Bulletin No. 37, February 5th, 2012

Left or Right, Where's the Threat?

By Victor Grossman

Berlin         

Late last year the German establishment was caught with
its pants down. It was not a pretty sight! Early this
year, alas, while still hastily struggling to cover
itself up, its pantaloons fell again, dramatically
revealing a second, no less abhorrent sight than the
first one.

The first view displayed how Germany's major domestic
spying agency, the Office for the Protection of the
Constitution, or VS, somewhat like J. Edgar Hoover's
FBI, had failed for over ten years to protect the
country from a band of Nazis carrying out a well-
planned series of cold-blooded murders. The victims
were eight ethnic Turks, a Greek man, all of them small
retailers or food shop owners, and one policewoman. In
addition, banks were robbed and bomb blasts injured
over twenty people. The gang's aim was to spread
confusion and hatred against "non-Germans" (once called
"non-Aryans"). As more and more facts leak out, it
became clear that the group, larger than the three
originally found (two dead men and one woman) had
barely-concealed ties to the legal neo-Nazi National
Democratic Party of Germany or NPD, whose
representatives all too often win seats in local and
state legislatures. And somehow, though never
completely concealed, they had gone undetected for so
long!

And now the other side of the picture has come into
view. While the VS "protectors of the constitution"
were finding it hard to track down a small gang of out-
and-out murderers, and playing down the dangers of the
far more numerous, highly visible thugs with the same
ideas, they were keeping close track of what they
called "left-wing extremists" - thus claiming to
balance two "equal evils". The crime of those on the
left, it seems, aside from occasional rocks or bottles
thrown at Nazis (but not by members of the Left party),
was an alleged failure to support Germany's "basic
libertarian democratic order." Among those observed,
now disclosed by the magazine Der Spiegel, were 26
democratically-elected members of the Bundestag, the
highest German parliament, all of course from the Left
party. Ironically, two of those being secretly
monitored are in parliamentary committees responsible
for monitoring just such offices as the VS protectors.
One, Petra Pau, is an elected vice-president of the
Bundestag. Was this in fact illegal? The matter will
now go to the usually very slow courts.

At first, when this nastiness came to view, there was
an embarrassed flurry of excitement. The man most
directly responsible, Interior Minister Hans-Peter
Friedrich from the Christian Social Union (CSU) -
despite its name the very right-wing Bavarian affiliate
of Angela Merkel's party - asserted that only publicly
available writings and statements of the deputies were
being monitored. This soon proved to be a lie. Gregor
Gysi, head of the Left caucus and one of the 27, was
able to obtain parts of the file on himself, all full
of blacked out lines and paragraphs. On one page
everything was inked out except his name. If the
observation covered only publicly available sources,
why was so much blacked out? It soon had to be
admitted; the VS offices in many German states had been
far more intrusive - which usually meant reading mail,
tapping calls, bugging meetings and conversations.

Some more decent delegates - including a few of the
Greens - publicly rejected such spying on their
colleagues. Others tried instead to split the Left
delegates: if only the party rid itself of its "radical
wing" and became respectable such secret monitoring
would no longer be necessary. All that talk about
socialism or, a year ago, the fatal use of the word
"communism" for some time in the future by party co-
president Loetzsch, and then the 85th birthday
greetings to Fidel Castro and the defense of some
aspects of the GDR - all this was reason enough for
spying and barring the Left from a respected place at
the "libertarian democratic" table. It was up to the
"reformers" to clean up the party and throw the radical
rascals out. Or so it was self-righteously proclaimed.

Surprisingly, however, most of the 27 representatives
were not from the more leftist wing of the party but
rather those very so-called "reformers" called upon to
rescue the party from evil. Some guessed that they were
chosen simply because most or all of them came from the
eastern states, the former GDR, even though eastern
delegates in the Left party generally tend to be less
militant than those from the West. Then it was learned
that the list was not complete; not 27 but at least 42
of the 76 Bundestag delegates, as well as many in state
legislatures, had been spied on; many suspected that
all those from the Left had been subjected to special
"observation" ever since East Germany and its
representatives were first attached to the Federal
Republic in 1990.

After the early embarrassment at being caught had
passed, some government leaders revealed their way of
looking at subjects like liberty and democracy. Family
Minister Kristina Schroeder, also from the far-right
Bavarian CSU, has always equated "extremists of both
the right and left";  it was very clear which of the
two she viewed as the main foe - she even denounced the
moderately left newspaper "Neues Deutschland" as being
a "left-wing extremist" publication. Then, in an
aggressive new blast, the Interior Minister loudly
proclaimed his certainty that the Left party really
wants to "erect a dictatorship of the proletariat". The
proof: it had not distanced itself from anarchist
antifascists or from unjust states like Cuba. Another
leader of his Bavarian party took the next step and
said it was high time, once and for all, to outlaw the
entire Left party altogether!

The propaganda machine in official circles has always
equated "extremists of left and right" just as it
equated the GDR with Hitler Germany. As it has repeated
over and over, both were dictatorships after all. This
relativizes and markedly minimizes the fact, still hard
for some to swallow, that the Nazi rulers killed Jews,
the Roma people, Russians, Poles and others by the
million, something not even the angriest foes of the
GDR could quite say about it. But such dangerously
distorted equations of the left hand with the right
hand did not simply reflect an F in school history
classes. They were part of an old, established
practice. And they could now be gaining ground again in
German politics.

Angela Merkel is a cool player, rarely angry, never
extreme, and still relatively popular. But her party is
facing difficult times, with a national election due
next year. Her man in the office of German president,
Christian Wulff, has been hit by one scandal after
another in the past three months. Although the charges
against him relate to minor scandals, the kind of
corrupt practices and misuse of perks and influence
common to politicians in nearly all countries, the
media attacks against him have been fierce. One theory
is that the mass circulation newspaper BILD, the leader
of the pack, hates Wulff because he has opposed its
Islamophobia hate campaigns. But whether or not he
holds on to office - he cannot be impeached but would
have to resign - his prestige and that of his and
Merkel's party have suffered greatly.

Worse still, the junior partner in her coalition
government, the once prestigious Free Democratic Party,
now a mishmash bunch run largely by friends of big
business, has become so unpopular that it will probably
not get the 5 percent vote needed to get into the
Bundestag and might thus largely disappear from the
national scene. Merkel's CDU still leads in the polls,
but without this junior partner it can hardly achieve
fifty percent of the votes and the seats in the
Bundestag and could thus be pushed out of office in
2013.

Yet the Social Democrats and Greens, now in opposition
but eager to form the next government, do not currently
command fifty percent either. There seem to be only
three possible solutions to this dilemma: A) the Greens
could ditch their present Social Democratic buddies and
join with their traditional foes on the right, Merkel's
Christian Democrats and CSU. They have done this
locally wherever it meant winning cabinet posts. B) Far
more likely - the Social Democrats will resort to the
same tactic, ditching their Green buddies and joining
their not so very hostile foes on Merkel's side of the
aisle to form a "Grand Coalition" of the largest two
parties. This has also been done in the past, most
recently in Berlin and Mecklenburg, and always meant
especially bitter medicine for common people.

 C) The third possibility: that Social Democrats and
 Greens collectively gnash their teeth and ask the Left
 to give them the necessary votes. They always insist
 that they will never do this, not when the Left
 adheres to so many unforgiveable policies, like
 stubbornly keeping German armed forces strictly inside
 Germany's national borders (as the constitution
 actually requires). But with the Left stubbornly
 maintaining such demands and insisting on a truly
 socially conscious economic program, always a threat
 to wealthy backers, it would be nicer for all of them
 if the troublesome Left were not in the Bundestag.

One major uncertainty looms over all such
deliberations. Although Germany is stronger
economically than any other country in Europe and
arrogantly throws its weight around as never before (at
least since 1945), no-one knows what tomorrow will
bring. Will the recession return with greater force and
pain than ever? With the euro still teetering on the
brink this is by no means impossible. The influence of
the Left in 2009, as the only consistently socially
conscious party in the Bundestag, cost the four older
parties many, many votes and frightened them to the
core. They quickly found it necessary to bend their
party lines, at least in the media, in a more socially-
conscious direction. And in times of greater need, when
more and more people are sick of capitalism and
powerful, obscenely wealthy fat-cat rulers behind the
scenes, these powers-that-be will feel far safer if the
Left is greatly weakened, with nothing like its present
76 seats in the Bundestag or, better still, fully
wrecked - with no members there at all. It must be
stopped now, as soon as possible! And one tried and
true method, sometimes still associated with the name
of Joe McCarthy, is to frighten its members, friends
and potential voters by sending off alarm signals about
secret observations of a bunch who are almost
officially anti-constitutional!

The neo-Nazis on the other hand, unpleasant and uncouth
as they may be, and despite some of their radical
slogans, have never been anti-capitalist but only anti-
leftist and anti-foreigner. The prospect of angry
"masses" fighting each other because of ability or lack
of ability in speaking German or sticking to good
German customs and clothing styles is far preferable to
the idea of seeing them join together on behalf of the
99 percent to which they all belong!

This preference has been the official policy of the
Federal Republic since its birth: in the earlier post-
war decades it hit out sharply against leftists in
every way while accepting the all-pervading strength of
former Nazis. Indeed, some of the worst Gestapo and SS
men built up the VS in the first place. Judging by its
present priorities one might suspect that some of those
traditions have remained. The general top-level
toleration of today's neo-Nazis, in deeds if not in
words, and constant legal and personal attacks on those
really fighting against them, lead to one conclusion on
their strategy on fascists: One never knows when they
may be useful!

There is another worrisome aspect to all this. The
Left, sharply and most deviously attacked in every way
from the start, with tactics recalling J. Edgar
Hoover's COINTELPRO, has been dangerously caught up in
its own inner problems and quarrels, despite almost
total unanimity on the party program in October. Some
in the Left party clearly hope to play a key role after
next year's election, expecting that the Social
Democrats and Greens, in order to get a ruling
majority, may be willing to accept the Left after all
if only it tones down its too militant program. This
might even result in a government post or two. But
others say contrariwise: "Nothing doing"; even if they
should need and want us we will not join them in a
government until they change their dubious positions;
every time we joined with them in a state government we
lost out in the end, most recently in the Berlin
government, where after ten years of joint effort with
the Social Democrats we lost out badly and are now out
on the chillier opposition benches.

These disputes, often on a personal level, and the
resultant lack of any major fight on key economic
issues, plus the media attacks, have meant lower and
lower popularity ratings. In 2009 the Left got nearly
12 percent of the vote. Now it is down to six or seven
percent in the polls, far too close to that strict five
per cent hurdle so important in German politics. For a
while a leading light for left-wing parties in many
parts of Europe, east and west, its position is now
endangered even at home. What seems dreadfully
necessary is a tough, clever fight for the rights of
the people, and not one confined to the warmer (even if
bugged) rooms of the Bundestag! One third of all German
children live below the poverty level, countless
working people, though not officially jobless, have
only temp and otherwise underpaid jobs while others are
being thrown out of work by geographically mobile
economic giants. Rents are rising, forcing people out
of their homes. Even in times considered stable there
is so much to be done! This is an urgent business;
history never repeats itself, it is often said. Maybe
not, or not exactly, but some worrisome recollections
cannot be ignored!

Two state elections are due in coming months, in
Saarland on March 25th and in Schleswig-Holstein on May
6th. They can indicate whether the Left is finally
recovering from the doldrums of 2011 and can put up a
good fight between now and the national election in
2013.

___________________________________________

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