALDI, Netto Ghetto, a Kreuzberg bio shop, a Turkish shop, Bauhaus, Spaeti, Skalitzer Strasse, Felix Restaurant, Le Bateau Ivre, Nest, Risani Kebab, King of Falafel, Felix, Max Und Moritz, Ice Cream Shop, Starbucks, Goerlitzer Park, Tempelhof Airport, Boxhagener Platz Market, Kreuzbuerg Market, Paul-Linke Ufer, West Berlin, Goerlitzer Park U Bahn, BMW 3er 1997, Teuffelsberg, Prenzlauer Berg, Hackescher Markt, Scientology Church stall on Potsdamer Platz, Kurfustendamm, Flutgraben, Berghain, Berghain toilets, West Germany, Club der Visionaere, Agora, Kater Holzig, Kneipe, Wilde Renate, Loftus Hall, Warschauer Strasse Hof, LEAP Gallery, White Trash, Toilets, Unknown, Maybachufer in Neukoelln

    Shot on location in Berlin in 2012

    #Berlin #Video

  • Une #vidéo de #Gabriele_Del_Grande

    «Pensate alla Tunisia, la Tunisia dopo la caduta di Ben Ali, un paese che ha conosciuto una fase di 6 mesi – un anno di totale anarchia, in cui non c’era controllo di frontiera, non c’era, tecnicamente parlando, la polizia al porto. Si partiva dai porti direttamente. Ci si imbarcava e si andava di contrabbando verso Lampedusa, verso la Sicilia. La Tunisia, che è un paese di 10 milioni di abitanti, e che è uno dei paesi dove è più forte il mito dell’Europa… partirono in 25’000 in un anno! 25’000 persone su un paese di 10 milioni di abitanti. E dall’anno dopo non è più partito quasi nessuno dalla Tunisia… Queste sono le proporzioni: parliamo di 200-300 mila persone all’anno che individualmente decidono di investire in un viaggio verso l’Europa, provano le vie legali e una volta che apprendono che le vie legali sono impossibili, perché non si rilasciano i visti, bussano alla porta del contrabbando libico»

    https://www.facebook.com/100000108285082/videos/1661454033868190
    #visas #fermeture_des_frontières #ouverture_des_frontières #asile #migrations #afflux #préjugés #accueil #travail #invasion #morts_en_méditerranée #mourir_en_mer #mourir_en_méditerranée

    • If the United States had open borders, how many immigrants would come?

      The Great Wall of Trump may never stand on America’s southern border. Of course, it also seems unlikely that the border would ever be left completely open, with just a bunch of turnstyles to give a general population count.

      But it’s an interesting hypothetical that often gets bandied about during immigration debates. Anti-immigration activists argue that if we really opened up our borders, we’d be swamped by the teeming masses. Seems a reasonable speculation, at least superficially. America is very rich with an average per capita GDP of $60,000 (on a purchasing power parity basis). That’s four times higher than the global average.

      We have no way to know for sure how many people around the world would move to the United States if our legal barriers were erased tomorrow, but we do know how many say they would like to come — if they had the means and the opportunity. For more than a decade, Gallup has polled adults in countries around the world to see how many would move permanently to another country if they had the chance. About one in five potential migrants — or about 147 million adults worldwide — name the US as their desired future residence. (For reference, net migration to the US has averaged about 1 million per year this decade. Moreover, there are plenty of other advanced economies where the inflow of immigrants as a share of the population is higher than the United States, and whose stock of immigrants as a share of the population is higher as well.) The United States is the top country of choice for potential migrants — far ahead of the next choice, Germany, which is preferred by 39 million potential migrants.

      But surely far fewer than 147 million would actually show up even with open borders. Legal barriers are not the only barriers to migration. Consider residents of Puerto Rico, who can freely move to the mainland United States because they are US citizens. As economist George Borjas points out in “We Wanted Workers,” the average construction worker in his thirties earns $23,000 a year in Puerto Rico vs. $43,000 in the continental United States. Moving from Puerto Rico to the continental United States increases lifetime earnings by a quarter of a million dollars, while the actual cost of moving is a tenth or less than that. More than 3 million people live in Puerto Rico, but fewer than 84,000 migrated to the continental US in 2014. This is especially surprising because a Pew Research Center survey over the same time period found that 89 percent of Puerto Ricans “were dissatisfied with the way things were going on the island.”

      Or consider an example given by The Economist in July 2017: migration within the European Union. A tad more than 1 percent of Greeks have moved to Germany since the 2010 Greek economic crisis, even though wages in Germany are twice as high as in Greece. Because both countries are within the European Union, barriers to migration are minimal. But the low migration rate suggests that the psychological and social costs of moving are potent and large.

      Even migration between two culturally similar areas, like Cold-War era West and East Germany, can be lower than expected. Before the construction of the Berlin Wall, the East German economy was weak and its government undemocratic, yet only 15 percent of East Germans made the trek to West Germany when all they had to do was take a train from East Berlin to West Berlin.

      Though many people around the world dream of coming to the United States for a better life, not every dreamer would make the trip, even if they could do it legally. Proponents of open borders often tout the enormous economic benefits of open borders, arguing it could double world GDP or add 78 trillion dollars to the global economy by re-allocating workers to where they are most productive. But things may be a bit more complicated than that calculation suggests. This from economist Adam Ozimek:

      The big, fundamental meta question to me is: why is the US richer than the countries that most immigrants are coming from? It’s a combination of different levels of physical capital, human capital, technology, social capital, and institutions. But the last two are extremely vague, and our knowledge of how institutions and social capital emerge and evolve is not great. A decent amount of immigration only changes these things slowly, but open borders could change them very quickly.

      Would these changes be positive or negative? We don’t know, but given that the US as already very rich compared to the rest of the world the risks are to the downside. That said, if we could do better at directing immigration to parts of the US I think in some places the risks of massively increasing immigration flows are outweighed by the benefits. Detroit, for example, is not doing nearly as well as the US overall. Ranked as a country by itself, one would not describe it as doing so well that the risks are mostly to the downside.

      Fears of the US being overrun with immigrants should we liberalize our immigration laws seem overstated, but the long-term economic benefits of doing might be less than promised as well.

      http://www.aei.org/publication/if-the-united-states-had-open-borders-how-many-immigrants-would-come
      #USA #Etats-Unis

  • DVD Review: ’Taxi Zum Klo’ - Film Reviews | CineVue
    http://www.cine-vue.com/2011/03/dvd-releases-taxi-zum-klo_15.html

    During one scene from Frank Ripploh’s semi-autobiographical tale of a sex-obsessed, German school teacher Taxi Zum Klo (1980) we witness a man lying on a bed being sprayed in the face with urine. For ten, maybe fifteen seconds, all we are shown is the increasingly soaked and excited gent and a stream of the aforementioned urine being directed by an unknown party. 

    Although a large percentage of the film-going public would claim to be appalled by the allusion of one man relieving himself on another, I thought it was a brave and interesting scene. Certainly my first experience of seeing a ’golden shower’ on the big screen and being a liberal fellow in an art house cinema I had no problem with the suggestion. Hell, it was only a stream of water or something; it’s not as if Ripploh had furnished us with a wide shot of him with his cock out actually pissing into the guy’s mouth!

    When the wide shot of Ripploh with his cock out actually pissing into the guys’s mouth arrived, a strange silence swept across the audience. Nobody walked out, nobody vomited on the person in the neighboring seat and it wasn’t long before the silence was replaced with laughter - though it wasn’t the act itself which we all found amusing, it was the director’s audacity.

    Taxi Zum Klo is audacity personified. Upon its release it quickly became notorious for its graphic portrayal of gay sex. Few people have actually seen the film in its entirety, altough a few gay men of a certain age might have seen the sex scenes cobbled together in a private Soho club or on a grainy videotape. Taken out of context those scenes wouldn’t look out of place in a hardcore porn movie, but to dismiss the film as being nothing more than a sexual aid does Frank Ripploh a gross disservice: it’s a funny, provocative and clever piece of film making. 

    Shot in a documentary style on a shoe string budget, Ripploh is fearless in exposing his life and desires. By day he’s a good primary school teacher who shares a fabulous relationship with this students and by night he’s a sex tourist haunting public toilets in search of cheap thrills. Along the way he meets a man in a cinema and falls in love but his lust, verging on nymphomania, eventually spirals out of control.

    Ripploh is unapologetic about his sexual exploits and being as this film was made in a Pre-AIDS Germany we shouldn’t make the mistake of judging his reckless behaviour by modern standards. Plenty of heterosexual folk liberally put it about back then without fear of reprisal and although some may question his morality, in reality it’s nobody’s business what Frank gets up to with his own body.

    The film also attempts to dispel certain myths regarding homosexuals and children. At one point a public information film about paedophiles is inter-cut with scenes of Frank tutoring a student. He deliberately provokes the audience and although he does it in a humorous way he is also making a point. Just because you’re gay that doesn’t mean you pray on children and just because you have a broad sexual appetite that doesn’t mean you can’t be good at your day job. There is no conflict unless you, or a disapproving other, creates one.

    All in all the film works best as an insight into the normality of gay life. Frank may run around like a sex-crazed Timothy Claypole at times, and the editing is a little on the clunky side, but if you want to be challenged and experience a piece of cinema quite unlike anything you have seen before then ’Taxi Zum Klo’ is essential viewing. As a straight man - who, admittedly, has always shied way from gay cinema, believing that it wasn’t for him - I was pleasantly surprised.

    Although I’m not going to rush down to Blockbuster video and order a stack of homoerotic DVDs, I’m glad to report to anyone laboring under the mis-apprehension that watching two men have sex turns you gay that it simply isn’t true...now where’s my copy of Brokeback Mountain?

    Lee Cassanell

    Taxi Zum Klo, review - Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8467365/Taxi-Zum-Klo-review.html

    On its first release, Taxi Zum Klo (1980) was seized by US Customs. The film (its title translates as Taxi to the Toilet) was written and directed by Frank Ripploh who also takes the lead role of a schoolteacher who likes sex. He marks student essays while sitting on cottage toilets, picks up garage attendants, tells his homebody boyfriend that he’s going to clubs to pick up strangers.
    These adventures, intercut with scenes of vintage porn, are shot naturalistically with (literally) warts-and-all candour and a good deal of droll humour. The film, far from being degenerate filth, is a loving document of pre-Aids Berlin, and a touching comedy about the human desire for and struggle to achieve intimacy.

    Taxi Zum Klo Movie Review & Film Summary (1982) | Roger Ebert
    http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/taxi-zum-klo-1982

    “Taxi zum Klo” is an unsparingly honest film, documentary matched with (I assume) docudrama, in which Ripploh reveals himself fearlessly. The revelations that must have taken the most courage are not the ones about his homosexuality, but the ones about his unhappiness, his sense of inadequacy. He appears in this film to be seeking a life of openness, love, beauty and loyalty to a lover — and at the same time he marches on a treadmill of futile promiscuity.

    As the film opens, Ripploh is a schoolteacher in West Germany. He seems to be a pretty good teacher, cheerful and frank with his students. After hours, he cruises the gay bars and public meeting places, seeking anonymous sex, often with a sadomasochistic flavor. He’s particularly drawn to gay sleaze, to the bars specializing in the theatrical flaunting of sexual identity, to the places in the big city where sex is mixed with danger.

    He meets a young man, Berndt, whom he values more than most of his partners. They become lovers. They move in together, and Ripploh tries to break his pattern of addictive sex and to be faithful to one person. The movies best scenes involve Frank and Berndt trying to work out the ground rules of a relationship.

    Meanwhile, Ripploh gets fired from his job (for staying out too late after a drag ball and imprudently turning up in his classroom in drag). He contract hepatitis, is hospitalized, and, in the movie’s saddest scene, leaves the hospital bed in his patient’s gown, and hails a taxi to take him to a rendezvous with an anonymous stranger (hence the title’s English translation, “Taxi to the Toilet”).

    How does he feel about his sex life? Judging by the movie, he finds the sex itself an exciting addiction, but fears his promiscuity is training him to see persons as objects. The end of the process is clearly a great, bleak loneliness, and it is against his loneliness that he seeks protection with Berndt.

    “Taxi Zum Klo” does not contain much explicit sex, but the sex it does portray is graphic and will probably shock some viewers. Ripploh believes he could not make an honest film of his life without showing us all of it, and his frankness redeems even his most scatological scene.
    The triumph of “Taxi zum Klo” is that, in the midst of its portrait of isolation, Frank Ripploh himself emerges as a cheerful, open man, willing to reveal his weakness, willing to hope that things will take a turn for the better. The movie is about a person, not about his sex life. It understands that all of our identities and lifestyles are just hopeful strategies in the search for a sense of belonging, usefulness and love.

    #cinéma #gay #Berlin

  • Édifiant. Quand un nazi devient un tueur du Mossad

    The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman
    Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.

    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.711115

    On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

    The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

    HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

    But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

    We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.
    Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.
    But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”
    Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

    Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

    During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

    According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.

    In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

    The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.

    It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.
    On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

    Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

    The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

    Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

    The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

    After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

    The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.
    Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

    The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

    To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.

    But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

    He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

    He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.

    Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.
    His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

    This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

    In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.

    Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.

    The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.

    There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

    Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.
    In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

    Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

    The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.

    Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.

    Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

    The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

    Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.

    One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.

    They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.

    They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.

    There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”

    The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

    “Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

    Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

    After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.

    Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

    The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

    The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

    Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.

    “I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”

    The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”

    Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”

    Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

    The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.

    Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

    Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

    Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.

    Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

    “Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

    Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

    The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.

    Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.

    The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.

    Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

    Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

    Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.

    Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

    He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.

    It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.

    He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

    He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

    There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

    The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

    Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com

    For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

    The Forward

    Haaretz Contributor

    #Israel #Mossad #Nazi #Egypte #Histoire #Allemagne #Hitman

  • Migrants Arriving in Germany Face a Chaotic Reception in Berlin
    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/world/europe/germany-berlin-migrants-refugees.html?_r=0

    For two decades, Germany has sought to streamline its government, and nowhere has this been more visible than in Berlin. After the East and West sectors of the city were fused in 1990, its public work force was at 200,000. The city set out to halve that number, spinning off some services and downgrading others, so that by 2004, the number of employees had shrunk to 149,000.

    Even as the population grew, the number of city employees continued to drop. A decade later, there were just 117,000 of them, and those who remained complained that their ranks were too thin to provide needed social services to Berliners.

    At the same time, inexpensive rents, extensive public transportation and the image of Berlin as one of Europe’s hippest cities drew thousands of newcomers — 175,000 from 2011 to 2014. City planners had projected that Berlin would have another 175,000 arrivals over the next 15 years, but that estimate did not account for the thousands of migrants.


    Those who know the situation best — the volunteers who donate their time and energy to feed, clothe and counsel the new arrivals — worry that city administrators are failing to ensure the migrants’ welfare.

    “We need to work hard, otherwise we will see the first people dying of cold,” said Victoria Baxter of Moabit Hilft, an organization formed over the summer to help asylum seekers left waiting for hours in the sun without sufficient water or food.

    Berlin’s role as a city of refuge has dominated much of its post-World War II history. West Berlin served as a haven in the heart of East Germany for people fleeing communism, predominantly in the 1960s; for Tamils escaping civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s; and for pacifists from West Germany seeking to avoid compulsory military service.
    ...
    “Nowhere else in Germany is this a problem — every other city manages to find everyone a roof over their heads,” Ms. Mandeau said.

    “This is not a refugee crisis,” she said. “This is an administration crisis.”

    #Allemagne #Berlin #réfugiés

  • Foreign Policy - Situation Report - Suwalki Gap
    http://link.foreignpolicy.com/view/52543e66c16bcfa46f6ced1634dlf.1elv/c11237bc

    Remember the #Fulda_Gap! Fulda was a legendary spot in West Germany where during the Cold War, U.S. forces stood ready to stop the Soviets as they pounded their way into Europe. And now amid tensions with Russia it looks like the gap is back, at least in spirit, though it has moved a little bit to the east according to Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of the 30,000 U.S. soldiers in Europe. Hodges told FP’s Paul McLeary about the “#Suwalki_Gap,” a narrow strip of Polish territory that sits in the seam between the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad to the northwest and Moscow-friendly nation of Belarus to the southeast, which has become the latest potential flashpoint between an increasingly aggressive Moscow and NATO.

    Kaliningrad has long bristled with thousands of Russian troops and advanced weapons, while Belarus recently agreed to house a large Russian air base, making the Suwalki area a small vulnerable land bridge increasingly squeezed by Russian hardware. Hodges acknowledges, “that’s an important piece of geography right there.

    Ah, la #trouée_de_Fulda et les hordes blindées du Pacte de Varsovie, la bataille aéromobile, toussa, toussa…
    Et donc maintenant, le déferlement se fera par la #trouée_de_Suwałki

  • #Germany’s Rhodes Must Fall
    http://africasacountry.com/germanys-rhodes-must-fall

    In 1967, West Germany had its own #RhodesMustFall moment. In September of that year, socialist students tore down the monuments to colonial leaders Hans Dominik and Hermann von Wißmann that.....

    #ACADEMY_PAGE #activism #History #Politics #protests #racism #Student_Movement

  • Disarm and Modernize | Foreign Policy
    http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/24/disarm-and-modernize-nuclear-weapons-warheads

    In the early decades of the Cold War, NATO made arrangements to bury what were known as atomic demolition munitions (in essence, nuclear mines) at key points in West Germany, to be detonated if Warsaw Pact forces ever invaded. Although this plan, if enacted, might have slowed the enemy advance, it also almost certainly would have turned vast West German territories into radioactive wastelands littered with corpses and smoldering buildings—the stuff of hellish alternative-
history scenarios. The West viewed such tactical nukes—NATO fielded 7,000 to 8,000 of these shorter-
range, smaller-yield weapons for most of the Cold War—as tripwires in anticipation of the Soviet Union’s own Strangelovian plans for its thousands of tactical weapons. That is to say, the forward positioning of these nukes was a signal: If the Soviet Union invaded Europe, confrontation would escalate quickly to the nuclear realm, and the United States would intervene.

    With the end of the Cold War and the reduced risk of a Russian invasion, NATO eliminated almost all its tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Today, five NATO countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey—are widely believed to host roughly 200 U.S.-owned nuclear bombs at their air bases. These weapons, variants of the B61 warhead, a stalwart of the American thermonuclear arsenal since the late 1960s, are viewed by some security experts as provocative anachronisms. The critics argue that strategic missiles and bombers posted in the United States and the United Kingdom, along with missiles on nuclear submarines, provide more than enough deterrence against any Russian aggression.

    But in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of Ukraine, the controversy about B61s is being heightened and compounded. In addition to retaining tactical nukes in Europe, the United States plans to modernize the weapons, as well as its arsenal back home, in a remarkably expensive way. This decision has inflamed debate about the depth of the U.S. commitment to the Nuclear Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which allows the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France to have nuclear weapons if they promise to eventually disarm.

    Today, weapons innovation threatens to become the new mode for arms competition. Washington’s upgrading of the B61-4 bomb, for example, would equip the device with a tail assembly, making it into a precision-guided standoff weapon. An irony is attached to this redesigned device, called the B61-12: It would be able to attack the same targets as previous gravity bombs in the U.S. arsenal, but would do so more accurately and efficiently, using smaller yields that would create less collateral damage and less radioactive fallout. This means the bombs might be seen as more conceivably usable in a limited or tactical conflict. And this is precisely why the U.S. Congress rejected the Air Force’s requests for low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons in the 1990s: Their very accuracy increases the temptation to use them.

    Nonetheless, under current plans, approximately 480 B61-12s are set to be produced by the mid-2020s, and they would serve all U.S. gravity-bomb missions contemplated for five different aircraft. In addition to deployment in Europe, the U.S. Air Force also intends to use the B61-12 to arm heavy B-2 and B-52 bombers based in America. Even by the standards of defense budgets, the B61 modernization program is exorbitant: Estimates place its ultimate cost north of $10 billion, or
 more than if the bombs were constructed of solid gold.

  • German demography : Ageing but supple | The Economist

    http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21646213-responding-creatively-shrinking-populations-ageing-supple?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ageingbutsupple

    @klaus ça a l’air d’être moins grave chez toi que ailleurs, mais bon, nous nous faisons du souci quand même .

    THE little town of Schladen-Werla in rural Lower Saxony, right alongside the former barrier between East and West Germany, is in a demographic “devil’s spiral”, says Andreas Memmert, its mayor. The place is projected to lose about a third of its population by 2030. “The young and clever leave and the less mobile stay,” he notes. As the population thins out, bus routes, crèches, schools, banks, convenience stores and libraries close for lack of demand. This makes life even harder for remaining residents, so they leave too.

    #allemagne #démographie

  • • Photos of Life inside Berlin’s Marienfelde Refugee Transit Camp in 1961
    http://www.vintag.es/2014/11/rare-color-photos-of-life-inside.html

    Marienfelde refugee transit camp in Marienfelde, Berlin, was one of three camps operated by West Germany during the cold war for dealing with the great waves of immigration from East Germany, especially between 1950 and 1961. Refugees arriving in West Berlin were sent to the center where they received medical treatment, food, identification papers, and housing until they could be permanently re-settled in the West. Here’s a collection of rare color photographs inside Berlin’s Marienfelde refugee transit camp were taken in September 1961.

    #Berlin #photographie #Marienfelde

  • « Antisémitisme et national-socialisme », par Moishe Postone. - Critique radicale de la valeur
    http://palim-psao.over-blog.fr/article-31273595.html

    Cet essai a été publié par Moishe Postone en 1986 (in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust : The Changing Situation in West Germany, éd. Holmes & Meier).

    http://sd-1.archive-host.com/membres/up/4519779941507678/AntisemitismeetnationalsocialismeparMoishePostone.pdf

  • Amazing Landscape Photographs Resemble Traditional Chinese Paintings | Feature Shoot
    http://www.featureshoot.com/2012/01/amazing-landscape-photographs-resemble-traditional-chinese-paintings

    Hong-Oai was one of the last photographers to work in this manner. He is also arguably the best. He was honored by Kodak, Ilford and at Fotokina in West Germany and was a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art in Switzerland and the Chinatown Photographic Society.