Page 2 of 3 GERMANY, THE
RE-ENGINEERED ALLY PART 3: Hail to the chief, or
else
introduce
the German public to the need for torture, with
the "ticking bomb" scenario. There was no
talk-show format that did not have torture on its
schedule - with the former director of the Aspen
Institute in Berlin, Jeff Gedmin (now president of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) as the most
indefatigable of its proponents.
But it
was the German-Israeli Michael Wolffsohn, a
prominent professor at the Armed Forces University
in Munich, who publicly
moved the subject from the
"ticking bomb" to affirm the West's fundamental
obligation to use torture against terrorist
suspects.
Torture, however, though normal
in Israel, would be in breach of the German
constitution and for a civil servant to propose
it, a breach of the civil service laws. He should
have been fired. He wasn't.
Instead,
then-interior minister and Social Democrat Otto
Schily went out on a mission of damage control. In
an interview with Die Zeit he presented the
concerns about torture as a tempest in a teapot.
Knowing full well what really was happening,
having been privy to intelligence briefings about
the material of the US military's Taguba Report
about Abu Ghraib as well as profiting from a very
close relationship with former US attorney general
John Ashcroft, he still ridiculed the concern
about torture as a matter of suspects who have to
sit on a stool instead of lounging in an
easy-chair and who have their faces illuminated to
study facial expressions. Regarding Guantanamo, he
ascribed it to the understandable American dilemma
of what to do with the worst of the bad, a dilemma
that required for him, too, the need to change
international law and the Geneva Conventions.
No wonder, then, that he and Fischer
obviously had no qualms about letting the CIA
airlines use Germany for "rendition" traffic. No
wonder, too, that both refused to lift a finger to
rescue from Guantanamo a young German resident of
Turkish origin, who had lived all his life in
Germany, innocent even to his interrogators, or to
follow up on the kidnapping of a German to Bagram.
In the end, it was the images of Abu Ghraib that
put paid to this effort to acclimatize the Germans
to the harsh demands of the global "war on
terror". But at least the legal innovations
introduced by then-interior minister Otto Schily
to get Germany on a civilizational war footing -
and those promulgated or ventilated by his
successor, Wolfgang Schäuble - are fully
compatible with the mindset and the intentions of
the US Patriot Act.
100 million
superfluous young Muslim men Die Zeit, once
the leading liberal weekly, the standard-bearer of
"secular humanism" and enlightened Atlanticism,
and now the flagship of German neoliberal
neoconservatism, a hybrid of The New Republic and
National Review, is indefatigable in its mission
to convert its mostly educated readers to the new
demands of the German alliance with Israel and the
US. It opened its pages to hate-mongers in
social-science disguise whose wares bear an
uncanny resemblance to those peddled in earlier
days by the ideologues of the extreme right. Among
those is sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn, professor at
the University of Bremen where he heads the
Raphael Lemkin Institute for Comparative Genocide
Research.
He maintains that the "youth
bulge" - the rapid increase of un- or
underemployed young men in Islamic countries -
presents the West with the imperative of culling
them to keep the terrorist threat from becoming
unmanageable: either by instigating civil wars in
these countries or by intervention (one might call
them "wars of demographic sanitation"). In Die
Zeit he developed this thesis with reference to
the problems the "civilized" Israelis encounter in
dealing with the terrorist barbarians and
especially, with suicide bombers. The
Palestinians, though, present for him not only the
terrorist problem in a nutshell, but the spawn of
a particularly depraved and defective society that
even produces female suicide bombers. Heinsohn
sees, therefore, no difference between the Hutu
woman wielding a machete to slaughter her Tutsi
neighbors and the Palestinian woman donning an
explosive belt to slaughter innocent Israeli
civilians.
The publicized disgust with
female suicide bombers, by the way, is limited to
Palestinians. The Chechen women with explosive
belts who threatened to kill a whole theater full
of people in Moscow were treated in the German
media with a great deal of understanding and
commiseration. Disgust and rage were, instead,
directed against the Russian authorities for their
refusal to withdraw from Chechnya and for their
victimizing the innocent theater audience. And
when a school full of children was held hostage in
Beslan, the German media, again, made the
terrorists all but disappear behind their
indignation and venom directed against the Russian
authorities.
Following the lead of Die
Zeit, the high-brow formats of public TV offered
Heinsohn the opportunity to expand on his theses
before a larger audience. And contemporary German
philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, did not withhold his
admiration for Heinsohn's bold challenge to the
pussyfooting humanitarians. And bold it is. Even
the economists and race strategists of the Third
Reich did not anticipate the need to kill more
than 40-60 million subhumans during and after the
victorious campaign against the Soviet Union.
In propagandizing the need to take off the
gloves in the fight against the Islamic threat,
Die Zeit recruited also a Dutch writer of
middle-brow novels, Leon de Winter. He exposed the
hopelessly defective nature of Arab civilization,
the inbred resistance to acculturation of the
Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the gynophobe (or
genocidal) obscurantism of Islam. Since he
preached this message often enough, one of the
most prestigious German honors was bestowed on
him.
Die Zeit also saw to the requirements
of creating empathy with Israel's struggle at the
front lines of Western civilization. Its
publisher, Josef Joffe, did see to it that one of
his editorial team was embedded with one of the
covert operations and assassination squads of the
Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to report about the
pride and the suffering of those soldiers. At the
same time, Die Zeit refined the use of images,
already characterizing the German media in toto,
that opposes the dignified tears of a pretty young
woman in an IDF uniform to the TV images of
howling, old Arab strumpets and menacingly
strutting young men.
Similar messages
dominate the German media either in an even more
vulgar fashion or somewhat less stridently. But
there is virtually a complete absence of any
challenge to its common denominator. The same
holds true, by the way, for France - with the
exception of the monthly Monde Diplomatique.
Nevertheless, the German general public seems to
continue to resist at least its intended
consequences.
'The Germans have to
learn how to kill' Thus, "the Germans have
to learn how to kill". This strange and most
revealing conclusion about the German state of
mind was brought back from a NATO meeting at the
end of last year by Karsten Voigt, the eternal
Social Democratic "coordinator for German-American
relations". It was occasioned by the allied
indignation (American, Canadian, and Dutch) about
the German refusal to do combat duty in "Operation
Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan: the mandate of
the German forces is still limited to
reconstruction assistance, peacekeeping in the
Tajik north, as well as policing and training
duties. But since the German commitment there is
already highly contentious and enjoys hardly any
support among the German population, this sardonic
comment is addressing more directly the failure of
the German political class to create the climate
for getting the "Germans to the front" than just
the limits of the Afghanistan commitment. And its
meaning was not lost. For a while, one might have
been able to enjoy the spectacle of shamefaced
German opinion-leaders barely able to restrain
their impatience with the rabble they are forced
to educate.
To placate the allies, Germany
sent six Tornado reconnaissance planes to
Afghanistan, either as the thin end of a wedge or
as the
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