[Disarmo] Nazi propaganda su frontpage del FAZ

[Jure Ellero LT <glry at ngi.it>]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/06/04/germ-j04.html

Fascist propaganda on the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

By Peter Schwarz
4 June 2014

“If one tells a big lie, and repeats it often enough, then people will 
believe it in the end.” This principle of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi 
propaganda minister, today serves many in the German media as a 
guideline for writing columns opposing the widespread resistance to a 
revival of German militarism.

Since Berlin and Washington helped a right-wing regime come to power in 
Ukraine, and thereby provoked a dangerous conflict with Russia, leading 
German media outlets have not shrunk from any lie in order to justify 
this policy. They play down the significance of the fascists of Svoboda 
and the Right Sector, depict the resistance in eastern Ukraine as a 
Russian conspiracy, and denounce their critics for daring to “understand 
Putin.”

But that is not enough. In order to undermine the opposition to the “end 
of military reticence” announced by the German government, they are even 
prepared to deny the historical crimes of German imperialism.

On Monday, the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) 
carried a comment piece uniting both positions, headlined “One-sided 
friendship.” It combined hateful attacks on Putin and Russia with a 
presentation of the Second World War which one usually reads only in 
Nazi publications.

FAZ editor Frank Pergande complains about the “understanding shown for 
Putin’s policies, especially in eastern Germany,” and ridicules the 
“apparent friendship with the ‘big brother’ in the GDR [former East 
Germany].” He praises Chancellor Merkel, who “already at a time when she 
wasn’t even a politician” (i.e. in the GDR), knew “what was to be 
thought of Russia.”

Indeed, according to Pergande, the relationship with the Soviet Union 
was also marked by fear in the GDR. “Those who had experienced the end 
of the war,” he writes, “had to keep silent about their vile 
experiences: murder and suicides, expulsion, rape, camps, reparations. 
On the way to Berlin, the onslaught of the Red Army destroyed towns like 
Frankfurt (Oder), Prenzlau or Demmin, to the extent that the wounds ache 
to this day.”

Pergande says nothing about the previous war of extermination by the 
Nazis, which claimed over 25 million victims in the Soviet Union alone, 
including more than 3 million prisoners of war. Reading his text, he 
would have you believe that in 1944, the Red Army attacked a peaceful, 
unarmed Germany.

He also makes no mention of Hitler dispatching the elderly and minors to 
the front, and ordering his soldiers to resist to the last man. In the 
Battle of Berlin alone, which eventually sealed Hitler’s fate, some 
80,000 Red Army soldiers died and 275,000 were wounded.

In Pergande’s reading, Hitler’s defeat was not liberation but rather a 
“bad experience.” He thereby suggests that things would have been better 
had the Nazis remained in power. That borders on fascist propaganda.

The fact that the FAZ, which has a daily circulation of 320,000 and is 
one of Germany’s leading newspapers, can publish such a hack piece 
without causing a word of protest, says much about the political climate 
in Germany. An article which just a few years ago would have only been 
printed in Nazi rags such as the National Newspaper or Young Freedom, is 
now the political consensus within the ruling elite.

Pergande himself lacks any qualifications to write on historical topics 
on the front page of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Born in East 
Germany in 1958, he studied journalism in Leipzig. Since 1998, he has 
reported for FAZabout local events in the three northern Bundesländer 
(federal states). His literary output includes several travel guides and 
some crime novels set in Mecklenburg Pomerania.

His comment piece is pure propaganda. Like much other commentaries 
appearing in the newspapers and other media, it is aimed at reshaping 
public opinion, which is obstinately opposed to the official propaganda 
about Ukraine.

The column’s downplaying of the crimes of Nazism has been systematically 
prepared over a long period. In 1986, when the historian Ernst Nolte 
ventured into public with his thesis that National Socialism (Nazism) 
had been an understandable reaction to Bolshevism, he met with fierce 
opposition.

Now, Jörg Baberowski, professor of European History at Berlin’s Humboldt 
University, can announce in Spiegel that “Nolte was right, 
historically,” and Nolte himself claims that the Poles shared 
responsibility for the Second World War, without any opposition from 
official circles. In Ukraine, the foundations associated with all the 
main German parties, from the Greens to the Social Democrats and the 
Christian Democrats, are working with political forces that glorify war 
criminals and Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera.

Behind this turn to the right is the dead end of German capitalism. Six 
years after the outbreak of the deepest financial crisis since the 
1930s, the European Union is threatening to break apart, and competition 
for markets and raw materials, upon which the German economy depends, is 
fiercer than ever.

This is the source of the determination of the German ruling elite to 
abandon the military restraint it was forced to observe following the 
crimes of the Second World War and pursue its imperialist interests 
violently once again.

The fact that journalists, academics and party functionaries have now 
switched over to this course does not mean that it is supported by the 
broad mass of the population. On the contrary, it meets with broad 
mistrust and resistance. This is the reason for the wave of propaganda 
and lies; it is an attempt to intimidate and suppress this opposition.

------ je