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The Passion of Joschka Fischer (very long)

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Gene Zitver

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Aug 28, 2001, 11:12:49 PM8/28/01
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There's a very long piece in the August 27-September 3 issue of The New
Republic entitled "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" which touches on some of the
topics we've discussed here: the New Left, personal political transformations,
violent street protests, the justification for military intervention. The
article is by Paul Berman, an unsentimental American former New Leftist and
author who has not swung over to the right. His willingness to challenge some
of the standard ways of thinking on the left reminds me a lot of Orwell.

The article traces Fischer's path from radical left-wing Frankfurt
street-fighter in the 1970s (there are photos of him and others beating up a
cop during a 1973 demonstration) to member of the Green Party, German Foreign
Minister and supporter of NATO intervention in Kosovo. Berman makes a strong
case that this transformation isn't particularly unusual or surprising.

I've attempted below to summarize some of the article, which unfortunately
isn't available on-line. I apologize for the length of my summary, but it
hardly scratches the surface of the article itself and I think it's important,
especially for those of us on the left, to think about these things.

Berman begins with a discussion of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang (formally known at
the Red Army Fraction), which engaged in kidnapping, bank robbery and murder
during the 1970s, with secret support from East Germany. Although gang members
were a tiny minority on the West German left, they "drew on the active and even
enthusiastic support of a not-so-small number of people, plus the passive
support of far larger numbers, the leftists who would never have endorsed a
program of violence and who wanted nothing to do with murders, but even so, the
Red Army Fraction did have reason to despise German bourgeois society, and
Marxist revolution was an excellent idea, and state repression posed a greater
threat to society than any guerrilla resistance from the left. And shouldn't we
progressives and reasonable leftists worry chiefly about civil liberties? And
so forth: the many arguments and apologetics that people offer in circumstances
when, out of confusion and moral timidity, they are too frightened to applaud
the murders and kidnappings and too frightened to condemn them." Jean-Paul
Sartre expressed an appreciation of the group, "a cagey admiration, designed to
leave him unstained by any crimes that the guerrillas might commit."

Fischer, though he had no direct links to Baader-Meinhof, joined in the mass
demonstrations when the gang's leader, Ulrike Meinhof, died in prison (it was
officially reported as suicide but leftists believed it was murder). Fischer
was arrested during one of these protests (though never charged) on suspicion
of helping organize a Molotov cocktail attack on a policeman who nearly burned
to death.

This information on Fischer's background, which came out around the beginning
of 2001, naturally infuriated German conservatives. But Fischer had already
infuriated many of his fellow Greens by not only backing the NATO action in
Kosovo but by supporting the German participation-the first use of German
soldiers in a military action since WWII.

Berman traces the beginning of Fischer's (and a lot of other New Leftists')
transformation to the German New Left's attitude towards Israel: "The 1967 war,
in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's
imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian
Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And under those
circumstances the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle
Eastern conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of
modern life was suddenly re-configured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel
became the crypto-Nazi site par excellence, the purest of all examples of how
Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in
every more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish
state? Israel thus advanced in the New Left imagination into the vanguard of
imperialist aggressors, and the Palestinian resistance into the front ranks of
modern anti-Nazism."

Earlier, in 1969, Fischer attended a PLO meeting in Algiers, which adopted a
resolution to achieve final victory, i.e., to destroy Israel.Berman tells about
Hans-Joachim Klein, a friend of Fischer, who joined the Revolutionary Cells (a
violent German group loosely connected to Baader-Meinhof) and was sent for
military training in an Arab country. "He found himself in a military training
ground where, in one part of the camp, European leftists singing left-wing
songs received their anti-Zionist military training, and, in another part,
European fascists singing fascist songs received their own anti-Zionist
military training." Klein, whose mother had been imprisoned by the Nazis for a
time, was horrified. He abandoned the Revolutionary Cells and "accused his old
comrades among the German guerrillas not just of having betrayed the
revolutionary ideal but of being out-and-out anti-Semites."

Fischer had a similar shock in 1976 when the Revolutionary Cells, acting on
behalf of jailed Palestinian terrorists, hijacked an Air France plane, took it
to Entebbe in Uganda, and went about arranging a "selection" of passengers,
Jews on one side, non-Jews on the other, with the Jews slated for execution.
(Before this could happen, Israeli commandos staged a raid that killed all the
terrorists and rescued all but one of the hostages.) According to Berman,
"Fischer never got over the shock of Entebbe." He cited the hijacking and the
"selection" as part of his disillusionment with the violent left.

Berman writes, "Entebbe had such an effect on quite a few of West Germany's New
Leftists. A new suspicion was dawning on those people-a little tardily, you
might complain, but dawning nonetheless. It was a worried suspicion that New
Left guerrilla activity, especially in its German version, was not the struggle
against Nazism that everyone on the New Left had always intended. It was a
suspicion that, out of some horrible dialectic of history, a substantial number
of German leftists had ended up imitating instead of opposing the Nazis-had
ended up intoxicating themselves with dreams of a better world to come, while
doing nothing more than setting out to murder Jews on a random basis: an old
story."

Another shock for the New Left was the news from Indochina, especially
Cambodia, after the Communists they had supported took power there and began
their mass slaughter. "A good many people on the Marxist side of the movement
simply lumbered on as if nothing had happened. Some of those people lumber on
still. The largest number off all drifted away, speechless and agog, until the
years had passed and they could no longer remember having participated in the
New Left and its several manias and fanaticisms-amnesiacs of a New Left
radicalism that no one could recall anymore, the kind of people who, in their
respectable middle age today, would indignantly deny having ever been anything
but ardent liberals. Who, us?"

The most serious response on the New Left to these events, Berman writes, came
from the libertarian side of the movement. "They could gaze at the terrible new
events and feel with some justification the anti-capitalism was a fine position
to hold but had never been the main idea, not for the libertarian left. Those
people could feel that authoritarianism, and not capitalism, had always been
the real enemy."

As the New Left started to disintegrate, Fischer dropped out of politics and
drove a taxi. In 1981 he joined the West German Green movement. At the time,
the Greens wanted West Germany to withdraw from NATO. Fischer said in 1986, "I
do not want to identify myself with either Communist or American imperialism."

However cracks in this attitude developed around the time of the collapse of
the Soviet empire and the Gulf War. "George Bush the Elder was president of the
United States, and he defined the war to drove Saddam out of Kuwait mostly as a
war over material interests, which came down to oil; and Bush's definition,
given the power of the American president, guaranteed a pretty strong backlash
against the war on the part of a lot of people on the left, all over the world.
Still, the inadequacy in Bush's way of thinking did not inhibit a number of
other people from noticing a few additional aspects of the war: the slaughter
of hundreds of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq, the threats of further
atrocities to come, Saddam's threat to incinerate the Israelis. There were, in
short, questions of genocide to consider: a twentieth-century predicament."
Berman notes that a number of prominent former New Leftists, including
Fischer's former roommate Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Danny the Red of Paris 1968 fame)
supported the war against Iraq.

"Yet the big moment of change came the next year, when the ethnic massacres got
under way in the Balkans. Then at last the old, profound question of Nazism and
what to do about it-the old founding question of the New Left-rumbled up in a
European setting and not just in connection to a barbarous dictator in the
Middle East… When the massacres got going in the former Yugoslavia, the big
Western democracies had to respond, if only to affirm what it meant in the
1990s to be a powerful democracy. So the big powers responded. They unfurled
the bloodless blue flag of the United Nation. They came up with a principle of
non-action through action: a resistance that was no resistance at all… And
so, when the Serb nationalists made their insane 'selection' of Bosnian Muslims
to be killed en masse at Srebrenica, the Dutch troops and a French general and
the other Western military forces in Bosnia-the foreign interveners-did what
they have been sent to do, which was to not intervene."

Berman notes that the foreign policy "realists," both left and right, in the
western democracies were not about to press for stronger action. "The realists
were going to observe with perfect accuracy that massacres in the Balkans or
anywhere else threatened the fundamental interests of not one of the great
powers… What did worry the realist thinkers was that a NATO military
intervention in the Balkans might upset Western relations with Russia.
Intervention, not massacre, posed the danger, from the point of view of great
power relations. Realism was non-interventionism in the 1990s.

"The argument for intervention, therefore was going to have to come from zones
of opinion that chose to put matters of conscience at the heart of their
foreign policy thinking-from the foreign policy 'idealists'… The realpolitik
left in Europe, just like the realpolitik liberals in the first years of the
Clinton administration, were hardly going to press for forceful interventions
in the name of something as vaporous as human rights.

"In Europe, if any large group of people was going to press for a forceful
intervention, it was going to have to include a good many veterans of the
student uprisings circa 1968-the people who, in their young days, had imagined
that they were building a new civilization in Europe. Those people, in looking
at the Balkans, were at least guaranteed to give a few thoughts to matters of
genocide, to questions of resistance and non-resistance-the issues that, many
years before, had brought them to the left-wing barricades. Anti-genocide was
those people's oldest and deepest idea, together with the worried conviction
that Nazism was capable of reappearing under new disguises." Berman notes that
French veterans of the '68 movement were largely responsible for France being
the first of the Western powers to play any kind for forceful role in the
Balkans.

As for the German Greens, they "still insisted on interpreting anti-Nazism to
mean anti- imperialism in the left-wing style. Didn't American hegemony pose a
terrible danger to Europe and to the world, perhaps the greatest danger of all?
A laughable question, you might observe, given the Balkan massacres. But the
Greens had been asking that question all their lives, and repetition made it
anything but laughable. The United States had committed crimes in the past. How
could it not be doing the same in the present?"

Berman writes, "The Greens needed to tear off their veil of ideology. And this
was precisely was Joschka Fischer managed to do. Even as late as 1994 he could
not imagine sending German soldiers to places where Hitler had sent German
soldiers. But then, with the news from Srebrenica, he finally understood the
anti-Nazism in its traditional Green version was going to end as no anti-Nazism
at all: 'I learned not only "No more war" but also "No more Auschwitz." For
there, at Srebrenica (and at Omarska and other places), was Auschwitz… down
to the 'selection' by the master ethnic group of its victims."

And so when the Social Democratic-Green coalition came to power in Germany, and
Fischer became foreign minister, he emerged-in the face of fierce opposition
within his own party-as an advocate for military intervention when Milosevic
began clearing out Albanians from Kosovo.

"And so it was," Berman writes. "The foreign minister gave the endorsement.
Germany, which had failed to resist Nazism, resisted Nazism."

There's much more, which I've spared you. Again, apologies for the length of
this post. I'll try to keep them a little shorter from now on.

Gene

Martha Bridegam

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Aug 29, 2001, 12:16:42 AM8/29/01
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Gene Zitver wrote:

> There's a very long piece in the August 27-September 3 issue of The New
> Republic entitled "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" which touches on some of the
> topics we've discussed here: the New Left, personal political transformations,
> violent street protests, the justification for military intervention. The
> article is by Paul Berman, an unsentimental American former New Leftist and
> author who has not swung over to the right. His willingness to challenge some
> of the standard ways of thinking on the left reminds me a lot of Orwell.
>
> The article traces Fischer's path from radical left-wing Frankfurt
> street-fighter in the 1970s (there are photos of him and others beating up a
> cop during a 1973 demonstration) to member of the Green Party, German Foreign
> Minister and supporter of NATO intervention in Kosovo. Berman makes a strong
> case that this transformation isn't particularly unusual or surprising.
>
> I've attempted below to summarize some of the article, which unfortunately
> isn't available on-line. I apologize for the length of my summary, but it
> hardly scratches the surface of the article itself and I think it's important,

> especially for those of us on the left, to think about these things....

<snipping rest of summary>.

Thanks much, Gene.

Interesting phrases about the libertarian left seeing authoritarianism, not
capitalism, as the primary evil. Do you think Orwell felt that way?

/MAB

Edward Belsky

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Aug 29, 2001, 12:47:42 AM8/29/01
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Gene Zitver wrote in message
<20010828231249...@mb-df.aol.com>...

>There's a very long piece in the August 27-September 3 issue of The New
>Republic entitled "The Passion of Joschka Fischer"

I really enjoyed that Gene.


Bayle

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Aug 29, 2001, 1:32:59 AM8/29/01
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Martha Bridegam <brid...@pacbell.net> wrote in article
<3B8C6CAA...@pacbell.net>...

Thanks from me too. A rather bizarre and absurd path to action in Kosovo
(in fact absurd enough to place in doubt his judgement IMO), but we needed
all the help we could get.

I particularly liked this one: Fischer said in 1986, "I do not want to
identify myself with either Communist or American imperialism." Do you
think the Poles or the Czechs or the Hungarians or the Ukrainians or the
Latvians or the Lithuanians or the Romanians or the Russian Jews had the
same problem? The ones who want to join NATO now? You gotta love being
lectured by Europeans with such high moral stature.

In response to Martha's question. Yes.

Gene Zitver

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Aug 29, 2001, 1:10:37 PM8/29/01
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Martha Bridegam wrote

>Thanks much, Gene.
>
>Interesting phrases about the libertarian left seeing authoritarianism, not
>capitalism, as the primary evil. Do you think Orwell felt that way?

Wow, that's a tough question. It's obvious from his writings that he was
struggling with it. He never gave up his socialist beliefs, but I think toward
the end of his life, the threat of authoritarianism/totalitarianism became his
main political concern. He didn't write very kindly about capitalist
democracies, but in the end I think it's clear he preferred them over
"socialist" tyrannies.

Gene


Bayle

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Aug 29, 2001, 2:45:35 PM8/29/01
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Gene Zitver <gzi...@aol.com> wrote in article
<20010829131037...@nso-cv.aol.com>...

Which suggests that the issues a thinker chooses to deal with are often
outside of their control and thus we must be very careful in judging people
based on having overlooked certain causes from a current list (ala Patai).

It almost feels like today, in the absence of any overwhelming threat and
with high disposable incomes and leisure time, causes are like fashion
accessories. Not that they aren't important, but in the omni-present media
age of consumption and short attention spans, they often don't seem real or
enduring. Not surprising I guess, when our politicians change wardrobes as
they change issues in order to modify their images so they can conquer a
large enough market to get elected.

Martha Bridegam

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Aug 29, 2001, 3:12:19 PM8/29/01
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Bayle wrote:

> ....It almost feels like today, in the absence of any overwhelming threat


> and
> with high disposable incomes and leisure time, causes are like fashion
> accessories. Not that they aren't important, but in the omni-present media
> age of consumption and short attention spans, they often don't seem real or
> enduring. Not surprising I guess, when our politicians change wardrobes as
> they change issues in order to modify their images so they can conquer a

> large enough market to get elected.....

What high disposable incomes? Who's the "we" who has money to burn?

I just got off the phone with a disabled veteran who was living in his truck
until it got towed, and who probably can't raise the four hundred dollars to
get it back out of the city's impound lot. I get phone calls for legal advice
on tragedies like this about once a week and there are of course lots of
others I don't hear about.

/MAB


John Rennie

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Aug 29, 2001, 3:10:15 PM8/29/01
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"Martha Bridegam" <brid...@pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:3B8D3E93...@pacbell.net...

Thanks Martha - we all needed that.


Tom Deveson

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Aug 29, 2001, 5:27:27 PM8/29/01
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Gene Zitver writes
<very interesting and thought-provoking piece, for which many thanks>

>Fischer had a similar shock in 1976 when the Revolutionary Cells, acting on
>behalf of jailed Palestinian terrorists, hijacked an Air France plane, took it
>to Entebbe in Uganda, and went about arranging a "selection" of passengers,
>Jews on one side, non-Jews on the other, with the Jews slated for execution.
>(Before this could happen, Israeli commandos staged a raid that killed all the
>terrorists and rescued all but one of the hostages.) According to Berman,
>"Fischer never got over the shock of Entebbe." He cited the hijacking and the
>"selection" as part of his disillusionment with the violent left.

Do you know Jillian Becker's book *Hitler's Children*, a study of the
Baader-Meinhof gang?

She tells the story of how, at Entebbe, some of the hostages had
previously been in camps during the Nazi era. They found themselves
being again sorted out into groups of Jews and non-Jews, ordered about
by guards with guns, barked at -- "Schnell" -- by armed Germans. One
terrorist, probably Brigitte Kuhlmann, slapped some of the prisoners.
One prisoner showed Wilfried Boese, a terrorist who worked for a
publishing house called Red Star, the number branded on his arm. He said
he had hoped a new generation had grown up in Germany.

Boese replied that this was something quite different from Nazism, and
that what they wanted was world Marxist revolution.

Becker's book is about the difficulty of drawing the distinction.

Tom
--
Tom Deveson

Gene Zitver

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Aug 29, 2001, 9:16:54 PM8/29/01
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Tom Deveson wrote

>Do you know Jillian Becker's book *Hitler's Children*, a study of the
>Baader-Meinhof gang?
>
>She tells the story of how, at Entebbe, some of the hostages had
>previously been in camps during the Nazi era. They found themselves
>being again sorted out into groups of Jews and non-Jews, ordered about
>by guards with guns, barked at -- "Schnell" -- by armed Germans. One
>terrorist, probably Brigitte Kuhlmann, slapped some of the prisoners.
>One prisoner showed Wilfried Boese, a terrorist who worked for a
>publishing house called Red Star, the number branded on his arm. He said
>he had hoped a new generation had grown up in Germany.
>
>Boese replied that this was something quite different from Nazism, and
>that what they wanted was world Marxist revolution.
>
>Becker's book is about the difficulty of drawing the distinction.

Thanks for the information about the Becker book, Tom. According to Paul
Berman, Boese (whom Fischer knew) was "well-known and much admired on the
Frankfurt left-- a hammy thespian who used to play the evil capitalist in
street theater events, a founder of various left-wing institutions, and a
prominent member of Frankfurt's Black Panther solidarity committee."

Gene

Bayle

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Aug 29, 2001, 9:25:33 PM8/29/01
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John Rennie <j.re...@ntlworld.com> wrote in article
<07bj7.2309$Nb2.6...@news2-win.server.ntlworld.com>...

I agree and Martha has underlined my point. That veteran isn't worried
about oil drilling in Alaska or arsenic levels that are indistinguishable
(if they are) or diversity in corporate offices or half of the things the
politicians play games about and the celebrities raise money for and the US
has done nothing to fix over the last eight years. And I'm betting that
those with the power and the access that manipulate these issues on both
the right and left have plenty of disposable income. Somebody must be
paying to go on those cruises sponsored by the Nation.

Bayle

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Aug 29, 2001, 9:38:20 PM8/29/01
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Gene Zitver <gzi...@aol.com> wrote in article

<20010829211654...@nso-dd.aol.com>...

This story is unimaginable, simply astounding. I would think that this is
the kind of event that would cause an "epiphany" or a conversion experience
in most sane human beings. Not to recognize the hypocrisy and potential
evil of your own actions in such a situation, boggles my mind. I say this
as no supporter of Zionism. Someone should write a play about this.

Martha Bridegam

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Aug 29, 2001, 9:46:06 PM8/29/01
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Bayle wrote:

I didn't ask him about any of those things, so I can't tell you what he
thinks. It would be none of my business anyway.

/MAB


Bayle

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Sep 1, 2001, 9:51:58 PM9/1/01
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Gene Zitver <gzi...@aol.com> wrote in article

<20010828231249...@mb-df.aol.com>...

U.N. Racism Talks Resume After NGOs Condemn Israel

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010901/ts/race_dc.html

"African and Caribbean states want a formal apology and some countries are
pressing for financial reparations. ...

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, one of a small number of top
Western government officials in Durban, offered his country's apology.

He said recognition of guilt was the way to restore to the victims and
their descendants ``the dignity of which they were robbed.

``I should therefore like to do that here and now on behalf of the Federal
Republic of Germany,'' he told the conference in a speech. Germany was a
former colonial power in Africa."

****

Slavery—White, Black, Muslim, Christian By David Brion Davis (NYRB, July
5,2001)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/14320

" ... it is easy to forget that virtually all African slaves were first
enslaved by fellow Africans. The men, women, and children sold to Europeans
in exchange for textiles, metal goods, guns, liquor, cowry shells, and
other commodities were, for the most part, slaves under African laws."

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