Dialog International

Insufficient Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Vergangenheitsbewältigung ("coming to terms with the past") is a key word for understanding the success of democracy in post-war Germany.  Germany confronted its historical responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era, and as a result the principles of enlightened democracy were embraced.  Unfortunately, the process for the most part did not take place in the eastern states of the former GDR, and as a consequence both right-wing extremism and authoritarian leftism are prevalent in the region.

But the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung is also needed for Russia and the former Soviet satellite states. The Russian philosophy professor Michail Ryklin sees the roots of the conflict in the Caucusus as the outcome of insufficient Vergangenheitsbewältigung in an important essay that appears in Die Zeit:

Und überhaupt: Wer sind diese »Russen« und »Georgier« eigentlich? Vor allem sind sie alle postsowjetische Menschen, denen es nur so scheint, als seien sie nach dem großen Terror in ihre nationalen Nischen zurückgekehrt – ganz so, als hätte der Terror bei ihnen keine tiefen Wunden hinterlassen, die noch jahrzehntelang nicht ausheilen werden, als würden sie am Körper ihrer Nation keine Phantomschmerzen aus der Sowjetzeit spüren. [...} Dieser Unwille, sich mit der eigenen Geschichte auseinanderzusetzen, beschert dem postsowjetischen Raum Kriege und ethnische Konflikte. Unabhängig von der jeweiligen Rhetorik blüht der Nationalismus, wobei auch die demokratische Rhetorik keine Ausnahme bildet.Eine Rückkehr nach Europa ist nur durch die Auseinandersetzung mit der jüngsten totalitären Geschichte möglich, mit jenen Mechanismen, die Russen, Ukrainer, Weißrussen, Kirgisen und Georgier gleichermaßen unterjocht haben. Erst wenn diese Arbeit getan ist, werden unsere Vorstellungen von Europa komplexer, differenzierter und – was das Wichtigste ist – realistischer, auch wenn sie dann nicht so hochtrabend klingen werden wie die der »Übereuropäer«.
(And who are these 'Russians' and 'Georgians' anyway? Most of them are post-Soviet people who think they have returned to their national niches after the end of the Great Terror - as if the Terror had not left them with deep wounds that would take decades to heal, as if their nation would not feel the phantom pains of the Soviet era. ...  The refusal to confront their own past is bringing wars and conflict to the post-Soviet region. Regardless of the form the rhetoric takes nationalism is flourishing, and democratic rhetoric is no exception here. ... A return to Europe can only be achieved by confronting the recent totalitarian past and those mechanisms that reduced the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Kyrgyz and Georgians to the same servitude. Only when this work has been done can our concepts of Europe become more complex, nuanced and - what is more important - realistic.)

Open Letter to ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo

Jurgen Todenhöfer is the manager of a German media group and for 18 years was a Christian Democrat representative in the Bundestag. He has studied the situation in the Middle East extensively and has traveled frequently throughout the region.  His book on Islamic extremism - Warum tötest du, Zaid? (Why do you kill, Zaid?) - will shortly appear in English translation.

His open letter to Luis Moreno Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor to the International Criminal Court, appeared in the Berliner Zeitung on July 19, 2008. (Thanks to Omar for the reference.)

The following is my translation:

Dear Mr Moreno Ocampo,

Like many who believe in the universal validity of human rights, I welcome your intention to investigate  the actions of the Sudanese President Omar Hassa al Baschir in court. Crimes against humanity must in any case be prosecuted. As you have correctly made clear, it does not make a difference if the perpetrator is an acting head of state. Once you have the evidence you must indict.

As a former justice, however, I have to ask why you are not exercising the same perserverence and the same demand for justice against those who are responsible for the Iraq War - namely US President George W. Bush or the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

We are all "Good Germans" now

The other day the Canadian government released a video of Canadian intelligence officers interrogating a 16-year old detainee.  The entire video is painful to watch, since the kid pleads to have his life ended.  Suffice it to say, the video received extensive media coverage all over the world.  In Germany, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung was shocked by the images:

Zum ersten Mal ist im Fernsehen und im Internet ein Video von einem Verhör im US-Gefangenenlager Guantánamo Bay auf Kuba ausgestrahlt worden. Der Sender CNN zeigte einen Ausschnitt, in dem der als mutmaßlicher Terrorist festgehaltene junge Kanadier Omar Khadr sich voller Verzweiflung sein Hemd vom Körper reißt, um vernarbte Schusswunden zu zeigen. (For the first time an interrogation at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is broadcast on television and on the Internet. The news channel CNN showed a segment in which the young Canadian, a terrorist suspect, tears the shirt off his body in despair in order to show the scars of bullet wounds he had received.)

It turns out that prior to the interrogation the US military had subjected the boy to several weeks of a specific program of sleep deprivation called "the Frequent Flyer Program". Sleep deprivation is considered a form of torture under the Geneva Conventions, which the Bush administration has disavowed in its War on Terror.

The video received some attention in the US media for a single news cycle, but was quickly pushed off the the screen and off the newsprint with breathless reports of Angelina Joilie's twins.

This week also marks the publication of an important book on the subject of torture: Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. I have blogged several times about Jane Mayer's strong investigative pieces in The New Yorker which formed the basis of her book. Fellow blogger Gary Farber just read the interview with Jane Mayer ub Harper's and is fed up with the complacency and passivity of his fellow Americans:

"It's your country. It's your choice. It's your former rights that have been disappearing, while you stood by, good Germans, wrapped up in your own lives, leaving it to others to prevent crimes, to pay attention, to work to prevent torture, spying, law-breaking, war crimes, and the criminally unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. 

What have you done to stop it?"

Far too little.  But the sad thing is, most of us didn't care enough to even try and stop it.

 

China is Funding Bush's Iraq War

Der Tagesspiegel has a lengthy excerpt from a new book to be released next week: Der globale Countdown by Harald Schuman and Christiane Grefe.  The book is about the risks inherent in the globalized economy  - risks that are all too apparent in the worldwide crisis spawned by the US real estate meltdown.  The excerpt here, however, is an excellent discussion of how the Bush administration has dramatically raised the stakes - and increased the likelihood of a global meltdown - with its reckless fiscal policy.  Among other things, the Bush administration has relied exclusively on China to fund its disastrous Iraq War. America's trade deficit with China increases the Chinese US dollar reserves by about $1 million per minute - which roughly equals the cost burden of Bush's wars:

De facto finanziert auf diesem Weg ausgerechnet der US-Rivale China Amerikas militärische Abenteuer mit milliardenschweren Billigkrediten für die Bush-Regierung. Die aufgewandten Summen stimmen erstaunlich überein. Die Kriege in Irak und Afghanistan kosteten von 2003 bis Ende 2006 rund 400 Milliarden Dollar amerikanischer Steuergelder. Etwa im gleichen Zeitraum erwarben die Mitarbeiter der Devisenverwaltung am Pekinger Platz der Luftfahrt amerikanische Staatsanleihen und staatliche garantierte Pfandbriefe im Wert von 464 Milliarden Dollar.

(It is ironic that in this way China - America's great rival - is financing America's military adventures with $$billions of cheap loans to the Bush administration. Astonishingly,  expenditures nearly match each other. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US taxpayers from 2003 to 2006 about $400 billion. Over the same period the staff at the State Foreign Exchange Center on Fucheng Road in Beijing acquired US Treasury Bonds in the amount of $464 billion.)

The Bush administration's fiscal policy is leading inexorably to a prolonged period of hyperinflation and the replacement of the US$  by the Euro as a reserve currency.  The final consequence will be a run on America.

An Uncomfortable Silence

Tageszeitung correspondent Bernd Pickert makes a good point in his column Das grosse Schweigen (The great silence).  During the Patreaus hearings this week on Capitol Hill no one brought up the issue of how multiple deployments in the US military were leading to a extreme psychological stress, which, in turn, is played out in how Iraqi civilians are treated (or rather mistreated):

"Dabei würde es sich lohnen, einmal einen Blick auf die Erfahrungen jener insgesamt mehr als 500.000 Soldaten zu werfen, die im Irak stationiert waren - nach fünf Jahren sind sie inzwischen ja recht ausführlich dokumentiert. Was sie über ein systematisch menschenverachtendes Verhalten der Soldaten gegen die Zivilbevölkerung in diesem Krieg ohne Fronten berichten, kann eigentlich nur zu einer Schlussfolgerung führen: die Iraker so bald wie möglich von dieser Besatzung zu befreien." (It would be worthwhile to have  a look at the experiences of the 500,000 or so soldiers who have been stationed in Iraq so far. These have not been sufficiently documented even after five years of war. What they say about the systematically brutal behavior of these soldiers towards the civilian population in this endless war without fronts can only lead to one conclusion: the Iraqis need to be freed of this occupation as soon as possible.)

Read my translation of Pickert's entire piece over at Watching America.

Last month the US military dropped all charges against one of the marines involved in the Haditha Massacre, when 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians - mostly women and children - were killed. The story was barely noticed in the press as President Bush celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.  And earlier in March dozens of veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan testified at the Winter Soldier event in Silver Springs, Maryland.  The event was ignored by the mainstream media outlets in the US, as noted by the Web site FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting):

On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is particularly important that the media reverse this silence, and include the voices of the vets who are speaking out about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in national news coverage.

Videos of the testimonies can be found here.  The German press did cover the event, and it was also picked up by bloggers.

Let's face it: we don't consider Iraqi lives as valuable as Americans.  We keep detailed records of every US casualty in Iraq, but no one knows or cares how many Iraqis have been killed or injured as a result of the US-led invasion and occupation.  General Tommy Franks: "We Don't Do Body Counts".

Iraq and Postwar Germany

Quite often apologists for the Iraq War point to American success in postwar Germany as a rationale for the the military occupation of Iraq.  Both Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice often draw parallels to postwar Germany as a reason to stay the course: Democracy  will eventually blossom in Iraq the same way it did in Germany thanks to the American occupation.  And recently Republican presidential candidate John McCain has held out the possibility of America "staying in Iraq for one hundred years" the same way we have had a military presence in Germany for more than half a century.

Now historian David Stafford continues this argument in a piece in the Washington Post: Iraq is a Mess. But Germany Was, Too. Stafford's reasoning, however, it muddled.  He does point out the significant differences between post-invasion Iraq and defeated Germany:

It would be harder to think of two more different societies than Germany in 1945 and contemporary Iraq. The former -- despite Hitler and the Third Reich -- had a long tradition of law, order, constitutional government and civic society to draw on in rebuilding democracy. Nor was it riven by deep-rooted ethnic and sectarian religious tensions that erupted to the surface once the dictator's iron fist was removed. And although Germany certainly had hostile neighbors -- especially to the communist East -- the threat they posed served to create, not crack, political cohesion.

But then he draws parallels between the de-Baathification efforts in Iraq and the American attempt to purge Nazi's from positions of power in Germany.

Critics of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq point to the decisions by L. Paul Bremer, Garner's replacement, to dismiss Baathists from public office and to dissolve the Iraqi army as critical and disastrous turning points that created a vast legion of the unemployed and disaffected. Yet in 1945, the Allies implemented a similarly draconian policy in Germany. They dissolved the Nazi Party, carried out a thorough purge of Nazis in public office and even abolished the ancient state of Prussia, which they believed was at the root of German militarism. Millions of Wehrmacht soldiers languished in prisoner-of-war camps while their families struggled to survive.

But the American occupation forces in Germany were far more pragmatic than the neocon ideologues in charge of Iraq: they quickly changed course and brought former Nazis into the governance structure and economic reconstruction programs.

Ultimately, Stafford concludes, the American occupation of Germany was pretty much a failure several years in, and it was only the economic assistance of the Marshall Plan that finally changed the game and brought some stability:

Even so, despite this willingness to rethink and adjust, occupation policy floundered. Two years after Allied victory, Germany was in desperate straits, facing an economic crisis that threatened to nip democracy in the bud. Only the Marshall Plan, with its massive program of financial aid, saved the country from disaster. Self-government did not come until 1949, and Allied troops remained in West Germany as occupiers until 1955, a full decade after the defeat of the Third Reich.

So, Stafford seems to think, a Marshall Plan for Iraq and a long-term military occupation might  bring stability to the ruined country.  Trouble is, the success of the Marshall Plan has never been duplicated.  President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress - a Marshall Plan for Latin America - was a bust. And the attempts in the 1980s to establish a Marshall Plan for the Third World failed miserably. 

Two key elements are missing in Iraq for a successful Marshall Plan effort.  The first is security.  Tony Judt points out in his great work of history Postwar that the Korean War was an enormous benefit to Europe, since the US invested significant security resources there to prevent a "second front" from opening in the west.  The other missing factor is ownership.  By 1949 Europe had functioning governments everywhere - including Germany - and took complete ownership of the Marshall Plan.  Iraq, on the other hand, has a corrupt, dysfunctional government which lacks legitimacy in the eyes of most Iraqi citizens.  Also, the Bush Administration has awarded reconstruction projects to American firms, often under no-bid contracts as a way of rewarding political allies.  I fear reconstruction in Iraq can never succeed as long as the country is occupied by American troops. I wish I could see the success of postwar Germany as a reason to celebrate a hundred-year occupation for Iraq, but I can't.  There are no parallels and Stafford is sadly mistaken.

Bush's War Enters its Sixth Year

Today President Bush will be giving a speech where he will declare the Iraq invasion, launched 5 years ago this evening, "a strategic success" and "well worth the price" in terms of American blood and treasure (no mention, of course, of Iraqi blood and treasure).

Germany opposed the invasion, and we are still feeling the effects of that transatlantic rift, although Angela Merkel has managed to improve relations between America and Germany to a large extent.

Scanning the German press, there are quite a few commemorative efforts on both the war and Germany's decision to break with its strongest alliance partner:  Zeit, Die Welt, Der Spiegel. The best  - most infuriating - presentation can be found in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung.  The Munich daily goes through Colin Powell's PowerPoint presentation to the UN on Februrary 5, 2003, which outlined the case for war (based on completely fraudulent information):  The Long Nose of Colin Powell. Also in the Sueddeutsche is an interview with Gunter Pleuger, Germany's ambassador to the United Nations during the run-up to the war.  Pleuger speaks about his impressions of Powell's presentation and the knowledge that it was based on lies:

Pleuger:"Das war alles sehr gespenstisch. Die meisten im Saal wussten, dass das, was Colin Powell da vortrug, nicht der Realität entsprach. Aber wir haben uns damals nicht vorstellen können, dass Colin Powell bewusst die Unwahrheit sagen würde." ("It was all very surreal.  Most of us in the UN auditorium knew that what Powell was presenting had no basis in reality.  But we couldn't imagine that Colin Powell would deliberately present falsehoods.")

Plueger then speaks about the enormous pressure that the US brought to bear on him and the other diplomats at the UN to go along with the Bush invasion.  In the end, the UN refused to vote approval for the invasion, and then suffered the vilification of the US.  But in retrospect the UN acted honorably:

Pleuger: "Schauen Sie sich die Welt doch an. Heute können wir sagen, dass die Entscheidung des Sicherheitsrates völlig richtig war, gegen diesen Krieg zu sein. Die Mehrheit der Staaten und die Mehrheit der Bevölkerung selbst in den Koalitionsstaaten waren gegen diesen Krieg. Mehr als die Hälfte der Amerikaner ist heute auch dieser Auffassung." ( Just look at the world. Today we can say that the Security Council was correct in opposing this war. The majority of the nations, and the majority of the people in the Coaltion countries, were against the war. Today more than half of all Americans share this opinion.)

We can now see that the Bush War has led to the Bush Recession (Wars are never good for the economy in the long run).

Today I grieve for the four thousand American troops killed, the tens of thousands who return home with permanent physical and emotional scars, the thousands of families across the country who have been destroyed by an unnecessary war, the deaths of untold tens of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of over 4 million from their homes.  How many more anniversaries of this nightmare will we have to endure?

Ken Burns' Mega-Documentary The War Comes to German Television

I have to confess that like most Americans I am a sucker for Ken Burns' films. The soothing voice of the omniscient narrator, the zooming and panning across still photographs with the plaintive piano or violin as the background music - the frank sentimentality of the narrative - lulls me into a sense of shared national heritage. It is a pleasant place to be, even though historians find the absence of context and analysis appalling.  For a nation that suffers from historical amnesia, the non-historian Ken Burns is the closest thing we have to a national historian.

What is good about a Burns film is that he goes to original sources and shows history "from the bottom up".  This was particularly effective in his Civil War documentary, as the narrator read from (remarkably eloquent) letters from soldiers and their families.  What was also admirable about that documentary was the acknowledgment of shared sacrifice on both sides of the conflict: at no point did Burns vilify the Confederacy.

Unfortunately this balance is totally missing from The War, which is a frank celebration of the American triumph of good over evil in the Good War. There is zero analysis of the origin of World War II or how America got into it. Rather, war is presented as something that is an immutable aspect of human behavior.  This from the very first episode: the narrator tells us"The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions: anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power".  The first episode is titled "The Necessary War", so everything that comes afterward is legitimized.  The firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - these aspects of the Good War are not questioned: the destructive brutality (and the film does not shirk from showing this, at least) is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of "The Necessary War". 

Still, The War contains some compelling film footage.  I also thought the focus on the war experience from the perspective of four medium-sized American cities - both on the battlefield and the home front - was effective. Ken Burns also does an excellent job on in conveying the terrible price of war, the pervasiveness of death.  This war was fought before PSTD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was a known affliction, but it is clear from the letters from the front and the eyewitness accounts of the living survivors that it affected many of the soldiers.

The War will be broadcast on the German TV network ARTE starting this Wednesday for seven consecutive weeks.

I found only one review so far in the German press: Silke Lührman  writes about the  Burns' documentary  in the völkisch weekly Junge Freiheit.  Lührman's tone in her review is predictably sarcastic, but she does have one great line at the end of the piece:

"Geschichte, wie sie Sieger schreiben? Mag sein, aber sicher auch Balsam auf der wunden Seele einer angeschlagenen Supermacht, die demnächst in das sechste Jahr eines unnötigen Krieges geht."(History from the pespective of the victor?  Perhaps, but it (The War) is also a balm for the wounded soul of a beleaguered superpower, which shortly will be entering the sixth year of an unnecessary war.)

You can read my translation of the entire review over at Watching America.

The Myth of "The Good War"

Americans are taught from an early age that "we" won WWII - The Good War - which pitted good against evil. Not only did American soldiers beat the evil Nazis, they rescued western civilization and brought Democracy to Europe.  Nothing could be further from the truth, according to British historian Norman Davies.  In a lecture delivered the other day at Harvard University, Davies exploded some of the myths of The Good War:

Among the Davies so-called myths:

That D-Day was big and decisive. (About 80 percent of German forces were lost on the Eastern Front, he said, where the biggest battles raged.)

That the West triumphed over the Third Reich. (Germany was all but defeated by the Soviets well before the Allies landed troops on the continent, he contended.)

In fact, asserted Davies, it was the Red Army that played the decisive role in defeating Germany, “and they were in the service of an evil tyranny.”

As for the myth that the war liberated Europe, said Davies: Most of Europe went from being under Hitler’s boot to being under Stalin’s.

Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and other nations at the crossroads of combat were gobbled up by the Soviets in 1944 and early 1945, while the Red Army idled outside Berlin waiting for the Allies to creep toward the Rhine.

Winning a war means defeating an enemy, collapsing its economy, destroying its political structure — then replacing it with another. By those terms, Davies averred, the Soviets won the war in Europe.

Militarily, the Allies contributed less than the Soviets to the defeat of Germany, he said. Politically, they failed to restore democracy to most of Europe.

Will Americans ever revisit their own history? Unlikely, since that would also surface some uncomfortable questions about the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the firebombing of German cities, targeting civilians.

Bush and Benedict XVI: Opportunity Missed

When Pope Benedict XVI met with President Bush last week at the Vatican, he missed an opportunity to condemn the Iraq War as "unjust" under the Christian doctrine of Just War.  After his meeting with the pope Bush was almost gloating:

"Speaking later to reporters, Bush said the pontiff was worried that Christians in Iraq were being "mistreated by the Muslim majority."The Vatican has been critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but both sides said they did not dwell on those differences Saturday. "We didn't talk about just war," the president said at a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi."

This was very unfortunate in several respects.  First, Pope Benedict has been very open in his criticism of the US-led invasion of Iraq and its catastrophic aftermath.  In his Easter address this year, Benedict spoke lamented that "nothing positive comes from Iraq, torn apart by continual slaughter as the civil population flees." Second, Benedict could have used the occasion his meeting with Bush to instruct Christians everywhere on the meaning of "Just War" from a Christian perspective, and how the Iraq Invasion fails the "Just War" test in several respects.  This is all the more important since President Bush has often justified his use of violence in messianic Christian terms, even hinting to reporter Bob Woodward that he had consulted with God on the necessity for launching a unilateral invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Bush's Iraq invasion at the minimum fails the "Last Resort" requirement:  Force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted. And, to most sane observers who have watched with horror the death toll on Iraqi civilians caused by the invasion, Bush's war fails the Proportionality Test: The overall destruction expected from the use of force must be outweighed by the good to be achieved , as well as the Minimun Force Test: This principle is meant to limit excessive and unnecessary death and destruction.

But I sometimes have to question whether Benedict XVI even believes in "Just War".  Last July, just as the war in Lebanon was breaking out and Condoleezza Rice was celebrating the violence as the "birth pangs of a new Middle East", Pope Benedict spoke extemporaneously about How to Be A Force for Peace in the World.  Here is an excerpt:

"The Lord has triumphed upon the cross. He did not triumph with a new empire, with a power greater than the others and capable of destroying them; he triumphed, not in a human way, as we would imagine, with an empire more powerful than the other. He triumphed with a love capable of reaching even to death. This is God’s new way of winning: he does not oppose violence with a stronger form of violence. He opposes violence with its exact opposite: love to the very end, his cross. This is God’s humble way of winning: with his love – and this is the only way it is possible – he puts a limit on violence. This is a way of winning that seems very slow to us, but it is the real way to overcome evil, to overcome violence, and we must entrust ourselves to this divine way of winning."

These words go beyond "Just War" in their rejection of violence; too bad he did not challenge President Bush by repeating them in his presence.