THE ANTI-DEUTSCHEN
A `Thatcherite' Cult Targets
German Nation for Destruction
by an EIR/LaRouche Youth Movement Investigative Team
Beginning in the Winter of 1989-90, when the whole world was celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, the liberation of East Germany, and the unfolding demise of the Soviet Empire, bizarre banners began appearing at left-wing rallies throughout Germany. The demonstrators carrying these banners were part of a violent, left-wing "autonomist" milieu in Germany, known as the "Antifa" ("Anti-fascists"). Their banners and posters carried slogans like "Fourth Reich—Never Again!" and "Bomber Harris—Do It Again." The latter slogan referred to British Royal Air Force Marshal Sir Arthur Travers "Bomber" Harris, otherwise known as "Butcher Harris," who was the architect of Britain's massive World War II strategic bombing campaign directed against German civilian targets, which killed and maimed millions of Germans, destroyed most German cities, but did little damage to the Nazi war machine.
The violent hatred of all things German, particularly the prospect of a united Germany, which characterized this extreme wing of the Antifa (they soon labeled themselves the "Anti-Deutschen"—"Anti-Germans") precisely mirrored the rhetoric and policies coming, at that same time, out of the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain, and some of the leading City of London propagandists in the British media.
On Oct. 31, 1989, Conor Cruise O'Brien penned an hysterical attack on the prospect of a future united Germany. Writing in the Times of London, he ranted, "We are on the road to the Fourth Reich, a pan-German entity commanding the full allegiance of German nationalists.... Nationalist intellectuals will explain that true Germans should not feel guilt, but pride about the Holocaust, that great courageous and salutory act—I fear that the Fourth Reich, if it comes, will have a natural tendency to resemble its predecessor."
On Nov. 12, 1989, within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Sunday Times editorialized on the same theme under the headline, "The Fourth Reich." The voice of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal establishment declared, in apocalyptic terms: "The result [of reunification] will be a German economy twice as big as any other.... A united Germany will then become the locomotive in the rebuilding of the newly free market economies of Eastern Europe, for Germany is preeminent in the capital, industrial know-how, and management skills that these countries need. The Fourth Reich is set to boom, becoming Europe's economic superpower in the process.... Where does that leave Britain?"
By July 1990, the theme was directly taken up by the British government of Prime Minister Thatcher. On July 12, Minister of Trade and Industry Nicholas Ridley gave an inflammatory interview to The Spectator. Accompanying the Ridley interview was a cartoon portraying Germany's Chancellor Helmut Kohl with a Hitler moustache. The caption read "Saying the unsayable about the Germans." Asked to comment on a statement by Germany's Central Bank head Hans Tietmeyer about the possible benefits of a common European monetary policy, Ridley railed, "This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe. It has to be thwarted.... You might as well give up [sovereignty] to Adolf Hitler, frankly." Ridley went on to boast that Britain had "always played the balance of power in Europe. It has always been Britain's role to keep these various powers balanced and never has that been more necessary than now, with Germany so uppity."
Days later, Thatcher herself came out strongly in defense of Ridley's comments, further underscoring that the destruction of Germany was a top priority for the British government, as well as the City of London financial establishment.
Unspoken, but clearly on the minds of the authors of this British propaganda outburst, was the fact that, in October 1988, American statesman Lyndon LaRouche had delivered an historic press conference in West Berlin, forecasting the near-term reunification of Germany, and putting forward a proposal for Germany to play a leading role in the economic rebuilding of post-Communist Central Europe and Russia. LaRouche's ideas had been echoed in the efforts of Chancellor Kohl's leading economic advisor, Deutsche Bank President Alfred Herrhausen. Herrhausen would be assassinated in December 1989, in a still-unsolved killing, blamed, at the time, on a non-existent "third generation" Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorist cell. At the time, LaRouche and others pinned the assassination on British intelligence—given London's rabid campaign to destroy Germany, and given Britain's longstanding expertise in creating controlled terrorist "countergangs," including nominally "left-wing" terror cells in Germany that had been carrying out assassinations of leading German bankers and industrialists, from Walter Rathenau (1923) to Jürgen Ponto (1977) and Hanns-Martin Schleyer (1977).
Anti-Deutschen: Sporting the Union Jack Label
The continuing parallels between the rhetoric and actions of the Anti-Deutschen and the policies of the Anglo-Dutch oligarchy, up to the present day, are hardly coincidental. A several-month-long investigation by EIR and the LaRouche Youth Movement (LYM) has revealed a level of top-down ideological and operational control over the violence-prone Anti-Deutschen by a London-centered apparatus, closely tied to the trans-Atlantic neo-conservative movement.
The objectives of the controllers of the Anti-Deutschen hooligans, and the international network of think-tanks, academics, and political operatives who back their operations, is to destroy the real Germany of great republican figures like the philosopher, scientist, and political leader, Moses Mendelssohn, a German Jew who was a pivotal figure in the 18th- and 19th-Century development of the German Classical movement (see article in this section). It is the Germany of Mendelssohn, Gotthold Lessing, Abraham Kästner, Friedrich List, Friedrich Schiller, J.S. Bach, and Ludwig van Beethoven that the British oligarchy despises, and is out to obliterate.
By convicting every German of the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis, this London-directed apparatus is also out to cover up the role of leading British bankers, like Lord Robert Brand of London Lazard Brothers, and Bank of England head Montagu Norman, in Hitler's rise to power. Without the backing of the British Round Table group—and American Wall Street allies such as Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, and the Dulles brothers of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, along with French Synarchist banking circles (Lazard and Banque Worms)—Hitler could have never taken power, and Germany might have aligned in the 1930s with the United States of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in leading the Americas and Europe out of the horrors of the Great Depression and the continuing plague of Anglo-Dutch colonialism.
The Anti-Germans
In 2005, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, BfV), in its annual survey report, offered the following description of the Anti-German wing of the larger autonomist groupings.
"Within violent left-wing extremism, positions favoring a strict rejection of the German nation's right to exist and hence the struggle to abolish the German state, play a special role. In recent years, the supporters of this ideology, the so-called 'Anti-Germans,' have been better able to take up a well-defined position and to contribute to a significant polarization among left-wing extremists. The fundamental dispute over the general direction came to the fore in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the intervention of the U.S. and its allies in Iraq.... Anti-Germans regard Germans as having an inherent tendency to nationalism automatically leading to the destruction of other ethnic groups. Such Anti-Germans believe that the Federal Republic has neither overcome its National Socialist past nor adequately dealt with it, but merely suppressed it and is now conjuring up a new edition of the Third Reich under the guise of Democracy.
"In their view," the report continued, "in order to prevent a new Holocaust, it is absolutely necessary for the German people to dissolve and become part of a multi-cultural society. Anti-Germans demand absolute solidarity with the State of Israel and support all measures guaranteeing its existence as a refuge for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and preserving it from threat. This includes the U.S.-led war against Iraq, which is viewed by more traditional left-wing extremists as imperialist aggression. Demonstrations by anti-German groups typically include Israeli, U.S., and British flags and banners and slogans such as 'USA anti-Fascism,' 'Stalingrad 43—Thank You Red Army,' and 'Bomber Harris Do It Again.'
"Anti-German positions provoked serious ideological confrontations among left-wing extremists. These confrontations are often hateful, especially on the relevant Internet websites. In practice, this conflict has already led to the break-up of long-standing associations and even physical attacks at demonstrations and other events."
The BfV report also included a general warning note: "Organizations have developed within the militant autonomist scene whose attacks have crossed the line of what constitutes terrorist violence."
The report continued: "The members of these small, clandestine groups live a life that looks perfectly normal to the rest of the world. They leave behind few traces that could help the authorities identify them and as a rule sign each of their letters claiming responsibility for an attack with a different name in order to avoid criminal prosecution ('no-name militancy'). However, some groups do operate under the same 'brand name' as an expression of continuity, to be recognized and to provide a contact point."
While the BfV report certainly provided an accurate ground-level snapshot of the Anti-Deutschen and their role within the overall autonomist, proto-terrorist German left-wing scene, and also underscored German government concerns about the growing influence of the Anti-Germans, some of the most crucial and revealing features of the network were left out.
One early but critical lead in the EIR/LYM probe emerged in May 2005, when an open letter was published, addressed to the leadership of the German metalworkers union, IG Metall. The letter, from the "Anti-Deutschen Camp" within the German labor movement, attacked the union for its criticism of foreign hedge funds, which were in the process of taking over and looting what remained of Germany's steel industry. The letter accused the union of anti-Semitism, for daring to attack international finance capital. "Nowadays, it might be popular again," the letter charged, "to pretend an 'international financial capital' is responsible for the crisis, while a 'productive capital' nicely creates jobs. The Nazis called this 'appropriating' versus 'creating' capital. The latter was supposed to mean 'German labor,' and the former 'Jewish non-labor.' This distinction therefore is not only hair-raisingly crazy, but also clearly anti-Semitic."
The letter lamented the penetration of the labor movement by ideas also being expressed at the time by Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the head of his Social Democratic Party (SPD), Franz Müntefering, who had attacked foreign private equity funds in April 2005 as "a swarm of locusts," who take over companies, asset-strip them, and shut them down, leaving thousands of workers out of a job.
While the signators on the letter to IGM were all ostensibly German trade union officials, one of the 26 signators was, in fact, an American college professor named Andrei Markovits, the Karl Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Markovits, Goldhagen, and Herf
The appearance of Markovits's name on the Anti-Deutschen letter opened a very large can of worms. The Romanian-born American professor, apart from being a life-time devotee of the Grateful Dead rock band, is a leading ideologue of the Anti-Deutschen movement. One of a tightly knit group of dissident "Holocaust Studies" scholars who frequently commute to Germany, Markovits has, since the early 1980s, been churning out academic propaganda for the destruction of the German nation-state, and for the collective condemnation of all Germans as cultural anti-Semites. Among Markovits's intimate collaborators are Harvard University professor Daniel Goldhagen and University of Maryland professor Jeffrey Herf.
Some of Markovits's most inflammatory works have been published in German by Konkret Literatur Verlag in Hamburg, which also publishes Konkret magazine. Konkret has historically shaped the entire New Left, from the 68er generation, until today, as an organ of the Antifa and Anti-Deutschen. Ulrike Meinhof, former editor of Konkret and wife of publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl, in 1968 left both Konkret and her husband, to team up with the original Baader-Meinhof/Red Army Faction.
Two of Markovits's working papers, "Twin Brothers: European Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism," and "European Anti-Americanism (and Anti-Semitism): Ever Present Though Always Denied," are frequently cited as cornerstone ideological documents of the Anti-Deutschen. It is noteworthy that his "Twin Brothers" paper is promoted on the website of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a right-wing Jabotinskyite think-tank headed by Dore Gold, Ambassador to the United States under the government of former Israeli Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and that the Center's co-publisher, Manfred Gerstenfeld, has frequently interviewed Markovits for the Center's website. Markovits' latest propaganda screed, published in 2006, is Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America.
Markovits's writings and lectures, and those of his University of Maryland crony Jeffrey Herf, all mirror, precisely, the even more libelous book by their long-time ally and Harvard Center for European Studies colleague, Daniel Goldhagen. In 1996, Goldhagen's Harvard doctoral dissertation was published by Alfred A. Knopf under the title Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.
Flaunting a total disregard for German history, Goldhagen asserted that the overwhelming majority of Germans were seething anti-Semites, who jumped at the opportunity to exterminate the Jews. He referred to German anti-Semitism as "eliminationist anti-Semitism," and asserted, with no historical documentation, that Germans had been culturally anti-Semitic since the medieval period. Anti-Semitism, Goldhagen wrote, "continued to be an axiom of German culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.... Its pregnant version in Germany during the Nazi period was but a more accentuated, intensified, and elaborated form of an already broadly accepted basic model."
Indeed, Goldhagen argued that the German people welcomed the Nazi takeover with open arms. "The Nazi German revolution," he wrote, "was an unusual revolution in that, domestically, it was being realized—the repression of the political left in the first few years notwithstanding—without massive coercion and violence. The revolution was primarily the transformation of consciousness—the inculcation in the Germans of a new ethos. By and large, it was a peaceful revolution willingly acquiesced to by the German people. Domestically the Nazi German revolution was, on the whole, consensual."
When Goldhagen's book appeared, it evoked a firestorm of protests, including from serious Holocaust scholars, who freely denounced both Goldhagen and Harvard for ignoring the most basic historic truths. In a highly unusual move, on April 8, 1996—just weeks after the publication of Hitler's Willing Executioners—the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. hosted a debate between Goldhagen and seven distinguished historians, who had all written extensively on the Holocaust. Australian historian Konrad Kweit decried the fact that "only those who offer extreme views can make a name for themselves," adding, "I take exception to Goldhagen's thesis, which is worthless, all the hype from Knopf notwithstanding." Yehuda Baer, from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, denounced Goldhagen's "Germanophobic racism," but focussed more of his anger at Harvard University, which approved the dissertation: "You don't permit a study like this ... with complete disregard for German history, which ignores the opposition" to Hitler.
Reactions from serious scholars to the Goldhagen trash reverberated around the world, with the great Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin appearing on German television on April 18, 1996, to denounce the Goldhagen book as "a disgrace" for which the author should be "totally ashamed." In a March 29, 1996 review in the London Guardian, historian Hella Pick, the biographer of Austrian Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, denounced the book as "often pernicious" and loaded with "gross distortions" and a "superfluity of embarrassing psycho-babble."
Goldhagen was unmoved by the harsh attacks. Along with Markovits and Herf, he would wage a propaganda campaign against Germany, willfully fueling the growth of the Anti-Deutschen networks, which had already taken up the theme of Germany's unrepentant and incurable anti-Semitism. As early as 1990, Jürgen Elsasser had written a piece in the magazine of the Hamburg-based Communist Alliance (Kommunistischer Bund, KB), Arbeiterkampf, "Why the Left Has To Be Anti-German." Elsasser went on to become editor of Konkret magazine at the point that the Hamburg journal fully embraced the Anti-Deutschen scheme; however, in the past several years, Elsasser has reversed himself, and has now written a book, Attack of the Locusts: The Destruction of Nations and Global War, which tears apart the Anti-Deutschen argument that no attack on hedge funds or speculators can be permitted, because it is just a thin cover for anti-Semitism.
To get a more complete picture of the apparatus behind the Anti-Deutschen, and how the different networks all come together, fast forward to May 8-9, 1999. An extraordinary gathering took place in Potsdam, Germany, financed by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the tax-exempt and German government-funded foundation of the Green party. The key organizer of the event was Böll Foundation head Ralf Fücks, himself a leading Anti-Deutschen propagandist, who later would write that Germans have a "widespread tradition of an anti-Semitism-prone criticism towards 'financial capital' and 'plutocracy.' "
The conference, titled "The Goldhagen Debate: Consequences and Perspectives," brought together most of the leading ideologues of the Anti-Deutschen project, including Goldhagen, Fücks, Markovits, Herf, and a cast of dozens of lesser figures, to not only reinforce their fractured fairy-tale version of German history and culture, but to promote the idea that the ongoing Kosovo War would set a new international precedent. As Goldhagen himself proclaimed in his keynote address: Any nation that acts as an oppressor forfeits its right to sovereignty and self-determination. Goldhagen argued that it takes several generations, at minimum, to reeducate people to "rearrange dominating notions." Therefore, he argued for a "German solution for the Balkans"—a semi-permanent NATO occupation. "In order to stop genocide," he demanded, "NATO must defeat, occupy and reeducate Serbia." In effect, Goldhagen revealed himself to be an unabashed apologist for Anglo-American imperial conquest.
Among the other speakers at the two-day affair was hard-core Anti-Deutschen activist Matthias Kuntzel. A former senior policy advisor to the Green party faction in the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag) from 1984-88, Kuntzel emerged after 1989 as an "expert" on European and Muslim anti-Semitism, an early exponent of the idea of "Islamo-fascism," and a prolific writer on the theme. In 1997, two years before he joined with Fücks in organizing the Potsdam event, Kuntzel had helped fuel the Goldhagen controversy with a book, Goldhagen and the German Left: The Presence of the Holocaust. The book was published by the Berlin house Elefanten Press, the wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsman Verlag. In 2002, Kuntzel released a book that has since become the "bible" of the Anti-Deutschen rabble, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: On the New Anti-Jewish War, which has been translated for publication later this year in the United States by Telos Press. Nominally a left-intellectual journal, Telos has recently taken up the defense of Nazi-era jurist Carl Schmitt, the leading apologist and juridical theoretician of the Hitler dictatorship.
Echoing Goldhagen's call for a NATO "mandate" over Serbia, Kuntzel polemicized at the Potsdam conference on "Milosevic's Willing Executioners: Goldhagen, Germany and the Kosovo War." In 2004, Kuntzel was appointed as a research associate of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Andrei Markovits, in the middle of a two-year stint in Berlin, addressed the Potsdam event, and heaped praise on the Konkret publishing house, for backing his research into the rising tide of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism in Europe. He fully backed Goldhagen's assault on German culture, describing anti-Semitism as a pan-European disease, which erupted in Germany with the Holocaust due to "Germany's pre-war political culture and hegemonic self-image as a 'blood nation.' "
Perhaps most disgusting among the speakers at the Potsdam event was a Markovits protégé from the University of Michigan, Lars Rensmann, who also is a Permanent Fellow at the Moses Mendelssohn Center at the University of Potsdam, who proved himself to be a rabid defiler of Mendelssohn's legacy. Speaking in the unintelligible double-speak of the Frankfurt School, Rensmann peddled the German collective guilt hoax, telling the gathering that, "The abstract-total, the universal principles of the socialization of the citizen, are to be conceived as a characteristic of the concrete—the concrete murder of 6 million Jews by German perpetrators." Citing Frankfurt School founder Theodor Adorno, Rensmann declared, "Nationalism, according to Adorno, is almost always accompanied by anti-Semitism." Denouncing nationalism in general, and German nationalism in particular, Rensmann described patriotism as "the need for a collective-narcissistic elevation through a positive identification with the German nation." Praising Goldhagen's denunciation of the "ordinary" German, Rensmann concluded, "The German Jew-murderers were not either authoritarian-aggressive or underling-like conformist, nor were they either anti-Semitic or repressed-sadistic vis-à-vis the Jews, but they were all of those things."
To ensure the continued impact of the Potsdam conference, Markovits, Elsasser, Erich Spaeter and Katrin Werlich (the latter two of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung) assembled the entire conference proceedings, which were published in 1999 by Kuntzel's publisher, Elefanten Press under the title "The Threatening Face of Their Own Past: From the Goldhagen Debate to the Kosovo Conflict."
Markovits's and Herf's 'British Moment'
Although ostensibly U.S.-based, Anti-Deutschen ideologues Markovits, Herf, and Goldhagen emerge, on deeper investigation, as leading players in a London-centered "liberal imperialist" apparatus, out to destroy both the United States and Germany, on behalf of a globalized world, run by a cabal of Anglo-Dutch private bankers, deploying mercenary armies to grab control over the planet's physical resources. They call this revival of the British Round Table and British East India Company model of "globalization," "ethical interventionism."
The Anti-Deutschen troika show up as American cheerleaders for a pair of British initiatives drawing on some of the same wannabe imperialist talent pool.
The first project, launched in March 2005, is the Cambridge University-based Henry Jackson Society. Named after the late U.S. Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.), the political patron and godfather of today's American neo-conservative movement, the HJS has drawn together a group of leading British liberal imperialists from both the Conservative and Labour parties, along with other prominent figures in the British Establishment, such as Sir Richard Dearlove, the recently retired head of British MI6, who played a pivotal role in the fabrication of intelligence that enabled the Bush Administration to "sell" the disastrous Iraq War.
Among the other leading figures in the Henry Jackson Society is the 13th Lord Lothian, Michael Andrew Foster Jude Kerr (Michael Ancram). Kerr is the grandson of Philip Kerr, the 11th Lord Lothian, who headed the British Round Table group and was a pivotal figure in the pro-Hitler Cliveden Set. Lord Lothian epitomized the faction of the British oligarchy that installed the Nazi Party in power in Germany to stage a war to the death between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Among the other noteworthy HJS leaders are: Lord Powell of Bayswater, the long-time private secretary and chief foreign and defense policy advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; Dr. Irwin Steltzer, right-hand man to Anglo-Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch; Dr. Jamie Shea, director of policy planning for the Secretary General of NATO; and Dr. Alan Mendoza, co-president of the HJS and president of the Disraelian Union, a Conservative Party think-tank.
Among the international patrons of the Henry Jackson Society are a collection of American neo-con imperialists, including William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Clifford May, Michael McFaul, Joshua Muravchik, Richard Perle, and James Woolsey. Woolsey, a former CIA Director, is presently the co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger, a third-generation U.S. policy group, relaunched by former Secretary of State George Shultz, to provide backing to the Bush-Cheney Administration's permanent war schemes.
But make no mistake about it. The Henry Jackson Society is all about the revival of the British Empire, under the rubric of military interventionism and the imposition of a globalized, cartelized system of ownership of the industrial and raw material wealth of the planet. Nowhere was this more evident than at the July 2006 rollout of the Henry Jackson Society's strategic agenda, a 128-page book bearing the unambiguous title, The British Moment.
As HJS co-president Alan Mendoza wrote of the event in a July 23, 2006 press release, "A funny thing happened at Thursday night's launch of the Henry Jackson Society's new foreign policy manifesto, the British Moment. A room full of two hundred of 'the great and the good' cheered to the rafters at the prospect of a huge increase in both the scope and frequency of British ethical intervention abroad over the coming decade." He summarized the mission of the British government, whether Tory or Labour, to "rally liberal interventionists, conservative internationalists, muscular liberals and neoconservatives around a permanent foreign policy consensus: the pursuit of democratic geopolitics."
One of the most revealing features of the Society's The British Moment clarion call for a revival of the British Empire was the fact that the document had been prepared by The Social Affairs Unit, a London think-tank that had been spawned out of the Institute of Economic Affairs, the principal British branch of the Mont Pelerin Society of radical free-market advocates and post-nation-state fanatics. Founded by English disciples of the Austrian free-market economist Friedrich von Hayek, including Antony Fisher and Lord Harris of Highcross, the apparatus had been the architects of Thatcher's assault on the British industrial economy, an assault now being conducted around the world by a network of hedge funds and private equity funds, largely housed in British Crown offshore colonies, like the Cayman Islands.
Heavily overlapping the Henry Jackson Society is another London-centered effort, the Euston Manifesto. Released early in 2006, the Manifesto was put together by a group of British liberals who gathered at a pub in Euston in the North End of London. The group included a number of members of the HJS, who drafted a document that echoed the Society's own call for a bold new foreign policy initiative, based on proactive intervention to "promote democracy." The Euston Manifesto's 15 points proclaimed the universality of Western liberal democracy, and asserted the right to intervene, militariy, anywhere in the world, to remove undemocratic regimes, which, by their actions, forfeit their right to sovereignty. Among the authors of the Euston Manifesto were: Norman Geras, Alan Johnson, Shalom Lappin, Nick Cohen, and Simon Pottinger.
Shortly after the publication and Internet circulation of the Euston Manifesto, a group of like-minded American academics and activists penned an endorsement, under the title "American Liberalism and the Euston Manifesto." Two of its principal author were Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, along with Telos magazine editor Russell Berman and The New Republic assistant editor Richard Just. Among the earliest signators was Daniel Goldhagen.
While the "American Liberals" who threw their weight behind the Euston Manifesto characterized themselves as non-communist left-wingers, the group included some well-known neo-cons and Bush-Cheney Administration advisors, including Eliot Cohen, Michael Ledeen, and Barry Rubin—all leading proponents of the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive and preventive war, particularly against Islam. Other signators came from the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the neo-con wing of the Democratic Party, including The New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, Progressive Policy Institute (the DLC think-tank) president Will Marshall, and Peter Ross Range, editor of the DLC's Blueprint magazine.
The New Anti-Semitism ...
The ideological glue tying all of these seemingly disparate networks together is a common, hysterical defense of the Anglo-Dutch financial system, and their permanent right to loot the economies of the world. The recent eruption of new attacks against former Social Democratic Party head Müntefering, and the escalation of Anti-Deutschen violent attacks against German government officials promoting a crackdown on the locust funds, underscores the linkage.
On Feb. 14, 2007, the Financial Times German-language edition published a vile editorial, "Müntefering's Heritage," which read, in part: "On Wall Street, Müntefering's remarks were read as pure anti-Semitism, because many of the private equity funds on Müntefering's hit list had Jewish names.... Bankers were enraged," the FT warned, openly threatening that Germany would be economically ostracized by international banks unless the "locust" remarks were retracted.
Around the same time that the FT published its threats, Anti-Deutschen hooligans in Hamburg set fire to the family automobile of Thomas Mirow, the number two official in the German Ministry of Finance, who had been also advocating the imposition of regulations on the private equity funds and hedge funds. The attack on Mirow called up images of the London-directed wave of assassinations of some of post-war Germany's leading industrialists and pro-development bankers, such as Herrhausen, Ponto, and Schleyer.
... And Its Frankfurt School Roots
The hatred for industrial capital (more properly referred to as the American System of Political Economy, which had been brought to Germany in the early 19th Century by Friedrich List) and nationalism that permeates the Anti-Deutschen today finds its 20th-Century roots in the Frankfurt School of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. At the Potsdam conference, Lars Rensmann had quoted from Adorno, that all forms of nationalism breed anti-Semitism. The Anti-Deutschen organizations all point to Adorno and Horkheimer as their intellectual godparents, and, in fact, the Anti-Deutschen ideology is a recast of Adorno and Horkheimer's late 1930-40s work on "the Jewish question."
In 1941, Adorno and Horkheimer produced one of their seminal works, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In a chapter entitled "Elements of Anti-Semitism," they made the essential case that the issue of anti-Semitism could be exploited to tear apart Western culture and the nation-state. "For some people today," they wrote, "anti-Semitism involves the destiny of mankind; for others it is a mere pretext. The Fascists do not view the Jews as a minority but as an opposing race, the embodiment of the negative principle. They must be exterminated to secure happiness for the world.... The Jews today are the group which calls down upon itself, both in theory and in practice, the will to destroy born of a false social order. They are branded as absolute evil by those who are absolutely evil, and are now in fact the chosen race. Whereas there is no longer any need for economic domination, the Jews are marked out as the absolute object of domination pure and simple. No one tells the workers, who are the ultimate target, straight to their face—for very good reason; and the Negroes are to be kept where they belong; but the Jews must be wiped from the face of the Earth, and the call to destroy them like vermin finds an echo in the heart of every budding fascist throughout the world. The portrait of the Jews that the nationalists offer to the world is in fact their own self-portrait. They long for total possession and unlimited power at any price. They transfer their guilt for this to the Jews, whom, as masters, they despise and crucify, repeating ad infinitum a sacrifice which they cannot believe to be effective."
The idea that the issue of anti-Semitism, and, by extension, the survival of the State of Israel, is the single most pressing issue of post-war history, is the most powerful axiom of the Anti-Deutschen ideology, and it comes directly from the pens of Adorno and Horkheimer.
Launched in 1923 as a de facto joint project of the Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International) and the British Fabian Society, the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research—the Frankfurt School—drew together such leading "Neo-Marxist" and "Neo-Freudian" ideologues as Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Richard Sorge, Gerhard Eisler, Leo Lowenthal, and Walter Benjamin—as well as degenerate cultural icons like Bertold Brecht.
Having recently experienced the failures of "Bolshevik" revolutions in Hungary, Bavaria, and Berlin, following World War I, these dissenting Marxists scorned the idea that the working class would break from their capitalist masters and lead a communist revolution. They, instead, called for an all-out cultural assault on Western Judeo-Christian values and institutions—a Kulturkampf, to overturn all of the axioms of the modern nation-state system. While the ostensibly "left-wing" intellectuals of the Frankfurt School easily co-mingled with the leading philosophers of National Socialism, like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt (Frankfurt School diva Hannah Arendt was the mistress of Heidegger even as the German existentialist philosopher was hailed as the theoretician of the Nazi Party, and proudly flaunted his membership), the fact that most leading members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish hampered their career advancement, once Hitler and the Nazis came to power.
Through arrangements with the British Fabian Society, the Institute left Frankfurt, temporarily passing through the Geneva, Switzerland headquarters of the International Labor Organization (ILO), before nesting for a quarter of a century in the United States. Through such American co-thinkers as John Dewey and Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, the Frankfurt School refugees were placed in universities all over the United States, and also migrated to Hollywood, where Adorno, a classically trained pianist and protégé of the atonalist composer Arnold Schönberg, joined the "British Set" of cultural manipulators, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and the post-modernist Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.
But in 1944, the American Jewish Committee hired Max Horkheimer to head up a new Department of Scientific Research, to conduct a five-year study on the roots of prejudice. The concluding work, The Authoritarian Personality condemned Americans as unabashed authoritarians, whose propensity for seeking scientific truth was a sure sign of anti-Semitic impulses.
In 1949, John J. McCloy, the head of the U.S. Occupation Government in the American Zone of Germany, invited Horkheimer and Adorno to return to Germany, to resume their cultural assault on the German nation-state. For years, the duo maintained absolute veto power over the placement of "de-Nazified" Germans in posts in government, the media, and the universities within the American Occupation Zones. Under the U.S. Occupation, the ISR was rebuilt across the street from its original location. Horkheimer remained in Germany, but only under the condition, worked out with McCloy, that he retain his American citizenship.
McCloy personified the radical turn in U.S. policy, following the death of President Franklin Roosevelt and his replacement by Harry Truman. FDR's enemies on Wall Street came back, with a vengeance, and many of the leading Anglo-American bankers who joined with the London Round Table in installing Hitler in power, and rearming Germany for war against the Soviet Union, took up key posts within the post-war Allied Occupation. As well-documented in the eyewitness account of James Stewart Martin, All Honorable Men, Hitler-backers, typified by McCloy and Gen. William Draper, the head of the Economic Division of the U.S. Occupation Government—and formerly the head of the Dillon Reed brokerage house, ran the U.S. Occupation Zone, and assured that their own war-time crimes were buried, and many of their pre-war and war-time business partners reinstated in power.
It would be in this context that Adorno, Horkheimer, and other Frankfurt School figures would work, hand-in-glove, with the British oligarchy, typified by Lord Bertrand Russell, a pivotal figure in Britain's own "de-Nazification" reeducation center at Wilton Park, England, which was launched at the personal initiative of Winston Churchill. Between January 1946 and June 1948, 4,000 German prisoners of war were put through "reeducation" at the Wilton Park facility west of London. Among the leading figures who led the British "reprogramming" of the post-war generation of "democratic" German leaders, were Lord Bertrand Russell; Lord William Beveridge, the Chancellor of the London School of Economics (LSE), who had sponsored and financed the Frankfurt School migration to America; and Lady Astor, who had been part of the pro-Hitler Cliveden Set during the 1930s.
The head of Wilton Park during this period was Sir Heinz Köppler, a German Jew who fled to England, was trained at Oxford, and then served in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office during World War II. The semi-official historian of the Wilton Park POW program was Kingsley Martin, a leading member of the British Fabian Society and the editor (1930-60) of The New Statesman. In April 1946, Martin wrote a promo for Wilton Park, labeling it "Prisoners' University." "Any prisoner could escape if he wished," Martin wrote, "but none do so, or wish to do so. Wilton Park is discovering the nucleus of what may become a new democratic Germany." One of the first POWs to arrive at Wilton Park was Willi Brundert, who later would become Mayor of Frankfurt, and who publicly praised "the encouragement Heinz Köppler and his colleagues gave to us German POWs by having ministers of the British Crown, leading opposition figures, economic figures like Lord Beveridge, come and talk to and discuss with us."
The Frankfurt School on the Elbe
While programs like the Horkheimer/Adorno and Wilton Park "reeducation" schemes impacted on the immediate post-war generation of "liberated" German leaders, the real fruits of these efforts would come later, with the arrival of the "68ers," the traumatized offspring of the war-time German population, who would feel the full brunt of the Anglo-American post-war occupation psychological warfare schemes.
The case of Konkret, which is today the leading organ of the Anti-Deutschen scene, is most revealing. Konkret was founded in 1955, at the height of the post-war occupation and at the point that Horkheimer, Adorno, and the entire Frankfurt School apparatus was thoroughly integrated into the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) assault on German Classical culture.
At the outset, Konkret was the organ of the Free German Youth, the official youth group of the German Communist Party (Konkret received subsidies of 40,000 deutschemarks per issue from the East German communist party, the Socialist Unity Party, up through 1964). The Free German Youth was itself an early Frankfurt School-linked project, with ISR leader Walter Benjamin a member back in the 1930s. Ultimately, the Free German Youth had fled the country, when Hitler took power, ending up in Britain during the war. Their migration back to Germany, and the establishment of branches in all of the areas of British, American, and French Occupation, could not have happened without the approval of the Occupation authorities—particularly, given that the ties to the East German communists were well known and rather public.
Konkret was, in fact, an integral part of the British-American CCF project. While the Congress was principally bankrolled by the CIA, the intellectual control over the Kulturkampf project was in the hands of the British. CCF's flagship publication, Encounter magazine, was headquartered in London, and was under the joint editorial management of senior British Fabian spook Stephen Spender, and a young Irving Kristol, later to emerge as the founding intellectual of the neo-conservative movement. Bertrand Russell was one of five honorary chairmen of the Congress, underscoring the links between the Anglo-American project and the just-concluded Wilton Park brainwashing program.
In Germany, the two key CCF journals were Der Monat, under the editorial control of the American Melvin Lasky, and Konkret. Konkret filled its pages with articles by leading Frankfurt School writers, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—along with works by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, and the German writer Heinrich Böll. Böll's name graces the Green party's foundation, underscoring the 50 years of incestuous goings-on between the Occupation authorities and the present generation of "free" Germans. What's more, Anti-Deutschen ideologue and Böll Stiftung head, Ralf Fücks, is today listed on the board of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee, the patrons of the Frankfurt School during their sojourn in America. In recent years, the AJC and Heinrich Böll Stiftung have co-sponsored events that promote the crude Anti-Deutschen fairy-tale that all criticism of speculative capital is anti-Semitic.
The publisher of Konkret, Klaus Rainer Röhl, and his future wife, Ulrike Meinhof, were both active in the early 1950s Bertrand Russell-led Ban the Bomb movement, undoubtedly the source of their recruitment into the Anglo-American CCF program. In 1968, Meinhof left Röhl and Hamburg, journeyed to Berlin, where in 1970, she helped stage the escape of Andreas Baader from a German prison, and then co-founded the Red Army Faction, one of the key European underground terrorist cells of the early 1970s.
In 1973, Konkret went bankrupt, and Röhl sold the publication to Herman L. Gremliza, a staff writer for Der Spiegel. The question of where Gremliza came up with the money to revive Konkret remains a mystery to this day. But under Gremliza, the magazine rebounded and became one of the leading organs of the Frankfurt School-dominated New Left.
In 1989, Gremliza helped choreograph the launching of the Anti-Deutschen, through his own widely publicized resignation from the Social Democratic Party—in protest over the fact that SPD members of the Bundestag had joined conservative parliamentarians in singing the German national anthem, when the Berlin Wall came down. By 2000, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon provoked the second Intifada by invading the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, one of Islam's holiest shrines, accompanied by 1,000 Israeli police and soldiers, Gremliza editorialized in support of the action, in a signed article called "Israel: The Last Victim of the New World Order." Describing Sharon's provocation as a "harmless tourist visit," Germliza launched into a vile attack on Islam and the cause of Palestinian justice and national liberation: "For example, Islam, the particular features of which includes that every young believer, pledged to chastity, receives as payment for an assassination, in which he is blown up along with a large number of Jews, the chance to have sex with a dozen virgins in Paradise." An accompanying article by Horst Pankow denounced the German news criticism of the Sharon Temple Mount provocation as "an anti-Jewish alliance of denunciation."
Hamburg, in the heart of the British post-war Occupation Zone, has always been a hub of the anti-German efforts of London. Indeed, in 1984, the heir to the Reemtsma tobacco fortune, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, founded the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS), otherwise known as the "Frankfurt School on the Elbe."
Ironically, the Reemtsma Tobacco Company, one of the largest in Germany, had been the exclusive supplier of tobacco products to the German government—during the Hitler period. Philipp F. Reemtsma was appointed to a number of Nazi industrial commissions by Hermann Göring, and, although never indicted as a war criminal, paid over $10 million in reparations at the end of the war. By the mid-1950s, the family had fully recovered their fortune. In 1982, upon the death of Philipp F. Reemtsma, Jan Philipp convinced his mother to sell the company (it was eventually absorbed into British Imperial Tobacco), thus establishing an enormous fortune, which is now the piggy-bank for the Hamburg Kulturkampf.
The HIS, modelled on the original Frankfurt ISR, purchased the entire archive of Theodor Adorno's writings, and has promoted the Frankfurt School's activities ever since. Indeed, in 1996, HIS sponsored a touring exhibit called "War of Elimination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht," which launched a campaign to smear the regular German Army with the crimes of the Nazi SS. The exhibit toured Germany at exactly the moment that the Goldhagen book, Hitler's Willing Executioners, was being released. Andrei Markovits was the guest speaker, in 1999, when the exhibit opened in the city of Saarbrucken. However, soon afterwards, the exhibit was shut down, when it was revealed that some of the key historical documentation was fake.
The publishing house of HIS, Hamburger Editions, published the German edition of Markovits's 2002 book, Offside: Soccer and the American Exceptionalism. Konkret publisher Herman Gremliza published Markovits's Twin Brothers: European Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism through Konkret Literatur Verlag.
Even more telling is the fact that a third Hamburg-based publishing house, Rotbuch Verlag, which is an imprint of Europäische Verlagsanstalt (EVA), published yet another of Markovits's Anti-Deutschen propaganda tracts, German Left: Red, Green and Beyond.
EVA was established on Nov. 14, 1946 in Hamburg, with a license from the British Military Occupation Government, to publish works dealing with "the Jewish question," anti-fascism and totalitarianism. The publishing house was staffed by exiled German Social Democrats, who had taken refuge in London during the war, and had worked closely with the British Fabian Society.
EVA would be most famous for promoting the works of the Frankfurt School, particularly the writings of Hannah Arendt. In 1978, EVA was taken over by a radical attorney named Kurt Grönewold and his wife Sabine (they remain directors of the company to this day). Kurt Grönewold, along with attorneys Klaus Croissant and Hans Christian Strobele, would defend Baader-Meinhof RAF terrorists, and would be accused of abetting the terrorists in a series of high-profile actions, including the hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger jet—leading to the spectacular GSG-9 rescue mission in Mogadishu, Uganda, and the assassination of Hanns-Martin Schleyer in September. 1977. Indeed, in 1977, shortly before he took over EVA, Grönewold was convicted by a German court of "supporting a criminal organization," and received a two-year suspended sentence.
Recently, Groenewold's EVA published a book by Bettina Röhl, daughter of early Konkret publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and his then-wife, Ulrike Meinhof. In a most revealing chapter, titled "CIA Meets KGB," Röhl documented the intimate ties between her mother and Hexi Hegewisch, the daughter of a Hamburg shipping magnate, who was a leading figure in the left-wing cultural milieu—and was the live-in lover, and eventually, the wife of CCF leader Melvin Lasky.
