`Green Nazis' in Germany Under Fire
by Rainer Apel
For the first time outside the publications of the LaRouche movement in Germany, the Greens have been denounced as on a par with the Nazis. A signed editorial on April 11, in the left-wing Berlin daily Junge Welt, quoted a November 1938 speech by Adolf Hitler, in which he said that, whereas in the past, he was obliged by the political constellation to talk about peace, he now feels free to talk about war. "That, or something similar, one will hear sometimes from [Green Party leaders] Reinhard Bütikofer or Claudia Roth—their commentaries about this year's Easter Marches give a taste. Everything that these people promised in the 1980s: abolition of the German Army, exit from NATO, ending arms exports. Today, it is clear that that was the same swindle as the Nazi peace policy of the earlier period," author Jürgen Elsässer wrote.
His article is a long-overdue attack on the leadership of the Green Party, which not only has adopted the neo-con program and endorsed the Bush Administration's military interventionism, especially in Afghanistan, but even called on Germany to shift its military mission in Afghanistan from peace-keeping to hot combat at the side of the Anglo-American strike force. Elsässer's article manifests the fierce brawl between peacenik sections of the party base and the leadership, in the run-up to, and during, the traditional Easter Marches for peace, when Bütikofer and Roth called the protesters ill-advised because "there are situations which require military intervention," such as Afghanistan and Darfur.
Numerous prominent Greens in the national Parliament voted for the extension of the German military mission in Afghanistan recently, defying calls by their own party base to vote against it, which left the peaceniks with no one to support but the neo-socialist Linkspartei, which rejected the mission.
The political environment for these developments, has been created by the LaRouche movement, especially the LaRouche Youth—first, with harsh attacks in mass leaflets three years ago (when numerous Linkspartei leaders were still under the influence of Dick Cheney's anti-terrorist propaganda in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001); second, with a mass pamphlet on the "Locust Funds and Their Stormtroopers," in March 2007, which documented the neo-con and even neo-fascist roots of the radical ecology movement in Germany, in the tradition of Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchism. The Green warmongers such as Bütikofer and Ralf Fücks were exposed in that pamphlet, and it is one of the ironies of this turbulent period, that the attack on the Greens as a political continuity of the Nazis was published in a leftist daily which is associated with some of the protest movements that were identified in that same LaRouche pamphlet.
Enormous frictions have developed inside the Green movement, notably after the takeover of the leadership by neo-con Greenies after 1991, who, as Elsässer put it in his article, emerged like "zombies" from the aborted leftist movement, and have killed more people with their war policies than the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD). Therefore, if one is justified in calling for a constitutional ban against the NPD, one must also call for a ban of the Greens, Elsässer wrote. The first call for such a ban of the Greens was issued by the LaRouche movement in March 1983, when the Greens entered the West German Parliament for the first time.
Just as the Elsässer article was published, currents in the Green Party base announced their intent to oppose the warmongers at the party top, especially on the Afghanistan issue. When that news broke on April 11, the warmongers received instant support from former Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin, who accused the peaceniks of "denying reality" with their "simplistic views on war and peace." The peaceniks responded by calling Trittin and other party leaders "traitors to the cause of peace," who "have formed an axis of evil, together with Bush."
Rejection of Bio-Foolery
The Green leadership is coming under attack also on a second front: the bio-fuel issue. Green leaders such as Fritz Kuhn have endorsed massive investments in the bio-fuel sector, with a vanguard role for hedge and equity funds; this has enraged many among the party base, who do not accept the notion that giant areas of the globe should be allocated to grow food crops for fuel, at a time when the basic food supply for large parts of the population in the developing sector is still far from secured. The mass protests in Mexico recently against the lack of corn for baking tortillas, have been published and discussed broadly in Germany, and when the April 10 issue of Germany's second-largest weekly Focus ran a cover story on the drastic price increase for food, and on coming food shortages as a result of bio-fuel production, it reflected a broad protest against Al Gore and his "bio-fools."
Die Zeit, the same week, ran an interview with the CEO of the Nestlé firm (one of the world's biggest food cartels), Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, who lambasted the idea of expanding bio-fuels as "ecological insanity," which, since one liter of ethanol requires the use of 4,560 liters of water, is a "waste of our most precious resource: water." He added: "Bio-fuels cause an increase of prices for basic food items. Automobile drivers in the rich industrial nations are being subsidized at the expense of the poorest among the world population."
