After the Second World War, Germany was shorn of much territory and was partitioned and occupied. The East was under Soviet control. Since Stalin was initially supportive of Israel, East Germany was initially positive in its attitude to Israel but became hostile from about 1956 onward because of the Suez crisis when Israel allied with Britain and France to attack Nasser's Egypt. Since West Germany was under American control, it was anxious to appease the Israelis though the latter country only agreed to exchange Ambassadors in 1965. The East never had diplomatic relations with Israel.
Nazi Germany was not the only country which persecuted Jews. However, countries like Romania, whose War-time regime was even more unhinged than that of Germany, were quick to establish diplomatic relations with the newly created Israel. The Czechs were particularly important in supplying weapons during its first war in 1948. However, like Poland and other Warsaw pact countries it severed relations with Israel in 1967. Romania was the exception because Ceaucescu wanted to be seen as taking an independent line.
Pankaj Mishra has an article, taken from his latest book, in the Guardian on
Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture’Germany embraced Israel to atone for its wartime guilt. But was this in part a way to avoid truly confronting its past?
After the second world war, Germany’s
West Germany's
contrition and radical self-cleansing, under allied supervision, as the chief tormentor of European Jews ought to have been straightforward.
It was. The Americans had plenty of money of their own and thus let the West Germans off lightly when it came to reparations. Germany made a one-off payment to Israel which, with hindsight, was cheap at the price. Thanks to the Cold War, 'de-Nazification' was halted or reversed. Still, the intelligentsia in the West were fearful of the supposed attractions of the Communist ideology. After the Russians gave up on Nasser, East Germany stepped in as the biggest supporter of the Palestinian terrorists and this spilled over into their recruitment of nutters like the Baader Meinhoff gang. Thankfully, the young lost interest in that type of stupidity. There was sympathy for the Israelis athletes killed in Munich. More importantly, Israel's policy of reprisals was admired. Nevertheless, most West Germans were not greatly concerned with the Shoah till the Holocaust TV series (starring Meryl Streep) was broadcast there in 1979. Since Germans had become 'materialistic' rather than 'martial', they felt themselves to be the new Jews. Nothing wrong with that. After all, Christ was a Jew- rejected by the Jews- and thus appropriable by Aryans.
No country, however, matches its convoluted journey from ground zero in 1945 to Gaza today.
Nonsense! West Germany followed a consistent line. East Germany, like other Warsaw Pact countries, did not. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, everybody was on the same page. America, from time to time, was bound to bomb the fuck out of A-rabs. The same goes for Israel. If we are on America's side, we are on Israel's side.
In recent decades, solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the very foundation of its collective identity.
Fuck off! Germans are proud- or were proud- of their cars and capital goods. The foundation of Germany's collective identity has to do with economics, not talking bollocks.
Particularly since German reunification, a Shoah-centred memory has been comprehensively institutionalised.
So as to civilize those knuckle-draggers in the East. The West Germans eagerly bought into AJP Taylor's theory that the good German was the Rhinelander. It was the Junkers from agricultural East Prussia who had started both wars and been responsible for any beastliness.
School curriculums and calendars emphasise anniversaries such as 27 January (the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz)
Auschwitz is in the East. German Schools had to teach the Holocaust from 1992 onward. Why? Reunification.
and 8 May (the final surrender of the Nazis). Monuments, memorials and museums across the country commemorate the victims of German crimes. A resonant symbol of this memory culture is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe near the Brandenburg Gate in the capital, Berlin, probably the only major national monument to commemorate the victims of a nation rather than the nation itself.
It must be said, it was a great stroke of Germanic wit to give a big contract, in this connection, to the firm which produced Zyklon-B. Still, in a certain sense, the Memorial was timely. Its concrete soon started to crack. The message was clear. German infrastructure was failing. Thankfully, the politicians were able to ignore this completely.
In 2008, the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, claimed before the Knesset that ensuring Israel’s security was part of Germany’s Staatsräson, or raison d’état.
She was a deeply silly person. Still, she was from the East and so people were grateful she didn't try to kill and eat the American ambassador.
The phrase was repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders after 7 October 2023. Less than two months before the Hamas offensive, Israel had secured, with American blessing, its largest ever arms deal with Germany. German arms sales to Israel surged tenfold in 2023; the vast majority of sales were approved after 7 October, and fast-tracked by German officials who insisted that permits for arms exports to Israel would receive special consideration.
Biden, it must be said, had been very quick off the mark air-lifting weapons to Israel. Mishra is puzzled as to why a NATO country would follow suit. Perhaps it is because of something Robert Musil said to Hannah's Aunt.
As Israel began to bomb homes, refugee camps, schools, hospitals, mosques and churches in Gaza, and Israeli cabinet ministers promoted their schemes for ethnic cleansing,
NO! Israel is roasting and eating Palestinian babies! Did you know that 80 percent of all falafels sold in Tel Aviv are actually LGBTQ Palestinian dissidents who are screaming loudly even as heartless Islamophobes dip them in ketchup and munch upon them?
the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, reiterated the national orthodoxy: “Israel is a country that is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly.”
Compared to Hamas, the IDF truly are angels. Still, maybe angels aren't the need of the hour.
As Benjamin Netanyahu’s campaign of indiscriminate murder and destruction
not to mention the indiscriminate sale of LGBTQ disabled Palestinian dissidents to hungry people who eat them, despite their vociferous protests, under the impression that they are falafel.
intensified, Ingo Gerhartz, the head of the German air force, or Luftwaffe, arrived in Tel Aviv hailing the “accuracy” of Israeli pilots; he also had himself photographed, in uniform, donating blood for Israeli soldiers.
I suppose he bombed plenty of Muslims in Afghanistan and thus looks upon the Israelis with a fond eye.
The German health minister, Karl Lauterbach, approvingly retweeted a video in which an English far-right agitator claims that the Nazis were more decent than Hamas. Die Welt claimed that “Free Palestine is the new Heil Hitler” and Die Zeit alerted German readers to the apparently outrageous fact that “Greta Thunberg openly sympathises with the Palestinians”.
Nothing wrong in any of that. Mishra's own people are strong supporters of Israel. Genocidal Islamists aren't greatly liked by kaffirs.
Visiting Germany after the war, the philosopher Hannah Arendt
who was as stupid as shit
confessed to being “oppressed by a kind of pervasive public stupidity
it was called being German and having studied stupid shite at Uni
which cannot be trusted to judge correctly the most elementary events ... A great number of Germans,” she wrote, “especially among the more educated, apparently are no longer capable of telling the truth even if they want to.”
She was incapable of telling the truth- which was that she liked dollars and would publish any old shite to get more of them.
Witnessing the German public sphere in recent months,
Mishra is a public urinal in Berlin and thus has been witnessing a lot
it was hard to resist a similarly damning conclusion:
Those who come to such conclusions are damned indeed.
that self-righteous hypocrisy had been normalised enough to turn into a mode of governance and thought.
When has this not been the case? Mishra himself is self-righteous. He does not say 'I escaped from India- which Socialism had turned into a shithole- so as to thrive in Thatcher's England.
As hypocrisy lapsed into self-deception,
The Germans have woken up to their parlous economic position and have reversed course on migration
and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) led a dramatic reshaping of the country’s politics and culture,
the country has no alternative but to change course.
it was also hard not to think about Germany’s past and to fear for the political future of Europe’s most important country.
Mishra is incapable of thought.
“In less than six years,” Arendt marvelled, “Germany laid waste the moral structure of western society, committing crimes that nobody would have believed possible.”
Arendt liked the 'moral structure' of Jim Crow America. This is because America was rich.
With the intimacy and bluntness of a former insider,
she ran away when Hitler came to power. She may have been stupid but she had a great survival instinct.
she recorded that a “general lack of emotion, at any rate this apparent heartlessness, sometimes covered over with cheap sentimentality, is only the most conspicuous outward symptom of a deep-rooted, stubborn and at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened”.
What really happened was that Germany tried to conquer a lot of territory so as to get rich. It failed. Boo fucking hoo.
Such mentalities were partly manifest in German treatment of the Jewish displaced persons. They were still languishing in West Germany in 1952, when the Bavarian customs police launched a raid on a displaced persons camp.
This was the Fohrenwald camp which had recently come under the control of the FRG. Most of the Jews there were from Russia or East Europe. They feared being sent back behind the Iron Curtain- where they would swiftly be killed. Also, they had heard things weren't really very comfortable in Israel. Still, there was little sympathy for them. The feeling was that the Allies had taken their pick of those capable of manual work and only the dregs remained.
The assault had, according to the Manchester Guardian, “all the trademarks of Nazi descents on the ghettos of Berlin and Frankfurt in the past”.
The Brits knew their own soldiers had used anti-Semitic language when beating the shit out of Jewish rioters in Palestine. Soldiers will be soldiers. As for the police- don't get me started.
As the newspaper reported, quoting the camp committee, “policemen yelled such slogans as: ‘The crematoria are still there’, ‘The gas chambers are waiting for you’, and: ‘This time you really will get it in the neck, you damned Jews.’” In communist-run East Germany, antisemitism was more subtle,
Fuck off! Erich Nelhans, the leader of the East German Jews, was sentenced to 25 years hard labour for allegedly helping Jewish Red Army soldiers to escape to the West. Still, one might say that there was a brief period- ending with the Slansky trial in Prague in 1952- when it appeared that East German Jews might be coopted by the Communist regime. After Stalin's death, official anti-semitism was moderated but, by then, Jews in the East had no illusions as to their fate if they tried to gain a political voice. However, there were some Communist intellectuals and artists who did well in the GDR.
if not less lethal, closely mimicking Stalin’s campaign against “cosmopolitans”, which assumed that most Jews were potential spies.
Some were spies- for the Soviets- e.g. Jurgen Kuczysnski who, while serving in the US military, recruited Karl Fuchs.
At the same time, as an American military officer told the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, many Germans were acting “as though the Nazis were a strange race of Eskimos who came down from the north pole and somehow invaded Germany”.
Whereas Americans acted as though the indigenous people were some strange race illegally occupying territory God had destined for the WASP.
Bourke-White herself remarked: “I have yet to find a German who will admit to being a Nazi.”
Because De-Nazification was a real thing back then.
As late as 1949, the philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote to Thomas Mann that aside from a “couple of total and touching puppet-like villains”, he hadn’t met a Nazi yet, “not simply in the ironic sense that people will not admit to having been Nazis, but in the far more disturbing sense that they believe they never were Nazis”.
They only joined the Party because they were drunk and lost a bet.
In his 2002 book Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past, Norbert Frei painstakingly measures the depth and the breadth in the early postwar years of popular German sentiment against prosecuting criminals of the Nazi era or ejecting tainted elites out of positions of power.
Send Uncle Willi to jail? No! He used to bring us chocolates.
In West Germany, according to the British historian Mary Fulbrook, of the nearly 1 million people who “were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians” (the number of enablers was much higher), “only 6,656 were convicted of Nazi crimes” – “fewer even than the number of people who had been employed at Auschwitz alone”. By the end of the 20th century, only 164 individuals had been sentenced for the crime of murder – of 6 million Jews.
So what? There was a collective punishment. Germany lost territory.
In a March 2024 article for Dissent, the historian Hans Kundnani wrote: “By the mid-1950s, the elite in the civil service, judiciary, and academia had largely reverted to that of the Third Reich.
The same thing happened in Japan. Why? The answer is- the Cold War.
Many young people growing up in west Germany felt they were ‘surrounded by Nazis’, as one person I interviewed put it.
Also the neighbour's cat was keeping them under surveillance. Did it report to Mossad or was it the CIA?
By the mid-1960s, they had begun to see not just personal continuities but structural ones: the federal republic was a fascist, or at least ‘pre-fascist’, state. The student movement emerged as a protest against these real and imagined continuities.”
It truly was shit. Fuck off to the GDR if you hate Fascism so much. I suppose Brandt's 'Ostpolitik' and the suspicion that Barzel's bid to bring him down was defeated thanks to bribes paid by the Stasi, defused Student radicalism. No root and branch reform was possible. Indeed, it might not be desirable.
When in March 1960, the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York, he had not only been presiding over a systematic reversal of the denazification process decreed by the country’s western occupiers in 1945,
those Western occupiers changed tack as the Iron curtain came down.
he had also been aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust.
Nobody gave a fuck about it. What India's partition showed the world was that genocide was more cheaply done with agricultural implements.
The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had “joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could”.
Also, most Germans under Nazi rule spoke Chinese as their mother tongue.
In September 1952, Adenauer had agreed to a deal that would compensate the state of Israel to the extent of some 3.5bn Deutschmarks. The deal was not popular: in 1951, only 5% of Germans had admitted to guilt over the fate of the Jews, and 21% thought that “the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the Third Reich”. More embarrassingly, some in Adenauer’s own party voted against the deal.
It was pushed through only because the SDs were unanimous in supporting it. The truth is, it was a good deal for both sides. Still, it was America which decided the issue.
Nevertheless, Adenauer’s language at his meeting with Ben-Gurion was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a “fortress of the west”, adding: “I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.”
Jews wanted to be left alone. Still, I suppose a German Chancellor can't help sounding sinister even if he is trying to be friendly.
The German chancellor possessed the typical worldview of a western colonialist:
as opposed to Eastern colonialists who believe you should hand over cash and territory to anybody who wants it.
as vice president of the German Colonial Society
which was big in Cologne because Catholic Missionaries from there kept going off to Africa. Sadly, few were eaten by the natives. In dietary matters, Africans can be a little too fastidious. By contrast, Israelis eagerly devour LGBTQ Palestinian dissidents claiming them to be falafel. Mishra Sahib is remiss in not pointing this out. It is ILLEGAL to eat Lesbian Muslims! Kindly desist from this loathsome practice! As Robert Musil said to Hannah's Aunt 'Stop chowing down on the Begum of Bhopal! Kant would so not have approved.'
he had urged the German reich to possess colonies in order to create more living space for the German people. But, as the cold war intensified, he was also convinced that Germany’s “long road west” – the title of historian Heinrich Winkler’s bestselling book about German history – lay through Israel. “The power of the Jews even today, especially in America, should not be underestimated,” he said after his retirement. West Germany moved quickly along that road west after 1960, becoming a major supplier of military hardware to Israel in addition to being the main enabler of its economic modernisation.
The Arab League threatened to boycott the Germans. They they realized they would be cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
The postwar German-Israeli symbiosis was at the centre of the “unprincipled political gamesmanship”, in Primo Levi’s bitter words, that expedited the rehabilitation of Germany only a few years after the full extent of its genocidal antisemitism became known.
Fuck off! The FRG, like Japan, was rehabilitated by the Cold War. So was Franco's Spain.
By the mid-1960s, when the Jewish Austrian writer Jean Améry travelled through Germany, the country was savouring its so-called economic miracle,
West Germany had been quicker off the mark in getting back to a market economy.
partly due to the American loans that were also sparking a broader European recovery.
Marshall plan assistance ended in 1953. Adenauer's reparation payment to Israel meant the Americans were willing to take a bigger haircut on those loans.
In “the industrial paradise of the New Europe”, Améry found himself unexpectedly discussing the latest European and American novels with Germany’s “refined” intellectuals.
As opposed to illiterate hobos.
Yet the survivor of Auschwitz could not expunge from his memory the “stony faces” of Germans before a pile of corpses at a railway platform or of the Flemish SS man who beat him on the head with a shovel handle whenever he didn’t work fast enough.
Sadly, Mishra has no such memories.
And he would discover that in this “thriving land”, he bore a new “grudge” against Germans and their exalted place in the “majestic halls of the west”.
The Soviets had decided that they were losing money on their bit of Austria and thus permitted its reunification. It too did well materially and, thankfully, remained as xenophobic as ever.
The flip side of west Germany’s accommodation of Nazis was what Améry called an “obtrusive philosemitism”.
Unlike good old-fashioned Jew baiting in Vienna.
Why did anti-Semitism in Europe get replaced by admiration for Jews? The answer is obvious. Jews were smart and talented. The more education you get, the more likely it is that your intellectual or artistic heroes will disproportionately feature Jews. We might say 'philosemitism is highly income elastic as is education.' Mishra won't accept this obvious point.
As the historian Frank Stern unsparingly diagnosed in 1992 in The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge, German philosemitism is primarily a “political instrument”, used not only to “justify options in foreign policy”, but also “to evoke and project a moral stance in times when domestic tranquillity is threatened by antisemitic, anti-democratic and rightwing extremist phenomena”.
This is nonsense. Support for Jews and Homosexuals and women who want to go to school rather than sit at home behind a 'purdah' has to do with
1) raising productivity rather than doing stupid shit
2) opposing Islamic nutters who might want to chop our heads off.
Thus, German Israelphilia and philosemitism is peaking just as there is again a recrudescence in Germany of far-right furies.
By 'far-right' Mishra means people like Rishi Sunak who supported Brexit.
This perverse dialectic helps explain why, while commemorating the Shoah and proclaiming its undying support for Israel, Germany ignores the atrocities Germans inflicted on Asians and Africans during the brief rampages of German colonialism.
It also ignores Mishra. Surely, that is the biggest atrocity here?
The political and moral deformations and intellectual helplessness of
Mishra. He is as stupid as shit.
Germany today are more dangerous than at any other time since 1945.
Germany wasn't dangerous in 1945. It was as weak as a kitten.
The AfD is no aberration;
Priti Patel is worse.
it benefits from a broadening lurch to the extreme right among mainstream politicians and journalists.
Rishi Sunak was so 'extreme right' he practiced 'Hinduism'. Did you know that it is an 'Aryan' religion? Swastika is a Sanskrit word.
The likely next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, the leader of the centre-right Christian Democrats, has recently broken the German mainstream’s “firewall” against the AfD, promising to work with politicians overfond of Nazi slogans and salutes.
So what? Kiesinger was a member of the Nazi Party. He served as Chancellor from '66 to '69. There has never been any fucking 'firewall'. What happened, after reunification, was that there was a fear the East Germans, unused as they were to Democracy, would go astray. That's one reason Merkel was made Chancellor. Then, she fucked up. There has been a political back-lash against refugees because of the horrific actions of a small number of them. Still, Europe has to seal its borders one way or the other. All we can hope is that it is done in a legal and responsible manner and there is no more virtue signalling on what- for desperate people- really is a matter of life or death.
Meanwhile, German courts are trying a far-right group for plotting the violent overthrow of the government.
Some Germans be kray kray. Who knew?
The country that laid waste the moral structure of western society looks feeble again
to Mishra's feeble intellect
before the economic crises and social breakdowns of capitalism that first produced fascism.
There we have it. First we must bring down Capitalism and then build up Socialism by eating only our own shit.
Worse: Germany’s long road west now leads straight to Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
No. America's road led to them.
Germany’s pre-eminent philosopher
which is like saying 'The Taliban's foremost Feminist'
Jürgen Habermas
who had shit for brains
once hailed the “unconditional opening of the federal republic to the political culture of the west” as the most important achievement of postwar Germany.
Actually, reunification was an achievement as was going into the Euro under-valued.
According to this argument, Germans had strayed too far off the road to the west and ended up committing monstrous crimes.
Crimes don't matter. Losing wars does.
Thus Habermas lauded an exemplary “western civilisation” from which Germans had unwisely dissociated themselves.
Nonsense! Even under the Nazis, they were part of 'Western Civilization'. Israelis felt a bit foolish for banning Karajan & the Berlin Philharmonic.
Germans could become part of a superior west again by putting the Shoah and undying commitment to Israel at the centre of their collective identity and by renouncing ethnonationalism.
Also they should eat only their own shit. Only thus can true Socialism be achieved.
But this entire framework for understanding the world, and Germany’s place in it,
is as stupid as shit. Economics matters. Military and Diplomatic strategy matters. Saying everybody should feel deep remorse for stuff that happened long ago is mere virtue signalling of a type we have grown tired of.
has been tottering in recent years. Habermas and others have convinced themselves their country safely converted to liberalism on its high road to the west through Israel; they don’t, however, seem to ponder the fact that the old idea of the west has never seemed more incoherent and unconvincing.
Says a guy who lost little time in getting the fuck out of Socialist India and settling in the West.
Refined during the cold war, this conception of the west had a large, self-flattering Anglo-American component, signifying electoral democracy, free markets and individual freedoms, in contrast to totalitarian regimes. But the US has lurched in the last decade from calamitously failed wars to far-right demagoguery, and Britain, deceived by blustery rogues into Brexit, is unlikely to recover soon from an extreme act of self-harm. The “political culture of the west” does not inspire great admiration even within the west today.
Which is why Mishra is packing his bags to return to a UP ruled by Yogiji.
As Günter Grass wrote in his 2002 novel Crabwalk: “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.”
This is why German peeps should kindly listen to Mishraji. He is telling you to abandon Capitalism and establish TRUE Socialism by eating only your own shit. That way, you won't need toilets. Guess who keeps building toilets? Narendra Modi! That proves toilets are totes Fascist.
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