History Revisited: The Fall of Kiev to the Nazis in WW II

Richard J. Evans, The New Republic

[box type=”bio”] (This is a slightly redacted version to eliminate anti-Russian/Cold War propaganda memes that occur automatically in the work published in all mainstream publications. While Professor Evans is on the whole notably free of redbaiting, his views implicitly incorporate the prevailing Western liberal biases and assumptions that regard communism intrinsically as evil as fascism, and morally inferior to capitalist democracy. —Eds)[/box]

Defeat Out of Victory

Soviet infantry march through Kiev.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]N JUNE 22, 1941, at 3:15 in the morning, the largest invasion force ever assembled crossed into the Soviet Union from the west to begin Operation Barbarossa. Three million German troops, another half a million soldiers from allied countries such as Hungary and Romania, 3,600 tanks, 600,000 motor vehicles, 7,000 artillery pieces, and 2,700 combat aircraft opened the assault.

As bombs rained down on Soviet cities and airfields, the Germans advanced up to 50 kilometers a day, taking the opposing Red Army forces by surprise, killing and capturing huge numbers of Soviet soldiers. Confused and disoriented, the Red Army virtually collapsed. Retreat was made difficult by the Germans’ destruction of roads, railways, and communications behind the Soviet front. By July 3, the Chief of the German Army General Staff was noting in his diary that “the campaign against Russia has been won in 14 days,” a view echoed triumphantly by Adolf Hitler. By July 11, German tanks had broken through to the outskirts of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. The euphoria in Hitler’s field headquarters was unbounded.

Hitler’s long-term aim in this offensive was to conquer a huge area of Eastern Europe, above all the endless agricultural plains of the Ukraine, and use it to produce food that would keep German soldiers and civilians from starving throughout the remainder of the war. In the longer term, the area would be denuded of its existing inhabitants, up to 45 million of whom he intended to kill through starvation and disease, and settled by German farmers. A start was made with the deliberate extermination of prisoners from the Red Army, who were simply penned into barbed-wire enclosures in the open, denied food and medication, and left to rot. Altogether three and a third million of them died in the course of the war, nearly 60 percent of the total Red Army prisoners taken; 300,000 were dead already by the end of 1941, before the German armed forces and war economy administrators began to realize that some of them could be used for forced labor in Germany instead of being indiscriminately murdered.

Hitler and the Nazi leadership regarded the Soviet Union as a fragile, artificial entity, consisting of a vast mass of dull peasants oppressed by a small clique of Jewish Communists. One good push and the whole edifice would collapse. As with so many aspects of Nazi ideology, this was so remote from reality that it seems justified to call it a fantasy. In fact the Soviet Union did not collapse. Stalin—who, ironically, was himself deeply anti-Semitic—rallied after an initial moment of panic, and called upon the Soviet people to resist in a famous radio broadcast on July 3. Abandoning for the moment the rhetoric of Soviet Communism, he declared the defense of the motherland against the Germans to be a “Great Patriotic War.” Realizing what fate lay in store for them if they surrendered to the Germans, and conscious of the fact that they would be shot by the Soviet secret police if they showed the slightest sign of hesitation, Stalin’s troops rallied behind their leader.

The Germans’ looting of food supplies and destruction of Soviet towns and villages reminded the Soviet soldiers of what they were fighting for. Their families would surely perish if the Germans won. Fresh reserves of men and munitions were available in quantities that the Germans could not even imagine: five million reservists were mobilized within a few days of the invasion, and nearly ten million more were soon preparing to fight. Military equipment was momentarily harder to come by, since Soviet war industries were being relocated out of harm’s way east of the Ural Mountains in an operation of such magnitude and complexity that it could not be completed until the end of November. The restructuring of the Red Army command and the reorientation of battle tactics that Stalin realized were necessary would not be completed until several months had passed. Still, within a few weeks the Red Army had begun to fight back.

Kiev War Museum monument

Well before the end of July, German officers and troops were complaining in their diaries and letters home that the Russians’ will to resist did not seem to have been broken. German troops were exhausted after weeks of rapid forced marches over huge distances and constant combat along the way. Losses amounted to more than 200,000 by the end of the month. The advance began to slow, hampered by stretched communications, poor roads, and the absence of a railway network of the necessary density to transport large quantities of men, fuel, and equipment at speed. (The Germans were forced to rely on horses, of which more than 600,000 were involved in the campaign.) On July 30, the Army Supreme Command ordered a temporary halt to the invasion to recover, regroup, and resupply.

The division of the advancing German forces into three Army Groups—North, Center, and South—was partly dictated by the vastness of the terrain to be traversed, and partly by the need to skirt the huge and virtually impenetrable obstacle of the Pripet marshes. But that stratagem, together with the heavy losses it had sustained, and the continual arrival at the front of new Soviet reserves, made it look increasingly less likely that the enemy could be eliminated by the single knockout blow favored by German military theory, going back ultimately to the early nineteenth-century treatise On War by the intellectual Prussian army officer Carl von Clausewitz.

While the advance stalled, Hitler and his generals debated what to do next. It had become obvious that the dissipation of German military strength was hampering the drive for victory. The weight of the campaign had to be concentrated into one of the three main Army Groups. The generals favored strengthening the Army Group Center for a rapid advance on Moscow, where they believed the main enemy force to be located. There it could be destroyed, they thought, bringing a Clausewitzian total victory. But Hitler refused. Instead, he strengthened Army Group South, taking away men and resources from Army Group Center in order to make it ready for the assault on Kiev.

“Hitler and the Nazi leadership regarded the Soviet Union as a fragile, artificial entity, consisting of a vast mass of dull peasants oppressed by a small clique of Jewish Communists…”

Still expecting the edifice of Soviet command to collapse, Hitler did not think that the assault on Stalin’s capital city should be the highest military priority. So he stuck to his original plan to concentrate on acquiring the food supplies and industrial resources of the Ukraine. After that, Army Group South would push on towards the Caucasus, with its oilfields, so badly needed by the petrol-starved German tanks, assault guns, and transport vehicles, while Army Group Center would resume the march on Moscow. Overawed by Hitler, whom they held to be the architect of the previous year’s rapid conquest of western Europe, in a situation where many of them had entertained serious doubts about the wisdom of attacking through the Ardennes, the generals felt unable to gainsay their leader.

Germans enjoying a pause during the assault on the USSR in 1941.

On August 21, 1941, the decision was finally taken, and soon the German forces began to encircle the city, with General Heinz Guderian’s panzers from Army Group Center approaching from the northeast, and Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt moving tanks across the river Dneiper to the south; three weeks later the various German forces joined up. The city was surrounded, with four Soviet armies encircled. Well before this, Chief of the Soviet General Staff Georgi Zhukov had urged the abandonment of the city by the Soviet forces in order to avoid disaster. But Stalin overruled him, and dismissed him from his post. The commander on the spot, Marshal Budennyi, backed Zhukov and was also fired, and then replaced by the more pliant Marshal Timoshenko.

Like Hitler, Stalin regarded retreat as a sign of cowardice, or worse, treachery. Kiev in particular held a huge symbolic importance for him as the capital of Russia in the Middle Ages and the main city in the Ukraine. The local party boss, Nikita Khrushchev, urged him to stand firm, perhaps sensing that this was what Stalin wanted to hear. The loss of Kiev, Stalin thought, would demoralize the defenders of Leningrad, besieged by the Germans in the north, and open the way for the Germans to threaten Moscow. It would also send the wrong message to the Allies, whom he was trying to persuade to open a second front by invading France. So he ordered his generals to hold the city. The decision was fatal. Replying to the order to “stand fast,” the chief of staff of the Soviet South-Western Army Group, General Tupikov, said bluntly: “This is the beginning, as you know, of catastrophe—a matter of a couple of days.” Stalin dismissed his remark as “panicky.”

The German advance was met with fierce resistance and repeated counter-attacks. “The Russians’ behavior in action is simply incomprehensible,” wrote one German soldier. “They are incredibly stubborn, and refuse to budge even under the most powerful gunfire.” Another German account spoke of the dead bodies of Russian soldiers as a “carpet” stretching for miles. The Soviet troops knew that their only chance of survival lay in breaking through the German lines, and threw themselves at the advancing forces with astonishing recklessness, resulting in “such losses,” as the German account reported, “that one wonders how they can find the courage and the men to keep coming on.” Unwilling to take prisoners, they shot any Germans they managed to capture, often venting their anger, fear, and frustration on them in horrifying acts of vengeance.

Murder of Jews in Ivangorod (Kiev region), in 1942. The photo has become a classic of German atrocities on the Eastern front.

The Germans replied in kind. On another part of the front, German troops came across the bodies of over a hundred of their comrades, hung by their hands from trees, their feet doused with petrol and set alight, a method of slow killing known among the Germans as “Stalin’s socks.” Following the discovery, four thousand Red Army prisoners of war were summarily shot by German firing squads.

Around Kiev, German planes pounded Soviet positions and communications, German panzers and infantry fought their way relentlessly forward, and the Red Army forces were steadily pushed back until the Germans finally took the citadel on the nineteenth of September. The sheer scale of the victory was unprecedented. The Germans calculated that they had taken 665,000 prisoners along with staggering quantities of tanks, guns, and equipment. In his detailed narrative and assessment of the campaign, David Stahel reckons this is an exaggeration or even a propagandistic “manipulation of the facts.” Still, there was no doubting the total defeat of the Red Army. At the end, morale had finally collapsed. One local man, observing a group of captured Red Army soldiers, reported them complaining about Stalin and his henchmen (sic): “They want us to die for them—no, we are not as stupid as they think.” Lice-ridden, hungry, desperate, with rags around their feet replacing broken and worn-out boots, they were susceptible to the blandishments of the Germans, who dropped or posted leaflets or broadcast with loudspeakers across the lines promising bread and cigarettes to anyone who surrendered. So demoralized were the Soviet troops that many gave themselves up in droves, despite the widespread knowledge of what had happened previously to huge numbers of Soviet prisoners of war taken by the Germans.

German platoon during a lull in the advance. Youth and blind faith in the superiority of German arms and race.

As soon as the Germans had taken up their quarters in the city, the Soviet secret police detonated numerous bombs that they had planted around the major public buildings and offices, killing two hundred Germans including two staff colonels, while the explosions set off fires that raged uncontrollably, fanned by high winds and encouraged by Molotov cocktails thrown surreptitiously by Soviet agents. With water supplies largely out of action, it took five days to bring the fires under control. Outraged, the German occupiers, believing after years of Nazi indoctrination that the Bolsheviks and their agents were part of a world Jewish conspiracy to destroy them, blamed the city’s Jews, and rounded up 34,000 of them, men, women, and children, took them to the nearby ravine of Babi Yar, and over a period of two days shot them all, in the largest single anti-Semitic mass extermination of the war to date. Already, SS task forces were roaming the countryside rounding up and shooting tens of thousands of other Jews. Within a few months, the gas chambers would start implementing what the Nazis were already calling “the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe.”

Kiev was a large city with 815,000 inhabitants, around half of whom had already fled the advancing German armies. For the remainder, life under German rule became increasingly impossible. The Germans quickly banned the supply of food to the city from the surrounding countryside. “Kiev must starve,” agricultural experts told confidential planning meetings, in order for the resources of the Ukraine to be devoted to feeding German troops and civilians. Soon people were reduced to eating pancakes made from ground potato peel, or bread made from animal fodder. Men, women, and children were “emaciated or swollen from hunger,” as one observer noted, roaming the streets in search of food. It was, reported Anatoly Kuznetsov, author of the classic novel Babi Yar, “a city of beggars.”

By October 1943, there were only 295,000 people left in Kiev. Scores of thousands had died from malnutrition and associated diseases. “First they finished off the Yids,” people were recorded as saying, “but they … exterminate us every day by the dozen, they’re destroying us in a slow death.” Hitler had originally ordered the city to be razed to the ground, and was reportedly angry that he had been disobeyed; but the slow death of Kiev was in fact the future he had envisaged for all Russian cities in the wake of conquest, to make way some time in the not too distant future for waves of German settlers as the ‘Slav’ population died out.

In sheer scale at least, the Battle of Kiev was the greatest German victory of the war. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels lost no time in trumpeting it as a stunning triumph for German arms and a vindication of Hitler’s change of strategy on the Eastern Front. Morale at home, dampened by the slow progress of the German advance over the previous few weeks, improved dramatically, but only because, as the SS reported, many people now expected a collapse of the Soviet regime and the “end of the war against Russia” in four to six weeks. “Kiev,” Stahel concurs, “was uniquely Hitler’s triumph.” His strategy had been bitterly opposed by his senior generals before the event. But he had been aided and abetted by the intransigence of Stalin, whose dismissal of his own senior generals and insistence on defense at all costs made a major contribution to the German victory.

The two dictators drew opposite conclusions from the outcome of the battle. Stalin belatedly recognized that it would in the future be wiser to leave matters largely to his generals. Hitler saw his triumph as a vindication of his own strategic genius, brushing his generals aside with ever-growing, ever more thinly veiled contempt. Yet as Stahel notes, the victory was Pyrrhic, the triumph illusory.

Immediately after the capture of Kiev, the German forces drove on to Moscow. But it was already too late. Throughout the summer, the paucity of rail links to the combat zone had meant that the Germans had to use dusty, unmade Soviet roads for most of their transports; huge dust clouds rose from the rumbling tanks and lorries and marching columns of men, clogging up engines and making it difficult to breathe. The autumn rains came early in 1941, with rainfall in the Ukraine by September already the worst since 1874. “Such is war on the steppes of the Ukraine,” noted one eyewitness: “dust, mud, dust, mud.” The advance on Moscow was called to a halt for three weeks.

Zhukov, the chief of the Soviet General Staff, restored to favor after the vindication of his dire warnings about Kiev, seized the opportunity to bring up fresh reserves and reorganize Moscow’s defenses. By November the onset of winter made the ground hard enough for the Germans to resume their advance. But soon it was snowing, and the German troops, who had not been issued with winter clothing because Hitler and the generals had expected to win the war by the fall, began to suffer frostbite in temperatures as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius; some froze to death. The better equipped Red Army counter-attacked and brought the advance to a halt. The consternation at this defeat caused several German generals to suffer breakdowns or even heart attacks; Hitler took the opportunity to reshape the army command, blaming his officers for the debacle. After the war, the surviving generals riposted by claiming they could have taken Moscow had they not been diverted to Kiev, thus causing a fatal delay of several weeks in the advance. But Zhukov pointed out, not unreasonably, that the existence of several Soviet armies in the Kiev area would have exposed the German flank to attacks that he certainly would have ordered them to undertake on the German forces if they had moved towards Moscow immediately.

The weather was not the only problem. Every German victory was bought at a price that the Wehrmacht could ill afford. By the sixteenth of September it had lost almost half a million men since the invasion. In some divisions the casualty rate stood at nearly 17 per cent. Guderian’s Panzer Group 2 had lost a total of 32,000 men. In September alone, during and immediately after the Battle of Kiev, the German forces in the east suffered more than 50,000 fatalities. Replacements took time to train and bring up, and German combat units were already below strength when the battle for Moscow began. This meant that commanders had to ask those who remained to fight and to march even harder than before. Not surprisingly, they became increasingly battle-weary. Growing attacks from Soviet partisans in the rear only added to their woes. The tired, exhausted, lice-ridden, sick, and freezing soldiers who faced Zhukov’s troops before Moscow in December 1941 were very different from the optimistic, dashing troops who had entered the Soviet Union six months before.

Just as bad was the strain that the continual fighting, and major operations such as the Battle of Kiev, placed on German supplies. Stukas and other combat aircraft caused considerable damage in the battle, but these planes were being shot down and crews killed or captured all the time. The situation on the ground was if anything even worse. General Model’s Third Panzer Division, beginning the invasion with a force of just under 200 tanks, had only ten in operation by the middle of September. As Guderian concluded, “These figures show how badly the troops needed a rest and a period for maintenance.” The bad weather made it difficult to bring up spare parts and fuel to the front.

German war production and recruitment could not keep pace with losses on this scale over a long period. By contrast, the Soviet economy was outperforming the German in every respect, producing twice the number of combat aircraft and three times the number of tanks. At the beginning of February 1942, Hitler’s Minister of Armaments Fritz Todt was warning that Germany could not hope to keep pace even with the Soviet Union, let alone with the British Empire and the United States as well. Each of these three enemy powers was out-producing Germany on its own: together their economic strength was unmatchable. The Soviet Union’s resources in manpower were virtually inexhaustible, especially once the bombing of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath focused the attention of the Japanese on the war with the United States and thus allowed Stalin to bring huge reinforcements across from the Pacific theater to engage in the defense of Moscow.

The year 1942 would see further German victories, but they were to be short-lived. The writing was already on the wall. Indeed, Stahel argues, it had already been there at the beginning of August, when Operation Barbarossa had been brought to its first temporary halt. The whole campaign depended on a quick victory, bringing the Soviet Union to its knees in a few weeks, just as had happened with Germany’s swift victories in the west, over France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway the previous year. But the blitzkrieg tactics that had worked by pinning up Germany’s western enemies against the North Sea and the English Channel could not work in the limitless expanse of the Eastern European steppe. Small and medium-sized west European powers were one thing; conquering the might of the Soviet Union, increasingly helped by supplies convoyed from the United States, was an entirely different proposition.

The story of the Battle of Kiev has been told many times, but seldom in such detail as it is in David Stahel’s book. Relying mainly on German sources, he brings new evidence to bear on the conflict with the official war diaries of German divisions, as well as making good use of published editions of the private field-post letters and diaries of German soldiers of all ranks. This is emphatically a military history, replete with complex (and not always easily decipherable) maps of troop movements and dispositions, technical terms, titles and abbreviations, and full names for all the troop units involved. Some of this impedes readability (particularly irritating is the use of Roman numerals, as in “the XXXXVII Panzer Corps”), but overall Stahel conveys extremely complex military action with exemplary clarity.

Unlike more traditional military historians, Stahel is acutely aware of the wider context of the action, from Hitler’s overall aims for the war to the importance of logistics for the outcome; from the murderous racism and ruthless pragmatism with which the German leaders, military as well as political, condemned so many Soviet civilians to starve and so many Jewish inhabitants to terrible death, to the postwar disputes among historians and retired generals over Hitler’s strategy; from the conditions troops had to face in the Ukrainian and Russian autumn and winter to the basic realities of the economic foundations of the German war effort, foundations which, he argues convincingly if not entirely originally, were starting to crumble almost from the moment when Operation Barbarossa was launched.

His realism refreshingly prevents him from following traditional military historians’ often overly positive and simplistic descriptions of “great” generals and “decisive” battles. Kiev, as he correctly notes, was only part of a much wider conflict, and the impression, so enthusiastically conveyed by Hitler and his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, that it was a decisive step in the conquest of the Soviet Union, was in reality no more than an illusion. Privately, Goebbels was far less optimistic than he told his tame press to be about the outcome of the war. Already in mid-September 1941, on the eve of the capture of Kiev, he was noting in his diary that the war in the east was not going to end as quickly as Hitler had supposed. The blitzkrieg had turned into a war of resources. “After it has become known that the campaign in the east cannot be brought to an end in the time we had actually expected to do so, the people should also be made aware of what difficulties we confront … It now depends on who can endure this the longest … Indeed, we are now fighting with our backs against the wall.”

Richard Evans is Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College at Cambridge University, and author of The Third Reich at War, published by the Penguin Press in 2009.

[printfriendly]

What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

The Long Arm of the EU: the Association Agreement and Expansionist Policies

By Jürgen Wagner | Translation by Paul Carline

There they go again: nothing learned from a long and painful history. And the US, misguidedly, is stoking the fires.

Without a true political integration, can the European Union ever dream of fielding its own independent army?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is often alleged that the EU’s foreign policy is cobbled together in an ad hoc fashion – more often badly than well – and, so the common critique goes, that there is a lack of any coherent strategy. In this paper I maintain, to the contrary, that the European Union is in fact pursuing a targeted geostrategic goal aimed at extending its sphere of influence. The motive for this is the deeply rooted belief that in order to achieve its goal of becoming a “world power”, it is essential for it to gain control of an imperial ‘grand area’ – as will be shown by reference to publications of the [European] Group on Grand Strategy (GoGS). The first priority is to control its immediate “neighbourhood”, the most important means for which is the conclusion of an association agreement between a neighbouring state and the EU. It was thus no accident – for precisely this reason – that the escalation of tension and violence in Ukraine came immediately after the former president, Victor Yanukovich, decided to postpone signature of the association agreement with the EU which was then on the table.

Pretension to world power status and strategy of expansion

Influential exponents of European politics are more and more openly articulating the pretension to join the front line of the battle for global power and influence. Thus Social-Democrat Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said in 2013:

“Whether it wants to be or nor, Europe is a ‘global player’. The EU is the biggest and richest single market in the world, our economic strength accounts for a quarter of the world’s GDP. The EU is the biggest trading bloc in the world, the biggest donor of development aid in the world – the EU is an economic giant. Global economic power goes hand in hand with global political responsibility; Europe cannot back out of that responsibility. Europe’s partners are justified in expecting that Europe will face up to its responsibility and that the economic superpower will also become a global political superpower”.

From the point of view of the political elites, a “European Superpower” that wants to be taken seriously inescapably has to exert control over its European neighbourhood. Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorkski formulated it perfectly when he said: “If the EU wants to be a superpower – and Poland endorses that aim – it has to be able to exercise influence in its own neighbourhood”.

Thomas Renard, Senior Research Fellow at Egmont and Consultant to GoGS, underscores this: “Of course the EU has to establish itself as a power in its own region if it wants to be a global power”.

Members of GoGS – an increasingly influential group of EU geo-politicians – have been demanding for years that the EU finally commit itself openly to a geostrategy aimed at expanding its sphere of influence and establishing an imperial ‘grand area’. Writing in 2011, GoGS co-director James Rogers explained:

“The ultimate aim of geostrategy, then, is to link geography and politics to maximize the power and reach of the domestic territory. [….] Such an approach must be backed up by a subtle but formidable military posture, which aims to prevent potential rivals from emerging, encourages a high degree of security dependency on the part of foreign governments, and prevents dangerous non-state and state actors from working with one another.”

Based on this, Rogers developed criteria for delineating the borders of such a territory – defined by him as a “Grand Area” – thus, in a sense, laying out a kind of cartography of an EU empire. He includes large parts of Africa, the oil-rich Caspian and central-Asian region, and the Middle East, but also extends the ‘area’ far towards East Asia, where the shipping lanes have to be controlled (see map). Specifically, those countries and regions are to be integrated into the “Grand Area” which satisfy the following requirements:

“From a geopolitical perspective this zone would have to meet five criteria:

Represent an area the European Union can work towards defending most cost-effectively through the expansion of the Common Security and Defence Policy – in other words, without mandating an excessive and draining defence effort.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n addition, in order to exert control over the “Grand Area”, it should be covered with a dense network of European military bases: “The ‘Grand Area’ approach would attempt to integrate those countries into a permanent Europe-led system, underpinned by military stations, better communication lines and tighter partnerships – a European ‘forward presence’ – to reduce the need for sporadic intervention.”

The network of military bases is primarily designed to emphasize two aims: “Firstly, to deter foreign powers from meddling in countries in the wider European Neighbourhood and secondly, to dissuade obstinacy and misbehaviour on the part of local rulers”. Specifically, the proposal is to install a whole series of new bases: “New European military stations may be required in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Arctic region, and along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean. The intention behind these installations would be to (…) exercise a latent but permanent power within the ‘Grand Area’”.

Now one might dismiss Rogers’ ideas as the product of someone who has gone decidedly off the rails, but there is no question of us dealing here with some “geopolitical backbencher” – as is shown by the fact that he was commissioned by the EU’s own think-tank, the European Institute for Security Studies (EUISS), to write one of the core papers on the future of EU military policy, in which large elements of his “Grand Area Idea” were incorporated. It is striking that, in the way it has been carried out, EU enlargement corresponds significantly with Rogers’ idea. Within the political elites, discussions have been held for some time on extending the EU’s military presence as far as East Asia – and the adoption in June 2014 of the “European Maritime Security Strategy” represented an important intermediate step. But it is clear that greater importance attaches to control of the immediate “neighbourhood” within the foreseeable future – and the EU has already been working on this for many years.

Eastern enlargement as a strategy of expansion

For a long time, limits to the expansion of EU influence into the neighbouring area were imposed especially by the existence of the Soviet Union. But with the collapse of the U.S.S.R. at the beginning of the 1990s, the EU was presented with an enormous area for expansion which had to be ‘conquered’. This happened very quickly in the form of the so-called “eastern enlargement”, which had basically already been decided with the adoption of the “Copenhagen Criteria” in 1993. In order to be formally accepted into the EU, accession candidates had to submit themselves to a neoliberal shock therapy which essentially involved renouncing any and all measures of protection for their own economies and entering into “free and fair competition” with their far more powerful competitors in Western Europe. “Eastern enlargement primarily serves to open up new markets for the Western powers – the so-called “global players” – and to secure the “acquis communautaire” by means of the regulatory framework”.

In general, the strategy was successful: after the candidate countries had been forced to accept far-reaching concessions in negotiations lasting several years, in 2004 and 2007 twelve new countries – almost all from Eastern Europe – were integrated into the European sphere of influence as junior members. Since that time, only one other country – Croatia – has joined the EU, the reason being that the distribution of votes in the most important EU organ – the Council of Ministers – has been more closely aligned to the population size of a member state than before. Admitting new countries – especially those with large populations – would change the balance of power to the detriment of the major EU powers, and is thus not seriously on the agenda at this time.

In view of this, “expansion by enlargement” – which had in fact been quite successful – was no longer usable: “Even before the completion of the 2004 enlargement, the European Commission was already considering how to continue. (…) The EU had reached the limits of its existing developmental dynamics – a two-way reinforcement through integration and enlargement. (…) But it was also clear that an abrupt end to the dynamic of expansion could not be in the interests of the EU, as it would involve the risk of creating a stark conflict of interest between the EU and its periphery. Thus a plan had to be hatched that would allow further expansion of the EU – but an expansion that did not force the EU to accept further enlargement. How is expansion without enlargement possible?”

Imperial neighbourhood policy

The new strategy of expansion had actually been initiated as early as 2003 with the Commission’s “Wider Europe Communication” [full title: “Wider Europe – Neighbourhood: A New Framework for Relations with our Eastern and Southern Neighbours”. COM(2003) 104, 11 March 2003], which paved the way for the introduction the following year of the “European Neighbourhood Policy” (ENP). In relation to the ENP, which currently involves 15 countries around the EU, its official raison d’être is the promotion of democracy and prosperity, but in reality the same objectives are being pursued as previously through enlargement. There is only one – but very significant – difference: for the reasons outlined above, the EU was not prepared to offer the ENP countries the prospect of accession. The Commission’s “Wider Europe” communication states drily: “A response to the practical issues posed by proximity and neighbourhood should be seen as separate from the question of EU accession.”

Apart from that, the clear priority in the Neighbourhood Policy is to enforce the neoliberal economic agenda and the integration of further countries into the European sphere of influence:

“What is not said is that the main reasons for economic integration are to bolster the competitiveness of the EU, integrate new economies into the expanding economy of the Empire (the EU) and to gain access to natural resources in the energy-rich neighbouring countries. The enormous accumulation of prosperity and economic power has given the EU a lever with which to impose market-friendly reforms – including privatisation, the liberalisation of trade and the adoption of the EU’s regulatory mechanisms – at the same time as avoiding being drawn into the ongoing debates in the surrounding countries. By doing so, however, rather than contributing to stability it runs the risk of creating political instability and of exacerbating the economic inequalities in its neighbourhood”.

Denied the lure of EU membership, the political classes and the public in the neighbouring countries are to be “persuaded” of the necessity of neoliberal reforms primarily through the promise of large sums of money – almost 15.5 billion Euro have been allocated to the “European Neighbourhood Instrument” (ENI) for the EU budget between 2014 and 2020.

The basic stipulations and regulations for countries to promote themselves as peripherally integrated sales outlets and investment opportunities for the core EU will then be set in stone as binding elements of an Association Agreement which the countries will have to sign. These agreements are central to the EU’s current strategy of expansion and are thus of enormous importance: “The association agreements which the EU is pushing for in the post-Soviet arena are a key element of the expansion of the EU’s sphere of influence to the east”, according to Professor Joachim Becker of the Institute for International Economics and Development at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Neoliberal Association Agreement

By 2012, the lengthy negotiations with Ukraine over an association agreement had finally resulted in a document that was ready to be signed – as it subsequently was, in full and unamended, on 27 June 2014, by the new rulers of Ukraine. For a long time only parts of the text of the “Association Agreement between the European Union and its Member States of the one part and Ukraine of the other” were to be found on the Internet, but it was finally published in full in the Official Journal of the EU on 29 May 2014. It comprises a 180-page core text plus a further 2000 or so pages of annexes and protocols devoted primarily to defining in detail the free trade zone being pursued.

If one examines the specific provisions of the agreement, it becomes clear that these are extremely problematic for Ukraine from an economic point of view. Three elements stand out: firstly, that a free trade zone is to be set up within 10 years; secondly, that for this purpose all tariffs and other measures designed to protect the domestic economy must be almost entirely abolished; and thirdly, that the introduction of common – N.B. European – production and certification standards will form a binding part of the agreement.

If one takes each of these points in turn, one quickly discovers the core concern: “The Parties shall progressively establish a free trade area over a transitional period of a maximum of 10 years starting from the entry into force of this Agreement” (Title IV, Article 25). In order to implement this goal, any tariffs [customs duties] with which a country protects its own economy but which could make the products of another country more expensive must be almost completely removed: “Each Party shall reduce or eliminate customs duties on originating goods of the other Party in accordance with the Schedules set out in Annex I-A to this Agreement (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Schedules’). (Title IV, Article 29, para. 1). Anyone making the extremely frustrating attempt to understand what is hidden in Annex I-A is confronted by a list of around 500 pages which details the future tariffs for almost every imaginable product. We must be grateful to the European Commission for explaining – in a background paper – that the Association Agreement will result in 99.1% of Ukraine’s tariffs being lowered, and 98.1% of the EU’s.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n order to make this process irreversible, the association agreement prescribes that the tariffs may not be raised again at a later date: “Neither Party may increase any existing customs duty, or adopt any new customs duty, on a good originating in the territory of the other Party.” (Title IV, Article 30). In addition, so-called ‘non-tariff barriers to trade’ – such as restrictions on quantities – are likewise banned: “No Party shall adopt or maintain any prohibition or restriction or any measure having an equivalent effect on the import of any good of the other Party or on the export or sale for export of any good destined for the territory of the other Party, except as otherwise provided in this Agreement or in accordance with Article XI of GATT 1994 and its interpretative notes.” (Title IV, Article 35).

A further passage with considerable implications appears under the seemingly inoffensive heading of “Approximation of technical regulations, standards, and conformity assessment”. This binds Ukraine to accept European production and certification standards: “Ukraine shall take the necessary measures in order to gradually achieve conformity with EU technical regulations and EU standardisation, metrology, accreditation, conformity assessment procedures and the market surveillance system, and undertakes to follow the principles and practices laid down in relevant EU Decisions and Regulations (1)”. (Title IV, Article 56, §1).

While the European Union claims that the increased competition the Association Agreement brings with it – and of which the EU is fully aware – will result in undreamt-of improvements in efficiency and unleash a veritable economic boom in the country, the Russians maintain that the exact opposite will be the case. For example, Sergei Glasyev, adviser to President Putin on questions of Eurasian integration, wrote: “If Ukraine signs the Association Agreement with the EU and enters this unequal free trade zone, it will suffer negative growth and a negative trading balance up to 2020. We estimate the losses at around 1.5% of domestic GDP per annum. Up to 2020, Ukrainian products will be ousted from its own market, accompanied by economic recession and a reduction in opportunities for development”.

Of course, in the context of this dispute it is necessary to treat Russian statements with some care. But one hears similar arguments from different quarters – to the effect that Ukrainian companies which are already under great pressure from the introduction of expensive European product standards and certification procedures will be virtually defenceless in the face of the mighty competition from the EU due to the abolition of protective tariffs and non-tariff restrictions. Even Germany’s own “Germany Trade and Invest” foreign trade agency concedes this: “The adoption of EU standards and survival in the EU free trade zone will in many cases require immense modernisation efforts on the part of Ukrainian companies. The foodstuffs industry in particular has to adapt itself to the new standards. Financing [such changes] often presents an almost insurmountable hurdle to Ukrainian companies”.

Prof. Joachim Becker, whom we have already cited above, comes to a similar conclusion: “The geo-economic and geo-political line of attack is particularly obvious in the case of Ukraine. Going far beyond the liberalisation of trade, it is intended that Ukraine should be partially integrated into the internal market of the EU. This would mean that Ukraine would have to adopt substantial parts of EU economic law. Ukraine would lose not only possibilities for external protection of the national economy, but also core options for its domestic industrial policies (e.g. in relation to public tenders). (…) A “deep and comprehensive free trade area” is a core element of the Association Agreement. For Ukraine, ‘deepened’ free trade and the adoption of core elements of EU economic law might well result in a ‘deepening’ of de-industrialisation and ‘deeper’ structures of dependence”. (Italics ours.)

Concerns such as these appear to have played an important role with the Yanukovich government, which is why the attempt was made during the negotiations to have various protective measures for domestic companies included in the Agreement. But this was categorically rejected by the EU. When Russia then offered Ukraine the prospect of considerable economic concessions (a discount on gas supplies worth around $3 billion a year and the purchase of 15 billion dollars’ worth of government bonds), it made perfect sense for the Yanukovich government to reject the Agreement in November 2013. This then initiated a process of escalation – massively supported by the US and EU – which led finally to the overthrow of Yanukovich and the establishment of a “transitional government” that lacked any legitimacy.

Military Association Agreement

The significance of the Association Agreement with Ukraine is, however, not merely economic, but to an even greater extent geo-political. This is so because it represents in practice a decision to join just one of two alliances which stand in an increasingly hostile relationship to each other. An Association Agreement with the EU categorically and permanently rules out accession to the Eurasian Economic Union to which Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan belong (and vice versa).

Given this, a more or less openly waged war has broken out over control of those countries which have not yet formally joined one or the other block. Thus GoGS co-director James Rogers writes:

“Eastern Europe is the gateway between the vast resources of Asia and the dense and technologically advanced populations of Europe. This means that it will either be controlled by imperial despotism in the form of Russia (sic), or by democratic civilisation in the form of Europe. Due to its geostrategic location, who gains access over this crucial zone will also gain influence over the entire Eurasian supercontinent. When Eastern Europe is controlled from Moscow, Europeans – and by extension, North Americans – will be held captive, as they were for much of the Cold War. When Eastern Europe is shaped by Brussels (as well as London, Paris and Berlin) – and by extension, Washington – Russia will be weakened and rendered relatively harmless, as it was for much of the 1990s and 2000s.”

Bearing such [insidious] statements in mind, we can understand the otherwise rather strange (because they are unusual in such an association agreement) passages in the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement on the development of military cooperation and integration into the military policy of the EU:

“The Parties shall intensify their dialogue and cooperation and promote gradual convergence in the area of foreign and security policy, including the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), and shall address in particular issues of conflict prevention and crisis management, regional stability, disarmament, non-proliferation, arms control and arms export control as well as enhanced mutually-beneficial dialogue in the field of space. Cooperation will be based on common values and mutual interests, and shall aim at increasing policy convergence and effectiveness, and promoting joint policy planning. To this end, the Parties shall make use of bilateral, international and regional fora.

The Parties shall enhance practical cooperation in conflict prevention and crisis management, in particular with a view to increasing the participation of Ukraine in EU-led civilian and military crisis management operations as well as relevant exercises and training activities, including those carried out in the framework of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).” (Title II, Articles 7 and 10).

It is surely such passages as these which have contributed to Moscow’s decision to challenge the West. Probably also because it cannot have escaped Moscow’s notice that in a core strategy paper published on 15 October 2013, Catherine Ashton, the EU’s “High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy”, stated that the whole of the European periphery was an area of special interest and even intervention for the EU:

“The renewed emphasis by the US on the Asia-Pacific region is a logical consequence of geostrategic developments [e.g. the rise of China]. It also means that Europe must assume greater responsibility for its own security and that of its neighbourhood. (…) The Union must be able to act decisively through CSDP as a security provider, in partnership when possible but autonomously when necessary, in its neighbourhood, including through direct intervention. Strategic autonomy must materialize first in the EU’s neighbourhood.”

ABOUT THIS MATERIAL
What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

US Training Nazis, Western Media Providing Cover

ERIC DRAITSER | NEO (New Eastern Outlook)

Region: Ukraine in the world

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t has become a popular position both in the mainstream and pseudo-alternative media, and among those on the Russophobic left, to downplay the significant fascist influence on the political and military institutions, as well as the cultural character of the “New Ukraine.” Quite often, the reality of Ukrainian fascism is obscured by vague assertions that such conclusions are merely “Russian propaganda,” that they are simply Kremlin talking points, and not statements of objective reality.

Indeed, influential political figures such as the ever-hilarious John McCain and Jen Psaki, and global media brands like The Guardian and FOX, have all rushed to the nearest camera or twitter account to proclaim that Ukraine is “free” and that we should “stand united” with it. Carefully embedded in these pleas is the notion that Ukraine is democratic, and that whatever “ultra-nationalists” – coded language for fascists and Nazis – exist, are merely a marginal influence at best.

Such vacuous statements belie the inescapable fact that Nazis make up an important strata of both the political and military establishment. Moreover, they are intended to provide cover for US policy which provides these elements with the support they need to both influence the political development of the country, and prosecute its illegal war against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk.

At issue is not whether everyone in Ukraine is a Nazi, as that is an absurd argument that no one is really making. Rather, the question has to do with precisely which individuals and factions that are unmistakably fascist are being supported, directly or indirectly, by the US and its allies. More to the point, which of the US-backed Nazi elements are integral to the continued illegal war against the East, and which figure prominently in the future trajectory of the Ukrainian state.

Arming Nazis to Fight for “Democracy”

The war in Ukraine is being prosecuted by the US-backed government in Kiev using all available means. While of course the regular Ukrainian military forces (also armed and trained by the US) are fighting this war, alongside them, and in concert with them, are outright Nazi elements who, like their regular army brethren, are receiving direct support from Washington.

The Associated Press reported on March 31, 2015 that “The United States plans to send soldiers to Ukraine in April for training exercises with units of the country’s national guard… the units to be trained include the Azov Battalion, a volunteer force that has attracted criticism for its far-right sentiments including brandishing an emblem widely used in Nazi Germany.” Of course, first and foremost is the fact that US military will be on the ground in Ukraine providing direct support for the Ukrainian military. Isn’t that precisely what Washington accuses Russia of doing (while failing to provide evidence), namely providing direct military support on the ground?

The Azov Battalion does not hide its Nazi ideology. But apparently even Nazi flags do not register with the ever “professional” Western correspondents.

But leaving aside such pesky questions as to hypocrisy and accountability, there is still an even more salient point. The language employed in the Associated Press article essentially whitewashes the true nature of the Azov Battalion: who they are and what they stand for. AP refers to criticism of the Azov Battalion for its “far-right sentiments including brandishing an emblem widely used in Nazi Germany.” Unpack that deliberately, deceptively circumspect language, and it becomes clear that there is a fear, if not outright refusal, to call Azov Battalion what they are: Nazis.

It is not “far right sentiments” that Azov holds. Far right sentiments might be American libertarian supporters of Ron Paul, or even supporters of Marine Le Pen in France. The Azov Battalion instead has fascist sentiments that include advocating for ethnic cleansing to “purify” Ukraine. They talk of “one nation for one people” and other such Nazi slogans. But don’t take my word for it.

As Foreign Policy magazine – not exactly a “pro-Russian” source – quoted Azov Battalion literature in 2014:

Unfortunately, among the Ukrainian people today there are a lot of ‘Russians’ (by their mentality, not their blood), ‘kikes,’ ‘Americans,’ ‘Europeans’ (of the democratic-liberal European Union), ‘Arabs,’ ‘Chinese’ and so forth, but there is not much specifically Ukrainian… The reason for this situation is the mass propaganda of trans-myths that are foreign to us through advertising, television, laws and education. It’s unclear how much time and effort will be needed to eradicate these dangerous viruses from our people.

This conception of the nation as rotten and impure because of perceived “degenerate” elements is a hallmark of all fascist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan in the US to Hitler’s Nazi Party. These are most certainly not, as the AP referred to them, “far right sentiments.” Such views are not even “nationalistic” in the broadest sense of the word. They are deeply racist and fundamentally rooted in bigotry.

As an Azov Battalion fighter explained to The Guardian, “I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia…But Putin’s not even a Russian. Putin’s a Jew.” Aside from the obvious falsehood of that statement, it is quite revealing in the sense that it illustrates unmistakably the true nature of many, if not all, Azov’s members’ views; to be fair, they are also deeply anti-Russian, despite what this particular fighter had to say.

Returning to the AP article, the inexplicable use of the phrase “brandishing an emblem widely used in Nazi Germany” is deeply troubling. An honest description would simply be “brandishing Nazi emblems,” a clear statement that would get the point across. Instead, the reader is left with the notion that somehow Azov uses an emblem – in this case the Wolfsangel – that just happened to be used during the Nazi regime, rather than a symbol deeply embedded in the collective memory of Nazism in the region.

This goes hand in hand with the utterly absurd obfuscations of Azov members themselves who claim that their swastikas and other symbols are just indicators of their “interest in Nordic mythology.” Or, as one of the Azov members told The Guardian, “The swastika has nothing to do with the Nazis, it was an ancient sun symbol.” While there may be some who are either shockingly ignorant, or simply feign stupidity to mask their fascist ideology, the leadership in Ukraine that relies on Azov and other such groups knows perfectly well who they are and what they believe.

But of course, the mainstream and pseudo-alternative media, along with the liberal and conservative Russophobes, quite often try to deflect the logical conclusions of clear-thinking people who see the fascists for what they are. They argue that Azov Battalion and Right Sector are just “marginal” groups that are held up by “Russian propaganda” to smear Ukraine’s government and military. But this is far from the truth.

Even The Guardian, a publication I have personally critiqued for their anti-Russian lies regarding Ukraine, has confirmed that these are not isolated examples, noting that the Azov Battalion is “one of many volunteer brigades,” and that “Azov and other battalions could be integrated into the army or special forces when the conflict is over.”

Ukraine’s Fascist Future

That Azov Battalion, Right Sector, and other fascist formations do not comprise all of Ukraine is clear. But what is equally clear is that such groups wield tremendous power and influence both through their ability to marshal weapons and use brute force, and for their deep connections to the political and financial oligarchic establishment controlling the country.

The Nazi-deniers are fond of saying that, despite the fact that a number of key fascist leaders were elected to Ukraine’s parliament, they represent a tiny segment of the political establishment. Dmitry Yarosh, the founder of the fascist Right Sector organization, has been serving as an MP in Ukraine’s parliament where he has directly, and repeatedly, threatened Ukraine’s oligarch President Poroshenko with a violent overthrow of the government. As recently as late March 2015, Yarosh was quoted as saying that:

Of course, the next [Maidan] will be, let’s say, different. People are so heavily armed now that no one is going to sit in tents and wait for a month or two, singing songs or waving flashlights…Our position is that we must walk on a knife’s edge. On the one hand we must maintain the state, but on the other, we must make it so that parasites do not drink the blood of the Ukrainian people, as they did before the revolution.

Naturally, in the so called “New Ukraine” such inflammatory language coming from an infamous Nazi criminal is no mere rhetoric, but rather must be understood as a direct threat. However, rather than purging such individuals from the government and putting them on trial, Yarosh is offered a position in the Ministry of Defense.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ther fascist political formations are also prominent, including the well represented Radical Party of Oleh Lyashko, a violent criminal with a history of kidnapping and torture documented even by the pro-Western NGO Amnesty International. The notorious Svoboda Party of Oleh Tyahnybok is also a major player. Though Svoboda’s direct political representation in the parliament is low, its influence is substantial as former members have infested a number of other political parties.

The precarious state of the government in Kiev which tenuously maintains its grip on power is worrying to many around the world – especially in Russia – who rightly fear the possibility of a full-blown fascist takeover from the likes of Yarosh, Lyashko, and oligarchs such as Ihor Kolomoisky, who have paid the salaries of various fascist groups in order to use them as de facto private armies. And it is within this bubbling cauldron of hate and political uncertainty that the United States has chosen to arm and train fighters for a continued proxy war against Russia.

But of course, one cannot blame imperialist “strategic planners” in Washington for pursuing such a dangerous policy…after all, it’s what they do.

One can blame, however, a compliant corporate-controlled western media which has abdicated all responsibility to truth in its reporting on Ukraine. The Associated Press article mentioned above is a very minor example of the sort of propaganda that has passed for journalism on Ukraine since the coup against Yanukovich in February 2014. The New York Times and the Washington Post, FOX News and MSNBC, all are equally accountable.

But the lies are only part of the story. It is when those lies cost innocent lives that we must stand up and demand an end to the madness. In Ukraine, sadly, it seems that US policy and media propaganda work hand-in-glove to inflame the situation in a country already on fire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Eric Draitser is an independent geopolitical analyst based in New York City, he is the founder of StopImperialism.org and OP-ed columnist for RT, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” [/box]

SOURCE: http://journal-neo.org/2015/04/21/us-training-nazis-western-media-providing-cover/

[printfriendly]

What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

UNDERSTANDING THE HOLOCAUST IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

MICHAEL FAULKNER
Part one of a two-part series.

“We should properly use the term ‘Holocaust’ to describe the policy of total physical annihilation of a nation or a people. To date, this has happened once, to the Jews under Nazism.”
—Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective. 1978.

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]anuary 27 2015 marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, less than three months before the final collapse of the Third Reich and the end of the Second World War in May of that year. The extermination camp was liberated by the Red Army on its advance into Poland. In April the British and American armies liberated the camp at Bergen-Belsen and other concentration camps in Western Germany, and revealed to the world the first horrific film images of the genocide perpetrated by the bestial Nazi regime, which had taken the lives of so many millions during the preceding six years. From that time on all those throughout the world with access to the information, whether through the direct evidence of the newsreel camera or through various other sources, were aware that the Nazis had murdered in cold blood many millions of innocent people who were guilty of nothing other than having been born into one or other of particular ethnic groups deemed by the Nazis to be ‘unworthy of life.’

Auschwitz-Birkenau: end of the line, literally.

Since that time it has been impossible to deny knowledge of the genocide. It has been impossible to deny that it happened, or plausibly to claim that somehow it has been deliberately exaggerated. Attempts by some, almost always neo-Nazis and apologists for Nazism, to peddle such falsifications or denials, have met with the contempt they deserve. Such people are worthy of consideration only as subjects for study in the realm of psycho-pathology. But this does not mean that there is any consensus about how the Holocaust should be understood. In the perspective of history, and amongst historians who have specialized in studying it, there is still much controversy. Indeed, some historians still avoid using the term ‘Holocaust’, preferring to use the terms ‘Shoah’ or ‘Judeocide’. Then there is considerable disagreement about whether ‘The Holocaust’ should refer only, or primarily, to the genocide of the Jews. Such disagreements are quite apart from the tendency over recent years to describe as genocide, or attempted genocide, large numbers of other mass killings that have been perpetrated against innocent victims all over the world.

Germans herd Jewish victims to their immediate execution in the woods and pre-dug mass graves.

This article will concentrate primarily on two aspects of the subject: (1) To what extent, if at all, the Holocaust should be regarded as unique in history, and as a uniquely Jewish tragedy, and (2) How understanding of the Holocaust was influenced for three decades after 1945 by the ideological imperatives of the Cold War. Because any serious discussion of the issues raised will inevitably and quite properly involve both acute intellectual enquiry and strong emotional commitment, it is necessary to begin with an unequivocal statement of the standpoint from which the issues discussed will be approached.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm titled his history of what he called The Short Twentieth Century – 1914 – 1991, “The Age of Extremes.” He argues that after about 150 years of secular decline, the twentieth century, with the onset of the First World War, witnessed an upsurge of barbarism which by the 1990s had shown no signs of abating. Barbarism should be understood as the breakdown of the rules and moral standards governing relations between members of a civilized society, and more specifically, as the reversal of what he calls “the project of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment” – the existence of rules and standards of moral behaviour conducive to the pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness. According to Hobsbawm, between 1914 and 1990, the death toll from wars, genocides and various armed conflicts amounted to 187 million, approximately 9 per cent of the world’s population in 1900. “The Age of Extremes” was written in 1994 and does not include accounts of the Rwandan genocide or of slaughter involved in the break-up of Yugoslavia or the first Gulf war. And of course, the grim record has continued unabated into the present century with the invasion of Iraq and its catastrophic consequences now unfolding in all their horror.

Twentieth Century Barbarism

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Holocaust can only be understood within the context of the twentieth century’s descent into barbarism. But to contextualize it is neither to simply assimilate it to other genocides nor to attribute to it a special status, a uniqueness setting it apart from all others. For example, it has been argued by some who adopt the former approach that in the Soviet Union far more people perished in the man-made Ukrainian famine and the liquidation of the Kulaks during the collectivization of the 1930s than were murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. On the basis of the numbers involved they claim that the Soviet genocide was worse than the Nazi one. In this way the Holocaust may be subsumed with other genocides and possibly accorded a place in a hierarchy of horrors according to the numbers of victims. Some of those who argue that the Holocaust was unique see it as an almost supra-historical phenomenon, beyond the comprehension of the historian and essentially unfathomable to anyone who did not experience it. The problems with this are manifold. It de-contextualizes and mystifies the Holocaust. It follows logically that once there are no more living survivors of the death camps (and Auschwitz stands a symbol for them all) there will be no point in any further research into the Nazi Judeocide.

The Uniqueness of The Holocaust

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he only approach to this subject which rests firmly on the ground of historical fact and historical truth is one which recognizes that the Holocaust was indeed unique in the sense intended by Yehuda Bauer, cited under the title of this article. This does not obviate the uniqueness of other cases of genocide – for example, the Armenian massacres of 1915 – within their specific contexts. The Holocaust is unique in that it is the only example in history of an attempt, based on a fanatical ideology, a firm intention and clearly conceived plan, to murder every member of a particular people – the Jews – and thereby to eliminate them forever from the face of the earth. This was a genocide which, had its operation been able to continue, would have been considered completed only with the total annihilation of the Jewish people. However horrifying were the massacres and persecutions of many millions of others at the hands of the Nazis – Poles, Russians, homosexuals (and political enemies)– all regarded as “sub-human”, no other people was singled out for complete extermination, “ausrottung” in the phrase used publicly by Hitler in his address to the Reichstag in 1939. The terrible fate of so many Gypsies is in some ways comparable, but it is not an exact parallel. Large numbers went to the gas chambers as “a-socials” but Gypsies who were integrated into the wider population were often ignored. There is, of course, a sense in which it remains almost impossible to grasp how such a barbaric enterprise could have been possible in a world that had grown out of the European Enlightenment, and particularly to have come out of a civilization that had contributed so much to it.

Buchenwald ovens.

But there were those who, during the fateful years leading to the catastrophe, began to have a notion of what was to befall the Jews. According to Marxist historian Enzo Traverso, in 1938 “Trotsky predicted that a new conflict would lead to ‘physical extermination’ of the Jews.” Traverso also draws attention to the very last written work (Theses on Philosophy and history. 1940.) by the German-Jewish writer, Walter Benjamin, in which he “sketched the outline of a new vision of history in which the idea of catastrophe replaced the myth of progress.” Later that same year, 1940, both were dead, Trotsky murdered and Benjamin by his own hand. In 1942 the first serious (and in many ways still unsurpassed) Marxist study of the Nazi regime, Behemoth by another German exile, Franz Neumann, was published in the United States. The book was completed in 1941, just before the German invasion of the Soviet Union and therefore prior to the Wannsee Conference. In the chapter devoted to Nazi race theory and antisemitism, Neumann writes that “National Socialism is the first Anti-Semitic movement to advocate the complete destruction of the Jews. But this purpose is only part of a wider plan defined as ‘the purification of German blood’. In which barbarism and a few progressive features combine to form a repellent whole.”

Nazi Antisemitism

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is not easy to present concisely a clear and accurate account of the role played by antisemitism in the Nazi Weltanschauung, but it is essential to an understanding of the Holocaust. It goes without saying that Nazism was profoundly and fanatically racist. Its racism was inherited and refined from the pseudo-scientific hotchpotch of biological racism, social-Darwinism and eugenics theory which was rampant in central European pan-German nationalist circles prior to the First World War. With the collapse of the German Empire during the revolutionary upheavals of 1918-19, antisemitism became a rallying call for counter-revolutionary nationalism in Germany and Austria and a potent force in the European elites’ reaction to the Bolshevik revolution. The infamous forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion circulated widely and was widely believed despite its early exposure as a forgery. In desperate times desperate people, particularly the ruined middle classes, may be persuaded that the most preposterous myths are the truth. To understand what led to Auschwitz and the Holocaust one must grasp the full virulence of Nazi antisemitism. In this respect Nazism went far beyond most other variants of Fascism, such as the Italian or Spanish versions.

For Hitler and the Nazis, the Jews were not, as was initially believed on the Left at the time, simply a convenient scapegoat. The scapegoat serves a particular purpose and then may be cast aside. The Nazis, like other fascist movements, adopted much of the style and paraphernalia of the left-wing movements of the day, presenting themselves as revolutionaries fighting on behalf of the down-trodden “little man”. The Nazi claim to be involved in an eternal struggle for the survival and ultimate triumph of the “Aryan Race” against dark forces of destruction, may be regarded as a perverted version of the Marxist theory of class struggle, which would result in the eventual triumph of the proletariat and the construction of a socialist society.

The Warsaw ghetto was the only major clash between Jewish organized resistance and the Wehrmacht. Fewer than 800 ludicrously armed fighters resisted for about 10 days the wrathful might of the Nazi military machine. According to the official report, at least 56,065 people were killed on the spot or deported to German Nazi concentration and death camps (Treblinka, Poniatowa, Majdanek, Trawniki).

The Nazis had to win the support of large sections of society who had been ruined – largely the middle classes and peasantry – but also, if they were to be successful, sections of the industrial working class. Their aim was not to bring about a radical change in the class structure but rather to leave in place, in a much strengthened position, a class of monopoly capitalists, while totally destroying the trade unions and political organizations of the working class and imposing a totalitarian regime. Although antisemitism was not the main propaganda appeal in the crucial months of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, it was firmly entrenched in their propaganda armoury. Attacks on the “plutocratic elites” – the Jews – were the Nazi storm troopers’ substitutes for the Communists’ anti-capitalist agitation. But the immediate enemy from the start, the ones the Nazis came for first, were the Communists. Then they came for the Socialists, and then the Trade Unionists. These were the first to fill the makeshift concentration camps that opened in 1933.

Mass liquidations without scruples.

The Enemy: “Judeo-Bolshevism”

There can be no doubt that the Nazis believed their own propaganda. For Hitler “The Jews” were responsible for Marxism and Communism. It is impossible to read Mein Kampf without acknowledging that he was totally convinced of this. Thus, “Bolshevism” (the term was always used by the Nazis rather than “Communism” as it sounded more alien and frightening ) was a Jewish invention. The other one was Plutocratic Capitalism. The Nazis needed to do everything in their power to destroy the Communist party (KPD) and its influence in Germany. It was the largest of the European Communist Parties when they came to power. The Soviet Union was said to be in the grip of “Judeo-Bolshevism”. “The Jews” had invented Communism and their aim was to use it to destroy national movements and nations everywhere in order to achieve their age-old plan to dominate the world. In the fevered minds of Nazi ideologues, this drive for world domination was biologically determined, an adaptation from the ancient Christian demonology of the “Anti-Christ”.

Der Fuhrer: few doubts and no conscience pangs.

Der Fuhrer surrounded by true believers. A man with a mission and a nation sworn to implement it.

In the Nazi racial hierarchy, the North European “Aryans”, represented pre-eminently by the Germans, stood at the pinnacle. The Jews were not at the bottom of the hierarchy. They were not a recognizable human race at all, not even “sub-humans”. The terms used to describe them were drawn from pathology – “bacillus”, “bacteria” “cancer” “plague”. That Hitler passionately believed this is clear from the opening of Mein Kampf, written in 1924 to his final Will and Testament twenty years later. The war against the Soviet Union was the decisive ideological struggle against “Judeo-Bolshevism” to which Hitler had always been completely committed. When victory had been achieved It would give Germany limitless “Lebensraum” in the East, fulfilling the wildest dreams of German Imperialism. It would supply a limitless supply of helots and slaves and it would enable him to embark upon the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. When, in December 1941, as the Wehrmacht was stalled before Moscow, it became clear that the Red Army would not be defeated so easily, implementation of the Final Solution could not be delayed.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]nce propaganda had persuaded thousands of people to believe that all Jews were not simply a species of sub-humanity but a demonic, monstrous force with whom the German people and all other “healthy” races were locked in life-or-death struggle for survival, then it becomes clear how Auschwitz was possible. Amongst those commissioned to carry out the genocide there were some who believed, in their deluded way, that they were acting from high moral principles. The Viennese doctor, Ella Lingens-Reiner, who was herself imprisoned at Auschwitz for sheltering Jews in her home, reported, word for word, in her book Prisoners of Fear, 1948, a conversation she had in 1944 with an SS officer in the camp. He said: “It is quite possible that we shall lose this war and that all the wonderful things Adolf Hitler has created will be destroyed by the Unholy Alliance of our enemies. But there is one achievement that will stand, and future generations will thank us for it – there is one fact that will never be reversed….the fact that we have exterminated, root and branch, the mass reservoir in the East from which they were drawing fresh forces makes one thing certain: we have freed Europe from the Jews for good.”

Ukrainian askaris helped the Germans put down the Warsaw ghetto rebellion.

Afterword: The Cold War and The Holocaust

It is of some interest to note that on Holocaust Memorial Day Vladimir Putin was not invited to attend the commemoration at Auschwitz Birkenau. In his speech at the ceremony, Polish premier Grzegorz Shetyna went out of his way to claim that Ukrainian and not Russian soldiers liberated the camp in 1945. Thus, the Cold War is back. Putin is the villain. The Soviet Union is airbrushed out of the titanic struggle they waged to defeat Nazi Germany. Soldiers of the Soviet Red Army cannot be named for what they were but need these days to be referred to as Ukrainians. This should probably receive fuller treatment in a separate article, but it is worth pointing out one or two things about the way the Holocaust was treated in most of the Western media between 1945 and the mid-1970s.

It is perfectly understandable that many, perhaps most, Holocaust survivors were very reluctant, or unable to talk about their experiences for many years. At any rate, it is well known that they didn’t. They only began to talk later. But, however one may account for that, there is something else that needs explaining. Why was it that documentary film of the liberation of the camps, after a brief initial showing, was put under wraps for decades? Why, for so many years, was so little heard about the Holocaust? The term itself did not come into common use until the 1970s. There is one obvious explanation: The Cold War. Consider this:

By 1948 the “totalitarian enemy” was no longer Germany, but Soviet Russia. Anti-communist hysteria gripped the United States. Amongst the people most prominent in Western Europe and the USA in their opposition to the re-armament of West Germany, were communists and others on the Left. Throughout the 1950s it was mainly the Left that exposed the return to positions of power and influence of former Nazis in West Germany. Organized visits to Auschwitz from Britain and Western Europe were often undertaken through the 1950s and 60s under the leadership of Communists. The McCarthyite witch hunts of the late 1940s and early 50s and the HUAC hearings were tainted with anti-Semitism. In both the US and Britain mainstream and conservative Jewish organizations were extremely nervous about becoming involved in public controversy about West Germany, which was from 1955 a member of NATO. In 1959 the national newspapers in Britain roundly condemned an exhibition on Nazi concentration camps that had opened in Coventry, sponsored by a former Belgian inmate of Buchenwald. It was condemned for arousing anti-German prejudice. Things changed somewhat in 1967 and even more so after 1973. Perhaps it will be possible to return to this theme later.
≥.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box] Senior Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column, Letter from the UK, for TPJ Magazine since 2008. Over the years his articles have also appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United States where he has friends and family in New York City. Contact Mike at mikefaulkner@greanvillepost.com [/box]

TPJ MAG

[printfriendly]

What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

Neocons: the Echo of German Fascism

WEEKEND EDITION | Todd E. Pierce
CROSSPOSTED WITH CONSORTIUM NEWS

[box type=”bio”] Exclusive: The “f-word” for “fascist” keeps cropping up in discussing aggressive U.S. and Israeli “exceptionalism,” but there’s a distinction from the “n-word” for “Nazi.” This new form of ignoring international law fits more with an older form of German authoritarianism favored by neocon icon Leo Strauss, says retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce. [/box]

Leo Strauss: The pedantic cryptoNazi intellectual worshipped by the Neocons.

Leo Strauss: The pedantic cryptoNazi intellectual worshipped by Neocons.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ith the Likud Party electoral victory in Israel, the Republican Party is on a roll, having won two major elections in a row. The first was winning control of the U.S. Congress last fall. The second is the victory by the Republicans’ de facto party leader Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s recent election. As the Israeli Prime Minister puts together a coalition with other parties “in the national camp,” as he describes them, meaning the ultra-nationalist parties of Israel, it will be a coalition that today’s Republicans would feel right at home in.

The common thread linking Republicans and Netanyahu’s “national camp” is a belief of each in their own country’s “exceptionalism,” with a consequent right of military intervention wherever and whenever their “Commander in Chief” orders it, as well as the need for oppressive laws to suppress dissent.

Irving Kristol: A prominent left turncoat and one of the pioneers in the shift to the ultraright. His son William, also a Neocon, has followed in his father’s footsteps. The family’s business is Zionist/Neocon warmongering.

William Kristol, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, would agree. Celebrating Netanyahu’s victory, Kristol told the New York Times, “It will strengthen the hawkish types in the Republican Party.” Kristol added that Netanyahu would win the GOP’s nomination, if he could run, because “Republican primary voters are at least as hawkish as the Israeli public.”

William Kristol, scion to a pestilential family. (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)

The loser in both the Israeli and U.S. elections was the rule of law and real democracy, not the sham democracy presented for public relations purposes in both counties. In both countries today, money controls elections, and as Michael Glennon has written in National Security and Double Government, real power is in the hands of the national security apparatus.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership role in the U.S. Congress was on full display to the world when he accepted House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to address Congress. Showing their eagerness to be part of any political coalition being formed under Netanyahu’s leadership, many Congressional Democrats also showed their support by attending the speech.

It was left to Israeli Uri Avnery to best capture the spirit of Netanyahu’s enthusiastic ideological supporters in Congress. Avnery wrote that he was reminded of something when seeing “Row upon row of men in suits (and the occasional woman), jumping up and down, up and down, applauding wildly, shouting approval.”

The loser in both the Israeli and U.S. elections was the rule of law and real democracy, not the sham democracy presented for public relations purposes in both counties…”

Where had he heard that type of shouting before? Then it came to him: “It was another parliament in the mid-1930s. The Leader was speaking. Rows upon rows of Reichstag members were listening raptly. Every few minutes they jumped up and shouted their approval.”

He added, “the Congress of the United States of America is no Reichstag. Members wear dark suits, not brown shirts. They do not shout ‘Heil’ but something unintelligible.” Nevertheless, “the sound of the shouting had the same effect. Rather shocking.”

Right-wing Politics in Pre-Nazi Germany

While Avnery’s analogy of how Congress responded to its de facto leader was apt, it isn’t necessary to go to the extreme example that he uses to analogize today’s right-wing U.S. and Israeli parties and policy to an earlier German precedent. Instead, it is sufficient to note how similar the right-wing parties of Israel and the U.S. of today are to what was known in 1920s Weimar Germany as the Conservative Revolutionary Movement.

This is the flatulent, tautological nonsense that Strauss is famous for. If he sounds like Yogi Berra it is because he does. (Public domain)

This is the flatulent, tautological nonsense that Strauss is famous for. If he sounds like Yogi Berra it is because he does. That such tripe could be worshipped surely says something about his followers. (Public domain)

This “movement” did not include the Nazis but instead the Nazis were political competitors with the party which largely represented Conservative Revolutionary ideas: the German National People’s Party (DNVP).

Poster propagandizing the German Army’s invincible character as defender of the Reich’s core values.

The institution to which the Conservative Revolutionaries saw as best representing German “values,” the Reichswehr, the German Army, was also opposed by the Nazis as “competitors” to Ernst Rohm’s Brownshirts. But the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, the DNVP, and the German Army could all be characterized as “proto-fascist,” if not Fascist. In fact, when the Nazis took over Germany, it was with the support of many of the proto-fascists making up the Conservative Revolutionary Movement, as well as those with the DNVP and the Reichswehr.

Consequently, many of the Reichstag members that Uri Avnery refers to above as listening raptly and jumping up and shouting their approval of “The Leader” were not Nazis. The Nazis had failed to obtain an absolute majority on their own and needed the votes of the “national camp,” primarily the German National People’s Party (DNVP), for a Reichstag majority.

The DNVP members would have been cheering The Leader right alongside Nazi members of the Reichstag. DNVP members also voted along with Nazi members in passing the Enabling Act of 1933, which abolished constitutional liberties and dissolved the Reichstag.

Reichswehr units clash with Red Guard volunteers during the 1919 insurrection. The uprising cemented the Army’s decision to control Germany’s destiny by any means necessary, including an alliance with Hitler.

Not enough has been written on the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement , the DNVP and the Reichswehr because they have too often been seen as victims of the Nazis themselves or, at worst, mere precursors.

The DNVP was the political party which best represented the viewpoint of the German Conservative Revolutionary Movement. The Reichswehr itself, as described in The Nemesis of Power by John W. Wheeler-Bennett, has been called a “state within a state,” much like the intelligence and security services of the U.S. and Israel are today, wielding extraordinary powers.

The Reichswehr was militaristic and anti-democratic in its purest form and indeed was “fascist” in the term’s classic definition of “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.” Mussolini merely modeled much of his hyper-militaristic political movement on the martial values of the Reichswehr.

German Army officers even had authority to punish civilians for failing to show “proper respect.” In its essence, the viewpoint of the DNVP and the Conservative Revolutionaries was virtually identical to today’s Republican Party along with those Democrats who align with them on national security issues.

These groups have in common a worshipful attitude toward the military as best embodying those martial virtues that are central to fascism. Sister parties, though they may all prefer to be seen as “brothers in arms,” would be Netanyahu’s “national camp” parties.

German Conservative Revolutionary Movement

The Conservative Revolutionary Movement began within the German Right after World War I with a number of writers advocating a nationalist ideology but one in keeping with modern times and not restricted by traditional Prussian conservatism.

It must be noted that Prussian conservatism, standing for militaristic ideas traditional to Prussia, was the antithesis of traditional American conservatism, which professed to stand for upholding the classical liberal ideas of government embedded in the U.S. Constitution.

Inherent to those U.S. constitutional ideas was antipathy toward militarism and militaristic rule of any sort, though Native Americans have good cause to disagree. (In fact, stories of the American conquest of Native Americans with its solution of placing them on reservations were particularly popular in Germany early in the Twentieth Century including with Adolf Hitler).

Historians have noted that when the German Army went to war in World War I, the soldiers and officers carried with them “a shared sense of German superiority and the imagined bestiality of the enemy.” This was manifested particularly harshly upon the citizens of Belgium in 1914 with the German occupation. Later, after their experience in the trenches, the Reichswehr was nearly as harsh in suppressing domestic dissent in Germany after the war.

According to Richard Wolin, in The Seduction of Unreason, Ernst Troeltsch, a German Protestant theologian, “realized that in the course of World War I the ethos of Germanocentrism, as embodied in the ‘ideas of 1914,’ had assumed a heightened stridency.” Under the peace of the Versailles Treaty, “instead of muting the idiom of German exceptionalism that Troeltsch viewed with such mistrust, it seemed only to fan its flames.”

This belief in German “exceptionalism” was the common belief of German Conservative Revolutionaries, the DNVP and the Reichswehr. For Republicans of today and those who share their ideological belief, substitute “American” for “German” Exceptionalism and you have the identical ideology.

“Exceptionalism” in the sense of a nation can be understood in two ways. One is a belief in the nation’s superiority to others. The other way is the belief that the “exceptional” nation stands above the law, similar to the claim made by dictators in declaring martial law or a state of emergency. The U.S. and Israel exhibit both forms of this belief.

German Exceptionalism

The belief in German Exceptionalism was the starting point, not the ending point, for the Conservative Revolutionaries just as it is with today’s Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton or Sen. Lindsey Graham. This Exceptionalist ideology gives the nation the right to interfere in other country’s internal affairs for whatever reason the “exceptional” country deems necessary, such as desiring more living space for their population, fearing the potential of some future security threat, or even just by denying the “exceptional” country access within its borders — or a “denial of access threat” as the U.S. government terms it.

BELOW: Lindsey Graham, a loathsome reactionary from South Carolina (it figures) is with John McCain a poster boy for today’s vehement warmongering cryptofascists. He is naturally a darling of the presstitute media. (DonkeyHotey, via flickr)

The fundamental ideas of the Conservative Revolutionaries have been described as vehement opposition to the Weimar Republic (identifying it with the lost war and the Versailles Treaty) and political “liberalism” (as opposed to Prussia’s traditional authoritarianism).

This “liberalism,” which offended the Conservative Revolutionaries, was democracy and individual rights against state power. Instead, the Conservative Revolutionaries envisaged a new reich of enormous strength and unity. They rejected the view that political action should be guided by rational criteria. They idealized violence for its own sake.

That idealization of violence would have meant “state” violence in the form of military expansionism and suppression of “enemies,” domestic and foreign, by right-thinking Germans.

The Conservative Revolutionaries called for a “primacy of politics” which was to be “a reassertion of an expansion in foreign policy and repression against the trade unions at home.” This “primacy of politics” for the Conservative Revolutionaries meant the erasure of a distinction between war and politics.

Citing Hannah Arendt, Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European history, wrote: “The explicit implications of the primacy of politics in the conservative revolution were totalitarian. From now on there were to be no limits to ideological politics. The utilitarian and humanistic considerations of nineteenth-century liberalism were to be abandoned in order to establish a state of constant dynamism and movement.” That sounds a lot like the “creative destruction” that neoconservative theorist Michael Ledeen is so fond of.

Herf wrote in 1984 that Conservative Revolutionaries were characterized as “the intellectual advance guard of the rightist revolution that was to be effected in 1933,” which, although contemptuous of Hitler, “did much to pave his road to power.”

Unlike the Nazis, their belief in German superiority was based in historical traditions and ideas, not biological racism. Nevertheless, some saw German Jews as the “enemy” of Germany for being “incompatible with a united nation.”

It is one of the bitterest of ironies that Israel as a “Jewish nation” has adopted similar attitudes toward its Arab citizens. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman recently proclaimed: “Those who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe.”

Within Israel, these “Conservative Revolutionary” ideas were manifested in one of their founding political parties, Herut, whose founders came out of the same central European political milieu of interwar Europe and from which Netanyahu’s Likud party is descended.

Ernst Junger

Author Ernst Junger was the most important contributor to the celebration of war by the Conservative Revolutionaries and was an influence and an enabler of the Nazis coming to power. He serialized his celebration of war and his belief in its “redeeming” qualities in a number of popular books with “war porn” titles such as, in English, The Storm of Steel, The Battle as an Inner Experience, and Fire and Blood.

The title of a collection of Junger essays in 1930, Krieg und Krieger (War and the Warriors) captures the spirit of America in the Twenty-first Century as much as it did the German spirit in 1930. While members of the U.S. military once went by terms such as soldier, sailor and marine, now they are routinely generically called “Warriors,” especially by the highest ranks, a term never before used to describe what were once “citizen soldiers.”

Putting a book with a “Warrior” title out on the shelf in a Barnes and Noble would almost guarantee a best-seller, even when competing with all the U.S. SEALS’ reminiscences and American sniper stories. But German philosopher Walter Benjamin understood the meaning of Junger’s Krieg und Krieger, explaining it in the appropriately titled Theories of German Fascism.

Fundamental to Junger’s celebration of war was a metaphysical belief in “totale Mobilmachung” or total mobilization to describe the functioning of a society that fully grasps the meaning of war. With World War I, Junger saw the battlefield as the scene of struggle “for life and death,” pushing all historical and political considerations aside. But he saw in the war the fact that “in it the genius of war permeated the spirit of progress.”

According to Jeffrey Herf in Reactionary Modernism, Junger saw total mobilization as “a worldwide trend toward state-directed mobilization in which individual freedom would be sacrificed to the demands of authoritarian planning.” Welcoming this, Junger believed “that different currents of energy were coalescing into one powerful torrent. The era of total mobilization would bring about an ‘unleashing’ (Entfesselung) of a nevertheless disciplined life.”

In practical terms, Junger’s metaphysical view of war meant that Germany had lost World War I because its economic and technological mobilization had only been partial and not total. He lamented that Germany had been unable to place the “spirit of the age” in the service of nationalism. Consequently, he believed that “bourgeois legality,” which placed restrictions on the powers of the authoritarian state, “must be abolished in order to liberate technological advance.”

Today, total mobilization for the U.S. begins with the Republicans’ budgeting efforts to strip away funding for domestic civilian uses and shifting it to military and intelligence spending. Army veteran, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, exemplifies this belief in “total mobilization” of society with his calls for dramatically increased military spending and his belief that “We must again show the U.S. is willing and prepared to [get into] a war in the first place” by making clear that potential “aggressors will pay an unspeakable price if they challenge the United States.”

That is the true purpose of Twenty-first Century Republican economics: total mobilization of the economy for war. Just as defeated German generals and the Conservative Revolutionaries believed that Germany lost World War I because their economy and nation was only “partially mobilized,” so too did many American Vietnam War-era generals and right-wing politicians believe the same of the Vietnam War. Retired Gen. David Petraeus and today’s neoconservatives have made similar arguments about President Barack Obama’s failure to sustain the Iraq War. [See, for instance, this fawning Washington Post interview with Petraeus.]

What all these militarists failed to understand is that, according to Clausewitz, when a war’s costs exceed its benefits, the sound strategy is to end the costly war. The Germans failed to understand this in World War II and the Soviet Union in their Afghan War.

Paradoxically in the Vietnam War, it was the anti-war movement that enhanced U.S. strength by bringing that wasteful war to an end, not the American militarists who would have continued it to a bitter end of economic collapse. We are now seeing a similar debate about whether to continue and expand U.S. military operations across the Middle East.

Carl Schmitt

While Ernst Junger was the celebrant and the publicist for total mobilization of society for endless war, including the need for authoritarian government, Carl Schmitt was the ideological theoretician, both legally and politically, who helped bring about the totalitarian and militaristic society. Except when it happened, it came under different ownership than what they had hoped and planned for.

Contrary to Schmitt’s latter-day apologists and/or advocates, who include prominent law professors teaching at Harvard and the University of Chicago, his legal writings weren’t about preserving the Weimar Republic against its totalitarian enemies, the Communists and Nazis. Rather, he worked on behalf of a rival fascist faction, members of the German Army General Staff. He acted as a legal adviser to General Kurt von Schleicher, who in turn advised President Paul von Hindenburg, former Chief of the German General Staff during World War I.

German historian Eberhard Kolb observed, “from the mid-1920s onwards the Army leaders had developed and propagated new social conceptions of a militarist kind, tending towards a fusion of the military and civilian sectors and ultimately a totalitarian military state (Wehrstaat).”

When General Schleicher helped bring about the political fall of Reichswehr Commander in Chief, General von Seekt, it was a “triumph of the ‘modern’ faction within the Reichswehr who favored a total war ideology and wanted Germany to become a dictatorship that would wage total war upon the other nations of Europe,” according to Kolb.

When Hitler and the Nazis outmaneuvered the Army politically, Schmitt, as well as most other Conservative Revolutionaries, went over to the Nazis.

Reading Schmitt gives one a greater understanding of the Conservative Revolutionary’s call for a “primacy of politics,” explained previously as “a reassertion of an expansion in foreign policy.”

Schmitt said: “A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings. For the definition of the political, it is here even irrelevant whether such a world without politics is desirable as an ideal situation.”

As evident in this statement, to Schmitt, the norm isn’t peace, nor is peace even desirable, but rather perpetual war is the natural and preferable condition.

This dream of a Martial State is not isolated to German history. A Republican aligned neoconservative, Thomas Sowell, expressed the same longing in 2007 in a National Review article, “Don’t Get Weak.” Sowell wrote; “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”

Leo Strauss, Conservative Revolutionaries and Republicans

Political philosopher Leo Strauss had yearned for the glorious German Conservative Revolution but was despondent when it took the form of the Nazi Third Reich, from which he was excluded because he was Jewish regardless of his fascist ideology.

He wrote to a German Jewish friend, Karl Loewith: “the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme [inalienable rights of man] to protest against the shabby abomination.” (sic)

Strauss was in agreement politically with Schmitt, and they were close friends.

Professor Alan Gilbert of Denver University has written: “As a Jew, Strauss was forbidden from following Schmitt and [German philosopher Martin] Heidegger into the Nazi party. ‘But he was a man of the Right. Like some other Zionists, those who admired Mussolini for instance, Strauss’ principles, as the 1933 letter relates, were ‘fascist, authoritarian, imperial.’”

Strauss was intelligent enough when he arrived in the U.S. to disguise and channel his fascist thought by going back to like-minded “ancient” philosophers and thereby presenting fascism as part of our “western heritage,” just as the current neocon classicist Victor Davis Hanson does.

Needless to say, fascism is built on the belief in a dictator, as was Sparta and the Roman Empire and as propounded by Socrates and Plato, so turning to the thought of ancient philosophers and historians makes a good “cover” for fascist thought.

Leo Strauss must be seen as the Godfather of the modern Republican Party’s political ideology. His legacy continues now through the innumerable “Neoconservative Revolutionary” front groups with cover names frequently invoking “democracy” or “security,” such as Sen. Lindsey Graham’s “Security Through Strength.”

Abrams: as filthy and criminal as a Neocon gets. (G.Skidmore, via flickr)

Typifying the Straussian neoconservative revolutionary whose hunger for military aggression can never be satiated would be former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame and practitioner of the “big lie,” who returned to government under President George W. Bush to push the Iraq War and is currently promoting a U.S. war against Iran.

In a classic example of “projection,” Abrams writes that “Ideology is the raison d’etre of Iran’s regime, legitimating its rule and inspiring its leaders and their supporters. In this sense, it is akin to communist, fascist and Nazi regimes that set out to transform the world.” That can as truthfully be said of his own Neoconservative Revolutionary ideology and its adherents.

That ideology explains Bill Kristol’s crowing over Netanyahu’s victory and claiming Netanyahu as the Republicans’ de facto leader. For years, the U.S. and Israel under Netanyahu have had nearly identical foreign policy approaches though they are at the moment in some disagreement because President Obama has resisted war with Iran while Netanyahu is essentially demanding it.

But at a deeper level the two countries share a common outlook, calling for continuous military interventionism outside each country’s borders with increased exercise of authority by the military and other security services within their borders. This is no accident. It can be traced back to joint right-wing extremist efforts in both countries with American neoconservatives playing key roles.

The best example of this joint effort was when U.S. neocons joined with the right-wing, Likud-connected Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in 1996 to publish their joint plan for continuous military interventionism in the Mideast in “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” which envisioned “regime change” instead of negotiations. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Israel Outfoxed U.S. Presidents.”]

While ostensibly written for Netanyahu’s political campaign, “A Clean Break” became the blueprint for subsequent war policies advocated by the Project for the New American Century, founded by neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The chief contribution of the American neocons in this strategy was to marshal U.S. military resources to do the heavy lifting in attacking Israel’s neighbors beginning with Iraq.

With these policy preferences goes a belief inside each country’s political parties, across the spectrum but particularly on the Right, that Israel and the United States each stand apart from all other nations as “Exceptional.” This is continuously repeated to ensure imprinting it in the population’s consciousness in the tradition of fascist states through history.

It is believed today in both the U.S. and Israel, just as the German Conservative Revolutionaries believed it in the 1920s and 1930s of their homeland, Germany, and then carried on by the Nazis until 1945.

Israeli Herut Party

The Knesset website describes the original Herut party (1948-1988) as the main opposition party (against the early domination by the Labor Party). Herut was the most right-wing party in the years before the Likud party came into being and absorbed Herut into a coalition. Its expansionist slogan was “To the banks to the Jordan River” and it refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Jordan. Economically, Herut supported private enterprise and a reduction of government intervention.

In “A Clean Break,” the authors were advising Netanyahu to reclaim the belligerent and expansionist principles of the Herut party.

Herut was founded in 1948 by Menachem Begin, the leader of the right-wing militant group Irgun, which was widely regarded as a terrorist organization responsible for killing Palestinians and cleansing them from land claimed by Israel, including the infamous Deir Yassin massacre.

Herut’s nature as a party and movement was best explained in a critical letter to the New York Times on Dec. 4, 1948, signed by over two dozen prominent Jewish intellectuals including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt.

The letter read: “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

“It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine. (…) It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents. …

“Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.”

According to author Joseph Heller, Herut was a one-issue party intent on expanding Israel’s borders. That Netanyahu has never set aside Herut’s ideology can be gleaned from his book last revised in 2000, A Durable Peace. There, Netanyahu praises Herut’s predecessors – the Irgun paramilitary and Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, a self-declared “terrorist” group. He also marginalizes their Israeli adversary of the time, the Hagana under Israel’s primary founder and first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

Regardless of methods used, the Stern Gang was indisputably “fascist,” even receiving military training from Fascist Italy. One does not need to speculate as to its ideological influences.

According to Colin Shindler, writing in Triumph of Military Zionism: Nationalism and the Origins of the Israeli Right, “Stern devotedly believed that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ so he approached Nazi Germany. With German armies at the gates of Palestine, he offered co-operation and an alliance with a new totalitarian Hebrew republic.”

Netanyahu in his recent election campaign would seem to have re-embraced his fascist origins, both with its racism and his declaration that as long as he was prime minister he would block a Palestinian state and would continue building Jewish settlements on what international law recognizes as Palestinian land.

In other words, maintaining a state of war on the Palestinian people with a military occupation and governing by military rule, while continuing to make further territorial gains with the IDF acting as shock troops for the settlers.

Why Does This Matter?

Sun-Tzu famously wrote “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

When we allow our “Conservative Revolutionaries” (or neoconservative militarists or proto-fascists or whatever term best describes them) to make foreign policy, the United States loses legitimacy in the world as a “rule of law” state. Instead, we present a “fascist” justification for our wars which is blatantly illicit.

As the American political establishment has become so enamored with war and the “warriors” who fight them, it has become child’s play for our militarists to manipulate the U.S. into wars or foreign aggression through promiscuous economic sanctions or inciting and arming foreign groups to destabilize the countries that we target.

No better example for this can be shown than the role that America’s First Family of Militarism, the Kagans, plays in pushing total war mobilization of the U.S. economy and inciting war, at the expense of civilian and domestic needs, as Robert Parry wrote.

Robert Kagan: disgusting from every angle. This is the kind of individual that should not be allowed anywhere near the levers of power but who, in the current rotten state, is at its very center.

This can be seen with Robert Kagan invoking the martial virtue of “courage” in demanding greater military spending by our elected officials and a greater wealth transfer to the Military Industrial Complex which funds the various war advocacy projects that he and his family are involved with.

Kagan recently wrote: “Those who propose to lead the United States in the coming years, Republicans and Democrats, need to show what kind of political courage they have, right now, when the crucial budget decisions are being made.”

But as Parry pointed out, showing “courage,” “in Kagan’s view – is to ladle ever more billions into the Military-Industrial Complex, thus putting money where the Republican mouths are regarding the need to ‘defend Ukraine’ and resist ‘a bad nuclear deal with Iran.’” But Parry noted that if it weren’t for Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, Kagan’s spouse, the Ukraine crisis might not exist.

What must certainly be seen as neo-fascist under any system of government but especially under a nominal “constitutional republic” as the U.S. claims to be, is Sen. Lindsey Graham’s threat that the first thing he would do if elected President of the United States would be to use the military to detain members of Congress, keeping them in session in Washington, until all so-called “defense cuts” are restored to the budget.

In Graham’s words, “I wouldn’t let Congress leave town until we fix this. I would literally use the military to keep them in if I had to. We’re not leaving town until we restore these defense cuts.”

And he would have that power according to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “unitary executive theory” of Presidential power, originally formulated by Carl Schmitt and adopted by Republican attorneys and incorporated into government under the Bush-Cheney administration. Sen. Tom Cotton and other Republicans would no doubt support such an abuse of power if it meant increasing military spending.

But even more dangerous for the U.S. as well as other nations in the world is that one day, our militarists’ constant incitement and provocation to war is going to “pay off,” and the U.S. will be in a real war with an enemy with nuclear weapons, like the one Victoria Nuland is creating on Russia’s border.

Today’s American “Conservative Revolutionary” lust for war was summed up by prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, a co-author of “A Clean Break.” Echoing the views on war from Ernst Junger and Carl Schmitt, Perle once explained U.S. strategy in the neoconservative view, according to John Pilger:

“There will be no stages,” he said. “This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there . . . If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”

That goal was the same fantasy professed by German Conservative Revolutionaries and it led directly to a wartime defeat never imagined by Germany before, with all the “collateral damage” along the way that always results from “total war.”

Rather than continuing with this “strategy,” driven by our own modern Conservative Revolutionaries and entailing the eventual bankrupting or destruction of the nation, it might be more prudent for Americans to demand that we go back to the original national security strategy of the United States, as expressed by early presidents as avoiding “foreign entanglements” and start abiding by the republican goals expressed by the Preamble to the Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

[box] Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. [/box]

[printfriendly]

What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?