Last generation

 

I only watched about ten minutes of this German documentary, and probably won´t watch more of it. Watch it yourselves at your leisure.

The real reason why "we" won´t stop climate change isn´t human psychology, fossil fuel company lobbying or capitalism. It´s that *no alternative to fossil fuels exist if we want to keep modern society going*. Read that again, slowly. This is true regardless of whether the system is capitalist or socialist. Or do you think East Germany was a Green paradise under Comrade Bahro? LOL. 

From the above follows that *nothing* will be done (apart from the usual fake BS)...until massive geoengineering of the atmosphere is the only option left. Or perhaps nothing will be done at all. 

There, solved the conundrum for you. Now, please move on. 

An ode to Däniken

 

So I recently watched “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. I reviewed it before, and I haven´t really changed my mind about the film. Sure, it´s great fun if you´re into the Indiana Jones concept, no doubt about it. All the usual plot elements are there, except ten times better (or worse)! Paranormal archeological artefacts, extremely exaggerated stand-offs with the bad guys (or situations in general), meetings with ancient spirit-beings and, yes, Indy´s bad love affairs. The Nazis have been replaced by Communists, and Dr Jones works with his son rather than his father, but these feel like logical changes since the plot takes place during the Cold War rather than the 1930´s. The film contains one major gaffe: Indiana says at one point that he wants to move to Leipzig to teach, but at the time, this particular location was controlled by Communist East Germany! Hardly a good hang-out for an American guy in a cowboy hat and a “I like Ike” bumper sticker.

Fanboys of Erich von Däniken or really insane alternative history scenarios might also appreciate this flick, which often comes across as an extended episode of “Ancient Aliens”. Indeed, the speculations of Indiana Jones and his long lost friend Oxley are just as confused and absurd as those in “Ancient Aliens”. Indy supposedly learned Quechua (a Peruvian Native language) while riding with Pancho Villa in Mexico, space aliens marooned in the Amazon speak Mayan (a Central American Native language), and what have you. Heck, it seems everyone in Peru is Mayan, LOL. There are tie-ins to the Roswell UFO crash, the search for El Dorado, the Mitchell-Hedges skull, elongated skulls, Nazca, the legend of Akakor, and God knows what else. Entertaining? Well, yes, unless you think Hollywood films should be proper science education (or basic geography)! Somewhat ironically, real archeologists *have* found a lost civilization in the Amazon, although not nearly as dramatic as the one depicted in this production. Last time I looked, they hadn´t found the Holy Grail or the Lost Ark, though.

The Communists are actually quite fascinating. For starters, doesn´t their female commander Irina Spalko reference “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”? Probably not a co-incidence. It´s also intriguing that “Stalin´s favorite” believes in the paranormal quasi-religious scenario even more fervently than Indiana Jones himself. I always suspected that all kinds of more exciting or downright crazy ideas were pursued in Red Russia and its satellite states behind the smokescreen of strictly scientific socialism. I mean, Erich von Däniken´s books were legal in Leipzig, yes?  

With that, I close this little review. 

Stalin´s most original popular front?

 

What the fuck is this???

National Democratic Party of Germany

The secret kingdom

 

"Stasi: Östtysklands hemliga polis" is a short book in Swedish written by Daniel Rydén. The book describes the workings of the East German secret police, nicknamed Stasi but actually called Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS). In English, that would be the Ministry for State Security, or words to that effect. The author visited the "German Democratic Republic" (GDR), as East Germany was officially known, as a journalist and therefore has firsthand experience with Stasi, since its handlers followed him around constantly. 

East Germany was a Communist state established in 1949 at German territory occupied by the Soviet Union. It was a de facto one party state, dominated by the "Socialist Unity Party" (SED), really the Communist Party of Germany under a different moniker. The Communist regime fell in 1989, and one year later East Germany was re-united with democratic West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG). East Germany is mostly known for two things: the Berlin Wall and Stasi. OK, they actually had good athletes...

At its zenith, Stasi directly employed 91,000 people. In addition, there were 189,000 informers. This was a staggeringly high number even for a repressive Communist state. One in 55 adults in East Germany worked for Stasi in some capacity! The vast network of spies and informers virtually guaranteed that everyone in the GDR encountered Stasi agents at some point in their lives. The agents could be your friends, neighbors, family members, teachers at school, and so on. Phones or apartments were bugged, letters were opened, reports were filed on millions of citizens. Stasi also spied on West Germany. Often, the agents and their handlers would meet on neutral ground in Sweden. Sometimes, Stasi worked in the open to show who was really in charge. As already mentioned, Rydén was followed by explicit Stasi handlers when visiting East Germany as a critical foreign reporter. The handlers even made sure that he knew his hotel room was bugged!

Most of Rydén´s book consist of case studies. We get to meet the daughter who helped Stasi kidnap her own father, a former Stasi agent who absconded to West Germany. Even the author admits that this case was complex: the father was by all accounts a real bastard! Another case deals with a long term Stasi spy living in West Germany who had to return to East Germany in a hurry with his family, only to be disillusioned by the cold realities of the Communist state he was serving. He tried to defect back to West Germany, but to no avail. We also get to meet various confused "socialist intellectuals" who criticized the Communist regime, but didn´t want to leave East Germany, instead hoping for reform (?!). 

Above all, there is a chapter on Erich Mielke, the effective head of Stasi for most of its existence. Mielke seems to have been an almost stereotypical secret police chief: ruthless, efficient, with an excellent memory and an ability to work around the clock, vain, arrogant, and a complete intellectual mediocrity. As behoves a Communist, he had a real working class background. Stasi was organized in such a way that all information flowed vertically, never horizontally. Only Mielke knew the full extent of Stasi´s operations. He apparently had files even on the other party leaders! 

Why would anyone want to work for this vast repressive apparatus? Honest Communist convictions (such as they are) was one factor. The Communist Party of Germany had fought a life-and-death struggle with the Nazis and obviously didn´t like the new top dog, the United States, either. West Germany was seen as a virtual Nazi successor state, since many middle-ranking and low-ranking Nazi officials remained on their posts. West Germany actually banned the Communist Party in 1956. Originally, most Stasi employees were working class. Later, I suspect corruption and privilege became more important. The Ministry for State Security became a virtual secret kingdom, a state within a state, with its own housing projects, hospitals, vacation resorts and even kindergartens. 

All this came down in 1989, together with the Berlin Wall. Democracy activists stormed Stasi offices up and down the country when they realized that the secret police were methodically destroying all their files. Stasi did manage to destroy perhaps half of them. Incredibly, Erich Mielke almost got away. He was given a short prison sentence, but not for anything he had done as Stasi head. Instead, Mielke was tried and convicted for the murder of two police officers in 1931, during the Weimar Republic! The handler who had followed Rydén around in 1988 moved to Sweden and started working as a college teacher...

"Stasi: Östtysklands hemliga polis" comes across as an extended journalistic article, rather than a "real" analysis, but I admit that it was quite interesting to read nevertheless. Maybe one day I´m gonna tell you about my own visits to East Germany...

The Stalinstadt spring

 

“The Silent Revolution” is a German film somewhat freely based on Dietrich Garstka´s autobiography “Das Schweigende Klassenzimmer”. The author, who passed away five years ago, was a high school teacher in Essen.

The plot of the film is set in Communist East Germany in 1956. A senior high school class in the town of Stalinstadt (“City of Stalin”) regularly listens to anti-Communist radio broadcasts from West Germany and eventually decides to stage a political protest in school by standing in silence to express solidarity with the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary. The protest is duly reported to the Communist authorities, and none other than East Germany´s minister of education, Fritz Lange (an old Communist cadre and anti-Nazi resistance fighter), is called in to investigate the “counter-revolution”. After various complex intrigues involving both the students and their parents, the class decides not to betray the instigators of the protest, at which everyone is expelled from school and forever barred from higher education. Despite this, the story does have a “happy ending” of sorts, since most of the students simply leave for West Berlin and freedom! (The Berlin Wall wasn´t built until 1961.)

While the storyline is interesting, I think it´s obvious that many of the characters are somewhat stereotypical. What are we to make of the sociopathic female “comrade Kessler”, the convinced but simplistic Communist Erik, the virginal Christian girls, or the nerdy Paul? There is also Theo´s cowardly father, and Kurt´s opportunistic ditto. The weak mothers were more convincing but equally stereotypical. One of the scenes is suspiciously similar to the “captain, my captain” climax in “Dead Poet´s Society”. A more interesting feature is that the heroic student Kurt turns out to have a problematic side, since he constantly visits his Nazi grandfather´s grave in West Berlin! And I still don´t understand what character (if any) is supposed to be Dietrich Garstka…

Stalinstadt still exists, now called Eisenhüttenstadt. It seems its local color is still somewhat “DDR 1956”, since the events Garstka describes in his book really took place at another location, Storkow, but that place has changed so much that the producers decided to tape the film in Eisenhüttenstadt instead.

No idea where you can find a copy with English titles. I recently saw the film with Swedish titles, my German being somewhat rusty (I mean, I can hardly pronounce “Eisenhüttenstadt”). Since I actually visited East Berlin before the collapse of the Soviet bloc, I found it very interesting on a purely personal level, despite the fictionalization.

With that, I close this little review.

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

 

“Baader-Meinhof: Terrorismens årtionde” is a Swedish book by Jens Nordqvist, offering a relatively popularized account of the Red Army Faction (RAF), the notorious German terrorist group. I admit I´ve never been *that* interested in them before, despite their status as ever-present boogey even today. And frankly, I probably won´t pursue the matter further.

The Rote Armee Fraktion was officially formed in 1970, but its roots go back to 1968-69. The radical student movement in West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, FRG or BRD), protesting against the Vietnam War and Nazi holdovers in West German society, was further radicalized by the brutal response of the police. One of the results was the formation of the RAF, known by its opponents as the Baader-Meinhof Group or Baader-Meinhof Gang after two of its principal leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

The high tide of this terrorist group was the period 1970-77. Shootouts with the police, kidnappings, bank robberies and murders of high profile individuals were part of its repertoire. In Germany, I assume the kidnapping and subsequent murder of prominent industrialist Hans-Martin Schleyer in 1977 is considered the most notorious action of the RAF. In Sweden, it’s the attack on the West German embassy two years previously. There was also the quixotic almost-attempt by one Norbert Kröcher to kidnap the Swedish government minister Anna-Greta Leijon (who had swiftly extradited the RAF terrorists involved in the embassy drama to West Germany).

RAF cooperated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and received weapons training from them at Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. There must have been cooperation with the Communist regime of East Germany (the German “Democratic” Republic, GDR or DDR) at a relatively early stage, too, since the RAF members trained in Jordan seem to have left by way of East Berlin. (The rumor that the RAF met with one Vladimir Putin behind the Iron Curtain is not mentioned in the book, I think.) After the fall of Communism, some RAF supporters were found in the GDR, where they lived with assumed identities.

What struck me most when reading Nordqvist´s account were two things. First, the strict Christian upbringing of several RAF leaders. They seem to have been strong idealists – or virtual “moral monsters” if you are more critical – and continued being so even after leaving Christianity behind. This simply confirms my suspicions of this kind of idealism, in which the world is seen in absolute black and white categories. It seems to be a close neighbor to cynicism, the kind of cynicism where you simply pursue the erstwhile “idealist” course to its bloody conclusion, no matter what. There is another word for this phenomenon, of course: fanaticism. This kind of moralistic idealism can be dangerous even when it doesn´t lead to violence – witness the fanaticism of many of the Woke.

The second thing that struck me even more forcefully was the complete futility of it all. The Baader-Meinhof Gang started out as some kind of “armed resistance” against the Federal Republic (no less!), but very soon, the “urban guerilla” became a rearguard action, with most of the attacks having as their goal the release of previously arrested comrades. While the Red Army Faction did do considerable damage, they were objectively speaking losing almost from the start, their downfall being all but inevitable. It would have taken a geopolitical earthquake to make the Faction anything more than a mere gang – and geopolitical earthquakes aren´t caused by small terrorist “focos” anyway. (Al-Qaeda was and is hardly a foco!) Some of the RAF´s actions look almost tragicomic in retrospect, like the “Socialist Patient Collective” – as if mental patients could be trusted to be members of a clandestine guerilla…

More strict Marxist-Leninists considered the Baader-Meinhof Group to be volatile petit bourgeois, and there is absolutely some truth in that characterization. That being said, there was certainly a context to the RAF and its activities. The 1970´s were “the decade of terrorism”. Stronger and potentially more influential movements used tactics often considered terrorist to further their aims: the PLO (including the PFLP) in Palestine and globally, the IRA on Northern Ireland and in Britain, the ETA in Spain, and a few others. These movements could be seen – and certainly were seen by sections of “their” communities – as national liberation fighters, not “terrorists”. There were also smaller groups of various degrees of seriousness all around the world which took to arms: the Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground in the United States, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Japanese Red Army, various Latin American urban guerillas, and so on. Armed resistance may not have looked *that* unrealistic to Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and their comrades back in the days. And yet, a sober analysis of West Germany in 1970 should have made anyone with a political IQ above 85 realize that the Bundesrepublik wasn´t Northern Ireland…or even notoriously chaotic Italy!

Will it happen again? Of course it will. And it will probably fail again, unless that seismic shift happens…

With that remark, I close this little review.   

The labyrinth of neutrality

 

Ernst Wollweber 

"Stora sabotageligan: Kominterns och Sovjetunionens underjordiska nätverk i Sverige" is a book by Wilhelm Agrell, a Swedish historian. It was published in 2016. While the book is well written and presumably directed at a wider audience (not at other historians), it´s nevertheless so filled with facts - page up and page down - that it might confuse the casual reader, not to mention the occasional reviewer. But then, a work about wartime espionage is bound to be complicated, especially if dealing with neutral Sweden, which had a complex relationship to both sides during World War II. Or where they actually three sides? 

The main characters in "Stora sabotageligan" is the so-called Great Sabotage Gang (as they were called in Sweden), better known as the Wollweber Organization, led by the exiled German Communist Ernst Wollweber. Already before the war, Wollweber recruited other Communists, often sailors, to carry out acts of sabotage against Nazi German, Italian and Japanese shipping. He also built up a sabotage network in Norway and Sweden tasked with attacking Swedish railways and other targets in the event of a Nazi German occupation (or Swedish collaboration). Sweden was an important supplier of iron ore to Germany. When the Nazis occupied Norway but not Sweden in 1940, Wollweber fled to the later country, only to be apprehended by the police (mostly by chance). The Swedish police and secret police did collaborate with Nazi Germany, but extraditing Wollweber was nevertheless considered a too obvious breach of Swedish neutrality, so the old fox was sentenced to a jail term in Sweden instead. When the Allies got the upper hand in the war, Sweden became more pro-Allied and released Wollweber, who promptly left for the Soviet Union. After the war, Wollweber resurfaced in East Germany, where he eventually became head of the Stasi, only to later lose an internal power struggle and being forced to resign. He died in obscurity in 1967. It´s actually quite amazing that he survived for so long! Stalin´s genocidal regime in Moscow purged even its own people on a semi-regular basis, and secret agents working abroad were no exception.

And then there´s the rest of the book...

It´s obvious from Agrell´s study that the Communist parties were not just politically subordinated to the Soviet Union, but frequently also micro-managed and financed from that source. Sweden and Denmark were important hubs for Soviet couriers carrying money from Moscow to various European CPs. Even day-to-day political campaigns of the Swedish Communist Party (SKP) were decided upon in Moscow, the orders relayed to the SKP leaders through short-wave radio (sic). After a damaging split in 1929, when the majority of SKP´s membership defected to form a new leftist party, the rump Stalinist SKP became completely dependent on Soviet financial assistance.

The Communist International and its member parties also created clandestine organizations. These quickly became de facto Soviet spy rings, and part of the same vast intelligence networks as the NKVD or the GRU. The Wollweber organization was unusual in that it had relatively few direct contacts with its superiors in Moscow, in order to give the Soviets "plausible deniability" in case of exposure. After all, Wollweber and his group were active saboteurs or "terrorists" in peace time. 

Agrell also describes some aspects of Western Allied espionage activities. It´s interesting to note that the United States actively tried to recruit unionists and Social Democrats to its intelligence services during World War II. The post-war alliance between the US and European Social Democracy seems to have been cemented already during the war itself. Since Sweden was neutral, many anti-Nazi refugees lived in the country during the war, and those who weren´t Communists proved a fertile ground for US recruitment. Assets within the Swedish railway union provided the Western Allies with intelligence about German trains transiting Sweden. 

The British intelligence service was also very active in Sweden, and even carried out a succesful sabotage against a German freight train at Krylbo. Independently of the Soviets, the British also planned attacks on Swedish railways and ports in case of a Nazi occupation of the country. They also created a "stay behind" network together with the anti-Nazi "Tuesday Club". Agrell claims that many of those who joined the network belonged to the "syndicalist party", presumably a reference to the Syndicalist Youth League (SUF), which was openly pro-Allied during the war. (There was no syndicalist "party", of course.) 

I admit that I hate Stalin and Stalinism even more (if that´s possible) after reading "Stora sabotageligan". Every other Communist mentioned in the book seems to have been purged by Stalin, who frequently acted in an irrational manner, decimating the Soviets´ own intelligence networks. The Western intelligence services noted that many Soviet stations abroad stopped transmitting during 1936 and 1937, clearly because many of the agents had been recalled to Moscow and liquidated. This makes me wonder what kind of person Wollweber was, since he survived Stalin, only to be disavowed and declared a non-person (but not killed or jailed) a few years after Uncle Joe´s death. Probably not the most sympathetic guy around! In a way, Wollweber´s life is a recapitulation of Communist history: he started out as a revolutionary sailor, became the head of Stasi, and then...a non-person, eaten by the system he had loyally served most of his life. 

What struck me most when reading "Stora sabotageligan", however, was how primitive much of the espionage seems to have beeen during the 1930´s. Ordinary Communist workers made bombs in their basements, radio transmitters often malfunctioned since the agents didn´t know how to use them, agents frequently got themselves arrested, and many started singing or turned coat. British intelligence was heavily understaffed before the war, and its various agencies were like cat and dog. The Wollweber operation used home-made explosives or stolen dynamite to sabotage fascist shipping, and the charges didn´t always go off. At least the Soviets were good at forging Swiss passports!

Perhaps I´m missing something here, but the technological development of spying must have taken a quantum leap during the immidiate post-war period... 

With that, I end my occasional review.  

Veckans Strasser

Die Linke vill utesluta en gammal stalinist (och ledande partimedlem) från partiet efter att hon kritiserat "politisk korrekthet" och massinvandring. Nästan bokstavligt talat "Strasser", alltså!

Die Linke vill utesluta PK-kritiker

Wikipedia om Sahra Wagenknecht (på engelska)

Checkpoint Charlie's War

I'm old enough to remember East Berlin: Ostbahnhof, Lichtenberg, Ostkreuz… OK, I mostly remember the train stations east of The Anti-Fascist Defense Wall, but so what? You weren't there at all, where you now? I admit that I'm not old enough to remember the Donovan-Abel-Pryor situation, though. Apparently, liberties were taken with the material, but then, it's (East) Hollywood, folks. I like the Cold War feeling, but sometimes “Bridge of Spies” is borderline comedy (think “Charlie Wilson's War”, also featuring one Tom Hanks). Somehow, however, it works. I first wanted to give the film four stars (cuz reasons), but after some negotiations with a mysterious private citizen, I give it five!

Pro-Stalinist orientation

This is a collection of mostly internal documents dealing with factional conflicts between different Trotskyist groups. It's part of a 16-volume series, published by the U.S. Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), and is mostly of interest to historians of the Trotskyist movement. This is the third volume of International Secretariat documents from the period 1951-54. The International Secretariat (IS) was a leadership body of the Fourth International, the Trotskyist world organization. However, the designation “IS” is also used to denote the majority faction within the International, a faction which claimed adherence to said leadership body. The IS faction was led by Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel. When the Fourth International split in 1953, the anti-IS faction called itself the International Committee (IC). The IC was dominated by the SWP. The Fourth International was reunited in 1963. The reunited organization is sometimes referred to as the United Secretariat.

Thrashing out the political differences between the IS and the IC is more difficult than many imagine, since both factions were fairly heterogeneous. The short story is that the SWP and its allies accused Pablo of having a pro-Stalinist orientation. Here, the term “Stalinist” is used in a broad sense, denoting not just Stalin's regime in the Kremlin, but the Soviet ruling bureaucracy in general. Thus, the Soviet Union remained “Stalinist” even after Stalin's death. China was also “Stalinist” in this sense. The SWP and the future IC further accused Pablo of wanting to “liquidate” the independence of the Trotskyist organizations by proposing strategic entryism into Stalinist, Social Democratic and Third World nationalist parties. Finally, the SWP attacked Pablo for supporting a minority faction within the SWP itself, the Cochran-Clarke-Bartell faction, hence disrupting the disciplined functioning of the SWP and its leadership. Pablo's International Secretariat hotly denied the charges of pro-Stalinism and liquidationism, but I think there was a large amount of truth in them. Indeed, Pablo counter-attacked by accusing the SWP of “Stalinophobia”, surely a curious slur when used by a Trotskyist.

This volume of IS material contains interesting articles by George Clarke, Michel Pablo and the IS on the post-Stalin thaw in the Soviet Union and the workers' uprising in East Germany. They were all written in 1953. While the Pabloites supported the East German workers, they nevertheless believed that the Soviet bureaucracy (and allied bureaucracies in Eastern Europe) had been forced by pressure from the masses to make real concessions after the death of Stalin. Both Pablo and Clarke imply that a faction of the Soviet bureaucracy could meet the masses half-way and reform the system. None of them calls for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany. Pablo clearly continues with his pro-Stalinist political orientation on the international scale, as if the cracks in the Soviet bloc proved *his* perspective rather than that of his opponents! He is also mesmerized by the Chinese revolution. How Pablo could simultaneously support the East German workers, Malenkov and Mao, is of course an interesting question… (But then, I've seen far worse eclecticism on the left. Trust me!)

This collection is very “in house”, but since I found it moderately interesting, I give it three stars. Of course, to get the full picture, the reader should get all four volumes of “International Secretariat Documents 1951-54”.

For lasting peace and people's democracy

"First Spaceship on Venus" is something as strange as a dubbed American version of a science fiction film made in the Soviet bloc, a Polish-East German co-production, to be exact. This explains the Soviet-style look of the film, the Soviet-style look of the actors (one of them reminds me of Romanian Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, although admittedly he was anti-Soviet!), and - above all - the Soviet-style message.

An international team of cosmonauts land on Venus, only to discover that the planet's civilization has destroyed itself through nuclear weapons, after a failed attempt to attack and conquer Earth. I think it's obvious that "Venus" is an allegory for NATO, while "Earth" symbolizes the Soviet Union and its satellite states. A more charitable interpretation is that "Venus" symbolizes the mad arms race. However, the fact that the Venusians want to attack Earth points to a NATO interpretation. To give the film more suspense, the machines of the Venus imperialists have survived their demise, attacking the peaceful cosmonauts.

So why only one star? Don't get me wrong, I also want peace, ha ha. No, the main problem with "First Spaceship on Venus" (or, to use its original German title, "Der schweigende Stern") is that it's so bloody boring. But sure, it feels strangely reassuring that they made B-movies even in the Eastern bloc. Perhaps there is common ground across the Berlin Walls of the future, after all...

:D

Truth or consequences

"1917" is the journal of the Bolshevik Tendency (BT), later renamed the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT). The group claims to be Trotskyist, but has more pro-Stalinist political positions than most other Trotskyist organizations. This is no doubt connected to BT's origins in the Spartacist League, a "Trotskyist" group notorious for supporting Jaruzelski's military coup in Poland in 1981.

This issue of BT's journal is dated Summer 1990. The Communist bloc had begun to unravel, and the lead article is illustrated with a photo of Czech democracy protesters carrying an effigy of Stalin with the inscription "Nothing lasts forever". There are several articles about the events in the DDR, and various polemics against other Trotskyists, including the ever-erratic Spartacist League. One of BT's anti-Spartacist articles bears the title "Truth or Consequences".

On the surface, the BT calls for a "political revolution" in the Eastern bloc countries, to remove the bankrupt Stalinist bureaucracy (using the term "Stalinist" in BT's broad sense). In reality, however, the BT shared the pro-Stalinist positions of the Spartacist League.

This was dramatically demonstrated in August 1991, when the BT, almost uniquely on the ostensibly non-Stalinist left, supported the coup of Yanayev and the Emergency Committee against Gorbachev. This was in keeping with their earlier support for General Jaruzelski against Solidarnosc back in 1981. Thus, if the Communist regimes in "Eastern" Europe had been stronger in 1989, smashing the democracy protests, the BT would presumably have sided with the repressive apparatuses of the regimes!

The BT may sound less overtly blood-thirsty, cranky and Stalinophile than the Spartacist League, even criticizing the Spartacists for having a portrait of Jaruzelski at their main office, but it's difficult to see any *real* difference between the two groups. In 1991, the Spartacists actually abstained (!) from supporting Yanayev, leaving the supposedly more humane BT alone on the Stalinist barricades...

Truth or consequences? Indeed.

This issue of "1917" also contains a theoretical article on "Black Liberation and the Class Struggle", and the second part of an interview with Geoff White, a founding member of the Spartacist League in 1966.

On a more sympathetic note, BT's journal has a union bug. Not the Polish Solidarnosc union, though, but the GCIU Local 280. ;-)

The Germans are nice to dogs

Someone at Amazon is selling "Dachshund Patriotic Flags", whatever that is. My review of this bizarre product follows... 

Hmmm... The name "Dachshund" doesn't strike me as particularly patriotic. Sounds more, well, German. Now, let's see. Who was the main enemy of the United States in World War I? Germany. Who was the main enemy of the United States in World War II? Germany. Who was the main enemy of the United States during the Cold War? EAST Germany. Get my drift, partner? This T-shirt is clearly the work of nefarious agents of the Reich on our precious patriotic soil!!!

Mythology and counter-mythology

Wilhelm Agrell is a Swedish professor specializing in national security issues. Interestingly, he used to work for the Swedish military during the 1970's. “Den stora lögnen” (The Big Lie) is Agrell's 1991 exposé of Swedish foreign policy.

The author argues that Sweden's “neutrality” during World War II and the Cold War was a sham. During the war, Sweden adapted to and even collaborated with whichever side was strongest at the moment. During the Cold War, Sweden – despite its much vaunted and much flaunted non-aligned status – was a secret ally of the United States and NATO. This explains the American anger at Swedish criticism of the Vietnam War, a criticism probably seen as hypocritical, given that the Swedish military was dependent on U.S. war material. It also explains why the Soviet Union habitually carried out secret submarine operations in Swedish territorial waters. The Soviets saw Sweden as a hostile nation. (The conspiracy theory that the submarine activity was really a NATO false flag operation is also compatible with Sweden's status as a military ally of the West.)

It's also interesting to note when Sweden was subservient to the Soviet Union. The first time was during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Sweden seized the gold reserves of the Soviet-occupied Baltic republics (the reserves were deposited in Swedish banks) and handed them over to the Soviet Union. It's safe to assume that Swedish compliance with Soviet wishes was really a way to appease Hitler, who was Stalin's “ally” at the time. The second time was during the brief era of good feelings between the Soviet Union and the United States following World War II. At Soviet requests, Sweden extradited Baltic refugees who had fought for Hitler during the war. Conservatives and Cold War liberals have long used this as a terrible example of Swedish appeasement with Communism, but a more reasonable analysis is that Sweden simply adapted to the Allies as a whole, including the Western allies.

While Agrell's analysis is true “as far as it goes”, it also has a grave weakness. During the 1970's and 1980's, Swedish foreign policy wasn't simply “pro-American”, but in fact highly contradictory. The Social Democratic governments of Prime Minister Olof Palme criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam, and supported the ANC and the PLO. Palme was a member of the group around Soviet official Georgy Arbatov, which promoted détente and called for a zone free of nuclear arms in Scandinavia, in effect an anti-NATO position. The Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors sold or smuggled arms to pretty much everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain, including smuggling of ammunition to East Germany, a Soviet satellite.

Clearly, Swedish non-neutrality was a pretty colorful affair!

Yet, Agrell says little or nothing about this. The author is right, of course, that Swedish “non-alignment” was an official lie, a kind of political mythology. But there is also a counter-mythology which says that Sweden was simply a patsy of the White House. Agrell's book feeds this counter-mythology, which still exists. In its right-wing form, it argues that Sweden might as well join NATO since it was never neutral anyway. In its left-wing form, it argues that Social Democracy was “imperialist” (or even “fascist” in the crackpot 1970's version of this myth), as if there wasn't any difference between Palme and, say, Kissinger or Reagan.

Agrell has exposed the big lie, but in this book (only available in trustworthy Swedish) he inadvertently feeds a number of more petty ones…

Auferstanden aus Ruinen: Some impressions of East Germany

Previously posted at another site, which recently purged me, DDR style. This was intended as a "review" of the DDR flag, which they were actually selling! Its original title was "Taking it easy with Gysi", a phrase I stole from that DDR-loving outfit, the Spartacist League. 

I'm old enough to remember the German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany or the DDR. And yes, I've been there. In Sassnitz, East Berlin and Dresden.

Oh sorry, did I say East Berlin? I mean Berlin, Haupstadt der DDR!

This advanced socialist society used steam-powered locomotives still during the 1970's. The border guards and custom officers at Sassnitz and Dresden were just as scary and "German" as you imagined them to be. If you didn't have a transit visa (paid for in foreign currency), you were in trouble. Carrying evangelical Bibles across the border was another no-no.

I also remember the old, Cold War version of Berlin Ostbahnhof. I, my brother and two aunts were virtually stranded there once, on our way to a more hospitable and laid-back European nation. We missed the so-called Meridian train, due to the usual delays in the DDR railway traffic. Ostbahnhof was large. In fact, it was the central station in East Berlin. Yet, we couldn't find anything to drink, except beer - which is unsuitable for children. After some looking, we found a sunky bar in a very long and empty corridor which served something that at least looked non-alcoholic. Non-alcoholic beer, perhaps? It didn't taste very well, though. Finally, we took a ride with the metro to Lichtenberg, the new central station. Unfortunately, it wasn't finished yet, so there was nothing to drink there, either!

Clearly, the Central Planning Agency of the German Democratic Republic had missed something. But then, I suppose a Coke was off limits east of Checkpoint Charlie, anyway, LOL.

I also vaguely remember a really run down metro station called Ostkreuz. I laughed heartily the other day, when I read on Wikipedia that Ostkreuz is *still* run down. Apparently, the station hasn't been given an overhaul for ages. Well, it seems the new, united and capitalist Germany sometimes misses a thing or two, as well...

I also saw the famous TV tower. But not the Berlin Wall, Brandenburger Tor or the checkpoint. It was mostly Ostbahnhof, Ostkreuz and Lichtenberg, as far as I was concerned.

Now, did I *really* miss something? I don't think so. Frankly, I was fed up with New Germany after this experience! A friend of mine, on his way to the goulash socialism in Hungary, saw more of the DDR than I ever did. He described it as a really extreme, kitschy and "Soviet" place, filled with propaganda posters, Soviet flags and huge portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. (And presumably Erich Honecker.) Nothing like Hungary, then. ;-)

The weird design on in the centre of the flag is the coat of arms of East Germany. It symbolizes the firm unity of workers, farmers and intellectuals. In reality, the DDR was a bizarre society with Stasi spies in every bush. The regime even had an international spy network. They gave secret asylum to the Baader Meinhof gang and had a cozy relationship with one Idi Amin. All DDR athletes were pumped up with steroids so they could win the gold medals in the Olympic Games and make propaganda for New Germany. A small national minority known as Sorbs were given extensive rights, and their folksy dance teams were used for good propaganda effect. The Berlin Wall was euphemistically called The Great Anti-Fascist Defence Wall. Et cetera.

So, no I didn't miss much.

What the people of New Germany thought of all this became abundantly clear when the Wall come tumbling down. In the first and only free elections before re-unification with West Germany, only one political party demanded the continuation of East Germany as a Communist state. The party, known as the Spartakist Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, was financed by an erratic left-wing sect in New York City (!), the so-called Spartacist League. With 2,600 votes, the Spartacists ended up last, getting less votes than the Beer-Drinkers' Party. (Any connection to Ostbahnhof?)

I admit that I would gladly have experienced that one! :D

Everyone else preferred taking it easy with Gysi.

Credit: Frank Vincents